Trip to Iron Knot Ranch, SW New Mexico

Well, the 3rd week of August I was down in the sw corner of New Mexico at Iron Knot Ranch, which is a Nyingma Buddhist retreat center, in the lineage of Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche. The first photo shows the main area in front of the kitchen, where the elite meet , to greet, and eat.

Next photo is of the Prayer Wheel Building; 16 large prayer wheels, billions of mantra.

Next is a Prayer Flag cairn.

This photo came out extremely well, and is looking north towards Apache Box Canyon.

Okay, an actual look at the prayer wheels, each one over 12 feet high.

This shows an adobe bldg. where butterlamps are offered in a traditional Tibetan style. Most days I was there it was roughly 103 degrees outside. One learns to drink a lot of water. Two nights I slept on a rooftop, and was able to contemplate the Milky Way, which is very prominant at night there, as light pollution is very low, mostly coming from Tucson. Very good thing to be able to see the Milky way, and ponder this Earth as traveling along the rim of the Galaxy.

West Texas Travels from Last year

What follows are a series of photos from my travels to west Texas almost a year ago.Managed to do the circle loop around the Davis Mountains, and then back over to Alpine.
This is a view looking from Davis State Park, to the west in the direction of McDonalds Observatory.

Above is along the highway about 20 miles north of Van Horn, as you begin to see the Guadalupe Mountains.

This is at the western edge of the Davis mountains on state hwy 166.

Came across this by Neruda...

As part of my job, I consider donations for the library.
I came across a book of poetry by Pablo Neruda, opened it up and came across this passage:

"What can I do if the star chose me
no flash with lightning, and if the thorn
guided me to the pain of so many others.
What can I do if every movement
of my hand brought me closer to the rose?
Should I beg forgiveness for this winter,
the most distant, the most untainable
for that man who used to seek out the chill
without anyone suffering because of his happiness?

And if somewhere on those roads:
- distant France, numerals of fog -
I return to the extent of my life:
a lonely garden, a poor district,
and suddenly this day equal to all others
descends the stairs that do not exist
dressed in irresistible purity,
and there is the odor of sharp solitude,
of humidity, of water, of being born again:
what can I do if I breathe my own air,
why will I feel wounded to death? "

- - -from a collection called Winter Garden.

Taking it to the streets

Throughout the last few days, many have noted how inadequate the main stream media coverage of the results in Iran has been. Especially cable news.

At the Daily Dish a reader write in and notes:

"My daughter is currently living in Madrid, and as she has Iranian friends from school, she is riveted to her computer following events on the Dish, the Beeb, and a few other online sources.

I've been preaching to her about the corrupt nature of the MSM for quite a while now, and I think this situation is driving home to her just how useless they've become. It's strange to contemplate, but Facebook and Twitter now are more relevant than CBS and the other mainstream media organizations. Edward R. Murrow is spinning in his grave.

What's so astounding about the performance of the MSM in response to Iranian events is that there is nothing preventing the NYTimes or CNN or MSNBC or WaPo from doing what you're doing. NOTHING. What you're doing doesn't require a staff of hundreds or budgets in the millions. No, what it requires are the most fundamental requirements for journalism: an intense curiosity about the outside world, the unquenchable desire to communicate what you learn, and the willingness to work your ass off to make it all happen. You give a shit, and the MSM doesn't. It's that simple."

Supposedly Cable and broadcast news don't have the budget to cover foreign news like thay use to, but I also think its the case that corporate sponsorship means that certain stories if put on too much drives away commerial sponsors, thus causing some stories to be hardly covered at all.

The Byrds from 1965

Stumbled across this at YouTube. I liked it and thought I would share it.

Comment upon a Commentary

Matt Taibbi has an excellent blog post on Torture this week at: Being anti-torture doesn’t make you pro-terrorist.

I encourage following the link and reading the post. Then , in the 4th comment about this post , a reader has his own comment which I find relevant to these times:

"Matt - A related argument often made by the right is that you cannot criticize any abuses committed by the U.S. because you have not criticized worse abuses elsewhere. Ironically, this complaint is offened directed at human rights groups (like HRW) that actually do work on documenting the abuses by the worst of the wrost, while the persons making the argument couldn’t care less what is going on in placed like Myanmar, Libya (after Khadaffi gave Bush a PR victory), Somalia, Sudan, Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan. But this oft-unfounded allegation of hyprocrisy then becomes another data point for the right in support of their belief that people concerned about torture or the execution of minors (prior to the Supreme Court ban) or other injustices in the U.S. are really pursuing some secret anti-American agenda.

I think what you are seeing are the effects of the right wing true believers being fed a steady diet of Hannity and Limbaugh for more than a decade. They hear this stuff day after day after day, and group think sets in. For anyone living outside the right wing information cocoon, the right appears to be getting crazier and crazier. Yet, they haven’t a clue because they do not hear anyone questioning their growing nuttiness."

As Jimi Hendrix sang : "

I used to live in a room full of mirrors

All I could see was me

Then I take my spirit and I smash my mirrors

And now the whole world is here for me to see

Now Im searching for my love to be"

The thing is if one lives in a room of right wing mirrors, and all one hears is Limbaugh, all one see's is Hannity, and O'Reilly, and perhaps reads the Weekly Standard, and then you see the Red/Blue poster of Obama, and it makes you think he is an American version of Hugo Chavez, well indeed the possibilities of becoming a right wing worm ouroburos just keeps increasing exponentially. Eating your own tail. Must be a hard time.

And I don't see much attempt to break through the Room Full of Mirrors. Unlike Jimi Hendrix, most Rightists, don't exactly have universal Love on their mind

Cheney and Nuremberg

What the Senate Armed Service committee report shows, is as early as Dec. 2001, Bush/Cheney et. al. were planning on torture. And Cheney was pressuring the CIA to torture to get confessions of a Sadamm-Al-Qaeda link in order to bolster the case for war. We prosecuted Nazis in Nuremberg for inciting war. If this doesn't qualify, what does? See also Frank Rich's NYTs article:

Op-Ed Columnist - The Banality of Bush White House Evil - NYTimes.com

And any number of posts over at the Daily Dish.

a little footnote to History from yesterday....

-- okay Garrison Keillor over at Salon, notes that after Obama was sworn in, but before the luncheon, when the JumboTron screens showed Bush & Co taking off in a copter from behind the Capitol:

"But the great moment came later, as the mob flowed slowly across the grounds. I heard loud cheers behind me and there on the giant screen was the Former Occupant and Mrs. Bush saying goodbye to the Obamas in the parking lot behind the Capitol, the Marine helicopter behind them.
The crowd stopped and stared, a little stunned at the reality of it.

They saw it on a screen in front of the Capitol and it was actually happening on the other side. The Bushes went up the stairs, turned, waved and disappeared into the cabin, and people started to cheer in earnest. When the blades started turning, the cheering got louder, and when the chopper lifted up above the Capitol and we saw it in the sky heading for the airport, a million jubilant people waved and hollered for all they were worth. It was the most genuine, spontaneous, universal moment of the day. It was like watching the ice go out on the river."

(Garrison Keillor is the author of a new Lake Wobegon novel, "Liberty," published by Viking.)

http://www.salon.com/opinion/keillor/2009/01/21/inauguration/

Syd Barrett and the Mystery of Time