Til Then

Well, after 4 days of holidaze, am not feeling all that inspired.
Still, I did succeed in transcibing the lyrics of Til Then by the 13th_Floor_Elevators, which is on their Bull of the Woods album.
These lyrics are virtually unfindable on the web. I've tried. Will add these lyrics here, and also add them to Leos Lyrics.
Okay, here they are:

Til Then

La La La La La
La La La La La
La La La La La
La La La La La

I hear the sound of feet.
of dancing in the street
there's a dance thats coming on,
have a feeling it won't be long
the sound of bells a ringing,
the sound of people singing

Something, I love something,
Something, I love something....

brings sadness from the heart
and the madness soon departs
until we've found a way
as what it takes to say
When each man lends his voice
and grabs his only choice

Something, I love something,
Something, I love something....
Something I love......

our dance is coming on,
and you know it won't be long

this is where the laughter plays,
so to lift your happy ways,
as the echo builds and swirls,
and you know the carpet fills,
and everyone will fly through space,
and so joins the human race

La La La La La
La La La La La
La La La La La
La La La La La

the new will soon be found
as the air fills up with sound
the sound of bells a ringing,
the sound of people singing

and each man lends his voice
and grabs his only choice

Something, I love something,
Something, I love something....

and you know I love those bells,
and you know I love those bells
something else I'd love to say.......

"they'll turn the game board over as they leave."

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE
November 17, 2005

President Bush's positive job rating continues to fall, touching another new low for his presidency, the latest Harris Interactive poll finds. Bush's current job approval rating stands at 34%.

"Seeing the Bush Administration go down is not going to be a pretty site. Like angry confused children, as it dawns on them that they will not be able to win this game, that they will soon completely lose the ability to swindle the American public, then they will decide that if they're going to lose, were all going to lose and they'll turn the game board over as they leave." ----- Bloganator at Huffington Post.

Then from Robert Scheer over at the Huffington Post:
"You've got to hand it to Dick Cheney; no other modern politician has come so close to perfecting the theater of the absurd. Even as he protests his innocence of lying about matters of state, he lies about matters of state.

Parsed out, Cheney's recent statements amount to a defensive claim the Bush administration didn't lie so much as it was just calamitously incompetent, too eager for invasion to bother to do its due diligence.`The reality, however, is that while the Yalie president may not be the brightest star on the horizon, the owlish Cheney is nobody's dummy. What he is nand has always been, is the most bald-faced of the administration's war hustlers, shamelessly peddling, for example, the cloak-and-dagger tale of a Hussein operative meeting with 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Prague long after U.S. intelligence had dismissed it.

Similarly, it was Cheney who was instrumental in getting Colin Powell to make the astonishing claims of the intelligence source code-named "Curveball" the centerpiece of the secretary of state's prewar presentation to the United Nations. Now, thanks to a definitive investigation by the Los Angeles Times published Sunday, we find out that top German intelligence sources in charge of interrogating Curveball had already declared him an unreliable source.

"We were shocked," a high level German intelligence officer told the Times. "Mein Gott! We had always told (the United States) it was not proven -- it was not hard intelligence."

But perhaps the most outrageous lie Cheney and the White House kept -- and keep -- making is that invading Iraq was a sensible part of the response to 9/11."In February 2002, after a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer, Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq -- a war more than a year away," noted Graham on Sunday. "Even at this early date, the White House was signaling that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was of such urgency that it had priority over the crushing of al Qaeda."",

In making his continued one-man jihad against the facts, Cheney is apparently throwing Hail Mary passes to that part of the Republican base which will believe anything it is told -- having already lost the trust of the majority of Americans.But as Rep. John Murtha said in response to the slander by a Republican congresswoman that he, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, is a coward for arguing for the quick and complete withdrawal from Iraq, 'You can't spin this. You've got to have a real solution. This is not a war of words, this is a war."
Yes, Cheney's war.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-scheer/cheneys-trouble-with-the_b_11117.html

Well, this has been sort of a connect-the-dots post, with me bringing in material from several sources.

As it is Bush at 34% means next spring, unless something miraculous happens, he can do fundraising for Repubs, but probably not public campaign appearances. By late spring the Abramoff trail should start, and Scanlon will squeal and start getting Repub congressmen indicted. By early fall the Scooter Libby trial could start.

Things don't look good for the Republicans , and the crack up in the ranks are a sign that panic is starting to set in. There probably will be a withdrawal or re-deployment, because if Bush tries to stay the course, with 57% of Americans thinking he's a liar,he will end up getting destroyed politically, and if Cheney is any indication of the mentality, or lack of, his stay the course idea will take the Republican party down with him.

As Thomas Friedman notes today," If ours were a parlimentary system Bush would have to resign by now."

Its too bad we have to wait til Nov 2006 for some substantial reaction to this regime to take place.Lets see ,2 years of Korean War took Harry Truman down to 23% approval. So Bush still has further down to go. It is messy, and it is going to get messier.
Since we don't have a parlimentary system , we are stuck with this turkey for another three years.

Check it out:

CD recommendation:
Traveling out to Ironknot , I was introduced to this cd by the Be Good Tanyas. Also my friend Gus, says it is a very popular album there, getting played a lot at IronKnot now. I tried it out,and can highly recommend it. Here is the listed review over at Amazon.com:

"Once again a Canadian perspective helps to bring out the best in American roots music. Like the Band, these three women of the Great North have taken the traditional sounds of their southern neighbor and made them uniquely their own. They inflect the acoustic intimacy of public domain tunes like "Reuben" and "In My Time of Dying," modern classics like Townes Van Zandt's "Waiting Around to Die," and Peter Rowan's "Midnight Moonlight," and their own songs with only the best and most appropriate elements of their punk, trip-hop, and Motown influences. As in the work of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, you have to listen closely to hear how Frazey Ford, Samantha Parton, and Trish Klein veer off from the past into the future: a soulful melisma wrapped in Ford's whisper, a hint of a funk groove in their arrangement of "House of the Rising Sun," Klein's electric guitar peeking out between her banjo and harmonica. Chinatown taps into the quiet power found on the back porches of what Greil Marcus called "old weird America," and with nary a musical misstep, qualifies as a masterpiece." --Michael Ross

A soothing album for the soul.---J.P.

Here is one more photo from the stupa consecration. The respective statues, from left to right, would be Chenrezig, Red Tara, and Shaykamuni Buddha. 

Shrine during Stupa consecration

Here you can see the Stupa which contains some relics from the cremation of H.E. Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche. His paranirvana anniversary happens to be Nov.17th. 

Front of the new Shrineroom at Ironknot Ranch

This is how the front of the shrineroom at Ironknot ranch looks at present. At some point, the raster block it is made of will be plastered over and look like stucco adobe. 

Photos from far western New Mexico

This is a view looking north from Ironknot Ranch towards Apache Box Canyon .
From what I hear, it was a canyon used at times by Geronimo and his band.

If the calvary pursued them , they would retreat to the far back of the canyon, snipe for a while , then use ladders to get out at the top of the canyon, and pull the ladders after them, leaving the calvary stuck, boxed up in the canyon, so to speak.

Back tracking: a church outside Levin ,CZR

This photo is of a church in the Czech Republic, that I used to see every Tuesday and Thursday, when I was doing one on one English tutoring at Metrostaf. It is just outside the village of Levin, about 33km NE of Kolin'.

When I used to see it it was always like stepping into the year 1805, I mean it appears to date from that era I would say. When you cross the wooden bridge and come close to it, the atmosphere around it felt like going 2 centuries back at least. Just from visiting the catherdral in Kutna Hora, I surmised that the further east one could go, in the Czech Republic, Slovakia or southern Poland, the feeling of going back in time would also obtain. Quite amazing really. I kept expecting a Hussar in a Napoleonic uniform to come riding around the corner at any minute. Very quiet ,still place too.

Back from a Journey to the Far End of New Mexico

Well, the reason no posts have happened for so long has been my journey to the Far end of New Mexico by plane, auto, and back by train and bus. Went to Ironknot ranch in New Mexico , which is a Tibetan Buddhist retreat center about 14 miles east of Duncan , Arizona.

What was happening there was Tulku Jigme Rinpoche conducted a series of empowerments from the Dudjom Tesar,and then there was a 2 day consecration of a small stupa that contained relics of the late Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche.

For anyone stumbling across this that has never heard of the Dudjom Tesar.; briefly Dudjom Rinpoche who was once head of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism discovered a great number of mind treatures or terma, that were set down as specific Tibetan deity practices by him. These practices are needed by anyone doing the Dudjom Tesar,which is a Nyingma lineage ngondro practice> Ngondro being the preliminary foundation practices found basically in all four schools of Tibetan Buddhism. One can uses Wikipedia and check out the little article I wrote on Ngondro there.

Also one can go to :http://www.ironknot.org, for plenty of info on Ironknot ranch.
At the time the empowerments were also given as blessings for one's mind-stream, which is how I took them.
I will write more about this in another post. Just thought I would explain the absence.