caucus99percent

free-range politics, organic community

Afternoon folks!

I uploaded a bunch of cool stuff this week, and I added to the collection of Jeff Beck stuff that has been accumulating as I dig out and clean up albums.

There's a Brownie & Sonny album, some Hot Tuna, a few cuts of Professor Longhair from a compilation, a live Flying Burrito Bros. album (later in their career without Gram Parsons), one of The Band's later albums and an album by Rory Gallagher.

Then there's two Jeff Beck Group albums that I just uploaded this week when I got the news of his passing, an album with Beck, Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice, a live album with Jeff Beck and the Jan Hammer Group and an old Yardbirds album that I uploaded a while ago.

Have a great weekend and enjoy the tunes!

Yesterday's Democracy Now recording echoed a report in the journal Science (not to mention the one in The Guardian) about Exxon. The headline started at about 2:45 of the recording, after Amy Goodman cited a couple of climate-change amplified weather disasters:

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
Pablo Picasso

The time between events, collective narrative created and new revelations challenging the official narrative keep getting shorter. This could be an interesting year.

A Time of Unimaginable Sorrow is Upon Us

It was a nice cool sunny morning with some blue birds soaking up the sun, all in a row on the high wire. It took some time to figure out what happened. There were a few low rumbles, they seemed to be coming from north of here. We live on a farm out in the wooded hills of southern Missouri, and north would be up towards St Louis. Soon as the booming sounds started the power went off. At first, I didn’t pay much attention, but with all the military stirrings going on in the world these days, you just don’t know what to expect.

I went inside the house, but with the power off there’s no internet, so no way to find out what’s going on. At least until the power comes back on, or until I get the generator started up. More distant thunderous booms that echo now less like thunder and more like tremendous explosions – and I’m starting to get worried. My kids are at work and the grandkids are in school. I swear I‘m seeing sparks and smoke coming from under the hood of my car, but it’s not running. Now the power line where those bluebirds were singing looks like it’s getting really hot and smoke is coming from the bucket transformer on the poles. Wow! The transformer just blew up sending a shower of sparks and molten metal flying all around the pole! I can hear blasts all over the countryside from more pole transformers exploding. All the fences are sparking and smoking. The woods around the power lines and transformers are starting to go up in extremely violent flames. And the cars are now on fire – all of them! Even the old broken-down ones out in people’s pastures. Our emergency generators are smoking – I’ve got to get them away from the houses before they burn up.

The Federal Reserve has not had an operating loss since 1915. However, that more than a century-long streak came to an end this year.

Happy Friday the 13th everyone. Post any photos, memes, or music you like.

With over 450+ species, San Diego county has the larges number of bird species of any county in the US, so if you go out looking often enough, there will be days with first time finds. Tonights selection are all first time finds for me from the last few months. I've only got 400+ to go.

Lewis's Woodpecker

We all travel back through time. Where the temporal may not pass, the minds-eye goes freely.

What is it that can cause a ten year old boy to pause? Having already survived the fallout from the hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll, the premier of The Mickey Mouse Club, potential hip dislocation dancing to Heartbreak Hotel, invention of the Frisbee, the creation of NASA, Fidel Castro coming to power, Bill Mazeroski's home run, Yuri Gagarin, Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday, that fateful day in Dealy Plaza, and 1964.

The summer of '64. A fine year to be ten years old. Little did I know what was about to happen on that beautiful sun drenched summer day. I can remember it so well because I recall exactly where I was and where I was living at the time. I was alone in the back yard. The cute girl next door was actively ignoring me, by trying to get my attention. My mind was on Cassius Clay and killing nazis. I had just pulled a Pete Rose and a Mickey Mantle from a couple of packs of baseball cards, gum in mouth and pet beagle at my feet. School was a distant memory and life was as it should be for a boy my age. And then it happened.

An event so seminal in a young man's life that all things subsequent are newly defined as a linear division between the alpha and omega. An event that has shades that color the entirety of a life yet sung. An event so revealing it walks with him through life, as an expressive companion to his soul.

Just Shaking My Head:

Sometimes all I can do is shake my head when reading analyses of the 'news' which is pumped out to us daily.