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Puddy: The Gift

puddygravesite.jpg

And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

        — Eliot

Last Sunday in Seattle I was still sitting with my morning coffee when the phone rang. It was my old friend, the constant urban explorer, who lives a few blocks away. “I want to give you a gift,” he said, “but I can’t bring it to you. Instead, you’ve got to go to it.” This man’s gifts are not lightly chosen (Except for the inflatable Sarah Palin love doll — but he’s getting that one back when he least expects it.), so I listened.

“Write this down. Walk to the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in your neighborhood.”

“Oh..kay…..”

“No. No. You’ll be glad you did. Then go in the main entrance and stroll along the road on the west side.”

“Right.”

“Look to your left for a large white stone with two benches on either side of it. The name carved into the stone is ‘PUDDY.’ ”

“Got it.”

“Sit down on a bench and look around. That’s your gift. Talk to you later. Oh, you’ll want to take your camera.”

I wondered for a moment if this could be some sort of geocaching joke. At the same time, I knew it wasn’t. He’s a man with little use for the latest techno-ephemera. He values time, his, and others. Sleeveless errands are not his style. It was a bright, somewhat cool, Indian Summer Sunday in Seattle and the cemetery was only a few blocks away. I suited up and out the door I went. In a few minutes, I was walking into the cemetery and looking around.

Mt. Pleasant is a fine cemetery as cemeteries go. Quiet and expansive without being overlarge. You can be buried with your own kind if you are Asian or Jewish, or you can just be planted helter-skelter in the great Seattle diversity plots that make up most of its area. I’ve written about this place before in Small Flags, a meditation about loss and war, but the cemetery tells, as all cemeteries do, more than one kind of story if you settle your soul down and listen.

At first, I was a bit disoriented inside the gates since the one-lane road winds hither and yon around the grounds and the office with the map to the gravesites is closed on Sundays. By and by, however, I spied off to my left and over near the wall of trees and bushes and chain link fencing that is the western border of the cemetery a large white stone with two white stone benches on either side. I went over and read:

PUDDY

Come sit with us awhile and share our sorrow. Though you weep share the joyful memories too. Look in your heart: In truth you mourn for that which has been your delight.

For Joy and sorrow are inseparable.

I sat and looked north to the outer edge of the large plot that, so far, had only one grave. And there they were. [continue reading…]

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Dan Patterson: “That was a very clear observation on human nature – we humans can either find the root of the problem and address it, or a conveniently associated noun or verb and address that instead. One attraction to attacking the scapegoat instead of the root is the poorly positioned sources for representation if they exist at all. Any support for the assigned enemy is quickly shouted down and if not subdued is placed in the camp of, not just an opposing view but the enemy itself. Just ask anyone objecting to the Iraq war and occupation, or a male supporting the protection of the unborn.

“And it happens on a personal playing field as well as a national one. Get in a discussion with a close friend or intimate about a subject you two do not agree on; instead of a rational and logical point-counter-point does the discussion devolve into the heated broad-stroke assignment of “camps” or “(X)-wing talking points”? If you’re lucky the opponent will decide you are not worthy of wasting their time and toss the playing board to the ground and strut arrogantly away. My experience is exactly that most of the time, so it is less damaging to retreat and disengage.

“It is that retreat and disengagement that is the trouble, I suppose. Doing that gives ground and moves the front lines closer to the enemy’s objective. And it is that point at which I disagree with the learned author of this piece: Yes it is likely the normies will be whipped into a lather to vent their spleens at a foreign throne, but that is less effective now than in the past. The Ukraine mess, for example, is far too grey to fall into the narrative; too many crimes from Uke and some justification from the Russkies. The Myth of the Noble Savage, too, is long in the tooth, and stirring additional outrage about this tribe against that one because of unjust modern oppression does not pass the smoke test.

“The people like me who once backed away must now speak, and clearly. The enemy is not a scapegoat but a trojan horse. The enemy bent on our destruction, and making extraordinary gains toward our extinction, is our own government, local, state, and national. The enemy.

“Read the Constitution and founding documents, diaries, newspapers, and pamphlets of the late 1700s and up to the mid-1800s. There is a clear direction for independent thought and action, and clear protections against scapegoats created to distract and deflect. If that sounds too much like either the Russian Revolution against the Czars or the American Revolution against The Crown, so be it.”

Dan Patterson
August 7, 2022, 6:23 PM

PLEASE
AND THANK YOU!
OR BY MAIL WITH “CASH CHECK OR MONEY ORDER” TO
Gerard Van der Leun // 1692 Mangrove Ave Apt: 379
Chico, CA 95926

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Strange Gaze: The Crazed Eyes of George Soros


George Soros vows to keep backing woke DAs despite urban crime spikes The Capital Research Center reported in January of this year that Soros has given more than $29 million to left-wing district attorney candidates through a network of political action committees. Other incumbents who have benefited from the largesse include Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Kim Foxx in Cook County, Ill., Kim Gardner in St. Louis, and Kim Ogg in Harris County, Texas.

When parking in the handicapped space is prescient.

Richard Barnes Sharpshooter’s Den After Gardner, Gettysburg, 2013

As you look at this picture, you’re on a planet spinning at 1,040 miles per hour, or .3 miles per second. (That’s at the equator. You can calculate your own personal speed by multiplying the cosine of your latitude by 1,040). The earth spinning beneath your feet is at the same time hurtling around the sun at 18.5 miles per second. In addition, your entire solar system is cartwheeling around the milky way at 140 miles per second. Even at that incomprehensible speed, it will still take 250 million years for you to complete a single rotation around the galaxy. Pitted against these immense facts, this small square image controls your psychological outlook and gives you a feeling of calm. [continue reading…]

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Noted in Passing: Never a rose without a thorn.

 

https://andsomeitsjustaswell.tumblr.com/post/691939999724257280

PLEASE. . .
AND THANK YOU!
OR BY MAIL WITH “CASH CHECK OR MONEY ORDER” TO
Gerard Van der Leun // 1692 Mangrove Ave Apt: 379
Chico, CA 95926

{ 6 comments }

On Scapegoats by Commenter Nutella


Robert Rauschenberg. Monogram, 1955–59. Oil, paper, fabric, printed reproductions, metal, wood, rubber shoe-heel, and tennis ball on two conjoined canvases with oil on taxidermied Angora goat with brass plaque and rubber tire on a wood platform mounted on four casters

Humans can’t solve their societal problems without killing scapegoats. This goes back to the dawn of time. It’s our Coping Mechanism. After a bit of communal bloodletting, we all have a nice post-coital cigarette and return to Normal. Either you know your history and your basics of humans 101 and you get this or you don’t.

Scapegoats need to be discernible outsiders (for some definition of Outsider) upon whom all the psychological burdens of the community can be laid… and then you drive out and/or kill the scapegoat.

One problem I didn’t mention in the previous comment is that in an age of Mass Media and Mass Man this can be problematic: See the War Between the States. Or certain other unpleasantnesses more recent. The killing of scapegoats can get a trifle out of hand and go on for a bit too long.

In the Current Year, illegal and impossible to let off societal stress on the traditional Old Favourites (can’t type the word or Bad Things Will Happen) who can no longer be named.

In fact, if you open your eyes and look around you you’ll notice that WE (White Men) are the Designated Scapegoats of the Regime now. The problem with this is that you can’t scapegoat your productive fraction of society and expect things to work out well. Also, Regime Scapegoating of White Men is the subconscious of a tiny Alien ruling class festering away but it doesn’t gel properly with the very different hopes and fears of the still vast numbers of Legacy Americans (you.).

There’s also the fact that Ordinary Americans feel the terrible stresses building up in society and feel a compelling urge to strike out because doing so is what humans do. We’re coded for it. But the Old Outlets for doing so are now illegal and thanks to post-1945 brainwashing and shuffling/replacement of elites, Unthinkable. So all that’s left is to strike out wildly at Foreigners Over There: Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Muzzies in general. And your rulers will encourage this because if anyone should be getting the Scapegoat Public Square Immolation treatment it is your rulers.

It’s not rocket science. The West was built on grit, determination, Christianity, and an occasional pogrom to let off any excess steam. Ain’t none of those factors or options left in a serviceable state in 2022, so I put my money on Normie being easily whipped up into a foreign adventure. The problem is that the USA’s internal stresses are now too big for a small foreign adventure to suffice. It will need to be a Big Foreign Adventure. And the Big Foreigners have many deliverable nukes and don’t have Trannie Admirals. Problematic.

The parsimonious solution would be to hurry up and have your Civil War II and kill plenty of each other. Butcher’s bill will be big but likely smaller than if try to dodge it by taking on the Chinese or Russians (or maybe even Iranians).

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From a comment to The Sacrifice and the Reckoning: The Event (An August 6th prophecy from 2004)

The ScapegoatWilliam Holman Hunt, 1854–1856, Oil on canvas

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Gerard Van der Leun // 1692 Mangrove Ave Apt: 379
Chico, CA 95926

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Solo:

Sadikova at 16 years of age (!).

Ensemble:

[continue reading…]

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Your Prayers Please for MOTUS AD

[Clairifcation: I am fine. I was calling for prayers for MOTUS  (item at the link below)who has been undergoing some extreme moments in the battle against cancer. Prayers there please. Repeat: I’m fine. I regret this item was not clearer. — Gerard]

MOTUS A.D.: In The Infamous Words Of Rosana Rosana Dana, “It’s Always Something” ||  reports: I was admitted at 11:00 pm Monday, 12 hours after arriving at the ER, dripped until Wednesday evening at which time I was determined to have reached a “therapeutic” level of blood thinner. I was released and sent home with oral blood thinners which will be a permanent addition to my drug protocol. I was happy to relinquish my room to some poor soul still lying on a stretcher in a hallway somewhere .

I was initially told that the clot could have caused heart damage due to the excess pressure it placed on the heart, but they seem to have determined that was not the case, thankfully. Once again, I owe a huge thank you to everyone here who has been soliciting the Good Lord on my behalf. I am truly grateful, thankful and blessed for your continuing prayers.

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Something Wonderful: Flying the Jet Watermelon


As I am fond of saying: “In America if it is worth doing it is worth overdoing.”

PLEASE. . .
AND THANK YOU!
OR BY MAIL WITH “CASH CHECK OR MONEY ORDER” TO
Gerard Van der Leun // 1692 Mangrove Ave Apt: 379
Chico, CA 95926

{ 7 comments }

“We have made a dark bargain with ourselves to let one of our cities die.”

THE TECATE TRUCK was just like all the other Tecate Beer trucks that went back and forth daily at the border crossing, except that it was not owned by Tecate. The driver of that truck spoke fluent Spanish and the truck was always loaded with Tecate. In time the US border guards got used to the Tecate trucks. The difference was that this Tecate truck had, at its center, a narrow, hollow space shielded with thin sheets of lead so that no ambient radiation could escape.

It had cost The Base over $150,000 to convert the truck at a garage in Ensenada a year before. That was little enough when it came to securing the device which had cost the same group more than $45 million in Ukraine in 1997. In any event, the truck did its job and passed without incident over the border and into the United States at Tecate, California on August 6th. Dates were important to The Base, and this date was especially significant. After all, what could be more significant than the day on which Hiroshima was destroyed?

After clearing the border the Tecate Truck followed Highway 94 north to its merge with Highway 8 at La Mesa, California, and then drove west towards Highway 5. It pulled off the road at a rest stop where it picked up a technician in a Tecate uniform who was carrying a case with the necessary electronics and a couple of weapons. After that, the two men followed the road that ran straight towards the heart of San Diego. It got off the freeway downtown and quickly made its way to the intersection of North Harbor Drive and West Broadway. Its total travel time from the border to downtown San Diego was just over an hour. It was running close to schedule. It was about 11:30 in the morning.

The truck pulled over and parked along North Harbor Drive and the technician took out some binoculars and scanned the harbor beyond the Navy Region Southwest Complex whose entrance was less than 100 yards away. Intelligence was correct. The USS Ronald Reagan was in its home port and riding comfortably at anchor.

The technician opened his case and took a wire that ran from the back of the truck along the floorboards. He plugged it into a jack in the simple switching device in the case. He looked at the driver and smiled. The driver smiled back. They both began to recite a prayer in Arabic while looking over the San Diego harbor. At some point in the prayer, without really thinking about it, the technician threw the switch. In the next instant, at the intersection of North Harbor Drive and West Broadway in San Diego, California on a warm August morning, a miniature version of the Sun appeared on the surface of the Earth. [continue reading…]

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The Summer of Our Content

1910: It wasn’t the last summer but it was one of the last summers when America was at peace with the world and at peace with itself. The Civil War was a 45-year-old memory. The first of the World Wars that would scar the century to come was not even the shadow of a premonition. Lenin was an exile in Europe with no power and Mao was a student in Hunan. Hitler was living in a homeless shelter in Vienna selling paintings to tourists. Stalin was either being sent to or escaping from Siberia. Churchill was the Home Secretary in England and planning the first bit of social engineering, the National Insurance Act. Taft was President and his plan was “try to accomplish just as much [as Teddy Roosevelt] without any noise.”

Both the automobile and the electric light were ubiquitous. Air conditioning was still a wild fantasy, but the swamp cooler had begun to come online in 1904 so it wasn’t completely out of the question for the very rich.

Halley’s Comet had just passed by taking Mark Twain with it. Somewhere in Macedonia Mother Teresa had just been born. If men looked up they could have seen, had they been in the right place at the right time, other men in flight. If any had been in Sheepshead Bay outside of New York City on the 20th they would have heard the first gunshots ever fired from an airplane. Individual lives might have their small tragedies but there was no perceptible or imaginable catastrophe in the cards dealt Americans that summer. It was August and everywhere Americans paused to refresh themselves.

Presented for your contemplation: One wave breaking over a group of Americans who have waded into the Atlantic on the Jersey shore sometime around noon on a hot day in August 1910.

The wave would have swelled up and started out far over the eastern horizon near the edge of the Gulf Stream. It would have rolled with strict impunity in the midst of thousands of others like it, all bound towards the shore. The photographer would have gotten up early and hauled his cumbersome equipment towards the shore. The bathers would have arrived in the late morning if they were not already staying near the shore.

Once there they changed into swimming apparel known more for modesty than comfort. From the light it was around noon and would have been hot. Seeking to be cooler they waded in. Some stayed near the shore. Others waded further out into the steadily deepening water.

On some kind of elevated platform above the sand, the photographer put the 8×10 glass plate into the camera and ducked under the black hood for final adjustments. Then he stood up and called out and called out and called out and finally got the attention of some. Most ignored him.

The wave rolled in from somewhere over the horizon, rising up and down, maybe cresting here and there, until it swelled one last time and, just as the photographer happened to release the shutter, jumped up in that one moment and splashed and spattered the unwary people posed and unposed in the cool salt water just off the beach on the Jersey shore. That was the moment, less than a second, in the midst of that summer now more than a century gone. All, each and every one, of those nearly 300 souls are now gone as well, even the children held on the shoulders or standing in the shallows, all gone — all perhaps, maybe, save one now almost silent centenarian.

Well, what of it? That’s the way of the world and the way of the waves of the world and our lives. What we have is this moment snatched out of time on the Jersey shore one afternoon in August before the last century went smash. Who is there? What were they like? It can’t be known, but it can be seen and what can be seen, at least in this one moment, is that these people had what anyone would recognize as that thing we call happiness. Let’s see what we can see of it.

We can see the chaos ruining the photographer’s carefully composed moment with a splash soaking those nearest and plastering down the hair of a man who was probably balder than he would like to be

We can see the young girl not entirely pleased with being drenched from the security of her father’s shoulder.

We can see those who are not particularly interested in being recorded on film for another century they would never know and gaze at something, at what?, that is just beyond the frame.

We can see one person who is concerned enough about the sun to carry a parasol with her out beyond the group until she is shoulder deep in the Atlantic and looking off at the horizon or contemplating the spatter of sunlight off the rollers.

Closer in towards shore, we can see two sweethearts looking at each other and liking what they see in each other’s eyes.

Closer still we can see at least one who has not disappointed the photographer and is determined to present a smiling face to the ages.

We can see those who, in their frumpy and modest bathing suits, hold hands as the water deepens.

We can see those who smile and clasp each other ignoring the rout and the riot of water and waves around them.

In the middle of the splash, we can see the young man, full of life and ready for anything, held up high by his father, shouting out and waving down the years as if to say hello from a great summer day in 1910.

Out beyond the bathers two men in a boat row past. Heading south. Perhaps for exercise. Perhaps as guards that would scoop up and return to life any bathers who had been swept too far from shore.

And then, finally, at the extreme right side of the frame we see two hands; the hands of a man moving towards the splash and the picture, but now caught forever just outside the frame; just a second too late to find himself forever frozen at this moment that I can see now, a hundred plus Augusts later. One step quicker and he would have been there. But at least his hands made it.

Maybe that’s enough. It’s August again in America. Maybe not the happiest August in our history, but it’s been a hard century so far, and is due to get harder.

We owe ourselves at least one more day at the beach.

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Our Mission? From Whom Is It?

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Gearhead Utah family on vacation in Florida. “What shall we do, dad?” “Let’s find some dysfunctional internal combustion engine. Fix it. And go for a ride in a swamp, okay?” “AWESOME!”

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Never forget. Never forgive.


Do not foreswear vengeance. Choose your preferred method:

VOTING
TICKLE FIGHTS
FACE PUNCHES
NOOSE
PITCHFORK
TORCHES
FIRING SQUAD
WOOD CHIPPER WITH BACKHOE
RETIRE ALL (LOCAL / STATE  / FEDERAL) TO HAWAII WITH FULL GOVERNMENT PENSION
NUKE HAWAII
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You know how it is, Whole. You know. And I know you know. We just can’t pretend it is what it was any longer.

Bad things have been happening between us whenever I’ve tried to get into your sack for quite some time. It’s time to face the fact that we just don’t have that old natural spark between us any longer. We’ve faded from organic to conventional. It’s time to move on to fresh fruits and vegetables new — elsewhere. Ditto your firm, moist, and alluring meats of many flavors. None of what you’re doing to me is doing it for me anymore.

I ignored a lot of your irritating habits, Whole — like keeping that entire wing of the dairy case jammed with your revoltingly raw vegan pastes and six flavors of tofu, that sloppy second of soy. I rationalized you were just trying to keep your green ass from getting so fat you couldn’t get into that tacky green apron you insist on wearing all the time, because “they go with my Earth shoes”.

I put up with your petulant insistence on “helping me” find things I wasn’t looking for whenever I paused in an aisle to ask myself “Johnson Grass and Brayla Suet Sausage? What the hell is that and what life form eats it?”

I put up with your plucking money from my wallet while I slept, so you could blow it on wind power and floats in the Green Pride Parades. I figured that every Whole needs a hobby.

Yes, I put up with your junkies’ greed as you whined for more and more…. especially in the cheese department where you had no shame in marking up English and French and “local, sustainable” cheeses first to $20 a pound (Or as you coyly say, “$19.99!”)…. and then up to $25 a pound… and then — since somebody was evidently paying you to screw them this hard — when you went whole hog and started into the $35 a pound range with no end to your cheese needs in sight.

Yes, I just looked the other way, Whole. I figured I could always just skulk around the deli counter cadging slices of salami and smidgens of cheese off your perky crew until they grew tired or I was full. But the feeling of being used by you — especially with the Euro cheeses which went up and up regardless of how heavily the Dollar was sitting on the face of the Euro — kept on pinching me in the pocket.

Even then I accepted your “Give More Green to Be More Green” smarm. Why?

Was it because your moist and juicy fruit always looked so tender, sweet, and tasty?

Was it because you always reminded me, in your organic, vegan, tofu-sodden shelves, of those unshaven but passionate hippie girls of my youth? The ones with the faint Frida Kahlo mustaches like the fuzz I once licked from your peaches.

Was it because I thought I was demonstrating my successful status by shopping at a grocery store whose motto might as well have been, “Whole Foods: Why Pay Less?”

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{ 37 comments }

Noted in Passing: Just one salad shy of freedom.


Smugglers Abandon Migrant Woman Trapped in California Border Wall Section
Human smugglers jacked open a portion of the border wall in an attempt to smuggle migrants into the U.S. Chief Heitke reported the smuggler’s jack slipped trapping a Salvadoran woman between the bollards. The smugglers promptly abandoned the woman in the precarious position.

Border Patrol agents teamed up with the San Diego Fire Department, EMS crews, and the Government of Mexico to free the woman.

In another section of the border wall, human smugglers encouraged an 11-year-old Jamaican child to jump from the wall. A few moments later, smugglers endangered a three-year-old child from the top of the wall. Border Patrol surveillance cameras captured the incident, Chief Heitke tweeted.

“Smugglers continue to charge upwards of $10k to be smuggled into the US, all with little to no regard for their safety,” Heitke stated.

PLEASE. . .
AND THANK YOU!
OR BY MAIL WITH “CASH CHECK OR MONEY ORDER” TO

Gerard Van der Leun // 1692 Mangrove Ave Apt: 379

Chico, CA 95926

{ 12 comments }

Something Wonderful: White Bird

White Bird: The Documentary

[Note: In the black and white segments over Bill Graham’s voice you can see the Telegraph Avenue and Dwight block in Berkeley where I lived during the various Telegraph Avenue riots of the era. I was surprised to see it and wonder if, somewhere in that footage, is the boy I once was**. Probably, but as a footnote to that era I would be hard to see.]
White Bird: The Pretty Version

White Bird” is a song that most music fans (at least those of us of a certain age) will instantly recognize.

It’s a Beautiful Day were “Summer of Love” San Franciscan contemporaries of The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Santana and their lilting rock, jazz, folk, classical style was unique in that context. They were neither very “proggy” or “fusiony. They certainly weren’t very psychedelic, either, but they made lovely music that still evokes an era splendidly, even if they are remembered primarily for just this one song. “White Bird” is one of the ultimate hippie anthems and has been a staple of FM radio for decades.

Ironically, bandleader and violinist David LaFlamme later said of “White Bird,” that the oh so pretty ditty was inspired by living in gloomy, soggy Seattle without a car:

“The song describes the picture Linda and I saw as we looked out this little window in this attic. We had a little Wurlitzer portable piano sitting right in the well of this window, and I’d sit and work on songs. When you hear lines like, ‘the leaves blow across the long black road to the darkened sky and its rage,’ it’s describing what I was seeing out the window. Where the ‘white bird’ thing came from: We were like caged birds in that attic. We had no money, no transportation, the weather was miserable. We were just barely getting by on a very small food allowance provided to us. It was quite an experience, but it was very creative in a way.” >>

Via Dangerous Minds. [continue reading…]

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