Monday, August 30, 2021

"7 Examples That Show How Completely And Utterly Insane Our Society Has Become"

"7 Examples That Show How Completely 
And Utterly Insane Our Society Has Become"
by Michael Snyder

"Reading the news has become like going to a freak show. You never know what you are going to see each day, but it is almost certainly going to be nutty. Some of the things that I am going to share with you in this article are weird, others are infuriating, but they all point to the same conclusion. From the very top to the very bottom, America is going crazy. And I mean that in the worst way possible. We truly have become an “idiocracy”, and it seems like those that are the most incompetent of all are often rewarded by being elevated to the top of the food chain. Meanwhile, those of us that still try to approach things rationally are increasingly being pushed to the fringes of society.

If you don’t understand the point that I am trying to make, hopefully things will become clearer by the time you complete this article. The following are 7 examples that show how completely and utterly insane our society has become…

#1 At a time when global food supplies are getting tighter and tighter, Joe Biden wants to pay farmers to not grow anything in order to fight climate change… "President Joe Biden wants to combat climate change by paying more farmers not to farm. But he’s already finding it’s hard to make that work. His Agriculture Department is far behind its goal for enrolling new land in one program that has that goal, with participation being the lowest it’s been in more than three decades.

Thankfully, relatively few farmers are grabbing the cash that Biden is offering, because prices for agricultural commodities have soared as global supplies have tightened. So in a desperate attempt to get more farmers to sign up, the Biden administration has “more than doubled key incentive payments”… "Even though the USDA this summer more than doubled key incentive payments for the program that encourages farmers and ranchers to leave land idle, high commodity prices are keeping it more worthwhile for growers to raise crops. On top of that, the plan, known as the Conservation Reserve Program, takes land out of production for only 10 to 15 years - so those acres could release carbon into the atmosphere if the land is planted again and thus cancel out its environmental benefit." Considering where global trends are heading, paying farmers not to produce food is one of the stupidest things that our government could possibly be doing at this moment.

#2 We are now learning that the chaotic evacuation in Afghanistan could have been conducted much, much differently. According to the Washington Post, the Taliban actually offered a deal to the Biden administration that would have allowed the U.S. to secure the entire city of Kabul… "In a hastily arranged in-person meeting, senior U.S. military leaders in Doha – including McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command – spoke with Abdul Ghani Baradar, head of the Taliban’s political wing. “We have a problem,” Baradar said, according to the U.S. official. “We have two options to deal with it: You [the United States military] take responsibility for securing Kabul or you have to allow us to do it.”

Can you imagine how much more orderly the evacuation of Americans and allied Afghans could have gone if U.S. forces had actually secured all of Kabul? Needless to say, ISIS forces would have likely never gotten close enough to bomb the airport. But instead of accepting the opportunity to secure all of Kabul, U.S. officials decided to hand Kabul to the Taliban and crowd everyone that needed to be evacuated into the airport… "On the spot, an understanding was reached, according to two other U.S. officials: The United States could have the airport until Aug. 31. But the Taliban would control the city."

It is hard to believe that our officials could actually be this incompetent, but nobody will even be held accountable for this decision because we really do live in an “idiocracy”.

#3 One of the hottest new social media trends is to show off the fact that your body is inhabited by multiple “beings”… "Several TikTok and YouTube accounts of such broken people, who refer to themselves as a “host” or “system” of multiple beings, have millions of online followers. They exhibit their various personalities for online notoriety in the guise of “educating” and “promoting awareness.” One TikToker who says she has DID explains in a Q&A about her personalities, “I can’t force anyone [inside me] to come out but I can communicate very well within the system and ask someone to come out, but sometimes it’s very involuntary.”

Why in the world would “millions of online followers” want to watch these people manifest their various “personalities”? And can’t most of those “followers” actually understand what is really going on with these people?

#4 A 43-year-old man took his parents to court after they threw out his porn collection. Instead of laughing the case out of court, a judge in Michigan has awarded him more than $30,000 in damages… "A judge has ordered a western Michigan couple to pay $30,441 to their son for getting rid of his pornography collection. U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney’s decision this week came eight months after David Werking, 43, won a lawsuit against his parents. According to NBCDFW, he said they had no right to throw out his collection of films, magazines, and other items. Werking had lived at their Grand Haven home for 10 months after a divorce before moving to Muncie, Indiana. The judge followed the value set by an expert, MLive.com reported. The value of the collection was “set by an expert”? What kind of sick credentials does someone need to become “an expert” in that field?"

#5 After denying a transgender student the ability to use a particular bathroom, a school board in Virginia has been forced to pay out over 1.3 million dollars… "A Virginia school board will pay more than $1.3 million to the American Civil Liberties Union after losing a court battle involving a transgender student who sued the school over its bathroom policy. According to the Virginian-Pilot, the Gloucester County School Board on Thursday agreed to pay the ACLU the full amount of costs and fees associated with its representation of one of its former students, Gavin Grimm, marking the end of a lengthy six-year legal fight."

As word of this case spreads around, schools all over the nation will be deathly afraid to ever tell anyone what bathrooms they can or cannot use. Nobody will want to be the next victim to get hit with a million dollar lawsuit, and it probably won’t be too long before the “boys” and “girls” signs on school bathrooms disappear entirely.

#6 When I was growing up, the American flag was proudly displayed in our classrooms and we said the Pledge of Allegiance every day. But today the American flag is being taken down in classrooms all over America, and one public school teacher in California is urging her students to pledge allegiance to a new flag… "A Southern California public school teacher was caught admitting to encouraging her students to pledge allegiance to the LGBT pride flag as an alternative to the American flag, bragging of the indoctrination on her own TikTok account.

The teacher, identified as Kristin Pitzen of Newport Mesa School District in Orange County, recounts taking down the American flag, and then pointing to the LGBT flag as an alternative. “We do have a flag in the class that you can pledge allegiance to,” said Pitzen when a student asked about the American flag that she had removed from the classroom “because of COVID.”

#7 In recent days, Joe Biden has been encouraging officials all over the country to impose extremely strict vaccine mandates. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is insisting that “no one should be forced to get a jab”… “Vaccination is the main weapon against the spread of the virus. Importantly, no one should be forced to get a jab. Pressure, where people may lose their jobs, is even less acceptable. People must be convinced of the need to get the vaccine,” he said."

When even Vladimir Putin is significantly less tyrannical than the guy that is running your country, you have got a major problem on your hands. When I was growing up, people would risk everything to flee the Soviet Union so that they could experience true freedom in the western world. Could we soon get to a point where Americans are actually fleeing to Russia so that they can “live free”?

It seems like such a bizarre question to ask, but this is how bad things have gotten in the United States. We live in a society where up is now down, good is now bad, and lies are now truth.

Our nation has become a giant circus, and the crazies are running the show. It will be entertaining to watch for a little while, but it won’t be too long before the entire thing comes crashing down on top of all of us."

"A Heedless Aftermath"

"A Heedless Aftermath"
by Jim Kunstler

"For all the seeming power of the Deep State - a.k.a. the “Intel Community” - one really has to be impressed by its stupidity and desperation. It can’t keep secrets or cover its tracks. Anyone who was paying attention to the RussiaGate operation has seen the published evidence of all the lawless behavior it spawned and knows the names of all the players. Ditto, the effort to engineer the 2020 election and install an obviously senile puppet-stooge in the White House. And ditto the effort to manufacture the Covid-19 crisis by hijacking the public health apparatus of the federal government.

Yet, this Deep State rogue menace is stumbling badly now because it didn’t figure out the basic dynamic of the long emergency: that over-investments in complexity inexorably produce disorder and collapse. This includes the complexity of the Deep State itself, a sprawling enterprise choking on the immense stream of data it feeds on and the fumbling efforts of its all-too-human agents to weaponize all that. The question now is whether the Deep State will collapse - even perhaps get forcefully defeated by Americans who oppose it - before the entire country and all its support systems collapse.

Events are on the loose well beyond the Deep State’s control now. Its front man, “Joe Biden,” sealed his fate last week with the bungled exit from Afghanistan. Thirteen dead US soldiers may only be the preview of a Grand-Guignol to come as the victorious Islamic maniacs get to stage atrocities starring the thousands of Americans and other Westerners left behind. Why wouldn’t they? For decades, they’ve promised to defeat and humiliate their “infidel” enemies. Remember the video-recorded beheadings of Nicholas Berg, Daniel Pearl and many others? The roasting of the captured Syrian pilot in a steel cage?

There’s no need to even ask the rhetorical question: who planned and executed the buggered-up evacuation of Kabul. It is self-evident: the entire chain-of-command. This is finally galvanizing half the country not in thrall to the Deep State to move against it, and that’s what you’ll see in the weeks to come. They will get rid of this imposter “Joe Biden” - if the Deep State doesn’t try do it first - and then they will “cancel” the Deep State’s attempt to manage any succession to the vacancy at the top.

Do you suppose that you will not be hearing any results of the Arizona election audit just because the endeavor went silent last week when three audit team members got sick with Covid? The process was not stopped or squashed. The report will show a gross and startling disparity between the results certified and the actual ballots counted. That will blow away the tatters of legitimacy “Joe Biden” has been wearing, revealing the larval, sightless creature hiding inside.

The CDC and its allied agencies have maxed-out on Americans willing to vax-up. The latest FDA switcheroo move to “approve” the not-yet-produced (or trialed) genetic therapy agent, “Comirnaty” was intended to fool the public into thinking that the current Pfizer-BioNTech “vaccine” was likewise approved. It is not approved. It is still being administered under the emergency use authorization. The quisling news media is lying about it. Anyway, the half of the country that declines to take a cocktail that fails to act as a true vaccine (i.e., preventing disease), and threatens to fatally attack the lining of their blood vessels… that large swathe of the public is good and goddam sick of being pushed around with mandates and threats.

We will not submit. We’re nearing the end of this medical reign of terror. The trouble is, the medical establishment won’t survive it. They’ve perverted and undermined what used to be called science - truth-driven inquiry into what’s real and what is not - and, anyway, the medical system had already poisoned itself with racketeering so outlandish and cruel that it makes the old Mafia look like a charity organization. Not only do Americans get a Covid virus whose development was funded and guided by America’s chief public health official, Tony Fauci, but if it puts them in the hospital, their doctors deny them treatment with efficacious medicines, and, if the patients happen to survive the ordeal, they’re hit up with million-dollar bills. This conduct exhibits a kind of sadism that goes beyond just adding insult to injury.

Half the country is also paying attention to the invasion of border-jumpers coming in from Mexico with the assistance of the Deep State. They’re also noticing “Joe Biden’s” failure to comply with the recent US Supreme Court decision that he must enforce the standing procedure to return “asylum-seekers” to Mexico to await any decision on their eligibility. Many of these migrants come from the farthest corners of the world, including places full of people who don’t like us or our country. How many of them are coming here to blow things up and shoot American citizens? Nobody knows. The Deep State doesn’t want to know and they don’t want you to find out.

Finally, there is the question of the financial system which, lately, has become the proxy for what used to be the productive US economy, its Potemkin false front. The various plans to spend about $8-trillion in non-existent money on more social experiments such as paying citizens to be idle, would have been enough to sink American money, the US dollar. Now that the world has witnessed the humiliating withdrawal of the US from our 20-year-long war in Afghanistan, the process will accelerate. The world sees that we can’t be depended on in any foreign crisis. They know we no longer produce things of value. What are we good for, exactly? Absurd ventures in gender confusion and race hustling? Drugs and pornography? Is that what stands behind the dollar?

Former (as of yesterday) Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller returned to YouTube yesterday. He represents exactly how pissed off that better half of the nation is, the half that refuses to bend over for the Deep State, the half that is looking to run it down and call it to account for attempting to destroy the country six ways to Sunday."

Gregory Mannarino, AM 8/30/21: "Markets: Look How This Is Being Set Up! The MIC Is In Full Control"

"Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
Your guide:
Gregory Mannarino, AM 8/30/21:
"Markets: Look How This Is Being Set Up!
 The MIC Is In Full Control"

"How It Really Is"

 

"Economic Market Snapshot AM 8/30/21"

"Economic Market Snapshot AM 8/30/21"
"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
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates

CNN Market Data:

CNN Fear And Greed Index:
A comprehensive, essential daily read.
August 29th to 31st, Updated Daily
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."
Daily Job Cuts
Commentary, highly recommended:
And now, the End Game...
Oh yeah...

Sunday, August 29, 2021

Musical Interlude: Peder B. Helland, "Unknown Lands"

Full screen recommended.
Peder B. Helland, "Unknown Lands"
Beautiful fantasy music ("Unknown Lands" ) composed
 by Peder B. Helland. Enjoy relaxing music with ethereal voices,
 cello and piano while you let your thoughts wander.

"Viral Infographic Reveals The Shocking Amount Of Military Hardware Biden Handed To The Taliban"

"Viral Infographic Reveals The Shocking Amount 
Of Military Hardware Biden Handed To The Taliban"
by Tyler Durden

"When President Biden leaves billions of US military hardware in the hands of America-hating terrorists - after having seven months to "plan a withdrawal" - he doesn't mess around.
Click image for larger size.
According to a now-viral infographic from The Sunday Times, above, ongoing terror operations will benefit from the luxury of more than 22,000 Humvees, 42,000 pick-up trucks and SUVs, 16,000 night visions goggles and devices, 64,000 machine guns, and 358,000 assault rifles.

Indeed, while Biden wants to strip law-abiding Americans of their constitutional right to bear arms, he's put over 400,000 of them in the hands of terrorists. "Biden gave the Taliban 350,000 assault rifles but wants to take yours away." -https://t.co/o55Oozyp7o
- Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) August 29, 2021

Needless to say, the vast trove of US military hardware handed to America's enemies on a silver platter should, at minimum, make Raytheon - whose board Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sat on until he joined the Biden admin - very happy."

2500 dead Americans over 20 years... $2.3 Trillion spent...
$83 billion in weapons, vehicles just left there.
Excuse me, but WTF?!
NO ONE THOUGHT OF THIS?!


We had better pray to God Almighty we 
never have a war against Russia or China...

“The FED Can’t Stop The Coming Financial Crisis; Bankruptcy Of America”

Jeremiah Babe, PM 8/29/21:
The FED Can’t Stop The Coming Financial Crisis; 
Bankruptcy Of America”

"Get Prepared For A Massive 80% Stock Market Crash By The End Of 2021"

Full screen recommended.
"Prepared For A Massive 80% Stock
 Market Crash By The End Of 2021"
by Epic Economist

Warnings about a looming stock market crash have grown louder this week as inflation levels soared and investors are getting increasingly concerned about Fed tapering. Since hitting bottom in March 2020, the S&P 500 has rallied by more than 45%, and it just hit a new record high last week, now up more than 1% for the year. However, there are many reasons to believe that the rally is unsustainable and that overvalued stocks could face a reckoning and collapse soon. Even though many market watchers and financial strategists in Wall Street see that stock valuations are extremely extended and will end up canceling returns in the long-term, no one sees a stock market crash as sharp as the one David Hunter is calling for taking place this year as inflation spirals out of control.

The chief macro strategist at Contrarian Macro Advisors, argues that the US economy is in the middle of a massive “bust” consisting of two phases. Phase one was the initial bear market and short-lived recovery witnessed last year. We're now in the second phase of the bust, according to Hunter, which will lead us to a much steeper downturn than the first phase. The expert outlines that the government's and the Fed's stimulus measures have failed to boost many sectors of the economy that needed fiscal support. As a result, hundreds of thousands of businesses have gone bankrupt, and thousands more are still on the line. That's why Hunter Hunter predicts we’ll see much more insolvency during the second phase.

What we will witness is “a bear market of historic proportions,” culminating with the S&P 500 around 800 - yes, you heard that right. “Basically the biggest bear market since the ‘29 crash,” Hunter highlights. This downfall will occur very rapidly. “Faster than what we saw in 2008/9. We can go from peak to trough in less than six months". The coming crash will be a result of decades of debt buildup and other forms of leverage. "This dynamic worked great on the way up, which is why you had the highs we had, but they really punish you on the way down - and they also speed up any declines,” the investor explained.

The 48-year market veteran believes that the Fed will be forced to tighten policy much sooner than most investors anticipate. Hunter has a very specific vision of where markets could go in the months ahead. Up until this point, his predictions have been accurate. He said it before and reiterated this week that he believes the S&P 500 will top in mere weeks from now. And even though the topping process might keep investors' hopes up for a while, as stocks may test their highs again after peaking, when the fall approaches, he said, "stocks will begin their descent toward a 65-80% drop from around 4,500 levels". "So I believe in the next few months, you’ll see. I’ve been calling from 4,200-4,500 on the S&P - I think you’ll see that this year and probably by this fall. And melt up means it’s going to go parabolic. It’s going to get even steeper than it’s been out of the March trough," he said.

"I've been of the belief that inflation is going to get to a point where the Fed's going to have to tighten way sooner than people are anticipating, and that it will -- because of the fragility in the global system - it will lead to a much faster, much steeper decline than anybody expects," he concluded. Once again, his prediction seems to be right on track, especially considering that the Fed announced on Friday that they plan to begin tapering by year-end as opposed to previous statements ensuring that the taper process would only start in 2023. In response, stocks faced another jump as investors took the statement as a sign of economic strength and as proof that more strict tightening remains months away in the future.

But Hunter believes the Fed is going to be forced to take drastic action than just reducing the volume of bonds they're buying per month, which right now is $120 billion. As for when the stock market crash will happen, the market veteran believes stocks are close to a peak, and a subsequent burst will unfold over the next two-to-three months. However, he argues, if inflation indicators continue to jump higher than expected, prompting a more serious Fed reaction than anticipated and blindsiding investors, the stock market bubble will explode way before they have time to run for the exits, resulting in what can be the greatest combined wealth loss in world history. Beware the risks because things are rapidly changing and a stock market crash of major proportions is just a matter of time."

Musical Interlude: Moby, "Love Of Strings"

Full screen highly recommended.
Moby, "Love Of Strings"

Life, glorious Life...

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Have you ever seen the Pleiades star cluster? Even if you have, you probably have never seen it as large and clear as this. Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the bright stars of the Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. With a long exposure from a dark location, though, the dust cloud surrounding the Pleiades star cluster becomes very evident.
The featured exposure covers a sky area several times the size of the full moon. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades lies about 400 light years away toward the constellation of the Bull (Taurus). A common legend with a modern twist is that one of the brighter stars faded since the cluster was named, leaving only six of the sister stars visible to the unaided eye. The actual number of Pleiades stars visible, however, may be more or less than seven, depending on the darkness of the surrounding sky and the clarity of the observer's eyesight."

"Openings In Heaven..."

"Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in heaven
 where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines
 down upon us to let us know they are happy."
~ Eskimo saying

"At Last..."

“At last, the answer why. The lesson that had been so hard to find, so difficult to learn, came quick and clear and simple. The reason for problems is to overcome them. Why, that’s the very nature of man, I thought, to press past limits, to prove his freedom. It isn’t the challenge that faces us, that determines who we are and what we are becoming, but the way we meet the challenge, whether we toss a match at the wreck or work our way through it, step by step, to freedom.”
- Richard Bach, “Nothing by Chance”

"95 Questions to Help You Find Meaning and Happiness "

"95 Questions to Help You Find Meaning and Happiness"
by Marc Chernoff

"At the cusp of a new day, week, month or year, most of us take a little time to reflect on our lives by looking back over the past and ahead into the future. We ponder the successes, failures and standout events that are slowly scripting our life/s story. This process of self-reflection helps us maintain a conscious awareness of where we've been and where we intend to go. It is pertinent to the organization and preservation of our long-term goals and happiness. The questions below will help you with this process. Because when it comes to finding meaning in life, asking the right questions is the answer.

1. In one sentence, who are you?
2. Why do you matter?
3. What is your life motto?
4. What's something you have that everyone wants?
5. What is missing in your life?
6. What's been on your mind most lately?
7. Happiness is a ________?
8. What stands between you and happiness?
9. What do you need most right now?
10. What does the child inside you long for?
11. What is one thing right now that you are totally sure of?
12. What's been bothering you lately?
13. What are you scared of?
14. What has fear of failure stopped you from doing?
15. What will you never give up on?
16. What do you want to remember forever?
17. What makes you feel secure?
18. Which activities make you lose track of time?
19. What's the most difficult decision you've ever made?
20. What's the best decision you've ever made?
21. What are you most grateful for?
22. What is worth the pain?
23. In order of importance, how would you rank: happiness, money, love, health, fame?
24. What is something you/ve always wanted, but don't yet have?
25. What was the most defining moment in your life during this past year?
26. What's the number one change you need to make in your life in the next twelve months?
27. What's the number one thing you want to achieve in the next five years?
28. What is the biggest motivator in your life right now?
29. What will you never do?
30. What's something you said you'd never do, but have since done?
31. What's something new you recently learned about yourself?
32. What do you sometimes pretend to understand that you really do not?
33. In one sentence, what do you wish for your future self?
34. What worries you most about the future?
35. When you look into the past, what do you miss most?
36. What's something from the past that you don't miss at all?
37. What recently reminded you of how fast time flies?
38. What is the biggest challenge you face right now?
39. In one word, how would you describe your personality?
40. What never fails to frustrate you?
41. What are you known for by your friends and family?
42. What's something most people don't know about you?
43. What's a common misconception people have about you?
44. What's something a lot of people do that you disagree with?
45. What's a belief you hold with which many people disagree?
46. What's something that's harder for you than it is for most people?
47. What are the top three qualities you look for in a friend?
48. If you had a friend who spoke to you in the same way that you sometimes speak to yourself, how long would you allow that person to be your friend?
49. When you think of home,what, specifically, do you think of?
50. What's the most valuable thing you own?
51. If you had to move 3000 miles away, what would you miss most?
52. What would make you smile right now?
53. What do you do when nothing else seems to make you happy?
54. What do you wish did not exist in your life?
55. What should you avoid to improve your life?
56. What is something you would hate to go without for a day?
57. What's the biggest lie you once believed was true?
58. What's something bad that happened to you that made you stronger?
59. What's something nobody could ever steal from you?
60. What's something you disliked when you were younger that you truly enjoy today?
61. What are you glad you quit?
62. What do you need to spend more time doing?
63. What are you naturally good at?
64. What have you been counting or keeping track of recently?
65. What has the little voice inside your head been saying lately?
66. What's something you should always be careful with?
67. What should always be taken seriously?
68. What should never be taken seriously?
69. What are three things you can't get enough of?
70. What would you do differently if you knew nobody would judge you?
71. What fascinates you?
72. What's the difference between being alive and truly living?
73. What's something you would do every day if you could?
74. At what time in your recent past have you felt most passionate and alive?
75. Which is worse, failing or never trying?
76. What makes you feel incomplete?
77. When did you experience a major turning point in your life?
78. What or who do you wish you lived closer to?
79. If you had the opportunity to get a message across to a large group of people, what would your message be?
80. What's something you know you can count on?
81. What makes you feel comfortable?
82. What's something about you that has never changed?
83. What will be different about your life in exactly one year?
84. What mistakes do you make over and over again?
85. What do you have a hard time saying no to?
86. Are you doing what you believe in, or are you settling for what you are doing?
87. What's something that used to scare you, but no longer does?
88. What promise to yourself do you still need to fulfill?
89. What do you appreciate most about your current situation?
90. What's something simple that makes you smile?
91. So far, what has been the primary focus of your life?
92. How do you know when it's time to move on?
93. What's something you wish you could do one more time?
94. When you're 90-years-old, what will matter to you the most?
95. What would you regret not fully doing, being, or having in your life?"

The Daily "Near You?"

Derby, Kansas, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"On The Meridian Of Time..."

“On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured – disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui – in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.”
- Henry Miller

"Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything"

"Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s
Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and
Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning"
by Maria Popova

“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in his classic 119-page essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" in 1942. “Everything else… is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.” Sometimes, life asks this question not as a thought experiment but as a gauntlet hurled with the raw brutality of living.

That selfsame year, the young Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) was taken to Auschwitz along with more than a million human beings robbed of the basic right to answer this question for themselves, instead deemed unworthy of living. Some survived by readingSome through humor. Some by pure chance. Most did not. Frankl lost his mother, his father, and his brother to the mass murder in the concentration camps. His own life was spared by the tightly braided lifeline of chance, choice, and character.

A mere eleven months after surviving the unsurvivable, Frankl took up the elemental question at the heart of Camus’s philosophical parable in a set of lectures, which he himself edited into a slim, potent book published in Germany in 1946, just as he was completing "Man’s Search for Meaning."

As our collective memory always tends toward amnesia and erasure - especially of periods scarred by civilizational shame - these existential infusions of sanity and lucid buoyancy fell out of print and were soon forgotten. Eventually rediscovered - as is also the tendency of our collective memory when the present fails us and we must lean for succor on the life-tested wisdom of the past - they are now published in English for the first time as "Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything" (public library).

Frankl begins by considering the question of whether life is worth living through the central fact of human dignity. Noting how gravely the Holocaust disillusioned humanity with itself, he cautions against the defeatist “end-of-the-world” mindset with which many responded to this disillusionment, but cautions equally against the “blithe optimism” of previous, more naïve eras that had not yet faced this gruesome civilizational mirror reflecting what human beings are capable of doing to one another. Both dispositions, he argues, stem from nihilism. In consonance with his colleague and contemporary Erich Fromm’s insistence that we can only transcend the shared laziness of optimism and pessimism through rational faith in the human spirit, Frankl writes: "We cannot move toward any spiritual reconstruction with a sense of fatalism such as this."

Generations and myriad cultural upheavals before Zadie Smith observed that “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” Frankl considers what “progress” even means, emphasizing the centrality of our individual choices in its constant revision: "Today every impulse for action is generated by the knowledge that there is no form of progress on which we can trustingly rely. If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines what and how far something “progresses.” In this, we are aware that inner progress is only actually possible for each individual, while mass progress at most consists of technical progress, which only impresses us because we live in a technical age."

Insisting that it takes a measure of moral strength not to succumb to nihilism, be it that of the pessimist or of the optimist, he exclaims: "Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism! How steadfast would a person’s belief in the meaningfulness of life have to be, so as not to be shattered by such skepticism. How unconditionally do we have to believe in the meaning and value of human existence, if this belief is able to take up and bear this skepticism and pessimism?
[…]
Through this nihilism, through the pessimism and skepticism, through the soberness of a “new objectivity” that is no longer that “new” but has grown old, we must strive toward a new humanity."

Sophie Scholl, upon whom chance did not smile as favorably as it did upon Frankl, affirmed this notion with her insistence that living with integrity and belief in human goodness is the wellspring of courage as she courageously faced her own untimely death in the hands of the Nazis. But while the Holocaust indisputably disenchanted humanity, Frankl argues, it also indisputably demonstrated “that what is human is still valid… that it is all a question of the individual human being.” Looking back on the brutality of the camps, he reflects:

"What remained was the individual person, the human being - and nothing else. Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down - the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one - the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that “he” had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self."

In a sentiment that bellows from the hallways of history into the great vaulted temple of timeless truth, he adds: "Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being."

Frankl then turns to the question of finding a sense of meaning when the world gives us ample reasons to view life as meaningless - the question of “continuing to live despite persistent world-weariness.” Writing in the post-war pre-dawn of the golden age of consumerism, which has built a global economy by continually robbing us of the sense of meaning and selling it back to us at the price of the product, Frankl first dismantles the notion that meaning is to be found in the pursuit and acquisition of various pleasures:

"Let us imagine a man who has been sentenced to death and, a few hours before his execution, has been told he is free to decide on the menu for his last meal. The guard comes into his cell and asks him what he wants to eat, offers him all kinds of delicacies; but the man rejects all his suggestions. He thinks to himself that it is quite irrelevant whether he stuffs good food into the stomach of his organism or not, as in a few hours it will be a corpse. And even the feelings of pleasure that could still be felt in the organism’s cerebral ganglia seem pointless in view of the fact that in two hours they will be destroyed forever. But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right, then our whole lives would also be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else — preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which now seems obvious to us."

He quotes a short verse by the great Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore - the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, Einstein’s onetime conversation partner in contemplating science and spirituality, and a man who thought deeply about human nature:
"I slept and dreamt
that life was joy.
I awoke and saw
that life was duty.
I worked - and behold,
duty was joy."
In consonance with Camus’s view of happiness as a moral obligation - an outcome to be attained not through direct pursuit but as a byproduct of living with authenticity and integrity - Frankl reflects on Tagore’s poetic point: "So, life is somehow duty, a single, huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be “willed into being” as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome; the outcome of the fulfillment of that which in Tagore’s poem is called duty… All human striving for happiness, in this sense, is doomed to failure as luck can only fall into one’s lap but can never be hunted down."

In a sentiment James Baldwin would echo two decades later in his superb forgotten essay on the antidote to the hour of despair and life as a moral obligation to the universe, Frankl turns the question unto itself: "At this point it would be helpful [to perform] a conceptual turn through 180 degrees, after which the question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” but can now only be “What does life expect of me?” What task in life is waiting for me?"

Now we also understand how, in the final analysis, the question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way, if asked in the way it is generally asked: it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life - it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential “life questions.” Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to - of being responsible toward - life. With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us.

Frankl adds a caveat of tremendous importance - triply so in our present culture of self-appointed gurus, self-help demagogues, and endless podcast feeds of interviews with accomplished individuals attempting to distill a universal recipe for self-actualization: "The question life asks us, and in answering which we can realize the meaning of the present moment, does not only change from hour to hour but also changes from person to person: the question is entirely different in each moment for every individual.

We can, therefore, see how the question as to the meaning of life is posed too simply, unless it is posed with complete specificity, in the concreteness of the here and now. To ask about “the meaning of life” in this way seems just as naive to us as the question of a reporter interviewing a world chess champion and asking, “And now, Master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?” Is there a move, a particular move, that could be good, or even the best, beyond a very specific, concrete game situation, a specific configuration of the pieces?"

What emerges from Frankl’s inversion of the question is the sense that, just as learning to die is learning to meet the universe on its own terms, learning to live is learning to meet the universe on its own terms - terms that change daily, hourly, by the moment:

"One way or another, there can only be one alternative at a time to give meaning to life, meaning to the moment — so at any time we only need to make one decision about how we must answer, but, each time, a very specific question is being asked of us by life. From all this follows that life always offers us a possibility for the fulfillment of meaning, therefore there is always the option that it has a meaning. One could also say that our human existence can be made meaningful “to the very last breath”; as long as we have breath, as long as we are still conscious, we are each responsible for answering life’s questions."

With this symphonic prelude, Frankl arrives at the essence of what he discovered about the meaning of life in his confrontation with death - a central fact of being at which a great many of humanity’s deepest seers have arrived via one path or another: from Rilke, who so passionately insisted that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” to physicist Brian Greene, who so poetically nested our search for meaning into our mortality into the most elemental fact of the universe. Frankl writes:

"The fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.
[…]
Death is a meaningful part of life, just like human suffering. Both do not rob the existence of human beings of meaning but make it meaningful in the first place. Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it - or leave unfulfilled - that gives our existence significance. But it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited “for all eternity.” Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “canceled out” by becoming the past. In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps even the safest form of being. The “being,” the reality that we have rescued into the past in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness."

In the remainder of the slender and splendid "Yes to Life", Frankl goes on to explore how the imperfections of human nature add to, rather than subtract from, the meaningfulness of our lives and what it means for us to be responsible for our own existence. Complement it with Mary Shelley, writing two centuries ago about a pandemic-savaged world, on what makes life worth living, Walt Whitman contemplating this question after surviving a paralytic stroke, and a vitalizing cosmic antidote to the fear of death from astrophysicist and poet Rebecca Elson, then revisit Frankl on humor as lifeline to sanity and survival."

The Poet: Theodore Roethke, “The Return”

“The Return”

“Suddenly the window will open
and Mother will call,
it's time to come in.
The wall will part,
I will enter heaven in muddy shoes.
I will come to the table
and answer questions rudely.
I am all right, leave me
alone. Head in hand I
sit and sit. How can I tell them
about that long
and tangled way?
Here in heaven mothers
knit green scarves;
flies buzz.
Father dozes by the stove
after six days' labor.
No - surely I can't tell them
that people are at each
other's throats.”

- Theodore Roethke

"How It Really Is"

 

Gregory Mannarino, "Must Watch! Markets, A Look Ahead: Special Report”

Gregory Mannarino, AM 8/29/21:
"Must Watch! Markets, A Look Ahead: Special Report”

Greg Hunter, "Fed Prints Money or the Whole Thing Blows Up"

"Fed Prints Money or the Whole Thing Blows Up"
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Financial writer, market analyst and precious metals expert Craig Hemke says the Fed has all but said it was going to delay the so-called “taper” of easy money policies–forever. This is why gold and silver spiked as the dollar tanked on Friday. Hemke contends, “The Chinese, four months in a row, have been net sellers of Treasuries. They’re not buying them. Well, somebody has got to buy. Congress just announced this week that they came to a deal where they are going to spend $4.1 trillion on what is allegedly called infrastructure. The money has got to come from somewhere. There is this notion that they are just going to raise taxes on rich people. Rich people are just going to change how they spend and do their taxes. Who is going to loan us money? It’s not going to be the Chinese or other foreign countries because they don’t have confidence in us anymore. So, the money is going to come from somewhere. Of course, the Fed is going to keep monetizing the debt because if they don’t, interest rates have got to rise to a point people are willing to loan it to the U.S. If interest rates go to 3% or 5%, the whole thing blows up.”

Hemke points out, “All we can do is prepare for a time when this finally implodes because it will. Confidence will eventually collapse. Confidence is like Hemingway’s explanation of how he went bankrupt. He was asked, ‘How did you go broke?’ He said, ‘At first slowly, and then, all at once.’ Confidence gets chipped away a little bit at a time like what you are seeing in Afghanistan, and then, all at once. That is eventually what is going to happen. You’ve got to be using this time to prepare for that. Econ 101 teaches you if you are increasing supply (of dollars) and decreasing the demand, the price falls and the dollar collapses. Inflation spins out of control. Then, you have to do all these other things to try to keep interest rates from going up. All the plates start to collapse that Fed Head Powell is trying to spin.”

Hemke says all this dollar printing and interest rate suppression is a good thing for precious metals and a very bad thing for the U.S. dollar. Hemke explains, “You’ve got people saying I don’t want to use the dollar anymore. These are all significant consequences to everything that led up to the last three weeks, but now, the events of the last three weeks are spinning it that much faster.”

Hemke is still expecting gold and silver to close much higher by the end of the year. How much higher is anyone’s guess? There are some things you can count on, and Hemke predicts, “Covid is not going away. Confidence in the U.S. monetary system continues to get chipped away. The taper is impossible. The Fed not monetizing the debt is impossible, they have to... prices of gold and silver are going to soar.”

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One
 with Craig Hemke of the popular website TFMetalsReport.com