San Bernardino, California, USA. Thanks for stopping by!
So, we rise from the rubble...
Friday, February 26, 2021
"Our Dilemma..."
"Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time;
what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better. "
- Sydney J. Harris
"The Narrative Void"
"The Narrative Void"
by The Zman
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality” is a line from a T.S. Eliot poem that has always been popular on the Right. While the Left does not have a monopoly on utopian thinking, it has never embraced realism. The Right, on the other hand, has always had an element that accepts the reality of the human condition. Not everyone on the Right or even a majority. One reality of the human condition is that most people, even the sober minded, prefer the escapism of fantasy to reality.
The fantasy view of politics is most obvious on the Left, of course. Much of what constitutes our current politics would best be described as a paranoid delusion or maybe even a psychotic break. Six weeks on and official Washington is still playing the game of make-believe over the January protests. For five years they were convinced that invisible Russians using mind control rigged the 2016 election. Left-wing politics, which means mainstream politics, is just a long conspiracy theory.
Another thing that is made obvious with left-wing reality avoidance is that it is deliberate, something of a cottage industry. There are people who invest all of their time patching up the fantasies and inventing new ones. Here’s an example from the conspiracy site Vox, about how Progressives are trying to “catch-up” to right-wing media. The absurdity of the post is not rare. These fantasies are churned out like shark’s teeth in order to have a steady supply of new fantasies for the Left.
This is something most on this side of the great divide get about the Left. They need a devil to oppose in order to have a rallying point. The absurdity of claiming Trump was a secret Nazi was never noticed, because they needed him to be their devil. Since their devils are always imaginary to begin with, they need to be churning out new ones, because eventually the imaginary ones are no longer useful. Progressives have been plotting the final showdown with the Devil since the Mayflower.
The American Left is really just escapism. It always has been, but in a post scarcity world where even the poorest people are materially safe, the escapism has had to conjure increasingly bizarre rationales. Whether it is invisible Russians, invisible Nazis, invisible Klansman and now invisible insurrectionists, the fantasy requires a villain, so they will conjure one when one does not exist. The Left is Dungeon’s and Dragons for mentally unstable, upper-middle-class white people.
Escapism is not just the domain of the Left. Libertarianism is the most obvious form of it outside the Left. In fact, the escapism is so strong it is possible to place libertarians on the Left, next to the orcs and wizards of Progressivism. The political spectrum would then be realism at one pole and escapism at the other. The libertarians generally accept the reality of math, so they would be somewhere between the midpoint and the end point where we find the modern American Left.
In case it is not obvious, the escapism of libertarianism lies in the fact that you can never have a libertarian society. Hans-Hermann Hoppe has explained at length how it is impossible to go from a modern society to a libertarian one. Even if you sort that puzzle, there is no way to maintain the libertarian society within libertarian theory. Put another way, the libertarian society is like any other fantasy world. Its appeal is in its impossibility, not in its plausibility. It is escapism.
For at least half a century, the Republican Party has been built on the escapism of what we now call civic nationalism. Evangelicals, for example, unhappy with left-wing social changes, organized to get their people elected. They finally got one of their guys in the White House and he did nothing for them. The reaction to this burst of reality was the Tea Party movement, which was really just a civic nationalist reaction to the failures of the Bush administration. It too crashed on the rocks of reality.
Donald Trump was the ultimate civic nationalist and he got nothing done. Part of the anger at Trump and his voters is that they accidentally proved that civic nationalism was always a big lie. The fake anger of the Left was always about their escapism, not anything Trump actually did in office. The real venom comes from the GOP, who sense he ruined the game for them. The Trump phenomenon ruined the fantasy of civic nationalism, removing that form of escapism from the system.
This is a truth that the core of the dissident right has always grasped, but never found a way to exploit. Most people, especially people in politics or cultural movements, are not interested in reality. They want a story, a narrative, that makes them the good guy fighting the selfless fight against the bad guy. Politics in general is not about reasoning from fact to some new facts or truths. It is not about making broad generalizations based on observable truths. Politics is about storytelling.
This is the great lesson of the interwar years. The people on the winning side knew the war was a horrible blunder committed by their rulers. Because they were on the winning side, they had an easy story to explain it. The bad guys were to blame, even if their own rulers were reckless and stupid. Ultimately, the fault lay with the losers and they would be made to pay for their crimes. The losers, in contrast, had no story to explain why their rulers lied to them and “stabbed them in the back.”
Into the void raced liberalism, communism, and fascism. Liberalism could blame the old rulers, but it suffered from being a story told by the winners. Communism told a story that failed to include the facts of the war. Communism was always a story about the future, not the past. Fascism, in contrast, offered a story that included the past, the present and a future. To the modern ear, Hitler sounds like a raving lunatic, but in his time, he was a master storyteller. He made fascism a pleasant fantasy.
This is why our present is full of bizarre conspiracies and fantasies. The Left has total control of the institutions, but they keep churning out new fantasies, because they cannot square the circle of who they are. How can the underdog also possess the high ground of society? How can they have control of the institutions, yet the system still suffers from institutional unfairness? The Left is spiraling into madness because its plot has an unreconcilable contradiction at the heart of it.
We are living in an interregnum of narrative collapse. The various right-wing fantasies, like libertarianism, conservatism and civic nationalism have collapsed. Those stories no longer make any sense. Only old people cling to them. The Progressive story is in the process of narrative collapse. The explosion of conspiracy theories and subcultures is due to the hole at the middle of a politics. The future will belong to those who create a new story that adequately explains the past, present and the future."
"Shadowland"
"Shadowland"
by Jim Kunstler
"The State of the Union speech is a somewhat squishy national ritual. Since Franklin Roosevelt, presidents have delivered it early each year in-person to a joint session of congress, with every other dignitary in government on hand - except for one cabinet officer designated the “lone survivior,” who sits it out elsewhere in case, say, the Capitol gets blown up. Before Woodrow Wilson, presidents customarily sent over a written message. Article II, Section 3, Clause 1 of the constitution only stipulates that a president “from time to time” shall report to Congress on how the nation is doing.
Lately, it’s mostly just a made-for-TV special, like the Oscars, allowing a lot of familiar faces to preen before the cameras for the home-folks. Ronald Reagan introduced the gimmick of showboating heroes or victims of this-and-that seated up in the galleries, which has naturally devolved into a maudlin, cringeworthy feature of the show. But often presidents use the occasion to drop a ripe phrase on the big audience that captures the spirit of the moment: “The era of big government is over” (Bill Clinton); “the axis of evil” (G. W. Bush); FDR’s “four freedoms.” In 2020, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced an instant op-ed closer feature to the proceedings, ripping up Mr. Trump’s speech behind his back in a striking display of pique, much applauded by the avatars of rising Wokesterdom, who had only days earlier seen their half-assed impeachment attempt flop.
Kinda looks like our current president, Joe Biden, will skip the grand show this year. Too busy playing “Mario Kart” with the grandkids, or something like that. The Washington press corps has given him a pass on it, apparently. There’s no chatter, no buzz on the cable channels or in The New York Times, though a few newsies have begun to whine about Mr. Biden’s general unwillingness to hold a routine press conference with freely-pitched questions - not hand-picked, vetted ones, as the president’s handlers have insisted.
How long will it be before the public realizes that Mr. Biden is being strictly concealed from view by his managers? And how long can they keep it up? A few more weeks, maybe, I’d guess. What did they think they were doing when they engineered the election of this empty suit, this blank cartridge, this political mannequin, this man-who-isn’t-there? Of all the hundred-million-odd adults over 35-years-of-age in this country, they picked this empty vessel to lead in a year of obvious crisis?
Apparently so - an act so collectively insane it makes you shudder to think about it. Like, the Democratic Party really thought this was a good idea? And who’s calling the shots behind this false front? Some committee chaired by Susan Rice? With directives coming into the Oval Office by messenger from Barack Obama’s Kalorama fortress, with, say, Eric Holder, Rahm Emmanuel, David Axelrod, John Brennan, and a few others charting the daily play-by-play?
So, you suspect that something weird like that is going on? I sure do. And I also suspect that when the truth comes out, the Democratic Party will have to face some pretty harsh music. Just the other day the public learned that 30 House Democrats are seeking to limit Mr. Biden’s sole authority over the launch codes for our nuclear missile arsenal. That doesn’t sound like a vote of confidence. Does White House Press Secretary look like a cornered animal going about her daily briefings? The ongoing spectacle of the missing head-of-state is inching beyond embarrassing.
And then, what do the people of this country think when it becomes necessary to throw the switch on the 25th Amendment and remove poor Ol’ Joe from office on account of being simply unfit to continue serving? I’ll tell you what they’ll think: that the Democrats knowingly put an unfit man in high office. They’ll understand that they got played, scammed, hustled. They’ll be mighty pissed off. They may seek to learn a bit more about exactly how this happened, especially the sketchy mechanics of the November 3rd vote that put Ol’ Joe in the White House. Even some Democrats may demand answers. Of course, the cruelest scene in this scenario will be the big manufactured hoo-hah celebrating Kamala Harris as the first female president - which in itself may be difficult to pull off, since so many Democrats have declared there’s no such thing as two sexes.
Meanwhile, you better pray for the bond market and, in turn, the equities markets, and, in turn, the whole shootin’ match of the economy (whatever remains of it, that is). Yesterday the benchmark ten-year US Treasury peeked above the dangerous 1.5 percent mark. What this tells you is that world is expecting the dollar to go down substantially and with that, the value of US Bonds, which foreign holders will seek to dump on a market not eager to buy them up, meaning the Federal Reserve will have to step in and buy them, meaning they will have to create a shitload of new dollars out of thin air to do that, which will drive down the purchasing power of each dollar, which will further inflame the world’s urge to dump devaluing US bonds - a vicious feedback that could crash the banking system just as Covid 19 begins fading away to nothing.
Oh, and note: rising interest rates on US Treasuries will force the government to pay much more to service our massive debts. That will negate any of the fiscal ambitions of Kamala Harris’s shadow government - unless the committee running America decides to utterly destroy the US Dollar. The bait-and-switch game playing out in the White House is just an overture to all that."
“Skid Row Los Angeles Hell On Earth; California Poverty; US Economy Getting Worse By The Day”
Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe,
“Skid Row Los Angeles Hell On Earth; California Poverty;
US Economy Getting Worse By The Day”
Gregory Mannarino, "Hyperinflating! The Federal Reserve Balance Sheet Has Now Gone Super-Parabolic"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 2/26/20:
"Hyperinflating! The Federal Reserve
Balance Sheet Has Now Gone Super-Parabolic"
Gerald Celente, "Market Crash? Covid War = Eat More Crap"
Gerald Celente,
"Market Crash? Covid War = Eat More Crap""
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over hype and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in the increasingly turbulent times ahead."
“Next Market Crash Will Be Brutal; Big Trouble Coming; Bond Market Warning; Interest Rates Rising”
Jeremiah Babe,
“Next Market Crash Will Be Brutal; Big Trouble Coming;
Bond Market Warning; Interest Rates Rising”
Thursday, February 25, 2021
"So, My Friends..."; "Ex Obscurum
I'm writing this from a room at the major hospital in this area, where several hours ago I underwent a cardiac catheterization to determine if a similar proceedure done 15 months ago to repair a crushed heart valve (from November 2013's massive heart arrack and quadruple bypass) was as successful. It was, totally. My apologies for the sudden disappearance on Monday, but circumstances provided little time to act, as Life often does to us. And we survive, or we don't. Long time readers know well that this blog was never, ever about me in any way, I never needed any emotional ego stroking and don't care if you like my dog or not, I merely tried always to provide the very best version of "truth" available, then share better-angels-of our-nature examples like poetry, music, quotes, encouraging stories, etc.
Things have to change though. Doing this blog has always given me a much loved higher sense of purpose, and that will continue as we move along. Yes, the global economy's collapsing, true Hell on earth has arrived for millions, and all that will get it's fair share too, but less frantically, and my next birthday says 70, not 30, lol, and we don't need the stress, right? So let's just relax a little, and savor our time together here while we can, considering it's obvious there's not a damned thing we can about about any of it anyway. So, my friends, please, slow down, and don't take it so deadly seriously, ok? Don't take it all so seriously that the stress gives you a heart attack, OK? Only a fool would allow that, right?
- CP
○
"Ex Obscurum, Adagio for Strings, Op. 11"
From emotional turmoil, hatred, and addiction the miracle of recovery begins in this Spadecaller Video entitled "Ex Obscurum" (From Darkness). Featuring original poetry narrated by the author and visual artist, Matthew Schwartz. Composer Samuel Barber's powerful musical score, adopted for the movie "Platoon", (Adagio for Strings) sets the background for this spiritual exodus "From Darkness."
Tuesday, February 23, 2021
"Economic Market Snapshot AM 2/23/21"
"Economic Market Snapshot AM 2/23/21"
○
"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will
do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
- John Maynard Keynes
○
"Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
Your guide:
Gregory Mannarino, AM 2/23/21
“Important Updates: ,
Stock Market, Bitcoin, Crypto Drops”
○
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
○
MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates
CNN Market Data:
CNN Fear And Greed Index:
○
A comprehensive, essential daily read.
Feb 23rd, Updated Daily
○
Financial Stress Index
"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
○
Daily Job Cuts
○
○
And now, the End Game...
○
Oh yeah...
"The Behavioral Sink: A Fable For Our Times"
"The Behavioral Sink: A Fable For Our Times"
by Hardscrabble Farmer
"Not long after the last of the last American soldiers returned home at the close of WWII, a little-known ethologist named John B. Calhoun set up a quarter acre pen somewhere on the outskirts of Rockville, Maryland and populated it with several dozen Norwegian rats. His experiment was meant to see just how large the population density would become if they were provided with adequate food, water, shelter and protection from predators so that all of their needs were met. Fellow researchers dubbed his experiment rat utopia and before long he had discovered the answer to his question.
When his research caught the eye of bureaucrats at the National Institute for Mental Health, they approached him with an offer of unlimited funding for another project along the same lines under stricter conditions than the bucolic environs of a pasture just north of Washington, D.C. By 1954 he had devised a complex interior setup for his rats to inhabit that divided the environment into four cells, each configured to provide a continuous supply of food, water and bedding with plenty of space for nests and open areas for social interaction. Into each of these he placed an equal number of both male and female rats and simply watched as they began to at first explore and then to colonize and dominate their surroundings.
There is very little material available about his research today, though at the time he was a media darling. During this period Americans had become concerned with the concept of overpopulation, due in large part to popular media and its constant focus on a “population bomb” that threatened to exhaust the Earth’s resources if something wasn’t done about it. As his research was just beginning to demonstrate the consequences of overpopulation the New York Times book review was pushing dystopian works such as "Stand on Zanzibar" and Paul Ehrlich’s "The Population Bomb."
Years before Mao began his enforced One Child Policy, American cosmopolitans were aggressively selling the concept of ZPG, or zero population growth in the pages of Time. Back in the government lab that housed the ever-growing population of rats, certain unpleasant realities were beginning to manifest themselves in the behavior of the colony. Calhoun was able to observe a recurring pattern, broken into four distinct phases that repeated itself each time he re-stocked his utopian environment; Exploration, Exploitation, Stagnation, and Death.
In the first phase the rodent experiment the numbers were such that the social order was rapidly established, hierarchies arose within days and the dominant males created harems of available females and guarded them against the lower ranking competitors. Feeding areas were designed so that no individual could eat alone but rather had to share communal trays. The choice nests were established at ground level while the lowest ranking members of the colony had to climb towers to their nesting spot.
With plenty of space and endless supplies with a small population resulted in a living space that was, as far as brown rats go, copacetic. During the exploitation phase two discernible differences arose- a rapidly growing population and an increasingly hostile environment. The dominant males controlled access to the quadrants where their harems lived while the lower ranking members turned to an endless cycle of violence towards each other as well as the younger generation of rapidly maturing rivals.
As the population grew to the point where no rat was able to find privacy, the third phase began in earnest. At this stage Calhoun observes that the rats have entered what he calls a behavioral sink, a situation where aberrant and destructive behavior becomes the norm and normal behavior is no longer possible. For example, the females abandoned their young, attacked them, or oddly enough, became sterile. Certain numbers of both male and female became- according to Calhoun- somnambulists.
They slept the majority of their lives emerging only to gorge themselves at the feeders while the rest of the colony slept, slowly becoming enormous and dying far earlier than the other rats. The subordinate males clustered together between the quadrants and controlled the access to food for the younger rats, violently attacking them and each other. They also turned into pansexuals, neither interested in mating but rather engaging in homosexuality and self-gratification in their nests for extended periods of time, often damaging and disfiguring their genitalia and pulling out their fur.
The remainder became probers, a constant source of irritation to the dominant males who used every available means to keep them away to the point of exhaustion and eventual submission to groups of predatory male rats who would kill them and raid their harems, killing the offspring and even the females. At the peak of the population which reached over 2,200 the entire colony entered the terminal phase and once reproduction ceased it was simply a matter of time until the natural cycle of rodent mortality ended the experiment yet again. Over and over for years until NIMH pulled the plug and ended its funding of Calhoun’s Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice. Utopia, at least for rodents, remained elusive.
In the years following the release of his publication entitled "Population Density and Social Pathology" plenty of people jumped on the bandwagon and tried to turn the results into a commentary on modern urban living and overpopulation. Tom Wolfe’s final chapter of The "Pump House Gang" was originally a short essay entitled “Oh Rotten Gotham! Sliding Down Into the Behavioral Sink” followed by a novel, later turned into the children’s movie "The Secret of NIMH," by Robert O’Brien, a very dark and decidedly un-child friendly dystopian cartoon featuring scientists carrying out a rodent genocide. Calhoun continued on with his work, but never returned to the rats again, calling the outcome of his experiment ” a Malthusian dilemma born of a Utopian vision”.
The planners at the World Economic Forum have a lot of ideas about the future of the Earth’s population and if you’ve somehow missed the agenda they have outlined, maybe now would be a perfect opportunity to see what they are lining up for us. Concentrating people into urban clusters, providing us with all the food we could ever need, eliminating privacy, and on and on in the Great Reset.
One could reasonably conclude that all of those experiments done on the taxpayer’s dime so many years ago at the National Institute of Health would have made some kind of impression on the people who are paid to look at such outcomes. It could be safely assumed that they understand that by confining any living creatures in large numbers and in tight spaces, regardless of the necessities provided, would lead to certain consequences. Perhaps they have looked at the data and they do understand what occurs when a Utopian society is allowed to flourish and that is the endgame. But then we’re not brown rats."
Monday, February 22, 2021
"A 'Biblical' Invasion Of Locusts Threatens To Cause Widespread Famine In The Horn Of Africa"
"A 'Biblical' Invasion Of Locusts Threatens To
Cause Widespread Famine In The Horn Of Africa"
Full screen a must.
by Epic Economist
"A biblical invasion of locusts is decimating several crops and threatening to cause widespread famine in the horn of Africa. Last year, a devastating plague of locusts had already destroyed millions of hectares of agricultural land in eastern Africa, across the Middle East and throughout much of Asia, but many were hoping that would be an isolated event. However, this year's second wave is threatening the livelihoods of more than 39 million people, according to UN estimates. Experts with the organization have affirmed the new infestation is completely unprecedented and the situation is bound to get much worse in the coming months as the insects are fast reproducing and it is getting harder and harder to keep the problem under control. That's what we're going to expose in this video.
The locusts are back, and they are hungry. The insect plague is once again taking over the Horn of Africa, as a new generation of pests is fast breeding and hatching. In countries like Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya, the next harvest is at serious risk of being devastated by the massive locust swarms. But what is even more concerning is the fact that millions of families that have been impaired and severely impoverished by years of crises will likely fall even further into a downward spiral of hunger and poverty, as a consequence of the destruction of these crops.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization is warning that the next generation of locusts is threatening the livelihoods of more than 39 million people across Ethiopia, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and Kenya. Over the past few months, the pests have affected over 1.3 million hectares of agricultural land in the Horn of Africa. But now, in northern and central regions of Kenya, including 15 districts and many new areas, a second wave is fast spreading and critically impacting locals' food security. The country has roughly 1.9 million people already living in a precarious nutrition situation, which could now dramatically worsen.
As locusts move off into the wilderness, they lay millions of eggs across the land, which hatch in about 15 days, vastly increasing the size of the swarms. Farmers who are still recovering from the losses caused by previous swarms as well as years of droughts and floods, particularly livestock farmers, who now lack feed for their stock, are amongst the hardest hit, according to the organization. Without enough feed for their livestock, they lack "vital income from sales of milk and meat". Considering most Kenyan farmers are part of the most underprivileged economic sector of society, their subsistence depends on what they grow throughout the entire year, so a disaster of this size and extent can be incredibly harmful.
According to the World Food Program 690 million people were suffering from hunger late last year while an additional 130 million people are at risk of being pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2021. The numbers are staggering, but unfortunately, hunger crises around the world are likely to be aggravated by supply chain disruptions resultant from the destruction of these fields as well as the ongoing effects of the sanitary outbreak.
The head of the UN World Food Program, David Beasley, said “we are going to have famines of biblical proportions" this year”. On the same note, according to a recent analysis 20 countries “are likely to face potential spikes in high acute food insecurity” in the next three to six months, “and require urgent attention". Back then, Beasley couldn’t possibly have imagined that another massive plague of locusts could be striking Africa so early this year. What's even more worrying is the fact that this second wave can spin out of control very soon.
For the longest time, experts have been warning that global food supplies were getting increasingly limited. Here in the western world, as we're used to always get what we need from the stores whenever we want, oftentimes we lack sympathy with those suffering from famines and literally facing starvation on the other side of the planet. We might not realize that when a disruption in such proportions happens in one country, that triggers a cascade effect in supply chains across the world, and eventually, it also hit us by sparking shortages of some items while also elevating our already overly-inflated food prices.
The situation Africa is experiencing right now matters to us because the whole world is now interconnected, and we have to remember that what happens in one place eventually affects others as well. As economic collapse writer Michael Snyder perfectly summarized in his last article: "even in the best of times we have struggled to feed everyone on the planet, and these are definitely not the best of times.""Hollywood Homeless Flood Los Angeles; Homeless Encampments Everywhere; Skid Row Coming To America"
Jeremiah Babe,
"Hollywood Homeless Flood Los Angeles; Homeless
Encampments Everywhere; Skid Row Coming To America"
Full screen highly recommended.
"A Look to the Heavens"
"In the heart of the Rosette Nebula lies a bright open cluster of stars that lights up the nebula. The stars of NGC 2244 formed from the surrounding gas only a few million years ago. The featured image taken in January using multiple exposures and very specific colors of Sulfur (shaded red), Hydrogen (green), and Oxygen (blue), captures the central region in tremendous detail.
A hot wind of particles streams away from the cluster stars and contributes to an already complex menagerie of gas and dust filaments while slowly evacuating the cluster center. The Rosette Nebula's center measures about 50 light-years across, lies about 5,200 light-years away, and is visible with binoculars towards the constellation of the Unicorn (Monoceros)."
Gregory Mannarino, "Hyper-Bubble: Both The Treasury And The Fed Will Vastly Expand The Debt"
Gregory Mannarino, Post-market 2/22/21:
"Hyper-Bubble: Both The Treasury And
The Fed Will Vastly Expand The Debt"
“Mutiny of the Soul”
“Mutiny of the Soul”
by Charles Eisenstein
"Depression, anxiety, and fatigue are an essential part of a process of metamorphosis that is unfolding on the planet today, and highly significant for the light they shed on the transition from an old world to a new. When a growing fatigue or depression becomes serious, and we get a diagnosis of Epstein-Barr or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or hypothyroid or low serotonin, we typically feel relief and alarm. Alarm: something is wrong with me. Relief: at least I know I'm not imagining things; now that I have a diagnosis, I can be cured, and life can go back to normal. But of course, a cure for these conditions is elusive.
The notion of a cure starts with the question, "What has gone wrong?" But there is another, radically different way of seeing fatigue and depression that starts by asking, "What is the body, in its perfect wisdom, responding to?" When would it be the wisest choice for someone to be unable to summon the energy to fully participate in life?
The answer is staring us in the face. When our soul-body is saying No to life, through fatigue or depression, the first thing to ask is, "Is life as I am living it the right life for me right now?" When the soul-body is saying No to participation in the world, the first thing to ask is, "Does the world as it is presented me merit my full participation?"
What if there is something so fundamentally wrong with the world, the lives, and the way of being offered us, that withdrawal is the only sane response? Withdrawal, followed by a reentry into a world, a life, and a way of being wholly different from the one left behind?
The unspoken goal of modern life seems to be to live as long and as comfortably as possible, to minimize risk and to maximize security. We see this priority in the educational system, which tries to train us to be "competitive" so that we can "make a living". We see it in the medical system, where the goal of prolonging life trumps any consideration of whether, sometimes, the time has come to die. We see it in our economic system, which assumes that all people are motivated by "rational self-interest", defined in terms of money, associated with security and survival. (And have you ever thought about the phrase "the cost of living"?) We are supposed to be practical, not idealistic; we are supposed to put work before play. Ask someone why she stays in a job she hates, and as often as not the answer is, "For the health insurance." In other words, we stay in jobs that leave us feeling dead in order to gain the assurance of staying alive. When we choose health insurance over passion, we are choosing survival over life.
On a deep level, which I call the soul level, we want none of that. We recognize that we are here on earth to enact a sacred purpose, and that most of the jobs on offer are beneath our dignity as human beings. But we might be too afraid to leave our jobs, our planned-out lives, our health insurance, or whatever other security and comfort we have received in exchange for our divine gifts. Deep down, we recognize this security and comfort as slaves' wages, and we yearn to be free.
So, the soul rebels. Afraid to make the conscious choice to step away from a slave's life, we make the choice unconsciously instead. We can no longer muster the energy to go through the motions. We enact this withdrawal from life through a variety of means. We might summon the Epstein-Barr virus into our bodies, or mononucleosis, or some other vector of chronic fatigue. We might shut down our thyroid or adrenal glands. We might shut down our production of serotonin in the brain. Other people take a different route, incinerating the excess life energy in the fires of addiction. Either way, we are in some way refusing to participate. We are shying away from ignoble complicity in a world gone wrong. We are refusing to contribute our divine gifts to the aggrandizement of that world.
That is why the conventional approach of fixing the problem so that we can return to normal life will not work. It might work temporarily, but the body will find other ways to resist. Raise serotonin levels with SSRIs, and the brain will prune some receptor sites, thinking in its wisdom, "Hey, I'm not supposed to feel good about the life I am living right now." In the end, there is always suicide, a common endpoint of the pharmaceutical regimes that seek to make us happy with something inimical to our very purpose and being. You can only force yourself to abide in wrongness so long. When the soul's rebellion is suppressed too long, it can explode outward in bloody revolution. Significantly, all of the school shootings in the last decade have involved people on anti-depression medication. All of them! For a jaw-dropping glimpse of the results of the pharmaceutical regime of control, scroll down this compilation of suicide/homicide cases involving SSRIs. I am not using "jaw-dropping" as a figure of speech. My jaw literally dropped open.
Back in the 1970s, dissidents in the Soviet Union were often hospitalized in mental institutions and given drugs similar to the ones used to treat depression today. The reasoning was that you had to be insane to be unhappy in the Socialist Workers' Utopia. When the people treating depression receive status and prestige from the very system that their patients are unhappy with, they are unlikely to affirm the basic validity of the patient's withdrawal from life. "The system has to be sound - after all, it validates my professional status - therefore the problem must be with you."
Unfortunately, "holistic" approaches are no different, as long as they deny the wisdom of the body's rebellion. When they do seem to work, usually that is because they coincide with some other shift. When someone goes out and gets help, or makes a radical switch of modalities, it works as a ritual communication to the unconscious mind of a genuine life change. Rituals have the power to make conscious decisions real to the unconscious. They can be part of taking back one's power.
I have met countless people of great compassion and sensitivity, people who would describe themselves as "conscious" or "spiritual", who have battled with CFS, depression, thyroid deficiency, and so on. These are people who have come to a transition point in their lives where they become physically incapable of living the old life in the old world. That is because, in fact, the world presented to us as normal and acceptable is anything but. It is a monstrosity. Ours is a planet in pain. If you need me to convince you of that, if you are unaware of the destruction of forests, oceans, wetlands, cultures, soil, health, beauty, dignity, and spirit that underlies the System we live in, then I have nothing to say to you. I only am speaking to you if you do believe that there is something deeply wrong with the way we are living on this planet.
A related syndrome comprises various "attention deficit" and anxiety "disorders" (forgive me, I cannot write down these words without the ironic quotation marks) which reflect an unconscious knowledge that something is wrong around here. Anxiety, like all emotions, has a proper function. Suppose you left a pot on the stove and you know you forgot something, you just can't remember what. You cannot rest at ease. Something is bothering you, something is wrong. Subliminally you smell smoke. You obsess: did I leave the water running? Did I forget to pay the mortgage? The anxiety keeps you awake and alert; it doesn't let you rest; it keeps your mind churning, worrying. This is good. This is what saves your life. Eventually you realize - the house is on fire! - and anxiety turns into panic, and action.
So if you suffer from anxiety, maybe you don't have a "disorder" at all - maybe the house is on fire. Anxiety is simply the emotion corresponding to "Something is dangerously wrong and I don't know what it is." That is only a disorder if there is in fact nothing dangerously wrong. "Nothing is wrong, just you" is the message that any therapy gives when it tries to fix you. I disagree with that message. The problem is not with you. You have very good reason to be anxious. Anxiety keeps part of your attention away from your tasks of polishing the silverware as the house burns down, of playing the violin as the Titanic sinks. Unfortunately, the wrongness you are tapping into might be beyond the cognizance of the psychiatrists who treat you, who then conclude that the problem must be your brain.
Similarly, Attention Deficit Disorder, ADHD, and my favorite, Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) are only disorders if we believe that the things presented for our attention are worth paying attention to. We cannot admit, without calling into question the whole edifice of our school system, that it may be completely healthy for a ten-year-old boy to not sit still for six hours in a classroom learning about long division and Vasco de Gama. Perhaps the current generation of children, that some call the Indigos, simply have a lower tolerance for school's agenda of conformity, obedience, external motivation, right-and-wrong answers, the quantification of performance, rules and bells, report cards and grades and your permanent record. So we try to enforce their attention with stimulants, and subdue their heroic intuitive rebellion against the spirit-wrecking machine.
As I write about the "wrongness" against which we all rebel, I can hear some readers asking, "What about the metaphysical principle that it's 'all good'?" Just relax, I am told, nothing is wrong, all is part of the divine plan. You only perceive it as wrong because of your limited human perspective. All of this is only here for our own development. War: it gives people wonderful opportunities to make heroic choices and burn off bad karma. Life is wonderful, Charles, why do you have to make it wrong?
I am sorry, but usually such reasoning is just a sop to the conscience. If it is all good, then that is only because we perceive and experience it as terribly wrong. The perception of iniquity moves us to right it.
Nonetheless, it would be ignorant and fruitless to pass judgment upon those who do not see anything wrong, who, oblivious to the facts of destruction, think everything is basically fine. There is a natural awakening process, in which first we proceed full speed ahead participating in the world, believing in it, seeking to contribute to the Ascent of Humanity. Eventually, we encounter something that is undeniably wrong, perhaps a flagrant injustice or a serious health problem or a tragedy near at hand. Our first response is to think this is an isolated problem, remediable with some effort, within a system that is basically sound. But when we try to fix it, we discover deeper and deeper levels of wrongness. The rot spreads; we see that no injustice, no horror can stand in isolation. We see that the disappeared dissidents in South America, the child laborers in Pakistan, the clearcut forests of the Amazon, are all intimately linked together in a grotesque tapestry that includes every aspect of modern life. We realize that the problems are too big to fix. We are called to live in an entirely different way, starting with our most fundamental values and priorities.
All of us go through this process, repeatedly, in various realms of our lives; all parts of the process are right and necessary. The phase of full participation is a growth phase in which we develop gifts that will be applied very differently later. The phase of trying to fix, to endure, to soldier on with a life that isn't working is a maturation phase that develops qualities of patience and determination and strength. The phase of discovering the all-encompassing nature of the problem is usually a phase of despair, but it need not be. Properly, it is a phase of rest, of stillness, of withdrawal, of preparation for a push. The push is a birth-push. Crises in our lives converge and propel us into a new life, a new being that we hardly imagine could exist, except that we'd heard rumors of it, echoes, and maybe even caught a glimpse of it here and there, been granted through grace a brief preview.
If you are in the midst of this process, you need not suffer if you cooperate with it. I can offer you two things. First is self-trust. Trust your own urge to withdraw even when a million messages are telling you, "The world is fine, what's wrong with you? Get with the program." Trust your innate belief that you are here on earth for something magnificent, even when a thousand disappointments have told you you are ordinary. Trust your idealism, buried in your eternal child's heart, that says that a far more beautiful world than this is possible. Trust your impatience that says "good enough" is not good enough. Do not label your noble refusal to participate as laziness and do not medicalize it as an illness. Your heroic body has merely made a few sacrifices to serve your growth.
The second thing I can offer you is a map. The journey I have described is not always linear, and you may find yourself from time to time revisiting earlier territory. When you find the right life, when you find the right expression of your gifts, you will receive an unmistakable signal. You will feel excited and alive. Many people have preceded you on this journey, and many more will follow in times to come. Because the old world is falling apart, and the crises that initiate the journey are converging upon us. Soon many people will follow the paths we have pioneered. Each journey is unique, but all share the same basic dynamics I have described. When you have passed through it, and understood the necessity and rightness of each of its phases, you will be prepared to midwife others through it as well. Your condition, all the years of it, has prepared you for this. It has prepared you to ease the passage of those who will follow. Everything you have gone through, every bit of the despair, has been necessary to forge you into a healer and a guide. The need is great. The time is coming soon.”
"Oh Yeah..."
"When life hands you a lemon, say
"Oh yeah, I like lemons. What else you got?"
- Henry Rollins
"Learning from Ants"
"Learning from Ants"
by Jeff Thomas
"If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti-Mask. Vax vs. Anti-vax. Rich vs. poor. Man vs. woman. Cop vs. citizen. [Etc.] The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar… and why?"
The above observation by Shera Starr cannot be improved upon. And yet, the answer to the question is fairly simple. But let’s first take a look at this anomaly. It’s natural to identify with some individuals more than others. That tendency occurred before Homo sapiens came into being. In addition, the tendency for animals to group into families or packs also predates humans.
We tend to want to be around those who behave the way we do and have the same perceptions as we do. That only makes sense. We wish to surround ourselves with those who are unlikely to surprise and possibly even endanger us by behaving in a fashion that we would not ourselves choose. This is the basis of trust – an essential in group or herd mentality. And being a part of a group or herd brings to us increased safety.
So, what then, of those who are not within our group or herd? How do we relate to them? Well, any nature program that covers animals gathered around a water hole can provide that answer. We see a small group of wild pigs drinking alongside a group of wildebeests. Neither species is predatory, so they learn to recognize that, even though one group is made up of savannah-living grazers and the other are forest-living foragers, they can easily co-exist, which will increase the ability of both species to use the water hole at the same time.
We might also see a group of hyenas using the water hole, but we notice that the prey animals all seek to keep a distance between themselves and the predatory hyenas. Everyone understands that they are all at the water hole for the same reason and it makes sense to share, even if, in another situation, they are natural enemies. In fact, in most of nature, we see that species adapt to a condition of mutual tolerance in order to be able to coexist.
No surprise, then, that Homo sapiens got on the mutual tolerance bandwagon in its formative stages and, for the most part, has remained that way. But it is also true that predators develop dual habits. They may exercise tolerance at the water hole, but at some point, they mean to make a meal of their water hole neighbors. And when doing so, many species create associations with others of their kind to hunt.
This, too, is true of humans. Most of humanity seeks to live in a spirit of cooperation with others. In the countryside, people erect walls and fences to establish boundaries, then find it expedient to respect such divisions in order to live in peace. Even in cities, people who live cheek by jowl in the same building respect each other’s privacy for the most part. Even if they do not become friends, they either remain polite or ignore each other.
Although there are always exceptions, for the most part, mankind behaves in a manner that is based upon "getting along." He might argue with others, but for the most part, he understands that cooperation generally should be the objective, as it’s in his best interests. But why, then, are we seeing in so many of the countries of the First World, a rapidly increasing polarity amongst people. Ms. Starr is exactly correct. Those who would be most inclined toward mutual tolerance have, in recent years, become so polarized that they cannot so much as get together with their own families for the holidays without getting into heated arguments.
Why are people of today so solidly in one of two camps? Can this be blamed on the rise of the internet? Well, no, the internet has become the source of a plethora of opinions and perceptions. And more than closing people off to polarized "A" and "B" choices, the internet has served to broaden public discourse.
Of course, most people express distrust for the media, particularly those networks that purportedly deal in "news." What passes for news today is far from objective information that the viewer can then assess at his leisure. On one network, we view unceasing diatribes against one political party. Then we turn the channel and view unceasing diatribes against the opposing party. In turning on the News, we arrive at Indoctrination Central. But if we really pay attention objectively, we discover that the same programs are dictating to us that it is either our humanitarian duty to vax, or that vaxxing will enslave us to globalists who will inject us with microchips. They are also our source for the opposing beliefs that warfare is essential to protect us against those who seek to destroy us, or that it will be the wars themselves that will destroy us.
In fact, all of Ms. Starr’s concerns find their source in the media. When we ask the question, "Who is shaking the jar… and why?" we find that those who control the media are at the source of the polarization of people, especially in the First World. As to the "Why?" the answer is so simple that it’s often overlooked. Like the ants, the more a people can be made to fight each other, the easier it is to subjugate them. And since the effort to polarize people has become so massive, we can only conclude that the ultimate objective will be to implement a far greater level of subjugation, in an abnormally short period of time.
Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. white. Man vs. woman. Divide and conquer. In such a socio-political climate, the challenge will be to keep your wits about you. As the jar is shaken on a daily basis, it will be vital to recognize that those who control the media are creating a war between the pigs and the wildebeests. This is something that is not desired by either species, but as Hermann Goering stated, "Why, of course the people don’t want war." They must be goaded into it if those who are pulling the stings are to achieve greater subjugation.
In the coming years, this trend can be expected to become far worse than at present. The challenge will be to escape the jar if you can. Find a location where the state of warfare is less pronounced, or if this is not possible, seek a location within the jar that’s away from the fray. Those who fall for the bait – who buy into rabidly supporting one political party or another, or who allow themselves to be angered at an entire race, or who are conned into hatred of an entire gender – will prove to be the greatest casualties of subjugation."
Free Download: Mark Twain, "Letters From the Earth"
"Letters From the Earth"
by Mark Twain
"This is a strange place, an extraordinary place, and interesting. There is nothing resembling it at home. The people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane. Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the "noblest work of God." This is the truth I am telling you. And this is not a new idea with him, he has talked it through all the ages, and believed it. Believed it, and found nobody among all his race to laugh at it.
Moreover - if I may put another strain upon you - he thinks he is the Creator's pet. He believes the Creator is proud of him; he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes, and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to Him, and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea? Fills his prayers with crude and bald and florid flatteries of Him, and thinks He sits and purrs over these extravagancies and enjoys them. He prays for help, and favor, and protection, every day; and does it with hopefulness and confidence, too, although no prayer of his has ever been answered. The daily affront, the daily defeat, do not discourage him, he goes on praying just the same. There is something almost fine about this perseverance. I must put one more strain upon you: he thinks he is going to heaven!"
•
Mark Twain's "Letters From the Earth"
by Wikipedia
“Letters from the Earth” is one of Mark Twain's posthumously published works. The essays were written during a difficult time in Twain's life; he was deep in debt and had lost his wife and one of his daughters. Initially, his daughter, Clara Clemens, objected to its publication in March 1939, probably because of its controversial and iconoclastic views on religion, claiming it presented a "distorted" view of her father. Henry Nash Smith helped change her position in 1960. Clara explained her change of heart in 1962 saying that "Mark Twain belonged to the world" and that public opinion had become more tolerant. She was also influenced to release the papers due to her annoyance with Soviet propaganda charges that her father's ideas were being suppressed in the United States. The papers were edited in 1939 by Bernard DeVoto. The book consists of a series of short stories, many of which deal with God and Christianity. The title story consists of eleven letters written by the archangel Satan to archangels, Gabriel and Michael, about his observations on the curious proceedings of earthly life and the nature of man's religions. Other short stories in the book include a bedtime story about a family of cats Twain wrote for his daughters, and an essay explaining why an anaconda is morally superior to Man.
Textual references make clear that sections, at least, of “Letters from the Earth” were written shortly before his death in April 1910. (For instance, Letter VII, in discussing the ravages of hookworm, refers to the $1,000,000 gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr. to help eradicate the disease – a gift that was announced on October 28, 1909, less than six months before Twain's death.)"
•
Freely download "Letters From the Earth", in PDF format, here:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)