A new day I never seen before nor will I ever again. Be glad in it.

Greetings, beings of time and space. It is happening again.

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Today In History

Patient: "Herodotus is the father of history. Did you know that?"
Hana: "I don't know anything."

There are Indians of another tribe, who border on the city of Caspatyrus, and the country of Pactyica; these people dwell northward of all the rest of the Indians, and follow nearly the same mode of life as the Bactrians. They are more warlike than any of the other tribes, and from them the men are sent forth who go to procure the gold. For it is in this part of India that the sandy desert lies. Here, in this desert, there live amid the sand great ants, in size somewhat less than dogs, but bigger than foxes. The Persian king has a number of them, which have been caught by the hunters in the land whereof we are speaking. Those ants make their dwellings under ground, and like the Greek ants, which they very much resemble in shape, throw up sand heaps as they burrow. Now the sand which they throw up is full of gold. The Indians, when they go into the desert to collect this sand, take three camels and harness them together, a female in the middle and a male on either side, in a leading rein. The rider sits on the female, and they are particular to choose for the purpose one that has but just dropped her young; for their female camels can run as fast as horses, while they bear burthens very much better.

When the Indians reach the place where the gold is, they fill their bags with the sand, and ride away at their best speed: the ants, however, scenting them, as the Persians say, rush forth in pursuit. Now these animals are, they declare, so swift, that there is nothing in the world like them: if it were not, therefore, that the Indians get a start while the ants are mustering, not a single gold-gatherer could escape. During the flight the male camels, which are not so fleet as the females, grow tired, and begin to drag, first one, and then the other; but the females recollect the young which they have left behind, and never give way or flag. Such, according to the Persians, is the manner in which the Indians get the greater part of their gold; some is dug out of the earth, but of this the supply is more scanty.

Today's Economists

We say you cannot divert the river from the riverbed. We say that everything is moving, and we are a part of this motion. That the soil is moving. That the water is moving. We say that the earth draws water to her from the clouds. We say the rainfall parts on each side of the mountain, like the parting of our hair, and that the shape of the mountain tells where the water has passed. We say this water washes the soil from the hillsides, that the rivers carry sediment, that rain when it splashes carries small particles, that the soil itself flows with water in streams underground. We say that water is taken up into roots of plants, into stems, that it washes down hills into rivers, that these rivers flow to the sea, that from the sea, in the sunlight, this water rises to the sky, that this water is carried in clouds, and comes back as fog, back as dew, as wetness in the air.

We say everything comes back. And you cannot divert the river from the riverbed. We say every act has its consequences. That this place has been shaped by the river, and that the shape of this place tells the river where to go.

We say every act comes back on itself. There are consequences. You cannot cut the trees from the mountainside without a flood. We say if you change the course of this river you change the shape of the whole place. And we say if this river leaves this place, nothing will grow and the mountain will crumble away. That once the trees are cut down, the water will wash the mountain away and the river be heavy with mud, and there will be a flood.

We say look how the water flows from this place and returns as rainfall, everything returns, we say, and one thing follows another, there are limits, we say, on what can be done and everything moves. We are all a part of this motion, we say, and the way of the river is sacred, and this grove of trees is sacred, and we ourselves, we tell you, are sacred.

"The Chinese, they come here. Three times. They said they were just measuring the tide. It's a lie. We never said nothing."

"You get snappers, yellow tail, drum, mackerel. You catch jack, snook, shark, green turtles, iguanas."

"We may look poor but we are rich. If you want to have a coconut, there is the tree. If you want to have breadfruit, the tree is right there. The orange tree is here."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgVpjyQYbLE]

Forty years ago this month, Lou Reed released Metal Machine Music. Lester Bangs claimed that this lp was "the greatest record ever made in the history of the human eardrum." But the consenus is Bangs wrote that after he was dead. Having tried this night 82 seconds of Reed's Metal Machine Music, I've decided that I don't think we need any of that here.

I find more interesting the recent conversation between Oriol Vinyal and Quoc Le of Google and their metal "chatbox" AI machine. The metal machine music of which sounds as follows:

Human: What is the purpose of life?
Machine: To serve the greater good.
Human: What is the purpose of living?
Machine: To live forever.
Human: What is the purpose of existence?
Machine: To find out what happens when we get to the planet earth.
Human: Where are you now?
Machine: I'm in the middle of nowhere.
Human: What is the purpose of dying?
Machine: To have a life.
Human: What is the purpose of being intelligent?
Machine: To find out what it is.
Human: What is the purpose of emotions?
Machine: I don't know.

People think Roger Zelazny's "For A Breath I Trarry" a work of fiction. They are wrong. It is, once and future, fact.

The planet Pluto has a heart. Literally. It is 1200 miles across, and it is beating right there on the surface. There is a whale swimming across the surface of the planet, too.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DzrOqLQhKg]

And on the comet Philae there is life.

And animals dream, and of the future. And computers dream, in psychedelica.

Miracles are frankly, simply, everywhere.

What more do you need? When it is seen that the magnetic poles—as Owsley once did say—of anywhere, of anything, can, on any day, shift, and 180 degrees—when to wit, Paul Thurmond, son of Strom Thurmond, the 1948 disinterrer of the foul and filthy slavery diaper, takes to the floor of the South Carolina Senate, and there says this:

My family has been in South Carolina for many generations. I was told that my great-grandfather was with General Lee when he surrendered at Appomattox. I am aware of my heritage. But my appreciation for the things that my forebears accomplished to make my life better doesn't mean that I must believe that they always made the right decisions. And for the life of me, I will never understand how anyone could fight a civil war based, in part, on the desire to continue the practice of slavery. Think about it for just a second. Our ancestors were literally fighting to continue to keep human beings as slaves, and continue the unimaginable acts that occur when someone is held against their will.

I am not proud of this heritage. These practices were inhumane and were wrong, wrong, wrong.

I am proud to take a stand and no longer be silent. I'm proud to be on the right side of history regarding the removal of this symbol of racism and bigotry from the statehouse.

But let it not satisfy us to stop there. Justice by halves is not justice. We must take down the Confederate flag and we must take it down now. But if we stop there, we have cheated ourselves out of an opportunity to start a different conversation about healing in our state.

I am ready. Let us start the conversation.

For the white winger, these are the days of sadness. For now, suddenly, not even the blood-kin of Strom—not even he—can be depended upon to publicly strut proudly, in the slavery diaper.

The world, for the white winger, so turned upside down, that the governor of Sweet Home Alabama, Robert Bentley, went to his office early one morning, and called workmen into his presence, and told them to go out and remove the Confederate battle flag from the capitol grounds. When the workmen reported back that they had done so, Bentley next told them to remove the remaining three Confederate-fellating flags from the statehouse grounds. When the workmen reported back that they had accomplished this, Bentley next instructed them to unearth the flagpoles. This, too, the workmen did.

Bentley made no public announcement about any of this. He commented on it only when harrassed by an inquiring reporter. Bentley then stated that "this is the right thing to do. We are facing some major issues in this state regarding the budget and other matters that we need to deal with. This had the potential to become a major distraction as we go forward. I have taxes to raise, we have work to do. And it was my decision that the flag needed to come down."

It was like the slavery diaper had become, overnight, to Bentley—and to every other American whose knuckles do not permanently drag upon the ground—an utter embarrassment. One akin to waking up the morning after a night of drunken folly to discover you'd the night before peed fulsomely into the shirt drawer. The best thing to do, then, is just quickly clean it up, pretend that it never had happened, never say nothing about it, and move on.

The white winger, he cannot any longer even enjoy his sports. For, bad enough, that gay people are now, flagrantly, freely, legally, marrying, and all across the land. But when once the white winger has hooted himself hoarse chanting "USA! USA! USA!," for his beloved sports team, he must witness the keystone of "his" victory, the person generally acknowledged as the finest football player in all the nation's history, after having secured the win that ranks her team number one in the sport in all the world, race across the field to embrace . . . her wife.

And the white winger, he must watch this, on Fox.

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The white winger, he thought for a time there he might rally, when there occurred what, for him, would be the perfect murder—a sweaty seedy paperless brown man, he shooting and killing, on a pier in San Francisco, an attractive young white woman.

Pure Fox, continuous-coming, Heaven.

But the woman's family, very soon, made, very clear, that they were not all interested, in allowing the white winger to wave the dead woman's bloody shirt, in the white winger's jihad. And, it next developed, the gun the brown man had used, was misplaced by an Inspector Clouseau of a federal agent, who had let it go missing in a manner indicating he was a clodhopper beneath even the competence of a Barney Fife, who was at all times permitted but one bullet for his gun.

That the brown man had used a federal agent's Fife-fucked-away gun—well, shit, that just shot right in the stomach, the white winger's "good man with a gun" argument for forcibly arming every man, woman, and child in the nation.

But wait! The white winger might yet be saved! Because racing to the rescue was The Hairball—the number one presidential favorite in the white-winger party—who immediately foghorned that the fed-fumblebum in SF was Proof Positive that he, The Hairball, had been right all along—that Ramon from out of Mexico is a rapist, and a rounder, and a wrongo, and other libels drawn directly from the French exterminationalist literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which called, eventually—and boy did they get it—for the permanent and forever extirpation of the Jews.

The Hairball had for some days prior been seriously at sea, as his craft was badly floundering: everyone from Univision to Macy's, the FAA to Atlantic City Pizzeria, had kicked The Hairball right out of the boat. People were fleeing The Hairball as if he were as foul and filthy as the Confederate flag, and at a speed approaching that reached by Richard Pryor with his body on fire.

The Hairball thought the SF fumble-gun would re-anoint him. But instead the head of the RNC called him up to tell him to bung up his blare-hole. But because The Hairball is the naked screaming id of the white winger, the RNC plea had precisely the opposite effect. The Hairball immediately inserted himself into all and every available media orifice, to ejaculate that Jeb Bush is "a total disaster," Lindsey Graham "wants to bomb everybody," Mitt Romney is "a frozen jellyfish," and Marco Rubio wants "people flowing across the border."

And oh, by the way, he, The Hairball, shall appear at an "anti-immigration rally," with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, in Phoenix, Arizona, on this very day, Saturday, July 11, 2015.

Everyone in any sort of Power in The Hairball's party tried to dissuade him from this—but he doesn't care. For he is The Hairball. And therefore The Ruler. Like no one has ruled since fucking Genghis Khan.

A little known fact: Sheriff Joe (who shall soon be going into federal prison), his mother, she died giving birth to him. Informed sources relate that this is because she had a flash of pre-cog, of what her son would become, and determined she was too mortified, to remain in a world, which her son would, for so many years, fill with such suffering.

No one sane can predict, what the Hairball, and the Motherless Joe, may say, there in Arizona, here, in a few hours. What all conscious beings do know is that, whatever they may say, it will without doubt compel the extraterrestrials, keeping a winking eye on this earth, to expand a further 50 parsecs, the no-go zone around this planet, a no-go zone designed to debar from damage, damage emanating from this earth, damage that would cripple beings evolved. Beings of the great wide open. Fired on the mountain.

Of course, even as they're pulling away, them extra-ters, they're getting pulled back in, courtesy folks like the aformentioned Mr. Reed. Who, having abandoned the onanism of Metal Machine Music, opens all of his heart, to all and every sweet Jane.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrMLt9bMd_I]