“Bigger guns”?

Or, as he got fatter and fatter, “Bigger (and bigger) coats”?

Or is it “bigger guns” after all?

Just asking. We love them all.

As a rule, we feel kind of protected here in South Jersey. No tornadoes raking houses into splinters and all that, no mudslides, no wildfires, no avalanches, no earthquakes. But the truth is, storms happen at intervals, even here. I’ve been through a bunch in my lifetime, and none of them had to do with climate change. Just weather being its usual irascible and wildly unpredictable self.

My first hurricane was Donna, back when hurricanes all had girl names. 1960. She snapped off trees, big ones, and tore away the power lines. We had to flee like refugees to grandparent homes where they also had murdered trees but retained electricity.

http://www.thedailyjournal.com/videos/news/local/2017/02/16/watch-hurricane-donna-hits-vineland-1960/98018684/

My next hurricane, some years later, was at sea, technically irrelevant here as I experienced it in the South Atlantic onboard an ocean liner which just barely survived. Her name was Beulah. The ship, when she finally reached harbor in New York, was a battered and rusted wreck. Want to experience a hurricane up close? Watch 30 foot waves toss an ocean liner around like a cork for eight hours, sitting on the floor while glass breaks and grand pianos moonwalk across a ballroom.

There was also Floyd, a weak sister of a hurricane who was mostly rain and pushed over trees by making the ground soggy. I remember strolling through the village of Greenwich during the eye and thinking Donna would have laughed at Floyd. Then there was Sandy, who butchered the shore but mostly gave us, you guessed it, rain.

Thing is, there’s more than one kind of storm. They don’t name the ones that come in the winter. Those they just give dates — the Blizzard of ’87 or suchlike — and your only documentation is anecdotal. 

I remember living in Philly in the 80s, and there was so much snow one year that whole rows of cars disappeared, and the few navigable streets were just narrow tunnels between snow banks.

Back in Jersey in the 90s, there was a freak ice storm that locked my MR2 in the driveway for two weeks, turned my Harley into a lovely ice sculpture, and took out the electricity for a week because ice kills power with a thousand tiny breaks in the lines, not a single downed electrical station. We camped in the living room, feeding wood into a small fireplace and eating cold food from cans.

A few years back we had a derecho, a dry hurricane that deprived us of electricity for five days. I sent my wife north and stayed with the dogs because somebody had to. First time I really believed I might die because of a storm. Temperatures were in the high nineties, the dogs were catatonic, and so, I concede, was I.

Storms happen. They happen all the time, even in what seem like the magically protected places. You can dream up conspiracy theories all you want, but the truth is, it’s just life on earth. It’s not change. It’s the rule. As the French say, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”

So I’m being singled out for extermination. Not for nipples. For what I’ve done, written, and recorded. 30 years worth. They can’t wipe that away if you don’t let them. If you want to endorse me, buy my books.

https://www.amazon.com/R-F.-Laird/e/B00J8VKZQQ. (Interesting. WordPress won’t make this obvious link live.. You know. Don’t let them look at the forbidden material.)

I did everything I could. It wasn’t enough obviously. Just enough to get me noticed, singled out, and shut down. Well, life is like that. 

So far, Amazon hasn’t caught on to what a threat I am. Three more books on the way.

“(P)articles of InstaPunk”. “All That’s Left of The Naked Woman.” And “InstaPunk on Matters Religious.”

i am content. All my life, I have given it my best shot. I will continue to do so. Until my last breath. But I can’t fight Big Brother without you. 

I’ve been fighting the lefty A’holes all my life. Growing tired. Time for you to do something maybe..

i guess I should be saying Who Cares? Facebook doesn’t like me showing nipples just as The City of Berkeley is determined to give women the right to be bare breasted and nippletastic. One of the pics they banned me for featured a news photograph, black barred to conceal (gasp) nipples, showing a feminist screaming for her right to be as naked as she wanted to be. Since I showed the censored news photo, I’m violating Facebook standards. Got it.

i’m banned for showing bare breasts, which are legal in New York and practically everywhere else in the U.S. 

But that’s not the real story. I’m being shut down and closed out at Facebook. And elsewhere. Told the story before. Predicted this. 

Go ahead. Try to access InstaPunk.com, InstapunkRules.com, or me at Facebook.com. Not happening. I’m a lifelong conservative. Want some irony?

The Phoenix SK Club. Libeled in the movie they made about Zuckerberg. He wanted to be a member of a Harvard final club. Didn’t get in. I was president of that club in 1973. Since then I have written a bunch of books and no longer care about money. At all. But some people never stop obsessing about laurels they can never have.

i can live without Facebook. Can you? 

Meet me here. We can still have fun.

Leni Riefenstahl was probably the greatest propagandist of the twentieth century. She was a brilliant cinematographer, and she made the milestone Hitler movie,”The Triumph of the Will.”

Bad eyes. Always bad eyes with sociopaths.

Thing is, she really had no politics. She was in love with images of masculine and feminine beauty. Sex and sex and sex. She escaped the purge of ex-Nazis someho and went hunting with her camera in Africa.

Older but all the more a voyeur.

Great photos.

Ja!

Ve luv us some hunky Männer.

And some frauleins too.

Beautiful pics, but they buy her no forgiveness, because she did this too:

Arid amoral talent is ultimately empty. Something millennials should set about learning. They’re well on the way to a place Dante described in detail.

Everybody in Washington is gray and brown and kind of melted. Blondes tend to be individual because bold and not easily controlled. Why there has never been a blonde president before. (You could look it up.) Maybe why they hate him so. Think about it. Never a blonde president. Not once. Outrageous. They make jokes about us. Especially about our womenfolk, who can’t help how they are. We are compelled to call this bias “blondism.”

https://www.eyrie.org/~thad/strange/blondejokes.html.

In the movies (why?), blondes are always stereotypes, of good, evil, astonishing physical beauty and bravery, and cunning, and intelligence despite their low IQs, and the really fine looking breasts of our wives, and, well, always winning in the end.
 

The fastest gun. 
 

The saddest man.
 

The scariest, meaning the really truly scariest..
 

The nightmare. Why you can’t sleep.
 

The best of the best and the worst of the worst. Take it from me, Peter O’Toole was blond.
 
Yeah. They’re always the ones you think of in supernatural terms, as opposed to Martin Scorsese’s beaten up Booklynites. What’s the difference? Ultimate hero, ultimate villain, ultimate boy toy, ultimate piece of ass. Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue wouldn’t exist without blondes. You know it and I know it. And then there are the blonde men: Robert Redford, Brad Pitt, James Dean, Thor, and such. Sometimes shining, sometimes doomed. The best and the worst. Why the whole world watches.
 
Yeah. They’re almost always the villains these days. Heroes back then. But villain parts are way more fun to play. Blonde hair = evil. I c’n do that. Who dat who wanna play? Evil be da fun game.

Even, well, especially, the women.
 
Lana Turner.

Her movies were almost as salacious as her life.
 
 Veronica Lake.

  4′ 10″ and and a fall of blonde hair.
 
 Grace Kelly.

I was there when she was there but I fell in love with Edith Sanski at Menton instead..

Kim Novak

She was the only woman who was a Nemesis for James Stewart.

Everybody knows that blonds still rule everything. They don’t like it. Blonds don’t seek it. They’re content to have incredibly awful jokes told about them. Truth is, everybody wants to be a blond.

Until the guy who put five bullets in your blond back thinks he should give you one more.

Eastwood used to be blonde. So did I. We got so discriminated for it. All we can say is, Blonde Lives Matter.

btw, you think Clint’s cold? Try Fred.

Those brown haired guys are blondists like you wouldn’t believe.

You see, true is the best credential.

1. Secretariat

2. Rush

3. Cinderella Man

4. The Greatest Game Ever Played

5. A TIE: Miracle and Coach Carter

You can do better? I dare you.

FILBERTS

UNSALTED PEANUTS

CASHEWS

KOKONUTS

And for good measure, more…

UNSALTED PEANUTS

LOL, Joe.

Crichton was right. Also wrong. Annexing the others won’t work. Always more islands. & storms.

Somebody posted a lecture Michael Crichton gave at CalTech. He was a truly brilliant man. He annihilated the notion that there’s anything compatible between science and consensus. But his opening remarks gave rise to a serious disagreement I have with him. From the speech:

“I was born in the midst of World War II, and passed my formative years at the height of the Cold War. In school drills, I dutifully crawled under my desk in preparation for a nuclear attack. It was a time of widespread fear and uncertainty, but even as a child I believed that science represented the best and greatest hope for mankind. Even to a child, the contrast was clear between the world of politics—a world of hate and danger, of irrational beliefs and fears, of mass manipulation and disgraceful blots on human history. In contrast, science held different values— international in scope, forging friendships and working relationships across national boundaries and political systems, encouraging a dispassionate habit of thought, and ultimately leading to fresh knowledge and technology that would benefit all mankind. The world might not be a very good place, but science would make it better. And it did. In my lifetime, science has largely fulfilled its promise. Science has been the great intellectual adventure of our age, and a great hope for our troubled and restless world. But I did not expect science merely to extend lifespan, feed the hungry, cure disease, and shrink the world with jets and cell phones. I also expected science to banish the evils of human thought—prejudice and superstition, irrational beliefs and false fears. I expected science to be, in Carl Sagan’s memorable phrase, “a candle in a demon haunted world.” And here, I am not so pleased with the impact of science. Rather than serving as a cleansing force, science has in some instances been seduced by the more ancient lures of politics and publicity. Some of the demons that haunt our world in recent years are invented by scientists. The world has not benefited from permitting these demons to escape free.”

He’s scornful, meaning perplexed, by the dominion of science as a sweeping political, sociological, even religious tool. He shouldn’t have been perplexed. It was always in the cards. Every authority regarding itself as expert expands ineluctably into the realm of believing it alone knows what to do about everything. In other words, the realm of power, ultimate seductress of the universe, whose measure is always always omniscience and control.

But science has always been a dicey game, and it’s never been clear that scientists, uniformly didactic, ever got anything more right than anyone else. They’re right about some things, but only within their narrow realm of expertise. We all know the Pythagorean Theorem (A2 + B2 = C2). But there was also a whole School of Pythagoreanism, in which the triangle king tried to lay down the law about EVERYTHANG. Or, in the words of Crichton, “prejudice and superstition”:

“The whole Pythagoric school produced appropriate songs, which they called exartysis or adaptations; synarmoge or elegance of manners and apaphe or contact, usefully conducting the dispositions of the soul to passions contrary to those which it before possessed. By musical sounds alone unaccompanied with words they healed the passions of the soul and certain diseases, enchanting in reality, as they say. It is probable that from hence this name epode, i. e., “enchantment,” came to be generally used. For his disciples, Pythagoras used divinely contrived mixtures of diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic melodies, through which he easily transferred and circularly led the passions of the soul in a contrary direction, when they had recently and in an irrational and secret manner been formed; such as sorrow, rage and pity, absurd emulation and fear, all-various desires, angers and appetites, pride, supineness and vehemence. Each of these he corrected through the rule of virtue, attempering them through appropriate melodies, as well as through certain salubrious medicine.”

Triangles as religion. Maybe we should junk our knowledge of right triangles. Science was never pure. Scientists were never objective or religion free. Newton invented the scientific method. To illustrate the hand of God in the universe. The pretense, the appalling pretense, that science was ever free of a belief in divine order is both ludicrous and laughable. But Crichton, like all his peers, pretended to the contrary. He knew better. I promise you he did. Where he’s as guilty as all the phony scientists who were so sure about climate change.

I feel compelled to suggest that no discipline, no field of study, art, literature, philosophy, religion, or science can stretch across the breadth of human and universal experience to deliver a single answer.

I call it my Theory of Islands. The islands in question are not isolated. They are loci of interest, unique perspectives on life.

John Donne was dead wrong. Every man is an island. Every field of interest is an island. How we look to God:

We don’t see the water that joins us. Every one of us wants our island to conquer all the dry land. Science wants to conquer religion, philosophy wants to obviate reason, comedy wants to pretend there is no water but only concealed shipwrecks, psychology wants us to believe that the water is an illusion concealing our fears about sex, and the cosmologists want us to accept that the distances between islands are too vast to matter.

What no one wants to concede is that there’s an architecture to all our islands and distances. There are lakes in Italy where every tiny island has a distinct identity — from Isola Bella to Pescatore — each one lovely and valid and true.

Science and reason can’t accept this. Why their determined efforts at hegemony will always, ultimately fail.

But Crichton was also a beautiful island. Just wrong about important points.

Islands do meet and collide from time to time, even merge. But it’s always temporary, like a night of passion. Union is not Pangea. It’s a romance.

Why Utopians would ever want this state to reoccur is the central mystery of the death of consciousness on earth. Islands.