Ital vs. the Tudors, the beauties of collapse

I must apologize for not tending to the blog or I should have told you I was not going to put anything up for awhile, but those are the ruinous musts and shoulds so let's just get on with it. We have some lovely weather here these days, last week was deep snow and cabin fever. The more I go out, the better it feels. Then I don't have to twist my mind around why I am doing or not doing what I must or should, you understand. None of that changes the course of destruction we are on regardless of wanting to be involved, or wanting nothing to do with anything under the heavy, pressing webbed paws of the Illusion.

I dislike TV with the exception of the Tudors series. Last Sunday night's episodes were just as backbiting and evil as anticipated. The courtiers and titled ladies all seem to be working towards the goal of getting someone's head whacked off or conniving to see a supposed seditionist, heretic or treasonist burned at the stake. To do this, first they must curry favor with His Majesty, while behind his back, lay a trap for whomever it is that is felt to need a good lesson without allowance for an aftermath in which they might have been able to show repentance, although, as the sentenced head up the stairs to their execution, purse in hand to pay said executioner for his labors, you can imagine the pleas and denials, the promises, the apologies, the beggings for forgiveness and so forth. Detail for detail, trap for trap, it runs a course parallel to what we hear unfolds in the Palace of the Illusion among the your graces and lords. The only difference is the costuming and candelight. An important aside, you will note, if you watch carefully and if you've traveled through Europe, incredible cathedrals and castles are shown to have been built eight centuries before the industrial revolution sucked dry the easy oil. The scriptwriters know this - why have they not made it known? I'm thinking eight centuries because the Italian Renaissance c. 1400's due in large part to lavish sponsorship from the Medicis, took place two hundred years before such grandiosity (mastery of frills and frosting) spread to other parts of that continent where THE Renaissance, two hundred years later, was recognized as the only one of its kind throughout all of time. While we think of the history of the Humanities, and all that was accomplished long before big oil/big ag put a key into the ignition of the overpopulation machine (more people, more sales) let's look at Charles's wonderful discovery of a 1905 postcard, a real life photograph of Market Street in San Francisco.

To me, this finding is of equal importance as the photo I received of our Rasta's spar, Neil, just cooking food. It is a blessing to be sent such reminders, its is a blessing to have faraway friends who like to throw reality checks at the little people from time to time. I lived Ital as well in my youth. Returning to the US remains a culture shock in more ways that I can describe. I still suffer somewhat from the weirdness of our contrived lifestyle and revert to common sense simplicity when necessary just to get something done that in America means generally trying to work with something broken, dysfunctional, can't get a part or replacement because X company merged with Y company who was bought out by Z company in China. A lot of gadget distress has to do with plastic being breakable, it wears out much more quickly than old fashioned cast iron, wood or bamboo. I think just about everyone busting their chops at one of these outsourced corporate manufacturing sweatshop assembly lines knows this, too. Do they think we're silly? No, they think we are extremely rich and silly. They can't wait to get here. It is a measure of Illusory progress that our Rasta tells me they aren't so hot to expatriate anymore, because ... sigh ... because they can just fly back and forth to the great mall that is the US. Many have seen the light. (Those that live in ignorance to this day are those who are ignorant of their history as Arizona will show them soon enough. You can come to spend and go, but you may not come to hang around and drain the system unless you adopt the system in full = pay heavily as you go or go.)

Last time in heaven, I mostly hung out with a longtime Beekeeper, on his land in the unmapped jungle, with his extended family, under a galvanized roof held up by four wood poles under which a large cast iron cookpot fed everyone and anyone who happened along. If the mood struck, and something about being outdoors with people you know and love is the right mood for a little jungle jam, there were huge drums and a wooden/bamboo xylophone, flutes and more. But the most interesting thing of all was the Beekeeper's coffeebean shelling apparatus. He's taken a washboard and cylindrical grater, more about graters in a minute, attached a handcarved wooden crank to the grater so that each bean's coat was lifted off as it funneled through, rolling down the washboard and passing under the grater much the same way the early washing machine squeezed wet clothes into a tub. He gave me a thick chunk of beeswax to chew while we discussed how his machine worked. Nice. His granddaughter, everyone in the extended family lives at home, was an angelically beautiful three year-old child born deaf, but fell right in with everyone else working or playing, it seemed not to hold her back in any way, but allowed the elders to smother her with open affection. No one, I mean no one, would ever think of removing her from the tribe and sending her away to some official center for special needs children. I carried her in my arms and we danced to the pounding of the percussion instruments. She feels it. At one point, the Beekeeper got us involved in moving a mature chocolate tree to a more spacious location in which to branch freely out of the way of its neighbors. Everyone joined in, you would have thought it was the Alabama chain gang building a railroad, the rhythms and the chants made it easy to do a chore most little people insist on doing with lifts and pulleys, gasoline chain saws and tractors. You push on the down beat and hang back on the up. There is an art to it which is to remove the me from the moment. A little beeswax, a little chocolate tree moving, a little dancing with the baby and the me vanishes without knowing or thinking about it at all. You are just there, with the moment, of the moment. With them, of them.
It took a month or two to realize I had completely lost any sense of skin color, other than to be in the habit as all were, of using it as a tool for definition: "You know who I mean, the clear skin girl." or "No, he's the red one." In the beginning, I was pretty young then, fresh from the states and thought everyone looked alike. This of course, caused a lot of confusion, having an idea of whom I was conversing with only to discover we'd never met before, so too often I'd find I was on familiar terms with a total stranger, however, this half-bond turns out to be a fearless way to make friends. Sometime later, wading and rock climbing alone at sunset it struck me I was recognizing everyone all the time and then more, I had lost my white. I tried dreadlocks, but they didn't suit me at all, I always looked like I just fell out of bed. This goes over badly when you have some sort of bureaucratic mission to accomplish.

In complete reversal, in Bubblovia, I find I remain the clear-skinned girl only to myself, not really at home in civilization and often irritated to be pressured into dependence on plastic, convenience and entertainment technologies. Somehow its not fair. But then what is fair? If you watch the Tudors next weekend you'll see nothing was ever fair. The story of Cain and Abel isn't fair, either. Collapse is not fair. Life in full is not fair. I prefer a world where there is no unfair or fair, where things just are because they give and take with Nature - naturally. A grater for citrus peel or cheese is a square foot of galvanized aluminum pounded to remove the ripples, and pounded with nails to make holes. Take the "holed" galvanized and roll it into a half cylinder so the scratchy side faces outwards and secure each end with a single piece of wood, nail each strip of wood into place tightly across the ends making handles and securing permanently the half-cylinder shape. (If you're really good, you'll use wooden pegs.) You can grate comfortably for at least an hour as well as pass it down to your daughter for her household, etc. I've mentioned some of these "differences" in the comments section at various times and I think it is important we realize we don't need to keep stocking our lives with useless gadgets with brief lifespans in order to get something done. The same principle applies equally well to communication devices, unnecessary when people gather casually among each other on a daily/nightly basis. They love to gossip - and what is writing about and commenting on the activities of the Illusion but gossip on a plastic and precious metals communication device that makes lots of money and provides jobs to sweat labor in "developing" countries? Word always gets around.

More to come on this subject, in series - eventually. Collapse can be beautiful.

Just a typical week in the Apocalypse

Its a snow day here after yesterday's 7.2 mag earthquake in Baja. Not being an Ologist of one or the other, I'm not sure if there is a relationship in what I just said or if there is a relationship to what the Fireteacher grumbled when he saw the quake graph on IRIS, which was " Hmmmm, gettin' closer to the San Andreas Fault ..." (I thought the same). Meanwhile, we ponder the relationship of the current external public nastiness with the shift in the Tectonic Plates, as if Mother has had quite enough and those priests should all be doing time, etc. The fact they are not in the clinker (still abusing) means Nature will do as Nature must, text Luca Brazzi aka Mister Karma to clean up the joint. There is enough happening on the ground to upset the balance, flying in the face of every human life, every innocent species just being alive, but in process of being extincted though our overpopulation-consumerism-corruption crisis. Such a crisis, no matter how you look at it, is unfolding as genocide planet wide benefiting no one, with the exception of Nature. As I said before, when its gone, there is nothing left for exploitation by corporations in their daily business of exploitation, war and addiction. Yesterday, they rubbed their hands together in glee, tomorrow those hands will be grasping the edge of the cliff. Warning, don't look down, you will find there is no soft landing or even any landing at all. Infinity is a long way down. In our slow collapse, it might just take as long to fall as it took to achieve superpower stardom if it were not for the arrival of Peak Everything like a smothering black veil creeping over the Earth. Every day it is darker out there.


Being a snow day (holiday), there won't be any painting, everyone is home, big dog indoors doing figure 8's around the sofa, Fireteacher posting on the blogs alternating with some fix-its and the light is weak. I came across a few sites I'd like you to see if you have not already. Begin with Charles's The U.S. Status Quo: Unsustainable, Doomed and Danced Out:

...it is certainly striking that the two products chosen more or less at random were both complete wastes of money and time.

Added together with millions of similarly defective/low-quality/useless goods, this is malinvestment on a vast scale.

Add in the granite countertops in millions of falling-apart McMansions, empty malls, vacant highrises, hundreds of needless "profit center" MRI machines, etc. and we have a nation which has misinvested trillions of dollars which are now lost to productive investment elsewhere.

No economy can recover from this scale of malinvestment ...

... I am reminded of the Beatles' song I, Me, Mine. Perhaps that will be the anthem of the next decade as everyone scrambles to protect their swag and perquisites at the expense of some other less politically adept group of citizens, until the entire system freezes up and the dancers suddenly notice the music stopped playing a long time ago.

From there, you'll be of a mind to check out Justin Raimondo's Rachel Maddow, McCarthyite, the FBI, the left and the war on "extremism:

...there is a sinister aspect to all this violence-baiting, as well as a comic one. For the central point of all the pro-FBI, pro-government, anti-"extremist" propaganda blaring from MSNBC and other news outlets is to convince us that speech leads to violence – and that, indeed, certain forms of political speech – "antigovernment" in nature – are inherently violent.

The irony of this is that these people are cheerleaders for the biggest most powerful purveyor of violence on earth, the US federal government. All states are founded on violence, of course, and maintained in power by the continual threat of it, and yet the US government enjoys a special status in this regard, with more firepower at its command – and the inclination to use it – than any previous empire in human history. We are talking about a government currently waging two open wars and one "secret" one, abroad – systematically murdering many thousands – and actively threatening yet another.

The tiny and powerless Hutaree "militia" has about as much chance of overthrowing this Leviathan as a flea. Yet they are charged with "sedition." This would be a joke if it weren’t such a danger to what’s left of our civil liberties. ...

Next, it seems to me that long essays on this blog are supreme time swallowers and am going to be testing out a less consuming approach of brief mentions, more frequently. This would be a mirror to Ran's style, but when there is a need, I claim the right to revert. Likely, we'll end up with both. Today is a good example of what to expect.

Next, but on topic: How will all those people who built homes since NAFTA went into effect in 1992 know where their drywall was created? The Feds say if you have a home with Chinese drywall, it has to be gutted. And who pays for that?

Lastly, in reflection on the Easter weekend busy news, let me close with a mention there really is such a person as a Papal Preacher. A Papal Preacher (loose cannon) that thinks the public response to the (pure evil) sexual molestation scandal is anti-semitism. The Pope's personal Papal Preacher was made to apologize after the outrage hit the airwaves, but who really knows what goes on deep inside someone's secret mind or inside the Holy See?

Since all of us are subjected to the passage of time in years designated A.D. and B.C., you'll begin to get an idea of how powerful is organized religion by thinking a bit on that. How different it would all be if that power never got its grip so long ago.

Awful layout problems persist for some unknown reason. Will continue to work on it.

Silber, beasts, costumes and slaveships

I'm glad to see Arthur Silber found his voice again, for however long it may last. Even though I don't know him personally, he makes you feel like you do. If you haven't visited his blog, Once Upon a time... , try to make a point to do so, you'll find it hard to make the visit brief. He doesn't have comments and perhaps its just as well. There are so many links you will have an overwhelming volume of material to consider, it may just be an exercise in repetition to comment with any comprehensive remark other than perhaps with a word that isn't in the dictionary. What he does is this: He fills in the holes where you thought you had it all figured out, and did, but could have done better if your mind was stripped of all external noise. His personal life I understand is extremely difficult, bordering on impossible actually. You can see for yourself because you will get hooked and want to read all the way through the archives, not a quickie I assure you.

There is something, hmmmm, saintly to me about people who go right to the heart of the matter without an agenda, without exaggerating or omitting crucial thinking points. It is the height of the whole Internet experience as far as I am concerned. When I say saintly, I am saying "pure", untainted, no flavorings, no e-coli. Its a quality I always look for and more often than not am bored because there is so much of nothing being jammed through the motherboards. Basically, I limit the experience to the tried and trues. Listen, on dial up you don't want to waste time.

I know, I haven't said the H word yet. I am forcing myself to refrain for a short time in an experiment to see if it removes the huge dark boulder of epic tragedy pressing on my heartstrings. It is true I placed it there and once begun, it enters the blood stream flowing to the brain where it acts as an antagonist on normal serotonin re-uptake. Without consciously realizing it we cannot avoid returning to the Polaroids of the Civil Rights era of the deep south, Strange Fruit, Tuskegee, George Wallace, Lester Maddox and his Chicken Lickin' lunch counter and the cooks given axe handles, we cannot avoid going back further to the true to life stories passed on through generations, stories of indescribable suffering. Then you go back farther, as far as you can. You can go back very far, its all there. After living our insignificant and insular lives, we awake to find its still there, costumed differently as are most things, but alive and making plans.

I've known a lot of undercover racists, those who knew better but adopted the mores of their social community for survival within the community whose leaders made their feelings clear. This is not any different than accepting never ending war as the way things are. That middle easterners are dangerous, that security enhancements are for our own good, that we are hated for our freedoms. It has NEVER sat right with me. It is illogical in fact because we are all members of the human species, just another species inhabiting the same planet with the same needs and drives. I must have missed the miseducation of the illiterates where hatred of our fellows was a required course for successful living. It has cost me, it would cost you, too, to go against the grain, to be stupid and feign ignorance, but there never was any other way possible. Not a single time would I have backed down, there was never a choice.

It seems the route racism has taken is a pretense it ended with slavery, then came the pretense it ended in the 60's Civil Rights Movement. And certainly, with a Mulatto leader, it does not exist at all, right? What will they call it when we have a GLBT leader? A Jewish leader? An Arab leader? Perhaps we are supposed to think the world will collapse before it ever gets that far? If the world does not collapse within the predictable future, we will definitely be in line for leaders of any persuasion and nationality, very likely Arab as in the last holdout for the industrial revolution. Westerners have no prejudice when it comes to fulfilling their own needs. The same can be said for psychopaths.

I'd happily end this entry on an optimistic note, but that isn't in the cards right now. What we see overall may be costumed differently, but we're still in 1604. Indeed, there are billions more bodies, but nothing really changed. As the oil depletes, the costumes come apart, the masks slip off and the rough beast is revealed lumbering among us freely, unimpeded, rampaging in riches and gloating in triumph. There are a lot more rough beasts in our overpopulation crisis. Everything multiplied while we were consuming fluff and now its ensured we consume ourselves. There appears to be no end in sight other than an act of God. Everybody in a position to reverse the tides is far more interested in covering their hides from the punitive prejudice of the 1604 community. Everywhere there are warnings and signs of things to come, if we are clear on nothing else, let's at least be clear about that. Never was there a more implosive mix than racism and the end of easy oil.

lying vampires from OZ

When you look at the civilization in which we are supposed to be members, like some sort of huge fraternal brotherhood of the human species, it always makes me ask what do we really think we are doing within such an arrangement? Whether we want to or not we are included in reforms and regulations, wars and hustles, when we actually reject them on the grounds of common sense, but have to go along with the hype anyway because its everywhere. You'd think if you see something everywhere, its got to be good for the species, right? And its your own lameness, laziness, ignorance or diverted attention that blinds you to the greatness of the supposed altruistic thing that is "everywhere"? You'll think maybe you were not paying attention and must be flagellated for refusing to kneel at the wonderments cascading down upon the brotherhood. Surely that punishment will catch up with you in its own time, we know that as the trickle down effect ... but it won't make you kneel, it will just make you work harder to unravel yourself from the brotherhood. What are they doing for YOU? Or your children? Or your loved ones, your friends and your treasured aquaintances? You'll want to say nothing or at least, not much, but that's not how it works when its working, as opposed to living large. Like blades of grass subject to the winds, we are bent this way today and that way tomorrow. And with each tornado a little more life is taken from each of us who are just going about the innocent business of living, producing and dying, all we were ever meant to be we are already, but according to the destructive winds of change that is never enough. There is always more heavy weather on the way. No matter how well you think you prepare, are you really a match for the Mob? Its a religion to end all other religions in which they see themselves as the creators.

We are asked to see the evil in our lives. We are made to bear the guilt for crimes in which we had no participation. Years after the fact we bear scars we didn't deserve that will never heal. We could say that the evil and crimes impacting us are designed with that effect in mind, as springboards for more of the same. After all, what is grass for anyway but to be trod upon, mowed down, grazed and consumed?

As the Earth's population explodes, so does the Mob proliferate. This gives us history on which to reflect that in less populated times, governments kept lower profiles, there were not as many of them and we experienced less trauma. My how things have changed.

Or have they? Maybe its us who have changed. A whipped and beaten people made deliberately stupid would change if only to avoid paying for their own demise.

We have come to expect anything to happen at any time. How many of you live like this? Drive like this? Walk like this? Question your every action wondering on the outcome and how it will be interpreted by complete strangers? It becomes habit. If it hasn't, you know it should be habit by now.

I am fond of my late Father's remark on these things, "F--- 'em, let 'em take a number." Recently, watching the film The Changling, I've also come to appreciate the line "F--- you and the horse you rode in on." I'm not the kind of person that would say these things offhand, but our world has changed. All credit to those who invented the lines I quoted, for they knew what we are just getting around to seeing.

We are totally on our own now in every respect. Orphan citizens. Wipe clean all your thoughts of how things were and start anew as if you never went to school or read a book or viewed TV. The catastrophes we've been expecting have already happened and we are in the aftermath acknowledging the mess. It appears too big to fix. Bernie Madoff ain't got nothing on the Mob or the winds of change, in fact, that was likely his downfall. Now in his cell, eyes wide open pondering his new friends from OZ, does he heel to the call of Patsy?

Since everyone who reads here also reads many of the sites on my blog list, you won't need links. You will recognize today's howl as a long comment that could have been made at any one of those locations. And made as well in sympathy with some few sites that do not have comments or have so many comments it is impossible to try to be a coherent voice in the anguished I's, me's, excuses and justifications, imaginary personas, hackers, wingnuts, lobbyists and so forth.

Its in the bloodlines now. You see, its not "When are they going to get it?" rather it is they are programmed to enslave.

Intentional Coincidence

When Arthur suggested the line between coincidence and intentional activity as a topic we should explore, it seemed to me we'd been over this question thousands of times in The Story of Nine Eleven, even if only in our own minds, so thoroughly that by now we should be on the other side where coincidence is one of the many hoped-for results of intentional activity.

This is not exactly an essay about 9/11. This is one of my usual word studies leading into the deeper recesses of thought under Deep Thoughts, the levels where seemingly innocuous statements turn into the heebeejeebies of bitter truth. There are no examples offered because any example I might supply can be better supplied by your own.

Blogging and surfing actually lessen our capacity to retain information due to the sheer volume of material being presented. After a while it becomes just more TV, another passive activity where you are fed words and images all the while thinking you are improving your intelligence and enjoying yourself in the process. We've learned that TV is utter nonsense, but we haven't yet figured out the true nature of the web. Yes, I know, we think we have, but the day will come generations of the future will scoff at what the Internet did to their civilization.

Watching 9/11 on TV and watching the 9/11 investigative commission unfold, sending off for your very own copy of the findings-in-full and watching mainstream news, you could form your own opinions without the assistance of the Internet. That's why its lame to legislate against the web, the web is just another tool in the larger bag of Satan's tricks. You'll notice he never runs out. You also might have noticed every trick leaves you in doubt - as if something other than what your mind tells you happened is taking place. What is really going on here, anyway? Taking stock - pause now to take stock - the amount of doubt currently being served to ALL OF LIFE IN GENERAL is equal to the garbage strewn acreage of every landfill dump in every major city worldwide. This makes it unanimous, humans refuse to trust their own judgment at almost every turn. What I am saying is: Coincidence is extremely rare, if it exists at all. We know, but we don't want to know what we know. We will stretch for explanations and sift tirelessly through the universe of pretense partnering with expectation, rather than take it for granted our hearts know best.

How did we get this way? We know that, too, don't we? Come now, from the time of the cave dwellers there has always been someone who wanted a story to fly for various reasons, the first is to place him/herself in the category of being more intelligent than someone else. Another reason of equal priority is manufacturing a pretext for action lest that action betray a scornful lack of integrity. The impressionable mind of the watching listener subject to these "reasons" will more often accept a story at face value rather than do the mental labor of asking questions. Thus the popularity of the student-teacher matrix in which some get away with murder and the others look on in amazement. Amazement is actually just a cover for avoiding the conflict that will naturally arise from disagreeing with the official story and always leads to pain and/or loss. Pain and loss are to be avoided at all costs, or so that story goes, according to the teachers who in reality are grocery clerks fulfilling the agenda of the other side of all that is humane, right, real, compassionate, healing and spiritually enlightening.

Our minds are not very talented in exploring the depths of personal existence. Mostly, we flow through our days unaware. We do whatever we are doing with the comfortable idea that if we don't see it, it isn't there. When things happen, we like to put them off to coincidence because we don't understand how something came to be and we don't understand because we fail to perform the mental labor connecting unknowns to darker unknowns. When we finally get around to doing the heavy work, we are confronted with things we already suspected were taking place and find verification for our suspicions. Then we can say we know what happened with certainty, even though we already knew. We did not like what we would find which makes the work even harder. Its like a grisly job in a dangerous business and you want to get out as fast as possible. It seems that the faster you can return to perusing the glossy brochure of Coincidence the better off you will be since everyone else says its much more enjoyable there.

To travel with Coincidence Vacation Tours, you'll need steamer trunks of expensive stuff like your benzodiazepines, a wardrobe stylist and an image consultant, Jocko's personal physician and Angelo Mozilo's bible for better living. That could possibly deter the average unemployed, credit-riddled, pro-life citizen, however it has never been a real obstacle as the powerful masters of fictional realities know. They know beyond the shadows of doubt or coincidence you will get exactly what you deserve. They create fables out of thin air knowing some people will do anything to avoid the pain of mental labor and worse, damnation from their peers. Coincidence is an intentional avoidance mechanism. Many things are done with just that end in mind. Sometimes the detective work is easy and the criminal confesses, other times coincidence shields a death match.

Of course, there is plenty of coincidence in between those stark contrasts. Its the everyday coincidence that makes huge coincidence possible. Before you know it, everybody is doing it and getting away with it. Have you made a coincidence today? Hurry, its happening now in real time.

Verification word: humancause

As if we needed verification.

"Life is about loss."

Mia Farrow, speaking in a documentary about her life, after divorcing Woody Allen who then married their adopted daughter.

The President's remark concerning the stupid behavior of law enforcement is certainly one anybody, even without paying close attention to the incident prompting it, might have made offhandedly in recent times. The incident itself nearly pales in relation to Obama's statement, mirroring the times we now endure, times of deep turmoil and troubling questions in which one misstep leads to lock-up or worse, permanent public condemnation, as if we had somehow rolled back into the days of burning people alive who were suspected of witchery. As if the Jim Crow laws were back in effect in the courts and the court of public opinion hung people from trees for
consorting with those ones of darker skin. God help us for we have lost our way

... although that way keeps showing itself to have been a matter of decisions of the moment that distorted into a permanency of parasitical political correctness. It is exactly what results when a traveler, faced with various possibilities, takes a wrong turn, certain the detour on which he travels leads to his destination only to discover, too late, he's wound up in a cul de sac inside a gated, barrel-tiled maze where everything looks the same. He'd have to spend his dying days pressing the perimeters, being too threatened by his unconscious version of lockup to simply knock at one of the many locked doors and ask "Where am I? How do I get out of here?" Do you honestly think one or two beers in the Rose Garden at that stately mansion built by slaves can turn back the sands of time?

In this recent incident, we ask Cui Bono? Perhaps the Health Care industry breathing a small sigh of relief the ever-extending deadline for reform permits them unbridled opportunity to continue denial of care and keep charging obscene fees for a hospital administered tablet of acetaminophen?

Or perhaps the benefit belongs to second-generation Neocon followers of 4th generation warfare by halting the budget war over further F22 manufacturing while sliding those funds over to the unmanned aerial drone column. In this way, the other Gates, the Secdef, not the Harvard professor, can say the coalition troops are better protected.

Another noteworthy side benefit of "stupid remarks" is of course, viewer ratings of primetime TV news, vastly important to program sponsors who are the public screech of the corporatocracy. While Jocko News fades to chasing prescription providers, racism is a live body, always available for pundits' dissection offering a lifetime warranty of ratings borne from the bottomless well of correspondents, analysts, former and retired bottom-rung political-beat staffers, eager to expound on the expoundings of others who came before them, expounding on race since the Dutch slave ships kidnapped human beings from the dark continent to sell to other human beings, providing themselves with evolutionary financial evidence of New World progress.

All of which is backwards and upside down to the rest of this entry.

Let's not lose ourselves in despair over that which we have no control, rather, today, as on many days in these new strange days of our lives, consider all of life as learning to live with loss, to swim in its rivers, to survive when you are impacted behind its cascade of related damages as generally happens as naturally as breathing, one thing leading to another. We instead put the right foot ahead of the left, moving away from, moving to something more, awkwardly at first, testing the appetite of the Piranha, attempting success if for no other reason than revival of the self though understanding why these things have to happen at all. This is what we do and this is how we do it. If we do nothing, we will be eaten alive, or burned alive or noosed as Strange Fruit ...

Scientifically, biologically, philosophically, literally, figuratively and spiritually, the genesis of the matrix itself encompassing all of life, leads in one direction, always to its polar opposite, from birth towards death. That is our present phase within the cycle. We inhabit one above-ground, beneath-the-stars portion of space within the Universe. We are very small, indeed, we are nothing, but we dream we are something. We are in a dream that we matter. This we support through memory, we remember our feelings, events, other places, other people, different times, different from this day. We've seen the furniture of our collective pasts dissolve into the Now. We think it wasn't supposed to be this way, but that's just false desire speaking, taking us into the cul de sac of continued suffering. We've passed, unknown to ourselves, through the portal where elements of what we thought made us matter no longer exist. There is enough of the appearance of a familiar landscape to create the illusion nothing happened, but again, its
false desire at work. Stop looking at it. Loss and change goes on no matter what we do, who we think ourselves to be, what insurance we thought we possessed preventing the cycle's incessant movement towards the next phase.

If you have so far grokked what this is about, the negativity preventing your personal flow should vanish. Let it go. Maybe you are one of the fortunate who has understood this all along whatever your personal situation? That would be very rare, more realistically, you and I are in a state of readiness-to-know rather than all-knowing. If we really knew all of life is about loss, our's would be a drastically different, genuinely compassionate world. It could have been, all the tools were there and instead maligned. How far back it really goes are only general estimates, mankind appears today as satisfied to live with the malignment rather than work towards sustainability within the Universe. Yes, we hear they are working on it, sometimes, but that's usually just a grab for moral high ground - also known as ground for furthering someone else's suffering. When someone wins, someone else always loses.

The smallest kindness, those "here now, gone tomorrow" joys are easily attainable growth spurts achieved by our understanding the human being's natural state is that of suffering. Suffering is all we really have left, our losses, our foibles, our missteps, our uncertainties, our representative-selves making arrangements with the representative-selves of everyone else, this is all we have to withstand the backhoes of our time on Earth.

We should be doing everything we do with this knowledge at the root of our every action. This is why we hear "Love is the answer", because contained within each passing second exists the opportunity to fill the glass rather than ignore it.

Once there was something

Recently I suggested "This is the change, this is what it looks like from the inside." I'd like to elaborate in somewhat greater detail, the "change" we are experiencing is not something that is going to happen in the future, a production from Tinseltown starring ourselves running behind boulders between burned-out vehicles and towering used tires, communicating with each other by walky talky. The future is now. It is destitution and tent cities and it is ongoing war wherever an abundance of natural resources are concentrated. It is lying, it is a new language where lies have become truth and liars are never challenged except during sound bytes interrupted by commercials. It is nuclear, it is geography, it is financial and it is religious. Our problem is we don't like it, we see it all as a false construct, it has and continues to take away, steal, rob us and our total worlds of everything sacred and beloved, sustaining and required for balance in the Universe. Does that knowledge end the conflict? Has it ever veered away from this course? If you've been paying attention, you know it has not. Our problem, then, is the truth. We see the truth. We know it, it hurts, so we spend more time in denial than in reality. We think we've woken up inside a nightmare, when actually we were born in it, coming into consciousness inside of it, participated in it and now we don't want it, but its too late. Everything we know about our beginnings tells us we've been heading towards this moment all along. We are forced to accept the natural outcome as it is unfolding at this moment. And worse, there is more to come. You've lived the trailer, you're living the show.

We are where we are, each one of us, because we expected free will to somehow reward us. That's the clincher, isn't is? Good old free will. And yes, that fool expectation too! Expecting all along we had some sort of God-given entitlement to a better life, a better world, one sans all these egregious pitfalls, these traps, we hardly expected it to be this way, the way it is. No, my friends, the tragedy of our time is that tragedy exists and we are bound by the cards of chance to not only slip into traps, but often wallow inside of them for decades. This moment in time, by the way, isn't one of them as I'm seeing it, although for some of us, and I sincerely empathize, it may well be your personal pitfall period.

If we can ever grasp the idea that "what is" is all there is, we are freed to make the best of that which holds true value as junk civilization mutates into a flat, colorless, lifeless expanse. The direction and the increasing velocity of western, i.e.; industrial, civilization's extraordinary rise and decline urgently demands we'd best make our time here as having had meaning if we're going to be known as having been here at all.

Can you see it? Fifteen million years from today? It will be noted briefly, in passing: "There appears to have been hominids, then an empire of a sun worshipping mountain people, another gathered around the depressions where those land masses split and then nothing else until today, folks. This atmosphere can't sustain life. There are signs they had water, but nothing registers. And that's it. Back to the ship."

Shyorongi Codetta

Shyorongi Village resident Evariste Ahimana said he was forced by a mob to take part in the clubbing death of his neighbor. This is some of what was written about Rwanda's Genocide when the ten year passing was observed in 2004.

Doing Violence to the Truth

... Evariste Ahimana can’t even utter the word “one” to tell how many people he killed in Rwanda’s genocide. He just holds up a finger to represent what he did – clubbing a neighbor named Augustin Murinda, whom he liked and often drank with – at the behest of strangers from the next village. Since returning to this village after his release from prison last year, Ahimana has walked past the house of his victim’s brother every week as he climbed the hill to the church. Walking downhill after prayers and confession, he has never stopped to apologize. When he passes the brother on the narrow dirt paths of the village, the two men greet each other, but their eyes never meet.
“I’m planning to say sorry one day,” Ahimana said. “It’s not so much reluctance to go as lack of strength.” Leaning on a wooden stick in his house, with pictures of Mary and Jesus tacked to the wall, he says he can’t be held responsible: An armed mob forced him to kill the man....

And more:

Friday, March 19, 2004
Article by the Amazing Gabi, Rwandan journalist for Hirondelle News agency:

CLAMPING KILLERS AND SURVIVORS TOGETHER

By Gabriel Gabiro Shyorongi, February 18th, 2004 (FH) – After a brief wait inside a stuffy little house in the middle of a thick banana grove, a small shy
man dressed in tired farm clothes and a flat cap made of part cloth, part red mud emerges from the front door clutching a machete. One can’t help but immediately try to visualize to how many uses Evariste Ahimana, 50 and a
confessed killer, may have put the soiled machete in his hands. At the start of the 1994 genocide, Ahimana and a group of his ethnic Hutu friends and fellow farmers swept through the hills and valleys of this remote Central Rwanda town of Shyorongi rummaging through all possible hideouts for their Tutsi neighbours before killing them. For the ‘work’ - a popular euphemism for ‘killing’ - they used machetes, cudgels, hoes, axes or any other farm tool they could lay their hands on...

There is a slide show here beginning with the photo of Mr. Ahimana that I used in telling his story . I didn't see the slide show until tonight because I read it in the physical paper in 2004 for a "newsreel in artworks" series. Drop the newspaper subscriptions and one naturally progresses to sagebrush oceans and clouds. Slide show photo number 16 is a must see also.

Andrew moves into the Lighthouse at last

Andrew Wyeth left this plane, early today, while sleeping they said. Fare thee well and Godspeed. You will be missed of course, selfishly I admit. I wanted to see what else was coming, but after thinking about it hard and long this morning, I see what happened. You got so close to Nature's perfection you breathed-in the last deep scent of her seasons and chose to stay. And now you are all you ever wanted. I think of you, today traveling beyond Christina's World, somewhere you are hanging out with John Lennon, Jimi and JFK and Bobby and Leonardo and Pablo and Winslow and Whistler, pitching-in with the making of rain and wind and mixing mysterious tints human eyes cannot perceive, and maybe flirting just a little with Georgia, the way you did with my mother, in Maine, before you grew up and met the woman who would stay with you for the remainder of this brief journey in your handsome envelope which in the end, could never contain such a survivalist's soul. Goodbye for now, but not forever.

the sighting

We saw a UFO tonight. It may have been a planet it was so bright. But I don't know of any planet that morphs designs in flashing colored lights and changes shape from a horizontal string of bright lights into a sphere and then expands into an egg shape with a huge hole running through it until it breaks into an arch. The reason you could discard a lot of the usual man-made technologies is this object remained in position in relation to the slow movement of constellations.
At first it appeared to be a jet, port and starboard lights indicated it was traveling NW. But it didn't actually go anywhere. It just twinkled, as some stars will under weather conditions between us and their location. But it twinkled too much. I look at the night heavens quite a lot, it gives me a thrill, so I am equipped to know when something new shows up where a vacancy should exist at a certain hour in a certain part of any season.
This shape-shifting circus object was new, behaving as if it was there all along, just hanging out with the rest of the Universe, nothing personal, business as usual.
We got out our high power binoculars and studied it. At one point it became a spherical grid. In a way it was reminiscent of a Times Square neon billboard on New Years Eve. Discard that thought - A shape shifting billboard at billions of light years away that keeps its location within in the constellations isn't possible.
And here's the thing - it wasn't just me who saw it.
We could go on a lot of Zen trips about it since we are here in the Now, creating our own realities. I don't discount that possibility. If we are creating our own realities, for example, we are also creating our own memories, complete with visuals.