Body of Love, 56th Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): I have a question about the news. Why must it be delivered to us by big corporations? Print media, television, etc. - all the news outlets are owned by mega-corporations with profit margins, growth goals, and an understandable desire to minimize loss and liabilities. 

Follow-up question: what role (positive role, that is) do those billionaire owners have in the delivery of news to the public? Just what exactly, on a more-or-less daily basis, does Jeff Bezos do at the Washington Post?

Obviously, these billionaire owners want to imprint their own personal world views on the news that's delivered to us, and as the mega-conglomerates get larger and larger, we get fewer and fewer owners and fewer and fewer points of view.

Worse, the corporations own other companies and to meet their growth goals, they have to acquire still more companies, to the point that they've gotten so big and monopolistic that further mergers require government approval and waivers of anti-trust laws, so the billionaire owners kowtow to the government and self-censor to curry favor. Instead of holding the rich and powerful accountable, they end up being mouthpieces and propagandists for the powerful due to late-stage capitalism.

There are some independent journalists out there that bravely operate on low-cost to free platforms, like Substack and other social media. But each independent can only cover one or two news stories a day, and a full understanding of current events requires following a number of issues simultaneously for context, including politics, both national and local, economics, culture, and climate. As much as I can appreciate one writer's nuanced view on the situation in Gaza, for instance, and another's on warming trends in the Arctic, it's exhausting to endlessly search through social media for a full contextual understanding of all those events. 

Interdependence: What's happening in Gaza has a bearing on what's happening in Ukraine, which has a bearing on the Chinese intentions toward Taiwan, which will affect the production and cost of microchips and development of AI, which affects energy and climate change, which causes extreme weather events and could result in the cancellation of a game in the World Series. 

But I get it (I think) - it's expensive to operate a studio, even if you're "broadcasting" only on YouTube, there are costs in assembling and publishing an on-line  newspaper, and top writing and reporting talent understandably doesn't want to work for free or for life-of-poverty wages. Enter the big corporations and their built-in biases.    

If you're waiting on me to reveal the answer, sorry, I don't have one. The situation sucks. The government could step in Teddy Roosevelt-style, all rough-riding and trust-busting, and break up the news outlets and media companies the way they broke up Ma Bell, but since they've now got the media behaving the way they like, the government has little motivation to change the status quo. Someone else will have to take the lead.

Oprah? If she's reading this, a weary nation needs her help right now.

 

The Unrecovered Ocean, 55th Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): The Ocean giveth and the Ocean taketh away. Today, I learned that French electronic and new-music composer Éliane Radigue has passed away at age 94. Impermanence is swift. 

An early collaborator in the field of musique concrète, Radigue carved a singular path with unparalleled vision. She pursued an exciting musical life, moving from electroacoustic feedback to electronic music with the help of her ARP 2500 synthesizer, and finally reinventing herself through fruitful acoustic collaborations with numerous instrumentalists, most notably through the Occam Ocean and related series. I posted many of her Occam compositions here on Universal Solar Calendar Ocean days  

In 2019, Nate Wooley performed an Occam composed specifically for him at Knoxville's Big Ears festival. 

A practicing Tibetan Buddhist, she spent three years under her guidance of her teacher, Tsuglak Mawe Wangchuk. Returning to composition, she completed Songs of Milarepa and Jetsun Mila. about Tibetan patriarchs. Since 2011, her Occam series consisted of acoustic compositions written for specific musicians, including but not limited to, Occam I through XXVII, Occam River I through XXVIII, Ocean Delta I through XIX, and Occam Hexa I through V.

Here's a video about Occam Ocean XXV. If the music sounds like one long note played endlessly (the full piece is nearly 45 minutes), you're right. But just as you never enter the same river twice, deep listening reveals subtle but surprising variations in harmonics and reverberation. In addition to a remarkably disciplined performance by organist Frédéric Blondy, it's but one of many remarkable compositions by Radigue.  

 

The White Spheres, 54th Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Helios): It's no bomb cyclone here like the Northeast is suffering through, but it's damn cold again down here in the South. Another disruption of the increasingly unreliable Polar Vortex is underway and sending cold Arctic air far down across the country all the way to the Guld of Mexico.  

In addition, the La Niña conditions have ended and we'll be going into a El Niño later this spring and summer. The neutral pattern we're in right now between the two extremes nearly always bring colder than average temperatures, or so I'm told. El Niños also weaken trade winds, alter global weather patterns, and often bring increased rainfall to the southern U.S., so we can look forward to a soggy, humid summer.

I really want to blame the weather on the Stable Genius, but can't figure out how. 

 

The Supernatural Bride, 53rd Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Electra): Comic actor Dana Gould recently noted, "Thinking about Rush Limbaugh and how, now that he's dead, you never, ever hear about him. No one mentions anything he did, because what he did had no value. It contributed nothing worthwhile to the culture. Nothing of lasting value. He just made anger. Every day. Rising, blooming and fading like a fart. Then he died and was instantly replaced by a fleet of little replicas, farting fake fury five days a week. Creating nothing of interest or artistic value to anyone. Seriously, what an awful way to make a living."

I couldn't agree more. There's no "Limbaugh philosophy," no "Limbaugh teachings," not even a "Limbaugh style." He just spewed vitriol into the atmosphere to inflame the minds of angry listeners, who simply turned to their next source of invective, their next opiate, after Rush was gone.

Even beyond the fleet of little replicas to which Gould refers, we now have the millions of little comment bots relentlessly monitoring social media to post hateful words and comments on any post deemed outside the narrowest of MAGA world views. Adding nothing of value, nothing worthwhile, just hate. The mayor of Boston, Massachusetts posted the most anodyne of congratulations to the USA's men's hockey team for winning the Gold Medal in the Olympics today, and I saw nothing but smarmy, mean-girl comments making fun of her and her ethnicity, and complaining about taxation. They've been calling the state "Taxachusetts" since at least the 1970s, and the name is so well established that even spell check accepts the word "Taxachusetts" without corrections, but sure, there were no taxes in Boston until Michelle Wu came along.

Fun historical fact, speaking of Boston and taxes and all: the Boston Tea Party wasn't a protest over taxes as is commonly assumed. It was actually more a protest about government-sanctioned monopolies. American colonials didn't have a vote for members of the British Parliament and therefore couldn't be taxed (taxation without representation), so the government-controlled East India Company would instead ship all their tea from the Far East directly to England where it was taxed, and then would ship the tea from England over to the Americas. The colonists, frugal as they were, preferred to buy their tea at cheaper prices from the Dutch instead. However, the British government decided that the East India Company deserved a little more profit, and issued a ban on Dutch tea imports to the British colonies, forcing them to buy the more expensive and highly taxed tea from the British instead. The colonists were incensed about losing freedom to choose from whom to buy tea, rebelled, and stormed an East India Company vessel in Boston Harbor and dumped the tea overboard. 

It wasn't until four score and seven or so years later, during the Reconstruction of the Confederacy, that the event was called the "Boston Tea Party" and used as an argument that opposition to taxes was a sacred American tradition. Previously, the protest had been known by uncatchy terms like "The Destruction of the Tea." But southerners opposed to their tax money being spent on Black schools and social programs for the formerly enslaved started a protest movement not against the specific programs they detested, but over the very principal of taxation in general, and mythologized The Destruction of the Tea into an anti-taxation Boston Tea Party.

Same shit happens today. When Democrats are in power and money is spent of social welfare and fighting inequality, "taxpayer unions" and teabaggers emerge protesting not those programs (that would be racist), but protesting the general concept of taxation. But when Republicans control the government, taxes are still collected but the taxpayer unions and teabaggers are strangely quiet.  

It's cold again. Thursday, I was outside taking my alternating-day walk in a tee-shirt and shorts in 70° F weather, and today the temperature is falling below freezing, with wind-chill temperatures down to 12° overnight. Apparently, the polar vortex winds have broken down again, allowing arctic air to spill south, and while the Northeastern U.S. is getting pummeled by a nor'easter and heavy snow, we down here in the former Confederate States are suffering sub-freezing temperatures and blustery, 10-20 mph winds with gusts up to 35.  

To summarize, I never liked Rush, I'm excited that the USA beat Canada in Olympic hockey (even if I didn't quite say so above), and I provided an unrequested history lesson and bitched about the cold weather. Any questions?

Invisible Half Man, 52nd Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Speaking on Stephen Colbert's The Late Show, author Michael Pollen reminded me of something interesting. Brains, he pointed out, evolved to support bodies; bodies aren't a life-support system for brains. The brain controls our body's breathing and heartbeat, regulates various metabolic processes, and keeps us aware of various external threats and dangers. 

Going back to the age-old body-mind schism, people conventionally think that "they" are the mind, and hence their identity is somewhere in the brain. We exist somewhere inside our skulls, it's thought, peering out at the external world through the eye sockets. For centuries, science fiction and horror novels have obsessed on the idea of disembodied heads, brains kept alive in laboratories, and consciousness transferred to computers. But if the brain is merely a support organ for the survival of the body, and if personality, memory, and intellect are all but byproducts of that one particular organ, if we wanted to live forever, shouldn't we preserves the body below the neck instead of the head above?    

Body and mind are not two separate things. The brain is simply another organ, no different than the heart, lungs, stomach, and gall bladder. The latter excretes bile for some reason (I don't remember why) and the brain excretes thoughts and stores memories. Personality, intellect, and consciousness are all after effects of the brain's functions. "You" are your body, including the brain and everything that goes with it. "You" are as much your toenails as your awareness.     

All things are liberated and without fixed abode. When we think of water, we visualize it as flowing in rivers, pooled in lakes, and rolling in the waves of the great oceans. Of course, water takes many forms and flows over the earth and through the sky; it flows upward and it flows downward. It flows in a single winding brook, and it flows in the ocean depths. It rises up to form clouds, and it comes down to form pools. 

The way of water is to ascend to the sky, forming rain and dew, and to descend to the earth, forming rivers and lakes. There's nowhere on Earth that water doesn't reach - it reaches into flames and it reaches into rocks. If you look up the chemical composition of most minerals, you'll see H₂O somewhere in the formula. Our bodies are mostly water, and our brain is primarily made of water. We're basically skin-bags of water walking around and building things. Water reaches into the mind and its images, into wit, and into discrimination, and it reaches into the realization that we're just very clever forms of water.

Back on the 50th day of Childwinter, I noted that the warm weather meant that there's a lot of moisture in the unstable atmosphere, which portends thunder and storms. The thunder woke me up last night (water awakening water), and this morning I finally got out up of bed after a particularly loud thunderclap. It rained all morning, but despite the thunder, I'd hardly call the rainfall a "storm" - it fell reasonably gently, if persistently, and didn't try to take any trees down with it. It's let up now, and since today is a walking day, this skin-bag of water is heading out shortly to get in some mileage, more water flowing over the Earth.    

 

Day of Footfall, 51st of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Castor): "Where can the horizon lie when a nation hides its organic minds in a cellar, dark and grim?" - Oprah, I guess

I'm not going to write about today's Supreme Court decision striking down the Stable Genius' idiotic tariffs. It's all over the media, others who know more about economics than I are posting far better, more informed political and macroeconomic analysis, and it's all but just another headline in the constant shitstorm of this second SG presidency. We'll have a whole other set of headlines tomorrow.

I'm not writing about the Court or the tariffs, so what will I write about? . . . I don't know . . . Nothing else comes to mind. Maybe I'll just shut the fuck up and wish you a happy Friday.

Happy Friday. The tariffs are dead. Enjoy your weekend.   

 

Speech in the Glade, 50th Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): It was an extraordinarily pleasant 75° F today. Due to a late start, I only got in a 5.8-mile Quincy, a short distance given the weather, but wearing a t-shirt and shorts. 

Other than today, however, this has been an unusually cold Childwinter, as was the Hagwinter before it. I've seen lower temperatures in Atlanta before, but the lows this season were nearly as cold and have lasted far, far longer than in years past.

While I'm thrilled to see the warmth return, I also know from past experience that when the air gets this warm this early in the season, the air mass become unstable and we get severe thunderstorms and even tornados. Too much moisture in the air in too close proximity to adjacent cold-air masses, and, well, you do the science. 

The global climate is nearing so many tipping points, and it's probably crossed many already, even without the Stable Genius' recent recission of the Endangerment Finding (or the "Engagement Rule" as Bill Maher called it). Several environmental groups have already sued to challenge the recission, and they might even win, but we were still well on the path toward climate collapse and its consequences. 

We're going to be facing a decade of increased hurricanes, severe thunderstorms, and tornados, along with alternating periods of drought and flooding. The remaining trees around my house, that is, the ones that haven't already fallen or I had taken down, are healthy, but I may have to take them all down. There's still way too many tons of timber way too high over my head and home for me to be comfortable with knowing the weather that's coming.        

 

Lessening Heart Hums, 49th Day of Childwinter,  526 M.E. (Aldebaran): Knowledge is raw data. Intelligence is knowing how to parse and sort that raw data. Wisdom is understanding what to do with the parsed and sorted raw data. 

Ignorance is not knowing. Knowledge can exist in ignorance, but not intelligence and even less so wisdom.

The bell looks like a mouth, gaping,

Indifferent to the wind blowing in the four directions;

If you ask it about the meaning of wisdom,

It only answers with a jingling, tinkling sound.

- Rújìng (1163-1228 C.E.), Chinese monk who taught and gave dharma transmission to Sōtō Zen founder Eihei Dōgen 

 

Third Ocean, 48th Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Helios): Atlanta's Cop City is one of the largest militarized police training centers in the United States. The site includes military-grade training facilities, a mock city in which to practice urban warfare, and dozens of shooting ranges. Construction of the site cleared much of the Weelaunee Forest, Atlanta’s largest green space. 

Back in 2023, I signed a petition to stop Cop City. Some people scoff at opposition to the facility, saying it's important to train the police, and while I agree to that in principle, the training the police need is not in urban warfare but in de-escalation techniques and community awareness, classroom lessons you don't need a mock city to teach. They need hands-on leadership and an on-the-street mentoring  program. 

Further, building the site in a majority Black neighborhood that understandably didn't want it in their backyards reeks of racism, and it's well documented that it's the Black community that disproportionally suffers police brutality and over-zealous enforcement. I'm sure the sounds of gunfire from the shooting ranges and sirens and noise from helicopters, flashbangs, etc. have hurt the already depressed property values in the neighborhood. Would you want to live next to it?    

There's a lot of underutilized space in the City of Atlanta for a training facility, including abandoned shopping malls and environmental brownfields, and it seems preposterous that the only site considered was the city's largest remaining green space. Also, what about the old training ground? Why not rebuild there? And if it's so unusable, why should we turn the forest land over to such irresponsible stewards of property? 

If all that doesn't trigger alarms in your head, look at the absolutely vicious response to protests by the city. They literally murdered one protester while still in his tent (descanse en paz, Tortuguita), and prosecuted others as domestic terrorists and charged them with racketeering under the RICO Act. They even went after organizations offering legal aid and bail assistance. A judge eventually overturned the case, but both the City of Atlanta and the State of Georgia have vowed to keep persecuting the opposition and refile the charges, even though construction of Cop City is now complete. 

The petition opposing Cop City requested a referendum on the development be put on the ballot for voters to decide. The petition eventually gathered more than 116,000 signatures, nearly double the number required by the city to put a referendum on the ballot. It’s also more than the number of people who had voted in Atlanta’s previous mayoral election.   

The City engaged in a series of legal shenanigans to ignore the petition and the will of the people. They  announced that would use a burdensome signature verification process regarded by many as a tactic of voter suppression to disenfranchise Black, Brown, and low-income people. Many of the city’s leaders had argued against such verification requirements in a lawsuit over the 2018 election. 

Finally, the city simply refused to even count the signatures on the petition or otherwise acknowledge its existence. When the petition was presented at the city clerk’s office on September 11, 2023, city officials falsely claimed they couldn’t begin verifying signatures because a deadline had been missed, even though a federal court had extended the deadline to late in the month. 

According to recent reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a former municipal clerk was hired in 2023 to help with the signature verification process. The signatures were never counted, but the city still paid the former clerk $910,000 anyway. Nearly one million dollars to not verify or count signatures. Nice work if you can get it. 

The whole case stinks to high heavens. Murder, trumped-up charges against the protesters, persecution of those assisting the protesters, and illegally disregarding a valid petition, not even allowing a vote on the matter. And now we learn there's also what appears to be graft. This whole thing stinks and that's why I voted against incumbent Mayor Andre Dickens last November.

Stop Cop City!

 

The Painted Timbers, 47th Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Electra): They're all saying the same thing, aren't they? "Go to a place that's neither hot nor cold." "Do not stay where buddha exists and run quickly from where no-buddha exists." Same thing. I was taught in the Soto Zen tradition and didn't do koan practice, but it seems to me that once you've solved one koan, you've essentially completed them all.

Here's a koan for you: Since the future is very much uncertain and we cannot foresee what will happen next, how should we live this day today? 

These awful times we live in. Today's headlines: Critics accuse administration of cooking the books in claims of cost savings from climate finding reversal. Vaccine makers curtail research and cut jobs amid hostile policies. Shooting at Rhode Island ice rink leaves at least two people dead. US teen who pushed for her father’s release from ICE custody dies of cancer. Producer of Israeli spy thriller found dead in Athens hotel room. Russian dissident Alexi Navalny poisoned by frog toxin, postmortem shows.  Actor Robert Duvall dead at age 95. Documentary film-maker Frederick Wiseman dead at age 96. 

As tennis player Coco Gauff recently put it, "I don’t think people should be dying in the streets just for existing." I agree. 

Life-and-death is the great matter and impermanence is swift. Our life changes moment by moment and it flows by swiftly every day. This is the reality before our eyes. In every moment, do not expect tomorrow will come. 

 

Descent of the Host, 46th Day of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Deneb): A monk once asked Zen Master Jōshū, "What is a true statement?" Jōshū replied, "Your mother is ugly."

Is there any surprise that Jōshū (778-897 CE) is one of my favorite Zen Masters? 

When a monk once bid him farewell, Jōshū asked, "Where are you going?" The monk replied, "I'm going to visit various places to learn the buddha-dharma."

Jōshū advised him, "Do not stay where buddha exists and run quickly from where no-buddha exists." The monk replied, "In that case, when you put it like that, I'll stay right here."

Jōshū was trying to get the monk to realize that the Way is not to be found far or near, within or without. To search for it is to miss it. Jōshū had learned this when he asked his teacher, Nansen, “What is the Way?” and Nansen famously answered, “Ordinary mind is the Way.” 

Jōshū asked, “Should I seek after it or not?” and Nansen answered, “If you try to turn toward it, you go against it.” 

“The Way does not belong to knowing or not knowing," Nansen explained. "Knowing is delusion. Not knowing is blank consciousness. When you have truly reached the Way beyond all doubt you will find it as vast and boundless as outer space. How can it be talked about on a level of right and wrong?” 

Zen Master Dogen (1200-1253 CE) said, "Just cast aside body and mind and practice without desire either to realize the Way or to attain the dharma. Then you can be called an undefiled practioner." John Daido Loori (1931-2007) said, "If you seek it from others, you go astray. If you seek it from within, you are far removed from it."   

Today was a walking day, but I barely got in half a Washington because of the rain. Tomorrow is a sitting day, and only the weather in my own mind can deter me then. The forecast, as always, is foggy. 

 

Day of the Inn Dweller, 45th of Childwinter, 526 M.E. (Castor): The things I do for you. Today, I completed my review of the EPA's regulatory impact analysis titled, Rescission of the Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and Motor Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emission Standards Under the Clean Air Act. Don't expect it to appear of a bestseller list any time soon.

The February 2026 report (EPA-420-R-26-002) was prepared by the EPA, as in "Environmental Protection," but you'd hardly know it by the report. Instead of attempting to refute the science behind the effect of CO₂ emissions on climate, either technically or even by simply saying, "we disagree," the so-called "regulatory impact analysis" only considers the economics of the decision to repeal the Endangerment Finding (or as Bill Mahar hilariously mispronounced it last night, the "Engagement Rule"). In short, if you don't want to read the 35-page document, it basically concludes that since U.S. consumers don't buy as many electric vehicles as other types of automobile, repealing the Endangerment Finding and its associated regulations will give buyers more "consumer choice" and lower costs for cars without emission restrictions. 

Amazingly, the Environmental Protection Agency didn't consider the protection of the environment in their decision. The word "environment" only appears once in the entire document when not used as part of the agency's name, or in footnotes referring to other organizations or the titles of other reports and documents. Similarly, the word "climate" only appears three times, and one of those is merely a reference to something called the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University, and another is a footnote reference to the same institute. 

The third and final use of the word "climate" comes in a sentence on page 5, stating that a model for automobile production and pricing decisions should "capture how consumers make vehicle purchase and driving decisions to maximize their welfare based on their preferences for vehicle attributes (e.g., efficiency, size, speed, reliability) and travel, new and used vehicle prices, and fuel price expectations, subject to their budget constraints and any location constraints (e.g., climate, commuting options, access to fueling infrastructure, etc)." Climate, as considered here, merely considers if a consumer lives in a warm or cold region, and could easily be replaced by the term "temperature zone."

No, the report is a complete and startling abandonment of the agency's responsibility not only to protect the environment but to even consider the environment. It's an absolute dereliction of duty. The analysis simply justifies rescinding the Endangerment Finding because consumers seem to prefer gasoline-powered vehicles, and because automobiles will be cheaper without emission controls than with them. In short, it's the sort of report one might expect to see from an automobile-manufacturer trade group or the oil-and-gas lobby, but not from the EPA.      

Lee Zeldin, the Long Island hack with no prior environmental experience named by the Stable Genius to head the EPA, stated a year ago that the agency's new mission is to focus not on environmental protection but on fostering economic growth, energy independence, and auto-industry expansion by prioritizing the rollback of Biden-era climate rules and cutting costs for consumers. In announcing the rescission, Zeldin said he was "driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” 

EPA's rescission of the Endangerment Finding without consideration of effect on the climate or the environment is exactly the kind of reckless and idiotic actions this godawful administration has inflicted on the citizens of these United States.