Hell, it’s already January. Damned year is almost over and I’ve got a lot to do. Jeanne had a box here with what’s left of my old hundreds of cassette tapes I converted during the 1980s from vinyl LPs. I’ve tried to get as much as possible from the local library and InterLibrary loan, but some of it just isn’t out there.
I say it isn’t, but probably a lot is on YouTube and available from Amazon if a person pays for it. But I donealready paid for this back in the day when music was music and everyone was glad of it.
Time was I believed my favorite bluegrass album was Jonathan Edwards and Seldom Scene, Blue Ridge.
However, I eventually found this one elsewhere digitized. The library was also helpful finding old Louvin Brothers I didn’t expect to be available anywhere.
On the other hand, I once believed The Red Clay Ramblers were the best bluegrass ever and had a lot on cassette. And today nobody’s ever heard of them for the most part. The Johnson County Library doesn’t have any of their work.
So most of what I have by RCR on tape will be all I ever listen to in the future once I convert it to MP3. Then there’s Ned Sublette’s early years, a guy I used to know named Jerry Sires, along with [not enough] other tapes Jeanne salvaged from my ruins after Y2K.
A new project for 2015 and the damned year’s almost gone already. These things take time.
Back in the 1960s browsing around book stores a person used to find 33 1/3 LP records of poets reading their own poetry. I bought several and always enjoyed listening to Robert Frost, TS Eliot, Archibald MacLeish and several others. Those poor old LPs were awfully scratchy and beat up by the time cassette tapes came along and I converted those I could.
But toward the end of LP-days along came Rod McKuen and I suppose made everyone a bit shy about admitting they listened to poetry. I’m telling you now I listened to part of a Rod McKuen LP once, so shoot me for a dumbass.
Anyway somewhere back there my tapes ran away with a fancy machine designed to play them and it’s been a long time since I’ve heard Frost, MacLeish, Penn Warren, or TS Eliot, among others. Missed it considerable.
But here in my dotage in Olathe, KS, there’s a lady who works at the County Library who was once an English Major. She takes delight in getting me whatever the library has on almost anything. I’ve consumed books on low sodium cooking, for instance, and am currently reading some new Terry Pratchett.
So lately when I got hankering to find some MP3 recordings converted from those mentioned naturally she was my database. The bad news is a lot of it is still in libraries somewhere on vinyl, never converted even to tape. You can find my favorite MacLeish on Amazon on LP for $4.77 used, but nothing even on tape. Or you can get it Interlibrary loan from NY Public Library on LP.
Anyway I got Frost converted from CD to MP3, along with an assortment of other CD anthologies and spang sent them back to the library, ordering more. And today I’ve got another stack she brought home last night. TS Eliot and The Spoken Arts Treasury Volume 1 [6 CD] of a large variety of poets reading their own poetry if they were still alive when recording devices were invented.
I also have a 2 CD set of the Mills Brothers, 1931-1968 I’ll be converting to MP3. Truly looking forward to hearing it.
But the technology is moving so fast by the time I get them on MP3 probably something will come along assuring they’ll be lost to history some other way. Heck, there aren’t enough people interested in Archibald MacLeish, Carl Sandburg, to justify someone commercially to preserve them. Not anyone after cassette tapes came along.
Ezra Pound spent the years of his life after WWII in confined exile because he got so enthusiastic about Italian fascism, entirely because Il Duce supported the arts.
If poor old Ezry had recorded all those endless cantos he penned from 1945 until he died I suppose it would be one hell of a treasury to convert to MP3. I’m probably the only person on the planet who wouldn’t listen to it.
As I’ve made perfectly clear on this blog, I don’t trust this 21st Century US government and I don’t believe there’s a lowest common denominator the folks running it would stoop to. Have probably already stooped to, to manipulate the minds of the citizenry, give themselves more power, and blame it on someone else.
Seems to me there’s enough going on today, and plenty of confusion for a setting, so’s the 9/11/2014 might be the next BIG DAY for them to roll out a new piece of theater. I’m not saying it will happen, but I’m saying if it does, the possibility exists that having the day earmarked and frowning at it as it develops might lead to greater understanding after-the-fact. Might seal off the emotions it’s contrived to create and allow clear thinking while examining it from the front.
Could be something with this silly Ebola thing they’ve been waving the bloody flag about seemingly trying to work up to something, but that doesn’t seem a likely candidate. Too difficult to twist it around and blame it on the Arabs, or the Russians. Or Iran, or North Korea. Those have the best potential as boogiebears, but these folks are sneaky. It could turn out to be something entirely unexpected.
But if someplace gets hit, say Japan, or the Golan Heights, or Paris, Edinwossname, Scotland [because of that Independence vote coming up] with a small thermonuclear device, say, hold in your mind the possibility it’s not as it seems. That the Arabs, or the Russians, or the Persians, or whatever other usual suspect they point the finger at, aren’t the guilty parties.
Assuming this twitching at the back of my neck is correct and someone’s going to take advantage of the day to burn another one in your memories, it mightn’t be a nuke. It might be something else calculated to have everyone running around in increasingly smaller circles giving up any constitutional rights standing in the way of destroying the alleged responsible parties.
And if it does transpire, probably we’ll all be doing precisely as we’re expected to do. Those folks have studied us for a long time. They know where to punch all the right buttons to make us salivate.
But they are doling out a few hints. The Russian thing lately seems a good possibility, something about ISIS, North Korea is always good, maybe nuking Seoul or Tokyo. And Israel’s been hoping for some really compelling means of getting us into a war with Iran for the LONGEST time. And there’s ISIS.
Anyway, maybe keeping some distance, retaining some skepticism and analytical ability is the best any of us can hope for.
Hi readers. If you’re like me you’ve been admiring Rokon motorcycles from the 1970s onward, but never got around to purchasing one. Damn it all. Made more sense than any trail bike ever manufactured. Good old American ingenuity.
So what happened? The Rooskies did Rokon one better. Built it out of ceramic frame members instead of steel, made it so light Barbie can lift it over her head and trek up a mountain with it.
Tarus 2M (Military Russian Motorcycle)-floats, packs, portable and gets you wherever you need to go
Meanwhile Rokon’s just kept glitzing it up, driving the cost up and not really adding anything essential. $795 would buy the first Rokon I ever saw for sale. Today they probably might as well only be sold to the defense industry and celebrities.
Thanks to the orbital eccentricities of Saturn and its moon Titan, the equatorial dunes – made of sandlike plastic – appear to be going the wrong way. NASA Cassini radar
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
Most of you have probably spent a lot of time pondering those drifting dunes of plastic the NASA Cassini craft discovered on Saturn’s moon, Titan. http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/05/plastic-wrong-way-dunes-arise-saturn-moon-titan. And most of you have probably concluded, rightly, that it’s spillover from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch finally having reached Saturn.
It’s obvious that all those plastics partially digested by Mother Earth in the stomach of her ocean have been belched into outer space moving hastily enough to reach Titan and create drifting dunes. Before Cassini arrived.
Which means NASA will be spending a lot of time in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch placing hopeful spacecraft in the way of earth belches. The NASA budget cuts and ending most government funded space ventures makes earth belches the only practical means of sending anything of US origins into outer space.
But of course there’s another alternative explanation for those dunes of drifting plastic on Titan. It’s the one the government doesn’t want you to know about because it confirms the existence of the Dreaded Green Men. A whole civilization of them beginning, climbing to the top of their food chain, inventing plastics, and creating ocean garbage patches of their own.
Yeah, you read that right. The reason those damned Titanians came to earth and crashed at Corona, New Mexico in 1947 was that they were looking for some empty space in the solar system where they could dump their damned plastics.
Hell, who do you think came up with the idea of selling water in bottles for a dollar each? That idea didn’t originate on a planet 2/3 covered with water. The entrepreneurs and engineers on earth reverse-engineered the whole concept from the Roswell UFO crash. Along with memory metal frames for eyeglasses.
I finally just said, “To hell with it.” Ordered something called Oxygen Boost in a can. 60 deep breaths per can. Even though it doesn’t make a lot of sense, the oxygen-concentrating machine I used when I stayed at Eddie Brewer’s place last year seemed to help a lot. Several times when I was in the midst of seemingly major events it brought them to an immediate halt.
The past few days around here, maybe because of the Orange Ozone Alert, have me thinking it’s time to give O2 another try, despite the fact the various sawbones haven’t seen fit to prescribe it. I haven’t been able to exercise for several days, which they did prescribe.
Anyway, if these 60 breath cans of 02 get the job done I’ll be back banging on the door of the VA over in KC Missouri threatening to scream and hold my breath if they can’t bring themselves to prescribe something to fill in during those moments when Mother Earth just isn’t enough.
After all, is it not written, “You veterans are responsible for keeping us free! You brave guys deserve the absolute best for killing all those brown people who wanted to take away our freedoms! And while a lot of people can breathe easier because of all the freedoms you protected, if you breathe hard we can afford a bit of oxygen to help you along?” Ahem. You believe the bullshit comes out of the mouths of patriots?
Well, I’m truly moved, though I din’t kill any brown people who were trying to take away our freedom. Got into a few fights with some in bars but nobody got hurt too badly. Bastards trying to steal our freedoms.
And I’d breathe more easily if someone over at the VA fixed me up with the freedom to breath when the going gets tough.
Is it not written, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going?”
I ain’t going anywhere without being able to, including all the usual mobility abilities.
Meanwhile there’s canned air at a price that’s probably a bargain considering I don’t drink bottled water.
Besides, the something for nothing I’m going after is AIR! What the hell can air cost when you buy it in volume? Economy of scale. That sort of thing.
I’d been putting off giving Drones, the movie a try on Netflix because of the cover art. Gave the appearance of one of those animated space war games I’ve found I don’t want to devote any minutes of my remaining life to see. But it was on my ‘list’ anyway. I kept scrolling past it and eventually decided to bring it up long enough to apply the ruthless scourge treatment.
Frankly, it wasn’t a good movie in most of the ways I’d normally measure movies. But it did show that somewhere some other human beings are wondering about the moral and ethical issues related to killing off targets thousands of miles away using drones and drone technology. I’d wondered a lot about the minds of the people making the decision to kill a host of obviously innocent bystanders and whether they were experiencing any karmic loading afterward.
Drones does explore the matter and a viewer is left with the impression someone among the directors, screenplay writers, producers, had personal experience with drone piloting and all it implies. I find it encouraging that someone, though maybe not any of the parties actually involved in making choices to blow away babies, children, mothers, and people such as myself who happen to be in the wrong place at the right time, someone is thinking about what it means.
All the usual suspects have opinions about the flick and have said so on Netflix:
Once again the poster and disc art has nothing to do with the actual movie. The entire production is shot inside a “trailer” with a few external shots to show it was in the Nevada desert. This mess concerns the elimination of a suspected terrorist and a shave tail lieutenant that doesn’t want to fire a Hellfire missile from the drone she and her pilot are operating. It is left wing mush focusing on collateral damage with a side trip to how EVIL the military command is. Save yourself the loss of 82 minutes and avoid this male bovine excrement.
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Wow. 1st, yes the audio sucks in parts, but there’s subtitles. 2nd, surely any high ranking officer would not disregard such flagrant refusal of orders. Oh, & then we have both military people (girl & guy—YES, women can be violent!) committing assault; One could argue this is an example of why women should not be in combat (drone pilots are more like ground soldiers than regular pilots).At least 1 other review was wrong, this is somewhat realistic, nothing corporate, all 100% military. I’m not in the military, but as I understand it, deliberate refusal of orders, (esp in a combat situation!) would result in being relieved of duty, & disciplinary action.As another says, Poster is BS, nothing to do with movie. Does bring up many moral questions, but so does war & killing in general; If they’re part of your own nation, killing even 1 civilian can make someone a terrorist, & a murderer. (and US military—-yes, I’m in US—has killed *THOUSANDS* of Iraqis, who were unarmed; How does that make Us (ie, USA) any better than them?3.5 stars for moral issues; 1 for technical; Much more realistic than most military movies, but if this is 100% realistic, it’s a sad commentary on our (US) military.I agree, needs better research.
Just following orders is an excuse that ceased to carry water on the losing side back shortly after WWII. Evidently the makers of this movie believe, probably correctly, that military careersmen in an all-volunteer military damned well better just follow orders. And, of course, the orders are coming from people who’ve weighed all the ethical and moral issues, made sound value judgements without regard to anything in their personal lives. All the way up the ladder to the guy in the White House.
Reminded me that I saw on Yahoo News the other day a story about Bill Clinton remarking somewhere that, “I could have killed Osama Bin Laden.” Seemed strange to me, brought up visions of him and some Arab duking it out with swords or dueling pistols.
I’m more inclined, however, to think he meant he could have killed him the way he murdered the Mount Pleasant men, women and children outside Waco, Texas, using puppets who were just following orders. Heroes who were, at least, close enough to smell them burning and hear their screams. Different sort of hero from the drone pilots.
Hi readers. Everywhere people gather with no television playing and no cell phone calls to attend to the US citizenry conversations eventually get around to fracking. Drilling oil and gas wells horizontally into shale and fracturing the deposition to release energy producing minerals.
Heck, I’d never heard of it until a couple of years ago, when my neighbor began telling me about the amazing oil discoveries in Texas now reaching production. Oil reserves larger than the combined deposits everywhere else on the planet.
At first I was skeptical, and I couldn’t imagine what fracking was. But one thing I discovered immediately was the fact everyone who knew the word was possessed of a certainty about whether it was a dangerous risk to one or another environmental facet.
When I visited Eddie Brewer in Andrews, Texas while waiting for the VA to try figuring out what manner of health problems I’d given myself I found he’d educated himself about it. A neighbor was drilling a number of wells so’s to sell water to drilling companies for use in fracking. And Eddie was concerned about depletion of his household water well.
It was through Eddie I first became fundamentally acquainted with what’s involved. And with him I watched a number of television documentaries on the subject of fracking and groundwater contamination. I didn’t come away with a deep understanding of the risks, and I doubt anyone actually can lay claim to a thorough understanding of those. But at least I was able to comprehend the basics.
And gradually became cognizant of how much BS was coming from the mouths of people who didn’t understand those basics in the form of almost religious opinion, either for, or against fracking.
So, even though I don’t have a good reason for doing so beyond curiosity, I recently decided to devote some time to learning about it. Just enough to decide whether I’d have an opinion if I were smarter and better informed than I am. I started by watching two movies currently streaming on Netflix: Gasland, and FrackNation. What would appear at first glance to be a way of getting both sides of the viewpoints.
Unfortunately, Gasland turns out to be a fraud. Which doesn’t mean a strong stand opposing fracking mightn’t be valid. All it means is that Gasland was a deliberate nest of lies and misrepresentations intended to propagandize unfavorably about fracking.
However, here are some other videos giving both sides of the subject. I’ve watched them carefully and learned a lot. But I still can’t figure out whether I have an opinion. Or, if I have an opinion, what it might be. I’ve graduated from not having an opinion out of total ignorance, to not having an opinion knowing a good bit more, and being more acutely aware of how much a person with an opinion ought to know. Which most of us don’t.
FrackNation vs Gasland
The Director of ‘FrackNation’ Fights Back!
Dr. Ingraffea Facts on Fracking
FrackNation the documentary that exposes Joshua Fox as a liar?
WARNING Fracking An Inconvenient Truth Watch Learn about Fracking Shale Gas what they dont say
If you watch it all and discover yourself to be without an opinion, I’d guess you’ve learned a great deal more than you knew beforehand.
That search engine technique is full of surprises. I’d searched ‘Mossad admits’ before the last post, but hadn’t searched ‘Israel admits’. But as an afterthought, I searched it. Turned up a lot, including an international Jewish news site:
Israel stripped more than 100,000 residents of Gaza and some 140,000 residents of the West Bank of their residency rights during the 27 years between its conquest of the territories in 1967 and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994.
As a result, close to 250,000 Palestinians who left the territories were barred from ever returning.
Given that Gaza’s population has a natural growth rate of 3.3 percent a year, its population today would be more than 10 percent higher, had Israel not followed a policy of revoking residency rights from anyone who left the area for an extended period of time. The West Bank’s population growth rate is 3 percent. Many of those prevented from returning were students or young professionals, working aboard to support their families.
The data on Gaza residency rights was released by the Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories this week, in response to a freedom-of-information request filed by Hamoked – The Center for the Defense of the Individual. In its letter, COGAT said that 44,730 Gazans lost their residency rights because they were absent from the territory for seven years or more; 54,730 because they did not respond to the 1981 census; and 7,249 because they didn’t respond to the 1988 census.
It added that 15,000 of those deprived of residency are now aged 90 or older.
In May 2011, Haaretz obtained the figures on West Bank residents who were stripped of their residency rights. The report noted that Israel had, for years, employed a secret procedure to do so. Palestinians who went abroad were required to leave their identity card at the border crossing. Unlike those from Gaza, who were allowed to leave for seven years, these Palestinians received a special permit valid for three years. The permit could be renewed three times, each time for one year. But any Palestinian who failed to return within six months after his permit expired would be stripped of his residency with no prior notice.
Former senior defense officials told Haaretz at the time of that report’s publication that they were unaware of any such procedure.
Today, a similar procedure is applied to East Jerusalem residents: A Palestinian who lives abroad for seven years or more loses his right to return to the city.
GOGAT’s letter to Hamoked regarding the Gaza natives said that there are various ways for Palestinians to get their residency restored, and in fact, some of those Gazans who lost their residency rights later regained them. However, it added, it lacks the resources to comply with Hamoked’s request to be told the specific reason behind each such restoration.
Since many of those who lost their residency rights from 1967 to 1994 in both Gaza and the West Bank were students or young professionals, their descendants today presumably number in the hundreds of thousands. Of the original people affected by the policy – nearly 250,000 – many have since died. But several thousands who were affiliated with the PA were granted the right to return in 1994; still other Palestinians have since been allowed to return for a variety of reasons.
Among the more prominent West Bank residents who have been barred from returning are the brothers of the PA’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, who went abroad to study and subsequently lost their residency. They now live in California. Erekat said that having learned from their experience, he was careful to return to the West Bank periodically while he was studying abroad, so as to keep his residency permit valid.
Hamoked, which learned of the existence of this policy by chance while investigating the case of a West Bank resident jailed in Israel, charges that stripping tens of thousands of Palestinians of their residency – and thus effectively exiling them permanently from their homeland – is a grave violation of international law.
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Hi readers. I was messing around trying to find out what’s the current claim of choice regarding that airliner in the Ukraine and made a surprising discovery. Turns out if you want to find intriguing news and information and type, [name something admits]. You’ll enter a new world.
Russia admits will give you pages and pages of things you never dreamed needed admitting to.
Argentina admits turns up stories of how Argentina would like and plans to get the Falkland Islands back.
Britian admits, among other surprises, to selling several billion dollars in weapons to Israel.
Mossad admits will have you wondering more than ever what they’re likely to admit sometime in the future.
Honduras admits brings up all manner of issues about how International banks are putting the squeeze on them. And how they, and Mexico are trying to clamp down on people trying to get to the US illegally.
Mexico admits brings up, among other things, a story about a train refugees from Latin America hitch rides on to get to the US International Border.
I’m wondering now whether this might open a door to other phrases destined to drag unnoticed and unwanted weeds out of the web-garden.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 