The Iron Keeled Pentecost, 36th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): These modern times in a nutshell (What's your opinion of the times?):

The Stable Genius has released Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes, 38, in order to testify against Kilmar Abrego Garcia. In case you've been blissfully living in a news vacuum, Garcia was wrongfully deported to a notoriously brutal prison El Salvador. The Administration admitted the deportation was a mistake but argued there was nothing they could do about it, what's done is done, and initially refused to bring him back, despite court orders and public outcry. They finally agreed to bring him back, but only in order to face trial for a host of charges from human trafficking to child pornography, charges which had nothing to do with his initial deportation.

The government intends to use Reyes' testimony in their case against Garcia. Reyes has been deported but returned five times, has been convicted of smuggling migrants, and has pleaded guilty to deadly conduct for drunkenly firing a gun in Texas. I have to admit I didn't know that drunkenly firing a gun was illegal in Texas - I thought it was a state tradition, something you had to do in order to get a driver's license. I guess it's illegal when Latinos do it. 

So in order to justify his own mistake, the Stable Genius is releasing a violent felon with five deportations so he can testify against a person with no criminal record they mistakenly deported.

Idiocracy.

 

The Shouts from the Sea, 35th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Atlas): Let's take a look, shall we?, at what's going on in the world today:

Israeli forces are urging people to evacuate eastern areas of Gaza City before planned military operations  there escalate and intensify, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians in this one offensive alone. Meanwhile, "post-apocalyptic" violence and anarchy among militants, clans, Hamas, and criminal gangs rise as they vie for power amid Israeli strikes and fights over aid and supplies.

Almost forgotten among all the other news items, Russia is continuing its unprovoked war against Ukraine and last night pounded the country with hundreds of drones and missiles in one of the war’s largest assaults. Strikes on infrastructure were reported across the country, including in western Ukraine, which Russia had until now hit less frequently.

Analysis by the NY Times claims that the Republican budget reconciliation, the Stable Genius' "big beautiful bill," will cause 11.8 million people of lose their health insurance, and separately could cripple wind and solar power.

An "explosive increase’ in the number of unusually aggressive lone-star ticks is due to climate change. The ticks, which can cause meat allergies, were common here in the South, but are new spreading to areas previously too cold for them. Also, the Earth is trapping much more heat than climate models had forecast, and the rate has doubled in the past 20 years. Positive feedback loops are leading to the exponential growth.

The University of Virginia has received explicit warning from the Stable Genius that the school will suffer cuts to jobs, research funding, student aid, and visas unless the university's president resigns over his DEI policies. Also, the Stable Genius is threatening to cut off funds to New York City if the presumptive Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani doesn’t "behave." The Stable Genius has accused Mamdani, a self-described "democratic socialist," of being a communist over his campaign pledge to tax the very wealthy.

May we live in interesting times.

 

Eighth Ocean, 34th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Helios): Today is the 15-dozenth day of the year, so even if it wasn't Eighth Ocean in Angus MacLise's Universal Solar Calendar, it ought to be something. So I moved Eighth Ocean from the 22nd day of Summer in the original USC to the 34th in my New Revised USC.. 

Depressingly, Mike Allen of Axios has catalogued all the new precedents conceded to The Stable Genius by Congress this year:

• Presidents can limit the classified information they share with the House and Senate after bombing a foreign country without Congressional approval.


• Presidents can usurp Congress's power to levy tariffs, provided they declare a national emergency.


• Presidents can unilaterally freeze spending approved by Congress, and dismantle or fire the heads of independent agencies established by law.


• Presidents can take control of a state's National Guard, even if the governor opposes it, and occupy the state for as long as the president wants.


• Presidents can accept gifts from foreign nations, as large as a $200 million plane, even if it's unclear whether the president gets to keep the plane at the end of the term.


• Presidents can actively profit from their time in office, including creating new currencies structured to allow foreign nationals to invest anonymously, benefiting the president.


• Presidents can try to browbeat the Federal Reserve into cutting interest rates, including floating replacements for the Fed chair before their term is up.


• Presidents can direct the Justice Department to prosecute their political opponents and punish critics. These punishments can include stripping Secret Service protections, suing them, and threatening imprisonment.


• Presidents can punish media companies, law firms, and universities that don't share their viewpoints or values.


• Presidents can aggressively pardon supporters, including those who made large political donations as part of their bid for freedom. The strength of the case against the pardoned supporters is irrelevant.

The American government sure is a different thing than what I grew up with, and my old grade-school civics teachers' heads would probably explode if they saw what was happening now.

Republicans had better hope that a Democrat never becomes president. Imagine what an Ocasio-Cortez or a Jasmine Crockett could do with those kinds of powers. Of course, the Republicans will use those new powers, plus whatever else they could come up with, to make sure that never happens, and in the remote possibility that it does somehow, all those new precedents will, poof!, suddenly vanish, like Moscow Mitch McConnel's precedent that a Supreme Court justice can't be nominated in a president's final year in office.

Dream Oven, 33rd Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Elektra): Today, on this very day, the Supreme Court, which can always be counted on to make horrendous decisions, just gave the Stable Genius another gift. Federal courts are now weaker, and the Constitutional checks and balances fade even further.

Of the 100 or so executive orders the Stable Genius signed since January 2025, lower courts have issued 25 injunctions to temporarily stay ("pause") the orders if they were deemed to cause immediate and irreparable harm to individuals. Today, the Supremes (Keg-Stand Cavanaugh, Amy Boney Carrot, Samuel Vergogna, et al) ruled that the injunctions should only apply to the jurisdiction of that particular court, not the entire country. They further stated that this will apply only when the injunction is "too broad," meaning the ruling is highly open to interpretation. Since the case was about birthright citizenship, the ruling will also allow the possibility of a person being a legal U.S. citizen in one state, say Massachusetts, and not in another, say Texas. 

Centralization of power is a common strategy for authoritarian governments, especially if the institutional change is done in the context of nationalist viewpoints where ethnic groups are painted as the root of societal problems. They are also often implemented when the public is distracted by alarming or controversial topics, such a international conflict or polarizing social issues.

If you're looking for Biblical portents of the end of the world, and last month's earthquake in tectonically-stable, trailing-edge Georgia wasn't enough, consider yesterday's meteor in the Atlanta sky. A loud, rolling rumble (I mistook it for thunder), a sudden flash, and a white streak in the sky. It was confirmed by NASA to be a meteor entering the Earth's atmosphere around 12:30 pm nearly 50 miles above Oxford, Georgia, east of Atlanta.

The fireball traveled southwest at roughly 30,000 mph before disintegrating and unleashing energy equivalent to about 20 tons of TNT, possibly leaving scattered fragments in South Carolina. The Guardian reports that a possible fragment pierced a house's roof in Henry County, south of Atlanta, all the way through and cracked through the laminate flooring to the concrete.

Imagine that homeowner having to convince his insurance company that he and he alone was the sole victim in the entire universe of this meteor. Imagine the meteor, after traveling through the infinite vastness of space for hundreds of millions of years, to have the incredible good luck, the one-in-a-trillion chance, of landing somewhere it was noticed by a sentient being. How happy it must have been! Somebody noticed!

Day of the Sickness, 32nd of Summer, 525 M.E. (Deneb): The Guardian ran an article today on the subreddit r/collapse. "The threat of nuclear war, genocide in Gaza, ChatGPT reducing human cognitive ability, another summer of record heat," The Guardian wrote. "Every day brings a torrent of unimaginable horror. It used to be weeks between disasters, now we’re lucky to get hours." But instead of ignoring the distressing events, the redditors of r/collapse look the disasters in the eye and unflinchingly document and discuss the End Times. 

Posts from r/collapse would occasionally pop up in my Reddit feed, but I never officially followed the sub. But after the Guardian article, I popped in and almost immediately saw this:

I don’t think collapse will look like some sudden disaster. It’s already happening, quietly, gradually. Every day, life gets a little harder. Rent rises, wages shrink, apartments get smaller, work hours get longer. I see my friends and family less, and I care less, too.

I’ve started lowering my standards for everything. Jobs, food, relationships. Job security barely exists anymore. People hold onto worn-out clothes, fewer get married, even fewer have kids. Most of us are just buried in our phones, numbing ourselves with distractions, disconnected from reality.

The dreams I once had for my life feel distant now, like echoes. What’s left is debt, exhaustion, and the constant pressure to survive. And yet, every day, we’re told we’re free, safe, and prosperous.

But this is what collapse really looks like. Not fire or chaos, just the slow erosion of meaning, until we forget what it felt like to hope for something better.

We see our lives becoming worse. We see more people dying from violence and drugs. The number of homeless people keeps increasing and we start worrying that if we lose our job or the Social Security program ends, we will be the next ones. Fisheries are disappearing, the corals are bleached, species extinction is a daily event. The worst president to ever occupy the White House got reelected, and this time the Senate and media just follow along with whatever he says.

Another word for collapse is entropy. Another word for entropy is impermanence, and impermanence, if anything, is swift. Our natural environment is crumbling, the social safety net is weakening, and most of us struggle to maintain mental and physical health. To simultaneously heal individuals, society, and nature, these interconnected challenges should be addressed together. There's nothing that can be done about the physical realities of entropy and impermanence, but all things and experiences are interconnected and arise in dependence on other factors. The key to coping with impermanence is interconnectedness.

 

Strand of Names, 31st Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Castor): One year ago today, according to Facebook's Memories, I reposted a quote by the Stable Genius:

And the fake news they go, "he told this crazy story with electric." It's actually not crazy. It's sort of a smart story, right? Sort of like, you know, it's like the snake, it's a smart when you, you figure what you're leaving in, right? You're bringing it in the, you know, the snake, right? The snake and the snake. I tell that and they do the same thing. - June 23, 2004   

I'll offer a quantum of sympathy here, as someone who has read transcripts of my expert testimony in environmental litigations. We all think we're speaking perfectly structured sentences all the time with correct grammar, but the humbling truth is that when we read back the carefully recorded, word-for-word transcript of our testimony, we discover that it's actually full of incomplete sentences hanging in mid-thought, interjections of "you know" and "like" and slang, and occasionally the wrong words, sometimes complete non sequiturs. When we read the questions and comments of the cross-examining attorneys, they're perfectly formed and articulate, because they're used to being transcribed and have considerable practice at structuring well-formed, perfect sentences on the fly.

I'll excuse a person for a "you know" or the occasional incomplete sentence, but a politician, certainly the President of the United States of America, should have had enough experience giving speeches and talking to the press not to utter the nonsensical word salad above. But that was a whole year ago. Certainly the Stable Genius has gotten better by now, right?

“I want to buy icebreakers, you are very good at icebreakers,” he said today in response to an unrelated question from Finland during a press conference at the NATO Summit in The Hague. ”You're the King of Icebreakers, you make ‘em good, really good, that particular country, and they know what they're doing." 

"I actually made 'em an offer," he continued,

I didn't go to Congress, they'll try and impeach me for this, but there's an old, it's not old, it's fairly new, but it's used icebreaker, and I offered them about one third of what he asked for, but we're negotiating.

We need icebreakers in the US and if we can get some inexpensively, I'd like to do that actually. They'll fix it up, make it good. . . And so we're negotiating with them for about 15 different icebreakers, but one of them is available now. It's old and it's old. It's five, six years old now. We're trying to buy it. I'm trying to make a good deal. All I do, my whole life, that's all I do is make deals. Yeah."

Assuming he wasn't inebriated while speaking, the words suggest a shocking level of cognitive decline. But where is the Jake "I Dated Monica Lewinsky" Tapper coverage of the SG's senility, his garbled speech, his incoherent thought?    

Just as alarming, during the same icebreaker conference, the SG admitted that he gave Iran permission to launch its missile attack on the US base in Qatar. “They said, ‘We're going to shoot them. Is 1 pm okay?’” he claimed. The fact the the U.S. Commander in Chief gave a foreign nation permission to launch missiles at one of our overseas bases should be reported much more widely in the news than the scant coverage it's getting.

Day of the Millrace, 30th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Picture him: a bully, all meat and mass, jailhouse tattoos, armpits' oniony sweat, fishgluey slime. The terror of the neighborhood, starting fights with everyone, encouraging others to fight even when he's not around. Few friends, many enemies, complicated relationship toward women.

Finally, someone stands up to him, a much smaller man but with a sinewy build and a feral, ferret-like swiftness. He gets in several punches in rapid succession before the bully can hit back, but then the bully braces himself and comes back with a couple shots of his own. Despite that, the bully, surprised and caught off guard, is soon reeling, dazed and confused. 

By that point, a crowd has gathered to watch the fight and out of the mass of people pops a bystander who walks up to the bully and punches him square in the jaw and then immediately falls back into the surrounding crowd again. Disappears. The bully is hurt, badly, but still has some fight left in him, and he and his original opponent exchange a few more punches.

"Cut it out, you two!,"  the bystander shouts from the safety of the surrounding crowd. "Stop it!"

Both the bully and his opponent are dazed and exhausted. They trade a few more blows, weak shots more for show than to cause any real damage, and then walk away.  

Back in the crowd, the bystander, Donald J. Trump, demands the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the fight.

 

Through the Thin Words, 29th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Atlas): So now I'm apparently liveblogging the end of the world. Was that old expression, "That's the end-of-the-world news" or "That's the end of the World News?" Our father who art not in heaven. . . 

"Iran Fires Missiles at U.S. Base in Qatar" in retaliation for Trumps' bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities,  the Times reports. "Al Udeid Air Base, the largest American military installation in the Middle East," they tell us, "was the target of the strike. Qatar said its air defense systems intercepted the missiles. There were no reports of injuries." 

Of all the conspiracy theories I've seen of the internet about the U.S./Iran conflict, the one that seemed most far-fetched at first but is now sounding more and more plausible is that this whole thing was jointly staged by the U.S. and Iran, military theater for the mutual political benefit of both sides. 

Were the Iranians told in advance that the bombs were coming and given the time to remove their enriched uranium?  

According to Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), as unreliable a witness as any, U.S. intelligence has found that Iran did not move nuclear material from the Fordo site ahead of the attack. However, Israel, an equally unreliable source, says Iran did indeed move uranium stockpile before the strikes. The Economic Times reports that Iran claims it secretly moved 400 kilograms of enriched uranium to an undisclosed location before the attack, and some reporting claims "unusual activity" and trucks lined up at Fordo prior to the attack. We may not know the truth for some time.

But now I'm hearing that satellite images of the Al Udeid Air Base taken this morning shows it was nearly empty of aircraft immediately ahead of the Iranian missile attack. However, the images showed dozens of aircraft at the base through early June, before Israel began its bombing campaign against Iran on June 13. And now we learn that Iran gave the U.S. notice prior to attacking the airbase, and Trump publicly thanked Iran thanked for giving advanced notice, adding, “I am pleased to report that NO Americans were harmed, and hardly any damage was done. Most importantly, they’ve gotten it all out of their ‘system,’ and there will, hopefully, be no further HATE.”

So we may have told Iran that we were going to make a show of bombing their facilities, giving them time to prepare, and they gave us notice they were going to "retaliate," giving us time to more planes and get the Qatari air defense ready. Nothing suspicious in any of that, right?

 

Day of Fur Gale. 28th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Helios): Trump bombed Iran last night.

America didn't bomb Iran. I certainly didn't bomb Iran.  Our tinpot wannabe dictator, disappointed at the lackluster response to his birthday military parade, embarrassed about leaving the G7 meeting early because the other world leaders weren't kowtowing to him, and feeling emasculated by Israel's aggression toward Iran without his involvement or approval, decided to jump in on his own and ordered the military to drop multiple 30,000-pound bunker-busters from B2 bombers on three Iranian nuclear development sites. 

Trump bomber then. We're one step closer to Armageddon. Time to reset the Doomsday clock a few seconds closer to midnight.

Look, I'm no fan of Iran, and can see nothing good coming from a nuclear-armed Iranian regime. Fuck Iran. But intervening in an Israeli-Iranian conflict doesn't seem to advance American interests. Sure, it's in American interests for Iran not to have nuclear weapons - it's in the world's best interests for Iran not to have nuclear weapons. I get it. But how do we know Iran was close to having the bomb? Because Netanyahu says so? He's been saying that since the 1990s - it's his mantra, it's his thing. Tulsi Gabbard says they weren't close, but why would I believe anything Tulsi Gabbard says one way or the other? Part of the problem with hiring a Russian asset as the Intelligence Chief is that we now have basically no reliable intelligence.

I watched the Sunday news shows this morning. Republican pundits were wistfully speculating that based on the bombings, the Iranian people will realize that the ruling regime can't protect them and may rally to overthrown them. When in history has that ever happened in the Mideast? All a foreign nation ever accomplishes from invading or bombing another nation is causing that nation's people to rally in defense of their homeland. The Iranians, who were never reluctant to chant "Death to America" before this, now will only hate us even more.

What's the end game here? We may not have totally eliminated Iran's nuclear program but, especially with Israel's targeted attacks on scientists, leadership, and infrastructure, we certainly set it back several years. We may  have set it back by 20 years - back to when Netanyahu was saying Iran was mere weeks away from having the bomb. 

There's now a whole new generation of Iranians who have whole new reasons to hate America even more. Just like there's probably not a single Palestinian left surviving who hasn't lost family or a limb to Israel's genocidal campaign, who isn't suffering from a combination of PTSD and malnutrition, who doesn't hate Israel and Israelis with a white-hot passion. This will come back and haunt Israel for generations, just as our actions in Iran, compounded by all the bad karma from Iraq and Afghanistan, will haunt America for generations to come.

Now the world is waiting to see how Iran will respond (pro tip: it won't be "unconditional surrender" or regime change). This morning, they launched a new round of missiles into Israel. On Meet the Press, J.C. Vance said that Iran wouldn't close the Strait of Hormuz, through which some 20% of all the world's oil passes. It will cripple their own economy, Vance said, it's not in their self-interest to do that and he doesn't expect them to. 

Headline: Iran Parliament Votes to Shut Hormuz Strait in Response to US Attack, Raising Fears of Oil Price Shock. The first thing I did on seeing that headline was hop in my car and top off the tank before prices surge. The way I drive (which is to say, not very much at all), that should last me at least a month, probably longer if I'm careful. But still, it just goes to show that Vance, and hence this stupid administration, doesn't know what he's talking about. As if we needed more proof. The incompetent ruling regime can't protect the American people - perhaps it's time for the people to rally and overthrow them.

Spirit Woman, 27th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Electra): I have to hand it to Midjourney. In the time since I joined back in October 2023 (version 5.2), they've constantly improved their model from 5.2 to the current 7.0, offering greater realism, more imagination, and more faithful interpretation of prompts. Last week, they added video generation and even in the only four or so days since then, they've tweaked the video model with different download options - "raw," and "optimized" after they noticed that many of the videos were getting overly compressed when uploaded to social media.

Yesterday, I noticed that they also offered the option to download the vids as animated gifs, which work better on this Blogger platform. No more arrows to click to start the video, no more awkward Blogger frames around the video. The gifs function here just like photos, except they move.

Cool.

Look, say what you want about AI - and there's a good healthy debate to be had around its long-term effect, its carbon footprint, and its potential to go rogue. But I like the image generating possibilities of models like Midjourney, and despite what critics say - many of whom never generated a single image - there's more to it, or potentially more to it to be precise, than just typing in some words and getting a picture.

The image above wasn't an instant, random result. It took several iterations and selections from a variety of initial choices, then tweaking one of them to bring out some of the preferred aspects and to suppress some of the others. It wasn't the precise realization of an image I had in my mind, but it wasn't just being handed what the AI decided to come up with. It was a collaboration between a human mind and a virtual mind, and while I wouldn't claim it as "my" work, my fingerprints aren't absent from the final form.

If you go to any one of the many online galleries of AI art, you'll quickly see that some folks consistently produce better, more interesting, and more visually appealing images than others. It's not all the AI, it's also the human collaborators. 

There's an argument to be made that photographers don't "create" their images either - they point and shoot, and the pixels produced in the camera generate the image. Anyone can aim a camera, press a button, and take a shitty photograph. But a skilled photographer carefully frames the subject and composes the image, manipulates the light and exposure, works with the depth of field, etc. The human collaborators in AI art (at least the good ones) work with a different set of controls - skillfully using prompts, culling from several alternatives, enhancing the selection, etc. - to produce their imagery. As we weave and unweave our bodies from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image.

I'm not claiming I'm an artist. The best pictures I've created were flukes, luck not skill, and even then don't even belong in the same league as the best AI art I've seen on line. But ditto the photographs I've posted, and my writing, and my thinking. 

But despite all of these thing's shortcomings, I don't believe anyone can reasonably say it isn't self-expression.

Instead and Else, 26th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Deneb): The summer solstice occurs today, 10:42 pm Eastern time, officially starting the summer season for many. But in the Universal Solar Calendar, or my New Revised USC, summer began 26 days ago, although we will acknowledge that today is the infamous "longest day."

All those weeks and weeks or rain finally ended today, and the forecast for the next week is all blue-sky, sunny days. Summer has indeed arrived.

I got my walk in today, a Harrison along the river and on into the Cochran Shoals and Sope Creek woods (a fool i'the forest). I didn't walk last Wednesday because the forecast called for an increasing likelihood of rain all day, although in fact it never rained. I kept getting tempted to go outside when the sun temporarily broke through, but then I'd look at the forecast on my phone and decide not to. As it turns out, though, I could have gotten my steps in and returned home dry. Oh well, no such ambiguity today - 0% chance of rain. I hadn't seen that in months. 

And in this way, the languid days and nights of my retirement continue. Each day, I awaken, make coffee, and measure my blood pressure and weight. I do the Times' Spelling Bee over the first cup of coffee to awaken the brain, and then read my assigned pages of Ulysses over the second cup. The rest of the morning usually finds me falling down one musical rabbit hole or another as documented on sister blog Music Dissolves Water. On alternating days, I either sit or walk - today was a walking day. I shower after my walks. By the afternoon, I'm usually playing some video game or another - I'm currently wrapping up Watch Dogs 2. As the evening approaches, I either continue the game or watch whatever's on television - usually Netflix, Max, Prime, MSNBC, or sports. Sports is a biggie, as documented on the brother blog, Sweat Dissolves Water. I'm following this doomed Red Sox season right now, as well as the Arctic Ocean solo circumnavigation of sailor Ella Hibbert aboard the Yeva. Somewhere between all that, I'm posting to this blog and generating the images on Midjourney. The days typically end with The Daily Show and Colbert's monologue, and then an hour or so of reading in bed (not Joyce but contemporary books). And then to sleep.

Who knew life could be so good, amirite?

The Millstone Lure, 25th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Castor): The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)  Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey has revealed that out of 263 early galaxies observed, 66% spin clockwise while only 34% spin counterclockwise. In a universe with no preferred direction, one would expect a 50-50 split. This unexpected bias raises the question of whether this phenomenon is a leftover imprint from the birth of the universe.

While this observation would cause me to wonder about the accuracy of the observations and the statistical likelihood of a 66-34 split versus that of a 50-50, some have made the quantum leap that this could mean that the universe lies within a massive black hole in another, “parent” universe. 

Let me explain. In physicist Nikodem Poplawski’s torsion theory, matter doesn’t collapse into a singularity - it gets spun and twisted by extreme gravity, forming an entirely new universe. The Big Bang could have been matter rebounding from collapse inside a black hole. The spin of that black hole may have left its fingerprint on the rotation of galaxies in our universe, explaining the JWST’s puzzling spin imbalance. The notion that our universe lies within the event horizon of a black hole in a parent universe is consistent with an model called Schwarzschild cosmology. 

If verified, this could change not only how we think black holes work, but about how our own universe came to be.

Not everyone is convinced. Some researchers suggest the anomaly might be caused by the Milky Way’s own spin influencing the JWST’s readings. If that’s true, we may need to rethink how we measure the cosmos. That might also help address big questions like the Hubble tension or the existence of unexpectedly mature galaxies in the early universe

It also raises the possibility that if our universe exists in a black hole within a larger, parent universe, that universe might also exist within an even larger universe, and black holes within our universe might contain universes of their own. 

Imagine a whole set of universes all nestled within one another like a set of Russian Matryoshka dolls. A black hole forms in a universe, and matter collapsing into that hole creates a Big Bang, and a new universe is formed. A black hole forms in that new universe, matter collapses, and yet a third universe is formed. This could go on infinitely. Something to think about.     

Day of the Beachhead, 24th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): As you can see, the AI image generator Midjourney has just released its new video mode. I'm excited about the creative possibilities, but my god, brace yourself for the incoming wave of celebrity fakes, disinfo, agitprop, and bullshit. I'm not going to be the one to do it, but I can't wait to see the inevitable videos of Trump getting pegged by Putin, of feral dogs attacking Christi Noem, of J.D. Vance and Lindsey Graham flirting with bears in a gay bar.     

The supreme question about a work of art, Joyce tells me in today's reading, is out of how deep a life does it spring. Art has to reveal to us ideas. A computer, no matter how sophisticated, has no life at all and no ideas of its own, so can art sprung from a machine even be called "art"? Or is the art, Suches it is, not in the generation of the image, but in the prompts, the editing, the selection, and the sequencing?     

Today's post is as much a test as anything else - to see how the Midjourney model actually handles videos, what it does with my Sun Girl summer avatar, how the animations look, and how well they upload and behave on Blogger. So far, so good, or so it seems. I'm going to use this technology in service of whatever it is I'm trying to say each day (which is to say, rubbish) and try to avoid misuse and evil. That's my vow, that's the precept I'll follow. At least until I inevitably break it. 

Any ideas, suggestions, advice, or requests will be duly considered. 

Day of the High Lists, 23rd of Summer, 525 M.E. (Atlas): Look at them. Men in blue jeans and sport shoes, wearing baseball caps (some backwards). No uniforms, no insignia, not even lanyards with identification, claiming they are ICE agents as they manhandle and arrest the New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate at an immigration courthouse as he was escorting a migrant they wanted to arrest. 

Who the fuck are they? Should we believe they're ICE agents just because they say so? Are they truly ICE as they claim, or are they vigilantes? Or members of the Proud Boys or Oathkeepers or something? Last weekend, four Minnesota politicians were shot by a gunman, two fatally, by a man disguised as a police officer. It seems a bit naïve these days to just accept who they say they were based on their words alone. 

In fact, according to the press reports, the comptroller, Brad Lander, was asking for just that kind of identification when he was arrested.  He asked to see a warrant and told them, “You don’t have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens.” Then they manhandle him and frog marched him to the courthouse. 

ICE agents, typically wearing masks and carrying no identification, have become a regular presence as the arrest of migrants showing up for routine court hearings has become a common occurrence. Politicians, including members of Congress, have shown up at immigration courthouses in recent weeks to protest these tactics, but now the goons are turning on the pols, too.

Last month, federal agents arrested the mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, and Representative LaMonica McIver in connection with a clash outside of an immigration detention center. In April, FBI agents arrested a Milwaukee judge on charges that she had shielded an undocumented immigrant from federal agents.

This latest assault and arrest of a Democratic politician comes not only after the Minnesota assassinations and the arrests mentioned above, but also after Senator Alex Padilla of California was shoved to the floor and handcuffed by federal officers after he had tried to ask Kristi Noem a question during a press conference.

It's particularly unfortunate that Padilla's mistreatment diverted attention from what Noem was actually saying during that conference. “We are not going away,” she was warning, referring to the presence of armed National Guard and U.S. Marines in Los Angeles. “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor (Newsom) and that this mayor (Bass) have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

She's flat out saying that the Trump administration is using the military to overturn the duly elected representatives of the people. That statement alone should cause millions to march in the streets and protest this fascist power grab. 

Trump, Noem, Homeland Security, and ICE are using unidentified, masked thugs to rough up and arrest Democratic politicians, and using the military to overturn elections if they don't like the outcome. This isn't "drifting toward fascism" - this IS fascism. The Nazi's are already here and they're already reaching out well beyond the undocumented immigrants they're supposedly after.

This fascist Trump regime has got to end now.

 

Bloomsday, 22nd of Summer, 525 M.E. (Helios): Flayed glasseyed sheep hung from their haunches, sheepsnouts bloodypapered snivelling nosejam on sawdust. As you might have guessed based on certain words and phrases dropped in italics in recent posts, I've been reading Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922) since the beginning of June. About 10 pages a day (it's pretty dense stuff; any more would be overwhelming), along with an online reading group. Not that the group is offering much insight on the text, but they are providing needed moral support to keep soldiering on, as well as suggesting just where to start and stop in the reading each day.

I find it very helpful to follow along with the RTE Players' 1982 theatrical reading of Ulysses. Joyce doesn't use quotation marks in his text, and the podcast helps to distinguish between the characters' spoken words, their inner stream-of-consciousness monologue (which famously occupies much of the novel), and the author's narration.   

After each day's reading, I then have to turn to Patrick Hastings' online Ulysses Guide to tell me what I just read, as I'm not clever enough to figure it all out myself. While Hastings give a broad overview of what's happening in the book, I also turn each day to John Hunt's annotations in The Joyce Project, which provides excellent line-by-line notes on dramatic, historical, and linguistic implications of the text. 

For example, in today's reading, Leopold Bloom is absorbed in memories of an early romantic liaison and thinks, "Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still." I needed Hastings' help to realize the liaison was on Howth Head, "a lovely hilly peninsula overlooking Dublin Bay. . . north of the city."  Of course, I recognize the penisolate location from the "Howth Castles and Environs" mentioned in the opening paragraph of Finnigan's Wake (from swerve of shore to bend of bay, etc.). I've been stuck on the first page of Finnigan for 50 years now, but that's another story for another post.

I recognize Howth Head, but without Hunt's annotations, I would not have realized that "pebbles fell" was an allusion to King Lear, when a blinded and despairing Gloucester wants to commit suicide by jumping from the cliffs of Dover. His son tricks the old man into believing that he is standing at the top of a cliff, far above the beach, telling him, "The fishermen that walk upon the beach, appear like mice. . . The murmuring surge, that on th' unnumb'red idle pebble chafes, cannot be heard so high." Hunt goes on to identify other instances when Joyce alludes to pebbles as a portent of danger and death that recur throughout the novel. Indeed, Molly is laying still, corpselike, and Bloom's reverie is both triggered by and interrupted by the buzzing of flies, those avatars of death and decay. 

But despite all these resources, I'm still convinced I'm missing at least 50% of what's happening on the pages. But that's okay, all my online resources inform me. The novel's intended for multiple, repeat readings, and by design no one gets everything the first time through. 

I'm not sure this old man will ever read this novel again - this may well be my one-off. I once breezed through the book back in my early 20s, flipping through the pages and just skimming the text - probably searching for the "dirty bits" that famously got the novel banned upon it's publication. But that hardly counts as a "reading," although I frequently claimed otherwise over the years ("Ulysses? Yes, I've read it once, back in the '70s"). My copy of the novel, both back then and now, is a 1942 Random House edition once owned by my grandfather and somehow passed on down to me. In fact, it's probably my having owned the book for so many years, schlepping it from one home to the next, one apartment to the other, over all those years that encouraged me to finally take the plunge and read it through   

Anyway, I'm old now and this reading of one of those books one is supposed to have read before you die seems like a worthwhile post-retirement project to fill my late and languid days. For all its intricacies and eccentricities, I'm quite enjoying it.

 

Day of Suffering Night, 21st of Summer, 525 M.E. (Electra): A U.S. Senator wrestled to the floor and handcuffed. Minnesota politicians assassinated in their homes, along with their spouses. A mad president, sitting in the rain among a paltry crowd, watching a squeaking tank roll down a Washington street, imagining it to be some great display of military strength. Goose-stepping forces on the streets of L.A., with foodheated faces, sweating helmets, patting their truncheons. The Hebrews and the Persians exchanging missile barrages over Israel and Iran. 

There were well over 2,000 events during yesterday's No Kings demonstrations. The vast majority of the events were peaceful and most of the non-peaceful actions were from counter-demonstrators or the police. A demonstrator was shot and killed in Salt Lake City in crossfire between the so-called peacekeeping team and a man who allegedly drew a pistol and fired. In Virginia, a man intentionally drove an SUV into a crowd of protesters, injuring at least one person. Police in Los Angeles hit protesters with batons and fired tear gas as they ordered a downtown crowd to disperse. Tear gas was also used in Seattle and Portland. Here in Atlanta, members of the Proud Boys walked through a crowd of protesters near the State Capital in an unsuccessful attempt at provocation. And a group of protesters were tear-gassed and arrested near Doraville, Georgia after they tried to march onto Perimeter Highway I-285.

Scrolling through pictures of the local No Kings events on social media, I noticed there were a lot of comments posted and almost all of them were negative, mocking the event or outright hostile. The pro-MAGA comments outnumbered the No Kings comments by at least ten to one, probably closer to twenty to one, and many of them said the same things. It looks like the snarky remarks were either posted by bots, or were a coordinated effort by the Trumpists, or both. 

"We already have a day to celebrate no kings," many of them said, "it's called the Fourth of July," as if Independence Day addressed the same concerns as yesterday's events. "I'll be at home celebrating the American military today," many boasted, as if we didn't already have an Armed Services Day to celebrate the military. And a Veterans Day. And a Memorial Day. And opening ceremonies at most major sporting events. Halftime shows, too. Not to mention a college football Military Bowl and a separate Armed Services Bowl. But yeah, let's co-opt Flag Day and make that a celebration of the military-industrial complex, too.  

Another recurring theme in the comments focused on the word "King." Some tried to suggest an anti-Christian bias to yesterday's protests by pointing out that their Jesus was the King of Kings, and that their (white) Christian nationalist country did indeed have a King and his name is "Jesus." (What? A Mexican is king? Do tell.) Maybe that's why the Westboro-Baptist types were out at the Atlantic Station event yesterday.      

The comments protesting the protests were so frequent and so ubiquitous that it tells me yesterday really got under the skin of MAGA Nation and we must be doing the right thing.            

The Offside Mysteries, 20th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Deneb): Despite rain still in the system, I got my walk in today but only 4.7 miles, a Madison. But no complaints, most of the walk was to and from the 17th Street overpass near Atlantic Station, one of the 2000 or so No Kings protest sites across the country today. I made it back home just as the day's thunderstorms were starting to pour down in earnest.

I was proud of Atlanta's behavior at the protest today. The chanting was heartfelt and loud, the crowd was diverse in gender, race, and age, and everyone behaved peaceably. There was a very small Westboro Baptist-type group, really only about three or four people, that seemed to enjoy trolling everyone, proclaiming through bullhorns that "homosexuality is a sin" and "Atlanta is a den of iniquity." But the other protesters pretty much ignored or just laughed at them, and no one took the bait and got outraged. There was no violence.

During the 2016 Trump protests, a fairly sizable number of protesters played cat and mouse with the police, making a sport of trying to block the roads and shut down the interstate, and then running away when the cop cars came over. People today stayed on the sidewalks and let the traffic pass by, most of which honked their horns and gave thumbs up in approval and agreement. 

I saw a post on social media "warning" people that paid outside agitators were coming to the protest sites, that they were instructed to cause maximum chaos, and that pallets of bricks had already been delivered at strategic points to throw at the police. Obviously bullshit, and the crowd that I saw today behaved in such a polar opposite way that no one could take such spurious claims seriously.

But make no mistake: a LOT of people showed up, and they were all fed up with the Trump administrations, the tariffs, the deportations, the military presence, the grifting, the deadlocked, do-nothing Congress. There was no mistaking the anger and the outrage, but it didn't need to express itself with violence or vandalism. 

Pics or it didn't happen:

     

Day of the Five Lost Havens, 19th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Castor): It's Friday the 13th by that other calendar but that's the least of our problems right now. Israel and Iran have taken to bombing each other - initiated by Israel, I should add - in what portends to be a long and possibly wider war. Harbinger of WWIII. For those with short memories, former U.S. President Obama, concerned that Iran was getting close to developing nuclear-weapon capability, reached an agreement with Iran to unfreeze seized assets in return from then stopping their uranium enrichment (with supervision and verification, of course). After Trump's election, he set out to undo everything Obama had accomplished because racism (coupled with stupidity) and reneged on the agreement. Then, after Iran resumed enriching uranium and got close to developing nuclear weapons again, Israel decided to act unilaterally and began bombing Iran's nuclear sites, also targeting top Iranian scientists and military leaders. Iran, naturally, is retaliating. Israel, of course, will retaliate the retaliation and so on and so forth until, as Sun Ra put it, they push that button and your ass gotta go.

So how is the Trump administration responding to this situation that they allowed to develop? After initially saying that we had no involvement in Israel's strike and that they had no knowledge of the attack, they reversed position and said of course they knew, and the strike was so successful because Israel used the pure, Grade-A, American-made weapons, the best in the world, that we sold them. Also, while the Middle East teeters closer and closer to all-out Armageddon, Trump has the National Guard and U.S. Marines stationed in Los Angeles because of a handful of protesters and his petty grudges with the elected leadership in California. Those military resources not occupying L.A. are busy preparing for tomorrow's vulgar military parade in D.C., which probably will get rained out anyway.

The American people aren't going to stand for this shit, muchibus thankibus. We're not going to stand for the unconstitutional use of military personnel patrolling the streets of an American city, especially when there's no crisis anyway. We aren't going to stand for masked goons snatching people off the streets and departing them to third-world hellholes without any due process. We aren't going to tolerate U.S. senators being thrown to the ground and handcuffed for asking questions. And we're through with a handful of corrupt, greedy oligarchs lining their pockets at the expense of the rest of America. 

The course correction starts tomorrow.

Odd Man Out, 18th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): I got my walk in today by starting early (for me), around 10:45 am, before the daily showers started. The current forecast is for this rain to continue through the weekend and all of next week until Thursday (a week from today), and sunny conditions are finally predicted for next weekend.

The only consolation of all this is that there's a 65% chance of thunderstorms in Washington D.C. for Saturday during Trump's birthday military-recognition parade. OTOH, it may also rain on the roughly 1,200 or so No Kings protests planned for Saturday.  They put on their bonnets and best clothes and take their umbrellas for fear it may come on to rain. Mother Nature karma's a bitch, but she's an equal opportunity bitch. I'll give her that. 

Today, California Senator Alex Padilla was manhandled, forced to the ground, and handcuffed during a Homeland Security press conference. MAGA folks will say he deserved it for barging in and interrupting Fascist Barbie Kristi Noem's talk, but that's still no way to treat a sitting U.S. Senator, no matter how much white privilege you think you have. Fuckin' Nazis, man.

A semi-ecstatic round robin

Inebriate, pale face like Gollum, 

On a blanket, they say,

Aujourd'hui, odelay.

It kick-starts my aortic goblin.

The Stagger Litany, 17th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Atlas): Sometimes, as a sort of thought experiment, I wonder how the late Howard Zinn (1922-2010), my old poly-sci professor at BU, would have viewed the current shenanigans of the Trump administration.

His People's History of the United States, if written now (or at some future date) would certainly have focused on the anti-ICE protests across the U.S. and the government's current response to the protests in L.A. Heather Cox Richardson, in many ways Zinn's heir in documenting the resistance, notes that ICE agents encountered a few hundred protesters after Trump instituted aggressive immigration sweeps in L.A. ICE responded to the protests with violence and of course, that violence only resulted in more protests. Still, the protests were mostly peaceful and local officials maintained they could handle the situation, but Trump insisted that L.A. was staggering under widespread violent unrest. Then, over the protests of both L.A. mayor Karen Bass and California governor Gavin Newsom, Trump federalized 4,000 members of California’s National Guard and ordered 700 Marines to Los Angeles. He also threatened to arrest anyone who does not cooperate with ICE, including Bass and Newsom. 

Trump has described Los Angeles as “invaded and occupied by illegal aliens and criminals,” and said “violent insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations.” Yesterday, in a speech at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Trump claimed the U.S. was under a “foreign invasion,” aided by “stupid people or radical Left people or sick people.” Kristi Noem called L.A. a “city of criminals.”  The news outlets have shown a driverless Waymo car that was set on fire on a near-continuous loop, creating the impression that L.A. today is similar to cities like Ferguson, Missouri or Minneapolis during 2020's George Floyd riots. Even liberal comedian Jon Stewart asked in his Daily Show monologue if there was ever a time when L.A. wasn't on fire, creating an unfortunate and inaccurate comparison between last year's wildfires and today. 

The narrative that L.A. is under siege, Cox notes, is incorrect. Economist Paul Krugman notes that “Los Angeles right now is probably as safe as it has ever been.” The protests have remained small, and protesters have been filmed dancing in the streets to live music. Yesterday, a small group of protesters surrounded by overwhelming ICE forces peacefully submitted to arrest, approaching the police walking backwards with hands crossed behind their backs to be handcuffed or zip-tied. So where are the supposed violent insurrectionist mobs?

Nevertheless, ICE agents have been using non-lethal flash-bang stun grenades and tear gas on the crowds, and have shot rubber bullets at individuals, including an Australian journalist who was speaking live on camera when she was shot from behind. Activist David Huerta was charged with conspiring to impede an officer, yet the official complaint states that he merely walked and sat on a public sidewalk before an officer pushed him to the ground and arrested him. 

Zinn would have seen these protests as a continuation of the long American resistance to fascism, drawing a direct line from the anti-ICE protests of 2025 back to the American Revolution against the King of England. 

He probably also would have associated Trump and the current crop of tech plutocrats to the robber barons (Mellon, Carnegie, Roosevelt) of the 19th Century and the Gilded Age, when high tariffs were imposed by the government to protect the business interests of those robber barons. 

Personally, Trump's shameless desire to institute a new American royalty reminds me of Francis Higgins, one of Ireland’s most prolific grifters. Though he was semiliterate and born into poverty, Higgins used his skills as a forger to weasel his way into 18th Century Dublin high society by forging papers claiming he owned an estate in County Down. The paperwork was so convincing that he persuaded a family of good reputation to allow him to marry their daughter. After it was discovered after the wedding that Higgins in fact owned no estate whatsoever and was in fact penniless, he served a few weeks in jail. 

Following his release from prison, Higgins again took up various fraudulent schemes to make money, another attribute he shares with the relentlessly grifting Trump. Although the sentencing judge dubbed Higgins the “Sham Squire,” a nickname that plagued him the rest of his life (And here comes the sham squire himself! professor MacHugh said grandly), he knew that commanding the press would influence public opinion and restore his influence in Dublin’s high society. He then became the editor of the Freeman’s Journal, and although the paper was staunchly opposed to British rule in Ireland prior to Higgins, he slanted the paper’s coverage to the favor of the pro-British establishment. Although this move was arguably more Murdoch than Trump, Higgins also made a lucrative practice of sharing secrets with the pro-British government in Dublin Castle, similar to Trump's betrayal of our NATO allies and Ukraine to curry the favor of Putin.

 History, a nightmare from which we're trying to awake.

 

Day of Kings, 16th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Helios): A military parade is planned for Washington this weekend, the ostentatious tanks-rolling-down-the-street kind of affair seen in the old Soviet Union and in North Kora, ostensibly to celebrate the US Army’s 250th anniversary but also timed to coincide with Trump's birthday. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to attend the event, and thousands of agents, officers and specialists will be deployed from law enforcement agencies from across the country. 

“For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force,” the subliterate Trump said ("very big force"). "I haven’t even heard about a protest, but you know, this is people" (I can hear the grammarians groan) "that hate our country, but they will be met with very heavy force.” God, the man's an imbecile.

I wonder how Trump's "very big force" plans to oppose Mother Nature. The current forecast for the weekend is for cloudy skies on Saturday morning followed by scattered showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon and continuing through Sunday. It very likely will literally rain on Trump's parade.  

It rained here in Atlanta again today, and again cancelled by planned alternating-day walk. I had a dentist's appointment at 2:00 (cleaning) and hoped that the weather would clear by 3:00, but the rain was pouring down when I got out. The only day in the current 10-day forecast when rain is not expected is tomorrow, which is a sitting day but I may have to both sit and walk tomorrow if I want to get any mileage in the next week.

This stupid soggy weather! After recent storms, I've noticed a lot of downed rottenwood branches in my yard and the surrounding area covered with lichens, It seems the trees can't dry themselves out after the rain and are starting to rot in place. Rot quick in damp earth, the lean old ones tougher. Our annual rainfall so far this year (23.02 inches) is only slightly above the average (22.55 inches). But according to the NWS, last month Atlanta had 13 clouds days, 15 partly cloudy days, and only 3 days of fair skies. To look at it another way, we had 17 days with light rain and 9 days with heavy rain. We had thunderstorms on 14 days last month and fog on 17 days. On top of all that, Georgia experienced 15 confirmed tornados last month, with some of them rated EF1 and one an EF2.

Seasonal affective disorder. In the summertime! 

Climate change sucks.

No kings.

Day of the Two Daughters, 15th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Electra): I see in the news (inked characters fast fading on the frayed breaking paper) that the National Guard has been summoned to L.A. to counter protests against the cruel and unusual tactics of ICE agents there, and Marines have been stationed to Camp Pendleton south of L.A. and placed on "high alert." Democratic members of Congress from California and New York say that they were blocked from entering federal detention facilities over the weekend while trying to inspect conditions and check on individuals arrested during immigration raids and related protests. Greta Thunberg has been detained by Israeli forces. Sly Stone passed away last night. Russia launched  almost 500 drones and missiles at Ukraine, the largest drone assault of the war, as it tries to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defenses, which shot down most of the previous weapons. The past is over. Impermanence is swift.

The Transcendental Outpost, 14th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Deneb): Alert readers are forgiven if they experience a state of deja vu at "Transcendental Outpost." Didn't we just have one of those? 

You are correct. The Transcendental Outpost is the 71st day of spring in Angus MacLise's Universal Solar Calendar. But since then, I've been dicking around with calendar and developing my own New Revised Universal Solar Calendar, and have swapped some of the names around. 

Today, the 14th day of summer, was Seventh Ocean in MacLise's USC. But the first "Ocean" days followed multiples of 12 and fell on the 13th, 25th and 37th day of the year, and then on the dozenth days after that, so I moved Seventh Ocean to the 71st of spring, the 144th day of the year (12th twelve). But so as not to lose the delicious poetic flavor of MacLise's day names, The Transcendental Outpost became the 14th of summer in my NRUSC. 

If you're confused, well so am I and it really doesn't matter. Trump has called in the National Guard against protesters in L.A., and the black-out drunk Secretary of Defense is threating to send in the Marines. This is it, folks, it's happening, and we may very well all be under martial law very soon, which is what I think the Trump administration wanted all along.

So happy Transcendental Outpost Day, y'all!

Forming the Inner Ring, 13th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Castor): All anyone's talking about lately is the very public feud between Trump and Musk, as if those two egomaniacal narcissists falling out wasn't the most predictable thing imaginable. The press and social media are going along with it, giving front page coverage to the latest tweet, the latest press release.

I don't think the feud is deliberately staged, but the distraction does give the Senate good protective cover as they mull Trump's signature "Big Beautiful Bill." Also, we shouldn't forget that Musk and his DOGE stooges, an army rotten with venereal disease, have accessed our Social Security account and have our numbers, probably our bank account information, too. Do we really think that Musk wouldn't use that data when his fortunes evaporate if Trump cancels his lucrative government contracts? 

We have to follow the money and keep our eyes on the cash, because, god knows, they are.

Stages of the True Field, 12 Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Although the midweek forecast had a 40% chance of rain for today, the skies cleared up enough overnight that I was able to get out to the Chattahoochee and walk a Harrison. Along the way, on the connecting stretch between the Cochran Shoals and Sope Creek areas, I met the gal above. She stayed close to the trail and didn't bolt away from me - I suspect she had a faun nesting somewhere nearby and was either being protective of her young or using herself as a decoy to distract me. We exchanged pleasantries and I went on my separate way, leaving her there.

The old shape-shifting fox-man (to return to that long koan) responded to the question, "Is an enlightened person subject to cause and effect or not?," with the Theravada answer, "An enlightened person does not fall into cause and effect," and was reborn as a fox for five hundred lives.

The Zen teacher Baizhang avoided a yes-or-no answer to the question with the Mahayana response, “An enlightened person does not ignore cause and effect.”

The term Mahayana is from the Sanskrit term for "greater vehicle" and some Mahayana Buddhists call the Theraveda schools Hinayana, or "lesser vehicle." I don't like the term "Hinayana" both because it sounds derogatory and also because it's relativistic (lesser only in regard to the greater, greater only in regard to the lesser).

After hearing Baizhang's Mahayana answer, the old man was supposedly released from rebirth in the fox’s body.

But wait, there's still more (I told you it's a long koan) -  after the funeral for the fox's body, Baizhang explained the whole story to the monastics. But a clever monk, Huangbo (there's always one in the crowd), asked him, “The man from ancient times gave a mistaken answer, and he was reborn as a fox for five hundred lives. What would have happened if he gave the correct answer?"

Baizhang said, “Come up close and I’ll tell you.” Huangbo went up and slapped Baizhang across the face. Baizhang clapped his hands, laughed and said, “I thought I was the red-bearded barbarian, but here’s a guy who is even more the red-bearded barbarian.“

Those wacky Chinese patriarchs, always whacking each other when they're not tweaking noses. For the record, Baizhang had his nose painfully tweaked by his teacher and then had his face slapped by a student, and that's just in two koans. The whole collection of koans reads at times like a Three Stooges script. "Oh, a wise guy! (Bonk!) (Bink!) (Konk!)" The Chinese obviously had a different attitude toward corporeal punishment than we do today (times change). I once heard American Zen teacher John Daido Loori say he had to establish a rule at his monastery that striking the teacher was NOT ever a correct answer to a koan. 

The red-bearded barbarian (Barbarosa) is a reference to the revered Indian patriarch Bodhidharma, the man who allegedly first brought the Mahayana to China. According to legend, Bodhidharma had red hair and blue eyes, quite the ethnic contrast to the uniformly dark-haired Chinese. Also, the Chinese considered everybody not from China to be barbarians (redheaded women buck like goats). So Baizhang is basically saying, "I thought I was the enlightened one here, but here's a guy who's even more enlightened than me," because Huangbo alone saw through how ridiculous the whole old priest/fox story was.