time

Open Thread - 07-19-24 - Ride My See-Saw

Sometimes when you're watching history happen it goes by really fast. Like the last couple of weeks or so. If political years are like dog years, we all just aged rapidly.

I wont try to add anything new to the Trump Assassination© story lines, just about all has already been said, but I do want to point out how the incident has proven to be a masterclass in marketing, symbolism and narrative creation and control, both before and after the event.

In a timeline of an event there is a past, a present, and a future. The past and the future are predicated on the present. The present being that fleeting fragment of a millisecond in time that we recognize as the here and now, that swiftly renders the future into the past. It's that fleeting moment of the present that the story tellers use to define the past and the future to fit within a narrative. Never mind that you witnessed the event in real time, that's not what you saw, here's what you saw, laid out in a neat package of cognitive bias.

Package it in patriotism, repeat the media message ad nauseam, add in some slick AI imaging and babbling talking heads, and you've got a story line worthy of a TMZ gossip column.

That's how modern histories are written, and truth is dispatched right before our eyes.

see-saw.jpg
Attribution: Pxhere

A very good read, well worthwhile

Not perfectly straightforward and also a bit of a slog in parts, but one doesn't have to understand all of the references on any deep level in order to get the overall point at the end.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/07/22/other-stories/?utm_source...

The title and subhead alone make a good teaser

The Weekly Watch

The Longest Night

(in the N. Hemisphere)

We are tied to the natural world in ways which we are unaware. Time is an odd concept constantly in flux....sunrise to sunset. As it passes the wheel of the year rolls ever faster...wearing ever smaller and gathering speed as it goes downhill. Perhaps it is our pagan past, but somehow this seems a time of year for reflection...like the god Janus looking forward and backward in time. For now the darkness passes and the light will grow. It is a time to celebrate across religions, cultures, and countries.

4 Solstice at brodgar.jpg

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