We Need Justice for George Floyd

All right. Then will you run for president? 'Cause remember, if Biden wins, Trump wins. . . I think I'll stop by the market, on my way, and buy a length of green ribbon to match the green in my dress, and, of course, a new kitchen knife.

New Game: Neo-Constantinople (which is us here, now), about to become Byzantium--for a thousand years (which to us sounds like forever): We need us a Constitution with a carefully considered bill of rights

Our Mother City could be Alexandria with its Pharos and Library, or the Athens of Parthenon and Academia, or just Epicurus' garden--we don't care.  We need to foster beauty and intelligence, without crushing or unnecessarily insulting the ugly and the stupid.

Trump Demands Protesters Be MURDERED

Perfectly correct, though perforce too much abbreviated. The reality is maybe too vile for such nice kids to deal with explicitly--though Anna comes close, in her excoriation of Hillary. Fact is, and you know it in your hearts: fascists crying for murder are asking to be murdered. Come to your Aunt Charlotte (Corday), kids.

Minneapolis Burns As Police Precinct is Taken Over And Lit on Fire

That's America burning.

I'm sorry, but

No one is ever going to persuade me that the play by Jean Racine, Bérénice, is not sickening, tedious, sentimental bilge, or that Victor Hugo's religious  poetry is not maddeningly stupid, or that oily fish is not the most nauseating smell/taste in the world--after the utter emesis of Vagina. Tastes may differ, but some horrors never cease being abhorrent.

Newly Found Disk Galaxy Shouldn't Really Exist

Had a flash, while notre cher Anton was explaining how galaxy-formation computer-simulation requires the existence of Dark Matter to explain the (photographic, etc.) evidence we have of the Universe of approximately only one and a half billion years old (say, twelve billion years ago): Dealing in a rational, adult manner with such immense antiquities is maybe something that those who grew up in Jesus Land, and who may have had their brains sadistically mutilated by Parochial School Educations, are ill-equipped to do. While still, I myself find the existence of Dark Matter a depressing prospect--and even as I still am deeply annoyed by the Big Bang itself (which, goddammit, in a rational, godless universe ought never to have happened)--I must allow that my disquiet is probably not of the same order of magnitude of spiritual anguish as that of one who, while surveying the Grand Canyon, and bearing in mind (if he were not stupid) the hundreds of thousands and millions of years necessary for the laying down of geologic strata of limestone, might be attempting to shoehorn those ancient seabeds (in his imagination) into an earth supposedly less than seven thousand years old. That must hurt.

Huge Mario Plush Collection!!

These people are so damned sweet. And nice.

System Update with Glenn Greenwald - The Murderous History and Deceitful...

On le sait, sans même l'avoir entendu.

True thing I once said, that was immediately resented by those who heard me say it:

"Wine is food." I was giving my advice--to a group of 18 and 19 year old prospective exchange students at the University of Oregon, as being one having recently then returned from being a student, and living, in Italy--on how, decently and politely, to grow accustomed to having a glass of wine with one's meals. A distinct, low moaning was heard, signalling that those not yet twenty were fed up and impatient with being preached (grownup stoïcism) at by a sexagenarian. I wish now that I had said, "Wine and beer and Ouzo are foods."

The Wines of Washington

I'm so proud. ¡Oh the long, elegant tannins of those Horse Heaven Hills' Cabernets.

Walking Food Tour in Medford with The Hungry Hustle

These nice people are from eastern Tennessee, and, for sure they've never been to Prague, or Rome, or Paris, or St. Petersburg--but they are not stupid; neither is the southern Oregon that they have made their home at all barbaric. A signal moment is when Josh, instinctive cosmopolite, sampling a vegetarian dish, effortlessly and naturally uses chopsticks.

U.S. Airstrikes Are Killing Civilians in Somalia

But of fucking course.

Outdoor Marijuana Water & Feeding Secrets (Candyland Pt 3)

Speaking of Genetics.

How to Grow 4,000 Cannabis Plants Outdoors with Greenbull farms

Notice: There is a transcendent over-all beauty/personality/character about this "garden" which is more than the sum of its parts. It breathes, exudes, allures, seems conscious of itself; bespeaks the exquisite selectivity and constant attentiveness that have gone into its cultivation and maintenance.

Personal Note, about Coffee

Simplefying, always simplefying...Double-strength, high quality, fragrant Mexican coffee, equal quantity of hot, whole milk, sugar to taste, strained though a double sieve: Mon Starbucks à moi. ¡Mon dieu, que c'est bon!

Remembering San Francisco's Summer of Love Pt. 1 Ep 57 : Smokin’ With Sw...

Déja vu all over again. Verily, I too was there, then. A lady who was young (eighteen) then, meeting me at the Blue Unicorn (near the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park), in a recent phonecall to me, described my long-ago mid-twenties persona as "elegant--I thought you were gay."

Odin and Wisdom

"Proverbial Wisdom is one man's Wit, and every man's Consensus"? Something like that, which unites the "one" and the "every." Something which hovers between deep, anarchic truth and shallow, untrue platitude. Anyway, what could be more convincing than a man in a cowboy hat, intoning verses in Old Norse?

Some Galaxies Have a Strange X Shape And We Now Know Why

Important news about the behavior of Black Holes.

Talking with Margo in NC this morning,

Both of us in our late seventies, we concur that the current presidential election is an unseemly farce, and that both candidates are repulsive examples of terminal senile dementia. And we recall, both of us, Margo and I--and as actually do all my friends my age--when Trump first appeared on "reality" television, twenty-five or so years ago, and we were appalled and disgusted by him and could not, either of us, bear then to watch more than a couple of minutes of the turd-vulgar spectacle of him. We knew, distantly, then, that there was perhaps a majority of our fellow turd-vulgar Americans who were  amused, and somehow not repulsed, by the crass "entrepreneurial" Trump--but we never suspected that we should ever have to take their god-awful bad taste seriously. Let it be a lesson to us: Really bad taste (such as that evidenced in finding Donald Trump amusing) is a signal instance of Stupidity; and Stupidity, such as reigns throughout Dumbfuckistan, is an active, malevolent Force of Nature. Or something. Anyway, you can't just dismiss it, because it resents being dismissed.

The basic Argument for the Existence (as opposed to the Non-Existence) of a "Patriarchy" is:

"¿What else could it be?" Which is exactly what I ask myself when I see pictures of controlled deomolition, or when I try to imagine who, other than flesh-eating Lizards from Outer Space, could be in charge of U.S. foreign policy. But which does not mean that I believe in the existence of "Patriarchy."

Oregon is Selling Legal Weed For $2

Everything this nice young man with the ridiculous ring in his nose says is modestly and charmingly well said, and perfectly true and very much worth knowing. But what I'm struck by most is the beauty and regularity of his dazzlingly white teeth--American teeth in this gently weird Oregon boy's mouth--which lend him a decidedly peculiar, but compelling, Grace Invincible.

You know, if I were a flesh-eating Lizard from Outer Space,

I'd be concerned, even alarmed, by the virtual populist revolution which has rescinded (1) military conscription in the United States, and (2) is rescinding the War on Drugs. I'd think that we (carnivorous, legged worms) were losing control of our captive anthropoids.

There is something you should know about epilepsy and cannabis | Jokubas...

OK. Such is the nature of Mind-as-electro-chemistry (with those oh-so-precisely sliced up little rats' brains lying on the table before us, reminding us just how physically actual, and inherently cruel, is any definition of Mind as Matter). But still, left unchallenged is the bad science and improper statistical analyses of data of all the biased "research" (including that done in New Zealand) which has found THC to be deleterious to children's developing brains. You hear me, Lucy? Actually, THC is good for kids, and, over all, makes them smarter.

Cringe | ContraPoints

À savoir. Our boy/girl (s'il le veut),--Damn, I forget his name (because I am old and don't believe in the non-cosmetic actuality of transgender--to me he is, obviously, a doll-maker who has personified, and identified with, his dolls: the old Geppetto/Pinocchio syndrome), whatever, [he] is a very knowledgeable Source of What is Thought. That's what matters about him; not whatever paltry token of validation I might submit to him for his extra-biological gender-identification by calling him her. It's not my place to indulge him, but I love what he has to say.

¿"Natalie"?--maybe, in a (shudder, retch) sexual context; but I beg to be excused from contemplating anything of the sort--I call him Nate.

¿How can I never have learned to drive (a car)--and never have had a driver's license?

Basically two reasons: (1) As a matter of principle, I will not engage in any activity that, in the normal performance of which, a moment's lapse of attention or application on my part can result in serious injury or death for myself or someone else. And (2)--this is a little harder to explain, because I am, so far as I know, the only member of my species to have this precise perception-deficit: I lack the ability (which, I conscientiously note, all other humans seem somehow to possess--when I am seated in the driver's seat, to tell exactly where the wheels of the vehicle I'm entrusted with driving are (from where I'm sitting, of course): such that, in driving down a two-way street, and meeting an oncoming car, I cannot be sure that I will not collide with it.

The Oregon Coast - #SUMMER2019 Episode 24

Et in Arcadia ego...

¡Cannabis business in Uruguay still grows six years after legalization!

The historical record of human rights (abuses) in Uruguay, thanks mostly perhaps to direct meddling by the US  (and its violent military and paramilitary agents), but still--even in its own right--is a pretty gruesome story. Thanks largely, I think, if I may indulge myself in a little racist cultural typification, to the bloody, exploitative, Catholic, colonial ethos of native Uruguayans. Still, they are a comely people, with an exquisite intelligentsia, and partly upon these strengths they have become, willy-nilly, the first and premier national weed-liberators in the world. From motives rather absurd perhaps (from this end of the telescope), but rational enough.

Mount Saint Helens and the Columbia River Gorge - #SUMMER2019 Episode 29

Thoroughly likable, competent sort of fellow, with dazzling expertize in our Millennial, digital-material culture, whose opinion about my homeland--so different geographically and culturally from his homeland--I particularly value, and, frankly, am a little anxious after. Willfully not to have visited neither Mts. Hood nor Raineer (in their present paradisiacal somnolence), is not to know what Mt. St. Helens was before she erupted. Perhaps he does not believe that things are--but I can't help feeling that he's missing something.

Rare Dankness & House of Dankness Cannabis - Scott Reach (S1E6: Canna Cr...

Have I shared this with myself before? Well, it's worth repeating. These are the final, infinitely sophisticated, retributive, material results of having made War on Cannabis. We imagine that this is being shown--perhaps projected on a wall--to the immortal Shade of Richard Nixon, in whatever Hell he's being eternally punished in.

The Thing about Scandinavian Monarchies is

that they are, compared to, say, their English counterparts, not creeps, scuzzes and nut-cakes. I refer to their Royal Highnesses Prince Andrew (twice over, for he is both a creep and a scuzz) and Prince Charles (who is, by himself, only--with all respect--a certifiable nut-cake. What, in one of his subjects, might be called "eccentric." That is, though he falls within the broadly tolerant parameters of eccentric British normality, any other culture would admit that Prince Charles is, plainly, a nut-cake).

My Connection to the King of Sweden

is slight and happenstantial, but it goes back to my tempestuous relationship with Maria, the 80-year old Bolivian firebrand, whom I met (and connected with in our mutual enthusiasm for Evo Morales) in the local soup-kitchen where she was cruising. Back in her 60's, Maria had been married to a doctor in the Swedish navy, and had not unnaturally met the King at parties, such as the monarchs of Sweden like to give, in the endless Swedish summertime, for their households, and especially for their armed services. "He's just a man," said Maria.