"...chasing a supposed centrism..."

 this is an optical illusion....what appears to be lines on an angle are actually parallel lines....

after a day in Yumertonville washing my laundry, buying groceries and getting my mail it did not escape my notice that at every turn there was a cop car (city, not sheriff) so my life and lifestyle has incurred the wrath of some of the more "soiled" constabulary...unfortunately this indicates a lot of rot in the system...there is a great interest in making me a felon due to the restrictions which go with this conviction...it seems to me that this attitude is similar to the German SS and the Gestopo and the East German Stasi as well as many other "secret police " types throughout history....I am guilty of much in the way of "non-conformity" but the best thing about living in the USA is the  (supposed) freedom to not be regimented and ordered about...I guess my listening to Thoreau's "Walden" and "Civil Disobedience" makes me a dangerous character...or not...

this is the only coyote I have seen in this part of the desert in a month or more...the gun goobers insist that these animals are vermin...also ravens, foxes and probably "longhairs" (as we un-trimmed used to be called) the current political climate gives license to extreme social views...quite unrealistically....

this is Algodones, Mexico which is a few miles away and this proximity to another country makes for a constant awareness of the political differences which exist in the world...and also the awareness that an arbitrary border does nothing to separate the physical realities of the "sameness" of the people...

I found some very good YouTube offerings from "Back 2 Basics Adventures" which is a couple of Aussis who go to the Solomon islands and Papua New Guinea and such places as that and fish and pick local fruit and eat the occasional kangaroo...these guys are the real deal or maybe the reel deal...also much excitement on the "Little Chinese everywhere" as Yan and Flo battle the cold to cross the 15 thousand foot mountains and the last three episode are fantastic adventures..Yan admits to breaking down and crying at the hardships but big Flo is there to comfort her and they persevere...what a tough couple!...when they encounter some young people across the river on the border of Afghanistan their excitement seems to indicate a thirst to know the "outside' world...maybe allowing the females of this country to enter the USA would be an better alternative to the banning of all Afghanis...

this mode of observation is not effective...but neither are the helicopters...these people are not serious about patrolling the US/Mexican border as they appear to have ignored the use of drones...every time they send up a helicopter they risk the life of the crew and the loss of the machine...when a person can sit safely on the ground and see just as much or more...there seems to be much bogus stuff on the border...

I came across these bones nearby which may be human...however, as many episodes of "Bones" as I have seen I do not claim any expertise in this area...I am more interested in the rocks which may be tools of thousands of years ago inhabitants...

I found Robert Frost reading his poem "The death of the hired man"...which I have always found to be extremely "disconcerting"...as I get closer and closer to "shuffling off this mortal coil" I think about the multitude of situations that might be encountered when the time comes for there to be no more time...and Robinson Jeffers reading his poem "Hurt Hawks" is quite moving also...

seeing more of these since there was a lot of rain in recent months...not a dragon..not a fly...go figure...Sabine Hossenfelder has an excellent episode on "the next big thing' which is "spintronics" so now we can have machines that can run the machines that run the machines that run the machines ad infinitum...as long as nature does not get excluded in the equations humanity is safe...

"....chasing a supposed centrism that avoids the conflicts that have to be faced and the choices that have to be made..."from the article "Second Coming" about the 2nd trump presidency in 11/7/24 N.Y.book review

 

"We live within..."

 one of the daily morning guitar therapy sessions...with the sunrise therapy and the hot coffee therapy and the multitude of other aspects to my days and nights I may just be healing...

the nomads have the right idea....mobility is life...life is mobility...the"INSTITUTE OF NOMADIC ARCHITECTURE " has some very good videos of nomads constructing their housing...humans. are pretty creative about how they managed to live in all environments...

the old and worn and the new and fresh often live side by side...but rarely understand one another...I have watched some great music videos lately...I stumbled across SARAH DELANY BUFFET and her video work...she is a trained cinematographer (although she majored in criminal law) and she decided to document her old dad playing some tunes you don't know by heart...some of these tunes jimmy buffet has only played less than a dozen times in public but they are still on his albums...his recollections of his beginnings in the music biz are interesting and his life in New Orleans, Key West and in the Carribean islands makes for some interesting personal history...ms. Buffet handles the camera work and questioning with great candor and humor...also there is a woman named Alison Balsom who illustrates three different kinds of trumpets and finds she likes the Baroque best...historically educational..."Down that line" by "the leopards" by "silent paprika films" is interesting and these folks have many offerings...

 pipe which was laying on the desert floor apparently run over by a tank during training ops in WW2

the number of people who have been damaged physically and mentally due to societies insistence on pursuing violent conflicts has resulted in societies which have reduced ability to provide for citizens to have even the rudiments of the things necessary for an enjoyable life...war is not the answer...

"We live within the immediacy of our own personal worlds, where a sense of "normality" is hard to displace, even as "normality" begins to look like an illusion. It's possible that our capacity to adjust to almost any "new normal" may turn out , ironically, to be one of our greatest liabilities as a species." from "What the ocean holds" by Verlyn Klinkenberg in the New York Review of Books 10/17/24

'Haven't I got better things to do on..."

  This is a round object with a square shadow...big doings in the last couple of weeks...full moon inspired me to stay put in the desert for two weeks ...temps in the 60's and only a few days of much wind and blowing sand...read about a young theoretical physicist named SABRINA GONZALES (cuban) PASTESKI  who is studying what she calls CELESTIAL HOLOGRAPHY and has a web site called PHYSICS GIRL...sort of stretches the synapsis to ponder...

both of the glass cooking cylinders imploded on the solar cookers...I ate more baked potatoes and bake apples in the last few weeks than I ever have in my life...I am looking at the parabolic dish solar cookers to see if maybe they are less prone to failure...I must say that I was very favorably impressed with the results of these cookers and may purchase replacement tubes and be more attentive to my cooking procedures....it may be a design flaw which is un-avoidable....

    

currents in life always leave their impressions...however subtle...

a couple of days after thanksgiving a gun goober decided to use a metal plate for a target and use me as a backdrop....I think it was one of the syndicate people...later in the day an ambulance came down the very sanded up road as fast as it could go which was not very fast at all...by the time the sun set and it was dark the ambulance had not come out...I did see it come out a few hours after sunset and I figured one of the gun goobers had too much to drink and there was a fatality...for several days before and after thanksgiving the 4 wheelers were very busy tearing across the landscape...but after the ambulance incident there was no 4 wheelers anywhere to be seen or heard... 

I heard of H."Rap" Browns death while incarcerated a couple of weeks ago...we both grew up in the same town...when I was 18 years old during my first job in an oil refinery I was walking around in the refinery with an older white guy when we came upon some materials in a pile between some refining equipment...the white guy said "that needs to be picked up and moved...but that's nigger work..." and so we moved on...this was in 1972 and in this part of the Deep South there was a lot of talk like that..."rap" Browns daddy who was a world war two military veteran worked in an oil refinery in this city and I rather doubt if he escaped the racist attitude which was prevalent...this sort of attitude is undoubtedly what made "rap" Brown so bent on violence...he was not what the "good 'ol boys" would call a "good nigger"...he was more of a Spartacus type of person...I heard that the local paper did not acknowledge his death but it was well reported in the New York Times...sounds about right...

"Haven't I got better things to do on                                                                                                                         this earth than avenge the Blacks                                     

of the seventeenth century?"   Frantz Fannon from the final chapter of his book "Black skin, white masks"                                                                                                                                                    

"...who have not one virtue..."

after 30 minutes of trying i finally got this image to upload from my photos...

so what in the hell is this internet thing anyhow!?...i looked it up and came across this information "How big is the internet in 2025-Data, websites and users explained" (5 min) Nextzen Tech...and it says 5.4 billion users daily or 67% of the global population...1.3 billion websites...but only 200-250 million of these are maintained...google does 100,000 searches per second or 8.6 billion per day...of course all of these numbers must be taken as possibly inaccurate, some wildly inaccurate...i was recently told that everything i have ever written on these blogs could be erased with a single key stroke...maybe...maybe not...i have probably pissed someone off somewhere...one thing for sure is that humans on planet earth are using the internet very enthusiastically!...i would like to be able to download into my hard drive some of the youtube presentations that i find inspiring...i did just this a few years back but now it seems to be harder...one of the things that i have noticed is that more and more of the presentations are bogus information...should some oversight group edit this crap off the internet?...well, maybe a personal "bullshit meter" needs to be used..."The most mysterious language on earth isn't even human"...(18 min)...this is about bio-semioics which concerns how biological stuff communicates and how "...survival patterns become meaning systems"...mind stretching stuff here..."meaning is never fixed, it lives in context..."meaning may be more fundamental than matter..."wow! this are heavy concepts...chew on this for a while...and now some music i have listened to and enjoyed....mr micah nelson has a very good presentation with "Particle Kid" (this name according to mr nelson derives from his father once refering to him as "prodigal son"... "Golden Hair/ When you dance" these songs seem to be almost incantations and micah presents as a full blown Druid...great guitar work and vocals...more of this!...listened to a lot of older joan armadtading...what a songwriter!...there is a 24 minute interview with ms. armatrading from paul cashmere (Noise11) from australia...and "weakness in me" Radio 2 piano room (3:20)..listen to the words!....show some emotion!..."cotton pickin kids" have a great presentation with "I'll fly away"...excellent  harmony!...also i listen to Juice Newtons (official video) of "Angel of the morning"...brings back memories of long ago...i listened to the great radio show "American Routes" last week with nick spitzer from new orleans and heard some roots music from "The Charioteers" a gospel tune called "All Gods Chillun Got Shoes"....this song is actually about the extreme deprivation suffered by american negros to the extent that they could not afford proper footwear....and now some of them obtain very expensive shoes...(i heard that some "restitution" proponents are saying that according to their calculations great britain owes about 130 TRILLION! dollars to the offspring of former enslaved people...thats a lot! )....you might like a single short lived musical group called "The Dirty Mac" with a video called "Yer Blues" with 4 experienced musicians...namely john lennon, eric clapton, keith richards (on bass!) and mitch mitchell on drums...good stuff...whatever happened to those guys? ...i just heard that "Guns and Roses" will go on a big tour next year...same hair, same hat...same ol same ol same ol...i heard where a musical group called "Deer Hoof" got tired of the big business of music and decided to release their latest offering on "craigslist" ...whatever it takes...i think with current political climate in the USA we should be on the alert for the creeping "GLEICHSCALTUNG"...it might happen here! got to go as the sun is shining bright and "miles to go before i sleep..."

"...who have not one virtue to rub against another in the field of active life, and yet perhaps, in the life of contemplation, sit with the saints." robert louis stevenson from "The lantern Bearers" (1888) here he describes some of the people in his community who seem simple but have rich inner lives.
 

"...creation is ALWAYS the successful resolution"

top image is of the insect when first encountered after a rainy night...the next image is of another giant rainbow which was only visible for about 40 seconds, the camera was handy...the next image is of the same insect after some of the water drops were knocked off it...the bottom image is of shattered glass....which is how my mind feels occasionally....

 in the last couple of weeks or so i have encountered some very stimulating ideas from the internet and reading some great articles in the "new york review of books"...an especially stimulating presentation from "the silent thinker" entitled "Spinoza explains why guilt is the oldest disease of the spirit" (34 min)..i don't know why i have not read more of this humble lens grinders ideas...this poor guy was thrown out of his jewish church and it was forbidden for anyone to speak to him...he was way too intelligent to be sucked into the very flawed world view that was being propose at the time...he died at the age of 44 probably due to glass dust in his lungs...mr steven west on "Philosophize this!" has a couple of interesting segments on Spinoza also...another radical presentation i encountered (i doubt if any of these youtube presentations i encounter are strictly random chance) ... "What does lying do to your energy field?" the hidden library (20 min) this view astounded me...and makes sense on several levels...and "Living with synchronicity: Marie-Louise von Franz and C.G. Jung " (the Jungian Aion) 38 min...some excellent learned commentary is presented regularly by Sabine Hossenfelder with her "bullshit" meter "Is it pointless now to fight climate change?" and "What the HELL is wrong with Europe"...ouch!...i always like to see what "Animalogic" and Danielle Dufoe has to offer and i was especially pleased with her "Andean Cat- the rarest cat in the world" these tiny felines eat a lot of viscachio? which look like a sad rabbit...i worked at a place that had several of these animals which are strictly forbidden in the USA...also the veterinarian at the N.O. zoo after much research figured out how to do artificial insemination in felines....this might be of some interest to these rare cat conservationist...also Ms. Defoe said something i have never heard anyone say....which is that people might want to get a game camera and set it up at night to see what critters are around...i think more citizen science would help the professionals with more information...much as the large population of birders have become an important source of information for bird conservationists... i looked at a lot of music videos...with the recent death of Jimmy Cliff one of the better known "island" music performers i came across Ernest Ranglin the so called inventer of reggae and ska , a very good guitar player...more later past my bedtime...."

"...creation is ALWAYS the successful resolution of internal conflict or anxiety..." Dale Salwak 

 

"Be a channel...."

 like so much we encounter in the visual world there are sometimes only shadows to inform us

this beautiful lake in the desert attracts birds and vegitation

this western grebe was a constant resident in this place where the water flowed at all times

lost/misplaced my so called smart phone yesterday morning...this is a more traumatic experience than i had assumed...had to buy a replacement at the walmart yesterday and set the damned thing up...well the phone lady in the phone department was adamant that she had no obligation to help me with a "pay as you go" phone...and so she was no help at all....the news seems to be pretty negative. as the federal government of the USA has not figured out that no funding stalls a lot of government activity...i think the other governments (city/county/state) are determined to keep society more or less running...i did not plan to fly anywhere anyway....enough of the human errors in the world...some of my reference material was/is on the errant phone (lost or stolen ) so i will look to the notebooks and my memory...since new york city is much in the news recently i will start with a very good article in "The New York Review of Books" from may 23, 2024...the article is about the building of supertall buildings  in new york city....'".., in light of all the other urgencies the profession should be addressing instead-climate change and social equity being the two most urgent- the devotion of so much talent, money, and effort to erecting ever higher "supertalls' and "megatalls" verges on the obscene. The world is burning- literally and figuratively- this flagrant waste of capital and imagination makes the biblical parable of the Tower of Babel all too easy to comprehend as both the most ancient and most modern of human follies." last lines from "Supersize that?" by Martin Filler...i think they should allow people to jump from the top of the tallest buildings with and without parachutes...there is a very good youtube presentation by Dr. Andrew Huberman who interviews Dr, David Fajgebaum about "Using existing drugs in new ways to treat and cure diseases of brain and body." (2 hours)..this fascinating discussion illustrates how multi-disciplinary approaches to treating ailments has proved to be very productive...this just in...elon musk allowed mucho money by tesla board...like a trillion bucks if he can make tesla stock price rise...the robot army awaits..."Ultra Hardcore" is a good article in New York review of books (jan.18, 2024) which gives some history of elon musk...his life is different from your life...and i do not begrudge him is wealth as it seems to me most everything he has sought to develop is a positive influence on humanity..."Seeking the truth"(30 min) is a good youtube presentation about the author leo tolstoy 

this guy was born into a wealthy family and inherited the family estate when his parents died...he inherited 330 serfs (slaves?) which was a great influence on his life...

his best known book is a huge volume and he said it was not a novel...he kind of rejected the life of social parties and self indulgence after a while and the plight of the economically oppressed interested him much...never read it...but his was an interesting life....i listened to one of the latest musical offerings from Ms Florence Welch called "Buckle"...a very good vocal presentation and good lyrics...this poor girl has not had much luck in the relationship department if her songs are to be taken as personal experiences...she is one of my favorite female vocalists and sings with great power...HOWEVER! i did notice that at the end of one of the presentations of "Buckle" (the one one where she is facing to the left and wearing a sort of veil thing)...there are at least a dozen or more persons or entities shown (credits)...she got robbed! the crook (shirley kurata) who gets credit for "costume design" had no costumes to design...that veil don't hardly count as "costume"...and the rest of the vultures should be given the boot also...ms. Welch needs to spend some quality time with lucas nelson and study his wonderful musical presentations like "Hallelujah"...the one where he sits crosslegged on a bed with a camera and a guitar....forget the damned superfluous production crap...this woman has too much talent to let it be "produced" to death...by the way she is pretty but needs to come to the realization that she is older today than she was yesterday and she will age like everyone else...get over it..."Ancient Aboriginal (australian) History" rock carvings deeper meaning (22min)(rob dogs vlog) this is a good not overproduced viewing of some old, old, rock carvings...GET AMONGST!..."Little Chinese Everywhere" is still putting out some great youtube presentations....visiting a village with german inhabitants was exciting for Flo who speaks the language...a couple of weeks back Mr. Flo had a splitting headache as they ended the show...well DUH!...he was eating any food that was dropped on his table which is a big no no...undoubtedly poisoned by some jealous russian..."trust your friends, but cut the cards"...is a good reminder to be cautious at all times....

"Be a channel, not a dam"...a huberman

"Considering the unforeseen events..."

 being in the desert gives one much incentive for reflection on the human condition....

lets start with some good news for a change..."High school basketball team gives up title after the coach discovers they didn't actually win." (3 min)..."The most beautiful wingsuit flight I've done" (3:34) Joanne's/ wingsuit...."Teen workers save restaurant as owner spends months in hospital(4:27)...also I found some really good music from a person whom I met long ago..."Eliana" (4:05) is a superb piece of musical nostalgia which is mr Steve Conns speciality. Also "Annalee" is well done..."20 Ph.D's in the time of one,  how AI is changing college" (9:51)Bloomberg Television... "Improve your lymphatic system for overall health and appearance' by dr Andrew Huberman (1 hr. 40 min) is about something one does not hear about nearly enough and how the lymphatic system is essential to good health...Also I really enjoyed "Trinity sessions revisited Cowboy Junkies with Natalie Merchant (57 min.) this is one of the most artfully presented musical concerts I have ever seen...the director of photography is Eugene O' Conner and deserves special mention...I think this was filmed in "Church of the Holy Trinity in 2007...ms.Merchants voice is remarkably dynamic...there is a very good interview with Michael Timmins  the superb guitarist of the Cowboy Junkies which illustrates the special qualities which this musical group brings to their performances at "Rock and Roll ghost (S14 E1)...this concert is as much a seance as a music performance!...also as a fan of the Clark Creative ensemble I like to go back and review the presentations from some time ago such as "You can call me Al" the Paul Simon tune...Ms. "B" is undoubtedly one of the most animated performers ever to take the stage...she also has a presentation where she performs with a hula-hoop....only Shakira come close to her degree of animation...I am sure that her Mom is behind the camera giving her cues on "dance" moves....good fun!....

"Considering the unforeseen events of this world, we should be taught that no human condition should inspire men with absolute despair." H. Fielding