Full screen recommended.
Yanni, "A Love for Life"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Thursday, March 18, 2021
"A Look to the Heavens"
"One of the brightest galaxies in planet Earth's sky is similar in size to our Milky Way Galaxy: big, beautiful Messier 81. Also known as NGC 3031 or Bode's galaxy for its 18th century discoverer, this grand spiral can be found toward the northern constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear.
The sharp, detailed telescopic view reveals M81's bright yellow nucleus, blue spiral arms, pinkish starforming regions, and sweeping cosmic dust lanes. Some dust lanes actually run through the galactic disk (left of center), contrary to other prominent spiral features though. The errant dust lanes may be the lingering result of a close encounter between M81 and the nearby galaxy M82 lurking outside of this frame. M81's faint, dwarf irregular satellite galaxy, Holmberg IX, can be seen just below the large spiral. Scrutiny of variable stars in M81 has yielded a well-determined distance for an external galaxy -- 11.8 million light-years."
The Poet: Charles Bukowski, "The Mind, Go All The Way"
- Charles Bukowski, "The Mind, Go All The Way"
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"The Life And Philosophy of Charles Bukowski"
"Nothing New Under the Sun"
"Nothing New Under the Sun"
"Yes, the times change with the tides; yet the tales, like the surf, sound on in familiar perpetuity and with steady repetition. In the modern era, during the great clash of civilizations currently underway, there will be no new, great and ghastly crusades. Only resistance or surrender. In America, just as her tide recedes from the world, in the end it may become Man overboard, and every man for himself. The sun rises. The sun sets.
As sand through an hour-glass, or waves rolling over every shore, so too, do our journeys mark passageways through time; and, in the end, our navigation may, indeed, depend upon guidance, like stars, shining down from heaven upon what we know, over the decisions we make; on the destinies we choose. And, of course, there will be losses incurred during the storms.
So, we raise our sails and pray for the prosperous winds of Providence to guide our ways and guard our lives through uncharted seas. Perhaps it's true that fortune finds and favors the faithful above all. Even still, those who believe, and those who doubt, and those who sleep, all do drift and blow by the same breeze. The winds of change are on us. They've always been here, steadfast and old as time itself. Like the earth. Nothing new under the sun."
- Doug "Uncola" Lynn,
"Hopi Elders' Prophecy"
"We Are The Ones We've Been Waiting For"
"You have been telling people that this is the Eleventh Hour,
now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour.
And there are things to be considered…
Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know your garden.
It is time to speak your truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for your leader.
“This could be a good time!
There is a river flowing now very fast.
It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid.
They will try to hold on to the shore.
They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly.
Know the river has its destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore,
push off into the middle of the river,
keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.
And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate.
At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves.
For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.
The time of the lone wolf is over!
Gather yourselves!
Banish the word ’struggle’ from your attitude and your vocabulary.
All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for."
- "Hopi Elders' Prophecy"
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"Now we must look upon each other as brothers and sisters. Only by joining together in a Spiritual Peace with love in our hearts for the Great Spirit and Mother Earth shall we be saved. If you have a way to spread the truth tell what you know to be true. Should we succeed, we will realize our mistakes of the past and return to the true path, living in harmony as brothers and sisters, sharing our Mother, the Earth, with all living creatures. In this way we could bring about a new world. A world which would be led by the Great Spirit and our Mother will provide plenty and happiness for all."
- Chief Dan Evehema of the Hopi Nation
"An Insufficiency Of Data..."
“Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. A man really learns little by it, for it is narrowly limited in range. What does a faithful husband know of women, or a faithful wife of men? The generalizations of such persons are always inaccurate. What really teaches man is not experiences, but observation. It is observation that enables him to make use of the vastly greater experience of other men, of men taken in the mass. He learns by noting what happens to them. Confined to what happens to himself, he labors eternally under an insufficiency of data.”
- H.L. Mencken
"Dead Men Don’t Spend"
"Dead Men Don’t Spend"
by Bill Bonner
YOUGHAL, IRELAND – "The checks went forth yesterday. And all the peoples rejoiced. Bloomberg reports: "As the economy reopens, consumer spending over the next two quarters is likely to be the strongest such period in at least 70 years with a rebound in services leading the way, according to economists at Wells Fargo & Co."
This is La Bubble Epoch… a joyous time for all… full of farce and foolishness. Tesla is going to the moon. Bitcoin is headed for Mars. It makes us all giddy with excitement – 5G, 6G, 7G, 98G… million-dollar non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of cindered artworks and Michael Jackson “lactating”… negative real interest rates… Joe Biden… a free-range chicken in every pot and a stimmy check in every bank account…All things are thought to be possible… even those that are physically, mathematically, and theoretically impossible.
And there is no longer any career risk or shame associated with saying or doing astonishingly stupid things. Men can have babies, too – yes, we can! Farmers can plow backward to fool the crows. But, OMG… You’re using the third-person singular masculine pronoun rather than the all-purpose, politically correct (though grammatically idiotic) “they.” Horrors! But that’s just a feature of the era. Things that don’t matter do matter. And things that do matter… well, fuhgeddaboutem.
Cockamamie Rip-Off: Our problem with this glorious age is that many things that don’t seem to matter right away – like a whiff of smoke on a dry California hillside… or a $3.3 trillion federal deficit – may become big deals later. Here’s one… the biggest heist in history. We refer to the $200 billion stolen from the “bailout” money. Here’s Yahoo Money on the story: "More than $200 billion in unemployment aid may have gone to fraudsters in the pandemic."
A significant chunk of the government support reserved for unemployed Americans went to fraudsters instead during the pandemic, according to new estimates. More than $200 billion of unemployment benefits distributed in the pandemic may have been pocketed by thieves, according to ID.me, a computer security service that 19 states - accounting for 75% of the national population - use to verify worker identities. That's more than triple the official government estimate of $63 billion based on the 10% pre-pandemic fraud rate. Up to 30% of claims under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), the program that provides benefits to self-employed and contractors, are fraudulent, according to data by ID.me.
What’s $200 billion? Peanuts. But people follow leaders. And when leaders impose a cockamamie rip-off as the law of the land… it doesn’t take the public long before getting in the spirit of dishonesty behind it. Then, the whole society falls apart.
It’s Complicated: But don’t worry, Dear Reader. The Biden Administration is ready to fight corruption - overseas! Politico: "Going after the ‘Achilles’ heel’: Biden charges into global anti-corruption fight." "Earlier this month, amid a blizzard of news both domestic and foreign, Secretary of State Antony Blinken took the time to ban a powerful Ukrainian oligarch from setting foot in the United States.
That’s right. We won’t tolerate corruption – in the Ukraine. Here in the U.S.? Well… It’s complicated. We are not so much concerned by the facts… as by the theory. Sure, apparently many people – millions? – lied to get the stimmy money. But when the money goes, everything goes. Money is what determines our place in line. Those with the most money go to the head of the line and get the most stuff. Those at the end get what’s left. And when the feds begin handing out money willy-nilly, the right and the wrong of it are hard to figure out. It’s not surprising that people begin cutting in line.
Raise the Dead: First, the stimmy money itself… Was it earned by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? Did it belong to Joe Biden? Was it saved by Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell? No. Was it taken from any human being’s bank account? No again…Then, how could it be stolen? From whom? Nobody.
Prosecutors would be at a loss. Because nobody is ever going to get standing in court to challenge the somebodies who made off with it. Besides, who had a “right” to the money? The young woman who fit the eligibility requirements, as determined by Congress? But where in the U.S. Constitution do the feds get the power to create money and give it to some people and not to others? You can check it yourself. Congress has no such right.
Maybe the thieves had as much of a right to the money as anyone else. It was up for grabs. They grabbed it. And better they than some others.
According to the H&R Block website, even corpses are eligible for the stimmy money:
Q. I received a stimulus check for a deceased relative. What do I do?
A. It depends when your loved one passed. Individuals who died in 2020 are eligible for the second stimulus check while anyone who died before 2020 is not.
This deepens our curiosity. Do the feds think they can raise the dead? If not, why give them money?
Federal Spend-a-Thon: Surely, a dead man needs the money less than a living one – no matter when he kicked the bucket. Even a fraudster would seem a better bag man than a corpse for the stimmy giveaways. And maybe, it is “life-ist”… a kind of “live privilege”… to think that the shades are somehow unable to do their part in the great spend-a-thon that the feds are trying to incite.
Shame on us. We would be peddling a “negative stereotype” if we were to observe that dead men are not big spenders, are not stimulated very easily, and that even $1,400 is unlikely to do the trick.
And perhaps, since the impossible is now possible, fake money is real money… and the frontier between right and wrong, true and false, ridiculous and sublime is no longer clearly marked…perhaps it is no longer permissible to make distinctions? Maybe the quick and the dead… sinners and saints… all have the same rights to the money that none of them earned?
So, in keeping with the Bubble Epoch zeitgeist, we will await the Dawn of the Dead… when the cadavers rise from their graves… shuffle into our malls… and, drawing on their stimmy checks, leave with Hermès scarves…thus distracting the clerks so the crooks can make off with the big-screen TVs. Yes… that ought to get the economy moving in the right direction!
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"Economic Market Snapshot AM 3/18/21"
"Economic Market Snapshot AM 3/18/21"
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"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will
do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
- John Maynard Keynes
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"Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
Your guide:
Gregory Mannarino, AM 3/18/21
"Total Collapse: First Time Unemployment
Claims SURGE HIGHER. 10yr Yield Spikes"
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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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MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates
CNN Market Data:
CNN Fear And Greed Index:
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A comprehensive, essential daily read.
March 17th to 19th, Updated Daily
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Financial Stress Index
"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
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Daily Job Cuts
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And now, the End Game...
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Oh yeah...
"If You Alone..."
“Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country – hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
- Mark Twain
"Freely Read “Shantaram” Online, by Gregory David Roberts"
Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope.
Sometimes we cry with everything except tears.
In the end that’s all we have – to hold on tight until dawn.”
- Gregory David Roberts, “Shantaram”
“Shantaram”
by Gregory David Roberts
“Crime and punishment, passion and loyalty, betrayal and redemption are only a few of the ingredients in “Shantaram,” a massive, over-the-top, mostly autobiographical novel. Shantaram is the name given Mr. Lindsay, or Linbaba, the larger-than-life hero. It means “man of God’s peace,” which is what the Indian people know of Lin. What they do not know is that prior to his arrival in Bombay he escaped from an Australian prison where he had begun serving a 19-year sentence. He served two years and leaped over the wall. He was imprisoned for a string of armed robberies performed to support his heroin addiction, which started when his marriage fell apart and he lost custody of his daughter. All of that is enough for several lifetimes, but for Greg Roberts, that’s only the beginning.
He arrives in Bombay with little money, an assumed name, false papers, an untellable past, and no plans for the future. Fortunately, he meets Prabaker right away, a sweet, smiling man who is a street guide. He takes to Lin immediately, eventually introducing him to his home village, where they end up living for six months. When they return to Bombay, they take up residence in a sprawling illegal slum of 25,000 people and Linbaba becomes the resident “doctor.” With a prison knowledge of first aid and whatever medicines he can cadge from doing trades with the local Mafia, he sets up a practice and is regarded as heaven-sent by these poor people who have nothing but illness, rat bites, dysentery, and anemia. He also meets Karla, an enigmatic Swiss-American woman, with whom he falls in love. Theirs is a complicated relationship, and Karla’s connections are murky from the outset.
Roberts is not reluctant to wax poetic; in fact, some of his prose is downright embarrassing. Throughout the novel, however, all 944 pages of it, every single sentence rings true. He is a tough guy with a tender heart, one capable of what is judged criminal behavior, but a basically decent, intelligent man who would never intentionally hurt anyone, especially anyone he knew. He is a magnet for trouble, a soldier of fortune, a picaresque hero: the rascal who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. His story is irresistible. Stay tuned for the prequel and the sequel.”
– Valerie Ryan
Freely read “Shantaram” online, by Gregory David Roberts, here:
There is a download option for registered users.
"America’s Worst Drug Crisis Ever Is Causing The Streets Of Many U.S. Cities To Look Like A “Zombie Apocalypse” Has Arrived"
"America’s Worst Drug Crisis Ever Is Causing The Streets Of
Many U.S. Cities To Look Like A “Zombie Apocalypse” Has Arrived"
by Michael Snyder
"America has been battling illegal street drugs for decades, but we have never seen anything like this. When the COVID pandemic hit the U.S., illegal drug use dramatically surged, and that has carried over into 2021. As I discussed a few days ago, the amount of meth that CBP agents have seized is up 9 percent so far in fiscal year 2021 and the amount of cocaine that CBP agents have seized is up 64 percent so far in fiscal year 2021. But the largest increase has been in fentanyl traffic. At this point, CBP agents have seized “more than 4,900 lbs of fentanyl during the first five months of FY21, already surpassing the total for all of FY20”.
The big drug cartels absolutely love fentanyl for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is extremely inexpensive to make, and it is very easy to move it long distances. Secondly, it is exceedingly addictive, and so customers constantly come back for more. But the only problem is that many of those customers don’t last too long. Tens of thousands of Americans are dropping dead from fentanyl overdoses, and this has become a major national crisis.
Once again tonight, vast hordes of addicts will congregate in urban areas where they know they will be able to score some fentanyl. One of those areas is Kensington Avenue in northeast Philadelphia…
"The video looks like a scene from an apocalyptic movie – dozens of disheveled people shivering in the middle of a winter night as they camp out around a trash bin on fire among a street strewn with litter. But the footage isn’t a Hollywood production but a candid snapshot of Kensington Avenue in northeast Philadelphia – an area that has been likened to the infamous Skid Row section of Los Angeles. The neighborhood has previously been dubbed the ‘East Coast’s largest open-air drug market’ by DEA officials, according to the New York Times." If you didn’t know better, you would probably be tempted to think that it was pulled right out of a post-apocalyptic horror film.
On Kensington Avenue, addicts can purchase a bag of fentanyl-laced heroin for as little as five dollars…The Kensington section of Philadelphia, where anyone can buy a lethal dose of fentanyl-laced heroin for $5 a bag, has been known locally as the ‘ground zero’ of America’s opioid epidemic, Philadelphia Magazine reported. It is not uncommon for locals who pass by the area to notice men lying motionless on the sidewalk. Syringes and needles are also frequently seen out and used in plain sight. Sometimes the men that are lying motionless on the sidewalk never get up, and that is because they have dropped dead from an overdose.
Of course scenes like this play out on a nightly basis all over America. At this point, synthetic opioids such as fentanyl have become the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States… "In 2016, synthetic opioids, primarily illegal fentanyl, passed prescription opioids as the most common drugs involved in overdose deaths in the United States, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
It is incredibly easy to overdose on fentanyl. In fact, an amount of fentanyl equivalent to “two grains of salt” is apparently enough to put you in the grave… "Some families are facing a fentanyl crisis and law enforcement is sounding the alarm. The tasteless, odorless drug is driving up the number of fatal overdoses. People who are battling a substance use disorder are being fooled by fentanyl. Lisa Smittcamp, the District Attorney in Fresno County, California, says the amount it takes to overdose is about the size of two grains of salt."
For a number of years, this was primarily a problem in the eastern half of the nation, but that has all changed. Fentanyl use is now spreading like wildfire in the western half of the country, and that spike is pushing the overall death toll dramatically higher. The following comes from NPR… "The spike in fentanyl deaths in the West contributed to a record number of fatal overdoses last year, with roughly 72,000 Americans dead. “It’s just getting worse, and it’s killing too many people,” said Matthew Donahue, deputy chief of operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration." Sadly, the final number for 2021 is expected to be even higher.
These are deaths that do not need to happen, but Americans don’t seem to be getting the message that fentanyl use is extremely dangerous. In fact, since the beginning of the pandemic the number of Americans testing positive for fentanyl use has absolutely skyrocketed… "Use of methamphetamine and fentanyl shot up after the pandemic hit the U.S. in March 2020, with a particularly sharp spike for the latter, according to a new report by drug testing company Millennium Health.
The adjusted positivity rate of urine drug screens was up 78% for fentanyl and 29% for methamphetamine during the first 9 months of the pandemic compared with the same period in 2019, according to the report. While cocaine and heroin saw small increases initially, both fell below pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2020." This is yet another example of how the fabric of our society is unraveling all around us, and it is only going to get worse.
For years, much of the fentanyl being used in the U.S. was coming in from China, but then international pressure forced the Chinese to ban the sale of fentanyl. Unfortunately, since that time vendors in China have found ways around that ban… "Under international pressure, China’s government banned the production and sale of fentanyl and many of its variants in May 2019, resulting in a significant reduction in the country’s illicit fentanyl trade.
But more than a year later, Chinese vendors have tapped into online networks to brazenly market fentanyl analogs and the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl, and ship them directly to customers in the U.S. and Europe as well as to Mexican cartels, according to an NPR investigation and research from the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, or C4ADS, a nonprofit data analysis group."
This is one of the reasons why we need strong security on our southern border. Right now the Mexican cartels are flooding our streets with fentanyl, and the new administration does not seem too concerned about doing anything to stop this from happening."
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Being from Philadelphia this song came to mind...
Full screen recommended.
Wednesday, March 17, 2021
"Housing Hysteria Cooling; Average American Is Going Broke; Economic Casino; FED Will Buy It All"
Jeremiah Babe,
"Housing Hysteria Cooling; Average American Is Going Broke;
Economic Casino; FED Will Buy It All"
"Rising Food Prices Are Triggering A Dangerous Hunger Crisis In America: Be Ready For Starvation!"
Full screen recommended.
"Rising Food Prices Are Triggering A Dangerous
Hunger Crisis In America: Be Ready For Starvation!"
by Epic Economist
"While the U.S. tries to bounce back from the health crisis, a ravaging hunger crisis is still sweeping across the nation. Recent data suggest that over 40 million Americans are still at serious risk of facing food insecurity this year, and although the health crisis may seem close to an end, its consequences will linger for a long time. Long-term unemployment and sharp wage cuts are here to stay, as countless jobs were permanently lost and many industries are still struggling to make it through the recession.
The UN is warning that now - one year after widespread business shutdowns severely impacted economic activity, and governments' extraordinary monetary response aggravated inflation - the situation is bound to get a whole lot worse, as food prices are going through the roof and neither wages nor employment rates are keeping up with the pace of such increases. That's what we're going to analyze in this video.
Even before the current recession, 35 million Americans were already food insecure, meaning they lacked access and means to afford enough nutritious food for themselves and their families. While millions of others were one or two paychecks away from needing help. Then, after the sanitary outbreak exploded, those vulnerable workers and households have fallen into a poverty spiral incredibly hard to recover from.
In 2020, more than 54 million Americans suffered from food insecurity, and now at least 42 million, or one in six, remain at risk of experiencing acute hunger in 2021, according to Feeding America, the nation’s largest anti-hunger organization. According to a report published by the Institute for Policy Research, "food insecurity has doubled overall, and tripled among households with children".
As of January 18, nearly 24 million households - including 12.5 million households with children - reported to already be facing severe food insecurity. The fallout of the health crisis has inflamed the problem, but also shed a light on the fact that, in the world's wealthiest country, a large chunk of the population doesn't have the means to afford their most basic needs. A Federal Reserve survey found that 40% of Americans can not afford to pay an unexpected $400 bill. So in face of long-term unemployment or other financial strains, this lack of financial cushion created an economic shock and exacerbated an already existing hunger crisis.
During the early months of the sanitary outbreak, lockdown announcements triggered a massive panic-buying frenzy that lead to dramatic food shortages all over the country. Even though shortages of some essentials linger until this day, the reason why we still have massive lines at food bank distributions is not because we have a shortage of food supplies.
Yes, supply chain disruptions repeatedly occurred and caused short-term shortages when people started to run to stockpile non-perishable goods and cleaning supplies. However, the main determinant that is driving millions of Americans to face starvation is the growth of social inequality. Throughout the years, the American living standards were continuously deteriorated by reckless monetary policies that have put us on a hyperinflationary path and ended up expanding the wealth disparities while progressively rising food prices. Needless to say, in face of such a multi-layered crisis as the one we're into, the government's extraordinary monetary response has made the problem worse.
Food staples such as meat and grains have seen the highest spikes of about 40%. But the truth is, even with a leaner output, the amount of food produced in the world is enough to feed the entire global population. Food shortages mostly happen due to poor management issues and people continue to suffer from hunger as economies collapse and workers lose their ability to provide for themselves.
Another major issue no one seems to be talking about is the fact that, even though vaccines are starting to be distributed and that could put the health crisis behind us, after the last shots are given and politicians declare it's the end, the hunger crisis will likely be - once again - swept under the rug, and all of those food-insecure people will remain in the same situation, as the reopening of the economy also means higher inflation, and therefore, higher food prices.
That is to say, as many of the problems that experts predicted last year have been deferred, and not solved, and our economy has significantly shrunk, more and more Americans are likely to be pushed to the brink of starvation. Even more tragically, their struggles might be made invisible as our leaders turn their eyes away from our real problems, and leave our great people fighting for crumbs while our economy dies. We should prepare for the worst since the good old days may never come back."
"A Look to the Heavens"
"A gorgeous spiral galaxy some 100 million light-years distant, NGC 1309 lies on the banks of the constellation of the River (Eridanus). NGC 1309 spans about 30,000 light-years, making it about one third the size of our larger Milky Way galaxy. Bluish clusters of young stars and dust lanes are seen to trace out NGC 1309's spiral arms as they wind around an older yellowish star population at its core.
Click image for larger size.
Not just another pretty face-on spiral galaxy, observations of NGC 1309's recent supernova and Cepheid variable stars contribute to the calibration of the expansion of the Universe. Still, after you get over this beautiful galaxy's grand design, check out the array of more distant background galaxies also recorded in this sharp, reprocessed, Hubble Space Telescope view.”
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Full screen recommended.
Vangelis, "A Tour of the Universe"
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"In this galaxy, there's a mathematical probability of 3 billion Earth-type planets. And in all of the universe, 20 trillion galaxies like this. And in all of that... and perhaps more, only one of each of us."
"Dr. Leonard McCoy"
Chet Raymo, “Free As A Bird”
“Free As A Bird”
by Chet Raymo
“All afternoon I have been watching a pair of hummingbirds play about our porch. They live somewhere nearby, though I haven’t found their nest. They are attracted to our hummingbird feeder, which we keep full of sugar water. What perfect little machines they are! No other bird can perform their tricks of flight – flying backwards, hovering in place. Zip. Zip. From perch to perch in a blur of iridescence. If you want a symbol of freedom, the hummingbird is it. Exuberant. Unpredictable. A streak of pure fun. It is the speed, of course, that gives the impression of perfect spontaneity. The bird can perform a dozen intricate maneuvers more quickly than I can turn my head.
Is the hummingbird’s apparent freedom illusory, a biochemically determined response to stimuli from the environment? Or is the hummingbird’s flight what it seems to be, willful and unpredictable? If I can answer that question, I will be learning as much about myself as about the hummingbird. So I watch. And I consider what I know of biochemistry. The hummingbird is awash in signals from its environment – visual, olfactory, auditory and tactile cues that it processes and responds to with lightning speed.
How does it do it? Proteins, mostly. Every cell of the hummingbird’s body is a buzzing conversation of proteins, each protein a chain of hundreds of amino acids folded into a complex shape like a piece of a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Shapes as various as the words of a human vocabulary. An odor molecule from a blossom, for example, binds to a protein receptor on a cell membrane of the hummingbird’s olfactory organ – like a jigsaw-puzzle piece with its neighbor. This causes the receptor molecule to change that part of its shape that extends inside the cell. Another protein now binds with the new configuration of the receptor, and changes its own shape. And so on, in a sequence of shapeshifting and binding – called a signal-transduction cascade – until the hummingbird’s brain “experiences” the odor.
Now appropriate signals must be sent from the brain to the body – ion flows established along neural axons, synapses activated. Wing muscles must respond to direct the hummingbird to the source of nourishment. Tens of thousands of proteins in a myriad of cells talk to each other, each protein genetically prefigured by the hummingbird’s DNA to carry on its conversation in a particular part of the body. All of this happens continuously, and so quickly that to my eye the bird’s movements are a blur.
There is much left to learn, but this much is clear: There is no ghost in the machine, no hummingbird pilot making moment by moment decisions out of the whiffy stuff of spirit. Every detail of the hummingbird’s apparently willful flight is biochemistry. Between the hummingbird and myself there is a difference of complexity, but not of kind. If humans are the lords of terrestrial creation, it is because of the huge tangle of nerves that sits atop our spines.
So what does this mean about human freedom? If we are biochemical machines in interaction with our environments, in what sense can we be said to be free? What happens to “free will”? Perhaps the most satisfying place to look for free will is in what is sometimes called chaos theory. In sufficiently complex systems with many feedback loops – the global economy, the weather, the human nervous system – small perturbations can lead to unpredictable large-scale consequences, though every part of the system is individually deterministic. This has sometimes been called – somewhat facetiously – the butterfly effect: a butterfly flaps its wings in China and triggers a cascade of events that results in a snowstorm in Chicago. Chaos theory has taught us that determinism does not imply predictability. Of course, this is not what philosophers traditionally meant by free will, but it is indistinguishable from what philosophers traditionally meant by free will. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.
I watch the hummingbirds at the feeder. Their hearts beat ten times faster than a human’s. They have the highest metabolic rate of any animal, a dozen times higher than a pigeon, a hundred times higher than an elephant. Hummingbirds live at the edge of what is biologically possible, and it’s that, the fierce intenseness of their aliveness, that makes them appear so exuberantly free. But there are no metaphysical pilots in these little flying machines. The machines are the pilots. You give me carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and a few billion years of evolution, and I’ll give you a bird that burns like a luminous flame. The hummingbird’s freedom was built into the universe from the first moment of creation.”
"Butterflies..."
“I think humans might be like butterflies; people die every day without many other people knowing about them, seeing their colors, hearing their stories… and when humans are broken, they’re like broken butterfly wings; suddenly there are so many beauties that are seen in different ways, so many thoughts and visions and possibilities that form, which couldn’t form when the person wasn’t broken! So it is not a very sad thing to be broken, after all! It’s during the times of being broken, that you have all the opportunities to become things unforgettable! Just like the broken butterfly wing that I found, which has given me so many thoughts, in so many ways, has shown me so many words, and imaginations! But butterflies need to know that it doesn’t matter at all if the whole world saw their colors or not! What matters is that they flew, they glided, they hovered, they saw, they felt, and they knew! And they loved the ones whom they flew with! And that is an existence worthwhile!”
- C. JoyBell C.
The Poet: Charles Dickens, “Things That Never Die”
“Things That Never Die”
“The pure, the bright, the beautiful
that stirred our hearts in youth,
The impulses to wordless prayer,
The streams of love and truth,
The longing after something lost,
The spirit’s longing cry,
The striving after better hopes -
These things can never die.
The timid hand stretched forth to aid
A brother in his need;
A kindly word in grief’s dark hour
That proves a friend indeed;
The plea for mercy softly breathed,
When justice threatens high,
The sorrow of a contrite heart -
These things shall never die.
Let nothing pass, for every hand
Must find some work to do,
Lose not a chance to waken love -
Be firm and just and true.
So shall a light that cannot fade
Beam on thee from on high,
And angel voices say to thee -
‘These things shall never die.’”
- Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
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