starleader's logbook

A possible case of New World screwworm has been reported in South Texas. If confirmed, it would be the first detected breach of the US-Mexico border by the ravenous flesh-eating flies, which have been making their way up through Central America for the past several years. In a social media post Wednesday afternoon, the US Department of Agriculture said a “sample is now at USDA’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories (NVSL) in Ames, lowa for confirmatory testing. We will provide updates the moment results are available.” It added that “We have already activated personnel on the ground and are working with local partners.”

May you fall in love again with yourself.

You will never find the real truth among people that are insecure or have egos to protect. Truth over time becomes either guarded or twisted as their perspective changes; it changes with the seasons of their shame, love, hope or pride.

Existential anxiety—knowing that you are inevitably going to die—is the ultimate source of human fear. Even when you’re not thinking about it, it festers in your subconscious as a constant low-level angst, and in your body as a chronic activation of the sympathetic (fight/flight) nervous system. But death as some sort of eternal finality is a fraud perpetrated by the brain-mind, which chronically seeks to create an “entity” somehow separate from the very fabric and ground of its own Reality.

“Armed with billions by the mortal enemy of the demos — the oligarchs and corporations — the political elites, Republicans and Democrats, destroyed the careers of those politicians who resisted. They crushed labor unions. They blacklisted honest journalists and consolidated the press into the hands of a handful of corporations and oligarchs. They slashed regulations that constrained unfettered greed and protected the population from predatory corporations and environmental toxins. They passed legislation that created a de facto tax boycott for the rich — Trump famously paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the 15 years prior to his presidency — while stripping the country of its industry and throwing some 30 million people out of work. Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing. It is created by manipulating the prices of stocks and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public.”

“This new medium is reprogramming us, yet we fail to grasp the radical paradigm shift that is underway. We are hobbling along after the very medium that, below our threshold of conscious decision, is definitively changing the ways that we act, perceive, feel, think, and live together. We are enraptured by the digital medium yet unable to gauge the consequences of our frenzy fully. The crisis we are now experiencing follows from our blindness and stupefaction.”