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Wednesday 27 August 2014

the daily screenshot


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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Caprock_Canyons_Mule_Deer_2005.jpg/1024px-Caprock_Canyons_Mule_Deer_2005.jpg

Mule Deer (Odocoileus hemionus), Caprock Canyons, West Texas: photo by Leaflet, 15 May 2005


Today... dry season continuing after the latest insane war... I made it down the steps oh boy... and saw a doe, in the midst of the full-on mad-dog rush-hour get-and-spend take-no-prisoners commuter traffic stream blasting up the hill to where the rich live, attempting to herd her two scared fawns across the freeway feeder.

Two trips; on the second, the more timid of the young ones finally got the message, moved by her gentle nudgings, and -- as she lagged behind, observing the imminent danger with watchful motherly caution -- somehow made it across unscathed.

But now the red light at the Alameda had again turned green, and she was stranded and beginning to panic, ears pinned, eyes wide, frantically looking for an opening; a car bearing down on her at 40 mph, she leapt over the bonnet, seeming to hang in the air one long heartstopping moment, bounded away...




gas 'n go (view from an Air Force C-17 Globemaster III about to receive fuel from a KX-10A Extender on a training mission above southern Oregon): photo by Robert Couse-Baker (**RCB**), 25 September 2013

4 comments:

manik sharma said...

Tom,

Talking about screenshots. Aren't these good people waiting for some good ones of some
Panda sex yet to be had on their Panda Webcams.

By the way that second image of the airplane 'arse' hovering over another's face begs the question that have these aircrafts ever been fueled in air, outside of a training exercise. There being this finality attached to the practice -- no base camps here, only the summit or beyond.

TC said...

Or beyond the beyond...

That photo oddly enough made me think of the way a mother bird might feed her chicks a worm, having regurgitated it.

A sort of mutant mechanical maternal care in the air, as I imagined it.

Wish it were possible to say that the latest insane war had also happened entirely in my imagination.

As it was, seeing a place on earth where people are having it so bad inspired a spark of hope in the old folks here who aren't having it so good -- but nowhere near that bad.

Still trying to figure out where the resolution, courage to sustain and survive, came from, over there, during this long attack which those who came through it are now calling "worse than the Nakba" (i.e., 1947-1948).

Which is to say, worse than the worst.

They have nothing to hold them up but each other.

And that turns out to have been so very much.

Alas it's hard to celebrate the end of the slaughter when the sky over the open air cage, which still "belongs to" (!!) the occupiers, is still aswarm with drones.

Demographic analysis that produced the "policy" of periodic "mowing of the lawn" remains embedded in the playbook of the killers.

They're like Arnold, the Terminator. "I'll be back".

"Sooner or later, we will have no choice but to destroy them completely," a hideous mechanical mutant dispatched by the IOF is saying into my ear by way of the BBC at this very moment. "We're very frustrated".

Meaning, like all bullies, they don't like losing.

I don't want to think about the next one, but my not thinking about it won't help it not happen.

The deer in the traffic stream put me in mind of every living thing fleeing the onrushing mechanical mutants everywhere.

Here the high tech weaponry trade fairs are doing a booming business. Oakland has a big paramilitary / "law enforcement" trade convention called Urban Shield (and if you are thinking IDF gear is a brass bolt in that shield, you must be clairvoyant). Urban police are over the moon for SWAT and UAV gear. The government has designated a patch of Nevada as a drone test range. Five drone firms have already located there. Another, with 400 employees, is moving to Reno soon. Quickie divorces, slot machines and drones. Today, in the wake of the earth-shaking shock waves created by the private Brangelina nuptials in the Provençal chateau beneath the branded vineyard, Google announced it has its own drone line in development.

"The climate seemed right for going public", a spokesperson droned.

Mose23 said...

Perfect joxtaposition.

Netanyahu's declaration: I was with a friend in Tower hamlets (they have the Palestinian flag flying from the Town Hall), heard the word "Victory" and found ourselves laughing. The type of human creature Bibi is: how can he ever be done?

TC said...

By the by, the swatch of bollocks to which I referred in passing was a BBC interview that aired last night... it's now down to where the servile attempts to create platforms of "free expression" for the apologists of strategic genocide allow the apologists to do little more than dig ever deeper the bottomless crater of b.s. which for them comprises the default homepage.

The interview was conducted in Israel by Stephen Sachur, the infamous "Hard Talk" host whose m.o. is rudely bossing his guests around. But this time, having dared to intimate that after all that pointless horror and suffering they'd inflicted, Israel had actually suffered a strategic defeat in Gaza... he was, for once, shouted down.

By the same old tired slogans and lies.

About the "poor little Jish state" -- his interviewee's wording and pronunciation, with a small theatrical sob included -- surrounded and pushed around and menaced by everything and everybody on Earth.

Mouthed this time by Yuval Steinitz, Israel's Minister of Intelligence.