Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 10/20/24
"You Are Witnessing The End Of The U.S. Empire -
A Bankrupt Nation Is Not A Prosperous Nation"
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So, we rise from the rubble...
Sunday, October 20, 2024
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Planetary nebula Abell 78 stands out in this colorful telescopic skyscape. In fact the colors of the spiky Milky Way stars depend on their surface temperatures, both cooler (yellowish) and hotter (bluish) than the Sun. But Abell 78 shines by the characteristic emission of ionized atoms in the tenuous shroud of material shrugged off from an intensely hot central star. The atoms are ionized, their electrons stripped away, by the central star's energetic but otherwise invisible ultraviolet light.
The visible blue-green glow of loops and filaments in the nebula's central region corresponds to emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms, surrounded by strong red emission from electrons recombining with hydrogen atoms. Some 5,000 light-years distant toward the constellation Cygnus, Abell 78 is about three light-years across. A planetary nebula like Abell 78 represents a very brief final phase in stellar evolution that our own Sun will experience... in about 5 billion years.”
Chet Raymo, "Exile "
"Exile "
by Chet Raymo
"Are we truly alone
With our physics and myths,
The stars no more
Than glittering dust,
With no one there
To hear our choral odes? "
"This is the ultimate question, the only question, asked here by the Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon. It is a poem of exile, from the ancient familiar, from the sustaining myth of rootedness, of centrality. A poem that the naturalist can relate to, we pilgrims of infinite spaces, of the overarching blank pages on which we write our own stories, our own scriptures, having none of divine pedigree.
Yes, we feel the ache of exile, we who grew up with the sustaining myths of immortality only to see them stripped away by the needy hands of fact. We scribble our choral odes. Who listens? We speak to each other. Is that enough? Having left the home we grew up in, we make do with where we find ourselves, gathering to ourselves the glittering dust of the here and now. Are we truly alone? Mahon again:
"If so, we can start
To ignore the silence
Of infinite space
And concentrate instead
on the infinity
Under our very noses -
The cry at the heart
Of the artichoke,
The gaiety of atoms. "
Better to leave the blank page blank than fill it with sentimental hankerings for home, with those prayers of our childhood we repeated over and over until they became a hard, fast crust on the page. Incline our ear instead to the faint cry that issues from the world under our very noses, from there, the tomato plant on the window sill, the ink-dark crow that paces the grass beyond the panes, the clouds that heap on the horizon - the dizzy, ditzy dance of atoms and the glitterings of stars. "
○
"I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here I can pretend... I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come and Gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend...
- Olethros, in "Sandman"
"We Do Choose..."
"All men and women are born, live suffer and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about... We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death. But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live."
- Joseph Epstein
○
"George Harrison knew something most of us didn't and still don't: there is a reality beyond the material world and what we do here and how we treat others affects us eternally. As he sings in "Rising Sun":
"But in the rising sun you can feel your life begin,
Universe at play inside your DNA.
You're a billion years old today.
Oh the rising sun and the place it's coming from
Is inside of you and now your payment's overdue."
Lyrics here:
○
"Death twitches my ear. 'Live,' he says, 'I am coming.'"
~ Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro)
"Only One Basic Human Right..."
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as
you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic
human duty, the duty to take the consequences."
- P. J. O'Rourke
"And It Was Pointless..."
“And it was pointless… to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell… for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn’t changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You’re left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is to go on or not. But if you go on, it’s knowing you carry your scars with you.”
- Charles Frazier
"Maybe..."
“We’ve all heard the warnings and we’ve ignored them. We push our luck. We roll the dice. It’s human nature. When we’re told not to touch something we usually do even if we know better. Maybe because deep down, we’re just asking for trouble.”
- “Meredith Grey”, “Gray’s Anatomy”
"Israel Collapsing: Iran, Hezbollah, Yemen, Iraq & Syria Crush IDF, US Army "
Danny Haiphong, 10/20/24
"Israel Collapsing: Iran, Hezbollah,
Yemen, Iraq & Syria Crush IDF, US Army "
"Professor Mohammad Marandi joined the show to discuss how Israel and its US military partners are collapsing underneath the weight of their escalating all out war with Iran, and how regional players will play a decisive role in changing the calculus in West Asia once and for all. Watch this to obtain a perspective silenced by the Western media."
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o
Full screen recommended.
Democracy Now!, 10/16/24
"U.S. Surgeon & Palestinian Nurse:
Israel Is Routinely Shooting Children in the Head in Gaza"
"As the official death toll in Gaza passes more than 42,400, the true number may be impossible to know until Israel's war is over. But medical workers who witnessed the carnage in Gaza's hospitals are speaking out. We speak with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa about his op-ed in The New York Times that features harrowing stories from dozens of healthcare workers and CT scans of children shot in the head or the left side of the chest. The Times called the corresponding images of the patients too graphic to publish. "I personally wish that Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head, when a child is flayed open by bombs," says Sidhwa. "I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world." We also speak with Palestinian nurse Rajaa Musleh, who worked at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. "I will never forget the dogs were eating the dead body inside Shifa Hospital at the front of the emergency department. This will be stuck on my mind for my whole life," says Musleh. "My message for the whole world: We are human beings. We are not numbers. We have the right to receive healthcare inside Gaza."
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Dan, I Allegedly, "Tough Times Means Tough Decisions"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, AM 10/20/24
"Tough Times Means Tough Decisions"
"We're diving into the massive layoffs happening at Meta and what that means for the tech world. As companies face tough times, they're making even tougher decisions. We'll explore how the tech industry is struggling with over-hiring and the impact on profitability. Plus, I'll share stories about other industries, from retail to automotive, facing similar challenges. Don't miss out on all the insights!"
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