High Midnight

Istanbul time is the same as Moscow time. It is after 5.00pm May 15, 2025 as I write this.

Ukraine, I believe, requested a change from a morning start to an afternoon one. Russia’s delegation has been waiting for them in Istanbul since the original time this morning.

I don’t think they, the Ukrainians, are going to show up.

But I guess they’ve got until Midnight.

It is believed the Ukrainian delegation are also in Istanbul, but what does that mean?

Trump, the fatuous bastard, says there will be no progress unless Putin meets with him first. Well, that’s not going to happen. Some Kangaroo Court, in The Hague I believe, has, along with a general mistrust in the veracity and honour of the West, ensured that. And Trump is not even on the invite list – not that there is an invite list as far as I know, only Putin delegated, and assiduously briefed, Russian officials will attend, and also expected are an as yet undisclosed bunch of Ukrainians.

Putin has got everything he has called for so far. He does not need Trump, in any capacity, to wrap this up on his own terms – if they are appropriately agreed to by people of sufficient standing. And if not, well, Ukraine will continue to get smaller and smaller until they are – by whoever Russia deems acceptable to make that agreement

Is Russia likely to make any concessions to their stated terms, in order to get an agreement? I doubt it, although the team has said they are in a ‘working mood’. Whatever that means. And it might just be a carrot dangled as inducement to a turn-up by the other side.

No Europe. No NATO. No U.S.A., required.

What could be simpler?

But this is a game, isn’t it. And I mean literally a game. With set moves, just like old time medieval dancing. Only it takes two to Tango. And in this dance, there could be serious repercussions for any missteps. Including no-shows.

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Tidiness is something that happens when compulsive activity replaces thoughtful creativity.
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The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
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It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
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Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.
Henry Kissinger (Who controlled Henry Kissinger?)

Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.
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Many people today work jobs they don’t like, to buy things they don’t need, so that they can impress people they don’t like. But at the end of life these people will deeply regret spending their lives trying to impress other people. Be humble and seek to impress yourself only. Let other people worry about chasing status. This perspective is extremely liberating.
Simplicity Institute

What I hear, I forget;
what I see, I remember;
what I do, I understand.
Old Chinese saying

It is the microbes that will have the last word.
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We have already seen cuts to services and increases in taxes and user fees, and we can expect a great deal more of that dynamic as central authorities emulate hypothermic bodies. In other words, they will cut off the circulation to the fingers and toes in order to preserve the core. This is of course, a survival strategy, from the point of view of the core. But it does nothing good for the prospects of ordinary people, who represent the fingers and the toes.
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Society is an anonymous enterprise for living a life of secondhand emotions.
Josephin Peladan 1885

Without a sense of the past and its meaning, without narratives that weave the events of our daily lives into patterns that touch the principles that matter, we lack the essential raw materials of thought, and so our collective reasoning processes, such as they are, spit out the same rehashed nonsolutions over and over again.
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In order to arrive at what you do not know, you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
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...western Health Care... is mostly, a method of social control and a means to generate economic growth.
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William Hunter Duncan (http://offthegridmpls.blogspot.com.au/)

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When we think about climate change (if we think about it at all), we envision rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, freakish storms, hellish wildfires, and rising sea levels. Among other things, this will result in damaged infrastructure and diminished food supplies. These are, of course, manifestations of warming in the physical world, not the social world we all inhabit and rely on for so many aspects of our daily well-being and survival. The purely physical effects of climate change will, no doubt, prove catastrophic. But the social effects including, somewhere down the line, food riots, mass starvation, state collapse, mass migrations, and conflicts of every sort, up to and including full-scale war, could prove even more disruptive and deadly.
Michael T. Klare - The Hunger Wars in Our Future

Remember that fact and faith are mutually exclusive things. If you have facts you have proof, therefore you don't need faith. Conversely, with no facts there is no proof and faith is needed to believe something. But faith is more emotion than logic, so almost anything can be justified. And that's where the Church gets its power.
Martin I Henry - The Anunnaki (The Chronicles of the Guardians)

...from nature’s perspective, we’re simply one more species that overshot the carrying capacity of its environment and is about to pay the routine price...
John Michael Greer - The Falling Years: An Inhumanist Vision

It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
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Money is not what it used to be and not what it seems.
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Hope and history are sisters: one looks forward and one looks back, and they make the world spacious enough to move through freely. Obliviousness to the past and to the mutability of all things imprisons you in a shrunken present.
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http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175701/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_what_comes_after_hope/

To claim that there are many gods, a few gods, only one god, or no gods at all is to insist on something about which human beings have no independently verifiable source of information whatsoever.
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http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/a-question-of-values.html

Knowing many stories is wisdom.
Knowing no stories is ignorance.
Knowing only one story is death.
John Michael Greer
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2006/05/knowing-only-one-story.html

We should live as if we were in public view, and think, too, as if someone could peer into the inmost recesses of our hearts. The Blight which assails us is not in the localities we inhabit but in ourselves. We are more wicked together than separately. If you are ever forced to be in a crowd, then most of all you should withdraw into yourself. Never trust another to do your thinking. Even a maston.
Gideon Penman of Muirwood Abbey - from The Blight of Muirwood (Legends of Muirwood Book 2) by Jeff Wheeler.

High Midnight

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