Solo:

Sadikova at 16 years of age (!).

Ensemble:

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MOTUS A.D.: In The Infamous Words Of Rosana Rosana Dana, “It’s Always Something” ||  reports: I was admitted at 11:00 pm Monday, 12 hours after arriving at the ER, dripped until Wednesday evening at which time I was determined to have reached a “therapeutic” level of blood thinner. I was released and sent home with oral blood thinners which will be a permanent addition to my drug protocol. I was happy to relinquish my room to some poor soul still lying on a stretcher in a hallway somewhere .

I was initially told that the clot could have caused heart damage due to the excess pressure it placed on the heart, but they seem to have determined that was not the case, thankfully. Once again, I owe a huge thank you to everyone here who has been soliciting the Good Lord on my behalf. I am truly grateful, thankful and blessed for your continuing prayers.

Amazing

Wikipedia has now changed the definition of the word Definition pic.twitter.com/fPO0Y5HUYP

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) July 29, 2022

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As I am fond of saying: “In America if it is worth doing it is worth overdoing.”

“We have made a dark bargain with ourselves to let one of our cities die.”

THE TECATE TRUCK was just like all the other Tecate Beer trucks that went back and forth daily at the border crossing, except that it was not owned by Tecate. The driver of that truck spoke fluent Spanish and the truck was always loaded with Tecate. In time the US border guards got used to the Tecate trucks. The difference was that this Tecate truck had, at its center, a narrow, hollow space shielded with thin sheets of lead so that no ambient radiation could escape.

It had cost The Base over $150,000 to convert the truck at a garage in Ensenada a year before. That was little enough when it came to securing the device which had cost the same group more than $45 million in Ukraine in 1997. In any event, the truck did its job and passed without incident over the border and into the United States at Tecate, California on August 6th. Dates were important to The Base, and this date was especially significant. After all, what could be more significant than the day on which Hiroshima was destroyed?

After clearing the border the Tecate Truck followed Highway 94 north to its merge with Highway 8 at La Mesa, California, and then drove west towards Highway 5. It pulled off the road at a rest stop where it picked up a technician in a Tecate uniform who was carrying a case with the necessary electronics and a couple of weapons. After that, the two men followed the road that ran straight towards the heart of San Diego. It got off the freeway downtown and quickly made its way to the intersection of North Harbor Drive and West Broadway. Its total travel time from the border to downtown San Diego was just over an hour. It was running close to schedule. It was about 11:30 in the morning.

The truck pulled over and parked along North Harbor Drive and the technician took out some binoculars and scanned the harbor beyond the Navy Region Southwest Complex whose entrance was less than 100 yards away. Intelligence was correct. The USS Ronald Reagan was in its home port and riding comfortably at anchor.

The technician opened his case and took a wire that ran from the back of the truck along the floorboards. He plugged it into a jack in the simple switching device in the case. He looked at the driver and smiled. The driver smiled back. They both began to recite a prayer in Arabic while looking over the San Diego harbor. At some point in the prayer, without really thinking about it, the technician threw the switch. In the next instant, at the intersection of North Harbor Drive and West Broadway in San Diego, California on a warm August morning, a miniature version of the Sun appeared on the surface of the Earth. [continue reading…]

1910: It wasn’t the last summer but it was one of the last summers when America was at peace with the world and at peace with itself. The Civil War was a 45-year-old memory. The first of the World Wars that would scar the century to come was not even the shadow of a premonition. Lenin was an exile in Europe with no power and Mao was a student in Hunan. Hitler was living in a homeless shelter in Vienna selling paintings to tourists. Stalin was either being sent to or escaping from Siberia. Churchill was the Home Secretary in England and planning the first bit of social engineering, the National Insurance Act. Taft was President and his plan was “try to accomplish just as much [as Teddy Roosevelt] without any noise.”

Both the automobile and the electric light were ubiquitous. Air conditioning was still a wild fantasy, but the swamp cooler had begun to come online in 1904 so it wasn’t completely out of the question for the very rich.

Halley’s Comet had just passed by taking Mark Twain with it. Somewhere in Macedonia Mother Teresa had just been born. If men looked up they could have seen, had they been in the right place at the right time, other men in flight. If any had been in Sheepshead Bay outside of New York City on the 20th they would have heard the first gunshots ever fired from an airplane. Individual lives might have their small tragedies but there was no perceptible or imaginable catastrophe in the cards dealt Americans that summer. It was August and everywhere Americans paused to refresh themselves.

Presented for your contemplation: One wave breaking over a group of Americans who have waded into the Atlantic on the Jersey shore sometime around noon on a hot day in August 1910.

The wave would have swelled up and started out far over the eastern horizon near the edge of the Gulf Stream. It would have rolled with strict impunity in the midst of thousands of others like it, all bound towards the shore. The photographer would have gotten up early and hauled his cumbersome equipment towards the shore. The bathers would have arrived in the late morning if they were not already staying near the shore.

Once there they changed into swimming apparel known more for modesty than comfort. From the light it was around noon and would have been hot. Seeking to be cooler they waded in. Some stayed near the shore. Others waded further out into the steadily deepening water.

On some kind of elevated platform above the sand, the photographer put the 8×10 glass plate into the camera and ducked under the black hood for final adjustments. Then he stood up and called out and called out and called out and finally got the attention of some. Most ignored him.

The wave rolled in from somewhere over the horizon, rising up and down, maybe cresting here and there, until it swelled one last time and, just as the photographer happened to release the shutter, jumped up in that one moment and splashed and spattered the unwary people posed and unposed in the cool salt water just off the beach on the Jersey shore. That was the moment, less than a second, in the midst of that summer now more than a century gone. All, each and every one, of those nearly 300 souls are now gone as well, even the children held on the shoulders or standing in the shallows, all gone — all perhaps, maybe, save one now almost silent centenarian.

Well, what of it? That’s the way of the world and the way of the waves of the world and our lives. What we have is this moment snatched out of time on the Jersey shore one afternoon in August before the last century went smash. Who is there? What were they like? It can’t be known, but it can be seen and what can be seen, at least in this one moment, is that these people had what anyone would recognize as that thing we call happiness. Let’s see what we can see of it.

We can see the chaos ruining the photographer’s carefully composed moment with a splash soaking those nearest and plastering down the hair of a man who was probably balder than he would like to be

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It’s Friday! 🎉 pic.twitter.com/RCXPWK8oxE

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) August 5, 2022

Gearhead Utah family on vacation in Florida. “What shall we do, dad?” “Let’s find some dysfunctional internal combustion engine. Fix it. And go for a ride in a swamp, okay?” “AWESOME!”

They let your loved ones die alone.

They wouldn’t let you hold a funeral.

They destroyed the future for your children.

And it was all in the name of political power. pic.twitter.com/nQc4bYO1Dd

— Matthew Foldi (@MatthewFoldi) August 5, 2022

Do not foreswear vengeance. Choose your preferred method:

You know how it is, Whole. You know. And I know you know. We just can’t pretend it is what it was any longer.

Bad things have been happening between us whenever I’ve tried to get into your sack for quite some time. It’s time to face the fact that we just don’t have that old natural spark between us any longer. We’ve faded from organic to conventional. It’s time to move on to fresh fruits and vegetables new — elsewhere. Ditto your firm, moist, and alluring meats of many flavors. None of what you’re doing to me is doing it for me anymore.

I ignored a lot of your irritating habits, Whole — like keeping that entire wing of the dairy case jammed with your revoltingly raw vegan pastes and six flavors of tofu, that sloppy second of soy. I rationalized you were just trying to keep your green ass from getting so fat you couldn’t get into that tacky green apron you insist on wearing all the time, because “they go with my Earth shoes”.

I put up with your petulant insistence on “helping me” find things I wasn’t looking for whenever I paused in an aisle to ask myself “Johnson Grass and Brayla Suet Sausage? What the hell is that and what life form eats it?”

I put up with your plucking money from my wallet while I slept, so you could blow it on wind power and floats in the Green Pride Parades. I figured that every Whole needs a hobby.

Yes, I put up with your junkies’ greed as you whined for more and more…. especially in the cheese department where you had no shame in marking up English and French and “local, sustainable” cheeses first to $20 a pound (Or as you coyly say, “$19.99!”)…. and then up to $25 a pound… and then — since somebody was evidently paying you to screw them this hard — when you went whole hog and started into the $35 a pound range with no end to your cheese needs in sight.

Yes, I just looked the other way, Whole. I figured I could always just skulk around the deli counter cadging slices of salami and smidgens of cheese off your perky crew until they grew tired or I was full. But the feeling of being used by you — especially with the Euro cheeses which went up and up regardless of how heavily the Dollar was sitting on the face of the Euro — kept on pinching me in the pocket.

Even then I accepted your “Give More Green to Be More Green” smarm. Why?

Was it because your moist and juicy fruit always looked so tender, sweet, and tasty?

Was it because you always reminded me, in your organic, vegan, tofu-sodden shelves, of those unshaven but passionate hippie girls of my youth? The ones with the faint Frida Kahlo mustaches like the fuzz I once licked from your peaches.

Was it because I thought I was demonstrating my successful status by shopping at a grocery store whose motto might as well have been, “Whole Foods: Why Pay Less?”

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Smugglers Abandon Migrant Woman Trapped in California Border Wall Section
Human smugglers jacked open a portion of the border wall in an attempt to smuggle migrants into the U.S. Chief Heitke reported the smuggler’s jack slipped trapping a Salvadoran woman between the bollards. The smugglers promptly abandoned the woman in the precarious position.

Border Patrol agents teamed up with the San Diego Fire Department, EMS crews, and the Government of Mexico to free the woman.

In another section of the border wall, human smugglers encouraged an 11-year-old Jamaican child to jump from the wall. A few moments later, smugglers endangered a three-year-old child from the top of the wall. Border Patrol surveillance cameras captured the incident, Chief Heitke tweeted.

“Smugglers continue to charge upwards of $10k to be smuggled into the US, all with little to no regard for their safety,” Heitke stated.

White Bird: The Documentary

[Note: In the black and white segments over Bill Graham’s voice you can see the Telegraph Avenue and Dwight block in Berkeley where I lived during the various Telegraph Avenue riots of the era. I was surprised to see it and wonder if, somewhere in that footage, is the boy I once was**. Probably, but as a footnote to that era I would be hard to see.]
White Bird: The Pretty Version

White Bird” is a song that most music fans (at least those of us of a certain age) will instantly recognize.

It’s a Beautiful Day were “Summer of Love” San Franciscan contemporaries of The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Santana and their lilting rock, jazz, folk, classical style was unique in that context. They were neither very “proggy” or “fusiony. They certainly weren’t very psychedelic, either, but they made lovely music that still evokes an era splendidly, even if they are remembered primarily for just this one song. “White Bird” is one of the ultimate hippie anthems and has been a staple of FM radio for decades.

Ironically, bandleader and violinist David LaFlamme later said of “White Bird,” that the oh so pretty ditty was inspired by living in gloomy, soggy Seattle without a car:

“The song describes the picture Linda and I saw as we looked out this little window in this attic. We had a little Wurlitzer portable piano sitting right in the well of this window, and I’d sit and work on songs. When you hear lines like, ‘the leaves blow across the long black road to the darkened sky and its rage,’ it’s describing what I was seeing out the window. Where the ‘white bird’ thing came from: We were like caged birds in that attic. We had no money, no transportation, the weather was miserable. We were just barely getting by on a very small food allowance provided to us. It was quite an experience, but it was very creative in a way.” >>

Via Dangerous Minds. [continue reading…]

They’re rioting in Africa. They’re starving in Spain.
There’s hurricanes in Florida and Texas needs rain.

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.
The French hate the Germans. The Germans hate the Poles.

Italians hate Yugoslavs. South Africans hate the Dutch.
And I don’t like anybody very much!

But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud
For man’s been endowed with a mushroom shaped cloud.

And we know for certain that some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away.

They’re rioting in Africa. There’s strife in Iran.
What nature doesn’t do to us will be done by our fellow man.