Another Song: Cloudy

​

A Transition Of Significance

 There are two non-government institutions that currently exist that have been of any consequence to the world.

One of them has been around for quite a while - founded in 1843 - The Economist.

The other, founded 140 years later, PBS News Hour (originally, The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour) founded in 1983.

Tonight, the anchor desk has passed from Judy to Amana and Geoff.

Steady hands will keep the ship sailing straight.

We are so lucky.

Watch tonight's edition.

Tennessee Sunrise

 My son sent me this image this morning.

He pointed out that we may have great sunsets out here west, but, back there where he is, sunrise is equally glorious.

I pointed out that out here sunrise is accompanied with the cry "how high's the water, mama?"

There are more, but this one tells the tale.

A World Event That, I Hope, Points The Future

 Pele was of the world.

The outpouring of love that has occurred in the last few hours is the kind of thing that I have always wished for my country and for the world.

Underpinning that wish has always been - not a belief, but a CERTAINTY, bolstered by an ethereal feeling of personal rightness, that America for starters, and the world soon after, will find its place in the universe when we all agree in our hearts to live and love as one.

We will fight and disagree - we won't stop being humans - but the disagreements and fights will always be based on the mutually agreed to fact that we are one, not black, white, yellow, red, brown or mixed.

Because we are mixed.

Either currently or imminently.

And we all are and will be the better for that.

The outpouring of love that has occurred in the last few hours is the kind of thing that I have always wished for my country and for the world.

If Tom Brady had died the BBC would have said in closing "oh by the way".

Tonight, the BBC NewsHour was the Pele NewHour.

He was Brazilian, not British.

Pele was of the world.

And the world is vastly better for that fact.

A republican Lied? What A Shock!

 George Santos.

Actually, he didn't lie, he turned over his resume to that AI thing we've been hearing so much about.

And fed it truth social as a data stream.

From Raw Story; is that - Raw Story - really something?

Yes: © Raw Story

"George Santos' lies put Kevin McCarthy in 'no-win situation' as he tries to wrangle votes for House speaker"

"Kevin McCarthy's leadership bid may depend on seating congressman-elect George Santos in spite of his admission to fabricating much of his background.

"So far only one Republican has publicly called for an investigation into the New York Republican, although others have privately said he would likely face probes, but McCarthy and other GOP leaders have remained silent about Santos admittedly lying about his education, work history and religious faith, reported Politico."

Going to be interesting to watch the spineless one squirm.

And listening to the tortured obfuscation from the rest of the fascist party of america.

But even if Santos did lie, why would anyone be put off?

He is, after all - he has said so far, but things can change, I guess - a republican.

So as 2023 dawns we can look forward to Squirmy Kevin sweating blood like Jesus in Gethsemane, the House of Representatives shelving legislative activity for the duration of the then current session in favor of investigations: Hillary Clinton's Server, the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Hunter Biden's laptop, Bill Clinton's underwear, whether Bennie Thompson is a racist and myriad other priority look-intos of great importance to all us 'Mericans.

 Meanwhile Ol' Mitch and the Boys over in the Senate are rubbing their hands in glee as one more step on the road to serfdom is taken by all of us waiting for a real American Legislature to emerge and address the needs of most of us.

Sounds like reality TV to me.

How nice.

Here Is What Forbes Says About Aid To Ukraine

 Here is an extract from a larger article.

It sounds as if we are getting maximum value out of old stuff we have already paid for and were not going to use; it was just sitting around waiting for a garage sale.

By Craig Hooper

"The list of American security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s “unprovoked and brutal invasion” is impressive. What is more impressive is that $21.9 billion in U.S. military aid has been dominated by largely second-string gear, comprised of unpopular or lower-tech systems that were, in many cases, on the way to the scrapyard.

"As Congress gears up to constrain the Biden Administration’s relative largesse, it is worth emphasizing that the aid, to date, is neither excessive nor threatening to U.S. national security.

"In fact, U.S. military support to Ukraine has cost less than what Congress is paying to procure two Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. In total, taxpayers will put some $26 billion into the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) and the USS John F. Kennedy (CVN 79). In comparison to these troubled flattops, the $21.9 billion for Ukraine appears to be a far more effective return on investment.

"Aid to Ukraine has, in effect, shattered the Russian military, exposing it as little more than a paper tiger. The war has helped destroy Russia’s once-burgeoning arms bazaar, ruining Russian efforts to destabilize strategic regions. Enabling the fight has bolstered Ukraine’s commitment to their nation, critical for advancing society-building and anti-corruption efforts there. Facilitating Ukraine’s resistance may even end the kleptocratic reign of Vladimir Putin, paving the way for a more just—if not more democratic—society in Russia itself.

"The war served a good proving ground for modern conflict, forcing the U.S. to recognize old “big war” conflict models it had eschewed for decades. The war has also reinforced the value of basic, boring old consumables, items the U.S. often ignores in the constant pursuit of the newest and shiniest technology—like the pricey Ford Class carrier.

"In all, the $21.9 billion has been very well spent. Had America held back the support, and just let Russia roll over Ukraine, America would have spent far more in keeping Russia from suborning the rest of Europe."

A Beautiful, Brown Bird

 A Lopez Island song sparrow sitting on a Nootka Rose stem - in a wind.

A Very Important Award

Many vied for this award, but one person stood out.

He specialized in war crimes, murder, rape and terrorism: bombing maternity wards, apartment buildings, railroad stations, markets, shopping malls, churches, dams, aqueducts, electric grids, farmland and crops.

He is so good at war crimes and pointless, indiscriminate destruction, he is on the short list for the 2023 Adolph Hitler Award for Genocide and Sadism.

The R.F. Trio

​For reasons that I don't understand this page recently disappeared.

It was only because I had sent an email to one of Dave's daughters to let her know I had posted this, and I decided to check the link that I discovered the problem.

Two Songs From The Trio

Truly Do

 In the early spring of 1973, I sat for an extended period of time one evening in Doug Peters' living room.

Doug had a good reel to reel Sony with two excellent microphones.

Doug was a great sound engineer.

So, we just started recording, with an occasional break for a sip of beer.

Otherwise, we just let it rip from a recording viewpoint.

That tape became a Valentines gift for my then fiancé, my now wife of soon to be forty-nine years.

This link will let you play one of those songs.

There may be more over time, now that I have figured out how to post audio.

Truly Do

Cosmic Musings - Irrational Bullshit

 This is the preface of a book I just finished writing.

I won't waste any money on self-publishing this one.

********************************************************************

Einstein said that E = mc2.

There are a bunch of things this equation says and a lot more that it implies.

Mainly, though, it says that there is a huge amount of energy trapped in mass and light.

There was a time, we are told, when there was nothing and nothing was everything, all trapped in a nothing called a singularity.

In due course the singularity achieved its destiny: it became everything.

An uncontrolled variable generated by this occurrence was where everything was.

At the point of nothing becoming everything, everything was very close to where it had just previously been nothing.

Not exactly, but close.

But that was a fleeting condition.

The energy released by nothing becoming everything brought a new condition into being: speed.

Speed drove newly minted everything from wherever it had just not been to where it was about to be, and would continue to be for …

For what?

We call it time.

Time came into being as a byproduct of nothing becoming everything.

It was the measure of – something – but it could be described by knowing where everything was then and where everything was now.

Then and now were words not known before the singularity had become everything.

Then and now are words that let humans sense a thing called time.

Since, once sensed, humans figured out how to represent it with a thing called a clock.

But you can’t see time with a clock.

You can only show the effects of its existence: clicks and clangs.

Those are not time; they are just a way of indicating that something we really don’t understand and really can’t describe does in fact exist.

That’s strange.

But not as strange as light.

Light is a wave.

But it is made up of particles.

And it’s really, really fast.

And that speed is the upper limit of speed.

So why is energy equal to a given mass times the speed of light squared?

Speed of light times speed of light is exponentially faster than the speed of light.

So how does that work?

Kinda like the horror that most of human-kind have for the concept of a godless universe.

When one admits the mayhem meted out by humankind over our tenure on earth under the banner “Deus Vult”,or “Gott Mit Uns” it becomes hard to say that we need a supreme being to bring out our kinder, gentler selves.

All we need is the will to treat others as we would be treated.

And then there is that quantum thing.

Einstein said something like "at the outer edges of my equations things get squirrely” - or something to that effect.

He was talking about the fact that things can be, simultaneously, in more than one place at the same time.

Remember, however, that time is pretty slippery, so that observation, if true, may not mean a whole lot.

These shards of brightly colored glass from the great question jar of the cosmos that I just dropped on the concrete and cosmic floor of conjecture are the pieces from which I have created the mosaic of the story about to be told. 

 Cinq is one of the main characters in the story.

The Taliban's Four Reasons Why They Stopped Women Going To University

Today the Taliban told the world why they are forbidding women to go to university. 

When I heard the four reasons, I was brought up short.

They were:

1. Women are to be inseminated.

2. Women are to be inseminated.

3. Women are to be inseminated.

4. The Taliban can't figure out how to get close enough to a woman to inseminate her.

(The actual Arabic word was not "women"; it was "woman").

I've got a million of em.

MOAB For The Upcoming Russian Offensive

 I had this to say back in March.

A while back I published a post that suggested that the United States has a conventional weapon that, if given to the Ukrainians might be very helpful in dealing with the Russians.

Now that the Russians have formed a forty-mile-long string of military vehicles and tanks the time has come to deploy it.

Forty miles of slow-moving things that apparently are intermittently running out of fuel is as classic a form of a sitting duck as it is possible to imagine.

We have a conventional bomb that has a yield of 11 tons of TNT; some call it MOAB - the mother of all bombs.

They can be delivered by C-130 aircraft.

It would seem to me that ten C-130/MOABs should be given to the Ukrainians ASAP. 

220,000 pounds of TNT, artfully delivered over forty miles of trucks and tanks, probably would slow the Russians down a little.

********************************************

My suggestion was ignored.

The forty-mile-wide gaggle of russians was allowed to molder in its own juice. 

After moldering for a while, that gaggle withdrew to safer places, where they have been licking their moldering wounds.

Now they are thinking about sending another, big, big, gaggle back to take Kiev.

If I were running things, I would look at that as an opportunity to finish off the russians once and for all.

If they want to present themselves in prime target mode again, we in the West ought to thank them with a fleet of MOAB armed C130s, flying and dropping round the clock.

The only difference between nuclear and conventional is, how big are your conventionals, and how many planes have you got?

Our national legislature just approved an annual expenditure of almost a trillion dollars for "defense".

We better have a lot of MOABs and C130s in that expenditure.

*******************************************

The Worst Is Yet To Come

 As a progressively senile donnie the dildo hawks his NFT trading cards and disappears in a rapidly descending pink and gold trumped up sunset, everybody is turning to Ron De Santis for a trump of a different flavor.

De Santis has a couple hundred million dollars for campaigning, so, from republican circles comes a sigh of relief as the descent of donnie and the ascent of ronnie is beginning to be accepted as an accomplished fact.

Look out, though.

Marjorie Taylor Greene fits the silhouette of an-up-from-the-bowels-of-hell MAGGOT much better than ronnie.

THE BASE loves that shit.

Extrapolating Einstein

 In 1915 Albert Einstein published the General Theory of relativity - an update to the limited theory, published ten years earlier.

That little episode was only the then most recent example of a human phenomenon.

As a race and as a species we come up with great ideas, that, at inception, are missioned for some advantageous contribution to our race.

The lever could move weights of a magnitude that no human or group of humans could move.

Big things resulted: the pyramids - perhaps - for example.

But it was not long before a thing called a catapult was hurling flaming tar over city walls into unprotected and unexpecting populations.

Flint was used for scrapers, bird points, and heavy-duty game killers: food became more plentiful.

But the game points were a good way to kill fellow humans; and kill they did, en masse.

Bronze was a mix of copper and tin.

When it was discovered, manufacturing tools (the "manu" being accurately tied to its base-word meaning - hand) exploded, as did human prosperity and its associated fecundity, associated with making a lot of stuff cheaply.

But mass production - relatively speaking - of warfare points became possible; empires, and their associated human populations began to be toted up and written down as gone in a massive war game count of death and destruction.

Gun powder was invented for fireworks.

But it was not long before someone figured out that if you put a projectile in a tube and loaded a charge of gun powder behind it you had a weapon substantially more lethal than either a flint or a bronze point designed for human destruction.

Which brings me back to Einstein.

His General Theory has been summed up: E = MC squared.

Buried in that equation, but obvious to anyone worth his or her salt in those days was the fact that, if you could disassemble an atom - of something to be determined - you could create a big burst of energy.

That could have generated a rush to create some sort of perpetual motion machine - something to run the turbines of our electric grid for example.

But it produced a bomb that killed a lot of Japanese and maimed myriad others.

Today I heard an NPR show about human embryos in a test tube.

Not a new thing.

But, when added to the preceding thoughts, a disquieting thing.

Being able to do that makes parenthood for many, many people, who, for various reasons could not be possible; that is a good thing.

But how long will it be - applying the "buts" outlined above - before test tube babies will begin to resemble Hitler's super race?

Just askin'.

Then there's CRSPIR.

That's a cut and paste gene technology that allows humans now and humans future to be re-engineered.

It has had a lot of success in improving the human condition.

It has ridden certain people of sickle cell anemia, for example.

But, again applying the rule of precedents, how long will it be before we all are blonde, six feet or more in height and are singing Deutschland uber Alles?

Just askin'.

Or, related to CRSPIR, what earthly reason do we have to believe that cloning humans has not already occurred, let alone believing that such a thing will never happen?

Just askin'.

I'm not comfortable with the answers I get to that, or any of my other questions.

Our track record history to date seems to me to be grim.

The Plot May Be Thickening

 Early Sunday morning I made the following post.

"The news this morning tells of a significant power outage in North Carolina.

The outage is being characterized as "vandalism": unruly and disgruntled individuals randomly blowing up substations; "boys will be boys" and all that sort of thing.

It looks to me more like the first of, what I assume, will be many more practice feints preparatory to some ultimate country-wide coordinated thrust to break our nation into several smaller militarized zones under militia control.

After executing some large number of follow-on test thrusts against the nation's infrastructure during 2023, "Operation Restore the Donald" is scheduled to depart the practice round and become a full-scale insurgency in early 2024.

We will know the bell has been rung when the republicans follow donnie's dictate and terminate the Constitution". 

I don't know whether y'all have noticed but, as coverage of what might have been a one off, but isn't, continues to increase, it sounds as if the word "feint" was pretty well chosen.

Vandals Or Proud Boys Etc.?

 The news this morning tells of a significant power outage in North Carolina.

The outage is being characterized as "vandalism": unruly and disgruntled individuals randomly blowing up substations; "boys will be boys" and all that sort of thing.

It looks to me more like the first of, what I assume, will be many more practice feints preparatory to some ultimate country-wide coordinated thrust to break our nation into several smaller militarized zones under militia control.

After executing some large number of follow-on test thrusts against the nation's infrastructure during 2023, "Operation Restore the Donald" is scheduled to depart the practice round and become a full-scale insurgency in early 2024.

We will know the bell has been rung when the republicans follow donnie's dictate and terminate the Constitution. 

Tacos Japanese Style

 Back in 2017 I posted a about my ZIP Code - at the time the most diverse in America.

I guess I felt the urge to say what I said in that post because of the recent election of klansman trump to the presidency.

Everything that I have ever believed about America was in that post: her exciting prospects, her first ever in human history prospects for a multi-everything, diverse democracy, the great amalgamation. 

The election of a psychotic racist as our president had brought me up short.

And, in the face of that horror, I had needed to lay out my feelings in that post.

Last night, having just returned from a month in Paris, I began to get hungry.

On the way home from the airport I had bought the makings for any kind of Mexican food that might occur to me to be on the menu.

After a month of great French cuisine, I was ready for some real 'Merican food.

So I had corn tortillas.

Therefore, when I began to have a strong craving for tacos, I put some cooking oil in my favorite cast iron skillet, turned on the gas and reached in the drawer for a pair of Evenflo tongs dating back to the dawn of my adult life.

Over the years,those tongs had turned out to be more useful in making tacos shells than feeding infants.

Infants grow up and move on; tacos stay the course.

To my chagrin and dismay, the tongs were nowhere to be found.

I guessed they were on Lopez.

The oil was up to temperature, and I really wanted tacos for dinner.

How was I going to make taco shells with no implement?

Plyers?

A fork?

Aha, I heard myself say to no one in particular.

 Chop sticks.

And they worked swimmingly.

I couldn't help but concatenate that little culinary episode with the blog post referenced, above: Mexican food made using a Japanese implement in the Amalgamated States of America.

How appropriate.