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
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Happiness is…a warm gun.
This is my weapon and this is my gun, and both are warm and harder’n chinese rithmetic. That’s what the drill sgt sed.
“Bang bang, shoot shoot!”
Bang Bang Shoot Shoot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdvnOH060Qg
All true statements.
From Scoopyweb. Could not pass up posting this.
Olena Bilozerska, 42, credited with at least 10 confirmed ‘kills’ in the trenches of Donbas, told MailOnline she would be at the front lines again within hours to face the Russians.
And this chilling video posted online of her picking off her targets through a thermal imaging night sight in 2017 shows the ruthless efficiency of her deadly craft.
On the soundtrack, as a bird flutters above the silent enemy trench 200m away, she is surprised to see two men crawling out of their position.
‘It was the night of Ukrainian Independence Day anniversary in August 2017,’ she recalled, ‘and these Cossacks must have assumed we were lying drunk in our trenches celebrating.
‘I felt something interesting was going to happen when they started getting out of a trench and passing weapons to each other.’
The sobering footage shows one man crawling out of the trench into the crosshairs of Olena’s rifle. Unable to believe her eyes, she exclaims to her comrade ‘Ah, he got out! Look, look, look, look -crawling! B*****d.’Twenty seconds later, the image becomes more focused and her first shot rings out, targeted at the enemy soldier’s torso, swiftly followed by two more rounds.
After the screen clears following the gun’s muzzle flash, another soldier is seen leaning over his comrade and he is similarly dispatched.
Shortly afterwards, another enemy combatant is seen emerging above the level of the trench and he is felled with a single shot, falling lifelessly backwards out of sight.
‘I shot three of them that night,’ said Olena. Two of them were what we call “cargo 200” [an old Soviet military term for dead, referring to the labels put on coffins] and the third was “cargo 300” [wounded].’
Five years on, Olena – who was then a volunteer fighter, but later joined the Ukrainian Marine Corps, has no qualms about any of the men she has killed or wounded in battle.
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Olena – who was then a volunteer fighter, but later joined the Ukrainian Marine Corps, has no qualms about any of the men she has killed or wounded in battle
‘I felt excited, because that night, a unit of six people came out of their trenches for the two of us – it doesn’t happen every day.
‘Moral anguish about the “murder of a human” was invented by people far from the war. An armed enemy is not a person, but a target.
‘You take up a weapon against my country – that’s it, you’re a target. If you don’t take him out in time, he might kill you or one of your comrades.
‘If I didn’t shoot in time and the target hid, that’s when I feel angry at myself for missing my chance. And if the target is hit, I feel the pleasure of a job well done.’
She said she spares no thoughts for those unfortunate enough to come into her line of fire.
‘When the enemy crawls towards our position to kill me, does he think if I have a husband, parents, or kids?’ she said.
‘Of course not. And I don’t bother myself with stupid things either. That stuff is for books and movies.
‘In real life, anyone who thinks along those lines in battle is already as good as dead.’
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Bilzerska (pictured) says she spares no thoughts for those unfortunate enough to come into her line of fire. ‘When the enemy crawls towards our position to kill me, does he think if I have a husband, parents, or kids?’ she said
She came very close to being shot herself one night when a machine gun tracer bullet grazed her cheek, with the phosphorus chemical which allows the round to be seen at night, searing her flesh.
‘I don’t know if someone was looking after me that night,’ she said, ‘but we all have our share of luck, I guess.’
She is scathing about Hollywood’s depiction of snipers: ‘In the movies, it looks as if a sniper sees the eyes of a living human. But you cannot see the eyes. It’s hard to tell if the person is large or small.
‘You just see a silhouette of an armed person and you fire at it. That’s all… if you miss, you will feel as if you’ve lost.’
After the Independence Day incident, her husband Valeriy Voronov, a regular soldier who was beside her in the trench, collected up the cartridge casings and, following an old sniper tradition from WWI, had one made into a ring for her.
Olena, from Kyiv, is something of a celebrity in Ukraine, having written a best-selling book called ‘Diary of an Illegal Soldier’, referring to the fact that for the first few years of her service, volunteers like her were not technically allowed to fight on the front lines, but that law was changed in 2016.
She was well-known even before the war as her oppositional journalism found her under threat of imprisonment by the old hardline regime of Viktor Yanukovych, deposed in the 2014 Maidan Revolution.
She also writes poetry but finds no contradiction between that and fighting, saying: ‘A creative nature requires perfectionism in everything, and this helps a lot in my work. Of course I don’t write poetry now though.’
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Olena, from Kyiv, is something of a celebrity in Ukraine, having written a best-selling book called ‘Diary of an Illegal Soldier’
Although she was demobilised from the marines in 2020, she and her husband are both members of Ukraine’s Territorial Defence Services, and, along with thousands of other reservists, ready to deploy should the need arise.
She believes that Putin will not order an invasion and his troop build-up is ‘pressure and intimidation’
But along with many other Ukrainians, she is thankful for the support that Boris Johnson and the UK has given her nation, both with words and deeds, in the shape of at least 2,000 NLAW anti-tank weapons which have been sent.
‘Ukrainians are now very grateful to Britain for military assistance,’ she said, ‘and I’ve seen lots of people writing on social networks “God save the Queen”’
She still keeps up her marksmanship with regular practice with ‘Halia’, the traditional Ukrainian girl’s name she christened her Zbroyar Z-10 rifle.
‘A weapon is a living thing — It has a soul,’ she said. ‘There is a Ukrainian story about “Spoilt Halia”, which is why I chose that name – the rifle is always being cleaned and adjusted and looked after like a spoilt child.
‘But she does what I ask her to do, and if the Russians decide to come, I’ll be only too happy to introduce them to Halia.’
Thanks for that, Joe. Went to (I know … ) Amazon to buy the book, but it isn’t listed. I’d like to read it.
The book is written in Ukrainian. Olena says that she dreams of having it translated into English, but it is difficult to arrange, as she cannot afford to pay for the translation of 600 pages. The author hopes that perhaps the translation can be done on a volunteer basis.
https://www.promoteukraine.org/diary-of-an-illegal-soldier-as-a-mirror-of-events-in-donbas/
Video of night time sniper
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10477277/Ukraines-deadliest-female-sniper-10-confirmed-kills-vows-Putin-again.html
the crosshairs are really steady, I wonder if that is a digital enhancement, like steadying on a camera.
Another “bang bang shoot shoot” moment delivered by Jimi Hendrix. First one I thought of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnG6qXE7xWk
A balmy -2° outside right now here atop the world. The sun will be up at 9:22 this morning.
Guess I’ll go out in the yard and enjoy some true happiness. Still a little cool for black powder so the Diablo stays in, but the weather’s right for the Kel Tec sub 2000
Prepare, Prepare and Prepare more…. – ‘They’ Are In Total Control And Won’t Be Stopped – Don’t Be Fooled When They Drop Their Burnt-Out Covid Narrative – They have Dozens More Things On The Shelf
Somehow I see this “pandemic” as their final chance at total control of the earth and its resources. It has been planned for a decade or more. They actually believed that it would work. Now it is falling apart around the world. They neither look nor sound confident; on the contrary, they look and sound afraid; they look and sound desperate. In the meantime they will trot out that old “global warming” scam, for what that is worth.
Of course I do not expect them to simply give up and admit defeat. Oh no. I expect them to perish from the earth. There is not enough room in this universe for both them and us. Ok then.
Mike, I believe that this is one strategy of many being used by evil to conquer mankind, specifically one race. “If you are far from the enemy, make him believe you are near.” Sun Tsu. Nothing is falling apart for evil. It knows no bounds when it comes to deception. Make one feel good through deception, thinking that they are winning while evil waits in the wing to trounce. We must always be on alert. “Everything in life had a pattern and then a coincidence was simply the moment when the pattern became visible.” From “The Magpie Murders.” Joe Krill
All true. Certainly Evil deceives, but that does not mean therefore that we are deceived. The more lies that are tossed about means that each lie has less effect. This “pandemic” was more than a decade in the making. All the necessary people had to be in the right place at the right time. It is therefore a “one off”. Klaus Schwab and his acolytes have not the ability or resources to simply substitute some other deception in place of their failed attempt to enslave the entire globe under the COVID hoax. And of course we need to always be on alert. But that means to recognize failure as well as success—both ours and theirs. And one huge failure has been the massive loss of trust in government at all levels around the world. Who now listens to the CDC, Biden, Fauci or Gates? Who now is afraid of COVID?
I see the, we must stop Putin and save the Ukraine else he’ll march all the way to England, as the followup.
Hey I know, let’s start WW III, wars always make our kind of people richer, the commoners more pliable, any government action justifiable, any skullduggery deniable and to top it off, that’ll stop those stinkin’ truckers descending on D.C. in their tracks!
But do you think we can create a world wide conflagration before March?
Hold my beer.
Do Not Forget: Plan B is always “Hold My Beer!”.
Oh, and then there’s “Hey, y’all — watch this!”