In Noted In Passing: The All-American Heimatsicherheitsdeinst commenter anon notes, also in passing…
” Take the 50,000 TSA workers and put them on the Mexican border. Let them inspect, care for and control the immigrants.”
Game. Set. Match.
In Noted In Passing: The All-American Heimatsicherheitsdeinst commenter anon notes, also in passing…
” Take the 50,000 TSA workers and put them on the Mexican border. Let them inspect, care for and control the immigrants.”
Game. Set. Match.
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Address for Donations, Complaints, Brickbats, and — oh yes — Donations
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In Memory Of W.B. Yeats
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
Your Say
My Thinking Hat
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The People Yes
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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My Back Pages
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
Comments on this entry are closed.
The smartest readers are gathered here. This is blog gold.
I’m pretty sure that the TSA would screw up the management of immigration too. The ones I’ve met are dickheads beyond compare who simply love to fondle people. If they don’t start out that way they’ll become that way.
I was forced to fly last week and I had a D shaped combination lock that I placed in my luggage with a couple of USB cords to charge my cell phone. I was in a Southern airport and the TSA was all black. They spent 15 minutes looking at the X-ray of the lock and cords and then sent two guys over to frisk me. Playing “stump the dickheads” is fun, except for the fondling part.
I often fly through Spokane, and lately I am getting pulled aside so they can inspect the snacks in my shoulder bag. I thought maybe they were searching for pot edibles, but, no, a baggie full of chocolate covered raisins resemble fissionable material.
TSA is simply a nicely uniformed job for the marginally employable. They vote to keep it,which is the purpose.
Hi, Anon. Spokane: my point of origin for any flight.
Any time in the past three years inspecting my bag of raisins would’ve been a deal-breaker. My health is better, now, and so this first time insult 2 weeks ago went into my life’s book of ignominy without ruining my day.
I get my gear inspected almost every trip. My box of pastels looks a hundred and ten percent like a bomb.
I agree the TSA is past its due date. What makes me even madder is the airlines. The generation of executives now in power have all 9-11 mentalities, and do not remember when fliers could choose from a number of flights and routes: it was a market-oriented environment. Now it’s a goddamned Soviet style business environment. Peanuts, trash-sorting, green preaching, no flights, passenger beatings (although in retrospect that one was pretty entertaining).
Any real business executive would know that it is time to flesh-out the flight choices, compete with prices, and go after the market. It is so ripe. They might start with putting actual fucking gas in their vehicles. The cost savings of that alone would cover the overhead, but the increase in travel would seem like the Midas touch.
Why the hell aren’t I an airline CEO? I tell you what. When you make it to 60, and you’ve been around business and the market for awhile, you begin to see how very small these suits are. I’d give my eye teeth to be in the boardroom at United for just 10 minutes and with the microphone. Oh my God the blood would flow.
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fellows.
“How to slow and stop the border invasions without machine guns”
WHY?
It’s a invasion in there numbers. Someone(Z) is Financing this, setting up a Logistical Base and providing routing.
That requires Belt Feds and Miniguns.
IMHO