(After my pre-dawn qigong practice I had crawled back into bed, at which point these dreams occurred. It had had been a difficult, trying practice, the right side of my brain raging and intrusive.)
I was sitting with a blonde-haired girl on a concrete sidewalk next to an asphalted motorway. We were on the top of a low hill. It was bright, daytime; the sky was blue. Brick structures stood across the road to our front left and farther down the rise to our right rear. Walking paths had been worn into the scrub grasses that covered the now-empty lots around us where buildings had once stood. My bicycle lay in the grass behind us, and some part me remembers having just left a cluster of abandoned and crumbling single-storey buildings somewhere nearby.
A person drove past in a rocket-powered sled of some sort, gunning the engine to maintain speed. Though it was a warm spring day there was still enough snow on the motorway to allow the the sled to slide along quickly, without its steel skis kicking up sparks. I pointed it out to my companion, who seemed nonplussed, saying something like “Oh yeah, that’s a...” (I forget the name she used for the contraption.)
The next thing I remember was being in a house with colorful walls, watching a couple - a man and woman I knew well - getting ready to venture forth on an outing. They bustled back and forth within the large kitchen where I too stood, gathering things and talking to each other in quiet, friendly tones. Bright, golden light streamed into their abode from windows set into its thick outer walls to my left, warming the parquet flooring and wooden kitchen furniture. To my right was an inner wall painted an earthy red. The two were dressed in mismatched but colorful clothing, leggings and long-sleeved undershirts under shorts and t-shirts. Both wore what appeared to be straw hats with bandanas tied around their chins to keep the hats in place. They vacated the structure through a door to my rear, leaving me behind. I went to a cupboard at the far end of the room where I knew I would find a vacuum-sealed coffee thermos and a rolled up yoga-mat. The items were indeed there. I spoke with a companion, the blonde-haired girl perhaps, explaining something to her as I took out the items. I remembered, then, that I had similar items elsewhere, and put them carefully back into the cupboard.
Realizing that I had other places to be, I exited into an inner courtyard with red walls. Rectangular stones paved the courtyard, which was littered with wheeled contraptions, ancient wooden pushcarts perhaps. As I was walking toward the gate that led to the outside, I passed under a broad arch that led to the exit. In the adobe above my head, directly in the center of the arch, was an opening that appeared to have been hastily-patched with a rusted ventilation register, into which I peered, finding however little of interest.
americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑
Showing posts with label rocket. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rocket. Show all posts
03 April 2017
25 April 2012
on our common Nazi heritage
(I had begun to write a piece lambasting Americans for our shameless and widespread use of technologies developed and perfected by the Nazis, until I realized that every person living in today's industrialized societies benefits from the murder, chaos, fear, and hatred perpetuated by those horrible people; this article has changed significantly since its inception.)
As persons living in this modern world, we benefit from and use a variety of methods and technologies that were discovered by persons known as Nazis. Many of the advances we so readily use and accept today would be impossible without the wars fought during the 20th century, wars fought specifically to counter the threat posed by the Nazis and their allies. Therefore, any individual using and otherwise benefiting from such things as highly mechanized production, the use of electric-hybrid batteries, the interstate highway system, and air-conditioning (without which neither jet-flight nor high-rise buildings would be feasible), such persons are accomplice to every atrocity and horrendous action (including the genocidal bombings at Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Dresden) that made that technology possible. Those people who jettison from their lives all vestiges of this modern world, who live, wear, and eat only such things as grow in Nature, or those who kill themselves outright, these people are free of the shameful burden of Nazism; the rest of us live with the blood of thousands of innocent people on our hands. I, the author, am just as guilty as the rest of mankind.
Without the Nazis, our modern world would not amount to much. (I applaud the efforts put forth by the brave and industrious women and men in America and her allied countries who worked on and mastered the methods and ideas – rocketry, the use of mass media in propaganda, diesel engines – pioneered by Germans during the 1930s and 40s; a spade, however, shall be called a spade.) American astronauts traveled to the moon on rockets designed and built by Werner Von Braun, who was a card-carrying member of the NSDAP, and a slave-master at Peenemünde. Without Nazis, the citizens of the world would not enjoy the privilege of traveling rapidly, and comfortably, in jet-powered aircraft, nor would we likely have developed radar or sonar technologies, without which air and naval travel become frightening and inefficient. If not for the Nazis, Albert Einstein's course in life would have been slightly altered, resulting in unknowable changes to the space-time-continuum (if, of course, one believes in such nonsense as the space-time-continuum), and he and his ideas may have benefited some country other than this, our own. And, to conclude this stress-inducing and poorly-argued piece, without the Nazis we would not likely have allowed nationalistic, fear-mongering, borderline-racist politicians such as Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, or Sarah Palin to gain such prominence on the national stage, and we would likely have found it far harder to neglect and to ignore our shared, common virtues of generosity, humility, and kindness, virtues that counter-act feelings of self-loathing, hatred, contempt, and dissatisfaction.
There is nothing more evil than hatred, and there are few dangers as great as to rely solely on mass media for one's daily news. Therefore, please turn off your TV, switch off your radio, burn your morning paper, and spend some time enjoying life's simple pleasures, such as breathing. If we are not careful, however, that too may soon join the growing list of Things Only Terrorists Do.
場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit
As persons living in this modern world, we benefit from and use a variety of methods and technologies that were discovered by persons known as Nazis. Many of the advances we so readily use and accept today would be impossible without the wars fought during the 20th century, wars fought specifically to counter the threat posed by the Nazis and their allies. Therefore, any individual using and otherwise benefiting from such things as highly mechanized production, the use of electric-hybrid batteries, the interstate highway system, and air-conditioning (without which neither jet-flight nor high-rise buildings would be feasible), such persons are accomplice to every atrocity and horrendous action (including the genocidal bombings at Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Dresden) that made that technology possible. Those people who jettison from their lives all vestiges of this modern world, who live, wear, and eat only such things as grow in Nature, or those who kill themselves outright, these people are free of the shameful burden of Nazism; the rest of us live with the blood of thousands of innocent people on our hands. I, the author, am just as guilty as the rest of mankind.
Without the Nazis, our modern world would not amount to much. (I applaud the efforts put forth by the brave and industrious women and men in America and her allied countries who worked on and mastered the methods and ideas – rocketry, the use of mass media in propaganda, diesel engines – pioneered by Germans during the 1930s and 40s; a spade, however, shall be called a spade.) American astronauts traveled to the moon on rockets designed and built by Werner Von Braun, who was a card-carrying member of the NSDAP, and a slave-master at Peenemünde. Without Nazis, the citizens of the world would not enjoy the privilege of traveling rapidly, and comfortably, in jet-powered aircraft, nor would we likely have developed radar or sonar technologies, without which air and naval travel become frightening and inefficient. If not for the Nazis, Albert Einstein's course in life would have been slightly altered, resulting in unknowable changes to the space-time-continuum (if, of course, one believes in such nonsense as the space-time-continuum), and he and his ideas may have benefited some country other than this, our own. And, to conclude this stress-inducing and poorly-argued piece, without the Nazis we would not likely have allowed nationalistic, fear-mongering, borderline-racist politicians such as Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, or Sarah Palin to gain such prominence on the national stage, and we would likely have found it far harder to neglect and to ignore our shared, common virtues of generosity, humility, and kindness, virtues that counter-act feelings of self-loathing, hatred, contempt, and dissatisfaction.
There is nothing more evil than hatred, and there are few dangers as great as to rely solely on mass media for one's daily news. Therefore, please turn off your TV, switch off your radio, burn your morning paper, and spend some time enjoying life's simple pleasures, such as breathing. If we are not careful, however, that too may soon join the growing list of Things Only Terrorists Do.
場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit
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