I keep thinking that today is Sunday. Maybe because it's raining and so very quiet outside and many of our neighbours are on holidays. Or maybe because I feel shitty and ill and slow. Earlier I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and I told myself, just stay with it. This will pass. As if that helps.
This morning I read an opinion piece of one of the daily national newspapers, the left wing one from Berlin, with the heading I want to fight injustice instead of breathing it away mindfully. It's all about mock solutions and avoiding responsibility and the cynical appeal of a positive mindset catering to individuals and their fears. The promising balm of kindness and avoiding stuff that is too hard and may disturb our ever so important inner peace. Have the courage to be angry, it ends.
To which I may add, get me the energy. And while I lack that specific item, also the positive mindset is very faint at the moment, all I am left with is reading and watching and listening. Here are some cherry blossoms from a few days ago.
I am reading Werner Herzog's memoirs, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, which is really a long rambling jumble of the outrageous thoughts and anecdotes and wild insights of a person with an enormous ego. Great reading. Really great.
We dusted off the old record player and connected the ancient tuner system to the big fat speakers and I am now listening to our vinyl collection - the remains of it - one LP a day. Today's one was Dire Strait's Love over Gold, which we bought for 2.99 pounds (Irish) at Golden Discs in the Dun Laoghaire shopping centre in 1982 a week or two before the birth of our daughter. The shopping centre is long gone, but Golden Discs is still around. It was great fun listening to a young Mark Knopfler. I am just pulling the records off the stack as it sits here, without looking and the rule is to play it no matter what. Tomorrow it will be The Inner Mounting Flame, John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. That's one of R's records, from long before we met and I have a vague memory that I never really liked it. Back then that is.
And a final thought, something that came up in a conversation a few days ago. You know why we Germans are so pedantic about data protection? Someone around 90 years ago went through all records available, selected people with certain criteria, with the help of IBM, and then killed them all.
Fortunately for me, anger comes easily:( I do use it though to rage against the machine. I don't know if it does any good, but I hope it does.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know about IBM. It sickens me.
Okay. And now I'm crying again. I feel so drained and I do not even have a physical ailment.
ReplyDeleteLove over Gold is a good one, one of the best along with Brothers in Arms. I had no idea of their involvement in that horror.
ReplyDeleteooo, Dire Straits. We still have our vinyl collection but some are missing. Don't know what happened to them. I have a turntable that hooked into my old computer and when Jade would come she would pull old records out for us to listen to. I need to get a turntable that functions on its own. I'd like to listen to them now and then. Or maybe I should just figure out if I can hook the one I have into this computer.
ReplyDeleteMusk is stealing all our data secretly using Starlink hidden hookups. Here's a quote from Alt Nat'l Park Service...:DOGE installed a virtual system inside the agency’s servers that operated in secret. This system left no logs, no trace of its activity, and was removed without a record of what had been done.
Then, large amounts of data began disappearing from the system. This wasn’t routine data—it included sensitive information on union strategies, ongoing legal cases, corporate secrets, and even personal details of workers and officials. None of it had anything to do with cutting costs or improving efficiency. It simply wasn’t supposed to leave the NLRB under any circumstance.
Almost immediately after DOGE accounts were created, login attempts began—from a Russian IP address. These weren’t random hacks. Whoever it was had the correct usernames and passwords. The timing was so fast it suggested that credentials had either been stolen, leaked, or shared."
It's truly scary what is happening, the data theft, the feeling that it's all beyond what we can truly stop from happening. People say, we can't let this happen, and I want to scream, tell me what to do, because if there is something concrete that i know to do, believe me I will do it. But the truth is, I dont know what to do, how to stop what is happening. I will never look at what happened in Germany 90 years ago the same way again.
ReplyDeleteThese scams and thefts are sadly worldwide and can be frightening. Your photo is beautiful. Happy Easter and warm greetings from Montreal, Canada.
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