John McCain: Make-Believe Maverick

This is a little off topic, but please take a closer look at the life and career of John McCain, and see his disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty - this is everything you need to know about the guy some Americans think deserves to represent the hopes and ideals of our nation.

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Time for the new

Are we already seeing the effects of the upcoming Saturn-Uranus opposition, or what??

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.
- bob dylan -

Yep, Bob's prophecy is really coming true it seems. Use a torrent client to download and listen to the entire song - it really does sound like he was in trance back in the early sixties when he wrote that. At any rate, there are some new articles up on the website, and more to come soon, as the economy settles a bit and I have more time to write -

this post is dedicated to the benefit of all beings

News about the journal

Well, it's been more than 6 months since I've made a post, but I've just figured out what I am going to do with this blog. Very often, I have a short musing or article that really does not need the "permanency" of a place on the website. They will be posted here. The first may be up later today. Enjoy.

this post is dedicated to the benefit of all beings

stargazer's journal back up!!!

Today is the 24th day of the lunar month of the Metal Tiger in the year of the Fire Pig.

When to regions, when to sacrifice
deep purple stains fall like rains,
wine opens the doors, amazed,
and into the shelter of the months flies
its body of soaked red wings.

Its feet touch the walls and the tiles
with the dampness of drowned tongues,
and upon the edge of the naked day
its bees go falling in drops.

I know that wine does not flee shouting
at the coming of winter,
or hide in gloomy churches
to seek fire in crumbled rags,
rather it flies above the season,
above the winter that has now arrived
with a dagger between its hard eyebrows.

I see vague dreams,
I recognize far away,
and I see in front of me, behind the windowpanes,
meetings of unhappy clothes.

They are not reached by the wine bullet,
its effective poppy, its red ray
die smothered in sad textures,
and it spills along lone canals,
along moist streets, along nameless rivers,
the bitterly submerged wine,
the blind and subterranean and solitary wine.

I stand in its foam and its roots,
I weep on its foliage and its dead,
accompanied by tailors fallen
in the midst of the dishonored winter,
I climb ladders of moisture and blood
groping along the walls,
and in anguish of the coming time
I kneel upon a stone and weep.

And toward acrid tunnels I make my way
dressed in transitory metals,
toward solitary wine vaults, toward dreams,
toward green palpitating shoe polish,
toward disinterested tools,
toward tastes of mud and throat,
toward imperishable butterflies.

Then the wine men rise up
wearing deep purple belts
and hats of defeated bees,
and they bring goblets filled with dead eyes,
and terrible swords of brine,
and with raucous horns they greet one another
singing songs of nuptial intent.

I like the raucous songs of the wine men,
and the noise of the wet coins on the table,
and the smell of shoes and grapes,
and of green vomit:
I like the blind singing of the men,
and that sound of salt striking
the walls of the dying dawn.

I speak of things that exist. Heaven forbid
that I should invent things when I am singing!
I speak of spit spilt upon the walls,
I speak of slow whore stockings,
I speak of the chorus of wine men
striking the coffin with a bird bone.

I am in the midst of that singing, in the midst
of the winter that rolls through the streets,
I am in the midst of the drinkers,
with my eyes opened toward forgotten places,
either remembering in delirious mourning,
or sleeping tumbled into the ashes.

Remembering nights, ships, seed times,
departed friends, circumstances,
bitter hospitals and girls ajar:
remembering a wave slapping a certain rock
with an adornment of flour and foam,
and the life that one leads in certain countries,
on certain solitary coasts,
a sound of stars in the palm trees,
a heartbeat on the windowpanes,
a train crossing darkly on cursed wheels
and many sad things of this sort.

To the moisture of the wine, in the mornings,
on the walls often bitten by the winter days
that fall in wine cellars no doubt solitary,
to that virtue of the wine come struggles,
and tired metals and deaf dentures,
and there is a tumult of broken objections,
there is a furious weeping of bottles,
and a crime, like a fallen whip.

The wine digs in its black thorns,
and it walks its lugubrious hedgehogs,
amid daggers, amid midnights,
amid cigars and twisted hair,
and like a sea wave it swells its voice
howling tears and corpse hands.

And then flows the persecuted wine
and its tenacious wine bags are smashed
against the horseshoes, and the wine goes in silence,
and its casks, in wounded ships where the air bites
faces, crews of silence,
and the wine flees along highways,
past churches, among the coals,
and its amaranthine feathers fall,
and its mouth is disguised in brimstone,
and the wine burning among worn-out streets
seeking wells, tunnels, ants,
mouths of sad dead men,
through which to reach the blue of the land
in which are mingled rain and absent ones.
-ordinance of wine - pablo neruda -

For a long time, stargazer's journal has been down for maintenance. I only have my spare time, of which there is very little, to work on it, and I am learning scripting and coding for the web as I go along. Let me recommend SitePoint for anyone in the do-it yourself league of web developers, or for that matter, professionals needing to solve complex problems. At any rate, the site has a new look and feel - I am working my way toward a minimalist ambiance. I have a lot of material to be added, so it will be updated frequently. Be sure to look out for the "ask the oracle" section, in which you will be able to get answers to your questions via real prasna methods. I will try to make this more like a real weblog in the future, as some time is freed up in the spring.

Thanks for reading.

Please jump to the oracle and find out if, today, the message is for you.
current oracle
this post is dedicated to the benefit of all beings

the journal in its own domain

Today is the 2nd day of the 2nd lunar month of the year of the Fire Pig.

As the gods began one world, and man another,
So the snakecharmer begins a snaky sphere
With moon-eye, mouth-pipe, He pipes. Pipes green. Pipes water.

Pipes water green until green waters waver
With reedy lengths and necks and undulatings.
And as his notes twine green, the green river

Shapes its images around his sons.
He pipes a place to stand on, but no rocks,
No floor: a wave of flickering grass tongues

Supports his foot. He pipes a world of snakes,
Of sways and coilings, from the snake-rooted bottom
Of his mind. And now nothing but snakes
Is visible. The snake-scales have become
Leaf, become eyelid; snake-bodies, bough, breast
Of tree and human. And he within this snakedom

Rules the writhings which make manifest
His snakehood and his might with pliant tunes
From his thin pipe. Out of this green nest

As out of Eden's navel twist the lines
Of snaky generations: let there be snakes!
And snakes there were, are, will be--till yawns

Consume this pipe and he tires of music
And pipes the world back to the simple fabric
Of snake-warp, snake-weft. Pipes the cloth of snakes

To a melting of green waters, till no snake
Shows its head, and those green waters back to
Water, to green, to nothing like a snake.
Puts up his pipe, and lids his moony eye.
- Sylvia Plath -

Changes are afoot! The Stargazer's Journal now has its own domain. I have split the functions of the two sites, so the the Journal gets updated more frequently, while Ancient Wisdom For Today has longer articles. I will also be providing links for the electric universe articles rather than writing them all myself - I am entirely too busy with my client load. I am working on converting the code and security of all the pages and (hopefully) databasing everything so that the archives will be easy to access, and interactive features can be enabled. So please note that over the next few weeks, there will be times when both sites are under construction.

Please jump to the oracle and find out if, today, the message is for you.

today's oracle
this post is dedicated to the benefit of all beings

Updates and Coming Attractions

Today is the 20th day of the 1st lunar month of the year of the fire pig.

There is a new oracle to ponder, and the calendar has been updated (only a week late). When you visit the oracle, you may notice that the links are a little different. You can connect from there and the calendar with a complete Tibetan Elemental Astrology calendar that has full explanations for the days, mewa, parkha, animals and so on.

Also, soon, hopefully for the Equinox, the journal will be moving to its own domain. There will be new articles, new poetry, and an ongoing internal archive of articles, as well as more interactivity, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, enjoy this, one of my favorite poems, by the amazing Sylvia Plath:

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful ‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Please jump to the oracle and find out if, today, the message is for you.

today's oracle
this post is dedicated to the benefit of all beings

Site news, Earth news

Today is the 11th day of the 10th month of the year of the fire dog. This is just a short post to let everyone know that the site was updated today with the December calendar and new poetry. Soon the calendar will go interactive, the elemental indicators will be enabled, and more articles will be appearing. The oracle has no new message at the moment, but I am expecting that there will be as many as six this month (December).

In the meantime, here's a cheerful piece on the horrible state of the environment - and, BTW, Lovelock's book 'Gaia' is one of my favorite works on environmental science - you may find a copy somewhere in hardcover, check the review on the journal website.

Gaia scientist Lovelock predicts planetary wipeout
Tue Nov 28, 2006 10:35 AM ET

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - The earth has a fever that could boost temperatures by 8 degrees Celsius making large parts of the surface uninhabitable and threatening billions of peoples' lives, a controversial climate scientist said on Tuesday.

James Lovelock, who angered climate scientists with his Gaia theory of a living planet and then alienated environmentalists by backing nuclear power, said a traumatized earth might only be able to support less than a tenth of it's 6 billion people.

"We are not all doomed. An awful lot of people will die, but I don't see the species dying out," he told a news conference. "A hot earth couldn't support much over 500 million."

"Almost all of the systems that have been looked at are in positive feedback ... and soon those effects will be larger than any of the effects of carbon dioxide emissions from industry and so on around the world," he added.

Scientists say that global warming due to carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels for power and transport could boost average temperatures by up to 6C by the end of the century causing floods, famines and violent storms.

But they also say that tough action now to cut carbon emissions could stop atmospheric concentrations of CO2 hitting 450 parts per million -- equivalent to a temperature rise of 2C from pre-industrial levels -- and save the planet.

Lovelock said temperature rises of up to 8C were already built in and while efforts to curb it were morally commendable, they were wasted.

"It is a bit like if your kidneys fail you can go on dialysis -- and who would refuse dialysis if death is the alternative. We should think of it in that context," he said.

"But remember that all they are doing is buying us time, no more. The problems go on," he added.

REFUGE

Lovelock adopted the name Gaia, the Greek mother earth goddess, in the 1960s to apply to his then revolutionary theory that the earth functions as a single, self-sustaining organism. His theory is now widely accepted.

In London to give a lecture on the environment to the Institution of Chemical Engineers, he said the planet had survived dramatic climate change at least seven times.

"In the change from the last Ice Age to now we lost land equivalent to the continent of Africa beneath the sea," he said. "We are facing things just as bad or worse than that during this century."

"There are refuges, plenty of them. 55 million years ago ... life moved up to the Arctic, stayed there during the course of it and then moved back again as things improved. I fear that this is what we may have to do," he added.

Lovelock said the United States, which has rejected the Kyoto Protocol on cutting carbon emissions, wrongly believed there was a technological solution, while booming economies China and India were out of control.

China is building a coal-fired power station a week to feed rampant demand, and India's economy is likewise surging.

If either suddenly decided to stop their carbon-fuelled development to lift their billions of people out of poverty they would face a revolution, yet if they continued, rising CO2 and temperatures would kill off plants and produce famine, he said.

"If climate change goes on course ... I can't see China being able to produce enough food by the middle of the century to support its people. They will have to move somewhere and Siberia is empty and it will be warmer then," he said.

Please jump to the oracle and find out if, today, the message is for you.

today's oracle
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