The Rock Cries Out to Us Today

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Mark the mastodon.
The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no hiding place down here.
You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.
Your mouths spelling words
Armed for slaughter.
The rock cries out today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your face.
Across the wall of the world,
A river sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.
Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more.
Come, clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I
And the tree and stone were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your brow
And when you yet knew you still knew nothing.
The river sings and sings on.
There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing river and the wise rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew,
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the tree.
Today, the first and last of every tree
Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the river.
Plant yourself beside me, here beside the river.
Each of you, descendant of some passed on
Traveller, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name,
You Pawnee, Apache and Seneca,
You Cherokee Nation, who rested with me,
Then forced on bloody feet,
Left me to the employment of other seekers--
Desperate for gain, starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot...
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru,
Bought, sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am the tree planted by the river,
Which will not be moved.
I, the rock, I the river, I the tree
I am yours--your passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage,
Need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts.
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out upon me,
The rock, the river, the tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.
Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes,
Into your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.

Maya Angelou

Miracles

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.

Walt Whitman

I am not losing sleep over $122 in Nerf footballs

So, the big news was the IRS targeting Tea Party groups and stonewalling them non-profit status. Then it turned into a slow disclosure that it wasn't only right wing conservative groups that were given the run around, but also groups that sat on the left.

Today the IRS witch hunt is focusing on the minions, the credit card holders, that charged wine, porn, thomas the tank engine wristlets, and yes, $122 in Nerf footballs that ended up in a filing cabinet.

The minions are peanuts.  Low level managers who probably attended seminars on how to raise employee morale-seminars that were expensive studies funded by the taxpayer, and thought they were doing the right thing by buying wristbands and footballs.

The other small stuff, personal items, comes from a keeping up with the joneses mentality of some lower level employee who works harder than their boss and wants to live at least as well as the boss does, so they justify a little extravagant charge for themselves.

What REALLY gets my goat is CMP getting 80 MILLION taxpayer dollars to "upgrade" under the guise of "stimulus" because the upgrade will save ratepayers 20 million dollars.

Well, my regular reader might recall that that 80 MILLION dollars went into installing "smart meters", and if you opted out, you had to pay an ADDITIONAL $12 a month to keep your smart meter.

So, guess what? CMP blew the 80 mill, plus a bit more, and now taxpayers aren't going to save a damn cent, nope, in fact, CMP has asked the PUBLIC UTILITY COMMISSION for a rate increase to cover the difference. 

Yup, we paid 80 million for smart meters, and now more for rates.

$122 for nerf footballs? that's almost as much as I am paying a year NOT to have the smart meter.

oh, and my concern over smart meters spying on my electricity consumption? who cares?  The new land sat put into orbit will record every INCH of the EARTH's surface over the course of several days, and keep it up for ever.  It has infared capabilities, and can see to the bottom of the ocean.

Sleep with your dog? Have guests over regularly? Have a barn full of animals? Digging out a prep cellar?
This info will be available.  You will not get away with anything, and if you do, I imagine it can and will be held against you in a court of law. Secret or public. Or in the eyes of robot drones, soon to be released.

Sweet dreams.

i informed you Thusly

spoken not with satisfaction but in a manner of bemoanment, disgust, angst.

It's sort of like feeling like your dog needed to go outside to the bathroom but thinking maybe he just wanted to sniff the breeze, and finding a big pile of steaming crap the hard way-barefoot-by the back door shortly thereafter.

then you're on a hot street, your harmless goofy pet suddenly proves your subconcious is functioning optimally.

what else might be possible>

and how on earth does one arrive at these conclusions? sniff the dirt? tingle on the spine?
what are they reading, who are they listening to, who are they talking to?

How in the hell did they arrive at that conclusion given that series of information?

well, crap, out of the millions of humans that can make connections, if any of us are set aside for closer scrutiny, muy compleando!

makes one wonder what makes us worth the effort? with all the advances in profiling, if anyone warranted a second look, they must be grander than they could ever have thought possible..

Tree 2013

SO.  I like to tell it as I see it, and I like to keep where I saw it personal.  In other words, I have always felt the way my brain works is a trade secret, personal property, and so on.

Through the years I have seen an information tightening. 

The digital age has enabled it.  Even libraries keep track of what you check out, When was the last time you were able to tuck down in the stacks and shuffle through several books and then reshelve them without drawing the ire of one of the librarians?

What search engine do you use? They like to collect your data to sell to advertisers, what's wrong with uncle sammy having a peek?

Boy, if I had access to ALL the information, the truth, which is my mantra, what accurate conclusions I might draw!

So. I am unwilling to comes to conclusions at this time.  I have seen some signs.  I have sniffed some dirt. Read everything they will let you. Watch the skies.  Sniff some dirt. come to peace with yourself.

Ha ha

Teach your children

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye.

Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they pick, the one you'll know by.

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you will cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.

And you, of tender years,
Can't know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.

Teach your parents well,
Their children's hell will slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they pick, the one you'll know by.

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you will cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.

Crosby, Stills & Nash
written by Graham Nash

June 3, 2013

Tree

Welcome June

"In these divine pleasures permitted to me of walks in the June night under moon and stars, I can put my life as a fact before me and stand aloof from its honor and shame."
-  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals 

“There are moments, above all on June evenings, when the lakes that hold our moons are sucked into the earth, and nothing is left but wine and the touch of a hand.”
-  Charles Morgan

Fatalism

Well it's hard to be fatalistic when under the influence of dandelion beer. 

But, when  15 year old girl in my state goes to meet someone she knew from facebook and ends up in the medical examiner's office it becomes every parent's nightmare.

Try to tell your 15 year old, remind them, that anyone can make a facebook profile and just because  5 or 10 of their friends are also friends of that person does not make that person ok....and deal with that attitude.

Inform and trust, and a lot of prayer. 

I guess it might help or may hinder that I walked off on my own at 16, wholeheartedly believeing that I would not live to see 21 because I just had too much trust in strangers.

Now that I am much older I ride the tin rocking horse between trust and paranoia.

Paranoia because I have known many souls that are just in it for their own good no matter what the cost, and others that would give you the shirt off their backs.

I still try and maintain that truth.  I hand out bucks to the homeless and hungry signwielders at the crossroads, wishing I had an extra room and more money.

I offered the kid I worked with today the clean socks off my feet since his were soaked through from riding a bicycle in the pouring rain to his job.  I had a pair from the day before in my car I could put on my own...and it so happened I had on guy socks since I was in a rush and grabbed the first mated pair I could locate in the clean laundry- a relatively new pair of the Firebird.

When he declined I felt sort of like an ass, of course who wants to wear someone else's socks? But having had wet feet in the past, I thought it was worth the offer.

Divide and conquer, that is where society is at in these times.

What of the parents trying to find their kids in the aftermath of the vicious tornadoes that devasted the midwest this week? Met with roadblocks, mothers having to walk for three hours to meet their sons and walk three hours back to their cars.

Remninscent of Katrina, where folks were forced to leave their beloved pets at the evacuation buses, or at home and not allowed to return.

We have a plan here, the Firebird being in high school hopefully won't be locked down, and is under orders to start walking, and either we will meet in the middle and go to claim the Willow, or he will continue home and I will claim the Willow on my own. 

I am hoping we won't ever have to be evacuated from here, or I envision us going down the road with a herd of goats and poor aging peko keeping the pack of cats and chickens and geese in order... we better be dragging a travois because I don't think the evac centers would let us in .

Since I see most of the blue coastal evac signs point in this direction I suppose that in case of real emergency most of our gang will be appropriated to feeding the masses... along with whatever crops I produce in the meantime.

but I hope I can be the one handing out the soup, and glad to be of service.

First Petunias and now the Pope

Go San Lorenzo!

Facebook profiling

My last post I discussed various privacy issues as they relate to utility companies.

Most readers will be aware of the privacy drawbacks of Facebook. People have heard the stories of how people have lost their jobs because their boss read something they didn't care for on their Facebook page. Or perhaps the reader has heard of people who were asked to hand over the passwords to their Facebook accounts to prospective employers.

Today the news was out that it is not just people the Facebook user chooses to allow to view their personal information who can draw conclusions about FB users.

A Facebook app, mypersonality, tracks a person's "Likes" and draw conclusions based on that data.

A study published Monday by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed the likes of 58,000 facebook users and was able to tell a person's sexual orientation, race and political affiliation correctly in greater than 85% of study participants. 

Researchers also attempted to determine user's religion, drug and alcohol use and IQ.



 
The public is sold on the idea of giving up their personal data with the promise that the experience will be greatly enhanced by providing advertising that might appeal to the user. 

 
The implications of such profiling are a bit frightening. Black or white, gay or straight, democrat or republican, christian or muslim? One of which eight different personality types? Drinker, medicinal marijuana user or supporter? Add that to the information on your browsing history(if you stay logged in to Facebook while browsing the net, they know where you go) and think back to the McCarthy era. 



Perhaps certain people don't agree with various policies? Perhaps they have the profile of an activist?

What about the internment of Japanese Americans during WW2?

Opponents of any criticism are hushed with the words, "If you're not up to anything, you shouldn't be worried."

Are you worried yet?