"Light-years across, this suggestive shape known as the Seahorse Nebula appears in silhouette against a rich, luminous background of stars. Seen toward the royal northern constellation of Cepheus, the dusty, obscuring clouds are part of a Milky Way molecular cloud some 1,200 light-years distant.
Click image for larger size.
It is also listed as Barnard 150 (B150), one of 182 dark markings of the sky cataloged in the early 20th century by astronomer E. E. Barnard. Packs of low mass stars are forming within, but their collapsing cores are only visible at long infrared wavelengths. Still, the colorful stars of Cepheus add to this pretty, galactic skyscape."
“Grandfather, Great Spirit, once more behold me on earth and lean to hear my feeble voice. You lived first, and you are older than all need, older than all prayer. All things belong to you – the two-legged, the four-legged, the wings of the air, and all green things that live. You have set the powers of the four quarters of the earth to cross each other. You have made me cross the good road and road of difficulties, and where they cross, the place is holy. Day in, day out, forevermore, you are the life of things.
Hey! Lean to hear my feeble voice. At the center of the sacred hoop You have said that I should make the tree to bloom. With tears running, O Great Spirit, my Grandfather, With running eyes I must say The tree has never bloomed. Here I stand, and the tree is withered. Again, I recall the great vision you gave me. It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, That it may leaf And bloom, And fill with singing birds! Hear me, that the people may once again Find the good road And the shielding tree.
The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.”
“A reader shared with us those well-known lines of T. S. Eliot (“Little Gidding”). It is not quite what Eliot is up to, but I was reminded of some lines of Pascal that I shared here several years ago: “Scientific learning is composed of two opposites which nonetheless meet each other. The first is the natural ignorance that is man’s lot at birth. The second is represented by those great minds that have investigated all knowledge accumulated by man only to discover at the end that in fact they know nothing. Thus they return to the same fundamental ignorance they had thought to leave. Yet this ignorance they have now discovered is an intellectual achievement. It is those who have departed from their original condition of ignorance but have been incapable of completing the full cycle of learning who offer us a smattering of scientific knowledge and pass sweeping judgments. These are the mischief makers, the false prophets.” (“Pensees” V:327)
It took almost three centuries for Pascal’s remarkable insight to become the common opinion of scientists. The 20th-century philosopher Karl Popper expressed it this way: “The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance- the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.”
It is an odd, unsettling thought that the culmination of the scientific quest - the long slow gathering of reliable empirical knowledge of the world- should be confirmation of how little we understand about the universe we live in. A willingness to say “I don’t know” is a prerequisite of scientific discovery. Only in the silence of acknowledged ignorance can we hear - half hear - the thing that calls us to attend."
"At this point, virtually all of us over the age of forty have encountered enough "snowflakes" (those Millennials who have a meltdown if anything they say or believe is challenged) to understand that, increasingly, young people are being systemically coddled to the point that they cannot cope with their "reality" being questioned.
The post-war baby boomers were the first "spoiled" generation, with tens of millions of children raised under the concept that, "I don’t want my children to have to experience the hardships that I faced growing up."
Those jurisdictions that prospered most (the EU, US, Canada, etc.) were, not coincidentally, the ones where this form of childrearing became most prevalent. The net result was the ’60s generation – young adults who could be praised for their idealism in pursuing the peace movement, the civil rights movement, and equal rights for women. But those same young adults were spoiled to the degree that many felt that it made perfect sense that they should attend expensive colleges but spend much of their study time pursuing sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Flunking out or dropping out was not seen as a major issue and very few of them felt any particular guilt about having squandered their parents’ life savings in the process.
The boomer generation then became the yuppies as they hit middle age, and not surprisingly, many coddled their own children even more than they themselves had been coddled. As a result of ever-greater indulgence with each new generation of children, tens of millions of Millennials now display the result of parents doing all they can to remove every possible hardship from their children’s experience, no matter how small.
Many in their generation never had to do chores, have a paper route, or get good grades in order to be given an exceptional reward, such as a cell phone. They grew to adulthood without any understanding of cause and effect, effort and reward.
Theoretically, the outcome was to be a generation that was free from troubles, free from stress, who would have only happy thoughts. The trouble with this ideal was that, by the time they reached adulthood, many of the critical life’s lessons had been missing from their upbringing. In the years during which their brains were biologically expanding and developing, they had been hardwired to expect continued indulgence throughout their lives. Any thought that they had was treated as valid, even if it was insupportable in logic.
And, today, we’re witnessing the fruits of this upbringing. Tens of millions of Millennials have never learned the concept of humility. They’re often unable to cope with their thoughts and perceptions being questioned and, in fact, often cannot think outside of themselves to understand the thoughts and perceptions of others.
They tend to be offended extremely easily and, worse, don’t know what to do when this occurs. They have such a high perception of their own self-importance that they can’t cope with being confronted, regardless of the validity of the other person’s reasoning. How they feel is far more important than logic or fact.
Hypersensitive vulnerability is a major consequence, but a greater casualty is Truth. Truth has gone from being fundamental to being something "optional" – subjective or relative and of lesser importance than someone being offended or hurt.
Of course, it would be easy to simply fob these young adults off as emotional mutants – spiteful narcissists – who cannot survive school without the school’s provision of safe spaces, cookies, puppies, and hug sessions. Previous generations of students (my own included) were often intimidated when presented with course books that had titles like Elements of Calculus and Analytic Geometry. But such books had their purpose. They were part of what had to be dealt with in order to be prepared for the adult world of ever-expanding technology.
In addition, it was expected that any student be prepared to learn (at university, if he had not already done so at home), to consider all points of view, including those less palatable. In debating classes, he’d be expected to take any side of any argument and argue it as best he could. In large measure, these requirements have disappeared from institutions of higher learning, and in their place, colleges provide coloring books, Play-Doh, and cry closets.
At the same time as a generation of "snowflakes" is being created, the same jurisdictions that are most prominently creating them (the above-mentioned EU, US, Canada, etc.) are facing, not just a generation of young adults who have a meltdown when challenged in some small way. They’re facing an international economic and political meltdown of epic proportions. Several generations of business and political leaders have created the greatest "kick the can" bubble that the world has ever witnessed.
We can’t pinpoint the day on which this bubble will pop, but it would appear that we may now be quite close, as those who have been kicking the can have been running out of the means to continue. The approach of a crisis is doubly concerning, as, historically, whenever generations of older people destroy their economy from within, it invariably falls to the younger generation to dig the country out of the resultant rubble.
Never in history has a crisis of such great proportions loomed and yet, never in history has the unfortunate generation that will inherit the damage been so unequivocally incapable of coping with that damage. As unpleasant as it may be to accept, there’s no solution for idiocy. Any society that has hardwired a generation of its children to be unable to cope will find that that generation will be a lost one. It will, in fact, be the following generation – the one that has grown up during the aftermath of the collapse – that will, of necessity, develop the skills needed to cope with an actual recovery.
So, does that mean that the world will be in chaos for more than a generation before the next batch of people can be raised to cope? Well, no. Actually, that’s already happening. In Europe, where the Millennial trend exists, western Europeans have been growing up coddled and incapable, whilst eastern Europeans, who have experienced war and hardship, are growing up to be quite capable of handling whatever hardships come their way. Likewise, in Asia, the percentage of young people who are being raised to understand that they must soon shoulder the responsibility of the future is quite high.
And elsewhere in the world – outside the sphere of the EU, US, Canada, etc. – the same is largely true. As has been forever true throughout history, civilization does not come to a halt. It’s a "movable feast" that merely changes geographic locations from one era to another. Always, as one star burns out, another takes its place. What’s of paramount importance is to read the tea leaves – to see the future coming and adjust for it."
"Ukrainian Counteroffensive Runs Into Defensive Wall"
By Scott Ritter
"Over the course of the past few days, Ukraine has thrown two of its best-trained, best-equipped mechanized brigades into offensive operations against entrenched Russian defenders in the Zaporozhye sector of the front lines. These two brigades had been hand-picked for this job, having been equipped with modern Western tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, supported by Western-supplied artillery, and using NATO-specific tactics shaped by NATO-provided intelligence and NATO operational planning. In short, these two brigades represented a top-level NATO-level capability, the epitome of the nexus between Ukraine and the Collective West in their ongoing war to destroy Russia.
As the world comes to grips with the imagery of destroyed US-manufactured M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and German-made Leopard 2A6 tanks abandoned and burning on the Ukrainian steppe, the harsh truth regarding the futility of its larger designs - the strategic defeat of Russia - is starting to sink in.
The reality, however, is that Ukraine was never going to achieve its stated objective of punching through the Russian defenses to sever the land bridge connecting Crimea with Russia proper. This was pie-in-the-sky thinking promulgated by Ukraine’s Western supporters to motivate the Ukrainians into committing the equivalent of mass suicide to inflict similarly prohibitive casualties among the Russian defenders. The Western hope was that Russia would become demoralized by these casualties and accept a negotiated end to the conflict on terms acceptable to both Ukraine and its Western allies.
The genesis of this failure can be traced to two things. First, the low-opinion Ukraine and their NATO allies had regarding the combat capabilities of the Russian army, and in particular those forces deployed in the Zaporozhye region, and second, the unrealistic expectations assigned to NATO training and equipment that had been provided to the Ukrainian forces assigned the task of breaking through the Russian defenses.
The area selected by Ukraine and its NATO partners as the focus of effort for the counteroffensive was held by the 42nd Guards Motorized Rifle Division, part of the 58th Combined Arms Army. The Institute for the Study of War, a US-based think tank with close ties to US and NATO, claimed that the troops of the 42nd Guards Motorized Rifle Division “are predominantly comprised of mobilized recruits and volunteers and are therefore likely to face some problems with poor training and discipline.” Moreover, it accused at least one of the subordinate regiments - the 70th motorized rifle regiment - of performing poorly during the initial phases of the Special Military Operation in 2022.
It is therefore reasonable to believe that NATO and Ukrainian military planners, using intelligence assessments that highlighted perceived command and control weaknesses and poor morale among the Russian forces which, when combined with poor past performance, believed that the Russian defenses in the Zaporozhye sector manned by the 42nd Guards Motorized Rifle Division would collapse under the weight of a NATO-style assault, allowing Ukrainian forces to penetrate deep into the Russian defenses.
While the fighting in Zaporozhye is not yet finished, the initial results on the battlefield show that, contrary to the expectations of Ukraine and its NATO partners, the men of the 42nd Guards Rifle Division performed their tasks in a professional manner, decisively defeating the Ukrainian assault forces. The 70th Motorized Rifle Regiment has been singled out as performing very well under difficult circumstances. The same can be said of the 291st Motorized Rifle Regiment and the 71st Motorized Rifles Regiment, along with special forces soldiers from the 22nd Spetsnaz Brigade. Analysts from ISW, in assessing the initial successes of the Russian defenders, noted that “Russian forces appear to have executed their formal tactical defensive doctrine in response to the Ukrainian attacks.”
This, of course, should have taken no one by surprise, since the individual in command of Russian forces in the Zaporozhye area is Colonel General Alexander Romanchuk, the man who is responsible for conceiving modern Russian defensive doctrine. In April 2023 Romanchuk, who at that time was serving as the Rector of the Combined Arms Academy of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (the equivalent of the United States Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth), co-authored an article titled “Prospects for Improving the Efficiency of Army Defensive Operations.”
In the article, Romanchuk noted that the main mission of a defending force “is to neutralize the initiative of the advancing enemy, i.e., to bring him to the state of impossibility to continue advancing with deployed forces. Ultimately, this allows you to reduce his activity and seize the initiative by going over to a decisive counter-offensive to defeat the enemy with shock groups.”
This represents a restatement of Soviet-era doctrine. Indeed, Romanchuk draws upon the defeat of German offensive operations in the vicinity of Lake Balaton in March 1945 as representing an ideal implementation of this doctrine, underscoring “a bold maneuver of the reserves…especially artillery, the skillful use of anti-tank reserves, vigilant detachments of obstacles and the arrangement of fire ambushes” by the Russian forces in defeating the German attack.
Romanchuk, however, did not simply reiterate old doctrine in his paper. Instead, he emphasizes the concept of “dispersed forces” in building a defensive scheme capable of prevailing on the modern battlefield. “A dispersed defensive operation should become a logical response to a superior enemy,” Romanchuk writes.
Such an operation “is based on the retention of important areas, objects and transport hubs in separate most important directions,” and is “characterized by an even distribution of forces and resources in areas, and decentralized use of formations and military units of the armed forces and special forces.”
Romanchuk then went on to describe the ideal deployment scheme for these “dispersed forces” - one which focuses on three separate “zones of defense responsibility” separated by distances of between 8 and 12 kilometers. These gaps are covered by Russian artillery. The first “zone” is the “cover” zone, whose task is to define the main axes of the enemy’s advance. The next “zone” is the “main line of defense”, which is designed to halt enemy attacks using obstacle belts and fire power (artillery and air strikes). The last “zone” is the “reserve”, which is responsible for mounting counterattacks designed to push the attacking forces back to their original positions.
Romanchuk’s doctrine was the blueprint for the Russian defensive scheme employed in Zaporozhye. Indeed, Romanchuk was pulled from his teaching position at the Combined Arms Academy and put in command of the Zaporozhye sector. In other words, the place chosen by NATO and Ukrainian intelligence as the “weak spot” in the Russian defensive scheme was designed by Russia’s top specialist in defensive combat and placed under his direct command.
NATO and Ukraine gambled that Russia lacked the military capacity to successfully implement its own military doctrine, believing that Russian command staffs lacked the communications necessary to coordinate the complex operations necessary to implement this doctrine, and that the Russian forces - especially those who were recently mobilized - lacked both the training and morale needed to perform well under stressful combat conditions.
NATO and Ukraine’s poor assessment of Russian military capability mirrored their own exaggerated assessments of Ukrainian units tasked with attacking the Russian defenses in Zaporozhye, namely the 33rd and 47th Mechanized Brigades. Both units were the recipients of modern NATO equipment, including Leopard tanks (the 33rd) and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles (the 47th). The officers and men of both units had been provided with the best training NATO could provide regarding modern combined-arms operations, including weeks of specialized training in Germany which focused on platoon, company, and battalion tactics and operations integrating firepower and maneuver while undertaking offensive operations.
The Ukrainian troops, working side by side with their NATO instructors, started by using computer simulations to introduce them to the complexities of the modern battlefield, before moving to the field for realistic hands-on training using the very NATO-provided equipment they would use against the Russians. US “experts” like Mark Hertling, a retired US Army general believed that the combination of advanced western military equipment and superior NATO-style tactics “will allow Ukraine’s emerging combined-arms teams to conduct high-tempo maneuver” capable of overwhelming the Russian defenders in Ukraine.
Hertling and his active-duty NATO brethren would have done well to listen to the words of General Christopher Cavoli, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, when speaking before a Swedish defense conference this past January. “The scale of this war [i.e., the Russian-Ukraine conflict] is out of proportion with all of our recent thinking,” Cavoli noted.
The takeaway from this revelation is that NATO is neither trained nor equipped to fight the kind of fight they are demanding Ukraine execute against Russia. The sad truth of the matter is that there are no NATO forces capable of successfully executing the offensive tasks that have been assigned to Ukraine. No one doubts the courage and commitment of the Ukrainian forces which have been thrown against Colonel General Romanchuk’s defensive barrier. But courage and commitment cannot overcome the reality that NATO lacks the ability, both in terms of equipment and doctrine, to successfully defeat Russia in a force-on-force confrontation, especially one which has Russia playing to its doctrinal strength (defensive operations) while NATO seeks to do something (an assault against prepared defenses) that it has no experience in doing.
Moreover, NATO and the Ukrainian high command threw the Ukrainian brigades into the teeth of the Russian defensive buzzsaw without adequate fire support, meaning that the Russians were free to maximize their superiority in artillery and air power to neutralize and destroy the Ukrainian attacking forces before they could generate the momentum expected from “high-tempo maneuver.”
The end result: Russian reality trumped NATO theory on the battlefield, and it is Ukraine’s military that once again paid the heaviest price. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that this situation will change anytime soon, if ever, a fact that bodes poorly for the future of Ukraine and NATO going forward."
Hat tip to The Burning Platform for this material.
o
Full screen recommended.
Hindustan Time, 6/11/23
"Russian Forces Crush Zelensky's Soldiers in Donetsk;
Ukrainian Strongholds Pounded, Attacks Foiled"
"Russian troops repelled Ukrainian attacks in the Soledar-Bakhmut direction. Russian Aviation Units reportedly hit Ukrainian strongholds in a number of cities in Donetsk region amid reports that Ukraine has already launched its counteroffensive. Russian Defence Ministry said Ukrainian forces had in the past 24 hours made "unsuccessful" attempts at attacking Southern Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions which are the two areas subject to heavy fighting recently. Watch this video for the latest update from the battleground."
Arsenals Being Deployed In War - Pantsir Missiles"
"Also known as SA-22 Greyhound, the Pantsir missile system embodies a combination of advanced technology, mobility, and firepower. Its alternate name, "Carapace," alludes to the impenetrable armor of a turtle, further emphasizing its defensive strength and resilience on the battlefield. Operating on mobile, ground-based platforms, the Pantsir missile system is designed to counter a wide range of threats, including aircraft, helicopters, drones, and precision-guided munitions. It is equipped with both surface-to-air missiles and rapid-fire cannons, providing a layered defense against aerial targets."
"Professor Mark Crispin Miller teaches media studies at New York University (NYU) and is an expert in propaganda. Dr. Miller says just about everything concerning Covid was simply an elaborate exercise in propaganda. Dr. Miller explains, “The propaganda dimension is crucial to our understanding of what went down. Some people like to say this is a result of a number of ‘blunders’ by the health authorities and the government. ‘Blunders.’ No, these are not ‘blunders.’ When everything they recommend is deleterious and destructive of people’s health, when they suppress the truth about life saving remedies in furtherance of this so-called ‘vaccination program,’ and when the so-called ‘vaccines’ have abysmal records for safety and effectiveness and those records are all hidden, we cannot reasonably conclude this is all the result of ‘blunders.’
I have called the period from 2020 through the present a ‘Propaganda Masterpiece.’ Covid and every aspect of that whole crisis was engineered with extreme brilliance and sophistication of a propaganda operation. This was followed by the George Floyd moment. This served a number of purposes quite in line with the Covid crisis, which is to shut down society, cripple the economy and destroy the middle class. Also, another important aspect of this whole propaganda epic has been to divide the American people. No matter what side of the struggle we are on, what matters is the struggle took place at all. It is deeply divisive.
Dr, Miller goes on to say, “I know a lot about propaganda, and this is unprecedented in the history of mass persuasion. There has never been anything like this because this is global. This has never happened before. We had Stalin’s crimes. We had Hitler’s aggression and the Holocaust. We had 911 and the ‘War on Terror.’ None of those actually begin to compare to what we have now because what we have now is planetary. It’s worldwide.”
Dr. Miller does not call the CV19 bioweapon/vax a genocide. He says it is really a global democide. Meaning everyone and anyone is being murdered with the CV19 bioweapon/vax. Dr. Miller says, “My Substack is called ‘Died Suddenly.’ I started it in February of 2022 when I noticed many, many people were dying suddenly for no given reason. In the history of obituaries, certainly in the United States, that is unprecedented. Obituaries always tell you why somebody died. Even if the person is very, very old, you have a cause of death. Now, all kinds of people are dropping dead for no reason and often very young. We do a weekly overview with as many pictures of these people as possible. This is the point. There are many statistical claims of the numbers of people who are dying. But as Stalin said, ‘One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.’ This is brutal, cynical wisdom, and he was absolutely right. If you read 1 million people starved in Ukraine, you say that’s too bad. If you look at page after page after page of people’s faces and names with the names of their survivors, it’s not so easy to shrug off.”
During the so-called “Covid Pandemic” (October 2020), Dr. Miller was teaching a propaganda class at NYU, and one of the subjects covered was the science around wearing masks that show they were ineffective for stopping Covid. We now know wearing masks was more propaganda than any sort of protection from the CV19 infection. More than 2 dozen professors wanted Professor Miller fired for going against the official narrative or propaganda. According to Dr. Miller, they said all sorts of things that are not true. Dr. Miller says, “They made me out to be a monster.” Dr. Miller sued, and so far, the suit has been dismissed by two New York courts. In the last dismissal, the court ruled the lies told about Dr. Miller are simply an opinion.
Dr. Miller is appealing and says, “From now on, the have nots, the dissidents who have good reason and solid ground for suing for liable and those who defame us won’t be able to do it anymore because anything that is said about us can be defended on the grounds that it is just an opinion, and opinion is protected by the First Amendment. This second decision is catastrophic for free speech. The people who have the power and the money will still sue for libel, and they will sue people like us. They will sue people who contradict prevailing narratives.” USAWatchdog.com will be following this important appeal. There is much more in the 1-hour and 7-minute interview.
"The numbers don’t add up in the economy. We are being told that we are now in a “bull market“ for the stock market. Bank of America just stepped forward and said “sell all stocks“ Foreclosures are rising in the United States right now."
"What's that below those strange clouds? Presidents. If you look closely, you may recognize the heads of four former US Presidents carved into famous Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, USA. More obvious in the featured image are the unusual mammatus clouds that passed briefly overhead. Both were captured together by a surprised tourist with a quick camera in early September.
Click image for larger size.
Unlike normal flat-bottomed clouds which form when moist and calm air plateaus rise and cool, bumpy mammatus clouds form as icy and turbulent air pockets sink and heat up. Such turbulent air is frequently accompanied by a thunderstorm. Each mammatus lobe spans about one kilometer. The greater mountain is known to native Lakota Sioux as Six Grandfathers, deities responsible for the directions north, south, east, west, up, and down."
"I know nothing that I may say can influence you. You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats. You are lick-spittlers and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy."
- Jack London
Freely download "The Iron Heel", by Jack London, here:
“The TLS (“Times Literary Supplement”) had an absorbing review of American Historian Joel Harrington's book on the manuscript diary of a 16th-century German executioner, Franz Schmidt of Nuremberg. Remarkably, Schmidt kept a full record of the criminals he executed, the crimes they perpetrated, and the gruesome ways they met their fate. It is a tale that would chill most 21st-century readers.
Hangings, beheadings, burnings at the stake, and breakings with the wheel. In the latter custom, a heavy cartwheel is dropped onto the person to be executed, who is tied down spreadeagled on the execution platform, starting with the feet and working the way up to the head. There are also less final punishments: floggings, finger-choppings, ear-choppings, brandings, and an ingenious catalog of tortures.
For Herr Schmidt, it was all in a day's work. He might as well have been a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker. He had a family to support, and he was good at his job. His neighboring townspeople attended the executions. It was good public entertainment.
Of course, there is nothing unique to the 16th century or Germany about any of this. Hideous tortures and executions have been part of human history from the beginning. Think of the Roman gladiatorial entertainments with their cheering crowds. Or the public stonings, beheadings and amputations still common in certain parts of the world today. It seems that only in the post-Enlightenment West do we look with disapprobation on Herr Schmidt's trade, ostensibly at least. We have the grisly torture chambers of the Gestapo and NKVD to remind us that Enlightenment values are fragile.
All of which raises the question: Is taking pleasure in the infliction of pain on others nature or nurture? Are we born with a good angel on one shoulder and a bad angel on the other? How do we explain the huge popularity of slasher movies and shoot-'em-up video games? Is there something of Herr Schmidt in all of us?”
“The map above shows how the US really has 11 separate ‘nations’ with entirely different cultures. Author and journalist Colin Woodard identified 11 distinct cultures that have historically divided the US. His book “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures in North America” breaks down those cultures and the regions they each dominate. From the utopian “Yankeedom” to the conservative “Greater Appalachia” and liberal “Left Coast,” looking at these cultures sheds an interesting light on America’s political and cultural divides. In response to the coronavirus pandemic, some governors are acting among these factions – like California, Oregon, and Washington, of all which have parts comprising of “The Left Coast” group.”
Please view this complete and fascinating article here:
"What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?'"
- Barbara Kingsolver
“For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.”
However detached from the reality of life dreams may seem, they affect our every waking moment and even help us regulate our negative moods. And yet, try as we might to control our dreams, we still know so very little about where we go when we slip into that nocturnal wonderland. For all the advances science has made, it still seems best left to the poets - and the best of poets only.
In one of the many masterpieces in his "Collected Poems" (public library), Pulitzer-winning poet and MacArthur “genius” Mark Strand (April 11, 1934–November 29, 2014) explores the delicate and disorienting world of dreams with unparalleled elegance. The poem is a supreme testament to Strand’s belief that it is the artist’s task to bear witness to the universe, within and without."
