A tree must go numb with starlings
when they crowd its tranquil limbs,
their creaking demi-syllables
beetled with the same squeaking green
that oils their radar bodies.

A tree must only just endure starlings,
almost waking from bark lethargy
to crush them in a fast clap of boughs
and punch them into the earth
between the tentacle toes.

A tree's patience is proved by starlings
existing in its magnanimous crown,
their shrilling beaks like maggots,
racking worse than black crow racket,
morning violence of raze-brain sound.

Asperges Me

I was plucking slugs and snails from the hyssop (to kill, not to eat) and a branch broke off. A good supply of before-supper tea right there. Among other things, hyssop is what they call an "appetite stimulant", which makes it sound like you should take it if you have a bad appetite. But that's bunk thinking. Truth is that even if your appetite is good (as mine is) it makes eating better. I call it a supper enlivener: it makes eating more enjoyable - spirited, if you will. I do not mean that in a gluttonous sense, rather in a wholesome sense.

Also, when I water the garden the hyssop releases fragrance upon being wetted.

Radiant Things

"Now, how many of you people are not certain that you could live without government or authority? … All of you know that in your own minds you are certain that you could live without carrying these governments, but you say, ‘I can, but the other fellow cannot. I don’t need law, but he does.’ You keep on thinking you are your brother’s keeper and the trouble is you have kept him so long he has forgotten to keep himself. How do you otherwise account for that vast horde of lazy people the workingmen have always carried, the judiciary, the police, the soldiers and all those others who won’t work? Anarchism opposes government in every form because it believes in the power of the individual to take care of himself."


“‎Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against "society," that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship.”


 "I shall begin with a definition.... Anarchism: The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary."


"Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property: liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations."

"Anarchism... is the great, surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world, and that will usher in the Dawn."

--Emma Goldman

"You know, I had an abortion. The doctor was fat, dirty and furtive. He left hastily after it was accomplished, leaving me bleeding. The daughter of the landlords assisted me and never said a word of it. He was Emma Goldman's lover; that's why I have never had any use for Emma." --Dorothy Day

"My visitor was a tall man with a finely shaped head, covered with a mass of black curly hair, which evidently had not been washed for some time. His eyes were brown, large, and dreamy. His lips, disclosing beautiful teeth when he smiled, were full and passionate. He looked a handsome brute. His hands, narrow and white, exerted a peculiar fascination. His finger-nails, like his hair, seemed to be on strike against soap and brush. I could not take my eyes off his hands. A strange charm seemed to emanate from them, caressing and stirring..." --Emma Goldman describing first meeting Ben Reitman

"Dr. Reitman was a large man of imposing presence, with untidy black hair, and a full beard in later years. He usually wore a black foulard tie and carried a cane and a black slouch hat when he went out. Niver often went to lunch with Reitman at Berghoff's on Adams Street in the basement. Reitman's favorite meal there was pig's knuckles and sauerkraut. He would noisily suck out the marrow and smack his lips in enjoyment. His political and social philosophy is not so easily described...Reitman wrote to Niver, 'I'm an Anarchist and think all governments wrong and harmful and built upon violence. Only freedom in all of its loveliness, cooperation to share and share alike will bring peace on earth. Let me repeat again with Walt Whitman, "I swear I ask for nothing for myself that I do not want for all man.'" --The Rise and Fall of the Dill Pickle, quoted from, Homelessness: A Documentary and Reference Guide

"On August 2, 1931, the Dill Pickle reached perhaps the lowest point in its descent to sideshow. The focus of that night's activities was expected to be "Billie", female hobo, prostitute, friend of Dr. Ben Reitman, and pregnant. Jack Jones and Ben had persuaded Billie to discuss the subject, "What Shall an Unmarried Mother Do? Have a Child, an Abortion, or Commit Suicide?" As the crowd of 300 wedged into the lecture hall, the chairwoman for the evening, Roxy Hinkley, opened with a reading from Voltairine de Cleyre's poem "Bastard Born." After only four lines the place erupted. A shower of eggs whizzed to the front, along with vegetables in doubtful stages of maturity. Reitman was a favourite target, his black suit soon dribbling with a mucky egg salad. John Burnes, a Dill Pickle regular, shouted above the din, "We've discussed queers and crooks, but this is too much, even for me, to take a woman about to become a mother and drag her through a lot of talk about it." Billie never gave the address. The Dill Pickle had become too tasteless even for its own insatiable audience." --The Damndest Radical: The Life and World of Ben Reitman, Chicago's Celebrated Social Reformer, Hobo King, and Whorehouse Physician

"I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." --Emma Goldman

"Hi there. Name is Ben Reitman - before I became fat. I practiced 'free love' to the hilt. And I performed abortions. Lots of abortions. After carrying out an abortion and leaving the woman to bleed away in the gurney, I would enjoy sucking the marrow out of pig's knuckles for lunch. Mmmmm. Wikipedia describes me as 'colorful'."

"Why, hello! My name is Emma Goldman. My claim to history is birth control-anarchism disseminator, criminal and all-round cobbler of unreadable prose. Well, unreadable, unless you were Benny reading my randy love letters to him. Oh, his hands, those baby-killing hands - so mesmerizing. They made me go all chubby!"

Good grief, these early twentieth century anarchists on the lecture circuit, self-described radicals and social reformers; these we-don't-need-no-gubmint proto-libertarians (basically the plain-meat version of today's abstract libertarianism?) - oh man! Who can possibly be exhausted in describing the obnoxious overflowing stream of banality these people produced? (And no, I am not including Dorothy Day in this set at all, of course, so don't have an apoplectic seizure.)

Under a thin crest of intellectual foam the century was inundated by a tsunami of pure, unrendered human fat - blindsiding, clobbering. A bizarre combination, or rather crashing together, of suffrage power, demonic scapegoating of children born and unborn, racial cleansing, glowing spiritism, guttersnipe eugenics, stump speeching and on and on, all reacting together like a suffocating family reunion. The purpose, it seems, was ideally anarchic: not one content per se mattered all that much, so much as to drown the successive generations with their intellectual filth, their own stench-filled baggage. These very people claiming to have shed the shackles of their ancestors, of the oppressive church, of the government - they were doing nothing, absolutely nothing else, but shackling the new generations beyond anything their ancestors could have done. They released a torrent of flabby, buttock cheek fat-quivering evil stupidity, fronted by a nauseating hypocrisy of sunny adjectives and vapid sagacity - "to share and share alike" and "everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things" and "freedom in all of its loveliness" etc. - with their asinine quoting of Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau. Oh Lord - what dreadful people! In their dead earnest intellectual seriousness: what superficial, ghastly ignoramuses! In their self-assured intent of bestowing warmth and goodness towards all: what wastrel thin child orphans haunting the bodies of adults!

But what is really interesting is this: the wave of birth control and abortion was not pioneered by a government, but by anarchists, by those who constantly railed against the (supposedly inevitable) violence and evils of government "in all its forms". The fact is that back in earlier days the governments were actually seeking to arrest and prosecute the people who were disseminating birth control/abortion practice and indoctrination.

Funny too, how if you phone up any of your government officials in office, whether your local guy or the one in parliament or wherever, and ask them why, instead of having to service a national debt by borrowing the country's money into existence at interest, they don't just issue it themselves without interest-bearing debt, the politician will tell you - I guarantee you, nine times out of ten - some variation of, "The government cannot be trusted with that; for they will cause inflation."

We have government, in other words, that tells us exactly what the libertarians tell us.

I find that immensely interesting.

Doorways light because the trees are like lambs
in the blue sky morning, wearing May green.
The wind is pacific and brings a band
of wool white clouds in boundless skein.

Doorways ope because the morning is true
as it plays the cymbals of the poplar rows:
gladness of leaves, like Easter drops strewn,
brandishing light out of teeth-skin winnows.

Doorways weep because a fragrant departure
has left a door wide on easy hinges,
feather-fingering the taut strings of heart,
a glory disheveling at the rush-like fringes.

Title: Swallows over Field

Medium: Oil on board

Size: 15.5 in x 11.5 in.

Walkabout

Just look at all the lush skunk cabbages swamp lanterns and bracken fern!

Oregon grape. The low growing variety.

You can see the contrast between the new leaves I'm holding and the old leaves (darker). The old leaves are tough. The new leaves are very tender. Very good eating. Lemony-sour-tart-twang. And very good for you.

Good old vanilla leaf. The sight of them always sings to me of the PNW. You dry these leaves and the smell is glorious (hence its alternative name: sweet-after-death). Their white stamens also smell wonderful.

A long while since I laid down in the deep grass. That's an old apple tree. Its branches reach over the spot where I took the pic.

Everything I know about the desert
was taught by Gary Larson: two men
crawling on their fours with thirst
over a vacant tract, collide head first,
with all the white page space about them.

Four square absurdity, instant as ink
the comfort of scenario's remove,
cacti and cow skull: that what else occurs
in a desert? Impossible things on cue,
beaten adrift like the dance of side-winders

shaped to the endless, beveling dune
and vapours that writhe from the changing brink,
take place at the place of the far, far side,
where heads that bump and how do you do's
are anciently surfeit as kitchen sinks.

Monday Links

Catholic in Brooklyn writes very well about the truth that Christianity is about dying. Mark Mallett has a very helpful post about the simple threefold foundation to building the house of peace. Heather King writes in honour of the feast day of St. Damien of Molokai. Bill Still covers a great speech made by Senator Elizabeth Warren. Paul Stilwell reveals an astonishing bread hack that you just have to see to believe. John O'Brien has an excellent review of the Russian film The Island. Actually, all his film reviews are great.

Try this amazing bread hack!

 So you have a loaf of bread and it's not been sliced!

 So you take a knife. This is key. It should be a serrated knife. It works like a saw. Awesome!

And you draw the blade over the loaf of bread, back and forth, back and forth.

Eventually it makes a slice of bread.

So amazing.

Just wait until you see my amazing selfie stick hack. It's awesome!

The new Roswell photos

Face it people - all you UFO hopefuls. Learn to see something that is staring you in the face. The so-called alien bodies from the Roswell crash site were the bodies of human beings. They were not extra-terrestrials. They were human beings subjected to experimentation.

People want to reject this immediately as too far-fetched. For many, it is more far-fetched than saying they were aliens. Yet something as destructive and demonic as the atom bomb was made, and dropped - twice - in 1945. Why is it so hard to believe that extensive, dark, cruel human/genetic experimentations were being carried out, with horrific accomplishment, in those years and earlier?

A great thwack of Catholics online give their wholesale trust over to the voices of bloggers, columnists and internet personages claiming to see the truth of our times, rather than trusting in the voice of the shepherd who has been given to us for these times, Pope Francis.

Contrarily, as we have seen, these dupes actually posit the pope as either the source, cause, conspirator, enabler - what have you - of all that makes them "duty-bound" to speak out. In fact, they are rejecting the shepherd that has been given to them. For them, the reality of the Catholic faith is just as much "only when convenient" as the polyester pant suit bongo player.

This truth is simply astonishing when you think about it.

Anyhow, I thought this post by Steve Kellmeyer from a few weeks back was excellent on what exactly is the purport and purpose of certain online petitions: Shilling for Donors.

Medjugorje Message - May 2

"Dear children. Open your hearts and try to feel how much I love you and how much I desire for you to love my Son. I desire for you to come to know Him all the better, because it is impossible to know Him and not to love Him - because He is love. I, my children, know you. I know your pain and suffering because I lived through them. I laugh with you in your joy and I cry with you in your pain. I will never leave you. I will always speak to you with motherly tenderness. And I, as a mother, need your open hearts to spread the love of my Son with wisdom and simplicity. I need you to be open and sensitive to the good and mercy. I need you to be united with my Son, because I desire for you to be happy and to help me to bring happiness to all of my children. My apostles, I need you to show everyone the truth of God, so that my heart, which suffered and today suffers so much pain, can win in love. Pray for the holiness of your shepherds, so that in the name of my Son they could work miracles, because holiness works miracles. Thank you."

End the damn debt!

A must-watch:

"Look what we did as a nation between 1938 and 1974 - less than forty years. We became one of the leading nations; one of the healthiest nations in terms of education and infrastructure because of the Bank of Canada mechanism. No two ways about it."

That's not taught in official history today, or official economics.






It's obscene.

It's beyond obscene.

"Will you tell me why a government with power to create money, should give that power away to a private monopoly, and then borrow that which parliament can create itself, back at interest, to the point of national bankruptcy?" --Gerry McGeer

LOLOLOLOLOL!!!

That is golden.

End the debt!

107 years ------- 18 billion dollars in debt.

3 years ------- 588 billion dollars in debt.

But you see, we can't have the government issue money debt free because that will cause inflation.

LOL!!!

Uncle Corky!

Misc.

One way of knowing you made a good cup of coffee: it is as drinkable and enjoyable after it has gone cold as when it was hot.

*

I now understand why the ancients tended not to write formulaic recipes as we understand them today with delineated amounts, temperatures and cooking times etc. If you read any modern recipe, even baking recipes, there is typically only one or two components in the process that make that particular dish what it is. More often than a particular ingredient, it is a particular combination at a particular time - and not so much even a particular combination of ingredients, as a combination of two different cookings, like, for instance, de-glazing, which is basically dry fry meeting wet simmer.

In relation to what is being cooked and for what result and for how long, there is only low temperature, medium temperature and high temperature. All this business about 350 and 475 and 235 and what have you is really a bunch of nonsense. Same goes for cooking times. Higher temperatures generally mean shorter cooking time; lower temperatures mean longer.

When you understand what the acid of vinegar does, or the saltiness of salt and the sweetness of sugar, and how far each goes in relation to any other amount of other ingredients, it is not so much that you don't need to know what amounts are required anymore, but that you have enough understanding to proceed were you not given the amounts. What you do need to know is that this is a "fat and acid" or a "sweet and sour" or a more complex combination and so forth.

Dry ingredients tend towards concentrated flavour; wet ingredients towards their dispersal, and thus towards dissipation and quick alteration. Bringing the two together is very often a key thing, an essential part of a recipe. That is one example.

Go ahead and look at any recipe. Look for that one essential thing or two that makes that recipe what it is. For that is the recipe. Learn how to rip that out and integrate it into your own arsenal. When you read a recipe that you really want to try but it lists faraway gourmet ingredients, do not say, "Oh, I can't make that!" Strip recipes down mercilessly. Be like the ancients. Be traditional. Don't be a slave.

*

When you have to forcefully tell the credit card pushers, "No, I don't want that credit card" three times before they relent; when the credit card pushers send you credit cards without you asking for one; when credit card pushers tell you you are "pre-approved"; when credit card pushers are lying in wait for you at the entrance of the bank, then you know that "credit ratings" mean precisely nothing.

Your so-called "good credit rating" is like the government announcing they balanced the budget. It is utterly meaningless.

*

I wonder why the legalization of marijuana issue is always framed as "people being allowed to smoke pot." In my view that is a tiny fraction of the large picture, which is basically people having the right to grow marijuana for fresh consumption, for fibre and all its many other uses, with an emphasis on the right to grow it. Even official organs of the government recognize the powerful medicinal properties of this plant. The stories of people being healed of this and that by consuming fresh marijuana (one can consume as much as one wants in its fresh state; but when it is heated by burning or drying, that is when it becomes psychoactive) are many.

One cannot argue that it would take too much to monitor farmers to make sure they aren't growing it for the drug trade. The dairy industry is monitored - or inspected, whatever term you want to use. And anyways, the stuff that's grown for the drug trade is a special hybrid, if I understand correctly, and it's only really worthwhile grown inside, hydroponically; for outside here in northern North America you could get a harvest of good bud, but not nearly as much as you can continually get growing it inside. Thus farmers growing it in their fields wouldn't even want to be bothered with that when it would be far more profitable for them to grow it for all the many other uses that people are very, very willing to pay for.

If marijuana can heal a person of his or her cancer and there are farmers wanting to grow the stuff for those people, then what the hell business is it of the government to say no? They don't own marijuana. They don't have a patent on it. It is not evil. It is God's creation. It is not a contradiction at all for the government to allow people to grow it while still fighting the drug trade.

What potential there is in growing marijuana! It was grown commercially not too long ago, only it was called hemp. Stop it with this stupid prohibitionist holdover from the very recent past. And stop framing the issue in a stupid way, you idiotic pot heads and prohibitionists.