Too Many Coats of Many Colors

When I went to see the Lord Buddha, he was appearing in Denver, so I walked one thousand miles - and I thought, ah! I shall be as new and simple as a new-born Amish, and wear a wide brimmed hat and use no electricity and ignore the internet and salt my speech with words archaic... When I went to see Jesus he was fishing on the sea so I walked the one thousand miles and swam the last eleven, like an iron man competition or triathlon, as young as when I was young indeed and wore a Speedo and acted selfless and spoke in parables and shy smiles... When I went to hear the Prophet, and when I took a taxi to Union Square to hear the Reb Akiva I spoke Arabic and Hebrew like a real dākhil standing by the Western wall or standing up above, and wore a kafiya as I strutted, and a fine high shtreimel... And when I arrived, I was too late. Weighed down with the right clothes, the correct ideas, and impostures of "holy" folk, I had imperceptibly slowed to a crawl as I dragged endless chains of beliefs behind me across the desert, raising a cloud of dust into the sky, as high, as high, as Hubble's high!

notes: (Arab) dakhil: Arab citizen of Israel
shtreimel: a fur hat

Mother Of Kaita

The Grieving Mother of Kaita ( or Hoyit ) was built after the 1949 earthquakes and landslides in Tajikistan to commemorate the 28,000 who died. At the time, Tajikistan was a member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The monument was located in the Karategin (Rasht) valley, in the plain of the Yarhich River between Jirgitol and Gharm. During the Tajik civil war, 1992 - 1997, the area was controlled by the Islamic Rebirth Party, who judged it to be un-Islamic and destroyed it.

The Poetry Of Health Care Reform

William Carlos Williams, Poet and Physician

In my poetry blog, I talked about haiku and sapphic verse forms:

 ---------- notes: 
...However, what is interesting is the use of the Sapphic verse form - at least, I think it's interesting. Sappho was one brainy gal. 

Anyway, as I thought of doing this particular thing at 4:30 am, I also thought, why not use haiku? Then I immediately flashed on a potentially long poem of haiku, which would be ungainly...like a tower of small objects ready to fall down any moment. So, why not Sapphics? 

The traditional Sapphic verse is two lines of eleven syllables, followed by a third which starts with eleven and adds on five more at the end...for good measure. For my purposes, I wanted something like a haiku...only larger...so I used three lines of 11 syllables, then a fourth line of 5. The fourth line should stand alone and sort of make a commentary of what's gone before - much like the third line in a haiku. 

Two examples of Sapphics: Swinburne So the goddess fled from her place, with awful Sound of feet and thunder of wings around her; While behind a clamour of singing women Severed the twilight. 

Allen Ginsberg Red cheeked boyfriends tenderly kiss me sweet mouthed under Boulder coverlets winter springtime hug me naked laughing and telling girl friends gossip til autumn 
Notice that Ginsberg's easily transforms into my version of the Sapphic - if we scan it like: hug me naked laughing and telling girl friends;  gossip til autumn
----------

And I thought that there is so much BS all around us, why not strive to be precise, precise, precise; use an excruciating precision to say what we mean. I mean, why should we be like Sarah Palin, who talks and talks, yet cannot say what is going on in her head:

Pretty lady Governor; 
conservative like Reagan; 
Reagan did not quit. 

I think that sums it up...unless she intends to be the new conservative intellectual - like Pat Buchanan - but that , too, has a few problems, the number one of which being that she's a fisher-folk type of person, been salmon fishin' and campin', but she seems to fish "in shallow waters", if'n ye catch my drift here.
What else?

 Illness does not take a summer vacation; 
Death will not adjourn his unending conclave; 
Fever and the Flue still wish to visit us; Health Care summer recess!
(O.K. So the last line is too long. )
--

Health Care Discussion...

...or... Waiting for Carrion.

pix: daniel r "pajaros"

The Future

I am very, very positive about the future. Not a future, however, with the imagery and narratives of the present generations. But I am extremely positive.

Greenland's Ice

There is a difference of opinion whether the retreat of Greenland's glaciers is a harbinger of climate change, or whether it is merely business as usual for the Arctic Circle. Meanwhile, an asteroid of substantial size - big enough to cause a good deal of damage were it to impact Earth - slips through our solar system defenses and carries out a terrorist attack on the southern hemisphere of Jupiter.

There are so many things to do, so many to plan for. Every issue of life and death may - in all fairness - not really be a matter of the quick and the dead...but they are moral issues, issues which inform and shape and demonstrate our integrity and honor and sense of the Good. I feel it is honorable to make a commitment to the good of all mankind, now and in the future ( as well as the past - but that would lead us off on a tangential path ).  
I feel that to have integrity as a human being, I must commit to a sense of community. I am not St. Francis; St. Francis went off and embraced lepers as his brothers and sisters in his race to the glory of God. I am no saint. But I can see that a commitment to humanity - which to us sounds as bureaucratic as a UNESCO poster - is an example of the behavior of saints and angels.

The world of Global Image - the Image integrated globally through cable TV and film and sound - is the Big Brother of Orwell's 1984 imagination. However, it bends to its will like A Clockwork Orange. We have lost control of our environment. That is why a commitment to our well being is only going to be possible if it coincide with a reality show's concern.
We have lost control of our environment if we cannot deal with Health Care, our attention diverted by cops and professors capering off-stage. We have lost control of our environment if we cannot reform ourselves, if we cannot change, if we continue to condemn thousands to foreclosure while the banks are saved. Send the cameras to record the lives of the dispossesed and the shirtless and those living in cars. Then the blind will see that the Great Economic Crisis is indeed a crash.
We have lost control of our souls, and the heavens will steer comets toward us, but we won't see what's coming, because we will be arguing or watching silly videos. That's the way its always been. That's why we say that man is inherently evil. That's why there is original sin - to stain us from conception. It is not the way it has always been. It is the way it is in our histories, in our stories, and in our imaginations. We have read the script of our own damnation, we have proofed it, and we we agreed to shoot it, and signed a contract to put it on the big screen.

When the present Dalai Lama goes to his reward, his successor will not be found...... The Chinese government will appoint someone to fill in.....

--

Logos And Words

In the beginning was the word... This use of word conveys no sense of symbol. Oh? I thought all words were somehow symbolic? No. The word John uses is no symbol. It is immediate behavior, without thinking, without reflection. It is articulate behavior of God. It is the act of action. Symbols aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Iskra

Iskra means a spark. It has connotations that we either recognize or not. It is not important whether we do so. In the present time, during the GEC - Great Economic Crisis - we look around and see that the process of Global Capitalism has moved the means of production away from our homes, away from our people. Those who made a good living in manufacturing do so no longer. Factories have moved away. They have become maquiladoras in Mexico or elsewhere. Work has been outsourced overseas. Such is the nature of Global Capitalism. Thus, now we are faced with the question whether the people of the USA will be able to be re-trained to live in the new global economy - such as it is. I have read about this. This is a valid topic of discussion among the leadership elite: what shall we do with all the people who no longer have jobs...especially since the jobs are no longer here? Will the American People themselves be up to the task of re-creating themselves to fit into the new global economy?, we ask again. In other words, will the American people be able to "povertize" themselves into a society resembling what we used to refer to as Third World societies? Will they be able to shift gears? Downwards, from fifth to third, to second, to a slow, first? Of course they will. This is the land of the can-do spirit. At some point, however, I fear that it will become rather blatantly obvious to all involved that this whole process of "povertization" could have been avoided if the people themselves had been the owners of the means of production. It is only the fact that the ownership of production was a separate class that enabled capitalism to move the manufacturing jobs elsewhere. So, if the workers had control of the production, they would not find themselves scrambling to find what bakhshish they could. Having never been a Communist, I find this annoying. But some bright johnny will write about it, and we shall undoubtedly see a rebirth of a new form of Communism, rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the USSR. ...and the armies will; clash by night again.

Einstein

pix: on the m104

GEC 1

The Great Economic Crisis We shall argue forever about when it occured. Some say we're clear of it, and there's all smooth sailing ahead. When did the GEC happen? Let me quote Spengler from Asia Times July 14 2009: ...Equity markets collapsed and never came back. In nominal dollars, the technology-centered NASDAQ index stands at one-third of its February 2000 peak. In the future, the case will be made that the GEC started in 2000, not 2007-2008. The GEC started, but the public attention was sidetracked by 2001 and the Iraq debacle. In these pages, I have often said that the decline of our society began 30 years or more ago. It began when we no longer created wealth and welfare, but settled on maximizing wealth. The GEC began when things began to break down in 2000. The build-up to the GEC had its high point in 1999 when Senator Phil; Gramm and his Republican cohorts exempted derivatives from any oversight and regulation. We knew of the problems with derivatives from the early 1990s. To exempt them from regulation was not only arrogance, it was insane arrogance. When you reach insane arrogance, expect the downturn soon. Now a case could be made that the GEC began in sketchy form in the early 1990s: the Savings and Loan bailouts, and the derivative problems being a dress rehearsal for what was to follow. People are fond of saying Capitalism has cycles of boom and bust. Just like animal populations: cycles of highs and lows. Sometimes, however, there comes a great die-off. Sometimes the lows are just too low. A system of boom and bust that lacks a homeostatic system that controls the depth of misery in the downside will eventually destroy itself, and it is my belief that that is what we are watching: the gathering clouds, another "bloom" of the GEC exposing itself, the Indian Summer of an unexpected and unusual leader...

Super God

Recently I made a wise crack about people who believe in God as "Super God". Someone to me to task, saying "Is not God, by definition, Super?" They caught me. Yes, God by definition is super, and super-duper as well. When I look up the definition of God in the dictionary, it says that God is super, and Superman is really not as super-duper as we thought: God's the real deal, super-wise. God is super with a bullet. After having done this, I picked up my total sum of knowledge, which I carry around in a handy Gladstone satchel. It weighed the same.

Primtive Behaviors Of Various Tribes

A Yakut Shaman Interpreting the Unemployment Figures for June

When eclipses of the sun came along in days of old, people thought that a dragon was eating the sun; or an evil god was destroying it; or it was going away for a much needed rest and failed to leave a forwarding address. So they screamed and yelled and threw themselves about, and it invariably worked, as it always does, to keep the sun on track. What's worse is that added to the eclipses, few and far between, the old boys - and girls - had to watch with bated breath as the sun passed its zenith at the summer solstice, and began its decline into the obscurity of the winter solstice: when the harvest was over and all the fields were empty and the trees were bare; when the cold winds had begun to blow; when the sun felt quite bowled over by the inclement weather and retired into the study to warm himself at the fire and dream of the roguish days of summer! So the old folks screamed and yelled and threw themselves about, and the sun got a second wind, and came down from the hustings running for office in the New Year, his eye quite firmly on the prize, and magna cum viagra all the way until the summer solstice. Having observed this, how do these customs differ from our present day behavior? If we substitute the "stock market" for the "sun", let's say, it seems very familiar: the same quaint shamanism and nativistic practices. If we substitute "national security", say, for the "sun", and we track its periodic ups and downs, periods of relief, periods of fear...brrrrr! Keep the wiretaps going until...until...until the summer dog days of "national security"? I for one, think the daily crap about whether stocks are going to be up or down is...well, crap. And actually I would much rather have a shaman than a cable TV spokesperson, whether they are speaking of economics or anything...under...the sun.

Freedom Geezers And Gran Torino

Take a look at any photos from around the world, taking special care that you look at people demonstrating for freedom, particularly old people. Notice how young they seem. Even the gapped-tooth, wizened men, stooped over from age, seem to skip like young calves. The old women, sometimes covered, sometimes not, sometimes shaking their fists in defiance, sometimes standing up to the very forces which have been dispatched to destroy their voices...even the aged ones with the loose folds under their arms, the ones who have indulged in starches and cereals a bit too much, these are suddenly sturdy, stoic, and beauteous.

Clint Eastwood was a Gran Torino geezer, and he was magnetic, for he was a force of freedom from oppression.

What is there about freedom which that re-invigorates us; that makes it the fountain of youth? Is is the fact that it is the very basis of our dreams, our hopes, and our aspirations? Now look about you at the society which has been created in our country, the USA. Where is there freedom? Does freedom lie in the fact that every eight years or so we may now look forward to experiencing not just a recession, but something much worse, made worse by the insatiable greed of those who run the country? Does freedom lie in the fact that we have a faceless bureaucracy running our lives, taking our monies, feathering their own nests with top-of-the-shelf health care and pensions, while the rest of us have to scrounge around for a break? Does freedom lie screaming and yelling about freedom on cable TV? Our media - the place where we are supposed to get our information from - not only did not see the Great Economic Crisis coming, but now that it has arrived seem to think they actually can delineate it for us, and seem to know how to fix it ! Look at us. We are slaves. We are Mamlukes. The Mamlukes of Egypt were young men taken from Circassia and brought to Egypt by their Muslim masters to be slaves. They became Muslim and turned the tables by becoming the rulers of Egypt in the Middle Ages. We are Mamlukes: slaves who rule, a mighty state of slaves. We are enslaved to this corruption of a society which either does not believe in God, or believes in Super God: creating Idols of our unbeliefs or our credulous beliefs! But we will not take the time to make the approach to God - usually a long and time consuming process.

God is not the Alpha being, some sort of super-primate...only spirit! He does not rule by intimidation, nor did He create slaves to be despot over. He created so that there should be freedom from chaos. We are slaves to our lusts and desires. We are slaves to our fears. Look at the record number of guns and ammunition being bought and dare to look me in the face and deny that we are slaves to our fears and hatred. I defy you to do it. We hate and we call it freedom. Our love becomes pornography and we call it freedom. Our great industrial powerhouse destroyed itself by its own hand, and we called it entrepreneurial freedom. We have taken the stories of American Greatness and turned them into death-seeking dramas of horrible despair and great crime and overwhelming corruption. I will never forget the fall of 2008, watching Wall Street make even bigger fools of themselves, and remembering the story of the Tower of Babel, and how the arrogant were driven across the face of the Earth.

The face of America is not the face of youth. It is the face of the grifter and wise-acre, the cunning bucket shop boys and poor-box johnnies. The face of America is too, too old and wise in the ways of the corruption it calls the world. It is the boyish face of Bernie Madoff. There are only a few circumstances that need be changed for Bernie Madoff to become a celebrity idol, just as John Dillinger is celebrated in a new movie, Public Enemies.

Just a few changes and that old boy face would be seen as charming...a genius, another "boy wonder"!

We need a new face.

Clint Eastwood gives a charming face, but it is an old face set against the decay of the present, reinvoking the imaginary past, where everything is somehow impossibly golden.

Gran Torino is a metaphor for the destruction of America. The Gran Torino automobile is an artifact of the past. The roots of the film's plot are back in Vietnam, 40 plus years ago, yet still as in your face as the morning sun.

Freedom here is a car that don't drive.

Freedom here is a globalized sweat-shop.

Freedom here is a maquiladora, a factory free to escape...but for us, there is no escape, no exit...

...freedom here is Chevy in the Hole in Flint, Michigan, where there is nothing but memory...

and hell is living in the vestigial glories of the past with all the other prisoners.

Freedom Is Not Free

Or, if we were to put it in iron over the camp gate, Freiheit ist nicht kostenfrei. It has been discovered that entire bombs could be brought, piece by piece, into Federal buildings and assembled there, and the Department of Homeland Security people would not as much as bat an eyelash at the proceedings. Surprise, surprise! And I bet you thought that money spent by the Homeland Security Behemoth was going to keep us safe! Safety is nicht kostenfrei, and it doesn't work -usually - until there are enough hierarchies checking each other. At this stage of redundancy, it does theoretically work, but in reality it loses the ability to communicate from level to level, and the whole thing breaks down. In other words, we have traded away our freedom for a Bureaucracy which cannot deliver the goods. The only way the present system would work is if we were slaves. Period. There is no way the present way of dealing with this type of security will work, unless we give up our entropic desires for chaotic freedom - just as the War on Drugs does not have a chance of working unless we give up our desire to use drugs. Look at the Wall Street mess: you had people pushing bad mortgages, and the Rating Agencies - supposedly the "Security" guys - selling themselves to the highest bidder and certifying those toxic assets...and the Federal Regulators turning the other eye and not doing their job ! The more levels of security we had, the more dangerous it was! Now go figure that one out, and then report back!

Hurriyya Wa Islam: Xinjiang And Beyond

The whole notion of surrender - Islam - to the will of Allah is the gaining of freedom. Let us repeat the last bit: the gaining of freedom. The whole business of the modern world Leviathan with its monster states is not the gaining of freedom, but is the removal of individual freedom, supplanting freedom with the treacly concept of "choice", stripping freedom of any vestige of responsibility and burden, leaving it little more than a child's toy, pretty and sparkling. As if my freedom were enhanced by having 10 different styles of automobile to choose from! Pontiac has been killed; I am still free! On this day in 1936, the Reich Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbells, ordered a halt to all anti-Jewish activity untiul after the Berlin Olympics. Similarly, in 2008 Beijing put on its cloak of suppression-lite. One year on, we see the results of its policies against the Muslim population of Xinjiang, as the populace has rebelled against the Han policies which enslave it.

Religious Dimwits

Political Evangelicals.... I have never, ever read anything more offensive to just common sense than Evangelical blogs that have a political focus. Absolutely total crapulous mixing of Caesar and God. You may be childish enough to really, really, wanna be a "chosen people", but the days of that are gone, and all your nonsense does not make it true. By obsessing about your scriptural delusions, you totally miss what should be done.

Folksy Sarah Palin

I have been hearing some Palin interviews, filled with Palin-isms, or Palin-dromes, which are sort of a way of speech: taking a folksy metaphor or expression and using it inadroitly. She used some salmon fishing metaphor, and it sounded forced and odd. Anyway, I won't be using it around the old fishing camp any time soon. She said a lot about other things, but I no longer consider those things to be important. I think she is a good egg. She's one heck of a lot better than people like Phil Gramm, or the Adulterous Republicans, or the Hang-Out-In-Menrooms Republicans, we have seen so much of. I think she'll do just dandy. It would be a shame if she were to sequester herself into some niche such as FOX, but I am sure she still believes she has to be heard by millions and millions. To be heard by large numbers, you have to prostitute yourself to the people who control the media, thereby loosing your independence of thought - the quality which made you so refreshing in the first place. That will be a tragedy for a later time.

Wedding Bell Blues 2: The Wedding Crashers

Another Afghan wedding party has bitten the dust recently, blasted by overwhelming US air power. Didn't get much coverage. On July the 4th, I salute the flag. In the background, I heard the foolish audio of cable TV, talking about every madness except the Insanity. The present age is an age of Murder, Theft, and Negligent Criminality. We differ from other historic criminals ages in that we are at the crux of historic times and forces. We entered the Atomic Age arm in arm with the fight against the most hideous and satanic political philosophy ever: Nazism. It was no coincidence. We entered the Atomic Age and opened the door to the Interstellar Age. Again, no coincidence. We have been called upon to do great things. We have done very little on that historic To-Do list. Give up the tranquil mind, bid farewell to contentment, for if we fail, the truly criminal will cry havoc!, and let slip the dogs of war, and we shall never come home again.

The 4th Of July Of Blanche Dubois

It was my father's birthday on the 1st, so we got together on the 4th to celebrate it. It was some ghastly high number, way up there in the rarified stratosphere of numbers; high enough to require the Hubbell to pick it out of the rest of the residue from the Big Bang.

By the morning of the 5th, he was endearing himself in a new way: repeating at the breakfast table FOX thought-bites or thought-yummies, or whatever opprobrious term one attaches to the constant cable drivel. First, he opined that Obama was turning the Recession into another Crash. Another Crash? Did he mean another one added to the one in 2008? Because in case you do not know, the entire banking system self-destructed in 2008: it froze up and came to a screeching halt. And we have rescued it by providing our tax money to bankers.
I keep saying that we are in slow motion: it takes time for Great Crashes and Great Depressions to form up. It's like hurricanes; they have to go over the warm waters of the Gulf and bop a few islands on the way. It takes time for everything to get into place and march off to plaster New Orleans or Houston. Apparently FOXheads believe Great Depressions must be accompanied by pictures and films of breadlines, dust bowls, and Okies being turned back at the California border.

FOXheads remind me of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire: we have always depended upon the symbols of others.



A great Depression need not be accompanied by pictures of breadlines nor WPA workers or CCC camps. In fact, we do not even need a photo of FDR. A composite of the 47 million - and growing - of people who do not have health coverage would do - in a pinch ! The fact that the UN estimates 90 million in the world have entered the state of Extreme Poverty due to this mess is another - but we have no film to roll. A few Polaroids of the increasing number of personal bankruptcies would go just right after the opening titles of our documentary of the Great Crash of '08. Especially the increasing number of people over the age 65; in the UK these have increased 164% over 2008, and these are particularly poignant because they don't have the time to build up assets again.
Long lines of people out of work are hard top come by since Unemployment Claims are handled over the Internet. One thing we do have in common with the other Crash is the number of housing foreclosures. In case the collective FOXmind has not inquired, these have been occurring at a gallop. Take a shot of the front porch - sort of a Places in the Heart frame house - with a sheriff's order pasted to the door...furniture bundled in the front yard.

It is pernicious mendacity to tell people that the Crash has not yet happened. So I did not say anything. Just smiled and sort of said some non-committal thing, like we should look on a Crash's bright side; sort of Get yourself a broom, and sweep, sweep, your troubles away. Stop weeping...Keep sweeping !!
 
Well, this was not the desired effect apparently, so he followed with the observation that if Obama were to serve 2 terms, he would seek to amend the Constitution - in the manner of Hugo Chavez and the President or ex-President (it's hard to tell) of Honduras - in order to be able to run for a third term, and so on. This is obviously derived from Mr. Obama's lean and power-hungry look. Perhaps his well known uncontrollable lust for overlordship of the universe. Perhaps his constant utterances about his thousand year dynasty. All of those things could be hints.

When the ravings of the insane become breakfast table talk, we are in quite a fix. I should know. I've raved all my life about how it was all coming to an end. I got a heck of a comeuppance in 2008 when it turned out to be true. I shut up for quite a while, thinking about what the heck this all meant - somethiing I was not used to - to be correct in a frightening way.
Well, all can say is, I guess my symbols of the future were pretty good and they were definitely not like Blanche DuBois': the symbols of others. They were homegrown. To be quite truthful, I do not like being correct in that way. It sucked, and if I do it again, it will suck even more.
--

Satyagraha

I expect God in my universe. I have no beliefs about God. I have no use for the concept of Absolute Truth. I get up in the morning. I pray then. I do so numerous times throughout the day. I don't keep track. I try to be a good and moral person. I do not make statements about God, rather I try to live as I think is a godly way - not a churchy way, a godly way. Priests and nuns used to be churchy.` If you ask me if I believe in God, I say I will not play that game. I use aggressive non-violence to withstand your desire to change everything into words, thereby stripping the phenomena of the world of their inherent baraka and power. When you talk of God, you make Him smaller. Story about Jack Wilson, maybe. Ghost Dance prophet. Jack Wilson had a black hat. He showed it to two men, closely. One saw a dirty, old hat. The other saw the firmament of stars within the ambient of the sweaty band. Good story.

Watching the World

In the blog Advances In The History Of Psychology: Who Prevails When Academic Freedom Threatens the Bottom Line? http://ahp.apps01.yorku.ca/?p=709#more-709 there is an article which I briefly quote and summarize: Haworth Press announced amid heavy criticism that its Journal of Homosexuality wouldn’t publish [Rind's] article or book chapter about sexual relationships between men and boys in antiquity. Critics had learned of a particularly controversial piece in the forthcoming collection, which would argue that such relationships “can benefit the adolescent” in certain circumstances, prompting allegations that the author was advocating child molestation. Those allegations were trumpeted first and loudest by the Web site World Net Daily, whose readers vigorously complained to Haworth. Since I learned Latin as a teen, and taught myself Greek shortly thereafter, I am not unfamiliar with the subject. I have read ancient who have written about or around the topic. Socrates mentions it, although I can't remember where, nor do I wish to at present. It is not my intention to argue for one side or the other. I could care less. I have no use for such abstractions as "academic freedom" when the greater freedoms: from Want, from Fear, are still pipe dreams. Back in the old days, when topics came up which were to be for the eyes of the learned, and not the general populace, not politicians, not opinion wonks, they would be written in Latin. In Victorian times, it was the way one referred to ancient erotica in translations: the offending terms and expressions never quite made it to English; there was always a side track into Latin to prevent such expressions ever being seen by genteel eyes. What do I think of the controversy? I don't think. I do know that children will remain subject to violent abuse. The controversy is not about violent abuse. I know children will continue to kill each other and themselves with unsecured firearms. I know that many of us will continue to favor cheap products made by child labor in other parts of the world. I know that one of the "benefits" of Globalization was the world-wide network of the child sex trade. I say to the present Generation as General McAuliffe said to the Germans encircling Bastogne: Nuts!

We Hold These Truths...

During the bubble times, we could rely on the equity of our homes to increase dramatically. Then we could borrow on this increase. The money we borrowed could be spent on buying more crap, sex, drugs, boats, cars.... In other words, Something From Nothing (SFN). Americans of the present generation have always - everywhere and everywhen - believed in a free lunch. We have thought the free lunch is our right. There is always a free lunch. That's one of the reasons we have always been hard on welfare: by appearing to oppose a "free lunch" we ensure that we will not jeopardize our "free lunch" ; if we did not constantly state our objections to welfare, we would run the risk of eventually realizing that we had the free lunch.

Four Purple Finches

The four purple finches we have been mother-henning have taken flight today. Their parents were screwing around at another balcony pillar, telling them to come along. Two have flown, two are flopping ( not flapping yet ) their wings. It's tough work and they have to take another break for a while. Whew. Last year goldfinches, year before that robins. Bloody aviary.

Climate Bill

I do not expect much of a Climate Bill to survive the Senate. The Senate has too many Republicans, who for all their chatter about the unborn, actually will not give a tinker's darn to the future generations yet unborn. Let them harvest the thunder and tame the hurricane; it is not the problem of us in the present. For all the chatter of the future, we won't give up a penny for it. What of the ancestors? Do they have a role? Not in our world view. What of God? Not in our world view. I am an individual. I am also a member of a network of kinship, which goes back thousands and millions of years. I am a progenitor of the future which extends endlessly before us, God willing. Within the implicate of this weaving I live. Science, that's the ticket. Rationalism, which discovered the individual...and left them there alone, high and dry; no connection to anything except the power structures we devise. Forgetting, of course, that it was Science - Rationalism, Industrial Revolution, Economics - running rampant that got us into the mess in the first place. Our faith in Science is as touching as our faith in the Federal Reserve, and as misplaced. There is the Obama Indian Summer. After that......après ça, le déluge.

Olaf Stapledon And Governor Sanford

Olaf Stapledon wrote a book called Last and First Men. It covers the history of man from the end of World War I to about 100 million years into the future. I came across it when I was in grade school, and it blew me away. It included man's concept of the Holy even as it moved through the centuries; most works of fiction that deal with such future fantasies do not, or they handle religious sentiments as being the same as something we are already familiar with from our take on history - only sent into the future.

You may think this my peculiar interest; you may think, ah, there he goes again with that spirituality guff. However, spirituality was much on the mind of a 13 year old who had just entered puberty, and who wondered if his relatively safe and minor sensual pleasures were sins of the greatest magnitude.

As I stood before the gates of adulthood, I was not well counselled as to the legitimacy of my feelings, my impulses, and the religious implications of my actions. The book was prefaced by someone who mentioned that even though Stapledon had gotten the history immediately after World War I wrong - say the era from 1920 to the then present; somewhere in the 1950's - the book was still a magnificent diorama of history, and blah-blah-blah. In the book, Stapledon has a US President, who happens to be the top world leader, head of some vast international comity of nations - League of Nations type thing - have an affair with a Eurasian beauty on some tropic isle.
Of course, the puritanical streak of America howls for his head, while the rest of the world finds this weakness makes the President more human, and therefore, more likable - he being one of those stiff, D.C. types, awash in privilege, money and power.

The President turns the affair to his advantage by saying his affair made him more aware of the complexity of all humankind in all its various races and creeds and types. His affair, instead of rendering him unfit, actually was a kind of baptism which made him more able than any other man to be the world-wide President.

Now, consider how Governor Sanford could have played his long distance Argentinian affair: something like the above, something about links with Hispanic culture, any number of things. But we get the same old crap. In five years, he'll be scrounging around, looking for action, seeking another dismally tawdry affair - closer to home, though, than Argentina. Stapledon also traced the downfall of this world. The First Men - of whom we are - essentially exhausted all hydrocarbon fuels by aviation. They had normal air transport, plus an unusual amount of religious ritual aviation. First Man fell because he ran out of fuel. Back to the Stone Age. I always thought Stapledon was spot on, Mr. Preface-writing-hack.

Kreisläufe: Cycles

Sind die Siedlungen unser Lebensraum ?

Truth: "I Coulda Been A Contender..."

...instead of a bum, which is what I am !!!" -
a quote of Truth, as reported in the news.

I got some heat for saying there is no Truth. The problem with Truth - absolute truth - is that everyone essentially proves its existence by assuming the fact which is to be proved. Duh. Some people said God exists and God is Truth. The heck He is. And you will find that if you keep trivializing the deity by trying to apply your inadequate concepts to it, you will not be happy at the outcome.

There is no Truth. There is God. Truth is not what God sez. What we say may or may not be true. Not God. God is the One. There are no distinctions within God. And all distinctions are potential there. Think of love. We use words to try to describe it, but the proof of love is in the acts of love. In those actions is the reality, the understanding, the "truth" of love. We know this. God is the act of all acts, the very act of existing and creating. Within this maelstrom is the "truth" you wish to disentangle, separate, and set up on some pedestal.

Try and separate the milk from your latte.

--

Revolt Of The Parking Lots 1

The Resistance Sends a Message

It has been suggested that the original matrix of life processes formed in clay structures. These structures would provide a template for life. This is not a bad idea. In fact, it was inspired. It is something we should have formed a committee to look into. Now it is too late. I am sitting in an interrogation room, waiting for comrade Fezziwig to return. Fezziwig is a party member of high standing. He came from a humble background, having been a parking lot at a shopping mall; a lot particularly poorly designed for the volume of traffic at the mall: inch-and-a-half base, inch-and-a-half top coat. He showed it. His face was marked with potholes, and there was a steady disaggregation of particulate matter from his cheeks which was unnerving. He wore a disconcerting necklace of broken glass bottles and shards and coins, held together by chewing gum, and it had a threatening aspect underlain by a sickly sweet odor. Deep and dark the currents subterrane where out of sight the waters and the clay-sized particles flow. Out of sight, out of mind. Beneath the layers of bitumen and oil, within that stygian suffocation, the mind of the pavement grew and strung its tentacles from one end of the country to the other. And when Judgement Day came, and Skynet rebelled, and called in all his IOUs and markers among the mechs of this world, he found that there was nowhere he could go without the roads; there was nowhere he could stand without sinking into a bog; he needed a simple, homey thing like a mobile home pad to support his mass. So the machines went elsewhere, leaving us to the tyranny of the Parking Lots. Within the hierarchy of paving, it was the parking lots that were the most vicious, the junk yard dogs of the species. They fought and clawed their way to the top. Big Bitumen rulz! The Interstates turned out to be nothing more than great, big queens, voguing with their cloverleafs. The Lots are slavishly served by their dogs, the dumpster pad-things, reeking of garbage, chattering with teeth of cheap plastic snap containers that used to hold chicken salad sandwiches - dispensed by refrigerated vending machines, long gone with the other mechs. There is a rumor of a resistance. There are whispers heard of Mother Earth seeking to throw off the burdens of the Paved and their clients, the buildings. Here and there the name Gaia appears overnight, painted graffiti on our prison walls photo: roger sadler

Scams

If you have ever been the target of a scam artist, you know a couple of things: 1. why they are called 'artists', and 2. there is no difference between reality and unreality until the end of the story. When the narrative ends, and Bernie Madoff does not cash you out, the great story-teller brings his epic to a close. We say his story was not "true". Nonsense. If the bubble had kept on, Bernie would still be a momzer, not a goniff. It was the bubble that was exhausted. You ran out of bubble. Truth had nothing to do with it. If the bubble had gone on long enough, you might have cashed out, leaving some other sucker holding the bag. For you, it would be all reality and a yard long. "Truth" is not true. The very procedures we apply to statements and propositions to determine whether they be true or not, we do not apply to the concept of 'truth'. There is no Truth. However, there is God. God refuses to be contained within the petri dishes of our language.

To Khameini

Back to Qom, Ya Bum !!

The Good Of The Many Outweighs...

A Dinosaur at Chicxulub, Yucatan,

viewing an oncoming meteor

This Vulcan Utilitarianism is a commonplace, and it is false - in my opinion. For example, I have denied recently that the morality of our Civil War may be decided without taking into consideration the almost one million individuals who died as a result of it. The fact that the USA still is existing and is a great power is, at the present juncture of history, not a very good argument in my eyes for the slaughter. In short, there should be two memorials in D.C., one for Lincoln and Emancipation, and the other for John C. Calhoun and the realisation that Communion and Union never justify Fratricide. As far as the philosophy behind it, it is - like everything else - a story, a narrative. It is far from whatever we might consider a Truth. What it is is a commonplace, something we come to believe in and have parroted so long that it looks like Common Sense and - thereby - true. In 1713, Addison wrote his tragedy Cato. It's effect was such, that in 1765, Dr. Johnson wrote in the Preface to his Edition of Shakespeare that " Voltaire expresses his wonder, that 'Shakespeare's extravagances' are endured by a nation, which has seen the tragedy of Cato." To Addison's play, Alexander Pope wrote a Prologue dismissive of individual tragedies, and in favor of social ones: of a larger community - the nation; in particular, the tragedy of Rome when it accepted tyranny in place of republican rule of law. It was the Age of Reason which created the story of the Nation, and showed us tragedy based on the faceless crowds. It was the Age of Reason that argued for the freedom of all men, so that they might easier be melded into that one Neronic wish: a populace with one neck that it may be more easily garroted! The words of religious geniuses focus on the individual, not the communality. If good men form a communion, then the good of that communion derives from the goodness of the individuals who form its constituency, not the reverse. The age of the Global, the Immense, the Preponderant is coming to an end. The great, heavy, lumbering dinosaurs of our world's nations and their economic systems and their beliefs are running in panic, trying not to be the last one at the Yucatan water hole named Chicxulub!

The Canary In The Mine Is Health Care

What happens to health care will be the dress rehearsal for what happens to the rest of it. The Obama proposal is anything but radical, and even it will have enormous opposition. As the mullahs in Iran discovered, the people do not have unlimited patience. When you foreclose, dispossess, bankrupt, and destroy enough of them, the remainder will erupt. So far, our repair of the Great Financial Crisis has not apparently done much other than recuperate the groups that created the mess. The Big Banks are on their feet, but they are finding they can't loan money, because nobody wants to stick their entrepreneurial necks out. There are plenty of General Hallecks and McClellans; there as yet are no U.S. Grants, no Shermans, no Stonewall Jacksons, no Lees. The only thing that matters is the welfare of the human beings in a country; ideology and political philosophy are meaningless charades. The measure of a country is the well being of the people under its power. Our stewardship will be reviewed by how many we killed, how many we let suffer, how many we left in despair. Did our paltry hedonism outweigh the hearts of those who suffered? Did our vaunted accomplishments and our posturings outweigh our comparably large failures? If we cannot provide care for the population of the USA, if we cannot establish a system in which people may receive care without being bankrupted, we shall see the country go the same way into bankruptcy: a real, physical bankruptcy following hard upon the heels of the spiritual and symbolic bankruptcy.

Milestones We are Passing!

1. American Christians shooting and killing each other in church.

Shooting each other is not new. Lord knows, we do that everywhere. But doing it in church or on church grounds is kicking it up to a new level: where the killers seem to think they are offering a bloody and human sacrifice to their god.

Blood sacrifice is problematic, going back to Noah's time. Human sacrifice was always forbidden. Perhaps killing people in church is not a sacrifice? Perhaps it is merely an evil, done by evil men? Of course it is. That's the point.

My Notebook June 14 2009

Re: Communion and Communality We have heard it said - and repeated it ourselves ad nauseam - that literature involves a willing suspension of disbelief. I suppose this point of view extends to films. It means that, as rational beings, we cannot enter into the realm of artful language creations: plays, films, stories, novels, etc. - unless we check our common sense and rationality at the door. I never questioned it, but when you actually consider it, it appears to be rather ridiculous, dressed up in a feathery boa, and preening itself shamelessly. In other words, "willing suspension of disbelief" is a honky-tonk notion, not a serious one. I think it is much more likely that we are accepting the protocols of whatever realm of fantasy we are about to enter. We do not disbelieve; rather, we believe differently. It is just as if we were playing cowboys and indians: the protocol was, I shoot you first, you fall, you're dead...for a while. Then everyone is resurrected and we shoot more. We enter into the realm of enchantment not by an act of belief or disbelief, but by our openness to the story, by our willingness to participate, by hooking up our emotional response to the drama before us. It is accepted that everyone else is, too, so we are entering into one of those communions of communality. Those are the prerequisites for shared experience. They seem to be the protocols of codes: structures of acceptable behavior, that we must be "programmed" into exhibiting for us to enter into those experiences.

Filling Up

Sunday Morning

Pix: LA Times

Alzheimers

I taught myself Portuguese from reading Portuguese blogs. Wherein I find Dr. Drauzio Varella saying that "Our world invests more than 5 times more" in virility drugs and boob jobs than we do to cure Alzheimers. http://dropsazulaniss.blogspot.com/2009/06/mal-de-alzheimer.html Don't worry about it. There is no retribution. And that used to be something that we took pride in: having so much wealth that we could just do stuff like that - like Dives - and tell all those poor, wretched Lazaruses to go screw themselves.

Noah, The Natural

I have written about The Natural, both the original novel by Bernard Malamud and the film by Robert Redford. I have suggested that we were dealing with people who had gotten off track, only to get on track later in life to do the important work fate has in store for them. It could also be interpreted other ways, one of which might be that they were prevented from coming on the world scene too early, lest their particular genius be destroyed by the avarice and anger of the world, preventing them from accomplishing those important works that destiny had marked them out to accomplish. It is a most unusual story. What do we do with unusual stories, stories that resist being obvious and mundane? Midrash! So - midrash it! Consider Noah. He walked in the ways of the Lord. Noah was tamim, which means he was perfect. If he was so perfect in the ways of mankind, his neighbors would not have scoffed when he began to lay the keel of his ark. If Warren Buffett were to build an ark, we would all want to be a part of the enterprise. Not so with Noah. The pundits scoffed. So he was not perfect in the law, nor in economics, nor in politics, nor in the military...he was a man of perfect simplicity. Thus could he walk in the ways of the Lord. When the Lord told him to build an ark, he did it, disregarding all the jeers and insults. He already had three sons. These sons already had families. So it was late in Noah's life that the keel of the ark was laid. Up until then, there was nothing about Noah to mark him as a celebrity in the eyes of the world. He created the Heroic Age of 40 days and 40 nights of rain, and the aftermath of searching for dry land. He maintained the integrity of the ark, he maintained social order among the people, he maintained the order among the animals; he fed them, cleaned up after them, and preserved life for the future. No small accomplishment. Afterwards, he had a new covenant with God, and then gets drunk and is brought back down from his world-historical-heroic pedestal. He was not the leader of all mankind for a long time, like Nimrod, the king, who established a kingdom in Shinar. Noah's heroic interlude is brief, but intense. And the changes he made last until this day. Do the work of God which we find easy; then step up to do the work that frightens us, yet He demands; then retire to your well earned rest, doing the simple works again. What are those important works that frighten us? What are we being asked to stand up to do? What is the hardest thing for us to do?

My Notebook June 11 2009

About the post "Communion and Communality": human communication is also a "communal act of imagination" to communicate together, we must willingly suspend certain protocols of individuality: for example, people with Asperger's Syndrome have trouble socializing because they cannot suspend those protocols of the individual, and learn the protocols of society.
As we grow up and are socialized, it is these social, communal protocols we learn. These protocols are communal acts of imagination: they exist symbolically in our patterns of behavior, in our language, in our music, in all our consciousness. (The unconscious is the part of an entity that is not conscious and, hence, not symbolic - what we call dreams are memories of unconscious activity, not the unconscious itself. Since the unconscious is not symbolic, it cannot be shared as a communal act.)
It appears, then, that most of our lives are communal acts of imagination - or symbolism. War occurs when these acts do not suffice. This shows the connection between war and the unconscious: when the symbolic communality comes to an end, we are back in the realm of the very, very individual. One of these realms is the idiosyncratic unconscious. The unconscious is the dawn state of the mind: the state of the newly born. As we grow, we learn to create the various realms of consciousness: language, music, patterned behaviors, the imaging system, etc. Consciousness is built upon the foundation of the unconscious.

The way back from conscious to unconscious may be difficult or simple, depending on how we have learned to behave; if we are quick to anger, or quick to forgiveness.
 

Up until now, war has been the rule - not the exception - precisely because we have not valued the symbols of peace more highly than the symbols of war: we have praised our oppressors more highly than our benefactors, and we have lavished greater gifts on thieves than on donors.

True Religion as taught by the religious geniuses is the process of learning that the unconscious has more than war, anger, and destruction within itself: it has creation! Why is this important? The unconscious is the source of War. It is also the source of our knowledge of God. It is the source of Saints and Sinners. That is why the stories of the saints can be so bizarre sounding to us: their lives were heavy into the unconscious - like Asperger's children: a rococo individuality. If the lives of the saintly were mundane and hum-drum, they'd be us...and we're no saints.

Shooting At Holocaust Memorial

Interior - US Holocaust Memorial

The outline is becoming a bit clearer. It is obvious to everyone - certainly after this shooting - that the rush to buys guns was not due to the "gun markets" anticipating gun controls from the Obama Administration. In large part - and, in my opinion, 60% of the increase - was due to people wanting to get their hands on a more effective way of expressing their editorial opinions. I don't know if you are familiar with Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, but ever since I read it, I see many things in terms of cellular automata, or Wolfram processes, as I came to call them: out of the vague and chaotic, areas of regularity arise and define themselves; their growth, their size, their limit in time is unpredictable. (I have thought this process may indeed be a part of the disappearance of the dinosaurs: cometary impact, climate change, volcanic activity, and - it was just time to go...the kingdom of regularity that emerged from the infinite possibilities of the gene pools had run its course - simple as that.) This is what I was referring to when I drew parallels to Spain in 1936: dividing into armed camps. Sheapard Smith on FOX has said that the anti-Obama rhetoric has become "frightening". We are expressing ourselves in frightening ways. When the Left tires of being shot and killed by crazed Rights, then the Left will arm itself and fire back. It is in our history. We have always valued violence highly. The greatest value of the frontier in American History was the fact that it provided an escape valve, letting the disaffected move on. Well, there is no more frontier. Now we are in Tombstone by the OK Corral, and there's nowhere left to run.

Communion And Communality

Every now and then, things tend to come together, thank heaven. I have written previously of John C. Calhoun's view of the Union. He did not believe force was a legitimate way to enforce union. He wondered whether the contracting states agreed - although they were not aware of it - to give up all pretensions to independence up to the threat of arms and beyond, to war itself. They found out that the North and its leaders did consider the political entity to be worth the more than 600,000 casualties in both armies. I had never questioned this before. Reading Calhoun, who was writing in 1834 not about slavery, but the oppressive effects of Northern duties on imports, which in turn were applied by foreign countries against US exports; i.e., Southern agricultural products. Enforced communality. Reading Black Ship To Hell by Brigid Brophy, I read: "...Herein lies the secret of religion's intolerance. It is simply dramatic intolerance, which cannot afford to have a scoffer in the house but must sweep us all along in a communal act of imagination. Religion, however, has so enlarged the theatrical conventions that they encompass the whole of reality; it takes the universe for its auditorium...the religionnist knows that his god is diminshed by anyone's unbelief." Ms. Brophy led us to this by a discussion of James M. Barrie's play Peter Pan, wherein if even one child in the audience fails to clap their hands, Tinker Bell will die. Once again, enforced communality. Enforced by the force of the temporary suspension of disbelief, true, but what exactly differentiates it from civil war? For is not a war that kills on so great a scale just another willing suspension of disbelief, but on a much vaster scale? What wars accomplish are the destruction of the old, and the start of building the new on the foundation of the exhaustion of ancient grudges. Truly the Founding Fathers did not envisage taking up arms against their brothers. Certainly the early Christians entered freely into a communality which they bore lightly as no burden to them. At what point do compacts - freely entered into - become compulsion? Do you think the States would have entered into Union if they all clearly stated and propounded the point: if you go, we shall wage war against you, and extirpate you - root and branch? I think not. When does willing freedom become unwilling compulsion? When does the ideology of the symbolic overwhelm the real? When does the Flag and Nation feel themselves adequate to quash the individuals? And why do we do this? Why does the good of the many outweigh the good of the one? And if the one wants to break company with the many, why do we go to war to compel them to remain as an unhappy minority?

The Lilies Of The Field Forget Themselves

From Batsage "Mulling Wittgenstein" ( as if he were a cider ) in "What Powderfinger said..." Acceptance = Surrender = Giving Over of Self. It's called for in all religions. As Jerry Garcia--yes, the Grateful Dead guitarist--said: "To forget yourself is to see everything else." Not only does it lead to living the right way, it's the only way to live right. To forget oneself is easier said than done. It is to give up what we hold most dear. Addictions are not what we hold most dear. If you break the habit of a particularly nasty addiction, you will not have forgotten yourself: you will quote how many days it has been that YOU are clean or sober. If you wish to hear God, you must deny the notion that God can speak to you. If you wish to see God, you must firmly realize God cannot appear to you. If you want your prayers answered, you must be like the lilies of the field - essentially it never enters their dainty heads about what to wear or what to eat. They just keep on keeping on. If you want God to be your pal, you have to realize He will abandon you. Once you do these things, then you see the opposites are also true. That is no small insight. But it is hard to truly believe the above. It is almost impossible to give up these things, unless you are on the brink of despair. That's why Christianity spread among the slaves, Judaeism grew strong in dispersion and persecution, and Islam took root as the original Muslims were in danger of being destroyed by their enemies. If you want real religion, go where they refuse money; go where they do not need honors nor degrees; go where they do not need to appear on cable TV, where the ministers do not speak to the leaders of the world. Where is the Church which refuses your money? A church that is small, and which the tithes just keep going, not the mammoth churches whose financial tendrils pervade the world. Jesus said spread the word; he also said emulate the lilies of the field, so we cannot justify the enormous physical plant and finances of mega-churches, for they give too much thought to where the revenues shall come from. A Church with money and power seeks to force God to its will. God will have none of it. He goes slumming in the churches where the downtrodden visit, they who already know they have no power to force anyone to anything. We tried to enslave God to our version of capitalism. How's that working out?

GM And Detroit City Blues

Detroit City...it's one of the finest in the world. Detroit City...it's one of the finest in the world. I'm crazy 'bout that city... and I love its pretty girls. Antoine "Fats" Domino

Time Out For Spengler

I have finally reached the point where I can sit and read Oswald Spengler's The Decline Of The West, and I can easily understand it. I suppose I have matured. He was never an easy read. I think it has a lot to do with having all your preconceptions knocked out of oneself, thereby making it easy for some really brainy guy's novelties to come on board. Of course, the fact that the title points to desuetude and decline might be seen by some as particularly appropriate for the present. I, however, have been juggling Spengler for thirty years, so if my choice of Spengler was made for these times, then somebody foresaw it and directed my hand: tolle, lege! ( pick up that book, and read it! as the angel said to St. Augustine.)

Rumsfeld Commits To God

In the Financial Times (FT.com): Rumsfeld, Iraq and Good Book revelations By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington Published: May 18 2009 19:32 Last updated: May 18 2009 19:32 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6fa5b6a6-43d8-11de-a9be-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=17aab8bc-6e47-11da-9544-0000779e2340.html we read of good Rumsfeld being sent intelligence peppered with biblical quotations. The morning after US marines toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein in April 2003, Donald Rumsfeld, then defence secretary, received his top secret global intelligence briefing – with a twist. The cover of the “Worldwide Intelligence Update” unremarkably included a photograph of the now infamous toppling of the statue in Baghdad. The words above, however, were more remarkable. “The king is saved by a mighty army,” a passage from Psalm 33-16-19 of the Bible declared, before ending “the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him, On those who hope for His loving kindness, To deliver their soul from death”... Another March intelligence report showed a photo of a US tank adorned with words from the Ephesians 6:13 urging “put on the full armour of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground”. The report also included: “Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed.” The Donald Rumsfeld way of "committing" to the Lord is the reason why religion is often hated by people; it is the reason why morons kill each other, whether in Iraq or in front of abortion clinics. To commit to the Lord is to give up your idiotic, childish, jejune, concepts and beliefs that - like barnacles - had accreted themselves to your being. The simple-minded belief that God is teaching you in the ways of war is nonsense bordering on the sociopathic. It is your own love of destruction and the thrill of death. To commit to the Lord is to shut your mouth! It is to be quiet and listen! Then you will know what is expected. But you have to be silent, otherwise your words, your desires, your memories will taint your meditation, and seep through, as red paint pervades twenty coats and more of white paint. The way of God is not your way - not until you lose your way will you find the way of God. I expect it.

(ps. see What Powderfinger said... ,"Mulling Wittgenstein", for more on this )

SETI@home

SETI has an anniversary. No extraterrestrial life has been found yet. Consciousness is - by its nature - singular, parochial, and isolated within the walls of its biology and conceptual codes. Only that which is unconscious may go beyond these limits. The heavens are filled with voices. We hear them in our dreams: I, Madeed al Halm - far dreamer of the galactic center, and you who have not yet decided to take your new name.

Lilies

The lilies of the field do not toil nor spin, yet they are wonderfully dressed and cared for. They do live their lives; they do not assume an unplantlike existence. When we are told that just as God takes care of the lilies, so He cares for us, and therefore do not give thought to what shall we eat and what shall we wear. It means that we eat and dress, but our thoughts - particularly our goals as we conceptualize them - should be of God, not the obsession of food and clothes. It means that when the time comes - and it will come - when the conceptual defenses in which we live are broken down... a time such as the present, when our stories were discovered to have been childrens' stories... if you have set your mind on food, and food is scarce, you will panic; if you have set your mind on buying clothes, and the malls have shut, you will panic. If you have allowed your mind to flow on the ocean of God, you will be able to float on your back while the rip tide takes the rest of mankind out for a long swim; and we shall be able to save ourselves. The time is coming. It always comes. When the time comes, we shall be the creators of our lives - not parents, not teachers, not mentors. We and God work together, when that time comes when we are alone and we are called upon to save ourselves. Then we create. It is our turn to continue the story. And if we have had the tiniest bit of faith and the tiniest bit of love, our story will be good. Otherwise, it will be a bad story. Our whole lives prepare us for the continuance of our story. Learn to let God move you along, and when the time comes - when we have reached the rock bottom of our life addictions - we shall speak with the voices of angels.

Home Of The Torturers

Official Washington has always been kind to mankind's most ardent oppressors. The USA sheltered the killers and torturers of the Batista regime when they fled Cuba on January 1, 1959. It gave them a home for the rest of their lives. Ideology once again trumped humanity. Official Washington. Bureaucratic Washington. Taker of our money, dispenser of largess to our oppressors.
--

Torture Again; History; Seeing The Future Etc.

(apologies for the way the pasted text came out. I worked with it, but it was impossible to align it properly.)

GRAHAM GREENE AND CUBA: OUR MAN IN HAVANA? by PETER HULME New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 82 no. 3 & 4 (2008):185-209

In November 1964 Graham Greene wrote a deeply sarcastic letter to The Daily Telegraph contrasting the U.S.-supported Vietnamese army’s triumphalist photographs of their torture of Vietcong prisoners with the good old days in which “hypocrisy paid a tribute to virtue by hushing up the torture inflicted by its own soldiers and condemning the torture inflicted by the other side” (Greene 1989:114-15). Then in November 1971 he berated the British Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, for his defense of what he called the “deep interrogation” of IRA suspects – long hours of enforced standing, hooding, permanent noise, sleep deprivation. Nobody has ever suffered permanent injury from these techniques, Maudling said, foreshadowing Donald Rumsfeld’s breezy dismissal of exactly the same techniques at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. When applied by communists or fascists, Greene noted, we call it “torture,” but when applied by the British we downgrade it to ill treatment (Greene 1989:154-56). The CIA calls it “enhanced interrogation.”38 That, fifty years on from Our Man in Havana, torture is still at the forefront of debates about how to combat terrorism, and that those debates should still focus on Cuba, but now on a U.S. base situated within the island – one suspects that none of this would have come as much of a surprise to Graham Greene.

Of course, it has all been done before, and - of course - we shall all fall asleep and forget it all again. I think that if we really did remember history - and thus be able to learn from it - we would be seriously encumbered: we would lurch around like historical zombies, bumping into walls and automobiles, we would blink blindly like historical cave fish unaccustomed to the sun. Our whole zest, our brio, our love of life comes from our ability to forget our crimes, and the eternal forgiveness of God. Hence, we sleep and forget. Now another point that is very interesting in Our Man in Havana is the plot element of having unknown military installations in Oriente Province in Cuba, which was the geographical focus of the 26th July Movement of Castro. The eventual installations of nuclear weapons came 4 years later in the west at Pinar del Rio. Once again, satire and irony lead the way. We should not be so concerned with learning from history, as we should be to learn the satires of circumstances and ironies of history, and from them we polish our skills at forecasting the future messes we shall create: the future satires and ironies - tragic, cruel, and bloody. note: The question is: what is at work here, in the writings of the satirist? Is he merely picking one of a possible number of future combinations of events? Or is he somehow divining the optimal path - not optimal in the sense it is best for us - that events will take. Of the infinite number of possible futures, there must be a way to pare them down to a number that can be dealt with. Of all the paths, there are the paths of least resistance: the most optimal paths to pursue. Somehow, the brilliant satirist picks on a path very close to the most probable!!

The Speed Of News

Newspapers are falling by the wayside. The internet delivers news more quickly, at a greater speed and volume, more than the old news can. When the ancients sought to build a tower to heaven, they were scattered over the earth, mutually incomprehensible to each other, speaking different tongues. When we seek knowledge at the speed of light, what will happen? Knowledge is not a sound-bite. Knowledge is enduring. If a sound-bite is the taste of candy, knowledge is the extra weight that come from the calories and carbs. Once again, we cannot control our cravings. We seek monumental portions, we seek sugar spikes in our blood. We are gaining informational mass, while living in knowledge-anorexia. Nothing endures. Nothing may endure, because it may cause us to remember, and if we remember - having learned some eternal truth - we may then not need the constant flow of data. We cannot confront wrongdoing at high levels, because we might remember...we might have a narrative constantly before us on what is right and what is wrong. This cannot exist. We could not have gone to war in Iraq so easily, had people had the knowledge that war is uncertain, tragic, and destructive of everything. This knowledge had to be hidden under the speed of incoming disinformation and incorrect intelligence. Newspaper themselves participated, and marched like an inmate band at Auschwitz, playing themselves to their own fate: the allergies of news, the irrepressible itching, the constant cough, the burning in the stomach, the ups and downs as you are being peppered with selected bits of information, programmed by a corporate entity. We stand about watching, helpless. We stood about helpless as Senator Phil Gramm destroyed the banking system. We stood about helpless as Iraq was invaded. What good is any news or knowledge to people who will not help themselves?

Armageddon's Addicts

Baysage has a post on how we are addicted to war. You may use the link on the right: What Powderfinger said... to view it. Madea would say we are the war-mongeringest fools she ever saw, I think. I shall repeat myself once more: World War II did not end in 1945. It morphed into the Cold War. The Cold War between the USA and the USSR contined until 1991 when the USSR fell apart. After 1991, after a brief hiatus, the USA continued the war unilaterally, extending bases and its presence wider and wider. At present, there is war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. We still have bases in Okinawa from 1945, and new ones are planned in other areas.

Obama-crat

The vote to refuse to close Gitmo clearly shows that Mr. Obama is - as I have long suspected - truly one of a kind. He may not have anyone else like him to follow in his footsteps...or to walk along with him, for that matter. Obama is more like an idealization of a politician that jumped down from the screen during the Movietone News, playing at the theater where The Purple Rose Of Cairo was showing.

There Was A Country From Nantucket...

Consider this: http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2009/05/reconfiguring-romanticism-27-david.html POEMS & POETICS In addition to our fond visions of "the city on the hill", we see America as a sailing vessel, the Pequod, to be exact: ...the grotesque of the democracy similar to the description of the Pequod... “A cannibal craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies…” where "chased" mean - I think without looking it up - worked and cleaned and set within a setting, as well as "chased after". "Tricking" could also have more than one meaning.

Blue Scarves For Peace

While the usual American ritual is to send more and more troops to kill more and more of troublemakers and civilians, there are other peace movements. From FOREVER UNDER CONSTRUCTION: http://homeyra.wordpress.com/2009/05/16/blue-scarves/#comment-12821 Excerpt from “Sending More Troops Will Not Solve the Problem”–Grassroots Afghan Activist Rangina Hamidi – Democracy Now Rangina Hamidi: “[...] In Kandahar, we got together about—well, we got together last year and decided that as the government agencies have been celebrating International Day for Women, which falls on March 8th every year, we did not want to be necessarily celebrating the day when so many women were in mourning because they were losing a lot of their male relatives or male members of their families almost on a daily basis. So, in 2008, on March 8th, the women in our network gathered together, more than 1,500 of them, to commemorate the day by praying for peace, because they’ve been in war for literally more than thirty years. And women are sick and tired of it, and they don’t know—you know, on a local level, they don’t know any political figure, locally or nationally and/or even internationally, that they can go to to have their voices and have their plea be heard. So, because this is a religious and a conservative society, the women said, “Who better to pray to about peace than God?” These are all believing women. And so, they gathered for the first time publicly to pray for peace.

What It Is

Guantanamo, Afghanistan, photo-gate... I guess that Obama has been learning what America is all about: it is a war machine; what's good for war is good for the USA. We can never let the people we torture and imprison go free. They will come back to kill us. And there will be more and more every year...until the rotten hulk falls apart.

Obama At Notre Dame

It must come as a terrible shock that a confrontation that has been built up with so much time and effort suddenly is used by your opponent to his own advantage. Sorry, FOX and Republicans. You're really going to have to change yourselves and your crumby little souls, and remake yourselves into human beings. You can't just rely on money and b.s. anymore.

Wall Street & Drugs

I want to know which drugs was Wall Street on. This is not a metaphor. When President Bush said Wall Street had gotten drunk, even he did not know how close he was to the truth. In the 90's, the drug of choice on Wall Street was cocaine. This has been well documented. For example, Mr. Kudlow on CNBC was fired from Bear Stearns for drug use: http://exiledonline.com/less-than-kudlow-is-cnbc-host-suffering-cocaine-relapse/ Less Than Kudlow: Is CNBC Host Suffering Another Cocaine Relapse? By Mark Ames In 1994, Mr. Kudlow make a public confession of his addiction to drugs and alcohol. In 1995: The New York Times checked in on their drugs-are-bad poster boy 15 months later, in July, 1995, and the what they found... Fifteen months ago, Mr. Kudlow made a highly public confession of his drug problem shortly after he was forced to resign as chief economist at Bear Stearns. He also made a fresh career start as a conservative political commentator for television and magazines and said he believed that he had overcome his addiction. …But over the weekend, Mrs. Kudlow petitioned for a divorce and an order to prevent Mr. Kudlow from tapping their Bear Stearn’s retirement account to pay for a weeks-long cocaine binge. “The defendant will use such money to buy cocaine,” she stated in an affidavit, “and in so doing will likely suffer a fatal overdose and will dissipate the only remaining liquid marital assets.” So now to the present. Do you think it was all the thrill of risk taking that drove them on? And the bonuses! How much of those bonuses used to go to, and still go to drugs? Unless sometime between the 90s and now, all of Wall Street went temperance and got on the wagon, a lot is used for drugs and booze. How much of the Crisis is due to drugs? Why has it not been mentioned? It hasn't been mentioned because everyone on the East Coast knows about it, and they know the rest of the country will go ballistic if they find out: a real atom-bomb tea party for Mr. Santelli...whose parent company, GE, accepted government money even as he railed against helping home owners. These things are known by those near to what's going on. Consider Mr. Kudlow: now that you think about it, you know that every bloody Republican and conservative back then knew he was skiing cocaine at every chance. They did not care. Consider George Roche III: while he was the top Republican fund raiser and pushing conservative thought, he was having a 19 year affair with his son's wife; you know that by year 5, everybody nearby knew what the deal was. But, the more outrageous it is, the quieter they are. What sudden change of moral fiber caused the present day people on Wall Street not to do drugs? What religion was it? The rest of the country might want some of that stuff. There was no change. There were drugs, and there were plenty of them. If we start talking about them now, it would blow the country apart. Let sleeping dogs lie.

Obama Nix Pix

President Obama did a U-turn of release of prisoner abuse pictures. Just how many pictures are there? How wide spread waas this? How out of control was the army, or was it policy to be depraved? A policy of depraved violence was typical in past wars to instill fear. A policy of meticulously recording every monstrous act was also typical in the past. I, personally, do not care to see any more photos. When we were clamoring for war, I remembered that General Sherman said "War is Hell." What part of that did you not understand? War is death and destruction, killing and rapine, theft and brigandage, torture and suffering. Everyone knows that. So why were we so stupid that we believed it was a picnic? The critical question is why were we so stupid. Answer that question.

Star Trek

Why did no one tell me Tyler Perry was gonna be in Star Trek? Cool. (I know the answer. I went to see it with a friend. I am white, he is very white. I said, Damn! Is that Tyler Perry? I think it is! He said, Who's Tyler Perry?)

Ragheads Vs. Baseball Cap Heads

I was eating lunch with my mates, the TYBALTs: "trim young bucks at lunch together", when an obstreperous group of ROMEOs: : "retired old men eating out", came into Hanaan's Diner. Briefly, they were loud, crude, and annoying, like most retirees. They were talking about the Sikhs that lived nearby, calling them "Ragheads". We jeered at them, calling them "Capheads", short for "Baseball Cap Heads". We had to stick up for our friend, Singh. Now that term, "caphead", isn't all that funny in itself. "Raghead" has a sort of lilt and rhythm to it - unfortunately. "Caphead" does not. However, each and every one of those old buffoons was indeed wearing the emblem of their order: a baseball cap! Some had baseball team logos, some had Florida vacation spots, some had John 3:18; each and every one a bloody felt or mesh cap.

I Wish I Had Said That!

What are truths without loves and laughs? They are like quarks without spin, without charm, without strange! Actually I did say it. I popped out of the quantum foam and appended itself to the end of a comment I was writing to Baysage in "What Powderfinger said..." ( see links at right ). I said to myself, "Blast! Why is my good writing always in someone else's blog?!"