Vangelis, "Hymn"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Sunday, November 1, 2020
"A Look to the Heavens"
"What's happening at the center of the Trifid Nebula? Three prominent dust lanes that give the Trifid its name all come together. Mountains of opaque dust appear near the bottom, while other dark filaments of dust are visible threaded throughout the nebula. A single massive star visible near the center causes much of the Trifid's glow. The Trifid, cataloged as M20, is only about 300,000 years old, making it among the youngest emission nebulas known.
The star forming nebula lies about 9,000 light years away toward the constellation of the Archer (Sagittarius). The region pictured here spans about 10 light years. The featured image is a composite with luminance taken from an image by the 8.2-m ground-based Subaru Telescope, detail provided by the 2.4-m orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, color data provided by Martin Pugh and image assembly and processing provided by Robert Gendler."
"Shibumi"
"Shibumi"
by Trevanian
"Shibumi, Sir?" Nicholai knew the word, but only as it applied to gardens or architecture, where it connoted an understated beauty. How are you using the term, Sir?
"Oh, vaguely, And incorrectly, I suspect. A blundering attempt to describe an ineffable quality. As you know, Shibumi has to do with great refinement underlying commonplace appearances. It is a statement so correct that it does not have to be bold, so poignant it does not have to be pretty, so true it does not have to be real. Shibumi is understanding, rather than knowledge. Eloquent silence. In demeanor it is modesty without pudency. In art, where the spirit of shibumi takes the form of sabi, it is elegant simplicity, articulate brevity. In philosophy, where shibumi emerges as wabi, it is spiritual tranquility that is not passive; it is being without the angst of becoming. And in the personality of a man, it is...how does one say it? Authority without domination? Something like that. "
Nicholai's imagination was galvanized by the concept of shibumi. No other ideal had ever touched him so. "How does one achieve this shibumi, Sir?"
"One does not achieve it, one discovers it. And only a few men of refinement ever do that. Men like my friend Otake-san. "
"Meaning that one must learn a great deal to arrive at shibumi?"
"Meaning, rather, that one must pass through knowledge and arrive at simplicity. " From that moment, Nicholai's primary goal in life was to become a man of shibumi; a personality of overwhelming calm. "
"A Day..."
"A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation
of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day;
and a succession of such days is fatal to human life."
- Lewis Mumford
"Choose A Side"
Sometimes a man with too broad a perspective reveals himself as having no real perspective at all. A man who tries too hard to see every side may be a man who is trying to avoid choosing any side. A man who tries too hard to seek a deeper truth may be trying to hide from the truth he already knows. That is not a sign of intellectual sophistication and 'great thinking'. It is a demonstration of moral degeneracy and cowardice."
- Steven Den Beste
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"Trump Rally Hits 57 THOUSAND PEOPLE IN PA As Newspaper Endorses Him As First Republican Since 1972"
November 1, 2020: "Trump Rally Hits 57 THOUSAND PEOPLE IN PA
As Newspaper Endorses Him As First Republican Since 1972"
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Trump rally near Pittsburgh, Pa Oct.31, 2020
"Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Endorses President Trump,
Marking First GOP Endorsement In Almost 50 Years"
by Tyler Durden
"The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - a well known paper in a key battleground state - came out on Sunday morning and announced their endorsement of President Donald Trump. It's the first Republican the paper has endorsed for President since 1972 - nearly fifty years ago. In an editorial called "The Man And The Record", The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette makes the case for shaking off arguments about Trump's personality and putting a focus on his record.
The editorial starts by asking what is important when choosing a president. "Isn’t the real question whether he has been taking the country, and the economy of this region, in the right direction these last four years? Can we separate the man from the record?"
The paper also started by acknowledging many of the personality flaws that are often brought up when discussing President Trump: "We share the embarrassment of millions of Americans who are disturbed by the president’s unpresidential manners and character - his rudeness and put-downs and bragging and bending of the truth."
But then, it does something that many on the left are unable to do: it looks at, and judges Trump, based on his record.
"Let’s look at the Trump record," the piece says. "Under Donald Trump the economy, pre-COVID, boomed, like no time since the 1950s. Look at your 401(k) over the past three years. Unemployment for Black Americans is lower than it has ever been, under any president of either party. Under Mr. Trump, our trade relationships have vastly improved and our trade deals have been rewritten. Thanks to him, middle America is on the map again and the Appalachian and hourly worker has some hope."
It continues: "Has Mr. Trump done enough for these struggling fellow citizens? No. But he recognized them. Maybe he was not articulate, but he recognized their pain."
The piece notes that Trump has put America first, the way he said he would: "No one ever asked the American people, or the people in 'flyover,' country, if they wanted to send their jobs abroad - until Mr. Trump. He has moved the debate, in both parties, from free trade, totally unfettered, to managed, or fair, trade. He has put America first, just as he said he would."
And it praises him for appointing Amy Coney Barrett: "He also kept his promise to appoint originalists to the Supreme Court of the United States. His third appointment, Amy Coney Barrett, is the best of all - a jurist whose mind and character and scholarship ARE first class. We hope she stands against both judicial and executive excess."
And you can't talk about Western PA without talking about the energy industry: "Finally, let’s talk about one of the most important concerns in this region - energy. Under Mr. Trump the United States achieved energy independence for the first time in the lifetimes of most of us. Where would Western Pennsylvania be without the Shell Petrochemical Complex?"
Finally the Post-Gazette rails Joe Biden as "too old for the job, and fragile" and says Kamala Harris "gives no evidence" of being ready to takeover for Biden: "Mr. Biden is too old for the job, and fragile. There is a very real chance he will not make it through the term. Mr. Trump is also too old but seemingly robust. But in Mike Pence, Mr. Trump has a vice president ready to take over, if need be. He is a safe pair of hands. Sen. Kamala Harris gives no evidence of being ready to be president."
"Donald Trump is not Churchill, to be sure, but he gets things done," the paper concludes. You can read the full endorsement here: "This newspaper has not supported a Republican for president since 1972. But we believe President Trump, for all his faults, is the better choice this year."
- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (@PittsburghPG) November 1, 2020
Gregory Mannarino, "Alert! Markets, A Look Ahead: Expect a Big Move This Week"
Gregory Mannarino,
"Alert! Markets, A Look Ahead: Expect a Big Move This Week"
"Super Intelligence - Binaural Beats, Focus Music for Concentration and Memory"
Greenred Productions,
"Super Intelligence - Binaural Beats,
Focus Music for Concentration and Memory"
"Study Music & Concentration Music is brainwave background music to help you to study, focus, and concentrate on learning process and work more effectively. Alpha Waves help your mind to get to the state of focus, which is perfect for studying or preparing for exam or test you have at school or university. It also maintains your alertness while studying. Beta waves will help to concentrate for tasks, enhance intelligence.
We compose instrumental and electronic music that is specially designed to enhance brain function and concentration, spa and massage therapy, and healing music therapy. For this reason, we use binaural beats. There are many types of beats for different daily meditation purposes: Delta Waves – Sleep Music/NREM sleep, Alpha Waves are neural oscillations, Theta Waves (Cortical theta rhythm and Hippocampal theta rhythm). Beta waves associated with muscle contractions in isotonic movements, Gamma waves can help to release serotonin, endorphin and dopamine, so it works as happiness music for depression treatment."
"Start..."
“Start doing the things you think should be done, and start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in free speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.”
- Adam Michnik
Free Download: Paulo Coelho, “The Alchemist”
“'The Alchemist' is a gripping narrative about a young Andalusian shepherd named Santiago and his journey to find the greatest treasure in the world. This charming story follows Santiago on his journey to Egypt, after having a recurring dream of finding treasure there. Santiago travels across great distances and encounters crazy adventures in his quest for gold. Little does he know that the ultimate treasure is actually found deep within.
This dream was so prophetic that Santiago genuinely believed this was his ultimate goal in life. After deciding to travel to a Romani fortune-teller in a nearby town to discover its meaning, a gypsy woman tells him that there is a treasure in the Pyramids in Egypt.
Towards the beginning of his journey, Santiago meets an old king, named Melchizedek, who advises him to sell his sheep in order to travel to Egypt. He also introduces the idea of a Personal Legend, stating that your Personal Legend, “is what you have always wanted to accomplish. Everyone, when they are young, knows what their Personal Legend is.”
Along the journey, Santiago meets an Englishman who is in search of an Alchemist and together they continue their search for treasure. As they travel through the Sahara desert, Santiago meets and falls in love with a beautiful Arabian woman named Fatima. After a brief period of time, Santiago asks Fatima to marry him, but she tells him that she will only marry him after he finds his treasures. Perplexed by this, Santiago later learns that true love will not stop one’s Personal Legend, and if it does, it is not true love.
Eventually Santiago meets a lone alchemist who teaches him about Personal Legends. He shares his wisdom that people want to find only the treasure of their Personal Legends but not the Personal Legend itself. The alchemist states, “Those who don’t understand their Personal Legends will fail to comprehend their teachings.”
If you are looking for a book that will inspire courage, this is the one. No matter what your dream, goals or visions are, the universe will conspire to help you achieve the things you want, regardless of how insurmountable the task seems. You must live the life you truly desire to its fullest extent if you want to look back on a life having worth lived.”
- Jeff
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Freely download “The Alchemist”, by Paulo Coelho, here:
“Why Not Despair?”
“Why Not Despair?”
“To view our times as decadent and dangerous, to mistrust the government, to imagine that those in power as not concerned with our best interests is not paranoid but perceptive; to be depressed, angry or confused about such things is not delusional but a sign of consciousness. Yet our culture suggests otherwise. But if all this is true, then why not despair? The simple answer is this: despair is the suicide of imagination. Whatever reality presses upon us, there still remains the possibility of imagining something better, and in this dream remains the frontier of our humanity and its possibilities To despair is to voluntarily close a door that has not yet shut. The task is to bear knowledge without it destroying ourselves, to challenge the wrong without ending up on its casualty list. “You don’t have to change the world,” the writer Colman McCarthy has argued. “Just keep the world from changing you.”
Oddly, those who instinctively understand this best are often those who seem to have the least reason to do so – survivors of abuse, oppression, and isolation who somehow discover not so much how to beat the odds, but how to wriggle around them. They have, without formal instruction, learned two of the most fundamental lessons of psychiatry, philosophy, and religion:
You are not responsible for that into which you were born..
You are responsible for doing something about it.
These individuals move through life like a skilled mariner in a storm rather than as a victim at a sacrifice. Relatively unburdened by pointless and debilitating guilt about the past, uninterested in the endless regurgitation of the unalterable, they free themselves to concentrate upon the present and the future. They face the gale as a sturdy combatant rather than as cowering supplicant.”
- Sam Smith
"Such Is The Law..."
"Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they’re mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows. We have conquered the whole world before leaving our beds. But we were awakened and it was dark, we rose and all was strange to us.”
- Fernando Pessoa
"Mind Blowing Magic"
"Mind Blowing Magic"
by Stucky
"Hey folks, I don’t post crapola time wasters, right? So let me tell you this. I have never never never ever seen a magic trick like this. I’m not even sure it’s magic - I think the guy is a time-traveler. I watched it twice to see if I could come up with a possible gimmick he’s using. Bupkis. I was even more amazed the second time. Oh, one more thing, you just might shed a tear. Really."
I'm speechless...and shed a tear...
Full screen mode recommended.
"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 11/1/20"
by Remy Tumin and Judith Levitt
Nov. 1, 2020: "Two days before the presidential election, the coronavirus is so widespread not even American health officials are able to keep up. The U.S. has recorded its worst week of known coronavirus infections with more than 500,000 new cases reported and a single-day record of 99,784 new cases on Friday, surpassing nine million total cases nationwide.
At least 1,200 counties - a full third of the country - qualify as a virus hot spot. Above, medics respond to a Covid-19 patient in Glen Burnie, Md.
Many people are coming to a frightening conclusion: They have no idea where the virus is spreading. As one public health expert put it: “It’s just kind of everywhere.”
Masks work. Really. In this animation, we show you just how effective a piece of fabric can be at warding off the virus.
And in Europe, Britain announced expansive new restrictions that effectively establish a national lockdown, joining France, Germany, Belgium and Ireland in shutting down large parts of their societies to try to keep their hospitals from being overwhelmed amid vast second-wave surges in coronavirus infections."
Oct 31, 2020 8:11 PM ET:
The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 45,990,300
people, according to official counts, including 9,198,326 Americans.
Oct 31, 2020 8:11 PM ET:
Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count◆
NOV 1, 2020 11:10 AM: "White House Slams Dr. Fauci As Outbreak Slows; Australia Sees First COVID-Free Day In 5 Months: Live Updates"
NOV 1, 2020 7:35 AM: "'Le Grand Escape' From Paris: Footage Shows Record-Breaking Traffic Gridlock Hours Before Lockdown" "One newspaper calculated that lines of cars stretched over 430 miles in and around capital hours before stay-at-home orders took effect."
10/31/2020 - 20:00: "'A Lot Of People Are Leaving': COVID Shutdowns Have Turned San Francisco Into A Ghost Town"
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Updated 11/1/20, 5:24 AM ET
Click image for larger size.
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A "Must Read":
Saturday, October 31, 2020
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Colorful NGC 1579 resembles the better known Trifid Nebula, but lies much farther north in planet Earth's sky, in the heroic constellation Perseus. About 2,100 light-years away and 3 light-years across, NGC 1579 is, like the Trifid, a study in contrasting blue and red colors, with dark dust lanes prominent in the nebula's central regions.
In both, dust reflects starlight to produce beautiful blue reflection nebulae. But unlike the Trifid, in NGC 1579 the reddish glow is not emission from clouds of glowing hydrogen gas excited by ultraviolet light from a nearby hot star. Instead, the dust in NGC 1579 drastically diminishes, reddens, and scatters the light from an embedded, extremely young, massive star, itself a strong emitter of the characteristic red hydrogen alpha light."
The Poet: Anne Sexton, "Courage"
"Courage"
"It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.
Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.
Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.
Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out."
~ Anne Sexton
“As I’ve Aged”
“As I’ve Aged”
- Author Unknown
“You ask me how it feels to grow older. I’ve learned a few things along the way, which I’ll share with you…
As I’ve aged, I’ve become kinder to myself, and less critical of myself. I’ve become my own friend. I don’t chide myself for eating that extra cookie, or for not making my bed, or for buying that silly cement gecko that I didn’t need, but looks so avante-garde on my patio. I am entitled to a treat, to be messy, to be extravagant.
I have seen too many dear friends leave this world too soon; before they understood the great freedom that comes with aging. Whose business is it if I choose to read or play on the computer until 4 AM and sleep until noon? I will dance with myself to those wonderful tunes of many years ago, and if I, at the same time, wish to weep over a lost love… I will.
I will walk the beach in a swim suit that is stretched over a bulging body, and will dive into the waves with abandon if I choose to, despite the pitying glances from the jet set. They, too, will get old.
I know I am sometimes forgetful. But there again, some of life is just as well forgotten. And I eventually remember the important things. Sure, over the years my heart has been broken. How can your heart not break when you lose a loved one, or when a child suffers, or even when somebody’s beloved pet gets hit by a car? But broken hearts are what give us strength and understanding and compassion. A heart never broken is pristine and sterile and will never know the joy of being imperfect.
I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turning gray, and to have my youthful laughs be forever etched into deep grooves on my face. So many have never laughed, and so many have died before their hair could turn silver.
As you get older, it is easier to be positive. You care less about what other people think. I don’t question myself anymore. I’ve even earned the right to be wrong. So, to answer your question, I like being old. It has set me free. I like the person I have become. I am not going to live forever, but while I am still here, I will not waste time lamenting what could have been, or worrying about what will be. And I shall eat dessert every single day (if I feel like it). May our friendship never come apart especially when it’s straight from the heart!”
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