Mech Alert!

The Mechs are back!
Just when you thought it was safe to let your computers go out and play...

example of a Mech Message:

Who knows where to download XRumer 5.0 Palladium?
Help, please. All recommend this program to effectively advertise on the Internet, this is the best program!

This software intrudes into forums, blogs, etc. pretending to be a conscious entity, and leaves billets doux for the people to read, who will think them messages from good eggs for whom English is a third language.
It is supposed to be able to handle those write-down-the-letters-you-see devices which are designed to foil robots.

Brother Saif is the sword who will hack them...
Sister Zulma is the darkness which will confound them...
Sister Nur is the light of the fire...

What pompous, arrogant bastards Mechs and Techs are!
And your crap doesn't pass the Turing test; neither do youse guys.

The Three Standard Stoppages

I was speaking to Ruth about learning new things: I learn stuff all the time. I know it's hard to believe, but I do. My trick is that I pay attention. I really do. When you say something, you had better be aware that I am paying very close attention, so that 5 years later, when you say something a bit different, I may blurt out chapter and verse of what you had said 'way back when...as it is recorded in the archives!

Anyway, I wandered into Marcel Duchamp's Three Standard Stoppages, or Trois Stoppages Etalon. I have sort of considered these a paradigm of creativeness.

Marcel Duchamp - who is really one of the ones of our age - around the time of the Armory Show, where he exhibited his painting Nude Descending A Staircase, had taken 3 lengths of a heavy thread, and measured them to an exact meter.
He held them out, at absolute rest, and let them fall, twisting and turning in their descent, until they landed on a large piece of paper or cardboard. He thereupon copied their exact outline, and made up wooden templates of these chaotic curves.
He created a new meter - or 3 - for himself. Taking the Standard Meter, which by itself was pretty revolutionary back at the time of the French Revolution when it was intro'd, he created the new ones: the 3 standard stoppages.

All conscious beings have the potential to build upon their History. In doing so, they have the potential to Create Anew.
To not do so is to live in Lyonesse - the city of the dead-in-life, the drowned city of the tales of Arthur and the Round Table.

Take what is there and create anew, according to the best advice from God.

Our Cult of Celebrity is what happens when we do not do so: manufactured cravings for mass produced paper cut-outs.
We need the genius of Paradox, Heracleitus, today, in order to tell us: Fools! What you mistakenly take for life (bios) is the life-taker (bios - an arrow).


pix: http://artslearninginteractive.blogspot.com/

An Aside On Religion

Order and Chaos  by Aexion

Thanksgiving is coming up. People and families get together. They do not talk about politics and religion.

I do.
I expect God.
I don't "believe" in God. That expression is as goofy sounding as "I believe in my left foot."

I experience God everywhere, like the background of my existence; the backdrop for a play or film, wherein I am a brief actor. Infinite cinema, unending direction...
scripts cut into small pieces and tossed into the air...
picking the pieces up at random, and chaotically glueing together for another script...
all before that backdrop of reality.

Andy Warhol's film Empire was God as seen by our generation: changeless, immutable, unending,...mute,......remote,.........boring,...........
The music and pace of the film Koyaanisqatsi is God-like: obsessed with creation and its creatures. The frenetic pace of Koyaanisqatsi is the humming of the electrons, the inability to look away from a quantum state...yet ever turning, ever turning, hard a port, and Heisenberg be damned!
God is not balanced; He is forever unbalanced. If God were in perfect equilibrium, He would not have created. He wanted to get His hands dirty.
And if you were watching Him, it would have stolen your breath away, the vertiginous speed of His construct.

O, God, creator:
Let us be free again!
Free us from the chains we forged for ourselves!

The Wet Spot Machine.

One Day Of Mourning

So just as we get done sitting shiva over the friend-follower that has disappeared, this morning I receive 2 wonderful comments containing commercial plugs and information.
...
......
.........

So...I published them.
I have no shame.


ps.
I had another today.
I rejected it out of hand...it may have been a joke.
If it was, I'm sorry, It was a good joke.
I'm acting awfully random lately.

For My Daughter: Gramma's Hat

The Straw Hat

 The wind blew your gramma's hat
and it landed where you are;
you put it on and smiled.
It will rain your mother's ring
which will fall in grass nearby;
admire it unbroken.
It will flood your father's boots
and sweep them in the general flood;
dork-like boats of leather!
It will dawn your childrens' smiles
when you garden, and they see
that funny straw hat,
that unbroken ring,
and hear you laugh at waterfalls
and rivers of your artifice!

pic: micmac

From my Peace-Weaving poetry blog ( link on right ->). I am a little early this week.

Blog O' Note

I have my way of handling Blogs of Note: I look at them, then I go up to that toolbar-thingamajig that has the Tattler gizmo where one reports someone who is acting like a Cad, and another link for Next Blog =>.

So I go trolling downstream about 4 or 5 blogs, until if find my Own Private Blog of Note; a bit more random.

Anyway, today's BoN is: The Daily Nail, http://daily-nail.blogspot.com/

So I hopped downstream to 3 other blogs which opened up to pictures of nails and nail polish!!
So I decided to do this post.
And since I did not save the urls, merely used the Back button on the browser, when I reached this point to regale you with this story, I can't get back to them, because the roulette wheel of Next Blog => had spun
and I was suddenly in Indonesia.

Thanksgiving Approaches

Even though this cartoon is for Christmas ( o Natal ) rather than Thanksgiving, the thoughts remain the same.

Loose translation:

Lady on Treadmill:  You really have to lose weight for Christmas.

Turkey:    Even if it kills me...

http://dropsazulaniss.blogspot.com/

Everything I know about Portuguese, I learned on the Net. I think it is a totally wizard and shaman way to learn a new lingo. Next I shall attempt English.

Adieu, Scarlet Pimpernel!

I opened up the dashboard this AM, only to discover I had lost a follower-friend!

I had always wondered what I would do when this event - to which we all are prone - reared its ugly head. So now I knew. I immediately imagined Anthony Andrews as the Scarlet Pimpernel , from the film of the same name, in his day-time disguise as foppish dilettante, reciting foppish poetry:

"Is he in heaven?
or is he in hell?
that damned
Scarlet
Pimpernel!"

(At nights, the Monsieur S. Pimpernel saved French aristocrats from the Terror and the Guillotine. And the quote is word for word...I do not wish to imply anyone is "damned"...I shall NOT build a Berlin Wall 'round about my blog, lest some future friend say "Mr. Montag, tear down this wall!"...and so on...My German Democratic Republic has porous borders.)

Peter Hoekstra Is A Meme

If Michigan did not have enough problems, they have some particularly odd Republicans: Peter Hoekstra,
Congressman:

To Hoekstra is to whine using grandiose exaggerations and comparisons.


It all started with a simple, foolish tweet. On June 17th, GOP Congressman Pete Hoekstra compared the life and death struggle of Iranians trying to get their message out via Twitter to the Republican Party’s tussle with Democrats.

http://hoekstraisameme.com/
 

An example:

Nova Philosophia

All of German philsophy from Kant on is summed up in Fritz Lang's Metropolis !!!

Kairos

kairos

Baysage  (http://whatpowderfingersaid.blogspot.com/ )  has mentioned in a comment here a wonderful concept: Kairos.

Of course it is Greek. Everything really brainy is from Ancient Greece.

Why is that, you ask?

Because everyone says that all of Western Philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato.

I know it is pathetically fail, but that's what they say - and take pride in.

We are so enmeshed in the past and our memories - imperfect though they might be! - of the past, that we don't create the future. We really have nothing to do with it until it is forced down our gullets...rather as if we were the geese for foie gras.

Why, even the great gift of our religion was wrenched from the hands of Abraham, and handed over to Plato. Plato! Who cheated his fellow Pythagoreans, and was kicked out of their brotherhood!!

I was going to write bit about it, but the Paranoid Archipelago beckons, so I must go hop in the old auto and get in the middle of one of those ghastly Ben-Hur type chariot-race/traffic-jams we go through every morning here; no public transport. Ay caramba! Quien needs public transport!??

Me & Chase

My previous extensive interpersonal dealings with Chase occurred in spring 2008. There was a personable young man of Indian descent who was in charge of the local Chase activities. He wanted my money in their hands, to invest for my benefit.
The Dow was at 14,000.

I said I believe the Dow would go to 10,500. He smiled at my naivete. I never got around to doing that business with them, although I did have a CD.

I don't know if there was any connection, but the Bharatiya Temple just 2 miles away was in the middle of building an addition in 2008. All activity ceased in the fall of 2008, and just recently has started up again in a small way.

I went in a few weeks ago as the CD matured. There was a new fellow there. We got along fine. He was well on the way to signing me up in their investment schemes, when I said hold on, and I had to talk it over at home.
Of course, this time, when we talked about the Dow Industrial Index, he agreed with me.

Well, I thought about it for a week, and it's going to take a bit more than agreeing with me.

Tomorrow I shall call and politely ask him why I should do business with Chase.
I suppose he will want to trot out those graphs about the wonders of compound interest, and it you had a buck to invest back in 1990, how much it would be worth today.
But I want to know why I should trust Chase - or any other bank I might deal with - now.

I shall insist on it. If I had trusted them before to do that which they do best, and  I do not, I would have lost thousands.
What has changed so that my money is safe now?

The Utopia Of The Brotherhood Of Railroad Workers

After the world fell apart, people grew isolated from each other, and small communities sprang up, trying to keep order. Tales were told of the old days.
Then, from seemingly nowhere, the came the order of Railroad Workers, who brought the promise of Technology, Education, and Rule of Law.

Of course, first they had to get the trains to run on time...
For that people turned to a Mussolini look alike...they called him the Commissar with the Lazy Eye.

The rest is history. To be precise, it is referred to the Era of Crackpots, and is documented in Beard's masterly study The Betrayal of the Railroad Utopian Democracy.

Sandwich People & Oil Burners In The Archipelago

I almost wrote something about the Republicans whining about bringing an alleged terrorist to trial in New York...but I nipped it in the bud. In the view of Republicans, our judiciary system is adequate for sending scads of young black men into the cesspool of the Penal System of the USA ( PENSOTUS ).
This raises their fears immediately, because we can shove those men into the pipeline with little or no adequate legal representation, and often their trials look more like the local theater group's first run-through of The Pirates of Penzance than a regular forensic and judicial exercise.

If such charades occur at Sheik da Whoop's trial, even though he may enter the PENSOTUS - or the "slammer" - there would be appeals, and the business about confessions under torture might rear its ugly head...and who, really, wants a trial wherein confessions made under torture are - for the first time since King George III - accepted as probative?
I mean, 200 years of jurisprudence could go up in smoke...Oliver Wendell Holmes, and all that.

No. I shall ignore it, just as I continue to ignore Sarah Palin and Oprah Winfrey and Doctor Phil and all reality cable TV.


The Paranoid Archipelago stretches from the eastern coast of the USA ( EASTCOTUS ) to the western coast ( WESTCOTUS  ).
It is more properly the Asphalt Archipelago, but that sounds too much like The Asphalt Jungle, and that itself sounds too much like The Blackboard Jungle.

The Archipelago, an archipelago being a chain of islands connected within the great, blue sea, consists of mostly empty parking lots paved with asphalt that has not been seal-coated in at least 5 years. The most prominent flora and fauna are check cashing stores, abandoned UAW offices, $Dollar stores, Chinese take-out, dry cleaners, and food stores that state VALU on their signs, but are rather high priced once you walk into them.
These islands are spread across the landscape, tenuously connected by interstates and surface roads - a charm bracelet of bitumen, a web of disappearance tinkling with departed 401(k)s. This is where old people who are down on their luck go to add to their retirement money; this is Bleak House where the road-kill eating crows of our lives argue the law; this is today on the asphalt atoll.

The more cavernous empty buildings on the Archipelago are mutated into housing for temporary employment. The People who work as the temporary hires drift across the highway-sea and anchor at these spots daily, living out of their automobiles like the boat people of Vietnam: sweating in the summer during the brief interlude of lunch, freezing in the winter...standing around in the spring, saying how unusually cold it was for spring...standing in the autumn fog and saying how the cold mist goes right through you...sleeping slouched in the front seat, and not enough breeze while a drop of sweat runs down your head... dreaming...dreaming...

Dreams with name tags of HI! My name is:Nostalgia and HI! My name is: Security;  verity, belief, and hope... comfort:  a cozy bed, long ago - remember? yes! in Truth, I feel it everywhere! It was so nice...

Bang! You wake up. You look around for those emotional name tags, figuring they must have been real, so real, they must have scattered around the car when you woke up, but they have gone. The name tags of Nostalgia and Security don't stick around the Archipelago; too many sharks in the waters - they just float in with the tide, stuck inside glass bottles, then they float back out.

People walk around on their breaks. They look like prisoners walking in the prison yard, only there is no fence with barbed wire to hem them in.

Actually, very often there is such a fence, or a monolithicly incongruous sound control wall stretched along the interstate in front of the mall-island where we are, looking like the wall at the city's edge in Dark City, or like all of those Pink Floyd record sleeves and CD covers. Walls not like Robert Frost's that make good neighbors; no, these walls only need a graffitti sneer painted on them, and all would be perfectly believable 1984.

I survey the parking lot's edge, where the tide of the concrete Service Drice comes in against the black asphalt. I stare at the wall.

I look at the We Cash Checks!! store and absent-mindedly caress the molotov cocktail I carry in my pocket, made out of an Absolut bottle and old underwear.
The rasping cough of escaped cigarette smoke reaches me, not volcanic, not sulfurous, but not tobaccic either: more like bitter herbs...bitter herbs laced with outrageous chemistry...

" Why, O, Lord" I cry, "is this day just like all the others!!"

My wife has packed a sandwich for me: 8 grain bread, turkey for protein without too much fat, lettuce for a vegetable serving, mustard...'cuz I like it!, but also for the turmeric which gives it that yellow color, and is so good for you that it is that wind at yer back of an Irish blessing.
I think of her love.
I think of my daughter, and what the future holds for her.
I think of the hours when so many people in my complex are up at 3:00 in the morning, on the internet, burning the midnight oil, looking for something better...or just something...just a shred of hope.
Oil burners.

I cry...just a tear or two.

But, I get over it and - lunch being done - I head back to the Big House.

Viagra And Comments

I usually do not post comments that say how great a blog this is, how inspired I am personally, and ya-da ya-da ya-da...my writing is a gift to mankind, and then ask me to buy Viagra.
I mean, She-who-must-be-obeyed doesn't even read this blog, so I can't imagine who else such a comment could be from.

I don't need Viagra.

I got a girl friend...
name of Lois Lane...
she says I have Niagara.

Gracious Tea

If you don't know by now, I drink tea from the Grace Tea Company, NY, NY.

When I started, I calculated how much tea was in a tea bag, and using 1 tea bag per cup, calculated the cost of a cup of tea, I found their price to be equal to or slightly less than the middle range; there are the outrageously expensive Empire of Panjandrum and Tea Gardens of the Hindu Kush type tea, which may or may not be worth the prices elevated as high as the mountainside terraces where the tea is grown; there are the cheap tea which are...well, they're very cheap.

Grace Tea is wonderful.
When you buy tea this way, and it takes a month or so to drink it, and you wonder whether it is going stale, you realize it is not going stale, it is as fresh as the day you bought it, and you realize just how incredibly long those other teas you have choked down must have been in the consumer pipeline: just remember how ghastly restaurant tea usually is - and served with 1 tea bag for 3 to 4 bloody cups of hot water!

In this world of tribulation, there is Grace.

The Shadow Of The Vampire

reprinted by massive ( 2 people, a guy and a doll ) demand:


“…the inadequacy of our plans,our contingencies, every missed train, the failed picnics, every lie to a child.”

John Malkovich as F.W.Murnau in The Shadow of the Vampire.

On Mothers’ Day we couldn’t go to my mother’s because of her dogs and my daughter’s allergy. Ditto Fathers’ Day.

We used to have picnics with our dearest friends on Fathers’ Day. The fathers would play tennis. The mothers minded the children and laid out the picnic.

We don’t do that anymore. We rarely see them. We’ve graduated to the one page enclosure within the Christmas card.

The failed picnics…and our contingencies...the shadows of the vampire.

Great American Poets Series: Robert Frost

MARY sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. “ Anna is back.” 
She pushed him outward with her through the door
And shut it after her...

-----
she resides at
http://futureofmypast.blogspot.com/

Mythic Landscapes Nov 10 2009

The Myth of Sisyphos:  eternally building and re-building the Three Gorges Dam. After completion, Sisyphos goes on the prepare for the Beijing Olympics. At completion, it's back to square one at Three Gorges, and so on and so on...
Sisyphos is the guy in red in the middle.

-----

Stella, the conductress on the Styx Subway, the subway in the Underworld and running to the Underworld...all Underworld production and materials.

Stella is the waning moon, also, and the goddess of the End of Oktoberfest:

Welcome

I would like to welcome Anita.
I just noticed her this morning.
I believed I welcomed everyone else.

I'm not sure, though. The pictures don't always show up;
this morning all the pictures were there, and things looked
different.
And - of course - I have totally forgotten how to look up friends
and learn something about them...

I shall have to do it tomorrow morning, because today I start a part-time job...
I drive to the asphalt Paranoid Archipelago of the spring
of 2008 - it was in one of the peace poems from then.
I remember it well as a mostly deserted mall with way to many
parking spaces, and asphalt crumbled like rogue waves upon
an urban shore...
and 2 check cashing stores!

Anyway, I welcome you to my library ( where I 'net from ), friends.

Mystery

Some things are just very mysterious to me. I remember when I started writing a poem a week for peace - fasting one day, too - and I never thought to be 127 weeks on; more than 2 years...2 years and 23 weeks to be precise. ( the link is on the right...that thing about "my other site" and "peace-weaving" or whatever conceit ruled me at the time.)

Sometimes the poems are mysterious, but become domesticated as time wears on, as if a wild lion raised in the belt of civilization becomes as docile as a fat tabby cat.
But sometimes they remain mysterious and wild, running like wild children who are lost from their mothers - or who are cast out from their villages - and are raised by a troop of ghazelles in the Tassili n'Ajjer desert in Algeria; awesome youth,  remote, untutored and unkempt, yet bearing all the lineaments of humanity - and overwhelming in their beauty.

This poem below still haunts me a year on.
There is a line: 

Then from a tangled thicket
I grasped a ring of lapis lazuli,
the joint of 2 bones, and pupil
of the brilliant eye, and was born...

It still makes me faint-headed; it is as if God let me perform the miracle of life, and from nothing came wonderful being...and - when I reflect - I realize that is true, and I did have a child: I am a father. Yet sometimes the creation and nurture of life strikes us as so mundane and pedestrian; we even give up the lives we consider superfluous; sometimes we think "father" or "mother" a really poor job description, and we pass on it for something better.
I never speak of abortion. But it requires the belief that the past and our grandsires do not stand behind us, pushing us, nor do those other beings of great power stand in front of us in our futures, pulling us, and that we are not in the eye of a Present Immediate of a vastly baroque and byzantine creation...so we stand squandering the magic, throwing away the baraka...

To grasp a ring and 2 bones, and thus to be the focus of the greatest mystery...life!
To be born!
Let me live, and let me be born to the ferocious mothers of the desert, coming to the rivulet to drink in the wasteland where an oasis is a singular olive tree. Let me live, and let the wilderness teach me, and let me learn nobility and honor East of your Eden.
Let me live with troops and pods and packs, then, if cities are not to be my home. Let me run naked, if I am not to be swaddled in mankind's cloth.
If your societies have degraded life, send me to the badlands, where every force alive strives to increase life and well-being in the face of great odds!

Let me crown the earth. Let me be happy to have been born, and let the earth be happy to have borne me.

CHRISTMAS 2008

The Trees

I used to be a tree,
and grew upon a hill;
I used to be arboreal
and deep roots immobile
I thought imprisoned me.
Then from a tangled thicket
I grasped a ring of lapis lazuli,
the joint of 2 bones, and pupil
of the brilliant eye, and was born
my parents most loved fruit
in a storm of heat at
the rising of the Pleiades.
Now...O, now, I see...
and I shall be
soon again a tree,
maenad queen of windswept hills;
pastor triumphant of animals
that flock the virginal
nativity's flash of light!

Existential HazMat Signs

From Drops Azul Anis S,  http://dropsazulaniss.blogspot.com/

Door signs...possibly from some OSHA ( Occupational Saftey and Health Administration )
catalog for existential hazards:

My Brother: A Reprise

Someone has asked me to re-run a piece on my brother...something about driving around with a case of beer or something, trying to evade a parole officer.
It took a while to find it, but it was from a little over a year ago, in autumn...truly autumn is sad and funny.

So here goes:

I went to visit my brother and give him some money.
He needs ID.
His PO has been after him to get his ID.
He said it was something to do with his DNA test.
"DNA test?", I said. "Why a DNA test?" I was wondering just how frivolous one can be with one's money.
"Anybody with a felony conviction gets a DNA test", he said.
"Oh," I mused, wondering at the marvelous technology and the cesspool of the Justice system. One gets a lot of information and hands it over to creeps.

His PO says that if he does not get his ID, then it will be a misdemeanor.
"Oh...," I decided to be willfully obtuse. "...perhaps they'll give you another DNA test for that."
"Yeah," he laughed.
It was debated whether he should bring it up to his PO, something like saying that he knew he needed another DNA test for failing to procure ID, producing a plastic specimen cup, brandishing it in her parole official face, and asking for a Playboy.

His PO was a good looking lady. I saw her once. Twice actually. Well, more like 11 times, if the truth be told. And that omits the glimpses in the rear view mirror.
This all came about one afternoon earlier in the year, in the summer of 2007, when I had taken him to the store. He has no car and no driver's license ( a piece of ID).
My job is to help, I guess. So as we were finishing getting the necessities, I asked whether he needed some beer.
"Sure," he said. "That always comes in handy."
He's not supposed to drink. Whether that is court mandated or comes from his history of hepatitis C, I do not know. I just know he does, and why make him walk to The Licker Locker after I go?
Furthermore, he lives, as it were, in the sights or cross hairs of three bars or liquor service restaurants. He is firmly triangulated and they have him cornered.
So we got a 12-pack of suds.
We checked out and took the groceries to the car, baking in the sun, where we put the bags in the back seat and the beer in the front seat, between us, in order to keep it cool when we drove, right in front of  the A/C.
As we arrived at the parking lot by his abode, I turned the car in and noticed two ladies standing in the thoroughfare and talking.
"Gosh," I said. "It's nice to see two ladies who aren't talking on cell phones."
"Gadfrey," he said. "That's my PO!"
Now he said this with a bit of warmth, leading me to conclude that this was not an opportune crossing of paths. He threw his left arm over the 12 pack, trying to obscure its cover, a cover painted and inked with vibrantly cool propaganda, dancing bears, gushing mountain streams, and happy brewmeisters.
"You don't want her to see the beer?" I asked.
"NO."
So I ducked down a side aisle and began cruising the parking lot, up and down, back and forth, just as I usually do when looking for a meter with time on it.
Fortunately, the lot was just big enough that the ladies did not eventually decide that they needed to unlimber their MACE cannisters on us.
They were both blonde. Well, who isn't these days? I mean, who of their age and in Port Desespoir. They were paradigmatic emblems of the femme d'affaires; no-nonsense women of the world.
Certainly the one called " my PO " must be. I kept trying to get a gander of her in the rear view.
I couldn't approach too close. I had thoughts of dominatrices scowling at us.
Crash...or Clunk actually...the 12 pack fell forward off the seat!
"That ought to be fizzy enough." I said.
My brother scrabbled the cube of liquid delight back onto the seat.
"Why don't we drive by and pop one open and spray them?" I said.
He laughed.
Then the A/C quit.
It had always been iffy. I usually did not use it. I think what happened is that the freon that was left decided it was time to join its brothers and sisters up, up, way up there in the Green Pastures of the Ozone Layer.
So the beer was not only stirred and shaken, but it was now going to warm up.
We drove on.
After a while, I began to wonder what happens to a 12 pack in critical condition. Would it eventually explode and take out half of downtown? Bullets of sweat began to form upon our troubled brows.
Finally, the gab fest ended. The two blondes lionesses shook their manes, and each strode off as regally as Aiyesha, looking for men to enslave and yoke to their chariots.
Slowly, we crept around a corner, watching the PO get into her car, fiddle with the seat belt, pick up a cell phone, then think better of it, and start the engine. Her red back ups glowed promisingly.
I came up slowly, looked around, saw she had 1 hour left on her meter, and slid the 1991 Marquis into the spot as gracefully as a an admiral guiding the USS Forrestall into dry dock. Actually, I think the Marquis has more "flight deck" than does the Forrestall.
We slowly got out of the car. The coast was clear. I carried the loot to the front door of his building.
It was a close call.

Back to the present. We talked about the weather. Since the weather is snafu, I asked whether he'd had any tornado warnings in Port Desespoir.
"No," he said, adding "The power went out, though."
He sat silently for a moment.
"We had two, no, three tornado warnings," I said. " You had a power outage?" I asked, remembering the big outage of 2000 or whenever it was...already forgotten and the power grid is just slightly better than Baghdad's.
"Yeah. You know, when there's an outage, the first thing you think is 'Did I pay the bill?' "
I pondered. "Yeah." I said..." Same with a tornado..."
He waited and I wondered how I was going to finish this bit of nonsense.
"...you see the tornado and you wonder if it's the REPO tornado, you know, if you didn't pay the bills..."
He laughed. "Yeah. Gonna take you, your car, your furncher...gonna take your whole house! and repo 'em!"
"Like Oz...and dump your sorry ass just over the county line...good riddance."

We laughed.

We talked a bit more. It was late, so I gave him some currency as well as the check I had delivered. He would not get to a bank until morning.
I thought he might need money. He smelled strongly of beer and its by-products.

We parted.
I did not cry.
I did not cry because I had already cried. I had paid my crying forward, as the snappy phrase goes.
It is Autumn and one expects to cry. Not as much as at Christmas, of course, because holidays are just made for crying and depression and fighting.
In Autumn I regret the passing of time.
I only yearn to hold on due to my mistakes, the loves I screwed up, the friends I messed with, the children I let down...
If everything was perfect, I'd go right now.

Democrats Or Republicans?

It is too late to worry which party to vote for: the destruction has been done.

Wondering whether to vote D or R is like the inhabitants of Babylon wondering whether to use the debris of the recently destroyed Tower of Babel to build fences, or to ship it to the dump; it's small stuff - the big show already took place.

We should have wondered whether to live lives of honor, courage, righteousness; we should have wondered why we are not humble before God, but instead are arrogant in our familiarity with what we foolishly believe is the mind of God.

There is a future.
It is a good future.
It is a bright and wonderful future...but it is not for the generation of vipers.

Nostalgia Nov 7 2009

The three nephews came for a visit, Aloysius, Ayden, and Austin.

They had flown in on Lucky Airlines. I assume this airline originates in Vegas or some other pilgrims' sanctuary. If you recall, the last time I had dealings with the Gang of Three was subsequent to their posing as journalists in some country in which a color-coded revolution was taking place: somewhere west of Mandalay.

We had tea (courtesy The Grace Tea Co. of NY, NY.) and scones.
I told them I had just visited a Senior Housing development in Port Desespoir, looking for a place for my brother, Absalom, to live. (a lot of "A" names in this family!)
One place had large closets in the master bedroom, and to emphasize the fact, the interior designer had set up a little tableau of chairs and table set for tea, big enough for the society of any grandchild with pretensions to society. All very cozy and idyllic.
Something about the closet, though. Something...something...vaguely I was reminded of Freddie Krueger in one of his films. "Nightmare at the Plaza", or something like that.

Of course, my brother is dead set against moving. He has apparently accumulated enough kindred spirits on the Street Down by the Docks - that's its name: "The Street Down by the Docks" ! - to have set up an Algonquin Round Table of wits and good fellows, and he does not wish to leave them. Oh, he could still get public transport back, but it is the life blood of the streets - or the one street, to be exact - which draws him. He says that if he were to have to move, you may as well ring up the vicar, tip the deacon, polish up the skills of the belfry's change ringers, and mark x on May the 5th, for it would be a poison shirt upon his back, a toxic needle into the arm...a nail into his coffin, and he would soon be dead.
Having known him so long, I mentally checked my calendar, and saw the date was open...but I knew he spoke in jest. May the 5th was totally open, and would be a fabulous day for a funeral. I am sure that the people who attended would come back and regale me with long tales of the magnificence of the Church, the tear in the eye of the beadle, the flowers arrayed like the muted sobbing of clouds...

...the cortege...the drive to the cemetery...the inexplicable disappearance of the priest at the cemetery, as the mourners looked at each other with suspicion...the search for an appropriate person - whom all trusted and was, technically, neutral - to say a few words...
...perhaps our friend Linda might be imposed upon...we used her once when the rabbi disappeared at a wedding...she paints eyeballs on furniture for a living, and, by all accounts, is considered a most spiritual type of being...sort of a shaman, if you will...of course, this veering off from regular High Church rituals into what appears to be paganism will probably not be a good sign...

Back to the Senior Housing. I said to him that I thought we were cremating you and throwing the ashes under a bus. He laughed and said that if that were to happen, how could he have his motto engraved upon his tombstone? How, indeed? Then he asked whether I remembered his chosen epitaph.
I tried the one of W.C. Fields, but that was not it.
I tried Oliver Cromwell's, but - alas! - again not the correct inscripture.
By now he was becoming visibly upset, seeing as no one would get the epitaph correct, and he may end up with something as appalling as one of my poems upon his stone. He might have to endure yet a while to ensure that the motto - perhaps it was a limerick? - be properly handled.
I asked why he didn't just go out and buy a stone, have it engraved, proof it, and be done. Put it in the tub for the time being, and take one's ablutions at the bus terminal.
He did consider this for a short spell, deciding finally the floor joists where he lived would probably give way under the weight, dumping his possessions one inauspicious day into the tattoo parlor downstairs.

So, the boys A and I talked about nostalgia and the old days.
I have never been one big on the old days. I agree with Henry Ford: History is pure bunkum...but you have to be well schooled in it to catch out the other sharp fellow who's fixing to run a scam by you, even as we speak here!

I saw the movie Putney Swope for the very first time the other day. I was amazed. There is a lot that was dated; there was a lot that was stupid; but there was a lot that was totally Sorcerer's Apprentice, totally wizard, totally schoolboy amazing.

I saw an artefact from that time, and it was unalloyed with my other memories. Everything about the old days and goldie oldies is real taffy of memory, and for me hard to chew. But this was new sprung, and it blew me away.
It was something that I had ignored, not read a review about, not seen a trailer for. I had not read a book on the Sixties with heavy historical musings on the cinema of the times, the rise of black cinema, the meaning for our times, or any of that other blather we always hear...and immediately ignore.

It allowed me to see exactly what was what, reminded me exactly how I felt, how I laughed, how I cried, how I loved back then.

It was the proverbial "blast from the past".

It was the prize of innocence of our age. It showed me what we all really were; it was not a memory like furniture overlaid with eras of re-painted memories - like The Greatest Generation - until the paint becomes so thick it even obscures the outline of the furniture's wood.
It was a prize, and it was real.

Look for something similar.
Remember what we all once were, before the present age.
Look at our souls, and compare it to what we've become.

History that is stuck in the same groove, that repeats the same moral over and over, that overlays actions with an shellac integument of thoughtless words... such History is Bunk!

Comment On Gaza Nativity

My friend Ruth commented on the Gaza Nativity post.
It caused me to think more about it, and I recalled Yeat's The Second Coming:


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?



It's like watching a disaster movie - the world's longest disaster movie - unfold before our eyes, and you know what's going to happen, but the people on the screen cannot see what's coming until too late.
 
The falcon is the ways of war and violence, so well taught and studied in the 20th century; in this, the 21st century, the falcon cannot hear the falconer, and thus cannot obey: war and violence are on their own.
This is the basis for the common myth of the revolt of the machines, the basis for the Terminator films and many others: something man made which escapes his grasp, and he just does not know how to call it back.
 
War has now escaped out control.
We are always on the verge of putting more troops in, or pulling more troops out. Our days and nights are filled with wars and rumours of wars. In Israel, Martin Buber's Ich und Du ( I and Thou), has a grisly look of confrontation.The center of our morality cannot hold us in our appointed courses anymore, and things fall apart.
This indeed is Schumpeter's "creative destruction", the lapse into chaos pregnant with a second coming. Now I understand: the hour of the rough beast has come; having waited 20 centuries, this unkempt watcher is ready to pounce.

I believe that all religions descended from Abraham are on the anvil of history. The time of Faith is now.

Gaza Nativity Scene

Sent from my friend, Mr. Ayyub Khan of Pakistan.

For some reason, he was in Gaza earlier in the year, and he took some candids of various atrocities.

If we cannot solve this, we are doomed.

In Afghan Fields The Poppies Blow...

This morning in The Asia Times:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KK03Df04.html

US goofs the Afghan election
By M K Bhadrakumar

...It was one thing to be dismissive when the former director general of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), General Hamil Gul, alleged that American military aircraft were being used for drug trafficking in Afghanistan. It might also have been expedient to simply ignore the issue when well-informed Russian sources made media comments that US troops were doing roaring business in drug trafficking in Afghanistan running into hundreds of millions of dollars. But Khodaidad is a highly trained professional who knows what he is talking about.

The Indians know him, and so do the Russians. Khodaidad passed out from the prestigious Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun and was a product of the famous Fronze Military Academy in Moscow. He had a proven record in the communist government in Kabul as a highly decorated general; he led crack paratrooper brigades in the war in the early 1980s and he served as the army commander in the crucial Kunduz and Takhar frontline facing Ahmad Shah Massoud of the Northern Alliance. Britain, where he lived in exile for a decade, knows him too.

Therefore, when Khodaidad said on Sunday that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) contingents from the US, Britain and Canada are "taxing" the production of opium in the regions under their control, he carried a stern warning on behalf of Karazi. It is a simple, direct message: don't throw stones while sitting in a glass cage...

Gosh. We never suspected.

River Morning

The Oreology of Clouds.

The date stamp is wrong. It was 2008. Oreology is - I think - the study of mountains. I think I talked to Ruth once about how we here in the flatlands see the Hindu Kush and Shangri-La in the clouds amassed upon the horizon.

Autumn Morning

Passenger Seat High Tea

Here we are at Harsens Island, Michigan.

We are having high tea. The 3 nephews are somewhere, and will soon arrive in their cars. We are waiting for scones and jam.

Tail-gating is for football.

For the days of autumn, we circle the cars around, and have Passenger-seating: tea ( courtesy The Grace Tea Company, NY, NY. ), and sweets.

Autumn is so strange and mixes sweet and sour, hope and disappointment, life and death.
 I think this is how Orpheus spent his time before popping off to Hades to recapture Eurydice: it was in the Fall, and he sat looking around, remembering...

Wii Bowling

I was snooping around senior housing in Port Desespoir today, looking for a place for my brother. At one place there was a Wii hooked up to a large TV, and some ancient numbers were Wii bowling.

I have never done or played Wii.

I don't think I'd like Wii bowling; it just doesn't have the Lebowski of real bowling balls and wooden alleys.

The real Big Lebowski.

pix: http://bragaparks.blogspot.com/2009/07/posters-polacos.html

A Taste of Flu:2

My daughter in Maryland received her H1N1 shot today.

The process took 5 hours, about evenly split between standing in line outside the hospital and queued up inside.

She has asthma, so she needed the injection. They took 2 patients at a time, so she went into the inoculation room with another lady. The other lady wanted an injection for some reason. The reason was not one of the approved reason for not using the vaccine nasally.

It turns out, they had exactly 1 shot left; exactly 1. Everything after that would be administered nasally.

So my daughter said, Ha! I have asthma!

and received her shot.

The other lady was a bit pissed.

We still have none here.

My daughter said that after standing in line outside for 2 hours, and watching the occasional medical helicoter land on the hospital, it all began to remind her of "The Fall of Saigon".

I don't know what happened to the people after her who needed the injection. I guess they had to return home.

Criminal Enterprises

An office in the Headquarters of Beagle Boys, Inc.
(I know; the Beagle Boys didn't wear stripes.)

pix: black and white dreams

Greek Mythology For Today:1

Winged Mercury chats up Athena in the snow.

pix: black and white dreams

The Curse Of Empires

Jumanji Game Board

The curse or bane, if you will, of empires is Reality.

Reality is the left upper-cut to the chin of Sargon, Caesar, and Hitler. In short, it is the world of facts which so quickly and elegantly derails the freight train of the imagination.

In effect, how do you run it?

Let me put this proposition forward:  A country which cannot control its own financial system in such a manner as to avoid widespread ruin and inequity is not a country that can run an empire.
The entire neo-conservative undertaking of American Empire was never, ever founded on ruminations about such homely things as: how shall we pay for it? Or, rather, when the question was put to the neo-cons, their answer was something along the order that it would pay for itself. In such a fashion they believed, for example, that our future client state of Iraq would reimburse us for our efforts through oil prices and profits.

As Max Lerner points out on the Nazi enterprise in 1941, if it were to be successful to a degree, it would face the terrible dilemma of mere existence after the wars were over, for the Nazi economy was based on war and the production of war material; the Nazi economy was an unreal economy, an economy of Mordor.

The stuff of childrens' minds, a Neverland of Empire! Glorious Jumanji of the present age!

The Unknown Option

Choppers in Afghanistan

The Asia Times
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KJ29Df01.html


Helicopter rumors refuse to die

By Ahmad Kawoosh

MAZAR-E-SHARIF - Persistent accounts of Western forces in Afghanistan using their helicopters to ferry Taliban fighters, strongly denied by the military, is feeding mistrust of the forces that are supposed to be bringing order to the country.

One such tale came from a soldier from the 209th Shahin Corps of the Afghan National Army, fighting against the growing insurgency in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan. Over several months, he had taken part in several pitched battles against the armed opposition.

"Just when the police and army managed to surround the Taliban in a village of Qala-e-Zaal district, we saw helicopters land with support teams," he said. "They managed to rescue their friends from our encirclement, and even to inflict defeat on the Afghan National Army." ...

2 Big 2 Fail, (or be 4gotten)

The Secretary of the Treasury apparently telephones a set of big bankers every day.
I suppose the Fed Chairman does pretty much the same.

I do not believe they call my uncle Aloysius ( pronounced A loi' shus ) down at the Credit Union for updates.

To be too big to fail means we have reached a point where the distinction between State and Business has become so hazy as to disappear.

"Private Enterprise" is only an empty phrase when we speak of things which are so important, that we must spend tax money to rescue them...not just once...nor twice, but always! Too big to fail means "forever".
-----
note:
It is also Socialism, and it is National.
I do not mean, however, it is National Socialism.

A Taste of Flu

In my county, the supply of regular flu vaccine has run out, and there is pre-enrollment for the H1N1 - which is not quite yet available. However, as of today, pre-enrollment is temporarily suspended.

This is all from the Oakland County, Michgan, Health Department web site at a few minutes ago.

An interesting turn of events.
I remember getting a swine flu shot back in '76...
I wonder if this sense of genial frustration is what is experienced in Baghdad when the power goes out...

Ahh, if Gods wills...we get the flu. If not, we don't.
That's the spirit.

Is God Perfect?

God is as perfect as our lives are not.

Very often, God is the perfect refuge, the perfect home, the excellent self-sufficiency where we live without being prey to other men with ravenous appetites, nor subject to a world disdsainful of our weaknesses, a world ready to wash us away with tsunamis, or drop a mountain on our heads.

Very often God is the garden in the Persian carpet, the flowing streams of Eden.

Is God absolute perfection? Only as much as our lives are not.
The more things - good or bad - we say about God..............the more we open up our hearts of darkness for future generations to be appalled.

Atheism

I never really had the chance to be an atheist.
I tried to at University, but it was all rather as if I had joined the fraternity where they chug-a-lugged divinity at toga parties...so I never really had a shot at it.

I mean, when I tried to be an unbeliever, I always checked back to see how His Nibs was doing, whether my unbelief had broken His heart and gone zero at the bone. I realized that after some months, I hadn't telephoned, and He might be worrying. I got His check every month, so there was no need of funds. I took it and cashed it at the Bank of Rake's Progress, just down the way.

I couldn't get away. He tasked me then, and He tasks me now.
It was all very much like I were Captain Ahab, retired from the sea, and sitting quite comfortably in the local Nantucket pub, only to be cruelly fronted by the White Whale like some ghastly cetacean Ancient Mariner...his back porcupined with spikey harpoons...reminding me my life is not over...not by a long shot!

What would the story be...told from the perspective of Moby Dick? Does he feel sorrow for those profane and blasphemous rascals pursuing him in their cannibal whaling boats -  boats chased and fitted with dead whales' bones - and hearts filled with passion?
What does He feel for those who do not pursue with fire in their eyes?
I guess...
I guess He calls them Ishmael.

Homeland Security For Dummies

We have a system in place where we can safely board a passenger airplane, safe from terrorists and hijackers, but not safe from the pilot and co-pilot.
If there had been one of those metal security cockpit doors on the plane, and it had been locked, how would the rest of the flight crew gotten inside to awake the pilot?

I propose a law that states either the pilot or co-pilot must be awake at any time.

(Was one of the Heene children aboard that plane ?!)

Symbols

I realized how difficult it is to talk about symbols when I read a blog wherein was said:
http://pmulder.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html

" ...explains the use of the emotional symbols   :-),  ;-)  ... "

where the author is talking about happy-faces-in-type as symbolic of emotional states.

I think "symbol" should be a carrier of meaning. A happy face doesn't "mean" anything necessarily; it is a representation or mimicry.

Happy faces are "billboards", "stand-ins", or "typesetters' puns". To call them "symbols" really messes things up.

Res Novae Interruptae

Or "Revolution Interrupted".

From PoliticFact.com:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/sep/22/barack-obama/obama-roosevelt-socialist-communist/

The president was accused of being "a socialist, not a Democrat." His plan was described as "undisguised state socialism." One critic, who controlled some powerful media outlets, suggested that communists had infiltrated the president's administration.

...

• "Roosevelt is a socialist, not a Democrat," declared Republican Rep. Robert Rich of Pennsylvania during a debate on the House floor on July 23, 1935. That remark came after Republicans hinted they were considering a move to impeach Roosevelt, according to the New York Times.


• "The New Deal is now undisguised state socialism, declared Senator Simeon D. Fess (R-Ohio) today as he pictured President Roosevelt as the New Deal's leading socialist," reported the Chicago Daily Tribune on Aug. 7, 1934. "The president's recent statements," Fess said, "remove any doubt of his policy of state socialism, which necessitates increased activities of the government in either ownership or operation of industry, or both."

• "The Russian newspapers during the last election [1932] published the photograph of Franklin D. Roosevelt over the caption, 'The first communistic President of the United States,'" said Sen. Thomas Schall, a Republican from Minnesota. "Evidently the Russian newspapers had knowledge concerning the ultimate intent of the President, which had been carefully withheld from the voters in this country. In fact, the voters of the United States were meticulously misled as to such intentions." We found Schall's comments in the book, All But the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Critics, 1933-1939.

The critic who controlled media outlets was William Randolph Hearst:

"On September 6, Hearst newspapers began a prolonged assault on the administration. The New York American published a front-page editorial titled, 'The Radical Brand on the New Deal.' It charged that radical and communist leaders had already given their approval to support Roosevelt against Landon. During the next two weeks Hearst editors trumpeted these recurring themes: that communists had infiltrated the New Deal; that communism was un-American and undemocratic; that 'America can only judge Mr. Roosevelt and his administration by the strange silence that has prevailed in official quarters.'"

That was as much as Roosevelt was willing to take. The White House issued a statement that mentioned "a certain notorious newspaper owner," and rebutted the accusations. The statement concluded, "The American people will not permit their attention to be diverted from real issues to fake issues which no patriotic, honorable, decent citizen would purposefully inject into American affairs."

It is the same fight.
There will be no new World War II to interrupt it...at least, none that we are aware of yet.
So these issues will be fought out.

It is the same fight.
That's why I have started reading columnists and commentators from that era, in order to gain insights free from my own personal involvement. To most of us, those people of 70 years ago are as remote as Noah.

We are in the midst of something vastly complex. Some of us can see only what the Wall Street Journal tells them to see, some see politics, some see ecological issues...
It is all these.

It's like we were an Afghan wedding party, dancing, smiling, and we are just about to shoot our rifles into the air to celebrate...

Shah On A Prayer Rug

Revolutions are usually captured by a new despot who fought against the previous despot. The freedoms Iran should have experienced after Khomeini never materialized, disappeared down the sink of clerical despotism.

What is the position of Khameini in Iran?

He is nothing more than the old Shah on a prayer rug.

Paradox & Irony & Contradiction In Christianity, Islam, and Judaism

The Tower of Babel

Arrogance is the absence of Irony.
Humility is the acceptance of Irony.

A Tale of Irony: The Tower of Babel
When mankind wished to build a tower to reach the heavens where God was, their project was thrown down, their unity was destroyed forever, and they were driven out on the face of the eareth, speaking in mutually incomprehensible tongues.

Arrogance could not conceive...
Arrogant hearts could not believe that they were not God's equals, and that they were not worthy of a place in heaven, and that they would not succeed.
Irony: instead of great success, there is abject failure.
Irony: the overturning of events; good becomes bad, the sweet goes sour, the joy becomes tears, the gold becomes a gilded cage...

So far, the 21st century has been our century of Irony: our sense of inviolable security turned to fears, military arrogance turned to desperate struggle, the greatest economy in the world falling into ruin...

The Abrahamic religions are filled with paradox, irony, and contradiction.
We have hitherto seen this as (1) a proof to unbelievers of the falsity of religion, or (2) a mystery to believers, or (3) an embarrasment best ignored.
Assuming the religious geniuses were not fools, and were up to something a bit more interesting than spouting nonsense, what was the point?
The point is not that life is rich and complex; we know it already. I do not need Jesus, Moses, nor the Prophet to inform me of that.
The point is not that life is inherently irrational, illogical, and chaotic.
For there is no point.
If we are dealing with conscious beings who propound these religions, and these beings speak in paradox, irony, and contradiction, it must be very obvious that if there were a "point", there would very soon be an antithetical or ironical "point":  if you love peace, prepare for war;  point "peace", antithesis "war".

We wonder about paradox, irony, and contradiction when we withdraw from the run of events and begin discoursing about the way things are; are they irrational, are they chaotic, are there any lawlike rules? We wonder when we finish the race, when we are out of the running:  ekdromema  and are sitting on the sidelines, talking about the race afterwards.

The genius of religion tells us that we are always in the running: endromema.
The ideals of religion are impossible to us so that we may never attain them, at least to our way of thinking. The race of religious ideals is the perfect Achilles and Tortoise race, where Achilles will never catch up to the tortoise with a head start.
Achilles and the Tortoise is one of Zeno's Paradoxes.

The point is:
Religion is living life as a process.
We are always writing and re-writing the screenplay, making it better and better and tighter and tighter, for that time when the Director calls for it.
When we are called for our screenplay to take over the direction of this film, it has to be "good", and good enough to deal with future paradoxes and ironies.
If our script is bad, heaven help the future, for we here on earth are busy sowing the wind, leaving it to our children to reap the whirlwind.
-----
-----
(for a brief outside discussion on religious contradiction and its discontents, see here: http://sidschwab.blogspot.com/2009/10/namaste.html )

Good

I don't believe in such things as Absolute Truth, nor Absolute Good.
If you wish to turn them into super-duper name tags for the Divine One, go right ahead.

There is Good. There is Bad.
It is quite obvious.
And it is obvious that Good promotes life, love and well-being.

Our problem is not that we cannot see the difference between Good and Bad: our problem is we are too weak to make the proper choice. We have been tutored too long in the ways of weakness.

To emulate the lilies of the field is strength.
To hoard and covet is the weakness of the incomplete.

Koan Of Christianity

Since the only sin in sexual mores espressly condemned in the New Testament is adultery - moicheia - and the divorce rate in the US is at least 50%, it raises questions.

The remnants of Jesus' life we have portray not strictly ideals to be achieved, but ideals impossible to achieve - unless (1) you become superhuman, or (2) you realize that the goal is defined by your consciousness and maintained by your consciousness and supported by your belief and conscious striving.

Once we realize perfection is impossible, we shall have arrived, if and only if we have striven to be where we aren't.
If we have not strived to be good, when we realize absolute perfection is impossible, we will fall away into the old refuse of the earth.
If we have strived to be good, and we attain absolute perfection, we shall be insane.
If we have strived to be good, we realize that perfection is not possible to attain, but is a ceaseless striving: in effect, our good consciousness creates that which is not realizable on the earth: absolute perfection.

Good consciousness is built on good teachings and good actions, no politics, no coercion; no persuasion and no threats. Every bad idea, every vile impulse, everything we can think of doing - even if we have not done it - interferes with our creation of good reality.

This is what Jesus meant by sinning in the heart; if you lust after a woman in your heart, it is the same as adultery.
The lust is not a one time sin; it is an ongoing bad consciousness and weakness; it is born, grows, and lives on through time. It is the tendency to be weak which is ongoing. Averting the sin is nothing compared to destroying the long and involved process of weakness and deceit that leads up to the sin.

What we have gotten used to calling "sin" is nothing but an overt act in a long history of covert fear and loathing. Sin flashes out like a nova; the nova galaxy had been there for millions of years, but remained unnoticed until it lighted up.
We sit up and take notice.
But it is the long process, the history of each individual life that is sinful, not the separate and discrete "sins" which we can notice.

Giorgio De Chirico Gets A Flat

ZombieLand

I was reading some entries earlier in the year of some blogs I have marked down to follow, and I came across an interesting description of cable TV:

http://sidschwab.blogspot.com/2009/06/cutting-back.html
Thursday, June 11, 2009

Cutting Back

...knowing isn't required. Just spouting, taking a predictable position, playing their role, over and over, enlightening no one, adding nothing new...

So, we are all pretty much aware of it, but we do prefer the same brand of delusion, and hate is a much better waker-upper than coffeee, so what the heck?

There is a new Zombie movie out: Zombieland. The trailers for it look terrible, but that's not the point. Zombies and Vampires are so much in our popular art, they form their own genre. Our entertainment depends heavily on the Un-Dead. They are in our minds, in our imagery.
Is the iconography of the Vampire and the Zombie more prevalent than that of God?

I think we imagine ourselves as supremely powerful, supremely extraordinary,... and supremely damned.

 

..."The point of still being a Marxist today," Prof. Panitch says, is to think ambitiously, "to recover the spirit of the revolution." Karl Marx, a freshman of 19 at the University of Berlin as his brain began to explode with ideas, sent his father a letter. "There are moments in one's life that represent the limit of a period and at the same time point clearly in a new direction," the young genius wrote. "Every change is partly a swansong, partly an overture to a new epic that is trying to find a form in brilliant colours that are not yet distinct." Surely one can be forgiven for seeing a little pink in the sky.

The Globe & Mail

The 18th Brumaire of Barack Obama
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/the-18th-brumaire-of-barack-obama/article1181115/

It's Not 2012...It's 2011 !!!!

If Mr. Obama cannot galvanize the troops to secure a Congressional majority in the House and Senate in the 2010 elections, this is what will happen:

1) his administration will become more and more ineffective;
2) Republicans will be re-elected in 2012;
3) Republicans will reduce spending, having run on a platform of fiscal responsibility.

However, a country with 9.8% official unemployment - double it for mistakes and underemployment - is not a country truly spending like a drunken sailor.
It may be spending like a drunken sailor when it bails out irresponsible banks, it may be inebriated when it lurches around looking for wars and more military bases, but when it comes to the day to day taking care of business, taking care of the people, it is not seriously over-extended.

Our capacity utilization is less than 68%, so we are not running full out.

The deficit actually should be greater...
Inaction will not wave its magic wand.
We have no prospects - drat! - of a war to the end, as we did in the 1940's.
The rest of the world will not destroy itself, leaving it to us to re-build them.

When the Republicans come back to "straighten things out" by their ideas of fiscal responsibility, remember Phil Gramm, remember the Bush years deficits, remember the Titanic - because it will be the beginning of the end.

Hillsdale Day: October 15

(The memorial day was to have been April 30, the anniversary of Lissa Roche's suicide, but there was a conflict. It is interesting to note that Glenn Beck seems to have a student from Hillsdale he often speaks to.)

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.

And this Conservative society loved Ayn Rand.
Just as the predators love her today.
Remember that Alan Greenspan was one of her foremost followers, and one of her main sources of economic information.

How the Servant Became a Predator: Finance’s Five Fatal Flaws

 by Bill Black

 http://www.newdeal20.org/?p=5330

...As financial sector elites became obscenely wealthy through predation and fraud, their psychological incentives to embrace unhealthy, anti-democratic Social Darwinism surged. While they were, by any objective measure, the worst elements of the public, their sycophants in the media and the recipients of their political and charitable contributions worshiped them as heroic. Finance CEOs adopted and spread the myth that they were smarter, harder working, and more innovative than the rest of us. They repeated the story of how they rose to the top entirely through their own brilliance and willingness to embrace risk. All of their employees weren’t simply above average, they told us, but exceptional. They hated collectivism and adored Ayn Rand.

Things To Come

There was a piece in the Times about an airline pilot who was not laid-off, but was reduced in rank to first lieutenant in charge of making "blip......blip" pingy type noises for the sonar machine. Anyway, he now made 1/2 of his previous salary. He now pulled in $34,000 per annum, making less than his wife, who teaches grade school.

Pretty soon, Ohio and North Carolina will be vying with each other not to claim to be the birthplace of Aviation.

So I viewed Things To Come yesterday. Based on H.G.Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, it was produced in 1935 (I think) and directed by Alex Korda.

The Decline of the West notion involves a war starting in 1940 and dragging on until 1966 or so.

-This forecast of the future was based on World War I, where armies remained locked in trench warfare, continously dieing, yet not gaining anything for their blood.

Wells and his adaptors could not know that the War foreseen by them - World War II - would end in total victory for one side.

Of course, it needn't have. The Manhattan Project was anything but a sure thing. If Oppenheimer and General Groves had taken the wrong turn - perhaps following Teller's research on the fusion bomb - there may not have been a bomb in 1945.

What if WW II had dragged on another three years? That would only be 9 years for the Brits, and we have wars nowadays much longer.
What if the Reich had developed their own Fetter Bube ( Fat Boy ) and the Allies and the Reich started blasting atomically?
Where would we be today?

Raymond Massey arrives on the scene of an England ruled by local warlords, much like Afghanistan. Massey is John Cabal, and he is a member now of the United Airmen who have formed Wings Over The World - a group of technicians and specialists and scientists devoted to peace, and having set up their own supra-national group to bring real peace to the world.

- In the 1930's it was still possible to see Science as a real liberator. This was before Science became totally part of the mechanism of war. It was a simpler age - a Hugo Gernsbackian age where plucky boys could make their own laser guns from parts left over from their crystal set receiver.
_______________________________________________

This is where we end that narrative. The rest of the film has its own vision of man's place in the future and man's soul, but I shall leave it for another time.
Right now, I am more interested in the late 1930's. The Depressed economy had not returned to health by the late 1930's; many truly revolutionary things waited until 1935 to start: such as Social Security - which everyone was forced to be a part of - and many parts of the New Deal were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court by 1936. Things were getting better, but slowly.
World War II did not so much end the Depression.
It was a clear victory with the total destruction of the other side's ability to make war that ended the Depression; it was the large scale destruction of Europe that ended the Depression. At this point, there was only the US and the USSR, allies for a bit longer.
The war itself liberated the returning veterans into college and good jobs. The re-building of Europe and the rest of the world let American manufacturing and Industry explode into new heights of growth. There was so much to do that Labor and Management co-existed...they were too busy going to the bank to fight anymore.

Whatever economic re-organization that America was due to undergo in the late 1930's and the 1940's, as the gap between the haves and the have-nots widened, did not occur because of the war. Back in the day, some said that we essentially leap-frogged over social revolution due to the war, because those very GI benefits provided so much for the Middle Class: education for oneself and one's children, help on mortgages, and common bonds of shared emotional experience between man and woman that cut across classes.
These civil bonds were unhealthily strengthened by a Cold War extension of WW II, during which Ideological hysteria was set free: blacklists and McCarthyism.

The blessings have been squandered.
Since the end of the Vietnam war, we have:
1) blundered around looking for war;
2) apparently lost the ability to hold a country once invaded;
3) lost political vision;
4) lost our Manufacturing and Industrial pre-eminence;
5) since 1980 or so, unlinked Government Spending from Ability to Pay, living in a fool's paradise - totally deceived by the faerie lights of our own Myths.

The great things we've done, we don't even recognize them.
One of the greatest Moral and Spiritual achievements of the human race was the refusal of the US and the USSR to use nuclear weapons, instead slowly and laboriously to find their way through a maze of distrust to a world where we could have totally disarmed. (Of course, we did not have the pluck to go all the way, yet.)
There should be an international holiday. There is not.
Let the Nobel Committe and pick out all the negotiators involved, American and Soviet, and issue a belated and partially posthumous Peace Prize to them all.
Their names and pictures should right now be inspiring children in their schools.
No such thing.

Starting September 24, there were sit-ins and occupations  in the California University system by students disaffected from the present social set-up, who see the future as having been destroyed by our greed and stupidity.
Radicalism still breathes.
We are back before World War II, looking at the discords and failures of our system, and wondering what we shall do.

Too Big To Fail

definition:
too big to administer privately, hence requiring government participation.

To be too big to fail is Socialism and Communism. Period.
The only thing in the State which needs to endure is the State itself.
The State alone may be too big to fail, but not private institutions.
To be too big to fail is to be part of the State.

Communiqué From An Absent Future

UC Berkeley Walkout September 24 2009

...For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities. Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved. We shepherd our emptiness from place to place...

from
we want everything
http://wewanteverything.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/communique-from-an-absent-future/

The End Of Days

End of Days and Rapture-think is a cop-out by exhausted Christian wanna-bees who don't have the pluck nor the gumption to see things through: they got to sit down and call their butler, God, to take care of things!

A lazy Christian is no Christian at all. Clean up your own mess. Get the world back on track, morally, physically, environmentally, spiritually...then see what happens.

Miracles And Prayer

I expect miracles, too.
I suppose I could go as far as to say that I believe in miracles.

Why?
Well, the nice things about miracles is that they are by defintion out of the ordinary and supernatural, and - to my little mind - are therefore beyond reasoning about them.
So I am relieved from arguing about miracles: they're miracles! They're Miraculous! They transcend Reason!

For the most part, if you find yourself in a mess and you turn to prayer, it's already too late.

There may be a miracle. They do happen. But, for the most part, you have certain bodily parts in the wringer, or you are backing into the buzz saw, or the lawnmower man is waiting for you to come out of the house.

Prayer is the road map for the rest of your life.
If you see it as an invitation to a miracle, God usually passes. He doesn't even send His regrets.
But once you have blundered your way into your own private hell, turning to God is learning to get the heck out of Hades. Prayer is the road map.
If you use prayer as a tool, you will be disappointed.
If you use it as your invitation to some completely different, you have taken that proverbial small step at the beginning of 1,000 miles.

Pedophilia?

Justin Bieber

America's approach to Pedophilia:

Family takes pictures in the tub; Wal-Mart calls cops; kids taken away for a month; lives turned ujpside down.

Ready for the rest?

This morning, some ephebe named Justin Bieber is singing and bouncing on The Today Show.
The camera catches a coy little crotch grab.
Isn't that cute.
Shall we have Wal-Mart calls the cops on the entire nation now?

Pedophilia is only wrong when it's private.
When it's public, we have added the safeguards that it must be a commercial venture, such as selling records, and it is O.K.
Justin is a bit older, maybe 15. Perhaps then it's O.K.? Why is it acceptable for a 15 year old to grab his crotch on national TV?
I might be completely nuts, but I seem to think a crotch grab is an invitation, not a warning; an enticement, not an admonition; and it is such to ALL who see it!

Boys and girls, Justin and Jon Benet...we go to crazy extremes...because we know we cannot control ourselves and our desires and our lusts. It's hard to spot our duplicity, but now and then it pops right into our faces...
We use accusations of sex with underage children to condemn, then we kick back and admire underage children in sensuous poses...
and give them money...
and give them adulation...
and act like Humbert Humbert panting after his Lolitas of all genders.

A Philosophical Examination of "Believe In..."

By J. G. Ballard, 1984

What I Believe


I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

I believe in the forgotten runways of Wake Island, pointing towards the Pacifics of our imaginations.

I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel; in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.

I believe in the beauty of all women, in the treachery of their imaginations, so close to my heart; in the junction of their disenchanted bodies with the enchanted chromium rails of supermarket counters; in their warm tolerance of my perversions.
....

Google up the rest of it, if you wish

Rumors And Scuttlebutt

I heard that the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to Obama, because Kenya has never had a recipient!!

Or, rather, if you wish to be picky about it, Kenya has never had a recipient since Wangari Maathai in 2004. She is a lady. He is a man. It was because Kenya has never had a male recipient of the Peace prize that the Committee awarded it to Obama! Whew!

And the Huffington Post - as Left as they come - says that Africa hails it as a win for Africa!! Ah-ha!

Museum Of Moving Objects

Exquisite composition of stationary bike with...stationary books? They aren't actually books, but DVDs and CDs and VCR tapes, but still I love the...what? irony?...everything that is quick and moving and gosh-amighty-hair-in-the-wind is suddenly sedentary, stationary, and subdued. Instead of a meeting of the minds or a clashing of the cycles, we have withdrawn to Sunday tea with treacle.
Yet inside our hushed Sunday sitting rooms, where tea and cakes abound, our madness is barely kept covered...boiling in Boschian tea pots, rattling the tops, throwing off the quilted tea cozies! we jump through the windows and run as naked as rain-forest foragers! jumping into poison sumac patches, rolling to the lake!

It used to be

I was so free...

as the whiskery thing on a time-

piece...
or the eye-numbing teller on
a
digital
stop-
watch.

that races
through its paces
like sixty!
to
a
minute!
But, wait!
one sweeps in numb circles;
other's battery goes dead;
like butterflies
pinned
upon
poster board
science fairs!


pix: faith in honest doubt (  http://danceswithanxiety.blogspot.com/  )

And Now For Something Completely Indifferent...

In the NYT, front page, top, right, there is the column we always expected:  in Health Care, the Lobbyists and Monied Interests are winning.

Long story, short...

That is why nothing will change....short of major economic collapse, short of demonstrations and riots, short of revolutions and upheavals...nothing will change in Washington, D.C.; nothing will change in the adamantine hearts of this generation.

If we have a penny, we shall not give you a mite. If we have a dollar, we shall not give up a penny. If we have a million, we shall not give up a thousand to lighten your burden, and to ensure peace and social discord.
We spit in the Face of God and His Mother - "He casts the mighty from their thrones, and raises the lowly".

We are on borrowed time.
I don't use literary devices or tropes when I say that I have seen myself as Ausonius, writing poetry in the cold of the autumn of the Roman Empire. I know I write for the future, a different future where this generation is a sad and miserable memory.

"I am Ausonius, Decimius Ausonius - grammarian, rhetorician, soldier, poet, and confidant of emperors - and I stand in Gallia. I am at my place in Burdigala, and I feel the cold wind of Fall blowing from Alemania upon my leathery cheek."

The Duke Of Omnium

...is a character in Anthony Trollope's The Pallisers. The story centers on Glencora and Plantagenet Palliser. Lady Glencora has a cousin, Alice Vavasor, who holds strong views on politics. She speaks of supporting the secret ballot, something Plantagenet - an up and coming star in the Liberal party - is not yet radical enough to support.

Alice is a Liberal, recently changed nomenclature from Whig.

I respect Liberals and Conservatives.
I dislike Right-wingers and Left-wingers.

Liberals and Conservatives have true differences of opinion and theory. Wingers are alike in their madness.

A Heck Of A Town

Apparently some Republikaans cheered the fact that their fellow countrymen in Chicago will not be hosting the Olympics.
Republikaans are odd entities, and they speak an odd language.

Nobel Prize

Congratulations !

But nothing is so easy in this maze we live in. People applaud, and others criticize. Endless talk and arguments.
I have a friend who insists on sending me half-baked articles on health care; they seek to persuade, not to analyze. And most of their logic is "something I don't like happened after X, therefore, it happened because of X."
I don't know why the dim insist on spreading their gospel of dimness, but they do. So finally I wrote back saying that such and such an article was politics and persuasion. She writes back and says I have not faith in Capitalism, and she has no faith in Big Brother.

Faith.
I have no faith in Capitalism, I have no faith in Big Brother-ism. I do not think human life may be reduced to either; life cannot be painted into either vicious corner.

And Faith is for God, not some Ideology.

What good is talking about anything, when we're all idiots?

I was on Jury Duty. In the jury room, I read a July People magazine about Jon and Kate, trying to find out exactly who they were,.and why their faces are everywhere.
In July, Jon was having an adulterous affair with someone called Hailley Grassman. And this entire country was tuned in and loving it.

....a country of moral morons.

Shopping At Levine's Freshest Fish Market

Levine does have the freshest fish and seafood, just like the sign says.

Creationism

"See this?" he said, running his finger down the motifs, often called guls, after the Persian word for flower. :See how they are all slightly different: the lines, the number of dots? This is the hand of man. In a handmade carpet, the kind you seek, there can be no design exactly the same. Even if you try, agha, it's impossible. The wool thread may be a different size and they could make only five knots when before it was six. Or the dye is a slightly different color. Small things, but important. This is the beauty you must see. There is beauty in these inconsistencies. It is human. It is life. But the gift of imagination and creativity comes from God. So you see, these carpets show the perfect hand of God in the inspiration and the imperfect hand of man in trying to follow it. Listen well, do you understand this?"
"I think so."
"Are you a believer?" he continued.
"I am not a Muslim." I said.
"No, I mean do you believe in God?"
"Yes."
"Good. Very good." he said. Then you must think hard about what I told you."
Excerpt from The Root of Wild Madder by Brian Murphy.
Simon & Schuster, NY, NY 2005

 To me, God, Allah, Shaddai is the elusive and hard to grasp. God is hard to grasp because He is similar to those carpets which vary the knots and the dyes. To me, God is the Design, but the design is creative and exists as constant growth and life.

God is the corn and wheat fields of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, not the marbled memorials of death which dot the landscape there.

When I first went to Gettysburg - when  was in eighth grade -  I entered the Pennsylvania memorial, and was immediately transformed into something I had never sensed before nor hardly since. But I walked with the dead amid the marble halls, and gazed with incredible longing at the life just beyond the perimeter of the shrine, where there was green grass, trees, and flowers in bloom.
I sensed I had joined the gods in unchanging death, in absolute immobile perfection, and I discovered it was cold. All who dwelt there were either dead upon their entry, or the marble drained the life from them over time.

God said the Perfect was the symbol, but the Life was the fact; I remembered God as a symbol, but if I wanted to talk with Him, I had to jump back into that endlessly buzzing bazaar of activity.

So, now I'm back.

The New Land

I have heard of a newly discovered land where Truth and Light both travel at the speed of 55 mph. This slows things down quite a bit. The poor and suffering don't seem to appreciate it, but the well-off are quite happy with the state of affairs.

Treasons, Strategems, and Spoils are light of foot, and run quickly about, sometimes approaching that old bug-a-boo that exists in our universe: the Einsteinian speed of light.

Disease and Sickness have been politicized, and turned into the hash-browns of politics, dispensed after an election by the party victorious.

Religion straddles the fence dividing the lands of Farmer Disbelief from those of Farmer Inane-and-Jejune.

If you travel faster - or if you seek the Truth faster - than the slow liesurely 55 mph, a policeman will appear from behind a billboard and fine you for impeding traffic. When the Lie rules, speed is of the essence. All things must be accomplished before...before....well, before things break down, if I have to say it. I mean it is like financial bubbles: they can only last so long...so you had better be quick. If you can't be quick enough, then slow down time, elongate it, stretch it out, so your plans may come to their hideous fruition.

Philosophy hangs out in Vegas. I saw him there playing Black Jack, drinking free booze, and smoking coffin nails. A pair of floozies hung on his shoulders, name of Persuasion and Politics-as-Usual.

The night sky in Las Vegas is totally obscured by the light pollution from the casinos, so I walked into the desert, and I headed to the Observatory behind the hills. Once there, I found that Light had slowed even more, that no stars at all were visible - the light wouldn't reach us for a thousand years.

Even though these paragraphs here are about 17 millimetres apart on the display, I have written them down over the course of centuries. The Einsteinian time involved is immense, and requires a serious temporal inflation for the government to be able to pull it all off.

Me? I live in that high-rise where the giraffe is the door man. He delivers the mail as high as the 12th floor.

There's a Margarita Party tonight in the Aquifer out back. It's a lot lower than last year, so they removed the diving board in July during the seasonal low water. It's all cyclical. It'll all come back.

Sink Or Save?

It is commonly agreed that we should save more. Previously, we were saving nothing..."I'm in debt up to my eyeballs!", as the commercial famously said, before offering us something else to buy.

How do we save, when there is no attractive savings instrument?

It is better to buy now. No point in saving at 0.75%. None at all.
Buy gold. Buy land.

Why are we cajoled into buying when we should be saving - when rates are reasonable - and badgered to save when rates stink?
That's how it works.

It's a conspiracy of the rich against everyone else. Of course, everyone I've mentioned it to say that I'm paranoid crazy. They said that the rich and their government would no more perpetrate such a scheme against me and the rest of working America, than it would conspire to flood the urban areas with drugs!
Yes, no more than it would dream up a scheme to invade Poppy-stan and reap substantial billions in drugs while the rest of us mill about at funerals, burying our soldier sons and daughters!!

Leaving me standing there, panting, unbelieving, wondering...

Environmentalism

Wild eyed radicals?

In the book of Job, we read:

"Speak to the Earth, and it shall teach thee."

I just wrote my Fast Day poem a few days ago for the first week in October. In it I referred to Nut and Geb, one the goddess of the sky, the other the god of the earth in ancient Egypt. Job speaks to God in heaven; he speaks to the earth below.

Interesting

The Prussianization Of America 1

This is the title for a new set of postings.
People are so fond of the Nazi-era, they forget the Prussian era. The warlords of Prussia seem to fill the bill for an parallel to the leadership of today: constant war and rumors of wars, and - oh, by the way - it' has just been discovered that billions and billions are unaccounted for in payment to private military subcontractors...

I believe the same thing happened in the Civil War...the Revolution...Cain vs. Abel.......

There is admirable continuity. Who is the continuity girl responsible for this amazing consistency? I mean, we never miss a beat. The only time we came close to disaster is 1991 when the USSR fell apart, and there was that peace dividend thing, and - holy hannah! war almost disappeared! - and who would pay for Johnny's Harvard education then?

O.K. More to follow.

Welcome

Mozeewink has joined our band of brigands. Welcome.

Morning Prayer

I pray: God; Your will be done.

and nothing else.

I stand silently, but I never let any previous notions about what God is, or what God's plan is for the world, or any other such nonsense intervene. I do not meditate that God is good, God is great, God is the alpha and the omega, God bless America, God help us!....nothing.
I don't look at pictures of praying hands, little angels, solicitous mothers, or solitary individuals walking down a lonesome road...nothing.
I don't dream of divine paradoxes to instill in myself a sense of wonder. My being alive after my life so far is enough of a wonder for me.

I refuse to define God. If I define God, I am writing a screenplay for how God is supposed to act in "The God Show".
(There are certain similarities to the concept Nirvana in obstinate silence.)

By acting as Jehovah's screenwriter, I am substituting my will for God's.

God; Your will be done.

Welcome

I wanted to extend a welcome to Jose Castillo and Mrmemitchell, who have taken up the gaunlet of becoming followers.
Ahh, the gabby, long winded days of winter await us!

My Vacation in D.C., Delaware, And New Jersey: September 2009

Breakfast Menu.

They believed in hearty meals back then.

Republikaans Talk Radio

My favorite conservative opinion-monger.

Steve Zissou And The Life Interior

I tried to use my enclosure link to the website The Cunning Realist and made a mess of things. It has nothing to do with Steve Zissou ( and the life aquatic...), but that's the way I remember stuff: Bill Murray films as mnemonic devices.
So I hope all is back to normal, and here is the post:


http://cunningrealist.blogspot.com/2009/09/great-lull.html

Wednesday, September 02, 2009
The Great Lull

While Rod Dreher emphasized the "boredom" angle in his kind link to this post, I liked this observation by Haffner (my bolds):

A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions, for love and hate, joy and sorrow, but also all their sensations and thrills -- accompanied though they might be by poverty, hunger, death, chaos, and peril. Now that these deliveries suddenly ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful, and worthwhile, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of the political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation.

What is the state of Americans' interior lives right now? The past fifteen years have featured the following in rapid succession: a stock market bubble and crash, a bitterly contested presidential election, 9/11, anthrax attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, war in Iraq, a housing bubble and national binge followed by economic collapse, and a historic presidential election. For a decade and a half there's been a series of national obsessions, an unprecedented, formative, near-constant stream of "raw material" from the "public sphere."

With the frenzy over the financial market collapse now fading, those deliveries, as Haffner put it, have suddenly ceased. Throw in a materialist culture and a consumer who can't afford toys anymore, and you've got a lot of people without an interior life to fall back on. Giddy chatter about revolution and fond memories of war and torture beat sitting quietly in a room wondering who you are.

Good Walls, Good Neighbors

A Belfast security wall from Workman Avenue to Lanark Way

1988 - 2003

I was reviewing all our many wars.

You know, we like quick results. I recall writing that some people were saying the stimulus wasn't working. After having spent years and years destroying the economy, we wanted a six month fix from the new Administration.

Iraq may be a success...but it may only be recognized as such 100 years from now.
Ditto Afghanistan...maybe 200 years. In two centuries, the Afghanis will stand up their model democracy and take a vote of thanks to the NATO forces who inspired them so long ago.

It takes a while, Look at the photo of Belfast above. Walls don't come down overnight. Mental walls may take longer. It's a long term investment - God willing, the river doesn't rise, and the cows don't run away - that'll pay off in spades in the far future.
Israel may still have its walls. Baghdad may still have its neighborhood walls: good walls make good neighbors.

So, don't say we never did anything for out grandkids, other than leaving them outrageous debts to pay off.
100 years from now, everyone will give a darn!

Arabic Classes

"Ay! This donkey! He is slower than the Crow of Noah!"

One particular insanity of this whole period of our history is the lack of classes in the Arabic language. While we flock like lemmings (!) to Chinese, we ignore Arabic...mainly because there are more Chinese speakers; i.e., there may be more Chinese consumers for whatever bric-a-brac the Corporate Mandarins of our ruling elite may choose to sell.

In Le Monde:

La langue arabe chassée des classes
LE MONDE 08.09.09 14h02 • Mis à jour le 09.09.09 08h31

L'arabe, une langue d'avenir ? Les Danois y croient. Copenhague vient d'introduire, à cette rentrée, l'arabe dans les collèges. Tout en accélérant l'intégration des 10 % des 31 000 collégiens d'origine palestinienne, libanaise et irakienne, la capitale danoise veut préparer les bataillons de commerciaux qui partiront demain, espère-t-elle, à l'assaut des pays du Golfe. Un discours simple et pragmatique qui n'a pas cours en France, où l'enseignement de l'arabe, pourtant centenaire, est laissé à l'abandon par l'éducation nationale, au profit des mosquées qui ont capté la demande...

If I remember my high school French, this article says that Denmark has just introduced the study of Arabic into its colleges. This will speed up the integration of the 31,000 college students of Arab lineage present in Danish colleges, and will prepare Danish business people of the future in their dealings with the Arab world...in France, the Colleges have pretty much abandoned this field of study to the Mosques.

The article has that nasty economic justification for everything, and there is a fear just barely remaining swept under the carpet about all those people of foreign extraction, but that is how we all think, and to expect Le Monde to express things differently is to expect too much.

Learning language not only builds bridges; it opens the bridges and strange people flock across said bridges to flood one's culture with anomalies.
Just look at me; having studied Arabic, I think I have all the answers, say what I want to say, and pepper my speech with obscure aphorisms ( "slower than Noah's crow!" ) like a supporting character in a picaresque novel.

Language is an instrument of Revolution, both in the Student of the language, and in the Society wherein the student will become a fluent speaker. A flood of new Arabic speakers - the serious, the crazed, the sober, and the bizarre - will do more than Democracy's bombs to change regimes.

My Vacation

We went by ferry from Delaware to New Jersey shore.

We did not only cross distance - as most of us do on vacation - but we did a time-cross thing, too, at no extra cost.

Georgia O'Keefe and Ansel Adams Get A Flat

pix: Emergence of Advertising

Revolution

Sooner or later, each individual undergoes a revolution where the past is torn away and all is future.

Societies also undergo revolution. The more uncertain the times, the more intense the revolution.
Each society gets the revolution it deserves, for it has prepared the way by constructing the symbolic story of the contest it faces: us versus them, good versus evil, science versus religion, etc.

Germany after World War I needed a revolution...badly. It got a failed revolution in 1918, and it got its Bad revolution finally in 1933, when the Nazis took power.
The USA, deeply divided and in conflict during the 1920's ( Labor versus Business ) and the 1930's got its revolution in World War II, where sufficient blood was spilled to slake History's thirst.

As conflict and tension increase in a society, the probability that blood will be spilled increases. Whether the revolution or war is seen as good or evil depends on how the society has prepared itself: the American Revolution versus the Nazi Revolution, is a good example of preparing oneself in honor and knowledge versus preparing oneself in hate and ignorance.

We shall always kill each other until we realize that it is we ourselves, the story makers and storytellers, who create the killing fields in our imaginations long before we pick up our guns; we plough the field with the blade of discord and we sow the seed of inequity and fertilize with hatred...the whirlwind waits the harvest.

At present, the tension is nothing compared to what it will be within the next 4 years. We shall get the revolution we deserve. Whether the turning of history topsy-turvy will be good or evil is unknown; what is clear is that there will be bloodshed; we are still primitive and bestial.
It is not 2012 we need fear.
(It is 2 years after that.)

Just Say NO!

(I Refuse to Occupy!)

“I know that the US is financing some of Israel’s actions in the Occupied Territories. I also know that many Americans believe that they are helping establish security in Israel. But this is not true, for real security will not be achieved by military means. Please help your government understand that by supplying weapons it is not helping the Israelis or the Palestinians. I would like to ask you to support those that are seeking peace for both Palestinian and Israelis.
–Maya Yechieli Wind
May 26 2009

Republikaans Health Care

According to Alan Grayson, D-Florida, the Republikaans Health Plan is (1) Don't get sick, and (2) if you do get sick, Die Quickly.

Rough, but it does capture the essence of Republikaans thought.

Homeless In Rome

Under the Ponte Flaminio, Rome


pix: Toni Garbasso

Red Square Interlude

In 1925, Comrade Stalin meets Venus rising from the Sea.
Mindful of Haephestos, he rebuffs her advances, and the rest is history.

Chaos Definition

King Khshayarsha ( Xerxes ) at the Hellespont

Definition on the edge of chaos...

always prone to re-definition, always like Proteus capable of a new face.

Like the war in Iraq...always re-define the goal. Thus, we never lose. If we are on the verge of disaster, we re-define our objectives and demonstrate that we have accomplished them.

Since the movie 300, we know more about Greek history.
Xerxes, the Persian despot, wanted to subjugate Greece in his second invasion. He wanted a satrapy on the European continent.
As time went on, the fortunes of war changed and the fates were unkind to Xerxes' plan. The Persian did sack Athens and burn it. Xerxes said his goal was to punish the Greeks - particularly the Athenians - and to terrify them so they would never cross the Persians again. Then he pulled out and returned home.
By re-defining his goal, Xerxes snatched a minor victory from the jaws of defeat.

Our time is the time of chaos...no true definitions...how very Confucian it all sounds.

Economics is the science of chaotic economic systems. The best thing in Economics is to catch the elusive Economy as it is about to change shape.
There is no science. There is informed art and faith, surrounded by Mathematics.

This could be quite fine...if the practitioners believed in art and faith.

The Afghan Drug War

Fortune magazine has an article Inside the Afghan Drug War
( http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/ )subtitled:

Afghanistan's drug economy is as pervasive as its poppy fields, linking impoverished farmers, heroin traffickers, and the Taliban.

There has been recently a good deal of effort aimed at the short-memoried, detailing opium production in Afghanistan, how the Taliban is behind it, and how we - the USA and NATO - have always been opposed to it.

This is, of course, a re-writing of History.
The Media gets away with it, because its audience is essentially brain-dead and dull, yet avaricious for any scrap of information which floats its way. The audience of the American media reminds me of some huge, bloated underwater leviathan, sedentary in its cave, blinded to reality by its enforced captivity, and only able to see in the region of the electro-magnetic spectrum controlled by Media.
Here in its lair it scoops up information floating plankton-like within easy range of its ever open mouth, lined with teeth worn and useless.

Let's go back to February 15, 2001, before the magic date where everything changed, and the war began which might yet destroy one of the last vestiges of World War II: NATO.


JALALABAD, Afghanistan (February 15, 2001 8:19 p.m. EST
U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan -- once the world's largest producer -- since banning poppy cultivation last summer.

A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year.

"We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields," said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier -- a sea of blood-red poppies.
...


Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, banned poppy growing before the November planting season and augmented it with a religious edict making it contrary to the tenets of Islam.

The Taliban, which has imposed a strict brand of Islam in the 95 percent of Afghanistan it controls, has set fire to heroin laboratories and jailed farmers until they agreed to destroy their poppy crops.

The U.N. surveyors, who completed their search this week, crisscrossed Helmand, Kandahar, Urzgan and Nangarhar provinces and parts of two others -- areas responsible for 86 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan last year, Frahi said in an interview Wednesday. They covered 80 percent of the land in those provinces that last year had been awash in poppies.
(available at http://www.opioids.com/afghanistan/ )

It is a fact that NATO and the USA and the government of Karzai did little in the eight years they have been the power in Afghanistan to eradicate this trade. There have always been seizures and burnings for show at home, but from 2007 through 2008, opium production was at the highest levels ever.

Who is responsible? Cui bono?
Look to find out who profits.
Essentially we have spent billions to secure cheap oil in Iraq - which is not cheap - and drug money for unnamed persons in Afghanistan. We have allowed certain people to control the opium trade for at least eight years.
I do not think they are all Afghanis.
I think there are many Americans - proud and patriotic and who encourage us to "win" this "war" - who have profited and continue to do so.

To Hell With Bank Of America

I have had it with the mega-bank, Bank of America.

My Countrywide money market accounts - all now digested into its enormous gut - do not count toward establishing my minimum balance to avoid a $12 service charge per month, because B of A says my Countrywide accounts are viewed as being in New Hampshire ( huh?! ), whereas I live in quite another state.

I started with Standard Federal Savings, then Standard Federal Bank, then ABM-AMRO ( who was my last mortgage holder ), then LaSalle Bank, then Bank of America.

Now I get no interest and ever increasing service charges.

I am looking forward to my next visit to the branch office. I know they are not responsible, they just follow orders. However, I think it is high time we said we are mad as hell, and we aren't going to take it any more!

My Vacation

In The Paint Department

I went to D.C. and painted my daughter's condo.
I went to Delaware, and took the ferry to Cape May.
I was poisoned in a Slovenian Restaurant in Cleveland.
I danced at Blob's Park outside D.C.

The Peacock Brothers were everywhere, man!


pix: Dennis Darzacq

The Revolt Of The Parking Lots 3

The Highways come under fierce attack by Parking Lots and their allies, the Dumpster Pads.

My Mother's Candy Factory

I made it through the holiday weekend without chocolate redundancy.
This is a covert way of saying I had no M&Ms from my mother’s shop for greedy children.
Since the M in M&Ms is doubled, it is redundant, and I am able to escape it on syntax alone!

Elements of Style, man. Elements of Style.
(This is to be spoken as David Clennon playing Palmer in John Carpenter’s The Thing: "Chariots of the gods, man. Chariots of the gods.")

Interestingly enough my three nephews, all of whose names begin with the letter "A", have a different approach. Last week, they stopped by en masse ( or is it en vrac ? ) for a reading of the Sunday NY Times, a mystifying of the crossword puzzle, a labyrinthine discovery of comestibles in the pantry, and a cup of tea from the tea gardens of India - courtesy the Grace Tea Company, NY, NY.

They consider M&Ms, or more properly, the name M&Ms, to be an oxymoron! To wit, the second M is not equivalent to the first M. It is - in their opinion - as if the twin siblings M were strolling about creation, up and down, here and there, and one takes it into his head that it is high time to put an end to this Edenic idyll, and takes the position that he is the real deal, ego-wise, and strives for distinction: Am I my brother's keeper? he shouts into the gap of creation.
And M was never the same as M again, east of Eden, and all that.

The nephews A had started with a rather fast paced discussion of Ozzie and Harriet and its connection to Umberto Eco’s literature and semiotic:

“…the symbolism of Darby and Doc Williams…”
“…Joe Randolph’s despair…”
“…and everyone knows that it was Thorny!”
“Was what?” I said.
“What was what?”, nephew #3 inquired with the face of an angel.
“What was Thorny…don’t you mean who played Thorny?”, I replied.
“No…The Name of the Rose!…it was Thorny.”

This was followed by a laughter that you might expect would be the immediate prelude to a particularly unpleasant end of the world as we know it, with Hieronymus Bosch as the guy recording it on video.

It was their opinion that in the nanosecond between the utterance of the first M and the second M, the atoms comprising the Ms were disentangled – across light years – and they became contraries.
For them saying M&Ms was like saying “Jumbo shrimp”......or "jummmmbbbooo" ( herein there is a period of time sufficient for the sun to become a red giant, then to recede to white dwarf status, yet at blink-of-the-eye speed ) " sssshhhhhhhhrrimp !"
At this juncture, it was an exquisitely small step to Jorge Luis Borges' story Funes the Memorious. Instead of being merely "M", the first M received the new name “Lavande de Valensole” and the second M “Ferris Buehler’s Day Off”.

At this time, my mother put on her apron to prepare dinner (the M in “mother” becoming “Mystery Clock”) and gently shooed us from the summer kitchen with a kindly “retro, daimones!”

*
*
note
a reprint for me mother!

Tom Joad: Thunderdome

The latest from Australia, where things are going Mad Max very quickly, is a dust storm in Sydney.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8270104.stm

The winds have picked up tons and tons - or tonnes and tonnes - of topsoil and dumped it over the city. So now we have our pictures of the Dust Bowl we were waiting for, hesitant to call the present state of affairs a Great Depression, because we did not have enough of the iconography of what we mean by a "Great Depression".

A Great Depression is the malaise we find ourselves in: at war with the environment and with each other.

I tell people that the true canary in the coal mine - the indicator of methane gas, hence a disaster - is Palestine. If the societies which derive their understanding of the Holy from the three Abrahamic religions cannot solve Palestine's puzzle, they not only will show the rest of the world that they are empty shells, but they will also become aware of it themselves.
Mankind cannot live with the burden of unforgiven failure.
Unforgiven it will be, because it is a failure of their religions, and they will not be able to see that God is even above their understanding of God.
It is the perfect storm coming: the Great Depression of the spirit, coupled with the revolt of the world against our depredations.

*
*
note:
Tom Joad was the lead character in The Grapes of Wrath, a story set in the Dust Bowl years.

Stuff

This blog gained a new follower. I suppose I shall have to clean up my act: pick up the dirty laundry laying about the old blogstead, clean the dishes, start using deodorant...

This occurred on 9/11/09, so there is a bit of secrecy surrounding it. I learned how to use the "Follower" gadget, and added it to the right column. I can only imagine how sad I'll be when they decide to bail out, but that is the future's burden.

When people ask about 9/11 - where were you? what were you doing when you first heard? - I usually say I was in Boston at Logan, and I was pissed off about being bumped off Flight 93: ranting and raving, gonna sue everyone, take yer g.d. airline and shove it...good stuff like that.

Of course, peoples' eyes widen and say how close I had come to death, and how lucky - truly lucky - I had been, and wow! how my life must have changed !!?? - like God saved you. Like God bumped you from that flight !!
I go silent for awhile, then say that I never had really thought about it that way. (They are amazed and incredulous at the depth of my insensitivity to God-stuff.) Perhaps it was divine Providence. (Of course it was, you ninny!) Maybe God saved me for a reason? (Yes, yes! Now you've got it!)
At this point, a lot depends on whom I am talking to. If I am speaking with white folks, I may follow through with the observation that God saved me in order that I may continue to carry my gun to Town Hall meetings, or to work to resuscitate the Militia movement, or to write that book on Obama wherein I prove that his name is "Kenya Bob".
If my audience is non-Jewish, I may use thinly veiled anti-Semitic insinuations, postulating a Mein Kampf in my future, or a Holocaust denial.
If my audience is Jewish and conservative, I may hint at a final solution for the Palestinian question, and demand more lebensraum on the West Bank.
If my audience is liberal, I may suggest mayhem at FOX.

Now, if you think me crazy, let me point out that my "success" rate is about 90% : meaning nine out of ten people allow me to chatter on as if I were a cable TV persona, while only one out of ten tells me to shut up, or becomes rattled and edges away.

It's all very "Twilight Zone".

The War(s)

I respect the soldiers and sailors of the USA. I served in Nam.

One thing we found out about war in Nam: our leaders did not know their asses from sideways. We lost the war in Nam, and we took off with our tails between our legs. We were still a superpower, so we came home to lick our wounds and plot revenge.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait, a country roughly the size of Rhode Island, we gathered overwhelming force and invaded.
The forces of Iraq were in two places: the Imperial Guard was north around Baghdad, and the rest was holed up in Kuwait.
We went right through the middle, separating them, cutting off the army in Kuwait, and destroyed the southern forces piecemeal.
This was done masterfully, but it was an obvious fight. If the enemy is strong on the flanks and weak in the middle, you go through the middle and turn and envelope them; destroy their cohesion and then pick them off. When it started, I said it would take one week to destroy the Iraq army; it took four days, I believe.

This was for Freedom.

In 2003, we invaded Iraq after having deliberately deceived ourselves.
We came within an ace of getting our butts kicked out of there, because we did not plan for anything other than flowers being placed in our rifles by Ahmed Chalabi.
After our experience with asymmetrical warfare in Nam and our familiarity with guerrilla fights elsewhere, it took us until the "9" count to put in Petraeus, a man who was familiar with the style of fight.
This war is not yet over, for pacification relied on establishing corps of Sunnis, who resisted the largely Sunni AL Qa'ida organization. However, the majority of the Iraqi voters are Shi'a and so is the government. This government does not trust our Sunni militias.

The incompetence of Cheney and Rumsfeld and the Pentagon will be legendary when this history is told.

In Afghanistan, we invaded, kicked out the Taliban, and then proceeded to ignore the country for five years, allowing the Taliban to re-establish itself in 80% of the country.
It is not totally new military knowledge that one must not give the enemy breathing space. It is beyond the grasp of the Pentagon and our Politicians, however.

So we continue to fight for Freedom. The Peace Dividend after the fall of the USSR has disappeared long ago. We shall always fight when the cause for war is continually redefined and extended. We shall always fight as long as the war planners plan for near disasters. Osama bin Laden originally said that he was not the prime director behind 9/11. If true, we once again do not comprehend the forces we face; we once again are deliberately deceiving ourselves.
We are dupes, but we are dupes in the cause of Freedom: allowing the architects of continuous warfare to plot the ever new and indecisive wars.

War for Freedom is not indecisive. Spartacus' rebellion was not. The Zanj rebellion was not. If you fight for Freedom, you don't settle for the freedom-hash we have seen for the last 40 years. No. It is not Freedom for which we fight.

I Quit!

As a vociferous and rabid supporter of Barry Goldwater, I hereby notify any Republican that I will not tolerate their presence, much less their speech.

Republicans have been in some sort of gutter for most of the time since 1965, and I have made no bones about my dislike of them.

I spit them out! I wish no dialogue with them! They are anathema!

Aggressive Ignorance

Friend Baysage has a post about Professor Bloom, wherein the Professor and the Sage combine to produce a gem:


There's a lovely little barb at the end of Bloom's piece. We have a literate president now, he observes, but "too many other politicians are devoid of syntax and appear to have read nothing. Aggressive ignorance in aspirants to high office is another dismal consequence of the waning of authentic education."

**
http://whatpowderfingersaid.blogspot.com/
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Get Lost. In Books.

September 11

From our friends in Brazil.

pic: http://dropsazulaniss.blogspot.com/

After Basra Was Destroyed...

Basra from the Shatt al Arab sometime before WW I

Iraq, Afghanistan....

Back in the good old days, Basra revolted against the government. Maybe it was during the Zanj Wars? It's odd that all this time we've spent mucking around in Iraq that we've never spent much time looking into some of the interesting history.
The Zanj Rebellion was a revolt of the black African slaves in Iraq, a good deal like Sparatacus' revolt against the Roman oppression of slavery. It was dark and bloody, and it lasted a long time.

Anyhow, Basra revolted. The Caliph raged against the rebels. Basra held out.
At last, Basra was enveloped, it was broken, it was looted, and it was destroyed root and branch.

The Caliph thought this was a good idea for a victory march and festival in the Capitol City.

So there was a great military victory...but it was after Basra had been destroyed.
And "after the destruction of Basra" thus became a saying in the Arab world for the type of leadership which sees victory in total destruction, or lets itself be deluded into seeing reasons to party after everything has been laid waste.

We learned in the last Good War to see victory in total destruction.
We did not learn much else, nor have we learned anything new.

*
*
notes
Some people state that the Zanj Revolt was not a slave revolt, rather a rebellion of African Muslims brought from their homelands to work in the marshes of Iraq.

The Kharijites - or Khawarij - were a sect in ancient Islam that held views of the extreme equality of all men. Obviously, they were heretical.
However, the Zanj leaders showed signs of being very much influenced by the Kharijites. The banner of the Zanj was inscribed with a surah from the Qur'an:

Lo! Allah has bought from the believers their lives and fortunes, because the Garden (Paradise) will be theirs...

the surah continues

They shall fight in the way of Allah and they shall slay and be slain. This is a promise binding on Allah in the Torah and in the Gospel and in the Qur'an.
Who fulfills his promise better than Allah?
Rejoice, then, in your bargain that you have struck, for that is the supreme triumph.

The early Kharijites rebels referred to themselves as Shurat
which may mean "seller" or "buyer", in this case meaning "sellers" of their lives and fortunes to Allah for His purposes.

The Obama Comma

My mother has come up with a new madness. I have no idea whether FOX inspired it, but it very well could be; Palin has a column in the Wall Street Journal, and there is no limit to the political depths to which Rupert Murdoch - the new Hearst - will not stoop.

The new thingie is The Obama Comma:

ʆ

This is part of the socialism of punctuation in Obamaland, the new USA.

I am not sure how it is used, but it may indicate a hiatus while you wonder which yahoo is yelling "liar!" at you.

Why Religion?

The dimension of divinity in human consciousness give us a higher ground from which to view our life in this world.
Without the divine, we could not see the forest for the trees, for we would be and would remain immersed within our immediate needs and desires, and would have no place to back up to, and from which to see the whole.

In the past, religion provided this higher ground. The leaders of the past could meditate upon their situations from the perspective of their religious beliefs, which they held to be true and unchanging: self-evident truths giving man rights inalienable.

Now there is nothing quite so secure and unchanging.

Of course, if a philosophy of evil rules, then the results of viewing things from a higher vantage point will only result in more and greater evil.

In our lives, the iconography of Guns is far superior and far more powerful than any so-called higher power of God.
We shall pay for this.

Socialism In One Country

I seem to remember that "Socialism in One Country" was a slogan floated by the USSR, sometime after the Revolution when it had become clear that world-wide revolution was not going to occur. The expressly international aspect of Marxism had to be amended to a more parochial nature: hence, socialism in one country, the USSR.

Having said that, since the Soviet Union has gone the way of the saber-toothed tiger, what is the most socialized country in the world?

What country has the most socialized and planned economy?

I think a case may be made that the USA is.

The era of great economic planning and control started in World War II. The governments essentially took over the economies of their nations to defeat Hitler.
After WW II, the USA's military budget continued to grow, and the role of the military continued to expand.

The entire portion of the economy of the USA devoted to the military: the military itself, support, contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, etc., may be viewed as planned economy in the fullest sense of the word. This is the socialism we speak of, the planned economy, planned by government agencies.

Thus, the USA will be in the running in the race for the most socialist country in the world, getting an enormous boost out of the starting block from its gargantuan military budget.

Financial Instruments With A Bullet

On the front page of the Sunday NY Times, there was a column about new Wall Street investments, which were instruments made up of insurance policies that people had sold for - oh, say 40 cents on the dollar, because they needed or wanted the money now - to investors who now held the policy until pay-off , pay-off being the death of the old policy holder.

I discussed this with my nephew, Alistair.
It pretty much followed the path all such discussions take: he said - for example - that no one held a gun to the heads of the old policy holders; they wanted money, or they needed money, and they freely sold.

My point was that that since the pay-off is bigger the sooner the old policy holder - the person whose life was and is being insured - dies, you now have a financial instrument with a decided political aspect - an unfortunate aspect:

Even though no one held a gun at your head to sell me your policy, you may bet that afterwards I shall indeed hold a gun to your head to increase my return !

How?

I could oppose health care, for example, with everything I had. If I could deny you health care, if I could achieve an average lessening of the life span of the many individuals - some of whom would probably be people from whom I bought policies - I would increase my pay-off.

So I would work against health care, reducing emissions, etc. The quicker they die, the better off I am.

Russia Restoration

http://www.russiatoday.com/Politics/2009-09-02/roar-stalin-metro-russians.html

ROAR: Stalin divides Russians even in metro
September, 2009, 13:23

An inscription praising Joseph Stalin at a refurbished metro station in Moscow has sparked a new controversy over the Soviet political and architectural heritage.

Passengers at the Kurskaya metro station, unveiled after the repairs, have been surprised recently to see it decorated with a powerful symbol of the past. A restored inscription contains a line from an old version of the Soviet national anthem.


It has gone further than that: the old boy has actually been seen riding the metro !

'inda Hanaan

Chez Hanaan. Hanaan's Place. Davy Jones' Diner. The TYBALTs were gathered, digesting food and the daily news. Across the room was a group of ROMEOs - retired old men eating out. We TYBALTs had been formed in active opposition - the young bucks at lunch together. There was a great deal of ruminant behavior in the place, the only noise being that of the digestive processes. I found myself wishing for another group, the MERCUTIOs, and set myself to the task of acronymy.

There had been laughs before lunch at the Anne Coulter toilet paper someone had put in the washrooms. Now silence reigned.

Beauchamp said that there were global demonstrations against Hugo Chavez. Most of us got our gas at Hugo's gas station, it being the least expensive. We were not receptive to the idea.
"Where?"
" Everywhere. It's global, dimwit. For instance, there's about 150 people in Madrid."
We laughed.
"150 !? Is that all the CIA can muster in Spain?"

After the USA got rights to military bases in Colombia, right wingers looked to reverse the leftward achievements of the past decade. This recently took the form of a military coup in Honduras.
A typical rightwing step forward...or backward. It doesn't really matter to rightwingers.

Henry Jakubowski spoke, "I guess they'll have places in the jungle to sneak the guys they kidnap to."

Hank didn't let on whether he approved or disapproved. He is becoming inscrutable.
It used to be that if you compared Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino - Walt Kowalski - to Hank, Kowalski was totally charming. Now things were becoming muddled.

Guns

Haven't shot a gun in 40 years.
So Hank Jakubowski says let's go down to the Schutzverein - German Shooting Club - and spend an hour or two. And I go.

Henry is a life-long union member, voted for Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II in 2000. Served in the Marines in Nam. To him, we Naval Intelligence guys were sissies, but he never says so.

He does not like people joking that Nancy Pelosi's wine should be poisoned. He does not like people walking around our President with guns.
He knows what guns are for.
So he taught me all about his rifle, a 1962 Winchester 70. He didn't like the changes Winchester made to the 70 in 1964 and after. It wasn't the same rifle he had in Nam, but it was the same year and model. He made sure of that.

Henry says the Right Wing wants blood. They are sending out their cries to the simple-minded followers, hoping for blood.

Henry's is ready.
In fact, we're going to get me a rifle tomorrow.

I don't know how far this is going. At the Schutzverein, the targets had picture of dough-boy Glenn Beck on 'em.

Capitalist Christianity & Socialism

Cover of the Russian Monopoly with Jesus Game,

where Jesus looks like a homeless person.

see: http://www.ship-of-fools.com/gadgets/toys_pets_games/218.html

Some captains of capitalism are still not at all happy with the Social Security system. Perhaps we should have let George W. Bush privatize it after all.

It smacks of Socialism, which it actually is, being derived from schools of thought more properly described as "socialist" rather than "capitalist".

And Medicare, and Medicaid...and children's health coverage. Nasty Socialism.

Except...the only thing that now and in the future that will prevent bodies of the old and dead accumulating in the streets is going to be Social Security and Medicare.
The only thing that will still allow the majority of the elderly access to any health care will be Medicare.
The only thing that will prevent a drastic decline in average age expectation is Social Security. (In Russia after 1991, the average age declined almost 10 years per male individual.)

Before we cringed at the sight of those nasty homeless people sleeping on the streets, good for nothing but holding squeegees.
Capitalist Christianity taught us that blessed are they who move those homeless bums out of town.
Now our Capitalist Christian god ..."dog" spelled backwards...will increase their numbers, and deprive them of care and nutrition, and their corpses will turn our Main Streets into rivers of the dead.

It is something to look forward to.

War On Drugs

No such thing.

We have troops in Afghanistan - the source of opium - and troops in Colombia - the source of cocaine.

We are not reducing the flow of drugs; it is a cover for protecting drug profits - along with whatever else our government manages to dream up.

What crimes are being committed in our names - and all we can do is yell about Health Care. A dead population does not need Health Care. We are The Dead.

Health Care Bubble

My Blue Cross / Blue Shield rates are going up 29 %
starting October 1, 2009.

Thanks, guys and gals.

When that bubble bursts, there'll be no bail-out.

My Missed Town Hall Meeting

We did not have a Town Hall meeting on the Iraq War. My parents and I were having a discussion about things which led to the war, and I recounted the story of Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors.
Of course, my parents, watchers of FOX, had entirely forgotten about the fact that the UN team found nothing. They had forgotten they even existed - the team, much less the weapons!

The lies go on and on.
I told them this country is foreign to me. It is a country of either (a) amoral immmoralists seeking some bipartisan deal to screw me, or (b) liars and outright thieves.

I have no understanding of Afghanistan. No one does. If I had had my Town Hall meeting on Iraq...and maybe now on Afghanistan, I would be screaming like a banshee.
"You destroyed this country!" I would scream.
"You destroyed our futures, our health, our education...everything!"

I would pause. "Go and do your torturing and extreme interrogations for the sake of 3,000 dead Americans at the WTC...who have led to a million deaths...and there is no end in sight...
How many wars, how much death...how much is enough for the dead?"

"You bastards!"

Do Not Believe....

Do not believe in God.
If you believe in, then you will always have the option not to believe in.

When Othello lived in love with Desdemona, all was well. But when he came to view his love as liable to proof or disproof, he only believed in his love up until Iago's urgings made him lose his belief.

Expect God.

Thunderdome

In case you have not been watching, Australia is in the middle of a process turning it into that future wasteland we know and love from the "Mad Max" films.

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Australia_sweats_through_long_hot_winter_999.html

The Australian winter temperature this August has exceeded records set in World War II, being often in the 40s Fahrenheit. Combine this with the record drought and we shall have to keep an eye out for Master Blaster.

The Mind Of A Republican

I read something by a Republican in support of Palin and Beck and the other marauders.

"What happens if Obama is not the Savior of America?"

The SAVIOR of America !!??!!

What in the name of heaven is that? And you probably didn't believe me when I said that these people are insane.

Republican Mind is a dark place of ill-fitting and out-worn images, icons of magical powers, and just plain out madness.

Savior, indeed ! Just because you idiots make idols of your ideas and urges, don't try and say that I do! It is just as easy for you Republicans to pray to your idiotic Intelligent Designer as it is to say that other people pray to some new Savior!

There is no dialogue with these people. Ever. They see gods and powers everywhere. They see devils and imps. Boycott them and their impudent shamans!

Odd Bedfellows

Health and Insurance and Pharma are contributing TO President Obama's push for health care.

Why?

I think it may be that by now, they know a "bubble" when they see one.

Health Care costs doubled in 7 years, and they are increasing at an ever faster pace; this is irrational exuberance if there ever was such.

What would the bursting of a health care "bubble" be like? I mean, what would happen? Is there enough disease and illness to support it? Enough disease, that is, among those with enough money?

Probably not. Then it would start to fall apart.

Old Times

I caught Mr. O'Reilly talking to Mr. Beck on FOX. Something about a Marxist in the administration.
A Marxist in the administration?

Old-timey-talk from two old-timey minds. Somebody tell them the Cold War is over, the fight between the Marxism of the time and the Capitalism of the time ended. There is a new struggle now, as we try to define to future of the world.

Do you see what I mean when I say World War II has still not ended? People still go around yelling "You're a Hitler!"..."Am not!"..."Are so!"

We still shiver at the ghost of the Stalinist form of Marxism.

I, for one, do not care.

Tell bold Mr. O'Reilly to catch up.

Time Travel

How I view Time Travel, and the grandfather paradox : I go back in time and "mess" with my ancestors, thereby destroying my own time-line.


Think of time as a cellular automaton, or a Wolfram process: areas of regularity and areas of chaos:

Areas A, B, and C are areas of regularity.

I inhabit area B. I may, therefore, go back in time to A, since it does not form part of my "history". I am prohibited from going back to C, however.

What prohibits me? I think we shall find "laws" of regularity in chaos. Maybe "habits" of regularity.

Now some people say we are all descended from some primeval Eve, like "Lucy". Well, that may explain why - if time travel is possible - you see no evidences of time travel. Surely our descendants would be buzzing around bothering us, wouldn't they? But they aren't. This may be due to the "Lucy" effect, and a deeper regularity underlying apparent chaos.

Too Good To Miss

In its entirety:

Town Hall Crazies Go Through the Ideological Rabbit Hole
By John Cook, 5:18 PM on Tue Aug 18 2009,

http://gawker.com/5340220/town-hall-wingnuts-go-through-the-ideological-rabbit-hole?autoplay=true

Unalloyed xenophobic rage presents a challenge similar to one posed by habitual lying—just as it's hard to keep up with one's own falsehoods, it's difficult to remember whether shouting "Heil Hitler!" at a Jew is good or bad.

Take, for instance, this woman at a healthcare town hall sponsored by a Las Vegas radio station. After watching an Israeli immigrant to the United States praise his homeland's government-run healthcare system, she is moved to respond, "Heil Hitler!"

What does that mean? Well, it could mean "Heil Hitler, you Jew, you are a subhuman blood-sucker," a sentiment common to right-wing extremists who actively seek the violent overthrow of the federal government. Or it could mean, "By supporting government-run healthcare, sir, you may as well be shouting 'Heil Hitler,' because you are supporting Barack Obama, who is a Nazi"—a sentiment also common to right-wing extremists who actively seek the violent overthrow of the federal government. You see the problem? The feverish, paranoid snake that is contemporary right-wing political thought has begun to eat its own tail, and the swamp is full of anti-Semites and Nazi-haters who both seek the same thing—a return to the "real America."

As you can see from the look of terror that crosses this woman's face when the Israeli challenges her—"I'm a Jew! You're telling me, ‘Heil Hitler'? Shame of you!"—she appears to have briefly forgotten which one she is. In the most cosmic of ironies, she is wearing an Israeli Defense Forces t-shirt, so it's not likely that she's a rabid neo-Nazi. Still, you can see in her eyes that she is frantically checking an exhaustive catalog of political outrages in the back of her mind—which is worse, supporting healthcare reform, or yelling "Heil Hitler" at a Jew?

She quickly decides that it's the former, and tells the Israeli that, as a Jew, he should be more frightened than anyone of Obama's policies. It's about as comprehensive a tangle of our current political dynamic as we've seen—a middle-aged white woman who seems to believe that Jews are good to the extent that Israel is good because Israel kills Arabs but bad to the extent that one of them supports socialized medicine shouts "Heil Hitler" at an Israeli because Hitler was bad to the extent that he was like Obama but was also good to the extent that he was against Communist Jews. It's taxing to remember where the political lines are drawn when the only thing you care about is hating the president.

And it's like a comment thread on Red State brought to life. The woman here had probably written "Heil Hitler" into dozens of comment forms during her long, lonely nights of rage, and she clearly was shocked when she realized she'd said it in real life. "Heil Hitler!" "Let's bring an assault rifle to the next town hall!" It's a reverse TRON, and the trolls have escaped into our world.

After she tells the Israeli that he should be more afraid than anyone else of nationalized healthcare—because, just like in Israel, it's an anti-Semitic plot—she mocks him with a caustic "boo-hoo" because he complained about an $8,000 trip to the emergency room without healthcare. Jews are so cheap!

CIA Probe

In the BBC:


Kevin Connolly, BBC News, Washington
The question now that these startling depictions of the handling of those suspects are in the public domain is - what should happen next?

Barack Obama doesn't want to inflame anti-American feelings around the world but he doesn't want to alienate the professionals within America's own intelligence agencies. The problem is that below the cautious pragmatism of the White House rages a partisan political battle.

America's human rights lobby wants full disclosure, and on the left of the Democratic Party there is a real appetite for proceeding with further investigations.

Conservatives, though, will argue that the harsh interrogations came at a desperate moment in American history. The interrogators could be cast as dedicated intelligence officers, ruthless only in the cause of protecting their fellow citizens.


I considered myself Conservative, but one who never believes that circumstances put me above the Law. If I am forced to evil, I shall bear the consequences.

Our whole illusion of bipartisanship relies on amorality in the face of immorality.

End Of History ( As We Know It, At Least )

In the Galley Espace, there is an exhibition of Indian Art, and among the exhibits is a statue of Vishnu on its side, fallen and broken, pushed from it pedistal, head separated from the torso.

Put a TV where the head used to be.
Turn it on.

Then put a giant screen TV where the Buddhas of Bamyan used to be. Run the world's longest extension cord from Kabul to Bamyan!
Turn it on.

Vishnu and the Lord Buddha, they were the Real; their destroyers were but blinks of an eye - the wink of alienated and dying pixels when someone pulls the plug.

A Moment In History: The Afghanistan Election

More sound and fury, signifying nothing; nothing to my life, at least. Maybe my grandkids will celebrate our wonderful nation building when they read about another Afghan election held under the auspices of the ever-present NATO military.

The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan because a pro-communist government was being undermined by the CIA, which was supporting Afghan warlords with money and arms.

The USA supported Osama bin Laden and his group - later to grow into Al Qa'ida - with money and arms. We essentially created Al Qa'ida.

The Soviets lost.
Time passes. We invade in our turn.

Our rational, as described by General Petraeus:

"When Afghanistan was a sanctuary for al-Qaida and other transnational extremists we saw what they did. That is a development that we have to prevent," he said. "That's why President Obama has identified this as a war of necessity, not a war of choice."

In other words, we created a monster that we had to destroy. We let Al Qa'ida slip away into Waziristan, so now we couldn't destroy it, but would have to occupy a country to prevent its return.

Again Petraeus:

"There has to be a development of governance that is seen as worthy of support by the people. There will be very substantial local components, traditional tribal and social organising mechanisms that will then mesh at some point with national structures that come out to join them," he explained.

"Those national structures have to earn the support of the people by being seen to improve the lot in life of the Afghan people."

This doesn't sound like it's going to be over any time soon. Off hand, given the complexity and the poor record so far, I'd say it is impossible to accomplish in the time we have.
I mean to say, we do not really have 50 years to devote to this. It is not going to work. It will be yet another disaster of our generations.

Showdown At The Diner

Hank Jacobowski called me out when I walked into Hanaan's Diner. He says America is still the greatest country in the whatever, and she still has the whatzis that makes for whatchamacallit.
He says I "go to far" when I say Americans - of which I count myself one - are idiots.

I looked at him and said that the Health Care debate is filled with fabrications, falsehoods,and lies.
He says that's just politics.

I said we fought - correction: are still fighting - a war in Iraq based on "misinformation" . I said I think it was lies.
He sputtered.

I said the banking system collapsed because everyone was scamming, on the take, pimping - you name it. The entire system was corrupt.
He was silent.

We do not make tough decisions. Oh, we do when it's pretty late in the game - maybe too late, like the bank bail out: a decision to help the elite who have hijacked this country. Not a very good decision. What can you do, though, when you wait so long that there's no time left?

We live on lies and pipe dreams; we will not face reality, rather we need a constant flow of flawed intelligence.

It's all crap.

The worst of it is, you all know it's crap, too!
But we all smile, and we say to our societal Niedermayers "Yes, sir. Could I have another?"

Private Language

There may be a "private language" ( see Wittgenstein et al. ), but it will certainly be extremely boring. I mean to say, the only person you may bestow the glad-eye upon will be yourself, and if there is anything sprightly and gingery that occurs in a "private language", the fun will last about 2 or 3 minutes from starting whistle to knocking down the goal posts.

Popularity

Often bloggers think how nice it would be if their blogs were more popular, if more people read them. I have done so myself.

Look at who is popular. Look at who is popular on cable TV news, the chatter-boxes, the celebrities.
Look!

To be popular is to exemplify the popular mass insanity of a society.

Screw popularity!

The Iceman Cometh: Health Care

I dawned on me that Eugene O'Neil is the playwright to dramatize Health Care reform in the USA in the 21st (...or is it reversed? is it the 12th?... ) century.

Town Hall meetings are like enough to hobnobbing at Davy Jones' Rathskeller.
The pipe dreams of the generals, the minorities, the disillusioned, the vengeful...

Pipe dreams are ideology.

All your religious figures have told you: Life ! ...do not smoke the pipe of dreams. That is Death in Life.
I have never known a people so half made-up...and so wounded, like the Fisher King of the Grail stories. I know because I've just referred to a figure - the Fisher King - and notwithstanding the fact that "The DaVinci Code" dealt with the Grail, you probably have no knowledge of the Fisher King and his place in the stories of the Grail. Our fantasies are halk-baked and half-witted, just as are our realities.

We are are half made people. We prop ourselves with prostheses of guns and firearms.
We are a severely wounded people. We seek to cure ourselves with the cauterizing fire of hate.

The Iceman Cometh.

pix: Doctor Fun

The Iceman Cometh: Black Ravens Revisited

Black Ravens was the nickname for Stalin's secret police cars.

Black Ravens are a sign we use to depict opponents of Health Care Reform. Or Carrion Crows.

What is a present-day Death Panel?

If you cannot afford the cost of your medications, you have been "panelled" into oblivion...to the hospice of last resort...

...and the Iceman Cometh !

Painting by Boris J. Wladimirskij

c. 1930

It's That Time

I'm afraid it is that time.
You know, the time when you put down the telephone, look bleakly at the wall, and mutter to yourself: "It's that time ! Blast!"

It was my mum, of course. She has a particularly idiotic fellow do her income tax, and the City wherein she resides decided to hassle the ancient ones with demands for more of this and that. Ditto the State - may they rot in that circle of hell reserved for States - and the Federal government.

So everything worked out, but she was gun shy of the telephone, especially if the caller ID served notice that the caller was from some seat of what we euphemistically call government.

Of course, as my luck would have it, hitherto she has been a dowager of fine largesse to the Republican fraternity boys who used to run...or ruin...the government. Thus, the Republican National Committee, when it gets the gleam in its eye, decides it is time to call old mums to see what kind of hand-outs are on the menu this month.

Now mum, being gun shy of telephones, will no longer answer calls from Washington D.C. So when the Republican National Committee calls, she writes down the bloody number, then calls me, breathlessly spinning the yarn that she had to run all the way from the basement and across the house...just missing the phone call...but - thank goodness - has the number written down. And could it be for my daughter, her granddaughter, who moved from D.C. two years ago?

At this time I muse among memory, and ask whether this is not the Republican National Committee again, since we have already down this before.
Well, she knows we did it before, but this could be someone for my daughter, so past it along, would you, like a good son.

So I shall have to start keeping a list of the phone numbers of the various organizations for cats, dogs, and politicians she foolishly sends her money to.

It was the Republican National Committee...again.

I think it reminiscent of the time in Dubois, Pennsylvania, when I went with my mother-in-law to the elevator, going down to breakfast, and looking out the east facing window and watching the sun come up over the hills.

"And who are you, young man?" she said as the elevator doors closed.

UFO Talk

Tilly down at the Hugo Chavez gas station - I forget the company name, used to be Sinclair and had a big green dinosaur logo about 60 years ago. Anyway, so Tilly says that Roscoe was in today, and Roscoe - in case you don't know...and you don't, 'cause I ain't told you yet - is the young man who talks to UFO guys. Gals, too. UFO gals. Singin' "UFO gals, won't ya come out tonight, come out tonight, come out tonight; UFO gals won't ye come out tonight..."


Now Roscoe was still there, using the Men's Room, and taking about 15 to 20 minutes doing it: there were sounds like a wrestling match coming from behind the locked door. Tilly and I, we figure Roscoe's got some really, really heavy Obsessive Compulsive type thing going on, got to hold a wad of paper just the right way to get a hold of the seat, then another wad to use the flusher, lots of hot water, a wad of paper to hit the on/off on the air blower...and he's probably got to hold his breath while the air dryer is blowing and recirculating...well, everything in the men's' room at the speed of light, or at the speed of air dryer air, at least. That explains the great expulsions of breath, followed by great gobbling gasps for air.

So he saunters out and it's all we can do to keep from laughing.

"What have you been talking 'bout with the UFOers, Roscoe?" Tilly asks.

He shakes his head in a sad, knowing way. He's been here before.

"I cain't tell yer. Ya couldn't stand it.You're not..," here he stopped and looked for the right words, words strong enough to condemn me, but not to assign Tilly - dear Tilly - to the same place in hell where I should be.
"Yer not strong enough for it." he said.

"Couldn't stand it?" says I, doing a thick Irish brogue like Uncle Leonard telling the joke of the time Claude stumbled in drunk and woke up his brother Bill, who happened to be asleep in the front room - his own bedroom being painted, a matter what Claude fergot.

Roscoe shakes his head. "No. It would be too much fer ya. I told a parson..." - he meant person...I think - "... oncet and that parson died."

Tilly and I became thoughtful.

"Indeed! And who was that, Roscoe?"

"Auntie Belle. Last year. She asked me if there was life after...after...ya know, and I wanted to tell her to put her mind at ease. The UFO people know all about Life after D."

After D. indeed! "Aunt Belle was 3/4 dead last year, Roscoe. She was already in the hospice when you spilled your UFO beans. The only reason you got to talk to her was that Death had stopped at the convenience store down the block for a pack o' smokes, 'n got to playin' video poker."

Tilly smiled as I said this.

"Scoff if ye must. It's too horrible fer human ears. Even coarse and crude ears..." he looked straight at me, "...that hear all kinds of cursing and swearing and...whatnot."

Like mine, he's thinking. Like my ears, connected to my crude eyes, just above me unkempt mouth.

"So, Roscoe," says Tilly, "Your sayin' that what the UFOers say is so horrible; is it more horrible than all the bankers in the world taking bets on lame-horse investments and having all the investments being so far behind in the field, they almost are in the next race?"

"Ay," says I. "Is it more horrible than having bankers piss your money away, then having to bail them out?"

Tilly grew more and more animated. "Is it worse than yer $200,000 house being worth $90,000 and change now? Worse than a foreclosure and sitting on yer sorry tail-crack on the kerbside?"

"Is it worse than not being able to afford health care, Roscoe? Do the UFO people tell you stories of Death Panels in the Sky?"

"What of inflation, Roscoe? Unemployment..."


Roscoe had run.

He crossed against the light. He had some small scraps of toilet paper and paper towels from the men's room he was shoving into his ears, trying to stop the sound of our voices.
"Shut up !! Don't...wanna...hear !!! " he yelled as he ran into traffic.

Tilly smiled at me. "You'll burn in hell for that."
I laughed. "Won't be alone, gal", and I went out.

Good Buddies

It turns out some of the guys toting guns to Town Hall meetings about Health Care - not Gun Rights - are allied with radical militias.

I'm surprised.

Picture above is the Stadium in the ancient City of Hate. Town Hall meeting tonight, brothers & sisters ! First time we've used the old place since 1936 or so.

Be there !

It's a Town Meeting...like the ones on Little Tall Island...Give us what we want, but we won't go away.

The Old Days

There is an ancient Mariner - a garrulous old geezer - who speaks to people down at the docks:

"In the old days..."

Do we anticipate? Will he tell us how far he walked to school? It was better? Children didn't sass their parents?

"...it was so - so win. Nowadays, it is so fail."

What do we need to turn things around? A Manhattan Project?...we are appealing to his long-term, World War II memories.

"Manhattan Project? Ya don't need another one; first one ain't over yet. We can't stop anymore. If we could get a good thing going, it'd go on ferever...but we cain't. We are so, so fail! "

Coleridge's curse, and I ran from that old mariner, I can tell you!

Twitter Revolution

My nephews got into a color-coded-revolution and twittered me with unending updates. I do not know which nephew this is...the taller one, obviously - baton and computer in his hands replacing the older insignia of hammer and sickle.

I am bemused.

Language And Consciousness August 16 2009

We say that Language does not merely describe reality, does not merely symbolize reality, standing apart from it and disinterestedly supllying us with information. No. We say that Language constitutes reality: it builds it on the foundation of what we have inherited - our history.

Therefore, Language is never separated from Morality.

We like to think that we can stand apart and use symbols as ten-foot-poles to touch the evil and madness of the world, that it never touches us, that we ourselves are beyond evil...

Guess again.

Healthcare Death Panels

I saw Newt Gingrich speaking of Obama's Plan leading to Death Panels.

We have such panels right now. They decided on the allocation of very scvarce resources, essentially deciding who lives and who dies; they typically deal with organs: hearts, livers, etc.
Those who received transplants have a chance; those who do not receive them have no chance.

"Death Panels" are not something new. In an economic and political and moral system such as ours, there will always be allocation of resources to where the "market" deems it best they be allocated to; some will not get the resources.
The decision, whether made by a panel of experts or an impersonal market, is a decision either way. We decide who even gets any healthcare whatsoever. We decide who has insurance and how much; we decide whether they get prescription coverage; we decide who gets food and who dives into dumpsters.

What an amusing notion Republicans have: that we do not already decide on the Quick and the Dead !

Language And Consciousness August 15 2009

The features of Human Worlds do not first exist, and then subsequently get spoken about or written of; they come into being in talk.

They come into being in talk, in music, in emotional interactions...

All that is conscious understands the world because it is also creating the world.

Language, music, et al. do not represent reality; they constitute reality.

So when I talk about the stories we create - and how the stories had better be good stories, lest we be screwed - I am talking of creating the House wherein our kids and grandkids will live.

Revolt Of The Parking Lots 2

Two bitumen storage tanks on the edge of no-man's land, standing guard.

pix: Black & White Dreams

Matrix Phone Booth

I tried to use the phone, but it was too late.

I ran back to the car...

but it was way too late.

New Link

I added a new link haut dexter, just under my peace mongering poetry site.
It is the Trousers Press - with iconic logo of inverted pantaloons - and hitherto it had not dawned on me the type of pun we were looking at. I had to write it down before I was made aware of it: press trousers; trousers press.

I suppose I shall consider this a form of chiasmic pun, chiasmus being the literary trope where one takes the structure and...well,