fart blossom

 

cross-eyed owl

 It's all about perspective:

still politically incorrect after all these years...

 ...and still hilarious.

Salad Ace

 

For my money, this is Prince's...

 ... most open honest and confessional song. Not his best song. It's rather conventional, a bit too orderly, but the lyrics speak of a man facing up to his personal inner truth. His is Jesus and all that. Yours may be... do you have one? If not, go  look for it. Quick-like.

Holy River

We will pass over in silence the video accompanying the song.

Let's go down to the holy river
If we drown then we'll be delivered
You can still see the picture upon the wall
One eye staring at nothing at all
The other one trying to focus through all your tears
You can try and try but there's nothing to hide
You can't run from yourself and what's inside
You got to find the answers to the questions that you most fear
So over and over you ask your soul
Why'd you come down to a world so cold?
And the voice inside says tonight the truth will be told
You surrounded yourself with all the wrong faces
Spending your time in all the wrong places
Putting your faith in things that only make you cry
People say they love you when they want to help
But how can they when you can't even help yourself?
The more they say they love you, the more you just want to die
So here we go again, the self-analysis
Have another glass of Port and forget this
The band's playing at the club tonight and they're bound to groove
There you are, you think you're high
You can't ask yourself because you'd only lie
If you had a dollar for every time you tried
You can't call nobody because they'll tell you straight up
Come and make love when you really hate them
Relationships based on the physical are over and done
They're over and done (they're over and done)
You'd rather have fun
With only one, with only one
Only one... One (one)
And then it hit you like a fist on a wall
Who gave you life when there was none at all?
Who gave the sun permission to rise up everyday? (Ooh, oh yes)
Let me tell it (go on)
If you ask God to love you longer
Every breath you take will make you stronger
Keeping you happy (happy) and proud to call His name (go on and say it)
Jesus (Jesus)
And over and over you ask your soul
Why'd you come down to a world so cold?
And the voice inside says tonight the truth will be told
And this time I was listening, hear me
Let's go down to the holy river
If we drown then we'll be delivered (yes we will)
If we don't then we'll never see the light (no)
If you die before you try
You'll have to come back and face the light (oh yes)
When you believe it, you got a good reason to cry (oh my, my)
So I went on down to the holy river
I called my girl and told her I had something to give her
I asked her to marry me and she said yes, I cried
Oh, that night I drowned in her tears and mine
And instead of a glass of sorrow and wine
Looking back y'all, I don't miss nothing except the time
And when I see that picture upon the wall
The one eye staring at nothing at all
My eyes trying to focus but these are much different tears
Oh, yes they are
Let's go down to the holy river
Let's go down to the holy river
Let's go down to the holy river
Let's go down to the holy river
Let's go down to the holy river
Let's go down to the holy river

vern decides

 

Cosmically unstoppable

 

Guaranteed President-Free

 

Happy Face

 

That Old September Moon

 

zebra shadows

 

pity this busy monster...

 

 

Bonus meme:

Special added value meme:

Hair Crow

 

Spicy Beings 2

 

SPicy beings 1

 

McArmy

 

Sentinel

 

Dog Ball

 

movie madness

I experimented. Even the red shoes/tap heels/'there's no place  like home'  magic has failed me:

I remain, as you can see, stuck in the X-dimension woven into a modern cineplex lobby carpet.

test

 <A HREF=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KHM-BZPI7o/>Sans Mojo Equals Death</A>

eggs

 

He sees you when you're sleeping too

 

an old boy and his dog

 

How it was done

 

homeless

 

danger, wr!

 

This message seems dangerous

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jobs galore

 

VISIT SITE

a candle

 

Snow Star

 

BIrd and HUman

 

hand puppet

 

dog hand

 

hand dog

 

action figure or something

 

A dirge

 

Something something Scottish

 

bloody me

 

starsky Hutch, M.D.

 

Apron on Fire

Charles Hugh Smith...

...is a very wise person.

The Art of Survival, Taoism and the Warring States

We Could Be Heroes...

Just For One Day

I foresee a time soon when a great many people get their martyred hero death wish. Nothing greater than to be a hero, but the shelf-life of herodom is generally brief. Maybe better to be a rich rock star singing about it, but I don't think so.

I've seen heroism in something we call 'real life' (an expression that points out how we have countless forms of unreal life that we consume in increasingly larger and more varied content to the point where some people consume far more virtual reality than the real thing.

'Tell 'em a magic elf named Leroy sent you.'

James Kunstler Is a Very Smart Man

When the Birdies Sing Like the Fat Lady
"And so here we are at a fraught moment in the convergent crises of corona virus and the foundering economic system that it infected, with all its frightful pre-existing conditions. Of course, it isn’t capitalism, so-called, that is failing, but the perversions of capitalism, starting with the appendage of the troublesome term: ism. It isn’t a religion, or even a pseudo-religion like Zoroastrianism or communism. It’s simply the management system for surplus wealth. In a hyper-complex society, the management of wealth naturally grows hyper-complex, too, with lavish opportunities and temptations for chicanery, cheating, fraud, and swindling (the perversions of capital). It’s in the interest of the managers to cloak all that hyper-complex perversity in opaque language, to make it seem okay.

"How many ordinary Americans have a clue what all the Municipal Liquidity Facilities, Primary Dealer Credit Facilities, Primary and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities, Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facilities, Main Street New Loan Facilities and Expanded Loan Facilities, Commercial Paper Funding Facilities, currency swap lines, the TALFs TARPs, PPPs, SPVs represent ­— besides the movement, by keystrokes, of “money” from one netherworld to another (both conveniently located on Wall Street), usually to the loss of non-elite citizens generally and to their offspring’s offspring’s offspring?

"Real capital is grounded in the production of real things of real value, of course, and when it’s detached from all that, it’s no longer real capital. Money represents capital, and when the capital isn’t real, the money represents…nothing! And ceases to be real money. Just now, America is producing almost nothing except money, money in quantities that stupefy the imagination — trillions here, there, and everywhere. The trouble is that money is vanishing as fast as it’s being created. That’s because it’s based on promises to be paid back into existence that will never be kept, on top of prior promises to pay back money that were broken or are in the process of breaking. The net result is that money is actually disappearing faster than it can be created, even in vast quantities.

"All this sounds like metaphysical bullshit, I suppose, but we are obviously watching money disappear. Your paycheck is gone. That activity you started — a brew-pub, a gym, an ad agency — no longer produces revenue. The HR department at the giant company you work for told you: don’t bother coming into the office tomorrow, or possibly ever again. Your bills are piling up. The numbers in your bank account run to zero. That sure smells like money disappearing. Wait until the pension checks and the SNAP cards mysteriously stop landing in the mailbox."

Paging Daddy Warbucks

Pandemic is a Global and Universal Problem...

A global problem is one that has a global reach. A universal problem is one that affects and is affected by everyone involved in a system. When you have a globally universal problem, like a pandemic, you have a problem that requires everyone on the planet to be on the same page following the same protocol.

It is like driving. In the "globe" of traffic, EVERYONE needs to follow the same basic driving protocols and obey the same traffic rules/signs. Otherwise, many many accidents. See:

The Early Wild Days of Urban Automotive Traffic

With a highly contagious virus traveling globally via cars, public transit, trains, planes, and sailing ships, we have a very global manifestation of a very universal problem. We also have a nearly unanimous lack of agreement between nations, states, corporations, their employees, small businesses, their employees, state, municipal and county governments, religions, sports clubs, bridge clubs, billy clubs...

***

People need to eat: 

South Africa Eases Coronavirus Lockdown

"South Africa has started to gradually loosen its strict coronavirus lockdown, allowing some industries to reopen after five weeks of restrictions that plunged its struggling economy deeper into turmoil.The economy of Africa's most industrialised nation was already teetering when the lockdown kicked in on March 27 to contain the spread of infections."

***

On what is practical:

Backwards into the Future

"Lockdowns can’t last forever, people are social animals. Also, lockdowns don’t solve the problem, that’s not their goal; they merely buy you time. Would you say we have used that time wisely? Would you say it’s safe now to put less distance between people, who are for all intents and purposes potential hosts for a lethal virus?" 
Raul Ilargi of The Automatic Earth 

***

Also: Why apex predators should be an elite minority not a 7-billion-plus-and-growing planetary hive colony:

March of the Locusts: Individuals Start Moving to Avoid Cannibalism

Will we achieve the miracle of globally universal cooperation along careful guidelines? Nuh-uh. 

Have we used wisely what we hopefully have learned from our  confused, inconsistent, and generally too little too late lockdowns? Nuh-uh.

Are we immune to cannibalism? I'm not gonna answer that question. I'll let this guy do that:

Little Demon

The above picture is from an article titled: Should I Wear A Mask In Public? ... whose headline says it all: complete lack of consolidated response aka solidarity, cooperation, unity...

President Trump Readies Bailout for Nations Food
"In another round of comments, President Trump has ordered meatpacking plants to remain open during the pandemic. While plants can remain open, workers, who don't want to contract the deadly virus, don't necessarily have to show up to work. We discussed that over the weekend in a piece titled "American Farms Cull Millions Of Chickens Amid Virus-Related Staff Shortages At Processing Plants."

The animals are always the first to get the worst. The worst is yet to come, however.

Meanwhile, in our human world, our prisons are becoming massively infected by COVID-19. Guards are also getting sick, of course. Less oversight over a distressed prison population.

Imagine you're sick, trapped in cages with other prisoners also getting sick or losing what's left of their prison-addled minds, many of which were already in bad shape before incarceration.

You don't necessarily like prison guards, but they literally hold the keys.

Spend a minute imagining this. We had 2.3 million prisoners in the USA as of 2016. That number may have dropped since then. Still, close enough. 2 million humans in the dungeon, feeling trapped in a new way on top of the already plain fact of being trapped by a jail sentence.

Now you know how the animals feel. Some statistics:

"The meat and poultry industry is the largest segment of U.S. agriculture.
U.S. meat production totaled 52 billion pounds in 2017.

U.S. poultry production totaled 48 billion pounds in 2017.
In 2017, the meat and poultry industry processed:
9 billion chickens
32.2 million cattle and calves
241.7 million turkeys2.2 million sheep and lambs
121 million hogs"

Ironically, the kindest thing you can do now is buy all the meat you can use. Better to be slaughtered by a soulless industrial assembly-line death camp system than to slowly starve to death because the system has collapsed and no one is showing up to work or can afford feed for the animals.

After all, they're "only animals", right?

"Insomuch as ye do it to the least of ye, ye do it unto Me." (some jerk named Jesus. Yeah, fuck Him too. Trouble maker. Nail Him up!)

And You Thought TRUMP...

...was an unrepentant addle-pated asshole. Meet his worthy successor, the King of Cloacas Himself, MIchael Richard Pence.

Coronavirus-mike-pence-tours-mayo-clinic-without-mask.html

"Pence, who leads President Donald Trump's coronavirus task force, later suggested to reporters that he did not need to wear a mask because he is tested regularly for the virus, and does not have it.

"The Mayo Clinic, which is located in Rochester, Minnesota, is requiring all patients, visitors and staff to wear a face covering or mask to slow the spread of Covid-19. The facility said that the mask requirement is part of its protocol “for ensuring your safety.”

"The clinic said in a Twitter post that it had informed Pence of its policy mandating masks before he toured the facility."

This is how you set an example for the USA populace, yessirreebob.

This is the man who, I remind us, felt it was pertinent that he stand on a South Korean rooftop staring ruggedly at North Korea so that they could see his determination. I can't find the original article, from a few years ago, where Pence said this, but it exists, along with a nifty picture of Pence looking very rugged and determined like some man who stares at goats, maybe.

These are the clowns we've allowed to take thelm of  a major geopolitical superpower )albeit one unfortunately taken to drinking gin'n'kryptonie cocktails... wait! I found it!
Mike Pence thinks mean-mugging at North Korea might deter nuclear aggression In lieu of an armed armada, the VP deployed a withering glare.

"VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE LOOKS AT THE NORTH SIDE FROM OBSERVATION POST OUELLETTE IN THE DEMILITARIZED ZONE (DMZ) ON APRIL 17. CREDIT: AP PHOTO/LEE JIN-MAN"

The actual quote: “I thought it was important that we went outside,” Pence said, according to the Post. “I thought it was important that people on the other side of the DMZ see our resolve in my face.”

Meanwhile, Uncle Joe Biden runs for the office of Chief White House (off his) Rocker Man:

That's Uncle Joe!

A Sad Song/Former Glories

Carla Bley's composition Utviklingssang

Simple but Detailed Info for Preventing/Healing a Case of COVID-19

https://www.evms.edu/media/evms_public/departments/internal_medicine/Marik-Covid-Protocol-Summary.pdf

hopelessness and homelessness

James Kunstler is perhaps the single best USA writer making sense of this mess:

Turning and Churning
"The old system is permanently broken now. We’re having a hard time recognizing that, plague or no plague. Many activities have flunked the scale challenge and will not come back to running the way they used to, generally anything organized at the giant scale: global supply chains, global corporations that depend on them, fracking for shale oil, big institutions like colleges and even public school systems, commercial aviation and tourism, the auto industry, show business (including the Disney empire and things like it), suburbia as a general proposition, skyscrapers and megastructures, shopping malls, pension funds, insurance companies, mega-banks, and, of course, medical conglomerates. We’re deceived by Amazon.com, which appears to be successful at the moment because it is filling a vacuum that Amazon will also eventually fall into. Amazon’s business model is a joke. The model is: every item purchased makes a separate journey by truck to the customer. That’s a “sell” signal to me.

"The lockdown is making people crazy. It’s one thing to be stuck in the house with spouses and relatives you can barely stand under normal circumstances. But to see all your financial support systems melt down at the same time, along with the implications for your hopes-and-dreams, is a pretty big shock. Naturally so many want to bust out of the waking nightmare and get going, to return to action, to at least see whether what they were doing before all this happened might restart.

"I dunno about that. They might flock back to restaurants to spend some of that fresh-minted $1200, and then what? Where will the next $1200 come from? Modern Monetary Theory? A new Guaranteed Basic Income? From what? From taxes paid by which businesses generating what profits from people too broke to buy goods and services? I don’t think so. Times have changed and we’re going to have to get some new good ideas that fit the new times. But, the craziness out there is very likely to start expressing itself differently as we discover the urge to action does not produce the desired result of returning-to-normal. Instead, it produces more disorder in the foundering system, and then the question is: how much disorder do we have to slog through to get to those new ideas suited to the new times?

"I’ve got one of my own. The mule business! Seriously."

Shabbat 4-25-20

Kindness comes from the most unexpected corners, and yet, reliably, in its curious way.

Seems you have to ask for help. Tell people you're lonely. Some jewels can't be bought, only given and received.

Sell Me a Diamond

The infamous Hope diamond

Lonely People

Doing these kind things for us, kind people not only help us and happify us (is 2 a woid!), they teach us things, especially about ourselves. Things they may well not have a clue about themselves. It's like handing out lottery tickets randomly. Some, it's just a nice fey gesture. Occasionally, jackpot.

Every dog has its day. Pet your local stray even if you can't take it in or even feed it.

It being that holiest of days, Saturday, Day of Hangovers after Unholy Nights, I as always present our moment with the Dark Side for it too needs our love and respect: it is us, after all:

Down in the Hole

Lord help me, amen. Can someone give me a light sabre or even a cheap blaster? Hallelujah!