(click for larger; it really is quite a place to take a bath…esp. for the land-locked who dream of the sea.)
Recently I’d gone into the bathroom to brush my teeth and seen a spidey web up in a high corner. It may have shown itself due to a beam of sunlight through the skylight, as I hadn’t noticed it earlier. At any rate, I wanted it gone, but was either in too much of a hurry or too lazy to go into the bedroom closet to fetch the telescoping dusting brush I use for cleaning the beams and other too-high-to-reach places.
Instead, I’d wadded up a couple tissues, moistened them slightly in the still damp sink, and tossed them at the web. Now it took a few tossings to get most, but not all of the web wrapped onto the tissues. By then the sunlight had shifted slightly, obscuring the corner a bit, although I could still see pieces of it. I’d shrugged mentally, and pronounced it ‘good enough for who it’s for’, as they say around here. But even that shrugged notion gave me pause enough to think: ‘Hmmm; there’s gotta be a metaphor in here somewhere’.
Just for fun, I thought I’d give any of you to see if the metaphor signifies anything for you. If not, after some time, I’ll turn this into a new Open Menu. It wasn’t the case in my tossing, but if a spider had fallen out of the web (oh, ish, I loathe spideys), that would indeed broaden the metaphor, which may make it far more useful as a metaphor.
Meanwhile, I’ll hit the (often inscrutable) tax forms again.
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
Syriassly? US’ Qoms strike (who’s 0ur $pidey?).
might you mean the Syrian airbase near Homs? if so, or even if not, could you expand what you see as the metaphor?
i’ll add this: ‘US drops largest non-nuclear bomb on Afghanistan, first time used in combat’, 13 Apr, 2017
because: IS (ISIS, of course), and oh, wait: “…and days after Staff Sergeant Mark De Alencar, a US Special Forces operator, was killed in the same region. “The Air Force “took every precaution to avoid civilian casualties,” CENTCOM said.”
how many spideys will be converted to sectarianism and join the (often proxy) battles for sectarian rule? i could add the US/nato occupation of the muslim holy lands, as well. 16 years!!!! usa!
but srsly, i’ll be back’ i need to play hooky a bit longer; i may just have figured out how some of those crazy numbers might relate.
some people are turned off by spiders, some turned on. google spider cos play, if you need an emetic. yes, the “black widow” “killing” that guy & then embalming him in a web (of silly string? yeah, deadly) is like the post-coital cig for some. though they really are amazing creatures. breathing in the water & killing people and so on. nature is alive w/things that gross us out. I tried to suggest to someone that her daughter being grossed out to the point of being incapacitated by bugs was a sign of alienation from nature. oh look it’s cooking channel #72! was the response. roaches just doing their thing is very gross, but hey, they have as much right to be here, to exist, as anything else. that nature is actually alive is revolting. sometimes.
great scene from annie hall; thanks. the battle w/ the lobsters was, too. but sure, ya talk about ‘psyop hollywood’: #1 on my list is ‘charlotte’s web’, oh yeah.
my friend margie says i shouldn’t kill spideys. (or yelp for mr. w to come and dispatch them).i say phooey, they actually get under my bed covers and bite me, usually in a triangular configuration. i’ve been bitten so many times i’m almost allergic by now. she says they bite me cuz i kill them.
but see? trump’s right to bring out the bad boy bombs. they shouldda nuked all enemies of the usa long ago, esp. IS, not just tossed tissues. the claim is that it wasn’t a tactical nuke, just a lesser bunker buster. the pretense is that as the phone lines are all down, no civilians were killed. one guy in this tweet (irony alert!!!) said over 500 were. now i’d believe the pentagon, wouldn’t you?
i made a stupid mistake on a key tax form, and hafta kinda start over, so i’m gonna make this an open thread.
hurray for Karzai the repentant collaborator! I suppose I misunderstood the “metaphor” part of this post and took it literally. oh well.
I think it was walker percy who said USAians are as bloodthirsty as they are sentimental. cf. j st. c’s notes at CP today on how ivanka showed daddy pix of splattered babies to motivate…more splattered babies, aka “doing something.” won’t somebody think of the children??? please???
isn’t that what we elected trumpbernobillary for? to think of the children while we watch the Hallmark channel? I mean, if you gonna have ww3, quasi-fake pix of tear-jerking dead babies is as good a reason as any. surely we’ll be thinking of nothing but the children when we blow ourselves up.
yeah, guess karzai’s spent all those pallets of hundreds by now. and his bro may not be cutting him on his opium grift. it’s okay you hadn’t seen the metaphor, though i reckon few would have. but ask yourself who financed ‘charlotte’s web’ if you will; it might take you to some dark places. ;-) (spoiler alert: the Shelob trade union)
yeah, some fake virtue signaling, eh? reminds me of reason #9 to ‘stay in afghanistan: “so the gurl chirren can learn to read!”. remember that sarah somebody who was on bill moyers doin’ her do-good talkin’ to stay? “MY students”, yada yada, kinda like “i beg you to find a new home for MY kikuyu, lord so and so (baroness karen, out of africa).
not familiar with walker percy, but it sounds just about right. sentimentalism is a tear at a movie, reminding oneself of something vaguely familiar; nothing deeper is required.
shelob! hah! yes, embiggen the spider to Hummer XL size. yes, I tho’t of her too, a spider somewhat bigger than tom friedman’s ISIS loving intellect. maybe we can gmo-engineer a MOAB sized spider!!! w/bazookas! sam gamgee would have been screwed if shelob had had bazookas. I don’t think that little light bulb he had would have cut it.
charlotte’s web? wtf is that? seriously, so the spiders eat the momma or something while somebody watches? life lessons learned the end? why didn’t they call it something like “charlotte learns harsh truths” or something catchy? for the kids? I never heard any kid talk about this book. it’s not on any google/bing list of top tens to make you cry. not sure i’m missing anything. it’s on video, right?
can Karzai fake-virtue signal? “i better make a statement, or somebody might shoot me!” yes, of course he can & screw him but he’s got more at stake than some. or did. I don’t know. did he get a lecture circuit in the Ivies or something after his dutiful & not w/o risk service? sorry, I could check the way back machine…but…nah…
lol. it may be that elon musk and darpa are planning a shelob transformer bot with depleted uranium missiles. nah, iirc, ‘charlotte’ was in aid of yanno, lovin’ spideys, hence…the funders. now that cartoon may have been the reason that our neighbor allows arachnids to make houses in his little house on stilts, and leaves them undisturbed. mr. wd says that the webs fairly vibrate w/ all the…activity. OMG.
yes, the phial of galadriel wouldn’tta helped much, eh? but how fun: if ya click the barthroom photo, it gets bigger, then there’s an extra magnifying click. just at the head of the bathtub on the wall is…tada! aragorn kneeling before her in a mallorn forest. (still hard to see, though) holy crow, you weren’t just a-woofin’ about mr. mustache the maniacal isis lover!
“Now he’s back beating the drums of war. This time in Syria. His proposal is so frightfully fetid and poisonously putrid that it’s best described as inscribed anthrax. Because Friedman has taken to the pages of The New York Times to propose how America should essentially manipulate ISIS to do its bidding by proxy. Yes, the same ISIS which is trying to return the Middle East to a time around 1389, in a strange symbiosis with his prescription for the Serbs. “In Syria, Trump should let ISIS be Assad’s, Iran’s, Hezbollah’s and Russia’s headache — the same way we encouraged the mujahideen fighters to bleed Russia in Afghanistan,” he writes.” (bryan macdonald at RT)
I need a bath after defending Karzai in the slightest. a stuffed wallet for his “courage”? screw him.
but now we know where all the coral & starfish are going don’t we? décor for people’s potties.
Galadri who? that was kate winslet in the movies right? of course I read lotr. one time too many. as Jacob Bacharach back in his whoisioz days said: “Maybe that shit sounds good in the original Elvish but the google translate version sucks.”
maybe Michael bay can help w/the concept design for our new bazooka-wielding Shelob transformer arachnibots? I hate to post a g.d. commercial, but if there is any man for the job…James Cameron is too thinky. “the thinking person’s Michael Bay” as somebody said. the way he acts in this ad is exactly the way our media decepticons acted w/the dropping of MOAB.
karzai’s wiki is a treat, including his having moved to pakistan to raise funds for the ‘anti-communist mujahideen during the 1980s Soviet war in Afghanistan. the ‘Financial ties with CIA and the government of Iran’ is worth thinking through, too. but sure, he’s amerika’s kind of puppet, yes?
likely you’re teasing me (but who knows?) about where all the coral’s gone, but almost all of the shells and corals i inherited when my paternal grandfather died. a few shells and maybe a starfish we brought back from fla three decades ago. a few corals, the blue and the red, i bought at yard sales long ago. in fact, most everything else in there came from yard sales; i’d repainted all those carved sea captains, and finally found that little sailing ship (cow horn sails?) at a sale my friend was holding.
yeah, mr. wd and i had read the trilogy to each other by kerosene lantern back in ’73; the ‘farm hand’ house had electricity, but…no lamps. the film rubbish, save for a few bits from hobbiton, srsly turned me off. guess whozzit had reckoned that his ‘target audience’ wanted to see more and more grisly battle scenes; helm’s deep was disgusting war porn, imo.
but dagnabbit, i can’t listen to the video; i’ve tried three times to score a sound icon by rebooting, other jiggering, but no luck yet. i have what billy bob gates’ minions said was a permanent fix: registry files tweaks or something stashed somewhere. i’ll have to try to dig it out again when i have time.
of course I was j/k about the coral et al. unless…that’s the 50% of the deceased great barrier reef on the back of your toilet. oh god, is it?
agreed on the movies. how many decapitations make a good movie? p Jackson’s lust for violence seems to have completely violated the spirit of the books, like, I guess, baz lureman’s recent Gatsby portrayed the lavish parties & glitzy displays of affluent leisure as the whole point of the novel. hard to care about extravagant levels of violence being inflicted on…orcs. lotr was not meant to be the iliad. the wsws review of the lotr movies is worth a read. (where are the elvish houses of healing? oh right, toooooooo boring. unlike that Arwen romance, which wins the George Lucas “I understand romance” award.) & the hobbit! I love the hobbit. don’t get me wrong: the plot of LOTR is superb. top shelf. maybe never better. the execution…as ioz also said, “every sentence reads like, ‘able was I ere I saw elba.'” the hobbit movies, all 16 of them…how much crap can you shove onto the screen? capitalist creativity in action. like sausage-infused pizza dough. if you thought the lotr movies were bad, you ain’t seen nothing. same w/his king kong. just terrible.
on the commercial, you are really only missing m. bay say “awesome” at every dumb thing that happens. “my cat? awesome.” fuck you bay. if anything is worse than Verizon, it’s your dumbass movies.
https://lorenzoae.wordpress.com/2014/11/03/michael-bay-benghazi-film/
is jackson’s ‘hobbit’ worth watching? and oh, my, war porn bay really made transformer films? i was just thinking of those creepy toys some kids would bring our son as…birthday gifts.
well, not quite half of the great barrier reef coral is behind our tub, but then…they’re dying on accoutta humans killing the planet with trash, nuclear waste, acids, and related casual destruction, not so much as grabbing ocean souvenirs for touristas, no?
and thanks for the OMG link! later on that one! gifs, even; my stars.
Why don’t we just deploy Tom Friedman as a “dumb” bomb? Everyone in concentric circles would be stricken with varying degrees of inability to think or write coherently, destroying ISIS’ propaganda wing in its entirety? The war would surely be won!
confession. when i’d read your st.clair construction, then this: ” I mean, if you gonna have ww3, quasi-fake pix of tear-jerking dead babies is as good a reason as any. surely we’ll be thinking of nothing but the children when we blow ourselves up”, i admit i couldn’t handle it at all.
i’d just been watching ‘jude the obscure’ (jude the dumbass). i’d thought i’d read it decades ago, but as it turned out…i hadn’t, or would never, ever, had forgotten juey ( “Little Father Time” in the hardy’s book, i guess) and his note: “The morning after their arrival in Christminster, he murders Sue’s two children and commits suicide by hanging. He leaves behind a note that simply reads, “Done because we are too menny.”
i’ll never forget that child’s note, nor his ‘helpful to the family’ deed. my guess that it did happen a few times, and yes, i dreamed of hanging chirren, their ankles and feet. more dickensian than dickens, but w/ the added underlying class and christian morés and ‘know thy place, serf’ Rules. ‘god has ordained your place in life’.
‘MIT professor exposes ‘egregious error’ & evidence tampering in US report on Syria sarin incident’, 14 Apr, 2017 21:15
“Postol’s six-page addendum, made public on Thursday evening, “unambiguously shows that the assumption in the [White House report] that there was no tampering with the alleged site of the sarin release is not correct.”
That assumption was “totally unjustified,” wrote Postol, “and no competent intelligence analyst would have agreed that this assumption was valid.”
By implication, the report was not reviewed and released by competent intelligence experts – “unless they were motivated by factors other than concerns about the accuracy of the report,” the professor added.
Postol’s key argument is a series of photographs of the crater where the container holding sarin was supposedly air-dropped. He pointed to a photograph of several men inspecting the site, wearing loose clothing and medical gloves.” (and so on)
Vexed! How I love that word! But no Ms. wd, I am not. Senator Sanders was the finest sheepdog available, none finer. Up next: Tulsi Gabbard..?
oh, good, doug c; i’m glad. and you’re seein’ tulsi w/ wide eyes; i hadn’t known much about her save for her current twit account. but oof, i did grab this that big al wrote at c99% for cynical seeker kinda imagining that she’d be a good candidate for prez. turns out that her objections over syria were the exception, not the rule. how many cruise missile libruls can we handle?
https://www.juancole.com/2017/04/simultaneous-ahmadinejad-presidencies.html
Fascinating piece in the information wars from BBC through Juan Cole.
Would the the nationalist part of the Trump administration (or would the US “deep state”) seek Ahmedinejad’s election as a part of a process to bring down Khamenei and Islamic rule in Iran? How would the Pahlavis figure in such a move? Watch to see how fast the clerics can succeed in slapping down Ahmedinejad and the political consequences if they do. Republican opposition to the Iran Agreement on nuclear weapons and Trump’s threat to end it, not to mention Rouhani’s failure to deliver normalized relations with the US and an end to all sanctions, have weakened Rouhani’s popularity.
thanks for parsing that for possibilities, amigo. it got altogether too confusing for me; i hope bbc monitoring translated it right. there used to be that whole flap about whether or not he’d really said ‘israel should be wiped off the map’, etc., and if so, what he’d meant, as in: existentially or what.
oh, and it seems that our avaaz friend tom periello is running for gov of VA. i dug this out for a few librul dems who were cheer leading him as a good guy progressive, yada, yada glow. at (the accursed) dagblog. nah, no one, esp. ‘cvilledem’ (srsly) to whom i’d replied, responded.
on edit: while looking for a simple version, i’d seen ann garrison’s ‘PODCAST: Washington Post Attacks Burundi’
Wrong Kind of Green Jan 10, 2017 (Imperialist Wars/Occupations), as well.
this is representative, and stuff i hadn’t been aware of:
“The U.S. and E.U. nations have repeatedly demanded that Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza step down, but Russia and China have stood up for Burundi, as for Syria, on the U.N. Security Council. Despite its small size, Burundi is, like Syria, very geostrategically situated.
To the east, it borders the scandalously resource rich Democratic Republic of the Congo. To the north, it borders longstanding U.S. ally and military proxy Rwanda. To the East, it borders Tanzania, which also favors Russia and China and borders the Indian Ocean.
Russian and Chinese firms have won Burundi’s major mining contracts, and Russia and China have repeatedly blocked U.N. Security Council resolutions to condemn, sanction or send armed force to Burundi. The U.S. and E.U. nations have punished Burundi by cutting aid, imposing sanctions, and turning a blind eye to Rwanda’s cross border aggression.”
and more powers history hitting on burundi, plus another information proxy war; will mercenary/dark army troops be sent in?
yes: this:
“I want to scream.
Fuck you. Fuck you, Trump. Fuck you. Fuck all of you with your might-makes-right bellicosity. Fuck Obama. Fuck Hillary Clinton. Fuck George Bush. Fuck Dick Cheney. Fuck all the fucking warmongers. Fuck corporate news. Fuck the war industry. Fuck the war profiteers.
Fuck the United States of Fucking America.”
missy beattie
Since I’m not attracted to four letter words, my subtlety is attracted to and focused on the much larger picture that is our Indigenous America. To wit, the following:
Rejecting the Philosophical Underpinnings of Resentment
In today’s zealotry for punditry, the notion that “resentment” manifests itself all across the human endeavor, is at best risible and thusly, not readily believable. Consequently, anyone and who is believing that the Trump voter led their fellow voters to vote affirmatively and on the premise that this “resentment” was the political driving force, and where Trump campaigned and succeeded can be traced back to this perceived resentment, doesn’t stand our test of time.
And if I’m proven wrong, our future here in our wonderful Sonoran Desert will be secured for the Republican Party, of which it’s likely success over the next two generations, and subsequently, avoiding its demise as a political entity and in contrast to the Democratic Party. And this resentment challenges the pending success of the Progressive Movement even when Chicanos and Native American voters will carry the Progressive Movement over the finish line within the next 20 years and due to our political agitation. Consequently, our view of the “deep state” of the Chicano movement, is located in and of the Internet, and which has given us the ability to bring forth our allies, the voters and the concretized political issues that manifest our agenda and which we have continued to recognize as our “unmet needs” and where our family members, friends and neighbors will collectively accept our responsibility and duty to effectuate a “newer and better” Democracy.
So, when I apply this resentment into the arena of domestic policy or that portion that pertains to Comprehensive Immigration Reform, the Gang of Eight conveniently dismissed our notional for TransNational Technology Centers (TNC’s) to be established within our Construct of Embassies and Consulates, turned immigration into the infallible crime that is today as per Attorney General Sessions. Thus this behavior is being short-sighted, perpetuates this perceived resentment. As such, the Guatamaleno or El Salvadoreno national seeking a more productive life and having the ability to 1) seek a visa for travel to the U.S., 2) seek out a citizenship application due to the inherent local violence, 3, seek out access to a data base of employment for jobs available here in the U.S., and 4) federal funding initiatives for establishing economic development compacts between our largest metropolitan cities and the largest metropolitan cities/citizens throughout the Latin America Region, is imminently doable and is in some sizable cases, being accomplished today, and as evidenced by the democratic bastion that is the Mayor and the City Council in Phoenix, Arizona.
Further, when I apply this perceived resentment into the foreign policy arena, defining the Border between Israel and Palestine is an “easy” no-brainer. As such, the Oval Office resident needs only to issue his formal request to the General Assembly at the United Nations requesting that a Border Commission be established and with its appropriate mission do so, even if this mission requires the usage of the peace troops for security’s sake.
And, lest the reader not recognize reality, the ideas for the established Border Commission and the inclusion of the TNC’s and in our economic development initiatives, have been around for these past 35 years, and which reinforces our national history that was Reagan’s Legacy for the Era of Criminal Stupidity and Bush43’s Legacy for the Era of Gross Incompetence. Lest it not be said but I will, President Obama dropped ball due to his conservative or neo-liberal banality for the evident and requisite lack of street cred, we expected, yet, he did not deliver.
In closing, the zealotry of the pundits being utilized to de-fang Clinton’s loss of last November via this national level of comprehensive resentment, doesn’t justify this political loss as per the Progressive Movement, but it does recognize that short-sighted and simple-minded does not a campaign make when the “money is taken off the table” and the decision-making is focused on the ideas for a Prudent Peace, especially among the combative advocates for the ‘newer and better” ideas that make for a “newer and better” Democracy.
Jaango
heh; missy and i love four-letter words; so…you’re covered. interesting angle that indigenous america is larger, though. best to you; i gotta prep some dinner things.
thank you, neil, and i’ll say fuck the fake humanitarians’ outrage: “i tell you; we’re shocked by what those evil men are doing!! shocked!” fuck the masters of war, and all those who aid and abet them in their silence and abject bigoted, sophistry. all the money in the world can never buy back your souls.
’Humanitarian hypocrites: 20mn face starvation but Western focus is on Putin and Assad’, neil clark
“How do we know that the Establishment concern we saw about child victims of war was insincere? It’s easy. True humanitarians care about all victims equally. The concern of phony humanitarians is only for those who have been killed, or who appear to have been killed, by an “Official Enemy” of the Western elites – like Assad. This “outrage”has to be expressed strongly, and very publicly, in order to build support for the bombing of the “Official Enemy” country, and further the case for regime-change, which helps the arms industry and the one percent get even richer. However, if it’s an ally of the West or Western powers themselves responsible for the atrocities, it’s a very different story. Then it’s a case of: “Don’t mention the war!” Let’s change the subject as quickly as we can! Bellicose “liberal interventionists” become as quiet as church mice.
What made the double standards even more glaring this week is the fact that a large proportion of those facing starvation, as identified by the UNHCR, are in Yemen, which has been bombed by staunch Western ally Saudi Arabia for two years now.”
The very same countries who are directly responsible for the “world’s largest humanitarian crisis” in 2017 are – surprise, surprise! – the ones who have sought to take the moral high ground over Syria. The same neocons and “liberal interventionists” who screech “Something must be done about Assad!” on social media from 6 o’clock in the morning until 11 o’clock at night are quite happy for absolutely nothing to be done to stop the suffering in Yemen.
This is the neocon agenda of the warmongering elites and not of those who really care about humanity. Next time you come across a “humanitarian” saying that toppling Assad and “dealing” with Putin is the most pressing issue, ask them why it’s more important than saving 20 million people close to starvation. They won’t have a satisfactory answer.”
more is here, he includes corbyn trying to cut off funds to the sauds, sold out by his own deputy; he counts more people starving in other nations…
Seconded. I don’t normally use a lot of four letter word, but I’m with you and Missy, those neolibercontrahumanjingopoodlesatrapnazicryptoroyslistneocainraisinventionists can all go FUCK A DUCK!
in her defense, missy beattie had a few more things to say, but me? i have no defense! this a.m. telesur is reporting that herr hair is sending troops to somalia,of course to “fight al shabab”. sadly, their reporting notes that clinton’s original deployment of troops to somalia was in aid of a ‘rescue’ plan. yeah, that op went pretty damned well, didn’t it?
what’s the old joke? “the scariest words on the planet are ‘hello, i’m here for the US gummit; i’m here to help'”?
“This new mission is believed to be focused on the strengthening of the Somali army. The UK, Turkey, among others, are said to be training Somali troops as well. The Al-Shabab fighters continue to maintain a strong presence in the rural parts of Somalia.
The African Union has a force of about 22,000 soldiers currently providing support to the Somali Government in its fight against the terror group.”
oh, and let’s give them some bombing instructions!
yeah, libya’s in the pipeline, you betcha. but at least it’s not ‘regime change’; this regime’s already got the USA stamp of approval!
meanwhile, b at MOA’s ‘Ostara, Ishtar And A Happy Easter Walk’
but dayum; the easter bunny didn’t leave me nuffin’! not even ONE marshmallow chick!
Holy Jesus. After staying up with Ellspeth into the wee hours of Friday morning and sleeping through entire Good Friday, the first – day of my rare three-day weekend, I wake up to not only a disaster in one of my cases which I must address immediately, but also to news that “we” (just because I live here doesn’t mean I am on this team of depraved psychopaths) dropped a 22,000 TON bomb on Afghanistan.
And on Good Friday no less.
I have no words. Paging Comrade Vltchek.
I live on a beautiful property with 100 foot tall pines and oaks in a thicket of trees so thick and tall I can only see a tiny chunk of sky. My neighbors include owls, possums, fixed, woodpeckers of every stripe, snakes (don’t tell Ellspeth that) and lots of spiders. Banana spiders, mostly. Often I’ve paused to admire the sunlight hitting one of their webs.
Inside is a different story. I don’t kill the spiders, I catch them and put them outside if I can. Wolf spiders I leave alone, because they are harmless to humans and eat roaches. (Not that I have a roach problem, but an ounce of prevention…..
Ellspeth has the worst insect phobia I’ve ever seen. A single palmetto bug will send her into a state of paralyzing fear for an hour or more. That’s the most “crazy” thing about her which she readily admits but if that’s the worst thing I have to deal with, compared to what I have had to deal with in the past, it’s almost endearing. So the wolf spider is my little secret.
But Wendy, I don’t blame you for killing them if they are biting you. I would do the same and would kill a brown recluse on sight. We have those around here too. I’ve been lucky enough to have never come in contact with one, but a friend of mine was bit by one, and within a short time his arm could have been an illustration from an anatomy textbook. You know the ones that show a little section of the arm with nerves, muscles, veins, arteries and bones visible….
I can’t read the rest of the comments on my phone because they have descended into narrow column land, but I’m heading into the office, so maybe I can read them on my laptop, there goes my three-day weekend.
BTW, to do a little self-serving virtue signaling of my own, the legal disaster had nothing to do with me taking Good Friday off, the triggering event happened much earlier, but failure is not an option here or I’m ruined. In several different ways
Happy Easter to everyone, somber as things may be.
good easter to you, as well, and to all who celebrate it, either religiously or pagan-ly. i have a new vltchek on my word doc, and will bring it soon, amigo. but yes, we have black widows that we imported by way of old barns and sheds we tore down to use in our our house. mercifully, i’ve not been bitten by one of those. might see ya soon; i just popped the tax forms into their envelopes. sweet relief.
oh, and juliania had mentioned that this year, russian orthodox easter is tomorrow, as well.
just a quickie for now:
‘Now Only Rational Thinking Can Save The World’, by Andre Vltchek / April 14th, 2017
hard to know which parts to include; it’s long, as well as being photo essay, but this passage mirrors neil clark’s op-ed, esp. the last graph:
“I may be labeled as a fanatic, but I am decisively choosing those C) and B) options from the ‘dilemmas’ I depicted above.
I am choosing rationality, now that the US ‘armada’ packed with the nuclear weapons is sailing towards both China and North Korea, now that the Tomahawk missiles have rained down on Syria, now that the West will be sending thousands more mercenaries to one of the most devastated countries on Earth – Afghanistan.
Survival and then the advancement of the world should be our greatest goal. I believe it and I stand by it. In time of absolute crises, which we are experiencing right now, it is irresponsible, almost grotesque, to simply ‘continue to live our daily lives’.
Imperialism has to be stopped, once and for all, by all means. At the moment when the survival of humanity is at stake, the end justifies all means. Or as the motto of Chile goes: “By Reason Or By Force”.
Of course, if those ‘who know’ do not act, if they are cowardly and opportunistically do nothing, from a universal perspective, nothing much will happen: one small planet in one of the so many galaxies will simply cease to exist. Most likely there are many inhabited planets in the universe, many civilizations.”
Wow. Just the excerpt floored me. Thanks, wd. Stupid autocorrect changed “foxes” to “fixed” and earlier today, changed “Melania” to “Melabia.” Swear to God I’m not making this up. Must read Vltchek article in it’s entirety now.
at 11:55: And the stupid thing “corrects” my correct use of the apostrophe into the incorrect one. I. Want. To. Scream. At. This. STUPID SOCIETY
“is jackson’s ‘hobbit’ worth watching?” let’s see: take this little romp of a story for kids & stuff it w/as much swirling “Bayhem” garbage dragged out over 4 (!) movies, w/ random crap shoved in from The Silmarillion (I guess) for the sawdust filler and another dreary romantic sub-plot shoehorned in, oh, and the dreamy Orlando Bloom swirling his adorable Legolas hair in front of the camera at every turn. (Legolas? wtf is that? gotta throw some stuffing in for girls in these very boy-oriented stories. I like it when cherubs shoot orcs w/arrows thru the eyeballs.) I made it thru the 2nd one and no mas. I really like tolkien’s the hobbit but i’d put jackson’s movies on a par w/the lucas star wars prequels. oh, and bay’s transformers. yes. that non-stop battering of the senses of these movies is pernicious. symphonies have slow(er) movement(s) for a reason: to develop emotional depth & connection w/the characters. it takes time. no one gives a shit about any of the characters in any of these movies. video games have more development these days.
anyway, ok, so no, I won’t blame you for the die off of coral. thank you for clarifying that ;)
uh-oh; somehow i’d figured that ‘bilbo badass & his MOAB bazookas of power!!!!!’ was hinting at a nuh-uhn. four of them? phooey. i loved the images tolkien portrayed in the book; nope, won’t even ask the inter-liberry loan for the first one to grunge them up.
you got it half right on legolas: my gay friends were in love with legolas (he is pretty cute).
now i didn’t say that i was to blame for the disappearing coral, did i? i was only *incidentally* to blame. i reckon some of my plastic shit is part of the several great garbage patches out there, yanno? i gave up my cloth shopping bags so i wouldn’t be called a ‘purist’; even went back to plastic dinner napkins and knickers.
see? even chirren can make a living from the floating islands when bits wash on shore…kinda like crawling on the piles of discarded toxic tech toys in __ to sell various bits.
ya have a good easter?
oh god. that image.
yes, I had a mostly wonderful easter. but ugh. i’m sure one or two plastic easter eggs are in that mix. see what the easter bunny really brings, kids?
i’s a tough image, bayhem (i love it) but yes, perhaps plastic grass and plastic easter baskets. i did read a few investigations into the however many floating islands of trash, and was it depressing. it was bugging me that i couldn’t recall which third world nations accepted discarded US tech rubbish for ‘mining’, but i did at least discover a piece from 2002 naming: China Pakistan and India.
“Their investigations uncovered an entire area known as Guiyu in Guangdong Province, surrounding the Lianjiang River northeast of Hong Kong where about 100,000 poor migrant workers are employed breaking apart and processing obsolete computers imported primarily from North America.
“There, men, women and children toil “under primitive conditions, often unaware of the health and environmental hazards involved in operations which include open burning of plastics and wires, riverbank acid works to extract gold, melting and burning of toxic soldered circuit boards and the cracking and dumping of toxic lead laden cathode ray tubes,” says the report.”
yep, bill and mel can offer him lasting help. “but teach a man to fish rubbish…and he can feed the whole village…rubbish”
glad your day was good. sorry if i’m i’m sour; we talked to our son’s wife last night, and i dreamt of more military madness again last night,
that kid is learning valuable, marketable life skills. think what he could do after some time in the B&M Gates SAT Test Prep program for junior achievers!
dunno which madison ave. agency he’s paying for his charm offensive (same one narenda modi did?), but oh, my: it’s getting more serious. look out maduro; they’re comin’ after you. took two of em to spout so much bullshit.
‘Meet the charismatic opposition leader the Venezuela government just can’t silence’, la slimes
‘Russia and China dispatch spy ships to shadow Trump fleet’, theDuran.com, today
“As the US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and its accompanying escort ships come within striking distance of North Korea, a Japanese newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, is reporting that Russia and China have sent spy ships to monitor their movements.
Yomiuri Shimbun says it has been provided with this information by “numerous sources within the Japanese government”. The Japanese government would be well-informed about this situation because some of its own warships have joined the task force led by Carl Vinson. [snip]
The dispatch of Chinese spy ships to the area alongside Russia’s is however the only practical action China has so far taken during this crisis. It suggests cooperation between Beijing and Moscow, not Beijing and Washington.”
sigh. i’m collecting links and relevant history on north korea, but it’s bread day, and starting some seeds in the greenhouse day, and more, so…it may take a bit of time.
“Spy ships” are monitoring more than the movements of the battle group; they likely are collecting the communications between US and Japanese ships about intentions and actions.
Pence’s words were carefully crafted in his speech in Seoul, given that North Korea currently has a no-first-strike policy for nuclear weapons. And it all was phrased in terms of North Korea provocations triggering proportional US action.
We are at the “saving face” strategizing of how to back down from this bilateral brinksmanship. Trump is acting more conventionally having used the Syria strike and the MOAB bomb as his attention-getters.
i’d imagine you’re exactly right about the communications intercepts, THD, esp. as the author had noted that these days so many satellite images are available. not a few pundits express the idea of more false flags coming, which might…or might not serve the seemingly berserk cheeto bandito. i suppose it depends on his cabinet full of generals, & how much they’re jonesin’ for war, or indeed, how eager he is, gods save us.
as far as i’m reading things that i’d never known, the Imperium could stop it all right now by accepting deals that NK had put on the table decades ago, and offered many times since then.
but at least the japanese insiders didn’t say about the nato ships buzzing the spratleys in the south china sea: “oh, they were on a mapping expedition”. ;-)
A Happy Easter to all, today being traditionally Boxing Day where I come from, so I am ‘boxing’ (getting in my carriage and visiting) around the web and just commenting here that I did very like wendye biffing the cobweb around my own hobbithole yesterday, (which I am ashamed to say was the grungiest it has ever been).
I also was ashamed to break out the noisy vacuum cleaner in close cohabitation with neighbors and the day dawning oh so bright and totally peaceful and calm. But some of my kids were en route so something had to be done – I did my tried and true, bucket of cold water, wetting the broom occasionally, and sweep, sweep, sweep. Dust is the order of the day hereabouts – low humidity makes a wet broom a lovely thing – the house appreciated it, the garden got the benefit of soapless but dirty refreshment (dirt to dirt) – and the spiders stayed where they had been for the most part, in and out.
There’s so much mayhem in the world I cannot comment upon it. And the contrast is – here in my postage stamp of a garden it could not look more like paradise. (And the house looks a whole lot better than it did!)
I didn’t stay long at RT – the madness is there recorded as happening everywhere, and everywhere else. And at MofA, b says Christianity began in the 4th century, whilst at Saker I find him earnestly pushing back end times and composing a diatribe against jewish thinking. Onward to wendye, and her dear little bathtub!
I first thought the metaphor was to be found in “I’d shrugged mentally, and pronounced it ‘good enough for who it’s for’, as they say around here. ” For, at once sprang to mind what they say around here (or I do), which is: “Close enough for folk music.”
For me, I cannot constantly look into the abyss, doing which, as Nietzche (however you spell him) says, might tempt the abyss to look back – but I do on special occasions, (and Easter is one of them) completely shun such activities.
This Easter my two giant lilacs, the white and the blue are in bloom simultaneously and are in bloom at Eastertime. The first has never happened before, and the second only happens occasionally. Easter, being a moveable feast, ranges back and forth on the calendar but for the Orthodox one I can say with some veracity that Holy Thursday night is when heaven peacefully touches earth as far as both heavens and earth are concerned in my locale, and Good Friday is always beset by wind. At least, close enough for folk music.
When the woman was pouring costly ointment from an alabaster jar on the feet of Jesus and weeping, the host of the party was asking himself, “Does he know what sort of woman this is?” (Maybe he’d been looking too long into the abyss.) I kind of think that Jesus’ response was very much like “good enough for who it’s for” – and for me,well, it’s just music to my ears.
“Simon, do you see this woman?”
Christos voskrese!
Christos anesté!
Christ is Risen!
The bathtub:
Let us cleanse our senses
That we may be able to contemplate
Christ resplendent with the glory of the Resurrection
And hear him say
“Rejoice, you who sing triumphal praise!”
Thank you for the metaphor, wendye! And to spiders everywhere, look to the little clown, the jumping spider we all love, and don’t bite our
dear hostess here!
thanks for all of it, juliania; you cheered me up. including of course, your call to spideys to not bite me, but i laughed aloud at this:
“When the woman was pouring costly ointment from an alabaster jar on the feet of Jesus and weeping, the host of the party was asking himself, “Does he know what sort of woman this is?” (Maybe he’d been looking too long into the abyss.) I kind of think that Jesus’ response was very much like “good enough for who it’s for” – and for me,well, it’s just music to my ears.”
and happy easter (and boxing day) to you, as well.
in honor of easter, a song about martyrdom:
and from the same album:
several people I know have been dealing w/the looming threat of diagnosis of some likely terminal illness or actual death. “you want to trust the doctors…their procedures are the best…questioning the sciences…questioning religion…”
anyway, this is from one of the stories of Haysoos miraculously feeding people:
Late in the afternoon his disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. 36 Send the crowds away so they can go to the nearby farms and villages and buy something to eat.”
37 But Jesus said, “You feed them.”
“With what?” they asked. “We’d have to work for months to earn enough money[g] to buy food for all these people!”
38 “How much bread do you have?” he asked. “Go and find out.”
dammit
took me five reboots to get sound, but yes. the lyrics. “Who cast the final stone? Who threw the crushing blow? Someone has to take the fall… Why not me?
Had consequence chose differently
Had fate its ugly head
My actions make me beautiful
And dignify the flesh
Me. I am free. Free.
loaves and fishes might be an aspirational metaphor for today, yes? i couldn’t get past the buzzing on airportman, but we have a number of friends facing terminal conditions, or even horrific conditions now.
one has a weird sort of bone cancer, and has been receiving experimental treatments in palo alto, and the current news is not good. all we can do is feed them when they’re here, make sure they feel our love. but all along, i’ve been trying to remember an REM song about battling cancer. or so i’ve always supposed, as the lyrics may have been somewhat…obscured. but the lyrics are just beyond my memory’s ears.
http://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/4/13/15268604/american-energy-one-diagram
comments getting eaten. above is good. I mean awful USA#1!
Questioning death, yes. It’s the great unfathomable. I can only say that people I have known closing in on the mystery seem, if they are not constantly racked with pain, other worldly – and I don’t mean because of belief, thinking of my father who was not a religious man. I’m sorry I can’t say it better, but we die a bit even in life, just going to sleep every night, only comes a time we won’t wake up and then our earth parts go back there.
I have been thinking that an all knowing God has already seen the depths mankind will reach. And yet if the stories are true part of him did this action. And it’s okay not to have faith – because faith is a gift and some haven’t been given the gift, that’s all. Who knows why. Maybe to keep us all humble. I was reading a book about it – “Lazarus” by Morris West. Good book.
[Sorry, have to go]
thanks for the thoughts, juliania. yes, some approaching the great beyond do seem to be in a sort of transitional state, which is what our friend whose young adult son committed suicide calls death. he swears that their son communicates with him; that’s beyond my ken, except of course, in the dreamworld.
it’s long baffled me that most of the religious folks i know have feared death the most. but, i finally dug out our REM discs, and found the song i couldn’t remember. had i remembered ‘alligators’, it’s likely that bingling would have kicked it up. given that a few of the lyrics might resonate w/ your final paragraph, and that you are hesitant to watch videos cuz: bytes, i’ll paste in the lyrics.
You want to go out Friday
And you want to go forever
You know that it sounds childish
That you dreamt of alligators
You hope that we are with you
And you hope you’re recognized
You want to go forever
You see it in my eyes
I’m lost in the confusion
And it doesn’t seem to matter
You really can’t believe it
And you hope it’s getting better
You want to trust the doctors
Their procedure is the best
But the last try was a failure
And the intern was a mess
And they did the same to Matthew
And he bled ’til Sunday night
They’re saying don’t be frightened
But you’re weakened by the sight of it
You lock into a pattern
And you know that it’s the last ditch
You’re trying to see through it
And it doesn’t make sense
But they’re saying don’t be frightened
And they’re killing alligators
And they’re hog-tied
And accepting of the struggle
You want to trust religion
And you know it’s allegory
But the people who are followers
Have written their own story
So you look up to the heavens
And you hope that it’s a spaceship
And it’s something from your childhood
You’re thinking don’t be frightened
You want to climb the ladder
You want to see forever
You want to go out Friday
And you want to go forever
And you want to cross your DNA
To cross your DNA with something reptile
And you’re questioning the sciences
And questioning religion
You’re looking like an idiot
And you no longer care
And you want to bridge the schism,
A built-in mechanism to protect you
And you’re looking for salvation
And you’re looking for deliverance
You’re looking like an idiot
And you no longer care
‘Cause you want to climb the ladder
You want to go forever
And you want to go out Friday
You want to go forever…
it makes me weep, of course, in its familiarity.
In something of the same vein, wendye, as I still have the book to return to the library – and thank you for giving me the lyrics of the music – this excerpt is from the final oration of the newly enlightened pontiff to his fellow bishops(most of whom remain unenlightened):
‘…I want to explain it to you. Bear with me now, I beg you. If our minds and our hearts cannot meet on a matter of life and death, then we are truly lost and wandering.
‘I do not propose to weary you with sick-room reminiscences. I want to tell you simply that there comes a moment when you are aware that you are about to step out of light into darkness, out of knowing into unknowing, without guarantee of return. It is a moment of clearness and stillness, in which you know, with strange certainty, that whatever is waiting to receive you is good, beneficent, loving. You are aware that you have been prepared for this moment, not by any action of your own, but by the gift of life itself, by the nature of life itself.
‘Some in this room will remember the long process against the distinguished Jesuit, Father Teilhard de Chardin, suspected of heresy and for a long time silenced within the Church. In my zeal as a young cleric, I approved what was done to him. But – here is the strange thing – in that still clear moment before the dark, I remembered a sentence de Chardin had written: “God makes things make themselves…” ‘
whoosh. i’d had to look it up, but it was “…Pope Leo XIV, a reactionary and forbidding pontiff who emerges from heart bypass surgery with a “change of heart” about a lot of things. As he struggles to overcome the policies he himself put into place, he must battle enemies from within the Vatican as well as Islamic terrorists determined to assassinate him.”
i admit i’ve forgotten de chardin and his fate, but i will applaud leo for his change of…understanding. because of a discussion on another thread here, i got to thinking about living in the US and fearing what will come next. for me, to still be able to live in the light of this wildlife sanctuary we’ve created, garden a bit, watch the skies at night…feed an water the birds and other visitors, and perhaps above all, be aware of the 4 seasons, phases of la luna bella!, in other words, feel life! i hope/imagine will prepare me not to fear death, but see it as another journey.
mr.wd and i went down and out into our wee gardens a bit ago to see who came alive again, who may not have, but the early fecundity simply blew me away. peonies (paonias) almost ready to bloom, miz fritillaria’s plump hanging bells caught in the western sun; and oh: look at all the volunteer annuals! the catkins on the weeping birch outside the bedroom door chubby as i’ve ever seen them, eaves about to unfurl; the pear blossoms alive w/ bees…some says i could cheerfully die with all the bounty. yes, esp. those days i am so tired of pain, but still, all of it helps keep the abyss at bay. oh dear, how i did go on. but thank you again.
oh, and you may have seen the film version of west’s ‘the shoes of the fisherman’ starring the cranky anthony quinn. ;-)
Isn’t it odd that mr. Paris shooter had a stay with the fuzz shortly before spraying the champs elysee with bullets?
whoa, nellie, j. nice to see you’ve surfaced; i’d been about to send in the marines to find you! (okay, maybe the K-9 Korp’s auxilliaries the K-Kitty Korps).
but no: i’d never clicked into those stories; are you pinging false flag or such? or just another dude pissed off by the po-po?
oh, I was def leaning toward Mr. shooter being some kind of asset but yeah, I suppose there could be other explanations. but maybe being so pissed off at the swine was part of his trigger? push him over the edge while making certain suggestions…?
lots to catch up on, wanted to pop in & say hi.
i may need to catch up myownself; i get very tunnel-visioned when i’m on some trail or another. yes to those possibilities due to ample examples. i just stuck up a new open menu if you’d care to wax polemically. ‘hi’ is not enough, j! ;-) i’ve missed you, iow.