Dire Straits, "Private Investigations"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Sunday, September 13, 2020
"In The End..."
"Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope.
Sometimes we cry with everything except tears.
In the end that’s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth.
In the end that’s all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn."
- Gregory David Roberts. "Shantaram"
"The Four D's That Define the Future"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"Four D's will define 2020-2025: derealization, denormalization, decomplexification and decoherence. That's a lot of D's. Let's take them one at a time.
I use the word derealization to describe the inner disconnect between what we experience and what the propaganda/marketing complex we live in tells us we should be experiencing. Put another way: our lived experience is derealized (dismissed as not real) by official spin and propaganda.
The current state of the economy is a good example. We see the real-world economy declining yet the officially approved narrative is that there's a V-shaped recovery underway because Big Tech stocks are hitting new highs. In other words, we don't need a real-world economy, all we need is a digital economy provided by Big Tech platforms. This is derealization at its finest: the everyday world you experience directly no longer matters; what matters is stock prices and various statistics that all paint a rosy picture.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest class is fleeing soon-to-be-bankrupt cities. The wealthiest class has the means to buy the best advice and also has the most to lose, so I give their actions far more credence than official propaganda.
I've sketched out my thesis on denormalization in "The 'New Normal' Is De-Normalization" and "Here's Why the 'Impossible; Economic Collapse Is Unavoidable": This is why denormalization is an extinction event for much of our high-cost, high-complexity, heavily regulated economy. Subsidizing high costs doesn't stop the dominoes from falling, as subsidies are not a substitute for the virtuous cycle of re-investment.
The Fed's project of lowering the cost of capital to zero doesn't generate this virtuous cycle; all it does is encourage socially useless speculative predation. Collapse isn't "impossible," it's unavoidable.
The basic idea is that all the structures of the "normal" economy only function at full capacity, as costs have moved higher, unproductive complexity has increased and our ability to pay these higher costs is based on ever-expanding debt. As a result, "normal" became extremely fragile and binary: it's either fully funded at full capacity or it collapses. The structures of everyday life (to use Braudel's apt phrase) are incapable of downsizing to 70% of their previous complexity and cost, much less 50%.
There won't be any "new normal" because the system has become too rigid, ossified, over-regulated and controlled by entrenched interests and elites. It is incapable of reducing complexity and cost, and bailouts via borrowed money are stopgaps, not actual solutions.
Decomplexification is a mouthful, and everyone inside the machine knows the impossibility of paring organizational complexity. Everyone who is a stakeholder in the status quo (which is virtually every employee, manager, etc.) will fight to keep the status quo intact as is, for fear that any re-organization might imperil their livelihood or security. This is entirely understandable, of course.
Modern life is inherently complex. Democracy is complex and cumbersome because having a bunch of stakeholders all competing for public resources and advocating for a bigger slice of the pie is inherently messy. There must be oversight and feedback to minimize the possibility of one clique gaining complete power.
Long global supply chains are inherently complex. Managing ever-increasing regulations is inherently complex. And so on. When the money runs out or loses its purchasing power, all sorts of complexity that were previously viewed as essential crumble to dust. We're witnessing the early stages of this in real time in healthcare and education: overly complex and costly systems are breaking down not just from the challenges of the pandemic but because they're structurally incapable of adapting or evolving beyond pseudo-reforms and policy tweaks.
As an illustration, consider the current overly complex way our healthcare system funds itself and a system in which customers pay cash for medical care: no insurance, minimal oversight auditing, etc. Regulations boil down to a requirement to publicly post prices for services and actually charge only the posted prices.
In higher education, as per the model I outline in my book "The Nearly Free University," the campus and its entire bureaucracy becomes superfluous. Classes, embedded apprenticeships and in-person workshops are organized online. The entire scheme of accrediting colleges is jettisoned in favor of accrediting each student.
And so on. You can see the problem: eliminating unproductive, obsolete layers of costly complexity will eliminate millions of middle-class jobs that can't be replaced with new expansive bureaucracies. Yes, paying cash for healthcare and campus-less, mostly automated universities are oversimplifications. So where is the middle ground between current costly complexity and some "new normal" with half the costs and complexity? There's no way to accomplish this while retaining the payrolls, priorities, processes and structures of the existing systems.
The point here is that when the money runs out or loses much of its purchasing power, overly costly complexity collapses whether we like it or not.
Decoherence is an interesting word. In science, "Decoherence can be viewed as the loss of information from a system into the environment, since every system is loosely coupled with the energetic state of its surroundings." Decoherence refers to the loss of systemic coherence between narratives, values, processes and systems. Simply put, stuff no longer works right and it no longer makes sense. What worked in the past has been transformed by two systemic drifts:
1. Systems that evolved to function in a specific socio-political-economic context continued adding complexity and cost because debt-based funding was available, not because they were becoming more efficient or effective.
2. The socio-political-economic context has changed and so the status quo systems are mal-adapted, i.e. obsolete.
These two systemic drifts occur so slowly that we aren't even aware of the loss of coherence unless we compare the current system to a previous set point or look at it from the perspective of starting from scratch: what would the most sustainable, lowest-energy consumption, most efficient and productive system look like if we designed it from scratch? It certainly wouldn't be the system we have now.
The four Ds help us understand why the status quo is incapable of adapting/evolving fast enough and effectively enough to manage a controlled collapse to a much lower level of cost and complexity. The status quo can't even admit the need for a controlled collapse, much less manage it.
We can add a fifth D: denial. The four Ds are already in motion and denial is only accelerating systemic decoherence."
"Something Really, Really Bad Is Going To Happen: Evictions, Starvation And Next Great Depression!"
"Something Really, Really Bad Is Going To Happen:
Evictions, Starvation And Next Great Depression!"
by Epic Economist
"At this stage of the economic collapse, we should be experiencing calmer times. After every big crash, a bounce-back follows, almost as the involuntary reflex inherent to human nature, an instinct of survival, in which we supposedly would have some time to breathe through the chaos. When you hit rock bottom, the only way out is up, isn't that what they say? But from where we stand, it feels much more like we've hit the economic rock bottom and we're still trapped down there, we just have gotten a little bit more used to it, so we can't see how bad it looks anymore, because the shock is so frequent that it became ordinary. If this is the so-called recovery, something really wrong is happening here. That's why today we decided to unmask this delusive idea that things are getting back on track, and show you why this is far from being a recovery.
If this is supposed to be the moment when things get more stable, why does it feel like we're still free-falling? If these are "calmer times" we wonder how much chaos is coming for us next. As we will discuss later on this video, more than half of the American families are suffering from serious financial pain, while the pace of unemployment claims continues to hit new records every week it passes by. The United States had never seen anything like that prior to 2020. The latest record was set in 1982, when 695,000 workers filed for unemployment benefits during a single week, configuring the worst rate for jobless claims for almost 38 years, and right now we have passed over that old record for 25 weeks in a row.
The study also presents that 29.6 million people who continued to claim unemployment insurance under all programs translate into 18.4% of the civilian labor force of 161 million. The blue columns stand for continued claims under state programs, showing an increase from 54k to 13.2 million, the first increase after five decreases in a row. The red columns stand for continued claims under federal established by the CARES Act and some other programs, outlining a rise from 326k to 16.4 million.
These numbers would be considered “catastrophic” at any other period in American history, but we are at a point when we constantly face catastrophic numbers so we have become somewhat desensitized to them. Even though the unemployment numbers are not as abysmal as they were earlier this year, and other economic figures seem to have stagnated for the time being, many analysts have been arguing that this moment of "relative" - and we mean very "relative" - "calm" won't last very long.
If you are having this gut feeling that something really bad is about to happen, you're not the only one. It feels like a simple wind strike would make the entire house of cards collapse, but let's not panic just yet. In hard times like these, we should stick to the ones we love and care for, so if you get the chance to spend some quality time with our family, take it, especially because not everyone can afford to have this privilege right now. Unfortunately, many American families are facing anxiety over having the basics to attend their needs, and a recent report revealed that over 50 percent of the households in some of our largest cities are currently facing severe financial distress.
Also, millions of people can face homelessness and starvation depending on how the election goes. We reported on our last mortgage crash video that due to a massive rental insolvency, many homeowners and business owners were receiving eviction moratoriums at a very accelerated rate, because with these extremely high unemployment rates and of thousands of businesses being directly affected by the lockdown, it has become almost impossible to make ends meet. But of course, it would look really bad for the administration to let a surge in homelessness happen just before the elections, so the CDC started to invoke some of these moratoriums to build up an image of concern and care for the citizens. But the act will expire by the end of the year, that is to say, if the outcome of the election doesn't come as planned, all these people can lose their homes for good.
Wherever we look things are falling apart. All of our systems are failing and a fog of insecurity is rising everywhere. The anticipation for the eruption of the next crisis is both nauseating and intriguing. What will be the next turn? When will the reckoning day arrive? How are you dealing with such expectations? What do you think is going to happen next? Please share your thoughts with us in the comment section, they will be much appreciated. Are you prepared for the next Great Depression yet?"
Must Watch! "Economic Red Flags; Las Vegas Collapse; Stimulus Checks On Hold; Coming Wave Of Defaults"
Jeremiah Babe,
"Economic Red Flags; Las Vegas Collapse;
Stimulus Checks On Hold; Coming Wave Of Defaults"
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Related:
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Related:
Musical Interlude: Tyrone Wells, "Time of Our Lives"
Tyrone Wells, "Time of Our Lives"
Please view in full screen mode.
"A Look to the Heavens"
"In brush strokes of interstellar dust and glowing hydrogen gas, this beautiful skyscape is painted across the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy near the northern end of the Great Rift and the constellation Cygnus the Swan. Composed using 22 different images and over 180 hours of image data, the widefield mosaic spans an impressive 24 degrees across the sky. Alpha star of Cygnus, bright, hot, supergiant Deneb lies near top center. Crowded with stars and luminous gas clouds Cygnus is also home to the dark, obscuring Northern Coal Sack Nebula, extending from Deneb toward the center of the view.
Click image for larger size.
The reddish glow of star forming regions NGC 7000 and IC 5070, the North America Nebula and Pelican Nebulas, are just left of Deneb. The Veil Nebula is a standout below and left of center. A supernova remnant, the Veil is some 1,400 light years away, but many other nebulae and star clusters are identifiable throughout the cosmic scene. Of course, Deneb itself is also known to northern hemisphere skygazers for its place in two asterisms - marking the top of the Northern Cross and a vertex of the Summer Triangle."
Chet Raymo, “The Ring of Truth”
“The Ring of Truth”
by Chet Raymo
“In Salley Vickers’ novel, ‘Where Three Roads Meet,’ the shade of Tiresias, the blind seer of the Oedipus myth, visits Sigmund Freud in London during the psychoanalyst’s final terrible illness. In a series of conversations, Tiresias retells the story of Oedipus - he who was fated to kill his father and sleep with his mother - a story at the heart of Freud’s own theory of the human psyche.
At one point in the conversations, as Tiresias and Freud discuss the extent to which our lives are fated, the question of immortality arises. Freud says of Oedipus that “he made his story into an immortal one, so far as any story is.” And Tiresias replies, “But, Dr. Freud, stories are all we humans have to make us immortal.”
Oedipus lives on, whether he lived or not in actuality. Sophocles lives in our consciousness as vigorously as ever he did in life. They live because their stories touch something resonant and unchanging in human nature. Vickers suggests that what makes the Oedipal story immortal is not any necessary tendency of humans to act out the Oedipal myth, a la Freud, but rather Oedipus’s rage to know the truth- or become conscious of a truth he has known all along and suppressed- even though the truth will be his undoing.
The poet Muriel Rukesyser got it exactly right when she said: “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” Even atoms are stories we tell about the world, having first paid close attention to how the world works. The plays of Sophocles and the other Greek dramatists live on not because their authors were immortal, but because nature endures and their stories tell us something that rings true about enduring nature. And, like Oedipus, we have a rage to know, even if knowledge will unseat some of our more comfortable illusions.”
"We're All Waiting..."
“We’re all sinking in the same boat here. We’re all bored and desperate and waiting for something to happen. Waiting for life to get better. Waiting for things to change. Waiting for that one person to finally notice us. We’re all waiting. But we also need to realize that we all have the power to make those changes for ourselves.”
- Susane Colasanti
“The Inevitability of Snollygosters”
“The Inevitability of Snollygosters”
by Jeff Thomas
“Snollygoster is an archaic term for, “A fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force monumental talknophical assumnancy.” All right, that’s a rather antiquated definition, but then, “snollygoster” is a very antiquated term. It hasn’t been in use since the mid-1800’s. Another definition is, “A shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician.”
So, of what interest is this bygone nomenclature to us today? Well, the definitions are exactly in keeping with our present-day politicians. When we look at our senators, parliamentarians, presidents and prime ministers, we see that, even with the passage of considerable time, the term snollygoster is applicable today.
And, we, the constituents, could be referred to as “grumbletonians,” a word common in England in the 1600’s for those who are angry or unhappy with their government. And we’re just as likely to be so exasperated with our political leaders that we resort to a “whipmegmorum” – a Scottish word from the 1700’s for a noisy quarrel about politics.
These ancient and forgotten terms may be entertaining, but they may additionally raise a question in modern minds. We may ask ourselves, “Do you mean that it isn’t just that our present leaders are virtual cartoons – and destructive ones at that? Do you mean that (gulp) it’s always been this way?
’Fraid so. But, how is this possible? How is it that, regardless of the times we’re in, and regardless of whether we have literally hundreds of millions of citizens to choose from (in the larger countries), we end up with literal cartoon characters as leaders? Is it that we’re so bad at making a selection that we always choose the worst person?
Well, actually, there, the answer would be, “No.” Voters don’t actively seek out the worst. The problem is that they’re presented with the worst. In the UK, we can complain about how useless Theresa May was; that she continually dropped the ball and repeatedly acted with foolhardy overconfidence. But, if asked, “Would you rather have had Jeremy Corbin?” those of us who grumble are likely to respond vehemently in the negative. (We don’t wish to jump from the pan into the fire.)
Similarly, across the pond in the US, Americans, including republicans, cannot help but laugh at their president as being an arrogant and petulant buffoon. (For the record, those of us outside the US also regard him as a source of perverse entertainment). Still, I expect that most of those same people, if asked whether they thought Hillary Clinton would be closer to their ideal of the perfect leader, they’d emphatically have said, “No.”
So, the problem is not that the voters “get the leader they deserve.” The problem is that the game is rigged – that there are no good choices. In a small country, it’s easy to introduce a candidate whom the electorate actually believe in, then to push him forward to victory. But, the larger the country, the more impossible it is for anyone who deserves a leadership position, to actually achieve it. (The system promotes its own kind.) But, this notion presupposes that the majority of people within the political structure are already “contaminated,” that they, too are, for all practical purposes, undesirable. Can this actually be the case?
Again… ‘fraid so… But how is this possible? Well, as long as we’re discussing definitions, there are two more that we might want to investigate. Let’s look at this one: “A long-term pattern of abnormal behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of understanding of others’ feelings. People affected by it often spend a lot of time thinking about achieving power or success.”
Well, that certainly fits virtually all political leaders and political hopefuls. This definition is used to describe “narcissistic personality disorder.” A fuller description is: “Persistent grandiosity, excessive need for admiration, and a personal disdain for, and lack of empathy for other people; Arrogance, a sense of superiority; actively seeks to establish abusive power and control over other people; openly disregards the feelings and wishes of others, and expects to be treated as superior, regardless of their actual status or achievements; usually exhibits a fragile ego, an inability to tolerate criticism, and a tendency to belittle others in order to validate their own superiority.” Take a moment and ask yourself whether the above describes a leader near you.
And, here’s another interesting definition: “A pervasive and persistent disregard for morals, social norms, and the rights and feelings of others. Individuals with this personality disorder will typically have no compunction in exploiting others in harmful ways for their own gain or pleasure and frequently manipulate and deceive other people, achieving this through wit and a facade of superficial charm.”
This is a definition for sociopathy, or “antisocial personality disorder.” To expand, sociopaths demonstrate a “Disregard for right and wrong, persistent lying or deceit to exploit others, callous, cynical and disrespectful of others, using charm or wit to manipulate others for personal gain or personal pleasure, arrogance, a sense of superiority and being extremely opinionated… repeatedly violating the rights of others through intimidation and dishonesty, impulsiveness or failure to plan ahead, hostility, significant irritability, agitation… lack of empathy for others and lack of remorse about harming others, unnecessary risk-taking or dangerous behavior with no regard for the safety of self or others… failure to consider the negative consequences of behavior or learn from them.”
Initially, we may be tempted to say to ourselves, “Surely, it’s not as bad as all that.” But, if we really want to get an accurate picture, a useful exercise might be to picture a specific leader whose behavior we’ve witnessed repeatedly and then read the above descriptions once again, whilst picturing his face. The surprising truth is that many political leaders and political hopefuls display these characteristics exactly. Many are clearly narcissists, sociopaths, or both.
But, why should this be? Well, the easy answer is “obsessive behavior.” Those who have the above disorders will literally do anything to achieve superiority over others and will have no remorse or regret whatever. Therefore, it’s perfectly predictable that, over time, any government will become populated by pathological individuals.
This is not a new occurrence. ‘Twas ever thus. The snollygosters have been a chronic dominant presence in governments for millennia. And they’ll continue to be dominant. However, there is a positive takeaway here. If we recognize that this syndrome is in fact the norm, in any age, in any country, we can stop hoping for a hero to arise and save us from the parasitical dominance of governments. We can accept that, if we’re to thrive, this may only be accomplished through our own independence of mind and action, not through the empty promises of pathological leaders.”
- https://www.theburningplatform.com/
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“The barbarian hopes, and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles. “
- Hilaire Belloco
"Be Like The Bird"
"Be Like The Bird"
“What matter if this base, unjust life
Cast you naked and disarmed?
If the ground breaks beneath your step,
Have you not your soul?
Your soul! You fly away,
Escape to realms refined,
Beyond all sadness and whimpering.
Be like the bird which on frail branches balanced
A moment sits and sings;
He feels them tremble, but he sings unshaken,
Knowing he has wings.”
– Victor Hugo
"If We Dare Not Even Look..."
"True, we must dare look things in the face before we dare think, speak, act,
or assume responsibility. If we dare not even look, what else are we good for? "
~ Lu Xun, 1925 - 1961
Freely download "Selected Works of Lu Xun" here:
"The US And Its Constitution Have 2 Months Left"
"The US And Its Constitution Have 2 Months Left"
by Paul Craig Roberts
"Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
- Sir John Harington
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
- Sir John Harington
"Bob Woodward writes that Trump’s Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, and Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, spoke together about taking “collective action” to remove President Trump from office. General Mattis said Trump is “dangerous. He’s unfit.” This is the same thing that the Generals and the CIA said about President John F. Kennedy.
When Generals and the CIA say that a president is unfit and dangerous, they mean he is dangerous to their budget. By “unfit” they mean he is not a reliable cold warrior who will keep hyping America’s enemies so that money keeps pouring into the military/security budget. By serving defense contractors instead of their country, generals end up very wealthy.
Both Kennedy and Trump wanted to normalize relations with Russia and to bring home US troops involved in make-war operations overseas that boost the profits of defense contractors. To stop Kennedy they assassinated him.
To stop Trump they concocted Russiagate, Impeachgate, and a variety of wild and unsubstantiated accusations. The presstitutes repeat the various accusations as if they are absolute proven truth. The presstitutes never investigated a single one of the false accusations. These efforts to remove Trump did not succeed. Having pulled off numerous color revolutions in which the US has overthrown foreign governments, the tactics are now being employed against Trump. The November presidential election will not be an election. It will be a color revolution. See, for example, here and here.
We have reached the point in the demise of our country that a simple statement of obvious truth is not believable. As a number of carefully researched and documented books, some written by insiders, have proved conclusively, the CIA has controlled the prestige American media since 1950. The American media does not provide news. It provides the Deep State’s explanations of events. This ensures that real news does not interfere with the agenda. The German journalst, Udo Ulfkotte, wrote a book, "Bought Journalism," in which he showed that the CIA also controls the European press.
To be clear, there are two CIA organizations. One is an agency that monitors world events and endeavors to provide more or less accurate information to policymakers. The other is a covert operations agency. This agency assassinates people, including an American president, and overthrows uncooperative governments. President Truman publicly stated after he was out of office that he made a serious mistake in permitting the covert operations branch of the CIA. He said that it was an unaccountable government in itself.
President Eisehnower agreed and in his last address to the American people warned of the growing unaccountable power of the military/security complex.
President Kennedy realized the threat and said he was going “to break the CIA into a thousand pieces,” but they killed him first.
It would be easy for the CIA to kill Trump, but the “lone assassin” has been used too many times to be believable. It is easier to overthrow Trump’s reelection with false accusations as the CIA controlls the American and European media and has many Internet sites pretending to be dissident, a claim that fools insouciant Americans. Indeed, it is the leftwing that the CIA owns. The rightwing goes along because they think it is patriotic to support the military/security complex.
After the CIA overthrows Trump, they will use Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and their presstitutes to foment race war. Then the CIA will ride in on the Pale Horse, and the population will submit. The scenario is unfolding as I write. Very few will believe it until it happens. Even then the CIA’s ability to control explanations will keep the population in hand. In America today, liars have more credibility than truth tellers."
"Market Fantasy Updates 9/13/20"
"Market Fantasy Updates 9/13/20"
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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Updated live.
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Daily Update (September 11th to 14th)
Gregory Mannarino,
AM 9/13/20: “Markets: A Look Ahead, Important updates”
"The Love of Life in the Face of Death: Keith Haring on Self-Doubt, the Fragility of Being, and Creativity as the Antidote to Our Mortal Anxiety"
"The Love of Life in the Face of Death: Keith Haring on Self-Doubt,
the Fragility of Being, and Creativity as the Antidote to Our Mortal Anxiety"
by Maria Popova
“It is very important to be in love with life… Life is very fragile and always elusive. As soon as we think we ‘understand,’ there is another mystery. I don’t understand anything. That is, I think, the key to understand everything.”
“Life loves the liver of it,” Maya Angelou observed as she contemplated the meaning of life in 1977, exhorting: “You must live and life will be good to you.”
That spring, the teenage Keith Haring (May 4, 1958–February 16, 1990) - who would grow up to revolutionize not only art and activism, but the spirit of a generation and the soul of a city - grappled with the meaning of his own life and what it really means to live it on the pages of his diary, posthumously published as the quiet, symphonic wonder "Keith Haring Journals" (public library).
Five days before his nineteenth birthday and shortly before he left his hometown of Pittsburgh for a netless leap of faith toward New York City, he confronts the difficulty of knowing what we really want and writes: "This is a blue moment… it’s blue because I’m confused, again; or should I say “still”? I don’t know what I want or how to get it. I act like I know what I want, and I appear to be going after it - fast, but I don’t, when it comes down to it, even know."
In a passage of extraordinary precocity, he echoes the young Van Gogh’s reflection on fear, taking risks, and how inspired mistakes propel us forward, and considers how the trap of self-comparison is keeping him from developing his own artistic and human potential:
"I guess it’s because I’m afraid. Afraid I’m wrong. And I guess I’m afraid I’m wrong, because I constantly relate myself to other people, other experiences, other ideas. I should be looking at both in perspective, not comparing. I relate my life to an idea or an example that is some entirely different life. I should be relating it to my life only in the sense that each has good and bad facets. Each is separate. The only way the other attained enough merit, making it worthy of my admiration, or long to copy it is by taking chances, taking it in its own way. It has grown with different situations and has discovered different heights of happiness and equal sorrows. If I always seek to pattern my life after another, mine is being wasted re-doing things for my own empty acceptance. But, if I live my life my way and only let the other [artists] influence me as a reference, a starting point, I can build an even higher awareness instead of staying dormant… I only wish that I could have more confidence and try to forget all my silly preconceptions, misconceptions, and just live. Just live. Just. Live. Just live till I die."
And then - in a testament to my resolute conviction, along with Blake, that all great natures are lovers of trees - he adds: "I found a tree in this park that I’m gonna come back to, someday. It stretches sideways out over the St. Croix river and I can sit on it and balance lying on it perfectly."
“Perspective” by Maria Popova
Within a decade, Haring’s resolve to “just live” until he dies collided with the sudden proximity of a highly probable death - the spacious until contracted into a span uncertain but almost certainly short as the AIDS epidemic began slaying his generation. A century after the uncommonly perceptive and poetic diarist Alice James - William and Henry James’s brilliant and sidelined sister - wrote upon receiving a terminal diagnosis that the remaining stretch of life before her is “the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life,” Haring, having taken a long break from his own diary, returns to the mirror of the blank page and faces the powerful, paradoxical way in which the proximity of death charges living with life:
"I keep thinking that the main reason I am writing is fear of death. I think I finally realize the importance of being alive. When I was watching the 4th of July fireworks the other night and saw my friend Martin [Burgoyne], I saw death. He says he has been tested and cleared of having AIDS, but when I looked at him I saw death. Life is so fragile."
In a sentiment evocative of neurologist Oliver Sacks’s memorable observation in his poetic and courageous exit from life that when people die, “they leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate - the genetic and neural fate -of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death,” Haring adds:
"It is a very fine line between life and death. I realize I am walking this line. Living in New York City and also flying on airplanes so much, I face the possibility of death every day. And when I die there is nobody to take my place… That is true of a lot of people (or everyone) because everyone is an individual and everyone is important in that they cannot be replaced."
But even as he shudders with the fragility of life, Haring continues to shimmer with the largehearted love of life that gives his art its timeless exuberance: "Touching people’s lives in a positive way is as close as I can get to an idea of religion." "Belief in one’s self is only a mirror of belief in other people and every person."
He returns to the love of life that charged his days with meaning and his art with magnetism - a love both huge and humble, at the center of which is our eternal dance with mystery: "I think it is very important to be in love with life. I have met people who are in their 70s and 80s who love life so much that, behind their aged bodies, the numbers disappear. Life is very fragile and always elusive. As soon as we think we “understand,” there is another mystery. I don’t understand anything. That is, I think, the key to understand everything."
Again and again, Haring declares on the pages of his journal that he lives for work, for art - the purpose of which, of course, if there is any purpose to art, is to make other lives more livable. As the specter of AIDS hovers closer and closer to him, this creative vitality pulses more and more vigorously through him, reverberating with Albert Camus’s insistence that “there is no love of life without despair of life.”
In early 1988, weeks before his thirtieth birthday and shortly before he finally received the diagnosis perching on the event horizon of his daily life, Haring composes a seething cauldron of a journal entry, about to boil with the overwhelming totality of his love of life: "I love paintings too much, love color too much, love seeing too much, love feeling too much, love art too much, love too much."
By the following month, he has metabolized the terrifying too-muchness into a calm acceptance radiating even more love: "I accept my fate, I accept my life. I accept my shortcomings, I accept the struggle. I accept my inability to understand. I accept what I will never become and what I will never have. I accept death and I accept life."
After the sudden death of one of his closest friends in a crash - a friend so close that Haring was the godfather of his son - he copies one of his friend’s newly poignant poems about life and death into his journal, then writes beneath it: "Creativity, biological or otherwise, is my only link with a relative mortality."
But perhaps his most poignant and prophetic entry came a decade earlier - a short verse-like reflection nested in a sprawling meditation on art, life, kinship, and individuality, penned on Election Day:
"I am not a beginning.
I am not an end.
I am a link in a chain."
Keith Haring died on February 16, 1990, barely into his thirties, leaving us his exuberant love of life encoded in mirthful lines and vibrant colors that have made millions of other lives - mine included - immensely more livable.
Couple with "Drawing on Walls" - a wonderful picture-book biography of Haring inspired by his journals - then revisit a young neurosurgeon’s poignant meditation on the meaning of lifehttps://www.brainpickings.org/2016/01/13/when-breath-becomes-paul-kalanithi/ as he faces his own death, an elderly comedian-philosopher on how to live fully while dying, and an astronomer-poet’s sublime “Antidotes to Fear of Death.”
“A Brief Visit to the End of the World“
“A Brief Visit to the End of the World“
by David Cain
“People mostly want the same thing, and many of us already have it, but we don’t really notice it. I have no way of confirming this, but I bet that if you could interview people across different centuries and cultures, asking them what they wanted most, you would notice a distinct theme in their answers. Some people would want great riches or power. Others would say they want something very specific: to invent a particular thing, or for a particular person to love them, or to win a gold medal or give an Oscar speech.
But I suspect most of them would say they want something like this: I want to be able to do my work and spend time with my friends and family, free to live my own values in relative peace. I just want a fair chance to pursue love and happiness, and a stable, humble life.
You could call this “The Peacetime Dream”, a life with the normal share of ups and downs - necessarily including heartbreak, health issues, setbacks and disappointments - but which isn’t defined by war or persecution. Almost universally, people want basic stability and basic freedom, and to someone who doesn’t have those things they are clearly the best things in the world.
But to someone who does have those things, their greatness is not so clear. It’s easy to forget, or never notice at all, that many or most of us already have this state of affairs, more or less -certainly most people who read blogs in their spare time. It’s also easy to forget that many (or most?) of history’s humans never had the Peacetime Dream. I wonder how many billions of individual human lives have been lived under tyrannical regimes, forced servitude, or during a war or a plague, or maybe all of those things.
I don’t know what your everyday worries are about, but I often worry about things like my work being criticized, the difficulty in making friends post-high-school, the ease of putting on weight at Christmas, the advance of age, the murkiness of our tax laws, and the declining quality of consumer products.
One defining characteristic of all of these concerns, aside from their ability to dominate my mind on a regular basis, is that they would evaporate the instant my basic freedom and stability were threatened. If the power went out and it became clear that it wasn’t coming back on, suddenly few of our day-to-day worries would matter much. All we would care about is regaining the Peacetime Dream, that relatively stable state of affairs that allows a person to build a life.
But when we live in the Peacetime Dream, and always have, we don’t even notice it. Imagine already having the one thing human beings most covet, and not knowing it. Our ability to take this foundation for granted is quite amazing. Even when I do worry about true horrors like incarceration, starvation and violence, I’m worrying on behalf of other people. I believe (without realizing it) that it will always be someone else who experiences them.
In those rare moments when you’re aware of the Peacetime Dream, to even go for a walk down the street is a joy. I remember being touched by a photo of a British Spitfire pilot crouching down to kiss the ground after a rough flight. Even if it’s right under our feet, we simply can’t see the value of what we have until we have some sense of being without it.
Noticing the ground we walk on: A friend and I were talking about living under catastrophe while playing Fallout 4, where a wholesome, 1950s-style America is razed by a nuclear war. The intro is a moving sequence in which a whole neighborhood rushes to an underground shelter, leaving televisions on and stoves lit - because suddenly one’s house burning down is a very minor thing - as the bombs ignite on the horizon and the sky turns orange. It didn’t immediately occur to us that this could really happen (and in fact has). Thinking aloud, I said that European civilians in the 1940s, who watched their cities get bombed to rubble, must have been convinced at the time that the end of the world was actually arriving. My very smart friend replied that for a lot of people, the end of the world is exactly what it was.
This was a new thought to me. We tend to think of the something like the Second World War as an unthinkable series of atrocities that is thankfully over. But for about seventy million people, each viewing the proceedings from their own corner of the world, it truly was the apocalypse, the very end. The end of the world isn’t just something that will happen to our species someday. It is something that has happened, to real people.
Of course, when we talk about “the end of the world”, we don’t mean the destruction of the planet. That event is assured, but so is our absence for it. The sun will incinerate our blue marble in a few billion years, but that will be long after every trace of our history has been erased. (Well almost every trace.)
When we talk about the end of the world, we mean the loss of civilization as we know it - the collapse of everything dear and precious, everything that had ever seemed secure, right before our eyes. This is a real thing that happens sometimes. (And is literally happening right now... - CP)
I realize this sounds morbid. We don’t like to think about the end of the world. But that’s why we probably should, occasionally but deliberately. We are so attached to civilization, stability, and freedom that we don’t want to even imagine life without them. For that reason, we stop noticing these huge, essential pieces of our happiness, and we fill our heads with worries about the state of the smallest pieces - missed appointments, insensitive comments, and other day-to-day ephemera that probably won’t matter a month from now.
The Peacetime Dream is the holy grail of backdrops for a human life, and it is a peculiar tragedy that we still aren’t great at finding happiness in it. Ironically, what would perhaps help us most is to look out at our neighborhoods and picture what they might be like as ruins. Reminding ourselves of the possibility of losing everything isn’t a new idea, but it isn’t especially popular. Alain de Botton often talks about reviving the Middle-Ages practice of keeping a human skull on one’s writing desk, which reportedly has a powerful clarifying effect on one’s priorities.
The occasional apocalyptic daydream is similarly powerful perspective exercise, a bit like looking up at the stars to remind you that your problems are a small part of the whole show. Taking twenty seconds to picture your surroundings as a post-apocalyptic ruin doesn’t sound pleasant, but it has a palpably liberating effect. Suddenly it seems significant that civilization is still happening—it turns out your timing was excellent.
Imagining the end of the world is the grand-scale version of my favorite gratitude practice: glancing at a loved one as though they’re gone and you’re only remembering them. The payoff isn’t in the morbid fantasy about loss, it’s the instant when you return from the daydream and recognize what you really have, that you’re living right in the middle of a fragile golden era. It’s unique and beautiful and will one day be gone, and you are fantastically lucky to be here for it.”
“Alea Iacta Est”
“Alea Iacta Est”
“Alea iacta est is a Latin phrase attributed by Suetonius to Julius Caesar on January 10, 49 B.C. as he led his army across the Rubicon river in Northern Italy. With this step, he entered Italy at the head of his army in defiance of the Senate and began his long civil war against Pompey and the Optimates. The phrase, either in the original Latin or in translation, is used in many languages to indicate that events have passed a point of no return.
The historian Frances Titchener has given a stylized description of the context of Caesar’s pronouncement: “We know from [Caesar's journals] that Caesar is not taking this lightly. He knows that if he marches on Rome with his armies, then he is a public enemy, and that he will either have to win, or die. For a Roman patrician like Julius Caesar there is no life without military service; there is no life without service to the state. He cannot simply ‘go native’ and stay in Gaul, and he does realize that if he goes back to Rome, he would be killed. At this time the northernmost border of the Roman territory in Italy is the River Rubicon. Once someone crosses the River Rubicon, he’s in Roman territory. A general must not cross that boundary with his army – he must do what the Romans call lay down his command, which means surrender his right to order troops, and certainly not be carrying weapons.
Caesar and his armies hesitate quite a while at this river while Caesar decides what to do, and Caesar tells us that he informs his soldiers that it’s a little tiny bridge across the river, but once they cross it they’ll have to fight their way all the way to Rome, and Caesar is well aware that he’s risking not just his own life, but those of his loyal soldiers, and he might not win. Pompey is a formidable enemy. It’s also impossible to avoid the fact that Caesar was attacking the state, and as a patrician Roman this would have been very difficult for him, equivalent to beating up your father. He wouldn’t have done any of this lightly. Finally he makes a decision, it’s time to go, and he uses a gambling metaphor: he says ‘Roll the dice’, ‘Alea iacta est’. Once the dice start rolling they cannot be controlled, even though we don’t know what the outcome will be as the dice roll and tumble. Julius and his men swiftly cross the river and they march double time toward Rome, where they almost beat the messengers sent to inform the Senate of their arrival.”
"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 9/13/20"
Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak
The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 28,746,700
people, according to official counts, including 6,504,633 Americans.
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- https://www.zerohedge.com/
SEP 13, 2020 2:35 PM: "Czech Republic Suffers Another Record Jump In COVID-19 Cases As Florida Deaths Drop To Just 8: Live Updates"
09/13/2020 - 12:05: "It's Far Too Late To Think Lockdowns Can Make COVID-19 Go Away"
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Updated 9/13/20, 1:26 AM ET
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