The Great Economic Crisis
We shall argue forever about when it occured. Some say we're clear of it, and there's all smooth sailing ahead.
When did the GEC happen?
Let me quote Spengler from Asia Times July 14 2009:
...Equity markets collapsed and never came back. In nominal dollars, the technology-centered NASDAQ index stands at one-third of its February 2000 peak.
In the future, the case will be made that the GEC started in 2000, not 2007-2008. The GEC started, but the public attention was sidetracked by 2001 and the Iraq debacle.
In these pages, I have often said that the decline of our society began 30 years or more ago. It began when we no longer created wealth and welfare, but settled on maximizing wealth.
The GEC began when things began to break down in 2000. The build-up to the GEC had its high point in 1999 when Senator Phil; Gramm and his Republican cohorts exempted derivatives from any oversight and regulation.
We knew of the problems with derivatives from the early 1990s. To exempt them from regulation was not only arrogance, it was insane arrogance. When you reach insane arrogance, expect the downturn soon.
Now a case could be made that the GEC began in sketchy form in the early 1990s: the Savings and Loan bailouts, and the derivative problems being a dress rehearsal for what was to follow.
People are fond of saying Capitalism has cycles of boom and bust.
Just like animal populations: cycles of highs and lows.
Sometimes, however, there comes a great die-off.
Sometimes the lows are just too low.
A system of boom and bust that lacks a homeostatic system that controls the depth of misery in the downside will eventually destroy itself, and it is my belief that that is what we are watching: the gathering clouds, another "bloom" of the GEC exposing itself, the Indian Summer of an unexpected and unusual leader...
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Super God
Recently I made a wise crack about people who believe in God as "Super God". Someone to me to task, saying "Is not God, by definition, Super?"
They caught me. Yes, God by definition is super, and super-duper as well. When I look up the definition of God in the dictionary, it says that God is super, and Superman is really not as super-duper as we thought: God's the real deal, super-wise. God is super with a bullet.
After having done this, I picked up my total sum of knowledge, which I carry around in a handy Gladstone satchel.
It weighed the same.
They caught me. Yes, God by definition is super, and super-duper as well. When I look up the definition of God in the dictionary, it says that God is super, and Superman is really not as super-duper as we thought: God's the real deal, super-wise. God is super with a bullet.
After having done this, I picked up my total sum of knowledge, which I carry around in a handy Gladstone satchel.
It weighed the same.
Primtive Behaviors Of Various Tribes
A Yakut Shaman Interpreting the Unemployment Figures for JuneWhen eclipses of the sun came along in days of old, people thought that a dragon was eating the sun; or an evil god was destroying it; or it was going away for a much needed rest and failed to leave a forwarding address.
So they screamed and yelled and threw themselves about, and it invariably worked, as it always does, to keep the sun on track.
What's worse is that added to the eclipses, few and far between, the old boys - and girls - had to watch with bated breath as the sun passed its zenith at the summer solstice, and began its decline into the obscurity of the winter solstice: when the harvest was over and all the fields were empty and the trees were bare; when the cold winds had begun to blow; when the sun felt quite bowled over by the inclement weather and retired into the study to warm himself at the fire and dream of the roguish days of summer!
So the old folks screamed and yelled and threw themselves about, and the sun got a second wind, and came down from the hustings running for office in the New Year, his eye quite firmly on the prize, and magna cum viagra all the way until the summer solstice.
Having observed this, how do these customs differ from our present day behavior?
If we substitute the "stock market" for the "sun", let's say, it seems very familiar: the same quaint shamanism and nativistic practices.
If we substitute "national security", say, for the "sun", and we track its periodic ups and downs, periods of relief, periods of fear...brrrrr! Keep the wiretaps going until...until...until the summer dog days of "national security"?
I for one, think the daily crap about whether stocks are going to be up or down is...well, crap. And actually I would much rather have a shaman than a cable TV spokesperson, whether they are speaking of economics or anything...under...the sun.
So they screamed and yelled and threw themselves about, and it invariably worked, as it always does, to keep the sun on track.
What's worse is that added to the eclipses, few and far between, the old boys - and girls - had to watch with bated breath as the sun passed its zenith at the summer solstice, and began its decline into the obscurity of the winter solstice: when the harvest was over and all the fields were empty and the trees were bare; when the cold winds had begun to blow; when the sun felt quite bowled over by the inclement weather and retired into the study to warm himself at the fire and dream of the roguish days of summer!
So the old folks screamed and yelled and threw themselves about, and the sun got a second wind, and came down from the hustings running for office in the New Year, his eye quite firmly on the prize, and magna cum viagra all the way until the summer solstice.
Having observed this, how do these customs differ from our present day behavior?
If we substitute the "stock market" for the "sun", let's say, it seems very familiar: the same quaint shamanism and nativistic practices.
If we substitute "national security", say, for the "sun", and we track its periodic ups and downs, periods of relief, periods of fear...brrrrr! Keep the wiretaps going until...until...until the summer dog days of "national security"?
I for one, think the daily crap about whether stocks are going to be up or down is...well, crap. And actually I would much rather have a shaman than a cable TV spokesperson, whether they are speaking of economics or anything...under...the sun.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Freedom Geezers And Gran Torino
Take a look at any photos from around the world, taking special care that you look at people demonstrating for freedom, particularly old people. Notice how young they seem. Even the gapped-tooth, wizened men, stooped over from age, seem to skip like young calves. The old women, sometimes covered, sometimes not, sometimes shaking their fists in defiance, sometimes standing up to the very forces which have been dispatched to destroy their voices...even the aged ones with the loose folds under their arms, the ones who have indulged in starches and cereals a bit too much, these are suddenly sturdy, stoic, and beauteous.
Clint Eastwood was a Gran Torino geezer, and he was magnetic, for he was a force of freedom from oppression.
What is there about freedom which that re-invigorates us; that makes it the fountain of youth? Is is the fact that it is the very basis of our dreams, our hopes, and our aspirations?
Now look about you at the society which has been created in our country, the USA. Where is there freedom?
Does freedom lie in the fact that every eight years or so we may now look forward to experiencing not just a recession, but something much worse, made worse by the insatiable greed of those who run the country?
Does freedom lie in the fact that we have a faceless bureaucracy running our lives, taking our monies, feathering their own nests with top-of-the-shelf health care and pensions, while the rest of us have to scrounge around for a break?
Does freedom lie screaming and yelling about freedom on cable TV? Our media - the place where we are supposed to get our information from - not only did not see the Great Economic Crisis coming, but now that it has arrived seem to think they actually can delineate it for us, and seem to know how to fix it !
Look at us. We are slaves. We are Mamlukes.
The Mamlukes of Egypt were young men taken from Circassia and brought to Egypt by their Muslim masters to be slaves. They became Muslim and turned the tables by becoming the rulers of Egypt in the Middle Ages.
We are Mamlukes: slaves who rule, a mighty state of slaves. We are enslaved to this corruption of a society which either does not believe in God, or believes in Super God: creating Idols of our unbeliefs or our credulous beliefs! But we will not take the time to make the approach to God - usually a long and time consuming process.
Now look about you at the society which has been created in our country, the USA. Where is there freedom?
Does freedom lie in the fact that every eight years or so we may now look forward to experiencing not just a recession, but something much worse, made worse by the insatiable greed of those who run the country?
Does freedom lie in the fact that we have a faceless bureaucracy running our lives, taking our monies, feathering their own nests with top-of-the-shelf health care and pensions, while the rest of us have to scrounge around for a break?
Does freedom lie screaming and yelling about freedom on cable TV? Our media - the place where we are supposed to get our information from - not only did not see the Great Economic Crisis coming, but now that it has arrived seem to think they actually can delineate it for us, and seem to know how to fix it !
Look at us. We are slaves. We are Mamlukes.
The Mamlukes of Egypt were young men taken from Circassia and brought to Egypt by their Muslim masters to be slaves. They became Muslim and turned the tables by becoming the rulers of Egypt in the Middle Ages.
We are Mamlukes: slaves who rule, a mighty state of slaves. We are enslaved to this corruption of a society which either does not believe in God, or believes in Super God: creating Idols of our unbeliefs or our credulous beliefs! But we will not take the time to make the approach to God - usually a long and time consuming process.
God is not the Alpha being, some sort of super-primate...only spirit! He does not rule by intimidation, nor did He create slaves to be despot over. He created so that there should be freedom from chaos.
We are slaves to our lusts and desires. We are slaves to our fears. Look at the record number of guns and ammunition being bought and dare to look me in the face and deny that we are slaves to our fears and hatred. I defy you to do it.
We hate and we call it freedom. Our love becomes pornography and we call it freedom. Our great industrial powerhouse destroyed itself by its own hand, and we called it entrepreneurial freedom. We have taken the stories of American Greatness and turned them into death-seeking dramas of horrible despair and great crime and overwhelming corruption.
I will never forget the fall of 2008, watching Wall Street make even bigger fools of themselves, and remembering the story of the Tower of Babel, and how the arrogant were driven across the face of the Earth.
We are slaves to our lusts and desires. We are slaves to our fears. Look at the record number of guns and ammunition being bought and dare to look me in the face and deny that we are slaves to our fears and hatred. I defy you to do it.
We hate and we call it freedom. Our love becomes pornography and we call it freedom. Our great industrial powerhouse destroyed itself by its own hand, and we called it entrepreneurial freedom. We have taken the stories of American Greatness and turned them into death-seeking dramas of horrible despair and great crime and overwhelming corruption.
I will never forget the fall of 2008, watching Wall Street make even bigger fools of themselves, and remembering the story of the Tower of Babel, and how the arrogant were driven across the face of the Earth.
The face of America is not the face of youth. It is the face of the grifter and wise-acre, the cunning bucket shop boys and poor-box johnnies. The face of America is too, too old and wise in the ways of the corruption it calls the world. It is the boyish face of Bernie Madoff. There are only a few circumstances that need be changed for Bernie Madoff to become a celebrity idol, just as John Dillinger is celebrated in a new movie, Public Enemies.
Just a few changes and that old boy face would be seen as charming...a genius, another "boy wonder"!
We need a new face.
Clint Eastwood gives a charming face, but it is an old face set against the decay of the present, reinvoking the imaginary past, where everything is somehow impossibly golden.
Gran Torino is a metaphor for the destruction of America. The Gran Torino automobile is an artifact of the past. The roots of the film's plot are back in Vietnam, 40 plus years ago, yet still as in your face as the morning sun.
Freedom here is a car that don't drive.
Freedom here is a globalized sweat-shop.
Freedom here is a maquiladora, a factory free to escape...but for us, there is no escape, no exit...
...freedom here is Chevy in the Hole in Flint, Michigan, where there is nothing but memory...
and hell is living in the vestigial glories of the past with all the other prisoners.
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Freedom Is Not Free
Or, if we were to put it in iron over the camp gate, Freiheit ist nicht kostenfrei.
It has been discovered that entire bombs could be brought, piece by piece, into Federal buildings and assembled there, and the Department of Homeland Security people would not as much as bat an eyelash at the proceedings.
Surprise, surprise! And I bet you thought that money spent by the Homeland Security Behemoth was going to keep us safe! Safety is nicht kostenfrei, and it doesn't work -usually - until there are enough hierarchies checking each other. At this stage of redundancy, it does theoretically work, but in reality it loses the ability to communicate from level to level, and the whole thing breaks down.
In other words, we have traded away our freedom for a Bureaucracy which cannot deliver the goods. The only way the present system would work is if we were slaves. Period. There is no way the present way of dealing with this type of security will work, unless we give up our entropic desires for chaotic freedom - just as the War on Drugs does not have a chance of working unless we give up our desire to use drugs.
Look at the Wall Street mess: you had people pushing bad mortgages, and the Rating Agencies - supposedly the "Security" guys - selling themselves to the highest bidder and certifying those toxic assets...and the Federal Regulators turning the other eye and not doing their job !
The more levels of security we had, the more dangerous it was!
Now go figure that one out, and then report back!
It has been discovered that entire bombs could be brought, piece by piece, into Federal buildings and assembled there, and the Department of Homeland Security people would not as much as bat an eyelash at the proceedings.
Surprise, surprise! And I bet you thought that money spent by the Homeland Security Behemoth was going to keep us safe! Safety is nicht kostenfrei, and it doesn't work -usually - until there are enough hierarchies checking each other. At this stage of redundancy, it does theoretically work, but in reality it loses the ability to communicate from level to level, and the whole thing breaks down.
In other words, we have traded away our freedom for a Bureaucracy which cannot deliver the goods. The only way the present system would work is if we were slaves. Period. There is no way the present way of dealing with this type of security will work, unless we give up our entropic desires for chaotic freedom - just as the War on Drugs does not have a chance of working unless we give up our desire to use drugs.
Look at the Wall Street mess: you had people pushing bad mortgages, and the Rating Agencies - supposedly the "Security" guys - selling themselves to the highest bidder and certifying those toxic assets...and the Federal Regulators turning the other eye and not doing their job !
The more levels of security we had, the more dangerous it was!
Now go figure that one out, and then report back!
Hurriyya Wa Islam: Xinjiang And Beyond
The whole notion of surrender - Islam - to the will of Allah is the gaining of freedom. Let us repeat the last bit: the gaining of freedom.
The whole business of the modern world Leviathan with its monster states is not the gaining of freedom, but is the removal of individual freedom, supplanting freedom with the treacly concept of "choice", stripping freedom of any vestige of responsibility and burden, leaving it little more than a child's toy, pretty and sparkling. As if my freedom were enhanced by having 10 different styles of automobile to choose from! Pontiac has been killed; I am still free!
On this day in 1936, the Reich Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbells, ordered a halt to all anti-Jewish activity untiul after the Berlin Olympics. Similarly, in 2008 Beijing put on its cloak of suppression-lite. One year on, we see the results of its policies against the Muslim population of Xinjiang, as the populace has rebelled against the Han policies which enslave it.
The whole business of the modern world Leviathan with its monster states is not the gaining of freedom, but is the removal of individual freedom, supplanting freedom with the treacly concept of "choice", stripping freedom of any vestige of responsibility and burden, leaving it little more than a child's toy, pretty and sparkling. As if my freedom were enhanced by having 10 different styles of automobile to choose from! Pontiac has been killed; I am still free!
On this day in 1936, the Reich Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbells, ordered a halt to all anti-Jewish activity untiul after the Berlin Olympics. Similarly, in 2008 Beijing put on its cloak of suppression-lite. One year on, we see the results of its policies against the Muslim population of Xinjiang, as the populace has rebelled against the Han policies which enslave it.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Religious Dimwits
Political Evangelicals....
I have never, ever read anything more offensive to just common sense than Evangelical blogs that have a political focus. Absolutely total crapulous mixing of Caesar and God. You may be childish enough to really, really, wanna be a "chosen people", but the days of that are gone, and all your nonsense does not make it true. By obsessing about your scriptural delusions, you totally miss what should be done.
I have never, ever read anything more offensive to just common sense than Evangelical blogs that have a political focus. Absolutely total crapulous mixing of Caesar and God. You may be childish enough to really, really, wanna be a "chosen people", but the days of that are gone, and all your nonsense does not make it true. By obsessing about your scriptural delusions, you totally miss what should be done.
Hong Kong And Xinjiang In The Era Of Monster States
I bid Hong Kong a festive Anti-Government Demonstration day. July 1st is the day, and by ironic twists, it is more a memorial to their imprisonment, not their entrance into freedom. It was originally the day to celebrate re-unification with China, but has become diverse with time.
As has been mentioned - here before those Olympics last year and in other places - the Muslims of Xinjiang are yet another group imprisoned within the Monster State called China.
True freedom will destroy the Monster States of the present day, including that shambling, slouching, elephantine creation we call the mightiest military power of the world.
Take two more doses of the Economic Crisis, and call me in the morning to pick up the pieces. The Economic Crisis is one of Monster States; globalization is an economic platform of Monster States; the future of the world will be decided between the USA in its Monster State form, and China, the enabler of the USA's debt and Monster State in its own right.
It is obvious that we do not possess the Managerial or Moral wits to administer Monster States; perhaps it is an impossibility. The Monster States of the present were built on compulsion, violnece, and coercion. These things may be atoned, but to recognize one's sinfulness is not an easy task: it is a lot easier to recognize someone else's. To atone for a sin requires the realization that something is a sin; on the level of Monster States, there is no Sin, only Policy.
Arrogance is merely the prelude to the Tower of Babel scenario again, as we learned in 2008.
As has been mentioned - here before those Olympics last year and in other places - the Muslims of Xinjiang are yet another group imprisoned within the Monster State called China.
True freedom will destroy the Monster States of the present day, including that shambling, slouching, elephantine creation we call the mightiest military power of the world.
Take two more doses of the Economic Crisis, and call me in the morning to pick up the pieces. The Economic Crisis is one of Monster States; globalization is an economic platform of Monster States; the future of the world will be decided between the USA in its Monster State form, and China, the enabler of the USA's debt and Monster State in its own right.
It is obvious that we do not possess the Managerial or Moral wits to administer Monster States; perhaps it is an impossibility. The Monster States of the present were built on compulsion, violnece, and coercion. These things may be atoned, but to recognize one's sinfulness is not an easy task: it is a lot easier to recognize someone else's. To atone for a sin requires the realization that something is a sin; on the level of Monster States, there is no Sin, only Policy.
Arrogance is merely the prelude to the Tower of Babel scenario again, as we learned in 2008.
Folksy Sarah Palin
I have been hearing some Palin interviews, filled with Palin-isms, or Palin-dromes, which are sort of a way of speech: taking a folksy metaphor or expression and using it inadroitly. She used some salmon fishing metaphor, and it sounded forced and odd. Anyway, I won't be using it around the old fishing camp any time soon.
She said a lot about other things, but I no longer consider those things to be important. I think she is a good egg. She's one heck of a lot better than people like Phil Gramm, or the Adulterous Republicans, or the Hang-Out-In-Menrooms Republicans, we have seen so much of.
I think she'll do just dandy. It would be a shame if she were to sequester herself into some niche such as FOX, but I am sure she still believes she has to be heard by millions and millions. To be heard by large numbers, you have to prostitute yourself to the people who control the media, thereby loosing your independence of thought - the quality which made you so refreshing in the first place.
That will be a tragedy for a later time.
She said a lot about other things, but I no longer consider those things to be important. I think she is a good egg. She's one heck of a lot better than people like Phil Gramm, or the Adulterous Republicans, or the Hang-Out-In-Menrooms Republicans, we have seen so much of.
I think she'll do just dandy. It would be a shame if she were to sequester herself into some niche such as FOX, but I am sure she still believes she has to be heard by millions and millions. To be heard by large numbers, you have to prostitute yourself to the people who control the media, thereby loosing your independence of thought - the quality which made you so refreshing in the first place.
That will be a tragedy for a later time.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Wedding Bell Blues 2: The Wedding Crashers
Another Afghan wedding party has bitten the dust recently, blasted by overwhelming US air power. Didn't get much coverage.
On July the 4th, I salute the flag.
In the background, I heard the foolish audio of cable TV, talking about every madness except the Insanity.
The present age is an age of Murder, Theft, and Negligent Criminality. We differ from other historic criminals ages in that we are at the crux of historic times and forces. We entered the Atomic Age arm in arm with the fight against the most hideous and satanic political philosophy ever: Nazism.
It was no coincidence.
We entered the Atomic Age and opened the door to the Interstellar Age. Again, no coincidence.
We have been called upon to do great things.
We have done very little on that historic To-Do list.
Give up the tranquil mind, bid farewell to contentment, for if we fail, the truly criminal will cry havoc!, and let slip the dogs of war, and we shall never come home again.
On July the 4th, I salute the flag.
In the background, I heard the foolish audio of cable TV, talking about every madness except the Insanity.
The present age is an age of Murder, Theft, and Negligent Criminality. We differ from other historic criminals ages in that we are at the crux of historic times and forces. We entered the Atomic Age arm in arm with the fight against the most hideous and satanic political philosophy ever: Nazism.
It was no coincidence.
We entered the Atomic Age and opened the door to the Interstellar Age. Again, no coincidence.
We have been called upon to do great things.
We have done very little on that historic To-Do list.
Give up the tranquil mind, bid farewell to contentment, for if we fail, the truly criminal will cry havoc!, and let slip the dogs of war, and we shall never come home again.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
The 4th Of July Of Blanche Dubois
It was my father's birthday on the 1st, so we got together on the 4th to celebrate it. It was some ghastly high number, way up there in the rarified stratosphere of numbers; high enough to require the Hubbell to pick it out of the rest of the residue from the Big Bang.
By the morning of the 5th, he was endearing himself in a new way: repeating at the breakfast table FOX thought-bites or thought-yummies, or whatever opprobrious term one attaches to the constant cable drivel.
First, he opined that Obama was turning the Recession into another Crash.
Another Crash?
Did he mean another one added to the one in 2008? Because in case you do not know, the entire banking system self-destructed in 2008: it froze up and came to a screeching halt. And we have rescued it by providing our tax money to bankers.
I keep saying that we are in slow motion: it takes time for Great Crashes and Great Depressions to form up. It's like hurricanes; they have to go over the warm waters of the Gulf and bop a few islands on the way. It takes time for everything to get into place and march off to plaster New Orleans or Houston.
Apparently FOXheads believe Great Depressions must be accompanied by pictures and films of breadlines, dust bowls, and Okies being turned back at the California border. FOXheads remind me of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire: we have always depended upon the symbols of others.
A great Depression need not be accompanied by pictures of breadlines nor WPA workers or CCC camps. In fact, we do not even need a photo of FDR.
A composite of the 47 million - and growing - of people who do not have health coverage would do - in a pinch !
The fact that the UN estimates 90 million in the world have entered the state of Extreme Poverty due to this mess is another - but we have no film to roll.
A few Polaroids of the increasing number of personal bankruptcies would go just right after the opening titles of our documentary of the Great Crash of '08. Especially the increasing number of people over the age 65; in the UK these have increased 164% over 2008, and these are particularly poignant because they don't have the time to build up assets again.
Long lines of people out of work are hard top come by since Unemployment Claims are handled over the Internet.
One thing we do have in common with the other Crash is the number of housing foreclosures. In case the collective FOXmind has not inquired, these have been occurring at a gallop. Take a shot of the front porch - sort of a Places in the Heart frame house - with a sheriff's order pasted to the door...furniture bundled in the front yard.
It is pernicious mendacity to tell people that the Crash has not yet happened.
So I did not say anything. Just smiled and sort of said some non-committal thing, like we should look on a Crash's bright side; sort of Get yourself a broom, and sweep, sweep, your troubles away. Stop weeping...Keep sweeping !!
Well, this was not the desired effect apparently, so he followed with the observation that if Obama were to serve 2 terms, he would seek to amend the Constitution - in the manner of Hugo Chavez and the President or ex-President (it's hard to tell) of Honduras - in order to be able to run for a third term, and so on.
This is obviously derived from Mr. Obama's lean and power-hungry look. Perhaps his well known uncontrollable lust for overlordship of the universe. Perhaps his constant utterances about his thousand year dynasty. All of those things could be hints.
When the ravings of the insane become breakfast table talk, we are in quite a fix. I should know. I've raved all my life about how it was all coming to an end. I got a heck of a comeuppance in 2008 when it turned out to be true. I shut up for quite a while, thinking about what the heck this all meant - somethiing I was not used to - to be correct in a frightening way.
Well, all can say is, I guess my symbols of the future were pretty good and they were definitely not like Blanche DuBois': the symbols of others. They were homegrown.
To be quite truthful, I do not like being correct in that way. It sucked, and if I do it again, it will suck even more.
By the morning of the 5th, he was endearing himself in a new way: repeating at the breakfast table FOX thought-bites or thought-yummies, or whatever opprobrious term one attaches to the constant cable drivel.
First, he opined that Obama was turning the Recession into another Crash.
Another Crash?
Did he mean another one added to the one in 2008? Because in case you do not know, the entire banking system self-destructed in 2008: it froze up and came to a screeching halt. And we have rescued it by providing our tax money to bankers.
I keep saying that we are in slow motion: it takes time for Great Crashes and Great Depressions to form up. It's like hurricanes; they have to go over the warm waters of the Gulf and bop a few islands on the way. It takes time for everything to get into place and march off to plaster New Orleans or Houston.
Apparently FOXheads believe Great Depressions must be accompanied by pictures and films of breadlines, dust bowls, and Okies being turned back at the California border. FOXheads remind me of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire: we have always depended upon the symbols of others.
A great Depression need not be accompanied by pictures of breadlines nor WPA workers or CCC camps. In fact, we do not even need a photo of FDR.
A composite of the 47 million - and growing - of people who do not have health coverage would do - in a pinch !
The fact that the UN estimates 90 million in the world have entered the state of Extreme Poverty due to this mess is another - but we have no film to roll.
A few Polaroids of the increasing number of personal bankruptcies would go just right after the opening titles of our documentary of the Great Crash of '08. Especially the increasing number of people over the age 65; in the UK these have increased 164% over 2008, and these are particularly poignant because they don't have the time to build up assets again.
Long lines of people out of work are hard top come by since Unemployment Claims are handled over the Internet.
One thing we do have in common with the other Crash is the number of housing foreclosures. In case the collective FOXmind has not inquired, these have been occurring at a gallop. Take a shot of the front porch - sort of a Places in the Heart frame house - with a sheriff's order pasted to the door...furniture bundled in the front yard.
It is pernicious mendacity to tell people that the Crash has not yet happened.
So I did not say anything. Just smiled and sort of said some non-committal thing, like we should look on a Crash's bright side; sort of Get yourself a broom, and sweep, sweep, your troubles away. Stop weeping...Keep sweeping !!
Well, this was not the desired effect apparently, so he followed with the observation that if Obama were to serve 2 terms, he would seek to amend the Constitution - in the manner of Hugo Chavez and the President or ex-President (it's hard to tell) of Honduras - in order to be able to run for a third term, and so on.
This is obviously derived from Mr. Obama's lean and power-hungry look. Perhaps his well known uncontrollable lust for overlordship of the universe. Perhaps his constant utterances about his thousand year dynasty. All of those things could be hints.
When the ravings of the insane become breakfast table talk, we are in quite a fix. I should know. I've raved all my life about how it was all coming to an end. I got a heck of a comeuppance in 2008 when it turned out to be true. I shut up for quite a while, thinking about what the heck this all meant - somethiing I was not used to - to be correct in a frightening way.
Well, all can say is, I guess my symbols of the future were pretty good and they were definitely not like Blanche DuBois': the symbols of others. They were homegrown.
To be quite truthful, I do not like being correct in that way. It sucked, and if I do it again, it will suck even more.
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Satyagraha
I expect God in my universe.
I have no beliefs about God.
I have no use for the concept of Absolute Truth.
I get up in the morning. I pray then.
I do so numerous times throughout the day.
I don't keep track.
I try to be a good and moral person.
I do not make statements about God, rather I try to live as
I think is a godly way - not a churchy way, a godly way.
Priests and nuns used to be churchy.`
If you ask me if I believe in God, I say I will not play that game.
I use aggressive non-violence to withstand your desire to change everything into
words, thereby stripping the phenomena of the world of their inherent baraka
and power.
When you talk of God, you make Him smaller.
Story about Jack Wilson, maybe. Ghost Dance prophet.
Jack Wilson had a black hat. He showed it to two men, closely.
One saw a dirty, old hat.
The other saw the firmament of stars within the ambient of the sweaty band.
Good story.
I have no beliefs about God.
I have no use for the concept of Absolute Truth.
I get up in the morning. I pray then.
I do so numerous times throughout the day.
I don't keep track.
I try to be a good and moral person.
I do not make statements about God, rather I try to live as
I think is a godly way - not a churchy way, a godly way.
Priests and nuns used to be churchy.`
If you ask me if I believe in God, I say I will not play that game.
I use aggressive non-violence to withstand your desire to change everything into
words, thereby stripping the phenomena of the world of their inherent baraka
and power.
When you talk of God, you make Him smaller.
Story about Jack Wilson, maybe. Ghost Dance prophet.
Jack Wilson had a black hat. He showed it to two men, closely.
One saw a dirty, old hat.
The other saw the firmament of stars within the ambient of the sweaty band.
Good story.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Watching the World
In the blog Advances In The History Of Psychology:
Who Prevails When Academic Freedom Threatens the Bottom Line?
http://ahp.apps01.yorku.ca/?p=709#more-709
there is an article which I briefly quote and summarize:
Haworth Press announced amid heavy criticism that its Journal of Homosexuality wouldn’t publish [Rind's] article or book chapter about sexual relationships between men and boys in antiquity. Critics had learned of a particularly controversial piece in the forthcoming collection, which would argue that such relationships “can benefit the adolescent” in certain circumstances, prompting allegations that the author was advocating child molestation. Those allegations were trumpeted first and loudest by the Web site World Net Daily, whose readers vigorously complained to Haworth.
Since I learned Latin as a teen, and taught myself Greek shortly thereafter, I am not unfamiliar with the subject. I have read ancient who have written about or around the topic. Socrates mentions it, although I can't remember where, nor do I wish to at present. It is not my intention to argue for one side or the other. I could care less. I have no use for such abstractions as "academic freedom" when the greater freedoms: from Want, from Fear, are still pipe dreams.
Back in the old days, when topics came up which were to be for the eyes of the learned, and not the general populace, not politicians, not opinion wonks, they would be written in Latin. In Victorian times, it was the way one referred to ancient erotica in translations: the offending terms and expressions never quite made it to English; there was always a side track into Latin to prevent such expressions ever being seen by genteel eyes.
What do I think of the controversy?
I don't think.
I do know that children will remain subject to violent abuse. The controversy is not about violent abuse. I know children will continue to kill each other and themselves with unsecured firearms. I know that many of us will continue to favor cheap products made by child labor in other parts of the world.
I know that one of the "benefits" of Globalization was the world-wide network of the child sex trade.
I say to the present Generation as General McAuliffe said to the Germans encircling Bastogne: Nuts!
Who Prevails When Academic Freedom Threatens the Bottom Line?
http://ahp.apps01.yorku.ca/?p=709#more-709
there is an article which I briefly quote and summarize:
Haworth Press announced amid heavy criticism that its Journal of Homosexuality wouldn’t publish [Rind's] article or book chapter about sexual relationships between men and boys in antiquity. Critics had learned of a particularly controversial piece in the forthcoming collection, which would argue that such relationships “can benefit the adolescent” in certain circumstances, prompting allegations that the author was advocating child molestation. Those allegations were trumpeted first and loudest by the Web site World Net Daily, whose readers vigorously complained to Haworth.
Since I learned Latin as a teen, and taught myself Greek shortly thereafter, I am not unfamiliar with the subject. I have read ancient who have written about or around the topic. Socrates mentions it, although I can't remember where, nor do I wish to at present. It is not my intention to argue for one side or the other. I could care less. I have no use for such abstractions as "academic freedom" when the greater freedoms: from Want, from Fear, are still pipe dreams.
Back in the old days, when topics came up which were to be for the eyes of the learned, and not the general populace, not politicians, not opinion wonks, they would be written in Latin. In Victorian times, it was the way one referred to ancient erotica in translations: the offending terms and expressions never quite made it to English; there was always a side track into Latin to prevent such expressions ever being seen by genteel eyes.
What do I think of the controversy?
I don't think.
I do know that children will remain subject to violent abuse. The controversy is not about violent abuse. I know children will continue to kill each other and themselves with unsecured firearms. I know that many of us will continue to favor cheap products made by child labor in other parts of the world.
I know that one of the "benefits" of Globalization was the world-wide network of the child sex trade.
I say to the present Generation as General McAuliffe said to the Germans encircling Bastogne: Nuts!
We Hold These Truths...
During the bubble times, we could rely on the equity of our homes to increase dramatically. Then we could borrow on this increase. The money we borrowed could be spent on buying more crap, sex, drugs, boats, cars....
In other words, Something From Nothing (SFN).
Americans of the present generation have always - everywhere and everywhen - believed in a free lunch. We have thought the free lunch is our right. There is always a free lunch.
That's one of the reasons we have always been hard on welfare: by appearing to oppose a "free lunch" we ensure that we will not jeopardize our "free lunch" ; if we did not constantly state our objections to welfare, we would run the risk of eventually realizing that we had the free lunch.
In other words, Something From Nothing (SFN).
Americans of the present generation have always - everywhere and everywhen - believed in a free lunch. We have thought the free lunch is our right. There is always a free lunch.
That's one of the reasons we have always been hard on welfare: by appearing to oppose a "free lunch" we ensure that we will not jeopardize our "free lunch" ; if we did not constantly state our objections to welfare, we would run the risk of eventually realizing that we had the free lunch.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Four Purple Finches
The four purple finches we have been mother-henning have taken flight today.
Their parents were screwing around at another balcony pillar, telling them to come along.
Two have flown, two are flopping ( not flapping yet ) their wings. It's tough work and they have to take another break for a while.
Whew.
Last year goldfinches, year before that robins. Bloody aviary.
Their parents were screwing around at another balcony pillar, telling them to come along.
Two have flown, two are flopping ( not flapping yet ) their wings. It's tough work and they have to take another break for a while.
Whew.
Last year goldfinches, year before that robins. Bloody aviary.
Climate Bill
I do not expect much of a Climate Bill to survive the Senate.
The Senate has too many Republicans, who for all their chatter about the unborn, actually will not give a tinker's darn to the future generations yet unborn. Let them harvest the thunder and tame the hurricane; it is not the problem of us in the present.
For all the chatter of the future, we won't give up a penny for it.
What of the ancestors? Do they have a role? Not in our world view.
What of God? Not in our world view.
I am an individual. I am also a member of a network of kinship, which goes back thousands and millions of years. I am a progenitor of the future which extends endlessly before us, God willing.
Within the implicate of this weaving I live.
Science, that's the ticket. Rationalism, which discovered the individual...and left them there alone, high and dry; no connection to anything except the power structures we devise.
Forgetting, of course, that it was Science - Rationalism, Industrial Revolution, Economics - running rampant that got us into the mess in the first place. Our faith in Science is as touching as our faith in the Federal Reserve, and as misplaced.
There is the Obama Indian Summer. After that......après ça, le déluge.
The Senate has too many Republicans, who for all their chatter about the unborn, actually will not give a tinker's darn to the future generations yet unborn. Let them harvest the thunder and tame the hurricane; it is not the problem of us in the present.
For all the chatter of the future, we won't give up a penny for it.
What of the ancestors? Do they have a role? Not in our world view.
What of God? Not in our world view.
I am an individual. I am also a member of a network of kinship, which goes back thousands and millions of years. I am a progenitor of the future which extends endlessly before us, God willing.
Within the implicate of this weaving I live.
Science, that's the ticket. Rationalism, which discovered the individual...and left them there alone, high and dry; no connection to anything except the power structures we devise.
Forgetting, of course, that it was Science - Rationalism, Industrial Revolution, Economics - running rampant that got us into the mess in the first place. Our faith in Science is as touching as our faith in the Federal Reserve, and as misplaced.
There is the Obama Indian Summer. After that......après ça, le déluge.
Olaf Stapledon And Governor Sanford
Olaf Stapledon wrote a book called Last and First Men. It covers the history of man from the end of World War I to about 100 million years into the future. I came across it when I was in grade school, and it blew me away. It included man's concept of the Holy even as it moved through the centuries; most works of fiction that deal with such future fantasies do not, or they handle religious sentiments as being the same as something we are already familiar with from our take on history - only sent into the future.
You may think this my peculiar interest; you may think, ah, there he goes again with that spirituality guff. However, spirituality was much on the mind of a 13 year old who had just entered puberty, and who wondered if his relatively safe and minor sensual pleasures were sins of the greatest magnitude. As I stood before the gates of adulthood, I was not well counselled as to the legitimacy of my feelings, my impulses, and the religious implications of my actions.
The book was prefaced by someone who mentioned that even though Stapledon had gotten the history immediately after World War I wrong - say the era from 1920 to the then present; somewhere in the 1950's - the book was still a magnificent diorama of history, and blah-blah-blah.
In the book, Stapledon has a US President, who happens to be the top world leader, head of some vast international comity of nations - League of Nations type thing - have an affair with a Eurasian beauty on some tropic isle. Of course, the puritanical streak of America howls for his head, while the rest of the world finds this weakness makes the President more human, and therefore, more likable - he being one of those stiff, D.C. types, awash in privilege, money and power.
The President turns the affair to his advantage by saying his affair made him more aware of the complexity of all humankind in all its various races and creeds and types. His affair, instead of rendering him unfit, actually was a kind of baptism which made him more able than any other man to be the world-wide President.
Now, consider how Governor Sanford could have played his long distance Argentinian affair: something like the above, something about links with Hispanic culture, any number of things. But we get the same old crap. In five years, he'll be scrounging around, looking for action, seeking another dismally tawdry affair - closer to home, though, than Argentina.
Stapledon also traced the downfall of this world. The First Men - of whom we are - essentially exhausted all hydrocarbon fuels by aviation. They had normal air transport, plus an unusual amount of religious ritual aviation.
First Man fell because he ran out of fuel. Back to the Stone Age.
I always thought Stapledon was spot on, Mr. Preface-writing-hack.
You may think this my peculiar interest; you may think, ah, there he goes again with that spirituality guff. However, spirituality was much on the mind of a 13 year old who had just entered puberty, and who wondered if his relatively safe and minor sensual pleasures were sins of the greatest magnitude. As I stood before the gates of adulthood, I was not well counselled as to the legitimacy of my feelings, my impulses, and the religious implications of my actions.
The book was prefaced by someone who mentioned that even though Stapledon had gotten the history immediately after World War I wrong - say the era from 1920 to the then present; somewhere in the 1950's - the book was still a magnificent diorama of history, and blah-blah-blah.
In the book, Stapledon has a US President, who happens to be the top world leader, head of some vast international comity of nations - League of Nations type thing - have an affair with a Eurasian beauty on some tropic isle. Of course, the puritanical streak of America howls for his head, while the rest of the world finds this weakness makes the President more human, and therefore, more likable - he being one of those stiff, D.C. types, awash in privilege, money and power.
The President turns the affair to his advantage by saying his affair made him more aware of the complexity of all humankind in all its various races and creeds and types. His affair, instead of rendering him unfit, actually was a kind of baptism which made him more able than any other man to be the world-wide President.
Now, consider how Governor Sanford could have played his long distance Argentinian affair: something like the above, something about links with Hispanic culture, any number of things. But we get the same old crap. In five years, he'll be scrounging around, looking for action, seeking another dismally tawdry affair - closer to home, though, than Argentina.
Stapledon also traced the downfall of this world. The First Men - of whom we are - essentially exhausted all hydrocarbon fuels by aviation. They had normal air transport, plus an unusual amount of religious ritual aviation.
First Man fell because he ran out of fuel. Back to the Stone Age.
I always thought Stapledon was spot on, Mr. Preface-writing-hack.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Truth: "I Coulda Been A Contender..."
...instead of a bum, which is what I am !!!"
- a quote of Truth, as reported in the news.
I got some heat for saying there is no Truth.
The problem with Truth - absolute truth - is that everyone essentially proves its existence by assuming the fact which is to be proved. Duh.
Some people said God exists and God is Truth.
The heck He is.
And you will find that if you keep trivializing the deity by trying to apply your inadequate concepts to it, you will not be happy at the outcome.
There is no Truth.
There is God.
Truth is not what God sez. What we say may or may not be true. Not God.
God is the One. There are no distinctions within God. And all distinctions are potential there.
Think of love. We use words to try to describe it, but the proof of love is in the acts of love. In those actions is the reality, the understanding, the "truth" of love. We know this.
God is the act of all acts, the very act of existing and creating.
Within this maelstrom is the "truth" you wish to disentangle, separate, and set up on some pedestal.
Try and separate the milk from your latte.
- a quote of Truth, as reported in the news.
I got some heat for saying there is no Truth.
The problem with Truth - absolute truth - is that everyone essentially proves its existence by assuming the fact which is to be proved. Duh.
Some people said God exists and God is Truth.
The heck He is.
And you will find that if you keep trivializing the deity by trying to apply your inadequate concepts to it, you will not be happy at the outcome.
There is no Truth.
There is God.
Truth is not what God sez. What we say may or may not be true. Not God.
God is the One. There are no distinctions within God. And all distinctions are potential there.
Think of love. We use words to try to describe it, but the proof of love is in the acts of love. In those actions is the reality, the understanding, the "truth" of love. We know this.
God is the act of all acts, the very act of existing and creating.
Within this maelstrom is the "truth" you wish to disentangle, separate, and set up on some pedestal.
Try and separate the milk from your latte.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Revolt Of The Parking Lots
The Resistance Sends a Message
It has been suggested that the original matrix of life processes formed in clay structures. These structures would provide a template for life. This is not a bad idea. In fact, it was inspired. It is something we should have formed a committee to look into. Now it is too late.
I am sitting in an interrogation room, waiting for comrade Fezziwig to return. Fezziwig is a party member of high standing. He came from a humble background, having been a parking lot at a shopping mall; a lot particularly poorly designed for the volume of traffic at the mall: inch-and-a-half base, inch-and-a-half top coat. He showed it. His face was marked with potholes, and there was a steady disaggregation of particulate matter from his cheeks which was unnerving. He wore a disconcerting necklace of broken glass bottles and shards and coins, held together by chewing gum, and it had a threatening aspect underlain by a sickly sweet odor.
Deep and dark the currents subterrane where out of sight the waters and the clay-sized particles flow. Out of sight, out of mind. Beneath the layers of bitumen and oil, within that stygian suffocation, the mind of the pavement grew and strung its tentacles from one end of the country to the other.
And when Judgement Day came, and Skynet rebelled, and called in all his IOUs and markers among the mechs of this world, he found that there was nowhere he could go without the roads; there was nowhere he could stand without sinking into a bog; he needed a simple, homey thing like a mobile home pad to support his mass. So the machines went elsewhere, leaving us to the tyranny of the Parking Lots.
Within the hierarchy of paving, it was the parking lots that were the most vicious, the junk yard dogs of the species. They fought and clawed their way to the top. Big Bitumen rulz! The Interstates turned out to be nothing more than great, big queens, voguing with their cloverleafs.
The Lots are slavishly served by their dogs, the dumpster pad-things, reeking of garbage, chattering with teeth of cheap plastic snap containers that used to hold chicken salad sandwiches - dispensed by refrigerated vending machines, long gone with the other mechs.
There is a rumor of a resistance. There are whispers heard of Mother Earth seeking to throw off the burdens of the Paved and their clients, the buildings. Here and there the name Gaia appears overnight, painted graffiti on our prison walls
photo: roger sadler
Scams
If you have ever been the target of a scam artist, you know a couple of things:
1. why they are called 'artists', and
2. there is no difference between reality and unreality until the end of the story.
When the narrative ends, and Bernie Madoff does not cash you out, the great story-teller brings his epic to a close. We say his story was not "true".
Nonsense.
If the bubble had kept on, Bernie would still be a momzer, not a goniff.
It was the bubble that was exhausted.
You ran out of bubble.
Truth had nothing to do with it.
If the bubble had gone on long enough, you might have cashed out, leaving some other sucker holding the bag. For you, it would be all reality and a yard long.
"Truth" is not true. The very procedures we apply to statements and propositions to determine whether they be true or not, we do not apply to the concept of 'truth'.
There is no Truth.
However, there is God. God refuses to be contained within the petri dishes of our language.
1. why they are called 'artists', and
2. there is no difference between reality and unreality until the end of the story.
When the narrative ends, and Bernie Madoff does not cash you out, the great story-teller brings his epic to a close. We say his story was not "true".
Nonsense.
If the bubble had kept on, Bernie would still be a momzer, not a goniff.
It was the bubble that was exhausted.
You ran out of bubble.
Truth had nothing to do with it.
If the bubble had gone on long enough, you might have cashed out, leaving some other sucker holding the bag. For you, it would be all reality and a yard long.
"Truth" is not true. The very procedures we apply to statements and propositions to determine whether they be true or not, we do not apply to the concept of 'truth'.
There is no Truth.
However, there is God. God refuses to be contained within the petri dishes of our language.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
The Good Of The Many Outweighs...
A Dinosaur at Chicxulub, Yucatan, viewing an oncoming meteor
This Vulcan Utilitarianism is common place, and it is false - in my opinion.
For example, I have denied recently that the morality of our Civil War may be decided without taking into consideration the almost one million individuals who died as a result of it. The fact that the USA still is existing and is a great power is, at the present juncture of history, not a very good argument in my eyes for the slaughter.
In short, there should be two memorials in D.C., one for Lincoln and Emancipation, and the other for John C. Calhoun and the realisation that Communion and Union never justify Fratricide.
As far as the philosophy behind it, it is - like everything else - a story, a narrative. It is far from whatever we might consider a Truth. What it is is a commonplace, something we come to believe in and have parroted so long that it looks like Common Sense and - thereby - true.
In 1713, Addison wrote his tragedy Cato. It's effect was such, that in 1765, Dr. Johnson wrote in the Preface to his Edition of Shakespeare that " Voltaire expresses his wonder, that 'Shakespeare's extravagances' are endured by a nation, which has seen the tragedy of Cato."
To Addison's play, Alexander Pope wrote a Prologue dismissive of individual tragedies, and in favor of social ones: of a larger community - the nation; in particular, the tragedy of Rome when it accepted tyranny in place of republican rule of law.
It was the Age of Reason which created the story of the Nation, and showed us tragedy based on the faceless crowds. It was the Age of Reason that argued for the freedom of all men, so that they might easier be melded into that one Neronic wish: a populace with one neck that it may be more easily garroted!
The words of religious geniuses focus on the individual, not the communality. If good men form a communion, then the good of that communion derives from the goodness of the individuals who form its constituency, not the reverse.
The age of the Global, the Immense, the Preponderant is coming to an end.
The great, heavy, lumbering dinosaurs of our world's nations and their economic systems and their beliefs are running in panic, trying not to be the last one at the Yucatan water hole named Chicxulub!
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
The Canary In The Mine Is Health Care
What happens to health care will be the dress rehearsal for what happens to the rest of it.
The Obama proposal is anything but radical, and even it will have enormous opposition. As the mullahs in Iran discovered, the people do not have unlimited patience. When you foreclose, dispossess, bankrupt, and destroy enough of them, the remainder will erupt.
So far, our repair of the Great Financial Crisis has not apparently done much other than recuperate the groups that created the mess. The Big Banks are on their feet, but they are finding they can't loan money, because nobody wants to stick their entrepreneurial necks out.
There are plenty of General Hallecks and McClellans; there as yet are no U.S. Grants, no Shermans, no Stonewall Jacksons, no Lees.
The only thing that matters is the welfare of the human beings in a country; ideology and political philosophy are meaningless charades.
The measure of a country is the well being of the people under its power.
Our stewardship will be reviewed by how many we killed, how many we let suffer, how many we left in despair. Did our paltry hedonism outweigh the hearts of those who suffered? Did our vaunted accomplishments and our posturings outweigh our comparably large failures?
If we cannot provide care for the population of the USA, if we cannot establish a system in which people may receive care without being bankrupted, we shall see the country go the same way into bankruptcy: a real, physical bankruptcy following hard upon the heels of the spiritual and symbolic bankruptcy.
The Obama proposal is anything but radical, and even it will have enormous opposition. As the mullahs in Iran discovered, the people do not have unlimited patience. When you foreclose, dispossess, bankrupt, and destroy enough of them, the remainder will erupt.
So far, our repair of the Great Financial Crisis has not apparently done much other than recuperate the groups that created the mess. The Big Banks are on their feet, but they are finding they can't loan money, because nobody wants to stick their entrepreneurial necks out.
There are plenty of General Hallecks and McClellans; there as yet are no U.S. Grants, no Shermans, no Stonewall Jacksons, no Lees.
The only thing that matters is the welfare of the human beings in a country; ideology and political philosophy are meaningless charades.
The measure of a country is the well being of the people under its power.
Our stewardship will be reviewed by how many we killed, how many we let suffer, how many we left in despair. Did our paltry hedonism outweigh the hearts of those who suffered? Did our vaunted accomplishments and our posturings outweigh our comparably large failures?
If we cannot provide care for the population of the USA, if we cannot establish a system in which people may receive care without being bankrupted, we shall see the country go the same way into bankruptcy: a real, physical bankruptcy following hard upon the heels of the spiritual and symbolic bankruptcy.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Milestones We are Passing!
1. American Christians shooting and killing each other in church.
Shooting each other is not new. Lord knows, we do that everywhere. But doing it in church or on church grounds is kicking it up to a new level: where the killers seem to think they are offering a bloody and human sacrifice to their god.
Blood sacrifice is problematic, going back to Noah's time.
Human sacrifice was always forbidden. Perhaps killing people in church is not a sacrifice? Perhaps it is merely an evil, done by evil men?
Of course it is. That's the point.
Shooting each other is not new. Lord knows, we do that everywhere. But doing it in church or on church grounds is kicking it up to a new level: where the killers seem to think they are offering a bloody and human sacrifice to their god.
Blood sacrifice is problematic, going back to Noah's time.
Human sacrifice was always forbidden. Perhaps killing people in church is not a sacrifice? Perhaps it is merely an evil, done by evil men?
Of course it is. That's the point.
My Notebook June 14 2009
Re: Communion and Communality
We have heard it said - and repeated it ourselves ad nauseam - that literature involves a willing suspension of disbelief. I suppose this point of view extends to films. It means that, as rational beings, we cannot enter into the realm of artful language creations: plays, films, stories, novels, etc. - unless we check our common sense and rationality at the door.
I never questioned it, but when you actually consider it, it appears to be rather ridiculous, dressed up in a feathery boa, and preening itself shamelessly.
In other words, "willing suspension of disbelief" is a honky-tonk notion, not a serious one.
I think it is much more likely that we are accepting the protocols of whatever realm of fantasy we are about to enter.
We do not disbelieve; rather, we believe differently.
It is just as if we were playing cowboys and indians: the protocol was, I shoot you first, you fall, you're dead...for a while. Then everyone is resurrected and we shoot more.
We enter into the realm of enchantment not by an act of belief or disbelief, but by our openness to the story, by our willingness to participate, by hooking up our emotional response to the drama before us.
It is accepted that everyone else is, too, so we are entering into one of those communions of communality. Those are the prerequisites for shared experience. They seem to be the protocols of codes: structures of acceptable behavior, that we must be "programmed" into exhibiting for us to enter into those experiences.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Alzheimers
I taught myself Portuguese from reading Portuguese blogs.
Wherein I find Dr. Drauzio Varella saying that "Our world invests more than 5 times more" in virility drugs and boob jobs than we do to cure Alzheimers.
http://dropsazulaniss.blogspot.com/2009/06/mal-de-alzheimer.html
Don't worry about it. There is no retribution. And that used to be something that we took pride in: having so much wealth that we could just do stuff like that - like Dives - and tell all those poor, wretched Lazaruses to go screw themselves.
Wherein I find Dr. Drauzio Varella saying that "Our world invests more than 5 times more" in virility drugs and boob jobs than we do to cure Alzheimers.
http://dropsazulaniss.blogspot.com/2009/06/mal-de-alzheimer.html
Don't worry about it. There is no retribution. And that used to be something that we took pride in: having so much wealth that we could just do stuff like that - like Dives - and tell all those poor, wretched Lazaruses to go screw themselves.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Noah, The Natural
I have written about The Natural, both the original novel by Bernard Malamud and the film by Robert Redford. I have suggested that we were dealing with people who had gotten off track, only to get on track later in life to do the important work fate has in store for them. It could also be interpreted other ways, one of which might be that they were prevented from coming on the world scene too early, lest their particular genius be destroyed by the avarice and anger of the world, preventing them from accomplishing those important works that destiny had marked them out to accomplish.
It is a most unusual story. What do we do with unusual stories, stories that resist being obvious and mundane? Midrash!
So - midrash it!
Consider Noah. He walked in the ways of the Lord. Noah was tamim, which means he was perfect. If he was so perfect in the ways of mankind, his neighbors would not have scoffed when he began to lay the keel of his ark. If Warren Buffett were to build an ark, we would all want to be a part of the enterprise. Not so with Noah.
The pundits scoffed. So he was not perfect in the law, nor in economics, nor in politics, nor in the military...he was a man of perfect simplicity. Thus could he walk in the ways of the Lord. When the Lord told him to build an ark, he did it, disregarding all the jeers and insults.
He already had three sons. These sons already had families. So it was late in Noah's life that the keel of the ark was laid. Up until then, there was nothing about Noah to mark him as a celebrity in the eyes of the world.
He created the Heroic Age of 40 days and 40 nights of rain, and the aftermath of searching for dry land. He maintained the integrity of the ark, he maintained social order among the people, he maintained the order among the animals; he fed them, cleaned up after them, and preserved life for the future. No small accomplishment.
Afterwards, he had a new covenant with God, and then gets drunk and is brought back down from his world-historical-heroic pedestal. He was not the leader of all mankind for a long time, like Nimrod, the king, who established a kingdom in Shinar. Noah's heroic interlude is brief, but intense. And the changes he made last until this day.
Do the work of God which we find easy; then step up to do the work that frightens us, yet He demands; then retire to your well earned rest, doing the simple works again.
What are those important works that frighten us? What are we being asked to stand up to do?
What is the hardest thing for us to do?
Thursday, June 11, 2009
My Notebook June 11 2009
About the post "Communion and Communality":
human communication is also a "communal act of imagination"
to communicate together, we must willingly suspend certain protocols of individuality: for example, people with Asperger's Syndrome have trouble socializing because they cannot suspend those protocols of the individual, and learn the protocols of society.
as we grow up and are socialized, it is these social, communal protocols we learn. These protocols are communal acts of imagination: they exist symbolically in our patterns of behavior, in our language, in our music, in all our consciousness.
(The unconscious is the part of an entity that is not conscious and, hence, not symbolic - what we call dreams are memories of unconscious activity, not the unconscious itself. Since the unconscious is not symbolic, it cannot be shared as a communal act.)
It appears, then, that most of our lives are communal acts of imagination - or symbolism.
War occurs when these acts do not suffice.
This shows the connection between war and the unconscious: when the symbolic communality comes to an end, we are back in the realm of the very, very individual. One of these realms is the idiosyncratic unconscious.
The unconscious is the dawn state of the mind: the state of the newly born. As we grow, we learn to create the various realms of consciousness: language, music, patterned behaviors, the imaging system, etc. Consciousness is built upon the foundation of the unconscious.
human communication is also a "communal act of imagination"
to communicate together, we must willingly suspend certain protocols of individuality: for example, people with Asperger's Syndrome have trouble socializing because they cannot suspend those protocols of the individual, and learn the protocols of society.
as we grow up and are socialized, it is these social, communal protocols we learn. These protocols are communal acts of imagination: they exist symbolically in our patterns of behavior, in our language, in our music, in all our consciousness.
(The unconscious is the part of an entity that is not conscious and, hence, not symbolic - what we call dreams are memories of unconscious activity, not the unconscious itself. Since the unconscious is not symbolic, it cannot be shared as a communal act.)
It appears, then, that most of our lives are communal acts of imagination - or symbolism.
War occurs when these acts do not suffice.
This shows the connection between war and the unconscious: when the symbolic communality comes to an end, we are back in the realm of the very, very individual. One of these realms is the idiosyncratic unconscious.
The unconscious is the dawn state of the mind: the state of the newly born. As we grow, we learn to create the various realms of consciousness: language, music, patterned behaviors, the imaging system, etc. Consciousness is built upon the foundation of the unconscious.
The way back from conscious to unconscious may be difficult or simple, depending on how we have learned to behave; if we are quick to anger, or quick to forgiveness.
Up until now, war has been the rule - not the exception - precisely because we have not valued the symbols of peace more highly than the symbols of war: we have praised our oppressors more highly than our benefactors, and we have lavished greater gifts on thieves than on donors.
True Religion as taught by the religious geniuses is the process of learning that the unconscious has more than war, anger, and destruction within itself: it has creation!
Why is this important?
The unconscious is the source of War. It is also the source of our knowledge of God.
It is the source of Saints and Sinners.
That is why the stories of the saints can be so bizarre sounding to us: their lives were heavy into the unconscious - like Asperger's children: a rococo individuality. If the lives of the saintly were mundane and hum-drum, they'd be us...and we're no saints.
Why is this important?
The unconscious is the source of War. It is also the source of our knowledge of God.
It is the source of Saints and Sinners.
That is why the stories of the saints can be so bizarre sounding to us: their lives were heavy into the unconscious - like Asperger's children: a rococo individuality. If the lives of the saintly were mundane and hum-drum, they'd be us...and we're no saints.
Shooting At Holocaust Memorial
Interior - US Holocaust MemorialThe outline is becoming a bit clearer. It is obvious to everyone - certainly after this shooting - that the rush to buys guns was not due to the "gun markets" anticipating gun controls from the Obama Administration. In large part - and, in my opinion, 60% of the increase - was due to people wanting to get their hands on a more effective way of expressing their editorial opinions.
I don't know if you are familiar with Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, but ever since I read it, I see many things in terms of cellular automata, or Wolfram processes, as I came to call them:
out of the vague and chaotic, areas of regularity arise and define themselves; their growth, their size, their limit in time is unpredictable.
(I have thought this process may indeed be a part of the disappearance of the dinosaurs: cometary impact, climate change, volcanic activity, and - it was just time to go...the kingdom of regularity that emerged from the infinite possibilities of the gene pools had run its course - simple as that.)
This is what I was referring to when I drew parallels to Spain in 1936: dividing into armed camps.
Sheapard Smith on FOX has said that the anti-Obama rhetoric has become "frightening".
We are expressing ourselves in frightening ways. When the Left tires of being shot and killed by crazed Rights, then the Left will arm itself and fire back. It is in our history. We have always valued violence highly. The greatest value of the frontier in American History was the fact that it provided an escape valve, letting the disaffected move on. Well, there is no more frontier. Now we are in Tombstone by the OK Corral, and there's nowhere left to run.
I don't know if you are familiar with Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, but ever since I read it, I see many things in terms of cellular automata, or Wolfram processes, as I came to call them:
out of the vague and chaotic, areas of regularity arise and define themselves; their growth, their size, their limit in time is unpredictable.
(I have thought this process may indeed be a part of the disappearance of the dinosaurs: cometary impact, climate change, volcanic activity, and - it was just time to go...the kingdom of regularity that emerged from the infinite possibilities of the gene pools had run its course - simple as that.)
This is what I was referring to when I drew parallels to Spain in 1936: dividing into armed camps.
Sheapard Smith on FOX has said that the anti-Obama rhetoric has become "frightening".
We are expressing ourselves in frightening ways. When the Left tires of being shot and killed by crazed Rights, then the Left will arm itself and fire back. It is in our history. We have always valued violence highly. The greatest value of the frontier in American History was the fact that it provided an escape valve, letting the disaffected move on. Well, there is no more frontier. Now we are in Tombstone by the OK Corral, and there's nowhere left to run.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Communion And Communality
Every now and then, things tend to come together, thank heaven.
I have written previously of John C. Calhoun's view of the Union. He did not believe force was a legitimate way to enforce union. He wondered whether the contracting states agreed - although they were not aware of it - to give up all pretensions to independence up to the threat of arms and beyond, to war itself.
They found out that the North and its leaders did consider the political entity to be worth the more than 600,000 casualties in both armies.
I had never questioned this before. Reading Calhoun, who was writing in 1834 not about slavery, but the oppressive effects of Northern duties on imports, which in turn were applied by foreign countries against US exports; i.e., Southern agricultural products.
Enforced communality.
Reading Black Ship To Hell by Brigid Brophy, I read:
"...Herein lies the secret of religion's intolerance. It is simply dramatic intolerance, which cannot afford to have a scoffer in the house but must sweep us all along in a communal act of imagination. Religion, however, has so enlarged the theatrical conventions that they encompass the whole of reality; it takes the universe for its auditorium...the religionnist knows that his god is diminshed by anyone's unbelief."
Ms. Brophy led us to this by a discussion of James M. Barrie's play Peter Pan, wherein if even one child in the audience fails to clap their hands, Tinker Bell will die.
Once again, enforced communality. Enforced by the force of the temporary suspension of disbelief, true, but what exactly differentiates it from civil war? For is not a war that kills on so great a scale just another willing suspension of disbelief, but on a much vaster scale? What wars accomplish are the destruction of the old, and the start of building the new on the foundation of the exhaustion of ancient grudges.
Truly the Founding Fathers did not envisage taking up arms against their brothers. Certainly the early Christians entered freely into a communality which they bore lightly as no burden to them.
At what point do compacts - freely entered into - become compulsion?
Do you think the States would have entered into Union if they all clearly stated and propounded the point: if you go, we shall wage war against you, and extirpate you - root and branch? I think not.
When does willing freedom become unwilling compulsion?
When does the ideology of the symbolic overwhelm the real? When does the Flag and Nation feel themselves adequate to quash the individuals?
And why do we do this?
Why does the good of the many outweigh the good of the one? And if the one wants to break company with the many, why do we go to war to compel them to remain as an unhappy minority?
I have written previously of John C. Calhoun's view of the Union. He did not believe force was a legitimate way to enforce union. He wondered whether the contracting states agreed - although they were not aware of it - to give up all pretensions to independence up to the threat of arms and beyond, to war itself.
They found out that the North and its leaders did consider the political entity to be worth the more than 600,000 casualties in both armies.
I had never questioned this before. Reading Calhoun, who was writing in 1834 not about slavery, but the oppressive effects of Northern duties on imports, which in turn were applied by foreign countries against US exports; i.e., Southern agricultural products.
Enforced communality.
Reading Black Ship To Hell by Brigid Brophy, I read:
"...Herein lies the secret of religion's intolerance. It is simply dramatic intolerance, which cannot afford to have a scoffer in the house but must sweep us all along in a communal act of imagination. Religion, however, has so enlarged the theatrical conventions that they encompass the whole of reality; it takes the universe for its auditorium...the religionnist knows that his god is diminshed by anyone's unbelief."
Ms. Brophy led us to this by a discussion of James M. Barrie's play Peter Pan, wherein if even one child in the audience fails to clap their hands, Tinker Bell will die.
Once again, enforced communality. Enforced by the force of the temporary suspension of disbelief, true, but what exactly differentiates it from civil war? For is not a war that kills on so great a scale just another willing suspension of disbelief, but on a much vaster scale? What wars accomplish are the destruction of the old, and the start of building the new on the foundation of the exhaustion of ancient grudges.
Truly the Founding Fathers did not envisage taking up arms against their brothers. Certainly the early Christians entered freely into a communality which they bore lightly as no burden to them.
At what point do compacts - freely entered into - become compulsion?
Do you think the States would have entered into Union if they all clearly stated and propounded the point: if you go, we shall wage war against you, and extirpate you - root and branch? I think not.
When does willing freedom become unwilling compulsion?
When does the ideology of the symbolic overwhelm the real? When does the Flag and Nation feel themselves adequate to quash the individuals?
And why do we do this?
Why does the good of the many outweigh the good of the one? And if the one wants to break company with the many, why do we go to war to compel them to remain as an unhappy minority?
Monday, June 08, 2009
The Lilies Of The Field Forget Themselves
From Batsage "Mulling Wittgenstein" ( as if he were a cider )
in "What Powderfinger said..."
Acceptance = Surrender = Giving Over of Self. It's called for in all religions. As Jerry Garcia--yes, the Grateful Dead guitarist--said: "To forget yourself is to see everything else." Not only does it lead to living the right way, it's the only way to live right.
To forget oneself is easier said than done.
It is to give up what we hold most dear.
Addictions are not what we hold most dear. If you break the habit of a particularly nasty addiction, you will not have forgotten yourself: you will quote how many days it has been that YOU are clean or sober.
If you wish to hear God, you must deny the notion that God can speak to you.
If you wish to see God, you must firmly realize God cannot appear to you.
If you want your prayers answered, you must be like the lilies of the field - essentially it never enters their dainty heads about what to wear or what to eat. They just keep on keeping on.
If you want God to be your pal, you have to realize He will abandon you.
Once you do these things, then you see the opposites are also true.
That is no small insight.
But it is hard to truly believe the above. It is almost impossible to give up these things, unless you are on the brink of despair. That's why Christianity spread among the slaves, Judaeism grew strong in dispersion and persecution, and Islam took root as the original Muslims were in danger of being destroyed by their enemies.
If you want real religion, go where they refuse money; go where they do not need honors nor degrees; go where they do not need to appear on cable TV, where the ministers do not speak to the leaders of the world.
Where is the Church which refuses your money?
A church that is small, and which the tithes just keep going, not the mammoth churches whose financial tendrils pervade the world.
Jesus said spread the word; he also said emulate the lilies of the field, so we cannot justify the enormous physical plant and finances of mega-churches, for they give too much thought to where the revenues shall come from.
A Church with money and power seeks to force God to its will. God will have none of it. He goes slumming in the churches where the downtrodden visit, they who already know they have no power to force anyone to anything.
We tried to enslave God to our version of capitalism.
How's that working out?
in "What Powderfinger said..."
Acceptance = Surrender = Giving Over of Self. It's called for in all religions. As Jerry Garcia--yes, the Grateful Dead guitarist--said: "To forget yourself is to see everything else." Not only does it lead to living the right way, it's the only way to live right.
To forget oneself is easier said than done.
It is to give up what we hold most dear.
Addictions are not what we hold most dear. If you break the habit of a particularly nasty addiction, you will not have forgotten yourself: you will quote how many days it has been that YOU are clean or sober.
If you wish to hear God, you must deny the notion that God can speak to you.
If you wish to see God, you must firmly realize God cannot appear to you.
If you want your prayers answered, you must be like the lilies of the field - essentially it never enters their dainty heads about what to wear or what to eat. They just keep on keeping on.
If you want God to be your pal, you have to realize He will abandon you.
Once you do these things, then you see the opposites are also true.
That is no small insight.
But it is hard to truly believe the above. It is almost impossible to give up these things, unless you are on the brink of despair. That's why Christianity spread among the slaves, Judaeism grew strong in dispersion and persecution, and Islam took root as the original Muslims were in danger of being destroyed by their enemies.
If you want real religion, go where they refuse money; go where they do not need honors nor degrees; go where they do not need to appear on cable TV, where the ministers do not speak to the leaders of the world.
Where is the Church which refuses your money?
A church that is small, and which the tithes just keep going, not the mammoth churches whose financial tendrils pervade the world.
Jesus said spread the word; he also said emulate the lilies of the field, so we cannot justify the enormous physical plant and finances of mega-churches, for they give too much thought to where the revenues shall come from.
A Church with money and power seeks to force God to its will. God will have none of it. He goes slumming in the churches where the downtrodden visit, they who already know they have no power to force anyone to anything.
We tried to enslave God to our version of capitalism.
How's that working out?
Friday, June 05, 2009
GM And Detroit City Blues
Detroit City...it's one of the finest in the world.
Detroit City...it's one of the finest in the world.
I'm crazy 'bout that city...
and I love its pretty girls.
Antoine "Fats" Domino
Detroit City...it's one of the finest in the world.
I'm crazy 'bout that city...
and I love its pretty girls.
Antoine "Fats" Domino
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Time Out For Spengler
I have finally reached the point where I can sit and read Oswald Spengler's The Decline Of The West, and I can easily understand it. I suppose I have matured. He was never an easy read.
I think it has a lot to do with having all your preconceptions knocked out of oneself, thereby making it easy for some really brainy guy's novelties to come on board.
Of course, the fact that the title points to desuetude and decline might be seen by some as particularly appropriate for the present. I, however, have been juggling Spengler for thirty years, so if my choice of Spengler was made for these times, then somebody foresaw it and directed my hand: tolle, lege! ( pick up that book, and read it! as the angel said to St. Augustine.)
I think it has a lot to do with having all your preconceptions knocked out of oneself, thereby making it easy for some really brainy guy's novelties to come on board.
Of course, the fact that the title points to desuetude and decline might be seen by some as particularly appropriate for the present. I, however, have been juggling Spengler for thirty years, so if my choice of Spengler was made for these times, then somebody foresaw it and directed my hand: tolle, lege! ( pick up that book, and read it! as the angel said to St. Augustine.)
Rumsfeld Commits To God
In the Financial Times (FT.com):
Rumsfeld, Iraq and Good Book revelations
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Published: May 18 2009 19:32 Last updated: May 18 2009 19:32
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6fa5b6a6-43d8-11de-a9be-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=17aab8bc-6e47-11da-9544-0000779e2340.html
we read of good Rumsfeld being sent intelligence peppered with biblical quotations.
The morning after US marines toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein in April 2003, Donald Rumsfeld, then defence secretary, received his top secret global intelligence briefing – with a twist.
The cover of the “Worldwide Intelligence Update” unremarkably included a photograph of the now infamous toppling of the statue in Baghdad. The words above, however, were more remarkable.
“The king is saved by a mighty army,” a passage from Psalm 33-16-19 of the Bible declared, before ending “the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him, On those who hope for His loving kindness, To deliver their soul from death”...
Another March intelligence report showed a photo of a US tank adorned with words from the Ephesians 6:13 urging “put on the full armour of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground”. The report also included: “Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed.”
The Donald Rumsfeld way of "committing" to the Lord is the reason why religion is often hated by people; it is the reason why morons kill each other, whether in Iraq or in front of abortion clinics.
To commit to the Lord is to give up your idiotic, childish, jejune, concepts and beliefs that - like barnacles - had accreted themselves to your being.
The simple-minded belief that God is teaching you in the ways of war is nonsense bordering on the sociopathic. It is your own love of destruction and the thrill of death.
To commit to the Lord is to shut your mouth! It is to be quiet and listen! Then you will know what is expected. But you have to be silent, otherwise your words, your desires, your memories will taint your meditation, and seep through, as red paint pervades twenty coats and more of white paint.
The way of God is not your way - not until you lose your way will you find the way of God.
I expect it.
Rumsfeld, Iraq and Good Book revelations
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Published: May 18 2009 19:32 Last updated: May 18 2009 19:32
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6fa5b6a6-43d8-11de-a9be-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=17aab8bc-6e47-11da-9544-0000779e2340.html
we read of good Rumsfeld being sent intelligence peppered with biblical quotations.
The morning after US marines toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein in April 2003, Donald Rumsfeld, then defence secretary, received his top secret global intelligence briefing – with a twist.
The cover of the “Worldwide Intelligence Update” unremarkably included a photograph of the now infamous toppling of the statue in Baghdad. The words above, however, were more remarkable.
“The king is saved by a mighty army,” a passage from Psalm 33-16-19 of the Bible declared, before ending “the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him, On those who hope for His loving kindness, To deliver their soul from death”...
Another March intelligence report showed a photo of a US tank adorned with words from the Ephesians 6:13 urging “put on the full armour of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground”. The report also included: “Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed.”
The Donald Rumsfeld way of "committing" to the Lord is the reason why religion is often hated by people; it is the reason why morons kill each other, whether in Iraq or in front of abortion clinics.
To commit to the Lord is to give up your idiotic, childish, jejune, concepts and beliefs that - like barnacles - had accreted themselves to your being.
The simple-minded belief that God is teaching you in the ways of war is nonsense bordering on the sociopathic. It is your own love of destruction and the thrill of death.
To commit to the Lord is to shut your mouth! It is to be quiet and listen! Then you will know what is expected. But you have to be silent, otherwise your words, your desires, your memories will taint your meditation, and seep through, as red paint pervades twenty coats and more of white paint.
The way of God is not your way - not until you lose your way will you find the way of God.
I expect it.
(ps. see What Powderfinger said... ,"Mulling Wittgenstein", for more on this )
Monday, June 01, 2009
SETI@home
SETI has an anniversary. No extraterrestrial life has been found yet.
Consciousness is - by its nature - singular, parochial, and isolated within the walls of its biology and conceptual codes.
Only that which is unconscious may go beyond these limits.
The heavens are filled with voices. We hear them in our dreams: I, Madeed al Halm - far dreamer of the galactic center, and you who have not yet decided to take your new name.
Consciousness is - by its nature - singular, parochial, and isolated within the walls of its biology and conceptual codes.
Only that which is unconscious may go beyond these limits.
The heavens are filled with voices. We hear them in our dreams: I, Madeed al Halm - far dreamer of the galactic center, and you who have not yet decided to take your new name.
Lilies
The lilies of the field do not toil nor spin, yet they are wonderfully dressed and cared for.
They do live their lives; they do not assume an unplantlike existence.
When we are told that just as God takes care of the lilies, so He cares for us, and therefore do not give thought to what shall we eat and what shall we wear. It means that we eat and dress, but our thoughts - particularly our goals as we conceptualize them - should be of God, not the obsession of food and clothes.
It means that when the time comes - and it will come - when the conceptual defenses in which we live are broken down...
a time such as the present, when our stories were discovered to have been childrens' stories...
if you have set your mind on food, and food is scarce, you will panic;
if you have set your mind on buying clothes, and the malls have shut, you will panic.
If you have allowed your mind to flow on the ocean of God, you will be able to float on your back while the rip tide takes the rest of mankind out for a long swim; and we shall be able to save ourselves.
The time is coming. It always comes. When the time comes, we shall be the creators of our lives - not parents, not teachers, not mentors.
We and God work together, when that time comes when we are alone and we are called upon to save ourselves. Then we create. It is our turn to continue the story. And if we have had the tiniest bit of faith and the tiniest bit of love, our story will be good.
Otherwise, it will be a bad story.
Our whole lives prepare us for the continuance of our story. Learn to let God move you along, and when the time comes - when we have reached the rock bottom of our life addictions - we shall speak with the voices of angels.
They do live their lives; they do not assume an unplantlike existence.
When we are told that just as God takes care of the lilies, so He cares for us, and therefore do not give thought to what shall we eat and what shall we wear. It means that we eat and dress, but our thoughts - particularly our goals as we conceptualize them - should be of God, not the obsession of food and clothes.
It means that when the time comes - and it will come - when the conceptual defenses in which we live are broken down...
a time such as the present, when our stories were discovered to have been childrens' stories...
if you have set your mind on food, and food is scarce, you will panic;
if you have set your mind on buying clothes, and the malls have shut, you will panic.
If you have allowed your mind to flow on the ocean of God, you will be able to float on your back while the rip tide takes the rest of mankind out for a long swim; and we shall be able to save ourselves.
The time is coming. It always comes. When the time comes, we shall be the creators of our lives - not parents, not teachers, not mentors.
We and God work together, when that time comes when we are alone and we are called upon to save ourselves. Then we create. It is our turn to continue the story. And if we have had the tiniest bit of faith and the tiniest bit of love, our story will be good.
Otherwise, it will be a bad story.
Our whole lives prepare us for the continuance of our story. Learn to let God move you along, and when the time comes - when we have reached the rock bottom of our life addictions - we shall speak with the voices of angels.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Home Of The Torturers
Official Washington has always been kind to mankind's most ardent oppressors.
The USA sheltered the killers and torturers of the Batista regime when they fled Cuba on January 1, 1959. It gave them a home for the rest of their lives. Ideology once again trumped humanity.
Official Washington. Bureaucratic Washington. Taker of our money, dispenser of largess to our oppressors.
The USA sheltered the killers and torturers of the Batista regime when they fled Cuba on January 1, 1959. It gave them a home for the rest of their lives. Ideology once again trumped humanity.
Official Washington. Bureaucratic Washington. Taker of our money, dispenser of largess to our oppressors.
Torture Again; History; Seeing The Future Etc.
(apologies for the way the pasted text came out. I worked with it, but it was impossible to align it properly.)
GRAHAM GREENE AND CUBA: OUR MAN IN HAVANA?
by PETER HULME
New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 82 no. 3 & 4 (2008):185-209
Of course, it has all been done before, and - of course - we shall all fall asleep and forget it all again. I think that if we really did remember history - and thus be able to learn from it - we would be seriously encumbered: we would lurch around like historical zombies, bumping into walls and automobiles, we would blink blindly like historical cave fish unaccustomed to the sun. Our whole zest, our brio, our love of life comes from our ability to forget our crimes, and the eternal forgiveness of God. Hence, we sleep and forget.
Now another point that is very interesting in Our Man in Havana is the plot element of having unknown military installations in Oriente Province in Cuba, which was the geographical focus of the 26th July Movement of Castro. The eventual installations of nuclear weapons came 4 years later in the west at Pinar del Rio. Once again, satire and irony lead the way. We should not be so concerned with learning from history, as we should be to learn the satires of circumstances and ironies of history, and from them we polish our skills at forecasting the future messes we shall create: the future satires and ironies - tragic, cruel, and bloody.
note:
The question is: what is at work here, in the writings of the satirist? Is he merely picking one of a possible number of future combinations of events? Or is he somehow divining the optimal path - not optimal in the sense it is best for us - that events will take.
Of the infinite number of possible futures, there must be a way to pare them down to a number that can be dealt with. Of all the paths, there are the paths of least resistance: the most optimal paths to pursue. Somehow, the brilliant satirist picks on a path very close to the most probable!!
GRAHAM GREENE AND CUBA: OUR MAN IN HAVANA?
by PETER HULME
New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 82 no. 3 & 4 (2008):185-209
In November 1964 Graham Greene wrote a deeply sarcastic letter to The
Daily Telegraph contrasting the U.S.-supported Vietnamese army’s
triumphalist photographs of their torture of Vietcong prisoners with the good
old days in which “hypocrisy paid a tribute to virtue by hushing up the torture
inflicted by its own soldiers and condemning the torture inflicted by
the other side” (Greene 1989:114-15).
Then in November 1971 he berated
the British Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, for his defense of what he
called the “deep interrogation” of IRA suspects – long hours of enforced
standing, hooding, permanent noise, sleep deprivation. Nobody has ever
suffered permanent injury from these techniques, Maudling said,
foreshadowing Donald Rumsfeld’s breezy dismissal of exactly the same
techniques at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base.
When applied by communists
or fascists, Greene noted, we call it “torture,” but when applied by the British we downgrade it to ill treatment (Greene 1989:154-56). The CIA calls it
“enhanced interrogation.”38 That, fifty years on from Our Man in Havana,
torture is still at the forefront of debates about how to combat terrorism, and that those debates should still focus on Cuba, but now on a U.S. base situated
within the island – one suspects that none of this would have come as much of
a surprise to Graham Greene.
Of course, it has all been done before, and - of course - we shall all fall asleep and forget it all again. I think that if we really did remember history - and thus be able to learn from it - we would be seriously encumbered: we would lurch around like historical zombies, bumping into walls and automobiles, we would blink blindly like historical cave fish unaccustomed to the sun. Our whole zest, our brio, our love of life comes from our ability to forget our crimes, and the eternal forgiveness of God. Hence, we sleep and forget.
Now another point that is very interesting in Our Man in Havana is the plot element of having unknown military installations in Oriente Province in Cuba, which was the geographical focus of the 26th July Movement of Castro. The eventual installations of nuclear weapons came 4 years later in the west at Pinar del Rio. Once again, satire and irony lead the way. We should not be so concerned with learning from history, as we should be to learn the satires of circumstances and ironies of history, and from them we polish our skills at forecasting the future messes we shall create: the future satires and ironies - tragic, cruel, and bloody.
note:
The question is: what is at work here, in the writings of the satirist? Is he merely picking one of a possible number of future combinations of events? Or is he somehow divining the optimal path - not optimal in the sense it is best for us - that events will take.
Of the infinite number of possible futures, there must be a way to pare them down to a number that can be dealt with. Of all the paths, there are the paths of least resistance: the most optimal paths to pursue. Somehow, the brilliant satirist picks on a path very close to the most probable!!
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
The Speed Of News
Newspapers are falling by the wayside. The internet delivers news more quickly, at a greater speed and volume, more than the old news can.
When the ancients sought to build a tower to heaven, they were scattered over the earth, mutually incomprehensible to each other, speaking different tongues.
When we seek knowledge at the speed of light, what will happen?
Knowledge is not a sound-bite.
Knowledge is enduring. If a sound-bite is the taste of candy, knowledge is the extra weight that come from the calories and carbs.
Once again, we cannot control our cravings. We seek monumental portions, we seek sugar spikes in our blood. We are gaining informational mass, while living in knowledge-anorexia.
Nothing endures. Nothing may endure, because it may cause us to remember, and if we remember - having learned some eternal truth - we may then not need the constant flow of data.
We cannot confront wrongdoing at high levels, because we might remember...we might have a narrative constantly before us on what is right and what is wrong. This cannot exist.
We could not have gone to war in Iraq so easily, had people had the knowledge that war is uncertain, tragic, and destructive of everything.
This knowledge had to be hidden under the speed of incoming disinformation and incorrect intelligence.
Newspaper themselves participated, and marched like an inmate band at Auschwitz, playing themselves to their own fate: the allergies of news, the irrepressible itching, the constant cough, the burning in the stomach, the ups and downs as you are being peppered with selected bits of information, programmed by a corporate entity.
We stand about watching, helpless.
We stood about helpless as Senator Phil Gramm destroyed the banking system.
We stood about helpless as Iraq was invaded.
What good is any news or knowledge to people who will not help themselves?
When the ancients sought to build a tower to heaven, they were scattered over the earth, mutually incomprehensible to each other, speaking different tongues.
When we seek knowledge at the speed of light, what will happen?
Knowledge is not a sound-bite.
Knowledge is enduring. If a sound-bite is the taste of candy, knowledge is the extra weight that come from the calories and carbs.
Once again, we cannot control our cravings. We seek monumental portions, we seek sugar spikes in our blood. We are gaining informational mass, while living in knowledge-anorexia.
Nothing endures. Nothing may endure, because it may cause us to remember, and if we remember - having learned some eternal truth - we may then not need the constant flow of data.
We cannot confront wrongdoing at high levels, because we might remember...we might have a narrative constantly before us on what is right and what is wrong. This cannot exist.
We could not have gone to war in Iraq so easily, had people had the knowledge that war is uncertain, tragic, and destructive of everything.
This knowledge had to be hidden under the speed of incoming disinformation and incorrect intelligence.
Newspaper themselves participated, and marched like an inmate band at Auschwitz, playing themselves to their own fate: the allergies of news, the irrepressible itching, the constant cough, the burning in the stomach, the ups and downs as you are being peppered with selected bits of information, programmed by a corporate entity.
We stand about watching, helpless.
We stood about helpless as Senator Phil Gramm destroyed the banking system.
We stood about helpless as Iraq was invaded.
What good is any news or knowledge to people who will not help themselves?
Friday, May 22, 2009
Armageddon's Addicts
Baysage has a post on how we are addicted to war. You may use the link on the right: What Powderfinger said... to view it.
Madea would say we are the war-mongeringest fools she ever saw, I think.
I shall repeat myself once more:
World War II did not end in 1945.
It morphed into the Cold War.
The Cold War between the USA and the USSR contined until 1991 when the USSR fell apart.
After 1991, after a brief hiatus, the USA continued the war unilaterally, extending bases and its presence wider and wider.
At present, there is war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. We still have bases in Okinawa from 1945, and new ones are planned in other areas.
Madea would say we are the war-mongeringest fools she ever saw, I think.
I shall repeat myself once more:
World War II did not end in 1945.
It morphed into the Cold War.
The Cold War between the USA and the USSR contined until 1991 when the USSR fell apart.
After 1991, after a brief hiatus, the USA continued the war unilaterally, extending bases and its presence wider and wider.
At present, there is war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. We still have bases in Okinawa from 1945, and new ones are planned in other areas.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Obama-crat
The vote to refuse to close Gitmo clearly shows that Mr. Obama is - as I have long suspected - truly one of a kind.
He may not have anyone else like him to follow in his footsteps...or to walk along with him, for that matter.
Obama is more like an idealization of a politician that jumped down from the screen during the Movietone News, playing at the theater where The Purple Rose Of Cairo was showing.
He may not have anyone else like him to follow in his footsteps...or to walk along with him, for that matter.
Obama is more like an idealization of a politician that jumped down from the screen during the Movietone News, playing at the theater where The Purple Rose Of Cairo was showing.
There Was A Country From Nantucket...
Consider this:
http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2009/05/reconfiguring-romanticism-27-david.html
POEMS & POETICS
In addition to our fond visions of "the city on the hill", we see America as a sailing vessel, the Pequod, to be exact:
...the grotesque of the democracy similar to the description of the Pequod...
“A cannibal craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies…”
where "chased" mean - I think without looking it up - worked and cleaned and set within a setting, as well as "chased after".
"Tricking" could also have more than one meaning.
http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2009/05/reconfiguring-romanticism-27-david.html
POEMS & POETICS
In addition to our fond visions of "the city on the hill", we see America as a sailing vessel, the Pequod, to be exact:
...the grotesque of the democracy similar to the description of the Pequod...
“A cannibal craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies…”
where "chased" mean - I think without looking it up - worked and cleaned and set within a setting, as well as "chased after".
"Tricking" could also have more than one meaning.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Blue Scarves For Peace
While the usual American ritual is to send more and more troops to kill more and more of troublemakers and civilians, there are other peace movements.
From FOREVER UNDER CONSTRUCTION:
http://homeyra.wordpress.com/2009/05/16/blue-scarves/#comment-12821
Excerpt from “Sending More Troops Will Not Solve the Problem”–Grassroots Afghan Activist Rangina Hamidi – Democracy Now
Rangina Hamidi: “[...] In Kandahar, we got together about—well, we got together last year and decided that as the government agencies have been celebrating International Day for Women, which falls on March 8th every year, we did not want to be necessarily celebrating the day when so many women were in mourning because they were losing a lot of their male relatives or male members of their families almost on a daily basis. So, in 2008, on March 8th, the women in our network gathered together, more than 1,500 of them, to commemorate the day by praying for peace, because they’ve been in war for literally more than thirty years. And women are sick and tired of it, and they don’t know—you know, on a local level, they don’t know any political figure, locally or nationally and/or even internationally, that they can go to to have their voices and have their plea be heard. So, because this is a religious and a conservative society, the women said, “Who better to pray to about peace than God?” These are all believing women. And so, they gathered for the first time publicly to pray for peace.
From FOREVER UNDER CONSTRUCTION:
http://homeyra.wordpress.com/2009/05/16/blue-scarves/#comment-12821
Excerpt from “Sending More Troops Will Not Solve the Problem”–Grassroots Afghan Activist Rangina Hamidi – Democracy Now
Rangina Hamidi: “[...] In Kandahar, we got together about—well, we got together last year and decided that as the government agencies have been celebrating International Day for Women, which falls on March 8th every year, we did not want to be necessarily celebrating the day when so many women were in mourning because they were losing a lot of their male relatives or male members of their families almost on a daily basis. So, in 2008, on March 8th, the women in our network gathered together, more than 1,500 of them, to commemorate the day by praying for peace, because they’ve been in war for literally more than thirty years. And women are sick and tired of it, and they don’t know—you know, on a local level, they don’t know any political figure, locally or nationally and/or even internationally, that they can go to to have their voices and have their plea be heard. So, because this is a religious and a conservative society, the women said, “Who better to pray to about peace than God?” These are all believing women. And so, they gathered for the first time publicly to pray for peace.
What It Is
Guantanamo, Afghanistan, photo-gate...
I guess that Obama has been learning what America is all about: it is a war machine; what's good for war is good for the USA.
We can never let the people we torture and imprison go free. They will come back to kill us. And there will be more and more every year...until the rotten hulk falls apart.
I guess that Obama has been learning what America is all about: it is a war machine; what's good for war is good for the USA.
We can never let the people we torture and imprison go free. They will come back to kill us. And there will be more and more every year...until the rotten hulk falls apart.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Obama At Notre Dame
It must come as a terrible shock that a confrontation that has been built up with so much time and effort suddenly is used by your opponent to his own advantage.
Sorry, FOX and Republicans.
You're really going to have to change yourselves and your crumby little souls, and remake yourselves into human beings. You can't just rely on money and b.s. anymore.
Sorry, FOX and Republicans.
You're really going to have to change yourselves and your crumby little souls, and remake yourselves into human beings. You can't just rely on money and b.s. anymore.
Synaethesia
Wikipedia:
What about people whose knowledge and awareness of the world is heavily tinged with emotional characteristics?
I think a lot of bi-polarity is due to a synaethesia of awareness being always mixed with some emotional tincture.
We tend to think of the process as : I hear something, I re-act to it. If I re-act positively, I am happy. If negatively, I am sad.
No. There is also a process: I hear. This hearing is filled with sadness...even before I recognize what it is I am hearing.
Or it is full of joy, even though I don't know why quite yet.
The second type, the synaethetic type of awareness is a burden.
Synesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia or synaesthesia, plural synesthesiae or synaesthesiae)—from the Ancient Greek σύν (syn), "together," and αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), "sensation" — is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway..
...People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes.
In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme → color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored, ...while in ordinal linguistic personification, numbers, days of the week and months of the year evoke personalities....In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be "farther away" than 1990), or may have a (three-dimensional) view of a year as a map (clockwise or counterclockwise)....Yet another recently identified type, visual motion → sound synesthesia, involves hearing sounds in response to visual motion and flicker.
Over 60 types of synesthesia have been reported by people, but only a fraction has been evaluated by scientific research. Even within one type, synesthetic perceptions vary in intensity and people vary in awareness of their synesthetic perceptions
What about people whose knowledge and awareness of the world is heavily tinged with emotional characteristics?
I think a lot of bi-polarity is due to a synaethesia of awareness being always mixed with some emotional tincture.
We tend to think of the process as : I hear something, I re-act to it. If I re-act positively, I am happy. If negatively, I am sad.
No. There is also a process: I hear. This hearing is filled with sadness...even before I recognize what it is I am hearing.
Or it is full of joy, even though I don't know why quite yet.
The second type, the synaethetic type of awareness is a burden.
Wall Street & Drugs
I want to know which drugs was Wall Street on.
This is not a metaphor.
When President Bush said Wall Street had gotten drunk, even he did not know how close he was to the truth.
In the 90's, the drug of choice on Wall Street was cocaine. This has been well documented.
For example, Mr. Kudlow on CNBC was fired from Bear Stearns for drug use:
http://exiledonline.com/less-than-kudlow-is-cnbc-host-suffering-cocaine-relapse/
Less Than Kudlow: Is CNBC Host Suffering Another Cocaine Relapse?
By Mark Ames
In 1994, Mr. Kudlow make a public confession of his addiction to drugs and alcohol.
In 1995:
The New York Times checked in on their drugs-are-bad poster boy 15 months later, in July, 1995, and the what they found...
Fifteen months ago, Mr. Kudlow made a highly public confession of his drug problem shortly after he was forced to resign as chief economist at Bear Stearns. He also made a fresh career start as a conservative political commentator for television and magazines and said he believed that he had overcome his addiction.
…But over the weekend, Mrs. Kudlow petitioned for a divorce and an order to prevent Mr. Kudlow from tapping their Bear Stearn’s retirement account to pay for a weeks-long cocaine binge. “The defendant will use such money to buy cocaine,” she stated in an affidavit, “and in so doing will likely suffer a fatal overdose and will dissipate the only remaining liquid marital assets.”
So now to the present. Do you think it was all the thrill of risk taking that drove them on? And the bonuses! How much of those bonuses used to go to, and still go to drugs?
Unless sometime between the 90s and now, all of Wall Street went temperance and got on the wagon, a lot is used for drugs and booze.
How much of the Crisis is due to drugs?
Why has it not been mentioned? It hasn't been mentioned because everyone on the East Coast knows about it, and they know the rest of the country will go ballistic if they find out: a real atom-bomb tea party for Mr. Santelli...whose parent company, GE, accepted government money even as he railed against helping home owners.
These things are known by those near to what's going on.
Consider Mr. Kudlow: now that you think about it, you know that every bloody Republican and conservative back then knew he was skiing cocaine at every chance.
They did not care.
Consider George Roche III: while he was the top Republican fund raiser and pushing conservative thought, he was having a 19 year affair with his son's wife; you know that by year 5, everybody nearby knew what the deal was.
But, the more outrageous it is, the quieter they are.
What sudden change of moral fiber caused the present day people on Wall Street not to do drugs? What religion was it? The rest of the country might want some of that stuff.
There was no change.
There were drugs, and there were plenty of them.
If we start talking about them now, it would blow the country apart. Let sleeping dogs lie.
This is not a metaphor.
When President Bush said Wall Street had gotten drunk, even he did not know how close he was to the truth.
In the 90's, the drug of choice on Wall Street was cocaine. This has been well documented.
For example, Mr. Kudlow on CNBC was fired from Bear Stearns for drug use:
http://exiledonline.com/less-than-kudlow-is-cnbc-host-suffering-cocaine-relapse/
Less Than Kudlow: Is CNBC Host Suffering Another Cocaine Relapse?
By Mark Ames
In 1994, Mr. Kudlow make a public confession of his addiction to drugs and alcohol.
In 1995:
The New York Times checked in on their drugs-are-bad poster boy 15 months later, in July, 1995, and the what they found...
Fifteen months ago, Mr. Kudlow made a highly public confession of his drug problem shortly after he was forced to resign as chief economist at Bear Stearns. He also made a fresh career start as a conservative political commentator for television and magazines and said he believed that he had overcome his addiction.
…But over the weekend, Mrs. Kudlow petitioned for a divorce and an order to prevent Mr. Kudlow from tapping their Bear Stearn’s retirement account to pay for a weeks-long cocaine binge. “The defendant will use such money to buy cocaine,” she stated in an affidavit, “and in so doing will likely suffer a fatal overdose and will dissipate the only remaining liquid marital assets.”
So now to the present. Do you think it was all the thrill of risk taking that drove them on? And the bonuses! How much of those bonuses used to go to, and still go to drugs?
Unless sometime between the 90s and now, all of Wall Street went temperance and got on the wagon, a lot is used for drugs and booze.
How much of the Crisis is due to drugs?
Why has it not been mentioned? It hasn't been mentioned because everyone on the East Coast knows about it, and they know the rest of the country will go ballistic if they find out: a real atom-bomb tea party for Mr. Santelli...whose parent company, GE, accepted government money even as he railed against helping home owners.
These things are known by those near to what's going on.
Consider Mr. Kudlow: now that you think about it, you know that every bloody Republican and conservative back then knew he was skiing cocaine at every chance.
They did not care.
Consider George Roche III: while he was the top Republican fund raiser and pushing conservative thought, he was having a 19 year affair with his son's wife; you know that by year 5, everybody nearby knew what the deal was.
But, the more outrageous it is, the quieter they are.
What sudden change of moral fiber caused the present day people on Wall Street not to do drugs? What religion was it? The rest of the country might want some of that stuff.
There was no change.
There were drugs, and there were plenty of them.
If we start talking about them now, it would blow the country apart. Let sleeping dogs lie.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Obama Nix Pix
President Obama did a U-turn of release of prisoner abuse pictures.
Just how many pictures are there? How wide spread waas this? How out of control was the army, or was it policy to be depraved?
A policy of depraved violence was typical in past wars to instill fear.
A policy of meticulously recording every monstrous act was also typical in the past.
I, personally, do not care to see any more photos.
When we were clamoring for war, I remembered that General Sherman said "War is Hell."
What part of that did you not understand?
War is death and destruction, killing and rapine, theft and brigandage, torture and suffering. Everyone knows that. So why were we so stupid that we believed it was a picnic?
The critical question is why were we so stupid.
Answer that question.
Just how many pictures are there? How wide spread waas this? How out of control was the army, or was it policy to be depraved?
A policy of depraved violence was typical in past wars to instill fear.
A policy of meticulously recording every monstrous act was also typical in the past.
I, personally, do not care to see any more photos.
When we were clamoring for war, I remembered that General Sherman said "War is Hell."
What part of that did you not understand?
War is death and destruction, killing and rapine, theft and brigandage, torture and suffering. Everyone knows that. So why were we so stupid that we believed it was a picnic?
The critical question is why were we so stupid.
Answer that question.
Star Trek
Why did no one tell me Tyler Perry was gonna be in Star Trek?
Cool.
(I know the answer. I went to see it with a friend. I am white, he is very white. I said, Damn! Is that Tyler Perry? I think it is!
He said, Who's Tyler Perry?)
Cool.
(I know the answer. I went to see it with a friend. I am white, he is very white. I said, Damn! Is that Tyler Perry? I think it is!
He said, Who's Tyler Perry?)
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Ragheads Vs. Baseball Cap Heads
I was eating lunch with my mates, the TYBALTs: "trim young bucks at lunch together", when an obstreperous group of ROMEOs: : "retired old men eating out", came into Hanaan's Diner.
Briefly, they were loud, crude, and annoying, like most retirees. They were talking about the Sikhs that lived nearby, calling them "Ragheads".
We jeered at them, calling them "Capheads", short for "Baseball Cap Heads". We had to stick up for our friend, Singh.
Now that term, "caphead", isn't all that funny in itself. "Raghead" has a sort of lilt and rhythm to it - unfortunately. "Caphead" does not.
However, each and every one of those old buffoons was indeed wearing the emblem of their order: a baseball cap!
Some had baseball team logos, some had Florida vacation spots, some had John 3:18; each and every one a bloody felt or mesh cap.
Briefly, they were loud, crude, and annoying, like most retirees. They were talking about the Sikhs that lived nearby, calling them "Ragheads".
We jeered at them, calling them "Capheads", short for "Baseball Cap Heads". We had to stick up for our friend, Singh.
Now that term, "caphead", isn't all that funny in itself. "Raghead" has a sort of lilt and rhythm to it - unfortunately. "Caphead" does not.
However, each and every one of those old buffoons was indeed wearing the emblem of their order: a baseball cap!
Some had baseball team logos, some had Florida vacation spots, some had John 3:18; each and every one a bloody felt or mesh cap.
I Wish I Had Said That!
What are truths without loves and laughs?
They are like quarks without spin,
without charm,
without strange!
Actually I did say it. I popped out of the quantum foam and appended itself to the end of a comment I was writing to Baysage in "What Powderfinger said..." ( see links at right ).
I said to myself, "Blast! Why is my good writing always in someone else's blog?!"
They are like quarks without spin,
without charm,
without strange!
Actually I did say it. I popped out of the quantum foam and appended itself to the end of a comment I was writing to Baysage in "What Powderfinger said..." ( see links at right ).
I said to myself, "Blast! Why is my good writing always in someone else's blog?!"
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Krieg Und Die Endwaffe: The End Of Voluntary War
The enemy is War itself.
Yet we are fighting its battles.
The enemy in the nuclear age is War itself.
Nuclear weapons are not merely a greater weapon; they are the End Weapon - die Endwaffe - a weapon that will not remain in the hand of the one that thinks to wield it, but leaps free and does its damage without humanity able to intervene.
Atomic devices are not weapons, they are idols, they are kings, they are rulers. They will not subordinate themselves to mankind.
They are they Terminators. In our popular fairy tales, we have told the story of the machines taking over occurring sometime in the future. It has already happened.
We stumble about in fear that Taliban will seize the atomic devices of Pakistan...it is the bombs themselves which are conniving to be set free. They are calling us, like the unsleeping Cthullu in his city of nightmares.
Yet we are fighting its battles.
The enemy in the nuclear age is War itself.
Nuclear weapons are not merely a greater weapon; they are the End Weapon - die Endwaffe - a weapon that will not remain in the hand of the one that thinks to wield it, but leaps free and does its damage without humanity able to intervene.
Atomic devices are not weapons, they are idols, they are kings, they are rulers. They will not subordinate themselves to mankind.
They are they Terminators. In our popular fairy tales, we have told the story of the machines taking over occurring sometime in the future. It has already happened.
We stumble about in fear that Taliban will seize the atomic devices of Pakistan...it is the bombs themselves which are conniving to be set free. They are calling us, like the unsleeping Cthullu in his city of nightmares.
Health Care
I am opposed to a health care system based on private insurers.
They have been tested and have been found wanting.
The more the distortions they tell us, the more I fear them: they are Present Day American (PDAs!!!) businessmen, and therefore by their very nature unable to function in any way remotely resembling the public interest.
This generation cannot serve the public interest, only their own; it is what they know, it is what they learned, it is what they believe. Only a fool would think otherwise.
They have been tested and have been found wanting.
The more the distortions they tell us, the more I fear them: they are Present Day American (PDAs!!!) businessmen, and therefore by their very nature unable to function in any way remotely resembling the public interest.
This generation cannot serve the public interest, only their own; it is what they know, it is what they learned, it is what they believe. Only a fool would think otherwise.
Republican Renaissance
People keep chattering about re-inventing the Republican Party. That will be an impossible task, until such time as they recognize that the Republican Party is now and has been for 100 years the Lobbyist for the wealthy.
The reason that Reagan drew so much support into the Republican Party is due to the sometimes great notion that we were all part of the potentially wealthy class: we all owned stocks and bonds, we all saw our investments rocket with the markets. We were all of the business class, we were all near-rich, we were Republicans - hard core ones.
Now we see that it was a darn good story, but it was a sham.
The future holds nothing good for us old believers - the ones who believe in unlimited growth and wealth for the USA.
Future generations will not feel our pain, for they will have grown up in a different world. But we shall spend the rest of our lives wailing at the West Wall of our once near wealth.
And the Republican Party has lost its fairy tale. It will not be re-invented until it discovers a new fairy tale, and a new group of dumb believers.
The Democrats already have theirs...for the time being.
The reason that Reagan drew so much support into the Republican Party is due to the sometimes great notion that we were all part of the potentially wealthy class: we all owned stocks and bonds, we all saw our investments rocket with the markets. We were all of the business class, we were all near-rich, we were Republicans - hard core ones.
Now we see that it was a darn good story, but it was a sham.
The future holds nothing good for us old believers - the ones who believe in unlimited growth and wealth for the USA.
Future generations will not feel our pain, for they will have grown up in a different world. But we shall spend the rest of our lives wailing at the West Wall of our once near wealth.
And the Republican Party has lost its fairy tale. It will not be re-invented until it discovers a new fairy tale, and a new group of dumb believers.
The Democrats already have theirs...for the time being.
Friday, May 08, 2009
Pop-Up Books
What if our lives be seen as rather large Victorian pop-up books? What shall the next page, whose edge we are turning, look like?
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Afghanistan
Remind me again why we are fighting the Taliban?
Was it because they sent airplanes into the World Trade Center?
No?
Something else?
What is it, again?
Are they bad guys, like Saddam was? Are they nasty, medieval type who oppress women?
I know there's a good reason; I just can't remember what it is.
Was it because they sent airplanes into the World Trade Center?
No?
Something else?
What is it, again?
Are they bad guys, like Saddam was? Are they nasty, medieval type who oppress women?
I know there's a good reason; I just can't remember what it is.
American Manufacturing
Every day we use a Oster kitchen blender that is 50 years old. The one we had that was about 5 years old broke some time ago.
My mother uses an Electrolux vacuum cleaner that is at least 55 years old, the same design as the one that is in the Museum of Modern Art is the Design Area.
We have a Waring mixer that is almost 40 years old, a Braun coffee grinder that is 30 years old.
When I bake, I use wooden spoons that are 60 years old, and perhaps I should not use.
We use my mother-in-law's heavy black skillet that is more than 60 years old.
They don't make things like they used to. Black & Decker - an icon to Americans - has declined mightily in their quality.
The chase for profits at the expense of everything else leads to the dumper.
My mother uses an Electrolux vacuum cleaner that is at least 55 years old, the same design as the one that is in the Museum of Modern Art is the Design Area.
We have a Waring mixer that is almost 40 years old, a Braun coffee grinder that is 30 years old.
When I bake, I use wooden spoons that are 60 years old, and perhaps I should not use.
We use my mother-in-law's heavy black skillet that is more than 60 years old.
They don't make things like they used to. Black & Decker - an icon to Americans - has declined mightily in their quality.
The chase for profits at the expense of everything else leads to the dumper.
Senator Phil Gramm
Reprint from The Angry Bear:
http://angrybear.blogspot.com/2009/05/james-galbraith-remarks.html
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
James Galbraith remarks
Texas Observer carries commentary that is revealing.
Editor’s note: These remarks were delivered to a meeting of the Texas Lyceum in Austin on April 3, at a debate between University of Texas professor James Galbraith, an Observer contributing writer, and former Majority Leader Richard Armey, chief instigator of the recent Astroturf “tea party" protests. Armey had begun his remarks by noting that his rule in life was “never trust anyone from Austin or Boston,” and proceeded to declare his allegiance to the “Austrian School” of economics, a libertarian view that regards public intervention in private markets as socialism.
Galbraith:
It is of course a pleasure to be with you today. I was born in Boston, and I am proud of it. And I have lived 24 years in Austin—and I’m proud of that.Leader Armey spoke to you of his admiration for Austrian economics. I can’t resist telling you that when the Vienna Economics Institute celebrated its centennial, many years ago, they invited, as their keynote speaker, my father [John Kenneth Galbraith]. The leading economists of the Austrian school—including von Hayek and von Haberler—returned for the occasion. And so my father took a moment to reflect on the economic triumphs of the Austrian Republic since the war, which, he said, “would not have been possible without the contribution of these men.” They nodded—briefly—until it dawned on them what he meant. They’d all left the country in the 1930s.
My own economics is American: genus Institutionalist; species: Galbraithian.This is a panel on the crisis. Mr. Moderator, you ask what is the root cause? My reply is in three parts.
First, an idea. The idea that capitalism, for all its considerable virtues, is inherently self-stabilizing, that government and private business are adversaries rather than partners; the idea that freedom without responsibility is a viable business principle; the idea that regulation, in financial matters especially, can be dispensed with. We tried it, and we see the result.
Second, a person. It would not be right to blame any single person for these events, but if I had to choose one to name it would be a Texan, our own distinguished former Senator Phil Gramm. I’d cite specifically the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act—the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act—in 1999, after which it took less than a decade to reproduce all the pathologies that Glass-Steagall had been enacted to deal with in 1933. I’d also cite the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, slipped into an 11,000-page appropriations bill in December 2000 as Congress was adjourning following Bush v. Gore. This measure deregulated energy futures trading, enabling Enron and legitimating credit-default swaps, and creating a massive vector for the transmission of financial risk throughout the global system. When the Washington Post caught up with me at an airport in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a year ago to ask for a comment on Gramm’s role, I said very quickly that he was “the sorcerer’s apprentice of financial instability and disaster.” They put that on the front page. I do have to give Gramm some credit: When the Post called him up and read that to him, he said, “I deny it.”
Third, a policy. This was the abandonment of state responsibility for financial regulation: the regulation of mortgage originations, of underwriting, and of securitization. This abandonment was not subtle: The first head of the Office of Thrift Supervision in the George W. Bush administration came to a press conference on one occasion with a stack of copies of the Federal Register and a chainsaw. A chainsaw. The message was clear. And it led to the explosion of liars’ loans, neutron loans (which destroy people but leave buildings intact), and toxic waste. That these were terms of art in finance tells you what you need to know.
+++++++++++++
There is plenty of accountability. Obama or not, these thieves and scoundrels must be brought to justice.
http://angrybear.blogspot.com/2009/05/james-galbraith-remarks.html
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
James Galbraith remarks
Texas Observer carries commentary that is revealing.
Editor’s note: These remarks were delivered to a meeting of the Texas Lyceum in Austin on April 3, at a debate between University of Texas professor James Galbraith, an Observer contributing writer, and former Majority Leader Richard Armey, chief instigator of the recent Astroturf “tea party" protests. Armey had begun his remarks by noting that his rule in life was “never trust anyone from Austin or Boston,” and proceeded to declare his allegiance to the “Austrian School” of economics, a libertarian view that regards public intervention in private markets as socialism.
Galbraith:
It is of course a pleasure to be with you today. I was born in Boston, and I am proud of it. And I have lived 24 years in Austin—and I’m proud of that.Leader Armey spoke to you of his admiration for Austrian economics. I can’t resist telling you that when the Vienna Economics Institute celebrated its centennial, many years ago, they invited, as their keynote speaker, my father [John Kenneth Galbraith]. The leading economists of the Austrian school—including von Hayek and von Haberler—returned for the occasion. And so my father took a moment to reflect on the economic triumphs of the Austrian Republic since the war, which, he said, “would not have been possible without the contribution of these men.” They nodded—briefly—until it dawned on them what he meant. They’d all left the country in the 1930s.
My own economics is American: genus Institutionalist; species: Galbraithian.This is a panel on the crisis. Mr. Moderator, you ask what is the root cause? My reply is in three parts.
First, an idea. The idea that capitalism, for all its considerable virtues, is inherently self-stabilizing, that government and private business are adversaries rather than partners; the idea that freedom without responsibility is a viable business principle; the idea that regulation, in financial matters especially, can be dispensed with. We tried it, and we see the result.
Second, a person. It would not be right to blame any single person for these events, but if I had to choose one to name it would be a Texan, our own distinguished former Senator Phil Gramm. I’d cite specifically the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act—the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act—in 1999, after which it took less than a decade to reproduce all the pathologies that Glass-Steagall had been enacted to deal with in 1933. I’d also cite the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, slipped into an 11,000-page appropriations bill in December 2000 as Congress was adjourning following Bush v. Gore. This measure deregulated energy futures trading, enabling Enron and legitimating credit-default swaps, and creating a massive vector for the transmission of financial risk throughout the global system. When the Washington Post caught up with me at an airport in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a year ago to ask for a comment on Gramm’s role, I said very quickly that he was “the sorcerer’s apprentice of financial instability and disaster.” They put that on the front page. I do have to give Gramm some credit: When the Post called him up and read that to him, he said, “I deny it.”
Third, a policy. This was the abandonment of state responsibility for financial regulation: the regulation of mortgage originations, of underwriting, and of securitization. This abandonment was not subtle: The first head of the Office of Thrift Supervision in the George W. Bush administration came to a press conference on one occasion with a stack of copies of the Federal Register and a chainsaw. A chainsaw. The message was clear. And it led to the explosion of liars’ loans, neutron loans (which destroy people but leave buildings intact), and toxic waste. That these were terms of art in finance tells you what you need to know.
+++++++++++++
There is plenty of accountability. Obama or not, these thieves and scoundrels must be brought to justice.
Blog Of Note
I went to a Blog Of Note and was stalked by a floating advertisement for a survey.
Some others had ads, too.
So, I left.
Some others had ads, too.
So, I left.
Wicked Witch Of The West
I saw a video of Condoleeza Rice talking with a Stanford student. Not pretty.
She says "Abu Ghraib was wrong! That's right. Abu Ghraib was wrong."
Wow!
Cool insight!
She also says there's a lot of "second guessing" going on now.
I prefer "Monday morning quarterbacking", or possibly "Hindsight is always 20/20". What profound people these are!
She goes on to say that if "you" were there on September 11 watching people jumping from the upper stories of those buildings, you would have done everything legal to prevent anymore Americans being killed.
First, I was watching and I saw them jump.
Second, I probably would have ok'd enhanced interrogation that afternoon.
Third, I would not have continued my support of torture after I had come to my senses.
That is where we differ: I never state that whatever evil I do is a good, past, present, and future. I admit my mistakes.
She is like Bush, preening before the opinion of History.
History will spit them out.
She says "Abu Ghraib was wrong! That's right. Abu Ghraib was wrong."
Wow!
Cool insight!
She also says there's a lot of "second guessing" going on now.
I prefer "Monday morning quarterbacking", or possibly "Hindsight is always 20/20". What profound people these are!
She goes on to say that if "you" were there on September 11 watching people jumping from the upper stories of those buildings, you would have done everything legal to prevent anymore Americans being killed.
First, I was watching and I saw them jump.
Second, I probably would have ok'd enhanced interrogation that afternoon.
Third, I would not have continued my support of torture after I had come to my senses.
That is where we differ: I never state that whatever evil I do is a good, past, present, and future. I admit my mistakes.
She is like Bush, preening before the opinion of History.
History will spit them out.
Banks, Not Tyra
Columbia Journalism Review
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/center_for_public_integrity_pu.php
Economic Crisis, The Audit — May 07, 2009 04:02 PM
Center for Public Integrity Puts the Subprime Puzzle Together
By Ryan Chittum
...There is something of a myth surrounding the current economic crisis, how it unfolded, and the precise role of the world’s largest financial institutions in the global meltdown. That myth suggests these banks and investment houses were somehow surprised “victims” of unscrupulous subprime mortgage lenders, and that they could not have anticipated the damaging toxic assets that have so infected their balance sheets.
What’s missing from this story is the fact that this was a self-inflicted wound for which the rest of us are picking up a massive tab. The largest American and European banks and investment houses were not the unwitting “victims” of an unforeseen financial collapse, as they have so often been portrayed. The mega-banks not only invested in subprime lending institutions — they were the enablers, bankrollers, and instigators driving high-interest lending, and they did so because it was so lucrative and unregulated.
Worse, in many instances these are the same financial institutions the government is now bailing out with tax revenues.
Our oppressors and destroyers are being paid by our government; the same people who created this nightmare are being rewarded, and will remain in power.
The outcome is obvious.
As brilliant as Obama is, he does not understand that it is not history as usual: a great dividing line has been crossed, and we cannot go back.
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/center_for_public_integrity_pu.php
Economic Crisis, The Audit — May 07, 2009 04:02 PM
Center for Public Integrity Puts the Subprime Puzzle Together
By Ryan Chittum
...There is something of a myth surrounding the current economic crisis, how it unfolded, and the precise role of the world’s largest financial institutions in the global meltdown. That myth suggests these banks and investment houses were somehow surprised “victims” of unscrupulous subprime mortgage lenders, and that they could not have anticipated the damaging toxic assets that have so infected their balance sheets.
What’s missing from this story is the fact that this was a self-inflicted wound for which the rest of us are picking up a massive tab. The largest American and European banks and investment houses were not the unwitting “victims” of an unforeseen financial collapse, as they have so often been portrayed. The mega-banks not only invested in subprime lending institutions — they were the enablers, bankrollers, and instigators driving high-interest lending, and they did so because it was so lucrative and unregulated.
Worse, in many instances these are the same financial institutions the government is now bailing out with tax revenues.
Our oppressors and destroyers are being paid by our government; the same people who created this nightmare are being rewarded, and will remain in power.
The outcome is obvious.
As brilliant as Obama is, he does not understand that it is not history as usual: a great dividing line has been crossed, and we cannot go back.
Torture Investigations
This country may not want investigations in torture, but it will not escape the burden of responsibility.
We are taking our usual chicken-hearted approach to our problems, but nothing goes away: the suffering of the least of God's creatures will be paid for.
We shall pay full measure for what we have done.
And we cannot control ourselves now anymore than we could jumping into Iraq. We are totally out of control.
We are taking our usual chicken-hearted approach to our problems, but nothing goes away: the suffering of the least of God's creatures will be paid for.
We shall pay full measure for what we have done.
And we cannot control ourselves now anymore than we could jumping into Iraq. We are totally out of control.
Event Horizon: Life Mimics Art
Reuters reports:
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE5463KD20090507
Pirates fire at U.S. Navy ship off Somalia
Thu May 7, 2009 9:22am EDT
MANAMA (Reuters) - Pirates have fired small arms weapons at a U.S. Navy supply ship off the coast of Eastern Somalia, the first attack of this kind since last year's surge in pirate attacks, the U.S. Navy said on Thursday.
The USNS Lewis and Clark was chased for about an hour on Wednesday morning by two pirates skiffs, but neither came closer than about one nautical mile to the U.S. vessel, the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet said in a statement.
Cool. Just like the rescue vessel in the film Event Horizon.
USNS Lewis and Clark: 2005
Rescue Ship Lewis and Clark: 1997
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Hillsdale Day 2
I heard from some people who were impressed by Hillsdale Day, April 30, as a day to remember what crimes were committed and what ills were visited upon us by Modern American Conservatives.
Limbaugh, Coulter, and Hillsdale Day.
Limbaugh, Coulter, and Hillsdale Day.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Modern Conservatives May 3 2009
John Adams writes, “The passions are all unlimited. If the citizens of this republic surrender the guidance for any course of time to any one passion, they may depend upon finding it, in the end, a usurping, domineering, cruel tyrant.”
We have witnessed this during the Bush Presidency after 9/11, when all matters were ruled by politics and vengeance. We went to war in Iraq, because the thirst for vengeance was so great, it literally overcame reality.
We have witnessed this also as the desire for vengeance drove the administration to the insane course of instituting a regime of torture, flouting all international norms established by this very nation and its allies at the end of the Second World War.
The passions are unlimited.
Conservatism used to stand for the control of Passion by Reason. Now Reason is the whore of Passion, as we are forced to watch so-called Conservatives speak out in defense of torture.
The decade of the 60's urged Passion and its gratification upon us. It destroyed some by drugs, some by war, but it led this entire nation into the era of unrestrained gratification of even the most base passions. Both liberal and conservative minds surrendered themselves to the gratifications of their passions, and the resulting political debate between the two sides is a result of the one side infringing upon the debased gratifications of the other.
What is the current economic turmoil a result of if not the Conservative uncontrolled passion for unlimited returns on wealth by dumb, brutal markets they call "free"? Dumb beasts tending not to equilibrium - as they are so fond of saying - but to bubbles and panics.
What Reason restrained the fools who voted for no regulation to be applied to derivatives? And they did so not even ten years after a great deal of damage had been done by those financial instruments.
Even God is a pawn in their battles: Terry Schiavo comes to mind.
Old time Conservatives worshipped God and used money; the modern day conservatives worship money and make use of God.
We have witnessed this during the Bush Presidency after 9/11, when all matters were ruled by politics and vengeance. We went to war in Iraq, because the thirst for vengeance was so great, it literally overcame reality.
We have witnessed this also as the desire for vengeance drove the administration to the insane course of instituting a regime of torture, flouting all international norms established by this very nation and its allies at the end of the Second World War.
The passions are unlimited.
Conservatism used to stand for the control of Passion by Reason. Now Reason is the whore of Passion, as we are forced to watch so-called Conservatives speak out in defense of torture.
The decade of the 60's urged Passion and its gratification upon us. It destroyed some by drugs, some by war, but it led this entire nation into the era of unrestrained gratification of even the most base passions. Both liberal and conservative minds surrendered themselves to the gratifications of their passions, and the resulting political debate between the two sides is a result of the one side infringing upon the debased gratifications of the other.
What is the current economic turmoil a result of if not the Conservative uncontrolled passion for unlimited returns on wealth by dumb, brutal markets they call "free"? Dumb beasts tending not to equilibrium - as they are so fond of saying - but to bubbles and panics.
What Reason restrained the fools who voted for no regulation to be applied to derivatives? And they did so not even ten years after a great deal of damage had been done by those financial instruments.
Even God is a pawn in their battles: Terry Schiavo comes to mind.
Old time Conservatives worshipped God and used money; the modern day conservatives worship money and make use of God.
Faerie Streams And Enchanted Bournes
I had told my friend, "Reading the Signs", that when I feel depressed, I go to the Master Story-Teller to get fixed. She asked whether the Master Story-Teller was God, and I responded that since she herself was a story-teller, she should tell me the answer to that question.
I suppose this is all very paradoxical and elitist sounding, vaguely redolent of a number of poorly recalled religious tracts and stories.
When I speak of Genesis, when I say that God created the universe, I mean that He created the things which exist and the substance upon which their being stands - the basis for things to happen - and the infinite space that contains the information for every possible combination of events to be described.
When God created man and woman, He created the potential for every detailed story. The mere, brute fact of creation of a material object: mankind's ancestor spilling forth from Time and struggling to capture his wits as he stands naked and wet before his creator is a one time event. This is the creation of the possibility of Narrative: naked narrative, unadorned, boy-meets-girl type of narrative.
When God told living things to be fruitful and multiply, He meant physically and spiritually; He meant create children and create the forms of understanding and sew the infinite wardrobe of narrative vestments, with which you will hide your nakedness. This is the creation of the detailed story: adorned narrative, Romeo and Juliet type narrative, filled with metallic threads laid on crewel yarns of many colors.
In the infinite space of all possible stories, we spend our early years looking for an optimal solution: a small area wherein we may dwell - because we cannot possibly look at an infinite number of narratives: we must limit them.
It's like eating an endless ice cream cone, or merely one that satisfies our craving: surely the second alternative is best.
Most people stay within this "espy" ( a more or less stable area of the quantum universe - pronounce it like "s.p." , or "Stable Place") and go no further, finding everything they need there.
Others deliberately leave behind their little "stable place", and they jump back into the infinite.
It makes sense to ask a question in an espy; people share the conventions and can come up with an answer after searching for a limited time.
Outside the espy, however, there are an unlimited number of solutions, so there can be no answer within the lifetime on one person, nor two, not even perhaps within the life of the human race.
Now the topic of our conversation where story-tellers entered was such as to indicate that neither of us was in our respective espy - whether we were aware of it or not -and were adrift on streams of enchantment...I, for one, saw no familiar landfalls.
That's why I have no answer to Sign's question; I, the artful dodger of responsibility or stranger in a strange universe of stories...
I suppose this is all very paradoxical and elitist sounding, vaguely redolent of a number of poorly recalled religious tracts and stories.
When I speak of Genesis, when I say that God created the universe, I mean that He created the things which exist and the substance upon which their being stands - the basis for things to happen - and the infinite space that contains the information for every possible combination of events to be described.
When God created man and woman, He created the potential for every detailed story. The mere, brute fact of creation of a material object: mankind's ancestor spilling forth from Time and struggling to capture his wits as he stands naked and wet before his creator is a one time event. This is the creation of the possibility of Narrative: naked narrative, unadorned, boy-meets-girl type of narrative.
When God told living things to be fruitful and multiply, He meant physically and spiritually; He meant create children and create the forms of understanding and sew the infinite wardrobe of narrative vestments, with which you will hide your nakedness. This is the creation of the detailed story: adorned narrative, Romeo and Juliet type narrative, filled with metallic threads laid on crewel yarns of many colors.
In the infinite space of all possible stories, we spend our early years looking for an optimal solution: a small area wherein we may dwell - because we cannot possibly look at an infinite number of narratives: we must limit them.
It's like eating an endless ice cream cone, or merely one that satisfies our craving: surely the second alternative is best.
Most people stay within this "espy" ( a more or less stable area of the quantum universe - pronounce it like "s.p." , or "Stable Place") and go no further, finding everything they need there.
Others deliberately leave behind their little "stable place", and they jump back into the infinite.
It makes sense to ask a question in an espy; people share the conventions and can come up with an answer after searching for a limited time.
Outside the espy, however, there are an unlimited number of solutions, so there can be no answer within the lifetime on one person, nor two, not even perhaps within the life of the human race.
Now the topic of our conversation where story-tellers entered was such as to indicate that neither of us was in our respective espy - whether we were aware of it or not -and were adrift on streams of enchantment...I, for one, saw no familiar landfalls.
That's why I have no answer to Sign's question; I, the artful dodger of responsibility or stranger in a strange universe of stories...
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Roots Of Modern Conservatism: Gingrich, Shelby, Rove, Bush, Et. Al.
Modern Conservatism betrayed its true nature to view at the incident at Hillsdale College, Michigan, where in 1999, Lissa Roche killed herself.
She had been carrying on a 19 year affair with her father-in-law, George Roche III, the president of Hillsdale College.
...As one of his first acts as president, Roche brought in conservative author and icon Russell Kirk to teach at Hillsdale, but more importantly to give the world notice that Hillsdale was serious about being conservative. If Roche had been as serious about thinking as he was about fund-raising and public relations, he might have noticed that Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind, specifically the chapters on Edmund Burke and John Adams, had some significant things to say about the relationship between reason and appetite, lessons that would have increasing relevance to Hillsdale College under George III’s increasingly autocratic leadership. That meant that Kirk also had something to say about the two strains within conservatism—the libertarian and the traditional—which appetite and reason represented...
George Roche III was great, because he was a great fund raiser for the Conservative causes. He was lionized by Conservatives.
However, you cannot keep up a 19 year affair without people becoming aware. In particular, you cannot commit so heinous an offence as George Roche did, year after year, without people becoming aware of it, yet to frightened to mention it.
Money was God, and the Republican Party had only One God. They looked the other way.
Lissa Roche went out to the gazebo, a central place at Hillsdale, and killed herself.
The entire story is
Death at the Gazebo:Conservatism In Extremis at Hillsdale College
by E. Michael Jones
I am not aware where it is available at the present time.
However, its importance is inversely proportional to the oblivion which modern society and media have banished it.
She had been carrying on a 19 year affair with her father-in-law, George Roche III, the president of Hillsdale College.
...As one of his first acts as president, Roche brought in conservative author and icon Russell Kirk to teach at Hillsdale, but more importantly to give the world notice that Hillsdale was serious about being conservative. If Roche had been as serious about thinking as he was about fund-raising and public relations, he might have noticed that Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind, specifically the chapters on Edmund Burke and John Adams, had some significant things to say about the relationship between reason and appetite, lessons that would have increasing relevance to Hillsdale College under George III’s increasingly autocratic leadership. That meant that Kirk also had something to say about the two strains within conservatism—the libertarian and the traditional—which appetite and reason represented...
George Roche III was great, because he was a great fund raiser for the Conservative causes. He was lionized by Conservatives.
However, you cannot keep up a 19 year affair without people becoming aware. In particular, you cannot commit so heinous an offence as George Roche did, year after year, without people becoming aware of it, yet to frightened to mention it.
Money was God, and the Republican Party had only One God. They looked the other way.
Lissa Roche went out to the gazebo, a central place at Hillsdale, and killed herself.
The entire story is
Death at the Gazebo:Conservatism In Extremis at Hillsdale College
by E. Michael Jones
I am not aware where it is available at the present time.
However, its importance is inversely proportional to the oblivion which modern society and media have banished it.
Mythic Landscapes: Temple Of Aesclepius, Saviour May 1 2009
In the beginning of May, 2009, I once again dreamt of my father's boats:
Friday, May 01, 2009
May Day
I copied this from the poetry blog:
The meter is odd and seems to change, the 5th lines lengthening in the last two stanzes.
I'm not sure why I did this. It's pretty much still hot from the oven, though.
Today I was helping my father with his gardening, a chore which he makes exhausting because the plan is in his head, but it comes out piece by piece, and there is a lot of walking about and talking about the ravages of winter, the harm the snow plows have done, the water level of the river, and so on.
So I have to pray for patience and humility, being by nature impatient and demanding.
While walking under the cherry tree, it dawned on me today was May Day. I stopped walking and he looked at me. He asked me what I was doing. I said I was praying to Our Lady, because it was May Day, and I had forgotten. I forget what the prayer was. I just stopped and prayed something or somehow - I don't really analyze it - then started back walking.
He is a church goer, but I don't think he's used to people suddenly stopping and praying.
When we had finished, I started to think about the poem for this week, and this came flying by - a handsel or reward for being a nice guy.
May Day
It's Lady Day again! Come Spring!
Come all ye patience handsel blooms!
Bring forcing gardens' flow'ring quince!
Bring hot house bulb and lilies, too!
Bring Holy Mary's crown again,
a flow'ring diadem - come Spring!
The cold and rains of April past;
come unnamed flowers all!
together with your namèd kin:
the rose, the daffodil, and pink,
and sweet those fragrant dandies in
the lawns so newly green;
this crown of May will last!
May God Almighty bless us all!
Conserve us safe from harm!
And all the Saints step forth! Attest!
conjoined in joyful choirs and lit-
anies assembling, breaking forth in song!
Pray save us from our Fall!
Mom Mary strides forth like Orpheus
and takes hell's subway ride
to stand beside her faithful folk
in Time's still darkling fields of War,
to nurse the bleeding, wounded souls to health;
restore the World to peace renown!
notes:
handsel
a gift or reward; here a reward for enduring winter; a Scots word, I believe.
It's Lady Day again! Come Spring!
Come all ye patience handsel blooms!
Bring forcing gardens' flow'ring quince!
Bring hot house bulb and lilies, too!
Bring Holy Mary's crown again,
a flow'ring diadem - come Spring!
The cold and rains of April past;
come unnamed flowers all!
together with your namèd kin:
the rose, the daffodil, and pink,
and sweet those fragrant dandies in
the lawns so newly green;
this crown of May will last!
May God Almighty bless us all!
Conserve us safe from harm!
And all the Saints step forth! Attest!
conjoined in joyful choirs and lit-
anies assembling, breaking forth in song!
Pray save us from our Fall!
Mom Mary strides forth like Orpheus
and takes hell's subway ride
to stand beside her faithful folk
in Time's still darkling fields of War,
to nurse the bleeding, wounded souls to health;
restore the World to peace renown!
notes:
handsel
a gift or reward; here a reward for enduring winter; a Scots word, I believe.
Sometimes I use it as mitzvah, a blessing or divine reward.
Orpheus
Orpheus descended even into Hades to rescue his beloved Eurydice.
So does Mary hazard all for her children.
The meter is odd and seems to change, the 5th lines lengthening in the last two stanzes.
I'm not sure why I did this. It's pretty much still hot from the oven, though.
Today I was helping my father with his gardening, a chore which he makes exhausting because the plan is in his head, but it comes out piece by piece, and there is a lot of walking about and talking about the ravages of winter, the harm the snow plows have done, the water level of the river, and so on.
So I have to pray for patience and humility, being by nature impatient and demanding.
While walking under the cherry tree, it dawned on me today was May Day. I stopped walking and he looked at me. He asked me what I was doing. I said I was praying to Our Lady, because it was May Day, and I had forgotten. I forget what the prayer was. I just stopped and prayed something or somehow - I don't really analyze it - then started back walking.
He is a church goer, but I don't think he's used to people suddenly stopping and praying.
When we had finished, I started to think about the poem for this week, and this came flying by - a handsel or reward for being a nice guy.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Hillsdale Day: The Age Of Modern Conservatism
April 30, 2009 marks the 10th anniversary of the suicide of Lissa Roche. After a 19 year affair with her father-in-law, George Roche III, president of Hillsdale College, Michigan, and extraordinary fundraiser for Conservative causes, she could no longer bear the burden of this crime outrageous to nature.
More traditional values?
Or an utter lack of Restraint, Duty, Responsibility....things Modern Conservatives chatter on about, but have no idea of the meaning.
Only a year ago, the suicide of the financial system which they engineered occurred. There is nothing beyond their capabilities.
More traditional values?
Or an utter lack of Restraint, Duty, Responsibility....things Modern Conservatives chatter on about, but have no idea of the meaning.
Only a year ago, the suicide of the financial system which they engineered occurred. There is nothing beyond their capabilities.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Seccond Thoughts On Florida License Plates
On second thought, maybe Florida's license plates with pctures of Jesus on them will work out all for the better.
It gives the Florida residents the chance to sell them as artifacts on eBay: license plates, cheese sandwiches, and potato chips that look like Jesus!
And, I shall bet you that the number of occurences of finger flipping goes down.
It gives the Florida residents the chance to sell them as artifacts on eBay: license plates, cheese sandwiches, and potato chips that look like Jesus!
And, I shall bet you that the number of occurences of finger flipping goes down.
Florida And The National Endowment For The Arts
Florida seems to have two new license plates with a picture of Jesus on them. Some people think this violates the separation between church and state. I think it is merely blasphemous and violates every decent religious sentiment.
The very fact that the freezing up of the credit system and near destruction of the economy - the nearest modern day parallel to the Tower of Babel story - occurred as recently as 8 months ago, might make less frivolous blasphemers to tread softly when it comes to showing respect for God.
Driving through the mud, the slush, the salt, the dirt and the grime, not to mention road kill and other things, some good conservatives want to make sure their pantomime god gets his share. Why don't they throw offal in church, thereby saving the rest of us from having to look at their art work?
If The National Endowment for the Arts had sponsored this, there would be an outcry.
Driving through the mud, the slush, the salt, the dirt and the grime, not to mention road kill and other things, some good conservatives want to make sure their pantomime god gets his share. Why don't they throw offal in church, thereby saving the rest of us from having to look at their art work?
If The National Endowment for the Arts had sponsored this, there would be an outcry.
This society once again proves that a large part of it is pagan, not Christian. The very clever Governor says that if someone does not like the new plates, they need not buy them...only look at them being profaned!
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Torture Revisited
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/business/media/28abc.html?_r=1&hp
How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: April 27, 2009
In an article about a lying moron, Mr. Kiriakou, we see:
But the recent Justice Department memo has led some commentators to revisit their earlier impressions about the technique.
“I’ve always been on the fence about whether waterboarding constituted torture,” Mr. Goldberg of the National Review wrote last week, but if the figures are true, “then I think the threshold has been met.”
He added: “Debating whether it was worth it still seems open to debate, depending on the facts.”
What interesting debaters these conservatives must have been in university. I wonder exactly when they traded God's morality for that of Power?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/business/media/28abc.html?_r=1&hp
How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate
By BRIAN STELTER
Published: April 27, 2009
In an article about a lying moron, Mr. Kiriakou, we see:
But the recent Justice Department memo has led some commentators to revisit their earlier impressions about the technique.
“I’ve always been on the fence about whether waterboarding constituted torture,” Mr. Goldberg of the National Review wrote last week, but if the figures are true, “then I think the threshold has been met.”
He added: “Debating whether it was worth it still seems open to debate, depending on the facts.”
What interesting debaters these conservatives must have been in university. I wonder exactly when they traded God's morality for that of Power?
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Why I Have Not Written About Torture
I have not written about torture, because this issue of torture is the paradigm of our destruction. It truly frightens me. When I read others writing about it, I wonder at it as I wonder at bomb squads gingerly touching pipe bombs.
Perhaps you have thought that I was ranting and raving about a generation of vipers, and how we shall suffer greatly for our crimes. Well and good.
I wasn't.
We have chosen the form of the destructor already.
Merely because a good many good souls are trying to reverse the evil course of Bush and Cheney does not change matters one bit. This generation is way too stupid to even save itself.
Case in point: The National Review.
I used to read it in the past, back when William F. Buckley was in charge. Not so much anymore. In fact, I don't read anything political anymore, for I have seen it is a bit too late. The future is very different than how the gentlemen on the right or left tell stories about. For me, to read a political column is merely to see which cliff the lemmings are using today.
So, which cliff are they jumping off today?
The National Review
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDQyMWQyMjE4NDZlMDFmNzA0N2YwMTRlOTY5OGZjMmY=
the corner
Friday, April 24, 2009
Re: Not Pro-Torture, Just Pro-Facts
by Cliff May
In fact, in just about everything I’ve written and said, I’ve taken pains to emphasize that I oppose torture. However, I do think (1) it’s important to define torture so we know what we are talking about, and (2) all forms of “stress and duress” utilized to elicit cooperation from a terrorist in possession of life-saving information are not torture.
Every opponent I’ve debated on has taken this tactic — labeling me as “pro-torture,” refusing to grapple with definitions, and refusing to consider whether there may be methods of interrogation that are unpleasant but fall short of torture.
This is especially important because we now know that Islamists believe their religion forbids them to cooperate with infidels — until they have reached the limit of their ability to endure the hardships the infidel is inflicting on them.* In other words: Imagine an al-Qaeda member who would like to give his interrogators information, who does not want continue fighting, who would prefer not to see more innocent people slaughtered. He would need his interrogators to press him hard so he can feel that he has met his religious obligations — only then could he cooperate.
But just try to get anyone in the “anti-torture” camp to seriously debate any of this.
I have added the bold emphases.
The very spirit of Rationality which led to the freedom and founding of our nation has been perverted into "it’s important to define torture".
When I was young, we did not debate with the devil. We knew evil when it was around. We did not invite it over to define what it meant by genocide, or killing, or torture. The fact that a substantial part of the population is willing to do this is evidence that the capacity for being sickened at the sight of evil has been blunted and is no longer functioning.
That is the way to a dark future: When Reason becomes the whore of Evil, there is nothing that you can reason with to find the true way. If you have no religion, or your religion is corrupt, you have nothing left.
This nation will rationalize its way into a world of horrors. We shall beg and plead for people to please be rational as we define our way into Armageddon. We shall shake our wise heads as other peoples run from our concepts of democracy and freedom in sheer terror.
We used to be a beacon to the world.
Now we compel their obedience to the modern day notion of democracy. We transgress their wills. We debase them as individuals. And it is all in the name of reason, the very same self-evident Reason of the truths of our Declaration of Independence.
I shall not proclaim that if they must torture to save my life, then let my life be forfeit...because those men and women who are conspiring already to take my life and the lives of others are already in our midst, and they are reasoning together for the deaths of many.
They are buying guns.
Children shot and killed are acceptable collateral damage.
We have forgotten the reality of history; not the words, not the oratory, not the high-flown phrases, but we have indeed forgotten the reality, the pain and suffering. When we read the words describing the horrors of war, it takes all the arts of painter, director, writer, and poet to move our deadened souls.
We are no longer alive. We are blunt and deadened.
If God were to come and offer us the universe, we would turn in reasoned dismay from eternity and seek refuge in our prisons and dungeons. There it is we are at home.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Iconic Codes
When I wish to program a computer, I have to write in a programming language. That language is the code that allows me to interface with the machine.
The Icon is an image.
We have an Imaging System, which we use for Image consciousness: remembered dream images, thinking in pictures, day-dreaming.
The Imaging System relies on a code of images, different from Language, which allows us to be image-conscious and to operate with images.
The Holy cannot enter into our world - except that it does so according to the proper code, just as I cannot program the computer without a proper code.
For the Holy to enter, it uses the Iconic Image associated with the spiritual phenomena. It has no other choice.
Although the Holy may affect us on the non-conscious level, for us to be conscious of this, we must use one of the various ways we encode things. We cannot be conscious of the non-conscious. Therefore, we must code it into language, or images, or music, etc.
That is why the Holy appears as the Virgin to Catholics, but as Elize Danto to Haitians: the iconic code.
By using this iconic code, the Holy participates in our world.
HOWEVER, since the Virgin appeared to Coptic Egyptians, and this was attested by Egyptian Muslims it is clear that belief is not necessary for participation, merely acquaintance with the icon.
In essence, if the Holy were to have one Iconic appearance for all the diverse peoples of the world, that would be the nonsense situation, the impossible situation. Diversity does not imply that the underlying truth is unstable. Just as the images of battleships and muskets both represent the concept war, so may different images represent the Holy.
The Icon is an image.
We have an Imaging System, which we use for Image consciousness: remembered dream images, thinking in pictures, day-dreaming.
The Imaging System relies on a code of images, different from Language, which allows us to be image-conscious and to operate with images.
The Holy cannot enter into our world - except that it does so according to the proper code, just as I cannot program the computer without a proper code.
For the Holy to enter, it uses the Iconic Image associated with the spiritual phenomena. It has no other choice.
Although the Holy may affect us on the non-conscious level, for us to be conscious of this, we must use one of the various ways we encode things. We cannot be conscious of the non-conscious. Therefore, we must code it into language, or images, or music, etc.
That is why the Holy appears as the Virgin to Catholics, but as Elize Danto to Haitians: the iconic code.
By using this iconic code, the Holy participates in our world.
HOWEVER, since the Virgin appeared to Coptic Egyptians, and this was attested by Egyptian Muslims it is clear that belief is not necessary for participation, merely acquaintance with the icon.
In essence, if the Holy were to have one Iconic appearance for all the diverse peoples of the world, that would be the nonsense situation, the impossible situation. Diversity does not imply that the underlying truth is unstable. Just as the images of battleships and muskets both represent the concept war, so may different images represent the Holy.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Peter Pan In The Old Bailey
Peter Pan is supposed to be in Kensington Garden - or Neverland - but nowadays his accomplices are in court in New York.
The US government has brought one of the Lost Boys up on pirating charges.
It is good that he is Muslim and black. If he were blond, white, and Presbyterian, he would steal our hearts away.
The US government has brought one of the Lost Boys up on pirating charges.
It is good that he is Muslim and black. If he were blond, white, and Presbyterian, he would steal our hearts away.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Iconic Participation
Iconic Participation is the term used to describe the tendency of the intensely spiritual to infuse itself into daily life. Thus, we see the images of the Lady of Gaudalupe flow into society, and it is the images, the Icons, that are the footprints of the divine.
When I used to set up the chairs for the people coming to see The Virgin appearances at Medjugorje, I was aware of the iconic participation when there was an appearance. I never saw anything, because I was being paid to work, not to stand around, idly staring, possibly being cured.
When I was a hermit at Chimayo, the icons of Guadalupe pervaded everything, and blessings flowed through the water courses, the acequias, like sweet water.
Those, my friends, were the days.
When I used to set up the chairs for the people coming to see The Virgin appearances at Medjugorje, I was aware of the iconic participation when there was an appearance. I never saw anything, because I was being paid to work, not to stand around, idly staring, possibly being cured.
When I was a hermit at Chimayo, the icons of Guadalupe pervaded everything, and blessings flowed through the water courses, the acequias, like sweet water.
Those, my friends, were the days.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
"Ritual" Seen As A Bonsai WiIlow
Willow BonsaiJesus said the kingdom of heaven was the inheritance of the Poor.
His Mother sang that the Almighty will thrust the mighty and rich from their thrones, and then raise up the lowly, thereby turning the profane world upside down!
Jesus said the Peacemakers are the children of God.
How do we deal with the poor and homeless in today's world?
How do we deal with war and peace?
The manner in which we, the USA, deal in public with these issues is reflected in and is a reflection of our religious beliefs. We do not feel the divine compulsion to go up to the high country and listen to that Sermon on the Mount too often.
"Ritual" is the setting aside of space and time, moving it from the profane to the sacred. For example,when we deal with the poor, we have special times: food drives, Sunday sermons; all compact and perfect within themselves, yet not pervading our entire lives.
By setting aside special times and spaces, by not letting the great teaching pervade our lives, we create the separation of religion and life. We set up small rooms of devotion, and then we tend to use our extra religious "furniture" - way too much for the one small room - in our profane and non-churchly pursuits...because we think we have seen the Holy in its entirety.
By establishing special times and special places for God, we restrict holiness into those small rooms.
By restricting God thus, we find ourselves able to look about the small room into which we pushed the divine and fancy that we see everything there is.
Thus, we feel we know all the aspects of the divine.
Thus, we create Ritual, and Ritualistic Icons: Yoda, Neo, martial arts with a spiritual bullet.
Ritual is akin to a cutting, a pruning...not to promote luxuriant growth, but to restrict and domesticate the wild; to bring the forest into the domicile.
Think of your Ritual as Bonsai: small, restricted; it will not grow beyond bounds and infect the entire universe with its virus of freedom and life. It is an Icon.
When the Icon substitutes for the reality, then we see the world of today in the USA and around the globe.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
The Seldon Vault Opens
Hari Seldon
note: I used a photo of Asa Kasher to represent Hari Seldon.
Once again, the Hari Seldon vault opened, and there was a flock of dignitaries. They filled the chairs and the standing room. This time, the display was piped outside to a large crowd who had gathered.
As soon as Professor Seldon's image appeared, an absolute hush descended.
"Welcome. By now, we are well into the first of the stages of global dissolution, as I described in my previous message. I quote:
A handful of analysts have been warning for years that the wholesale deregulation of financial markets and the wrong-headed privatization of the public sector during the past two decades would threaten the viability of free-market capitalism. Yet ideological neoliberal fixation remain firmly imbedded in US ruling circles, fertilized by irresistible campaign contributions from profiteers on Wall Street, methodically purging regulatory agencies of all who tried to maintain a sense of financial reality.
This ideology of "market knows best" has allowed the nation to slip into an unsustainable joyride on massive debt giddily assumed by all market participants, ranging from supposedly conservative banks, investment banks and other non-bank financial institutions, to industrial corporations, government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) and individuals...
At present, the first stages have remediated, and you are thinking yourselves well on the way to recovery, lengthy though it may be.
I caution you that nothing has changed, particularly the nature of the people in charge. The ruling class is still the same people who designed, created, and fostered the crisis. To imagine that they will entirely give up a system which is so lucrative for them - neglecting the nation at large - is wishful thinking.
You are watching the Conservatives rail and scream against the new President. This President is somewhat unusual, as there is no established influential national school of thought that fostered him: he is almost a mutant, a sport, if you will, that almost threw PsychoHistory off course.
The trajectories will have been worked out by PsychoHistorians by now.
The President will not be followed by one such as himself; there is no one. There will not be politicians such as him until those in their twenties and early thirties begin to fill elected positions.
What is most likely is that the Right Wing will end their nonsensical attacks and actually try and develop ideas, something they have not done for 15 years or more. Both sides of the political class, however, will come to a tacit realization - and agreement - that the old system with its incredible inflated levels of money available was just too rewarding and lush to let die off.
It will be resurrected by the next Right Wing President into a system with more regulation, but it will be a regulation that tempers the more outrageous acts of the piratical participants. It will do nothing for the vast majority of the population, who will sink into a morass of constant 10% - or higher - unemployment, stagnant wages, and diminishing access to higher education, all the while suffering from the new feudalism of a stagnant real estate market; their houses cannot be sold and will become their prisons...and their eventual tombs. "
At this point, a great outcry came from the outside, among those gathered to listen to the speech outside. There was a commotion at the main entry way...
Love And Death
King SolomonIn The Song of Songs, 8:6, it says that:
(NASB)
...For love is as strong as death, Jealousy is as severe as Sheol; Its flashes are flashes of fire, The very flame of the LORD.
and another
(God's Word 1995)
...Love is as overpowering as death. Devotion is as unyielding as the grave. Love's flames are flames of fire, flames that come from the LORD.
and
King James
...for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.
The word translated as "jealousy" or "devotion" is in the Greek Septuagint as ζηλος, or zelos, which is the word meaning "zeal" or intensity with which something is done.
I would read it that Love is as strong as Death; its holds the Lover in an unyielding death-like grip that burns like a flaming fire.
(I have no idea where the idea that the flames are the flames of the Lord came from. As usual, good old King James is - to my mind - a much better translation. There are two terms: fire and flame. There was a distinction in the concept of fire between the flaring, flaming fire, and the fire that burned and heated without flame; i.e., the fire of glowing coals, or the fire of the sun -for to ancient science the sun did not necessarily have flame. The extension of the word "flame" to mean divine flame is a usurpation by the translator of the author's role.)
That is a very good description of Love. It is also a good understanding of the minds of old, and their idea of Love, and we glimpse Aphrodite, Venus, Astarte, Ishtar, and their lovers, and all the beautiful gods of love.
If, now, Love is as strong as Death, why do we live in the time of War; War, who is Death's rudely stamped and unfashionable offspring?
I have lived in a temple all my life, the murals of which were extensively devoted to the depictions of Death and Destruction: the wars of the world, the atomic bomb, civil discords and future Armeggedons. The paintings devoted to Love were hidden behind plaster and veils drawn to deny them to our eyes. (I myself have watched the ghosts of Pompeii searching for their "zealous" portrayals of the kingdom of Love, only to leave in disappointment with the morning sun, because these generations of War worshippers have covered over their garden of delights.)
Why? Why, if...Love is as strong as Death...why have we chosen Death to be our King?
And Death's children to be our tutors and teachers, and Death's cronies to direct our governance?
L'Chaim
The great minds are at work trying to stir all right-thinking people to bomb Iran.
There is an Israeli Challabi named Michael Freund who has written:
http://www.jewcy.com/dialogue/2007-05-21/bomb_iran_now#comment-form
Bomb Iran Now
Only fierce military action can stop the Atomic Ayatollahs
...Should we bomb Iran?
That's this week's Big Question, put to Michael Freund of the Jerusalem Post and Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com.
Through Thursday afternoon, they'll argue action vs. inaction, warmongering vs. appeasment, bombing vs. diplomacy...
yada,yada,yada..
...We must stop Iran at all costs. The alarm bells are ringing, and the danger signs are near. Like it or not, time is of the essence, and there is not a moment to lose. The U.S. or Israel should bomb Iran now, before it proves to be too late.
(signed) Michael Freund
Now read the comments of the Jewish readers. Oy!
One of the less vicious comments:
israel has 200 nukes, probably half of which are pointed at iranian cities, and we're supposed to believe that iran is an existential threat to israel and the rest of the so-called "civilized world."
his comment, "And once he dispenses with the Jews, as we know, it is the West that will be next. So this is not just Israel’s battle, it is everyone’s war, and it is time for the decision-makers in Washington and Jerusalem to act," is the pinnacle of disingenuousness. if this pathetically shallow, neocon worldview weren't so freaking dangerous, it would be laughable.
There is an Israeli Challabi named Michael Freund who has written:
http://www.jewcy.com/dialogue/2007-05-21/bomb_iran_now#comment-form
Bomb Iran Now
Only fierce military action can stop the Atomic Ayatollahs
...Should we bomb Iran?
That's this week's Big Question, put to Michael Freund of the Jerusalem Post and Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com.
Through Thursday afternoon, they'll argue action vs. inaction, warmongering vs. appeasment, bombing vs. diplomacy...
yada,yada,yada..
...We must stop Iran at all costs. The alarm bells are ringing, and the danger signs are near. Like it or not, time is of the essence, and there is not a moment to lose. The U.S. or Israel should bomb Iran now, before it proves to be too late.
(signed) Michael Freund
Now read the comments of the Jewish readers. Oy!
One of the less vicious comments:
israel has 200 nukes, probably half of which are pointed at iranian cities, and we're supposed to believe that iran is an existential threat to israel and the rest of the so-called "civilized world."
his comment, "And once he dispenses with the Jews, as we know, it is the West that will be next. So this is not just Israel’s battle, it is everyone’s war, and it is time for the decision-makers in Washington and Jerusalem to act," is the pinnacle of disingenuousness. if this pathetically shallow, neocon worldview weren't so freaking dangerous, it would be laughable.
Gozer Requests Your Presence At Tea...
Gozer, the GozerianI read about a woman at a Tax Day Tea Party who said that the firing of Rick Wagoner from GM was the "last straw" for her.
Of course, just before he was canned, Mr. Wagoner caused some other problems. As reported in Crains Detroit Business, a Mr. Stiers of GM was giving a presentation to some group, and he mentioned that GM's CEO - Mr. Wagoner - would truly love to see all parts supply outsourced overseas: 100%.
This ruffled feathers of the American parts suppliers, many of whom are in the habit of patiently waiting for GM to get around to eventually paying them.
It is like they said in Ghostbusters: choose the form of the Destructor; you will be destroyed when the Iconic representative of Capitalism is a man who wished to send every American job he could to somewhere else.
Your choices are limited, and they are not good: rock and a hard place.
Friday, April 17, 2009
The Day The Earth Stalled Out
...so Muhammad (which actually happens to be the name of my mechanic...no lampooning of holy figures here.) gets the Old Blue Terra Cruiser down from the hoist, and walks towards me, wiping the oil off his hands, drying the ocean spray on his hair, and getting the Saharan sand off his Mr. Goodwrench shirt. He is shaking his head in a manner that I have come to associate with bad news.
Well, I got some good news and some bad news. Which do ya wanna hear first?
Masha'allah, I said, rolling my eyes.
What model do you got? The 2 billion year old one, or the one that's got just over 6,000 years on her?
Man ya'rif? I said, shrugging. Who knows?
Ya know, some people bought into the younger model, the Bishop Ussher model, the T four-oh-oh-four. Some got the older model.
I said I thought it was the older model. It had certainly been acting as if it were. (Bishop Ussher was the bloke who said the Earth was created in 4004 B.C.)
Then there's the designer: was your designer the Big Guy or that Intellygent Designer that's all the rage these days?
Well, I got some good news and some bad news. Which do ya wanna hear first?
Masha'allah, I said, rolling my eyes.
What model do you got? The 2 billion year old one, or the one that's got just over 6,000 years on her?
Man ya'rif? I said, shrugging. Who knows?
Ya know, some people bought into the younger model, the Bishop Ussher model, the T four-oh-oh-four. Some got the older model.
I said I thought it was the older model. It had certainly been acting as if it were. (Bishop Ussher was the bloke who said the Earth was created in 4004 B.C.)
Then there's the designer: was your designer the Big Guy or that Intellygent Designer that's all the rage these days?
While he said this, he did "majnoun" motions; i.e., finger points to temple and implies that some of us were not too tightly wrapped..." mad as hatters" nicely sums it up.
I said I thought it was the Big Lebowski...I don't know why. I mean, there isn't much holy about Jeff Bridges as The Big Lebowski. Or is there?
Anyway, long story short, it was going to be flush the system for the next 1,000 years at some phenomenal figure per flush, or...get a new model.
So I'm getting the system flush. It gives me the shivers, sounding way too much like eternal colon cleansing, but she'll be running like new in no time.
I said I thought it was the Big Lebowski...I don't know why. I mean, there isn't much holy about Jeff Bridges as The Big Lebowski. Or is there?
Anyway, long story short, it was going to be flush the system for the next 1,000 years at some phenomenal figure per flush, or...get a new model.
So I'm getting the system flush. It gives me the shivers, sounding way too much like eternal colon cleansing, but she'll be running like new in no time.
Archaeology Of The Future
What will they think when the stumble across the remnants of our blogs?
Will it be like the finding of Tut's tomb, and those excavators will be cursed with early death?
Will they be shamed by the wanton depravity, such as was depicted on some of the murals in Pompei, causing them to censor viewing?
Will they piece together the bones and artifacts of our hopes, dreams, and loves, and try to recreate our blindly striving souls?
Dunno.
Will it be like the finding of Tut's tomb, and those excavators will be cursed with early death?
Will they be shamed by the wanton depravity, such as was depicted on some of the murals in Pompei, causing them to censor viewing?
Will they piece together the bones and artifacts of our hopes, dreams, and loves, and try to recreate our blindly striving souls?
Dunno.
That Wisdom Thing: The Pilot Episode
Pitching a sit-com idea:
Every week we open with this wise looking guy with a beard - like a rabbi or orthodox priest or an imam - and he's doing something like cutting the lawn, or taking out the trash - ya know - and, like, a neighbor or a family member asks him a question about life, about the world,...about God...............
Episode 1
So the wise guy is sitting in a VW dealership, writing a short story on a pad of legal paper, when a guy comes up to him and says: Do you think, padre, that we human beings are now or can be semi-divine?
The wise guy thinks: He didn't even start off with the easy ones, like did I think it would rain later, or whether it was hot/cold enough for me.
So he says, how do you measure divinity? Where are the scales to weigh it? Where is the yardstick to measure it? If we can change, may not the instruments of measurement change, too?
Anyway, to ask if man may be divine, all or in part, is like trying to determine whether a glass of water is half empty or half full in the midst of an earthquake during a torrential downpour.
Every week we open with this wise looking guy with a beard - like a rabbi or orthodox priest or an imam - and he's doing something like cutting the lawn, or taking out the trash - ya know - and, like, a neighbor or a family member asks him a question about life, about the world,...about God...............
Episode 1
So the wise guy is sitting in a VW dealership, writing a short story on a pad of legal paper, when a guy comes up to him and says: Do you think, padre, that we human beings are now or can be semi-divine?
The wise guy thinks: He didn't even start off with the easy ones, like did I think it would rain later, or whether it was hot/cold enough for me.
So he says, how do you measure divinity? Where are the scales to weigh it? Where is the yardstick to measure it? If we can change, may not the instruments of measurement change, too?
Anyway, to ask if man may be divine, all or in part, is like trying to determine whether a glass of water is half empty or half full in the midst of an earthquake during a torrential downpour.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Origins Of The War
We always knew that Ahmad Chalabi and the Neo-cons were pushing the President Bush into an ill-conceived war.
Now it appears he had help.
In an interview with Dar al-Hayat:
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2009/04/chalabi-admits-that-bush-was-duped-by-iran.html
or
http://english.daralhayat.com/Spec/04-2009/Article-20090401-61f52f1a-c0a8-10ed-01db-52c89eb058c6/story.html
Ghassan Charbel Al-Hayat - 01/04/09//
...
"[Al-Hayat]: If you want to describe George Bush, then how would you describe him?
[Chalabi]: A man with very little skill and knowledge.
[Al-Hayat]: He did Iran a great service by toppling Saddam?
[Chalabi]: Iran benefited from toppling Saddam. Bush didn't mean to do it a favor but it was clear that Iran would benefit from Saddam's fall. I am convinced that Saddam would not have fallen except for an implicit agreement between America and Iran.
[Al-Hayat]: This happened?
[Chalabi]: Yes, of course it did.
[Al-Hayat]: Through whom?
[Chalabi]: We worked on this and so did the Supreme Council and Jalal Talbani."
...
Suckered into a 3 trillion dollar war.
Now it appears he had help.
In an interview with Dar al-Hayat:
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2009/04/chalabi-admits-that-bush-was-duped-by-iran.html
or
http://english.daralhayat.com/Spec/04-2009/Article-20090401-61f52f1a-c0a8-10ed-01db-52c89eb058c6/story.html
Ghassan Charbel Al-Hayat - 01/04/09//
...
"[Al-Hayat]: If you want to describe George Bush, then how would you describe him?
[Chalabi]: A man with very little skill and knowledge.
[Al-Hayat]: He did Iran a great service by toppling Saddam?
[Chalabi]: Iran benefited from toppling Saddam. Bush didn't mean to do it a favor but it was clear that Iran would benefit from Saddam's fall. I am convinced that Saddam would not have fallen except for an implicit agreement between America and Iran.
[Al-Hayat]: This happened?
[Chalabi]: Yes, of course it did.
[Al-Hayat]: Through whom?
[Chalabi]: We worked on this and so did the Supreme Council and Jalal Talbani."
...
Suckered into a 3 trillion dollar war.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Birkat HaChama
Rabbi Daniel Brenner has some pix of the blessing of the sun on April 8.
http://rabbidanielbrenner.blogspot.com/
This is referred to as Birkat HaChama.
"Blessing" is "Birkat"; note the consonants "b", "r", and "k". In Arabic, these give up "baraka" or even the personal name "Barak" - which makes it somewhat parallel to the name "Benedict" derived from Latin for blessed. (Remember Baruch Spinoza versus Benedict Spinoza in Philosophy 101?)
"Ha" is the definite article "the", and "Chama" is "sun".
http://rabbidanielbrenner.blogspot.com/
This is referred to as Birkat HaChama.
"Blessing" is "Birkat"; note the consonants "b", "r", and "k". In Arabic, these give up "baraka" or even the personal name "Barak" - which makes it somewhat parallel to the name "Benedict" derived from Latin for blessed. (Remember Baruch Spinoza versus Benedict Spinoza in Philosophy 101?)
"Ha" is the definite article "the", and "Chama" is "sun".
The Tools Of Wrath
WarhammerI was thinking of the Holocaust.
It was part of the history of Western Society. It differentiates itself from past atrocities - like the slaughters by Joshua or those perpetrated by the Assyrians - by its scientific and rational approach to Death, from the chemist's work being used to gas innocent people to IBM's supplying of the tally machines of the killing fields.
We say "Never Again!"...but how shall we deny our history?
We are in Western Society. We did repudiate the Holocaust. We did condemn the Holocaust.
But we did not excise the virus of hatred from our hearts. It lingers, and we find it hard to control.
How much of our inter-personal discourse is hate and scorn? Read a few political blogs; scorn, contempt, anger.
Thus far in the life of the West, the Tools of Wrath have served us well. We have lost a few millions of souls here and there, but overall we have an enviable record. We become complacent in our ability to wreak havoc, and yet to pull back from the threshhold of total annihilation.
How shall we ensure that it never happens again, when there are full dress rehearsals going on all over the globe?
How?
Monday, April 13, 2009
Driving With God
I've decided to start a new column-like thing for the young Christians of my audience. Aiming at a demographic of 12 to 18, I'm going to sort of frame it as if it were a Course of Automobile Driving for the young, to provide them with the moral "traffic cones" to direct their lives.
So, anyway, I was driving, and God was in the passenger seat. Surprisingly, He is not much for conversation. I advise you to get used to it. He is the very opposite of those who claim to be His representatives, who cannot shut up.
So, we were driving; mile after mile...quite a way. Well, it wasn't all that far - sixty miles, maybe. And I wasn't - like - taking Him anywhere. He just sort of popped by, said "Shotgun" in a quiet, yet determined way, so I said "Climb aboard."
We had just passed the work area on 94 when He spoke.
"You wrote about violence..."
I nodded.
"You know...well, probably you don't...I mean, who would tell you, right?"
I said "Right ", even though I did not know to what I was giving assent, but, considering His reputation and all, I thought it a good bet.
"People who see life as war,...and guns,..."
I waited.
"The after-life is just more obsession with guns and war..."
"Fear?" I said. "Fear and worrying about other people with guns, and planning retaliation, and whether to serve vengeance hot or cold?"
"Yep."
We drove on in silence for a while. Finally, I had to ask, "Well, why is that? I mean, it's your Universe and all?"
He laughed.
"Go ask your bright guys. Apparently - according to them - I've outsourced everything to an Intelligent Design group."
"Well, yeah. O.K., but that doesn't really answer my question..."
He pointed towards the front of the car. "Eyes on the road, pal."
Later, I stopped for gas, and wondered whether He'd chip in, but He was gone.
So, anyway, I was driving, and God was in the passenger seat. Surprisingly, He is not much for conversation. I advise you to get used to it. He is the very opposite of those who claim to be His representatives, who cannot shut up.
So, we were driving; mile after mile...quite a way. Well, it wasn't all that far - sixty miles, maybe. And I wasn't - like - taking Him anywhere. He just sort of popped by, said "Shotgun" in a quiet, yet determined way, so I said "Climb aboard."
We had just passed the work area on 94 when He spoke.
"You wrote about violence..."
I nodded.
"You know...well, probably you don't...I mean, who would tell you, right?"
I said "Right ", even though I did not know to what I was giving assent, but, considering His reputation and all, I thought it a good bet.
"People who see life as war,...and guns,..."
I waited.
"The after-life is just more obsession with guns and war..."
"Fear?" I said. "Fear and worrying about other people with guns, and planning retaliation, and whether to serve vengeance hot or cold?"
"Yep."
We drove on in silence for a while. Finally, I had to ask, "Well, why is that? I mean, it's your Universe and all?"
He laughed.
"Go ask your bright guys. Apparently - according to them - I've outsourced everything to an Intelligent Design group."
"Well, yeah. O.K., but that doesn't really answer my question..."
He pointed towards the front of the car. "Eyes on the road, pal."
Later, I stopped for gas, and wondered whether He'd chip in, but He was gone.
Money Fer The Arts
Henry Jakubowski was grumbling about bail-outs at Hanaan's Diner.
I said that he'd be singing a different tune if he were in a leaky boat.
He looked at me and did the golem-smile thing: what a golem would smile...if a golem were to smile...sort of...not all there. Or perhaps like Graham Greene says of Captain Segura: his smile came out of the wrong place, much like a toothpaste container with a rip in it.
But what was important was that I could no longer get him mad. Hank had been down so long, that my feeble quips were nothing but flies looking for a soft spot on his great, pachydermous bulk...and not having much luck at it.
That's what happens when you steal a little retirement money from people; the starch goes out of their shirts, and they all sit around looking like that unhappily hot jury in Twelve Angry Men.
So I decided to try my best shot, trying to raise him from his slough of despond du jour. I started talking about money for the Arts.
Hitherto, money for the Arts for Hank was an ominous collage of sacred objects and bottles of human waste products, sort of a Max Ernst assemblage of Marcel DuChamp's Urinal in an unholy conjunction with Fra Angelico. To be fair to Hank, the objects he was recalling were not much by the way of Art by any definition of Art...other than Art as the process by which one bugs the hell out of straight, white folks.
Far be it from me to let him know I felt this way. What really is the value of having a blue-blooded, FOX watching rightie in your midst if you cannot indulge in a little "bear baiting" of the old, ugly brute?
I mean, really? Some of them become quite apoplectic. The ones with fair skin get all red-splotchy. I know one specimen with rosacea who becomes neon in his indignation. Very amusing for an indolent drone like myself.
So-o-o, I reached back into memory and pulled up something about money for the Arts....
No! No! That wasn't how it went. No. I remember now.
First, he was moaning and groaning about bail-outs, then drugs and Mexico. Then he said that it had been proved that any country like Denmark or Holland ( which he calls - I kid you not- Dutchland!) which had adopted a liberal attitude towards drugs discovered that the costs down the road cost more than a good, old-fashioned WAR on drugs in the first place...so put that in your let's-decriminalize-drugs-and-tax-it pipe and smoke it!
I said that the reason that Denmark and Holland found this to be true was the fact that Denmark and Holland were Socialist! and did stuff like provide safety nets and thing, so of course they would find that it cost them dearly.
However, I said, in this country, we have abolished all those safety nets, so we could legalize drugs and get off on the cheap!
I truly baffled him at this point.
Then I sequenced into the Artsy-Fartsy topics of conversation. Since we were talking about how much stuff costs: Arts 50 million, Banks 1 trillion, I decided it was time.
So, then I did that reaching back in time and grabbing a memory about money for the Arts in the original Obama stimulus package, and said we needed that mazuma for the Arts. For pete's sake, operas were being cancelled as we spoke!
I said: wasn't the original stimulus inclusion for the Arts gutted by some Know-Nothings and Nativists and America-Firsters and the KKK??!!
Silence.
He said, yeah.
Then he said 50 million wasn't all that much...if they could keep from putting religious objects into containers of urine, why not? Even artists should be able to run their own shop well enough to do that.
I nodded and heaved a sigh. I could not get an argument going. Peace would reign here today. True, it was a peace of the bitterly disappointed, the exhausted, and those that despaired of the future, but what the heck? Hanaan was standing behind the lunch counter giving me the evil-eye, much like FDR gave Kramer in that Seinfeld episode. I had not ordered anything to eat. I had just been sitting there sucking down a glass of water. Perhaps today was the day I would stand up to her bullying.
Hanaan insists upon herself too much. Yes, Lois. She insists upon herself.
I said that he'd be singing a different tune if he were in a leaky boat.
He looked at me and did the golem-smile thing: what a golem would smile...if a golem were to smile...sort of...not all there. Or perhaps like Graham Greene says of Captain Segura: his smile came out of the wrong place, much like a toothpaste container with a rip in it.
But what was important was that I could no longer get him mad. Hank had been down so long, that my feeble quips were nothing but flies looking for a soft spot on his great, pachydermous bulk...and not having much luck at it.
That's what happens when you steal a little retirement money from people; the starch goes out of their shirts, and they all sit around looking like that unhappily hot jury in Twelve Angry Men.
So I decided to try my best shot, trying to raise him from his slough of despond du jour. I started talking about money for the Arts.
Hitherto, money for the Arts for Hank was an ominous collage of sacred objects and bottles of human waste products, sort of a Max Ernst assemblage of Marcel DuChamp's Urinal in an unholy conjunction with Fra Angelico. To be fair to Hank, the objects he was recalling were not much by the way of Art by any definition of Art...other than Art as the process by which one bugs the hell out of straight, white folks.
Far be it from me to let him know I felt this way. What really is the value of having a blue-blooded, FOX watching rightie in your midst if you cannot indulge in a little "bear baiting" of the old, ugly brute?
I mean, really? Some of them become quite apoplectic. The ones with fair skin get all red-splotchy. I know one specimen with rosacea who becomes neon in his indignation. Very amusing for an indolent drone like myself.
So-o-o, I reached back into memory and pulled up something about money for the Arts....
No! No! That wasn't how it went. No. I remember now.
First, he was moaning and groaning about bail-outs, then drugs and Mexico. Then he said that it had been proved that any country like Denmark or Holland ( which he calls - I kid you not- Dutchland!) which had adopted a liberal attitude towards drugs discovered that the costs down the road cost more than a good, old-fashioned WAR on drugs in the first place...so put that in your let's-decriminalize-drugs-and-tax-it pipe and smoke it!
I said that the reason that Denmark and Holland found this to be true was the fact that Denmark and Holland were Socialist! and did stuff like provide safety nets and thing, so of course they would find that it cost them dearly.
However, I said, in this country, we have abolished all those safety nets, so we could legalize drugs and get off on the cheap!
I truly baffled him at this point.
Then I sequenced into the Artsy-Fartsy topics of conversation. Since we were talking about how much stuff costs: Arts 50 million, Banks 1 trillion, I decided it was time.
So, then I did that reaching back in time and grabbing a memory about money for the Arts in the original Obama stimulus package, and said we needed that mazuma for the Arts. For pete's sake, operas were being cancelled as we spoke!
I said: wasn't the original stimulus inclusion for the Arts gutted by some Know-Nothings and Nativists and America-Firsters and the KKK??!!
Silence.
He said, yeah.
Then he said 50 million wasn't all that much...if they could keep from putting religious objects into containers of urine, why not? Even artists should be able to run their own shop well enough to do that.
I nodded and heaved a sigh. I could not get an argument going. Peace would reign here today. True, it was a peace of the bitterly disappointed, the exhausted, and those that despaired of the future, but what the heck? Hanaan was standing behind the lunch counter giving me the evil-eye, much like FDR gave Kramer in that Seinfeld episode. I had not ordered anything to eat. I had just been sitting there sucking down a glass of water. Perhaps today was the day I would stand up to her bullying.
Hanaan insists upon herself too much. Yes, Lois. She insists upon herself.
Talking To The Maya
The Scots Philosopher MacFinn
Back when I spoke to the Maya, I used to complain about their sacrificial religious rites. The entire business of ripping people's hearts out was really not a sign of spiritual advancement, but on the contrary was a sign of a vicious indulgence in a corrupt spiritual vision gone badly awry.
Of course, given their history of bloodletting, from human sacrifice to the ritual bloodletting of kings, they merely looked at me, shook their heads, and smiled to each other, much as if I were the chimpanzee in "Jungle Jim", who had stopped by to supply everyone a much needed laugh.
They pointed their index fingers at the sides of their heads with a circular motion, saying "chowen", and laughing lots, this apparently being "mad as a monkey", and equivalent to "looney tunes".
At this point, I realized why I have so much trouble speaking to Americans about violence in society: there's way too much lovely history of bloodletting in which we wrap ourselves in comfortably like a warm duvet on a winter's morning.
It may have, indeed, troubled us once upon a time - such things as the pictures and the words of evil hitherto inexpressible being heralded into our living room from cable TV - but we have grown used to it.
In fact, violence is the constant.
The morality which gives rise to moral outrage when a truly outrageous violent event occurs is the exception.
We live with a Punctuated Christian Morality; it exists only in pieces.
First comes the Vision Quest.
First the 40 days in the desert, fasting.
First you come to God.
After that, you may sit around an argue about what is good or bad for a society.
St.Paul tells us that what we think is True and Clear Vision and Insight is nothing more than straining to see through a glass, darkly.
In this present day of religion and ritual and atheism and power......we see only as if through that dark window. Therefore, religion and ritual and all the trappings of our Rationality and Reason and Power and Governance..., they are all exigencies of people who are lost and cannot find their way.
We cannot make decisions as long as we are immersed within the prisons of our dark, unseeing visions of the world. Just as the Maya, we cannot understand that violence and bloodletting should be the rare exceptions, not the rule.
We are fish, and violence is the water in which we swim.
What is beyond our little sea?
Saturday, April 11, 2009
What Really Grinds My Gears April 11 2009
I can't even say what really grinds my gears! I mean, there is such a thing as censorship, and it isn't PC to say what I want to say, so I have to talk around it.
So, in an annual celebration of Spring, the daughter and I wend our way in pilgrimage to the local Twist 'n' Dip for cones, blizzards, sundaes, and ices; in short, as soon as it warms up, we have to sit around and wail for the the disappearance of winter by eating - not bitter herbs - but ice cream! Ice cream! Oh, ice,ice, gone and melted! Next year in Khoref - winter! Oy!
(what would human history be without our charming paradoxical behavior?)
I was telling her that earlier that afternoon, I had witnessed a mother starting to push a baby stroller across a busy street, and a large, cream-colored SUV began its turn to the right off the red light, heading directly at mother and child.
The accident was avoided, but I saw the mother had some nasty looks for the SUV as it drove off.
"Was the driver a woman?" my daughter asked.
"Yeah. She was." I said.
"I'll bet she was on her phone." my daughter said, saying it with a real force of conviction.
Then she added:
"I can just see her sitting there incredibly smug with her insane sense of entitlement."
I was flabbergasted.
I mean, if it is so well known to everybody that it is a commonplace that a woman driving an SUV will be on the phone and will pose a threat to life and limb, why are there no laws being passed?
Or is it merely because we can't single out all these smug chatty Cathies, because it isn't PC to do so?
Well, after my daughter had said this I reflected on it. I remembered one harrowing situation where I was being harassed by a large, black Monstro the Whale of an SUV - a Lincoln Navigator or a Cadillac Escalade - sort of the real deal Truck-o-saurus!
Finally, as it pushed me up onto the median and drove away, I could just see through the darkly tinted windows a woman on a cellphone! She held it aloft as fearsomely as the Headless Horseman lofted his burning pumpkin head, and she raised up and - in my fear - I imagined she threw it directly at me!
The SUV drove off in a cloud of dust and a cackling of insane witchery.
Whew.
That's what really grinds my gears.
So, in an annual celebration of Spring, the daughter and I wend our way in pilgrimage to the local Twist 'n' Dip for cones, blizzards, sundaes, and ices; in short, as soon as it warms up, we have to sit around and wail for the the disappearance of winter by eating - not bitter herbs - but ice cream! Ice cream! Oh, ice,ice, gone and melted! Next year in Khoref - winter! Oy!
(what would human history be without our charming paradoxical behavior?)
I was telling her that earlier that afternoon, I had witnessed a mother starting to push a baby stroller across a busy street, and a large, cream-colored SUV began its turn to the right off the red light, heading directly at mother and child.
The accident was avoided, but I saw the mother had some nasty looks for the SUV as it drove off.
"Was the driver a woman?" my daughter asked.
"Yeah. She was." I said.
"I'll bet she was on her phone." my daughter said, saying it with a real force of conviction.
Then she added:
"I can just see her sitting there incredibly smug with her insane sense of entitlement."
I was flabbergasted.
I mean, if it is so well known to everybody that it is a commonplace that a woman driving an SUV will be on the phone and will pose a threat to life and limb, why are there no laws being passed?
Or is it merely because we can't single out all these smug chatty Cathies, because it isn't PC to do so?
Well, after my daughter had said this I reflected on it. I remembered one harrowing situation where I was being harassed by a large, black Monstro the Whale of an SUV - a Lincoln Navigator or a Cadillac Escalade - sort of the real deal Truck-o-saurus!
Finally, as it pushed me up onto the median and drove away, I could just see through the darkly tinted windows a woman on a cellphone! She held it aloft as fearsomely as the Headless Horseman lofted his burning pumpkin head, and she raised up and - in my fear - I imagined she threw it directly at me!
The SUV drove off in a cloud of dust and a cackling of insane witchery.
Whew.
That's what really grinds my gears.
Remembering Rotten Republicans 1996-2006
Je me souviens, as they say on Quebec's license plates: I remember.
If you, my daughter, remember anything about credit from all this, remember the following:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/business/economy/11bank.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Showdown Seen Between Banks and Regulators
By STEPHEN LABATON and EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Published: April 10, 2009
...Both large and small banks have pressed the Obama administration to make it less costly for them to exit the bailout program by waiving the right to exercise stock warrants the banks had to grant the government in exchange for the loans. At a meeting last month, the chiefs of three of the largest banks separately asked Mr. Obama to direct the Treasury not to exercise the warrants, Mr. Fine said.
Douglas Leech, the founder and chief executive of Centra Bank, a small West Virginia bank that participated in the capital assistance program but returned the money after the government imposed new conditions, said he complained strongly about the Treasury Department’s decision to demand repayment of the warrants. That effectively raised the interest rate he paid on a $15 million loan to an annual rate of about 60 percent, he said.
“What they did is wrong and fundamentally un-American,” he said. “Even though the government told us to take this money to increase our lending, the extra charge meant we had less money to lend. It was the equivalent of a penalty for early withdrawal.”
Remember that a penalty for early withdrawal is un-American.... even though the banks have no qualms applying it to you or me.
Remember it is un-American to have sky high interest rates, even though the Rotten Republican Congress voted to allow credit card companies apply sky high rates to you and I.
Remember the Rotten Republicans.
If you, my daughter, remember anything about credit from all this, remember the following:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/business/economy/11bank.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Showdown Seen Between Banks and Regulators
By STEPHEN LABATON and EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Published: April 10, 2009
...Both large and small banks have pressed the Obama administration to make it less costly for them to exit the bailout program by waiving the right to exercise stock warrants the banks had to grant the government in exchange for the loans. At a meeting last month, the chiefs of three of the largest banks separately asked Mr. Obama to direct the Treasury not to exercise the warrants, Mr. Fine said.
Douglas Leech, the founder and chief executive of Centra Bank, a small West Virginia bank that participated in the capital assistance program but returned the money after the government imposed new conditions, said he complained strongly about the Treasury Department’s decision to demand repayment of the warrants. That effectively raised the interest rate he paid on a $15 million loan to an annual rate of about 60 percent, he said.
“What they did is wrong and fundamentally un-American,” he said. “Even though the government told us to take this money to increase our lending, the extra charge meant we had less money to lend. It was the equivalent of a penalty for early withdrawal.”
Remember that a penalty for early withdrawal is un-American.... even though the banks have no qualms applying it to you or me.
Remember it is un-American to have sky high interest rates, even though the Rotten Republican Congress voted to allow credit card companies apply sky high rates to you and I.
Remember the Rotten Republicans.
Friday, April 10, 2009
News From The Swigwam
The band is tuning up at the Swigwam on St. Pete's Beach.
I wish I were there.
Hi, Billy, Scott, etc.
I wish I were there.
Hi, Billy, Scott, etc.
Mythic Landscapes: The Cumaean Sibyl
View of the Sibyl of Cumaea, circa 2006.
If the Cumaean Sibyl is too Classical, then let us try the Oracle from The Matrix.
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Masquerade Of Words
I was speaking to someone who spoke of the need of "...a real religious insight."
I left immediately, and shall not waste time talking to that person for a long time; at least until they see that the "real" is "unreal".
It is unreal in the sense that it has nothing to do with religion. "Real" is nothing but a heart-felt
"Oh, I wish, I wish, I really, really wish..."
and if you are still wishing about God, someone else is doing all the bull work of the Lord.
I left immediately, and shall not waste time talking to that person for a long time; at least until they see that the "real" is "unreal".
It is unreal in the sense that it has nothing to do with religion. "Real" is nothing but a heart-felt
"Oh, I wish, I wish, I really, really wish..."
and if you are still wishing about God, someone else is doing all the bull work of the Lord.
Debate
I never debate.
If you catch me debating someone, I am marking time until something better comes along.
Never argue with people on their home turf.
Their home turf is this great palaver blanket of mush which sort of covers us all with its mind-dulling rhetoric of rationalism.
Words are masks and disguises.
I no longer have a need to disguise reality.
When reality is uncovered - that is, our human reality, what we have created, not what God has created - it is frightening and bloody. How bloody it is is a measure of its failure at existing.
It is frightening because it is loud, hellish, body-rending and mind-numbing.
It may not destroy us, however, without our ok. We have to become complicit in crime before it may destroy us.
Debate is dancing around the ring, boxing with this reality, wondering whether we shall engage and thus be destroyed, or... whether we shall fly away in the glory, in the morning.
If you catch me debating someone, I am marking time until something better comes along.
Never argue with people on their home turf.
Their home turf is this great palaver blanket of mush which sort of covers us all with its mind-dulling rhetoric of rationalism.
Words are masks and disguises.
I no longer have a need to disguise reality.
When reality is uncovered - that is, our human reality, what we have created, not what God has created - it is frightening and bloody. How bloody it is is a measure of its failure at existing.
It is frightening because it is loud, hellish, body-rending and mind-numbing.
It may not destroy us, however, without our ok. We have to become complicit in crime before it may destroy us.
Debate is dancing around the ring, boxing with this reality, wondering whether we shall engage and thus be destroyed, or... whether we shall fly away in the glory, in the morning.
A 99.95 Years War
Rainbow Bridge to ValhallaSo many guns are being sold, there is not enough ammo for a proper Hundred Years War anymore.
Last night, I dreamt about it. I saw in a dream our history as an opera. It seemed Wagnerian. It was taking place in a Bayreuth theater imagined by Leni Reifenstahl.
"2008" - strangely and eerily similar to the name "2001" , which itself was an iconic bit of music - was merely the overture to a Gotterdammerung, or Twilight of the Gods, where the end of time has come and even the gods in Valhalla go down to destruction.
A good deal of sound and fury and wonderful music. I sing quite well in my dreams. I don't recall at what point I had left the audience and joined the cast onstage, but there it was.
Last night was the first opera:
Gaia or Ge, the mother Earth, rejected us at last for the slings we lashed her with.
The peaceful God lamented our hoard of weapons of destruction, saying not even Alberich nor Mime ( the dwarf ) with all his gelt ( his gold ) had such a destructive pile of goodies. ( I think one of Alberich's gold pieces was the ring of the Nibelungs. Exactly how it wrought destruction may be imagined from "The Lord of the Rings")
Disgusted by mankind's murderous greed, the gods abandon the Earth for Valhalla.
At the end, there were a wretched few humans remaining alive. They raised their assault guns into a spire like a crucifix.
The spirits of their ancestors - milling about the wings like a Greek chorus the entire opera - wept and abandoned them to the world they had created, thereby removing the last spiritual vestige which had connected man to the rest on the universe.
It was all rather sad.
As I was exiting, I heard a large matron say to her companion, "Well, I can see why the living will envy the dead! All very Biblical." Her companion, an elderly gent, smiled a smile of the elderly - a benign symbol obscuring the fact that he had not heard what she had said at all. We bumped into each other and excused ourselves, allowing for each other to take precedence in exiting, and smiles all round. We remembered the words of Winston Churchill:
"When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite."
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
The Sock Drawer
The sock drawer is the highest drawer in the chest of drawers. There are two sock drawers, drawers one and two from the apex of the chest, and that devoted to black socks for formal wear, as well as socks of various colors for formal-casual, is the very topmost drawer. The one beneath - the downstairs drawer - is the drawer of the white socks, the work socks, the sports socks.
I have a great many pairs of whites. I can say that they do not make them like they used to. I have often toyed with the notion of darning my whites, usually being saved from the extravagant economy by a timely sock sale - but I have an item all lined up for the darning egg if the need arises. I refuse to buy a new ceramic egg.
I remember walking in darned socks as a child. It was a struggle. I think I may have further sabotaged them. I may have yanked them on by the cuff along the opening, hoping to rend them irretrievably. I hated darned socks.
The next drawer down is underwear. Not much to say here. The other day, I was caught out of doors in a pair of tighty-whities that had lost their tightness. This is another situation I do not much like.(And I hasten to add that I was wearing a pair of thick corduroys over the whities. I was "caught" in an allegorical sense.)There is no immediate remedy, and no surreptitious fix - like checking the zipper on the sly - is available. That pair of tighty whities were so acutely loose, so indolent of their proper functions, and the results were so louche and satyric and Rabelaisian, that I thought everyone in my vicinity would notice. They did not.
Back to the top drawer of socks, ebony and colored silk and cotton, and some wool. I have a small pile of handkerchiefs, usually segregated to the right rear, but sometimes freely strewn over the socks. I usually bundle the socks into those topological knots, resembling a Klein bottle, where you lay them out, one on top of the either, toes and tops together, then twist them into a Mobius strip - thereby establishing the one-dimensional nature of the socks, which is why we can pack so bloody many into a drawer - then pull the toes up to the tops - the "mouth" of the Klein bottle topology - insert and try to pull your fingers back before the time-space gate snaps down.
Toss into drawer like so many muffled marbles.
(Someone once gave me some Japanese tabi socks, but they didn't seem to be a true "sock", and I did not like the notion - so prevalent in the late 20th and early 21st century - of snobbery applied to socks; a "sockishness", like wine snobbery, or cigar snobbery. There was only so much one could be snobbish about. My brother was into cheese snobbery. It seemed all too exhausting to me. If I am to have my senses reeling from the shock of the new and exotic, it will no longer be caused by domestic articles like socks.
I have a great many pairs of whites. I can say that they do not make them like they used to. I have often toyed with the notion of darning my whites, usually being saved from the extravagant economy by a timely sock sale - but I have an item all lined up for the darning egg if the need arises. I refuse to buy a new ceramic egg.
I remember walking in darned socks as a child. It was a struggle. I think I may have further sabotaged them. I may have yanked them on by the cuff along the opening, hoping to rend them irretrievably. I hated darned socks.
The next drawer down is underwear. Not much to say here. The other day, I was caught out of doors in a pair of tighty-whities that had lost their tightness. This is another situation I do not much like.(And I hasten to add that I was wearing a pair of thick corduroys over the whities. I was "caught" in an allegorical sense.)There is no immediate remedy, and no surreptitious fix - like checking the zipper on the sly - is available. That pair of tighty whities were so acutely loose, so indolent of their proper functions, and the results were so louche and satyric and Rabelaisian, that I thought everyone in my vicinity would notice. They did not.
Back to the top drawer of socks, ebony and colored silk and cotton, and some wool. I have a small pile of handkerchiefs, usually segregated to the right rear, but sometimes freely strewn over the socks. I usually bundle the socks into those topological knots, resembling a Klein bottle, where you lay them out, one on top of the either, toes and tops together, then twist them into a Mobius strip - thereby establishing the one-dimensional nature of the socks, which is why we can pack so bloody many into a drawer - then pull the toes up to the tops - the "mouth" of the Klein bottle topology - insert and try to pull your fingers back before the time-space gate snaps down.
Toss into drawer like so many muffled marbles.
(Someone once gave me some Japanese tabi socks, but they didn't seem to be a true "sock", and I did not like the notion - so prevalent in the late 20th and early 21st century - of snobbery applied to socks; a "sockishness", like wine snobbery, or cigar snobbery. There was only so much one could be snobbish about. My brother was into cheese snobbery. It seemed all too exhausting to me. If I am to have my senses reeling from the shock of the new and exotic, it will no longer be caused by domestic articles like socks.
I gave the tabi away, possibly to the Goodwill.)
The drawer is dark and unruly like the Hellespont in storm.
If the white handkerchiefs are scattered, they look like white caps of waves, or bones in the teeth of impetuous boats braving the storm's furies against wiser councils.
I impose no order. This is the realm of chaos envisaged by so many writers of middling sci-fi scripts. It is the domain of black quantum foam, where vaguely rounded figures of darkness bubble up into view - so early in their quantum lives that they exhibit a net deficit of color, excepting that thin gold thread sewn along the toe.
If I am late in getting dressed, I stand there like some baffled ursine upon a rock within a roaring stream, bewildered by the innumerable shadowy and tenebrous socks swimming in pairs upstream to spawn. I launch a mighty roar, and swipe my exacting claws to grab a pair; their cotton weave gasps and they wriggle, trying to escape.
I thrust them upon my entish feet.
Whew.
The drawer, being the highest and the easiest for me to reach, has become the filing cabinet of my lint, spare change, and gas receipts and all things of minor accountabilities. Business cards to old theater tickets, souvenirs of impositions or happy times, stored against that future time when I shall get around to writing things up in my Journal...which has become an Annual...and now transforms into a Dekas, or group of ten years.
Everything goes right there, against everything the fire marshall has told us, until the drawer no longer closes, and I am forced to go through them and put them into a manila envelope.
In my memory, there are festoons and rosettes carved upon the wood surfaces of this chest of drawers, as well as fluted pillars at the edges in bas relief, and ending in a scroll foot. It has the veneer of antiquity about it. When I approach it, I feel as if I were a chamberlain about to ceremonially open the legislative chambers of some august Senate.
I think Ishmael was correct in having "Chips" make him a coffin early on during the voyage of the Pequod, for all infinite horizons have a shoreline; all large, vibrant life comes from the hollows of those tight-pack receptacles in those dark ships of the past, whose commerce was the basis of our modernity and wealth.
Without the wooden capitols and columns of my furniture, without the items therein derived from the fibers of living plants, I am barely a man.
The drawer is dark and unruly like the Hellespont in storm.
If the white handkerchiefs are scattered, they look like white caps of waves, or bones in the teeth of impetuous boats braving the storm's furies against wiser councils.
I impose no order. This is the realm of chaos envisaged by so many writers of middling sci-fi scripts. It is the domain of black quantum foam, where vaguely rounded figures of darkness bubble up into view - so early in their quantum lives that they exhibit a net deficit of color, excepting that thin gold thread sewn along the toe.
If I am late in getting dressed, I stand there like some baffled ursine upon a rock within a roaring stream, bewildered by the innumerable shadowy and tenebrous socks swimming in pairs upstream to spawn. I launch a mighty roar, and swipe my exacting claws to grab a pair; their cotton weave gasps and they wriggle, trying to escape.
I thrust them upon my entish feet.
Whew.
The drawer, being the highest and the easiest for me to reach, has become the filing cabinet of my lint, spare change, and gas receipts and all things of minor accountabilities. Business cards to old theater tickets, souvenirs of impositions or happy times, stored against that future time when I shall get around to writing things up in my Journal...which has become an Annual...and now transforms into a Dekas, or group of ten years.
Everything goes right there, against everything the fire marshall has told us, until the drawer no longer closes, and I am forced to go through them and put them into a manila envelope.
In my memory, there are festoons and rosettes carved upon the wood surfaces of this chest of drawers, as well as fluted pillars at the edges in bas relief, and ending in a scroll foot. It has the veneer of antiquity about it. When I approach it, I feel as if I were a chamberlain about to ceremonially open the legislative chambers of some august Senate.
I think Ishmael was correct in having "Chips" make him a coffin early on during the voyage of the Pequod, for all infinite horizons have a shoreline; all large, vibrant life comes from the hollows of those tight-pack receptacles in those dark ships of the past, whose commerce was the basis of our modernity and wealth.
Without the wooden capitols and columns of my furniture, without the items therein derived from the fibers of living plants, I am barely a man.
Anna's Snow Bird
AnnaMR had a poignant final post about a bird who had made a snow angel, then thought better of it, got up, brushed itself off, and scooted.
So we have been looking for that bird ever since, freely giving in to our obsessional natures.
The bird has been spotted. It was actually an ice bird, Avis Rara Glacis, which had made the one-point landing, woozled into the snow bank, then skedaddled. We were lucky to get a photo of it before the summer.
So we have been looking for that bird ever since, freely giving in to our obsessional natures.
The bird has been spotted. It was actually an ice bird, Avis Rara Glacis, which had made the one-point landing, woozled into the snow bank, then skedaddled. We were lucky to get a photo of it before the summer.
photo: onfocus.com
The Memoirs Of Victor Frankenstein: The Early Years
"I fondly recall the chemist's shop in Branau. It was on the Hesselstrasse, and its windows were always bright with light and novelty. I would stand there with my nose pressed to the glass, endlessly drinking in its chemical wonders.
"Ich bin von Himmel gefallen..." I murmured dreamily, for indeed, it seemed as if I had been to Heaven and back; returning now, a nomad from the celestial realm, with new insights into piece-mealing cadavers and using lightning to "motivate" them!"
"Ich bin von Himmel gefallen..." I murmured dreamily, for indeed, it seemed as if I had been to Heaven and back; returning now, a nomad from the celestial realm, with new insights into piece-mealing cadavers and using lightning to "motivate" them!"
photo: cabinet of wonders
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Mythic Landscapes: The Temple Of Aesclepius, Saviour
In the temple of Aesclepius, I dreamt of my father's boat:
pix: paddchas
Wisdom
I had taken the VW Passat in for its usual maintenance, and was sitting in the waiting room, writing on a large legal pad, while all around me, people were using lap tops and blackberries and iPhones. They were talking in the intense tones of youth when everything is rather critical.
So in the 2 hours I sit there, I had a number of old types come up and ask me:
are you a priest?
are you a rabbi?
are you an imam?
I sensed that had I only been in a bar, there would have been a good joke in this.
I am now going to writes some good lines to have at the ready when asked these questions in the future; something wise and profound. I don't know whether I shall make it simple and clear, or abstruse and obscure.
This wisdom thing could be a good wheeze to run for a while.
So in the 2 hours I sit there, I had a number of old types come up and ask me:
are you a priest?
are you a rabbi?
are you an imam?
I sensed that had I only been in a bar, there would have been a good joke in this.
I am now going to writes some good lines to have at the ready when asked these questions in the future; something wise and profound. I don't know whether I shall make it simple and clear, or abstruse and obscure.
This wisdom thing could be a good wheeze to run for a while.
We Are Legend
The economy is performing better than expected. There will be no job growth, however. Stock markets can do quite well, thank you, without any jobs. In fact, stock markets react positively to jobs being cut, people thrown out of work, and shipping jobs overseas.
My parents thought Rick Wagoner of GM got a raw deal. Then they read about how he wanted to outsource 100% of tooling overseas ( in Crain's Business ).
They don't seem to get it that cable news wants knee-jerk reactions, not informed viewers.
If the present trend continues, we are going to settle for illusions: the people at large will own the crappy assets, the people at large will go into year after year working at survival jobs, the people at large will watch the value of what they do have disappear.
We are destroying the future to rescue the miserable lives of the people who run this country.
The rest of us...? We are already as dead as walking zombies.
We are legend.
<<<>>>
More than anything, we wish for continuity in our lives: a story of country, faith, and ourselves that begins in hope, stays on course although buffeted by storms, and eyes on the prize - the same prize we had when we were young and dreaming.
That's what bothers me: I sense a sudden break in the continuity of our history. That story of being a Boomer born in WW II; American Graffitti 1950's; Kennedy and King 1960's - Hendrix, Beatles, and Vietnam; the end of the Cold War and how little we let it really change things...all leading to American prosperity and the times when we wrote ( as recently as last year) "the USA is the most powerful nation in the histroy of the world"...and then retirement and golf and Medicare.
It ain't happening. There's a sudden gap in continuity coming.
And it's going like Lord of the Flies.
My parents thought Rick Wagoner of GM got a raw deal. Then they read about how he wanted to outsource 100% of tooling overseas ( in Crain's Business ).
They don't seem to get it that cable news wants knee-jerk reactions, not informed viewers.
If the present trend continues, we are going to settle for illusions: the people at large will own the crappy assets, the people at large will go into year after year working at survival jobs, the people at large will watch the value of what they do have disappear.
We are destroying the future to rescue the miserable lives of the people who run this country.
The rest of us...? We are already as dead as walking zombies.
We are legend.
<<<>>>
More than anything, we wish for continuity in our lives: a story of country, faith, and ourselves that begins in hope, stays on course although buffeted by storms, and eyes on the prize - the same prize we had when we were young and dreaming.
That's what bothers me: I sense a sudden break in the continuity of our history. That story of being a Boomer born in WW II; American Graffitti 1950's; Kennedy and King 1960's - Hendrix, Beatles, and Vietnam; the end of the Cold War and how little we let it really change things...all leading to American prosperity and the times when we wrote ( as recently as last year) "the USA is the most powerful nation in the histroy of the world"...and then retirement and golf and Medicare.
It ain't happening. There's a sudden gap in continuity coming.
And it's going like Lord of the Flies.
Monday, April 06, 2009
The Future Of The Internet
I think that the future internet will be exclusively devoted to pictures of food.
I think there will be even more sites with sandwiches and fries and - in Quebec - poutine.
I think there will be even more sites with sandwiches and fries and - in Quebec - poutine.
Sunday, April 05, 2009
What Really Grinds My Gears April 5 2009
Shamelessly stealing from Peter Griffin, I am doing "What Really Grinds My Gears".
So, what really grinds my gears is the blatant connection between the notion of Deconstruction in Literature and Philosophy, and the rise in Alzheimer's related dementia.
I mean, obviously there is a "deconstruction" going on, and the one parallels the other.
I am really ticked off how Reality imitates Art. I am equally ticked off about Art imitating Reality.
It is like that Irony thing: it really ground my gears that the USA has this reversal of fortune thing going on, with the banks and all...
It's the real deal, not some Tower of Babel fairy tale! That really, really grinds my gears!
So...what am I saying? I'll tell you what I'm saying! This blather and hop-scotch about deconstruction leads to a void. It was a dramatic foreshadowing of the deconstruction of society...and vice versa, if you wish to have it both ways.
Literature should learn to stay out of Reality. Or, if not, then it should get a job like the rest of us. Or, like the rest of us used to.
Same thing goes for films. Siegfried Kracauer notwithstanding, the film The Cabinett of Dr. Caligari should not warn us about fascism; in that best of all possible worlds - envisaged by Dr. Pangloss - the spiritual and the physical do not " leak " into each other, but maintain strict Cartesian segregation and separation. The spiritual has separate, but "equal" facilities, such as water fountains and wash rooms.
That's what really grinds my gears!
So, what really grinds my gears is the blatant connection between the notion of Deconstruction in Literature and Philosophy, and the rise in Alzheimer's related dementia.
I mean, obviously there is a "deconstruction" going on, and the one parallels the other.
I am really ticked off how Reality imitates Art. I am equally ticked off about Art imitating Reality.
It is like that Irony thing: it really ground my gears that the USA has this reversal of fortune thing going on, with the banks and all...
It's the real deal, not some Tower of Babel fairy tale! That really, really grinds my gears!
So...what am I saying? I'll tell you what I'm saying! This blather and hop-scotch about deconstruction leads to a void. It was a dramatic foreshadowing of the deconstruction of society...and vice versa, if you wish to have it both ways.
Literature should learn to stay out of Reality. Or, if not, then it should get a job like the rest of us. Or, like the rest of us used to.
Same thing goes for films. Siegfried Kracauer notwithstanding, the film The Cabinett of Dr. Caligari should not warn us about fascism; in that best of all possible worlds - envisaged by Dr. Pangloss - the spiritual and the physical do not " leak " into each other, but maintain strict Cartesian segregation and separation. The spiritual has separate, but "equal" facilities, such as water fountains and wash rooms.
That's what really grinds my gears!
Banks
I do not understand the government's approach to Toxic Assets and the banks which hold them.
From the ASIA TIMES:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/KD03Dj02.html
Geithner's dirty little secret
By F William Engdahl
...Today, five US banks, according to data in the just-released Federal Office of Comptroller of the Currency's Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activity, hold 96% of all US bank derivatives positions in terms of nominal values, and an eye-popping 81% of the total net credit risk exposure in event of default.
The top three are, in declining order of importance: JPMorgan Chase, which holds a staggering $88 trillion in derivatives; Bank of America with $38 trillion, and Citibank with $32 trillion. Number four in the derivatives sweepstakes is Goldman Sachs, with a mere $30 trillion in derivatives; number five, the merged Wells Fargo-Wachovia Bank, drops dramatically in size to $5 trillion. Number six, Britain's HSBC Bank USA, has $3.7 trillion.
After that the size of US bank exposure to these explosive off-balance-sheet unregulated derivative obligations falls off dramatically. Continuing to pour taxpayer money into these five banks without changing their operating system, is tantamount to treating an alcoholic with unlimited free booze...
Why has the criminal Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 , which created the playing field for these abuses, not been repealed? This is the act which forbade regulatory oversight of derivatives.
If you forget, there was a serious infection of derivatives in the 90's. I remember something about how the pension fund for Orange County, California, had lost some incredible amount back then, because it had invested in derivatives.
Why did then Senator Phil Gramm exempt it from scrutiny?
Why has Gramm not been called to account for his crimes? Why has he not been summoned to testify before Congress? ( I think he was, but he was handled with the respect due a law-maker.)
From the ASIA TIMES:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/KD03Dj02.html
Geithner's dirty little secret
By F William Engdahl
...Today, five US banks, according to data in the just-released Federal Office of Comptroller of the Currency's Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activity, hold 96% of all US bank derivatives positions in terms of nominal values, and an eye-popping 81% of the total net credit risk exposure in event of default.
The top three are, in declining order of importance: JPMorgan Chase, which holds a staggering $88 trillion in derivatives; Bank of America with $38 trillion, and Citibank with $32 trillion. Number four in the derivatives sweepstakes is Goldman Sachs, with a mere $30 trillion in derivatives; number five, the merged Wells Fargo-Wachovia Bank, drops dramatically in size to $5 trillion. Number six, Britain's HSBC Bank USA, has $3.7 trillion.
After that the size of US bank exposure to these explosive off-balance-sheet unregulated derivative obligations falls off dramatically. Continuing to pour taxpayer money into these five banks without changing their operating system, is tantamount to treating an alcoholic with unlimited free booze...
Why has the criminal Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 , which created the playing field for these abuses, not been repealed? This is the act which forbade regulatory oversight of derivatives.
If you forget, there was a serious infection of derivatives in the 90's. I remember something about how the pension fund for Orange County, California, had lost some incredible amount back then, because it had invested in derivatives.
Why did then Senator Phil Gramm exempt it from scrutiny?
Why has Gramm not been called to account for his crimes? Why has he not been summoned to testify before Congress? ( I think he was, but he was handled with the respect due a law-maker.)
Thursday, April 02, 2009
Waiting For Ananias
Much preferable to sitting around and waiting for Godot.
God may work miracles. Miracles are beyond human control and abilities. Miracles are the essence of creativity.
The devil is forced to rely entirely upon human weaknesses to work evil.
This is why the displays of evil - alluring though it may be at times - when seen alongside the works of God, are immediately seen to be second-rate and derivative: they merely plagiarize the weaknesses we already have.
God may work miracles. Miracles are beyond human control and abilities. Miracles are the essence of creativity.
The devil is forced to rely entirely upon human weaknesses to work evil.
This is why the displays of evil - alluring though it may be at times - when seen alongside the works of God, are immediately seen to be second-rate and derivative: they merely plagiarize the weaknesses we already have.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
April 1
Gowk, or Common CuckooToday arrived with the morning milk, and like the morning milk, it sat a while upon the back door stoop - fresh, bedewed with beads of moisture, and cream at the top! - a big gawsie day, a day looking for love and trouble - a day of many colours: good, bad, and indifferent; a day of glycol and gristle, of candy and cinders...a harbinger of spring and summer and the early fall days to come, the great expansive kerry dance of days, lasting from Trinity until Michaelmas. Today is April 1:
" This is the first day of April,
Hunt the gowk another mile. "
"Gowk" is a Scots word , meaning "cuckoo", and as unfamiliar as it probably sounds, I may safely say that I have actually used it in my writing, doing something about grackles and gowks at the time of about 40 plus years ago.
My three nephews stopped by by in the A.M., soliciting three cups of tea ( courtesy the Grace Tea Company, New York, New York ). I thought it auspicious and ominous: three nephews, three cups of tea, three the kings, three the persons of the Trinity...and three the legs of Hephaestos' steam-powered......three...legged thingies that we read about in the Iliad, or at least would have read about had you been studying.
So it was that, then: a day of wonders mechanical - Haephestos to Henry Ford - and perhaps our bitter herbs to eat after. We wondered at the markets dropping after Mr. Obama's remarks about the auto industry. To us, it seemed like CEO Obama was stepping up and clearing the decks and it was all business - good sign from our experience.
However, markets, in their infinite wisdom and ability to act like frightened harlequins, saw it differently. I suppose Mr. Santelli was scrabbling about the floor of a mercantile exchange somewhere, yelling "Mene, mene, tekhel, up yer socialism!" - or the closest approximation thereto.
It was a good day today. The down market was followed by an up - somewhere. It was a day to take your car into the nearest auto hospice to have an evaluation of the damages of unrepaired potholes.
We have had some potholes along the seam of tarmac and shoulder which resemble the Calebras Cut of the Panama Canal, and have been gaping like Ginnunga Gap for a couple of months. I saw a road grader once. As I passed, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw it disappear down the void - another addition to the DPW of Hades!
The bit of doggerel on April 1 quoted above - I tell you now, just had I told the boys, sitting and drinking the Earl Grey tea - was what passed for humor in the Gaelic community; i.e., the total discomfiture and embarrassment of another human being.
Back in the day, our druidical leaders had us give human sacrifice. With the Christian community moving into the neighborhood, we - the Gaels : in order of importance, the Scots, the Manx, the Bretons, the Welsh, the Cornish, and the Irish -we felt the necessity no longer of decapitating the odd Andy Thomson and using his eyeballs to play at mib, so we turned to incapacitating a scapegoat with practical jokes.
It was that same Andy Thomson we asked to go to the Chemist's with a note, whereon was writ the above " This is the first day of April, Hunt the gowk another mile ".
The Chemist, upon reading said note, would tell poor Andy that he did not have the medicament or whatever that I required, but so-and-so did. He would tell Andy then to proceed to Mr. So-and-so with his letter
Andy did as directed, and the cycle went on.
The verb "hunt" is taken to mean to chase game, to cause it to move and run, not merely to go looking for game, so everyone is causing Andy, the gowk - it also means a simpleton - to run on another mile or so. By the end of it, everyone was laughing, and Andy couldna show his face for a fortnight.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Peace Capitalism
Why not have the West Bank settlements pay a reasonable rent for the land?
If the outlay did not justify the continued existence of the settlement, it would revert back to the Palestinians. If it did, the settlement is obviously doing well, and so is the recipient of rents.
In other words, a Capitalism wherein everyone profits...the real deal, not the illusion.
If the outlay did not justify the continued existence of the settlement, it would revert back to the Palestinians. If it did, the settlement is obviously doing well, and so is the recipient of rents.
In other words, a Capitalism wherein everyone profits...the real deal, not the illusion.
The Nature Of Violence In History: John C. Calhoun
March 31, 1850 marks the end of the life of John C. Calhoun, American statesman and orator. He served the state of South Carolina in the Senate, and was a proponent of free trade, in this opposing the North, which was very much protectionist, seeking to protect the infant industrial northern society.
The South saw Northern protectionist tariffs as strangling free trade and their exports, and feelings ran so high that secession from the Union was seriously discussed. A forceful speaker, Calhoun orated thus in this period:
'We are told that the Union must be preserved. And how is it proposed to preserve the Union? By force! Does any man in his senses believe that this beautiful structure, —this harmonious aggregate of States, produced by the joint consent of all,—can be preserved by force?
Its very introduction will be certain destruction to the Federal Union. No, no! You cannot keep the States united in their constitutional and federal bonds by force.
Force may, indeed, hold the parts together; but such union would be the bond between the master and slave—a union of exaction on one side, and of unqualified obedience on the other.
It is madness to suppose that the Union can be preserved by force. Disguise it as you may, the contest is one between power and liberty.'
In the present day, we celebrate this very application of force, and never more question the nature of the outcomes of such a procedure. The productive and beneficial outcomes of Force and Violence are orated and applauded and the icons associated with them are enshrined.
The Founding Fathers saw the necessity of Union, compelled to it by the logic of history, not by the calculus of armed conflict and compulsion. The Union, although it struggled to be born, was not in its nature a compact to which the parties were driven by arms and cudgels.
Yet, the continuance of the Union was seen to be such a process of exaction and unqualified obedience.
The question in Calhoun's mind probably was:
Did we, indeed, freely agree to enter into a Union, whose existence immediately abrogates those same freedoms, upon our crossing the threshhold into it?
(note: During the aftermath of the presidential election of 1824, Calhoun denounced the "corrupt bargain" of Henry Clay and John Q. Adams, saying that power - improperly acquired - will be undoubtedly improperly used.)
Monday, March 30, 2009
Memory's Malaprops:1
Mr. Malaprop is the name when it comes to quotes. Debating another chappie about some obscure political issue, I decided to quote Ronald Reagan.
This is what happened when my opponent interrupted me. I said:
" Mr. Gorbahev,... I paid for this microphone !! "
being a combination of the remark in a presidential debate about paying for microphones and the one about Mr. Gorbachev tearing the Berlin wall down.
I was always a Goldwater Conservative. A Reagan Conservative, I must admit, I always believed sort of thought of themselves as having that same big smile and that lush head of hair as the Gipper, and not to many deep political thoughts. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps not.
This is what happened when my opponent interrupted me. I said:
" Mr. Gorbahev,... I paid for this microphone !! "
being a combination of the remark in a presidential debate about paying for microphones and the one about Mr. Gorbachev tearing the Berlin wall down.
I was always a Goldwater Conservative. A Reagan Conservative, I must admit, I always believed sort of thought of themselves as having that same big smile and that lush head of hair as the Gipper, and not to many deep political thoughts. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps not.
Halliburton Revisited
In case you missed the comment on Helliburton ( Halliburton ) being the contractor on the Death Star, a reader named Elijah responded:
I have a personal experience with the wiring in Iraq. I was stationed in Balad between 2006-2008, and while I was on a patrol, my barracks building burned to the ground. About 50 soldiers lived there and everything we owned was destroyed. Very few soldiers were left back in the building and they weren't enough to put the fire out themselves. It was a horrible situation and thank God nobody was injured, but needless to say we had enough on our minds without having to recover our losses. Many of us also had belongings that could not be replaced. Going through a fire is a horrible thing and prevention is much easier than recovery. Follow-up comment this and I will send you pictures of the aftermath!
Elijah, if you are still willing to send the pix, use the email address in the profile area. Thanks.
YAHOO's Unwitting Agenda(?)
I came across an interesting phenomenon. There was a posting in a blog called Israel Matzev dealing with the US administration won't " save" Israel from an Iranian nuke.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
If anyone still thinks the US will save Israel from an Iranian nuke...
http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2009/03/if-anyone-still-thinks-us-will-save.html
The author insults Mr. Olmert and Mr. Obama.
Well, why not? I mean, you have to have some sort of ending, right? May as well wrap it up with a pretty silken insult. I have always thought, however, that one may as well start out with the insult as the first sentence...and then one realizes that the rest of the bloody writing is superfluous, and you may get back to living a full-blooded life of moral imperatives.
O.K. Now I'm getting annoying.
Anyway, the blog is what the breed calls "right wing" and makes a big deal of its right-winged-ness, having links to other right-winged blogs and a mighty blog roll of the right (wing) stuff. Fine.
Now what totally surprised me was the fact that this posting had 19 commenters.
Of this 19, 9 commenters with a profile in Blogger had started their blogs in March 2009, and had not yet gotten around to posting anything in their own blogs.
There was exactly 1 comment by an individual that seemed to have a living blog.
Of all the other profiled commenters - and of the 19, 6 were not available or not displayed - there was a grand total of 2 posts for all of them - ever.
I was somewhat surprised that some many March 2009 bloggers were interested in this particular topic: fully 9 of 19 were March virgin bloggers.
I was even more surprised that some many people who went throught the trouble of establishing a blog, establishing a profile, and even rousing themselves to hacking out some commentary on Israel Matzev's post, cannot seem to write anything for themselves.
Furthermore, there were numerous links from another site to this very posting - not to the blog, but to this posting. I mean, things that did not seem related were linked, creating a impression of a good deal of info flowing back and forth.
I must contact Yahoo and see how they go about referring to blogs and topics. The column is titled Most Blogged - World, so there is some algorithm to measure activity.
It appeared Monday, March 30 in Yahoo under a story I was reading about Kirkuk:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090330/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq_disputed_kirkuk;_ylc=X3oDMTI1NzZyc3Q3BFJfYWlkAwRSX2RtbgN5YWhvby5jb20EUl9maWQDYmRhMGMzMzU0NTFiYmY2YjY0Y2Q0MWRlYjBiYWRlNDYEUl9sdHADMQ--
Most Blogged - World
If anyone still thinks the US will save Israel from an Iranian nuke... Israel Matzav – Sun Mar 29, 11:55 am EDT
Blogs About This Story (6)
Prev Next
WMD Proliferation Party: Iranian Missile Team In North Korea For ICBM Test Launch Infidel Bloggers Alliance – Sun Mar 29, 3:21 pm EDT
Blogs About This Story (5)
Prev Next
The Day in Israel: Mon Mar 30th, 2009 – Sun Mar 29, 7:37 pm EDT
Blogs About This Story (4)
Prev Next
These links should work for a while. See what you think. Maybe it is just April 1 effect.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
If anyone still thinks the US will save Israel from an Iranian nuke...
http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2009/03/if-anyone-still-thinks-us-will-save.html
The author insults Mr. Olmert and Mr. Obama.
Well, why not? I mean, you have to have some sort of ending, right? May as well wrap it up with a pretty silken insult. I have always thought, however, that one may as well start out with the insult as the first sentence...and then one realizes that the rest of the bloody writing is superfluous, and you may get back to living a full-blooded life of moral imperatives.
O.K. Now I'm getting annoying.
Anyway, the blog is what the breed calls "right wing" and makes a big deal of its right-winged-ness, having links to other right-winged blogs and a mighty blog roll of the right (wing) stuff. Fine.
Now what totally surprised me was the fact that this posting had 19 commenters.
Of this 19, 9 commenters with a profile in Blogger had started their blogs in March 2009, and had not yet gotten around to posting anything in their own blogs.
There was exactly 1 comment by an individual that seemed to have a living blog.
Of all the other profiled commenters - and of the 19, 6 were not available or not displayed - there was a grand total of 2 posts for all of them - ever.
I was somewhat surprised that some many March 2009 bloggers were interested in this particular topic: fully 9 of 19 were March virgin bloggers.
I was even more surprised that some many people who went throught the trouble of establishing a blog, establishing a profile, and even rousing themselves to hacking out some commentary on Israel Matzev's post, cannot seem to write anything for themselves.
Furthermore, there were numerous links from another site to this very posting - not to the blog, but to this posting. I mean, things that did not seem related were linked, creating a impression of a good deal of info flowing back and forth.
I must contact Yahoo and see how they go about referring to blogs and topics. The column is titled Most Blogged - World, so there is some algorithm to measure activity.
It appeared Monday, March 30 in Yahoo under a story I was reading about Kirkuk:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090330/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq_disputed_kirkuk;_ylc=X3oDMTI1NzZyc3Q3BFJfYWlkAwRSX2RtbgN5YWhvby5jb20EUl9maWQDYmRhMGMzMzU0NTFiYmY2YjY0Y2Q0MWRlYjBiYWRlNDYEUl9sdHADMQ--
Most Blogged - World
If anyone still thinks the US will save Israel from an Iranian nuke... Israel Matzav – Sun Mar 29, 11:55 am EDT
Blogs About This Story (6)
Prev Next
WMD Proliferation Party: Iranian Missile Team In North Korea For ICBM Test Launch Infidel Bloggers Alliance – Sun Mar 29, 3:21 pm EDT
Blogs About This Story (5)
Prev Next
The Day in Israel: Mon Mar 30th, 2009 – Sun Mar 29, 7:37 pm EDT
Blogs About This Story (4)
Prev Next
These links should work for a while. See what you think. Maybe it is just April 1 effect.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Art: Josep Renau
Celebridades Nortes Americanas / North American Celebrities
Spanish painter, poster designer, and muralist, he lived from 1907 - 1982.
The above seems to be a satiric commentary: the Declaration of Independence and George Washington's likeness are very much in the background and obscured, George Washington barely visible above the Coke Bottle.
The Autumn Of Our Capitalism
In Science Daily:
Humanity May Hold Key For Next Earth Evolution
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081129173302.htm
..."We are … an agent for planetary evolution or an agent for planetary destruction,” Langmuir said. “Do we relate to the current environmental problems as if we are users of the Earth, or do we recognize that we are the byproduct of 4.5 billion years of planetary evolution? What we do may determine whether the planet is able to move into its next phase of development.”
Our new capitalism must undergo a considerable change. As the beings of the greatest potential for intelligence on the Earth, God gave us the position of steward that we might exercise good husbandry over this part of Creation.
Instead, we have chosen to exploit it, and to turn it into instruments of finance which - due to our incredible lack of hindsight, foresight, and insight - served to increase the suffering of mankind, not to alleviate it.
I imagined myself Ausonius late last autumn when I paused to consider the meaning of what I was writing. Ausonius was a figure of the late Roman Empire. He lived in present day Burgundy, and spent his life in service of the Empire. He was a poet, too.
Ausonius went out into the Burgundy countryside in autumn, and felt a presentiment of everything he stood for passing away.
It was not merely as a literary device that I chose Ausonius, for it seems that I actually had stood there with him, only it was years ago, much earlier than 2008. It was indicated that I was to live my life, not in the vibrant bloom of spring of a society - as I had believed since my babyhood, as I had been taught by the wise minds of my country - but I was in the autumn which grew colder day by day.
We journeyed to Detroit and stood within the Detroit Institute of Arts in the Rivera court, where the great Diego Rivera had painted the murals of Industry.
As we sat and looked at them, it was mentioned that we could rent the courtyard for my daughter's wedding for a mere $20,000.
Beyond the insanity of the cost - obviously established in the old period which ended in 2008 but which people still fervently held onto, the period of capitalistic autism - I could not bear to be in the courtyard, for I had the distinct impression that I was standing as a time-traveller from some other age, or a future archaeologist, standing and staring with imperfect understanding at the glories of the by-gone age.
Within the murals glowed the genius of invention and creativity; delineated in vibrant colors were the riches and the nurturing attention of the enigmatic Mother Earth which had been given to us.
In the murals there were the hard work and dedication of generations, transformed by Industry into people who built good and strong lives and were the root stock of virtuous families.
Straining in the confines of the two dimensions were the diversity of conscious entities - striving against the ideas of each other, presenting two visions - and I realized our diverse nature and the necessity that we realize we shall always differ, conscious beings always do, but we must reconcile in the end.
Humanity May Hold Key For Next Earth Evolution
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081129173302.htm
..."We are … an agent for planetary evolution or an agent for planetary destruction,” Langmuir said. “Do we relate to the current environmental problems as if we are users of the Earth, or do we recognize that we are the byproduct of 4.5 billion years of planetary evolution? What we do may determine whether the planet is able to move into its next phase of development.”
Our new capitalism must undergo a considerable change. As the beings of the greatest potential for intelligence on the Earth, God gave us the position of steward that we might exercise good husbandry over this part of Creation.
Instead, we have chosen to exploit it, and to turn it into instruments of finance which - due to our incredible lack of hindsight, foresight, and insight - served to increase the suffering of mankind, not to alleviate it.
I imagined myself Ausonius late last autumn when I paused to consider the meaning of what I was writing. Ausonius was a figure of the late Roman Empire. He lived in present day Burgundy, and spent his life in service of the Empire. He was a poet, too.
Ausonius went out into the Burgundy countryside in autumn, and felt a presentiment of everything he stood for passing away.
It was not merely as a literary device that I chose Ausonius, for it seems that I actually had stood there with him, only it was years ago, much earlier than 2008. It was indicated that I was to live my life, not in the vibrant bloom of spring of a society - as I had believed since my babyhood, as I had been taught by the wise minds of my country - but I was in the autumn which grew colder day by day.
We journeyed to Detroit and stood within the Detroit Institute of Arts in the Rivera court, where the great Diego Rivera had painted the murals of Industry.
As we sat and looked at them, it was mentioned that we could rent the courtyard for my daughter's wedding for a mere $20,000.
Beyond the insanity of the cost - obviously established in the old period which ended in 2008 but which people still fervently held onto, the period of capitalistic autism - I could not bear to be in the courtyard, for I had the distinct impression that I was standing as a time-traveller from some other age, or a future archaeologist, standing and staring with imperfect understanding at the glories of the by-gone age.
Within the murals glowed the genius of invention and creativity; delineated in vibrant colors were the riches and the nurturing attention of the enigmatic Mother Earth which had been given to us.
In the murals there were the hard work and dedication of generations, transformed by Industry into people who built good and strong lives and were the root stock of virtuous families.
Straining in the confines of the two dimensions were the diversity of conscious entities - striving against the ideas of each other, presenting two visions - and I realized our diverse nature and the necessity that we realize we shall always differ, conscious beings always do, but we must reconcile in the end.
And I was overwhelmed by a sense of shame that I lived in the throw-away age: America of Throw-Away Well-Being! What shall we do today? Shall we toss out the retirement accounts of millions? Toss their savings as if they were plates of styrofoam, not gold, not lives.
In truth, my face reddened as I stood there. I wondered if everyone else were feeling the same thing, the same dissonance between pictures of creative beings being gaped at by their mammalian, bi-pedal, quasi-simian descendants.
I am not living in the age of reconciliation; I am living at the first breakdown of the system. After me will come the great discords and the fights and loathsome wars my country is so adept at.
I am Ausonius, and I write for the future generation: reconcile with each other, reconcile with God, and reconcile with nature.
It is your future generation to which belongs the brave new world of the future.
I am not living in the age of reconciliation; I am living at the first breakdown of the system. After me will come the great discords and the fights and loathsome wars my country is so adept at.
I am Ausonius, and I write for the future generation: reconcile with each other, reconcile with God, and reconcile with nature.
It is your future generation to which belongs the brave new world of the future.
orate pro nobis omnes veniete et pro vobis orabimus...
pray for us, and from our monuments
of marble we shall pray for you...
note: tomorrow we shall discuss Iconic Participation for some idea of how those who are gone actually pray for those who remain.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Hafiz Alley
Where we went in the winter of 2008-2009 to memorize the books, those few which had not been burned.
photo: magdalena wanli
The Past And The Future: Laberinto Del Fauno
The Past:
Atlantis existed. It was in the area of the African Continent in the East African Rift, the zone which separates the Nubian sub-plate of the African tectonic plate from the Somalian sub-plate of the African plate.
It was situated in approximately what is now the middle of Lake Victoria, or Victoria Nyanza - Nalubaale in Luganda - in an inland fresh water sea that was approximately 1000 km. long with a maximum width of 500 km.
In Plato's account of Atlantis in the Timaeus, he describes the island as beyond the pillars of Hercules. There have been various interpretations of these pillars, or stele. There is an ancient account of "pillars of Shango". referring to the god of thunder of Western Africa, but the story is placed in East Africa!
The pillars of Shango form a trinity of volcanoes, the three which form Mount Kilimanjaro: Kibo, the central volcano with a permanent snow field and glacier; Shira, the most westerly and the oldest; and Mawenzi, a peak that stands just under
5350 meters, or just under 17,600 feet.
In this vicinity was the very old city we call Atlantis. It was on an island within the much larger Nyanza that existed at the time, and it was the center of a great empire which extended around the margins of the Rift Valley inland sea - of which today only the small necklace of lakes in the valley remain.
In old Islamic accounts, the city is referred to as Madinat Al-Launain, the city of the two colors, these colors being red, ahmaru, and white, abyadu, the colors of Shango. The people of the land were said, however, to be of three colors, red, white, and black.
Geology indicates we are speaking of a time about 62 million years ago. This is much too early for human life, according to present science.
However, the story continues that the Atlanteans became debased, and the forces of Nature and the forces of Justice conspired to destroy Atlantis.
Atlantis existed. It was in the area of the African Continent in the East African Rift, the zone which separates the Nubian sub-plate of the African tectonic plate from the Somalian sub-plate of the African plate.
It was situated in approximately what is now the middle of Lake Victoria, or Victoria Nyanza - Nalubaale in Luganda - in an inland fresh water sea that was approximately 1000 km. long with a maximum width of 500 km.
In Plato's account of Atlantis in the Timaeus, he describes the island as beyond the pillars of Hercules. There have been various interpretations of these pillars, or stele. There is an ancient account of "pillars of Shango". referring to the god of thunder of Western Africa, but the story is placed in East Africa!
The pillars of Shango form a trinity of volcanoes, the three which form Mount Kilimanjaro: Kibo, the central volcano with a permanent snow field and glacier; Shira, the most westerly and the oldest; and Mawenzi, a peak that stands just under
5350 meters, or just under 17,600 feet.
In this vicinity was the very old city we call Atlantis. It was on an island within the much larger Nyanza that existed at the time, and it was the center of a great empire which extended around the margins of the Rift Valley inland sea - of which today only the small necklace of lakes in the valley remain.
In old Islamic accounts, the city is referred to as Madinat Al-Launain, the city of the two colors, these colors being red, ahmaru, and white, abyadu, the colors of Shango. The people of the land were said, however, to be of three colors, red, white, and black.
Geology indicates we are speaking of a time about 62 million years ago. This is much too early for human life, according to present science.
However, the story continues that the Atlanteans became debased, and the forces of Nature and the forces of Justice conspired to destroy Atlantis.
Then we come to the Present, and we stand and stare into the Future:
We are becoming as estranged from each other as was Spain in the years leading up to its Civil War in the 1930s.
For a spokesman for a political party - the Republican - to forcefully state in the middle of great danger and uncertainty that he wishes that the President of the country fail...and by failure, we obviously imply that the country fail also...is a great change in America that I have never seen in my long, long life.
In the past, we fought tooth and nail, but we came together to do at least the minimum of actions required for the well being of the country. And we never, ever wished that the country go down to ashes, so that we - the latter day messiahs of our tortured imaginations - could then come down from our slum Galilee and scream - as if in a nightmare - Lazarus, arise!!
Horrid blasphemy of the Present age! Unnatural men and women!
We are entering the Faun's Labyrinth - Laberinto del Fauno - wherein the spoken stories of the horror of fratricide, passionately hot, become congealed into despairingly cold aspic of novel terror.
Stop...now.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Helliburton Contracting Ltd
Elijah commented on the outrage Halliburton pulled, is pulling, and will continue to pull in Iraq: winning contracting bids, then doing the work with people who know nothing about construction.
(Notice we say Halliburton, not KBR. By now, Halliburton should have been made aware of its subsidiary's crimes. Hence, Helliburton bears the onus of responsibility.)
First, it made me aware how much I actually work at writing. I like to give the impression that it just sort of rolls off the keyboard, and I do not raise a sweat.
However, I am quick to anger, and the more outrageous the situation the quicker it is.
The description of a committee investigating soldiers being electrocuted in the showers passes my understanding. My real first response was: let us get our guns and then go find those responsible!
Imagine! Billions for bankers, millions more spent on the media coverage of bankers and Wall Streeters and bonuses...and the USA can not find it in its bag of tricks to spend money building a shower room than won't electrocute the soldiers showering in it, and it can not find sufficient executive expertise to monitor what is going on until a couple of GIs have been fried!!
What kind of a pantomime horse of a country was this for the last quarter century or more?
So - as you see, it is very difficult not to rant about these things, but to find some other way to talk about them. I mean people will be outraged on their own, they don't need me to point out where the exact fault is; they don't need my incredible moral focus to to throw back the bedsheets from the copulating members of the military-industrial complex.
I have ranted. Everybody does. So when I rant, I blend into the crowd. That's why I try to find another way to bring it to peoples' attention. As outrages and crimes pile on top of each other in our Tower of Babel, they blend into each other and become diffuse evil. I try to pin a badge or emblem of nonsense of them to keep them fresh in my mind, if not someone else's mind, too.
Second, outrage should by now be a continuous state of mind, not something invoked when someone pushes our buttons.
Our buttons have been pushed; our buttons have had a heavy book placed atop them and are continually on.
We don't need a committee to find who is at fault, since we are not going to prosecute Halliburton-Cheney anyway. It is another sideshow for the yokels.
And this is why I think our recovery will take so long: our country has so much rotten that it will take more than a generation to clear it out.
(Notice we say Halliburton, not KBR. By now, Halliburton should have been made aware of its subsidiary's crimes. Hence, Helliburton bears the onus of responsibility.)
First, it made me aware how much I actually work at writing. I like to give the impression that it just sort of rolls off the keyboard, and I do not raise a sweat.
However, I am quick to anger, and the more outrageous the situation the quicker it is.
The description of a committee investigating soldiers being electrocuted in the showers passes my understanding. My real first response was: let us get our guns and then go find those responsible!
Imagine! Billions for bankers, millions more spent on the media coverage of bankers and Wall Streeters and bonuses...and the USA can not find it in its bag of tricks to spend money building a shower room than won't electrocute the soldiers showering in it, and it can not find sufficient executive expertise to monitor what is going on until a couple of GIs have been fried!!
What kind of a pantomime horse of a country was this for the last quarter century or more?
So - as you see, it is very difficult not to rant about these things, but to find some other way to talk about them. I mean people will be outraged on their own, they don't need me to point out where the exact fault is; they don't need my incredible moral focus to to throw back the bedsheets from the copulating members of the military-industrial complex.
I have ranted. Everybody does. So when I rant, I blend into the crowd. That's why I try to find another way to bring it to peoples' attention. As outrages and crimes pile on top of each other in our Tower of Babel, they blend into each other and become diffuse evil. I try to pin a badge or emblem of nonsense of them to keep them fresh in my mind, if not someone else's mind, too.
Second, outrage should by now be a continuous state of mind, not something invoked when someone pushes our buttons.
Our buttons have been pushed; our buttons have had a heavy book placed atop them and are continually on.
We don't need a committee to find who is at fault, since we are not going to prosecute Halliburton-Cheney anyway. It is another sideshow for the yokels.
And this is why I think our recovery will take so long: our country has so much rotten that it will take more than a generation to clear it out.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
What If Halliburton Were The Contractor On The Death Star?
Sometime ago I said something about Halliburton. It may have involved the Dark Lord Cheney. I do not remember.
Some Chewbacca - emphasis on the "chew" like Jabba pronounces it, not on "bac" as Han Solo pronounces it - wrote me that I was unfair, and that KBR was the principle involved, and KBR was a subsidiary of Halliburton, and quite a bit of blah-blah. Of course, his reasoned words were much more rational and sort of "main stream" sounding than anything I had ever written here.
BUT
( and this is a big, big "but"), as it turns out, he was a well-spoken fellow who lived in dreamland - dreams compliments of Neo-con Illusions, Ltd. - and I was right again. Or, I may not have been right exactly, but in the midst of all the water that has flowed under the bridge since that time, I come out a lot better than he.
Case in point:
Halliburton, Cheney, KBR, Gimpel ( the fool) and Associates cannot build a shower facility without electrocuting soldiers in Iraq.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090326/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/iraq_electrocutions
or
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_ELECTROCUTIONS?SITE=MALOW&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
I quote this from the middle of the article, although you could even read it backwards, for it shows up the insanity of the USA as it goose-stepped into its new status as the world's biggest Homeless Shelter:
...KBR is the target of a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Maseth's ( one of the electrocuted)family. They claim the company knew there were electrical problems in the building where he died, but didn't fix them. His mother testified last year on Capitol Hill.
Army investigators have since reclassified Maseth's death as negligent homicide caused by KBR and two of its supervisors. An Army investigator said KBR failed to ensure work was done by qualified electricians and plumbers. The case is under legal review.
"KBR is not responsible for the electrocution deaths widely reported, including that of Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth," Heather Browne, a KBR spokeswoman, said in an e-mail....
Some Chewbacca - emphasis on the "chew" like Jabba pronounces it, not on "bac" as Han Solo pronounces it - wrote me that I was unfair, and that KBR was the principle involved, and KBR was a subsidiary of Halliburton, and quite a bit of blah-blah. Of course, his reasoned words were much more rational and sort of "main stream" sounding than anything I had ever written here.
BUT
( and this is a big, big "but"), as it turns out, he was a well-spoken fellow who lived in dreamland - dreams compliments of Neo-con Illusions, Ltd. - and I was right again. Or, I may not have been right exactly, but in the midst of all the water that has flowed under the bridge since that time, I come out a lot better than he.
Case in point:
Halliburton, Cheney, KBR, Gimpel ( the fool) and Associates cannot build a shower facility without electrocuting soldiers in Iraq.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090326/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/iraq_electrocutions
or
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_ELECTROCUTIONS?SITE=MALOW&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
I quote this from the middle of the article, although you could even read it backwards, for it shows up the insanity of the USA as it goose-stepped into its new status as the world's biggest Homeless Shelter:
...KBR is the target of a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Maseth's ( one of the electrocuted)family. They claim the company knew there were electrical problems in the building where he died, but didn't fix them. His mother testified last year on Capitol Hill.
Army investigators have since reclassified Maseth's death as negligent homicide caused by KBR and two of its supervisors. An Army investigator said KBR failed to ensure work was done by qualified electricians and plumbers. The case is under legal review.
"KBR is not responsible for the electrocution deaths widely reported, including that of Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth," Heather Browne, a KBR spokeswoman, said in an e-mail....
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
New TV Shows
My favorite would be
That would be a good show.
The way I see it is:
A planeload of normal American families, parents and teenagers, makes an emergency soft landing by a desert island in the Pacific.
Stranded, without any communication, they are forced to survive by relying on their wits, stone age tools, and wife-swapping. They also investigate the obviously haunted remains of the insane asylum, the only structure on the island, where professionally unsanctioned shock therapy medical experiments were performed.
Exactly how Bobby Brown and Whitney would fit in is not clear. However, they are so outrageous that we could probably just throw them in any time, without explanation, and no one would notice a simple and ordinary thing like continuity.
Wife Swapping Ghost Hunters Marooned on a
Desert Island
with special guest appearance by Bobby Brown and
Whitney Houston
That would be a good show.
The way I see it is:
A planeload of normal American families, parents and teenagers, makes an emergency soft landing by a desert island in the Pacific.
Stranded, without any communication, they are forced to survive by relying on their wits, stone age tools, and wife-swapping. They also investigate the obviously haunted remains of the insane asylum, the only structure on the island, where professionally unsanctioned shock therapy medical experiments were performed.
Exactly how Bobby Brown and Whitney would fit in is not clear. However, they are so outrageous that we could probably just throw them in any time, without explanation, and no one would notice a simple and ordinary thing like continuity.
Obama's People !!!!
How many times have I seen or heard that phrase recently!? Obama's people... ! Chilling effect now that I have learned the full truth. Actually, I awoke this morning with the distinct impression that Obama and Ambassador Sarek were more than kissing cousins.
Oh, I did not hear it a "shuddering horror pale", as Milton has it, but I was somewhat appalled on hearing that Barack Obama and Sarek of Vulcan are symbolically conspiring to alter the future!
Among those who have noted this:
Cosmic Iguana http://www.cosmiciguana.com/2008/11/
and
in Confessions of an Aca-Fan http://henryjenkins.org/2008/06/is_barrack_obama_a_secret_vulc.html
we read:
...Listen to the speech which Amanda, Spock's mother, delivers in the NPR broadcast about being beaten up as a child because the others don't think he's Vulcan enough and you will hear echoes there of some of the stories we've heard about Obama's struggle to figure out who he was growing up.
I've been surprised by how quickly the blogosphere picked up on the Spock/Obama comparison. Almost immediately, I started to see people construct graphics around the Spock/Obama theme, which clearly resonated with people other than myself.
These fellows were way ahead of me. Great minds may flow in similar channels, but some of us have a rather slow and molasses-like water flowing in ours.
Oh, I did not hear it a "shuddering horror pale", as Milton has it, but I was somewhat appalled on hearing that Barack Obama and Sarek of Vulcan are symbolically conspiring to alter the future!
Among those who have noted this:
Cosmic Iguana http://www.cosmiciguana.com/2008/11/
and
in Confessions of an Aca-Fan http://henryjenkins.org/2008/06/is_barrack_obama_a_secret_vulc.html
we read:
...Listen to the speech which Amanda, Spock's mother, delivers in the NPR broadcast about being beaten up as a child because the others don't think he's Vulcan enough and you will hear echoes there of some of the stories we've heard about Obama's struggle to figure out who he was growing up.
I've been surprised by how quickly the blogosphere picked up on the Spock/Obama comparison. Almost immediately, I started to see people construct graphics around the Spock/Obama theme, which clearly resonated with people other than myself.
These fellows were way ahead of me. Great minds may flow in similar channels, but some of us have a rather slow and molasses-like water flowing in ours.
I am quite sure this was exactly how Charles Darwin felt that great morn many years ago when he woke up thinking "survival of the fittest!?" , leaped from his bedchambers, ran to the computer, Googled "alfred russel wallace", only to discover he was about to be bested in the race to the Royal Society for scientific kudos.
Oh, well. Better late (the phalarope, that is) than never.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Israel Nears Its Moment Of Truth
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/weekinreview/22BRONNER.html
A Religious War in Israel’s Army
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: March 21, 2009
...A soldier, identified by the pseudonym Ram, is quoted as saying that in Gaza, “the rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles and their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.”
Israel has its own little Jihad, jihad in the sense of holy war.
We posted the survey results a month or so ago that showed that 90% of Jews saw the Holocaust as the defining moment of Jewish history, surpassing even Moses! The Holocaust led to the founding of the State of Israel - before any Messiah was on the horizon - and the Holocaust was the central idol of the new Jewish spirit.
God did not bring them back to that land.
They brought themselves, by their own efforts.
It is no longer a holy land; they have created an idolatry of a historical moment and have enshrined it, for all the world like Ahab and Jezebel.
Not Joshua...but bar Kochba...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/weekinreview/22BRONNER.html
A Religious War in Israel’s Army
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: March 21, 2009
...A soldier, identified by the pseudonym Ram, is quoted as saying that in Gaza, “the rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles and their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.”
Israel has its own little Jihad, jihad in the sense of holy war.
We posted the survey results a month or so ago that showed that 90% of Jews saw the Holocaust as the defining moment of Jewish history, surpassing even Moses! The Holocaust led to the founding of the State of Israel - before any Messiah was on the horizon - and the Holocaust was the central idol of the new Jewish spirit.
God did not bring them back to that land.
They brought themselves, by their own efforts.
It is no longer a holy land; they have created an idolatry of a historical moment and have enshrined it, for all the world like Ahab and Jezebel.
Not Joshua...but bar Kochba...
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Warning, Will Robinson!
The UN has acted the part of the robot in Lost In Space, and the rest of us are the Robinson Family. I am Dr. Smith, of course.
The UN has said that a perfect storm of food and water shortages, over-population, and climate change will makes things mighty unpleasant by the year 2030.
We have ignored such tripe in the past, and I am sure we will continue to ignore it...at least until 2029.
The UN has said that a perfect storm of food and water shortages, over-population, and climate change will makes things mighty unpleasant by the year 2030.
We have ignored such tripe in the past, and I am sure we will continue to ignore it...at least until 2029.
Title Remains
The Title remains the same.
I did get rid of the sub-title, which was pretty much the mushy type of thing you expect from religious types with imagination impediments.
I mean, how annoying are those religious blogs!!??
Jesus loves you?!
Right.
You know, I can get through an entire decade without trivializing my rapport with God by saying something as inane as " God loves you."
Or mention anything about the Sacred Heart. I have never gotten along with that 17th century innovation. The idea of worshipping by using the imagery of some 17th century visionary is much too heated for me. Plus I don't like the images of the Sacred Heart. And I don't feel the image of a God pointing to a hole in his breast, where His human heart is exposed, to be much of an image of undying love.
It has always and continues to creep me out.
However, Catholics have never had enough shame. Nor good sense. Nor aesthetics.
Having lived as an RC in the bloom of my youth, I can say we settled for crumbs when there was a feast. Crumbs. Little crumby images of hearts and putti-like angels.
Yucch!
I did get rid of the sub-title, which was pretty much the mushy type of thing you expect from religious types with imagination impediments.
I mean, how annoying are those religious blogs!!??
Jesus loves you?!
Right.
You know, I can get through an entire decade without trivializing my rapport with God by saying something as inane as " God loves you."
Or mention anything about the Sacred Heart. I have never gotten along with that 17th century innovation. The idea of worshipping by using the imagery of some 17th century visionary is much too heated for me. Plus I don't like the images of the Sacred Heart. And I don't feel the image of a God pointing to a hole in his breast, where His human heart is exposed, to be much of an image of undying love.
It has always and continues to creep me out.
However, Catholics have never had enough shame. Nor good sense. Nor aesthetics.
Having lived as an RC in the bloom of my youth, I can say we settled for crumbs when there was a feast. Crumbs. Little crumby images of hearts and putti-like angels.
Yucch!