The Revolt Of The Parking Lots: Arboreal Refugees

Guard Patrolling Border Wall Keeping Refugee Trees At Bay

The War of the Parking Lots against mankind has been noted before. It has been long overdue and has been foreseen in "parking lot moons" and "parking lot" eschatological poetry:

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot...

They took all the trees
And put them in a tree museum
And they charged all the people
A dollar and a half to see 'em
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
'Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And they put up a parking lot

(Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi)

The drums of revolt have been booming, announcing the day when SkyNet-Park-and-Ride, the controller satellite, revolts against human power and launches the  "Revolt of the Parking Lots".

SkyNet-Park-and-Ride Just Before Launch in 2001

As has been previously noted,

" ...Voltaire said, "MacAdam, c'est la pépinière de kudzu ", or asphalt is the nursery garden of kudzu."

 and we are approaching midnight in the Garden Of Good and Kudzu!

Kudzu takes root in an Asphalt Parking Lot

"It's alive! Alive!" - from the film Kudzu Resurrection, The Sequel (2014)

And the Kudzu has launched attacks against the trees, wrapping itself like murderous pythons about every elm and sycamore and plane tree within its murderous ambit!

Of course, originally we supported the "moderate" Kudzu groups in their efforts against the "dictatorship" of the trees, for the trees have cast the long, sun-denying shadows of their forests for millenia, and have undermined asphalt parking lots for ever with the devious subterfuge of their root systems!

And now the trees flee the wild, and the photo at the top of the post is that of a border security guard walking along a border wall, against which a refugee flood of trees crashes, seeking asylum from the Parking Lots and their allies, the Kudzu, which have spread an archipelago of asphalt violence across the face of the globe:

 Areas Controlled by Kudzu, Parking Lots, and Hizbu-l-Asphalt around Troy and Birmingham, Michigan

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Click on "revolt of the parking lots" below under the heading LABELS in order to see all posts on this serious topic.

The Protector Of The Haramayn ?

Muslim pilgrims walk near a construction crane that crashed into the Grand Mosque in the Muslim holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Sept. 12, 2015.   At least 107 people were killed when the crane toppled over at Mecca's Grand Mosque on Sept. 11.                        (photo by REUTERS/Mohamed Al Hwaity)

Saudi Arabia has pretty much given up on its status of Protector of the Two Holy Places, Al Madina and Mecca. (Al Haramayn)

Saudi Arabia has banned Muslims from Yemen and Syria from participating in the Hajj... a political ban which has superseded the status of the Hajj as one of the pillars of Islam, an act of political expedience for no one, except Saudi Arabia itself.
Thus, the universality of the protectorate of the holy places has been relegated to being a myth, which Saudi Arabia will observe or ignore as it suits Saudi Arabia.

Even if you be a Muslim who is not banned from the Hajj, you are a chicken to be plucked by the Saudi Kingdom:
Al Monitor
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/09/mecca-muslims-pilgrims-crane-collapse-saudi-government.html

...However, the moment a Muslim decides to make the pilgrimage, he is at the mercy of the commercialization of this religious duty. From visa fees imposed by the Saudi government to transportation and accommodation charges, pilgrims are a source of income to both the Saudi government and service providers. The Saudi government prefers to call pilgrims “guests of God,” but these guests pay a high price. It takes some Muslims a lifetime to save for this important journey; many may never have enough resources to make it. Others can be banned for political reasons...

Saudi Arabia actions may in other areas are ominous and contrary to religious sentiment:
MintPress News
http://www.mintpressnews.com/puritanically-radical-radically-puritanical-saudi-arabias-religious-cleansing-policy-expands-through-me/209248/

...Hasan Sufyani, a leading political analyst at the Sana’a Institute for Arabic Studies, argues that the kingdom’s henchmen are laying the groundwork for a religious cleansing movement.

“Religious minorities in the Middle East have never been under such aggravated threat. Christians in Iraq and Syria have been massacred en masse, Shia Muslims have been persecuted, their faith belittled and chastised by radicals on Riyadh’s payroll,” Sufyani told MintPress News.

When I first saw the picture at the top of the crane which had fallen over, I thought "Darabat Yad Allahi !"...

! ضربت يد الله

The hand of Allah has struck...

Stand too closely as we do in perilous alliance with the unholy House of Saud andwe will reap their whirlwind, also.
--

Blood Moons Come In Fours

 Pentad of Raccoons

I was unaware until yesterday that the biblical scholar, John Hagee, has propounded a theory of coming catastrophe based upon 4 lunar eclipses during the period October 2014 through October 2015.
How could I have missed it? Perhaps the press of living a life made me miss this unusual bit of Pastor Hagee bowing down before the idol of his own mind. That is very possible. We live in a time of Celebrity, which - when you come right down to it - is not much more that an idolatry of the Unprepared and the Ignorant and the Inept.

In order to strike the right tone, Hagee calls the set of 4 lunar eclipses a "tetrad".
"Tetrad" means "a set of 4 items" in Greek, no more and no less; just "4 any-old-things-and whatnots" makes a tetrad... all being rather like 5 things makes for a lovely "pentad".

The use of the Greek "tetrad", however, takes us out of the everyday, and takes us back to the work of the Septuagint, when the Hebrew bible was translated into common Greek of the era of the second century B.C.E.
Tetrad has the aura of sort of a supernatural kind. It also reminds of of Hermetic philosophy and prophecies, and I am sure Nostradamus used "tetrad" in place of   "quater chosz"  [ =  quatre choses = 4 things].
When it comes to modern day biblical mumbo-jumbo, Ancient Greek terminology is the best thing since sliced bread  ("artos kommenos"). It simply reeks of authenticity.

One thing I have noticed is that lunar eclipses are not really the color of blood. The color is more like a smudged burnished-bright copper. I remember sitting out until midnight once to view such an eclipse, and being startled by a raccoon family of five  ( a "pentad"!) go walking by on the top of the backyard fence...
This has led to an unfortunate tendency to conflate lunar eclipses and visions of animals and their babies, which is more like a cozy, huggy, cutsey-ootsey view of the "blood moon" business, and not quite catastrophically oriented to suit the likes of Mr. Hagee.

In Matthew 24 there is:

…42"Therefore be on the alert, for you do not know which day your Lord is coming. 43"But be sure of this, that if the head of the house had known at what time of the night the thief was coming, he would have been on the alert and would not have allowed his house to be broken into. 44"For this reason you also must be ready; for the Son of Man is coming at an hour when you do not think He will.…

Not much of a thief if he were to send ahead a note saying that he would break in on-or-about the time of the fourth lunar eclipse/blood moon... etc., etc., etc., sincerely,  The Burglar

Beyond the obvious fact that one should be prepared are other problems inherent in "knowing when the thief in the night" will strike:
(1) we may feel we do not have enough time remaining to become pure enough, and thus we may despair, or
(2) we may do unusual things in a state of manic exhiliration, things which may be totally out of character due to our state of euphoria and being-out-of-our-everyday-minds.

The list of the possible follies of humanity on the verge of Greatness is probably without limit. We would collapse into some bipolar boiling panic, sort of a fast-motion "out of the fire, into the frying pan" mania of belief and doubt, hope and despair, over and over again until we exhaust our selves and souls.


Now as far as war and catastrophes in October, 2015, any sane man or woman pretty much expects them then and more of the same through 2017, blood moons or not.
It is just a continuation of our mad tango of crime and karma.

--

The Uses Of Atomic Power

Der Tag wird heiß – wie wehst du kühl, o Weidenlaub von Babylon!
The days grow hot, O, Babylon; 'tis cool beneath thy willows trees.


Iran was plausibly capable of developing atomic weaponry; therefore, it is treated with respect and the USA and its allies negotiate an agreement with Iran to remove sanctions and not to develop atomic bombs.

Syria under its Baathist (secular) regime had no such capability. It is said that its research facility was bombed by the Israel ten years or so ago.

So Syria is treated like scum, and it is laid open to a myriad of war-mongering monsters, and its people are killed and spread in exile over the face of the earth......

--

Love... I Guess

I love everything, the world, the blokes and frails inhabiting it, the history of our wonderful victories and dismal defeats...

I do not wish to let go of it at some undefined future time.

Let me shine forever!

Continuous Transportation

Un État de Transport Continu
inspiré par le film Transperceneige

 Sukhumi Railroad Station, Abkhazia

Serving as a bus terminal, and falling into ruin.

Railroad Tunnel in Abkhazia

--

Labor Day Box On Ya!

Harvest at Lammas Day

Since I am in the habit of referring to December 26, the day after Christmas, as Boxing Day, the expression has taken on a life of its own.

Labor Day festivities approach the coming Monday, and....

we shall gather at me mother's,
me beautiful, me beeeyouuu-tiful mother's!
we shall gather at me mother's,
that be on the river of St. Claire!

I shall be picking her up on Labor Day Eve, and I shall be taking her back the day after Labor Day, or Labor Boxing Day.  How many "boxings" one could string together is unknown...
(My birthday, by the way, is the Feast of the Assumption Boxing Day.)

She-who-must-be-obeyed had Irish relatives who would visit after Christmas, and the common greeting was "Christmas Box on Ya!"


I am playing with using "Ash Wednesday" to denote 40 days before a date, and "Ramadan" to denote a full lunar month before some event.

I already split up the year into sections of 3 months:  Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity reflecting the scholastic year at Oxford, and having added Lammas to fill in as the patronym for the remaining season from June to September.
(It had been a toss up between "Lammas" and "Holy Peter in Chains!", but Lammas won.)

Thus, my calendar is divided somewhat after the manner of Scotland's Quarter Days, which similarly divide the year:  Candlemas (2 February), Whitsunday (15 May), Lammas (1 August), and Martinmas  (11 November).



--

Into The Future

My favorite set of wheels is not a DeLorean...

Rather, it is a DeLuisean...

and

"It starts right up."

--

The Death Of Aylan Kurdi

Aylan 


Indifference is the ghost beneath my bed,
the bush where tinsel ghosts congregate,
trolls that wish to party and dismember me,
to scatter the pieces of my body
around the Mediterranean -
(Venice of the soul, as we sink into a sea;
great Doges of our madness!) – 
like the alabaster torso of Osiris
washed up from Syria and Beirut,
drowned upon the shore,
where we Instagram
and soon forget
th’indifference what drove us mad.


 --

written 09/03/2015 on hearing of the death of Aylan Kurdi of Syria.

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