Seeing this he inquired, "Just out of curiosity, what the heck are you doing?"

"I'm listening to the music of the tree," the other man replied.

"You gotta be kiddin' me."

"No, would you like to give it a try?"

Understandably curious, the man says, "Well, OK..."

So he wrapped his arms around the tree and pressed his ear up against it.

With this, the other guy slapped a pair of handcuffs on him, took his wallet, jewellery, car keys, then stripped him naked and left.

Two hours later another nature lover strolled by, saw this guy handcuffed to the tree stark naked, and asked, "What the hell happened to you?"

He told the guy the whole terrible story about how he got there. When he finished telling his story, the other guy shook his head in sympathy, walked around behind him, kissed him gently behind the ear and said, "Cupcake, this just ain't gonna be your day".

LINK

Someone please tell me how to post a youtube link so the video shows in the post ?

:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:

I've forgotten how many times I've watched, it's that good. I recently got a digitally remastered version of it so had to watch it again.

"Oil billionaire Happer sends Mac to a remote Scotish villiage to secure the property rights for an oil refinery they want to build. Mac teams up with Danny and starts the negotiations, the locals are keen to get their hands on the 'Silver Dollar' and can't believe their luck. However a local hermit and beach scavenger, Ben Knox, lives in a shack on the crucial beach which he also owns. Happer is more interested in the Northern Lights and Danny in a surreal girl with webbed feet, Marina. Mac is used to a Houston office with fax machines but is forced to negotiate on Bens terms." Written by Matthew Stanfield.

I came across this story about  twins with different fathers, and I post the Ultrasound photo from the article to offer my interpretation. I'm interested in others' interpretations.

First UK case of twins with different fathers revealed LINK

Twins born from different fathers can occur in a biological process known as heteropaternal superfecundation. Photo / Getty Images

Now what I am seeing is an uncooked chicken wing at  the left, a rook from chess set at the front, centre right and cock ring, upper right.

Discuss

To cut down on the RIP threads, Bust suggested we just have one RIP thread for all the RIP messages. Thought it a good idea, so let's use this thread for any RIP messages from now on.

I'll sticky it for easy finding.

Sanuk!

Lest we forget.

---------------

I came across a reference to a very interesting bunch of soldiers, in a news item, on a local, who has finally got a headstone.

Popski's Private Army, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popski's_Private_Army  worth a read.

These guys could be the source, for any number of "derring-do", movies made since those times.

Examples may be - Arctic Ice Cap disappears completely predictions, but it hasn't. Or any topic at all, but it should be a prediction and whether or not it turns out to be true, or not.

I notice that Biden gave his final interview to Independent Media and after the Obama video posted by Trump his first interview was on Independent Media. Where do others go for informative information?

Brand while he was building ‘the clock of the long now’, designed to keep accurate time for 10,000 years. Photograph: San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers/Getty Images

In light of his epic life, Brand’s latest project hinges on what sounds like the most mundane topic imaginable: maintenance. It is “not automatically an exciting concept,” Brand readily admits, but once he started thinking about it, he realised you could view just about everything in terms of it, and a lot could be revealed by doing so: “Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going.”

His new book is titled Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One. It is the first of a planned 13 instalments, Brand explains, and it deals with the most literal, material forms of maintenance. Subsequent instalments will investigate everything from buildings to communities, institutions to the human body, plus planetary and environmental maintenance. So perhaps not such a departure after all in terms of long, big thinking. “I fell into it realising it was a tremendously ambitious thing, because I was going to be writing about a range of things I know nothing about,” he jokes.

Brand in 1975. Photograph: Janet Fries/Getty Images

In this first instalment, Brand’s magpie curiosity roves freely across industrial history, from round-the-world yacht racing to vehicle manufacturing to encyclopedias to the refurbishment of the Statue of Liberty. The military comes up a lot, “because the military is so maintenance-dependent and maintenance-aware”, he says, pointing out that he served in the US army himself for two years in the early 60s.

Wars have been won and lost on the strength of maintenance, Brand notes. In the Vietnam war, for example, the US army’s M16 rifle was lighter, more accurate and more precisely machined; the Viet-Cong’s AK-47s were more crudely made but therefore easier to fix and less likely to go wrong. Many American GIs lost their lives as a result of jammed M16s. Similarly, Russia’s attempted full-scale invasion of Ukraine faltered in its first days in part due to poorly maintained tyres on its long-mothballed trucks, which reflected a broader Russian doctrine of “treating equipment and soldiers as expendable”, as opposed to Ukraine’s flexible, Nato-influenced maintenance culture.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Brand expresses approval for Elon Musk. “What I find so admirable about Musk is that he keeps pushing the envelope of the possible in manufacturing,” he says. Just as Henry Ford revolutionised car manufacturing in the early 20th century with his Model T (which broke down a lot but was relatively easy to fix), so Musk’s Tesla has been a quantum leap, Brand argues. It catalysed the electric vehicle revolution, which has had an invaluable environmental impact. But Tesla also devised an ingenious way to make the entire underbody of its Model Y cars out of just two pieces of cast aluminium, whereas conventional cars used hundreds of parts that had to be welded, bonded, riveted together. Electric motors also have far fewer parts than internal combustion engines. Fewer parts means less to go wrong, which means less maintenance. This is how technology gets better, he says.

With the counterculture group the Merry Pranksters, in Marin County, 1973. Photograph: Ted Streshinsky Photographic Archive/Corbis/Getty Images

The flipside is, we now expect things to work all the time. “Most consumer products pretty much don’t require maintenance. You get an electric clock and plug it into the wall or change the batteries from time to time, and it’ll tell perfectly good time. You don’t have to do anything else. So there’s a getting out of the habit of expecting to do maintenance, and then when the thing has a problem, we’re offended: ‘Well, it’s not supposed to do that.’” For this reason Brand is also a huge fan of YouTube, where you can find lessons and instructions on how to fix just about anything. “We have higher expectations of not needing to maintain things, and lots of good ways to find out how to maintain them when we encounter a problem. So that’s basically progress, as far as I’m concerned.”

The sky’s the limit … Brand in 1995. Photograph: Ed Kashi/Corbis

Brand has been trying to foster a similar vein of long-term thinking with the Long Now Foundation. He co-founded it 30 years ago “to get people comfortable with thinking about not just the next 10,000 years, but more importantly, the last 10,000 years: we’ve come a long way, baby. How did that happen?” The idea began with an email conversation with the computer scientist and inventor Danny Hillis in 1994. They were discussing the year 2000, which had long been considered “the future”, but was then just six years away. The plan became to create an artwork “that would help pop through this membrane of the year 2000 for people, and let them take on various degrees and sizes of future, and not just the next decade”. Hillis conceived the Clock of the Long Now – a mechanical timepiece that would chronicle the next 10,000 years (the name came from Brian Eno, another collaborator). He had approached a lot of people with the idea, but, typically, it was Brand who responded and said: “OK. Let’s build the clock.”

Improbable as it sounds, the clock is almost finished, buried a few hundred feet into a mountaintop in Texas. The land and the money were donated by the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos. It’s really a giant work of land art, Brand explains. “There’s a statue of liberty in New York, and this is kind of a statue of responsibility. It’s beautifully engineered and beautifully constructed and designed as an experience … it’s going to be a day in your life you’ll never forget.” And maybe it will inspire visitors to think as big and long as Brand does. “It would be nice to have an institution of thinkers and explainers that can last as long as the clock does.” The foundation’s other initiatives have included a series of seminars on long-term thinking (hosted by Brand), a library of “books you would want to restart civilisation from scratch”, and a project to preserve all the world’s languages.

This benign global scope has always been a hallmark of Brand’s brand, combined, paradoxically, with a sense of entrepreneurship and individualism. The opening words of the first Whole Earth Catalog, for example, were: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Born in Illinois, in relative privilege, he came of age in a postwar America that felt it had largely figured out the “operating manual for spaceship Earth”, as the forward-looking designer Richard Buckminster Fuller put it at the time. Atom bombs, computers, vaccines, space travel – anything seemed possible.

‘Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going’ … Stewart Brand at his home in Petaluma, California. Photograph: Winni Wintermeyer/The Guardian

Brand combined these grand ambitions with a human-scaled ethos of empowerment. The strapline of the Whole Earth Catalog was “access to tools”, and it was meant in the broadest sense. The huge, thick directory, first published in 1968, listed all kinds of literal tools for the budding commune-dweller – from seed drills to footwear, kayaks to macrame kits – but it also championed books on all manner of hippy-era interests: esoteric religions, sociology, architecture, philosophy, science, the occult, how to talk to dolphins, you name it. Ideas are tools too, Brand points out. As such, the Whole Earth Catalog offered access to a multitude of alternative lifestyles. “It opened doors for people in a way that invited them to consider, ‘maybe I could just build a guitar, or live off the grid.’ And so it had the impact of conferring agency,” he says.

The Whole Earth Catalog became a huge bestseller in the late 60s and 70s, which made Brand a lot of money – too much for his liking, in fact. In the early 70s he wound the publication down and founded the Point Foundation, which gave grants to worthy causes, though he continued to publish books and periodicals in a Whole Earth spirit until the early 2000s.

One of the key schisms of the counterculture was a tension between the technologists and the environmentalists. The former embraced space exploration and computing; the latter condemned industrial civilisation and consumer society as inherently destructive. Brand straddled both camps. He saw how they could complement each other. That Nasa image of the whole Earth, for example, he points out, galvanised conservation movements such as Earth Day and Greenpeace, but it “was a direct result of something that environmentalists hated, which was the space programme”.

Asking an all-important question, in 2009, Photograph: c Zeitgeist/Everett/Rex Features

Predictably, Brand was in on the ground floor when it came to computers. In 1968 he was a camera operator at what is now known as “the mother of all demos” – a seismic event put on by the Stanford Research Institute showcasing what we would recognise today as the foundations of personal computing: windows, hypertext links, video conferencing, even navigation using a then-unheard-of “mouse”. In a 1972 article for Rolling Stone, Brand declared personal computing to be “good news, maybe the best since psychedelics”. “Actually quite a lot better,” he says today. “Because one of the things that soon became apparent was that psychedelics kind of levelled off”, whereas computers have been “an exponential takeoff”: Moore’s law (the doubling of processing power every two years), the internet, and now artificial intelligence – we’re still on that path.

Having lived through the rapid rise and fall of the commune movement, Brand saw the potential of online community early on. In 1984 he organised the Hackers Conference (these were the days when “hacking” simply meant “doing cool stuff with computing”), at which he coined the now-familiar maxim “information wants to be free”. A year later he co-founded the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (Well) as a sort of proto social media platform, with discussion forums on various topics. Meanwhile, many of Brand’s Whole Earth crew went on to found Wired magazine in 1993 (Brand features in the first issue, interviewing Camille Paglia).

To his critics, Brand paved the way for the neoliberal, libertarian mindset of today’s Silicon Valley. But he was also a community-focused idealist and a lifelong environmentalist. That technology v nature tension persists – hence his apparent affinity with tech figures such as Bezos and Musk. He’s still ambivalent: “Finding anything that is an absolutely unmitigated benefit is pretty rare,” he says. But “I would say the benefits of personal computers and smartphones and the internet vastly reached beyond, in good terms, what we imagined at the time.”

Brand discusses the dawn of de-extinction, during a Ted Talk in Long Beach, California, 2013.Photograph: James Duncan Davidson/TED

In terms of physical maintenance, Brand has always been a healthy, active, outdoorsy person – he was a keen sailor, he was hiking up mountains with rocks in his backpack in his 60s, and he started going to CrossFit when he was 75 – “that built a pretty strong constitution”. Now, though, he has a respiratory illness, he says, “which is progressive, incurable and fatal”. He’s in a stable condition, and still exercises, but uses supplementary oxygen as well. “I’d be very surprised by making it into my 90s,” he says, seemingly without regret: “Imagine the luck, to get to be 87 – it’s just fantastic!”

Brand has always been an optimist, he says, and taking the long view, he still is. “I find optimism in terms of being able to find a way to not only continue but keep getting better.” It might be hard to see a positive way forward right now, but that’s always been the way, he says. Brand brings up yet another of his incarnations, the Global Business Network, a consultancy he was part of in the 90s that mapped out future scenarios to help clients plan ahead. “It’s harder to imagine how something might go well than go badly,” he says. But we do not need to passively accept our fate as if we have no control over it. “If you like some scenarios better than others, you can be aware of the ones you don’t like and look for signs of them, and also look at signs of the ones you want to have come to pass, and lean differentially toward them. That’s how you negotiate your way into a future you were glad of. It’s done incrementally by, among other things, lots of individuals and some institutions, and that’s how we grapple our way, muddle our way forward.”

____

    LINK

Can anyone help him?

Cheers in advance.

jack (on behalf of Muff R. :hubba:)

If you encounter a Goon who is not identified as below, good luck and let us know if you survive.

and displays of 'roid rage from the leaders ::

images c/o https://www.theguardian.com

Whale breath collected by drones is giving clues to the health of wild humpbacks and other whales.

Scientists flew drones equipped with special kit through the exhaled droplets, or "blows", made when the giants come up to breathe through their blowholes.

They detected a highly infectious virus linked to mass strandings of whales and dolphins worldwide.

The sampling of whale "blow" is a "game-changer" for the health and well-being of whales, said Prof Terry Dawson of King's College London...

____

Very Interesting.

an aside - 

My view of strandings,  in cases where they're all very sick, or all had their ear drums blown out by sonar or some other large-group malady, is that they are 'returning to land' as a species instinctual behaviour.

You know, much like a new born human baby will grasp a finger quite strongly, which is thought to be an instinctual behaviour left over from when we hung around in trees..

Perhaps in evolution, where the proto-whales could still exit the water in the face of overwhelming danger, such a behaviour had it's benefits.

He was wearing a T-shirt that said "Australia.....Land of Plenty" which to be honest I wasn't too sure how to react to until he walked past me. My eyes followed him and on the back it had a map of Australia and the words "Plenty Bloody Flies" On closer inspection the map was made of flys. I had a chuckle to myself.

I have been watching all the rubbish happening in the world at the moment. We are having our share of protests and marches. One recently named "Reclaim Australia" I believe there are similar movements in the UK.

So my question is, does multiculturalism work or are we just digging ourselves into a deeper hole. Personally I have no issues with it. Curios to hear others thoughts.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-14/aurora-australis-southern-lights-november-2025/106004326

So I was wondering :

Assume that I am a Judge facing a person in my courtroom :  (real Judges and Lawyers take note...)

Defendant. "I am a sovereign citizen and your laws do not apply to me, so you cannot sentence me to any punishment what so ever". This despite, society having found said defendant and delivered him forcefully or compliantly, to the court room.

Judge. "So you are not bound by our laws and you are saying that I cannot be also bound to enforce these laws?"

Defendant. "Correct, you cannot use your laws".

Judge. "Unbound as you suggest I am, by the sentencing laws in this country, and further unbounded by the guidelines, pertaining to such laws, I hereby sentence you, with no authority what so ever, to life in solitary confinement, with no parole and no visitation rights, no food, no medical rights or other redress. I believe the correct description of this action is, Lock him up and throw away the key".

Defendant. "But you can't do that, your laws say.....etc......"

Judge. "Guards, take him away and lock him up, throw away the key and any copies".

see how that works?