They say that nothing is manufactured in the United States any more. But like so much of what They say, this is a Lie.

For I own a pink plastic watering-pig that pours water out its twin noseholes. And this pig was manufactured in the United States.

Actually, I own two. One for the front of the place. And one for the back. And both, they were made, they were born, in the USA.

They are out there, the pigs, right now, both of them, water spouting, like blood sprouting from all the dead of Vietnam, from out of their nostrils.

For they are, now, these pigs, like perpetual-motion machines. This is because the rain, it falls from the sky, and it puddles in the pigs, and then it spews out the noseholes. Alpha, unto omega. Just like the, just like the, just like the, just like the blood, spouted by the perpetual-motioning long-gone daddies, of the perpetual American war machine, who go off and kill, and kill, and kill, and who were born, and the blood that they spill, there is never an end, in the USA.

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

I am thinking that a pink plastic watering-pig that pours water out its twin noseholes, this is probably the zenith, of both the industrial and nuclear ages. And so we can now go ahead and shut those eras down.

For, really, it can't get any higher than this. Higher than a pink plastic watering-pig that spurts water out its twin noseholes. It is like the True Science Fact established by the esteemed Dr. Kurt Vonnegut: that humans were created, and intended to bend all their species efforts—unknowingly, yet doggedly—to eventually manufacturing and delivering a replacement part for a Tralfamadorian spacecraft marooned on the Saturnian moon Titan. Once such is accomplished—pig or part—then It Is Accomplished, and everyone can maybe then wake up, and get up out of the sleep.

In the late 1970s, the Americans started drinking their water out of plastic bottles.

The Americans, they all had tap-water in their houses. But they decided that such water was declasse, because it did not say "Evian" on it, like it said on the water in the plastic bottles. Also, many of the Americans were becoming a-feared that their tap-water might have something Bad in it. Like, maybe, Tumors. So they eschewed the water from the tap, for the Evian.

This tulip-mania of the bottled water, it converged, in that time, with several other tulip-manias. And so, the essential image of the American of the early 1980s, it is someone sweating and straining in a gym, to the insistent soundings of disco poundings, while alternately drinking Evian water, and smoking crack cocaine.

The Americans, they have their bottled water; now, the Chinese, they have bottled air.

A Canadian company, it first offered a product called Vitality Air, as a joke. But it was not regarded as a joke in China. Where they do not really have air. Instead, they have this sort of aerial . . . sludge.

The air is bottled in Banff National Park in the Canadian Rocky Mountains and then it is shipped to China, where the people breathe it. A Vitality air-can costs 50 times more than a bottle of mineral water in China, but the people, they don't care. Because they like to breathe.

The company's China representative, Harrison Wang, says their customers are mainly affluent Chinese women who buy for their families or give it away as gifts. But he says senior homes and even high-end nightclubs have also stocked up on their product.

"In China fresh air is a luxury, something so precious," says Mr Wang.

Domestic producers are also entering the air market. Beijing artist Liang Kegang sold for $743 a glass jar filled with air he snatched from southern France, while multimillionaire Chen Guangbiao sold wee cans of air, purportedly from less-industrialized regions of China, for 73 cents each.

The Vitality people are having trouble keeping up with demand, because each container of air is "filled by hand."

"It's very labor-intensive," complains company co-founder Moses Lam.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_liYOt9DAwM]

The Hairball, he announced this week that he will launch a trade war against China, over a bomb that North Korea does not really possess. He also ruled that the penis of Bill Clinton, it is a criminal, and therefore The Mad Bomber should be disqualified from the presidency, because she has sheltered it.

Maine Governor Paul LePage, he is a sort of mini-me version of The Hairball. Like The Hairball, he thinks reporters should be dead; LePage has offered to personally shoot a cartoonist, and also to blow up a newspaper building. He says the "worst part" of his life, is that "newspapers are still alive."

Also, like The Hairball, whenever LePage opens his mouth, there is a good chance the Ku Klux Klan will come riding out.

"These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty, these types of guys. They come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, and they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue that we've got to deal with down the road."

Again, like The Hairball, he maintains he said nothing wrong; the problem is those reporters. Who should be dead.

Several months ago, the Science Men did not even know that Pluto had "bumpy plains." But now they are purely confident they know exactly what created them: "violent collisions."

Science Men, they are really big, on "violent collisions."

I happen to know that the Pluto area, pictured below, which the Science Men describe as "the shoreline where Sputnik Planum bumps up against the al-Idrisi mountains," is in truth the work of planetary designer Slartibartfast. It was a preparatory sketch, before he set to work on the fjords of Earth.

Really, this sort of thing: it's all in the Histories. You'd think the Science Men would give those Histories a glance, every now and again.

I have discovered that oil paint, it never really dries. The painting has been lying around for six months—surely it is dry now—so you pick up the canvas, by the corners, and then your thumb experiences, like, just a little, smoosh. Jeez. Still not dry.

Then you go to the museum, and you experience a wonderation that on the Van Goghs, in some places, the oil paint is, like, three inches thick. And you want to feel it. So you graze, a bit, of the wonderacious paint mound, lightly, with your finger. And, uh, oops, not quite dry. Yet.

And then they come and they take you and they put you in the jail.

I met with one of the lawyers yesterday afternoon and we decided that we are going to file a Notice Of Motion And Motion To Produce Black People.

We are in the midst of a run of cases where the defendants are black. But whenever they throw the tarp back from the jury pool, there are no black people, anywhere in the pool. How can this be? We know there are black people in the county. So why are they then not in the pools? We know that the Americans have a long and ugly history of keeping black people out of the pools. So we are thinking, when it comes time for the jury pools, and particularly those for our black clients, that They are stashing the black people in some place like Warehouse 13, to make sure they can't be in the pools.

Thus, the Notice Of Motion And Motion To Produce Black People. For we have to be sitting there in the court, when the jury is being selected from the pool, so we can't actually verify that black people are at that moment out and about in the county, and not locked away in Warehouse 13. With our motion, we seek to compel the prosecutor to Prove it. We want the prosecutor to produce, in court, actual non-warehoused black people.

If our motion is denied, we will go to the appellate court, on a Writ Of Fear.

Site maestro John T. Chance, he says Thursday was the one-year anniversary of the opening of this here tube. So below be four 99 songs, in honor of that.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLhrenu1SKA]
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This is a really good piece. This is what it was like back when the Americans had magazine journalism. This is a story about a lawyer, who became a human, and stayed a human, and how he is tilting the world.

This is a thoughtful piece, from teleSur, which explicates why leftists should refrain from embracing the authoritarian oligarchic culturally-prune-lipped nation of Russia. And declare Vladimir Putin, their boyfriend.

Embedded within it is a link to this piece, from Z, which examines the ur-human impulse to remain en-cribbed in the primordial swamp of primitive duality/dichotomy. Which, of course, is the sad, sticky goo. Wherein Putin-boyfriending, is engendered.

Walter Murch, meanwhile, he knows why people might walk like an Egyptian.

We look at ancient Egyptian painting today and may find it slightly comic, but what the Egyptians were trying to do with the figure was reveal the various aspects of the person's body in the most characteristic aspect. The face is in profile because that reveals the most about the person's face, but the shoulders are not in profile, they're facing the viewer, because that's the most revealing angle for the shoulders. The hips are not in profile, but the feet are. It gives a strange, twisted effect, but it was natural to the Egyptians. They were painting essences, and in order to paint an essence you have to paint it from its most characteristic angle. So they would simply combine the various characteristic essences of the human body. This was a piece of spiritual art. It wasn't trying to reproduce photographic reality, it was trying to reproduce and combine all the essential features of a person within one figure.

That's exactly what we do in film, except that instead of the body of the person, it's the work itself. The director chooses the most characteristic, revealing, interesting angle for every situation and every line of dialogue and every scene. He then overshoots that material and gives an editor an additional range of choices. We're doing the same kind of shifting between angles. It may be, five hundred years from now, when people see films from our era, they'll seem "Egyptian" in a strange way. Here we are, cutting between different angles to achieve the most interesting, characteristic, revealing lens and camera angle for every situation. That seems perfectly normal to us, but people five hundred years from now may find it strange.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoKqe2kwuPc]

Murch also possesses insight into the Problem of Job.

That's what I call the "Tragedy-of-Job moments." They are like the good man Job, who does everything—and more—that God requests of him, but God perversely afflicts him and not the bad person who is Job's neighbour. Why me? Job asks. Well, it's because God can see the whole that Job cannot see, and in some mysterious way these afflictions are for the good of the whole, in a way that is invisible to the person.

There was a moment in The Conversation—it had to so with Harry Caul's initial assembly of his tape recording of the lovers—that was in every cut of the film, and somehow any changes in nearby scenes had to be reflected in it. It was like a hinge scene. Over and over again I would be working on that scene, and it would accept the changes, it would accommodate itself to the whole. If you anthropomorphized, you could see the scene becoming prouder and prouder of itself, of how it did all this for the film! And yet there came a point when I said, You know, I think I'm going to remove this scene. Everything else is now so clear that this scene no longer needs to be in there. It's making the point that is made elsewhere in the film.

And as I was removing that scene, at two in the morning, it began to speak to me, as if it were Job, saying, Why are you removing me, me of all scenes who has been so faithful to you, who has tried so hard to accommodate your every wish? And I said, I know what you're talking about, and believe me, I've spent many hundreds of hours on you and yet I'm willing to throw all that work away for the benefit of the whole.

Tuesday the Kenyan, again, publicly addressed the problem of the people of Fear, who bitterly cling to their private personal killing machines, in case some Other might need to be Shot. As he did so, and in recalling the children of Newtown—who did not have noseholes (as does even my pink plastic watering-pig), after they were blown off these children's faces, by the killing machines of Adam Lanza—the Kenyan wept.

There then swept across the land a great avalanche of cruelty. As people publicly mocked and scorned and denied him. The tears were not real; if they were real, he had no right to shed them; if he did have a right to shed them, he should have shed them for something else. Etc. Everywhere, people, they "hardened their hearts," as it is said.

The same thing happened in 2008, when the Kenyan's predecessor, George II, shed tears while presenting a medal to the parents of a man who had died in one of his wars. People publicly mocked and scorned and denied him. The tears were not real; if they were real, he had no right to shed them; if he did have a right to shed them, he should have shed them for something else. Etc. Everywhere, people, they "hardened their hearts," as it is said.

What happens is, people develop a Hate for a person, and then they deny that person the ability to feel any commendable human emotion whatsoever, at any time, at any place, for any reason.

But—so sorry—it doesn't work that way. Philip Hallie writes:

In one of his articles in the French Resistance journal Combat, Albert Camus tells a story about Heinrich Himmler, who, under Hitler, was responsible for the humiliation, torture, and murder of millions of defenseless people. When Himmler was working near Munich and had to come home late at night, he would enter very quietly, from the rear, through the kitchen door. Before he stepped into the house, he would remove his jackboots. He did not want to awaken his canary.

Here was the narrow, narrow eye of the hurricane for him. This was the range of his compassion. The peace, the slience in his home, in his kitchen, make the murderous winds of destructive power outside deafening for me, just as a little candlelight can make darkness visible. But still, here was a little peace and a little caring, just as the candlelight in great darkness is still candlelight, not darkness.

Rather than mock and scorn and deride and deny the caring for the canary, or the tears for the faceless children of Newtown, it seems to me to be preferable to recognize the flickering candelight, in such as that, and then and thereby strive to slide such people closer to the place where, all their tears—for all and every—like water, flow.

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

Hallie also tells a story of a teacher who became a human. In recognizing that, when we are all out and about and proud with our lions, we must needs remember to provide just as much, or more, space, for other people, and the wonders of their rabbits. Which are their—our—own lions. After, alpha unto omega, all.

He was a young teacher in northern Bavaria toward the beginning of the century, when one day he came into the classroom of his little wooden schoolhouse to give his students a lesson on lions. He had prepared a dramatic lecture about the king of beasts, and he was full of it, and full of himself. He started the lecture. "The lion is—" but before he could say more a little boy in the back of the room who had been sitting dumbly on his wooden bench during the whole term caught his eye. The boy was standing up and frantically waving his hand in the air. The burly young teacher set his jaw and kept talking about the great beasts. Suddenly the little boy yelled out, "Herr Professor, Herr—" Schmahling looked at him in anger. He could hardly believe that this little dunce was going to interrupt his discourse on lions.

Then the boy called out, "Yesterday, yes, yesterday I saw a rabbit! Yes, Herr, Professor, yesterday I saw a rabbit!"

Before the words were all out, Schmahling thundered, "Sit down, you little jackass." The boy dropped back like a stone onto his bench and said not another word for the rest of the year.

Until the end of his long life Julius Schmahling looked back at that incident as the turning point of his life as a person and as a teacher. In the very act of crushing the boy with all of the power of German authoritarianism, he had violated something in himself. He had violated his own deep need to be compassionate.

After trying for weeks to bring the boy out of his silence, he vowed that teaching and living for him would from that moment forward involve making room for each of his students and for each of the people he encountered outside of the classroom—making room for them to speak about the rabbits. About the wonders they had seen.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE0xG7ODayw]