This morning, like some other mornings, the bird songs are so plentiful and overwhelming that I try to identify the birds singing. Above is this morning’s roster.
What I learned was this: The birds remind us when we upset the grace of living. They do this by being in their own ways with their own songs the grace of living. As we are and can be.
I was very close to my grandparents. Literally, since we lived all together until I was eight. The three-generation living situation is still common in lots of places and circumstances, though not for many the ideal. For me it was so positively formative that I can’t imagine missing it. But that’s just me.
When I knew my Grandpa Harry, it was decades later than this photo, which I guess was taken in the 1930s when he was in his thirties. By that time he was older and a little grizzled, though as loving and lovable as a bear. But this Harry was someone else. Sharp dressed man doesn’t begin to cover it.
Love you grandpa.
I’ve previously posted this illustration about meditation drawn by Zen master Kōshō Uchiyama. Whatever type of meditation you practice or are thinking about practicing, Zen or otherwise, this says it all.
Actually, zazen is not just being somehow glued to line ZZ’. Doing zazen is a continuation of this kind of returning up from sleepiness and down from chasing after thoughts. That is, the posture of waking up and returning to ZZ’ at any time is itself zazen. This is one of the most vital points regarding zazen. When we are doing zazen line ZZ‘, or just doing zazen, represents our reality, so it is essential to maintain that line. Actually, ZZ’ represents the reality of the posture of zazen, but the reality of our life is not just ZZ’. If it were only ZZ’, we would be as unchanging and lifeless as a rock! Although we aim at the line ZZ’, we can never actually adhere to it, because it (ZZ’) does not exist by itself. Nevertheless, we keep aiming at ZZ‘, because it is through clinging to thoughts that we keep veering away from it. The very power to wake up to ZZ’ and return to it is the reality of the life of zazen.
Kōshō Uchiyama, Opening the Hand of Thought
Meditation looks like this sometimes, and that’s fine. My humble annotation to Kōshō Uchiyama is that when you return from a or b or c, like thinking about some person or breakfast or “I’ve got to write this down now!”, you may realize that what you are thinking about is an illusion. Not that the floor and the cushion and all the situations that await you after meditation are illusions, but if they are illusions, maybe you can return from them just as you returned from a or b or c.
Nobody said or wrote that. At least it hasn’t been reported. But it would not be surprising if that was thought or said by some U.S. leaders. Two of the closest American allies, Russia and Israel, have regularly committed war crimes in recent years, yet the U.S. has stood by silent or supportive.
The U.S. has made clear that it doesn’t support the concept or fact of international law. Just as it doesn’t support the concept or fact of American law when it comes to judges who try to stop its illegal or unconstitutional actions.
“Woke” is the overall characterization of anything that seems too tolerant, sensitive or soft, weak initiatives that get in the way of exercising real muscular strength and power. So just because something like international law says that destroying civilian power plants—Trump’s latest in an incoherent series of threats to Iran—is a war crime, that is no reason not to do it. Because those so-called international laws are just too WOKE.
Next up: More pardons for war criminals and genocidal leaders, contemporary and historic. He can do that, he thinks.
Take a break with Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941).
He was a Bengali poet, essayist, dramatist, composer and philosopher, and is the most esteemed creative artist of modern India. He was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.
A brief introduction is Stray Birds (1916), which consists of 326 very short verses—each one usually one or two sentences. Below is a selection of them. Among the many online items by and about Tagore there is a 1961 documentary about Tagore by Satyajit Ray, India’s most celebrated film director.
These literary stray birds may seem at first glance to be mere poetic aphorisms. Taken together, though, this is a worldview of inspired simplicity.
From Stray Birds by Rabindranath Tagore
1
Stray birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away.
And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh.
2
O troupe of little vagrants of the world, leave your footprints in my words.
6
If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.
28
O Beauty, find thyself in love, not in the flattery of thy mirror.
35
The bird wishes it were a cloud. The cloud wishes it were a bird.
36
The waterfall sings, “I find my song, when I find my freedom.”
40
Do not blame your food because you have no appetite.
43
The fish in the water is silent, the animal on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing,
But Man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.
45
He has made his weapons his gods. When his weapons win he is defeated himself.
48
The stars are not afraid to appear like fireflies.
52
Man does not reveal himself in his history, he struggles up through it.
58
The sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of its tail.
62
The Perfect decks itself in beauty for the love of the Imperfect.
75
We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.
88
He who wants to do good knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the gate open.
121
I carry in my world that flourishes the worlds that have failed.
123
The bird thinks it is an act of kindness to give the fish a lift in the air.
128
To be outspoken is easy when you do not wait to speak the complete truth.
130
If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out.
141
When I travelled to here and to there, I was tired of thee, O Road, but now when thou leadest me to everywhere I am wedded to thee in love.
146
I have my stars in the sky,
But oh for my little lamp unlit in my house.
156
The Great walks with the Small without fear.
The Middling keeps aloof.
158
Power takes as ingratitude the writhings of its victims.
161
The cobweb pretends to catch dew-drops and catches flies.
166
The canal loves to think that rivers exist solely to supply it with water.
169
Thought feeds itself with its own words and grows.
178
It is the little things that I leave behind for my loved ones, –great things are for everyone.
184
He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good.
193
A mind all logic is like a knife all blade.
It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
207
Praise shames me, for I secretly beg for it.
208
Let my doing nothing when I have nothing to do become untroubled in its depth of peace like the evening in the seashore when the water is silent.
210
The best does not come alone. It comes with the company of the all.
235
Do not say, “It is morning,” and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a new-born child that has no name.
243
The stream of truth flows through its channels of mistakes.
248
Man is worse than an animal when he is an animal.
258
The false can never grow into truth by growing in power.
280
Let the dead have the immortality of fame, but the living the immortality of love.
296
Blessed is he whose fame does not outshine his truth.
317
Man’s history is waiting in patience for the triumph of the insulted man.
319
I long for the Island of Songs across this heaving Sea of Shouts.
323
I have suffered and despaired and known death and I am glad that I am in this great world.
No Kings protests are scheduled across America on March 28, 2026. These protests are essential.
It is also Passover season, which begins on the evening of April 1, 2026.
Along with No Kings, we may also add No Pharaohs. Trump does not want to just be the ruler of America. He wants to be emperor of a global empire. Just as Pharaoh did. And just like Pharaoh, Trump considers himself, as do some of his followers, a divine ruler.
This Passover: No Pharaohs.
Pictured:
Allen Ginsberg: Poet, left-center, holding a cigarette.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Poet, publisher, owner of City Lights Bookstore, behind Ginsberg, umbrella.
Michael McClure: Poet, standing to the left of Ginsberg, vest and cross necklace.
Robert Duncan: Poet, front row toward the center-right, wearing glasses and beret.
Richard Brautigan: Poet and writer, toward the right, behind the stretcher, light hat and glasses.
Shigeyoshi Murao: Manager of City Lights, seated in the front with wide-brimmed hat.
Note: The title of this post is a version of the title Let’s Get Lost, a jazz standard from the 1940s made famous in the 1950s by legendary West Coast trumpeter and singer Chet Baker. Not exactly a beat guy, but immeasurably cool.
The Beat movement, its heyday in the 1950s and into the 1960s, has been viciously caricatured.
Two things defy and belie this mockery.
First, this was an earnest response to a country and world gone mad. Just years from World War II, Hitler, the spawning of the atomic bomb. Living in an America intent on repressing dissidence and killing attempts to (re)introduce humanity. The beats were the first postwar counterculture, but not the last.
Second, the next counterculture, which included hippies, was also caricatured and mocked (“get a haircut”, “get a job”). This was the natural evolution of the beat counterculture, and there were a number of crossovers. “Freaks” was a term of self-identification that proudly encapsulates what the dominant culture thought of those living and believing differently.
“Let’s get beat” is not a call for cool cats or chicks to grow a beard or learn to play bongos—though beards are again back and playing bongos is fun. It is a reminder that counterculture has a heritage that is just as important as whatever distorted heritage is going to be pushed on us in 2026 as part of the 250th anniversary of America’s declaring its independence. Celebrate the beats, the hippies, the freaks, and all the other cultural free birds. Let’s declare our independence. Let’s get beat!
The Trump people tried hard to keep The Apprentice movie from being seen in America in 2024, an election year.
The Apprentice is a candid, devastating and entertaining look at how a fledgling Donald Trump came under the diabolical wing of the notorious and unscrupulous lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn. Cohn’s tactic, beginning with his role in the McCarthy era hearings, was the Big Lie. Cohn’s strategy was winning at all costs, caring about nothing and nobody.
The movie won awards and finally ended up available in the U.S.—in 2025. It is currently streaming on Prime, though it is anybody’s guess when Amazon will pull it if too many people remember it’s there and start watching.
You did remember it, didn’t you? Or maybe you forget, dazzled by the Melania movie, also on Prime, or maybe you are numbed by the daily assault on our humanity by the man the movie is about.
Watch it while you still can. More and more media are likely to disappear, including The Apprentice, if the censorship and reeducation juggernaut isn’t stopped.
Stagflation is the simultaneous occurrence of high inflation, high unemployment, and slow (or negative) economic growth. It defies classical economic theory, which held that inflation and unemployment move in opposite directions (the Phillips Curve trade-off) — meaning policymakers can’t use standard tools without making one problem worse.
Raising interest rates curbs inflation but deepens unemployment. Stimulus spending reduces unemployment but worsens inflation. Policymakers face a genuine dilemma with no clean solution.
The defining American stagflation episode ran roughly 1973–1982. Unemployment hit 9% in 1975 while inflation ran above 10% — numbers once considered theoretically impossible together.
Fed Chairman Paul Volcker deliberately induced a severe recession (1981–82) by pushing the federal funds rate above 20%, breaking inflationary expectations. Unemployment peaked near 11%, but inflation was crushed from 13% to 3% by 1983.
A couple of Americans generations have no experience of stagflation. If they pay attention to the possibility at all (as noted, once considered a theoretical impossibility), it is an arcane matter of economic history.
Hints of stagflation have been showing up over the past year, and more so in recent months. Inflation has been stubborn, though not stratospheric, while employment has been shrinking and the economy less than robust.
The previous stagflation began in 1973 with the OPEC oil embargo. Then as now, despite attempts to promote alternatives, oil is a primary driver of the economy. The current serious oil disruption, with concomitant inflation not only at the gas pump but in many sectors, might not be enough by itself. But despite what you might be hearing from some sources, the economy is less strong than it has been in a while. So even if there is a quick wrap up of this war on Iran, with relief on the shipping of oil, there are other areas of concern.
Could we again see ever higher inflation and ever higher unemployment? Do we have the best and the brightest economic minds leading the nation, able to respond effectively to the not theoretical scourge and suffering of stagflation? Only when the best and the brightest return to American leadership do we have a chance.
Historians generally wait until the end of a presidency to evaluate an administration and where it ranks historically.
As low as the first Trump administration already ranks, at or near the bottom, this second term, even after one year with three more to go, is incontrovertibly the worst.
Which is why it is not too early to award him the prize for Worst American Administration.
Is this an “actual” award? It is no more or less “actual” than the FIFA Peace Prize.
Is it “official”? Not to repeat, but it is no more or less “official” than the FIFA Peace Prize.
Am I claiming the authority to offer a prize? Repeating again, I have as much authority to offer a historical assessment of a presidential administration as an international football association has to offer an assessment of contributions to peace or war. Probably more.
Finally, a funny story about this award. It was created by Nano Banana. All I asked for was an award with the text shown above. But on the first try, it added a little text of its own to the plaque, shown below, “Awarded by popular consensus”. AI with attitude.
Bob Schwartz 