Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Tecumseh, "Live Your Life..."


"Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.
Trouble no one about his religion.
Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours.
Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.
Seek to make your life long and of service to your people.
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.
Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting
or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.
Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.
When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light,
for your life, for your strength.
Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living.
If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.
Touch not the poisonous firewater that makes
wise ones turn to fools and robs their spirit of its vision.
When your time comes to die, be not like those
whose hearts are filled with fear of death,
so that when their time comes they weep and pray
for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.
Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home."

- Tecumseh, Shawnee

The Universe

"Friends are friends because they've discovered how much they have in common. Opponents, adversaries, and foes are friends too, who have not yet discovered this. It's as if a band of amazing angels got together, before time even began, to celebrate their common heritage, sense of adventure, creativity and savoir faire, and decided to meet in the distant future, amongst the jungles of time and space, upon a distant little blue planet, to see how long it would take for each and every one of them to discover who they really are. 7 billion angels, to be precise."
"Your friend,"
The Universe

"Thoughts become things... choose the good ones!"

“Mutiny of the Soul”

“Mutiny of the Soul”
by Charles Eisenstein

"Depression, anxiety, and fatigue are an essential part of a process of metamorphosis that is unfolding on the planet today, and highly significant for the light they shed on the transition from an old world to a new. When a growing fatigue or depression becomes serious, and we get a diagnosis of Epstein-Barr or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or hypothyroid or low serotonin, we typically feel relief and alarm. Alarm: something is wrong with me. Relief: at least I know I'm not imagining things; now that I have a diagnosis, I can be cured, and life can go back to normal. But of course, a cure for these conditions is elusive.

The notion of a cure starts with the question, "What has gone wrong?" But there is another, radically different way of seeing fatigue and depression that starts by asking, "What is the body, in its perfect wisdom, responding to?" When would it be the wisest choice for someone to be unable to summon the energy to fully participate in life?

The answer is staring us in the face. When our soul-body is saying No to life, through fatigue or depression, the first thing to ask is, "Is life as I am living it the right life for me right now?" When the soul-body is saying No to participation in the world, the first thing to ask is, "Does the world as it is presented me merit my full participation?"

What if there is something so fundamentally wrong with the world, the lives, and the way of being offered us, that withdrawal is the only sane response? Withdrawal, followed by a reentry into a world, a life, and a way of being wholly different from the one left behind?

The unspoken goal of modern life seems to be to live as long and as comfortably as possible, to minimize risk and to maximize security. We see this priority in the educational system, which tries to train us to be "competitive" so that we can "make a living". We see it in the medical system, where the goal of prolonging life trumps any consideration of whether, sometimes, the time has come to die. We see it in our economic system, which assumes that all people are motivated by "rational self-interest", defined in terms of money, associated with security and survival. (And have you ever thought about the phrase "the cost of living"?) We are supposed to be practical, not idealistic; we are supposed to put work before play. Ask someone why she stays in a job she hates, and as often as not the answer is, "For the health insurance." In other words, we stay in jobs that leave us feeling dead in order to gain the assurance of staying alive. When we choose health insurance over passion, we are choosing survival over life.

On a deep level, which I call the soul level, we want none of that. We recognize that we are here on earth to enact a sacred purpose, and that most of the jobs on offer are beneath our dignity as human beings. But we might be too afraid to leave our jobs, our planned-out lives, our health insurance, or whatever other security and comfort we have received in exchange for our divine gifts. Deep down, we recognize this security and comfort as slaves' wages, and we yearn to be free.

So, the soul rebels. Afraid to make the conscious choice to step away from a slave's life, we make the choice unconsciously instead. We can no longer muster the energy to go through the motions. We enact this withdrawal from life through a variety of means. We might summon the Epstein-Barr virus into our bodies, or mononucleosis, or some other vector of chronic fatigue. We might shut down our thyroid or adrenal glands. We might shut down our production of serotonin in the brain. Other people take a different route, incinerating the excess life energy in the fires of addiction. Either way, we are in some way refusing to participate. We are shying away from ignoble complicity in a world gone wrong. We are refusing to contribute our divine gifts to the aggrandizement of that world.

That is why the conventional approach of fixing the problem so that we can return to normal life will not work. It might work temporarily, but the body will find other ways to resist. Raise serotonin levels with SSRIs, and the brain will prune some receptor sites, thinking in its wisdom, "Hey, I'm not supposed to feel good about the life I am living right now." In the end, there is always suicide, a common endpoint of the pharmaceutical regimes that seek to make us happy with something inimical to our very purpose and being. You can only force yourself to abide in wrongness so long. When the soul's rebellion is suppressed too long, it can explode outward in bloody revolution. Significantly, all of the school shootings in the last decade have involved people on anti-depression medication. All of them! For a jaw-dropping glimpse of the results of the pharmaceutical regime of control, scroll down this compilation of suicide/homicide cases involving SSRIs. I am not using "jaw-dropping" as a figure of speech. My jaw literally dropped open.

Back in the 1970s, dissidents in the Soviet Union were often hospitalized in mental institutions and given drugs similar to the ones used to treat depression today. The reasoning was that you had to be insane to be unhappy in the Socialist Workers' Utopia. When the people treating depression receive status and prestige from the very system that their patients are unhappy with, they are unlikely to affirm the basic validity of the patient's withdrawal from life. "The system has to be sound - after all, it validates my professional status - therefore the problem must be with you."

Unfortunately, "holistic" approaches are no different, as long as they deny the wisdom of the body's rebellion. When they do seem to work, usually that is because they coincide with some other shift. When someone goes out and gets help, or makes a radical switch of modalities, it works as a ritual communication to the unconscious mind of a genuine life change. Rituals have the power to make conscious decisions real to the unconscious. They can be part of taking back one's power.

I have met countless people of great compassion and sensitivity, people who would describe themselves as "conscious" or "spiritual", who have battled with CFS, depression, thyroid deficiency, and so on. These are people who have come to a transition point in their lives where they become physically incapable of living the old life in the old world. That is because, in fact, the world presented to us as normal and acceptable is anything but. It is a monstrosity. Ours is a planet in pain. If you need me to convince you of that, if you are unaware of the destruction of forests, oceans, wetlands, cultures, soil, health, beauty, dignity, and spirit that underlies the System we live in, then I have nothing to say to you. I only am speaking to you if you do believe that there is something deeply wrong with the way we are living on this planet.

A related syndrome comprises various "attention deficit" and anxiety "disorders" (forgive me, I cannot write down these words without the ironic quotation marks) which reflect an unconscious knowledge that something is wrong around here. Anxiety, like all emotions, has a proper function. Suppose you left a pot on the stove and you know you forgot something, you just can't remember what. You cannot rest at ease. Something is bothering you, something is wrong. Subliminally you smell smoke. You obsess: did I leave the water running? Did I forget to pay the mortgage? The anxiety keeps you awake and alert; it doesn't let you rest; it keeps your mind churning, worrying. This is good. This is what saves your life. Eventually you realize - the house is on fire! - and anxiety turns into panic, and action.

So if you suffer from anxiety, maybe you don't have a "disorder" at all - maybe the house is on fire. Anxiety is simply the emotion corresponding to "Something is dangerously wrong and I don't know what it is." That is only a disorder if there is in fact nothing dangerously wrong. "Nothing is wrong, just you" is the message that any therapy gives when it tries to fix you. I disagree with that message. The problem is not with you. You have very good reason to be anxious. Anxiety keeps part of your attention away from your tasks of polishing the silverware as the house burns down, of playing the violin as the Titanic sinks. Unfortunately, the wrongness you are tapping into might be beyond the cognizance of the psychiatrists who treat you, who then conclude that the problem must be your brain.

Similarly, Attention Deficit Disorder, ADHD, and my favorite, Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) are only disorders if we believe that the things presented for our attention are worth paying attention to. We cannot admit, without calling into question the whole edifice of our school system, that it may be completely healthy for a ten-year-old boy to not sit still for six hours in a classroom learning about long division and Vasco de Gama. Perhaps the current generation of children, that some call the Indigos, simply have a lower tolerance for school's agenda of conformity, obedience, external motivation, right-and-wrong answers, the quantification of performance, rules and bells, report cards and grades and your permanent record. So we try to enforce their attention with stimulants, and subdue their heroic intuitive rebellion against the spirit-wrecking machine.

As I write about the "wrongness" against which we all rebel, I can hear some readers asking, "What about the metaphysical principle that it's 'all good'?" Just relax, I am told, nothing is wrong, all is part of the divine plan. You only perceive it as wrong because of your limited human perspective. All of this is only here for our own development. War: it gives people wonderful opportunities to make heroic choices and burn off bad karma. Life is wonderful, Charles, why do you have to make it wrong?

I am sorry, but usually such reasoning is just a sop to the conscience. If it is all good, then that is only because we perceive and experience it as terribly wrong. The perception of iniquity moves us to right it.

Nonetheless, it would be ignorant and fruitless to pass judgment upon those who do not see anything wrong, who, oblivious to the facts of destruction, think everything is basically fine. There is a natural awakening process, in which first we proceed full speed ahead participating in the world, believing in it, seeking to contribute to the Ascent of Humanity. Eventually, we encounter something that is undeniably wrong, perhaps a flagrant injustice or a serious health problem or a tragedy near at hand. Our first response is to think this is an isolated problem, remediable with some effort, within a system that is basically sound. But when we try to fix it, we discover deeper and deeper levels of wrongness. The rot spreads; we see that no injustice, no horror can stand in isolation. We see that the disappeared dissidents in South America, the child laborers in Pakistan, the clearcut forests of the Amazon, are all intimately linked together in a grotesque tapestry that includes every aspect of modern life. We realize that the problems are too big to fix. We are called to live in an entirely different way, starting with our most fundamental values and priorities.

All of us go through this process, repeatedly, in various realms of our lives; all parts of the process are right and necessary. The phase of full participation is a growth phase in which we develop gifts that will be applied very differently later. The phase of trying to fix, to endure, to soldier on with a life that isn't working is a maturation phase that develops qualities of patience and determination and strength. The phase of discovering the all-encompassing nature of the problem is usually a phase of despair, but it need not be. Properly, it is a phase of rest, of stillness, of withdrawal, of preparation for a push. The push is a birth-push. Crises in our lives converge and propel us into a new life, a new being that we hardly imagine could exist, except that we'd heard rumors of it, echoes, and maybe even caught a glimpse of it here and there, been granted through grace a brief preview.

If you are in the midst of this process, you need not suffer if you cooperate with it. I can offer you two things. First is self-trust. Trust your own urge to withdraw even when a million messages are telling you, "The world is fine, what's wrong with you? Get with the program." Trust your innate belief that you are here on earth for something magnificent, even when a thousand disappointments have told you you are ordinary. Trust your idealism, buried in your eternal child's heart, that says that a far more beautiful world than this is possible. Trust your impatience that says "good enough" is not good enough. Do not label your noble refusal to participate as laziness and do not medicalize it as an illness. Your heroic body has merely made a few sacrifices to serve your growth.

The second thing I can offer you is a map. The journey I have described is not always linear, and you may find yourself from time to time revisiting earlier territory. When you find the right life, when you find the right expression of your gifts, you will receive an unmistakable signal. You will feel excited and alive. Many people have preceded you on this journey, and many more will follow in times to come. Because the old world is falling apart, and the crises that initiate the journey are converging upon us. Soon many people will follow the paths we have pioneered. Each journey is unique, but all share the same basic dynamics I have described. When you have passed through it, and understood the necessity and rightness of each of its phases, you will be prepared to midwife others through it as well. Your condition, all the years of it, has prepared you for this. It has prepared you to ease the passage of those who will follow. Everything you have gone through, every bit of the despair, has been necessary to forge you into a healer and a guide. The need is great. The time is coming soon.”

"Oh Yeah..."

"When life hands you a lemon, say
"Oh yeah, I like lemons. What else you got?"
- Henry Rollins

Musical Interlude: Gnomusy (David Caballero), “Footprints On The Sea”

Gnomusy (David Caballero), “Footprints On The Sea”

The Daily "Near You?"

 
Roosevelt, Utah, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Against All Odds..."

"There's a little animal in all of us and maybe that's something to celebrate. Our animal instinct is what makes us seek comfort, warmth, a pack to run with. We may feel caged, we may feel trapped, but still as humans we can find ways to feel free. We are each other's keepers, we are the guardians of our own humanity and even though there's a beast inside all of us, what sets us apart from the animals is that we can think, feel, dream and love. And against all odds, against all instinct, we evolve."
- "Grey's Anatomy"

"It Matters A Great Deal..."

In the movie “The Lion in Winter”, when the sons, in the dungeon, think they hear Henry coming down the stairs to kill them:

Richard: "He's here! He'll get no satisfaction out of us! Don't let him see you beg...Take it like a man!
Geoffrey: "You fool! As if the way one falls down matters!"
Richard: "Well, when the fall is all that's left, it matters a great deal."

"Market Fantasy Updates 10/27/20"

"Market Fantasy Updates 10/27/20"
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
"The more I see of the monied classes, 
the better I understand the guillotine."
George Bernard Shaw
And now. The End game...

"How Systems Collapse: Reaping What We've Sown"

"How Systems Collapse: Reaping What We've Sown"
by Charles Hugh Smith

"A great many Americans will be shocked when our healthcare systems start failing because they believed the PR that "we have the finest healthcare system in the world." The ability to deliver the finest care to a few does not translate into an ability to deliver the finest care to the many, nor does it mean the system is robust enough to withstand a tsunami.

As I have endeavored to explain in recent posts, systems optimized for narrow envelopes fail when they slip outside that envelope. One analogy is an airliner that is optimized in terms of fuel efficiency to fly above 30,000 feet at around 540 miles per hour. The optimized envelope allows for somewhat higher and lower flight paths, but if the airliner is forced to fly at 500 feet, it will no longer have the range it had at 30,000 feet.

America's healthcare system is optimized for treating a relative handful of severely ill patients. As costs (and profit margins) have soared, the system has been stripped of hospital beds, extra supplies, etc. because these hurt the all-important bottom line: why maintain redundancies and buffers when all that matters in America is "maximizing shareholder value"?

In the pathological pursuit of "maximizing shareholder value," Corporate America's healthcare complex tossed community service and employees overboard. Sure, there is endless glossy (i.e. expensive) PR glorifying the corporate simulacrum of "community service," but everyone knows it's just PR: if a hospital fails to produce the profits demanded by corporate HQ, it's closed, regardless of the negative impacts on the community.

Sorry, folks, it's just business. When the "store" is no longer sufficiently profitable, it's closed, just like Walmart closes underperforming stores. The same sanitized, bloodless pursuit of maximizing profits (kneel before the mighty god we worship, Shareholder Value!) has stripped away the pretense that healthcare corporations care about their employees. Yes, the glossy PR about how much Corporate America cares about its communities and employees is endless, but it's all artifice: employees are treated just like factory workers in developing-world sweatshops. Everyone is expendable, replaceable, just another cog in the machine, and woe to any employee in Corporate America's healthcare complex who runs afoul of the endless compliance and regulatory reporting.

We're about to reap what we've sown in worshipping "shareholder value" and stripmining communities and employees. The people in the sweatshop get it: we don't count, we're just here to make some rich people even richer. The healthcare sweatshop workers will repay the absence of employer loyalty in kind: you had no loyalty to us, we have no loyalty to you.

When the tsunami wave hits, do you sacrifice yourself to save someone else, or do you conclude the better strategy is save yourself first? As I noted in "This Is How It Ends: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air" (September 10, 2020): The most competent will realize the impossibility of keeping it glued together and so they will exit first. The most noble will try to keep it going but they will burn out and drop away, leaving the incompetent to oversee the final collapse.

System after system has been optimized to only function in a narrow envelope. Once it slips outside that envelope, it unravels very quickly and then collapses. Those outside the system are bamboozled by the hype and PR and recency bias ("but it worked fine last year"), insiders know better.

Many will try to keep it all glued together for the sake of the patients, but the tsunami will be so relentless that saving themselves will eventually take priority. After all, the "shareholder value / compliance is all that matters" system never cared about you; why should you sacrifice yourself so the executives can keep their multi-million dollar bonuses?

All you cared about were profits - well go right ahead and keep all the profits. We're gone. Don't expect healthcare or any other hollowed-out, heavily optimized system to function as it once did. The fuel tanks are almost empty and we're still 1,000 miles from land."

"The Plan That Can’t Fail"

"The Plan That Can’t Fail"
By Bill Bonner

SAN MARTIN, ARGENTINA – "With only seven days to go to the presidential election, investors are getting edgy. Yesterday, the Dow sold off by as much as 900 points, before bouncing back to end the day down 650 points. What’s the trouble?

Party On Hold: For one thing, people look up at the sky. They crane their necks and strain their eyes… But, what ho! Where are the helicopters? Where is the bailout money… the filthy lucre… the counterfeit cash… the handout? Alas, Bloomberg reports that the party will have to wait: "Stimulus Hopes Put On Hold Until After Election as Senate Leaves."

The free money seems to have gotten held up in partisan politics. Donald Trump said he is willing to go along with any bailout boondoggle… no matter how ridiculous. But the Democrats seem to be running down the clock, hoping voters are in a sour mood when they decide whether or not to leave The Donald in office for another four years.

Connecting the Dots: And investors are beginning to connect the dots. Not only is the money – unearned and undeserved – not fluttering down from helicopters… neither is it rising up from the ground. In a healthy economy, that’s where it comes from – from the ground up… from working, saving, and investing… from self-discipline, innovation, sweat, and toil. Real money is earned, in other words. It represents real increases to the nation’s wealth. But making real money has become more and more difficult.

As we pointed out yesterday, neither the coronavirus nor the lockdown recession show any signs of going away. As for the former, the media is reporting a “record” number of cases in the U.S. Here’s The Washington Post: "More than 42,000 people were hospitalized nationally with the virus Monday, a figure that is steadily climbing toward the midsummer peak caused by massive outbreaks in the Sun Belt. In the places hit the hardest, this is nudging hospitals toward the nightmare scenario of rationing care."

The country is not there yet, but the recent rise in confirmed coronavirus infections – which set a single-day record Saturday of more than 83,000 – is an ominous leading indicator of an imminent surge of patients into hospitals. The pattern of this pandemic has been clear: Infections go up, hospitalization rates follow in a few weeks, and then deaths spike.

Hong Kong Flu: In years past – 1968, to be precise – a major new virus came and went… Nobody paid much attention. The Hong Kong flu killed about the same proportion of the U.S. population – less than 0.1% – as the coronavirus… But life went on mostly as normal. Your editor had the ailment. He was only 20 years old. He recovered quickly, as did most people who had it. Just like the coronavirus.

Tragedy and Failure: But that was then. This is now. And now, every breeze threatens to bring a fatal affliction. Every pain is an early sign of impending death. And every case of coronavirus is a tragedy… and a failure.

We live in a secular society. We have our doubts about promises of everlasting life from God Himself; but we’re damned sure the feds should protect us from the coronavirus. Which is why one of Joe Biden’s key campaign themes is that Donald Trump failed to do so. Would fewer have died from the virus in a Biden presidency? There’s no reason to think so. Governments – whether run by Democrats or Republicans, the French or the Germans, in North America or in South America – can’t really protect you from tropical storms, personal bankruptcy, love affairs gone bad… or the coronavirus.

(The media delights in telling us how many lies and misleading facts come from the mouth of the president. But we have not seen one single report mentioning that Biden’s claim – that Donald Trump “let 200,000 Americans die” – is claptrap.)

Live for Tomorrow: The other big change since 1968 is that the people who shrugged off the Hong Kong flu, like your editor, are now half a century older. Were it not for medical advances over the last 50 years, many of them would already be in their graves (including your editor). And now, these people – who were so “La, la, la, live for today” 50 years ago – want the feds to make sure they live for tomorrow…even if it means putting the whole country under house arrest.

Falling Into Place: Yes, we are all beginning to see how these puzzle pieces fit together. The old and the rich are afraid to go out and spend money. Young people have fewer jobs and less income. We saw yesterday that long-term unemployment is rising. It’s not hard to see why…

Small businesses are giving up. Restaurants are closing – permanently. Air traffic… and the whole cluster of travel, hostelry, hospitality, and entertainment… is down 30% to 50%, with no revival in sight. Business profits fall. Jobs become scarce. The rich (who are not spending… while still enjoying stock market gains) get richer. The poor get even poorer.

Feds to the Rescue: The feds fly to the rescue with jackass programs. The number of zombie workers… and zombie businesses – all supported by zombie money – increases, making it even harder for genuine, real economic growth. Tax revenues fall as expenditures rise. What can the feds do but “print” even more of the zombie money?

This formula – wreck the real economy with wars, lockdowns, controls, excess spending, and pernicious incentives… and then try to shore up what is left with “printing press” money – is a classic. It’s been used for centuries to ruin great empires… as well as small sh*thole countries. Rich countries as well as poor ones. European nations as well as African and Latin American ones. It never fails. We doubt it will let us down this time."

"How It Really Is"

Gregory Mannarino, "Congress Fails: NO DEAL.Expect Trillions In More Debt Post-Election"

Gregory Mannarino,
"Congress Fails: NO DEAL. 
Expect Trillions In More Debt Post-Election"

"Last Round-up at the Wokester Corral"

"Last Round-up at the Wokester Corral"
by Jim Kunstler

I have some questions for former friends who have dumped me on account of my support for Mr. Trump’s re-election - which is mostly a vote to prevent the Democratic Party and its fellow travelers from running the government. On the whole, these former friends are college-educated, mature in experience, and cultured. Some of them are well-acquainted with history, which is to say, they ought to know better than to support the obviously illiberal motives of the political Left.

Are you against the principle of free speech? The Democratic Party is. They used to be champions of the First Amendment; now they want to make it conditional on ideas and sentiments they support. Contrary ideas are to be labeled “hate speech,” and suppressed, along with anything that might hurt somebody’s feelings. How did you come to such a complete misunderstanding of what free speech means? Namely, that a free society is obliged to tolerate the expression of disagreeable ideas up to the limit, as the Supreme Court put it, of “crying ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.”

I will answer my own question partially by saying: you have been programmed against free speech by what used to be the very vehicles of it, the newspapers and TV News channels, which have, amazingly, come out against freedom of the press and turned into propaganda outlets for Woke Progressivism and its illiberal agenda - thereby inadvertently committing suicide of the entire profession. We’ve seen this acted-out most vividly just the past week in the social media companies’ efforts to suppress all news of the Biden family’s global business operations, along with The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and other leading news organizations that Americans used to depend on to know what was happening in the nation. This is especially unforgivable during a national election.

Did you support the movement on campus in recent years to shut down events featuring speakers such as Charles Murray (The Bell Curve), Heather Mac Donald of City Journal, Dinesh D’Souza, and many others who represented not-so-Woke ideas that “offended” you? Since when are your feelings so special that they negate the open exchange of ideas in the places that used to be dedicated to it, the universities? Should higher education only entertain ideas that you and your cohorts approve of? What if, in some future, a different cohort gains control of higher education and seeks to exclude your ideas on the grounds that they’re “offensive” (i.e. they just don’t like them)?

Are you in favor of a politicized Department of Justice and CIA? That is what the Democratic Party’s Resistance League deliberately brought about during the 2016 election, and they continue to promote it. Is it okay for bureaucrats to break the law to disable their political adversaries? That was the essence of the RussiaGate ruse. Former employees of those agencies, such as ex-CIA chief John Brennan and Andrew Weissmann, who ran the Mueller investigation, to this day still hype “Russian collusion” falsehoods to deflect attention from their own misdeeds. You let them get away with that.

Is it okay for these government agencies to spy on US citizens without any legal predicate, except their being political adversaries? Would it be okay if that were used against you in some future disposition of things? Is it okay for the FBI to withhold exculpatory evidence in federal court proceedings, thereby obstructing justice? Is it okay for the FBI and CIA to “leak” falsehoods to news reporters for political advantage? Do you not understand how by failing to oppose these actions you undermine the basis of political rectitude in a republic - bearing in mind the literal meaning of the word republic, from the Latin, res publica, the public thing, where civilization lives?

Are you against reason itself? For all your talk about the primacy of science, your agenda militates furiously against it: Math is “racist,” there’s no biological basis for understanding sex, all science is a “white colonial way-of-knowing,” masculinity is “toxic,” women can have penises and men can menstruate. Do you really believe these absurd fantasies manufactured in the graduate schools in the service of academic careerism at all costs - or do you just go along with them for the sake of protecting your own careers and perquisites?

Are you in favor of Antifa riots and the BLM hustle? They are staunchly supported by elected Democratic mayors and governors. These organizations looted and burned down shopping districts in many cities, and Democratic leaders did nothing to stop them. In Portland, Oregon, the nightly riots have continued for over 120 days under Mayor Ted Wheeler and Governor Kate Brown. The nightly riots have ceased to have any genuine political purpose or meaning; rather they’ve degenerated into a party space for energetic young people who can’t otherwise go to clubs, parties, concerts, cafes, or raves during the Covid-19 shut-down. So, rather, they’re enjoying a long-running game of “Cops-and-Robbers” out in the streets, busting things up, setting fires, getting chased around, and waking people up in their homes late at night with bullhorns and heavy metal music. They’re obviously having fun. The police have been forbidden to effectively disperse them, and the Multnomah County DA refuses to prosecute any of them — all of which just inspires the Antifas and BLMs to keep the game going. They have no real stake in the public interest. The net effect is terrible destruction of the city as a functioning civic organism. The Democratic Party has made it all possible. Wait until it comes to your town or city.

Are you in favor of cancel culture? The Democratic Party is addicted to it. Should livelihoods and reputations be destroyed for expressing an opinion, or telling a joke? Is asking someone for a date in the office a firing offense? Were Christine Blasey Ford and Michael Avenatti unimpeachable witnesses during the Brett Kavanaugh SCOTUS hearings? Or was that just an instance of anything goes and nothing matters? How much sadistic pleasure do you suppose has been involved in the professional ruination of men in the media, the arts, and politics? How much of cancel culture and the Me-Too movement have been based on simple coercion, the wish to push other people around, and on vengeance for personal losses and slights?

By the way, did you notice that Jeffrey Toobin has not been fired from his positions at The New Yorker magazine and CNN for jerking-off on-screen during a Zoom meeting of his professional colleagues last week? None of them have even publicly criticized him. Why do you suppose that is? I suppose it’s because he is a favored member of the Woke Journalists club and enjoys special protection from professional ruin - though the truth is he’s thrown away his credibility as a legal commentator, whether the Wokerati like it or not, especially on matters of public conduct. But that’s just one example of the hypocrisy that Wokesterism is full of, and reveals its chronic disingenuous insincerity.

The Democratic Party supports all this pernicious mendacity and bad faith, and more. Joe Biden is the current figurehead of the Party. Mr. Biden pretty clearly has insurmountable defects of his own, first as an international grifter while holding national office, as well as the misfortune of his cognitive decline, which is not his fault, but disqualifies him for high office. As for everybody else in the party, I don’t want such a reliably dishonest gang to be in charge of running the American government. So, I’m voting for Mr. Trump. He’s far from my idea of an ideal candidate, but despite his defects, he’s managed to hold the country together during the greatest disruption of normal life since World War Two. I’ve also come to admire his resilience and, yes, his bravery, in the face of an opposition that has spared no effort of foul play to destroy him.

I’m under no illusions that Donald Trump will Make America Great Again in the way that many of his supporters understand that slogan. The USA is headed into a terrible ordeal of economic disorder that I call the long emergency. Mr. Trump won’t stop it, and it may yet make a fool out of him. But the Democratic Party’s agenda would add an extra layer of tyrannical and sadistic insanity to the process that will only bring more suffering to more people, and I don’t want that to happen. I believe that Mr. Trump will probably win the election, but we’ll have to see what kind of nefarious dodges his opponents will employ to prevent any resolution of that outcome."

Monday, October 26, 2020

“Stock Market Desperation; Housing Sales Fall; Hotel Industry Smashed; California Burning”

Jeremiah Babe,
“Stock Market Desperation; Housing Sales Fall; 
Hotel Industry Smashed; California Burning”

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Where the Stars and Moon Play"

2002, "Where the Stars and Moon Play"

Full screen mode recommended.

"A Look to the Heavens"

“M13 is one of the most prominent and best known globular clusters. Visible with binoculars in the constellation of Hercules, M13 is frequently one of the first objects found by curious sky gazers seeking celestials wonders beyond normal human vision. 


M13 is a colossal home to over 100,000 stars, spans over 150 light years across, lies over 20,000 light years distant, and is over 12 billion years old. At the 1974 dedication of Arecibo Observatory, a radio message about Earth was sent in the direction of M13. The featured image in HDR, taken through a small telescope, spans an angular size just larger than a full Moon, whereas the inset image, taken by Hubble Space Telescope, zooms in on the central 0.04 degrees.”

"Each Of Us..."

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
- Robert F. Kennedy

"Tako-Tsubo Syndrome: The Broken Heart Disease"

"Tako-Tsubo Syndrome: The Broken Heart Disease"
by Prof. Filippo Crea

"It seems an infarction, but it's not. It's called Tako-Tsubo syndrome, or stress-induced cardiomyopathy, and it's a rare disease which at first used to be confused with the far more common (and dangerous) cardiac infarction. Patients arrive to the emergency room with the characteristic heart attack symptoms: acute pain in the chest, an electrocardiogram with the typical changes and the release of those enzymes associated with the usual heart disease. Yet, as soon as a coronarography is performed, in order to discover the location where the occlusion preventing the blood reaching the heart was formed, nothing is found. In the infarction this occlusion causes a number of heart cells to die.


Many have defined it also as the "broken heart disease": it affects mostly women in post menopause period, when they are no longer protected by the estrogen hormones, and it is associated with strong emotional stress, like a bereavement, in 80% of the cases. This is the reason why it is often associated with a broken heart. Researchers at the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine of the Catholic University – Policlinico Gemelli of Rome, led by Filippo Crea, have identified the mechanism underlying this peculiar pathology and have published an article in the "European Heart Journal," of the European Society of Cardiology. This article is already among the fifty most-read in the field.

"In 80% of the patients, symptoms disappear spontaneously after a couple of weeks, leaving no trace behind", explains Filippo Crea, "whilst in the other cases the damage persists. The fact is that the damage caused by this syndrome is in the heart but not in the coronaries. What we have tried to explain is the mechanism which leads to the onset of these symptoms".

To perform this analysis, the group led by Crea studied fifteen women aged on average 68 for a month. Thanks to this study, they were able to identify for the first time the physiopathological mechanism of the disease. "We concentrated on the apical region of the heart", explains first author Leda Galiuto, "because that is the area where the dysfunction is localized. Due to this, the heart takes on the characteristic shape of an air balloon, or – as the Japanese observed – of a local octopus trap. The Tako-Tsubo is as a matter of fact the name of this pot in Japanese."

The hypothesis the researchers developed is that the mechanism which influences the dysfunction resides in the spasm of the small coronary vessels, the so-called coronary microcirculation. "To prove our hypothesis we used the myocardial contrast echography, a method we pioneered and which allows us to study the coronary microcirculation in a selective, safe and cheap way at the patient's bedside", explains the young researcher. "The microcirculation plays an important role in cardiac diseases", adds Crea, "and the intense vasoconstriction of these small vessels cannot normally be noticed in a coronarography."

Researchers have also been able to demonstrate that this microvascular spasm is reversible and, once over the acute phase, the microvascular dysfunction causing the symptoms is also resolved. "Usually patients are not left with any damage, because the lowering of the blood input is sufficiently serious to prevent the heart from contracting properly, and hence the balloon-like shape, but not enough to determine the death of blood cells, which is what normally happens in an infarction", concludes Crea."

Prof. Filippo Crea, fcrea@rm.unicatt.it, Catholic University of Rome
- http://www.eurekalert.org/

"Chronic Stress Resulting in ‘Broken Heart’ Syndrome"
by N. Shahid, S. Bruhl, B. Saeed & U. Pandya

"Broken heart syndrome/ tako-tsubo cardiomyopathy is a recently described stress-induced cardiomyopathy that is often associated with symptoms suggestive of acute coronary ischemia including chest pain, ST changes and elevated cardiac enzymes. In most cases the syndrome is triggered by profound physical or psychological stress and has an increased incidence in post menopausal women. Here we describe a patient who was admitted with nonspecific abdominal pain and symptoms of ileus that went onto develop Tako-tsubo cardiomyopathy as confirmed by left ventriculography. Unlike previously reported cases, our patient appeared to develop the syndrome as a result of chronic rather than acute stress." Full article:
Citation: N. Shahid, S. Bruhl, B. Saeed & U. Pandya: "Chronic Stress Resulting in ‘Broken Heart’ Syndrome." "The Internet Journal of Cardiology", 2009 Volume 7 Number 1

"A Life of Learning: Earth School"

 

"A Life of Learning: Earth School"
by Madisyn Taylor, The DailyOm

"Earth school provides us with an education of the heart and the soul. Life is the province of learning, and the wisdom we acquire throughout our lives is the reward of existence. As we traverse the winding roads that lead from birth to death, experience is our patient teacher. We exist, bound to human bodies as we are, to evolve, enrolled by the universe in earth school, an informal and individualized academy of living, being, and changing. Life’s lessons can take many forms and present us with many challenges. There are scores of mundane lessons that help us learn to navigate with grace, poise, and tolerance in this world. And there are those once-in-a-lifetime lessons that touch us so deeply that they change the course of our lives. The latter can be heartrending, and we may wander through life as unwilling students for a time. But the quality of our lives is based almost entirely on what we derive from our experiences.

Earth school provides us with an education of the heart and the soul, as well as the intellect. The scope of our instruction is dependent on our ability and readiness to accept the lesson laid out before us in the circumstances we face. When we find ourselves blindsided by life, we are free to choose to close our minds or to view the inbuilt lesson in a narrow-minded way. The notion that existence is a never-ending lesson can be dismaying at times. The courses we undertake in earth school can be painful as well as pleasurable, and as taxing as they are eventually rewarding. However, in every situation, relationship, or encounter, a range of lessons can be unearthed. When we choose to consciously take advantage of each of the lessons we are confronted with, we gradually discover that our previous ideas about love, compassion, resilience, grief, fear, trust, and generosity could have been half-formed.

Ultimately, when we acknowledge that growth is an integral part of life and that attending earth school is the responsibility of every individual, the concept of "life as lesson" no longer chafes. We can openly and joyfully look for the blessing buried in the difficulties we face without feeling that we are trapped in a roller-coaster ride of forced learning. Though we cannot always know when we are experiencing a life lesson, the wisdom we accrue will bless us with the keenest hindsight."
"Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have 
drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you."
- Richard Bach
"Ten Rules For Being Human"

Rule One: You will receive a body. You may love it or hate it, but it will be yours for the duration of your life on Earth.
Rule Two: You will be presented with lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called 'life.' Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or hate them, but you have designed them as part of your curriculum.
Rule Three: There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of experimentation, a series of trials, errors, and occasional victories. The failed experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that work.
Rule Four: A lesson is repeated until learned. Lessons will be repeated to you in various forms until you have learned them. When you have learned them, you can then go on to the next lesson.
Rule Five: Learning does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
Rule Six: 'There' is no better than 'here'. When your 'there' has become a 'here,' you will simply obtain a 'there' that will look better to you than your present 'here'.
Rule Seven: Others are only mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about  another person unless it reflects something you love or hate about yourself.
Rule Eight: What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you.
Rule Nine: Your answers lie inside of you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
Rule Ten: You will forget all of this at birth. You can remember it if you want by unravelling the double helix of inner knowing.
- Cherie Carter-Scott, 
From "If Life is a Game, These are the Rules"

"Know What's Weird?"

"Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change,
but pretty soon... everything's different."
- Calvin, from "Calvin and Hobbes"

"Perhaps It Is Better..."

"Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is the best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future."
- Arthur C. Clarke

Gregory Mannarino, "Alert! Stock Market Craters, Gold Target Price, Treasury Bubble, MORE!"

Gregory Mannarino, 
"Alert! Stock Market Craters, Gold Target Price, Treasury Bubble, MORE!"