Wall Street, NYC Photo by Vanderleun

ONCE upon a time
Making money was a crime,
And I was in my prime,
And working for nothing.

Now that habit’s hard to break,
And what I got you wouldn’t take
The time to steal. Life’s so unreal
When you’re working for nothing.

        Working for nothing
                   — ain’t my act.
        Working for nothing
                   — an un-natural fact,
        Working for nothing.

Those fat cats in the top hats
All know money’s where it’s at,
Say `You want it easy, want it fat?
Quit working for nothing. [continue reading…]

These fragments I have shored against my ruins. – – The Waste Land

The full moon is sliding down the dark sky over Catalina Island off on the western horizon. Slipping in and out of sheets of haze it casts a long shadow of a blue on darker blue pool of moonlight out from the silhouette of Catalina’s steep hills and across the open slate water to the California shore. Below me to the north, the winding lights of the village converge on the long dark strand of the Pacific Coast Highway arcing up and over the hills of Laguna Beach and on into the towns that string out towards LA, growing ever denser along that route until the highway fades into the bleak streets of the metropolis.

Driving that way towards central California, you’d be tempted to give up the coast highway, old Route 1, for a quick transit through LA, up over the Grapevine to slide down to the featureless plain of the central valley and the torpor of Highway 5. But if you stay on the Pacific Coast Highway as it disappears into the scuzzy sprawl of LA, you’ll find, in time, you took the better route.

To find the deeper rewards of the Pacific Coast Highway you have to crawl through endless renditions of our modern malaise laid out as the strip malls and neighborhoods of low degree in that part of the passage — fried food joints, store-front fortune tellers, quick shot dive bars, bad to mediocre restaurants, drive-through churches — but in the end, the Highway emerges in Santa Monica, gives way to the long beaches and headlands of Malibu, sweeps out of the city completely and leads to highlands and sea cliffs and finally to the Sur. You’d never get there if you take the fast and easy freeway to the east. It is true that you might get to someplace else, some other clot of cities, quicker. But then you’d just find yourself in another variation of Los Angeles. It would be as if you never left, since, in truth, you had not.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that if you take your time with a journey, you have a much better chance of finding that the journey itself is the destination; that if you can accept you need to pass through the uglier parts of the landscape to get to the highlands and the vistas, they will in time appear again. But if you try to take the fast route, the route that leads around all the clutter, detritus, and smash of our disposable culture, you will, in the end, have seen little and understood less, you will be traveling on the bland Highway 5s that always run into the dark end of nowhere special.

“We live in a time where timeless wisdom has become fading whispers heard through glass. Worse still, we will not hear those whispers.”

Our recent ability to achieve speed in transit has infected us with the idea that all transitions in life need to be done at speed. Yet we complain there are too many wrecks and breakdowns on these highways of our lives. We complain that there is always too much traffic around us and all we can do is hunker down in our own steel shell and drive with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake, boxed in by a flying wedge of Semis hauling things we don’t need to houses that are never quite homes and tailgated by our own impatience only to discover our “destination” is not really where we need to be at all. [continue reading…]

[HT: Curry]

What greater fortune have we? [continue reading…]

They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it. ~ Thelonious Monk (Monk’s Advice, 1960)

As against our gauzy national hopes, I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible. ~ Ekow N. Yankah (New York Times, 2017)

Though the question seems naïve to some, it is in fact perfectly valid to ask why black people can get away with behavior that white people can’t. The progressive response to this question invariably contains some reference to history: blacks were taken from their homeland in chains, forced to work as chattel for 250 years, and then subjected to redlining, segregation, and lynchings for another century. In the face of such a brutal past, many would argue, it is simply ignorant to complain about what modern-day blacks can get away with.

Yet there we were—young black men born decades after anything that could rightly be called ‘oppression’ had ended—benefitting from a social license bequeathed to us by a history that we have only experienced through textbooks and folklore. And my white Hispanic friend (who could have had a tougher life than all of us, for all I know) paid the price. The underlying logic of using the past to justify racial double-standards in the present is rarely interrogated. What do slavery and Jim Crow have to do with modern-day blacks, who experienced neither? Do all black people have P.T.S.D from racism, as the Grammy and Emmy award-winning artist Donald Glover recently claimed? Is ancestral suffering actually transmitted to descendants? If so, how? What exactly are historical ‘ties’ made of?

We often speak and think in metaphors. For instance, life can have ups and downs and highs and lows, despite the fact that our joys and sorrows do not literally pull our bodies along a vertical axis. Similarly, modern-day black intellectuals often say things like, “We were brought here against our will,” despite the fact that they have never seen a slave ship in their lives, let alone been on one. When metaphors are made explicit—i.e., emotions are vertical, groups are individuals—it’s easy to see that they are just metaphors. Yet many black intellectuals carry on as if they were literal truths. [continue reading…]

When you’re ignorant to world cultures – YouTube

Notice no one died! That’s what they are for! #shorts #trucking – YouTube

https://youtube.com/shorts/nsg3KBMX0Q8?feature=share

This store has a secret room! – YouTube

Flying the SECOND LARGEST Owl in the World!!! – YouTube

FUNNY AND SAD AT THE SAME TIME part 2 – YouTube

https://youtube.com/shorts/3KsMoCE6xm8?feature=share

Why NICE GIRLS finish FIRST and BAD GIRLS finish LAST! @Anthony Dream Johnson – YouTube

Kind to animals �� – YouTube

Rap?
What dap?
Da blues
Is da news.

Want mo?
Fur sho!
[continue reading…]

BREAKING: Vaccinated, boosted President Biden tests positive for Covid

“Are you buckled in? Heads Down – Stay Down! Heads Down – Stay Down! Heads Down – Stay Down! Brace! Brace! Brace! Emergency Landing Positions!” [continue reading…]

“My grandma wanted to see the ocean one last time before checking into hospice.”

Coffee cooling in the morning light.
Thank the stars and say so long to night.
Have a smoke and play the radio.
Nod to Picasso in his last chateau,
With his view of Sainte-Victoire.

You feel so lucky in your postcard life.
You’ve made a little money, got a pretty wife.
You’ve got it made. Yes, you’ve got lots of time.
You’re at the top. You’ve nowhere left to climb,
In the russet winter woods of Sainte-Victoire.

Some days you’re drifting in a crystal trance,
Set to music woven in a hazy dance.
You’re safely hid away. You never get the blues.
Life goes on but never makes the news
In the village on the slopes of Sainte-Victoire.

Another slow-rolling easy day
In the forgotten land of bread and wine.
Shotguns sound… but they’re so far away
It’s hard to hear them as a sign
Of trouble somewhere far from Sainte-Victoire.

And in your daydreams, you can hear a song
As faint as secrets spoken in a distant room,
And though its words dissolve like frost at dawn,
You hear the singing of it linger on
And echo in the stones of Sainte-Victoire.

The misted ghosts of lovers still alive
Shine on brightly in the fields at dark,
Like winter’s ice embracing autumn leaves
To float them down the small, clear river Arc
That flows along the foot of Sainte-Victoire.

Young lovers hiking upward through the rain
On the mountain’s stone, they’ll all retrace their pain,
Limned in lines you know you know by heart,
And still, you go on climbing, it’s at least a start
Towards the peak of Sainte-Victoire.

NOTE: I once lived in an apartment in Vauvenarges, France where, while sipping my morning coffee, I looked down across the town to the chateau where Picasso was buried. My wife at the time was painting in her studio apartment next to ours and our days were lazy and long, the wine fine, the food better, and we spent our days going to various sites around the town where Cezanne set up his easel to paint Sainte-Victoire.

Recall that in the days before the Civil Rights Era, being a black American was a matter of shame and degradation, but Black Pride served to counter that. The concept of Black Pride, while initially beneficial, has, however, brought black Americans from one extreme mindset and deposited us into another. It took us away from the shame of being black and brought us to a place in which no one may criticize a black person who is deemed to be in good standing with the “tribe.”

As a result, many (most?) black Americans have come to believe that blackness is a Leftist way of thinking and a left-leaning political position and, stemming from these ideas, that any black person who deviates from the “black” mindset and political position—a black conservative–isn’t “really” black.1

This idea stems from the Organized Left co-opting Black Pride and using it to keep anger and grievance alive long past their dates of pertinence. The purpose of this tactic is to keep the wedge open between black and white Americans, drive it wider, and produce violence. The ultimate purpose, taken together with many other tactics, is to destroy America. [continue reading…]

Neil Young. Flaming asshole and commie moron, right? Right. Hit it, Neil:

In a 2013 radio interview, Graham Nash recalled visiting Neil Young in 1972: [continue reading…]

[continue reading…]

Merkins: The Original Fake News

Things that are trending positive.

– CA wildfire suppression (impressive)
– Energy costs topped out, turning
– Decoupling from China
– Nuclear energy (climate change)
– Supply chain issues topped out, turning
– Ukraine not going nuclear
– Pandemic managed
– Stocks
– jobs

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) July 20, 2022

Things that are NOT going well at the moment.

– Obesity
– Racist/broken school system (because teachers unions)
– Fake News
– Ukraine spending
– Inflation, government debt
– China
– Crime
– Illegal Immigration
– Social media = brain damage

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) July 20, 2022

Name a current problem NOT caused by fake news.

It’s harder than you think.

Fake news is the root cause of Jan6th, our energy problems, Ukraine, Covid, ongoing systemic racism, and on and on.

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) July 20, 2022

 Prof Tritto: COVID-19 was created in the Wuhan laboratory and is now in the hands of the Chinese military Rome (AsiaNews) – COVID-19, which is killing and infecting people all over the world, is not a naturally occurring virus; instead, it was created in Wuhan, in a level-4 biosafety laboratory. Not only Chinese, but also French and US scientists contributed to the production of this “chimera,” an organism created in a lab. [continue reading…]

U.S. astronaut Buzz Aldrin salutes the American flag on the surface of the Moon after he and fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first men to land on the Moon during the Apollo 11 space mission on July 20, 1969.

The moon marked out the edge of heaven.
On this, our scriptures all agreed.
The moon was fixed, it could not fall.
The moon would fill our final needs.

The songs we’d learned were of the moon,
A fitting subject, known to all,
But the songs we sang were of the Earth,
And those that lived before the Fall.

These songs of forests flowing round
The Earth’s four corners warmed the frost
That killed our gardens, coming early,
To remind us all of what we’d lost.

“Why wander yearning for the moon?”
We’d ask of stones and ancient trees.
Their silence sang back in the night,
Of lands where all free choices freeze. [continue reading…]