It’s a Quarter to 2020. Do You Know Where You Stand?
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
Gerard Van der Leun
When all Earth’s seas shall Levitate,
Dark shawled within the skies,
Upon our eyes will Starfish dance
Their waltz of Blind surprise.
The sun will Rise within wine Dark
As Argonauts imbibed,
Whose drunken arms embrace that sleep
Where Phaeton’s horses Stride.
Upon all of Earth’s wind-sanded shores,
As dolphins Learn to soar,
All we once were on the land
Shall be sealed behind the door
Of Ivory and Chastened Gold,
That the Mystery solved complete
Shall never til the seas’ Long fall
Wake mariners from their sleep.
— Van der Leun
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
— The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot
Comments on this entry are closed.
Can’t agree with the Paid Family Leave. It’s extorted by force.
My workers actually are worse off for it. Before, they essentially got as much time off as needed.
Now they’ll only get what is mandated because it has raised overhead such that the only way to control labor cost is by reduction of hourly pay offsetting the additional costs of the benefit with the additional bookkeeping administrative cost.
While on vacation I had limited access to news. One brief visit to internet news read that the farmer’s union was complaining about Trump’s China policies vis lower wheat prices.
Three, two, one…what “farmer’s union”??? Farmers don’t unionize.
You need to read the news very, very closely nowadays. They will bullshit you nine ways to Sunday.
Trump for the win. Anyone else is just a government agent, out to take your property, your rights, and your dignity. Politicians suck ass; Trump comes from outside of that horseshit factory.
I just returned from the coast, where logging is the economy. While I was gone, the news starts bitching about the Amazon burning. A little research, and it becomes evident that the fires are no more numerous than in the past; perhaps a little more than last year but not as much as last decade. Look around you: much of the prairie land in otherwise green parts of my state were burned by the indians to provide hunting grounds. The Amazon is not a precipitate crisis – it is a manufactured one. Ever watch a jungle grow? It grows like a weed.
The newsies are pulling your leg, man. Believe almost nothing at face value.
Trump remains as something akin to a Force of Nature. In a straight-up, no voter fraud, no democRat nefarious dirty deeds election, Trumps Election Night victory should resemble Secretariat’s Belmont Stakes prodigious domination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V18ui3Rtjz4
Wish I could feel confident about the above, but when it comes to the opposition’s ability to plumb the depths of sleaze, I suspect we ain’t seen nothing yet.
None of that stuff has anything to do with me.
If Trump wants to get on my good side he can cut sales tax, property tax, hell ALL taxes by 50%, to start, then he’ll get my attention.
If Trump wants to get my vote, for the first time ever, he can fire half of all gov’t employees and delete all their benefits.
Otherwise, it is life as normal around here.
Sales taxes and property taxes are controlled by your state and local governments not the federal government.
I agree that the family leave act is poor policy.
Why are you making excuses for Trump?
If he can force change around the world I’m sure he can force change right here in the country he lives in. Doesn’t anyone know how to think any more?
I think Anon was being pragmatic. Without becoming a complete dictator certain things will not and cannot be changed in four or eight years from the executive branch.
Sales tax here used to be 3%. Now it is almost 8%. FFS. How did we manage to get by at 3%? Give me the wheel and I would make it happen…. but would be blocked by countless judges. I’ve managed large budgets in business and I could always find the dead wood to cut out when necessary.
Noticed that the comment line here seems to be complaining. Folks, if you have another alternative to Trump, let’s hear it. It was a great ad, of course, but do you want any of the 20 Dems? He has labored against non-stop 24/7/365 opposition in the media, education, entertainment, shutting down of conservative voices. We all could be further ahead if half the nation wasn’t trying to destroy it.
I made a promise to myself that I’d allow Trump many, almost endless missteps, since he’s the bull in the China shop that I very desperately wanted. I’ll be straight with you, the disappointments I have with him are his one-time supportive statement for red flag laws, and the unintended consequence of lower wheat prices this year. I’m not mad at him for his centrist stuff, driven by his daughter.
His rhetoric is beyond great. My hope is that he’ll take that even further, since my sense of what’s happening now is that if we don’t speak clearly we’ll go down in flames. Twitter: own that shit. Double it down.
Then, there’s the economic boom we’ve enjoyed. Overseas, we are respected as much now as ever with maybe the exception of the WW II victory. Trump is as dovish as any president in my lifetime, with maybe the exception of Ike (you can argue Vietnam, but Ike didn’t “start” it in the way Johnson started it). This is good.
Opening a dialogue with NoKorea was a Nixonian moment, for sure. Very good.
Like I said previously, the news cycle is constant bullshit on an epic level.
My brother in law, whom I admire and respect (Korea/ Vietnam war army veteran) tried to get into complaining about trump with me. My sister and he live so far from Seattle, existentially, that I didn’t consider his mindset to be crazy. He’s more of a Roosevelt-era liberal than anything else. My defuse and comeback was to say that it is good to hear a complaint against the president because the 8 years before Trump you couldn’t complain about Obama. That was a scary time politically. I like hearing thoughtful complaints about Trump.
Another very close friend, who lives in Fla., was calling trump a lier. That one comes up often, so I thought it through. I know I am Trump-biased, so I wondered what lies he has supposedly told. My friend deflected to some shit about something – no lie related. I Googled Trump’s lies, and the first 2 results were some heap of smelly shit about the environment. My F-ing stars. This is what they’ve got: trump lies about the environment. Hold my beer while I almost puke from laughing. I want to know the lies. Send em to me.
Take it easy.
Casey said: “I wondered what lies he has supposedly told”
===========
Same here, and I looked it up.
Just as I thought.
The lying liar tried to make me jump through endless hoops to find out Trump didn’t lie at all.
I’m not saying Trump doesn’t lie, after all he’s a politician, but not in the ways the LSM is describing.
Probably the most atrocious LSM media Trump lie came early on – the pussy grabbing thing.
Have you seen the vid?
He didn’t say what the LSM and all of it’s downstream mindless parrots claim.
The LSM is not broadcasting to thinking people, they know they are lost on that genre.
They are catering to the low intellect, adolescent minded drones that are easily led by the snoot.
Just like all the other corporate and political entities are doing.
They don’t yet realize which side of their bread is buttered.