Recently some family issues caused me to feel lower than a snake’s belly, with the usual attendant sleeplessness, crabby-appleton-ness, and whatnot. Having checked in with my Inner Coyote Angel (he’s on the left; dunno how I drew a he angel), I was advised to take a couple days off to try to care for my current musty and dusty psycho-spiritual welfare.
So. I will try to. But I thought I’d leave a few bits and pieces that may be of interest to you, and I’ll see ya soon.
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From krqe.com: ‘Judge: Officers can testify in Boyd shooting case’
“We are not asking the ultimate question was he justified in shooting. We are asking would you have done it?” said Keith Sandy’s Attorney Sam Bregman.
After nearly two hours of back and forth, Pro Tem Judge Neil Candelaria ruled what can and cannot be used in the hearing which will decide if the case goes to trial.
“I think that it is allowable officers at the scene how they perceived the situation at the time, how they felt how the situation was going and whether they thought certain means were necessary to quell the situation at that point,” said Judge Candelaria.
Their defense attorneys should call this fraidy-cop lovin’ shrink:
“Psychologist William J. Lewisnski’ is ‘Training Officers to Shoot First, and He Will Answer Questions Later’, from the NYTimes.
“He has appeared as an expert witness in criminal trials, civil cases and disciplinary hearings, and before grand juries, where such testimony is given in secret and goes unchallenged. In addition, his company, the Force Science Institute, has trained tens of thousands of police officers on how to think differently about police shootings that might appear excessive.”
From wgntv.com: (Mt. Vernon, NY) Woman found dead in New York holding cell while awaiting hearing
Cop Fatally Shot Teen In Back, Not In Self-Defense, Family Says; Zachary Hammond’s family and attorneys say the police department’s version of events doesn’t add up.’, HuffPo. (The Sputniknews.com version doesn’t have the horrid spidey photos on the right sidebar)
Bassem Masri, livestreamer in Ferguson went to jail for three weeks over a traffic accident; he was unable to post bail. He was in solitary the entire time.
Yes, too many names to remember; too many #hashtags. Who’ll stop the nightmare?
Tsipras Defends Varoufakis Preparation for Grexit (1/2), therealnews.com; James K. Galbraith a member of the working group advising the former finance minister Varoufakis on ‘Plan B’ says there were great impositions imposed on the Greek government including certain procedures that removed control from the government and placed them in the hands of creditor institutions – August 1, 2015
Firedoglake is now ShadowProof. (Srsly jarring banner, imo) heh:
Shadow cloak swift as a swallow,
Pantaloon down in the hollow,
Dancing, his voice like a cloud
In the death of my night.
Trade ministers from a dozen Pacific Rim nations failed to reach a deal on a new trade agreement, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), that would cover nearly 40 percent of the global economy, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said Friday.
Well, yes; they’re almost there, of course, because: Corporatism. Wikileaks might have hope these new revelations would help unravel things with ‘Our Best Allies Since WWII’; Japan probably reckons that it’s just bidness.
From Democracy Now!: Full Interview with Former Honduras Pres. Manuel Zelaya, Ousted in U.S.-Backed Coup
From upsidedownworld.org: Tolupanes Put Their Lives on the Line Defending All Hondurans
Oh, and I’d missed Juliania’s link to Ellen Brown’s ‘The Greek Coup: Liquidity as a Weapon of Coercion’
High-larious!
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
Much strength to you from your mountains, wendye – ups and downs in my family as well, so it is in those clouds the Puebloans tell us are our ancestors that we must find nourishment, as the mountains do. Hang in there, as a wise elder from my region once said when I was low.
Here is a long conversation from the Varoufakis blog, much retelling in it, but that doesn’t hurt:
http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2015/08/02/in-conversation-with-el-pais-claudi-perez-the-complete-long-transcript/#more-9685
i will try my best, ww. but my goodness; that spider woman tale your chaco guide told may just make a Cloud Caller outta you yet. and i did hear a big boom of rolling thunder a few minutes ago, so thank you. ;-)
rc: so kind of you; it got my attention when i *thought* i might have heard mr. wendydavis mumble somethin’ about nurse diesel…
me too, on the trophy hunters. it was all a pimp on the media blame the victims of police assassination, and the #allLivesMatter dodge to the #BLM movement, of course. high spot of my day, lol.
see y’all soon…ish. now i gotta go on vacation. more boom-shacka-lackas! rain! oh, bring the rain!
So sorry you’re feeling low, please do whatever it takes to rejuvenate and come back refreshed and strong, dear one.
P.S. I’d be lion if I denied wishing harm to trophy hunters. ;-)
Ellen Brown the clown. She introduces the socialization of massive US bankster fraud as “the most dramatic exercise of [a central banks’] liquidity function”:
Liquidity my ass. I suppose if insolvency can always be cured by taxation, then pervasive private fraud leading to unprecedented bankruptcy (which free market wingnuts should cure by bankruptcy) can be cast as a liquidity problem at the federal level. These fucking US e-conmen-ists claim their world’s largest debt colony has the cure for crapitalist indigestion; only problem is, they can’t fucking diagnose to save your life!
Fuck Ellen Brown the Clown and the rest of the MMT idiots.
Lovely to see you here, realitychecker; may the force be with you.
On your mention of Maui, wendye, here’s a wikileaks bit furnished by scoop.co.nz that zeroes in on state owned enterprises, as we might have expected. It provides links to the wikileaks documents. All roads lead to Greece.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO1507/S00183/tpp-leak-soe-issues-for-ministerial-guidance.htm
I’m coming to the end of my “Anasazi America” reading, with lengthy analysis of current US statistics (as of 2013 and it’s only gotten worse since then) compared to Chaco on the brink of its sudden collapse as a society. Very bleak.
The positive aspect (and you know I always hunt for that) is that the pueblo offshoots, after a nasty period of transition, took the best of Chaco and shunned the worst, managed to barely survive the Spanish influx, and have strengthened as communities since then.
In time we might be looked back on as Ancient Ones from whom lessons can be drawn for new, vibrant communities. I sure hope so. The subtitle of the book is “Seventeen centuries on the Road from Center Place”. Gee, is it going to take that long?
We all need to take a rest and make our world a little smaller from time to time. May all be well, wendy, with you and yours.
Hasn’t she made this a lovely place to rest, jane 24? Very nice to see you here.
“Chaco, when it rained, was a glittering water world, with rainfall spilling over cliffs and rushing through a maze of channels into ponds and reservoirs. [Today that runoff roars, almost unseen, through deeply incised arroyos.] . . . Chaco’s glory days were wet . . .Chacoans gardened, and their gardening had more than domestic or nutritional intent. The most striking example was a huge, solitary ponderosa pine that was watered and cared for in Pueblo Bonito’s plaza. . .
Sheathing (as we should) Ockham’s razor, waterworks might become sparkling, dynamic, life-giving monuments, fringed with flowers. Was Chaco a place of water, reeds, and herons? Might Chaco be remembered as an island in a lake?”
[The Archaeology of Chaco Canyon, edited by Stephen H. Lekson]
Yes! Thank you, and apologies, juliania, for my belated response. (Still finding my way around WordPress…)
Chaco, yes.
When Ms Ché has been there, she’s felt the presence of the Old Ones very strongly, more strongly than I do (she being Indian and all), and that’s part of why she’s made a couple of pilgrimages on her own, while I’ve gone with her as more of a student, shall we say, of the archaeology and landscape than as a spiritual traveler.
There are things she won’t say about what that presence from long ago tells her. But there’s quite a bit she will say, too, and one of the first things she told me about it is that she thinks the scholars and archaeologists mostly have it wrong, They have it wrong in part because their careers depend on never getting it right. So they spin out their tales of what must have been — “according to the current research, in contrast with the previous research” — and then they do it all over again, never quite getting it right (in some cases not even getting close to right), but cheerfully making up new theories based on this shard, that wall, or the sunlight dappling and arroyo or whatever they think of at the time.
But Chaco Canyon was not what they think it was.
Further, bad things happened there, but not what scholars think those bad things were.
She had a vision, very clear, that parts of the canyon and the mesa-tops were heavily forested at one time, and the forest was cleared to the point where there was only one — sacred — ponderosa pine left. The trees were cut for firewood and building materials, but they didn’t grow back as expected. The forests had been left from a previous era, and once the trees were cut, a new forest couldn’t and didn’t grow back. Later she would see some research that suggested her vision was probably true, but the image of a forested Chaco has been rejected by the majority of scholars who insist that Chaco Canyon’s enviornment has always been the way it is now. Except there was a time, Ms Ché assures me, and not that long ago, when the environment was very different.
She’s seen in her visions animals in the forest-that-used-to-be, and she says it was the animals and the forest that attracted people to the Canyon in the first place.
Beyond that, her vision included many things she couldn’t tell me, but she said the Pueblo peoples know the history of what happened there very well, and what they tell the Anglos about it is… not necessarily true, though some of it no doubt is. It is not something the Indians feel obligated to share in any case.
What I’ve focused on in poking around out there is that a lot of what we see there today, especially at Pueblo Bonito, is essentially a reconstruction, most of it done in the 1930s and 40s. It’s an interpretation, some of it based on speculation, and one should be wary of drawing too many conclusions from it. For example, the stonework was not exposed when the site was occupied, it was plastered over. Sections of plastered walls were found by excavators, but they weren’t used as models for the reconstruction. Extensive woodwork — remnants of which survived, some in very good condition — was not reconstructed when the walls were re-erected. Entire rooms were found in nearly pristine condition, but they are not visible to the public today, and most visitors would have no idea what they looked like (surprisingly — or maybe not — like much of the Pueblo/Spanish construction in Historic Santa Fe). There is one mock-up I recall of a room in the complex as it might have appeared when the place was occupied, but as for the actual preserved rooms themselves, the public would likely not even know they exist. (As far as I know, most of them were re-buried and are still there for future discovery by scholars intent on new theories.)
It’s also my understanding that Chaco Canyon was never completely abandoned and it is still a destination for gatherings and ceremonies by various Indian families and groups. It is no longer what it was, but it still has a living connection with the Native peoples of the Southwest, a connection that was never lost.
There are lessons to be learned from Chaco, as there are from so many ruins, but one thing I’ve learned is that New Mexico is full of ruins, some of them ancient like those at Chaco, but many of them far more contemporary. There are lessons from those newer ruins, too, no?
there is ample evidence of forests in the area, but i dunno that ‘on the valley floor’ is specified.
http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/content/88/11/1593.abstract
http://www.cpluhna.nau.edu/Places/chaco_canyon2.htm
i’m not sure that the disagreements are financial in origin, but there certainly have been plenty of arguments over cannibalism there, and at many other ancestral puebloan sites. interpretation of the science, because yes, some of it is exactly that, especially in the case of that dirty C word. but at cowboy wash on the ute reservation there was direct evidence of human tissue in er…human scat (coprolite) iirc, it wasn’t the sole example. rare, perhaps, but charnel dumps have been found at 60 or 70 sites.
it seems that some diné have strong opinions about the place, and the author’s suggestions about the toltecs from the south being oppreive are interesting, again: if hotly debated.
yep, i reckon miz is correct about indians gathering there still; new age drum groups certainly do. ;-) (and no, i always declined the invitations.)
i have friends who teach at crow canyon, and they’ve worked very hard at including puebloans in discussions about how to make this news…almost palatable. but silly mon; it ain’t just indun who feel the spirits of the former inhabitants. and in fact:
oh, and i dug out some things about the great chaco highway system. there is some speculation that the the North Road didn’t follow the compass true north because: the milky way. i loved it, no matter: no proof. but if it’s the reason, you can bet your bottom dollar that the priest surveyors knew exactly what date to calculate the edge our universe and…bend the road with it.
mr. wd showed me sagittarius as a teapot the other night, and pointed out the spot on the spout that looks right into the heart of the universe. heady stuff.
Hi, WD!
You have a very sharp looking blog–congrats! Nice content, too. Hope you enjoy your R&R.
I thought of your son when I heard about the out-of-control wildfires in California this year, and of your own harrowing experiences in 2012. I hope it hasn’t been too bad in your neck of the woods [this fire season].
Hi, RC!
Hope you are doing well (and, hopefully, Riley as well). It was because you signed in to comment that I knew “for sure” that this blog belonged to the same WD that I knew at FDL.
;-)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Glad that you Guys are covering BLM’s much-needed activism. It is good to see balance in the coverage, here. It has been a shock to see that the Netroots Nation event has (somewhat) splintered progressive activists, and even some blogs.
Anyhoo, I’m currently trying to get a WordPress ‘dog and critter’ blog up, so I hope to see you Guys in the neighborhood, from time to time.
Oh, not sure if you remember me–I’m “Blue” Onyx.
Namaste.
thank you for your good wishes, jane24, and hello, blue. yes, i knew it was you from the way you speak (write). nurse diesel has let me out on a two-day pass, and will then decide how many “very sicks” are in front of my name. it’s not hard to feel that she is quite skeptical that i’m better…
juliania: hope things are better for your family; some situations just *are*, and we can do little to aid them except by way of good thoughts, prayers of light and love. one of my lessons is to not borrow the future, another is to compartmentalize a bit, and to right what we can of the past, and whooosh, try to move on.
i see that it’s not in common usage yet, but years and years ago, local archeologist fred blackburn coined the term “ancestral puebloans” (yech) as an alternative since many puebloans could not abide the bastardized ute/navajo term anasazi, that many claim meant “ancestor enemies” not “ancient ones”. dunno, but many folks use it now.
added on edit: silly of me, but i’d hoped you might have read my Cloud Callers vignette i’d linked to up yonder. ;-)
i’ll be back on chaco, but i’m creating a storify of the hearings on the assassination of james boyd in order that judge neil candelaria will decide whether or not to proceed to try killer kops sandy and perez.
What a lovely story, wendye!
No, I wouldn’t ever be a cloud caller, but thank you for linking to that wonderful telling. It is certainly true that the dancers are bringing us rain this year. I can’t call the clouds, though I thank you for the suggestion! And I always am thankful when they come. Even Chaco seemed to have failed to call them eventually, seemingly at the height of their powers.
I suppose that it is necessary to be one with the people; we need to be in community with our own. I think you have an ‘in’ because you have family within that heritage that you have raised – it’s not enough just to be living here on the land, though that is a great, great privilege.
I did go to see some dances in the past and they are wonderful. Now, I stay away not to intrude. There’s so much to learn, such a history, and I love that part of it, but I am just a respectful observer, not a participant. It’s as the Dalai Lama has said: you keep the tradition that is your own path, once you have found it, and I had already found mine.
hmmmm; by your metric mr. wd and i must be of many communities as would-be citizens of the planet. no particular road/s for either of us, and our interest in native cultures far pre-dated adopting our chirren, that snake dance was the last time whites were permitted to attend, unless that’s changed recently. shoot, we even hand-built a 12-sided hogan in the late 70s. ;-)
we both seem drawn to the earthiness of native spirituality, the four directions, circles, and the many representations of earth to sky/heavens. come to think of it, we did sweat lodge for years and years until my k-nees went k-rash.
we tried to be quite ecumenical about faith when the kids were growing up, even to lighting the menorrah saying the prayers on the candle boxes. ;-) but yes, you have indeed found yours; mine are…many.
but of course i’m not trying to say that all rain in the southwest is made by the hopi; but those several days of rain in (maybe) 1975 certainly were, imo.
but gosh, many of the pueblo folks love having guests to share with, and don’t consider them intrusive. i dunno about the cochiti in particular, though.
utes can be an entirely different kettle of fish: bear dance, cool; sun dance, not so much. ;-) (aurora did give us an outré in this case to *camp*, although we’d attended several times earlier. i can’t remember how we got to be friends with the sundance chief, but he and his wife were clients of mine.
Yes, welcoming guests at feasts is a major inheritance from Chaco. Part of the analysis of its demise was that it had become so immensely popular with a diverse mixture of the surrounding communities that it hosted on feast days that a period of drought found the storage rooms depleted. Farmers couldn’t grow corn; elites couldn’t help them out.
It is a matter of honor with all pueblos to welcome guests these days, and the numbers of guests are increasing.
That’s a lovely hogan you built.
If not, you’ll need to sign into the router directly, which must be done via the Web browser on your host’s computer. But first it’s time for a little detective work, starting with eyeballing the actual router to determine the make and model.