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Notes and Messages

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The Breadline, NYC 1932 :: Clare Leighton (1898-1989) :: British-American Artist :: Woodcuts

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“There is no person without a world.” ― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Rolling Stone :: @RollingStone

The Founders Warned Us About A Man Like Trump As America turns 250, the warnings of Washington, Hamilton, and Madison read more like headlines. Commentary: https://rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/founding-fathers-warned-america-trump-1235577524/

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The Founders explicitly warned us about the dangers of a demagogue, the poison of hyper-partisanship, the corrosive effects of corruption and foreign influence, the politicization of religion, and the erosion of the separation of powers.

Yes, by those basic standards, we’re living through the founders’ nightmare. But the right response is not civic despair but a defiant resolve to reclaim American patriotism and fix what’s been broken so that we can strengthen our democracy to survive the next 250 years.

#AlexanderHamilton perfectly anticipated the figure of Donald Trump in a letter to George Washington in 1792:

“When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents ... despotic in his ordinary demeanour — known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty — when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government [and] bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day — it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’ ”

Read that a second time to let it sink in. “Unprincipled in private life”: Check. “Bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents”: Check. “Known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty”: For sure. “Embarrassing the General Government [and] bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day”: Well, that’s almost too on the nose.

[havingapoemwithyou]

The Way Things Have Been Going Lately by Ada Limón

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Night in Day by Thomas Blackshear II

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“Always breathing-in this pre-life, exhaling this post. Something goes away, something comes back. But through you. Leaving no trail but self. As trails go not much of one. But patiently you travel it. Your self.” ― Jorie Graham, [To] The Last [Be] Human

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

via Parabola Magazine A simple science

Last night I spoke with a young Chinese woman clearly troubled about confronting deeply negative circumstances in her life; and one of my best friends is struggling with disease and heartbreak. In their own way, each of them brings their whole Being, everything they are, into this personal moment of struggle and suffering, wondering why things have to be this way, and whether there isn’t a force, a material inner force, that can go against such things. It prompted me to explain to my friend that people think metaphysics is about some cosmological pie-in-the-sky stuff; angels and cosmic evolution and so on. People write extraordinarily complicated texts about metaphysics, filled with magical diagrams and rays of cosmic energy, hydrogens and galaxies, and so on. It’s fair to say quantum physics is probably simpler to understand. But that’s not what it’s like at all. Metaphysics is about here and now; it is about the power of Being, which emerges from the divine inward flow and is manifested through intellect and will. So we have an ability to manifest something materially, something extraordinary and positive, which affirms our Being; yet outward circumstances so often arrange themselves as destructive forces, and they seem more powerful than we are. All of the great stories of heroism, from the epic of Gilgamesh to the stories from the concentration camps, celebrate humanity’s efforts to manifest the positive forces of being against these destructive outward circumstances. It is easy to swallow them as stories on a grand scale; but it is much more difficult to digest them when they are served cold and dirty on the hard plate of one’s personal life. That is when we really have to tighten our belts, pick up the fork, and eat what is true about our life and ourselves; and this is a dish we come to most reluctantly. It takes a greater kind of courage than the courage we read about in the heroic epics to confront our own lives; and although we can take inspiration from the great stories, it is every inward and outward breath of our own life that we have to deal with. This can be an anguishing labor. No one feels as grand as Hercules cleaning out the stables when one is dealing with the mental illness of a loved one or cancer.

This is where real metaphysics comes in. Physics is the study of objects, events, circumstances, and conditions; material things, things as they are. Metaphysics is the study of Being; of what we are as individuals, of how our consciousness encounters the material. So it’s an incredibly practical discipline; and everything about it is about beginning to understand that the external forces and events we confront are not who we are; in a certain sense, they don’t even exist. All they are is data; and data has no organized form or objective sense of what it is. It isn’t intelligent. In the same sense that atomistic materialism tells us there is nothing more than these little bits of stuff that make up bigger stuff, all that data can ever say is that it is there. But our Being, our awareness — that is what allows us to inwardly form a relationship to the outer, and it is in that place, within us, that the outer events acquire form, which we can have an attitude towards. This means, oddly, that the realm of heroism doesn’t lie in outward action; it is within us, where we form our attitude towards things, that the hero is born, not in the deeds that he or she does to save the world. Every human being who gets up in the morning and forms a positive attitude to overcome their obstacles and live in the face of the destructive forces around them is a hero. And they will always be a hero, whether they succeed or fail, because the hero is already there in the attitude, regardless of whether they live or die in the context of all the forces that would drag us down. The hero starts here, and starts now, by saying, yes – I can Be. I can have a wish for the good. We have a choice in our lives. We can practice this simple science of metaphysics in simple ways, by understanding how we form the outer world through our inner attitude; and we can begin in every moment by trying to make an effort for the good, rather than letting everything go down.

—Lee van Laer, poetry editor

[via “alive on all channels”]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“Lux spent the ride dialing the radio for her favorite song. "It makes me crazy," she said. "You know they're playing it somewhere, but you have to find it.” ― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Christiane Singer. /Ana Laguna and Mikhail Barychnikov in Place,Mats Ek /2009

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“People think intimacy is sex. But intimacy is about Truth. When you realize that you can tell someone your Truth, when you can show yourself to him/her who you really are, and their response is, “You are safe with me”, that is intimacy.“

- Christiane Singer

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Glee Violette

Mitch McConnell - BREAKING... oh never mind. It's just rumors. And more rumors. So here are the FACTS.

McConnell was last seen in the Senate on June 11th. On June 14th his office said that he had "gone to the hospital where he was receiving excellent care." The office declined to say which hospital he was in.

It did not come out until last week, when reporters got the audio of the emergency call, which said that McConnell had been found unconscious in his Townhouse on June 14, and received CPR for a possible "cardiac arrest".

He was taken to "a medical facility" - but we STILL do not know which one. His staff continues to say that he is "recovering nicely."

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OK, first of all. You do not get CPR for being unconscious. You get CPR when you are dead. When your lungs are not breathing and your heart is not beating. Nobody said how long it was between the time he fell "unconscious," and someone found him "unconscious," and called an ambulance, and a couple of burly EMTs arrived did what was necessary to bring him BACK from death.

When it comes to old, frail people, CPR unfortunately usually involves breaking every bone in their rib cage, according to a big burly EMT neighbor of mine. If he survived THAT, then when he arrived at the hospital, the doctors not only had to stabilize him, they STILL had to deal with the conditions brought on by the "possible cardiac arrest" or whatever ELSE it was that killed him in the first place.

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But he's "recovering nicely". So says his Senate staff, who said June 22 that he was "working on Senate business" but was not yet ready to return to the Senate. Their latest statement is that "The Senator continues to improve, and is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters while the Senate is out of session."

But that was not enough for People Who Have Questions. So today, Tuesday, there was a whole FLURRY of official statements from Republicans.

Senate President John Thune says he spoke with McConnell Monday - a "lengthy and substantive conversation that covered a variety of topics, including national security," according to Thune's spokesman.

Senate Republican Whip John Barrasso's spokesperson said that Barrasso and McConnell discussed "a number of topics, including national defense spending," during a 20-minute phone conversation on Tuesday afternoon.

And there was a post on X from a former adviser of his, Scott Jennings, who is now a conservative pundit on CNN and loses debates to young Democrats like Adam Mockler. Badly.

"I spoke to my old friend Mitch McConnell this morning.. He’s still recovering in the hospital. We talked for just shy of 20 minutes … about IRAN, UKRAINE, the unfolding situation in MAINE, my visit to the TR Presidential Library, and even a little bit of Senate history..."

Wow. So much talking. Each call lasting 20 minutes. Pretty good for an 84 year old guy who very likely has crushed ribs. And who already had lung issues - he was hospitalized in February for "flu-like" symptoms.

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Meanwhile, all this time, his wife, Trump's former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, has been in China on "a philanthropic trip," which included a meeting with Chinese Vice President Han Zheng. She left the USA on June 12, and returned TODAY, Tuesday, July 7.

So she left two days before her husband was "found unconscious."

And she did not rush home to be at his side.

Why? According to a FOX News report, she "did not see a need for an immediate return." FOX found that totally reasonable.

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Well, even though his hospital trip was so trivial that his wife did not rush home to be with him and oversee his care, and even though SO many upright, honest Republicans say they have spoken with him, STILL, there has been a great deal of speculation that McConnell has died, or is brain dead and on life support.

There is also speculation that his death might have been covered up, so that the Democratic Governor of Kentucky, Andy Bershear, could not appoint a Democrat to fill is seat in the Senate.

However, it does not work that way in Kentucky. Under a law updated in 2024, a U.S. Senate vacancy must be filled through a special election called by the governor, rather than by an appointment - in this case the election would be between the two candidates who won their primaries in May, Democrat Charles Booker and Republican Andy Barr.

And the quickest a governor could call an election is "63 days after the vacancy occurs". Which would bring us to the middle of September, and the winner would only serve out the rest of McConnell's term, to the beginning of January.

And meanwhile the winner presumably would not be able to run in the midterms in November for a full term.

And where would Thomas Massie fit into all of this, if he is planning to run as an Independent? Trump really, REALLY hates HIM. He co-sponsored the Bill that made releasing the Epstein Files LAW - a law that Trump's Attorney General Todd Blanche STILL refuses to follow.

So, the question is, who is most likely to win the midterm election, and would stalling things until then be worthwhile, for the kind of shenanigans that would be involved in covering up a death?

Apparently, the only folks who would know, are not very likely to tell us.

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[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

‘An absolute triumph’: first reactions to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey are ecstatic

Following the film’s premiere, critics are already calling the historical epic a best picture Oscar contender. Here’s what they had to say

That's a pretty intense preview.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose at everybody else's business"

—Marshall McLuhan, 1967.

[poetic outlaws]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Everything Is Love : House Gospel Choir

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The little things that you saw with a child’s eye and that will never go away. That’s what consciousness is all about.

Derek Mahon (via theparisreview)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Photo: Love is the Answer by Banksy

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A letter from Albert Einstein to his daughter: on The Universal Force of Love

In the late 1980s, Lieserl, the daughter of the famous genius, donated 1,400 letters, written by Einstein, to the Hebrew University, with orders not to publish their contents until two decades after his death. This is one of them, for Lieserl Einstein.

“When I proposed the theory of relativity, very few understood me, and what I will reveal now to transmit to mankind will also collide with the misunderstanding and prejudice in the world.

I ask you to guard the letters as long as necessary, years, decades, until society is advanced enough to accept what I will explain below.

There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us. This universal force is LOVE.

When scientists looked for a unified theory of the universe they forgot the most powerful unseen force. Love is Light, that enlightens those who give and receive it. Love is gravity, because it makes some people feel attracted to others. Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals. For love we live and die. Love is God and God is Love.

This force explains everything and gives meaning to life. This is the variable that we have ignored for too long, maybe because we are afraid of love because it is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will.

To give visibility to love, I made a simple substitution in my most famous equation. If instead of E = mc2, we accept that the energy to heal the world can be obtained through love multiplied by the speed of light squared, we arrive at the conclusion that love is the most powerful force there is, because it has no limits.

After the failure of humanity in the use and control of the other forces of the universe that have turned against us, it is urgent that we nourish ourselves with another kind of energy…

If we want our species to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer.

Perhaps we are not yet ready to make a bomb of love, a device powerful enough to entirely destroy the hate, selfishness and greed that devastate the planet.

However, each individual carries within them a small but powerful generator of love whose energy is waiting to be released.

When we learn to give and receive this universal energy, dear Lieserl, we will have affirmed that love conquers all, is able to transcend everything and anything, because love is the quintessence of life.

I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart, which has quietly beaten for you all my life. Maybe it’s too late to apologize, but as time is relative, I need to tell you that I love you and thanks to you I have reached the ultimate answer! ”.

Your father, Albert Einstein

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Instructions to an Actor Edwin Morgan

For William Shakespeare’s (probable) birthday:

This single poem gets, via the heart of all theatre, to the heart of the communal in all the arts, and to the heart of form, the heart of voice and silence and to the heart of a kind of life that will never actually stop. That’s what Morgan does, he gets to the heart of the heart, selflessly, wide-openly, with the joyous shock of energy that’s the core heartbeat of life-form and art-form. —Ali Smith, in From Saturn to Glasgow: fifty favourite poems by Edwin Morgan

Published in Edwin Morgan: Centenary Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2020).

A recording of Ian McKellen reading ‘Instructions to an Actor’ in July 1979:

Ian McKellen reads Edwin Morgan’s poem “Instructions to an Actor”, in which Shakespeare himself instructs the boy actor playing Hermione in the original production of The Winter’s Tale to hold as still as a statue in the final scene of the play.

London – July 28th, 1979.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Glee Violette ·

He hates us all. He looks like hell. He sounds like hell. And he is mad as hell - using BOTH definitions of the word.

He reportedly lost it when his FIFA team lost, and never got it back.

Right now he is at the NATO Summit in Turkey, which started Tuesday and ends today, Wednesday, where he is making it all about HIM.

Where he is demanding that NATO force Denmark to turn Greenland over to him. Where he sexually insulted Italy's leader. Where he said, “I don’t want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, including visits."

Where he is whining the NATO countries did not join his aggression against Iran, saying, "I spoke to Germany, I spoke to France, I spoke to UK, I spoke to Italy," he said. "They were not there for us." Ignoring the FACT that joining in on aggression is NOT part of the NATO pact. NATO responds ONLY when a member nation is ATTACKED.

Where he is complaining that NATO countries “have not treated us right, we been treated unfairly; we pay disproportionately.” Trump demands that all NATO countries pay 5% of their GDP. The US only pays 3.2%. SIX NATO countries pay MORE than us. Including Denmark.

Where he has been bragging non-stop that he ended 8 wars. He did not. And now he cannot even remember the names of the countries he has been rattling off. He has difficulty even bringing up one or two, before sputtering to an enraged stop.

So, instead, he restarted his OWN war. Iran.

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Over the past couple of days, Iran IRGC boats fired on three tankers that were not obeying its instructions on which route to use in the Strait of Hormuz.

So Trump put the US sanctions back on Iran's oil and petrochemicals, and revoked the oil export license issued by the US Treasury that allowed them to MAKE those sales.

Which is something he never should have given them in the first place until the USA got something substantial in return - at LEAST the unrestricted re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz.

But, whatever, doing something rational was not enough for Trump. He had to take it further. He had to take his rage out on SOMEONE.

US Central Command said Tuesday night that US strikes Trump ordered hit 80 targets, including Iranian air defense systems, command-and-control networks, coastal radar sites, anti-ship missile weapons and more than 60 small boats used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s paramilitary force.

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But even THAT was not enough to calm him down.

Trump told reporters Wednesday that the ceasefire is "over."

"I don't want to deal with them anymore, they're scum! You know what scum is? They're scum, they're sick people. They're led by sick people, and they're vicious, violent, and if they had a nuclear weapon, they'd use it. As far as I'm concerned, it's over," he ranted.

The MOU negotiations have been paused during the funeral of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah and his family members, who were killed on the first day of the attack on Iran by the US and Israel. The funeral ends Thursday.

The reporters asked Trump if he would allow the MOU negotiations to continue. Trump said the negotiators from Pakistan and Qatar were "good people" but that for him, "I think it is over."

"They'll have to come back to me. As far as I'm concerned, it's just a waste of time dealing with them. They're liars."

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SO. If he is saying the ceasefire is over, and negotiations are over, and he has re-started the war with Iran, it should be time for CONGRESS to be involved, right? That is their JOB, under the Constitution.

But NO. The Senate and House BOTH voted to take back their war powers. But then, Trump's people bullied two of the Republican Senators who voted against him into reversing their votes.

Trump retains sole authority to do whatever the hell he wants.

When will enough be enough for Republicans to realize they are not only destroying our national security in every way, for their own PERSONAL GAIN, but that in doing so, they are destroying THEMSELVES as well? They will NEVER get what the power they think they are going to get. The power he promises them.

Trump is TRUMP. Everything he promises is a lie. Everything he gets control of, he takes what he wants up front, and then runs it into the ground and walks away, leaving everyone else holding the bag, paying the price, and cleaning up his mess.

Just like his Crypto investors. His cell phone investors. His DC "project" investors.

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Europe has realized that. This NATO Summit will be the final straw. Trump did nothing to strengthen it. Instead he attacked it with childish rants and tantrums, spending more time on Truth Social, posting, posting and posting trivial CRAP, than talking with THEM.

They are now in private talks to form their OWN alliance. Other countries, like Canada, are indicating they want to join in.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the Arab nations, INCLUDING Iran, are in talks to create a new alliance of their own.

BOTH alliances excluding the United States of America. BOTH having the potential to create two NEW Superpowers. And leaving the United States NO LONGER a Superpower.

China would love that. So would Russia. Trump has made enemies of our friends, because he thinks our enemies ARE our friends. They are not. They most assuredly are NOT.

But why does he think this way? Because with our NATO allies, everything is above board, and he has to follow the rules, and there is nothing in it PERSONALLY for HIM.

With dictators and royals and oligarchs, well, that is quite a different thing.

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Thanks to the Republican Party's greedy support of Donald J Trump, THIS is where we are. He could NOT have done it alone. This is the doing of Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell, and their Billionaire DONORS, from Steve Bannon's Cambridge Analytica project, bankrolled by the Mercer Family, and the Tea Party bankrolled by the Koch Brothers, to the Project 2025 conspirators, Stephen Miller and Howard Lutnick and Russell Vought, bankrolled by Peter Thiel and the Tech/Crypto Bros. - and of course, Elon Musk.

None of this was for US. It was NEVER for us. It was always for THEM. For THEIR power. For THEIR money. For THEIR Empire.

To them, we are pawns. Serfs. Cannon fodder. Suckers. The "unwashed masses" used and manipulated by EVERY authoritarian system, no matter if they are called Royalty or Fascists or Communists - or CORPORATIONS.

We all know what our rights working for a Corporation are. THAT is the model for America's future government put forth by ALL of the above. THAT is what they think Donald Trump will give them.

Hell. Hell right here on earth.

Look at him. Look at ALL of them. THIS is America's true enemy.

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Photo AFP/Getty

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"Strive to become the true human being: one who knows love, one who knows pain. Be full, be humble, be utterly silent, be the bowl of wine passed from hand to hand."

~ Khwaja Abdullah Ansari 

[Ian Sanders]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

…courage dear heart❤️

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"Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this 'Ah', because there's something in them that's brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here's the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling 'why am I so ordinary?', you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn't realised or you'd forgotten human beings could shine so."

— Niall Williams, History of the Rain                                                             [exhaled-spirals]