Running 'Cause I Can't Fly 2

Saturday, January 9, 2021

"SPECIAL REPORT: Understanding The REAL GOVERNMENT, And MASS MIND CONTROL"

Gregory Mannarino,

"SPECIAL REPORT:

Understanding The REAL GOVERNMENT, And MASS MIND CONTROL"

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Remember Now"

2002, "Remember Now"

“You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence. But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.”

~ Wendell Berry

"A Look to the Heavens"

“You may have heard of the Seven Sisters in the sky, but have you heard about the Seven Strong Men on the ground? Located just west of the Ural Mountains, the unusual Manpupuner rock formations are one of the Seven Wonders of Russia. How these ancient 40-meter high pillars formed is yet unknown.

The persistent photographer of this featured image battled rough terrain and uncooperative weather to capture these rugged stone towers in winter at night, being finally successful in February of last year. Utilizing the camera's time delay feature, the photographer holds a flashlight in the foreground near one of the snow-covered pillars. High above, millions of stars shine down, while the band of our Milky Way Galaxy crosses diagonally down from the upper left.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150126.html

The Poet: Margaret Atwood, "The Moment"

"The Moment"

"The moment when, after many years

of hard work and a long voyage

you stand in the centre of your room,

house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,

knowing at last how you got there,

and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose

their soft arms from around you,

the birds take back their language,

the cliffs fissure and collapse,

the air moves back from you like a wave

and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.

You were a visitor, time after time

climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.

We never belonged to you.

You never found us.

It was always the other way round."

- Margaret Atwood,

"Morning in the Burned House"

"The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing But The Truth..."

"In the last few years, the very idea of telling the truth, the whole truth,

and nothing but the truth is dredged up only as a final resort when the

alternative options of deception, threat and bribery have all been exhausted."

- Michael Musto

"Ex Obscurum"

"Ex Obscurum"

by Spadecaller

"From emotional turmoil, hatred, and addiction the miracle of recovery begins in this Spadecaller Video entitled "Ex Obscurum" (From Darkness). Featuring original poetry narrated by the author and visual artist, Matthew Schwartz. Composer Samuel Barber's powerful musical score, adopted for the movie Platoon, (Adagio for Strings) sets the background for this spiritual exodus "From Darkness."

"A Cherokee Proverb"

“One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, generosity, empathy, truth, compassion and faith.” The grandson thought about this for a minute and then asked the grandfather, “Which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

"A Cherokee Proverb"

“‘Bloom’: A Touching Animated Short Film About Depression and What It Takes to Recover the Light of Being”

“‘Bloom’: A Touching Animated Short Film About

Depression and What It Takes to Recover the Light of Being”

by Maria Popova

“Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands,” the poet May Sarton wrote as she contemplated the cure for despair amid a dark season of the spirit. But what does it take to perch that precarious if in the direction of the light? When we are in that dark and hollow place, that place of leaden loneliness and isolation, when “the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain,” as William Styron wrote in his classic account of the malady – an indiscriminate malady that savaged Keats and savaged Nietzsche and savaged Hansberry – what does it take to live through the horror and the hollowness to the other side, to look back and gasp disbelievingly, with the poet Jane Kenyon: “What hurt me so terribly… until this moment?”

During a recent dark season of the spirit, a dear friend buoyed me with the most wonderful, hope-giving, rehumanizing story: Some years earlier, when a colleague of hers – another physicist – was going through such a season of his own, she gave him an amaryllis bulb in a small pot; the effect it had on him was unexpected and profound, as the effect of uncalculated kindnesses always is – profound and far-reaching, the way a pebble of kindness ripples out widening circles of radiance. As the light slowly returned to his life, he decided to teach a class on the physics of animation. And so it is that one of his students, Emily Johnstone, came to make ‘Bloom’ – a touching animated short film, drawing from the small personal gesture a universal metaphor for how we survive our densest private darknesses, consonant with Neil Gaiman’s insistence that “sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place… to make us warm in the coldest season.”

Complement with Tim Ferriss on how he survived suicidal depression and Tchaikovsky on depression and finding beauty amid the wreckage of the soul, then revisit “Having It Out with Melancholy” – Jane Kenyon’s stunning poem about life with and after depression.”

- https://www.brainpickings.org/

The Daily "Near You?"

Kuantan, Pahang, Malaysia. Thanks for stopping by!

"I Wish..."

"I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf “and so do all who live to see such times.

But that is not for them to decide.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

- J.R.R. Tolkien, “Lord of the Rings”

"Pentagon Officials Say Pelosi Asked Them To Stage A Military Coup Against President Trump"

"Pentagon Officials Say Pelosi Asked Them

To Stage A Military Coup Against President Trump"

"A Stock Market Crash Of 65-80% This Year?"

"A Stock Market Crash Of 65-80% This Year?"

by Adam Taggart

"A year ago, macro strategist David Hunter predicted a massive melt-up in financial assets, to be followed by an equally tremendous market crash. Well, he’s certainly been right so far on the melt-up prediction. All major stock indices are trading at record highs. And valuations have never been more stretched. Market Cap to GDP (the famed “Buffet Indicator”) has never been higher. Nor has the market’s price-to-sales ratio. As analyst Sven Henrich puts it “everything has gone vertical“.

So, having correctly called the current melt-up, will Hunter’s prediction of a 65-80% crash in prices this year also come true? Time will tell. But as extreme as that kind of drop may seem, history is on David’s side. Whenever excessive debt has enabled market multiples to distort to unsustainably excessive heights - which is what’s happening now on an unprecedented level - a painful correction to clear out the bad debt and malinvestment has always occurred."

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

"This Is Tyranny"

"This Is Tyranny"

by Charles Hugh Smith

"Well, wasn’t that a great fireworks display on Wednesday? It’s going to be pretty hard to lecture the world about democracy and peaceful elections after this. You can bet it got Congress’ attention. It’s one thing if angry crowds storm a Target in Minneapolis or break things in Portland, but it’s another thing when they overrun their work building. Would this have happened during a time of widely shared prosperity and social stability? It seems the social fabric is unraveling before our eyes.

Maybe it’s at least partly explained by a form of tyranny. There is much talk of tyranny in the political realm, but little is said about the tyrannies in the economic realm, a primary one being the tyranny of high costs: High costs crush the economy from within and enslave those attempting to start enterprises or keep their businesses afloat.

Traditionally, costs are broken down into fixed costs such as rent and fees which don't change regardless of whether business is good or bad, and operating costs such as payrolls, fuel, etc. which rise and fall with revenues. To some degree, this division no longer matters, because the entire cost structure of our economy is tyrannically high. If rent, insurance, taxes and general overhead don't eat you alive, then labor overhead (healthcare insurance, etc.) and other operating costs will.

The Plight of the “Precariats”: The major players in the U.S. economy used four tricks to offset the ever-higher costs: Globalization, financialization, reducing quality/quantity and turning the workforce into neo feudal gig economy precariats. That’s a class of people living without predictability or security. Their lives are precarious.

By offshoring high-wage manufacturing to nations with lax environmental standards and enforcement, Corporate America scored a two-fer: drastically lower costs of production in both labor and environmental controls.

The feudal lords of our financial system, the Federal Reserve, cemented capital's complete dominance over labor by dropping interest rates to zero and flooding Corporate America with trillions of dollars of essentially free money. The 20-year decline in interest rates allowed Corporate America to refinance debt at absurdly low rates, and borrow trillions more at absurdly low rates to buy back stocks, enriching the managers and top 5% who own the vast majority of equities.

The Fed's free trillions also enabled Corporate America to leverage and arbitrage resources, staff and capital around the world at a nearly frictionless cost of capital. (Meanwhile, the precariat labor force was still being charged 18% and higher for credit. Nice spread if you can get it. Thanks, Fed, for distorting the cost of credit and risk to benefit the few at the expense of the many.)

Just Look at Those Cereal Boxes: As for drastically reduced quality and quantity, all you have to do is open your eyes and look. Cold cereal boxes are now so tall and narrow to maintain the illusion of identical quantity that they cannot even stand upright on their own any more. As for the contents, barely half the box contains a product; the rest is air.

The list of products that fail by design or cost-cutting is essentially endless, as is the list of products whose ingredients have been cheapened and the list of manufactured goods stripped of quality so when the cheapest component (often a sensor or chip in today's digital-obsessed consumerist paradise) fails, the entire device must be tossed in the landfill because repair is now either impossible or too costly.

This ceaseless reduction of quality and quantity has reached the end of the line: the cold cereal boxes are already falling over, the can of tuna has already shrunk to a few ounces, the paint is already peeling off the new appliance, the sensor has already failed in the new dryer. There's nothing left to cheapen or reduce. The game of fooling an oblivious or resigned consumer is over. The price will now have to rise with actual costs.

As for the stripmining of labors' security, there's still room to run here as permanent workforces become a thing of the past and everyone becomes a precariat. The problem here is precariats can no longer afford to consume or borrow more money at 18% interest and so what do we do now to support expanding consumption and debt?

The Gravy Train: We have the federal government borrow trillions and distribute the dough to the precariats, under-employed and unemployed, essentially forever. This will appear to be without consequence until it's too late to save the financial system and economy from imploding as the dollar loses another 95% of its already-diminished purchasing power.

So why don't we look at the sources of the high costs that are eroding the economy? Because every high-cost structure is someone's gravy train: some politically sacrosanct and untouchable special interest or class of insiders depends on ever-higher costs to fund their ever-higher wages, benefits, profits, etc., and they will not be denied their gravy train.

Since healthcare, higher education, local government, etc. is unaffordable, let's print money and give it away as the "solution" to unaffordability. This faux "solution" merely transfers the rising risk of collapse to the entire economy. The costs of healthcare alone are instructive for they mirror the entire economy, which is now staggering under the crushing weight of higher administrative costs in every level. This is how healthcare has gone from 5% of the economy to 20% of the economy. As I have noted here many times, sickcare will bankrupt the nation all by itself. And that’s not to mention any of the other factors that can bankrupt us.

All the tricks to hide our unaffordable cost structure have reached marginal returns. Reality is about to intrude. The tyranny of ever-higher costs is about to crush the economy, and saying it isn't so doesn't make it so. And you’re probably going to see lots more angry crowds throughout America."

dailyreckoning.com

"How It Really Should Be"

"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 1/9/21"

"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 1/9/21"

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- https://www.zerohedge.com/

JAN 9, AT 10:45 AM: "US Reports Another Daily Case Record; COVID Deaths In UK, Germany Top 1K: Live Updates"

JAN 9, AT 6:10 AM: "Scottish Police Enter Home, Arrest Family After Neighbor Snitched On Them For Violating COVID Rules" "...children scream as parents are handcuffed."

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Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak
Jan. 9, 2021 1:09 AM ET:

The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 88,948,100

people, according to official counts, including 21,990,329 Americans.

Globally at least 1,913,400 have died.

Jan. 9, 2021 1:09AM AT:

Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count

- www.nytimes.com

○

"The COVID Tracking Project"
Every day, our volunteers compile the latest numbers on tests, cases,
hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every US state and territory.
- https://covidtracking.com/
○

- https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/112420_covidupdate.html

"This Difficult Thing of Being Human"

"This Difficult Thing of Being Human"

by Bodhipaksa

"It’s always good to remember that life isn’t easy. I don’t mean to say that life is always hard in the sense of it always being painful. Clearly there are times when we’re happy, when things are going well, when we feel that our life is headed in the right direction and that even greater fulfillment is just ahead of us, etc.

What I mean is that even when we have times in our life that are good, that doesn’t last. In fact, often the things we’re so excited and happy about later turn out to be things that also cause us suffering.

For example, you start a brand new relationship and you’re in love and it’s exciting and fulfilling. And then you find yourself butting heads with your partner, and you hurt each others’ feelings. Maybe you even split up. Does that sound familiar?

For example, the new job that you’re thrilled about turns out to contain stresses you hadn’t imagined. Has that ever happened?

For example, the house you’re so pleased to have bought inevitably ends up requiring maintenance. Or perhaps the house value plummets. Or perhaps your circumstances change and you find it a struggle to meet the mortgage. Maybe you’ve been lucky, or maybe you’ve been there.

Happiness has a way of evaporating. Unhappiness has a way of sneaking up on us and sucker-punching us in the gut.

On a deep level, none of really understand happiness and unhappiness. If we truly understood the dynamics of these things, we’d be happy all the time and would never be miserable. We’d be enlightened. But pre-enlightenment, we’re all stumbling in the dark, and sometimes colliding painfully with life as we do so.

This being human is not easy. We’re doing a difficult thing in living a human life.

It’s good to accept all this, because life is so much harder when we think it should be easy. When we think life should be straightforward, and that we think we have it all sorted out, then unhappiness becomes a sign that we’ve “failed.” And that makes being in pain even more painful.

We haven’t failed when we’re unhappy; we’re just being human. We’re simply experiencing the tender truth of what it is to live a human life.

So when you’re unhappy, don’t beat yourself up about it. Don’t fight it. Accept that this is how things are right now. Often when you do that, you’ll very quickly - sometimes instantly - start to feel better. By accepting our suffering, we start to move through it. And as you look around you, realize that everyone else is doing this difficult thing of being human too. They’re all struggling. We’re all struggling. We all want happiness and find happiness elusive. We all want to avoid suffering and yet keep stumbling into it, over and over.

Many of the things that bother you about other people are their attempts to deal with this difficult existential situation, in which we desire happiness, and don’t experience as much of it as we want, and desire to be free from suffering, and yet keep becoming trapped in it. Their moods, their clinging, their anger - all of these are the results of human beings struggling to find happiness, and having trouble doing so.

If we can recognize that this human life is not easy - if we can empathize with that very basic existential fact - then perhaps we can be just a little kinder to ourselves and others. And that would help make this human life just a little easier to navigate."

- https://www.wildmind.org/