'While he was rapping the rostrum to quiet the rabble-rousing, the gavel shattered.
Pieces of the wooden mallet
are lying on the House floor."
"Order in the toilet! Order in..."
Splinters
Thursday, December 19, 2024
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Clusterkiss
"In the 2023 Forbes Global 2000, Møller-Maersk was ranked as the 174th largest public company in the world "
"Dali was sold from Stellar Marine to Grace Ocean, a Singaporean company, in October 2016; she was placed under the management of Synergy Marine and reflagged as Singaporean.
A faulty fuel pressure gauge was detected at the port of San Antonio, Chile, in June 2023; the gauge was replaced and no faults were detected at a further check three months later.
On 26 March 2024, shortly after leaving the Port of Baltimore with a crew of 22 and two Maryland pilots en route to Colombo, Sri Lanka, the ship lost power and struck a support pillar of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, causing its collapse. "
"Grace Ocean Private and Synergy Marine Group filed a joint petition on 1 April in the Maryland U.S. District Court to limit their
liability to about $43.6 million
under the Limitation of Liability Act of 1851.
Chief judge James K. Bredar is overseeing the proceedings"
"On 23 April, the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore filed papers, in the Northern District of Maryland, seeking a jury trial within the district, to obtain compensation from Grace Ocean Private Limited of Singapore (Owners), and Synergy Marine PE Ltd of Singapore (managers), for the resultant financial losses.
The plaintiffs alleged that the defendants provided an incompetent, inattentive, improperly trained, improperly supervised crew, on an improperly maintained and unseaworthy vessel, resulting in the bridge collapse, harming the city."
"Dali departed to China in September 2024."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Dali
"On March 27, Moore and Biden thanked Dali's crew
for transmitting the mayday call warning of the ship's power failure and the impending collision."
"President Joe Biden, too, had promised during a news conference hours after the collapse
that the federal government would foot the entire bill
for a new bridge, now estimated to cost as much as $1.9 billion.
Federal law already would pay for 90 percent of the expense, but without the balance paid by federal cash,
Maryland has cut roughly $170 million from its own transportation projects to finance building the new bridge."
***
"the inclusion of all three provisions in the spending bill, which is intended to avert a government shutdown."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/12/18/rfk-stadium-dc-washington-commanders/
Squirrel Fangs
"ground squirrels are not as cuddly as they appear: researchers have found
they repeatedly hunt and eat voles,
decapitating their prey and pulling flesh from the torso.
The team say the discovery was a shock: while California ground squirrels have previously been observed eating insects, bird eggs, hatchlings and even – albeit rarely – scavenging small, juvenile mammals, they were primarily thought to be herbivorous, snacking on seeds, acorns, fruits and nuts."
"Yhe females are also known to commit infanticide, killing and eating the young of others."
'Over the course of 18 days in the summer of 2024, the team recorded 74 events in which ground squirrels hunted or ate California voles, or both, with at least 27 different squirrels engaging in the behaviour.
The team noted that adults and juveniles, both male and female, hunted the voles, and typically did so alone. Occasionally, squirrels attempted to steal dead voles from each other."
"Elon Musk: With a net worth of $474 billion, Musk is the world's richest person. His wealth comes from Tesla, SpaceX, and X.
Jeff Bezos: Bezos has a net worth of $251 billion and his wealth comes from Amazon, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, IMDB, and Audible.
Mark Zuckerberg: Zuckerberg's net worth is $221 billion and his wealth comes from Meta Platforms, Inc. (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp).
Larry Ellison: Ellison's net worth is $194 billion and his wealth comes from Oracle Corporation.
Bernard Arnault: Arnault's net worth is $177 billion.
Bill Gates: Gates' net worth is $162 billion.
Larry Page: Page's net worth is $168 billion.
Warren Buffett: Buffett's net worth is $140 billion.
Steve Ballmer: Ballmer's net worth is $152 billion.
The world's wealthiest family is the Walmart Waltons, with a fortune of $432.4 billion. "
Says AI
Tuesday, December 17, 2024
3.3 Trillion more pounds of Death
"The study, which was conducted by the Energy Department’s national laboratories, found that
allowing further U.S. LNG exports would cause
an additional 1.5 gigatons of planet-warming greenhouse gases
to enter the atmosphere by 2050.
That increase is equivalent to about a quarter of the country’s total annual emissions"
(A gigaton is a unit of mass that's equal to:
One billion metric tons,
2.2 trillion pounds,
10,000 fully-loaded U.S. aircraft carriers,
1 trillion kilograms)
"The analysis also found that sending more gas overseas would leave less gas available at home, raising wholesale domestic natural gas prices by roughly 31 percent. "
"Though gas generates fewer carbon dioxide emissions than coal when burned, U.S. gas operations leak enormous amounts of methane"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/12/17/lng-exports-study-biden-trump/
"The city’s bygone “king of cocaine,” as he was dubbed, Edmond exuded a charisma that helped him command an army of dealers and mountain of profits. Convicted of federal drug-trafficking charges in D.C. and sentenced in 1990, he oversaw a sprawling operation that smuggled as much as
1,700 pounds of cocaine into the city each month in the latter part of the 1980s, authorities said.
They estimated that Edmond raked in about $2 million per week in those years"
'I am very remorseful,” Edmond said at a 2019 court hearing on the government’s motion. It was the first time he had apologized to D.C. residents for the wave of addiction and violence he helped bring to their city."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/12/17/rayful-edmond-iii-dies-dc/
"Exposure to air pollution is linked to an increased risk of hospital admission for mental illness, according to the most comprehensive study of its kind.
The research, involving more than 200,000 people in Scotland, found an increase in exposure to nitrogen dioxide in particular was associated with a higher number of people being admitted to hospital for behaviour disorders and mental illnesses."
"Higher cumulative exposure to NO2, PM10, and PM2.5 was associated with a higher incidence of hospital admissions for all causes."
Ho ho ho, Teamsters strike Amazon
"Thousands of Amazon workers are gearing up to strike from Thursday, days before Christmas, over the tech giant’s
refusal to begin negotiations over a contract.
"Our sisters and brothers at Amazon need our help and support – now is the time to show them what being part of the Teamster family is all about "
"A flyer from Teamsters local 206 in Portland, Oregon, also announced a picket at an Amazon warehouse
on Thursday and Friday.
“Amazon has refused to recognize or bargain with the Teamsters at its facilities,” it said."
"Amazon workers in Staten Island; at DBK4 in Queens, New York; four facilities in southern California; and drivers at DIL7 in Skokie, Illinois, voted to authorize strikes over the past week.
Workers at two Amazon facilities outside Atlanta have threatened to strike."
"the Teamsters general president Sean O’Brien said:
“The corporate elitists who run Amazon are leaving workers with no choice.
Greedy executives are pushing thousands of hardworking Americans to the brink.
“Amazon rakes in more money than anybody,
they subject workers to injury and abuse at every turn,
and they illegally claim
not to be the rightful employer
of nearly half their workforce.
“This rigged system cannot continue. Amazon must be held accountable to workers and consumers alike"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/17/amazon-worker-strike
Football vs. Security and Operation of Federal Government
"The stopgap funding bill that will
keep the federal government operational
through mid-March also gives Maryland
full federal funding to rebuild the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge"
____
'DC. poised to control RFK site, step one in luring Commanders to city
A heavily negotiated federal spending bill in Congress
includes language that could ultimately pave the way
for the Commanders to return to its
“spiritual home” in D.C."
___
"the stopgap funding bill that is expected to pass by Friday to avoid a government shutdown"
___
'The state’s other chief priorities in Congress became also layered into negotiations, prompting Bowser to say last week at a closed-door meeting with business and civic leaders,
“We’re being held hostage by Maryland.”
'The state also sought the transfer of D.C.’s Air National Guard 121st Fighter Squadron into the Maryland Air National Guard, a push that predated the RFK negotiations.
The U.S. Air Force announced plans in March to convert the state’s air squadron into one with cyber responsibilities on the ground.
It wasn’t clear Tuesday evening whether the state would win control of the fighter jets.
While the Commanders have tried for years to leave what is regarded as
one of the worst venues in the National Football League"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/12/17/rfk-stadium-bill-washington-commanders/
Pam Bondi, bribery beltway
"Bondi was the lead attorney general in an unsuccessful lawsuit seeking to overturn the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (known as Obamacare)
In 2018, Bondi joined with 19 other Republican-led states in
a lawsuit to overturn the ACA's bans on health insurance companies
charging people with pre-existing conditions higher premiums
or denying them coverage outright."
____
"in 2010, Bondi's association with Scientology
and the multiple fundraisers that wealthy Scientologists have organized
for Bondi's political campaigns have provoked controversy.
Bondi has justified those contacts and her speeches before leading Scientologists
by arguing that the group wishes to help her crack down on human trafficking"
____
"In September 2016,
the IRS determined that the donation to Bondi's PAC violated laws against political contributions from nonprofit organizations, and ordered Trump to pay a fine for the contribution.
Trump also was required to reimburse the foundation for the sum that had been donated to Bondi.
Neither Bondi nor her PAC were fined or criminally charged.
In November 2019, Trump was ordered by a New York state court to close down the foundation
and pay $2 million in damages for misusing it, including the illegal donation to Bondi"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pam_Bondi
'In 2013, Bondi also received criticism following a campaign donation from Donald Trump.
Prior to the donation, Bondi had received at least 22 fraud complaints regarding Trump University.
A spokesperson for Bondi announced that her office was considering joining a lawsuit initiated by Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, regarding tax fraud potential charges against Trump.
Four days later, a political action committee established by Bondi to support her re-election, And Justice for All, received a $25,000 donation from the Donald J. Trump Foundation.
Bondi subsequently declined to join the lawsuit against Trump University."
Monday, December 16, 2024
mindered by moi
'We don’t want to give exact instructions on how to make a nuclear bomb or something like that,
but unless there’s a genuine risk to the country,
all the information in the government should be mine,” he added "and mined, and mindered by moi."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/16/elon-musk-government-security-clearance
___
"Until at least the fall of 2022, it was the Mount Vernon force’s practice to
strip-search every person it arrested,
according to the report.
Officers also strip-searched people
they did not arrest,
detained and interrogated people without formally arresting them,
and arrested people
for verbally criticizing police officers."
"But the illegal strip-search in 2020 of two women, one age 65 and the other 75, were emblematic of the department’s
shortcomings"
"Supervisors there approved a fully nude strip-search by detectives who “told them to bend over and cough”.
After an internal investigation found that the officers had lied about the pair buying drugs, those involved were docked a few vacation days"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/16/mount-vernon-police-report-strip-searches
_____
"In recent weeks, some business leaders, like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, have depicted Mr. Trump as a changed man.
At The New York Times DealBook conference two weeks ago, Mr. Bezos said Mr. Trump was “calmer” and had “grown in the last eight minutes.”
___
"The complaint hones in on a litany of alleged violations committed by Israeli military units with US support, including torture, prolonged detention without charge, forced disappearance, and what the plaintiffs describe as actions amounting to genocide in Gaza."
"The Leahy Law was designed to prohibit foreign governments from providing US assistance to any security forces
that the US identifies as being ineligible
due to a gross violation of human rights. But, as one former state official told the Guardian earlier this year:
“The rules were different for Israel.”
"references findings by international judicial bodies like the International Criminal Court that culminated in
arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu,
and the former Israeli defense minister
Yoav Gallant – "
"Despite a barrage of internal and external pressure, the Biden administration has consistently maintained its
“ironclad” support for Netanyahu.
A state department panel recommended months ago that Blinken block US aid to several Israeli military and police units
accused of serious human rights abuses, but the secretary of state has yet to act on genocide of children for the sake of religious money."
$hush lil Hama, xma$
" The massacre remains the "single deadliest act" of violence
perpetrated by an Arab state upon its own population
in the history of the Modern Middle East.'"
$$$$
$$$$$$$$$$
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
$hush lil Hama
Xma$ for American Defense Companies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Hama_massacre
___
Turkey has denounced Israel’s plan to
double the population living in the occupied Golan Heights at the south-western edge of Syria
as an attempt to “expand its borders”, as
international concern grows over Israel’s actions in Syria since the fall of the Assad regime.
Israel captured!?
about two-thirds
of the Golan Heights
from Syria during the 1967 six-day war.
Last week, it moved troops and armour into a supposedly demilitarised buffer zone beyond the land it already occupies."
Seized
Stole
Claimed by illegal force
What's next, Oklahoma?
"Strengthening the Golan Heights is strengthening the state of Israel,” said Netanyahu
in a statement on Sunday evening, “
"Israel declared in 1981 that it had annexed the territory.
Most countries do not recognise Israel’s sovereignty over the land,.
though the Trump administration recognised the annexation in 2019..
About 50,000 people live in the occupied land, half of them Jews and half Druze, an Arabic-speaking ethno-religious minority."
"Israel’s plan to double the population of the main part of the occupied Golan Heights was also condemned on Monday
by Germany, one of Israel’s closest allies in Europe, which called on Israel to “abandon” the plan.
Christian Wagner, a German foreign ministry spokesperson, said it was
“perfectly clear under international law that
this area controlled by Israel
belongs to Syria and that
Israel is therefore an occupying power”.
"Egypt also expressed its categorical rejection of Israeli government’s decision to expand settlements in the occupied Golan Height,
considering the move a flagrant violation of the sovereignty and integrity of Syria’s territories."
"Democrats eye Harris 2028 presidential run as they devise political comeback "
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/16/kamala-harris-2028-election-president-governor
'Since Donald Trump has rewritten the rules – the norms – I don’t believe Kamala Harris or anyone should try to go with precedent, ever,” said
Donna Brazile,
a Harris ally,
Al Gore 2000 presidential campaign manager
and political commentator.
“There are no rule books.”
Fuck You, Donna.
"one Harris adviser told the outlet. “Her approval is higher.
"People were very happy with the race that she ran.”
Fascists, Happy.
_____
"Russian forces first entered Syria in 2015
when Assad requested their military assistance against opposition forces, which he had been fighting since Syria’s 2011 revolution.
Now their presence in Syria has been called into question as the opposition take the reins of power."
"The EU foreign affairs chief, Kaja Kallas, said on Monday that Russia and Iran
“should not have a place” in Syria,
and said the bloc would raise the issue of Russian military bases with the country’s new leadership."
'Though the HTS official acknowledged
Russia’s role in “bombing innocent civilians” in Syria since 2015,
it seemed the rebel group was taking a pragmatic approach towards its relations with foreign powers."
"HTS has provided security for Russian forces over the last few days as they moved vehicles and personnel from the T4 airbase in Homs, central Syria, to Khmeimim airbase and Tartous port. Columns of Russian armoured personnel carriers, tanks and pickup trucks with the Russian flag waving and
a large “Z” painted on the sides have filled Syria’s highways for the past two days,
escorted by HTS fighters."
"The question of Tartous appeared easier to resolve than the airbase, as the HTS official said
the group was open to allowing the Russians to maintain their control over the port,
citing international law as a complication
for cancelling the 49-year lease of the naval facility –
even if it was signed with the now deposed Assad regime. "
Rifaat al-Assad, known as the “Butcher of Hama” Protection Again
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Hama_massacre
"brother of Hafiz al-Assad, who seized power in Syria in a 1971 coup, Rifaat was the head of the Defence Brigades. His elite forces allegedly
oversaw the massacre
of an estimated 20,000 people
in the town of Hama in 1982."
'Rifaat al-Assad’s crimes, particularly the 1982 Hama massacre, are among the gravest atrocities of our time,” said Philip Grant, the executive director of Trial International, which filed the criminal complaint against him in Switzerland.
_____
10:57 am Oregon time
Story is yanked from front page.
______
_____
'The Assad regime collapsed this month as rebel groups rose up and seized control of the capital, Damascus, after more than a decade of civil war.
Assad family members have been granted asylum in Moscow. It is unclear whether Rifaat, now 86, is among them.
His European wealth remains in limbo, with freezing orders imposed in the UK, Spain and France, meaning properties cannot be sold without permission from the authorities."
"An uncle of the recently ousted Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used an adviser in Guernsey to secretly manage his wealth, which included a
vast European property empire worth
hundreds of millions of euros that prosecutors claim was acquired
with funds looted from the wartorn state.
Rifaat al-Assad, known as the “Butcher of Hama” for overseeing the violent suppression of a rebellion in the 1980s, has been accused of war crimes by Swiss prosecutors.
In 2020, he was convicted by a French court of embezzling Syrian state funds
and pouring the money into luxury properties, with the French state seizing assets worth €90m."
"The most serious insurrection of the Syrian Islamist uprising happened in Hama during February 1982, when Government forces, led by the president's brother, Rifaat al-Assad, quelled the revolt in Hama with very harsh means.
Tanks and artillery shelled the neighbourhoods
held by the insurgents indiscriminately, and government forces are alleged to have
executed thousands of prisoners and civilian residents
after subduing the revolt, which became known as the Hama massacre.
The story is suppressed and regarded as highly sensitive in Syria (and in Europe and Britain and Guernsey)
The Hama massacre led to the military term "Hama Rules" meaning
the complete large-scale destruction of a military objective or target."
____
Oh, the event got its own euphemism.
___
~1,000 killed
300-400 killed
~25,000[4]-40,000 civilians killed
~15,000-17,000 civilians disappeared
~100,000 civilians deported
The Hama massacre
(Arabic: مجزرة Øماة) occurred in February 1982 when the Syrian Arab Army and the Defense Companies paramilitary force, under the orders of President Hafez al-Assad, besieged the town of Hama for 27 days in order to quell an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood against the Ba'athist government.
The campaign that had begun in 1976 by Sunni Muslim groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, was brutally crushed in an anti-Sunni massacre at Hama,
carried out by the Syrian Arab Army and
Alawite militias under the command of
Major General Rifaat al-Assad.
"Prior to the start of operations, Hafez al-Assad issued orders to
seal off Hama from the outside world;
effectively imposing a media blackout,
total shut down of communications,
electricity and food supplies to the city for months.
Initial diplomatic reports from Western countries stated that 1,000 were killed
Subsequent estimates vary, with the lower estimates reporting at least 10,000 deaths, while others put the number at 20,000 (Robert Fisk
or 40,000 (Syrian Human Rights Committee and SNHR).
"The massacre remains the "single deadliest act" of violence
perpetrated by an Arab state upon its own population
in the history of the Modern Middle East.'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Hama_massacre
Nearly two-thirds of the city was destroyed in the Ba'athist military operation.
Robert Fisk, who was present at Hama during the events of the massacre, reported that
indiscriminate bombing had razed much of the city to the ground
and that the vast majority of the victims were civilians.
Patrick Seale, reporting in The Globe and Mail, described the operation as a
"two-week orgy of killing, destruction and looting"
which destroyed the city and killed a minimum of 25,000 inhabitants.
The attack has been described as a "genocidal massacre "which was motivated by sectarian animosities against the Sunni community of Hama."
____
"Israel has been accused of carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people by a number of experts, governments, United Nations agencies, and rights organisations including Amnesty International, during its invasion and bombing of the Gaza Strip in the ongoing Israel–Hamas war
Various observers, including the UN Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices and the United Nations Special Rapporteur, have cited statements by senior Israeli officials that may indicate an
"intent to destroy" (in whole or in part) Gaza's population,
a necessary condition for the legal threshold of genocide to be met.
A recent Middle East Scholar Barometer poll of 758 mostly US-based Middle East scholars[e] found that a majority believe Israel's actions in Gaza were intended to make it uninhabitable for Palestinians,
and 75% of them say Israel's actions in Gaza constitute either genocide or "major war crimes akin to genocide"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
Deaths
At least 44,780 directly killed
More than 10,000 estimated under rubble
Indirect deaths[b][8] likely to be several times higher than those directly killed
Injured
At least 106,100
Victims
20% of population facing "catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity" involving "an extreme lack of food, starvation, and exhaustion"[12]
1,900,000+ internally displaced persons
"According to a 2 October 2024 letter[223] to President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and others by 99 American healthcare workers who had served in Gaza since 7 October 2023, the most conservative estimate based on the available data was that
at least 62,413 people in Gaza had died from starvation
(based on starvation standards by the United States-funded Integrated Food Security Phase Classification),
most of them young children,"
"Applicable law does not require a minimum number of victims.
Neither the Genocide Convention nor ICJ jurisprudence requires a minimum number of victims to establish genocide."
As of 10 December 2024, over 46,000 people –
44,786 Palestinian and 1,706 Israeli
– have been reported killed in the Israel–Hamas war, including 134–146 journalists and media workers, 120 academics, and over 224 humanitarian aid workers, including 179 employees of UNRWA.
"Nearly 70% of Gaza war dead verified by UN are women and children"
Xma$ for American Defense Companies
____
Major General Rifaat al-Assad, the brother of President al-Assad, reportedly boasted of killing 38,000 people.
Reports by Syrian Human Rights Committee claimed "over 25,000"[48] or between 30,000 and 40,000 people were killed.
Twenty years later, Syrian journalist Subhi Hadidi, wrote that forces "under the command of General Ali Haydar, besieged the city for 27 days, bombarding it with heavy artillery and tank [fire], before invading it and
killing 30,000 or 40,000 of the city's citizens
– in addition to the 15,000 missing .
who have not been found to this day, and the 100,000 expelled."
A report published by the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) on the 40th anniversary of the Hama massacre estimates that around
40,000 inhabitants were killed in the massacre; in addition to about 17,000 civilians who were disappeared and have
not been found as of the present day"
Sunday, December 15, 2024
Point a, point b, in-between maybe
"He was educated at Ohio Northern University and the College of Wooster, after which he enlisted in the Marine Corps and was stationed in Santiago.
Afterwards, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he received his master's degree in botany in 1923 and a PhD in botany in 1925.
While there, he and his wife Louisa E. Rhine were impressed by a May 1922 lecture given by Arthur Conan Doyle exulting the scientific proof of communication with the dead.
Rhine later wrote, "This mere possibility was the most exhilarating thought I had had in years." Rhine's interest in this topic was furthered after reading The Survival of Man, Oliver Lodge's book about mediumship and life after death.
Rhine lent an insight into the medium Mina Crandon's performances. He was able to observe some of her trickery in the dark when she used luminous objects. Rhine observed Crandon in fraud in a séance in 1926.
According to Rhine, during the séance she was free from control and kicked a megaphone to give the impression it was levitating.
Rhine’s report that documented the fraud was refused by the American Society for Psychical Research, so he published it in the Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology. In response, defenders of Crandon attacked Rhine.
Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a letter to the Boston Herald attacking Rhine's "colossal impertinence...stupidity and malignancy."
Rhine wondered why J. Malcolm Bird, with three years of experience, did not expose any of her tricks. Rhine suspected that Bird was a confederate of the medium "
____
"In 1934, drawing upon several years of meticulous lab research and statistical analysis, Rhine published the first edition of a book titled Extra-Sensory Perception, which in various editions was widely read over the next decades.
In the later 1930s, Rhine investigated "psychokinesis" – again reducing the subject to simple terms so that it could be tested, with controls, in a laboratory setting.
Rhine relied on testing whether a subject could influence the outcome of tossed dice – initially with
hand-thrown dice,
later with dice thrown from a cup,
and finally with machine-thrown dice."
"In 1940 Rhine co-authored with Joseph Gaither Pratt and other associates at Duke Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years,a review of all experimental studies of clairvoyance and telepathy.
It has been recognized as the first meta-analysis in the history of science "
"Rhine believed that a good groundwork should be laid in the lab, so that the scientific community might take parapsychology seriously.
In the early 1960s, Rhine left Duke and founded the Institute for Parapsychology, which later became the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man.
In the 1970s, several high-scoring subjects – Sean Harribance, M.B. Dykshoorn, and Bill Delmore – were tested in the lab, shortly before Rhine's retirement."
Rhine has been described as credulous as he believed the horse "Lady Wonder" was telepathic but it was discovered the owner was using subtle signals to control the horse's behavior.
Historian Ruth Brandon has written that Rhine's research was not balanced or objective, instead "motivated by the most extreme ideology" of vitalism."
*
(Vitalism is a belief that starts from the premise that
"living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some
non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things."
Where vitalism explicitly invokes a vital principle, that element is often referred to as the "vital spark", "energy", "élan vital"
(coined by vitalist Henri Bergson), "vital force", or "vis vitalis", which some equate with the soul.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, vitalism was discussed among biologists, between those who felt that
the known mechanics of physics would eventually explain the difference between
life and non-life
and vitalists who argued that the processes of life could not be reduced to a mechanistic process. )
___
Zener cards are cards used to conduct experiments for extrasensory perception (ESP).
Perceptual psychologist Karl Zener (1903–1964) designed the cards in the early 1930s for experiments conducted with his colleague, parapsychologist J. B. Rhine (1895–1980).
The Zener cards are a deck of 25 cards, five of each symbol. The five symbols are a
hollow circle,
a plus sign,
three vertical wavy lines,
a hollow square,
and a hollow five-pointed star.
"In a test for ESP, the experimenter picks up a card in a shuffled pack, observes the symbol, and records the answer of the person being tested, who would guess which of the five designs is on the card.
The experimenter continues until all the cards in the pack are used. "
"Once Rhine took precautions in response to criticisms of his methods, he was unable to find any high-scoring subjects."
The chemist Irving Langmuir called Rhine's experiments an example of
pathological science–
the science of things that aren't so–
and criticized its practitioners not as dishonest people but as ones that have sufficiently fooled themselves.
During James Randi's TV special, Exploring Psychic Powers Live!, a psychic was tested on a deck of 250 Zener cards and was only able to predict 50 of them correctly, which is the
expected result of random guessing the cards.
In 2016, Massimo Polidoro tested an Italian mother and daughter who were claiming a 90% and above success rate of psychic transmission using Zener cards. Upon restricting them from seeing each other's faces and the use of a silent writing method, their success rate dropped to no better than chance.
The women were cognizant of the fact that they required visual contact to achieve transmission of the symbols,
saying, "This kind of understanding is so natural to us, all this attention to us is also very surprising.
There are no tricks, but surely we understand each other with looks. It always happens."
_____
"The results of many tests using Zener cards fit with a typical normal distribution.
Probability predicts these test results for a test of 25 questions with five possible answers if chance is operating:
79% of people will get between 3 and 7 correct
(probability is a more precise calculation).
The probability of guessing 8 or more correctly is 10.9% (in a group of 25, you can expect several scores in this range by chance).
Getting 15 out of 25 correct is about 1 in 90,000.
Getting 20 out of 25 correct is about 1 in 5 billion.
Getting all 25 correct has a probability of about 1 in 300 quadrillion. "
___
"Probability is the branch of mathematics and statistics concerning events and numerical descriptions of how likely they are to occur.
The probability of an event is a number between 0 and 1; the larger the probability, the more likely an event is to occur.
A simple example is the tossing of a fair (unbiased) coin. Since the coin is fair, the two outcomes ("heads" and "tails") are both equally probable;
the probability of "heads" equals the probability of "tails";
and since no other outcomes are possible, the probability of either "heads" or "tails" is 1/2 (which could also be written as 0.5 or 50%)."
"These concepts have been given an axiomatic mathematical formalization in probability theory, which is used widely in areas of study such as
statistics, mathematics, science, finance, gambling, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer science, game theory,
and philosophy to, for example, draw inferences about the expected frequency of events.
Probability theory is also used to describe the underlying mechanics and regularities of complex systems. "
____
'U.S. Route 30 or U.S. Highway 30 (US 30) is an east–west main route of the United States Numbered Highway System, with the highway traveling across the Northern U.S.
With a length of 3,112 miles (5,008 km), it is the third-longest U.S. Highway, after US 20 and US 6.
The western end of the highway is at US 101 in Astoria, Oregon;
the eastern end is at Virginia Avenue, Absecon Boulevard, and Adriatic Avenue in
Atlantic City, New Jersey."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_30
'Despite long stretches of parallel and concurrent Interstate Highways, it has not been decommissioned unlike other long-haul routes such as US 66.
It is also the only U.S. Highway that has always been coast-to-coast since the beginning of U.S. Numbered Highway System."
___
"The Pine Barrens territory helps recharge the 17-trillion-US-gallon (64-billion-cubic-metre) Kirkwood–Cohansey aquifer, containing some of the purest water in the United States."
"unique ecology of the Pine Barrens supports a diverse spectrum of plant life, including orchids and carnivorous plants.
The area is also notable for its populations of rare pygmy pitch pines and other plant species that depend on the frequent fires of the Pine Barrens to reproduce "
"As a result of all these factors, in 1978, Congress passed legislation to designate 1.1 million acres (4,500 km2; 1,700 sq mi) of the Pine Barrens as the Pinelands National Reserve (the nation's first National Reserve) to preserve its ecology. A decade later, it was designated by the United Nations as an International Biosphere Reserve."
____
"The most popular version of subjective probability is Bayesian probability, which includes expert knowledge as well as experimental data to produce probabilities.
The expert knowledge is represented by some (subjective) prior probability distribution. These data are incorporated in a likelihood function.
The product of the prior and the likelihood, when normalized, results in a posterior probability distribution that incorporates all the information known to date.
By Aumann's agreement theorem, Bayesian agents whose prior beliefs are similar will end up with similar posterior beliefs.
However, sufficiently different priors can lead to different conclusions, regardless of how much information the agents share"
____
"The word probability derives from the Latin probabilitas, which can also mean "probity", a measure of the authority of a witness in a legal case in Europe, and often correlated with the witness's nobility. "
'An example of the use of probability theory in equity trading is the effect of the perceived probability of any widespread Middle East conflict on oil prices, which have ripple effects in the economy as a whole.
An assessment by a commodity trader that a war is more likely can send that commodity's prices up or down, and signals other traders of that opinion.
Accordingly, the probabilities are neither assessed independently nor necessarily rationally.
The theory of behavioral finance emerged to describe the effect of such groupthink on pricing, on policy, and on peace and conflict."
'In addition to financial assessment, probability can be used to analyze trends in biology (e.g., disease spread) as well as ecology (e.g., biological Punnett squares).
As with finance, risk assessment can be used as a statistical tool to calculate the
likelihood of undesirable events occurring,
and can assist with implementing protocols to avoid encountering such circumstances.
Probability is used to design games of chance so that casinos can make a guaranteed profit, yet provide payouts to players that are frequent enough to encourage continued play"
"Another significant application of probability theory in everyday life is reliability.
Many consumer products, such as automobiles and consumer electronics, use reliability theory in product design to reduce the probability of failure.
Failure probability may influence a manufacturer's decisions on a product's warranty."
'The cache language model and other statistical language models that are used in natural language processing are also examples of applications of probability theory."
"Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence.
It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related to information retrieval, knowledge representation and computational linguistics, a subfield of linguistics.
Typically data is collected in text corpora, using either rule-based, statistical or neural-based approaches in machine learning and deep learning.
Major tasks in natural language processing are
speech recognition, text classification, natural-language understanding, and natural-language generation."
*
"1950s: The Georgetown experiment in 1954 involved fully automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English. "
"1960s: Some notably successful natural language processing systems developed in the 1960s were SHRDLU, a natural language system working in restricted "blocks worlds" with restricted vocabularies, and
ELIZA, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist, written by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 and 1966.
Using almost no information about human thought or emotion, ELIZA sometimes provided a startlingly human-like interaction."
'1970s: During the 1970s, many programmers began to write "conceptual ontologies", which structured real-world information into computer-understandable data. "
"Examples are MARGIE (Schank, 1975), SAM (Cullingford, 1978), PAM (Wilensky, 1978), TaleSpin (Meehan, 1976), QUALM (Lehnert, 1977), Politics (Carbonell, 1979), and Plot Units (Lehnert 1981).
During this time, the first chatterbots were written "
Up until the 1980s, most natural language processing systems were based on complex sets of hand-written rules.
Starting in the late 1980s, however, there was a revolution in natural language processing with the introduction of machine learning algorithms for language processing.
This was due to both the steady increase in computational power (see Moore's law) and the gradual lessening of the dominance of Chomskyan theories of linguistics (e.g. transformational grammar), whose
theoretical underpinnings discouraged the sort of corpus linguistics
that underlies the machine-learning approach to language processing "
*
"Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses."
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes.
Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from both psychology and linguistics.
Especially during the age of symbolic NLP, the area of computational linguistics maintained strong ties with cognitive studies."
Apply the theory of conceptual metaphor,
explained by Lakoff as
"the understanding of one idea, in terms of another"
which provides an idea of the intent of the author
For example, consider the English word big. When used in a comparison ("That is a big tree"),
the author's intent is to imply that the tree is physically large relative to other trees or the authors experience.
When used metaphorically ("Tomorrow is a big day"), the author's intent to imply importance.
The intent behind other usages, like in "She is a big person", will remain somewhat ambiguous to a person and a cognitive NLP algorithm alike without additional information."
"Assign relative measures of meaning to a word, phrase, sentence or piece of text based on the information presented before and after the piece of text being analyzed, e.g., by means of a probabilistic context-free grammar (PCFG).
The mathematical equation for such algorithms is presented in US Patent 9269353"
ideas of cognitive NLP are inherent to neural models multimodal NLP (although rarely made explicit)
and developments in artificial intelligence, specifically tools and technologies using large language model approaches and new directions in artificial general intelligence based on
the free energy principle
by British neuroscientist and theoretician at University College London Karl J. Friston."
*
"The free energy principle is a theoretical framework suggesting that
the brain reduces surprise or uncertainty
by making predictions
based on internal models and updating them using sensory input.
It highlights the brain's objective of
aligning its internal model and the external world
to enhance prediction accuracy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle
"The free energy principle models the behaviour of systems that are distinct from, but coupled to, another system (e.g., an embedding environment), where the degrees of freedom that implement the interface between the two systems is known as a Markov blanket. "
The free energy principle is based on the Bayesian idea of the brain as an “inference engine.”
Under the free energy principle, systems pursue paths of least surprise,
or equivalently, minimize the difference between predictions based on their model of the world and their sense and associated perception.
This difference is quantified by variational free energy and is minimized by continuous correction of the world model of the system, or
by making the world more like the
predictions of the system"
Gold Mettle
NFL Player, Quarterback Contracts Total
Value Avg./Year
______
Dak Prescott $240,000,000 $60,000,000
Joe Burrow $275,000,000 $55,000,000
Jordan Love $220,000,000 $55,000,000
Trevor Lawrence $275,000,000 $55,000,000
Tua Tagovailoa $212,400,000 $53,100,000
Jared Goff $212,000,000 $53,000,000
Justin Herbert $262,500,000 $52,500,000
Lamar Jackson $260,000,000 $52,000,000
Jalen Hurts $255,000,000 $51,000,000
Kyler Murray $230,500,000 $46,100,000
Deshaun Watson $230,000,000 $46,000,000
Kirk Cousins $180,000,000 $45,000,000
Patrick Mahomes $450,000,000 $45,000,000
Josh Allen $258,000,000 $43,000,000
Matt Stafford $160,000,000 $40,000,000
Aaron Rodgers $112,500,000 $37,500,000
Derek Carr $150,000,000 $37,500,000
Baker Mayfield $100,000,000 $33,333,333
Geno Smith $75,000,000 $25,000,000
Gardner Minshew $25,000,000 $12,500,000
Sam Darnold $10,000,000 $10,000,000
Caleb Williams $39,486,058 $9,871,515
Bryce Young $37,955,074 $9,488,769
Jayden Daniels $37,746,650 $9,436,663
Drake Maye $36,639,764 $9,159,941
C.J. Stroud $36,279,246 $9,069,812
Zach Wilson $35,150,680 $8,787,695
Trey Lance $34,105,258 $8,526,315
Anthony Richardson $33,994,030 $8,498,508
Jacoby Brissett $8,000,000 $8,000,000
Tyrod Taylor $12,000,000 $6,000,000
Marcus Mariota $6,000,000 $6,000,000
Michael Penix Jr. $22,882,636 $5,720,659
J.J. McCarthy $21,854,796 $5,463,699
Jarrett Stidham $10,000,000 $5,000,000
Drew Lock $5,000,000 $5,000,000
Andy Dalton $10,000,000 $5,000,000
Justin Fields $18,871,952 $4,717,988
Bo Nix $18,613,166 $4,653,292
Joe Flacco $4,500,000 $4,500,000
Davis Mills $8,116,000 $4,058,000
Jameis Winston $4,000,000 $4,000,000
Mac Jones $15,586,340 $3,896,585
Kenny Pickett $14,067,904 $3,516,976
https://overthecap.com/position
______
Carson Wentz $3,325,000 $3,325,000
Jimmy Garoppolo $3,178,750 $3,178,750
Case Keenum $6,250,000 $3,125,000
Mason Rudolph $2,870,000 $2,870,000
Easton Stick $2,667,500 $2,667,500
_____
"The total payroll for the 2024 NFL season is
$10.54 billion across all 32 teams,
with a salary cap of
$255.4 million per team: "
___
"The National Basketball Association today announced that the Salary Cap has been set at
$140.588 million
for the 2024-25 season
The Tax Level for the 2024‑25 season is
$170.814 million. "
___
"Michael Jordan became the first NBA player to sign a contract worth over $20 million and $30 million in a season (1996–97) and earned $33,140,000 in the 1997–98 season, setting the record for the largest 1-year contract in NBA history, and held the overall record for over 20 years. Kobe Bryant became just the second player to eclipse $30 million when the 2013–14 season began.[1] LeBron James became the third in the 2016–17 season.
Stephen Curry signed a record 5-year contract worth $201 million in 2017 with a starting payout of
$34,682,550 in the 2017–18 season, setting a new single-season record in earnings. He became the first player to eclipse $40 million in the 2019–20 season. After signing a 4-year contract extension worth $215 million in 2021, Curry went on to become the first player to eclipse
$50 million in the 2023–24 season.
Damian Lillard
is expected to be the first NBA player to eclipse
$60 million in the 2026–27 season,
having signed a contract worth $63,228,828."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-paid_NBA_players_by_season
As of 2024, the highest-paid Major League Baseball (MLB) players are:
Shohei Ohtani: Los Angeles Dodgers, $70 million
Max Scherzer: Texas Rangers, $43.33 million
Justin Verlander: Houston Astros, $43.33 million
Aaron Judge: New York Yankees, $40 million
Jacob deGrom: Texas Rangers, $37 million
Gerrit Cole: New York Yankees, $36 million
Mike Trout: Los Angeles Angels, $35.54 million
Stephen Strasburg: Washington Nationals, $35 million
Anthony Rendon: Los Angeles Angels, $38.57 million
Corey Seager: Texas Rangers, $35 million
***
"Jim Thorpe
was a professional athlete who played in Major League Baseball, the NFL, and basketball, and was also
the first president of the American Professional Football Association:
Baseball:
In 1913, Thorpe signed a three-year contract with the New York Giants for
$6,000 per season,
which was the highest salary ever paid to a major league rookie at the time."
James Francis Thorpe
(Meskwaki: Wa-Tho-Huk, translated as "Bright Path"; May 22 or 28, 1887 – March 28, 1953)
was an American athlete and Olympic gold medalist.
A member of the Sac and Fox Nation, Thorpe was the first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States in the Olympics.
Considered one of the most versatile athletes of modern sports,
he won two Olympic gold medals in the 1912 Summer Olympics (one in
classic pentathlon and the other in decathlon).
He also played football (collegiate and professional), professional baseball, and professional basketball."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Thorpe
"He lost his Olympic titles after it was found he had been paid for playing two seasons of semi-professional baseball before competing in the Olympics, thus
violating the contemporary amateurism rules.
In 1983, 30 years after his death, the International Olympic Committee (IOC)
restored his Olympic medals with replicas, after ruling that the decision to strip him of his medals fell
outside of the required 30 days."
"Thorpe has received numerous accolades for his athletic accomplishments.
The Associated Press ranked him as the
"greatest athlete" from the first 50 years of the 20th century"
____
The Sac and Fox Nation
(Meskwaki language: Othâkîwaki / Thakiwaki or Sa ki wa ki) is the largest of three federally recognized tribes of
Sauk and Meskwaki (Fox) Indian peoples.
Originally from the Lake Huron and Lake Michigan area,
they were forcibly relocated
to Oklahoma in the 1870s and are predominantly Sauk.'
"Thorpe's father, Hiram Thorpe, had an Irish father and a Sac and Fox Indian mother"
"Thorpe ran away from school several times. His father sent him to the Haskell Institute, an Indian boarding school in Lawrence, Kansas, so that he would not run away again"
"he was coached by Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner, one of the most influential coaches of early
American football history."
"Thorpe began his athletic career at Carlisle in 1907 when he walked past the track and, still in street clothes, beat all the school's high jumpers with an impromptu 5-ft 9-in jump."
"Carlisle's 1912 record included a 27–6 victory over the West Point Army team.[4] In that game, Thorpe's 92-yard touchdown was nullified by a teammate's penalty, but on the next play Thorpe rushed for a 97-yard touchdown.
Future President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who played against him in that game,
recalled of Thorpe in a 1961 speech:
Here and there, there are some people who are supremely endowed.
My memory goes back to Jim Thorpe.
He never practiced in his life, and he could do anything better than any other football player I ever saw..
***
Thorpe was so versatile that he served as Carlisle's one-man team in several track meets.
According to his obituary in The New York Times, he could run the 100-yard dash in 10 seconds flat; the 220 in 21.8 seconds; the 440 in 51.8 seconds; the 880 in 1:57, the mile in 4:35; the 120-yard high hurdles in 15 seconds; and the 220-yard low hurdles in 24 seconds.
He could long jump 23 ft 6 in and high-jump 6 ft 5 in
He could pole vault 11 feet; put the shot 47 ft 9 in; throw the javelin 163 feet; and throw the discus 136 feet."
***
"He placed in the top four in all ten events, and his Olympic record of 8,413 points stood for nearly two decades.
Even more remarkably, because someone had stolen his shoes just before he was due to compete,
he found a mismatched pair of replacements, including one from a trash can, and won the gold medal wearing them.
Overall, Thorpe won eight of the 15 individual events comprising the pentathlon and decathlon"
"1917, Iva and Thorpe bought a house now known as the
Jim Thorpe House in Yale Oklahoma, and lived there until 1923. "
"At the time Thorpe won his gold medals, not all Native Americans were recognized as U.S. citizens
(the U.S. government had frequently demanded that they make concessions
to adopt European-American ways to receive such recognition).
Citizenship was not granted to all American Indians until 1924."
Corporate Rule, Fossil Fuel Fascism
"peaceful climate activists are facing trumped-up criminal and civil charges
amid mounting evidence of collusion between corporations, lawmakers and state security forces."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/12/down-to-earth-climate-protest-new-york
____
"John Mark Rozendaal, a former music instructor at Princeton University, and Alec Connon, director of the climate nonprofit group Stop the Money Pipeline, were detained for 24 hours and charged with
criminal contempt, which carries up to seven years in prison. Why? Rozendaal was playing a Bach solo on his cello while Connon sheltered him with an umbrella –
which police claimed broke the conditions of a temporary restraining order that related to another bogus charge of assault (that was later dropped)."
"the charges were without foundation, and appeared to be a punishment for participating in peaceful protests on the climate crisis and human rights."
'Rozendaal and Connon pleaded guilty to “disorderly conduct” for playing the cello and holding an umbrella.
They were among thousands of climate activists who over the summer participated in a series of nonviolent protests
calling on Citibank to stop financing the oil and gas industry and increase funding for renewables. "
Earlier this week, 15 student activists in Uganda were granted bail after spending a month in jail. The students were charged with common nuisance
while attempting to deliver a petition to parliament to stop the 900-mile transnational east African crude oil pipeline.
In the UK this June, five supporters of the Just Stop Oil climate campaign received record sentences after being found guilty of conspiracy to cause gridlock on the M25 motorway.
In fact, on Wednesday the Guardian reported Britain has the dubious honour of leading the world in
arrests of environmental protesters, at “nearly three times the global average rate”.
"In the US, Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline, is suing Greenpeace for $300 million related to the 2016-17 Standing Rock protests.
The case is scheduled to go to trial in North Dakota in February and, if the jury sides with the company, it could create a new legal precedent that would have
major ramifications for environmental groups organising against fossil fuels.
In Atlanta, Georgia, 61 social and climate justice activists opposed to the construction of a massive police training facility on an urban forest
have been charged with racketeering – a crime usually used to prosecute those involved in organised crime.
Meanwhile, US president-elect Donald Trump, whose cabinet nominations include several climate deniers, has vowed to quell protests and “drill, baby, drill”.
______
"controversy damaged the Austin festival this year,
when 80 acts pulled out in protest
against the organiser’s partnership with the American military.
This June South by Southwest discontinued its association with the US army and the defence contractor RTX Corporation."
“After careful consideration, we are revising our sponsorship model,” said a statement on the festival’s website.
“As a result,
the US army, and companies who engage in weapons manufacturing,
will not be sponsors of SXSW 2025.”
"The London event is owned by a company called Panarise - a subsidiary of Panarae investment firm."
"The event, styled as a kind of “Olympics of the mind”, with fashion and music thrown into the mix, has come to London rather than elsewhere in Europe “because of its multicultural aspects”, Arnander says."
"the conference that will be at the centre of the week-long festival in June will feature 420 sessions,
while the wider events will spread across 29 venues, including galleries and nightclubs."
California Okie , Commander Cody
Standin' by a cotton field
A little North of Bakersfield
Valley heat and dust looking to choke me
Tryin' hard to thumb a ride
Holdin' up my weary pride
I'm just a homesick California Okie
Well, just to keep from gettin' down
I remember sittin' 'round
That old wood stove in mama's country kitchen
And every car that passes by
I cuss and tell myself that I
Can't get back home nor anywhere's by hitching
And I wish I'd never left old Oklahoma
I never had no money, least I had a wife
She begged me not to leave old Oklahoma
I never had no money there, at least we had a life
When the sun's a goin' down
Needles ain't no kind of town
For a guy like me to be in
Broke and walkin'
'Cause if a cop should happen by
Ten to one he'd stop
And I ain't in no mood to do no fancy talkin'
I reckon I'd be outta stick
But only if I'd caught a friend
Back in Bakersfield, but somethin' wouldn't let me
Well, if you believe in Okie's guy
Give this country boy a night
Or send some kinda angel here to get me
And I wish I'd never left old Oklahoma
I never had no money there, at least I had a wife
She begged me not to leave old Oklahoma
I never had no money there, at least we had a life
Never had no money there
At least I had a wife
Commander Cody
Saturday, December 14, 2024
Fascist Nunes, Fascist Bondi, Fascist Beltway, Cowering Guardian
"As committee chair, Nunes alleged that the FBI had conspired against Trump during its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections in which Trump defeated Democratic nominee Hillary "
"Donald Trump on Saturday named ally Devin Nunes, a former US lawmaker who now
runs Trump’s Truth Social social media platform,
to serve as chair of the president’s intelligence advisory board.
Nunes, a longtime Trump colostomy bag
who led the US House of Representatives intelligence committee during part of Trump’s first White House reign
will remain Truth Social CEO while serving on the advisory panel"
Backstory?
Truth?
Journalism or press release?
Holy Cow
Thursday, December 12, 2024
Poetry 1985
blue harmonica dreams
stream across grey burlap eyes,
soothe with nuance softness
ears pointed toward distant sky
fields of grace aplenty
washed clean, noontime weep
the furrows gush a murky blood
into willing earth tears seep
the day of welcome wanes, dust beckons
the lights dim, sun rises on
another's land melting cloudy
on oklahoma's rim
(age 18, 1985)
____
cautiously crossing the barbed wire fence
their eyes scanned the diamonded landscape,
december first. all trees and berried bushes
twinkled richly under the icy coat of morning rain.
as they walked the crunching meadow
the guns they held hung limply at ease by their sides
casual rambling stride through an ocean
of crackling glass stirred the
grazing doe from midday feast and it bounded
skyward one ,two, three
it was safe as ken squeezed
a trigger on safety
(age 18, 1985)
____
sing a song O bright green days
when light flows pink about the end of the maze
and ground underfoot is moist but firm
the soil feeds richly all needy that yearn
O show us this world
we all know it exists where money means nothing
&justice persists, we read but who writes
of such fabulous tales
in this day of starving children blown lost
by a gale, O where find decency
in a land of heart held fallacy
where rises among rubble the palaces,
look quickly----for night brings out death,
the sunset marks our next last breath
but they'll write and relate all thru our sleep
create nightmares of cliffs & fated leaps
O lucky for those who croak ever young,
bitter lies never eat at their tongues
(age 18, 1985)
_____
the earth is round
but you can't touch the people
and the seas are wet
but you can't know yourself
the sun is warm
but you won't die in your sleep
and the sky is big but yer dreams are bigger
and harder to crush, realize & live with.
(age 18, 1985)
____
i was riding second class youth eurail
amsterdam to geneva, two german
girls or silly women were sitting next to me
speaking to one another
giggling with furtive glances at me.
do you speak english? smile,
laugh, side to side nod no,
just a bit. oh.
i curled up in my space
a fetal position hands cupped to breast
content on my face sleep in my eye
shortly i awoke to hear snort snort stifle
why do you laugh? they reply,
blush of flirtation, you look like a
dreaming baby. slow bumpy
train ride, air so sweet.
(age 18, 1985)
_____
the pull of the tide, moons strength on earth
minute organisms and bonding glue
that dissolves in death
spray of grey ocean
as i wandered sickly into the dark
the ferry ship bridging peoples twixt drought& rain
after train ride from dublin to rosslare
trench coats with collars stiffly angled,
wandering beach driftwood smooth from battering slams
soft thru relentless beating
waters fist
pearly white baby ears, macaroni shells
whatever i wrote in natures chalkboard
&how long did it stand?
was the cauliflower growing
over the gloomy grey swirl merely another ferry
chugging steamy or was it offspring of yet more
driving dismal edge depleting
water pounding loves?
(age 18, 1985)
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