keep it in mind

Eram quod es.




Eris quod sum.

random cards @ mid month

The studious young Jack of Clubs is a personification of creative, highly-charged mental energy. Will this be something new?









  Seven Diamonds is the spiritual money card -- a real-life oxymoron. When it appears, we will wish to examine just how attached to our money we are, and cultivate a little gratitude for what we've got. This is a time when our faith in the abundance of the universe is tested.





Tarot trump IV, the Emperor, is a disciplined guy, in control of himself, and confident in his role as the head guy in charge of everything. But ask yourself, "Are we a bad leader? Demanding? Impatient? Unreasonable?" So don't say "My way or the highway," lest you find yourself set out upon that selfsame highway, going down that dirt road by yourself.

the way ahead

The queen is indicative of a person who is highly intuitive, well-organized, and possessed of the nurturing instinct. This is someone who may be high strung and impatient. All these traits, usually associated with females, are in reality not gender-specific.

The ten of hearts is the performers' card, but the type of performing alluded to here isn't specified. This ten is closely linked to the Jack of Spades, possibly the most creative of all the suited cards (as opposed to the tarot trumps), and he can signal initiation into a higher plane of existence than one has experienced up until now.

The six hearts is a peacemaking card, but peace only comes after the card's karmic prerequisites are satisfied. Six hearts demands that all outstanding obligations pertaining to love be discharged, and that one take responsibility for the words spoken, actions done, and feelings generated by the closest of relationships.

Then come the nines, which signify endings. Nine hearts indicates a personal loss of desired affection, either that of the special other, or a diminishment one's own affection for that certain someone. The nine diamonds is concerned with the material plane, and usually means the ending of an accustomed way of making money or otherwise supporting oneself.

A bifurcated reading, with resolution and endings below on earth, and new beginnings in the sky above. Click on the picture for a larger image.

Photo and images on cards ©Dave B, 2012.

lost in the woods

I'm lost in the woods. The funny thing is, I don't even care whether I find my way out again, and don't know where I'd go or what I'd do if I did escape. I feel captive in this lady's organic gingerbread house, even though this is where I asked to be, sort of. I guess I didn't know it would be as confusing as it is.

chimpanzees on his mind

(*) An obviously amateur artist gives us a startling and in some ways very affecting picture. The painter's skills are not particularly refined; the subject's hands are badly rendered, for example. (*) Looking at something this weird, a person is bound to have questions. What was the subject's connection to the artist? Why are there two blue chimpanzees fucking in the sky behind the guy's head? (*) The ultimate thrift-store masterpiece was found at a second-hand store in Portland, Oregon. (!!) --30-- CLICK IMAGE TO EMBIGGEN.

Eostre

Easter falls on April 8 this year, the first Sunday following the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. The other significant lunar event of the year will be the blue moon, August 31.

testing...testing

This is a communication from the farthest outpost in the struggle for the preservation of ecstasy. We're doing OK out here, and just wanted to drop by and say "howdy."

btsflk

Here iss a hot, stimmy gritting from Yoshua Treeshua.

Why doan you open it?

No! ¿Why doan CHEW?!

BTSFLK!

Illustration by Matt Williams, dba überkraaft.

--30--

the theocrat

Writing in this week's New Yorker, Ryan Lizza tells how Michele and Marcus Bachmann while still in college fell under the influence of Christian dominionist author and film-maker Francis Schaeffer, who produced a film series, "How Shall We Then Live?"

Schaeffer died in 1984, but one of his disciples, Nancy Pearcy, carried on his work.

When, in 2005, the Minneapolis Star Tribune asked Bachmann what books she had read recently, she mentioned two: Ann Coulter’s “Treason,” a jeremiad that accuses liberals of lacking patriotism, and Pearcey’s “Total Truth,” which Bachmann told me was a “wonderful” book.

(Read more.)

Ryan Lizza also reports that in a recent Iowa speech, Bachmann asked the audience if they were familiar wth "How Then Should We Live?" and when greeted with applause, said:

That also was another profound influence on Marcus’s life and my life, because we understood that the God of the Bible isn’t just about Bible stories and about Bible knowledge, or about just church on Sunday. He is the Lord of all of life. Every bit of life, including sociology, theology, biology, politics. You name the area and walk of life. He is the Lord of life. And so, as we went back to our studies, we looked at studying in a completely different light. Not for the purpose of a career but for a purpose of wondering, How does this fit into creation? How does this fit into the code and all of life that is about to come in front of us? And so we had new eyes that were opened up as we understood life now from a Biblical world view.

Sounds like theocracy to me.

--30--

the sun's light

What follows is an edited version of a post which first appeared here on February 13, 2009.

The wise man Patanjali, the apocryphal transmitter of early yoga tradition, spoke of a "seer," or that part of us which sees, and taught that the right kind of mental discipline would establish (or reveal) this seer "in our own true nature." The discipline, according to the teaching, will enable a person "to see clearly."

The ancient Indian texts called the Upanishads identify this seer as Atman, also called the self, "hidden in every object of creation," being "the very Self which descends down...through self-projection and participates." According to this view, then, the center of the human being (or any other living thing) is the supreme being itself, incorporating itself into, the individual.

This sounds very much like the "collective unconscious" theory of Dr. Jung, who wrote that "A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious (i.e., subconscious mind) is undoubtedly personal. I call it the 'personal unconscious.' But this personal layer rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the 'collective unconscious.' I have chosen the term 'collective' because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal..." (S.V. Wikiquote: Carl Jung, en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Jung)

Not everyone agrees. Prince Gautama, who became the Buddha, did not believe in a Self separate from the individual, and taught that "Self is but a heap of composite qualities." He believed that what some call the Self or Seer is a bundle of loose ends, and simply another component of the individual.

But for our purposes, defining this part of our brain we see with as God or not-God is not important. What's at issue is the possibility of seeing "clearly," which both Patanjali and the Buddha agree is only possible by overcoming our social conditioning. William Blake expressed this same idea when he wrote that "The sun's light, when he unfolds it / Depends on the organ that beholds it."

This is all very deep stuff, and confusing to one not used to thinking in terms which can only seem abstract until experience has made them concrete. I find myself referring to something I heard my grand-teacher say about the G-word (God) when he expressed his preference for simply lumping all notions of Atman, Self, God, etc. under the phrase "that which never changes." What he's saying is that our attention, as distinct from that upon which the attention is directed, never changes.

The analogy I use to illustrate this principle is a goldfish bowl, which holds fish, water, plants, pebbles, and dirt. The contents of the bowl are the objects of attention, and the bowl is the attention itself. If your mind perceives goldfish in the bowl, you're perceiving accurately. If you see piranhas, you're misperceiving, and if you see miniature sea monsters, you're imagining. If you see not the goldfish swimming in the bowl but the ones who used to swim there and are now departed, you're remembering. And if you see nothing, you're asleep.

But if you empty the bowl and wipe it clean, and allow it to remain empty, avoiding both the temptation and the tendency to fill it with this or that, then there will be nothing to occupy the attention but the attention itself, which unlike its constantly-changing contents, never changes. It's always transparent and reflects accurately, like a clean mirror.

Since beginning a yoga practice I've attempted with limited success to empty my mind's attention of its contents. Changes in the mind have occurred, and I sometimes see things in my mind's eye that I don't understand. Also, life, and even the most mundane daily events, sometimes seem extremely strange and unfamiliar. I'm sure this is some sort of manifestation of the practice. I guess there's nothing to do but go on with it.

--30--

The Lion Sleeps

"The Lion Sleeps Tonight," recorded by the doo-wop group The Tokens in 1961, shot to number one on the pop charts immediately on its release. Part of the song's appeal was its uniqueness, and it certainly sounded completely different from any other American pop music of that or any other time.

Very few people were aware that the Tokens' hit was a cover, and that earlier versions had been done by the Kingston Trio, in 1959, and Pete Seeger's folk revival group The Weavers, in 1952. The Weavers' version had actually gone all the way to number six on the Billboard Top 100, but pop music fans tend to have short memories.

Virtually nobody was aware of the song's South African origins, even when, in 1994, it gained renewed popularity after Ladysmith Black Mambazo recorded it for Disney's animated feature "The Lion King," using its original title, "Mbube." The success of this latter-day version, which was incorporated in a live Broadway musical and a TV series, generated millions of dollars in revenue for Disney and a lawsuit by the dirt-poor descendents of the song's author, Solomon Linda, and the back story of "The Lion Sleeps" finally began to circulate.

Linda, at far left in the photo above, was born in 1909 in South Africa and wrote "Mbube" in the '20's. He was working as a cleaner and record packer for the Gallo Record Company in Roodepoort, South Africa in 1939 when he got the opportunity to record the tune with his vocal group, The Evening Birds. It was a hit in South Africa, selling over 100,000 copies, but Solomon Linda was paid only a small recording fee and sold the rights to the song to Gallo for a pittance. He enjoyed regional success as a singer and songwriter for some years thereafter, but died impoverished in 1962.

In about 1950 the American musicologist Alan Lomax discovered the recording and shared it with his friend Pete Seeger, whose subsequent concert and recorded versions were titled "Wimoweh," a mishearing of the song's Zulu refrain "Uyimbube" (You are a lion).

I became aware of the song's origins in the early 90's when I heard it on the CD "The Secret Museum of Mankind: Ethnic Music Classics; Vol. 4, 1925-48" on the Yazoo label. No American version that I'm aware of conveys the powerful and extremely African essence of the original, in which Linda used three bass singers in his back-up chorus.

If you want to learn more, see the excellent Wikipedia articles "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" and "Solomon Linda."

--30--

china is kicking our butts

China tested their new Beijing to Shanghai bullet train last month. They're griping about how much it cost them, but people everywhere and at all times gripe about the cost of things.

We could be building trains like this in this country, and there was a time not so long ago when we would have. Building infrastructure that looks to the future is an investment. One inter-city train project would put thousands of people to work.

Anyway, that's what the Chinese are doing. But we're too busy debating whether or not we should fail, and become a deadbeat to even recognize that there is something called the future.

The train is powered by electricity, and its 5 hour run to Shanghai takes about half as long as a conventional train.

I took a train from Portland to Seattle a few days ago, and it was great! Unlike flying, taking the train is actually fun.

--30--

clock with sphinx, cards, miscellaneous

The mantel clock was manufactured in New York City by the Ansonia Clock Company, probably between 1879 and 1920. It was the kind of mass-produced "luxury" item available in the popular mail-order catalogs of the day, such as those distributed by Sears and Roebuck and the St. Louis Hardware Company.

It's a study in contrasts: the extraordinary late-Victorian ugliness of the clock body seems not to belong to the beautiful cast-iron figure of Calliope, the muse of epic poetry with her wax tablet and stylus.

The face of double-headed iron sphinx looks remarkably like that of a Czech gangster I knew in my youth, a hoodlum named Dennis. It was most likely the ornamental top piece for a now-departed large clock.

The Victorian composition is completed by the inclusion of "fortune-telling cards," popular at the time.

Photo and images on cards created by Dave b and © 2011 by Daveb, Horney, and Smeavey Productions.

Click for bigger.

--30--

Rap

I always thought I didn't like rap at all, and I can still do without most of it. All the posing and gratuitous cussing are, well, adolescent bullshit, if you really wanna know.

I always thought it was mostly just the sound of it I didn't like, but either I was wrong or tastes change.

First I rediscovered the politico-socio-psychological work of Oaktown Mike Franti and the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy.

And then, quite by accident, I stumbled across the Polish rapper Dongularesko and his sidekick Dj Kostek doing "5 Chinek."

What's a chinek? Is it currency? I have no idea what this guy is rapping in Polish about except when he says 'Bam bam bam," but I love the sound. It's that synth-loop melody that drives it, I think, a combination of Middle East and old-time carnival carousel.

Listen!

--30--

What it Is

A Very Short History of the US since the Turn of the Century

What it is, cats and kitties? The prelude to the new century, the pro-log as it were, was good old Bill and the good times. We knew it was too good to last. Besides everybody workin and makin money, there was the stuff that was just good plain fun, you know, spunk on a blue dress and all that really hilarious "We gotcha, you pervert!" shit that made everybody's Aunt Anna gasp and clutch at her pearls.

But then it was 2000, and Bill's curtain call where he said "Bye, y'all. I gotta go now. Last one to leave, turn out the lights."

Then came darkness followed by a hangover, then came Bush. And his merry band of mentally deranged palsied harlequin mummers, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Paul "Smellysox" Wolfowitz.

Under Bush, everything became dreadful. It was still a great country to live in, but only if you were the "right" kind of person.

So we spent the greater part of the first 10 years of the new century in a kind of mental and spiritual gulag, relieved only by occasional outbursts of catastrophe, such as first, 9/11, then the war(s), and finally the bubble bust and collapse. But now, something rather odd has happened.

So along comes (ta da) Mr. Wonderful, that nice young black guy who didn't even sound or act anything like Bill O'Reilly's stereotype of how a nice young black guy is supposed to sound or act. And he was all like, "Hopey," and "Changey," so a lot of people said, "Hey, why not? Things might get a little better, and I sure as hell don't see how they could get worse," so went to bed and to sleep.

Then we woke up to a new day, same old shit. End of story.

And the moral of the story is: Bad situations get worse when they remain the same because they start to look like forever.

--30--

bouquet & brickbat

If I knew her name and address I would send a bouquet to the property owner who hired Seattle muralist David Heck to decorate the oft-graffiti'd blank wall of this vacant building she owns at 105th and Aurora, on the border between my neighborhood and those to the east.

Her thinking is that even spray-paint vandals and would-be street artists will respect competent artistry enough to bypass this location, and she's probably about 90 percent right.

The mural, still a work in progress, takes us on a nostalgic drive down old Highway 99 (Aurora Avenue) as it was during the golden age of our car-centric society, when the automobile was an object of veneration and symbol of liberation rather than an odious impediment to progress, as it is more accurately viewed today. Heck included some still-existing landmarks such as the elephant, eye-catching enough to have survived over a storefront through many changes in ownership and function, and the Klose-Inn Motel, which still offers rooms although it has seen better days.

Most of what you see here, however, is long gone; the beloved Twin Teepees Restaurant is just a memory, the Chubby and Tubby hardware store is a now a used furniture, junk mart, and eyesore called "Stupid Prices," and Playland, the amusement park which stood on the shore of Bitter Lake, was demolished many years ago.

I have mixed feelings about celebrating the advent of something as incredibly destructive of the natural environment, the urban landscape, and social relationships as the car has proved to be, but I suppose it's best viewed as a celebration of innocence. Forty years ago we sat in our gas guzzlers gulping down burgers and fries without the slightest apprehension of what we were doing to ourselves or others. In those days, the answer to too many cars was seen as more of the same -- more and bigger roads, and everybody believed the tremendous traffic jams along Aurora/99 would be solved by building Interstate 5 through town. They were right in a way; Aurora is now a pleasant if somewhat scenically ugly drive most of the time, while I-5 is the largest parking lot in the state.










If I knew the name and address of the owner of this blight on the neighborhood at 107th and Greenwood, I would throw a brickbat at his car, which I strongly suspect is a Cadillac Escalade. I don't know how long this pestiferous blot has stood in its present condition; it was abandoned and trashed when I moved here over a year and a half ago. Why the city has failed to condemn and seize this property as a public hazard and eyesore is beyond me. The "For Sale" sign is still on it, along with a public notice that hearings to assess the environmental impact of erecting a four-storey apartment complex with shops on the ground floor have recently concluded. So there's hope, but the wheels of civic improvement grind extraordinarily slowly.

And it's the automobile (again) that's responsible for this affront to the community festering for years. People driving by it at 40-plus miles an hour don't notice it enough to care. How long do you think such an insult to civic pride would be allowed to stand if all those drivers had to walk past it every day?

Photos by Catboxer. Click on them for larger views; click a second time for even greater embiggening.

--30--

D-generation

June 20, 2011

Dear AARP:

I've been an AARP member for 17 years, but am now resigning from the organization effective immediately.

This was not an easy decision, but considering the AARP's recent announcement that its leadership is now considering cooperating with bipartisan (but chiefly Republican) plans to reduce Social Security benefits to future recipients by raising the full retirement age, I feel I have no choice.

In the wake of the June 17 Wall Street Journal story which announced the AARP's change of position, a spokeswoman for the organization declared that "our position has not changed," when it clearly had. All subsequent AARP pronouncements on this matter have been vague and nebulous, rather than expressed in the language of what was once a vigorous and committed advocacy group for older Americans.

It seems to me that AARP should now be signaling total opposition to this bipartisan sellout, agitating for a restoration of the full retirement age to 65, and turning up the heat on Congress to pass a much-needed cost-of-living increase for 2011, one which would be retroactive to include 2010.

Paying lip service to politicians' attempts to short-change and eventually gut the most successful social program in the country's history indicates the AARP's new willingness to play along with the economic falsehoods we're subjected to daily, courtesy of the corporate-owned mass media. It gives credence to the notion that the need to reduce the debt is the country's most pressing problem (it's not; mass unemployment is), that "austerity" is the way out of recession (it isn't; spending on jobs is), and most ludicrous of all, that Social Security is in trouble, when even an oligarch like Alan Simpson will admit under pressure that the trouble is 26 years away.

For the last 30 years, our bribed-and-paid-for political establishment has been vigorously engaged in attempting to funnel all this country's wealth from the working classes upward, into the hands and pockets of a corporate plutocracy in whose service they labor, and with great success if the income distribution numbers are to be believed. Any advocacy organization for older and retired, working-class Americans must take a clear and uncompromising stand against this trend and its proponents. Searching for "common ground" with fat cats and Republican ideologues sends exactly the wrong message.

We had a saying back in the sixties: You're either part of the problem or part of the solution. The AARP's leadership urgently needs to do some deep soul searching.

Sincerely,
David T Brice
Former Member #--- --- --- -

cc: Editor, Seattle Times

Photo: President Roosevelt signs Social Security into law in August of 1935.

--30--

high water everywhere

Lord, the whole round country,
Lord, river has overflowed;
Lord, the whole round country,
man, is overflowed;

(You know I can't stay here,
I'll go where it's high, boy)

I would go to the hilly country,
but, they got me barred.

--Charlie Patton
High Water Everywhere, Part I

Charlie was singing about the great flood of '27, and probably never imagined there could be a worse one, like the flood of 2011.

One of the differences is the historically record-setting high level of the Missouri River as well as the Mississippi. Another is that the flood of 1927 drew massive newspaper and radio coverage, while today's disaster has so far been covered minimally, if it all.

This begs the bigger question of why the most significant and worthy stories are frequently buried by the corporate media, which instead of reporting them emphasizes shiny objects with personal-interest value, such as Tony Weiner's Excellent Adventure. Jim Kunstler says the national media is being held hostage by Little Caylee.

The biggest story of all is the national media itself, now owned and tightly controlled by the same corporatist influences which have total control over everything that happens in "the village" (Washington, D.C.). So even though the Times ran a story about the Missouri River flood, it was buried in the Greenwire blog of the Business Section, nowhere near page one. And it's not a very good story because it concentrates mainly on the Corps of Engineers response to the flood and politicians' criticisms of the
Corps, rather than the magnitude and significance of the disaster itself.

There's probably some decent reporting on it in the localities where the disaster is occurring (I'll check some of those out today) as well as unofficial places such as blogs and Facebook pages maintained by residents in the affected areas. I've seen some pictures from local sources, and they're scary as hell.

The corporate media is making every effort to downplay and suppress news of the Great Flood of 2011, since reporting it would clearly inform people that global warming is now a life-and-death situation for us, and broadcasting the news would cause unrest. People would start to put two and two together and recognize the situation we're in, and maybe begin to wish they had the terrorists back again as their main worry. Better they should be distracted by Tony's weiner, Kim's wedding, and the trial of Little Caylee's mom.

The Missouri River at Omaha. AP/Sioux City Journal photo by Jim Lee.

--30--

the monolith

Here is the monolith, the beating heart of our contemporary civilization, if we can call it that.

All the organs of government and order but one are housed here. The two top floors are occupied by the Ministry of Truth (Minitru), and are where the templates from which the contents of all mass media -- television, movies, print, and cyberspace -- are hammered out then disseminated. These templates are the raw material of what is commonly called "the Matrix."

The two middle floors include all the operations of the Ministry of Plenty (Miniplenty), and encompass departments as diverse as the Full Employment Wing and the Abundant Retirement Administration.

The ground floor and basements are taken up by the Ministry of Love (Miniluv), where you will find the notorious Room 101 in the deepest sub-basement, hidden away from the eyes of the world due to the overwhelming amount of love constantly dispensed there.

The blank facade of the monolith has shoved aside and rendered obsolete the human face of the old paternalistic social order, with its feudal hierarchies and quaint, polytheistic Christianity, replacing them with the uncompromising monotheism of total devotion to Moloch, whose name is Profit.

Only one ministry, Minipax, is housed outside the monolith, in its own five-sided building. So vast is the domain of Minipax that it constitutes almost a separate nation on its own, for there is much peace to dispense, both domestically and throughout the world. The foundation and global reach of this colossal and remarkable institution will be the topic of another essay.

--30--

defending your rights

The fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees citizens the right "to be secure in their persons, papers, and houses." Unfortunately, it doesn't confer a right for us to be secure in our electronic transmissions, since those things didn't exist at the time the Bill of Rights was embedded in our law.

"What does it mean" asks the social agitator and journalist Naomi Wolf, "to live in a society in which surveillance is omnipresent?"

It means, she continues, A concerted effort is underway in the US – and in the United Kingdom – to “brand” surveillance as positive. New York City subway passengers are now advised that they might experience random searches of their bags. Activists in America are now accustomed to assuming that their emails are being read and their phone calls monitored. Indeed, the telecom companies Verizon and AT&T have established areas on their premises for eavesdropping activity by the National Security Agency.

The paranoia of a government which conducts blanket surveillance of its citizens is obvious, and it's the reason why a pacifist/anarchist like Scott Crow of Austin, Texas ends up on the FBI's "domestic terrorism" watch list.

Besides monitoring all his phone calls and e-mails, government agencies closely watch Crow's house for any potential acts of terrorism that may be committed by his housemate, his pair of backyard goats, his flock of chickens, his turkey or his vegetables, or possibly enacted through some nefarious use of the solar panels on his roof.

In an article in the May 23, 2011 New Yorker, the award-winning political journalist Jane Mayer details the emergence of a vast new security bureaucracy, in which at least two and a half million people hold confidential, secret, or top-secret clearances; huge expenditures on electronic monitoring, along with a reinterpretation of the law in order to sanction it; and corporate partnerships with the government that have transformed the counterterrorism industry into a powerful lobbying force.

Considering the circumstances in which we now find ourselves, it becomes obvious that the Bill of Rights notwithstanding, the only rights we truly possess are those we're capable of defending.

With this in mind, I've recently cut back my presence on the internet by about 75 percent. I post here once a week and check my e-mails, but I no longer visit Facebook or post on the discussion boards at BeliefNet, since those places, besides being subject to government snooping, are under constant surveillance by armies of advertisers, con men, and scheissters.

At a time like the present, I would encourage fellow-citizens to reconsider the virtues of the United States Postal Service, which is also subject to surveillance, but of a much less comprehensive type due to physical limitations, and to re-visit the habit of letter writing. Also, printed newspapers, published anonymously, may enjoy a renaissance in the near future, since they would provide a much more secure medium for spreading revolutionary information and sentiment than blogs.

One thing is certain: we have a right to privacy, and cannot possibly continue living under the tyranny of a surveillance state, since its existence is incompatible with a free society.

--Cassandro
--30--