* * * *

Mahmoud Darwish says: As you prepare your breakfast — think of others (don’t forget to feed the pigeons). As you conduct your wars — think of others (don’t forget those who want peace). As you pay your water bill — think of others (think of those who have only the clouds to drink from). As you go home, your own home — think of others (don’t forget those who live in tents). As you sleep and count the stars, think of others (there are people who have no place to sleep). As you liberate yourself with metaphors think of others (those who have lost their right to speak). And as you think of distant others — think of yourself (and say, I wish I were a candle in the darkness).

[Wait-What?]

*

workingclasshistory :

“On this day, 23 April 1971, nearly 1,000 Vietnam War veterans returned their combat medals to the government. The Vietnam vets had planned to return the medals in body bags but authorities erected a fence around the Capitol building so the veterans threw their medals over it. Some of the vets, before tossing their medals, dedicated them to comrades — both from the US and Vietnam — who had died in battle. More info about this in our podcast episodes 10-11 about GI resistance to the Vietnam war: https://workingclasshistory.com/2018/08/06/e10-the-gi-resistance-in-vietnam-part-1/” https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1971309919720815/?type=3

"From ego's point of view, thought supplies itself with content. This is inbred thinking, and it creates a stale and musty mind."

- Ben Riggs Web Of Enlightenment

* * * *

When I learned to tell time I told it. I told it so; I stopped listening to what it tried to tell me: You’re already losing everything as you go and go and go. - Brenda Shaughnessy ::  Gift Planet

[alive on all channels]

vintagegal :

Steve McCurry- Camels on The Ahmadi Oil Fields, Kuwait, 1991 

At the bottom of a sinkhole, ancient trees stretch nearly 130 feet high. Dense plants cover the ground, and a rare type of bamboo grows.

Cave explorers discovered the hidden forest this month when they descended into a previously unexplored massive sinkhole in south China’s Guangxi region. Researchers say the hole, which is roughly 630 feet deep and spans more than 176 million cubic feet, could be home to previously unidentified plant and animal species.

The finding is less surprising than people might expect, said George Veni, executive director of the New Mexico-based National Cave and Karst Research Institute.

“It’s not unusual to have trees growing out of cave entrances,” said Veni, who was not involved in the new research. “It’s just that this [sinkhole] is particularly large and particularly deep, so it’s not the sort of thing that most people would expect.”

Giant sinkholes are common in this part of China, a UNESCO World Heritage site. They are a feature of some karst landscapes and form when groundwater dissolves bedrock, causing the ceiling of a cave chamber to collapse. Large sinkholes are known in Chinese as “tiankeng,” or “heavenly pits.”

The sinkhole near Ping’e village is known to local residents as Shenying Tiankeng, or “the bottomless pit.” From a distance, the cliff looks like a pair of soaring wings, the Guangxi Daily newspaper reported.

The researchers arrived at the sinkhole May 6 and saw dense trees blocking the bottom of the pit, the newspaper reported. They used drones to explore the area and then rappelled and hiked to the bottom for several hours, passing dense thorns and fig plants. They found three caves in the wall that may have formed early in the sinkhole’s evolution, Zhang Yuanhai, senior engineer at the Institute of Karst Geology of China Geological Survey, told Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua.

While trees exist in other sinkholes, Veni said they can only grow if the hole is shallow enough and has a big enough opening to let in sunlight. The newly explored sinkhole is almost definitely home to small animals, such as insects, that are currently unknown to scientists, he said.

The sinkhole is the 30th to be found in China’s Leye County. Video shared by CGTN, a Chinese state-run TV news channel, shows the explorers climbing through dense plants and documenting their findings. Comparing their new research to other sinkholes may help them better understand karst landscapes, the channel reported.

Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune

* * * *

“The Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), the influential right-wing PAC of the American Conservative Union, is holding its first European event, convening today in Budapest, Hungary. Its leaders have chosen Hungary apparently because they see that country as a model for the society they would like to see in the U.S. under a strongman leader like rising authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary.

Orbán is the architect of what he calls “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” This form of government holds nominal elections, although their outcome is preordained because the government controls all the media and has silenced opposition. Illiberal democracy rejects modern liberal democracy because the equality it champions means an acceptance of immigrants, LGBTQ rights, and women’s rights and an end to traditionally patriarchal society. Orbán’s model of minority rule promises a return to a white-dominated, religiously based society, and he has pushed his vision by eliminating the independent press, cracking down on political opposition, getting rid of the rule of law, and dominating the economy with a group of crony oligarchs.

Led by personalities like Tucker Carlson, the American right wing embraces the Hungarian model, despite the corruption, lack of legal accountability, and attacks on the press that make Hungary the only member of the European Union no longer rated as “free” by democracy watchdog Freedom House. As if in illustration of Orbán’s policies, U.S. journalists were not allowed into CPAC today.

Orbán gave the keynote speech at the CPAC convention. In it, he embraced the “great replacement theory” that says white people are being replaced by immigrants of color. This is the myth that motivated the shooter in Buffalo, New York, last weekend, when he murdered ten people and wounded three others. It is the myth from which most Republicans have tried to distance themselves since the Buffalo killings.

And yet, when CPAC leader Matt Schlapp met U.S. journalists outside, he said that ending abortion rights would address the great replacement myth: “If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved,” Schlapp said. “You have millions of people who can take many of these jobs. How come no one brings that up? If you’re worried about this quote-unquote replacement, why don’t we start there? Start with allowing our own people to live.”

Orbán told the attendees that the right wing in Europe and the United States must fight together to “reconquer” institutions in Brussels and Washington, D.C., before the 2024 election because those “liberals” who currently control them are destroying western civilization.

It is surprising to see folks who talk about American greatness take their inspiration from the leader of a small central European country of fewer than 10 million people, about the size of Michigan. Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley commented: “Oh come on US conservatives, stop embarrassing yourselves. Have some dignity and national pride.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

* * * *

"When I was 17, this poem by Carl Sandburg helped me through a difficult time (leaving behind my best friends and my first love); it also inaugurated my love for poetry. Its effect for me has something to do with the way it begins so gently and ends on a note of defiance:" Troths

Yellow dust on a bumble bee’s wing, Grey lights in a woman’s asking eyes, Red ruins in the changing sunset embers: I take you and pile high the memories. Death will break her claws on some I keep. [via “Alive On All Channels”]

robertalanclayton :

Sunflower, RA Clayton

Andrea Kowch - In my Mind, 2017.

* * * *

"We have all hurt someone tremendously, whether by intent or accident. We have all loved someone tremendously, whether by intent or accident. it is an intrinsic human trait, and a deep responsibility, I think, to be an organ and a blade. But, learning to forgive ourselves and others because we have not chosen wisely is what makes us most human. We make horrible mistakes. It's how we learn. We breathe love. It's how we learn. And it is inevitable.”

- Nayyira Waheed

[Ravenous Butterflies]

Old pals from Class of 67

* * * * *

“The World Has Need Of You” by Ellen Bass everything here seems to need us —Rainer Maria Rilke I can hardly imagine it as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient prayer of my arms swinging in counterpoint to my feet. Here I am, suspended between the sidewalk and twilight, the sky dimming so fast it seems alive. What if you felt the invisible tug between you and everything? A boy on a bicycle rides by, his white shirt open, flaring behind him like wings. It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much and too little. Does the breeze need us? The cliffs? The gulls? If you’ve managed to do one good thing, the ocean doesn’t care. But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth, the earth, ever so slightly, fell toward the apple.

Amelia Mary Earhart (July 24, 1897 – disappeared July 2, 1937) was an American aviation pioneer and author. Earhart was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. (via wikipedia)

* * * * *

"The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward." - Amelia Earhart

[Koschy Verocska]

"The Silence that Lives in Houses" (a 1947 oil on canvas painting) by French artist Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954), now owned by a private collector.

(Jaded in Japan)

* * * *

We hammer wood for a house but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, but non-being is what we use. —The Tao Te Ching

[alive on all channels]

wildlife

Florida wildlife photographer Bobby Wummer captured this eerie shot around dusk, showing dozens of alligators with "glowing" eyes staring back at him from the water 👀🐊 STORY: bit.ly/3NmUjsf

* * * * *

It's your solemn duty to learn how to enjoy this thing. Alan Watts

[alive on all channels]

These things and these people were also affected, and despite his misery this little world with all its light has been a beauty for him.

 (Jacques Prévert for Izis)

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 19, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson

Today, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol sent a letter to Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), asking for his voluntary cooperation in their investigation. The committee members believe he has “information regarding a tour you led through parts of the Capitol complex on January 5, 2021,” the day before the January 6 insurrection.

The letter goes on to say that there have been public reports of both individuals and groups gathering information about the layout of the U.S. Capitol before January 6. In response to those allegations, the committee’s letter says, “Republicans on the Committee on House Administration—of which you are a Member—claimed to have reviewed security footage from the days preceding January 6th and determined that ‘[t]here were no tours, no large groups, no one with MAGA hats on.’ However, the Select Committee’s review of evidence directly contradicts that denial.

Ouch.

Loudermilk and the ranking member (that is, the top Republican member) of the Committee on House Administration, Rodney Davis of Illinois, released an odd nondenial, saying, "A constituent family with young children meeting with their Member of Congress in the House Office Buildings is not a suspicious group or 'reconnaissance tour’…."

Notably, the committee did not use the words “reconnaissance tour.” As well, there is a rhetorical sleight of hand here: a hypothetical tour with a family and young children is presented here as innocuous…but the Republicans’ statement doesn’t say that’s actually what happened, although it seems clear that’s the conclusion the authors hope a reader will draw. It implies that Loudermilk simply gave a tour to a family with young children, without saying so. It’s a classic nondenial, a construction that makes Loudermilk look like a victim of an overzealous critic by deflecting attention from the central question.

The statement goes on to say that the committee is “pushing a verifiably false narrative that Republicans conducted reconnaissance tours on Jan[uary] 5th. The facts speak for themselves; no place that the family went on the 5th was breached on the 6th, the family did not enter the Capitol grounds on the 6th.”

So… Loudermilk did, in fact, take people around on January 5, despite denials from the Republicans on the Committee on House Administration, who claimed to have reviewed security footage, saying there were no tours? And despite the fact the Capitol complex was closed to the public because of the pandemic?

Lots of questions here, and it seems likely the January 6 committee will have new information when public hearings begin next month.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), the influential right-wing PAC of the American Conservative Union, is holding its first European event, convening today in Budapest, Hungary. Its leaders have chosen Hungary apparently because they see that country as a model for the society they would like to see in the U.S. under a strongman leader like rising authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary.

Orbán is the architect of what he calls “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” This form of government holds nominal elections, although their outcome is preordained because the government controls all the media and has silenced opposition. Illiberal democracy rejects modern liberal democracy because the equality it champions means an acceptance of immigrants, LGBTQ rights, and women’s rights and an end to traditionally patriarchal society. Orbán’s model of minority rule promises a return to a white-dominated, religiously based society, and he has pushed his vision by eliminating the independent press, cracking down on political opposition, getting rid of the rule of law, and dominating the economy with a group of crony oligarchs.

Led by personalities like Tucker Carlson, the American right wing embraces the Hungarian model, despite the corruption, lack of legal accountability, and attacks on the press that make Hungary the only member of the European Union no longer rated as “free” by democracy watchdog Freedom House. As if in illustration of Orbán’s policies, U.S. journalists were not allowed into CPAC today.

Orbán gave the keynote speech at the CPAC convention. In it, he embraced the “great replacement theory” that says white people are being replaced by immigrants of color. This is the myth that motivated the shooter in Buffalo, New York, last weekend, when he murdered ten people and wounded three others. It is the myth from which most Republicans have tried to distance themselves since the Buffalo killings.

And yet, when CPAC leader Matt Schlapp met U.S. journalists outside, he said that ending abortion rights would address the great replacement myth: “If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved,” Schlapp said. “You have millions of people who can take many of these jobs. How come no one brings that up? If you’re worried about this quote-unquote replacement, why don’t we start there? Start with allowing our own people to live.”

Orbán told the attendees that the right wing in Europe and the United States must fight together to “reconquer” institutions in Brussels and Washington, D.C., before the 2024 election because those “liberals” who currently control them are destroying western civilization.

It is surprising to see folks who talk about American greatness take their inspiration from the leader of a small central European country of fewer than 10 million people, about the size of Michigan. Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley commented: “Oh come on US conservatives, stop embarrassing yourselves. Have some dignity and national pride.”

—

Notes:

https://january6th.house.gov/sites/democrats.january6th.house.gov/files/2022-5-19.BGT%20LC%20Letter%20to%20Loudermilk.pdf

David Gilbert @daithaigilbertJust an update on #CPACHungary. As far as I can tell, no journalists from any US media outlet have been allowed entry to the event. Reporters from @voxdotcom @RollingStone and @NewYorker along with myself were all denied entry this morning.

177 Retweets402 Likes

May 19th 2022

Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNewsRep Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) & House Admin Committee ranking Republican Rodney Davis (R-IL): "A constituent family with young children meeting with their Member of Congress in the House Office Buildings is not a suspicious group or 'reconnaissance tour"

345 Retweets1,487 Likes

May 19th 2022

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/18/cpac-conference-budapest-hungary-viktor-orban-speaker

https://bangordailynews.com/2022/05/19/opinion/opinion-contributor/in-hungary-on-the-frontlines-of-the-battle-between-democracy-and-autocracy-the-us-is-mia-but-cpac-is-there/

Jason Stanley @jasonintratorOh come on US conservatives, stop embarrassing yourselves. Have some dignity and national pride.

usnews.com/news/world/art…

57 Retweets150 Likes

May 20th 2022

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2022-05-19/orban-tells-cpac-conservatives-in-europe-u-s-must-align-troops-for-2024-votes

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/19/gop-lawmaker-capitol-tour-jan-6-00033846

https://www.vice.com/en/article/93bxm8/cpac-hungary-us-journalists-blocked

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjb7ad/cpac-head-promotes-abortion-ban-to-stave-off-great-replacement

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[from comments]

TCinLA

Writes That's Another Fine Mess

I have several friends who were born and raised in Hungary, who no longer live there, because of Orban. They're not lefty intellectuals or political activists. They're just intelligent people with families who as one said "don't want to live in a country where the morons are in control." Orban's rule is responsible for a major Hungarian brain drain. My friends are so opposed to what has happened that they have applied for citizenship in the EU countries where they now live; they have no plans on going back.

This is what happens when the right wing takes power: since they are ipso factor braindead morons, that's who ends in running things.

Further proof that Truman was right 74 years ago: "the only 'good Republicans' are pushing up daisies."

The. Republicans. Are. America's. Enemy.

Moonlight by Max.

* * * *

"Let go, and respond to the immediate needs around you. Don't get caught in some false perception of yourself. There will always be another person more gifted than you. And don't perceive your position as important, but be ready to serve at any moment. If you can let go of who you think you are, you will become free--ready to love others. If you learn to see your impermanence, you will be able to live for the moment and not miss opportunities to love by pushing things into the future."

[Becoming Free :: By Thich Nhat Hanh]

* * * *

'Religion for dervishes is searching, for it is the custom of kings to bury treasures in deserted places'

(al-Maybudi) -Thanks Abdur Rahman

victormalonso :

tú eres la luz del universo | víctor m. alonso

War, at first, is the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off.

-Karl Kraus, writer

Claude Monet - Seascape , Storm , 1866-67

Saša Svoiski

* * * *

The strangeness that made everything sparkle came from me. Worlds rose out of my bottomless perplexity. César Aira, The Literary Conference

[exhaled-spirals]