Not likely, since everything is suspect and out of kilter.  Don’t snicker, but I just finished a copy of the Marilyn Monroe Murder Case Closed by Jay Margolis and Richard Buskin,  which also includes the Sirhan/Robert Kennedy  fiasco, and am feeling troubled again.   I’ve suspicioned that Castro did in JFK,  that 9-11 and Israel’s lack of preparation for Gaza’s initial attack were a planned and scheduled  excuse for a desired war, that the timing of the recent death sentence for a 9-11 bomber was curious, I read that Sirhan is still in  prison, and Wikipedia reports the following:  In a 2018 interview with The Washington Post, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of the murdered Kennedy, said that he had traveled to California to meet with Sirhan in prison and that, after a relatively long conversation (the details of which he would not disclose), believed that Sirhan did not kill his father and that a second gunman was involved.^[26

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The new law in Utah is one of several regarding book access to take effect in schools this summer. Proponents of these restrictions say they are necessary to protect children from encountering sensitive topics while alone in the library or in the classroom without the guidance of their parents.  So there goes sex education and  “stranger danger.”  I wonder if the new restrictions also apply to charter schools.  …And suddenly, does it mean that our adult Americans–who may have been forced to produce these children–are sterling caring  ethical individuals free of the drug and alcohol culture?  Would being protected from an author like Margaret Atwood or Judy Blume through high school really keep them from  the rampant sexism bragged about by an earlier president?  Will the Truth Make Us Free? Surely we’re not moving toward raising snowflaked children to increase our national birth rate!?  What other motivation can  suddenly be behind these fervent keep-the-children ignorant about life actions!  It isn’t like it is springing from  our citizens being overtaken by ethical values! Oh, I forgot:  Maybe parents will be impressed and vote conservative…

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STAIRCASE TO REALITY

Do the steps to reality go up or down?

Where did math come from?

There’s no line on the fishing pole?

But can we believe in serendipity?

How about extreme serendipity?

Who is it says there’s such a thing as reality?

If wishes were horses we could all ride.

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WHY THE INTEREST IN REALITY?

If the folks in Gaza are merely imagining  being brutalized and killed, they need to understand quick.

If the authors of 2025  are only nightmare figures, let the truth ring out!

Duh,  what floor will my escalator stop on?

I can imagine an uncouth man saying, “reality sucks.”

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APOLOGIES

I know this is no place for navel staring, but it’s the only blog I have and I’m the only nanmykel.

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Image:Bing.com

The sound of the overhead fan stopped  the moment I stopped. Briefly I wondered why I could no longer hear it. And then I knew, because I was being carried along a determined tide.

My son had been holding my hand a moment ago and now I’m tumbling in a liquid current?  Just sensing it, no words in my head. My head, what a laugh!  All I have now is my awareness, which is hard to believe.  I’m just experiencing, straight to myself, who no longer exists.  Hey, wait a  minute!  Who am I?

I have nothing to laugh with, but cannot fail to see the humor  in coming back in my own progeny.

Self Critique:  *If you’re looking for a delicate way to talk about someone dying, kick the bucket isn’t the right way to do it — it’s a blunt and casual, almost joking way to say “die.” –The Guadian via Google

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NOW DOWN TO BUSINESS

Difficult to believe, but the news seems kind of boring: same-o same-o.  Even the horrendous can fade if that’s all that’s on the horizon.  Of course  Trump is distancing himself from 2025.  How many believe it?  What do you believe about 9-11?  (I recently wrote “7-11”, in print!).    For what it’s worth, giving one of the 9-11 bombers such a belated death sentence surely smells of politics.  Related to the hostage swap?  Have we been given a rationale?

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DOUBLE THE DAMAGE

While the damage caused by the multiple wildfires is horrendous, putting them in perspective by looking at the earnest effort to expand forests by planting  trees to delay the climate crisis  is truly sickening.  Now why am I writing about unfortunate things?  Maybe so I’m not seen as a chicken crying “the sky is falling!”  What’s a useful way to respond when it really is?  And why doesn’t grandfather God in heaven spank Netanyahu?

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WHY ARE WE FOR ISRAEL?

FOR ME AND MY CHILDREN:

LESSONS

1. Pick your parents

2. Make your Inner Sanctum comfy

3.  Tend your inner fire

4.  Follow your curiosity

5.   Respect your creativity

6.   Feed yourself with nature’s beauty

7.  Connect, connect, connect!

Know that He’s displeased with His earthlings.

As if the Supreme Court wasn’t bad enough,  there’s out of control wild fires lapping our …everything, I guess.  As of today 71 thousand acres are ablaze in California, and the largest in the U.S. is in Oregon, where  the total land burned or burning in Oregon reached more than a million acres on Friday, meaning the size of land burning in the state is now greater than the entire state of Rhode Island.

As of Friday morning, there were 125 active fires burning in Oregon, totaling 1,018,218 acres.

This past Sunday was the warmest single day ever recorded, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union-funded research organization. That is, until Monday, when global temperatures inched up a bit more. Then Monday became the hottest day in modern history.

On Thursday, António Guterres, secretary general of the U.N., addressed the global heat wave and called for new efforts to protect the vulnerable and workers, as well as to make population centers more resilient.

“Let’s face facts,” he said. “Extreme temperatures are no longer a one-day, one-week or one-month phenomenon. If there is one thing that unites our divided world, it’s that we’re all increasingly feeling the heat. Earth is becoming hotter and more dangerous for everyone, everywhere.”

Smoke from the fires has reached the east coast.

“Extreme heat is the new abnormal,” Guterres said.

The state agreed to take steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. It’s the latest of several victories for youth-led climate lawsuits.

By David Gelles

Such dumb refrains keep falling off my brain these days, and the current “Supreme” Court keeps feeding my fire.  Better an Alka Seltzer than a fentanyl, I reckon, but Jeeze!  If God or the Devil tried to publish a drama based on current news, it would be difficult to find a publisher: too bombastic/fantastic  to be believed.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a blistering dissent along with the other two liberal justices, the ruling creates a series of “nightmare scenarios” for what a president is now allowed to do. “

The SPLC, a civil rights organization that monitors extremist groups, released its “Year In Hate And Extremism 2023” report recently.

 A significant portion of the report, which tracked burgeoning anti-democratic and neo-fascist movements and actors across America, is devoted to the New Apostolic Reformation, “a new and powerful Christian supremacy movement that is attempting to transform culture and politics in the U.S. and countries across the world into a grim authoritarianism.

“Emerging out of the charismatic evangelical tradition, the NAR adheres to a form of Christian dominionism, meaning its parishioners believe it’s their divine duty to seize control of every political and cultural institution in America, transforming them according to a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture.”

NAR adherents also believe in the existence of modern-day “apostles” and “prophets” — church leaders endowed by God with supernatural abilities, including the power to heal. In 2022, a handful of these “apostles,” the report notes, issued what they called the Watchman Decree, an anti-democratic document envisioning the end of a pluralistic society in America.

The apostles claimed they had been given “legal power and authority from Heaven” and are “God’s ambassadors and spokespeople over the earth,” who “are equipped and delegated by Him to destroy every attempted advance of the enemy.” Re Christopher Mathias in Huffington Post

Airlines, health care systems, banks and scores of other businesses and services around the world began to slowly recover recently from severe disruptions caused by a global technology outage. But issues persisted throughout the day with no clear end in sight, as businesses manually updated their systems and airlines struggled to get crews and planes to where they were needed.  The outage was attributed to a software update issued by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm whose software is used by myriad industries around the world. The disruption, which reached what some experts called “historic” proportions, was a stunning example of the global economy’s fragile dependence on certain software, and the cascading effect it can have when things go wrong.

The incident strengthens my concern–correct or not–that folks who have grown so dependent on the internet and destablized education (“dumbed down”) will be fodder for the more powerful, here/or abroad.

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MAYBE A RE-PRINT:

End Of

We came, we tried, we fought

and ate each other up.

We lived and died by our own hand.

If 2 survived and met on a plain,

would we hug one another

or kill again?    –Nan

I’ve discovered another hole in my education:  Camel racing. So, I thought I’d share my new info with those of you attending:

The dromedary is the camel used in camel racing. In fact, the dromedary’s name comes from the Greek verb dramein, which means “to run.” Many camels are specially raised for racing. They train on treadmills and in swimming pools.  If that isn’t a sight, there’s always ostrich racing. Camel racing is serious business abroad in Kenya, Sudan, Egypt, India, and Australia—but particularly in the Arab countries of the Middle East.  

CRUELTY TO CHILDREN  –  Beyond the fact that all races involving animals carry a certain element of cruelty, camel racing has a particularly notorious legacy of recruiting young boys, in some cases children abducted and trafficked from destitute villages in South Asia, to be jockeys.  Children are often favored as jockeys because of their light weight, and in order to maximize the camels’ speed they often will fast for days at a time prior to each race.^[5] It has been reported that thousands of children (some reported as young as 2 years old) are trafficked usually from countries such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Pakistan, and Sudan for use as jockeys in Arab States of the Persian Gulf.^[6] In 2005, aid workers estimated a range of 5,000 – 40,000 child camel jockeys in the Persian Gulf region.^[7][8]

(She is 81, like he is this year)

A poem by Bonnie Prince titled  High Flight for Joe Biden

Dear Joe. my dear old Joe,

You may think you are eternal

flying with angels above the clouds,

cock-sure, infallible, beyond gravity,

while hoping you appear in control,

divine, just short of godliness,

but, like all of us,

like me, also in my 81st year,

you are dying,

sloping down, descending now,

no longer resplendent, no longer godly,

no longer ascendant.

You are moving like all of us, elliptical,

oblique, moving in an ellipse,

an eclipse, circling the airport,

down toward commoners’ ground,

locked, like all of us,

in the epicycles of being 81,

looking in the self-confirming mirror,

vision warped by the gravity,

the trajectory

of hubris.

Dear Joe, I love you, but

I want you, now,

more than ever,

to see yourself caught

in the continuum of time and space,

that web that even eternal Einstein

could not exit.

Dear Joe, we both are hoping

for damage control,

praying for one last replay

of a fireworks display

to enlighten the world,

and one last chance to tell

the earthlings that the promise

of our being on the planet

mattered, that  our presence

in the world mattered,

and we were loved

for the lives that we lived,

and we made a difference.

You and I, Joe, each of us at 81,

we share the same trajectory.

Yet the gravity of anatomy, of biology,

is aiming downward now, dead serious.

Joe, we both are gravely mortal,

floating between cloud and soul.

Joe, we both are hang-gliding

on the wing of the lobe of our mind,

trying to find balance,

a stance, on the planet,

our wings are feeling gravity

taking us down now, gliding

to a lower level

seeking equity; seeking equilibrium.

Joe, I know how you feel,

but we both are 81 now.

We both are high-flying drones,

guided by satellite or instrument,

by North Star or lodestone,

by magnetic or electronic field,

by intuition, or vision, or AI,

but always inescapable  anatomy,

metabolically

in the biology of finality.

We are deep in mortality mode,

without a court appeal

without a safety net.

Our  landing gear are deployed,

hoping for a gentle touch,

a soft touch-down at the moment

of contact when our tires

jerk on the runway,

and we glide, seatbelts fastened

to a stop on the tarmac and taxi

down to the finale, grateful, at least

we did not crash

glad to slide,

on a slow play of earth and sky,

at the end of our Earth time,

our time for the final display,

the hubris of our lives, arrayed

against the promise

of our birth,

as told by our parents

our glide path.

Hey dear Joe,

we both are running

out of time.

Dear Joe, it’s quite likely

that we are all

in decline, but maybe

your taste for the ultimate Presidency

will buoy you up

and you can still

go viral after all!

And the last spark of light

that is uniquely our self,

the frail glint-mark

of sparked flint

that we finally make

upon the endless canvas

of the cosmos

will be inter-stellar.

Bonnie Prince    July, 2024