witches et al cast spell for/on Donald Trump

Donald Trump has stirred up a wide spectrum of reaction, not least, apparently, from "witches across America and beyond who performed a collective spell to stop the 45th POTUS from doing harm."

Not everyone is on-board with the spell-casting and some ranking witches have apparently come out against amateurs indulging in matters they understand poorly.

"insufferable credulity"

Since retiring in 2009, I have found myself sorting through the past and quietly trying to figure out how to leave less mess when I die. I don't worry too much about furniture and the like -- let push come to shove and most of it can be burnt. I can't do much about the sorrows others might feel, though if I could, I would. And then there are the thought processes I would like to dust off and align somehow and chief among those of late....

When I first took an interest in spiritual life, I was peeing in my pants to be included in the spiritual-life realm -- to be a 'real' Hindu or Buddhist or whoever-all-else who had bona fides. I wanted to join. I wanted to be counted-among ... and I had no clue how to do it. If I made donations, maybe? If I went to centers, maybe? If I read a lot of books, maybe?  If I hung out with those who seemed to be anointed already, maybe? Oh, I felt like an orphan in a world where everyone else had a family.

How the hell did anyone sign on?

Well, signing on worked itself out.

But what does anyone do when it comes time to sign off? Seriously, isn't there an unwritten quid pro quo in spiritual (or any other) life: If you can sign on, you have to know how to sign off ... because if you don't know how to sign off, you have never adequately signed on.

But that doesn't mean the uncoupling (so to speak) is smooth or simple. Looking back -- now and again, I busted my chops. Now and again I wept. Now and again the skies parted ... only to close again. Now and again I simply could not think of anything more relevant or important .... spiritual wisdom or ignorance or attachment or revulsion or whatever it was stuck all over me for 40 or 50 years. But what payback, what scent, what height and weight will be relinquished in death? Continuing to bask and hold on to spiritual interests is antithetical to spiritual interests, to the extent they are taken seriously. So... what then....? What divestiture awaits or insists? How do you get out of what must be gotten out of with the same insistence that once was applied to getting in?

And yesterday, what occurred to me as the universal solvent came visiting:

.........INSUFFERABLE CREDULITY.......

Every human being deserves and is compelled to drown in some insufferable credulity. 

Insufferable credulity is what makes individuals interesting in both positive and negative senses. Humanist, creationist, intellectual, dumbkopf, carpenter, writer, millennial, octogenarian, well read, Bible thumper, musician, horndog, policy wonk, miser, Ted talker, self-immolator, stamp collector ...

Just big and juicy and up to the armpits. Secret or open. It's all the same ... the importance of insufferable credulity...the stuff that makes stuff interesting ... and horrific.

That the individual will grow into

And grow out of

For the benefit of self

And the benefit of others.

It's the ketchup on an otherwise dumb-ass hamburger.

Interested in spiritual life ... insufferable credulity.

Weaned from spiritual life ... insufferable credulity.

So that eventually being insufferable -- being interesting -- requires too much energy. It is acceptable not to be credulous and thereby -- hallelujah! -- not to be insufferable.

alone with everyone else

"The Scottish Bothy Bible"

Bothies - remote shelters in the wilderness where walkers can spend the night free of charge - have long been one of Scotland's best-kept secrets. A new book has revealed the location of 80 of the mountain huts.

family photo

 A family snap taken a couple of weeks ago at Ives' birthday party: L-R: Ives, Elizabeth, Angus, Richard DeStefani (olivia's husband), Olivia, and Adam

teaching moments?

A school in the US state of New Jersey is under fire for an assignment that asked children aged 10-11 to create posters depicting slave auctions.

Some parents reacted angrily when they attended the school and saw the posters hanging in a hallway.
The principal apologised for any pain or offence caused.
District officials said children needed to learn about the "uglier parts of our past", but accepted the posters should not have been hung without context.
The assignment had been set by the South Mountain Elementary School in South Orange, near Newark.

 And then:

Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Videgaray met senior White House aides without the State Department's knowledge, according to an official.

State Department acting spokesman Mark Toner said he was "unaware" the foreign minister was in Washington.
The secretary of state typically receives foreign diplomats during visits to the nation's capital.
The disconnect comes amid reports that the State Department has been sidelined in matters of foreign policy.
"We'll take that and get back to you. I was unaware that he was - the foreign minister was in town," Mr Toner said at a news conference on Thursday.

parking in China

hunger and starvation

Imagine....

The world is facing its largest humanitarian crisis since 1945, the United Nations says, issuing a plea for help to avoid "a catastrophe".

UN humanitarian chief Stephen O'Brien said that more than 20 million people faced the threat of starvation and famine in Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and Nigeria.
Unicef has already warned 1.4m children could starve to death this year.
Mr O'Brien said $4.4bn (£3.6bn) was needed by July to avert disaster.

and....

Donald Trump is president of the United States.

and perhaps as a PS....

In the lobby of the James R Browning courthouse in San Francisco, there was a digital sign listing that day’s cases. At 9.30am on Monday 12 December last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit would hear.....and at 11.30 they would hear Sundus Saleh v George Bush et al, the only case yet filed in the US that questions the legality of the war in Iraq....

The accused (from left): Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, George W Bush and Dick Cheney. Photographs: AP, Getty, Reuters

“They have the power to look at international law and recognise aggression as a jus cogens norm.” In other words, the Ninth Circuit could have recognised illegal war-making as the “supreme” crime, as the judges had at Nuremberg, subject to a different level of scrutiny. “But they didn’t. They said, ‘We could do that, but we’re not going to today.’ According to this ruling, the White House and Congress can commit genocide in the name of national security, and be protected.”
With the case at an end, Comar plans to catch up on sleep and work...."We need to have a conversation about why we’re always at war. And why we’re always doing it unilaterally.”

remembering letters

Written in a handwriting I somehow feel I should remember but don't came a card with an anonymous birthday note yesterday.

The picture was a reproduction/print of a Swedish breakfast gathering under a birch. The card was signed "ever an admirer," which, if true, made me nervous, and, if false, made me wonder at the thoughtfulness of the card. The handwriting was quite small and meticulously neat. Contained inside the card was a Peanuts cartoon referring to snailmail letters. The cartoon strip was spliced into a truncated envelope bearing the question, "remember letters?"

Yes I do and I woke up this morning tantalized by the card that lacked a person. I didn't mind that it lacked a person ... person-dom is fun, but not exactly necessary. The card felt warm in my mind ... something placed on the parallel-lines-meet-in-infinity tracks. If it was a mystery, that was fine. If it wasn't a mystery, that was fine. Do the lines meet? Fine. Do the lines never meet? Fine. Everything felt toasty as I lay warm in bed in the pre-dawn hours basking in thoughts that allowed me to remain ensconced in sheet and blankets.

Letters -- the snailmail kind -- were lovely. They presumed without demurrer that between sending and receiving, little or nothing had changed. They allowed for raucous opinion or gnashing sorrow. How in love or hate anyone might be! How decorous or indecorous! How I would hang on their words after opening one from someone I hoped to hear from. There was no internet. No rush ... or, even if there was a rush, the rush was deflated by life's stately paces. Letters assumed both parties credited letters as concrete purveyors of the God's honest truth ... after three or four or five days traveling.

"I love you...."

The diaphanous words hung on diaphanous threads in a diaphanous mind ... and for whatever brief moment, it spelled out a cuddling "yes."

skimming the tops of the news waves

Stuff that fires my boilers this morning:

-- Fukushima disaster evacuees told to return to abandoned homes

People who fled after March 2011 nuclear meltdown face losing housing subsidies if they do not go back, despite radiation fears

I smell a financial rodent: If there is a lot of money to be made with nuclear power, let's just declare the bomb zone "safe" and prove it by forcing those who once lived safely to return to a place the government cannot yet make safe. A couple of steps further and this might be called murder with a pay day.

-- Harking back to the apposite nature of the Japanese saying, "Don't fix the blame; fix the problem," it occurred to me that this is Donald Trump's central issue. He likes to fix the blame but is incapable of fixing the problem .... so he affixes more headline-grabbing blame.

--  Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, has dismissed a basic scientific understanding of climate change by denying that carbon dioxide emissions are a primary cause of global warming....
This stance puts Pruitt at odds with his own agency, which states on its website that carbon dioxide is the “primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change”. This finding is backed by Nasa, which calls CO2 “the most important long-lived ‘fsorcing’ of climate change”.

-- The Pentagon is sending about 400 Marines to Syria to help local fighters wrest control of Raqqa, which ISIS considers its capital.
The Pentagon says the new troops will fire artillery rounds at ISIS fighters in support of the local forces, as well as provide security for the Marine artillerymen, as NPR's Phil Ewing reports.
These 400 troops will bring the number of U.S. forces on the ground in Syria to about 900, Phil says.

Wasn't it 15 minutes ago that excoriating Syria for its dictatorship and its gas attacks on civilians was par for the talking-head pundits? Wasn't blowing Syria back into the Stone Age a U.S. position? I guess a build-up for a Middle East war is to be expected. The poverty of imagination and effort is ... historically logical, I guess. But sad ... oh so fucking sad.

bird flu ... no joke

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) -- The detection of a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu at a Tennessee chicken farm has poultry farmers stepping up security in an attempt to prevent an outbreak like the one in 2015 that required the destruction of millions of chickens and turkeys in the Midwest. The appearance of milder forms of bird flu at a Wisconsin turkey farm and another Tennessee chicken farm has heightened concern.

"don't fix the blame; fix the problem"

1. Another birthday, this one celebrated by going to the Division of Motor Vehicles to have my driver's license renewed. I was edgy going in (my eyesight is not the 20/20 it once was and I hate going to see yet another damned doctor) but everything was smooth once the money changed hands (funny how that frequently seems to be the case). My son and I will go out to dinner, I think ... so I won't have to cook or wash dishes.

2. Useful saying: "Don't (af)fix the blame; fix the problem."

attacking the chickens

Chickens of Valley Street in more salubrious times.

Yesterday, in untimely warmth, both the people and the gossip came outdoors for a little airing. Mike was there as was Claudia and I joined the fray.

Mike said to Claudia he had seen some of the earlier-that-morning kerfful in which some dogs without leashes walked through the neighborhood, spotted Claudia's 'free-range' chickens and promptly attacked. Claudia went ape-shit -- as did Mike from a distance and I listening from a third-hand vantage point. The dog got the white chicken in its mouth ... Claudia grabbed a broom and the owers apparently told her to go fuck herself. I never did find out how the white chicken fared. Claudia called the cops and the animal control officer. I asked if she got into trouble because her chickens, which wander about with the straight-spined arrogance of a marquis, were not exactly under control either. Never did get an answer, but I still stand with the chickens: How many chickens do you know who would attack either people or other animals. Geese, sure ... but chickens? They're 'chicken,' right? This (chickens, rancor, warm weather) all could be grounds for a sissy version of the Hatfield and the McCoys, save the fact that people around here use the descriptive "hand-crafted" as if it were something serious in the world.

Doreen, Mike's wife and a good spirit in the neighborhood, has finished on bout of radiation/chemotherapy and it worked, as best I understood it, but now there is some lung cancer that cannot be operated on because of its integration with veins, arteries and other delicacies on the lung. It's being zapped in what everyone hopes is the last bout of trips to the hospital. I miss Doreen's laugh, which, from a  porch diagonally across the street, can be heard without straining. She's tired, but recuperating well, says Mike.

Today's was just a little 10-minute convocation on the street, but very pleasant as another day (tomorrow) of snow and the rest of winter cuts off a quick retreat into spring .... although my wife says there are flowers doing their best on the backyard lawns.

Internet celebs who may not make you cringe ...

Trend-setters who offer hope to the rest of us.

NC teen booked in mom's decapitation

Oliver Mauricio Funes Machada, 18, was arrested after he alerted authorities himself and was still on the scene when Franklin County deputies arrived.
The teen was seen walking out of his house holding his mother's head in one hand and what appeared to be a large knife in the other, police said.
Mr Funes Machada was taken into custody and charged with first-degree murder.

North Dakota battles parking meter

North Dakota reconsiders 70-year ban on parking meters

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) -- When an angry farmer was ticketed for not feeding a parking meter, he launched a one-man crusade that made North Dakota the nation's only state that bans the meters on all public streets.

Now the governor is quietly trying to end the nearly 70-year ban in hopes of revitalizing downtowns, and the farmer's granddaughter is fighting to uphold her family's legacy.

another dumbo in D.C.

In yet another example of the brain-damaged, you-know-what-he-means governance exemplified by the newly-enscoced Republican majority in Washington...

Ben Carson, the new secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), on Monday referred to slaves brought to the United States against their will as "immigrants," drawing quick condemnation from civil rights groups who cast his remarks as offensive....

"There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less," said Carson, who is African-American.

"But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land," he said.

Enslaved Africans did not voluntarily come to the United States and were denied freedom for hundreds of years. [Reuters]

It is worth noting that Reuters felt it necessary to add an explanatory note -- last line of abover-quoted -- for those who may be too ignorant to understand the gaff. The ignorance thermometer seems to be rising with the governmental appointment of (largely) rich, white men. Carson is brown ... which may be an excuse for his stupidity ... or is that too a really dumb remark?

Oh well, my intentions were good, dontcha know.

photos

From The Guardian: "Photojournalist Daniella Zalcman’s new website aims to showcase the versatility of female photographers and dismantle decades of industry bias."

squash is her sport

As a promising female athlete from a conservative, male-dominated area of Pakistan, Maria Toorpakai was forced to pose as a boy to learn her craft:

The best decision she ever made, she says, came at the age of four, when she burned her dresses, cut her hair and wore her brother’s clothes so that she could play outside.

steel mill to vegetable patch

Workers at Venezuelan steelmaker Sidor are planting sunflowers and vegetables on company premises to ease a national food deficit as steel output has almost ground to a halt nine years after the company was taken over by the government.
The company says the crops are meant to boost food supply in Venezuela, which suffers from chronic Soviet-style product shortages as a result of an unraveling socialist economic system that has been exacerbated by low oil prices.
Late socialist leader Hugo Chavez nationalized Sidor in 2008. Since then, chronic labor disputes and deterioration of installations have decimated production and left a swollen payroll of employees twiddling their thumbs on the job.

app assists would-be refugees

The creator of a chatbot which overturned more than 160,000 parking fines and helped vulnerable people apply for emergency housing is now turning the bot to helping refugees claim asylum.
The original DoNotPay, created by Stanford student Joshua Browder, describes itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer”, giving free legal aid to users through a simple-to-use chat interface. The chatbot, using Facebook Messenger, can now help refugees fill in an immigration application in the US and Canada. For those in the UK, it helps them apply for asylum support.
The London-born developer worked with lawyers in each country, as well as speaking to asylum seekers whose applications have been successful. [The Guardian]

ice music

Passed along in email:

Iditarod hampered by lack of snow

For the second time in three years, the Ititarod dog race will have its official start in Fairbanks, Alaska instead of Anchorage, due to insufficiently wintry conditions.
The ceremonial start of the race was still staged in the state’s largest city on Saturday, where trucks had brought in snow overnight.
A few hundred miles north, the Alaska Range – a mountain span that includes Denali – has little snow and open-water conditions. That prompted race officials to move the competition’s official start.

times of leaving

Like an artery pulsing into a bowl of warm water, there is what seems to be a lot of 'leaving' going on around the house this morning. My older son is off to a track meet near Boston, and my younger son hopped in his car, military gear stuffed in back, and headed out for two weeks of National Guard drill in New Jersey ...

...which will be followed by a short spell at home before he goes for a month of mobilization training in Texas ...

... and then heads to the Middle East for something less than a year's "deployment" -- a word that sounds competent and sensible and in control, but camouflages my country's uncertainties mixed with desire and greed and the knowledge that body bags (even the hidden ones) instill a diversionary fear in somewhat the same way that the Internal Revenue Service instills fear by auditing some small-fish, mom-and-pop store while ignoring the big-fish corporations that know where the big bucks are to be made.

A part of me caterwauls for my younger son... and by extension, me. Some part of me wishes him well on his mission to grow up and be a decent human being. And yet another part of me shudders that the growing up process is guided by a nation whose idea of being a grown-up is to be violent at someone else's expense.

I gave my son a burl circle I wore for 30-40 years on my Zen Buddhist raksu ... a talisman not all that different from the bobble-head Christianity dolls placed on the dashboards of the faithful. I went deep into the woods to find the maple tree and saw off the 18-inch wart that was the burl ... and then carve out and sand and oil the circle. It came with me through good times and bad while practicing Zen. Did it bring good luck? I have no clue, but I wanted my son to have something I too had had. I can't seem to find a picture, but what the hell ... may it be the thought that counts....

and yet I don't trust talisman's worth a shit ...

that too: I want a magic wand and don't believe in magic wands and am willing to live in the caterwauling dust storm of confusion than to apply for succor to either god or man, scripture or wise counsel... it's too late to improve this old duffer ... and besides, only god can pray to god ... and that's important in my lexicon.

A time of leaving. A time of tabula rasa.

Just like all the other tabula rasas.

So sad, so sad.....

if it works...

On the BBC news wire today, a critic bemoans the cowardice of imagination that he sees as infusing the money-making reinvention of "Beauty and the Beast." It seems to be a fad -- re-crafting lovely fairy tales and wringing out a few more shekels based on a proven winner. Said the critic, “If it ain’t broke, don’t remake it.”

As if to underscore the point, another BBC article reviews the successful 60-year history of the Cessna 172, a small plane whose functionality simply defies any but the most minor of tweaks. Reading both articles makes me want to twist the nose of all the wily 'entrepreneurs' whose capacities are limited to the Donald Trump style of imagination -- it's what it costs that determines the value.

Imagine that -- something works and keeps on working no matter what color you paint it.

OK, the Academy Awards and all the bogus hooplah are now behind us and perhaps the great unwashed like me can consider seeing what others circle-jerk into 'greatness' that is suspect to say the least. Who knows -- maybe an Academy Award winner is actually a pretty good movie ... though based on past performance, I doubt it. Mediocrity and political correctness are not why I want to see a movie. OK, OK ... the transgender, physically challenged, minority players are being injected and praised and in some cases are pretty interesting.

But is the story any goddamned good?

birthdays

In winter's hibernation, things slow and drip and dry up ... and there are birthdays.

My stepmother reached 92, I believe, and informed me, with telephone evidence provided, that the toilets in her house had begun moaning. There was no need to touch the apparatus ... it/they moaned without interference or inspiration and she couldn't get to sleep. So there was the adventure of the moaning toilet(s). Fixed now.

My younger son reached 23 and is gearing up for a National Guard two-week-exercise followed by a 8-9 month deployment in one of America's undeclared wars against inadequately-defined terrorism. Now and then, the reality of it washes over me and, like other parents, perhaps, I feel a desire to kill anyone responsible for supporting a war in which he might be hurt. A hypocrite when it suits me? You bet.

My 77th birthday is next week and with winter inching by, I reread books I find pleasant (Thomas Perry adventure for one) and rewatch TV serials I like ("Peaky Blinders" eg.) because the people don't require knicker-twisting and yet can make me cry or laugh from time to time. In the obituaries, a nice guy who liked to be known as "Grumpy" because his deceased wife had dubbed him that died himself. I knew and liked him. He was up in his 90's. Patches of desire to take on and write about a topic come and go, but are so sporadic that I hesitate to re-don those threads. There is sunshine that gets tantalizingly warm from time to time, but it's still winter ... I'm old enough to know that. I use a nebulizer twice a day and remember like a mental bookend the fortune teller who said I would die between 83 and 85. The closer it comes, the more sensible it sounds, though I do perk up when a good conversation gets going. So much of the conversation centers on the latest U.S. president, Donald Trump ... what a shameful, shaming guy ... he is, in some part of me, a 'man worth dying for.' I apologize to my kids, but there's nothing I can do about it. They will have to confront the assholes I did not.

Priest Off Spray

Received in email:

meditation memory

Passed along in email, this blast from the hard-core meditator's past...'member those days?

world war chores apportioned

Sweden, long known for its military "neutrality," plans to beef up/reconstitute its forces.

The Swedish government has decided to reintroduce military conscription - a move backed by the country's MPs....
The Swedish government has decided to reintroduce military conscription - a move backed by the country's MPs.
[A report] details a range of measures to boost Swedish military capabilities, citing "the deteriorating security situation in Europe, particularly in light of the Russian aggression against Ukraine". Deeper defence co-operation with Finland is "critical", it says.

Thank goodness Japan is discarding its anti-militaristic stance adopted after WWII. If you don't get in early, the little guys get left out on fire sales... everybody else gets to claim "heroes" and what's left over is bupkus. Things are moving along nicely, though: For the first time, Iraqi war plans attacked suspected militants/terrorists (it's hard to find a polite or apt or inclusive word ... just think of it as the people we dislike and fear and plan to suppress because otherwise there might be a necessity to consider the thornier difficulties of schools, hospitals, food, governance and the like) inside Syria last week.

The airstrikes in Bukamal, in Syria, were coordinated with Damascus and carried out through a joint intelligence-sharing and command center in Baghdad involving Syria, Iran, Iraq and Russia, according to Brig. Gen. Tahseen Ibrahim, a spokesman for Iraq’s Defense Ministry. He said he had no information on whether the strikes also were coordinated with the U.S.-led coalition, which is conducting airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq and providing close air support to Iraqi forces fighting the group.... According to a 2015 research paper by Barbara Kunz of the IFRI Security Studies Center, Sweden has about 52,000 full-time military personnel - 20,000 of them permanent staff and most of the others Home Guard members.

architectural winners

There is something satisfying about the minuscule Catalan architectural trio winning the big bopper of architectural awards ... the Pritzker Prize.

baseball-sized hail

For the first time in my life I see what looks like photographic evidence of what I always suspected was journalistic hyperbole -- hail the size of a baseball, this piece during storms in Illinois yesterday:

Now assuming that is the truth, how come more people are not reported injured or killed?