

Next post: Mars
Previous post: Noted in Passing: “It’s OK when Bill does it.”
Address for Donations, Complaints, Brickbats, and — oh yes — Donations
My Back Pages
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
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
Search American Digest’s Back Pages
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
The Vault
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.
Why would anyone willingly subject himself to this unremitting assault on their sanity? Although I’ve no background in Neuroscience, it appears a huge portion of the population has altered its natural neurotransmitter flow and re-uptake of these chemical agents through this constant bombardment of panic porn.
Could be that the hard wiring of the brain’s circuitry has been irretrievably changed, as well. Most distressing is what this is doing to the young and rapidly developing brains of children.
After the initial reactions to the Wuhan virus by the various agencies tasked with public health and disease control, I became quickly convinced that the wall-to-wall doom and gloom reportage had less to do with health than exerting power and control over the populace.
This has been and remains a huge psyop. What has been learned will be utilized against us in the future.
The fear porn factory is running 24/7 and idiots continue to subscribe and take delivery. What are these “rising cases” we are hearing of? If the “cases” are the “results” of the deeply flawed PCR test, which inventor Kari Mullis warned when amped up to 30 or 40 or 50 cycles intensity, you will find whatever you want to find, then science fiction is the results. Wanna find bubonic plague, sure, why not, there you have it. Here’s a sobering article, a sound slap to the face, for people who keep believing.
https://off-guardian.org/2021/08/03/repeat-after-me-the-pcr-tests-dont-work/
Here’s another tragedy for your consideration. A man aged 65, actor, body builder, in terrific shape, got vaxxed not twice but three times. It’s fascinating to read his parrot-like announcements, the virtue-signaling script he so dutifully memorized to be in full lock-step with the lemmings in his dive over the cliff. Be sure to click onto the link titled “this sort of story.”
https://voxday.blogspot.com/2021/08/blog-post.html
Did a quick search for a few of those twitter accounts. Not all real, it would seem.
Does someone want us to repeat lies, so we look foolish and untrustworthy?
Remain detached from emotion, and do your research.
Twitter seems to be the spawn of Satan. If I tweeted a Covid fact, and it didn’t fit the narrative, I’d be banned for fake news. These tweets above seem to be impervious to fact-checking. Twitter is propaganda, in every sense of the word.
How’s it feel, America, to be without news, and with a medical community deeply corrupt and broken?
I’ll come right out and say it.
I don’t believe any of it and haven’t since the beginning.
I only need to catch you in one lie to disbelieve anything that you say after that.
I have caught the gov’t lying hundreds of times.
I have caught the media lying thousands of times.
There is nothing those two institutions can ever do to fix that.
How do you find truth in a country built on, and subsisting continuously on, lies?
What a fucked up situation.
I’m with you, Ghost. The whole corona virus shit is palpable excrement. Perhaps because it started at the nursing home, in Kirkland, WA, directly across the street from where I worked I the 80s, I had my eye on it. I worried about it and took precautions (although I live so far out in the country that contagion was not a big worry for me and my family).
But, when the numbers on the cool graphs and maps online became evidently lower than the predictions for deaths, I lost all belief in it and quickly. It became about defeating Trump and MAGA. When a large caliber round is heading straight for your head, at a rate slow enough to see, you duck.
The medicos loved the attention. Every flu or pneumonia death became Covid at the stroke of a pen. Even with the lies, they still did not fudge enough numbers to make it credible. I was looking for bodies stacked in open mass graves, FFS. The Navy hospital ships, the King Dome (or whatever it’s called now) , the big temp. hospital wards…it was all a big nothing burger.
Fuck the CDC sideways. Fuck DC.
2 things:
There is no separate test for the so-called Delta variant of the Chinese flu. So where do all the statistics come from that we see everywhere?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/downloads/global-covid-19/Interim-Operational-Considerations-Implementing-Shielding-in-Humanitarian-Settings.pdf
The CDC plans for putting non vaccinated in concentration camps. (Yes, I said it.)
Just wait til the credit/debit card company’s start requiring proof of vac.
Do you have enough $$$ on hand to what you need to do if and when that time comes?
Pay the fuk attention!
This train is coming directly at you and you can’t tell how fast it is because your perspective of a direct hit is skewed. If you were off to the side watching it barrel down on someone else you would be frantically yelling and waving your arms.
You try to pay for something at the store and you find yourself in that embarrassing position of your card not working. Even after several attempts. You slog out to your vehicle and you call the bank. You get a 3 minute recorded message that gives you no info and makes you even angrier, so you drive to the bank. It is closed and there is no explaining sign on the door. The next day is the same thing.
Meanwhile you are out of milk, which is what you were buying at the store when your card failed. So you drink your mud with powdered cream only and that sets the tone for the day. You look your bank up online and it shows no relevant information. You drive back to the bank, still closed. You go to another branch. Closed. You try a ATM. Fail. WTF??? What do you do?
Now your bread is gone, literally, and your wife is pissing and moaning. You already have external pressure from the bank fiasco, now she’s riding your back. You’re being squeezed. Just think, if she had her own money in her own (different) bank maybe you guys could still have milk and bread. But being trad americans you have shared everything and now that it’s coming apart maybe you two will as well.
At work you ask your boss if he can pay you in cash rather than deposit your income into the bank like has been done for the past 20 years. Your question is so far out there that he is in disbelief that you are even asking it. He says that you’ll need to talk to the accounting dept so you do. They too are caught off guard and stammer, that they will have to check into what is involved to do that and will let you know in a few days. A few days! You need money NOW! Your gas gauge is less than a quarter and so is your wifes. She too is trying to get payed in legal tenders and having the same luck as you.
You called an attorney (out of the book) and told him your story. He is already aware of the trend and gives you just enough info to know that he can solve your problem but you have to give him a $1000 retainer up front. You don’t have that kind of money on hand and no way to get it. Even if you payed him there is no guarantee he can get you some fast cash and then being minus $1000 you’ll be in even worse shape. You check your bank again and surprise, they are open. The branch manager however, the only person that can deal with your issue, is in a corporate metting in the big city and won’t be back til Friday. OMG, your nerves are completely frazzled. Your impassioned pleas go unanswered by the desk clerk as she showers you with platitudes to keep your franti ass from pulling out the sheen gun and just get the hell out of here.
You drive home, thinking, and observing, trying to find a way to deal with this financial disaster. You get home and your wife is in tears. In your emotional angst you didn’t notice her ride wasn’t in the driveway. It broke down this afternoon and had to be towed to a shop and they want $2k to fix a blown tranny. OMFG, what next?
It’s all coming apart, one part at a time. But time is flying, now, and the parts will be leaving the building in handfuls as the days move forward. You can’t keep your mind on your work and your supervisor notices. He mentions it. Now you’re even more nervous, so you try harder, but you are coming apart. Your wife calls you at work and says you forgot to leave school lunch money for the kids and she has none and wants to know what to do. You almost lose it. In your mind the natural solution is to pack em a lunch and you are pissed that she couldn’t think of that. And you tell her so. She tells you to “Don’t take that tome with me!”, and starts crying again. You slam the phone down and sit there and seethe. You look at the calendar on the wall and see that today is Thursday and tomorrow the bank branch manager will be back from the meeting and set this problem right.
–to be cont’d.
Late to the party, are we? This Twitter storm was a psych-op by a number people looking to discredit some of the fear porn types. Many of these accounts were just created to repeat the same statements to make it look like the other side was posting multiple lies. Gotta keep the social media skeptic filters up, folks.
I was in a Delta variant hot spot, yes there were many people feeling like a case of flu, most just for a day or two. Delta spreads much faster, but seems to be less deadly than the original. I knew people in 2020 who suffered a lot, long recoveries, some died, including a fit and active fellow with no bad health habits. There wasn’t always a clear reason why some people were hit hard and others shrugged it off like a bad case of flu.
Stay out of crowds indoors, keep your distance and use some good sense, avoid airports and flying sickness cans, and don’t let the turkeys get you down.
Te panic porn has absolutely nothing anymore to do with real risk and personal danger, at least for 90+ percent of the population. But it hasd a great deal to do with an emotional need in some people to feel part of something Important and Bigger Than Themselves. For them wearing a mask is a visible signal that the wearer is one of the Elect.
Those who have called such people members of the Church of COVID are right on target.
Pay must be pretty poor for “True Believers”. It is the new Saint Vitus’ Dance. It seems to take too much effort to thow in an extra word, or two. Or a mis-spelling. The effect would still be there for the dim but would catch a few still on the fence.
The prattle wasn’t blocked or hidden, so someone is playing along.
Why would any of you be on Facebook or other tools of the left?.
What are the “Sugma” and “ligma” variants, and why is this the first time I’ve ever heard of them?
“Fact Checkers”… WHY don’t I believe them….. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…
Cynical? Moi?????
The clickbait farm that wrote that obvious b.s. forgot to end it with “Wait ‘til you see what happens next!”