Arch View

I was culling through some of my older urban exploration ("Urbex") photos tonight. I came upon this one, which I called "Arch View." I took my HDR RAW files at the Clemons Mansion in north St. Louis on one of my several trips there in 2015. It was an amazing building in it's heyday--it was built by the uncle of writer Sam Clemons, who reportedly visited the house several times. That was a long time ago, when one did not need to worry about being in a dangerous dilapidated, mold-infested building where you might accidentally happen upon another human being who feels threatened by your presence. About a year after I took this photo, the building went up in flames. It is now totally destroyed. Which makes me feel fortunate to have at least seen what was left of the building in 2015.

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Accounting Errors for Ukraine!

Why isn't there a single solitary anti-war voice among Congressional Democrats? Not even among the supposedly far left wing of the Democrats, "The Squad." This is disgraceful. Meanwhile we have rampant drug addiction, homelessness, shitty schools and crumbling infrastructure that is ignored in American cities.

But now, $6.2B of found money will pour into the coffers of American military contractors and their lobbyists. We have an endless military budget to pay for 800 American military bases around the world and for endless war that has increased the risk of annihilating everyone we know in a nuclear holocaust. I'm not making that up. I'm referring to the October 7, 2022 statement by Joe Biden, who admitted that there is a "direct threat" of nuclear weapons being used in the Ukraine war. Biden further stated, "We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

All of this to unnecessarily take sides in a territorial dispute over the Donbass, to maintain our control over Ukraine, a country in which the U.S. deposed Viktor Yanukovych, the duly elected leader, in 2014, to install its own puppet leader. Current "foreign policy regarding Ukraine is a neocon wet dream and it offers absolutely no benefit for ordinary Americans.

As Robert Fulghum stated, "It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need, and our air force has to have a bake-sale to buy a bomber." [More . . . ]

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The Oldest Human Superstition

Walter Kirn:

The oldest human superstition "is the evil eye: an almost universal fear that to attract envy is to attract disaster. The evil eye mindset is the reason that if someone comes into your house and says, “What a beautiful house,” You will usually say, “Yeah, but I’m sorry it’s so dirty,” or if they look at a baby and say, “Oh, it’s the perfect baby.” “Oh, but it just burped and it’s made a mess.”

One of our greatest fears and most universal anxieties as humans is that we may attract the jealousy of others, and that means an attack by others."

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