A few bricks shy of a wall…

Posted on December 16, 2014 by gigoid

Ffolkes,

“The question was put to him, what hope is; and his answer was,

“The dream of a waking man.”

~~ Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD) ~~

~~ Aristotle, xi ~~

I’m marking today down on my calendar; this is the first morning all month I’ve awakened without the usual screaming in my hands and shoulder, and I can once again attest to the accuracy of the old saw that says, “true freedom is the release from pain.” Even though there is some lingering stiffness, and threat of further pain, the mere absence of the worst part of it is a welcome sign, hopefully of changes for the better…. Hope springs eternal, even when unjustified by reality’s indifference to our suffering….

That, as they say, though, is Life, so, there’s no point in getting all worked up over those parts of it we can’t change…. Our old friend, Epictetus, told us that, and, he was right…. So, I’m not going to complain about any possible pain in the future, as it is merely the lot of man, and woman, to have pain as a part of life…. Nor will I spend any longer celebrating its absence, as it will no doubt make an appearance again before the day is done…. Now, all I have to do is figure out how to be somewhere else when it gets here….

Right…. Now that I’ve gone back to my fantasy world, maybe we can figure out what we’re doing with this Pearl…. Of course, that would mean we’d need to figure out what we’re doing here in the intro, and, since that particular event has NEVER occurred, it’s rather doubtful we’d be able to pull it off today. We’ve already established the futility of trying to change anything, (well, other than my own attitudes, and those aren’t going anywhere until AFTER coffee….), so there is little point in even discussing any such useless ideas…. Instead, we’ll wait, to see if we can fool anyone into making a break for the border, and just follow them….

While we’re waiting for someone’s nerve to crack, I suggest we get on with the rest of today’s post; if we can work this correctly, paying attention to the currents, and the obvious markers on the banks of the river, we might be able to cross off one of our daily chores while we’re at it. And, if not, well, I don’t think anyone would notice, anyway, so, why not? It won’t make any difference in the final product, and I’m pretty sure we can do it without any major splashage…. It’s worth a try, n’est pas?…. I think so…. In fact, I’m convinced, so, hang on, & we’ll get right on that….

Shall we Pearl?

“Some people never learn anything because they understand everything too soon.” — Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

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It’s another classical day, just because that’s what I feel like listening to…. and, so do you….

Best Classical Music Works Top 100

http://youtu.be/RAac3e8vKRw

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“Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.” — Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov was one of mankind’s best, a shining example of how a life can be lived well, with honor, joy, and compassion foremost…. He possessed a powerful intellect, and an insatiable curiosity about EVERYTHING in the universe; combined with his seemingly limitless energy, and an abiding desire to share all he knew with others, this made him one of history’s most prolific authors, with well over 600 books, of both fiction, and non-fiction, published during his lifetime. He wrote more books of non-fiction than fiction, literally covering every science listed in the alphabet, and more….

He is credited with the coining of three of today’s most well-known words, each of which is having a huge effect on our culture; he created the word, and the concept of “robotics”, as well as “positronic brains”, another term for artificially intelligent computer/robots…. He also created the concept of “psychohistory”…. All of these are are now considered to be mainstream usage, words which describe concepts on the cutting edge of technology, and modern psychology…

His belief in Man’s future in the stars was firm, as stated above; for much of my life, I’ve been a willing proponent of the same idea, i.e, we humans MUST explore space, if we are to have any chance of living up to our potential in this universe…. This single planet is not enough to encompass our imagination, as evidenced by our entire history of literature, which explores the very boundaries of existence, not merely on this plane, but, in all dimensions, throughout the visible, and non-visible universe….

Isaac believed, as do I, as humans, if we can imagine it, we can do it…. Thus far, nothing of which we’ve dreamed has been found to be impossible, but, rather, merely time-consuming, or currently not within our sphere of knowledge…. The only question that remains to be answered is whether our lack of moral/ethical maturity will prevent us from surviving long enough acquire the knowledge, to achieve that potential…. It is to this difficulty that Robert Heinlein referred, when he stated:

“Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.” — Robert Heinlein

Isaac also recognized the difficulties involved in getting ALL of mankind to realize our commonality…. In fact, he was a victim of the unwashed masses of the ignorant for much of his life…. as evidenced by the following:

The cult of ignorance is now in control of the US Senate, with a number of Republican Senators who have, as recently as the last election, expressed their disbelief in the theory of evolution, which has long been regarded as scientific fact; the same group tends to disbelieve in global warming, as well, which has also been found to be unassailable FACT…. These ignorant fools will now spend the next four years blocking any legislation put forth which might mitigate any of the effects of that warming, which is no longer deniable by any rational being over the age of three…

But, these assholes know they’re right, even if we don’t, and they’ll protect us from ourselves, you betcha…. The side effect of that, of course, is, we’re all going to die, but, hey, at least they’ll be rich when they die, right?…. Idiots…

I almost fell into ranting there, didn’t I? I promised myself I’d keep this positive, so, I’m going to leave this somewhat unfinished…. I’ll merely say this…. I believe our destiny is to go to the stars; colonizing this solar system is the first step to that destiny, and may, at this point, be our only hope of surviving our own idiocy long enough to get there…. I’d like to think that someday, my grandchild will stand on one of the moons of Saturn, looking up at the rings, and wondering if HIS grandchild will stand on the planet of another star…. Now, THAT is a dream worth dreaming….

Our destiny lies
in the stars above our heads.
‘Tis our last, best hope.

~~ gigoid ~~

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This poem is one of my better efforts, if only for its relevance to reality…. It rhymes, too….

Seeing is Conducive to Belief

Folly sits so comfortably upon my fevered brow
one would easily believe that I would know how
to look at Life with a jaded, weary eye
seeing enough, and more, to know Why.

Such seems the case, as I will it to be,
an open book of a face, it looks so like me;
what’s known to be so, needs no close attention
familiar sights require no minding, nor mention.

The eye is drawn at once to the stark and new,
and sent back to sleep by successful review.
Once we find evidence we feel we understand,
curiosity languishes, dismissed at command.

Ancient sages knew the insidious value of illusion,
preachers and pundits know the power of confusion.
Each pair of eyes contains its own point of reference,
each mind sets its own standards of preference.

Seeing is believing, for those who live in thrall,
accepting what is perceived is all they ever recall.
Unknown to them, reality follows another set of rules,
Deeper, more dangerous, and no place for fools.

~~ gigoid ~~

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Much of yesterday is a fog in my memory, mostly due to the copious amount of drugs I consumed in the battle against my skeleton…. Somewhere in that fog, I apparently allowed Smart Bee to put together this pearl…. I’m not in the mood to figure out if it is just me, or if it is really a very deep, very useful pearl…. But, then, y’all are the only ones who can make any final judgments on that, as it is intended for y’all to consume, not me…. If it doesn’t make the grade, or, even if it does, somehow, manage to make a statement worth repeating, let me know…. Otherwise, you should probably just keep it to yourself, and let everyone else make their own decision…. I know I will…

“I exist as I am, that is enough.” — Walt Whitman

“Shall I show you the muscular training of a philosopher? “What muscles are those?”–A will undisappointed; evils avoided; powers daily exercised; careful resolutions; unerring decisions.” — Epictetus (c. 60 AD) — Wherein consists the Essence of Good, — Discourses, Book ii, Chap. viii

“Complaint always comes back in an echo from the ends of the world; but silence strengthens us.” — G. K. Chesterton, The Father Brown Omnibus

“Asked what he gained from philosophy, he answered, “To do without being commanded what others do from fear of the laws.” — Diogenes Laertius (c. 200 AD) — Aristotle, xi

“Whatsoever that be within us that feels, thinks, desires, and animates, is something celestial, divine, and, consequently, imperishable.” — Aristotle (B.C. 384-322)

“Do not be angry with me if I tell you the truth.” — Socrates (470?-399 B.C.)

“The meaning of here and now is beautifully illustrated by a Zen story of a monk who was being chased by two tigers. He came to the edge of a cliff. He looked back – the tigers were almost upon him. Noticing a vine eading over the cliff, he quickly crawled over the edge and began to let himself down the vine. Then as he checked below, he saw two tigers waiting for him at the bottom of the cliff. He looked up and observed that two mice were gnawing away at the vine. Just then, he saw a beautiful strawberry within arm’s reach. He picked it and enjoyed the best tasting strawberry in his whole life!” — Ken Keyes

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I’m too old a hand at this to make any snap judgments, but, I can say this…. It’s done…. Having just gone back and proofed it, I can add this: it’s a damn good thing it IS done…. If I need to explain that statement, well, too bad, because, hey, it’s done…. I’ll see y’all tomorrow, if I can figure out a good reason to do so…. Ah, hell, who am I kidding? I always do….

Y’all take care out there,
and May the Metaphorse be with you;
Blessed Be, dearest Carole, Mark, and Theresa…
and everyone else, too…

When I works, I works hard.
When I sits, I sits loose.
When I thinks, I falls asleep.

Which is Why….

Sometimes I sits and thinks,
and sometimes,
I just sits.

gigoid, the dubious

PLEASE STOP READING THIS MESSAGE NOW.

À bientôt, mon cherí….

“Banging” seems popular this season….

Posted on November 3, 2014 by gigoid

Ffolkes,

“Friends are needed both for joy and for sorrow.”

~~ Yiddish Proverb ~~

With a brilliant smile, and a pithy remark for the kids, the Samurai baking enthusiast shouldered his pack, took up his walking stick, and left the building with Elvis…. They didn’t know where they were going, but, they sang happily as the strode along, down the wide pathway leading from the city to the river’s edge. When they came to the water’s edge, they kept walking, straight into the swiftly flowing stream, step by step, until the water covered their heads. A couple of moments later, both men emerged, head-first from the water, as they continued their stroll up the far side of the river’s bed, to the roadway above….

Sliding into the multi-colored VW bug parked at the side of the road, the Samurai baker, turning to Elvis as he turned the key in the ancient car’s ignition, remarked, “Well, do you think any of them bought our story?” “They must have,” replied the King. “They didn’t hassle us about leaving, and if they’d known the whole story, we’d be locked up right and tight!” “You’re right, I guess,” sighed the Samurai, picking a bit of flour from his eyebrows. ” I wonder if they’ll ever get that stuff out of their town fountain’s filter?” “Who cares?”, Elvis grinned, “we’ll be on Mars by then!”

Hmm… a bit cheeky, but, not bad. I suppose, one of these days, I’m going to have to take this process a bit more seriously, by finishing at least a short story based on one of the introductory paragraphs I’ve created here over the years…. If I had any interest at all in ever making any money at this, I’d do that…. but, I don’t, so, if I were y’all, I wouldn’t hold my breath too long….

Speaking of which, I’m not going to make y’all wait too long today to get going. I’ve got a lot to do out in the BBR today, all of which promises to be a lot of fun, and very satisfying, to boot. One is allowed to hope, at least, so, I will. What I will NOT do is belabor any more points, or keep us wandering around in this section. Instead, I’m going to take advantage of that opening right THERE…. and get us out of here…. Hang on, it’ll be another bumpy ride, but, should get us where we need to go…..

Shall we Pearl?

“If we are not stupid or insincere when we say that the good or ill of man lies within his own will, and that all beside is nothing to us, why are we still troubled?” — Epictetus (c. 60 AD) — Discourses, Book i, Chap. xxv

Very good question, Epi…. We’ll get to that….

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Today’s video selection is another blast from my past… James Taylor’s album titled after one of his biggest hits, is probably one of the all-time best selling albums from that era, so much so, it can be considered to have achieved icon status… I know that it is one of the most fondly remembered albums of my youth, and still manages to hit all the sweet spots…. Enjoy, please…. I did, and am….

James Taylor – Sweet Baby James (1970) (Full Album) HD

http://youtu.be/UaySP-L4OOk

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“If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.” — Isaac Asimov

In the upcoming days/months/years, you’ll see a change in the articles I’ll be using to supplement my arguments, on those subjects about which I rant. I am really tired of depending on just one, or three, or even four news purveyors, as they have all become sycophantically similar in the weight of their computing footprint; loading their pages can take forever, even at current speeds, because they like to include as many photos, videos, and income producing ads as they can… This is an example of how businesses pander to the stupid; they have determined that most of the people on the ‘Net, especially those who will click on anything bright, shiny, or lurid, prefer pix and vids, because they don’t have to read, or think; that’s all done for them…

SFGATE, the New York Times, even the UK Guardian, all have gone to a format heavy on less than challenging materials, though some in-depth, text-heavy reporting can be found on the Guardian, with a bit of digging. Other, internet based companies, like Huff post, and Bloomberg, etc. were already more like People magazine than a hard-line news reporting outlet…. Many of them now also want the reader to register on the site before being allowed to read anything other than headlines; this is so they can obtain your profile data, allowing them to sell that information, opening the registered reader to copious amounts of spam emails, all wanting to sell something, or seduce more data out of the victim…

Rather than spending my time to search far and wide every day for interesting material, both to read, and to use to discuss current affairs, I downloaded a RSS feed aggregate program, from Source Forge, the open source software development organization online, a clearinghouse for programmers working to develop new and more powerful tools, free to all, each one written in open source programming language(s), making them open to being improved by all who use them….

Now, any time I wish, I can open the RSS Owl, and find the latest news from virtually, and literally, any number of sources I wish, including all those I used to have to visit on my own…. The aggregate organizes all of it into appropriate categories, so I can find just the type of news I wish to explore, from all over the world… It starts with several thousand RSS feeds, from all over the internet, and the world, and can filter the results to fit any key words, or types of stories I want it to focus on, giving me just those in the categories I choose…. Pretty nifty, eh? Any time I find a new source of information with an RSS feed, I can add those to my reader, and see whatever they post, within seconds of it going online….

With the national, state, and local midterm elections coming up in a couple of days, I thought it would be good to start the new format/source utilization with a report on some of the issues being decided on Tuesday, all over the country… It’s a pretty good summary piece, and pretty fair-minded for a progressive site like the Daily Kos…. Other examples of new material will follow, as sort of a new kind of pearl…. I’ll see you at the end, hopefully not a bitter one….

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/02/1340952/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Round-up-Fear-and-lying-edition?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos%29

Well, there you go, ffolkes… This is how the new format, for this section, will look… or, knowing me, by tomorrow it may be completely different… But, rather than keep you now, glazing your eyes over with a rant on the upcoming election tomorrow, I’ll wait until AFTER the election, which promises to provide a wealth of material upon which to rant, as the Democrats and Republicans continue their battle for control of America’s wallet…. I’ll leave y’all with an appropriate thought, or two, as identified by our resident dB, Smart Bee….

“You are all depending for your spirituality on someone else, for your happiness on someone else, for your enlightenment on someone else…. You have been accustomed to being told how far you have advanced, what is your spiritual status. How childish! Who but yourself can tell you if you are incorruptible?… I desire those, who seek to understand me, to be free … from the fear of religion, from the fear of salvation, from the fear of spirituality, from the fear of love, from the fear of death, from the fear of life itself…. You can form other organizations and expect someone else. With that I am not concerned, nor with creating new cages, new decorations for those cages. My only concern is to set men absolutely, unconditionally free.” — Krishnamurti (1895-1986) From his last speech to the Theosophical Society

Me, too….

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One of the blogs I follow is that of a poetess of great talent, who writes under her own name, Mari Sanchez Cayuso…. She posted a blog with a short paean to Ms. Plath, which reminded me it had been a while since we’ve used her poems…. Here, then, is one of my favorites of hers, though all of what she wrote is pretty amazing…. Loosen up any resident constraints upon your imagination, ffolkes, you’ll need it to read Sylvia….

Witch Burning

In the marketplace they are piling the dry sticks.
A thicket of shadows is a poor coat. I inhabit
The wax image of myself, a doll’s body.
Sickness begins here: I am the dartboard for witches.
Only the devil can eat the devil out.
In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.

It is easy to blame the dark: the mouth of a door,
The cellar’s belly. They’ve blown my sparkler out.
A black-sharded lady keeps me in parrot cage.
What large eyes the dead have!
I am intimate with a hairy spirit.
Smoke wheels from the beak of this empty jar.

If I am a little one, I can do no harm.
If I don’t move about, I’ll knock nothing over. So I said,
Sitting under a potlid, tiny and inert as a rice grain.
They are turning the burners up, ring after ring.
We are full of starch, my small white fellows. We grow.
It hurts at first. The red tongues will teach the truth.

Mother of beetles, only unclench your hand:
I’ll fly through the candle’s mouth like a singeless moth.
Give me back my shape. I am ready to construe the days
I coupled with dust in the shadow of a stone.
My ankles brighten. Brightness ascends my thighs.
I am lost, I am lost, in the robes of all this light.

~~ Sylvia Plath ~~

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Y’all have been here before (unless you’re a virgin Gentle Reader…), you know what to do…. So, do it…. Today, we are, once again, talking about LIFE AT LARGE, as it applies to us naked apes….

“Everything is in a state of metamorphosis. Thou thyself art in everlasting change and in corruption to correspond; so is the whole universe.” — Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180 AD) — Meditations, ix, 19

“The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.” — Albert Camus

“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

“A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.” — Nikos Kazantzakis

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.” — George Bernard Shaw

“Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is quite staggering.” — R. Buckminster Fuller

Pity this busy monster, manunkind, not.
Progress is a comfortable disease.

~~ e.e. cummings, One Times One ~~

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Today’s Pearl is now in that state in which I am able to pronounce it done… or, close enough for our purposes…. Since the BBR is calling me, I shall be off…. See y’all tomorrow, ffolkes….

Y’all take care out there,
and May the Metaphorse be with you;
Blessed Be, dearest Carole, Mark, and Theresa…
and everyone else, too…

When I works, I works hard.
When I sits, I sits loose.
When I thinks, I falls asleep.

Which is Why….

Sometimes I sits and thinks,
and sometimes,
I just sits.

gigoid, the dubious

PLEASE STOP READING THIS MESSAGE NOW.

À bientôt, mon cherí….

Not the whole egg!! Just use the yolk….

Posted on April 24, 2014 by gigoid

Ffolkes,

This one’s going to be a tough one, ffolkes, I can tell already….. I got beau coups sleep, and am up a little late, but, not too bad; that isn’t the issue. The issue, damn it, is my brain, which seems to have decided to take a holiday without any notice, leaving me in the lurch for this morning’s Pearl….

Yep, I have very few, if any, brain cells that are functioning as anything other than space fillers; whenever I try to think of something to put onto the screen, all I get is fuzzy static, with no ideas, with no fresh phrases bubbling up from my creative wellspring, such as it is…. It’s not much, but, it’s mine, and it’s not working!

Okay, I won’t panic….. Let’s just see if there’s something else in there that will serve to get us down the page a ways, at least to the point where, perhaps, Murphy will take pity, and let my brain back in from wherever it went. If he doesn’t, well, we may just have to resort to the archives again….. at least for one section of today’s effort, if not more. I can already tell that section three might be of that ilk, as even collecting pearls for an old-school variety may take more brain power than I am currently able to muster….

Of course, there are those who would probably say that what you’re seeing today is nothing new for me; they are liars, of course. We ALWAYS have things under control around here, and I NEVER suffer from writer’s block….. And, to borrow a phrase from Lazarus Long, if you have the kind of mind that can believe that statement, then I have a wonderful deal for you, in a bridge. Cash only, no checks….

Let’s try this…. No, better not….

Okay, how about this?….. No, wait, I’m out of those…. sorry, I’ll try one more time….

How about them Giants, eh? Grand slam walk-off last night in the twelfth inning in Colorado, as the offense finally broke out after six games of non-production, to provide enough fireworks to win an official Coors Field game, 12 to 10 (an official Coors Field game isn’t over until both teams have scored 10 or more runs…), after five games of wondering just how many millions of dollars are needed to get somebody to not have slumps….

But, then, that’s baseball, especially in Colorado, where the game is different…. You may note, it is also an Excellent Example of a run-on sentence, perfect for the classroom full of budding young writers in need of a bit of education re: style, and/or the lack thereof…..

Well, that was a LITTLE better, but, I don’t think it’s going to fix this intro…. In fact, I’m pretty sure that by now, there is no further hope that this will EVER get to where it needs to be, so, I may as well just apply emergency method #4, and get on with the rest of this mess… In fact, that is what I’ll do…. now…

Shall we Pearl?….

Zeb: “Tomorrow I will seven eagles see, a great comet will appear, and voices will speak from whirlwinds foretelling monstrous and fearful things. This Universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract”. — Robert A. Heinlein, 666, aka “The Number of the Beast”, his final indulgent paean to solipsism….

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As I noted in the introduction today, my mind is NOT in its sharpest state today…. which means that ranting, as such, is pretty well out of the question. I’ve been known to hurt much more than just myself when I rant in this state; I’m not going there today. I have to do something, though, so I’ll do this…. I’ve found some good articles, and a literally unbelievable quote from a modern film producer, links to which I will provide below, along with a couple of comments, which makes this one of the new school pearls I’ve been working on…. Let’s give it a whirl, shall we?….

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2014/04/22/stand-up-or-die-trying/

This one really hits me where I live…. Mr. Morford speaks here of a syndrome of physical symptoms, including the ever-popular back spasms that hit about 12 on the pain scale of 10, that can be brought on by periods of long term sitting by humans, and talks about what a revelation it is for a healthy, well-conditioned human to suffer severe back pain, merely from having sat in front of a computer for too long…. which is a perfect description of ME…. Well, at least, a description of how I USED to be, up until my fortieth year, or so, when I first began to notice how my body was falling apart….

The article was written in Mark’s unique style, using far more of the dictionary than most columnists realize exists, which I appreciate greatly. His logical take on this issue, one near and dear to my heart, offers some new and uplifting points for consideration, and I found it to be quite a good pep talk, relieving me of much of my self-imposed guilt over having lost my physical prowess, upon which I depended heavily. I can relax a bit now, knowing there was little I could have done to prevent what I now experience, which removes some of my guilt, always a good thing….

For they starve the frightened little child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.

Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is a foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity’s machine.

And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword.

~~ Oscar Wilde ~~

Next, we come to an article in Rolling Stone magazine, which consists of an interview with a film producer, one George R.R. Martin…. The article begins this way…. I lost the link, but, if you go to the other article from the magazine, you could find the whole thing…. All I’m concerned with in it is the following quote….

“George R.R. Martin sits in the Santa Fe theater he owns, watching the Game of Thrones episode in which Ned Stark is unexpectedly beheaded. “As many times as I’ve watched this,” he says, “it still has great effect.” — from the Rolling Stone interview

Excuse me? I am fairly certain that I have never heard of an unexpected beheading described as “a great effect” so casually, as if the experience of witnessing the excessive gore, the blood and guts, as well as the extreme emotional impact of a sight such as this, were an everyday occurrence, as normal as any other sort of event that we perceive. I’m certain, in my own mind, at least, that this kind of acceptance of such violence is a sure indicator of a society-wide loss, of the ability to be shocked by this kind of violent behavior…. It is as if such an event is normal, and only valuable as a form of entertainment…

Now, I don’t know about y’all, but, I don’t ever wish to get to the point in my own mind where the sight of a beheading does not shock my sensibilities in a negative way; even the lack of ANY response, of ANY compassion at all for the victim, even if fictional, is an emotional state in which I would never wish to find myself….

I haven’t watched any of the Game of Thrones TV shows; now, I know why…. I’m not going to pretend that I find the glorification of violence, treachery, unbridled avarice, and rampant violence used as a means of securing power over others, to be an entertaining way to pass time…. I believe the entire series to be a clear indicator of how little ethics and morals are a part of the modern world, and a sure sign of the decay of civilization…. Shows like this can be directly correlated to the Roman circuses, held to keep the masses happy, while those in power go about their lying, cheating ways…..

As always, if anyone has any evidence to the contrary, I’d be happy to hear it; that’s what the comment section is for, you know….

Next, I offer this final article from Rolling Stone…. This is an excellent breakdown of the most critical issues that are the operative reasons behind the loss of faith, and membership, being suffered by the modern Republican Party, as they continue to stuff their heads into the nearest piles of sand…. I’d go on, but the author of the article has laid it all out very clearly, so, just read it, & then we’ll talk….

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/six-studies-that-show-everything-republicans-believe-is-wrong-20140423?utm_source=dailynewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

Ffolkes, I’m going to be nice here, and NOT rant on this…. I could, very easily, as all of this is stuff I’ve ranted on previously…. but, it wouldn’t help make the points any clearer, and could conceivably drive away some of my more impatient readers….. So, instead, I’ll finish this off with a five-star pearl, which, I hope, will make a nice ending statement…. Smart Bee is usually pretty good at this, so let’s see what we find…

Well, it took me three tries, but, I think these will do…

“If we do not believe in ourselves — neither in our efficacy nor in our goodness — the universe is a frightening place.” — Nathaniel Branden

“It does take a perverse form of optimism to have any faith in the news media when almost every time they cover something you _know_ about, they get it wrong. Maybe they’re wrong that often covering subjects in which I’m not an expert? Naw, it just couldn’t be.” — Grant Edwards

Like a young eagle who has lent his plume
To fledge the shaft by which he meets his doom,
See their own feathers pluck’d to wing the dart
Which rank corruption destines for their heart.

— Thomas Moore (1779-1852) — Corruption

“Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.” — Robert M. Pirsig

“Everyone talks about reality, but no one ever does anything about it.”– Smart Bee

See? It’s all in the wrist….

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

No ups, no extras, just a poem….

A Dubiously Soft Morning

Idiosyncratic images, clamoring for regard,
fill up the white, white screen on which I view
my life, never seeing, nor invited to sup
ambrosial remnants of anything new.

Still, but almost in motion, allegory sails away
bobbing gently, quick and easy to find,
signs of one happy child, seriously at play,
blissfully immersed, focused joy in mind.

Formidable cries of outraged simple justice
echo plaintive relevance, in half the time.
Maladaptive infants, destined for hospice
salvage an only child, daring to sing in rhyme.

Creativity equals unquestioning farce,
often reaching for absurdity, brazenly afire.
Instead, a blow is felt that no joy will soften,
accepting the price, added to the cost of desire.

~~ gigoid ~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As mentioned in the intro, even an old-school pearl could be trouble today; it worked okay for the five-star in section one, so, rather than push my luck in that respect, I’ll go with this old-school pearl I found in the archives, from a couple of years ago…. it’s a pretty good one, & I hope you enjoy it…. I KNOW you’ll like it better than any of the potential rants implied in the included pearls…..

From 10/21/12:

Okay, so there I was, cruising through Smart Bee, and these little gems popped up. Each one tempted me to begin a rant, or a discussion, but, none of them completely grabbed my attention enough to do the trick. They are all much too valuable to throw out, so I had this idea to include them as a “new-school” pearl….. Y’all can take the ideas herein described, and formulate them into your own pearl of virtual wisdom…. there is plenty here to work with; I’ve used many similar pearls myself to create unforgettable rants, or brilliantly funny forays into nonsense. (Sure I have….. trust me….)

“The correct way to punctuate a sentence that starts: “Of course it is none of my business, but –” is to place a period after the word “but.” Don’t use excessive force in supplying such a moron with a period. Cutting his throat is only a momentary pleasure and is bound to get you talked about.” — Lazarus Long, from Robert A. Heinlein’s “Time Enough For Love”

“In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.” — Mark Twain

“In regard to disagreeable and formidable things, prudence does not consist in evasion, or in flight, but in courage. He who wishes to walk in the most peaceful parts of life with any serenity must screw himself up to resolution. Let him front the object of his worst apprehension, and his stoutness will commonly make his fear groundless” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, _Essays_, Prudence

“I figure that if God actually does exist, He’s big enough to understand an honest difference of opinion.” – Isaac Asimov

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat, but there ain’t no way to make the cat enjoy it.” — Jed Clampett

“Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.” — Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592) — Essays, Book ii, Chap. xii, Apology for Raimond Sebond

“Once you can accept the universe as being something expanding into an infinite nothing which is something, wearing stripes with plaid is easy.” — Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

So, you should find it reasonably simple to do the same yourselves (creating a pearl, that is, not wearing plaid…) …. and if not, well, they are all fairly strong stand-alone dribbles of good advice/good observations, so you aren’t completely without recourse…. No refunds, though, we’re not completely without shame…. Remember, you get what you pay for in this world, right? TANSTAAFL….. (for the uninitiated, that is, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch….)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Though the creation of this Pearl felt a bit choppy as it progressed, it seems to have come out okay; it will do…. To keep from pushing my luck, which has held together enough to get us to this point, I will take my leave, before anything untoward can take place…. See you tomorrow, ffolkes….

Y’all take care out there,
and May the Metaphorse be with you;
Blessed Be, dearest Carole, Mark, and Theresa…
and everyone else, too…

When I works, I works hard.
When I sits, I sits loose.
When I thinks, I falls asleep.

Which is Why….

—
Sometimes I sits and thinks,
and sometimes,
I just sits.

gigoid the dubious

Growing signs of increasingly bizarre pistachios….

Posted on April 21, 2014 by gigoid

Ffolkes,

Oh carp! I mean, crap! Typographic fish just don’t afford the same degree of release as a good, strong vulgarity, do they? Probably doesn’t sound quite as formidable, either…. Either way, it may or may not be a good sign to have to begin the day with an expletive, delivered with enough emotive power to show just how irked I am today….

Awakening in an irk is somewhat less than my usual degree of angst, but, not so much I didn’t recognize the change in the level in the tank…. Of course, that doesn’t mean I am ready, willing, OR able to deal with that effectively, much less efficiently, I think we’ll just use the good old American technique for dealing with any kind of unpleasantness, to wit: we’ll pretend it doesn’t exist….

Denial, in this country, is an art form, highly developed by a number of different organizations and categories of people, the foremost of which reside in the halls of Congress, and in the many fine churches they have built in their own praise. The governing body, and virtually ALL the religious organizations, who vie for the public trust in this country are all quite adept at denial, and, in fact, have based their entire existence on the denial of many parts of reality that the rest of us take as truth…. Evolution, for example, and global warming/climate change caused by humans come immediately to mind, as does the whole concept of a supernatural creator based on NO perceptible evidence….

Stop, already! I told myself when I sat down I would NOT rant in the intro, and here we are, three paragraphs in, and I’m already lining up the shots, getting them ready to sling at their oh-so-deserving targets….. I promised myself I wouldn’t do that today, even if yesterday’s Easter Pearl, which DID rant extensively in the intro section, came out fairly well….

I’m guessing, though, it’s just too much to ask of my readership, to have to cope with that amount of passion and/or angst so early in the day, even if I do try to make up for it with the old-school pearls that generally follow such rants. I’m not certain that is what is keeping ffolkes away, but, chances are that’s why a lot of people are not coming to read….. it’s just too much for the mornings, and when I start in right off the bat, I suppose it gets old rather quickly….

Whatever the reason, it’s strange…. I am averaging, perhaps, four or five “Likes” per day, sometimes less, yet stats indicate I continue to garner new followers, as I am now up to almost 400 (398, as of yesterday, I believe….)…. But, that’s okay, as I still don’t write to get followers…. I write to take advantage of the spew effect…. purging the stuff that builds up in my head all the time is a necessary component of my overall level of mental health… If I DON’T spew every day, it can build up to dangerous levels; when it comes out, people are not happy, and the world becomes a more dangerous place….

But, I do write, and all is well in this corner of reality, as long as I do….. I won’t bother to mention that if I didn’t do this, the edges of reality begin to fray, but, they do, so, be thankful I do get up each day, no matter what time it is, to do what I can to protect reality, and the fabric of space-time we all depend on for our existence….

Shall we Pearl? Or should I continue to weave fantasies and delusions?…. Nah, let’s Pearl…..

“The most pathetic person in the world is a person who has sight but has no vision.” — Helen Keller

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Life is short. Get it right.” — Smart Bee

Before reading the following article, please engage your crap detectors; you’ll need them, as this short article has just about as many obvious lies and attempts at misdirection as is possible in so few words….

http://www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/Drone-in-Yemen-kills-at-least-9-al-Qaida-members-5414550.php?cmpid=hp-hc-nationworld

This little propaganda piece, which, had it been printed in a newspaper, would have been buried on the next to last page, bottom corner, was found at SFGATE, where it was put out just as if it were some kind of announcement of a meeting by a board of supervisors…. Very bland, straightforward, with no comments by the author….. If one paid attention only to the tone and volume of the post, one would believe it was completely unimportant, not worthy of thinking about…. It’s only a short little tale of murder, and terrorism, and hypocrisy, but, hey, who’s counting?….

Think a moment about what the story details…. Our nation has been, for some time now, killing people in other countries, countries with whom we are NOT at war (I don’t recall Congress declaring any in the last fifty years, do you? Only Congress is supposed to do that…. well, according to that pesky old Constitution thingie, anyway….), using unmanned, but heavily armed drones, with the targets picked on the basis of intelligence obtained…. how? Well, they don’t say…. In fact, if you look at the article with open eyes and mind, there are a couple of things that aren’t said, that perhaps should have been at least queried….

Who decided these people needed to be killed by us? Was that decision unilateral? How was the information on which the decision was based obtained? Why is it now okay for us to kill citizens of other countries with no regard for the laws of this country, or for the laws of the other countries? Who decided this was legal? Who decided that assassination was a tool this country would use? Shall we talk about water-boarding? (To mention just a FEW of those that occurred to me….)

It has always been my understanding that our values as a nation precluded the use of such ignoble forms of warfare; I have always liked being part of a nation that would NOT stoop to the vileness so prevalent in the history of other nations. I had pride in the virtue we have mostly displayed throughout history, having, until recently, declined to use torture, or assassination, or other anomalies of human behavior that would indicate a loss of morality….

Somehow, since 9/11, it seems to be okay with the people of this nation to use torture, to kill indiscriminately, targeting those who “threaten our way of life”, apparently giving us the green light to use even the most egregiously vicious and perverted forms of warfare, and espionage, justifying any and all of our transgressions with the phrase, “homeland security”, a catch-all to justify the use of the most immoral, illegal, and downright insane techniques of warfare available…. The assholes who run this nation have taken the words of Reichmarshall Göring completely to heart, when he said….

“Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America nor, for that matter, in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. … [V]oice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” — Hermann Göring

There you have it, ffolkes…. The way our country now behaves on the world stage is exactly the way the Nazi Party in Germany would have done, had we not first bombed them into submission. If you believe there is ANY difference at all in the way the two governments have reacted to the press of world events, I’d be happy to listen to your evidence….

But, it seems to me that the political assholes in this country have decided for us; according to their paranoid reasoning, we no longer need live up to any such values as those the country was founded upon…. We are no longer justified when we call ourselves an example for the rest of the world, because we are no longer acting with any morality, or any virtue at all, much less enough to make anyone look at us as being anything other than the bullies we have become…. I think I would give just about anything to see a piece in the news such as this, from our old friend Isaac….

United Nations, New York, December 25. — “The peace and joy of the Christmas season was marred by a proclamation of a general strike of all the military forces of the world. Panic reigns in the hearts of all the patriots of every persuasion. Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all-time low over the world.” — Isaac Asimov

Fat chance of that, eh? Oh, well….. Stay alert, ffolkes, they’re all crazy, and they have WAY too much money for their own good…. If you don’t watch out, they’ll do their best to take all YOU have, as well, and then tell you to be happy to live in such a free country…. “Free”, meaning they are free to rob, cheat, lie, and steal from whomever they wish, with no consequences…. and if you think that is an exaggeration, then, baby, you are NOT paying attention….

It is clear and obvious to the rest of the world that this nation has become an oligarchy; it’s time as a democracy is past. Our government has been bought and paid for by the rich, fat cats who control most of the resources in the world, most of whom are white Christian bigots, who have little to no interest in sharing any of what they have with anyone, especially anyone who is brown, or not Christian…. Oh, they’re still making noises as if we live in a country that cares about the middle and lower classes, but the reality is much different…. Life is demonstrably less comfortable for those who live in the bottom half of society than it is for those at the top, who are all working very hard to make sure it stays that way….

I’m done…. I can’t say much more to convince anyone of the truth of this; if you don’t see it by now, you don’t WANT to see it, and I wish you a happy time in your ignorance…. because it will be short lived. We are all up against the wall, ffolkes, the rich as well as the less so…. In fifty years, the atmosphere of this planet won’t be breathable for anyone, including them, unless they give up their intransigence, and the rest of us give up our lack of courage…. If things don’t change, then change is going to kill us all; it is that simple, even if people don’t wish to see that…. Mother Nature won’t care whether we see it, and accept it, or not…. it’s just the way it is, so, get used to it…..

Unless, of course, you wish to survive…. If we do, then I’d suggest we get off our butts, and get the revolution started as soon as we can, before it is too late (which it may already be….)….. Think about it, ffolkes…. it’s about time we did so, because the clock is ticking, and it won’t stop for anyone….

“There is but one element of government, and that is THE PEOPLE. From this element spring all governments. “For a nation to be free, it is only necessary that she wills it.” For a nation to be slave, it is only necessary that she wills it.” — John Adams (1735-1826), Letter to John Taylor, 1814

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Just because I’m a nice guy, here is a two-fer, from a modern voice, straight from the street level of society…. Those who enjoy using their minds for more than merely finding the way from toilet to kitchen to toilet may enjoy these poems, but, I’ll warn any who don’t consistently exercise those neurons to be cautious, as poetry like this can cause anyone who reads it to experience the awakening of long-dormant brain cells, a process which is bound to be painful for those unaccustomed to such exercise…. Regardless of how you approach them, these are excellent, thought-provoking pieces, and well-worth a few moments of your time and mental energy….

Cause And Effect

the best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
would ever want to
get away
from
them

~~ Charles Bukowski ~~

Alone With Everybody

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there’s no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.

~~ Charles Bukowski ~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Okay…. I ranted above, so, obviously, this section should be an old-school pearl…. and will be, if I ever get around to it…. Okay, there, that’s done…. Hi, there…. I’m back, from the daunting yet necessary task that has engaged my full attention for the past half-hour, ready now to don the sacred tanks of air, to go diving in the holy bed of oysters, searching for pearls we need to finish out the day with a bit of dignity…. At minimum, we are shooting for an engaging degree of chutzpah, or, alternately, all the charm we can muster…. Let’s see what Smart Bee can do for us today…..

“Before you have sex you have to be elected to a high government position.” — Zippy

“The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just keep your fucking mouth shut and hadn’t asked any questions.” — Frank Zappa Playboy Interview, April 1993

“It is common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active.” — Smart Bee

“The meaning of here and now is beautifully illustrated by a Zen story of a monk who was being chased by two tigers. He came to the edge of a cliff. He looked back – the tigers were almost upon him. Noticing a vine leading over the cliff, he quickly crawled over the edge and began to let himself down the vine. Then as he checked below, he saw two tigers waiting for him at the bottom of the cliff. He looked up and observed that two mice were gnawing away at the vine. Just then, he saw a beautiful strawberry within arm’s reach. He picked it and enjoyed the best tasting strawberry in his whole life!” — Ken Keyes

“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle if it is lightly greased.” — Kehlog Albran, The Profit

“The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.” — G. K. Chesterton

“It is ridiculous to lay the blame of our wrong actions upon external causes, rather than on the facility with which we ourselves are caught by such causes.” — Aristotle

Well, ffolkes, it took a while, but, this pearl will someday be known as “that special one”, for its completeness, pearl-wise…. “‘Nuff said, she said.” Handle with care….
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Well, this one took a long time, requiring numerous breaks to keep the old gluteus maximae from turning to stone, but, it’s done, and just in time, as the sun is up, and the day is starting to roll…. I’ve done all I can do, so, I’m done…. See ya….

Y’all take care out there,
and May the Metaphorse be with you;
Blessed Be, dearest Carole, Mark, and Theresa…
and everyone else, too…

When I works, I works hard.
When I sits, I sits loose.
When I thinks, I falls asleep.

Which is Why….

—
Sometimes I sits and thinks,
and sometimes,
I just sits.

gigoid the dubious

Feeling exposed, Barney hid behind a leaky pulpit….

Posted on April 19, 2014 by gigoid

Ffolkes,

Today’s Pearl of Virtual Wisdom will be an example of how burnt out a brain can get…. I’m going to cheat, big-time, and there’s little I can do about it now, other than issue this spoiler….

It’s already after 6 AM, & I have been up only a little while, desperately trying to catch up to the routine I’ve built over the last few months…. However, it seems that more than two hours late getting up is an insurmountable obstacle, and I WON’T be catching up…. A few minutes in, after some coffee, my mind cleared, and I realized I would have to cheat…. Hence, this disclaimer, to let you know that this intro, such as it may be, will be the ONLY fresh material you’ll find today….

Not that this is necessarily a handicap, or in any respect a bad thing….. Far from it, as trying to create a Pearl with my head in this state would be more than just a little dangerous, for me, and definitely for y’all, and I’m not willing to put you in that much danger, even given my less than compassionate nature…. Hey, I’m human…. I may not be a pundit, or a preacher, or even an asshole, but, I am still one of the specimens of Homo Australopithecus who are busy killing this planet, though, with some reluctance on my part….

All that nonsense aside, I just don’t have it in me today, and I’m too late to go find it…. So, below this you will find my version of a Re-Blog…. Everything you see below this intro consists of the Pearl of Virtual Wisdom posted on November 3, 2011, almost three full years ago (well, close enough for government work….)…. I spent some time finding one I think will do, and figure if nothing else, this one is both good enough, and long enough, to distract you from how stale it may be, from sitting so long without being read….

With no further BS, or any further ado, (Whatever that is…. What is “ado”, and why don’t we want any further episodes of it? Sometimes I wonder about stuff like that….), I give you, in its entirety, the POVW posted on…. well, you see the date right there, so no need for me to be any more pompous than I already am…. Enjoy, ffolkes, & I’ll be up earlier tomorrow…. maybe…. I kind of like this sleeping stuff, it’s rather refreshing….

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
11/3/12
Ffolkes,
As the moon looked down with massive disdain, several large specimens of domestic droid came rolling down the street. Each the size of a large dog, the droids bristled with cleaning arms and brushes, rolling on a strange assortment of wheels that looked like rubber balls on racks. One by one, they peeled off from the street to move toward houses on each side of the street, most rolling around to the back to enter.

The spare shadows from the moon’s pale light gave the scene a soft, romantic air, as if the droids were off to visit their own true loves. But, even in this, a deep winter night in 2088, droids didn’t yet have girlfriends, and the man watching the parade of mechanicals was not interested in fanciful thoughts of droids in love. He only had one thought, and that thought was murder…..

Well, J.D. Robb could probably use it as a start to another novel about Eve Dallas and Roarke, but who knows if Lt. Dallas will still be a cop in 2088?…. She would only be in her late fifties to early sixties, and given the state of medical science, most likely would still be on the job. But, maybe Roarke will have convinced her to retire with him to another planet, where they’ll raise exotic food plants and little Roarkes and Eves…. Just as well, as these intro paragraphs are well away from her usual opening chapters, which generally start after the murder is done…. But, it got that stuff out of my head, and that is all that really matters at this point….

Today will be another oddly constructed pearl, as I still haven’t finished the poem, and no other material has surfaced as yet….. Thus, we must begin the day searching for something about which to write. With the election so close, it might be time for a rant on politics, to drive home the need for everyone to make sure to get out there to cast their opinion, wrong-headed though it may be…. Just let me ask each of you heading to the polls to use your noggin to make you choices, not your fears or bigotry, should you be saddled with such.

Use that brain for something other than sitting on, and make the logical choice to vote for the incumbent. No President, good or bad, ever gets much done in just four years, and this one deserves more time to continue with the positive changes that he’s been able to accomplish in spite of all the partisan opposition he has suffered due to the Republican party’s stated racist platform….. Don’t blame me, just go read what it says, and the racism is obvious…. even their own pundits are getting disgusted with it, as one of them so lucidly stated the other day…

Okay, wrong place to start ranting…. I’ll leave it for later, if that is what comes up in this morning’s dive…. I’ll quit fooling around now, and get on with the program…. Shall we Pearl?…..

Were I so tall to reach the pole,
Or grasp the ocean with my span,
I must be measured by my soul:
The mind ‘s the standard of the man.

— Isaac Watts (1674-1748) — Horae Lyricae, Book ii, False Greatness
__________________________________

“Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.” — Isaac Asimov, The New Hugo Winners

In the intro section above, I started a rant, which mentioned the four years that the current President has had to try to accomplish his reforms. In that I mentioned the partisan opposition he has suffered at the hands of the Republican party. What Mr. Asimov states above may be considered as a large part of the reason that the Republicans have been so dead set against allowing him to make any progress.

Bigotry and racism are a direct outgrowth of ignorance; this is not something disputable, or subject to debate. It is fact…. and bigotry and racism are the real reasons that these people are so set on defeating Obama. They don’t care at all about how he is doing, or whether or not his policies are good for the country or not…. they don’t even attempt to address those issues, other than to create great outcries at every little issue that comes up in the news, when it suits them to make noise about it.

The Republican party has spent four years blocking all legislation proposed by the White House. This is legislation that would have created millions of jobs, and gone a long way to repairing the damage that eight years of Bush’s unlimited spending and economic disaster caused, but, his opponents have blocked all of it, in spite of the millions of Americans who might have benefited from the bills.

Their stated purpose, as outlined four years ago, right after the election in 2008, was to make Obama a one-term president, AT ANY COST, and using any means, including lying. Especially lying…. they’ve reduced that particular act to a science, and are not afraid to use it to their purpose at all. In pursuit of their ignorant, racist agenda, they have absolutely no shame…. It’s quite disgusting, actually, to those of us with more than two functioning brain cells….

“The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.” — James Russell Lowell

I have been noticing the people on Facebook who are posting political articles for others to read, and have noted a distinct difference in the two styles each side has shown. The liberals who support the incumbent post videos, mostly, that show the Republican candidates stating one of their asinine, dishonest attacks on the President, or an inspirational message from a supporter of the President.

In addition, there have been a lot of videos of Republican candidates around the country who have bee voicing their party’s war on women lately, with these idiotic statements about rape, which, quite simply, is something to which they are not even entitled to an opinion, much less policy making powers. Any who, the liberals post this kind of stuff about half the time, along with another half that is supportive stuff that shows off the progress made by Obama, with a message of unity and hope for the future….

None of the Republican supporters I see have come out with anything at all on the “rape” issues…. no comments at all. It’s like they are in total denial, and think that if they ignore it, (hmm… wonder what ignoring leads to?…. could it be…. ignorance?), it won’t be true, or will go away. I also see no ads that show Romney, or Ryan, as doing ANYTHING. Period.

They have stopped talking to the public, and refuse to talk to reporters. They don’t want to make any more mistakes, as almost every time they’ve opened their mouths, it has benefited the liberals, because of the depth of stupidity shown every time. There are no admiring ads touting how wonderful a leader Mitt the Twitt would be….

There are no detailed explanations of his proposed policies, because every detailed study of those policies has shown them to be totally inadequate, lacking in any understanding of the issues involved, and in some cases, pure lies…. These were independent studies, by the way, not funded by the liberals.

No, the only things the Republicans are posting are negative attack ads on Obama, for all kinds of little BS, from the recent terrorist attack in Bhengazi, to birther nonsense (yes, it STILL gets thrown out there….), to thinly disguised references to his skin color, which just goes to show their real fear….

These people are scared to death because a BLACK man is President, and they will do literally ANYTHING to get him out of that position…. One of the most highly recognizable pundits from the Republican party recently came out to express his dismay at the outright racism and bigotry of the Republican campaign, and to acknowledge the despicable nature of the ignorance that is being displayed.

Yet, the polls (which I regard as purely fictional, and merely another attempt by the media to assert their own form of mind control….. I am of the firm opinion that publishing a poll before the election should be illegal…. let us go to the polls without any precognition…. which is how it is supposed to work, now, isn’t it?…)…. the polls say that the race is close, and that it may be decided in the electoral college, rather than at the polls themselves.

Which is, to me, another opportunity for the Republicans to try to work their manipulation and voter suppression techniques to try to affect the outcome in their favor…. They did it successfully with GW Bush, twice, so it’s not like it hasn’t already been tested as a viable method of winning elections. It’s just that in this case, there is a distinct danger of the entire country falling back into the middle ages, should their cheating ways prevail again….

So, what I am suggesting, to all those out there with any shred of common sense and intelligence, is that we remove that issue, by going to the polls in such numbers as to make their ignorance and bigotry immaterial. Let us show them that there are more of us than they think there are, and we are not going to allow them to drag us back over a hundred years, eliminating all the progress in social issues that we have struggled so hard to obtain in the last fifty years.

The fate of millions of seniors, women, people of color, gays, and just about anyone who isn’t a rich white male will be seriously threatened by a Republican win in three days…. so let us remove their chances of winning, by going out to vote for Obama in record numbers everywhere, and make the electoral college a matter of form. (Then we can start the process to get rid of the college altogether…. should’ve happened fifty years ago… it’s a relic of the past, and should stay there….)

Go vote, ffolkes, and please, get it right!…..

(Note from the future: Well, they got it mostly right, as the voters managed to choose the lesser of the two evils presented…. Sadly, that’s still evil, if you hadn’t noticed….)
__________________________________

Days and Nights of Eire

Wondrously comforting, a dream creeps oft into my mind
On the elven hills of Eire lives the vision I will find.
Elegant, gracious, everlastingly draped in beauty
Just payment of simple homage lives as joyous duty.

Fairies and druids walk abroad in ghostly parade
Gracing each hearth with its own welcoming shade.
Castles and heroes still live in tale and song
Proving love for the land in each heart strong.

From cold of winter into glorious young spring
Brown, and gray, to emerald green songs to sing
Soft rains always follow winter’s great tempest
As Eire dons an emerald coat from east to west.

Old and strong, connections call out in dreams
Nothing that was known remains as it seems.
Immersion in ancient runes and battle hymns
Offering sanity in place of grievous whims.

Time and place can tell a much different tale
Judgment should never be a final sale.
Yet something solid and real calls me to go see
Where dreams of loving beauty may actually be….

~~ gigoid ~~

Whew! Finally…. Well, there you go… I hope it was worth the wait…. Actually, it may grow again; it’s okay, but feels not quite done, somehow… ah well, time will tell….
__________________________________

:GIGO: /gi:’goh/ [acronym] 1. `Garbage In, Garbage Out’ — usually said in response to {luser}s who complain that a program didn’t “do the right thing” when given imperfect input or otherwise mistreated in some way. Also commonly used to describe failures in human decision making due to faulty, incomplete, or imprecise data. 2. `Garbage In, Gospel Out’: this more recent expansion is a sardonic comment on the tendency human beings have to put excessive trust in `computerized’ data. — from The on-line Hacker Jargon File V423

Many years ago, I adopted the user name gigoid, taking it from the above definition, and adding an “id” for, of course, identification purposes; with that suffix, I am assured of human status, i.e. hominid, humanoid, etc. I chose this acronym because it is the perfect reminder of the basic integrity that is built into all computers, i.e., they can only do what we tell them to do, and cannot lie. Thus, if our results are wrong, the error lies in our input, not in the computer; this automatically cuts in half the number of places to look for the problem.

I like to think that my awareness of this principle characteristic is what has allowed me to use computers without suffering many of the common difficulties such as crashes, freezes, and blue screens of death. Only once have I ever encountered one of those on my own computer, and that was the result of a virus my defenses missed… my fault, of course, I hadn’t updated soon enough…

Oh, I’ve encountered that famous blue screen before, when I worked as a computer tech back in the late 90’s, setting up LAN’s and office systems for H&R Block…. a significant percentage of machines were dead soon after coming out of the factory box. But, on my own computers, I am very careful never to break any of the basic rules that govern those kinds of mishaps…. and I owe it all to a wise choice of user name…. Well, it’s fun to think about it that way anyway….

So, who is gigoid? Well, if you’ve hung about this blog site for long, I’ve certainly given y’all enough of my inner workings to look at, in my rants, and in my old school pearls, as well as in my poetry, which is quite revealing, to me….. but, then, if it wasn’t, I most likely couldn’t write it…. Any who, to give the short answer to that question, I’ll post below some pearls that give insight into what I believe to be true, and how I try to live….

Like any weak human, I don’t always succeed at being as moral or ethical as I can be, but, I do try, and I do feel pangs of regret when I don’t, so cut me some slack, eh? Just kidding…. What I am is all what I am, though I’m not Popeye…. and these pearls are what I see in the mirror…..

“They are able because they think they are able.” — Virgil

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” — Aristotle

“An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly.” — E. P. Whipple

It is my firm belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs. — Smart Bee

Computers can never replace human stupidity. — Smart Bee

“Do not confuse “duty” with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.
But there is no reward at all for doing what other people expect of you, and to do so is not merely difficult, but impossible. It is easier to deal with a footpad than it is with the leech who wants “just a few minutes of your time, please — this won’t take long.” Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few. If you allow yourself to fall into the vice of agreeing to such requests, they quickly snowball to the point where these parasites will use up 100 percent of your time — and squawk for more!
So learn to say No – and to be rude about it when necessary. Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you. (This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend, or even a stranger. But let the choice be yours. Don’t do it because it is “expected” of you.) ”

— Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love, by Robert Heinlein

“Do I look like someone who cares about what God thinks?” — Zippy the Pinhead

Well, that’s enough about me…. Hope this helps clear up any confusion, and if not, well, hey, life goes on…. all we can do is all we can do, and no more….
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Odd, indeed…. and long, too. I wasn’t sure the poem was going to make it, and it may not be all the way done, but, it’s out, and will stand as is for now…. I’m not sure about it right now, I’m too close to it to judge impartially…. so, I’ll take a chance, and let it go out as it is. I’m brave, sometimes…. but,then, what can happen, besides somebody hating it? I can handle that okay, so…. any who, enough of my rambling for one day…. I see that I have possibly gone a bit overboard in that respect today. Such is life, or as the French would say, literally, c’est la vie…. Y’all take care out there, and May the Metaphorse be with you…..

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Here endeth today’s Pearl, probably long after what might have been the most auspicious point for doing so…. which fits right in with the pomposity and heavy-handed style that still permeated my writing back then…. But, it saved me from having to come up with anything new and fresh, so, we’ll take it, and be happy…. and so will you…. See you tomorrow, ffolkes, hopefully a bit earlier than today…..

Y’all take care out there,
and May the Metaphorse be with you;
Blessed Be, dearest Carole, Mark, and Theresa…
and everyone else, too…

When I works, I works hard.
When I sits, I sits loose.
When I thinks, I falls asleep.

Which is Why….

—
Sometimes I sits and thinks,
and sometimes,
I just sits.

gigoid the dubious

One sure thing we know for certain about Life…. it’s always fatal….

Posted on March 6, 2014 by gigoid

Ffolkes,

“Dreaming permits each and everyone of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.” — Charles William Dement

Wandering through endless halls of wondrous elegance, with classical paintings adorning the walls, and chandeliers providing brilliant light to bring out the beauty of the surroundings. I try to avoid bumping into any of the what seems like millions of people, all naked from the waist up, but wearing slacks, skirts, shorts, etc. with shoes…. A few even wore hats, though we were indoors…. All very odd looking, but, not at all off-putting, except, perhaps, for the gang-bangers, whose sagging pants and sideways cap are as stupid-looking in dreams as they are on the streets….. Everyone was dancing, to an old waltz, familiar, but just out of memory’s reach….

I knew somehow, (as we always seem to know, in our dreams…) if I could just find one person, all the others would be okay, and no harm would come to them…. but, as it usually goes in dreams, I didn’t know who I was to look for…. I also knew that, if they didn’t dance, they’d never be given back their shirt tops, coats, and/or their blouses; why the dancing was supposed to kept their hopes alive, I have no clue….. As I moved from one massive ballroom to the next, the haunting, melancholy music that had been playing changed to a rag-time tune, whereupon all the half-dressed, frenetic dancers began jumping around in something that resembled the Charleston…..

This went on for hours, it seemed, until I turned in my sleep, and a stab of pain in my back woke me up, bringing me out of the dream, and into full awareness…. All in all, it was one of the strangest dreams I’ve ever had…. That is actually saying a lot, because my dreams, when I remember them at all, are ALWAYS strange…. I once asked the psychiatrist I was seeing, when I was off work due to the incident that shattered the last remnants of my sanity, why my dreams were so infrequent, and yet so strange when they came…. He said nobody understands dreams, and I was just lucky I didn’t dream more often….

I believed him, this time, without having to perform any further research into dreams, as I had done that already, when I was in high school… In our sophomore English class, the teacher assigned us to write a term research paper, college style, due at the end of the year…. He taught us how to do that type of paper, then let us go to whatever libraries we wished to use for our research….

The subject I chose was Telepathy, Dreams, and Paranormal Activity, which, though actually too large a subject, worked out well for one so unpracticed at the paper’s method of construction…. It gave me enough range of subject matter that the length of the paper (A minimum of 25 full pages, with footnotes and bibliography… the whole nine yards….) became moot; there was PLENTY of material to choose from…. at the University of California, Berkeley’s main library…

This was because I talked my father into driving me to Berkeley, to the UC there, so I could use their main library, which gave me a LOT of books to pick from, as well as extensive help from the librarians…. I used the reasoning that I would be able to look around the campus with him for living spaces and resources, as I had made up my mind, even in my sophomore year, that UCB was going to be my school…. I had known that ever since I learned that they had the best reputation in astronomy and sciences degrees in the world, along with a few others such as MIT, Cal Tech, Stanford, and a very few others…. I figured, why not go for the BEST?….

To bring us back toward some kind of rational end point here in the present, I’ll merely say that I already knew a lot about the subject of dreams, or, at least, more than most people, so it wasn’t really a surprise to hear a well-educated psychiatrist admit to ignorance in the field…. Since the medical pundits DON’T claim to possess a lot of knowledge about how the brain works, especially in sleeping mode, I really asked for rhetorical purposes, to see if he could perhaps shed some light….

Alas, no; I still wonder why my dreams are so infrequent… I suppose their infrequency is a factor in why they are so vivid in my memory, as they certainly create an impression on my unconscious mind…. Oh well, this is one of those things we can’t do anything about, so, I’ll take the advice of Epictetus, and not worry about it….

I will also note at this point that we shot right past the legal minimum for an intro, so we’re good to go for today… We even have enough coffee on board to make anything I write more coherent…. Glory Be!….. I think, maybe, y’all had best fasten those belts, tight, and hang on, because this could be quite a ride…..

Shall we Pearl?….

“I don’t think it would have all got me down quite so much if just once in a while- just once in a while- there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time.” — J.D. Salinger, Franny & Zooey
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I’ve made an executive decision regarding the format of today’s Pearl…. I’m tired of ranting every day, and I’m positive ffolkes are tired of me ranting every day about the same stuff, relevant as it may be…. Anything gets old after a time, and it isn’t as if I were writing short, easy pieces…. No, I have to go all verbose, and saddle my poor readers with seemingly greater portions of angst every day…. “BASTA!”, he cried…. “Enough! Let them eat cake!”

Okay, well, no cake, but what I WILL do is create TWO old-school pearls to go along with the most excellent poem I found for this morning’s missive…. For those of my Gentle Readers who come by often, it will be what I’m sure will be a most welcome change, as well as a little break for me, and my arthritic fingers… In this first pearl, let’s see what Smart Bee can come up with when I ask for quotes about Asininnies, and their jobs…. (e.g., doctors, lawyers, judges, police, etc…. you know, the Asininnies…)

“A thing either is what it appears to be; or it is not, but yet appears to be; or it is, but does not appear to be; or it is not, and does not appear to be.” — Epictetus

“A physician, after he had felt the pulse of Pausanias, and considered his constitution, saying, “He ails nothing,” “It is because, sir,” he replied, “I use none of your physic.” — Plutarch (46-120 AD) — Of Pausanias the Son of Phistoanax

“He is running for Congress … Do you know why he will be elected? Because all the gun owners will vote for him. Why will they vote for him? Because he is against any new law which will require registration of firearms. He claims that if there is a war, we might be invaded by Communists. And we will all need guns. With nuts like that in Congress, it could happen.” — Larry Siegel

“Of the various executive abilities, no one excited more anxious concern than that of placing the interests of our fellow-citizens in the hands of honest men, with understanding sufficient for their stations.” — Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) — Letter to Elias Shipman and others of New Haven, July 12, 1801

“There is no happiness where there is no wisdom.” — Sophocles

“As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on Christian religion…” — Joel Barlow (1754-1812) — Treaty with Tripoli (signed 1797)

“In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.” — Napoleon Bonaparte

I couldn’t have said it better myself….
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Today’s poem is from an author who is new to me…. I like the rhyming in this poem; it reminds me of more than one of my own poems, in that respect…. I also enjoyed the sense of metaphor, and the use of imagery that uses such metaphor to make it’s point…. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did….

The Alchemist in the City

My window shews the travelling clouds,
Leaves spent, new seasons, alter’d sky,
The making and the melting crowds:
The whole world passes; I stand by.

They do not waste their meted hours,
But men and masters plan and build:
I see the crowning of their towers,
And happy promises fulfill’d.

And I – perhaps if my intent
Could count on prediluvian age,
The labours I should then have spent
Might so attain their heritage,

But now before the pot can glow
With not to be discover’d gold,
At length the bellows shall not blow,
The furnace shall at last be cold.

Yet it is now too late to heal
The incapable and cumbrous shame
Which makes me when with men I deal
More powerless than the blind or lame.

No, I should love the city less
Even than this my thankless lore;
But I desire the wilderness
Or weeded landslips of the shore.

I walk my breezy belvedere
To watch the low or levant sun,
I see the city pigeons veer,
I mark the tower swallows run

Between the tower-top and the ground
Below me in the bearing air;
Then find in the horizon-round
One spot and hunger to be there.

And then I hate the most that lore
That holds no promise of success;
Then sweetest seems the houseless shore,
Then free and kind the wilderness,

Or ancient mounds that cover bones,
Or rocks where rockdoves do repair
And trees of terebinth and stones
And silence and a gulf of air.

There on a long and squared height
After the sunset I would lie,
And pierce the yellow waxen light
With free long looking, ere I die.

~~ Gerard Manley Hopkins ~~

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Okay, so…. Lately, I’ve been bringing up old religirants from the archives, since I seem to have covered most of the bases at various times in the past…. It saves me time and energy, and the rants I’ve revived were all still valid in terms of what they bespoke…..

Bully for me, but, in the long run, boring for y’all…. So…. Here is a link to another of Mark Morford’s brilliant takes on religious dogma, and the stranglehold with which it has gripped the throat of humanity for thousands of years…. After the link, I’ve created another old-school pearl, which will focus on those deluded asininnies who insist on sharing their ignorance with everyone else….. or else….

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2014/03/04/how-to-sucker-a-billion-christians/

“Yeah, God is dead, he laughed himself to death.” — Smart Bee

“Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process.” — Isaac Asimov

(Which is the very reason it is superior to religion as a means of understanding the Universe, AS IT IS, without the unnecessary inclusion of supernatural forces to control our destiny…. thus, handily relieving us of all responsibility for our own actions…. Nice scam, eh?….)

“Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.” — Ashley Montague

“There is nothing so stupid or dangerous or painful that people won’t eagerly do it, if by doing it they will make others believe they are better or stronger or more honorable.” — Jason Worthing (Orson Scott Card, “The Worthing Chronicle”)

(This concept includes going along with a delusion so one will be accepted as part of the flock….)

“Humility is a virtue all preach, none practice, and yet everybody is content to hear. The master thinks it good doctrine for his servant, the laity for the clergy, and the clergy for the laity.” — John Selden (1584-1654) — Humility

“I figure that if God actually does exist, He’s big enough to understand an honest difference of opinion.” – Isaac Asimov

“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.” — Demosthenes
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A perfect Pearl is one that fulfills all of the rules and regulations in my mind for how a blog with my name on it, user- or real-, OUGHT to be…. Those rules and regs, of course, are somewhat amorphous, but, they DO exist….

Today’s Pearl may just be one of them, if I’m any judge, and, who better? Except, of course, you, my Gentle Readers…. If you enjoyed today’s effort more than usual, please feel free to leave a comment, & let me know… I’ll enter that data into the records, along with my own for today, which will give us…. GASP, why, look at that! It’s a consensus!….. Right here on Exploring Consensual Reality!….

Hmmph….. Riiiight…. See ya……

🙂

Y’all take care out there,
and May the Metaphorse be with you;
Blessed Be, dearest Carole, Mark, and Theresa…
and everyone else, too…

When I works, I works hard.
When I sits, I sits loose.
When I thinks, I falls asleep.

Which is Why….

—
Sometimes I sits and thinks,
and sometimes,
I just sits.

gigoid the dubious

Fabulous shoes, Matilda…. Going waltzing?

Posted on January 24, 2014 by gigoid

Ffolkes,

It figures, of course, that the first day in ages I arise, having slept well, and, with all sorts of ideas streaming out of my head, I am beset by physical complaints that keep me from sitting in front of the computer for much longer than it takes to boot up (this comp is getting old, so the boot sequence takes a few moments these days…. a lot of software under the old download bridge, each one wanting a bit of the sequence….). Nothing particularly egregiously dangerous, or more than normally painful, but, enough to make me uncomfortable, & unable to sit, or stand, for very long…. Ah well…. lots of breaks forthcoming, but, we’ll get to the end eventually…

Today’s rant is again pointed at the POTUS, and his seemingly endless willingness to lie to the public….. Written yesterday, it revolves around the latest political cartoon from Mark Fiore, social critic extraordinaire, and, most-excellent gadfly of unparalleled wit…..Currently, according to the chatty little emails I get from the White House, Barry is scampering around the West Wing today, with a bunch of writers and staff researchers, putting the State of the Union address into final shape. It will be interesting this year for me, to see just how far off the rails this president has gone….

You may note the lack of a capital letter when referring to the POTUS, as is generally considered correct; it indicates one is respectful of the office, and its occupant…. Fuck that, dudes & dudettes….. In my world, respect has to be earned, and I haven’t seen enough from Obama to warrant any such thing, much less prompt me to hand out any unqualified respect; in fact, he has lost a lot of the respect I did have for him when he was first elected…. He’s spent almost six years now, since first being elevated out of the Senate in 2008, disappointing the American public time after time, by revealing lie after lie after lie, in the process of completely ignoring everything he said to get elected…..

Out of Iraq & Afghanistan? Hmm… well, MOSTLY we are out of Iraq, but, we still have a lot of “police & security trainers” and “training personnel” there; we are still fully engaged in the illegal war in Afghanistan ( …. which is a country, by the way, that has NEVER been successfully conquered, or controlled, in ALL of history, by ANY nation…. Our country is merely the latest to try, since the Russians pulled out of there in the 1990’s, giving up their long-time occupation, as too expensive, in terms of lives, equipment, and money….). We still have foreign nationals, and possibly some of our own citizens (Who knows who is actually in there?…. They aren’t required to tell anyone….), being detained in the Guantanamo detention facility, though he promised to close that in his FIRST election run-up…..

So, don’t tell me to capitalize his title when using it to point at him; he has definitely NOT earned the respect….. I do NOT have any of that to hand out, especially not to someone who lies to me on a regular, ongoing basis…. I don’t give a shit who they are, or who they THINK they are, or how much they believe what they say…. I don’t respect anyone who will deliberately tell a falsehood to achieve their purposes, and justify it in the name of patriotism, when it really more resembles repression…..

Oops, did it again, didn’t I? Ah well, such is life here in ECR; when I’m in ranting mode, nothing will stop me….. I guess we ought to go do something a bit more relevant, or, at least more entertaining than my gripes about the liars in Washington…. So, we will….

Shall we Pearl?….

“All men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them.” — G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 3/14/08
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“A picture is worth a thousand words….” — Universal wisdom, common to every culture on Earth, to my knowledge…. — gigoid

By that yardstick, a video is worth about 25,000 words, or so, depending on the subject matter, and the length….There’s probably an equation…. Any who, a few days ago, after the POTUS gave his speech on the reforms he “intends” to make at the NSA, I wrote a couple of thousand words about my take on his alleged changes….

I should have waited, to let Mr. Fiore do the same, in his own, Pulitzer-winning fashion…. Here is his take on that speech, and on this administration’s biggest failure, to wit: the transparency that was promised in every campaign speech…. but, then, as Mr. F. points out, the Guantanamo detainment facility IS still open, isn’t it? Why, yes, I believe it is….

http://blog.sfgate.com/fiore/2014/01/22/obama-on-the-nsa-translated/

When I wrote the above sectional opening, I hadn’t watched the video; now that I have, once again, the only possible adjectives I can think of as appropriate are in the nature of “excellent”, “brilliant”, or “superlatively perceptive”. I love the last twenty or so seconds of the speech, where Mr. Fiore has the POTUS utter six little power words, his “talking points”, strung together without any connecting words to get in the way of what they want us to think about, the six significant words he wants us to remember…. “democracy, progress, together, change, reform, believe!”….. This brilliant brainwashing technique is then followed by a brilliant statement of the administration’s true intent, when Obama says, “I have welcomed this debate, and this discussion makes us stronger, as a nation… which looks forward to…. imprisoning the person who started this debate in the first place. Thank you, God bless you, and God bless this database.”

Casual, condescending, arrogant, the president’s original speech was a sharp, insulting slap in the face to the American public, not just for the extremely smug disdain portrayed by his demeanor, one of supercilious, superior, omniscience, but, also by his complete refusal to even address any of the public’s real concerns, brushing them off as not important enough to even mention.

This accusation, by the way, is based on the speech, as I heard it, when it happened on Monday, not Mr. Fiore’s absolutely brilliant parody, which was very accurately paraphrased, serving well to clarify the meaning and intent, in contrast to that which was offered up by the POTUS with deliberate vagueness… Fortunately, it was clearly evidenced in his own words, if one is able to examine them objectively, with a critical mind, to see through the screen of words, to the implied meaning.

This assessment doesn’t even include the so-obvious, outrageously bald LIE he told, with a straight face, as a casual, off the cuff remark in the speech somewhere, when he so casually chided us, the American public, for believing they would actually stoop so low as to read our emails…. an event he failed to mention that has already been proven to occur….by their own records….

No, ffolkes, my crap detector went on full alert, as soon as I heard he was going to make the speech…. It then went off consistently at each assertion he made, continuing to go off frequently at double volume, which it is set to do, every time he said, or implied, “trust me”, whether intended literally, or metaphorically, from beginning to end.

My crap detector again went crazy, the next day, when Senator Feinstein, the most powerful legislative member of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, issued her office’s blind, unreasoning support of the POTUS’s message, (the article this came from said the Senator admitted the public was against them on the issue, but dismissed that as not worthy of consideration….).

The article made it clear that the Senator’s views on the matter were being held in the face of continued strong opposition for them by her own constituents…. She KNOWS the people who elected her are against what she is doing, but, she is committed to doing it anyway, claiming “special knowledge” not held by the public, thus completely ignoring the public’s wishes.

Like clockwork, on the following day, Congressman Mike Rogers, the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, (a definite, registered oxymoron….) issued an out-of-nowhere, never-before-considered, or mentioned, accusation during a press conference…. He strongly suggested that Eric Snowden, the whistleblower who exposed the administration’s outrageous abuse of civil rights, was aided by Soviet intelligence agency spies, making this accusation “ipse dixit”, or, just on his own authority (meaning, he just made it up….)….

“The conservation movement is a breeding ground of Communists and other subversives. We intend to clean them out, even if it means rounding up every bird watcher in the country.” — John Mitchell, Atty. General 1969-1972

(Sorry, couldn’t help it…. I heard this statement when it first hit the news back in the day…. It sure looks like the politicians are still using the same methods of dirty in-fighting to accomplish their paranoid goals…. Making up egregious lies as accusations, labeling average American citizens as enemies, to manipulate public opinion for their own purposes….. it’s all still going on, right here in River City, ffolkes….)

The political strategists who instructed Mikey-boy to make the obviously false accusations tried to make it look as if it had some actual juice to it, by trotting out some obscure, uninvolved CIA agent to give a supportive quote…. This person, brought in, I’m guessing, to show how the intelligence community is behind the administration’s view, was very careful to have the first words out of his mouth be, “Well, there’s no direct evidence of that….”…. But, he then went on to say, “but, it COULD be true….”

Very reassuring, don’t you think? Strong proof…. The idiot politician made the accusation that he had help, “because he did things beyond his technical abilities…”, of which, of course, as we all know, every politician is competent to make a judgment, due to their own technical experti….. wait a minute! They don’t HAVE any such expertise, do they? Aha….

Chairman Rogers, (which title is capitalized ONLY because it starts a sentence…) also, by making his statements, implied that the NSA was hiring, or had hired, employees to program computers, or operate computers, for them, who were NOT trained well enough to understand what they were doing….. otherwise, (according to genius congressman Mikey-boy Rogers…) “he wouldn’t have needed the Soviet, or maybe the South American’s help to get away with it….”

“Or, or,” he didn’t fantasize further, though he could have, “maybe the Chinese were involved…. They let him hang around their airport, didn’t they?….” After making his outrageous, paranoid, completely fabricated accusations to smear the reputation of Mr. Snowden as much as possible, planting false seeds in the fertile gullibility of the public mind, he then bowed out of the limelight, and hasn’t been heard from since….

I expect the strategists in the White House have put, or will, even more pressure on the Justice Department now…. It’s their turn to come up with a way to justify the administration’s anger at Mr. Snowden for pulling their covers, and there will be, sometime in the near future, an opinion expressed by some federal judge or other, about the case, with some elaborately constructed legal reason to continue the legal persecution the administration so desperately wants, and, in truth, needs, in order for them to be able to a) show a victory, of any kind, to shore up their image, and b) shut off the debate, so they can go back to their chosen task, which, by all evidence, is one of complete domination of the world internet, and control over every computer that connects to any network, anywhere in the world….

And, if you don’t believe THAT is their goal, then, ffolkes, you just aren’t paying very close attention, are you?…..

“When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.” — Max Lerner

P.S. I found the following pearl after finishing the rant above…. but, it’s perfect for this rant as an addendum, with this to say about it…. Sometimes, when I’m chastising the president, and his cohorts, for their tendency to lie, I forget about one of their most well-used and practiced maneuvers to get the public to go along with whatever they are saying…. I refer, of course, to what the literary world calls “deus ex machina”, and, to what I call encouraging delusional behavior, to wit: blame it all on God…. If you don’t think it’s true, well, don’t take my word for it; the idea didn’t start with me….

“In truth, there never was any remarkable lawgiver amongst any people who did not resort to divine authority, as otherwise his laws would not have been accepted by the people; for there are many good laws, the importance of which is known to be the sagacious lawgiver, but the reasons for which are not sufficiently evident to enable him to persuade others to submit to them; and therefore do wise men, for the purpose of removing this difficulty, resort to divine authority.” — Niccolo Machiavelli
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The pearl in section three went well, and so did my search for a suitable poem….The poem below by Walt Whitman is an excellent one, well worthy of inclusion here any time. It is, however, somewhat lengthy, so, in the interest of saving electrons, rather than copying the entire piece here, I’ve provided a link to the Bartleby’s copy of the poem, where you’ll find it, complete with annotations and discussion, if you so desire. I’m being a bit lazy today, because this is all the poetry you get, but, hey, it could have been something with less panache, so, buck up….

I Sing The Body Electric

If anything is sacred the human body is sacred.

~~Walt Whitman ~~

http://www.bartleby.com/142/19.html

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It’s probably a mistake, but, I’m going to work here, in section three, before picking a poem…. Most days, I use the poem-search-process to decompress from whatever rant I’ve written in section one, and/or the intro. I don’t care if it is misguided, I don’t quite feel up to poetry today, yet…. it requires a certain affability on my part that I’m currently having a hard time finding in me, due to body parts/systems in revolt….

Fortunately for us all, picking out an old-school pearl isn’t taxing, to either the body, or the psyche, so, I should be able to live through it without any further complaints…. If not, well, just stick you fingers in your ears, screw up your eyes, and go, “nyah, nyah, nyah! THPPPT!” , like I do in such instances…. That should take care of it….

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” — George Orwell (1903-1950), “1984”, 1948

“There is great beauty in going through life without anxiety or fear. Half our fears are baseless, and the other half discreditable.” — Bovee

“That life is long which answers life’s great end.” — Edward Young (1684-1765) – Night Thoughts, Night v, Line 773

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.” — Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

“Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.” — Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

“The fight is what’s important. Doing what is good and right is why we’re here. The end is variable and relative. A person can only do what his heart tells him and break away from the terrible things around him. We do what we can … and live with the consequences.” — Marc Zanoni

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.” — Isaac Asimov — Salvor Hardin, Foundation

It seems my misgivings were premature; this is an excellent pearl, for all its innocent arrogance…. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did putting it together…..
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Well, it has certainly been an adventure this morning…. I think my subject matter has sent a lot of readers packing; my site traffic seems to have dropped off a bit, with only a few regular readers showing up…. either that, or a LOT of people are coming by, DON’T like it, and so leave without any indication they were there…. Nah, I don’t think so….

Any who, no matter who may have been driven away by the somberness and vitriol in the last few Pearls, I’ll just say this…. I gotta write what is in there, lest it rot between my ears, causing me great discomfort, which I duly pass on the world at large…. Better all around for me to just keep typing, and hope for the best….. With that caveat spoken, I’m outta here…. See ya….

Y’all take care out there,
and May the Metaphorse be with you;
Blessed Be, dearest Carole, Mark, and Theresa…
and everyone else, too…

When I works, I works hard.
When I sits, I sits loose.
When I thinks, I falls asleep.

Which is Why….

—
Sometimes I sits and thinks,
and sometimes
I just sits.

gigoid

Renfield, settle our account…. Use the real money….

Posted on January 10, 2014 by gigoid

Ffolkes,

“Hey, mister!”
“What?”
“Got religion?”
“No, thank God.”

Okay, so maybe it’s not always the best way to begin…. I like it, though, if only for the degree of irony in the final line…. It probably doesn’t help soothe the minds of whatever readers may have ventured into today’s mess, but, dammit, this is ECR, and we won’t be pulling our punches for anybody! Not in THIS lifetime, even if it’s the only one we get this time (which is how it is beginning to appear….).

Life is too short, and too hard, to waste any time being hypocritical, especially when there has been enough trouble from that sector, (religion), historically, to last us, for as long as we want to hold a grudge…. Personally, I plan on holding it for a LONG time…. and, I LIKE looking myself in the eye every morning in the mirror….

Some days the ranting just jumps out of me, I guess. I’ve barely begun today, and I’m already deep into looking for new ways to say the same thing I’ve been saying for years now…. I hope to someday find the right words to awaken the sleeping dragon that is public sentiment, attempting, as I do, to engage society in the changes we will need to make in order to survive…..There are a lot of FOOLS alive today who insist on holding on to their ignorant denial of global warming and overpopulation, with FAR too many of those self-same fools in positions of leadership, they having persuaded society how harmless they seem to be….

These assholes are NOT harmless, though, and I’m getting really tired of seeing their denials in the news, given the same kind of coverage as what is true and necessary….. I’m sorry, but, at this point, I’m thinking it’s time to just quit being Mr. Nice Guy; these idiots will end up slowing things down enough that we ALL end up dead, when, in truth, THEY are the only ones who deserve to go the way of the dodo and the buffalo…. I’m very close to the point of making a decision to act…. If and when I make such a decision, it will be direct action, against those who would continue to argue that we have the time to allow their bullshit….

That won’t happen this morning, though…. I don’t have enough ammunition on hand; I’ll need to stock up…. and there’s a new cross-bow I’ve been looking at…. I like the cross-bow; quiet, powerful, with recyclable ammo…. an excellent weapon of choice for urban guerrilla warfare methodology…. As a weapon, its only drawback is its bulkiness…. If one has the time, and inclination, to recapture their used bolts, well, it’s easy to never run out of ammo… Plus, with some innovation, the bolts can be made into missiles of great destructive power, easily and accurately delivered from a reasonable distance from the target….

Any who, discussions of warfare technology and methodology aside, it seems we’ve come to a point where I need to make the decision to either continue on to the end of a rant, or end this here, and pretend it’s an intro section, as is our habit on most days…. Hmm, let me look back over what we’ve done here, and I’ll….

LOOK OUT! DUCK! INCOMING!….. Get down, ffolkes, we’ve got some heavy fire coming in…. Joe, get those guns online! Tom, activate the remote barriers…. Sally, fire up those catapults…. Let’s see how they like a bit of Greek fire raining down on their heads, eh?….

Sorry, ffolkes, you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve come under attack by unknown hostile forces, and must make a temporary foray out into the BBR to deal with the issue…. I’ll be back in a while, and will continue this Pearl at that time…. Until then, please enjoy the provided refreshments, over there on the table by the window, and be at ease…. You’ll be in no danger here; this facility is well-guarded, and is relatively impregnable to anything non-atomic in nature….

Shall we Pearl?…..

“But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? Hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?” — 2 Kings 18:27 (KJV)

“A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.” — Jessamyn West (Irony is when you buy a suit with two pair of pants, and then burn a hole in the coat.)
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Having indulged myself shamelessly in the intro section, diving into fantasy, a tiny religipolitirant, a bit of technological gobbledygook, and some Sun Tzu, I feel as if a rant in this section would not only be over-doing it, but, could actually be considered to be tacky, and pushy…. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being pushy when ranting; the whole point of a rant is to annoy the perpetrators, ultimately. It seldom does, of course, but, that’s the intent; we feel that intention should be honored, so we do…. But, today, and right now, it wouldn’t be right… for balance, and for integrity’s sake, we’ll go with an old-school pearl, with parameters such that we can find a bit of everything for our purposes….

“Yes, evil comes in many forms, whether it be a man-eating cow or Joseph Stalin, but you can’t let the package hide the pudding! Evil is just plain bad! You don’t cotton to it. You gotta smack it in the nose with the rolled-up newspaper of goodness! Bad dog. Bad dog.” — The Tick

“How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!” — Alexander Pope (1688-1744) — The Odyssey of Homer, Book xiii, Line 375

“By virtue we merely mean the avoidance of the vices that do not attract us.” — Robert Lynd

“I think too much or not at all.” — Isaac Asimov

There is a time for thinking and a time for NOT thinking. And THIS isn’t one of them.” — Paul the Samurai

“‘And how do you do your job, then, if you don’t exist?’
‘By will power,’ said Agilulf, ‘and faith in our cause.’
‘Oh yes, yes, well said, that is how one does one’s duty. Well, for someone who doesn’t exist, you seem in fine form.'”

— Italo Calvino, “The Nonexistent Knight”

“Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.” — Kahlil Gibran

Well, then, having achieved the balance so desperately sought, through the liberal application of empathetic synergy, I propose we move on…. Plus, those cops over there are giving us the hard eye, so, follow me, ffolkes….
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I found this while perusing other poems, and just thought it would be a nice little change for all of us…. You can always count on Keats for something new and fun….

Ben Nevis: A Dialogue

There was one Mrs. Cameron of 50 years of age and the fattest woman in all Inverness-shire who got up this Mountain some few years ago — true she had her servants — but then she had her self. She ought to have hired Sisyphus, — ‘Up the high hill he heaves a huge round — Mrs. Cameron.’ ‘Tis said a little conversation took place between the mountain and the Lady. After taking a glass of Whiskey as she was tolerably seated at ease she thus began —

Mrs. C.
Upon my Life Sir Nevis I am pique’d
That I have so far panted tugg’d and reek’d
To do an honour to your old bald pate
And now am sitting on you just to bate,
Without your paying me one compliment.
Alas ’tis so with all, when our intent
Is plain, and in the eye of all Mankind
We fair ones show a preference, too blind!
You Gentle man immediately turn tail —
O let me then my hapless fate bewail!
Ungrateful Baldpate have I not disdain’d
The pleasant Valleys — have I not madbrain’d
Deserted all my Pickles and preserves
My China closet too — with wretched Nerves
To boot — say wretched ingrate have I not
Le[f]t my soft cushion chair and caudle pot.
‘Tis true I had no corns — no! thank the fates
My Shoemaker was always Mr. Bates.
And if not Mr. Bates why I’m not old!
Still dumb ungrateful Nevis — still so cold!

Here the Lady took some more whiskey and was putting even more to her lips when she dashed it to the Ground for the Mountain began to grumble — which continued for a few minutes before he thus began,

Ben Nevis.
What whining bit of tongue and Mouth thus dares
Disturb my slumber of a thousand years?
Even so long my sleep has been secure —
And to be so awakened I’ll not endure.
Oh pain — for since the Eagle’s earliest scream
I’ve had a dam[n]’d confounded ugly dream,
A Nightmare sure. What Madam was it you?
It cannot be! My old eyes are not true!
Red-Crag, my Spectacles! Now let me see!
Good Heavens Lady how the gemini
Did you get here? O I shall split my sides!
I shall earthquake —–

Mrs. C.
Sweet Nevis do not quake, for though I love
You[r] honest Countenance all things above
Truly I should not like to be convey’d
So far into your Bosom — gentle Maid
Loves not too rough a treatment gentle Sir —
Pray thee be calm and do not quake nor stir
No not a Stone or I shall go in fits–

Ben Nevis.
I must — I shall — I meet not such tid bits —
I meet not such sweet creatures every day —
By my old night cap night cap night and day
I must have one sweet Buss — I must and shall:
Red Crag! — What Madam can you then repent
Of all the toil and vigour you have spent
To see Ben Nevis and to touch his nose?
Red Crag I say! O I must have them close!
Red Crag, there lies beneath my farthest toe
A vein of Sulphur — go dear Red Crag, go–
And rub your flinty back against it — budge!
Dear Madam I must kiss you, faith I must!
I must Embrace you with my dearest gust!
Block-head, d’ye hear — Block-head I’ll make her feel
There lies beneath my east leg’s northern heel
A cave of young earth dragons — well my boy
Go thither quick and so complete my joy
Take you a bundle of the largest pines
And when the sun on fiercest Phosphor shines
Fire them and ram them in the Dragon’s nest —
Then will the dragons fry and fizz their best
Until ten thousand now no bigger than
Poor Alligators — poor things of one span —
Will each one swell to twice ten times the size
Of northern whale — then for the tender prize —
The moment then — for then will Red Crag rub
His flinty back — and I shall kiss and snub
And press my dainty morsel to my breast.
Block-head make haste!
O Muses weep the rest —
The Lady fainted and he thought her dead
So pulled the clouds again about his head
And went to sleep again — soon she was rous’d
By her affrighted servants — next day hous’d
Safe on the lowly ground she bless’d her fate
That fainting fit was not delayed too late.

But what surprises me above all is how this Lady got down again.

~~ John Keats ~~

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I grew up having to listen to Billy G., far too many times…. Here is a rant from a couple years ago, with his words as the stimulus, which is as it should be….. Not that he, being who he is, would ever admit to any responsibility for them…. It’s more the habit of a Christian to blame what they do or say on Jesus…. and, since Billy is, perhaps. the most well-known, self-defined Christian in the Western world, he is VERY good at that….

From May 12, 2012:

“God is more interested in your future and your relationships than you are.” — Billy Graham

First, let me apologize…. I hadn’t meant to go into a rant this morning, especially about religion; sitting down is as difficult as standing up, or walking, so the time it takes to express the outrage necessary to produce a rant is more than I wanted to take. But then this popped up in front of me….

After I had picked myself up from the floor and recovered my breath, I still could barely stop chuckling and giggling long enough to use the mouse to cut and paste it to this page. Now that I have, I find myself almost speechless at the sheer arrogance, the complete lack of respect shown for humanity at large by this astounding statement.

In one short phrase, this deeply disturbed man has attempted to manipulate his listeners into a complete subjugation of their will, and in doing so, implies that they are not only unworthy in a moral sense, but are not smart enough to be allowed to think for themselves. I’m surprised he didn’t ask for money in the same sentence…. You can bet he did before the end of the night….

I remember seeing Billy Graham when I was quite young, speaking on TV to a football stadium full of enthusiastically cheering, excited, identical female clones in white cotton dresses, with skirts below the knees, and young, clean-cut, earnest looking young men in blue suits, with white shirts, no vests, and skinny ties. Even at the tender age of 11 or so when I saw it, my first impression of him was of a used-car salesman, with a smarmy-looking smile at inappropriate moments, and a smooth, fawning manner of speaking that ranged from sly confidences to outraged proclamations of evil and sin, all delivered in very obviously scripted stages.

The words and phrases he used, straight out of the King James Bible, mostly, seemed to promote love and tolerance, but the underlying message was one of elitism and divisiveness, as indicated by the insistence that only those who accepted JC according to their rules would be allowed into heaven…. The rest of us would be consigned to everlasting hell for having the audacity to think differently….. It was pretty over-the-top, as far as I was concerned, though entertaining in a circus sort of way…. (My five-year-old’s crap detector was on full, and rejected all of his words pretty much out of hand, as too obviously false to consider…. Just another adult spouting off stuff that made no sense….)

It is now 50 years since I saw that particular revival meeting; with a dismal display of stubborn perseverance, Mr. Graham has continued to spew his particular brand of ignorance for that entire time. He is indeed one of the men of whom St. Francis of Assisi warned us to beware, a man of one book. And the above statement, to me, is proof of just how little he thinks of the general run of human beings. His basic message, to paraphrase what he said above, is, “You are a miserable sinner, and have no right to exist, other than by the mercy of God. You are not smart enough to keep from sinning on your own, so just shut up and do what you are told….”

It is certainly proof, I guess, that it takes all kinds to make a world, for there are millions of folks out there who regard what Billy Graham says as just as much gospel as what is in the Bible…. but then in for a penny, in for a pound, I suppose…. Me, I’d rather listen to a ball game….

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Back in real-time, 2014, for some concluding comments: While searching for pearls for another section, I came across the following gem; it turns out to be a PERFECT example of the mind-set that one of Mr. Graham’s sermons can create in people…. I also wish to nominate this statement as the stupidest remark by an elected official in the latter half of the twentieth century EVER MADE IN PUBLIC…… Perhaps one of you could call Guinness, or the Pulitzer Committee?….

“I can see stopping a car for a dog. But a cat? You squish a cat and go on. I think we’re over-complicating life.” — Iowa Democratic State Senator James Gallagher
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I may be going a bit overboard this year; I can’t seem to shorten these Pearls back to the size I had evolved into creating. Ah well, such is life in blog land…. It’s done, and to my way of thinking, that’s good enough…. Remember, ffolkes, Life requires us to be honest with ourselves, if nobody else, and that means we need to live our lives so we have no regrets…. ever…. We are the only ones who can judge how we’re doing on that, which is where the honesty comes in…. See ya….

Y’all take care out there,
and May the Metaphorse be with you;
Blessed Be, dearest Carole, Mark, and Theresa…
and everyone else, too…

When I works, I works hard.
When I sits, I sits loose.
When I thinks, I falls asleep.

Which is Why….

—
Sometimes I sits and thinks,
and sometimes
I just sits.

gigoid

We were hoping for more of a gestalt version….

Posted on August 18, 2013 by gigoid

Ffolkes,

“…. crawfish pie, filet gumbo…” Can’t say why, but that song is stuck in my head this morning…. “…. gonna have big fun, on the bayou.” I must have been dreaming in Acadian, or something….. There’s a word, a good word, Acadian, another word lifted from another language by English, used to describe the group of folks who settled in Louisiana in the early 1800’s. Their culture, brought with them from France, melded into the mix of English,
Spanish, Indian, and African cultures that already flourished in the New Orleans area, producing what we now call Cajun food, music, and culture. (“Cajun” is a bastardization of the way the word “Acadian” comes through into English…. When pronounced correctly, it sounds like ‘a cajiun”, which, on the naturally lazy tongues of the new worlders, became “cajun”…..)

Now that the trivia portion of today’s post is finished, I’m left again in the lurch, with no intro planned. I could play my guitar for a while, and maybe sing y’all a song, but, I don’t really want to scare anyone away so early. Not that I’m terrible, it’s just that, so early in the day, my musical taste is a bit suspect; I’ve been known to listen to Mendelssohn, or Bach, for hours on end, and I don’t think y’all are ready to go back to sleep just yet, are you? I thought not…. Besides, I don’t do opera….

That does leave me adrift again, though…. Hmm…. now where shall I go to hide the fact that I am a poseur? That I am incapable of true creation, and all of my ambition to be a writer is a fool’s errand. I spend a lot of effort to keep it from becoming commonly known, but, days like today make it hard to keep it under my hat. If only I was ruthless, or politically minded, or had no shame at lying to people; then I could run for a public office, and make my living from the public trough. Unfortunately, I have lots of ruth, no political ambition, and often break into hives when I lie, so, being a politician is out of the question….

If there was a way to start all this over again, without having to toss out what is already done, well, that would be good, and would save me a lot of headache…. No such luck exists, however, so, I’m stuck with this, and haven’t a clue as to what to do to salvage what’s left, of what started out as a perfectly good intro… one that turned so swiftly to crap, I almost didn’t see it happen….. I suppose I could recycle it; we are encouraged to re-use old stuff, but, I don’t think this will stand up to a second use. It’s liable to turn rogue on us, and injure someone in its death throes…. No, recycling old intros is a pastime rife with danger, and we’ll have none of it here….

Oh well, I’m going to have to once again resort to the whimsical methods I’ve used so effectively in the past, to amaze, to entertain, to educate, and, ultimately, to confuse the reading public, or, at the very least, those of that group who stumble into this blog, and can’t find their way out…. In other words, voi-fucking-la! It’s an intro….

It would be quite insane, on the whole, to expect anyone to believe me if I claimed it’s a good one, in its own little way, but, it’s legal, it’s typo-free, and, it’s done, so there isn’t a damn thing to do but let it go out the way it is, and hope for the best….. In this case, I think that if we can get through the day without any further bloodshed, it will be alright…. If not, well, there’s always tomorrow, right?….

Shall we Pearl?…..

— Bother! said Pooh, as the pin fell out of the grenade.
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So, I was sitting here, trying to decide what to do…. rant, pearl, or fake it? Any of the above would be acceptable and appropriate, but, I’m not feeling any of those particularly strongly this morning, so I’m going to cheat…. I was cruising through some old Pearls yesterday, and found some that I enjoyed (God, I hope so!….) Any who, I thought this one was kind of fun, and pretty coherent, on the whole…. Since I’m lazy, and in charge, I’m including it here today, just because I can…. This is from August of 2011, if it matters…..

Ffolkes,
Another day dawns, dammit! Not really, but that was the first line that ran through my head this morning, so….better out than in, I say…Thus begins another fine day in paradise.

All of us have our secret fears; those little demons from our dreams that escape out into the real world and assault us at those moments we least expect it. How do we deal with it? Me, I’m a champion at denial; I can ignore most problems until they pretty much either give up or solve themselves. The few that aren’t subject to this method do tend to slap me around pretty well, but for the most part, I go along with King Ralph I, who said, “Well, the first thing we should do is order new globes.There’s no problem so big it can’t be ignored if we put our minds to it.”

While ordering new globes won’t help my current batch of woes, a dedicated state of ignorance duly cultivated while asleep can be of great use. In that state, even the news of the day can’t break through to that part of me that will worry over it. I’ve finally figured out that the rest of mankind is on their own; I’m retired, and no longer care about such mundane matters…..so be it…..

“But pain…seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?” — Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar

You may be a king
Or a little street sweeper,
But sooner or later
You’ll dance with the reaper.
— Reaper Rap (Grim Reaper, “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey”)

“A wise man first determines what is within his control; all else is then irrelevant.” — Epictetus

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.” — Isaac Asimov

“Life is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.” — Jean de la Bruyere

So there you have it…..carefully applied, you too can take comfort in the ready arms of practiced denial….and it only hurts yourself!!! How many things in life can you say that about?….. Y’all take care out there…..meanwhile, I’m going to try to get my tongue out of my cheek, where it has been firmly lodged for some time now……
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“I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.” — ee cummings

The Dragon of Grindly Grun

I’m the Dragon of Grindly Grun,
I breathe fire as hot as the sun.
When a knight comes to fight
I just toast him on sight,
Like a hot crispy cinnamon bun.

When I see a fair damsel go by,
I just sigh a fiery sigh,
And she’d baked like a ‘tater-
I think of her later
With a romantic tear in my eye.

I’m the Dragon of Grindly Grun,
But my lunches aren’t very much fun,
For I like my damsels medium rare,
and they always come out well done.

~~ Shel Silverstein ~~

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Below is another Pearl from the archives, from 2011… It would take at least two paragraphs and several hundred words to tell you the reasons why it is included here today, words I don’t intend to write…. Suffice it to say more than one compelling reason presented itself, so, here it is, for what it is worth…. It’s a pretty good one, all things considered, and could be considered as a bonus, were you so inclined….

Ffolkes,
I think it’s safe to say we all get pretty tired of the political circus as played out here in the USA; it all seems so pointless, until you realize it is directly affecting your own life, then it just gets irritating. Everyone I know has beliefs and convictions, with their own methods of dealing with the world, and their own methods of how to treat other people. Mostly they all get along just fine. Then I look at what is being said in the arena of public discourse, and there doesn’t seem to be any correlation, no connection with what I know is real for most folks.

The avaricious ones, the ones who seek public office, have an entirely different view of reality than most of the Americans I know. Even the conservatives I talk to think differently than the politicians, except for those few who allow the politicians to do their thinking for them, and merely parrot those talking points currently in fashion. It’s unfortunate that there are a LOT of the last category, which is part of the reason why the talking heads are able to maintain their death-grip on the almighty profit margin.

Since the whole point of the above is how sick I am of hearing the nonsense in the news, I won’t rant any further today on that subject. Don’t really feel like ranting anyway; it’s already been a tough morning, and I’d rather turn in a more positive direction. It took over 25 minutes on the phone, but I was able to complete a necessary task this A.M., and I’m using that to act as the driver for the rest of today’s tasks. All of this is just a long, convoluted and obfuscatory way to say, enjoy!……

“Confront them with annihilation, and they will survive; plunge them in a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory.” — Sun Tzu

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud
Under the bludgeoning of chance;
My head is bloody but unbowed.
It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll;
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

— Henley

I know you think that you understood what you thought I said, but I am not all that sure that you understand that I seldom say what I think and even less often do I mean what I say.

Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Louis Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.

If you think women are moody and bossy – get a cat.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
— William Butler Yeats, “The Stolen Child”

There you go; a little whimsy is good for the soul…..so is epiphany. Y’all take care out there…..
_____________________________

As a practicing curmudgeon, and a critically acclaimed bozoid, it behooves me to say, at this point, just how proud I am to have been nominated for this award…. Oh, sorry, wrong file…. Okay, here we are…. Well, that was interesting…. Some rather esoteric remnants of sanity being bandied about here, eh? If one didn’t know better, one might think that I had gone around the bend, so far I’ll never find the way back…. but, then, illusion is what it’s all about, now, isn’t it?….

I’m somewhat relieved to find myself here in the closing section of today’s Pearl…. The lines and defining characteristics of reality are starting to become rather blurred and indistinct, due, I’m sure, to the volatile nature of what has been written here today…. We wouldn’t want to get charged for any undue wear and tear on either space, or time, so we’ll call it a day, before it gets any worse…. (Of course, as you can see, it’s already gone off the rails….). Let’s see how it reads….

Well, ffolkes, it’s a Pearl, and there is NO doubt at all about that….. As such, I’m going to take the money and run, before I lose the courage it takes to hit the “Publish” button…. Ta ta, then….

Y’all take care out there,
and May the Metaphorse be with you;
Blessed Be, dearest Carole…
and everyone else, too…

When I works, I works hard.
When I sits, I sits loose.
When I thinks, I falls asleep.

Which is Why….

—
Sometimes I sits and thinks,
and sometimes
I just sits.

gigoid

Save those last few multicolored polynomials….

Posted on August 12, 2013 by gigoid

Ffolkes,

Reeling from an overabundance of hyper-oxygenated brain cells, I awoke, in severe confusion. Since quitting the consumption of nicotine via the avenue of cigarette smoking, (I’m wearing the patch to titrate myself off the bloody things….), I’ve been sleeping better, due, in part, to the decrease in my coughing, and, in part, from increased oxygenation while sleeping. It has, however, presented a different conundrum for me to deal with, which consists of a period of confusion and concomitant mild fear when I wake…. I can’t say as yet just why I wake up confused, but, I do, and the mild fear is a reaction to having to face the world in that state…..

Actually, that’s all a load of BS, and I’m just talking through my hat, which is marginally better than talking through my ass…. I did start wearing the patch, and have stopped smoking the cigarettes; it has also lessened my coughing, and increased my oxygen, thus improving the quality of my sleep…. The rest of it is all made up, just to practice two writing skills, one being sentence construction (major fail there…), and, sounding sincere and reasonable…. I think it came out alright on that part, even though it’s all just crap, in terms of facts and reality…… The sentence structure, such as it is, needs work to sound less pompous, and more ‘user-friendly’, to borrow some tech-speak….

So, how’re y’all doin’? For me, it’s been a quiet time of late, just learning the ins and outs of this new relationship, and dealing with the difficulties and issues that life and reality brings us all to deal with… For us retirees, thankfully, there is less of it, and the time limits aren’t usually so critical as when we were younger…. which is a good thing, because we move slower now, and need longer to get things done…. We have the advantage of a greater degree of foresight, and usually, a greater degree of organization and time management, though, so it all evens out for the most part….. I wasn’t sure if I would, but, I’m really enjoying being retired, now that I am more financially comfortable. The perks and advantages to being older seem to be greater, thus far, than the disadvantages, which are mostly due to the physical issues involved in the aging process we all go through…..

There, that’s done… I’m counting the above paragraph as my daily portion of bitching and whining about getting old, even though it’s more positive than not…. Consider it a gift…. 🙂 Now that is out of the way, there’s nothing holding us back from getting on with today’s post, which, given the disruptions to routine that have already occurred, and the alterations already made in the background, where you wouldn’t notice, promises to be, shall we say, unique? Well, different, anyway, and, hopefully, entertaining, if nothing else….. I see that we’ve again reached the proper amount of vacuous nonsense for stimulation, (or is that simulation?…) of the cortical processes we pursue each day….

Shall we Pearl?…..
_____________________________

The headlines I read every day show me absolute proof of Mr. Asimov’s assertion, as the power of stupidity in human affairs continues to direct, no, drag us, ever closer to our own self-destruction as a species. Ignorance, and the resulting fear of the unknown, is the single most powerful issue, in my estimation, in the struggle for existence in which we are now engaged. Moreover, by its very nature, that issue, and its power, is working against our continued presence on this planet in a way that almost guarantees its success (though, in fact, if properly channeled, it could, instead, be a powerful motivational tool for survival….). It (stupidity/ignorance) does that by appealing to what every human alive has, and will give in to every time it is invoked, to wit: our own personal self-interest…..

No matter how ethical, or moral, one considers themselves, they are still making their decisions in life, about everything, based on their own self-interest. This colors every aspect of what we perceive, for it determines, in advance, how we will employ those perceptions to act. Our self-interest considers, first, what WE want to make ourselves happy, and it is only those with the will and the intelligence to subdue this impulse who can bring themselves to act out of true charity, or selflessness, thinking first of what will benefit all, rather than just themselves. Any other acts of that nature are, when examined closely for motive, performed because they somehow improve the person’s own position, either in the real world, or in the world in our minds…. Remember, ffolkes, those are two separate things, entirely, and should not be confused as being the same thing (though that is what everyone tries to do…. make the outer world conform to their inner image of that world….)

Now, I realize that it’s a bit early for philosophical discussions of such a subtle, and deep, subject…. But, this issue is what I consider to be the primary operational factor in how the world is, quite frankly, going to hell in a handbasket…. Human nature is the very thing that is killing us, and will continue to do so as long as the most fearful and ignorant among us are allowed, and even encouraged, to continually act in their own self-interests, because those little indulgences are going to end up killing us all, all because the greedy and avaricious assholes who are in charge of the world’s resources are immoral and unethical enough to feel no moral dilemma, at keeping the rest of the ignorant masses under their control, for the benefit of THEIR own self-interests….

They, the BRC, the corporate masters, and their myrmidons, the churches, the police, and the armed forces, are the ones who have no ethical compunctions against making people afraid, so they can fan those fears, promising deliverance, if only they will give up their independence, and allow others to think for them. This system gives them everything they want…. power over others, power over money and resources, and control over everything they see, so that it all is working in a way that fulfills and enhances their self-interests…. It matters not at all to these monsters that the rest of mankind suffers, or that eventually the path they have chosen will kill ALL of us; it matters not, because their sense of entitlement does not stretch to include the concept of their own demise; they don’t think they are subject to the same laws as the rest of us, and tend to forget that they, too, are subject to the laws of physics…. laws from which there IS NO APPEAL…..

I’m a smart guy, and I’ve seen this building up through all of my life, due to events that have taken place throughout mankind’s relatively short (cosmically speaking) history on this planet…. I also am smart enough to realize that it’s all coming to a head, because physics cannot be ignored, and the physics of the situation here on Earth says that drastic changes are coming, in terms of planetary weather, and atmospheric, and oceanic chemistry, and those changes are going to be more than we are (currently…) able to cope with, either in a physical sense, or a cultural sense…. In other words, she’s a gonna blow, so we’d best be ready to jump….

I’m personally hoping that a Martian colony can be established before I, or my children and grandchildren, get swept up in the maelstrom to come…. If so, and they would take someone of my age, I would grab my grown kids, my grandson, and Patricia, and her kids, and be off to Mars, in a heartbeat….. Otherwise, I need to figure out another way to get the world to make the inner changes needed to alter the path we are on, or, quite simply, we are all going to die…. Maybe not today, and maybe not in the next 50-100 years…. But, the physics says that it WILL happen, ffolkes, so, I’d advise y’all to at least think about what you might do when it does…..

Okay, I’m done being a doom sayer for today…. Today is a good day, or will be, if I have anything to say about it…. Oh, you say you need proof of all I’m asserting here? Okay, this should make it pretty clear…. This is a real law, I checked….

“In Lexington, Kentucky, it’s illegal to carry an ice cream cone in your pocket.” — Smart Bee

(Okay, so I didn’t really check, but, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to find this to be true in fact…. We’ve all seen sillier examples that ARE true….)
_____________________________

After such a somber rant, I feel the need for something soothing to my spirit; it’s hard to be serious for so long…. Well, it is for me…. Besides, if we take the view of a solipsist, all of this. (Life, the Universe, and Everything….), is perfectly under our control, and we can change it anytime we wish, right?….. Right….

Soliloquy Of The Solipsist

I?
I walk alone;
The midnight street
Spins itself from under my feet;
When my eyes shut
These dreaming houses all snuff out;
Through a whim of mine
Over gables the moon’s celestial onion
Hangs high.

I
Make houses shrink
And trees diminish
By going far; my look’s leash
Dangles the puppet-people
Who, unaware how they dwindle,
Laugh, kiss, get drunk,
Nor guess that if I choose to blink
They die.

I
When in good humor,
Give grass its green
Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun
With gold;
Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold
Absolute power
To boycott any color and forbid any flower
To be.

I
Know you appear
Vivid at my side,
Denying you sprang out of my head,
Claiming you feel
Love fiery enough to prove flesh real,
Though it’s quite clear
All you beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,
From me.

~~ Sylvia Plath ~~

_____________________________

I’m not sure what stimulated the rant above, but, it felt good to get all that out, if nothing else…. So, I’ll indulge my own self-interest at this point, (as if that isn’t what I’ve been doing now for over a million words, a couple thousand of them daily for over two years….), and go to an old-school pearl, that is, at the very least, fresh, if not excitingly unique and perfect…. Hell, it may end up being perfect; that’s the nice thing about going in cold, you never know…. This one will be as random as I can make it, as I’m not setting any parameters, except that I like it, and it goes somewhere…. I don’t care where…. Enjoy!

“Nothing’s so weird that no one’s done it.” — Smart Bee

“I’m sorry. I’m not allowed to argue any more.” — Smart Bee, speaking for gigoid…

“It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.” — Oscar Wilde

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” — Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)

“You can play with my mind if you let me play with yours..”– Smart Bee, speaking for gigoid, again.

“A good place to start is where you are.” — Charles Wolf, Jr.

It is the heart afraid of breaking
that never learns to dance.
It is the dream afraid of waking
that never takes a chance.
It is the one who won’t be taken
who cannot seem to give.
And the soul afraid of dying
that never learns to live.

— Bette Midler, The Rose
_____________________________

One of my strongest skills is rationalization; as someone who posts every day, when possible, I have to be flexible in what I allow to go out, because, believe it or not, I do have some pride in what I do here…. Very little, as I’m a pretty good judge of literature, as opposed to litterature, and my own efforts goes back and forth between the two…. Let’s see what has been wrought today, shall we…. I can’t be sure, but, it’s pretty close to good, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, so, I’m taking it, and I’m gonna run with it…. Like I’ve said before, a number of times, I’ve done worse…. 😆 Y’all take care out there, and May the Metaphorse be with you….

When I works, I works hard.
When I sits, I sits loose.
When I thinks, I falls asleep.

Which is Why….

—
Sometimes I sits and thinks,
and sometimes
I just sits.

gigoid

Ned Moore, aka gigoid, is a 70 year-old, (!!!… When did that happen?….), retired dilettante, who would rather read than eat, most days. His first blog, "gigoid’s folly", has been emailed out to folks he knows for about 18 years now. He still considers it his best defense against angst, and the ever-present specter of sheer insanity..... Due to rigorous curmudgeon training requirements, he has discontinued his Facebook presence, but still indulges in the occasional Twitter session... In essence, he's socialized, but, not overly sociable; all labels and stereotypes are forbidden in his presence... and he doesn't care what anyone thinks about that..... In fact, he doesn't want to talk anymore.... If you feel you MUST contact gigoid, his email address is: alphagigoid@gmail.com You can go read now.... Go on, beat it.... gigoid, the dubious

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