As others in the business of disseminating news and information, somewhat as the Tally Atwater character in “Up Close and Personal,” mature from the tawdry and tacky to the four Fs of “fortunately, form follows function,” then those complying with Jackson Browne’s call in “Farther On”:

“But the angels are older
They can see that the sun’s setting fast
They look over my shoulder
At the vision of paradise contained in the light of the past
And they lay down behind me
To sleep beside the road till the morning has come
Where they know they will find me
With my maps and my faith in the distance
Moving farther on”

will learn to look farther on and farther up and those farther up will be able to look back along the ring at those looking up with understanding even as those looking up will be able to look back at those who are copies of their early selves and those at all levels will increasing understand that the circle of life is a spiral ring.

Near the top of the spiral is a coruscating bead whose uncommon duality comprises the fused elements of imagination and focus, a rare alloy. So rare is it that chemists can not discover the secret to fusing those two elements. This bead must be conjured by an alchemist savvy enough to mix outside the lab.

No known test exists to identify an ImagiFocusion, or IF, directly. But, once one who has tried finds a bread crumb trail of appropriate distinction to be distinguished as a linking ring, then the journey to the end of the ring oozes a difficulty. Focus for a moment on imagining the discovery of the following bread crumb byline.

“Thoughts on politics, current affairs, riffs and reflections on what’s in the news and what’s not–but should be” - Katrina Vanden Heufel

We may consider the last name a lagniappe. The ‘van’ part clues us the name is probably Dutch. The ‘den’ then is equal to ‘the’ in English. The ‘Heufel’ is probably pronounced originally the same as it would be if the word name were in German — ‘hoy fel’ and means hill. Breaking it down to the two syllables result in ‘hoy’ — probably ‘high’ and ‘fel’ — probably field or ground. So then, Katrina from the high ground is the creator and owner of this fantastic byline that is clever enough to contain the word ‘riff’ applied to language rather than music.

So imagifocus for a moment on the probable source of riff — riffle = ripple. Imagine a jazz line with sufficient melodic beauty that the riff will probably riffle several times since a riff by definition is “ostinato”, stubborn. Or perhaps the musician is confident to just play the riff once and let it do the rippling in your head as the musician gives you a simple diminished recurrent line to meld with the ripple of the riff which the musician knows is rippling through your brain.

I tend to think that in this time when floods of sound bytes sweep us away from bearings of depth we have come to treasure and rely on that, among the flotsam and jetsam of sound bytes and bull pucky, a writer may discover another writer’s alchemical gem warning us that we are floating into an area of diminished flood where we may find sprouting along the banks skillfully constructed, complete thoughts that explain to us and inform us and occasionally reveal a riff of rare beauty that will ripple above the grooves of our minds until comprehension settles.

A salute to Lordess of the Ring, Katrina Vanden Heufel, editor of The Nation and best wishes to The Nation, its many writers/bloggers who heed her examples, The Nation’s staff, and all those who desire The Nation to continue blessing the nation.

I hope you like the O’Really, O’Reilly logo pic. I would enjoy hearing your comments.

Believe it or not, my tardiness in getting my work done could result in a John Mac Inane presidency. A John Mac Inane presidency could result in the destruction of civilization.

This may seem incredible unless you realized how much destruction the Bush administration has already done and how far along the road toward a collapse of civilization the Bush administration has already caused us to travel. If you have been awake so far this century, if you are already too intelligent to have believed the mad media muck makers, then you know the crimes against humanity and the crimes against nature sufficiently that I do not have to devote space and times here to explain it all to you.

If you have witnessed the disorganized, dishonest, management of the Mac Inane Mac Cainpaign, if you have witnessed the mad rabble that has accompanied the Mac Inane Canepaign, if you have observed that according to the polls, then you know it is possible we have enough insanity or at best misguided behavior to comprise a society unstable enough to seriously perturb the national election.

Assume Mac Inane were to get 40% of the vote. Assume those capable of harassing and discomfiting and miscounting 11% of the vote. Voila, you have a president Mac Inane.

So it is important that you understand and help me with the plan. It is not much. Time may not permit its being carried through. But it is all I have to give you.

The plan is, I would create on this website a guide to the logical fallacies employed by the media muck makers to enthrall their audiences and lead them to believe the muck enough to consider it their duty to vote the way that the media muck makers would have them vote.

I

• Identifying the tricks
• Illustrate the tricks with examples from the muck makers’s own books and from their own TV and radio talk show thrones
• You and I use the guide to
1. educate those misled voters,
2. lead them to understand how their have been deceived
3. in time for the misled and freshly educated to persuade themselves before election day to go out and vote correctly.

Wear your technology out with emails, phone calls, messaging, textingdirecting people to the

So at the top of any ourSLO page you will see a link to logical fallacies. This page present 13 categories of logical fallacies. Each category names, describes, and provides and example of the logical fallacy taken from the output of one of the media muck makers.

Yes, that list of logical fallacies totals approximately 64. By coincidence, 64 on the octal radix scale, base 8, equals an octal 100, the number of cardinal elements in the I Ching or what I call in my upcoming book on the subject My Tao Jones.

The media muck makers have contributed so much to confusing the populace. The damage that has been done is incalculable. So much evil, so much dumbing down of the populace. So much contribution to the concept that lies and distortions are OK as long as you convince people to believe it. So much contribution to what has resulted in so much bad and criminal government.

more on this in the next post,
jack luna MOTH

mp3 version of this post by the author - Issues, Tissues, and Tushes

OK, as in poetry readings I must define my terms. Here is one I have not heard before and one I have not used before but I know one should exist just to save keyboard width. The word, the acronym, the term is tsh.

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O’Really O’Reilly

O’Really Reactor TO O’Reilly Male-Factor
mp3 audio of this post by the author

With approximately three weeks before the Nov. 4, 2008 elections the vociferous polls say Obama is about ten points ahead of McInane. Maybe. Maybe not. Who is left except for the same one who does not know the obese bat in the McInane asylum rally who said she was worried Obama was an arab, WHO was a shill, betcha dollar to a couple dozen doughnuts.

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Approximate to the time of this post, I’m am going to tell you three stories about character. One of the characters in this character analysis is me. Another of the characters is my step son. The third of the characters is running for president of the US.

As it happens, all three of these stories are military stories.

These stories are not presented here to laud one character or denigrate another.

I present these three stories in compliance with the theme of this web site. Let me repeat the theme of this web site. After all, you could have fallen in here by accident from a YouTube video of Britney Spears trying to convince you of her artistic talent.

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“I am going to join the army. I am going to be a Ranger.”

I was nonplussed. Then I laughed. I had figured it out. Jacob was doing another play. Maybe a new version of HAIR. He was doing the role John Savage did in the movie. A far stretch from reality.

Jacob could not be a soldier. Maybe an infrequent pining for the glory of uniform until his brain caught up with his heart. But aside from playing a role, this kid was raised in the virtual arms of the Buddha. This sometime victim of his own high velocity mind. The thought of him, our wondering wunderkind hurting someone, even after having donned the shiniest uniform ever with glittering high polished brass, was terrible but really laughable joke.

This kid, a favorite of the local folks who had seen the “Got Your Back” by the Smiley Crew as the hero appeared to help some student figure out a math homework problem, fix some elderly person’s flat tire, unstop a sink, save a marriage, and then veer into the sunset saying, “got your back.”

Or coming in with a load of pipe and wire and gizmos and answering our questioning eyes with “Yep, I have it. I can make a perpetual motion machine.”

“I am going to join the army. I am going to be a Ranger.”

My blood ran cold. My sang-froid froze. My laugh died in my throat.

“Well, Jacob. How does that work exactly?

“Well, when I finish basic, the army, the US Army will give me five thousand buck. I will use that to pay off my debts. Then after Basic Training, the army will send me to Ranger training. I will have the esteem of being one of the elite. They will send me to translator school. When I finish with the army, I will go to university, all expenses paid, and get my degree.”

My mind flashed to TV ads, paid for by the taxpayer, of the brightly dressed military used car salesman goons roaming parking lots looking for kids to inveigle into the military. And my frozen blood began to boil. Our son had been duped by the military sideshow carnies.

“Didn’t anything I have said to you about the reality of the US foreign relations nightmare ad infinitum get through to you? Hasn’t your mother’s example of peaceful equanimity impressed you? Aren’t you the guy who was reciting the words of Mahatma Ghandi last month? Has someone slipped you a mickey? Do you have a fever? Do you remember anything about the stillness of Paramahansa Yogananda?

“Do you think you can kill a Muslim mother and her children, Siddhartha? Do you? Do you really?

Jacob was quick. His memory was good. “Oh, I won’t have to kill anyone. I just have to learn the language. I won’t be in harm’s way. And I have a lot of debt. And I want to know I can get through university and make something of myself.”

“Mom, may I borrow five thousand dollars until the end of Basic?”

And suddenly, he was gone. If he reappeared, how would he be? Who would he be? When would that be? How many times would those questions recur?

Would he come back with depleted uranium poisoning? Would his someday wife give birth to a deformed child? Would he die slowly of some popular cancer like leukemia? Would he return totally wacko? Was he destined to make his misfortune in a war that should not be? Killing people who should not be killed?

He went off to the military with the apparent insouciance about his mortality, his existence, as only a wide eyed, inexperienced teenager could go.

We grieved! We were not happy like the political candidates who are now shoving their kids into a dead end war just to show that they, the politicans, are patriotic. Whatever happened to the brave non-soldiers of the Vietnam era who said “hell, no, we won’t go?” Where are the souls of the brave wild eyed kids who DID go? And returned in boxes decorated with flags to hide the cheapness of the fifty-dollar-hammer like caskets? Would our boy come back resembling my friend, Don, who would never harm a flag, but who, when he was fully conditioned just wanted to over kill something, anything.

Several weeks passed. We got a phone call. It was Jacob.

He said he could not take it anymore. It was contrary to all he had been taught growing up. Something horrible happened there on which everyone was focused. It was unrelated to him but perhaps he was using that distraction to get out of there. He couldn’t take it anymore. He had to go underground until his time expired and he was no longer under that command. Then he had to request a discharge. And eventually he was back home with us.

Later he explained the moment of training he could not get past.

“They demonstrated how to kill a mother and child and plant a gun on them so they would appear to have attacked us. I realized that if the situation required a demonstration and an exercise at that level of severity, I would never be able to do that. I was horrified.”

I am grateful he never had to face the decision to do that. He never had to breathe the DU dust that is everywhere in Iraq. He never had to fight a war with sufficient armament. He never had to depend on the lying politicians who refused to ensure the medical care of returning soldiers. The stupid, “maverick”, blood gorged (poli)ticks who almost without exception showed themselves to be gregarious herd members and refused to be real mavericks and stand up against an illegal war, illegally launched without authority by a greedy scion of a family whose list of evil doings goes back to injustices done against holocaust victims.

Jacob is our war hero! He is a real hero, not a strutting banty rooster who calls himself hero to be consistent. The strutting banty rooster’s only consistency is lies.

Jacob does not have the GI Bill for school. He is not a Ranger. But he is doing as Joseph Campbell recommended. He is “following his bliss.” And in his own way, he has still “got your back.”

by jack luna MOTH

The width of the street was little more than three car widths from curb to curb. Each curb had a parking lane. That left one for traffic. It was a cold Indianapolis winter day. The Beatles’s first song still lay in the future. I would not listen to a Beatles song enough to know the title until two or three years after that future arrived.

Right now I was terrified. A man had entered the traffic lane and it seemed I was hurtling toward becoming the cause of his death due to vehicular manslaughter. He didn’t look around. He seemed totally unconcerned about his impending death that was still a couple seconds away and could be avoided if he acted quickly.
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This story is not intended to be an exhaustive study of John McCain. It is not intended to be a denigration. It IS intended to outline some quotes and events within the space (and a bit more) normally allotted to an online blog post.

These references DO intend to provoke a question about a candidate for president who for whatever reason does not discuss the issues concerning the general public but has turned his campaign into an attempt to marshal a force to garner votes for McCain from the lunatic fringe, the ignorant, the illiterate, the hateful, the racist, the mean, and the stupid.

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Audio of this article

The output of Glossolalia (speaking in tongues) depends on the content of the machine generating the glossolalia.

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