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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
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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
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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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Have you listened to Scott Adams’ rants over the last few days? You should.
https://www.scottadamssays.com/
I have my coffee with Scott everyday.
Good summary ‘toon.
I fukt up badly today! I commented on a Tweet! The Tweeter was a Seattle cop, who also is an NG brigadier general. He was explaining why he “took a knee.” I commented how that symbolizes an affront to the flag and that his cohort should go back to policing.
You cannot appease these fux. Nike appeased BLM and look who got looted first.
Back in my day, “take a knee” had a riot baton related meaning to it.
Adams supported reparations? He can go horse fuck.
What’s wrong with reparations? Be serious.
[In 1936 Dunne, with agreement of others in the government, proposed that northwest European governments make a proposal to Hitler: Germany would give German Jews a ‘homestead payment’ and expel them to another nation. The other governments would pay Germany’s administrative costs and the emigration fee. The government never approved the idea.]
So back to reparations, a one-time, refundable* payment. Maybe 40 acres and a tractor ($100,000+$50,000), maybe a cash payment, maybe free passage and a homestead in an America-African community. That nobody today is encumbered by past laws, slavery or black-code, is a diversion. The US has a recurrent problem and reparations may be a way out of it. Why not?
*refundable on a naturalization oath of allegiance. Expired time and per year limits apply, etc etc.
I think De Blasio genuinely believes he’s a hero. Like Roy Munson in Kingpin
Chamberlain, er, I mean Hoooda, I’m not in the mood to argue this morning but there is a chasm and deep abyss between what Hitler did to Jews and others during his reign and what occurred with blacks back in the days before the US was even a nation and slavery was legal and used by a VERY SMALL MINORITY of planters or farmers, in states that did not even exist as part of any confederation of states during that era.
Reparations…..? BS, over 760,000 Americans died during the civil war and the South was practically destroyed by MFers like W.T. Sherman, and well after the slaves were technically freed (1861) by Lincoln. And keep in mind that emancipation was not granted by Lincoln out of a love or concern for blacks but by pressure from abolitionists and ostensibly, by his good sense to do the right thing.
The recurrent problem with blacks in America has a foundation of pure hatred of white people. These GGGGGgrandchildren of slaves are given everything from free food the moment they’re born to free college educations or no interest loans that they typically do not repay and tossing more money at them, or giving them this or that of whatever value will not change anything about them and most of them, when they’ve pissed away their sacred reparations, “the money” that you propose to give them…not from your pocket but from the already horribly burdened tax payor who has no skin whatsoever in their game….they are going to tell you that your are just trying to buy them off, that your piss poor little payoff wasn’t enough and that you’re a racist and bigot for not giving them more and then, if you refuse or try to reason with them, all hell will break loose and you’ll be sitting there with a “WTF Happened?” look on your face, probably trying to come up with another way to make an incurably toxic culture, a so-called “proud people” come to terms with being a gd human being and wondering “why don’t he learn sump’ins”.
What you might consider is that black and white cultures are diametrically opposite and that our federal government, in an effort to drag these people, screaming and yelling into a better life that would include prosperity, education and social skills among other things, FORCED….with Federal troops, the rest of the nation to embrace them as all manner of special privilege was granted. Some have taken advantage of those things but the majority prefers to sit back on the well fed and coddled behinds and scream “racism” and “black lives matter” any time one of their color gets hurt or killed by a white cop or whenever any of them are bested by a white. Except maybe in basketball. Simply put, they admit they cannot do anything wrong….they’re perfect….and the rest of the world should just accept it and pay homage or else there is hell to pay.
I think you should consider reconsidering reparations. Why over pay for the hatred you’re going to receive for free anyway?
Reparations for the families Union dead of the Civil War. Then, we can begin talking about other reparations.
Scott Adams takes up a lot of odd ideas as fodder for possible solutions. In the case of reparations, he thought perhaps some sort of college scholarship program would be appropriate. What he doesn’t know is that any talented black student can get pretty much a free ride at many schools. The really talented can watch top schools fight over them.
He’s also got some touchpoints: fentanyl from China, which killed his stepson, 4th generation nuclear power, and what seems to be a persistent belief in the basic good intentions of people.
Jack and Casey, I hear you. But I don’t hear a resolution, you make a good case for ‘h*ll no!’. But that doesn’t solve or even mollify what you know is a very old and longstanding problem. Detroit was a great vibrant industrial city in, was destroyed by rioting, and has never recovered. It’s population today is half what it was in 67.
Adams says to think in terms of systems, not goals. In this case what would be a realistic and permanent fix? What I proposed would be about as permanent as permanence is. Maybe expensive, but compared to what the nation pays now and how much damage is presently happening, maybe a great deal to make.
But what I’m not hearing is realistic ideas to solve a realistic problem.