May 2010 archive

VARIATIONS ON THE MYTH OF ZEUS AND SEMELE: POETRY FOR THE ATOMIC AGE END OF TIME

                             Part One

                            EMERALD SEA

Once, as in a dream, Zeus came to her

Quietly slumbering on her emerald isle

Thought form wholly

Holy without form

Asleep upon her emerald isle she played in dream

Invoking out of emptiness

Some image, sub-atomic, non-particulate

Evoking echo without sound

     …and to her watery bed she took

        mankind as her groom…

Just as in a dream, Zeus came to her

He too a shadow of his glimpse of her

Appearing conscious

Yet not wholly formed

Echoing the formlessness of his perfection

Awake above the teal blue sea

He sought the body for his litany

Shakti dreaming by the emerald sea

The dream in his emerald eye

     …and to his sky bound heart he took

        the maiden as his bride…

He, taking her hand in hand

Gave her hyacinths from the sun god’s land

To weave in her sea wound hair

Just as in a dream they moved

Dancing in tidepools

Gems for their eyes

They gathered anemonies from the tidal pools

     …pink, purple, lemon and orange…

With anemonies for her bridal bouquet

Eels grass for her gown

She led her sky god lover down

To the church at the bottom of the sea

          ~~~pls follow below~~~

Edvard Grieg is pretty much the national composer of Norway the same way Sibelius is of Finland, quite an accomplishment for a Scotsman.

Actually, for a composer, he led a pretty normal life.  Well traveled and mostly liked by his mid century contemporaries, he was a particularly gifted pianist.  He wrote 5 songs dedicated to Louis Hornbeck which ingratiates him to me (not that there is any relation, like Athena I sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus).

Tonight’s pieces are two Piano Rolls where he demonstrates his virtuosity playing his own compositions.

The first one is Bridal Procession which can come in handy if you are on your Larry Kingth marriage and are tired of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March.  The second is called Butterfly, Op. 43 #1, both posted by d60944.

What I notice about Piano Rolls in general is that the performances are quite up tempo compared to what I expected.  This is reflective of the desires and talent of the composers, speed is one of the things they are best at preserving.

Something good actually happened tonight. I can’t remember the last time in the past 10 years that I could really say that.

One of the Warren Commission accessories to the murder of John Kennedy, Arlen Specter, was finally defeated in his reelection for the U.S. Senate. Arlen Specter was the man who fabricated the whole “magic bullet theory” of the multiple gunshot wounds to John Kennedy and Governor Connally, in order to protect the real killers from public exposure and prosecution.

Background: John Kennedy was struck in the throat (front), and in the back (rear), and then in the head near his right temple (front). Governor Connally was struck in his ribs, and also in his right wrist, and also in his left thigh. The bullet cited the Warren Commission to have caused all of these wounds simultaneously, except for Kennedy’s head shot, was taken from a neighboring hospital stretcher and found in totally undeformed condition (with no bloodstains and no fragments missing).

___

This is Arlen Specter in 1964 fabricating the trajectory and the physics of multiple wounds sustained in two adult bodies in order to publish the lie that there was just a “lone gunman” in the assassination of President Kennedy. This became known as the “magic bullet” theory.

But the real facts were, of course, much different.

Here we see the proof that John Kennedy had been already struck in the throat (from the front) by a bullet, and yet Governor Connally at this point was totally unharmed and not hit at all, and still holding onto his hat.

Several frames later (and over 1 full second later), Governor Connally had still not yet been shot by any bullet at all, and he was still comfortably holding onto to his hat. Connally’s wounds could therefore not possibly have come from the same bullet that had hit Kennedy in the throat. Yet thanks to Arlen Specter (and also Gerald Ford who fabricated the position of Kennedy’s back wound in the report) “Official U.S. History” lies to us and states that it did.

Arlen Specter was defeated tonight. He was defeated by a Democratic Party challenger Joe Sestak coming from the left.

Of course, Establishment loving President Obama provided both robo-calls and TV advertisment support on behalf of this Warren Commission Kennedy Assassination accessory, Arlen Specter –who George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had also campaigned for in 2004– and not the true Democrat in the race, Joe Sestak.

Obama even stated in his TV ad that he loved Arlen Specter, while he also actively campaigned on behalf other status-quo, pro-Corporate Establishment figures like Blanche Lincoln, and opposed the more progressive Democrat Bill Halter. Despite Obama’s help, Blanche Lincoln is locked in a tight contest tonight that is still unresolved and will require a “runoff”.

• So the Establishment loses tonight.
• The Warren Commission loses tonight.
• WarHawk and Robert Gates fan, President Obama loses tonight.
• And a better Democrat defeated an imposter.

Video compiled from data produced by The College of Marine Science, University of South Florida, Ocean Circulation Group http://ocgweb.marine.usf.edu/

OCG/CMS/USF maintains a coordinated program of coastal ocean observing and modeling for the West Florida Continental Shelf (WFS).

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill trajectory ensemble forecast from four different numerical models – Modeling includes a West Florida Shelf version of ROMS nested in the Navy’s operational HYCOM. We are also diagnosing model output from the Navy’s HYCOM, from NCSU’s SABGOM ROMS, and also from the NOAA RTOFS.

http://ocg6.marine.usf.edu/~liu/oil_spill_ensemble_forecast.html

Well, Rand Paul in a blowout if you’d like a little schadenfreud at Mitch McConnell’s expense.

Early numbers for Sestak don’t look good.  42% reporting, Sestak 51% Specter 49%.

Halter leading.  62% reporting, Lincoln 43.3% Halter 42.6%.

Conway leading over Mongiardo 45% – 43%, 93% reporting.  Looks like a win.  AP calls it.

Critz 54% Burns 43%, 39% reporting.  Murtha’s seat.  53% – 45%, 70% in, AP calls it.

2 Top Specter supporters say to Mrs. Greenspan it’s over.  AP calls it.  Concession should be within the hour.  10:25 EDT.

Toomey for the Thugs- AP.

Politico election results.

May 18, 2010

by Kathy Kelly and Josh Brollier

Islamabad–On May 12th, the day after a U.S. drone strike killed 24 people in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, two men from the area agreed to tell us their perspective as eyewitnesses of previous drone strikes.    

One is a journalist, Safdar Dawar, General Secretary of the Tribal Union of Journalists. Journalists are operating under very difficult circumstances in the area, pressured by both militant groups and the Pakistani government.  Six of his colleagues have been killed while reporting in North and South Waziristan. The other man, who asked us not to disclose his name, is from Miranshah city, the epicenter of North Waziristan.  He works with the locally based Waziristan Relief Agency, a group of people committed to helping the victims of drone attacks and military actions.  “If people need blood or medicine or have to go to Peshawar or some other hospital,” said the social worker, “I’m known for helping them. I also try to arrange funds and contributions.”

Both men emphasized that Pakistan’s government has only a trivial presence in the area.  Survivors of drone attacks receive no compensation, and neither the military nor the government investigate consequences of the drone attacks.  

The black plague spreads.

The leadership lies.

The CEO’s spin.

We are not ignorant of the horrific nightmare you have unleashed.

Chris Hedges has a piece on TruthDig today about our corporate leaders and how these ‘Little Eichmanns’ are doing exactly what many thought would happen when you commoditize every living breathing thing on the planet.

You die.

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.

Those who carry out this global genocide-men like BP’s Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume”-are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, “little Eichmanns.” They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.

Hedges

Something Happened

James Howard Kunstler

truthout op-ed

Tuesday, May 18, the year of the tiger

Everybody in the world is broke, except for maybe Lloyd Blankfein, and he may not end up broke so much as broken — by a political meat-grinder that is revving up to turn the world’s woes and swindles into a new kind of Long Emergency sausage, to be distributed among the roiling, angry masses as a synthetic substitute for nutriment. Call it a synthetic non-collateralized political obligation.

Something snapped in the world last week and a lot of people around the world sensed it — especially in the organs of news and opinion — but this ominous twang was not very clearly identified. It was, in fact, the sound of the financial becoming political. The macro-swindle of a worldwide Ponzi orgy now stands revealed and the vacuum left in its place is about to suck everything familiar into it — standards-of-living, hopes, dreams, not to mention lives. The political action will be a desperate scramble to determine who and what is able to escape getting sucked into this black hole of annihilation. It’s very suddenly shaping up to become an epic in human history.

Meanwhile, a giant oil blob lies quivering in deep waters off the Gulf coast, like some awful amorphous Moby Dick full of malice waiting to sink Pequod America — or at least the economies of five states. A few months from now, the BP corporation will wonder why it didn’t go into something safe and predictable like the pants business instead of oil exploration. They will surely question the viability of conducting future business anywhere near the USA, and the USA will enter a wilderness of soul-searching about the drill-baby-drill strategy that only a few scant weeks ago seemed to be a settled matter. Tough to have your future hoped-for energy supplies evaporate at the same time that your hopes for future prosperity get sucked into a black hole.

I’ve maintained for a long time that the folks down Dixie way are the the most dangerously crazy people in America and the Deepwater Horizon oil blob is not going to improve their outlook when it slops over their beaches and bayous. They’ll blame Obama for it by syllogism. Anyway, they are only marginally more crazy than the rest of the folks in the USA. Those folks are warming up for an election season that is going to send a horde of exterminating angels into the halls of congress and the governor’s mansions, and before too long those merchants of retribution are going to appoint their inquisitors. It’s going to be a heckuva spectacle.

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