This political cartoon in the Reno Gazette Journal this morning did my old heart good! If the election wasn’t a high-tide blue wave for Democrats, it certainly was a tsunami of a “Me Too!” blue wave as liberal women “grabbed” congressional seats away from cowardly old Republican male incumbents who were deathly afraid of Trump.
Trump should be running scared from now on. He knows the Resistance will force him to pay the price for his white supremacy nationalism, bigotry, racism, xenophobia and misogyny ~llaw
Apollo’s Muses. Calliope, the muse of eloquent epic poetry and writing, is under attack in today’s world. . .
Writing allows us to more precisely and eloquently express ourselves, humorously or seriously, with neutrality or prejudice, happily or angrily, or even indifferently or passionately concerning those categories of issues we like and love, or disdain and hate, The latter includes journalistic opinions concerning and considering all the current administration’s political high crimes and misdemeanors such as cronyism, conspiracies, corruption, collusion, covert crime, and perhaps treason, placing America and the world in a dangerous and desperate place that threatens our questionable culture and social fabric as people —presumably civilized human beings.
Then, too, there is Gaia’s world for us to protect and advocate for, because Mother Earth is life’s common home at a time when we humans are ravaging Her once pristine habitat to the point that we, our children, and our fauna and flora friends may soon no longer be able to survive on this human-polluted planet — and there is nowhere else to go. There are already huge ocean dead zones along the continental coastlines, particularly along America’s eastern and southern coasts and along the northern Mediterranean coast, where no sea life can survive, and obviously, environmental death is rapidly coming ashore. We all have an obligation to protect the natural environment that was gifted to us so long ago in the latter stages of creation. Yet we, the self-proclaimed intellectual ones, are demeaning, damaging, despoiling, and even destroying the only home we have. We call it progress, but it is really just mankind’s parasitic gluttony and greed. Extinction is not a pretty word, and it is sad that we continue to forever fail to learn from our mistakes of the past. When we become too much for Mother Earth to be comfortable with, She will shake off our parasitic pandemic like water off a dog.
As for the the Fourth Estate, in 1839 Edward Bulwer-Lytton declared that ”the pen is mightier than the sword.” We shall see. The 4th Estate is under an overt brutal full-frontal attack in America and other countries, and I, for one, am here to defend and help fight for the cause of freedom of speech and our First Amendment liberties.
The court of public opinion may have to be the final judge against the rise of the 4th Reich’s fascist authoritarian rampage of chaos and anarchy that could be the most serious issue to threaten the concept of a self-governing democracy and our inalienable rights and freedoms since the American Revolution. But thankfully, at least in those days, we had a few leaders with a common sense of values, and especially, a President, on our side. ~llaw
Mary, John, and Jesus (from Da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’)
Mary, I’m not sure why I love you
Or why my heart yearns so intensely
Nor what created our strange milieu
Or my soul-indulgent fantasy
But my mind is filled with thoughts of you
That consume my nights and all my days
With such hopes and dreams that shan’t come true
Since we live our lives in disparate ways
What might have been is all that I have
To comfort me in my sad despair
When with my Muse I find words to salve
My heart for mending with Wisdom’s care
Your bright eyes reveal your inner light
Illuminate your divinity
You are our lost Goddess in plain sight
Sent from Pleroma’s infinity
You are Mary of old Magdalen
Reborn through divine androgyny
Sent to awaken the souls of men
To errant ways of misogyny
Old Christian clerics rewrote the Books
Turned the secular world upside down
In order to reverse the spiritual looks
From Sophia’s smile to Yahweh’s frown
Priests stole the Texts of the Gnostic times
Perverted the role of the priestess
From goddess of love to harlot’s crimes
And scribed the myths of that god they bless
They burned those Texts and switched the places
Of women and men and life and death
They moved the holy dwelling spaces
To far distant realms beyond our breath
Those priests hid the Truths once known so well
While Yahweh with hubristic grandeur
Led the world into the depths of hell
His archons draped in unctuous splendor
Eve was impugned for Adam’s weakness
Beguiling him of the ways of life
By eating from the Tree of Gnosis
And Yahweh cursed them to lives of strife
When Jesus was sent to right the world
Bursting with our sins and corruption
He found the Truths and tried to herald
That Yahweh’s way was blind deception
Christ was forsaken and left to die
While Magdalene with love’s treasure trove
Grieved at his feet knowing the lie
That the clerics with their archons wove
They tore Hypatia the lovely mind
To pieces in the Egyptian streets
Because she told of the truth behind
The lies of the Coptic Christian priests
Our Joan of Arc the Maid of Orleans
Burned at the stake by ecclesiasts
For heresy though yet in her teens
Made a martyr for their priestly castes
Mary, I am called to help you learn
And instruct you of your destiny
To inform the World of your return
And of your gifts for humanity
Now for us all with your heart laid bare
Our Lost Goddess has arrived once more
To right the wrongs for the ones who care
To conclude this Patriarchal War
~ from your loving John, for just one more of those ten thousand lifetimes during which I shall wait for you
Deep Springs College 2018 freshman class includes first women in school history. 10 women and 5 men are admitted to first co-ed class.
For the first time in its 101 year history, Deep Springs college, a highly regarded, but remote and isolated junior college in eastern California, about 40 miles southeast of Bishop near the Nevada border, has enrolled its first female students. Ten women and five men make up the new class of 2018. The two-year school’s normal total enrollment is between 25 and 30 students. The large number of incoming women was to provide at least a 1/3 voice in the student body, who have a significant role in the administration of the college, including student activities and discipline.
This is a great step for gender equality at a school that has spent the past seven years in litigation over whether or not women should be admitted, not to mention pressure from institutions and individuals close to the college for several years before that, including the Telluride Association, which granted (with low interest) the school $1.8 million in 1988 to remodel the main campus building, but with the covenant that it would have to repay the gift as a loan if women were not admitted by 2019. The school managed to beat the deadline by a year. Deep Springs College has had its fair share of problems over its long history, despite its shining reputation as one of the best collegiate prep colleges in the nation, as attested by its remarkable placement of graduates in the most acclaimed Ivy league schools such as Harvard, Yale and Brown, as well as Oxford, Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT, the University of Chicago, and many others, even though it is, by design, a school that is a cattle and hay ranch, and a dairy farm that provides a free education for its students for their hard labor in the pastures, fields and dairy barn.
In a 2006 article, the New Yorker had this to say, in addition to apparent homosexuality problems, that “Every major change at Deep Springs has been opposed by the students,” said Christopher Breiseth, former college president. Deep Springs’ s all-male self-enclosure allows its students to feel wildly, hedonically free. The shock of returning to the world of social norms can be profound. In 1994, the college voted against coeducation, but the controversial subject has created a fissure in the school’s relationship with the Telluride Association, where women have been members for 45 years.”
Perhaps the reticent and grudgingly awaited arrival of women students at Deep Springs this summer will provide a new cooperative attitude between the school’s board and the student body and instructors, raising the already sterling reputation of the school to the stratosphere of highly regarded and most reputable of America’s institutions of higher education. ~llaw
This photograph of the old Hotel Wisdom in the desolate and isolated town of Wisdom, Montana, reminds me in both name and verse of the old Eagles’ song “Hotel California”:
‘We are programmed to receive.
You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave!’Wisdom itself is like the conclusion of that old Eagles’ song. Once we begin at birth to acquire knowledge, no matter by what means, our minds are forever bound to a lifelong quest and need for more knowledge. Eventually we can try to turn off our innate curiosity, our inquisitiveness, our agendas, interests, inquiries and analyses, but we can’t because “We are programmed to receive” You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
Sometimes over the years many of us resist the urge to learn, acquire knowledge, and find wisdom, but it does those of us who fight it no conceivable good in the long run. In fact allowing our innate curiosity to go stale is probably the worst thing we can do with our lives because it leaves us behind on the valuable scale of knowledge in a very competitive world. And once we fall behind, it is nearly impossible to catch up. So we decide to “check out”, taking the easy way out, and that involves learning from others like ourselves by word of mouth, never knowing if that new knowledge is fact or fiction, but if it seems logical or reasonable in our uneducated minds, we begin to pass it along to others we know. Some of that is what once was known as”old wives’ tales”, but now includes full-blown “conspiracy theories” or propaganda promulgated by the thousands of lies by ignorant people as important as even the president of the United States, and he knows that a minority of the population will believe his lies and follow. But his is a losing effort, because at some point his house of cards will all come tumbling down by the wind of his own hot air.
About two-thirds of America’s population are knowledgeable enough to see through this president and some even have the wisdom to rail against him and his treasonous coup attempt (with Russia and a complicit GOP-led congress) to destroy what the Democratic Republic of America has always stood for and replace it with autocratic fascistic rule where we the people have no civil, social, or even human rights
Those of us who have endorsed the Trumpian world view have, somewhere along the way,, lost their will to learn and use the knowledge they never had, and the wisdom they never gained. giving themselves no pause to consider or evaluate the lies, propaganda and conspiracy theories spewing forth from Trump, his administration, sympathizers, and sycophants.
Hopefully the delusional dreams of Trump’s and all his minions’ dangerous dark new world is about to go down in a blaze of glorious delight with the midterm election on November 6th, 2018 and criminal justice shortly thereafter. But all of you who wanted to check out will never be able to leave. ~llaw
This, the immanent takeover of America by subversion, is precisely what I have been whining about for more than three years, and my concern has only grown since then. The validity of the upcoming mid-term election scares the hell out of me, and even if the Dems gain control of the house, it may be just a Trojan Horse. The seeds of absolute fascism have been well-planted and are being nurtured with overt aplomb while we watch with our eyes wide open. ~llaw
“We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals.”
Although there was more to his farewell statement, this part seems to be intended solely for Trump without mentioning his name, but Trump will probably say that McCain’s statement was not directed at him because he is the one bringing the people together. But, regardless, he will ignore the message. ~llaw
Cathedral Rock near Senator McCain’s ranch in Sedona, Arizona
Senator McCain was a brave military officer and just as brave as a United States Senator, one of few during his career where he served our country for thirty-six years. He not only had the courage to take on his GOP contemporaries, but also often reach across the aisle to work with Democrats on important critical legislation. America could use more men like John McCain. ~llaw
Wisdom itself is like the conclusion of that old Eagles’ song. Once we begin at birth to acquire knowledge, no matter by what means, our minds are forever bound to a lifelong quest and need for more knowledge. Eventually we can try to turn off our innate curiosity, our inquisitiveness, our agendas, interests, inquiries and analyses, but we can’t because “We are programmed to receive” You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
“We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals.”
Cathedral Rock near Senator McCain’s ranch in Sedona, Arizona