i've got a big problem here

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I must find a way to get it through everyone's heads. The piece at the image link is must see video, and you should pay PARTICULAR attention to the discussion that starts at minute seven, about the GOES satellite anomalies on 9/11. That is monster new evidence in support of Judy Wood's work. But this isn't exactly the problem I need to discuss, need to spit out clearly enough that it smacks you in your third eye and stays there.

Those of you who have been coming here a while know I'm completely gone for Bill Hicks posthumously because of his

It's just a choice.
Right now.
Between fear.
And love.
Never has it been stated so well in all human history. The problem is no one understands the level of COURAGE involved in love, the love he meant, the love he showed. I'm irked with this video for showing the vast herds of sheep hitting the streets of late to accomplish what amounts to absolutely bubkes. This is hard to talk about when you know how much heart it took for those people to get out in the streets. You might think it's easy for me, believing I identify with the contrarian role, love to be irascible about things, am never satisfied with all those ass hats who hide behind the old pen is mightier than the sword trope, scream about the capitalist shits with their nonprofits and clicktivism sites, bellow about the venality of groupthink, curse and knock things over about you and your motherfucking TV ... but I don't enjoy it. I don't identify with it. It is not my preferred mode of interaction. It is supremely difficult to sustain anything like a positive mood while engaging in this, but I have this thing about truth. I have spent decades learning how to cut down to it from inside, and it appears it's taking me another number of decades learning how to communicate it, but if you think I'm just grouchy, or a harridan by nature, you are dead wrong. You don't GET that love is not all flowers and candy. You don't get the size and power of it.

It's cosmic. Not personal.

You are not it; it actually is you.

You are blinded by the existential terror that has been conditioned into us all. You are leaping for the opportunity to go out and not get shot down by the riot police the controllers have decided is the best way to handle our natural objection to being ripped off, terrorized, enslaved and bombed to mist in our sleep. They're almost coming right out and telling you to do this... bring your tractor. As long as you are reasonably sure you won't be physically harmed you might actually get off your fat ass and join the protests. Look at the mobs who protest all the G8, G20, G92+365, Davos, IMF, World Bank meetings! We've been doing that for DECADES. What's changed?

Oh, oh, Mubarak stepped down. BFD. Egypt can feign people power now. They'll change the dictatorship into something that looks softer on paper. It'll be the same in Tunisia. The best it will be anywhere is theater fronting for change. But the loss of life in protest is much less if you agree to see this theater as reality, as freedom. It won't ever BE any such a thing, but if you will see it that way, they won't kill you... until it suits them to kill you another way.

Nope.

That's not love. That's delusion. They know you will pick a happy delusion over risky truth any day of the week and they know you NEED it right now. So the Governor of Wisconsin endures your circus and proceeds with his agenda as though you were not there. YOU are the one who needs to ignore him, ignore all the crap laws and regulations, and build our real world into something the planet can endure. You are omitting that part. You cannot EVER accomplish this by using the rules and/or the permission from the sociopaths as your means. Mubarak will be replaced by someone who will be made as amenable to the controllers' wishes if he is not already down with them. Anyone recalled for their perfidies in Wisconsin will be replaced by others likewise amenable... either from word go or from intimidation. It is a minor inconvenience and it ends up actually working in their favor to allow you to flex your muscles this way betimes.

Love is when you get out there with your whole family, from newborns to codgers and physically pluck the offenders from their offices, whether you are met with a hail of bullets or the cops all drop their guns in the face of the gorgeous little children skipping around them. You could absorb the violence rather than perpetrate it. THAT is true nonviolence. But THIS is NOT. This is pusillanimity. This is theater. This is fucked up. This is NOT "change". It is capitulation. It is the process of consent to enslavement.

You are NOT supplicants. They are NOT in charge. They have taken charge because you are afraid to stop them. You delude yourself that you've voted them in and so must hang with what they've wrought. IT'S AN HALLUCINATION. You know it's not right, you just can't get over your existential terror long enough to FIX it.

LOVE is the kind of courage you saw in Gladiator and Braveheart. You went batshit crazy for those two movies because of this ONE thing. The point is: It is vital to forever you get and keep that exact level of courage. You do NOT go apply for mercy on your tractor. You do not amass like a convention of sheep coming to auction. You do NOT waste days and weeks and months getting it done. You go out your door with the intent of stopping the harm immediately or dying in the effort. Gandhi HATED cowards. He was at pains to state that anyone too weak to walk smilingly into a hail of bullets had better fight for all he was worth. Gandhi would have stroked out to watch you tweeting madly between slogan chants.

OPEN YOUR EYES. IT'S TIME.

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love, 99
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test the power of your heart

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Keep Julian Assange in it all day. Let's see what we can do.

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love, 99
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happy birthday

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We will always love you.

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love, 99
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he's not talking about a woman

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Even though I love the music, the video is STUPID. It occurs to me, if he even wrote the lyrics, not even Robertson exactly got what he himself was saying... if he thought all that puny/chic symbolism in the video was capturing it....

Oh! Wait. Who cares? Forget the artist.

Look at it as NOBODY being the author of the words.

The lyrics are about nature, The Great Spirit, Avalokiteśvara, Samantabhadra, the primordial principal, sometimes a she, sometimes a he, sometimes both and neither. It's not about social constraints, or politics, or money, or sex. It's about real liberation.

With eyes of fire
No one can see
The smoke from the sweet grass
Covers me

I am drawn
I am drawn to her
Like a moth to flame
She leads me down
Unbound

I am lost
I am lost
Has anybody seen me
I am lost

Oh nothing is forgotten
Only left behind
Wherever I am
She leads me down
Unbound

No borders
No fences
No walls
No borders
No fences
Unbound

Oh, listen for the night chant
Oh, listen for the night chant

Like a moth to flame
She leads me down
Unbound

No borders
No fences
Unbound
No borders
No fences
Unbound

I'm dying for someone to start speaking my language to me. Am I being a baby tiger?

All our ancestors knew about this. They rode the last great recovery from cataclysm that we might know it too, live truly, be with reality, be the adamantine kind of free in a perfect environment. You keep ignoring it. You keep trying to squeeze it into a science you can quantify and manipulate. You keep drinking the ignoring away because you don't believe in it yourself anymore. You are distracted by endless horrors, and letting off bottle rockets in your backyard, changing the oil in your car.

No wonder you think it's about sex.

That's the closest you ever come to the truth.
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i do NOT have lupus, but i'm a shithead anyway

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I am home safely and do not feel deathly ill yet because I just got here. Skin biopsy and blood tests all no-way-Jose for lupus, and that is excellent, but leaves us vexed, of course. Nuking me with a strange antibiotic for a rare skin disease now, and blasting me with supplements of every ilk. I expect this to be the frickin' end of it! Goddammit!

It seems I all unknowingly offended the living snot out of a new friend who was in a killing state of grief, and she is understandably livid with me. If I'd known, and I guess I should have, that she was in such a state, it wouldn't have happened. I've tried to explain my temporary incogitance, and so ergo temporary ignorance, and maybe some day she will see that it was just a case of seriously suckish timing, but, damn, that really, really, sucks anyway. At least I hope she sees that there was no intent to cause offense. Be that as it may, while I am certain it was only a mistake of timing, I'm officially a shithead for right now.

Sheesh. Spaz on Tuesday, Shithead on Friday....

I have to run off to the store before I go soak my head in a bucket of ice cubes.

clutching my bob marley lighter

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... watching Moyers, musing about how he really didn't feel very sorry about fruffling a bunch of ruffles with Mark Crispin Miller last week, trying not to be incredulous about what Galbraith fils was saying, starting to tear up with hope and making the little lights go on my coveted lighter, thinking One Love... and then he ended tonight's program with it. So I had myself a good cry.

i gots me another bob marley lighter today

And I didn't have to go clear to Garberville for it. It was real close. In Brookings, Oregon! Oh joy!

A really stuffy kine Republican old broad sold it to me with her nose wrinkled in disapproval while I gushed about my hero on lighters. I told her it wasn't the music, really, or the hair that does it for me. It's the love, the unity, the perfection of humanity he stood for that turns me on. Her nose crinkled even more. I said, "Damn I wish he were still alive! I'd make love to him till he couldn't stand up." Just before she it the floor in a dead faint, she said, "You must be from Californiaaaaa...."

[Okay, so I'm exaggerating just a little on that last bit....]

[And goodness bless Floridiot for picking my spirits back off the floor from the fucking presidential debate with this hysterical bit of video!!!!!!]

dear humanity

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one tree hill... one....

someday they may have to settle for calling me the hysterical buddha

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I was so damn sleepy, and it was even a reasonable hour. I got in bed, and the words on my magazine were swimming around. So I turned out the light and snuggled deeply with my pillow. My mind went blank and sleep hovered over me like an angel. Then I was completely awake for the first time all day. I have not slept yet.

Something has happened with the post office out here in the boondocks. Mail is not coming at reasonable intervals anymore. Suddenly my New Yorker is arriving fantastically late, and even sometimes so late as to be jumbled in order. I was out of my magazine, my big splurge on myself. I had to resort to a truly fascinating gardening catalog. Then I thought I could get up and check the blogs. Then I got back in bed, feeling the distant burn of food poisoning hovering like a devil over the lining of my innards. Then my position was askew enough to make my post nasal drip cause me to choke and splutter, and my ears got that all numb feeling again. Then I stewed about my decision to put this place up for sale and how I am going to end up a bag lady with no broadband. Then I thought, what a lot of pain I'm entertaining these days. Shit! I can't get the shampoo out of my hair and I can't read my magazine and I'm dead tired and wide awake and obsessing and being mean to myself and, did I mention? -- old.

My hand swung down from under my mountains of comforter to a dusty book on the bottom shelf of my night stand and I began reading Master Zong Mi (780-841 c.e.) without even thinking to do it. Finally! This is the first I've read from him, but most of my books I've read at least three times, some of them seven or eight or twelve. It was hard to get my hands on this translation. I'd been looking for it for years. Still, I don't just acquire masters and gobble them up like my favorite novelist. I cannot bring myself to make a "practice" of them either, to pad around my rooms in attitudes of piety and keep my date with one or the other of the real men gracing my shelves and cubbyholes and baskets and my desk and file drawers. That's so fake. Even if no one sees me, it's just as bad to be a fraud in front of yourself as anyone else. I could then come report my virtue to you I suppose... change my name to Zen 99... start attracting legions of suffering scramble-heads for fun and profit. But no. That's utterly unacceptable. And so is running to the Huayen when I'm frightened I've lost my way, disgraced myself, never going to be worth the rooms full of diamonds my teacher lavished on me. I can't run to my books, then, like someone erring and frantic to do the thing that will block the karma. I just can't. That's so supremely self-absorbed. In short, I have great difficulty seeing to my Buddhist scholarship because I am almost never clean enough to be in the same house with these masterpieces, let alone open one, or sit on the floor with five or six of them arrayed in front of me.

But just before the sun came up, I was.

So naturally I did.

And Zong Mi made perfect sense. Every word was clear to me. I could remember all the times I read these guys without the first part of a clue what they were driving at. That bit we all think is Chinese inscrutability, but actually is Western imbecility. I cannot confess how long it has been since I could pick up one of these books and start reading. You might be able to guess from the incredibly busy schedule described above.

Crikey! My teacher leapt to wake me up, bathing me in oceans of sublime fragrances, heaping jewels on me, draping me in the finest fabrics, turning the ground to mountains of gorgeous flowers and sending singing birds to fill my air, but left me to fall back into the glue pit as often as ever karma would have it! The time it is taking is deeply, deeply humiliating.

I don't even know if I will ever even lay eyes on that Noble One again! Do you know that nothing and no one has as much priority, yet might be dead before I'm fit to engage with again. I can't believe my guts aren't splattered all over the wall, so important is this... to... all of us.

one

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Today has been a good day for serious contemplation. Obama standing up to do an almost perfect imitation of a president. The Dalai Lama standing up to do an almost perfect incarnation of a non-president. Even with the severe handicap of the inability to rely on the information available about almost everything, these seem to be shining lights on what is so, what has been so since before I was born, but was just hidden by the smog of conditioning for my whole life.

Were it not for capitalism, for the greed of the few forever subjugating the many, I would devoutly wish for globalization, the new world order, the one world order, because it more closely conforms with truth, the truth of Planet Earth. It has the potential for solving the problems of mankind from time immemorial, but instead we're looking down the barrel of the same old gun. Without well-defined nations, what mechanism do we have to enforce decent economic conditions for the people? If plutocrats can just choose to use the hungriest from wherever they are found, nothing keeps us all from slavery. Nothing.

The Dalai Lama stood up and told his people he wants no part of their struggle for their freedom, that he doesn't like blood and death and tribulation, so they should just be meek while he continues to be ignored in his wishes for Tibetan autonomy, and revered for his adamantine nonviolence and transcendental patience. We can all just hope the Chinese intermarry with the surviving Tibetans and someday there will be no more suffering on this account... I guess.

He never has had an ounce of statesmanship in his body, while a goddam American politician picked this very day to stand up to show he's got the potential for a couple hundred pounds of it. I had to watch the video of his speech over again. He erred in not insuring the sound quality for that speech. It was well that he delivered it in a very reserved manner, but the venue was too sedate rather than tastefully not a rock concert. We could have used that enhancement of affect to help drive home the uniqueness and elegance and beauty of the moment. Despite the glaring gratuitous lick for Israel, capped with another glaring gratuitous swipe at radical Islam, and rather too much vehemence against his pastor's ultimately righteous inflammatory speech, Obama stood up for decency and for adult administration of our nation. It actually did remind me just a little of JFK, and I'd thought Caroline was overstating it when she endorsed him. Maybe not. Maybe not.

This speech left his rivals in the dust. Of that is there any doubt? I think you might still only doubt it because it had to be delivered almost sotto voce lest Hillary or McWarmonger let fly with their sarcasm about his eloquence again, helping the entire country to miss heroically crucial points that already have been so long past due. So, yes, despite the too consequential nods to political expediency, I am left with a noticeable glow of hope that he will in fact grow into the job, that we can elect him and be unified in the long effort to repair and improve our entirely too imperfect union.

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While having myself a little smoking on the porch break and looking around for the link to Caroline's endorsement, I found an improved version of Obama's speech, so I replaced the version I'd posted below with a better one. It, I think, is worth listening to again, especially if you were left unclear on it the first time. Or, for those who prefer to read this stuff, the link to that is above and right here.

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So, okay, it wasn't as subdued as it seemed on the CNN feed, but that is the version most heard. It was, however, enough to scare the snot out of the right wing trolls. So desperate are they for Hillary, they're out spamming every comment thread on Obama from the last year with their smear sites' URLs already. So maybe I can be content that the point was not missed.

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While contemplating the Dalai Lama's unsuitability as a head of state in the wider world today it managed to come home to me how my country has never been the force for good in the world we've all been conditioned to believe. Yes we fought and beat fascism in WWII, but we immediately turned on our communist allies and dug in for the long economic starvation of their flourishing state. It's all, all, been about opening the globe to capitalist domination... to global feudalism. We worse than do not need Buddhist One and Politician One fighting public perception with words ruinous to whole populations, and it is so odd now to find myself losing hope for His Holiness and gaining just a flicker for Barack Obama.

We need so desperately leaders whose attention is not on the great popularity contest of public life on earth. We need men and women determined to make a better world, not determined to please enough backers to stay in office, not so married to shaming bad guys into freeing the oppressed because you have withstood every insult to life and decency they have slung with monumental equanimity, not so terrified of American military might they cannot act on the world stage in the best interests of everyone except the fascist fucks controlling it.

The silver lining to this economic crisis, this ultimate looting of the public's wealth, the global public's wealth, the one about which Aaron Russo fought so manfully to warn us before he died, if we manage to avert WWIII coming on its heels, is that it will turn nations to the business of domestic recovery, of rising from the ashes, and it could even mean getting the attention to doing it cleanly. But that is really only the hope that there has to be a point beyond which the war criminals will not go, that they have enough humanity left to just now sit back and count their loot for a generation or so. There is nothing in place anywhere to enforce this. It would all be merely at their whim. And that is patently not good enough.

Look at * and Fudd and Rice and Gates and McCain and Lieberman and Pelosi and Reid -- et al. -- all red-facedly and/or outright drunkenly squeaking the spin and the buzzwords and the lies and the excuses for this heinous progression of deadly -- genocidal -- profit taking! It won't ever stop if we don't outright turn all our attention to what is mandatory to the global emergencies their kind have caused and perpetuate despite the certainty it will bring on a mass extinction event.

Go click the peace symbol at the top of my sidebar!

That is the kind of determination we must use, despite our homelessness, starvation, fear for our families and lives, despite any impediment, despite every impediment. Don't have the audacity of hope Obama will come in and wipe this all away. Even if they let him live, he will only be able, and willing, to go so far for our benefit. The fact that he is showing that he indeed has the kind of discernment and judgment to make good decisions does not mean he will be willing to get killed to save us from these guys. He's shown already that he's not. He may be facing the distinct possibility of assassination to make this run, but these fiends have proven they have the audacity of bottomless greed and they will not hesitate to do whatever it takes to get their way for as long as there is a public this pacific, this hypnotized, this terrified of discomfort.

The only way it stops is when they are shown the consequences of continuing are unacceptable. It does not take rioting. It only takes them seeing the unequivocal evidence of outrageous numbers against them, and that stops them.

So, yep, Obama is the best one in the running for the job. I have no particle of a doubt left about it, and probably most of the people who visit here don't either, but we absolutely cannot let this lull us into the fantasy this is going to turn it around. The whole premise of the United States in the world, and at home, is rotten. There is only so much he can do. We really must insist.

And, founding fathers fanatic that I am, when I say "we", I do not mean only Americans. I mean humanity. We are all the same one, and we really must insist.