Back in the 20th Century, I knew Janis and while Joan’s not Janis, she’s as close to Janis as we’ll get in this century.

“I walk in shadows searching for light
Cold and alone no comfort in sight
Hoping and praying for someone to care
Always moving and going nowhere

What becomes of the brokenhearted
Who had love that’s now departed
I know I’ve got to find
Some kind of peace of mind
Help me”

 
And if, after you catch your breath, you’d like to know more about this performance, the learned Wings of Pegasus lays it all out for you. [continue reading…]

John Quincy Adams’s Warning Against the Search for “Monsters to Destroy,” 1821:

And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government.

America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.

She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama in the European world will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force… She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit…

[America’s] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.

We are the alternative that they have left behind but cannot escape. We are the alternative to the endless alternative, the alternative to national guilt, national suicide, and national armageddon. We are the rebels who rebel against the rebels, the counterrevolution to the revolution, the people, who, when the noise has grown loud enough and there are fires in the streets, step out and show a better way. — Sultan Knish: The End of the Alternative Media

“Apocalyptic cults and youth gangs, garage bands and wolfpacks, *colleges* and phalansteries, espionage networks trading in vaporous facts and networks of home shoppers for illicit goods; monastic, penological, mutant-biomorphic, and anarcho-terrorist cells; renegade churches, dwarf communities, no-risk survivalist enclaves, unfunded quasi-scientific research units, paranoid think tanks, unregistered political parties, sub-employed workers councils, endo-exile colonies, glossolaliac fanclubs, acned anorexic primal hordes; zombie revenants, neo-fakirs, defrocked priests and detoxing prophets, psychedelic snake-oil shills, masseurs of undiagnosed symptoms, bitter excommunicants, faceless narcissists, ideological drag queens, mystical technophiles, sub-entrepreneurial dealers, derivative *derivistes*, tireless archivists of phantom conspiracies, alien abductees, dupe attendants, tardy primitives, vermin of abandoned factories, hermits, cranks, opportunists, users, connections, outriders, outpatients, wannabes, hackers, thieves, squatters, parasites, saboteurs; wings, wards, warehouses, arcades, hells, hives, dens, burrows, lofts, flocks, swarms, viruses, tribes, movements, groupuscules, cenacles, isms, and the endlessly multiplied hybridization of variant combinations of all these, and more….

“Why this stupid fascination with stupid undergrounds? What is it about these throwaway fanzines and unreadable rants, these neo-tattoos and recycled apocalypses, this mountainous accumulation of declassified factoids, these bloody smears, this incredible noise? Why wade through these piles of nano-shit?

“Why submit oneself to these hysterical purveyors, these hypertheories and walls of sound? Why insist on picking this particular species of nit? Why abject criticism, whose putative task was once to preserve the best that has been known and thought, by guilty association with so fatuous, banal, idiotic, untenable a class of cultural objects?

“Why not decline, not so politely, to participate in the tiny spectacle of aging intellectuals dressing in black to prowl festering galleries and clubs where, sometime before dawn, they will encounter the contemptuous gaze of their own children, and almost manage to elide that event when they finally produce their bilious reports, their chunks of cultural criticism?

“No excuse, no justification: all one can put forward is an unendurable habit of attention, a meager fascination, no more or less commanding than that hypnosis one enters in the face of television; a rut that has always led downward and in the end always found itself stuck on the surface; a kind of drivenness, if not a drive; a *critique*, if you can forgive such a word, that has never located any cultural object whose poverty failed to reflect its own; a rage to find some point at which criticism would come to an end, and that only intensified as that end-point receded and shrunk to the size of an ideal. — Prologue to a Paper by Paul Mann | Postmodern Culture v.5 n.3 (May, 1995

It was a pretty big year for fashion
A lousy year for rock and roll
The people gave their blessing to crimes of passion
It was a dark, dark night for the collective soul
I was somewhere out on Riverside
By the El Royale Hotel
When a stranger appeared in a cloud of smoke
I thought I knew him all too well

He said: “Now that I have your attention
I got somethin’ I wanna say
You may not wanna hear it
I’m gonna tell it to ya anyway
You know, I’ve always liked you, boy
‘Cause you were not afraid of me
But things are gonna get mighty rough
Here in Gomorrah-By-The-Sea”
He said: “It’s just like home
It’s so damned hot, I can’t stand it
My fine seersucker suit is all soakin’ wet”

And the hills are burning
The wind is raging
And the clock strikes midnight
In the Garden of Allah

“Nice car………
I love those Bavarians…..so meticulous
Y’know, I remember a time when things were a lot more fun around here
When good was good, and evil was evil
Before things got so…….fuzzy
Yeah, I was once a golden boy like you
I was summoned to the halls of power in the heavenly court
And I dined with the deities who looked upon me with favor
For my talents; my creativity
We sat beneath the palms in the warm afternoon
And drank the wine with Fitzgerald and Huxley
They pawned a biting phrase
From tongues hot with blood
And drained their pens of bitter ink
Vainly reaching for the bottle of empty Edens
Branded specially for the ones
Who had come with great expectations
To the perfumed halls of Allah
For their time in the sun”
We were stokin’ the fires
And oilin’ up the machinery
Until the gods found out we had ideas of our own

And the war was coming
And the earth was shaking
And there was no more room
In the Garden of Allah [continue reading…]

In my email, this report: Lots of people still masked-up here in Santa Fe. It’s worse in Taos where I drove through yesterday. I installed a sign up in Red River. There’s a thrift store in Taos that has a notice on the front door that even though the governor ceased the mask mandate they are still insisting you wear a mask to enter. That store could function like that forever, I suppose. For many people the plandemic was the most fantastic thing that ever occurred in their lives. They felt like they were a part of something important that gifted them with a sense of urgency, purpose, belonging, identity, kumbaya…. on and on. They will never stop believing. To unquestionably obey authority is responsible, and truly, the harmony of the universe.

The amusing thing about these people? Go through their Twitter feeds and they’ll tell you the Ukrainians are absolutely 100% kicking Russia’s ass. [continue reading…]

Here’s looking at YOU kid.

Follow the Money!

Ready to “protect and defend! SIR, errr M’am… err….”

“There is a world dimensional for those untwisted by the love of things irreconcilable.”

Normality. It’s just ordinary life. There’s nothing “new” about it. It is your birthright. You were given it by God and it has been stolen from you. Seek it. Create it. Defend it. Be it. Then, and only then, make it new. And having made it new you can return to what it was then.

What then was it?

It was not a special place. It was ordinary. The most ordinary place in the world. It was fraught with a strange excitement, fecund with endless possibilities. It was built of a metaphysic so loose that the most absurd accident could happen and it would only be a part of His Grand Design. It was a place where revelation and prophecy were daily events, the Second Coming scheduled for tomorrow after lunch, magic considered merely another, older branch of science, poetry an acceptable mode of speech, and caricature a widely appreciated attitude. As far as we know Rasputin, William Blake, St. Teresa, and Walt Whitman had never lived in the green house, but they would have been welcome if they had wandered in.

Let’s go then and knock upon the door.
All you’ve got to do is step right up.
All you’ve got to do is ring that bell.
You can come as you are.
There’s nothing to be hung about.

There is some wine for the asking, music always playing, pipes forever smoldering. Perhaps there will someone to meet and take home later. Perhaps there will be a chance for love among these phantoms; among these phantoms we have set to sleep in music that our dreams remind us.

Take me back
Take me way, way, way back
On Hyndford Street
Where you could feel the silence at half past eleven
On long summer nights
As the wireless played Radio Luxembourg
And the voices whispered across Beechie River
In the quietness as we sank into restful slumber in the silence
And carried on dreaming in God

And walks up Cherry Valley from North Road Bridge, railway line
On sunny summer afternoons
Picking apples from the side of the tracks
That spilled over from the gardens of the houses
On Cyprus Avenue
Watching the moth catcher work the floodlights in the evenings
And meeting down by the pylons
Playing ’round Mrs. Kelly’s lamp
Going out to Holywood on the bus
And walking from the end of the lines to the seaside
Stopping at Fusco’s for ice cream
In the days before rock ‘n’ roll [continue reading…]

First, is a selection from the San Francisco’s Gay Men’s Chorus’s Most Famous Anthem: “We’re Coming for Your Children” from 2021. It was sold and defended as “just a bit of humor, of high satire,” sending up those pesky Republicans, Conservatives, Straights.” 

Fast forward less than a year and you have this update on the song, the slingers, and their schlongs:

The longer version is funnier ngl pic.twitter.com/MUTYwZJFB5

— BedsideTable (@BedsideHandjob) April 14, 2022

Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. 17 And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted. 18 And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. 19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: 20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

It is not just the secular elites that make war on the Christian. The big churches have been taken over by the ideologues. Anywhere you see a rainbow flag it is either a gay bathhouse, a public school or a Protestant church. The Pope cares more about climate change than the Catholic faith. Even the Baptists have seen their organizations taken over by far-left radicals. The great challenge for most Christians is in finding a church that is not run by a far-left lunatic.

“Some people wouldn’t know Tyranny if it:
Covered their faces
Locked them in their homes
Enacted the biggest wealth transfer in history
Censored their speech
Made them show vax papers
And force medicated them.”

“Biden says he will run again.” PANICKED HILARITY ENSUES

Twitter Board of Directors Own Almost No Shares of Stock in Company, Elon Musk Notes “their economic interests are simply not aligned with shareholders”

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was asked how Twitter would balance its efforts to combat misinformation with wanting to ”protect free speech as a core value” and to respect the First Amendment. He responded dismissively that the company is “not to be bound by the First Amendment” and will regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.”

Musk Announces He’s Secured Funding For Twitter, Details Potential Next Move To Work Around Unresponsive Board [continue reading…]

FROM: A Crime Scene Where the Victims Wore Masks – WSJ

As terrified passengers stumbled from the train at the 36th Street station in Brooklyn last week, it was noticeable how many of them were complying with the mandate that to enjoy the privilege of venturing into the underground abyss known as the New York City Subway system, you must be wearing a face covering.

There they were, desperately fleeing a gunman or bravely helping rescue injured passengers, but still dutifully playing their part in the absurdist theatre of pandemic regulations scripted and directed for us by our little overlords.

Those flimsy pieces of fabric might have offered some minimal protection from the noxious fumes of the smoke bombs that Frank James allegedly set off in that subway car. But they were never going to be a match for the bullets fired from the 9mm semiautomatic handgun recovered at the scene. Many innocents were wounded, and it is something of an Easter miracle that no one was killed.

For the millions of people who have dared to ride the city’s subway this year, the greatest danger to life isn’t some escaped molecule of a virus of rapidly diminishing potency. That exiguous risk is dwarfed by the combined threat of being pushed in front of an oncoming train, stabbed, hit in the head by a psycho with a hammer, robbed at gunpoint or being sexually assaulted. The number of robberies on the subway so far in 2022 is up 72% from the same period in 2021. There is no easily discoverable record of how many maskless riders have been struck down this year by Covid.

It’s hard to think of a tableau that better captures the disordered priorities of our governing classes than that scene in Brooklyn.

The politicians and bureaucrats who run almost all major cities, many states and the federal executive branch seem to care more about preserving the symbol of their authority that mask mandates represent than about the actual physical safety of citizens. In their warped ideology, crime is the result of material deprivation, prejudice and wicked police officers. The real need for enforcement is shown by those tempted to show their faces in public. [continue reading…]

Matins: LITERARY — the morning song of birds.
Origin: Middle English: from Old French matines, plural (influenced by Church Latin matutinae ‘morning prayers’) of matin ‘morning’, from Latin matutinum, neuter of matutinus ‘early in the morning’, from Matuta, the name of the dawn goddess.

Recessional by Rudyard Kipling (1897)

God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

He calls it a “fun day.” I remind him that this is: A drill practicing evacuation for the nuclear attack on DC. Pelosi rides out safe to he undisclosed location. With cocktail. Hiding in a closet won’t save you and your family from the nukes. Think about these choppers during the moments you have between the light and the blast wave.

UPDATE: Later today this went out to the Capitol building from the Capitol Police

Which soon became this “threat:”