“6 Steps to Release Your Fear and Feel Peaceful”

“6 Steps to Release Your Fear and Feel Peaceful”

by Nicolas Perrin

“We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.”

~ Mary Catherine Bateson

“It was a balmy spring morning and I started my day as per usual, but I soon realized that my mind was entertaining fearful thoughts about my financial insecurity. With many new ventures within the seedling stage, my income flow was erratic and unpredictable, while my financial responsibilities were consistent and guaranteed. At the time I ignored these thoughts as “petty,” like a parent dismissing a crying child after a mild fall on the pavement.

What I didn’t realize was that my mind wanted to entertain these fear-based thoughts like a Hollywood blockbuster, and as you may know, what you focus on expands. Before I knew it, my body was in a state of complete anxiety and fear. I literally felt my cognitive and creative centers shutting down. I felt completely powerless, a hostage to my own mind. My body felt paralyzed, and I felt disconnected from my talents and gifts. I felt separate, isolated, and vulnerable. I became a victim of the fear. In this moment I realized the powerful impact thoughts can have on how we feel, mentally and physically. Here is what unfolded through me, and the lessons I treasured from this experience.

Fear is a closed energy, referred to as inverted faith. Fear exists when we do not trust our connection to the infinite part of who we are and buy into a story about what’s unfolding in our life. The emotions we feel are created from the thoughts that we choose to focus on, consciously or unconsciously. The emotions act as markers to let us know if we are focusing on expansive, empowering thoughts or fearful, limiting thoughts.

If I were to relate this in a story, it may be like a pilot believing he no longer had any guidance or support from the airport control tower in a large storm, and no instruments on board to detect if he was on a collision course with another airplane. If the control tower represents the infinite part of who we are, which always knows what’s best for us, it can be understandable why the pilot with no other guidance except for his own eye sight would be fearful of the situation at hand. An alarm on the plane beeping at the pilot would represent the emotions. The alarm’s purpose is to get the attention of the pilot so he can focus and realize he is off the path. Once our emotions start to take a grip of our physical body, what can we do to move from a state of limitation and fear into an open, tranquil, peaceful state?

1. Come back to the present moment. The first step is to bring your awareness to the present moment. To do this, take three deep breaths through your nose and exhale through your mouth. After the air has filled your lungs and you’ve felt your stomach rise, exhale through your mouth by forcing the air through your teeth, as if you were hissing out loud. This detoxifies your body from the heavy emotions you’re experiencing and brings you back into the present moment. When I do this, I place my awareness into my feet so I am in a feeling space within my body, rather than being in my mind, entertaining the stories that swirl around with vigor, like a dangerous hurricane. Imagine that all your emotions are in a large sludge bucket. This breathing technique will empty the bucket out so you are empty and free.

2. Put things in perspective. Now that you are present, acknowledge the experience and ask yourself this question: “What is the worst case scenario that can happen to me?” Once we can accept this and realize we will be okay if that happens, we are free from the fear. When I realized I’d blown things out of proportion with my fears, I was able to detach from the story and put things into perspective. I like to imagine that in every moment I have two wolves I can feed (per the Native American myth): the fear wolf or the love wolf. The one that gets stronger and wins is the one I feed.

3. Become an observer of your thoughts. What has served me well in moments like this is to say, “I’m not these thoughts. I’m not these emotions. I’m not this body. I’m an infinite being having a human experience.” In saying this, we immediately detach from the story and allow ourselves the choice of suffering or to become the observer. Imagine that your life is represented in a book, and the story you are living out comes from the words on the page. We can change the words of the story at any point in time.

4. Change your experience. The fourth step is to place your awareness and your right hand on the heart center, which is located near the sternum. Close your eyes, take three deep breaths, and make the following command: “I am now connected to the infinite part of who I am, which already knows how to be whole and complete. I take full responsibility and accountability for this creation, I recognize how it has served me, and I am now ready to let it go. I command that the fear energy be transmuted into unconditional love now. Thank you. It is now done.” This process is incredibly empowering. We allow ourselves the opportunity to experience being our own inner master and a co-creator of our reality.

5. Prevent your mind from sabotaging you. Visualize a stone being thrown into a pond. Observe the ripples it creates when it enters the water. This is to simply distract your mind and allow the process to unfold without doubt or self-sabotage. It is only our mind that can interfere with our own healing.

6. Be grateful. Express gratitude and appreciation for the integration and healing you have received. The key to happiness is awareness. When we become aware that our mind is wandering, we can gently bring it back to the present moment. It’s only in the present moment that we are empowered and can consciously choose the thoughts we engage with. The thoughts we focus on will determine where our energy flows, and thus what is created in our life. Each thought has a vibration, which is reflected by the feeling we experience in our body. To be able to move from a fear-based experience to an open, peaceful experience we must first take full responsibility and accountability that on some level we created the experience, and nobody else is to blame. The choice is truly ours. Do we choose to experience a fearful, limited life or do we choose a happy joyful life?"

- http://tinybuddha.com/

○

Reduce fear, good. Reduce stress also...

Full screen recommended.

Marconi Union, "Weightless"

"Neuroscience Says Listening to This Song 

Reduces Anxiety by Up to 65 Percent"

- https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/

○

Think more clearly...

"Cognition Enhancer For Clearer and Faster Thinking - 

Isochronic Tones"

Full screen recommended.

"This session stimulates Beta, SMR and Alpha to train your 

brain for better cognition, such as clearer and faster thinking."

The Daily "Near You?"

Montpelier Station, Virginia, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"The Joke..."

"The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool."

- Scott Turow

"You Can Never Tell..."

"You can never tell what people have inside them

until you start taking it away, one hope at a time."

- Gregory David Roberts

"Exploring The Madness Of The System With Insights From Scott Adams And Elon Musk"

"Exploring The Madness Of The System With 

Insights From Scott Adams And Elon Musk"

By CWR

"Ever felt like the more you understand about how things work, the more insane it all seems? Scott Adams touched on this, highlighting how the system protects itself by being so outrageously flawed that those who start to see through it are often labeled as crazy. It’s like stepping into a “crazy zone” where you realize that what you once thought was reality might just be a facade.

Elon Musk chimed in too, calling it a battle against the anti-civilizational woke mind virus. But here’s the thing - this battle isn’t about left or right; it’s about common sense. Musk outlined his centrist positions, from securing borders to addressing racism and responsible spending. These are ideas that resonate with many, regardless of political affiliation.

"Have you noticed the "system" protects itself by being so outrageously bad that by the time you understand what is happening it makes you look insane to people who haven't begun the journey to awareness? I recently evolved into the "crazy zone," in which I understand too much…"- Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) March 21, 2024

George Orwell nailed it! “In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.” -1984

- MichaelG (@Michael888G) March 21, 2024

This is a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke mind virus. My positions are centrist:

- Secure borders.

- Safe & clean cities.

- Don’t bankrupt America with spending.

- Racism against any race is wrong.

- No sterilization below age of consent.

Is this right-wing? t.co/QgRkoem2u4

- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 21, 2024"

- https://citizenwatchreport.com/

"The Wages of Perpetual Fear"

"The Wages of Perpetual Fear"

by Paul Rosenberg

"I’ve gone on for a long time about fear making humans stupid, and even about it being a weapon and a brain poison. But I’ve also wondered at times whether people would hit fear-fatigue… that point where people have simply had enough and walk out from under it.

As it turns out, however, I was a bit optimistic on fear fatigue. I’ve been reading Robert Sapolsky’s newest book, "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best And Worst", and was disappointed to learn what the best new research shows on the long-term application of fear. (Or, in the academic terminology, sustained stress.)

My disappointment, however, was soon tempered by two things: I gained information on how fear poisoning works. That human neurology is immensely variable, that there are exceptions to everything, and that if the whole picture were actually as dark as the most troubling findings, we’d have devolved into nothing but murderous monkeys long ago.

I barely need to say this, but 2025 has been The Year of Fear. I’m a bit amazed by the extent of it. There is a certain appeal to soaking up all the fear stories in normal times – our ability to look evil in the eye makes us appear vibrant – but 2025 has pushed far beyond that level. What we’re encountering is much more than simple fear porn, and there are certain outlets (including websites) that I can only describe as obscene. This is more destructive than people realize.

What Perpetual Fear Does To Us: I’m going to quote from Sapolsky, who is one of the better neuroscientists of our time. I’ll edit a bit to simplify and to remove the brain-area references, and will follow the passages with a few elaborations. “During sustained stress, we’re more fearful, our thinking is muddled, we assess risks poorly, and act impulsively out of habit, rather than incorporating new data.”

Under a long stream of fear (like scary headlines), our thinking breaks down. Let me put that very simply: You may be very bright in essence, but when you consume hours of fear every day, you become stupid. And please understand: This is biological. Your brain operations become those of a stupid person. (And yes, I’m using “stupid” very unscientifically.)

Also bear in mind that fear works. The people selling fear on TV, web pages and social media are being rewarded for it. They have become, using my terms loosely but not unfairly, drug dealers, selling damaging material that people become dependent upon. Moreover, these are professionals. Social media companies are fully aware that their business models depend upon people being addicted to them. They are careful to keep them addicted. The fears people consume, then, are coming to them from people who are cashing in from it.

“Stress weakens connections that are essential for incorporating new information that should prompt shifting to a new strategy - while strengthening connections with habitual brain circuits.” In other words, fear locks you into your habits and your previous choices. It literally diminishes the brain pathways that allow you to change your mind. This is serious, and I suspect that you’ve seen examples of this already.

“Under sustained stress we process emotionally prominent information rapidly and automatically, but less accurately. Working memory, impulse control, decision-making, risk-assessment and task shifting are impaired.” Again, prolonged fear locks people into whatever path they’re already on. And again, this is biological. The brain circuits are directly affected. Still…

From everything I’ve written above (and there are other nasty effects like domestic violence), it would appear that we are doomed; that our neighbors who’ve drunk deep from the river of fear are brain-locked, and so long as the fear stream continues (there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight), they will get more and more rigid in their biases, and that violence will continue and increase. And for some people all of the above will be true. Fear destroys in the most direct way: biologically.

Still… biology is never simple, and especially on the human level. While the things above are generally true, there are always exceptions; sometimes a lot of them. And it is those exceptions that have saved us, time after time. The wages of perpetual fear are polarized and locked minds. And that leads to knee-jerk opposition, violence and murder. We’re seeing that now and we stand to see it for some time. The world, it seems, has become addicted to fear. And yet, many of us refuse, and this is a long way from over.

There was a party in my neighborhood two days ago: Music, talking, playing, laughing and so on. It was the first joyful noise I’ve heard in public for a long time. Life finds a way, and especially human life."

- https://freemansperspective.com/

"How It Really Is"

Adventures With Danno, "Items at Costco Everyone Should Be Buying Right Now!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 6/27/25

"Items at Costco Everyone Should Be Buying Right Now!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Elsewhere...

Full screen recommended.

Scottish Guy in Moscow, 6/27/25

"Typical Russian Supermarket Tour, With Prices"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Dan, I Allegedly, "Everything’s on Sale, Should You Be Worried?"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 6/27/25

"Everything’s on Sale, Should You Be Worried?"

"Luxury real estate across the U.S. is seeing massive price cuts, and it's shaking up the market! From multimillion-dollar Florida mansions to high-end homes nationwide, prices are dropping at levels we haven’t seen since 2008-2012. Why are the ultra-rich unloading their assets? How do interest rates and market conditions play into this? I'll break it all down and share insights on everything from discounted yachts and golf carts to the role of AI in home design. We’re also talking about the economy’s slowdown, unexpected vehicle problems (yes, even Teslas), and the importance of staying vigilant against scams. Plus, don't miss the story of a secret $250M real estate deal in Palm Beach - who’s behind it? You’ll want to stick around for this one!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Speaking of housing, as we were...

Full screen recommended.

Lisa with Love, 6/27/25

"Is Russia Poor? Look How Russians Live Today"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Bill Bonner, "Higher House Hurdles"

Irish fixer upper, Source: Elizabeth Bonner

"Higher House Hurdles"

by Bill Bonner

Youghal, Ireland - "The latest report shows the economy shriveling up more than expected. The Hill: "First-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) growth was revised lower Thursday in light of reduced consumer spending, surprising economists. GDP contracted by 0.5 percent on an annualized basis, 0.3 percentage points lower than the last measurement from the Commerce Department."

Does it make any difference? Maybe not. GDP figures are largely meaningless or misleading. They don’t tell you much that is useful. And what they pretend to tell you is mostly fraudulent. More on that next week. Today we look at a way to make money that is probably the least fraudulent and easiest to understand - real estate. But wait. A Redfin forecast: "U.S. Home Prices Will Dip 1% By the End of 2025." Redfin economists expect the median U.S. home-sale price to fall flat in the third quarter, and fall 1% year over year by the fourth quarter. When it comes to mortgage rates, we expect them to remain elevated near 7% for the remainder of the year."

We just bought an abandoned farm in Ireland. We’re enjoying putting it back in order - fixing stone walls, insulating walls, redoing plumbing, electricity and heating, planting new gardens and tidying up the old ones.

There were many bidders for the farmland around it. But no one wanted to deal with a group of dilapidated outbuildings surrounding a wreck of a house from the 19th century. For us, it is a pleasure; but not a way to make money. “Some guys play golf. Some watch TV. We just like restoring houses,” we explained to a puzzled neighbor. (On a practical level, our family - children and grandchildren — is getting bigger while our cottage seems to be getting smaller.)

Property has utility - whether you use it yourself or rent it out. That utility is measurable, simply by checking comparable rents. The calculations are easy. You subtract the costs - maintenance, taxes, utilities, etc. from the (possible) rental income. That is your return on investment. If it is more than the “hurdle rate” - usually measured by the yield on a ‘risk-free’ US 10-year bond - you are ahead of the game.

But investing in real estate that you won’t live in is like investing in a private business. It is specific. You’ve got to ‘know the territory.’ Each market is different. Each property is different. Each has its own story to tell.

Elizabeth, your editor’s wife, invests in small apartment buildings. In Baltimore. The city is in many ways a disaster. But many of its old houses - relics of the Gilded Age, converted to apartments - are handsome and solid. They were built when the city was rich. And, compared to other cities, they can be quite cheap. “You have to know what you’re doing,” says Elizabeth. “I look for a solid place, with good infrastructure, but often in need of a little ‘updating.’ I’m usually willing to pay about $125,000 ‘per door,’ as they say. All you can count on is the rental income. It’s got to pay the taxes, the upkeep and the management. And in my area, if I go much above $125,000 per unit, the numbers are hard to make work.”

Nationwide, the median monthly apartment rent is about $2,100, according to Zillow. We don’t know what it is in Baltimore; probably around $1,400 would be a safer guess. You need a margin of error. That gives you a gross rent of $16,800 per year per door. If you paid $125,000 for the property…spent half of that on management, taxes, and maintenance - again, very specific numbers per property …you end up with $8,400 per unit, which would give you about a 6% return.

Which is only to point out how ‘local’ the business is. You can’t just buy ‘at the market price’ and forget about it. “I try to stick to the rule of eight,” says Elizabeth. “I’m willing to pay eight times gross rents...and hope to end up with a 5% net return.”

Many people look to their own houses as sources of ‘investment’ gains. But houses aren’t ‘investments.’ Builders add wealth by building houses - at a profit. The homeowner may paint the trim or add a sunroom; rarely do improvements pay off. “Real estate never goes down,” was on millions of lips prior to the mortgage finance crisis of ’07-’08. Then housing prices did go down. Four million families lost their homes when prices were no longer high enough to support re-financing.

The Fed in its wisdom, lowered interest rates to try to undo Mr. Market’s correction, creating a new distortion. Over the last ten years, house prices have approximately doubled, rising twice as fast as wages. Over the last five years alone, median mortgage payments have doubled. This, of course, caused an affordability crisis, as the average family was no longer able to buy the average house. The median mortgage payment is today around $2,800, which leaves a lot of houses for sale and few people able to buy them. Sellers now outnumber buyers by the biggest margin ever.

As Mr. Market gets his bearings, we expect prices to come down, as Redfin projects. Already, this year, we’re seeing a drop in the rate of house price appreciation - down to just 1.3% annually. And if we are right about the primary trend in the credit market - towards higher yields over many years - we can also expect that speculative gains on residential real estate will vanish. Prices may go up. But they probably won’t keep up with inflation."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

"Chaos Creeps in on Little Cat's Feet"

Shopping with Zohran Mamdani

"Chaos Creeps in on Little Cat's Feet"

by Jim Kunstler

"Great cities fall to the sound of cheering crowds." 

- Ami Kozak on "X"

"The Democratic Party put another bullet in its head this week with the election of the charming, affable jihadi communist Zohran Mamdani. Is “communist” too harsh a label? (He styles himself, softly, a “socialist.”) Yet his campaign platform looks like a template from the venerable Soviet Council of Ministers circa 1957: Free Everything: housing, buses and subways, college, child-care, government food stores...with a cherry-on-top of replacing police with social workers in high crime areas - because rapists and car-jackers would quit their rowdy ways if only they could talk about their feelings.

If you believe the news reports emanating from Woke Central, Zohran received major support from the folks who predominate the Upper West Side, where he was raised-up by his Columbia prof Dad and film-maker Mom. That is, voted in by the same high-income demographic that flocks to Zabar’s Deli on Sunday mornings for smoked sturgeon and babka - a curious alliance. I guess this solves the old riddle of why Europe’s Jews walked so placidly into Auschwitz.

“Life imitates art,” old Oscar Wilde liked to say, and with so many self-administered bullets in its head now, the Democratic Party looks more and more like The Walking Dead, a necromantic tribute to its erstwhile mascot, “Joe Biden,” the Phantom of the White House. Fortunately, the Latinx bombshell, AOC, America’s answer to Eva Peron, has stepped up to the leadership role, flanked by the foxy Jasmine Crockett, with their mentor, Bernie Sanders close at hand (on a leash, really) barking validation for the Party’s death trip.

It’s a wonder of our time (and its playful zeitgeist) that New Yorkers might choose a mayor even worse than the brain-dead colossus, Bill de Blasio, but there it is, in plain sight for all to behold. The Big Apple and its various services will now go from their currently merely broke-ass condition, to the complete collapse of infrastructure, transit, housing, revenue, business, and public safety, in other words, to true Third World authenticity! Serious people, who run viable businesses, support families, and pay whopping taxes, are in a panic, all a’chatter about moving elsewhere.

That chatter is not idle, especially among the class that owns major real estate, of which New York City has a frightening and increasingly obsolete inventory - hundreds of office skyscrapers running at fifty percent (or less) occupancy, which cannot cover their mortgages, maintenance, or taxes. What will become of them? I’ll tell you: some will be foreclosed-on, sold for dimes on the dollar (and fail again under new ownership,) and quite few will stand empty waiting for acanthus tree seeds to sprout on their empty windowsills.

Or, they will turn into “squats,” like the towers in the abandoned city center of Johannesburg that I saw visiting there ten years ago. Those giant office buildings were not converted into “residential,” you understand; folks were simply camping-out there, even with the electricity and water turned off. This is exactly what happens when you run the prosperous people, whom you hate, out of town, which is what happened in that sad-sack nation. How many demonstration projects like that are needed to prove that communism with a racist frosting on top is a mug’s game.

Of course, we’re not there yet. Zohran hasn’t been sworn in, though the victory celebration just now looks like it’s fait accompli. You can only imagine the frantic conversation running between the old party poohbahs out in the cold: Chuck Schumer, Hakim, Nadler, Obama, even the loser, Cuomo, plus the non-elected party apparatchiks: Axelrod, Podesta, Carville, Plouffe, Emmanuel... They’re not saying, but I bet many are silently wondering: Is there some way we can just disappear the guy? Make him go away? X him out? Cancel his ass? (Someone, for Godsake, find a couple of girls who will say he groped them in an elevator!)

Or maybe some electoral work-around? Maybe put what remains of the party’s dwindling financial mojo back behind Eric Adams - yes, he’s still Mayor - who supposedly quit the party (after they tried and failed to stuff him in prison) and is running for mayor now as an independent...but who will surely welcome whatever support and moolah they can bring to his cause. Adams’s two great virtues as a political figure: he’s not Bill de Blasio and he’s not Zohran Mamdani.

New York might go down the drain anyway. At least for a while. That broken business model for skyscrapers is not going away anytime soon, and neither is the greatly augmented Third World population funneled across the open border into New York City by “Joe Biden’s” shadowy minders. Will New York turn into that fairytale town whose economy subsisted on people simply taking in each other’s laundry?

Well, the city will always have its geographical assets, like, the best goshdarn ocean harbor in the whole east coast. Something will be there...some human agglomeration. But what? And over all of that, like the uncanny eyes of Dr. TJ Eckleburg in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, looming above the ash-heaps of Queens County on the road to West Egg, lately rises the stern visage of Donald J. Trump, New York real estate mogul superbus, and now President of this sore-beset nation, watching events roll out."

- https://www.kunstler.com/

"False Flag Attacks and Nuclear Samson Option w/ Ray McGovern"

Full screen recommended.

Prepper News, 6/26/25

"False Flag Attacks and Nuclear Samson Option

 w/ Ray McGovern"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"I Was The Only One At The RV Dealership Today; Local Restaurants Shut Down Permanently"

Full screen recommended.

Jeremiah Babe, 6/26/25

"I Was The Only One At The RV Dealership Today; 

Local Restaurants Shut Down Permanently"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Gerald Celente, "Market Does Not Reflect Economic Reality"

Strong language alert!

Gerald Celente, 6/26/25

"Market Does Not Reflect Economic Reality"

"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present facts and truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for what’s next in these increasingly turbulent times." 

 - https://trendsjournal.com/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"What Can We Know..."

"What can we know? What are we all? 

Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, 

with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

12K Video Ultra HD, "Only Real OLED: 16K Video Ultra HD, Dolby Vision 16K HDR"

Full screen recommended.

12K Video Ultra HD, "Only Real OLED: 

16K Video Ultra HD, Dolby Vision 16K HDR"

Be kind to yourself, relax and savor this

 astonishingly beautiful video experience..

Musical Interlude: Alexandro Querevalú, "The Last of the Mohicans"

Full screen recommended.

Alexandro Querevalú, "The Last of the Mohicans"

"This masterpiece not only makes the performer cry but also millions of people all over the world! The sentiments expressed in Alexandro´s interpretation of the music with one of the native American flutes called Quenacho has a uniting effect on the hearts of people of all races, nations, religions, and cultures."

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Stars are sometimes born in the midst of chaos. About 3 million years ago in the nearby galaxy M33, a large cloud of gas spawned dense internal knots which gravitationally collapsed to form stars. NGC 604 was so large, however, it could form enough stars to make a globular cluster.

Many young stars from this cloud are visible in the above image from the Hubble Space Telescope, along with what is left of the initial gas cloud. Some stars were so massive they have already evolved and exploded in a supernova. The brightest stars that are left emit light so energetic that they create one of the largest clouds of ionized hydrogen gas known, comparable to the Tarantula Nebula in our Milky Way's close neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap121211.html

Chet Raymo, “Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright…”

“Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright…”

by Chet Raymo

“Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet.” You may recall these words from Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” There is nothing intrinsically cheerful about the world, she says. To live is to die; it’s all part of the bargain. Stars destroy themselves to make the atoms of our bodies. Every creature lives to eat and be eaten. And into this incomprehensible, unfathomable, apparently stochastic melee stumbles… You and I.

With qualities that we have - so far - seen nowhere else. Hope. Humor. A sense of justice. A sense of beauty. Gratitude. But also: Anger. Hurt. Despair. Strangers in a strange land.

Galaxies by the billions turn like St. Catherine Wheels, throwing off sparks of exploding stars. Atoms eddy and flow, blowing hot and cold, groping and promiscuous. A wind of neutrinos gusts through our bodies, Energy billows and swells. A myriad of microorganisms nibble at our flesh.

We have a sense that something purposeful is going on, something that involves us. Something secret, holy and fleet. But we haven’t a clue what it is. We make up stories. Stories in which we are the point of it all. We tell the stories over and over. To our children. To ourselves. And the stories fill up the space of our ignorance.

Until they don’t. And then the great yawning spaces open again. And time clangs down on our heads like a pummeling rain, like the collapsing ceiling of the sky. Dazed, stunned, we stagger like giddy topers towards our own swift dissolution. Inexplicably praising. Admiring. Wondering. Giving thanks.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

○

“The Tyger”

“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art.

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,

And watered heaven with their tears,

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”

- William Blake

The Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, "I Want A Lot"

"I Want A Lot"

"You see, I want a lot.

Perhaps I want everything:

the darkness that comes with every infinite fall

and the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing

and are raised to the rank of prince

by the slippery ease of their light judgments.

But what you love to see are faces

that so work and feel thirst...

You have not grown old, and it is not too late

to dive into your increasing depths

where life calmly gives out its own secret."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

"The Greater..."

"The greater our knowledge increases,

the greater our ignorance unfolds."

- John F. Kennedy

"It takes considerable knowledge just to

 realize the extent of your own ignorance."

-Thomas Sowell

The Daily "Near You?"

Surrey, British Columbia, Canada. Thanks for stopping by!

"Only One Question..."

"There's only one question that matters, and it's the one you never get around to asking. People are capable of varying degrees of truth. The majority spend their entire lives fabricating an elaborate skein of lies, immersing themselves in the faith of bad faith, doing whatever it takes to feel safe. The person who truly lives has precious few moments of safety, learns to thrive in any kind of storm. It's the truth you can stare down stone-cold that makes you what you are. Weak or strong. Live or die. Prove yourself. How much truth can you take?"

- Karen Marie Moning

"The End Of Free Will"

"The End Of Free Will"

by The ZMan

"The late polemicist Christopher Hitchens famous quipped, “Yes, I have free will; I have no choice but to have it.” He was addressing the paradoxical nature of free will in that even if it were an illusion, and we could somehow figure that out, we would be forced to carry on as if it were real. Everything about how we understand ourselves as human beings, and how we get on with one another, depends on the assumption that we have choices and we make those choices freely.

The reason for that is our societies and even our own minds are organized around prescriptive requirements, not descriptive ones. Sure, we know not to step off a roof as the facts tell us we will accelerate toward the sidewalk below, until we reach the sidewalk and suddenly decelerate. It is that rapid deceleration that kills us and that is a fact not subject to opinion. The reason we believe it is immoral to jump off a roof or kill yourself in any other way has nothing to do with physics.

Suicide is a choice. In Western societies at this point in time, making that choice, regardless of the circumstances, is immoral. In other times and other places, suicide was an honorable option. The Japanese used to treat ritual suicide as an honorable end for a man who faced a disgraceful end. The West used to have the idea of leaving a doomed man alone with a bottle of whiskey and revolver. The former was to gain the required courage to use the latter for the honorable act.

As an aside, this is why the liberal project was doomed from the start. It assumed that there was a universally correct way for humans to organize their societies. We could use reason and observations of nature to arrive at the correct way we ought and ought not act and how we should and should not organize our societies. We can reason our way to a set of universal moral principles. Then we can reason our way to building a society around those moral principles.

The liberal project, all of the ideologies that have spring from it, assumes that human beings are programmed to work best in a specific sort of society. We naturally function at our best within a specific set of rules. If we can figure out those rules and then figure out how to impose them, man will be liberated from the oppression of having to live against his nature within a hostile set of rules. This is the goal of libertarianism, anarchism, communism, progressivism and so on.

This brings us back to the issue of free will. Ideologies fail, because they assume that once the rules are imposed, people no longer have to make choices between the things they desire. Free will is no longer be necessary. Even if free will is an illusion, however, it is one necessary for us to be human beings, rather than moist robots. There is something about the nature of man that requires the belief in free will. Without this illusion, if that is what it is, we cease to be human and cease to exist.

It is probably why we lack the language to discuss the descriptive world in purely descriptive terms. You see that in this post by W. M. Briggs. He is taking on a post by former physicist and current YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder, who tries to argue that free will is a myth and you should stop believing in it. As Briggs notes, her language, even when discussing the laws of physics, is prescriptive. Even when we think descriptively, we end up using prescriptive language.

This crackpot notion that we would be better off if we chose to not believe in free will is not new to Sabine Hossenfelder. Like all such arguments, the first person to think about it was the first man with enough free time to waste some of it on contemplating pointless questions like do we have free will? Idle hands do the Devil’s work and the best proof of that is philosophy. Everywhere there have been idle hands we find the philosopher and Hell follows with him.

Of course, free will is a slippery concept. There is libertarian free will, which argues that for any choice we make, we could have chosen otherwise, even if all of the conditions that could impact our decision were identical. For example, you chose to arrive at work on time, but you could have arrived earlier or later, even assuming some negative or positive consequences to the choices. Like so much of libertarianism, this makes sense if you forget that humans live in societies with other humans.

The other form of free will involves morality. Often, oaths have a line where the person taking the oath testifies that he is taking the oath of his own free will. In criminal proceedings we differentiate between knowingly committing a crime and inadvertently or accidentally committing a crime. The driver who purposely runs down a pedestrian is treated differently from the person who does so while trying to avoid a group of school children because of our notion of free will.

Both conceptualizations of free will are most likely illusions, like much of what we think we understand about the natural world. What we think of as physical reality is probably a simplified illusion of reality. Our brains evolved to conceptualize the parts of reality we need to understand in order for our genes to advance to the next round. The concept of free will is just another item in the toolkit. Even our ability to question our conceptualization of reality is probably an illusion.

That is the problem with Sabine Hossenfelder’s argument. Whether or not free will, however defined, is a real thing does not matter, other than it being a useful topic around which to build a post. Whether you believe it or not does not matter, but once you decide to act as if it is not real, then you enter the world in which it is perfectly acceptable to remove the people who cannot fit your model of society. In the end, every ideologue must reject free will in order to pull the trigger.

That is the end of the free will debate. The age of ideology has taught us that in order to have societies that accommodate human nature, we must choose to organize ourselves as comes naturally to use. That means leaving others to organize themselves as comes naturally to them. Once you start down the path of rejecting free will, you end up on the road that leads to industrial slaughter and the menticide that now promises to extinguish the Western world.

We have free will and if we did not have it, we would have no choice but to invent it as it is the only way we can live as human beings. That means we have a choice as to how we organize ourselves. We must collectively choose our metaphysics and our morality and choose how we deal with those who undermine our choices. Those who choose otherwise, in effect, choose not to be us. Therefore, we have the choice to exclude them from us, even choosing to use force if necessary."

- https://thezman.com/

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"Eckhart Tolle: Free Will"

"No Offense"

"No Offense"

You can please some of the people, some of the time...

by Joel Bowman

“For the fairest.”

~ Inscription on Eris’s golden Apple of Discord

Hella, Iceland - "Crikey! It’s a good thing your editor does not mind holding unpopular opinions. Our reckless, anti-warmongering in Tuesday’s Note excited the umbrage of some gentle readers. (Catch up on our radical reckonings and dive into the comment section fracas – especially if you stand in disagreement – here: "Mostly Peaceful Bombings.")

Of course, we are not so naïve as to expect our own wife to agree with everything we write, much less an audience of thousands of people from different backgrounds all around the world. Notice we did not title this humble publication “Notes From the Echo Chamber.” It would be wrong to abuse independent-minded readers as though we had.

Rather, and unlike many in the so-called “legacy press,” we actively invite disagreement, courting discord like cheeky Eris and her golden apple. Indeed, we are inspired by a long line of ornery gadflies and impenitent contrarians.

Fighting Words: Back in the early 2000s, for example, we used to relish the delivery of Vanity Fair magazine for the pure pleasure of reading the monthly column, appropriately titled “Fighting Words,” from the pen of the late, great Christopher Hitchens. The iconoclastic pugilist rarely pulled his punches, and we disagreed with almost everything he wrote. (Mr. Hitchens was an unreconstructed Trotskyist who rabidly supported the Iraq war, just for starters...)

Still, we rarely parsed one of his columns without having enjoyed a chuckle or an “ah-ha” moment of some sort. And if it was pure disagreement we felt, at least we felt it more so after his essay than before. Of course, those were the good ol’ days, before being offended was considered to be an acute, and in some cases terminal, condition...

That being said, we will continue writing under the assumption that most folks tune in to hear what we honestly think... not what we dishonestly think they want to hear. (There’s enough pandering in the world already, without us adding to the steaming pile.) Besides, if we’re correct in our assessment of the latest quagmire in the Middle East, the mighty Military Industrial Complex will deliver us plenty of opportunity to offend and re-offend thick-skinned readers in future Notes. So, if you’re among the easily outraged... please, do stay tuned for more!

Meanwhile, let us turn from a subject upon which almost nobody can seem to agree, to one which everyone can surely disagree...Here’s CNN, with the latest from the center of the socialist universe: "Zohran Mamdani declares victory in NYC Democratic mayoral primary. New York State assemblyman and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani declared victory in a speech as he is poised to win the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, with his top challenger Andrew Cuomo conceding the race."

Readers unfamiliar with Mr. Mamdani will grasp most of what they need to know by discovering that he was enthusiastically endorsed by gushing comrade in arms, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The snappy pair of socialists are part of what some, including veteran collectivist Bernie Sanders, are calling the “new guard” of the Democratic Party. This is a party, lest we remind readers, that witnessed the results of the last general election... in which they lost the House, the Senate, the popular vote, the presidency and every swing state there was to lose... and said to itself, “Hmm... perhaps if we moved further left?”

Eat the Rich, Redux: Naturally, Mamdani supports all the usual “eat the rich” slogans... higher taxes for the enviably wealthy and “greedy” capitalists alike, “free” rides on the city’s already dilapidated public transport, collectively owned grocery stores and more governmental intervention in the already highly dysfunctional rental market. (We addressed many of these ideas in another Note, titled “Real Socialists”. ) “But, but, but...” comes the inevitable rejoinder to our frequent socialist-bashing, “Bernie and his DemSoc juniors are not talking about Havana/Caracas/Soviet-style socialism... rather, they’re aiming more at Denmark-style socialism.”

Which would be fine... except Denmark is not a socialist nation, as Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen was at some pains to note in a direct response to Bernie’s continued mischaracterization of his country and its people. “I would like to make one thing clear,” Prime Minister Rasmussen said in a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy. “Denmark is a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.”

Like its Nordic neighbors, Denmark is able to sustain generous welfare programs – universal healthcare, public education, etc. – because of its dynamic, highly functional capitalist economy. It is not the way it spends its money that makes it rich, in other words, but the way it generates it in the first place.

Denmark also happens to be a high trust society, something that cannot exactly be said of the mean streets of many a Democrat-run city in the US, where crime is rampant, baby formula lives behind plexiglass and stealing up to $950 of goods is considered by a growing demographic to be just a new and fashionable way of shopping, because: oppression.

We laid over in Copenhagen on the way to this icy End of the World earlier in the week and were reminded of this quaint cultural distinction when we saw the self-service vending machines and self-service stations at the airport...

Live Free and Prosper: For the uninitiated, these outlets operate entirely on the honor system. One makes their selection from a menu, swipes their credit card for the appropriate amount, then opens the door to the entire fridge, with all the goods within reach, and simply takes what he has paid for... and nothing more.

The items are not protected in individually-packaged and alarmed plastic containers, there are no security personnel to ensure compliance, and one gets the feeling nobody would dare entertain anything so wild as a smash-and-grab style shoplifting frenzy, as are regularly witnessed in cities from San Francisco to New York and between.

Buying people off with stolen freebies and relieving them from individual responsibility might win elections among low trust voters in the short term, but it doesn’t make the underlying society peaceful and prosperous in the long run. For that you need free markets, free minds and free people. But you already knew that didn’t you, dear reader. See you in the comments…And stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World..."

- https://joelbowman.substack.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

Good luck!