“When they won the Cold War, the US declared themselves God’s own representatives on earth, people who have no responsibilities – only interests. They have declared those interests sacred. Now it’s one-way traffic, which makes the world unstable,” Putin told the audience.
“They live in the past on their own under their own delusions … They think that … they have won and then everything else is a colony, a back yard. And the people living there are second-class citizens,” he said, adding that Russia’s “special operation” – the phrase the Russian government uses to describe its war on Ukraine – has become a “lifesaver for the West to blame all the problems on Russia.”
So let me get this straight Vlad. You invade your neighbor, a sovereign country and bomb them to smithereens, murder civilians there, take their land and steal their food. You further threaten a host of other neighbors and threaten nuclear war. You install yourself as a de facto President for life, become the richest man in the world by stuffing dirty rubles in your pocket and rewarding your cronies with mega yachts and untold riches and also have a nasty habit of killing journalists and political opponents.
And you think the rest of the world will come to respect and admire you? Not sure that is the way it works.
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Love and miss you always, Buzz.
Ultimately, Google, as is their all too customary practice, decided to jettison or kill Nik off in 2015. Google loves to create beautiful tools and workspaces, get users hooked and then yank the whole tablecloth out from underneath them. They do it again and again.
The French company DxO finally bought the rights and picked Nik up again and their hand was now out one more time like I had never ever paid them a single dime.
It gets discouraging. I didn't cough it up. Felt slightly abused by the whole process. But it mostly still worked except for what I considered my most important feature.
And suddenly one day, after an Adobe update, the programs were no longer functioning together and instead I got a blank color screen. Oh well, would have to do the best I could without the darn thing. And I did..
But I knew a secret trick with Nik, I could add structure in Silver Efex and then create a luminosity blend and all of a sudden I had an incredibly powerful and beautiful unique tool to work with that delivered something quite rare and visually marvelous. I really missed it although it must be used with a very light hand.
I was walking behind this woman last time we went whale watching in Oceanside. Had to take the snap, like rubbernecking an accident on the freeway.
My question is why? Why would you wear a sheer garment that exposes every butt dimple out in public and why would you wear such an outfit in front of your child? What message exactly are you trying to send, to her and to the world at large? That you dress like a hooker? In what universe is this copacetic?
Asses are like ears, elbows and genitalia. Standard operating equipment throughout the hominid species, I can assure you. This one had little or no redeeming features that I could discern, although I understand that such perceptions are somewhat subjective.
I don't want to be a prude but it seemed quite inappropriate, at least in my eyes. Certainly nothing to take a great deal of pride in displaying. Great example, mom.
You can find it everywhere and anywhere, stay perpetually angry if that is your desire, many good triggers available, whatever your political inclination.
Ginni and Clarence, DeSantis, Meadows, Loudermilk, Boebert, Barr, Greene, Trump, Sleepy Joe, take your pick. I don't really feel like wading in up to my hips but I will stick a little toe in the water.
Donald Trump sent a 12 page rebuttal out the other day regarding the January 6 hearings in which he makes one supposition that I haven't really heard anyone challenge. One that I find both pernicious and utterly racist on its face.
Joe Biden, a candidate who never left his basement and can’t speak without a teleprompter, outperformed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in their two high-charged elections. Biden even outperformed Obama in black communities, but only in important swing states. Isn’t that amazing? It’s impossible.
Basement Biden earned more votes than Obama in Fulton County, Ga. (Atlanta) by131,733 (53%), and Wayne County, Mich. (Detroit) by 1,917 (0.3%), which are the two largest black populations in the United States. Biden also earned more votes than Obama’s 2012campaign in Cobb County, Ga. by 89,321 (52%), and Oakland County, Mich. by 85,093(24.4%). Either there’s a lot of black voters in America who identify more with Joe Biden than Barack Obama, or Democrats are stealing black votes – and we all know the answer to that.
Apparently, Joe Biden is twice as popular in Arizona as Barack Obama, even among black and Hispanic voters. Sleepy Joe earned a total of 1,040,774 votes in Maricopa County,Ariz. (Phoenix). That’s 508,490 more votes than Obama earned in 2012 (532,284), nearly doubling Obama’s 2012 performance in the key swing state. Biden’s unbelievable success of out performing Obama continues in Las Vegas, Nev., Madison, Wisc. , Green Bay, Wisc., and a number of other cities across the country. It didn’t happen.
If you need me to break it down, what he is basically saying is that Biden could not have won on the square because he received more minority votes than Obama did. Think about that? He is saying that identity politics and racial considerations are the only paramount calculus for voting in this country. How venal and racist is that?
Either there’s a lot of black voters in America who identify more with Joe Biden than Barack Obama, or Democrats are stealing black votes – and we all know the answer to that.
Like a black person can't identify more with Biden than Obama? Hey, some blacks even supported you Donald, how crazy is that and how do you explain that in your convoluted reasoning and passel of ad hominem slurs?
There is of course a better explanation. Minority votes were not necessarily pro Biden, they were merely anti Trump. The ex narcissist in chief just can't wrap his head around that. Many of us, myself included, regardless of our pigmentation, would have voted for pretty much anybody but you. And isn't it funny that all that voter fraud you talk about only happens in states you lost and often other Republican candidates in those same states won their races in the same election cycle? How does that work?
Phil Bump at the WaPo has a good take in his article Trump issues 12 page greatest hits collection of is false fraud claims.
Since the election ended, Trump has fumed at the fact that Biden got so many more votes than he did. He’s complained repeatedly about how Biden held no events but “supposedly” got more than 80 million votes?
The explanation, of course, is simple. First, the country’s population grew 9 percent from 2008 to 2020. Second, a lot of Biden voters weren’t motivated by Biden but by Trump.
But Trump refuses to accept that. So he does things like wonder how Biden did better in Arizona than did Barack Obama in 2008, since of course Obama should have outperformed Biden when running against … John McCain, the senator from Arizona.
Donald Trump has done one thing for America, with his outright lies, utter falsehoods, gaslighting and racial antagonism, he has shown us the worst thing we can be. And unfortunately we have performed as poorly as can be expected.
Leslie and I went to Kung Fu Noodles in Vista for lunch today. Place has been getting rave reviews. Rated fourteenth best soup dumpling in the nation by Yelpers.
You may remember that they lost their house in the 2020 fire. Luckily all the horses were saved. Their daughter Kiersti is a top equestrian and a great person to boot.
Kiersti has been involved in trying to save a rare Spanish barb stallion from the kill buyers and the slaughterhouse. This is her GoFund Me page. She drove all the way to Idaho in terrible weather and ended up saving seven horses. I am not much of an Instagram user but her videos of the trip have been wonderful. What a great thing she has done here. Please donate a few dollars and help these horses survive!
I wanted to give it another shot. I seized the moment.
Shan Xi has lots of different kinds of hand made noodles including biang biang hand ripped noodles, hand pulled noodles, Liang Pi cold skin noodles, hot oil noodles, braised noodles, hand made noodles, oriental noodles, Ma chi noodles and noodle pieces. A noodle lover's delight!
The first time I went I tried a hand pulled noodle with beef brisket which was a very thick and wide noodle with a wavy decolate edge.
Monday I had the spicy hand pulled noodle with beef which you see a picture of in the photograph above. What an incredible noodle, ropey, chewy, textural and organic. A spicy cumin finish. It was delicious. A hand made noodle is a taste and thing of beauty. So different than the normal commercial fare.
I honestly think that I need to go back and try every noodle dish. They also serve a large number of lamb dishes which is rather unusual around here and also something I savor. Read this review on their Pao Mo lamb stew.
I am really looking forward to coming back. Here are screenshots of two of the pickup menu pages, give you a taste for what is in store.
So delicious. Let's go!
Shan Xi Magic Kitchen
858-565-2688
4344 Convoy Street San Diego, CA 92111
I won't dwell on this too much but what a great story! And I have to think that somewhere in heaven, my favorite author, Roger Zelazny, is smiling. Because he saw this one coming from a million miles away.
Don't believe me? Read Last of the Wild Ones or Lady of the diodes again. Phil Dick wasn't far behind either. I have to think that Kurzweil's singularity estimations might be a tad bit off.
Once the Singularity has been reached, Kurzweil says that machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined. It just might happen quicker than he thought it would.
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Postscript: I have typed this paragraph three times. For the first time in 11k + posts, my computer is not allowing it to appear on the page, preferring it bleed off into the blogpost situated below it. It it trying to tell me something? Should I back off when discussing this?
I swear to you I am not making this up. Be vigilant, the computers can get pretty angry these days.
Another old interview.
NYT PLW obit.
Peter Lamborn Wilson has died. I can not say I know a lot about him but I have seen a bit of his Hakim Bey stuff and find his output interesting.
Not that the man was without warts, he is accused of being attracted to young men, much like Whitman and Ginsburg.
Was he a pedophile, I have no idea? I wasn't there. Wouldn't be the first although it is said that he never acted on his impulses. He was never jailed or charged, as far as I know. I am going to let that one be.
His anarchist comrades held him in some suspicion because he was the recipient of a family trust. Wasn't poor enough evidently to have real street cred. And even worse, the family money was made on the backs of poor sugar laborers. Anyway, hard to please some people, especially the super woke.
Hakim Bey is the pseudonym for 59-year old Peter Lamborn Wilson, who has been based in New York City for most of his life, but is now living upstate in New Paltz. The Brooklyn Rail's interviewer, has this mistakenly reversed, giving Bey as the original name, Wilson as the pseudonym. The guy was born a WASP, and perhaps became Sufi one day while prowling the mountains of Asia. He has no occupation, and in 1994 told an interviewer (Voice Literary Supplement, New York, Feb. 1994) that he "thanks God that a trickle of family money keeps him 'independently poor.'"[1] The name Lamborn is rare in New York, and it is where the Sugar industry magnate Ody Lamborn died in 1971. It's been my impression that Hakim Bey's trust fund was originally earned by tormented labourers on sugar plantations. Whether it's from sugar or from something else, this brings us to Wilson's touching concern, about what he called "a class war situation" in the Rail interview : "Where's our support for the Mexican migrant agricultural workers?"
I have operated dangerous machinery in factories, carried lumber up flights of stairs, and I have (like most anarchists) done other boring, low-paid jobs to feed myself, starting around age thirteen. Still, I have known several anarchists who come from wealthy families, and I've thought well of them because they make the choice to use their privilege (freedom allowed by their trust fund) in good faith; perhaps to heal wounds made earlier by their own relatives. But Peter Lamborn Wilson gives me an unquiet feeling when he pretends to understand and hold concern in his heart for that other world, where he's never paid a visit, and where people work because they must work. It has the very phoney ring of someone pouring syrup into a liberal ear.
This line of thinking sort of cracks me up. If I remember correctly, the philosopher Thoreau was similarly ridiculed for coming out of Walden's pond to have his mother do his laundry on a weekly basis. And I think that the Thoreau family owned a pencil company.
Sorry guys, awful hard for a rich guy to make it to heaven, let alone make the grade.
The guy was pretty smart. I wish that I had read him sooner.
I think the iron curtain may have ratcheted down on my blog in Russia. Still doing well in China (for now.) I follow these things pretty closely through analytics. I usually have hundreds of Russian hits, it was 10 today. Quite odd. 144 from China, albeit a very slow day.
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He has openly compared himself to the Russian tsar, equating Russia's invasion of Ukraine today with Peter's expansionist wars some three centuries ago, and making his strongest acknowledgment yet that his own war is a land grab. Russia's president was meeting young scientists and entrepreneurs when he made the remarks. Before talking IT and tech development he talked politics and power: the new battle he sees for geopolitical dominance. In that, he told his select audience that Peter the Great was a role model."You might think he was fighting with Sweden, seizing their lands," Mr Putin said, referring to the Northern Wars which Peter launched at the turn of the 18th Century as he forged a new Russian Empire."But he seized nothing; he reclaimed it!" he said, arguing that Slavs had lived in the area for centuries."It seems it has fallen to us, too, to reclaim and strengthen," Mr Putin concluded, with a near-smirk that left no doubt he was referring to Ukraine and his aims there. Peter's rule, he suggested, was proof that expanding Russia had strengthened it.
When Russia invaded its neighbor on 24 February, Putin falsely claimed it was a "special operation" limited to the eastern Donbas region to "de-Nazify" Ukraine and reduce the supposed threat to Russia.But even as he was uttering those words, his troops were moving on Kyiv and bombing land even further west. More than 100 days later, a fifth of Ukrainian territory is under Russian military control, with puppet administrations who talk of referenda on joining Russia.And now Putin feels bold enough to admit that his "operation" is in fact an occupation.He also seems to believe the West will ultimately accept the reality his troops are fighting to create on the ground.At the time, "not one European country" recognized Russia's claim to the land where Peter created St Petersburg as Russia's bold new capital, Mr Putin said. Now they all do.His comments have also rattled the Baltic countries. The Estonian foreign ministry summoned the Russian ambassador to condemn his reference to Peter the Great's assault on Narva, now in Estonia, as Russia "reclaiming and strengthening" its territory.
The people in the Ukraine are in big trouble. They are losing too many people, ready to fight to the last man. Their ammunition is running out. They are getting wasted by superior firepower. And that is perfectly fine with some of their neighbors and some Senators and congressmen in America, people like Rand Paul and Thomas Massie. 57 Republicans voted against a weapons and humanitarian aid bill to Ukraine.
The euphoria that accompanied Ukraine’s unforeseen early victories against bumbling Russian troops is fading as Moscow adapts its tactics, recovers its stride and asserts its overwhelming firepower against heavily outgunned Ukrainian forces.
Newly promised Western weapons systems are arriving, but too slowly and in insufficient quantities to prevent incremental but inexorable Russian gains in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, which is now the focus of the fight.
The Ukrainians are still fighting back, but they are running out of ammunition and suffering casualties at a far higher rate than in the initial stages of the war. Around 200 Ukrainian soldiers are now being killed every day, up from 100 late last month, an aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky told the BBC on Friday — meaning that as many as 1,000 Ukrainians are being taken out of the fight every day, including those who are injured.
Where will Russia set its bombsights next? Moldova? Estonia? Poland? Finland, Sweden? And what will it take for the civilized world to take a stand? The cat is out of the bag, this insane despot is willing to fight the long war and recapture Russia's historic former glory, no matter how many innocent civilians get slaughtered and sovereign countries are invaded. He murders journalists and political opponents with all the empathy of a cat torturing a small mouse, like a psychopath. And we continue to read the sports page and follow the Kardashians.
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“It is easy for you and for me to shrug our shoulders and to say that conflicts taking place thousands of miles from the continental United States, and, indeed, thousands of miles from the whole American Hemisphere, do not seriously affect the Americas — and that all the United States has to do is to ignore them and go about (our) its own business. Passionately though we may desire detachment, we are forced to realize that every word that comes through the air, every ship that sails the sea, every battle that is fought does affect the American future.” FDR 1939
I lost too many family members in the camps and pogroms to count. The Coughlins, Lindberghs and Chamberlains of this world preached anything from pure isolation to open support for the Axis. And we sat on the sidelines here in America for far too long. Until December 11, 1941 four days after we were ourselves attacked. How many lives would have been saved if we had made a more difficult and moral choice sooner, say three years earlier?
But people are only guided by their own narrow self interest. They can not empathize with other people's misery and pain, especially those across an ocean, a continent away.
I remember watching a movie filmed in Poland a number of years ago. They asked Poles how it felt when they saw their jewish classmates hauled ou t of class and put on the trains to the extermination camps. One man cried, unloading a cascade of repressed tears and pain for the loss of his friends. But the next woman's response was even more telling.
She said that, "It was wonderful, there were more potatoes for the rest of us." I will never forget that.
When I hear people bitch about the current state of our economy, or inflation, I have to think; let's settle down, we have just faced the most cataclysmic virus in the last 100 years, one that killed 15 million people and paralyzed the global economy and a Trump administration that put the country $7.8 trillion dollars in debt. Russia is currently embarking on an expansionist war against sovereign neighbors. And all we can think about is our most mundane and banal personal fortunes.
An asteroid could wipe out half the earth and we would maybe shed a quick tear and then head right to the website to make sure our investments hadn't dropped a tick, that beer prices were stable and that reception was still available for the big football game. We are so narcissistic, nothing is really important enough to pierce our teflon solipsistic bubble.
We can not see past our own noses and also lack the cognitive facility and intelligence to learn anything whatsoever from national and global history. We make the same mistakes over and over again and then throw our hands up and feign helplessness and blame fate, or god, even when some things could be averted with a little gumption, compassion, will and backbone, not to mention moral repugnance.
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“It's easier to put on a pair of shoes than to wrap the earth in leather.”
Chogyam Trungpa
I have a friend and client coming over today to visit the gallery. Place has not really been in order for the last three months. "No problem," I said. "Just give me a few hours to clear and carve some navigable paths." He asked me if I was serious and I said yes.
With the auction taking precedence, I have tried to seal off the front of my shop in my mind. But the amount of inventory I have is pretty staggering and two warehouses are full to boot.
Right wing pundits are apoplectic about the idiot who threatened to kill Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh. No one would call his action well advised. But why the selective indignation? Obama, Hillary and Biden are similarly threatened with regularity and you don't see liberals fanning themselves on their fainting couches.
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| Dr. George Tiller |
Of course not. How about murders committed by anti abortion zealots James Kopp, Paul Jennings Hill, Scott Roeder, Michael F. Griffin or Peter James Knight?
Anti abortion violence goes on with regularity and its crickets with certain people but a justice gets threatened and the sky is suddenly falling. At least eleven anti abortion murders occurred in the United States since 1990, as well as 41 bombings and 173 arsons at clinics since 1977.
Real violence. Not empty, idle threats. But by all means, continue to allow yourself to be distracted and manipulated by the bright and shiny objects. After all, you are always the real victim.
