The Wonder of Ai

We are living in a brave new world in which the powers of electronic media can turn red presidents into blue protesters, so to speak. If you don’t believe me, follow the link to Michael Kryton’s You Tube presentation: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QOCwt4YM5bk

Here’s the message being delivered on YouTube by the Ai images and voices of four living presidents: “The country’s on fire and we’ve come down to the wire. We are face to face with what we have to do. It has become our destiny, our single opportunity. What happens to our nation now is really up to you. So we are here reminding you the power’s in your hands. Time to make decisions and to make your final stand. We’re the living presidents; oh hear our final word. Get off your ass and make it count on this November third. Sing this song and share it; do the thing you need to do. . . and let’s bring down these bastards in a raging sea of blue!” Blogger’s note: This blogation is assembled and presented here by a registered Republican who is in full support of the message that Michael Kryton has presented. The use of certain offensive words, a** and bas****s and f***, is a feature of this Ai video that obviously demonstrates our Constitutional right to free speech. “They started wars and make us pay with pain on every day. They tell us that we are the ones who really are to blame; They mock us and they F*c* us, cuz it’s in their dna, but they forget that we all walk, awake in every way. So we are reminding you the powers in your hands; It’s time to make decisions and to make your final stand! We’re the living presidents; we felt we had no choice Your nation really needs you and is counting on your voice All we have to do is grab the problem by the throat. Remember this November to get off your butt and vote. Remember this November third you know what you must do. Bring down all those bastards in a raging sea of blue! Bloggers note: this written blogitation is typed out by a 75 year-old American who is still a registered (red) Republican who is full agreement with the message.

Glass half-Full

From Eminant to imminent

The Creator of the universe is everywhere, all seeing, all knowing. YWHW spoke light into being. . . electromagnetic energy shining forth through the Universe, illuminating the planets, warming the lands and the waters. Long before Morse code, long before Fortran or Basic or C++ or html, YWHW wrote the genetic code that enables life to live, breathe and propagate. The Spirit of God was moving upon the waters, combining hydrogen and oxygen to create the waters that would supply an earthly environment with liquidity, fluidity and mobility. The Spirit separated waters from the waters, setting aside some waters that would generate new features of solidity, structure and growth, coding the elements creatively brought forth in minerals, proteins and plants. The Spirit of God sculpted mineral elements into planets and moons. Planets then brought forth plants, varying in size, shape, color, and protein, according to their respective genetic codes. The Spirit of God thereby established a garden where the plants could prosper and grow. The Spirit of God, moving right along, raised life to a higher level, enabling consciousness and mobility, and regenerative life processes for the propagation and growth of the various organisms that would be living in the garden. . . all the while, lengthening the genetic codes to establish patterns of development, growth, wired with neurons. . . time and history and evolution, empowering neurons and nerves to transmit consciousness. As the Spirit of God continued moving through the waters and the plants and the creatures, YWHW brought forth more new plants and animals. Creation took on the quality and appearance of what we call a garden. All the creatures were growing and flourishing. Seeing that it was all good, YWHW took Creation to a higher level. . . bringing forth the crown of Creation, Man. . . the creature that scientists later classified as homo sapiens, which is Latin for a creature that can walk and talk and use intelligence to supervise the other life forms. This intelligence development was originally a blessing for the man and the woman who were enjoying their life in the garden; but . . . (with homo sapiens there has always been a ‘but’ . . that is. . . a limitation, a natural boundary, a set of rules.) Understanding that this unique crown of Creation, this man. . . had been given a few god-like attributes. . . consciousness, intelligence and a certain amount of creativity. . . YWHW set limits on Adam and Eve, so they would not get too carried away with this freedom and dignity thing. Meanwhile, back at the Eden ranch, there was another critter to whom the Creator had given a certain amount of consciousness and intelligence. The snake had mobility, just like Adam and Even did, but he didn’t have any arms or legs, and I think he must have gotten upset about it. Licking his tongue on a root of bitterness, the serpent decided to take matters into his own scales and try to convince the man and the women to violate a law that YWHW had established. Thinking himself a wise guy, he raised the question of the tree of knowlege, which was bound with YWHW’s prohibition: don’t eat from the fruit of that tree of knowledge of good and evil!

. . .nd the rest is history. As a consequence of their breaking the rules, violating the limits of YWHW Law, Adam and Eve were banished from the paradise; YWHW sent them out into the world, the territories of homo sapiens, to struggle and contend with the other men and women on the earth, the neanderthals and the cromagnon peoples who were being mean and stupid and all that stuff. . . the will to power and thus spoke zarathustra blahblah and the bullsh** and you know the rest of the story.

So we understand, looking back into this revealed history, that the crown of creation, Man and Woman, blew their chance for a perfect life. Originally created as God’s eminent creature in this earthly garden, they set in motion a degenerative pattern in which human depravity dragged men and women into an imminent degeneration, which became the way of the world. . . a cycle of lawlessness, debauchery, greed, violence and magamania. and its been going on for a long time. I’m here to tell you the degeneration of decency into magamania does not have to be immanent. Read the books of Mattew, Mark, Luke and John to find out about it. Glass half-Full

The Fall

Our homestead is nestled in a forest. We are seeing the leaves fall from the trees; we are seeing the insects gravitate toward our window screens; we are seeing the spiders spin their webs in places that are not acceptable for our human habits and sensibilities. The trees sacrifice their leaves to contribute to the soil, making their contribution to the renewal of life after the tree falls dead. We are entering a season when the temperature falls, the leaves fall, and we are aware that a season of cold weather is ahead of us.

As all the signs of life fall to a lower arrangement, we may contemplate an historic event. . . a fall of a different king, a long, long time ago. . . in which a man and woman fell out of the luxury of a perfect human existence, because they broke the rule that Creator YWHW had commanded them. After Adam and Eve were banished from Eden; they had to make their way in a “fallen” world, where they had to labor for their food. They found themselves in a cruel world in which might makes right. Maybe the lion was the king of the jungle. The earliest men and women had to work for their food. . . whether they were gathering grains and fruits, or slaughtering an animal. Fruits and vegetables are good, but the humans noticed that the wild animals were killing each other, and that some of the wild animals wanted to kill them! Homo Sapiens learned early on that they needed to use their sapiens brains and their strong arms to kill the beast before the beast killed them! And then after the lion or tiger or bear had been killed, the men and women discovered that they could recover the carcass and eat it. Their motto might have been eat the beast before the beast eats me! So the paths of human survival required, like it or not, slaughter. As human families and tribes migrated from land to land, fording streams, eating plants, killing animals. . . their awareness of this world developed inside their brains and their human souls (which the animals did not have) and they began to stack great stones up to build shelters and huts and even towers, such as the tower of Babel, where their bold venture into earthly life crossed some boundaries that Creator YWHW would not allow. So the prideful bluster of human expansion and presumption got knocked back a few stages, when Creator used his ways and means committee to knock Babylon down so that a new strain or two of human endeavor could have some room to make a new start. Along came Abraham; he seemed to be on Creator’s wavelength. So YWHW, having a new leader to work with, appointed Abraham to initiate a new way of living in which the animal sacrifice would be recognized by the man as holy.

This principle of “holy” took on new significance when Moses came along and established the Hebrew faith, beginning with the ten commandments. The new rules forbade men from killing other men women or children. The expansion of the commandments, the Torah, provided a sacrificial system whereby priests acknowledged in their ritual offerings that the animals sacrificed were the Lord’s provision for the sustenance and growth of the people. So we see that religious sacrifice did not do away with killing. Rather, it sanctified the offering of precious life, so that the slaughter of the animals reminded the people of their dependence on the Lord YWHW. This blog started out with this writer’s contemplation of an awareness that the Fall season of this year begins on Tuesday, Sept 22, one day after the Yom Kippur sacrifice for the Hebrew people. But the greater signifigance for me is that the Lord Yahweh utilized the Hebrew sacrifice to change the history of the entire world, and to save this believer’s mortal soul, by the sacrifice of His only Son at Calvary, about 2000 years ago. So the fall of Man has inflicted great trouble on human history, but the shedding of Jesus’ blood constituted a salvation for me, my family, my Christian brethren, and anybody else who believes that good news! He conquered death! By good news, I mean. . . Jesus’ resurrection demonstrated that life goes on after death. You just have to believe it! So follow Him to that eternal realm, and try not to fall down. Glass half-full

Contention Too Much With Us

This contention is too much with us, day and night; Arguing and contending, we twitter into online blight. There’s little we see nowadays we can truly relate to; Do we really know each day and night just what we are to do? We have turned our attentions to magamania and greed Still yet, this natural world supplies our every want and need. The people, some complaining, some sustaining, day and night Talking, screaming, meeming, teeming so much hype and blight For this, for everything, we are clueless; we are out of tune; And yet, and yet, we are a human race who have trod the moon! Whether pagans or believers suckled in a creed outworn, We have lost our way and left our founding documents all torn!

So might I, pecking on this lit-up laptop, stretch a strand of Liberty into the web? Remember We the People, Constitution, Gospel, and common sense.

Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Glass half-Full

The Tom Dooley Tragedy

The legend lives on from Deep Gap on down of the tragic crime of Tom Dooley. The legend, it is said, never resolves the question of who killed Laura Fonda on a mountainside in the Blue Ridge, back in 1866. . . even though a guilty verdict had been laid upon a young veteran of the Civile War, Tom Dula. I first heard about the Tom Dooley tragedy in the 1960’s.from the Kingston Trio. “Hang down your head, Tom Dooley; hang down your head and cry. Poor boy, you’re bound to die.“ In the early 1980’s, my bride and I moved to Boone, about 20 miles up the road from where it happened. A couple of weeks ago, I attended a meeting of our High Country Writers group, to hear a presentation from author Sharyn McCrumb. After our meeting, I bought her book:

Sharon’s authorial coverage of this historic murder consists of personal monologues from two people: Zebulon Vance, Tom Dula’s defense lawyer, and Pauline Foster, a crusty mountain woman who was, more than likely, the real killer in the story. But we’ll never know for sure. The story that McCrumb distills from a sour mash of hillbilly ignorance and licentiousness is a tale to be told, which is why songs have been sung about that fateful love triangle in a mountaineer household that had no ole time religion to keep them on a blessed path, a path that might have saved Laura Foster’s life and Tom Dula’s as well. The tale unfolds in an Appalachian mountain community, Elkville, in Wilkes County, which is the the first county my bride and I drive through when we’re traveling “down the mountain”, out of Boone, to go eastward, through the Piedmont.

I don’t know, but I been told that this story is almost century and a half old, so I’ll not try to reveal all the details about a hillbilly love triangle that had turned fatal. I’ll just drop in some snippets about the fascinating historical background behind this legend, a profound story that. . . if Shakespeare were alive today. . . he could have written one hell of a profound tragedy. It’s an Appalachian tragedy that emerges from the foothills of time. So I’ll just drop a few details and gem quotes from Sharon’s characters: Zebulon Vance, defense attorney: “I had to practice a little law after the (Civil) War ended, before those same trifling government bureaucrats saw fit to let me back into the Congress again. I shall die here, protecting the interests of my fellow Tarheels for as long as God grants me breath and strength.” Pauline Foster, older sister of the deceased Laura Foster, and possibly a partner in crime with her sister Ann, but we’ll never know for sure. Pauline says “I reckon that, to a scared and lonesome soldier, any scrawny gal of twenty can pass for a beauty, though there is handsomess in the Foster line that some say I got a touch of.” Could there be a slightly jealous tone in Pauline’s reckoning? But the older Pauline did not, it seems, get enough “touch of” the beauty to truly win Tom’s love, even though he did lay with her at some point in time. . . and that it was probably her “poc” syphilis that infected Tom, and then the other two sisters, due to the nocturnal adventures of Tom Dula. The closest she ever got to Tom’s love was an occasional roll in the hay with him because Tom’s hankerin’ for friggin’ was a little more than he could manage with one girl, even if he loved that one special girl, aka Laura Foster, her sister, the deceased. Murder mystery, you say? Yep! Sharyn McCrumb weaves, skilfully, some historical background into the saga. Pauline said this about the Civil War, the war that both Zeb Vance, defence layer, and Tom Dula had fought in, back in the day, on the losing side: Pauline’s judgement about the Civil war: “But they never asked our opinion about secession, and most folks up here said it was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Pauline might have been right about that. The slave owners of the South were a lot richer than those hillbillies in Elkville, Wilkes County, North Carolina. “When you see a baby-faced fellow eyeing you like a starving dog, you know that he may not live to see another spring, he wants you to give him all the springtimes he’s ever going to miss in one gulp.” So Tom Dula’s libido must have so fierce that he couldn’t settle for just the girl he loved, Laura. . . but had to give in to her older sisters who were either jealous or in heat, or both. The legend of Tom Dooley is a mysterious tale that will never be concluded. Three women in a hillbilly household. . . two sisters, one cousin. . . all three being lovers with the same hansom/horny man; the syphilis creeping in, brought in by Pauline, the teller of the tale in Sharyn’s story. . . literally, a clusterf***! If Tom Dula (Dooley) killed Laura Foster, then how was it that Pauline and Ann both knew where the shallow grove was? Why did Ann go crazy with nightmares and hallucinations, and died screaming about seeing black cats on the walls? It’s a mystery that will never be uncovered.

When I finish reading Sharyn McCrumb’s “The Ballad of Tom Dooley” maybe I’ll have more to write about that ole story that happened in a mountain holler that I heard friends of mine talking about, back in the day. (THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS, an imprint of St. Martins’s Press 2111) maybe I’ll have an update. But meanwhile, back at the Blue Ridge, The Ballad of Tom Dooley. How can there be an update? The answer to the big question, who really killed Laura Foster? And why did Tom Dula, while he was standing at a the gallows with a noose around his neck, say that he had never touched a hair on that girl’s head? Glass Chimera

Tell me, tell me, bro’ Bob, about Blind Willie McTell. Tell me.

Tell me the backstory ‘bout that Deep South that I was born into Tell me ‘bout New Orleans and Ole Man River he just keep rollin’ Tell me ‘bout the delta and the swelterin’ heat, them ole cotton fields Tell me ‘bout the delta blues, the crossroads and the cotton bolls Tell me ‘bout the Cajuns who came down from Acadia to Louisiana Tell me ‘bout NewOllins and Missippi. Tell mebout Elvis inMemphis Tell me ‘bout magnolias and moss hangin’ on the cypress trees Tell me ‘bout Louie Armstrong with his trumpet and his sweat Tell me ‘bout Blind Willie in the delta sweat and New’Awlins jazz Tell me ‘bout Big Muddy and Memphis blues and St. Louis. Tell me ‘bout Chicago jazz the blues the brassy tunes good news Tell me how them cotton bolls and ole times not forgotten Tell me ‘bout Little Rock1954, black kids at the schoolhouse door Tell me James Meredith v Ross Barnett at the Ole Miss door. Tell me ‘bout the Freedom Riders and the Edmund Pettis bridge Tell me bout Martin and letter from a Birmingham jail and Tell me ‘bout Dallas and the shot heard round the world Tell me ‘bout the red clay hills of Georgia and Miss’ippi delta and everything in between, strange fruit them delta roots Tell me tell me ‘bout Blind Willie Mctell, blues in delta hell. And that’s the way it was, back in the day. but, but Those days are gone. In dixie land land blacks took their stand and now those days are gone. . . gone. Sho’nuf and Amen! Glass half-Full

Persia and Israel

2560 years ago, King Artaxerxes noticed that his Hebrew servant, Nehemiah, “Why is your face sad?” Nehemiah answered, “Let the king live forever. Why should my face be sad when the city, the place of my fathers’ tombs, lie desolate and its gates have been consumed by fire?” The King: “What would you request?” So Nehemiah prayed to the God of heaven, and he said to the King; “If it please the king, and if your servant has found favor with you, send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers’ tombs, that I may rebuild it.” King Artaxerxes asked gave his consent for Nehemiah’s journey to Jerusalem. Then Nehemiah said: “If it please the king, let letters be to me for the governors of the provinces beyond the river, that they may allow me to pass through until I come to Judah, and a letter to Asaph, the keeper of the king’s forest, that he make give me timber to make beams for the gates for the gates of the fortress which is by the temple, for the wall of the city and the house to which I will go.” The Persian king granted Nehemiah’s request. When Nehemiah left Susa, he was accompanied by officers and horsemen of the Persian kingdom. When he arrived in Jerusalem, he had to convince his own Hebrew brethren that he had been sent by the King. But not all were convinced. Nehemiah wrote: “From that day on, half of my servants carried on the work while half of them held spears and shields. In the contentions that followed, the Persian captains were helping to protect the house of Judah. Nehemiah wrote: “From the day that I was appointed to be their governor in the land of Judah, from the 20th year to the 32nd year of King Artaxerxes, neither I nor my kinsmen have taken advantage of the governor’s food allowance. The Bible reveals that Nehemiah played the game of reoccupation, by the rules that had been established for him by the Persian king. That was then. Things are different now. The Hebrews have established their ancient homeland as the national home for Jews who have immigrated from all over the world, even from the holocaust of Nazi Germany. So what about the Persians now? In the last few months, we Americans have all kinds of rumors about supposed enmity between Isreal and Iran. . . especially now with donald trump’s self-declared war against Iran (Persia). All kinds of rumors are buzzing around on the internet. What are to believe? Where’s Walter Cronkite when we need him? What’s going on over there? What’s happening to our armed personnel in the Persian gulf and the surrounding countries? Now we’ve got a clusterfud of reports. Today I saw a video that seemed to portray the firing of an Iranian nuke on Tel Aviv. Say what? So I turn on the radio, searching the airwaves to hear any report about an Iranian nuke hitting Israel! But what to I find? NOTHING, absolutely nothing. As Sweetwater said back in the day. . . “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” And apparently our journalists—the 2026 ones—did not learn the lesson of true Journalism. . . the facts, only the facts! We’re depending on these guys:

. . .fired up in the frenzy of their respective national paranoiae, to NOT let the nukes be fired! That includes the Ayatollah in Persia/Iran, and the magamaniac occupant of the Oval office! As for Netanyahu, he better keep his profile low and his mouth shut, and the the Lord Baruch Hashem Adonai to see to it that Jews are protected. As for the person, who produced a fake youtube video of a so-called Iranian nuke striking Israel . . you should make a public apology for throwing bullsh** into the public consciousness! Glass half-Full