Monday, August 26, 2013

WAR WAR WAR

 

 
 
Below are thoughts from John Hogue.
 
"I will predict this, American people. If I am wrong and the Congress rejects Obama’s war drumming, you still have vestiges of a representative democracy functioning. If they vote to support his war mongering, consider your democracy has failed and you have moved from being citizens of a democratically inspired republic to mere subjects and peons under the rule of a CEOligarchic big business aristocracy. The oil corporations want this war toppling Assad as part one of a war that takes down Iran next. (See Nostradamus Iran.) If your government is “buy” the Corp, of the Corp and political favors for sale for the Corporations supporting this military industrial complex, Congress will support Obama’s strike on Syria as I predict they will later this September."
CapitalHillStatuesCrying
"The consequence of this corporate-friendly decision of Congress will be a full-scale war in the Middle East over Syria, dragging in the US, NATO and Israel starting as soon as mid-October through November just when the great Comet ISON falling through the skies is seen with the naked eye.
Perhaps it is the comet of the Third Antichrist of Nostradamus, named Mabus, said to be a portent of his coming."
 



 



If we don't end war, war will end us.
H. G. Wells


http://buchanan.org/blog/will-boehner-stop-rogue-president-5815




"If a fourth military intervention is coming, it will not be to decisively alter events, which we cannot do, in a nation vital to U.S. interests, which Syria is not. Rather, its purpose will be to rescue Obama from his words."
From Obama is talking America into a war
By George F. Will
August 28,2013

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-obama-talks-himself-into-trouble-with-syria/2013/08/28/8f1ef83a-0f3f-11e3-bdf6-e4fc677d94a1_story.html?hpid=z3



"...the NeoConObama Doctrine as we have already seen performed in Libya, finds a reason to hide behind NATO gravitas and faux international support to bomb the crap out of any dictator the moment the civil war against them falters. You heard it then, you hear and “here at present” Obama now, decrying the need to protect innocent civilians from the evil al-Assad regime. Then like now, Libya or Syria, take your pick, you’ll see both sides committing atrocities to civilians and rather than seek a political solution, the United States of NeoCons will call their choosing sides “protecting” civilians”. They will put lipstick on the about-to-be slaughtered sacrificial “pig” of a regime for their own strategic ends. These ends become a social and political “dead end” waiting in the near future for every nation Americans have attacked without grounds, occupied without international support and left behind a tottering, sectarian violent mess".  John Hogue



It looks like another war is about to come through the world’s war-torn door.

Orwell was right about almost everything, including his idea about perpetual war.

*

Ever since Vietnam the United States Congress doesn’t vote on a war.

 The chief executive and commander-in- chief decides to start flying the bombs, and they start flying, and people start dying. 

*

Will a war in Syria let some pressure out of the pressure cooker, or will it explode into World War III?

*

The military-industrial corporations and cable TV stations will rake in the big dough (again!) when the bombs start flying.

*

The lies and cover-ups are catching up with us.

The truth about the saying what goes around comes around is true.

America the beautiful…

*

The foundation and working apparatus for an electronic-military police state are here.

Beware of who you elect in 2016.

Beware of all sitting presidents, especially those who can convince well with smiles and rhetoric.

 

IT’S ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday, August 25, 2013

J.D. SALINGER


 



“An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.”

J.D. Salinger

His alienation from the world and his mania for privacy became part of the Salinger myth — a myth that David Shields and Shane Salerno attempt to pierce in their revealing but often slapdash new book, “Salinger.”

Salinger stopped publishing decades ago (his last story to appear in print, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” came out in the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker), but, by some reports, he continued to write nearly every day.

In “Salinger,” Mr. Salerno and Mr. Shields assert that Salinger, who died in January 2010 at 91, left instructions “authorizing a specific timetable” (starting between 2015 and 2020) for the release of unpublished work, including five new Glass family stories; a novel based on his relationship with his first wife, Sylvia Welter, a German he married shortly after World War II; a novella in the form of a counterintelligence officer’s diary entries during the war; a story-filled “manual” about the Vedanta religious philosophy; and new or retooled stories fleshing out the story of Holden Caulfield, known to generations of readers from “The Catcher in the Rye,” the novel that made its creator famous in 1951 as the voice of adolescent angst. The authors of “Salinger” attribute details of these plans to two anonymous sources described as “independent and separate.”


From Hunting Again for Salinger Within the Silences and Secrets by By MICHIKO KAKUTANI/August 25, 2013/

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/books/a-biography-from-david-shields-and-shane-salerno.html?pagewanted=1&hp


 
*

Was it courage or common sense that caused him to go into seclusion?

 Maybe he believed that it wasn’t anyone’s damn business to know what he was doing, or what he was writing.

 Maybe he got a secret satisfaction knowing that the world wouldn’t know what he was up to until years after he was interred.

*

I wondered what he was up to, and I always felt that he was writing all of the time that he was living in solitude.

  When you think about it, his was a feat worthy of praise, this choice to live outside of the prying and reading eyes of the watchful world.

 Compare Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer to J.D. Salinger.

What a difference!

*

Vidal, Mailer, and Capote liked to talk in public, raise their flags, wash each other’s underwear, and spank one another’s bottom before the camera eye.

It will be interesting to finally find out what Mr. Salinger was up to for almost fifty years.

Or perhaps the mystery of J.D. Salinger will remain interred with his bones.

I hope not.
 
 
IT'S ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES!

 

 

Saturday, August 24, 2013

MIME OR MONEY?


 


Me, Mad Plato, a.k.a. M.L. Squier
Summer of 1972


He said, “Just put the money under the door”.

He was Samuel Avital, and the money was tuition for his mime class.

I had almost put the money under the door, but at the last moment I changed my mind, remembering what I had seen and done at a free “trial” class session of Mr. Avital’s a few nights earlier.

*

This was the summer after I had quit my job as an English teacher because the community where I was teaching had been fighting and shooting each other.  It was quite unpleasant, and had bummed me out so badly that I didn’t teach again for another six years.

I was working as a garbage man in the morning, and taking a class in improvisional theater during the day.

*


I had watched Mr. Avital do his mime, and found him quite good.

One evening I attended one of his classes to see what mime was all about.

This free session was to get more people to sign up for his class.

Mr. Avital had been barking at us to do this and that, and soon, all of us future mime artists were rolling across the floor as Mr. Avital hummed “OM OM OM…”, and OTHER strange sounds. 

It felt ridiculous.

I felt ridiculous.

When our rolling around came to a stop, I got up and left.

*

I remember a conversation I had had with Mr. Avital.  At one point during this conversation he said with enthusiasm, “We are all Shakespeares…!”, and he said some other names that I now forget.

This was his way of encouraging me to join his class.

“Just leave the money under the door.”

*

It was probably my fear of failure as much as not wanting to pay the money for his class that had made me run away from the door of Samuel Avital.

 

IT’S ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES!


*


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:


Samuel Ben-Or Avital is a professionally trained mime artist, teacher of mime, kinesthetic awareness, and Kabbalah.

Samuel Avital was born Shmuel Abitbol in 1932,[1] in the small town of Sefrou,[2] near Fez, in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. At the age of 14, Avital left his home in Sefrou to travel (via Algiers and France) to the newly established state of Israel.[3] There he spent the next ten years living in a kibbutz and studying physics, agronomy, theology, and theatre.[4]

In 1958, he traveled to Paris, France, to study dance and drama at the Sorbonne, as well as to study mime with the French masters, Etienne Decroux, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Marcel Marceau.[5] Avital later performed with the Compagnie de Mime under the direction of Decroux' son, Maximilien Decroux.[6][7]

In 1964, Avital joined his friend (and a fellow student of Etienne Decroux), Moni Yakim, in New York, performing with him in his Pantomime Theatre of New York. At the same time, he also performed off-Broadway, and later began to tour throughout North and South America.[8] In 1969, in was invited to teach in the Theater Department at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. In 1971, he moved to Boulder, Colorado and founded Le Centre Du Silence Mime School, which has held an annual International Summer Mime Workshop ever since.[4] As an extension of this work, Avital has also developed a unique method of bodywork called, BodySpeak, for cultivating kinesthetic awareness.[9]

In recent years, Avital has begun teaching Kabbalah publicly in a series of seminars called, Gathering the Sparks, in Boulder, Colorado. Though less well known as a teacher of Kabbalah than as a mime artist, Avital was steeped in the Jewish mystical tradition from his youth and has taught a number of students privately through the years.[5] Avital is descended from a long line of distinguished Moroccan rabbis, jurists, and poets, nearly all of whom were also learned in the secret teachings of the Kabbalah.[10]

 

 

 

 

Monday, August 19, 2013

FAVORITE WORDS


 

NOTE:

I am sure that this list is not THE list of my favorite words, and they are not words that I use when writing or speaking.

 But they are the words that were swimming in my neurons (I almost wrote swimming in my neurotic synapses).

I know, I’m asking the same question:

Do thoughts swim?

And in neurons?

Yes, these thoughts might have come from my neurotic synapses after all!

 

EXQUISITE

BILDUNGSROMAN

CHIAROSCURO

BLITHE

COUNTENANCE

CHASM

AZURE

QUOTIDIAN

BEAUTY [from Anglo-French beute, Old French biauté "beauty, seductiveness, beautiful person" (12c., Modern French beauté]

HONEY [Old English hunig, from Proto-Germanic *hunagam- (cf. Old Norse hunang, Swedish honung, Old Saxon huneg, Old Frisian hunig, Middle Dutch honich, Dutch honig, Old High German honang, German Honig "honey"); perhaps from PIE *k(e)neko- "yellow, golden" (cf. Sanskrit kancanum, Welsh canecon "gold")].
 
 
IT'S ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES!

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

BLACK HOLES WORM HOLES SPOOKY ENTANGLEMENTS AND THE ENTICING AROMA OF COOKING MEAT


 


“God not only plays dice with the universe, he sometimes throws them where they can’t be seen.”

Stephen Hawking
 
"If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?"
John Cleese
 
*

Why does bacon smell so good (at least for most of us)?

The answer, according to scientists, lies in meat’s unique mixture of fat and umami (more about this taste later), spiced up in a process called the Maillard reaction — the browning that happens when we cook a piece of meat. “These are powerful stimuli to humans,” says Paul Breslin, a nutritional sciences professor at Rutgers University.




Even in a black hole bacon would smell good.

But after the bacon was eaten, where would I go next?

Hopefully---if we believe there are such things as wormholes---I would travel through a wormhole to come out somewhere else to enjoy a second cup of coffee, instead of remaining within the black hole, and taking the chance that it might explode (“…although for a hole the mass of a star it would take longer than the age of the universe.”)

Thank goodness!


*

I’ve had vegetarian burgers that tasted quite good, and many years ago I consumed nothing but them and baked potatoes---along with carrot juice, fresh salads, and homemade bread---for an entire year.

 I stopped eating meat, and did not have any inclination to eat the red flesh.

 In fact, the aroma turned me off.

And bacon and I were never in the same kitchen. 

But today I love the aroma of bacon!

*

I found myself on a commune in New Mexico once where I tried to eat some barbecued goat.

The aroma of this meat wasn’t very enticing, nor was the taste.

I ate a big piece of Dutch apple pie instead.

*

While living on Guam, I kept an airtight bomb canister filled with 100 lbs. of brown rice, and spent the next two years trying to eat all of it.

Vegetables go great with brown rice.

Add soy sauce and cayenne, and voilà, it’s a feast for a famine.

If I were stuck in a black hole, I’d want plenty of brown rice!

*

Umami.

Yes, it sort of sounds like your mommy, but it isn’t.

In 1985, the term umami was recognized as the scientific term to describe the taste of glutamates and nucleotides at the first Umami International Symposium in Hawaii.[8] Umami represents the taste of the amino acid L-glutamate and 5’-ribonucleotides such as guanosine monophosphate (GMP) and inosine monophosphate (IMP).[9] It can be described as a pleasant "brothy" or "meaty" taste with a long lasting, mouthwatering and coating sensation over the tongue. The sensation of umami is due to the detection of the carboxylate anion of glutamate in specialized receptor cells present on the human and other animal tongues.[10] [11] Its effect is to balance taste and round out the overall flavor of a dish.

Umami enhances the palatability of a wide variety of foods.[12


 

 

IT’S ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

OUR NEXT PRESIDENT








 
 


 
 
 
 



Donald Trump and his orangutan hair might be gunning again for the U.S. Presidency in 2016.

To this scary thought, add the name of Senator Ted Cruz from Texas.

Mr. Cruz might be described as an ultraconservative demagogue.

Mr. Trump is just an arrogant one.

*

Jeb Bush is no doubt keeping his eyes and spies alert.

Even Sarah Palin might have some lunar (or lunatic) influence on the stars of the GOP who pine to shine in the next election.

*

On the Democrat’s side are Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

Joe should get off of the train if Mrs. Clinton is on it.

She has two winning qualities that Mr. Biden does not have:

Her name and her gender.

Sorry Joe.

*

Election time is like Halloween.

There are a lot of tricks and treats, and plenty of scary faces.

Election time is when candidates, like locusts, buzz, buzz, buzz (if that’s the sound that locusts make); it’s the moment when candidates open wide their arms and wallets to corporations who will pay for whatever they wish a candidate to endorse.

*

The debates are amusing parades and charades.

Every syllable, fly, and frown is televised.

Elections and debates have become expensive entertainment.

Buy and sell, sell and buy.

Everything is for sale.

The presidential candidate has become just another commodity of our Wal-Martian society (and emphasis should be placed on the word Martian.)

Buy and sell, sell and buy.
 


IT’S ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES!