I subscribed to the Lib of Congress nwsltr. They sent this article which includes the link to the (1.5 hr long / below) video.
Eventually I getz fed up stayin' up all night and tooken a whole ambien. The next day is loggy and includes a nap, typically an hour and a half in the late afternoon.
The nap easily carries me through until 5 a.m., maybe longer, depending on how exciting The Mkt is. Pre-Mkt opens at 2 a.m. and needs frequent checking.
The REAL Mkt opens at 7:30 a.m. and goes until 2 p.m. Having awakened at 4 pm the day before, we're now at 22 hours. Now, half an ambien is sufficient.
So far this month I've made $300.00. Nothing near my goal of $40k+/mo, but I'm humming that song about rubber tree plants.
Anyway, around 10:30 I started reading Shamans of the World edited by Nancy Connor with Bradford Keeney, Ph.D. and - you know how it is w the internet - now, at 1:22 a.m. Monday, here's the warren so far:
Here's Walking Thunder. Shamans starts w her, a Diné.
Adrienne had been coming since April. Then, in August, her dawg wrapped its leash around her legs and pulled her over backwards. Her injuries put her in the hospital; she thought she mught come back in November.
Andrea took over until one day Debbie from Vancouver showed up. She had no info about Andrea.
The next week Dawn came. She said Andrea had had an accident and she, Dawn, was just following orders. No one ever told me anything. My texts to both Adrienne & Andrea went unanswered.
Then came Jessica. She was different; she's an artist, a writer, a poet, a performance artist, a nurse for 30 years and has been working with the dying for twelve. She's lived in Grants, New Mexico, got her nursing degree in Mississippi, and is part Taos Puebloan and part Hispanic. She has a grand-daughter.
After taking my vitals, she read me her poems. She just got a YT channel so there'll be more soon.
The Brink
Brother-in-law takes tours around the globe fulfilling - as he says - his duty as a privileged senior; it's what he's supposed to do. Back from Budapest via New Zealand, he stayed with a friend in L.A. for awhile then came to our place. A list of chores kept him occupied for a few days but as time went on his things began appearing in odd places: his toothbrush and water glass took up residence behind the toaster next to the kitchen sink; an array of powders - whey & protein plus oatmeal and Smooth Move - appeared atop the kitchen cupboards where they offended the sensibilities of the ceramic wine bottles & German beer steins. A week earlier I'd begun wondering when he was gonna leave.
The man has a golden heart and is generous. He gifted us with both the 2008 and 2015 Honda FITS...new. But this is a 900 sq ft bungalow. The 3rd bedroom, Michelle's former studio is the "storage locker." I snore so "the office," the smaller bedroom, hardly more than a walk-in closet, is now my lair. The Smirket Room, where Steve sleeps, is our "maker's space."
Even gold-hearted & generous still casts an inhibitory pall on my proclivity for clothes-lessness. I did my best, but even eine Churminz best ist evidently not very güt as he interpreted my attempt at tact as: GET THE EF OUT!
Bless his heart, he went off to stay with a high-school buddy in god-for-saken Portales (east New Mexico), a mere hop annuh skip from Muleshoe, Texas. (People go for the notoriety of saying they've been.)
A former girlfriend sometimes lets him stay in her parent's home in Phoenix. They're in assisted-living and she's hiking in Patagonia and other relatives use it too so he had to find somewhere else until he could get the "all clear." Even though he can afford lengthy excursions anywhere on the globe, he's thrifty and prefers couch surfing to an Airbnb. He has an apartment in Denver, but it's cold up there.
From Navajo Lake
She told of heating them in an oven and holding them against one's heart. "It's grounding," she said, "and helps when you're dissociating." When I held it to my heart I felt the kindness of the gift. The round one is for Kristen.
my foot
O-rings keep the shower curtain on the hooks.
Ascorbic acid is an antibacterial.
A lemon in the cooler...
...keeps the skank water at bay.
It was around 3:30. A young couple were napping under the big pine. When I offered money they laughed and said they lived nearby but enjoyed sleeping under the tree. The homes are in the $375k range.
It's people like Greg & his spouse that give me hope. If they can keep on like this then so can I.
https://travelsofaramblingvan.blogspot.com/2025/11/another-silly-little-project.html?m=1
Screenshot from Greg's blog
If you tap on a picture to make it larger (or accidentally), there's a TEENSIE x in the upper right corner that'll get you back to the blog.
We're starting to recognize 'em.
We should all be so relaxed.
That's Vince Distasio's painting Little Weasel above Trixie (formally known as Bonsai cuz she's small).
If you goto my website you'll get a message saying it isn't secure. That's cuz it doesn't have http:// in front of the URL. If you know someone who can help with that, please have them get in touch. My email is at the bottom of my profile.
Vince lived downwind of Intel. He, like many others in his neighborhood, died of a rare cancer. He died angry as he'd worked hard to stay in shape. To spite the oil companies, he rode his bicycle everywhere including the 30 miles roundtrip 3x a week to clean the pool at the Officer's Club at Kirtland Air Force Base. He worked out at the gym two hours a day, played basketball as often as possible and ran for an hour (every day!) around the park near his house despite having been told he'd ruin his knee (both) replacements. Look at him in this video taken a year or so before he died.
This is how we (we guys) could look if we exercised like Vince. His 93-year-old cousin in Connecticut, in perfect health, had recently contacted him about helping him divest himself of some of his art collection; he was thinking he might should be thinking ahead a few years.
I went to the park by CNM. It's a long uphill from where I parked. I like to stop along the way and take in the mountains.
He was about my age, and as he went by I said, "Show off!" We both got a chuckle.
My mobile resting place.
BOLDING AND LARGER TYPE MY DOING.
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| Corporate interests keep world's poor hungry Sunday, June 29, 2003 By Alexander Cockburn They're saving the world from hunger again.This time the bold crusaders have been mustered in Sacramento, California, to proclaim the glories of chemical industrial agriculture, biotechnology, genetically-modified crops and livestock, and kindred expressions of the modern age. The forum has been a federally-sponsored Ministerial Confere n c e a nd E x p o of Agricultural Science and Technology. Under the approving eyes of bigwigs from biotech firms such as Monsanto, US officials such as agriculture secretary AnnVeneman pounded the drum for high-tech agriculture. "This conference is for those most in need," Veneman said last Monday. "It [hunger] has to become a global agenda . . . new approaches are needed." Was there ever a moment, in the long tradition of such overblown rhetoric, that "new approaches" weren't needed? Scour all the old speeches across the past century about starving billions around the planet or starving millions in the US, and it's always the same professions of noble purpose. "We can end hunger now," declared the sales folk for the Green Revolution that peaked in expectation in 1971 when Dr Norman Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize for his invention of Mexican miracle wheat, heavily backed by the Rockefeller Foundation. And indeed miracle wheat paid off handsomely for rich farmers on expensively irrigated land in Sonora but, as always, intensive monoculture drove marginal, subsistence farmers off the land and the Mexican poor people hated Borlaug's low-gluten wheat.The peasants and poor urban dwellers of south and southeast Asia also hated the first `miracle' rice, IR-8, because it cooked up mushy and tasted bad. "History may well record that the Green Revolution was a greater disaster than ourVietnam intervention." So wrote John and Karen Hess in their funny, fiery book,TheTaste of America, published in 1977. They were probably right, if you add up all the `greater-thanexpected deaths' (as the statisticians put it) inThird World countries savaged by techno-fixers from the First World trying to make world agricultural production safe for capitalism. The techno-fixers moved in step with the counter-insurgency forces, who also acted to save world agricultural production, but more drastically. In the 1950s, when the peoples of Guatemala and Iran elected governments committed to land reform, the CIA paid for coups to kill the reformers and protect the old land barons. This sanction - exercised by the CIA, advisers, technicians from USAID, death squads and allied agents - extended across Latin America for the next 30 years, crowned by the butchering, under CIA supervision, of 200,000 Mayan Indians in Guatemala in the 1980s. On the other side of the world, when the land barons of Afghanistan were threatened by a revolution there in the late 1970s, supported by the Soviets, the CIA pumped in aid and fanatical Islamic advisers. The opiumgrowing land barons returned, and they flourish still, rich on opium harvests that are now the highest in the country's ghistory, amid the desperate hunger of most Afghans. It wouldn't be hard to feed all the people on the planet. The Malthusian thesis about population growth outstripping means of subsistence has long since been disproved.The imperatives of capital are always searingly obvious in agriculture, as is obvious if you fly south down California's Central Valley from Sacramento, ground zero for an agricultural system based on oil (oil-based pesticides, fertiliser, courtesy of natural gas), absentee ownership - mostly by banks - and water allocated by water boards controlled by the land barons via politicians in their pay. The latest techno-revolution merely underlines the obvious. `Advances' in agricultural technology are mostly ways to tie the farmer into a cycle of debt peonage, to restrict production in favour of the big growers and to send the little guy to the wall. (Witness the fate of strains of corn or wheat perfected by peasants over centuries, as with Indians and hard wheat, later appropriated by Canadian farmers.) All the major US food programmes suffer from the same vice of hypocrisy. Food for Peace in the 1950s, touted as the US's gift to the world's starving, was a sophisticated dumping scheme, and a way of supporting US military allies with food. Franklin D Roosevelt's farm programmes in the New Deal favoured big agricultural concerns and pushed thousands of subsistence farmers off the land. At least we can thank FDR and his agriculture secretary Henry Wallace for the Chicago bluesmen who wended their way north after New Deal subsidies - given to land barons to take their acres out of production - de-stroyed all prospects for the sharecroppers. Thirty years ago in the US, politicians felt it necessary to make stirring speeches in support of the small family farmer. You don't hear much talk like that now, after the latest holocaust of corporate integration. US agriculture is controlled by about five monstrous corporations, such as Tysons and Archer Daniels Midland, and this trend is spreading across the planet. The way to ensure that there aren't hungry people in the world is to give peasants land, unencumbered by debt peonage. The US has spent the last 150 years ensuring that precisely the opposite conditions prevail, to which the corporate carnival in Sacramento attests. Alexander Cockburn has worked in the US as a journalist for the past 30 years and is the author of two books. He is coeditor of the newsletter and website, Counterpunch, and writes for the Nation. His column appears fortnightly in Agenda | ||||||||
