Next post: Cruising Off Baja
Previous post: Critical Racing Theory: 1) “Don’t Postpone Joy”
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
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
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
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
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
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
Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host
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
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
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.
When someone tells you what they’re all about it might be a good idea to believe them. ‘Prudent’, as basic old dead fart, globalist daddy-of-’em-all, GHW Bush, woulda blabbered.
So, I guess maybe this is what the Presidency has come too. A demented old fool who suggests using shotguns, fired into the air from your outside balcony, to frighten off predatory thugs is morphed into a deeper and more complicated idiot who thinks it prudent to consider employing American storm troops against citizens and firebombing cities.
If ever there was an asshole who should be tranq’ed and placed into a quiet, dimly lit padded room with some snacks, I think we’ve found him.
*Whispering like a demented pedophile*; “C’mon man, I went to Oxford, where’d you go to school? All the generals know me…tuberculosis…It’s not like we’ll begin bombing tomorrow, these things take time…where’s Jill?
*Now yelling agitatedly*; “That’s not what I said! Look…we’ll…we’ll…(long pregnant pause of 45 seconds)…I’m gonn’a get into trouble for this…I’ll get together with my militracrik team and come up with a plan and you’ll all now then.
It appears that Biden has now actually declared WAR on gun owning, Second Amendment supporting citizens.
Supposedly, Americans currently own 434 million guns, and billions of rounds of ammo.- https://www.guns.com/news/2020/11/17/data-us-has-434-million-guns-20m-ars-150m-mags
According to one source, the number of gun owners in the USA is estimated at 190 to 240 million, an obvious majority.
Is Joe now ‘lighting the fuse on the cannon’, or just mumbling incoherently like a senile old hoplophobe?
By the way, ammo prices (for many calibers) have been coming back down in the recent weeks, and availability of ammo has increased noticeably.
https://www.ammobuy.com/
Careful there Hoss. Don’t let a stupid ass bring the stupid ass in you out.
Yes, Pete, it’s dropping, so is plywood, but both are gonna hafta drop a lot more before I surrender my FRN’s. Was in Ruralking the other day and not a stick of ammo in sight. Guns were rather sparse too.
I had all my ammo laid out on 2 workbenches, inventorying it, and my wife came out there and said, “Wow, this looks like an ammo store.” I said, “I wish.”
Before the DogEater, I believed that the military – if it came to it – would back up the Normals. After the cancer of that presidency metastasized throughout every agency of govt, I no longer consider that will be so. The golem is doing everything in its power to destroy what was left of E Pluribus Unum. Schlichter is always worth the time to read.
Hey there comrade sleepy time slo jo, uh, we don’t need no stinking F15’s or nukes to take down this unbelievably corrupt and dysfunctional gubmint. Just look at the havoc J. W. Booth created with a single shot black powder small caliber pistol. And Col. Schlichter is 100% correct in his assessment, comrade Slo Jo hasn’t got a clue about anything coming out of his pie hole.
Logistics, bullets and beans as they used to say and who drives the trucks that deliver the goods, mostly men, lots of white men who drive pickup trucks to work where they drive big trucks and the most likely voted for Trump. Enlisted men and women in the military who have been over used on deployments for far too many years are mostly from Southern states and mostly, at least for a bit more, conservative while the officer people turned out by the Academy military trade schools have been selected and trained as nitwit, goober headed, left leaning, soft brain people for last last decade or maybe more.
An old adage is don’t give an order that will not be obeyed and carried out and I don’t think the rank and file NCO’s and enlisted folk will make war on civilians in the USA and if they were to do so, how long would the fuel, ammo, beans & bullets keep on being supplied. How vulnerable would they be to men and women who operate machinery and systems that keep the roads, rails, shipping and air ways operational or are they going to call up all of their equality people in the major metro areas and let them take over the logistics of this great nation running.
I hope I never see any of this shit come about because we the people of the USA are better people than that and I am hoping there are enough grown up people in Government who understand that if thing melt down no one wins, the thought of actual battles being fought in major cities would be destruction that would leave an infrastructure crippled that is already cracked and crumbling and vulnerable to meddling by other nations who are not our friends. The whole thing of Biden mentioning a military threat against law abiding civilians should cause the liberals to wake up and figure out how to help us “just all get along”. That should be the new woke, not hating white people.
Ghost-
You might want to start shopping at another RK store or head over here to Ohio for a vacation.
Our local RK, and pretty much all our local gun stores (except Walmart) now have fairly good supplies of ammo in stock, and at SEMI-tolerable prices. ($25 to $28 for .9mm)
Of course none of that affects me, as I cast my own projectiles reload my own ammo. The local outdoor ranges here are being heavily used again, and are supplying me with (literally) thousands of pieces of FREE brass per week- in all kinda calibers. And I’m very, very well stocked on components.
I don’t welcome another Civil War, but it seems inevitable at this point. And I sure as hell won’t be caught unprepared for it if it erupts.
OldTexan made some great points that I agree with- the Blue Collar Conservatives have a helluva edge over the “snowflake sector,” and that’s some powerful ‘ammo’ right there.
And good to hear you have a good ammo stash!
The F15/nuke remark doesn’t seem to have been one of the Girl Sniffer’s syllable salad pronouncements. Looks as if the puppeteers wanted to make a statement – “You counter revolutionaries out there don’t have what it takes to beat us. Give up!” Not true, by the way, ask the Ruskies why the left Afghanistan.
When I heard it the subtext that popped out to me was, “We’re scared to death. No locust swarms of backwoods militias invaded DC, so we took the fences down and sent the soldiers home, but we know you’re out there. We know that if you decide to swarm there is nothing effective we can do to stop you. So we’re gonna threaten you with bigger guns than you have and hope you stay cautious and give us time to consolidate our power.”
The DC revolutionary junta might well attempt to sic the military on the people, but that won’t happen unless they are teetering on the brink of defeat. To then the American military is an uncertain bet as to which way they’ll jump if ordered to fire on American civilians. No, they’ll trot out the same old playbook that worked so well in so many places before.
BLM, Antifa are just the clown show to get you distracted so you don’t notice the rest sneaking up on you. My sense is that they have other stuff waiting in the wings against the day somebody responds to the provocations and they can spring the trap. So far no joy (for them), but it is only a matter of time.
They have lists, they make and maintain lists of who is an enemy of the revolution. You are on it as am I, and, I’ll wager, most of AD’s readership. Antifa and BLM are not the only forces they can deploy to derail any potential counter revolution. Not that the counter revolution is in any way organized – yet – outside of their paranoid fever dreams. Yes, the potential leaders will be rounded up and disposed of, maybe a la Katyn Forest or a la Pol Pot, maybe a la Lefortovo, doesn’t matter. They will come for us, the cancel culture with extreme prejudice.
Then the famines. Because they have the records of who has a gun permit, rounding up the guns will simply be a question of exchanging food for guns. “You want food for your starving family? Says here you own an AR and a Glock. Tell you what we’ll do. Bill, Amir and Ashante, get a box of food and go with this guy, here’s his list. If he gives you any shit, shoot him.”
Of course it won’t be that crude. It will all be nice and antiseptic, on a data base tied to your passport card. But the same thing in the end.
Best not to let it get that far.
“Logistics”. The population centers are dependent on the “surround” for food, fuel, electricity, manufactured goods, potable water. Welfare is worthless when there is nothing left to buy (or steal).
They may have a “plan” The Soviets stayed in power by murdering millions in the Ukraine (in the 30s) and in what is now Iran (in the 20s). The “Founding Documents” of the CCP are a pile of death certificates.
However, most in the “surround” know that when the government trucks from the city show up to clean out a grocery, pharmacy, or warehouse, that the person giving orders and the driver(s) “go first”. The rest will not get very far on foot.
Any “F-15” strikes on the “surround” just bring the cities closer to uncontrolable starvation. [Maybe that is part of the plan. The clearing of Compton, Calif. worked like a charm. The burnt-out downtowns are ripe for the new Illegal Alien population. The refugees may be the threat, rather than government forces.]
The future may be ruthless and ugly. Very ugly.
If it makes Overton’s Window, it’s not a drill.
A competent rifleman with adequate equipment operates inside a 300 meter radius bubble that he controls.
A Marine rifleman moves that out to 500. That’s operating bone stock.
Hard to imagine ever having to put that to the test again.
Hard to imagine trannies sweeping women’s Olympic events, or an Alzheimers patient carrying the football, too.