Railroads

http://www.aar.org/

Become involved in the continuing story of American Railroads. They are an important facet of our economy and an important and fuel efficient way to get from point A to point B. We hope to see more about rail in the future.
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Take Shelter

 

Grizzly Man

If you are going to see the film Take Shelter, it would not hurt to review Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man about Timothy Treadwell and and Sean Penn's Into The Wild about Christopher McCandless. In my mind, they are similar stories about visions and things seen which tend to go wrong. It is not clear how things come out in Take Shelter, but the outlook is grim.
It is the reasons that are the motivations for the individual's actions that are of interest: are they intended to avert catastrophe, or are they something else, and catastrophe merely a possible accidental outcome.

To my mind, it is possible that they deal with the same thing.

 Into The Wild

--

Lear

I watched Ran this morning and I thought again of the madness of King Lear. Who is to be the Holinshed who chronicles our age, the post World War II age's immense trajectory, and tells the story of the madness of the first years of the 21st century?
Who will be the Shakespeare who uses it as the basis for his future dramas, set in the first era of technology when we believed our own dreams and nightmares, when we went insane and had no kind companions to talk us down from the precipices of our follies?

You all know in your hearts that our age will be a treasure house of tragic tales for future artists.
--

Ade Ileke 33: The Congress of the USA

當統治者的不能同意，
天命已經過去了。

--
when the rulers cannot agree
the mandate of heaven has passed.

Mythic Landscapes: Waiting for Charon

Thanksgiving

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 on Treadmill:    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.
--
reprint from past Thanksgivings

Fruits of Empire

We have reached a point where we may judge just how beneficial the status of being the one super power on the planet truly is.

(Need I go on? Oh, I guess I shall...)

When the USSR was around, we conspired together to avoid mutual destruction, even though we were headed that way, and agreed to eliminate nuclear weaponry. Personally, I have said and continue to say that this was one of the greatest and most influential Moral Acts in human history: when the USSR and the USA refused Armageddon's invitation to tea.
(And I am sorry that the Russian people and the American people are not closer friends at this time when all need friends.)

After that changed and the USA became the one super power and had dreams of Pax Americana and Empire ( they actually said crap like that in the Bush years!) we discovered that there actually is a Balance that God uses to keep things on an even keel; if someone goes to far in one direction, the Fates intervene to restore the balance... sometimes the Fates are called the Furies, too.

Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

That is not just poetry nor a Psalm; it is a true description of real world dynamics.
It is not a maxim, an adage, nor wisdom; it is the true manner in which events occur.

The bane of Empire is the Arrogance before Destruction. I understand Rome now... a keen balancing act between destruction, adequacy, and mind-blowing arrogance starting the cycle back up again.

Oh, and by the way, people can still keep making money through all of this. People got rich when Rome was up and when Rome was down. It was not Taxation that ruined business; it was the Arrogance and Greed of over reaching.
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Radical Gobblers!

It is time to politicize the Thanksgiving turkey; that is, it is time to politicize the slaughter of the turkeys. Turkeys themselves, as living beings with lives, are not really worthy of our high-faluting political views; we reserve those for really important things like whether the government should default or not. Animal Rights and Turkey Huggers already politicize the lives of poultry, tediously recounting the facts of the case: they are jammed into poorly ventilated coops, forced to stand on wire perches, and poop on each other before being shipped to our homes.
The Animal Rights Wing of the Party have also tried to politicize the slaughter of animals, but they have done it in their namby-pamby way, invoking alien concepts like care, responsible husbandry, sympathy, and civilized and humane behavior. They get nowhere with that approach!

The bright lights of the country have politicized Gobblers in a truly meaningful discussion: a ground-breaking expose of the Halal method of slaughter. Turkey certified halal must have been slaughtered according to Islamic practice.
This amounts to cutting the throat, letting the blood flow out, and a prayer.
The entire hideous experience is described in gruesome detail in the blog Atlas Shrugs.
The writer seems unaware of kosher practice, but why should I pick out that one bright light of ignorance? When we put our minds to it, it is obvious that our home-grown non-halal and non-kosher method of slaughter is at a much higher level of civilized behavior. Our poultry and beef is treated in a very humane manner. (One of the links I supply will describe it as a bit of a "bonk" to the head!)

Certainly we are superior in that we allow our turkey, chickens, and cows to have a last meal, benefit of clergy, and give them time to utter timeless quotations, such as "It is a far, far better thing I do..." before shipping them off as McNuggets or Big Macs. (Of course, you must remember that Tom Turkey who who "gave his all" in the background of the famous Sarah Palin interview... I believe they gave him a cup of hemlock.)

This is all at  http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2011/11/pamela-geller-american-thinker-hapy-halal-thanksgiving.html#comments   which is apparently Pamela Geller's site.

She calls herself "An American Thinker".  I tend to agree with her...

At  http://www.biblestudysite.com/kosherslaughter.htm   we may read a similar diatribe against Kosher preparations of foods. I believe this is where we read about the humane bonk to the noggin of cows, who then sort of swoon rather than fall down like a ton of bricks.
And as for prayer, the rabbi overseeing the slaughter, the shochet, must be a pious man and well-trained in the Law. That is just the type of suspicious johnny from whose lips a furtive prayer or two may escape.

Obviously, they both dislike the way the peoples of the Middle East who speak Semitic languages prepare their foods. They are Gastronomic Anti-Semites for starts. Read and find out what it is like to listen to howling in the mad night of unreason.
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Alibi Circles

Watching the pepper spray videos; the justifiers of pepper spraying have said that the police were encircled and were trying peacefully to make the line of huddled people give way. The videos I see show the spraying then the camera pans right and I see more police approaching behind the huddled people.

So if the pepper police were encircled by the protestors, then the protestors were obviously encircled by more police. They, in their turn, may have been encircled by more students, who were again in turn boxed in by more of the riot squad.

See how easy it is to descend into nonsense and violence?
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Historic Photos

Not sure what city this is set in. The vessel on the left is the Western States, and I remember well seeing her or her sister, the Eastern States, at anchor in East Tawas on Lake Huron, awaiting their eventual fiery destruction on the lake.
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Riding to Class Warfare

Actually, I prefer to think of class warfare in terms of a fox hunt, horses, hounds, bright jackets, and brushy tails. I mean, if one must look upon such things, why not spruce it up a bit? Instead of riding to hounds think of pepper to protestors, or P to P. It has a joyful cadence. Chivvy them from their docile and subservient burrows with a jolly blast of the old pepper spray to the eye goblets! Just the ticket!

There are many incongruities about class warfare,  like Newt Gingrich saying things like protestors should get a job... after they get a bath first. Somehow the joke is unbalanced and does not have a joyous sprightliness to it; the latter part is ancient anti-hippy-agit-prop from 1968 and the first part - about jobs - is what the entire election in 2012 is supposed to be about... isn't it?
If jobs were so plentiful and easy to get, then "get a job!" would make more sense. He says "get a job" with a lot more chubby cheshire-cat grins than he has when he tries to say how he will create them!

Ware the Jest of Gingrich, the jaws that bite, the claws that catch...

--

Ade Ileke 32: Stranger in Rio

o pano do paraíso perdeu seus poderes,
os poderes para vestir-nos
com o divino,
e nós andamos cegamente na praia,
nus como turistas estúpidos
a esta terra
--
the cloth of heaven has lost its powers
the powers to clothe us
with the divine,
and we take a stroll blindly along the beach
naked like silly tourists 
to this earth.

Ghost Dance 3

Deny all the myths. Burn the useless scripts. Throw out the icons that have lost their power to let the divine participate in human life. I have no use for the old shirts of capitalism and communism, of markets and price efficiency, of this society's idea of virtue and justice, for they are deader than Jacob Marley... deader and yet deadlier!
The cloths of heaven have lost their power; they can no longer warm us, they can no longer keep us dry. We have the newly loomed cloth and shall make the shirts of new life.

It is time for the new Ghost Dance, the new Resurrection and the new Life Eternal.
--

Pepper Spray and Mary

The Canticle of the Virgin:  "He casts the mighty from their thrones and raises the lowly."
Mary, or Miriam, the Mother of Jesus, is someone who has your back and goes to the wall for you. The usual representation of her ignore her Canticle from the Gospels, or gloss over the meaning of the words.

After hearing from people who support the forces of repression, I reprint a poem from my Poetry blog:




Kick-Ass Mary


How great the pain that pierced your heart,
Mother, when they raised Him on the cross;
ceaseless furrows of your tears record the
tsunami of your loss!
Hammer and spear, thorns and scourge,
all life from your soul did purge?

"My pain blinded everything else, I could not stand;
I admit that in my pain I cried a few
tears and screamed in my deep despair... softened
by the mound of stones I threw!
from Roman heads came blood, their cries attest:
'Get that Jew bitch! That Jewish terrorist!' "

Grasping at Straws and The Alien Invasion !

Climate Change is/will be the straw that breaks the camel's back, if the governments of the world cannot finally get their acts together. In the future of increasing damage caused by storms and weather events, there will be an increasing burden on all of our resources.

When you stop to think of it, Climate Change and its consequences will act the part an alien race in the science fiction scenario of "Alien Invasion that Makes the Countries of the Earth Work Together as One" which we have been so fond of over the past 60 years: Climate Change is something we should all be working together on now, but we do not.
I suppose if it came down to that and an alien race from Alpha Centauri did invade the Earth and offered the USA some sort of super-duper technology, we would let the UN and the rest fight their own battles while we took care of Numero Uno, believing that this was all due to our Exceptionalism!
--

Switching Senses

Watching CBS Sunday Morning and a piece on arty cuisine: food that appeals to the eye and - I assume - to the palate. What I do not understand switching the emphasis from one sense - that of taste - to another - that of sight.
Certainly the visuals of food is important, but it seems that sight has trumped taste.
Perhaps I am wrong, but I look simple tastes with little nuancing, maybe some sprigs of rosemary like I put on pita bread.

Of course, there was a mention of the outrageous price of truffles being used, which is something I have as much critical respect for as I do for film reviews that tell me who was the "winner over the weeked" at the box office.
--

Blast!

Blast it! I was just sitting and thinking about poetry and globalization, and I thought that globalization was a lot like promiscuity in that there are Socially Transmitted Diseases due to promiscuity and there are alien intrusion, such a Zebra Mussels, due to global economic activity.

So then I was thinking about the Global Financial Order and the Eurozone problems...

And it came to me that there is a parallel between a lot of our ecological and health problems and our economic and political problems...
In this case it is
(1) perils of promiscuity parallel perils of global economic intercourse ("intercourse" in the old sense), and
(2) the perils of the Lack of Diversity parallel the perils of a single currency, in that the individual states of Europe no longer have the fire wall of their own borders to prohibit the economic problems of their intimate members in the union being transmitted.

Interesting.
Of course, I have always thought all of our Intelligent experiences are very much interconnected and paralleled across their spectrum: we use the same language, logic, images and other codes to be intelligent. Just as "no man is an island", so also "no mental phenomenon is an island".

Diversity of life is the way life fire-walls against total destruction to the attacks of predators. So also Diversity of mind is how mind fire-walls against the destruction possible when everybody does the same thing....
Well, when does everybody actually do the same thing? Anyone? Anyone? (Where is Buehler?)
Everybody does the same thing in Bubbles.
Everybody does the same thing in Economic Bubbles and Behavioral Bubbles (fads) and Mental Bubbles (authoritarianism?)
Everybody did the exactly same thing in the lead up to the Iraq War. 

What does this all mean? It means that Climate Change is just another way of expressing the sickness which pervades our earth. I write this as I watch police pepper-spraying kneeling OWS protesters and I cannot believe that not only did we bail Wall Street out, we are pepper-spraying people who want meaningful change. I remember Gandhi and his followers being beaten by the Brits - who had an empire upon which the sun never set, by the way.

--

Occupy the Eurozone!

The sovereign debt accumulation which has created the problem is similar in many ways to the sub-prime business of the recent past. In both cases, far, far too much money was lent with no clear understanding of how-in-the-name-of-heaven was the funds' recipient going to pay them back... short of some sort of gentlemens' understood agreement that Government (in the USA) or the Governments and Eurozone Institutions (in Europe) were somehow going to back up the re-payment of the loans.

Any loan has risk. The whole process we observe and have observed is a process designed to remove the risk of default from the loans, thereby saving the lenders.

The austerities visited upon Italy will cause economic activity to shrink, but they will preserve - for a time - the quasi-sacred status of the loans, which will be paid back: that is, they will be paid back in that period of time during which the austerities are imposed and life continues, but the floor of the economy has not yet fallen out from beneath the Italians' feet. However, it is obvious to the most menial of us that any loans of such questionable nature - and the nature becomes questionable when the amounts loaned far exceeded the capabilities of the lender to repay the loans - are the fault of the lending institutions themselves.
These Banks and Institutions should be allowed to feel the wrath of capitalism at its fullest, but once again they are rescued by the Governments they have essentially bought and paid for. We have been calling this Socialistic Capitalism wherein  the risks are socialized to the population at large, while the benefits accrue to the Capitalist class. It might be more correct to call it Aristocratic Capitalism, thereby avoiding the political pitfalls of using poorly understood words - like "socialism" and "capitalism" - which possess iconic properties and lead to bar fights.

It is countered that if the Banks fail, everything goes....
Well, I agree. I just think that it is stupid that we all agree to live under such an idiotic system of periodic destruction and impoverishment of 99% of the population.

--

Perspective

--
pix: http://dougalthink.blogspot.com/

Benvolio

 

...waiting for Romeo and wearing shades.

--

pix

http://venicedailyphoto.blogspot.com/2011_11_01_archive.html

The Call

 

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/argentem/sets/72157608557465715/

Annoying Clubs

The most recent meeting of "I Say the Glass is Half-Full, You Say the Glass is Half Empty" Club in Glasgow.

--
just kidding
pix: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pgautier/

Ade Ileke 31: Olive Trees

كم من الوقت  شجرة الزيتون ؟ 
الأشجار في فلسطين؟  ستين سنة أو أكثر
  ...حان الوقت الحصاد

--
How much time the olive tree?
The trees in Palestine? 60 years or more.
It is harvest time...

Ade Ileke 30: Landing at the Space Station

Я вижу город да,
Я вижу город не:
это космическая станция -
новая звезда в небо ...
Я вижу небо да.

--
I see the city of yes,
I see the city of no:
this space station is
a new star in the sky....
I see the sky of yes.

A Deaf Old B.

 "Soapy Sam" Ballard and Rumpole

She-who-must-be-obeyed is sure that I am as deaf as a post. She demonstrated it again yesterday when she came into the bathroom as I was in the shower and asked, "Did you have trouble getting the tines up this morning?"
I asked her to repeat it, and she did.
I could not quite place the word "tines" in my morning's context. I had not eaten yet and had no intention of eating any breakfast that required forks to crush and harrow, so the "tines" were a puzzle (or a "puzazzle" as I just typoed, pronounced puh- ZAZZ-ul, and which is now a word I rather fancy as an intricate and enigmatic puzz... "puzz" itself being a diminutive and endearment term for the old standard "puzzle").

So I did not say anything.
This went on for about 5 seconds, which is her limit of endurance for the lesser lights and creatures under her dominion.
"Well!!?"
"Would you mind saying that again?"
Whereupon she took it up a hundred decibels or so, and bellowed it loudly enough that I thought I could hear the neighbors say, No, they hadn't.

Finally, I asked what the "tines" were she was speaking of.
"TIMES," she said. "The TIMES!"
Whereupon I can't say I actually hear the nasal consonant M magically differentiate itself from its brother nasal consonant N, but all did become clear. When she gets up, I usually get the New York Times Replica Edition up on the laptop for her to read. She has a subscription for the Sunday edition, and we can sign in daily and take a gander at what a real newspaper looks like: New York Times.
She was asking me whether I had had trouble with it this A.M., if the NY Times software was being glitchy. I hadn't.

Later I asked her whether she was aware of the (1) water running in my ears, and (2) the context of the situation. If she had bellowed... err, asked me about the "New York Tines", I would probably have heard "New York Times" and answered the question.
In fact, if she had said "New York Chimes", "New York Mimes", or even "New York Slimes" I probably would have known exactly what she was talking about and would have heard "Times" correctly.
She harrumphed.
"Rumsfeld..." she said, "it is time for those ears to be checked."
She meant to say "Rumpole" (... "of the Bailey" type Rumpole) but it comes out Rumsfeld. That is fine; just as long as she does not start calling me "Soapy Sam" after Sam Ballard, who became Rumpole's head-of-chambers.
--

O Tempora! O Mores!

Young Augustus

Too much lately have I read about the despicable Karl Rove, the witless George W. Bush, and the malevolent and villainous Richard Nixon.

I was discussing things with Arsen yesterday whether we were in a time parallel to that of the rise of Augustus in Rome....

I still wonder. Nixon was as ghastly and treacherous as Tiberius; Bush was as useless as Caligula. Rove was and is the spirit of a base people in base times: a personification of all that is wrong politically, whose influence was so exceedingly large and baleful that those who come after him look like feeble midgets - the Cains, the Romneys, the Gingriches.

--

Holiday Shopping

Buy locally, and check to see where the things you are buying are made.
We did not do so for the longest time, and things surprised us.

It reminds me of the time 20 years ago (during the Savings and Loan debacle) when I was at a bank and I enquired about FDIC insurance, and the banker sort of laughed, saying that yeah, it was there.... but not like we would ever have a need for it...
or like the Ford salesman 12 years ago who laughed at my question about fuel efficiency; it was a different time.
--

Politics and Religion

I pretty much consider political religious statements to be blasphemy: far too many Republicans have by now said that God has told them to run for the presidency, and if it is not blasphemous, it surely is idolatrous in that the candidates pray and hear their own voices bouncing back at them; it is as if they pray into a mirror and echo chamber.

I have said before that I consider the Intelligent Design hocus-pocus to be Idolatry and Polytheism.

These ideas seem to go well with a number of our cultural fascinations, things like the TV series The Walking Dead, a series about zombies. I mean, what are zombies really but sort of a diseased metaphor about the Resurrection? It all started with Bram Stoker's Dracula, which put a diseased form of metaphor of Life Eternal to the forefront, culminating in our later Interview With The Vampire.

I mean, we have our "religiousy" portion of life where we go to church and we pop out a few prayers and God bless gramma and grampa and then pray really, really hard for really important stuff... then we have our entertainments which seem to mock our beliefs: Andy Warhol's 15-minutes of fame has become Kim Kardashian's 10 weeks of marriage...
which would not be all that bad if divorce were not quite clearly forbidden in the New Testament...
so then we have our other entertainments where the profound Mystery of Life and Creation has become a virus that re-animates dead people and is passed on by noshing on body parts.
This is the "mysterioso" portion of life, where the grand effect of the immanence of the universe is reduced to overcoming one's fear and repulsion and making sure to shoot them zombies through the brain pan.

Well, entertainment is supposed to be easy on the IQ - or is it? Anyway what's wrong with a little Rabelesian mockery of the Resurrection? I suppose nothing, if we had actually worked hard at understanding in the first place. Since most of us had these concepts handed to us by adults when we were kids,  most of our religious ideas are not much different from chocolate milk, comix, and money to get into the movie.

There is mystery and understanding takes a life time.
God is not easy... ask Kim K.

--

Ecrasez l'imfame! SCOTUS

Wipe out the infamy!
Erase the anti-human decision of the Supreme (so-called) Court of the United States which made corporations equal to women and men.

From a Bill Moyers speech:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/macgp44/39449/if-this-doesnt-convince-the-majority-to-revolt

The revolt of the plutocrats has now been ratified by the Supreme Court in its notorious Citizens United decision last year. Rarely have so few imposed such damage on so many. When five pro-corporate conservative justices gave “artificial entities” the same rights of “free speech” as living, breathing human beings, they told our corporate sovereigns “the sky’s the limit” when it comes to their pouring money into political campaigns.

 Tolle, lege..... pick up and read; read and understand.

There is no longer any limit to the scope of the criminality of those who believe themselves to be the privileged classes.
--

Take Shelter

I saw the film Take Shelter, and I am still pondering it with ceaseless attention. Like the Science Officer Ashe in Alien, I am collating and collating and trying to put all the pieces together.
Most people in the audience said "Huh?", and that was way cool.

I'll write about it when I can wrestle it still for a fleeting moment.
--

Neo Awakes Within The Matrix

 Neo Awakes in a Matrix Pod

I predict that over the next four years, there will be an increase in drug events: usage, abuse, wars-against, interventions, busts, burnings, new designer drugs, etc.,etc., etc., as the governments of the world flounder about economically.

There will be those who turn to drugs to deal with their despair (but them we have always with us, do we not, O fellow Chosen Ones!), and more and more drug money will be "laundered" and injected into economies to stabilize banks and pay off sovereign debts.

The State will become Drug Lord... that is, if it already hasn't (and NATO in Afghanistan makes us wonder about this).
The Black Markets of Illegalities will remain illegal, but the nation state will "muscle in" on the old drug lords' territories. I suspect that plans are already in place. The integration of Crime with Politics will be complete and seamless, and that is the worst future imaginable: governments existing on the vicious cycles of abuse...
Just as the Prison Guard has a home and family with mouths to feed, and thus depends upon people breaking the law, in the future we shall depend on weakness and evil to render a good portion - not necessarily 99% - of the population into marginalized positions where they will in effect act like those embryonic-pod human entities in The Matrix: alive and nourishing "the machine", but not capable of independent life, and the huge Matrix network will be the foundation of the simulated dreams of our reality.

Our Images have always foreseen our futures. We are just not agile enough to see the entire hologram; we always believe what we see is "true" and become mesmerized by the first facet to enslave our attention.
--

Peak Oil

Peak Oil has come and gone. The only thing left are more and more expensive ways of wringing oil from the earth, like fracking. When environmental costs are added in, it is a terribly expensive process. We are where Olaf Stapledon foresaw: frenetically spending more and more on fossil fuels and madly expending energy in a cycle which gives us less and less.

It is time for people to start getting off the Macabre Merry-Go-Round, and to find their own sanctuaries and shelters.
--

Robert Ingersoll

In The New Oxonian:
 http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/robert-ingersoll-god-and-man-in-peoria/

In the country you preserve your identity — your personality. There you are an aggregation of atoms, but in the city you are only an atom of an aggregation...

and

It probably will not be long until the churches will divide as sharply upon political as upon theological questions; and when that day comes, if there are not liberals enough to hold the balance of power, this government will be destroyed.

Mr. Ingersoll passed in 1899.

We Have Been Socialists Forever

New York Times:

The government also promises to help defense companies shore up their pension funds when they become underfunded. Many of these funds have lost money in recent years in declining financial markets or on bad investments, so the bill for taxpayers has been growing...

 Defense contractors are not the only companies that get such reimbursements.

According to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, the Department of Energy had 46 contracts with private companies and nonprofit organizations as of September 2010. These contracts covered nearly 200,000 current and former employees and their beneficiaries, the report said, for such expenses as pensions, dental care and life insurance.

In the 2009 fiscal year, the G.A.O. said, the Department of Energy reimbursed $750 million in contractor pension costs, “more than double the amount it had reimbursed the previous year and significantly more than it had budgeted for.” The G.A.O. has not issued a report on the Department of Defense’s pension obligations recently. But some members of Congress have asked the office to look into them and the G.A.O. has just begun its work.


Among the large companies receiving taxpayer reimbursements for pensions and in some cases retirement health care are Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. To the degree that these companies work both for the government and private industry, their reimbursable pension costs are limited to their federal contracts.

How can we ever go back to being a private enterprise system? Tell me how. As time goes on, elected politicians will be less able to do anything meaningful for fear of not being re-elected. Then the democractic system will come to an end and we will accept our Corporate Socialism for what it is.

--

Cain Isn't Able

Herman Cain now says that God persuaded him to run for president. He thinks he is like Moses. Perhaps he will be the founder of a new religion... like Moses. Maybe Hermie was thinking of Noah, and Moses popped out.

What portions of Herman are not idiotic and silly are unworthy of elected office.

--

Single Cups of Coffee and Bottled Water

Bloomberg:

SodaStream International Ltd. (SODA) fell for a sixth day, the longest losing streak since its initial share offering, following Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. (GMCR)’s retreat to the lowest level in five months.
Shares of the Israeli producer of homemade soda machines that sold shares on Nov. 2 dropped 4 percent to $31.54 by 4 p.m. in New York. Green Mountain has declined 24 percent over the past three days after hedge-fund manager David Einhorn said the largest U.S. seller of single-serve coffee makers should improve its financial reporting. The Bloomberg Israel-US 25 Index of the largest Israeli companies traded in New York slipped 1.1 percent to 85.43.

I remember my shock at seeing a Keurig machine 4 or 5 years ago: such a large and good looking lump of plastics and metals all designed to hold, puncture, and pour boiling water into one plastic cup containing coffee or tea.
I was both fascinated... and repelled.

I resisted the crazed idea with all my might. I calculated just how much a single cup of coffee cost on one of those beautiful, Byzantine samovars, and showed that I could fly to Columbia for some Joe cheaper than brew it at home.

However, She-who-must-be-obeyed wanted one, for various reasons, and we did end up with a Keurig and a Green Mountain caffeine-module-delivery-system smack-dab on our kitchen counter. I refused to use it. It did not matter how easy it was.... and it was that - sinfully easy. It was way so much easier than our old way of Melitta brewing: extracting paper filter (recycled paper) from box, fit into cone, fill with 2 Tbsps finely ground coffee, pour boiling water over, and wait maybe one minute.
It was the most demonic drudgery ever conceived, and the blessed ease of the Keurig was so great, that the Keurig machine loomed ever larger in our lives, standing taller and taller over the harbors of our kitchens until it reached the metaphorical height of Miss Liberty holding out her promise of surcease of pain to our desperate and poor coffee-drudgery enslaved masses, yearning to have a cuppa Joe - one at a time!

I refused to use and still do so. My time is not nearly as valuable as the difference in price and time: I save 1.50 minutes using Keurig and the coffee costs me $4.00 per cup more;  60  minutes / 1.50 = 40 and 40 x $4 = $160 per hour.
Unfortunately my time is not worth $160 per hour, at least, I have not found anyone willing to pay that scale for my services.
So we tried to use the one-cup-delivery-system at my parents'; it would be great for my father to enable him to make his coffee, since his sight is so bad. My mother took an immediate dislike to the thing, however. She had no ecological reasons, nor economic reasons, she just did not like having another machine (she already had a Mr. Coffee, and that was Arabian Nights coffee to her mind) on the counter.

She does buy bottled water, however. Or she used to until I pointed out how expensive it was, and a lot of it was only tap water anyway. Bottled water! Brrrr!
I think the point of the Amish was exactly this: they resist technology and innovation not so much to avoid the good effects, but to avoid the bad ones, and the bad ones so very often overwhelm the good ones. Look at television; cable TV has definitely gone to the Dark Side of the Force. Bottled water! The idea of selling water in plastic bottles was a bit of Mephistophelean brilliance! I mean, if the suckers fell for the Apple in the Garden of Eden, they'll fall sure for over-priced water... just as they will for coffee that costs a King's ransom, but is delivered one cup at a time.

Homemade Soda drinks are another idea whose time is right for a discerning few people with too much money. Once again, we see the problems with enormous income inequity: the rich have to spend on gold-plated egg cups for their morning hard boiled eggs, boiled one at a time in space-age-technology boiler-matics, and seasoned with pink salt from Australia and freshly ground varicolored peppers from Malabar flown in that morning.
--

Occupy Penn State

Students rioted - or stampeded - in response to the firing of Joe Paterno.

So far as we can tell, no one has rioted in response to a systematic cover-up of child abuse, but maybe today there will be an Occupy Penn State (OPS) demonstration.

The Board President was asked if he was aware that the students were rioting in response to the Board's action, as if this awareness should have tempered their decision. Should we not do our duty if people were riot? If people disapprove of our decision, should we back off?

--

A Google Moment: The High Line

New York's High Line, the old and abandoned elevated rail line that was turned into a park, can now be digitally promenaded via Google Earth. Just search "high line, new york" and you will find a portion of it.
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Cain Around The Corner

... at Oakland University for a game of Liars' Poker, possibly.

Yesterday Herman Cain denied all harassment charges and blames the "Democratic Machine" for fabricating them.

The problem is that about a week ago, Herman Cain was trying to remember exact details about allegations and pay-outs from the National Restaurant Association.

So the Democratic Machine went back in time, apparently, to set this all up.


--

Ron Paul

I like a lot of Ron Paul. However, there is a lot I do not like, too.

The main problem is that Ron Paul is an Individual Libertarian, who believes that the individual alone is the sole judge of what is right and wrong. In this he follows the ideas of Ayn Rand, a woman whom I consider to have had a career of wretched and thwarted passion layered on top of a foundation of atheism.
Rand's heroes are those like John Galt of Atlas Shrugged, individual men whose intuitions are faultless, and whose only trials are fighting against the faceless forces of some sort of group-think of the uninspired.
No particular long journeys into religion here: no 40 days in the desert, no fasting. The devil is in those who wish to do architecture differently, not in the weakness of the flesh. It is all a fight of the inspired Individual against the forces of obscurity.

The trick is determining whose intuitions are inspired. We have seen a lot of that since World War I, and not all of it came out happily...
There was the Hillsdale College case, where the college president George Roche III was an avid Randian individualist, and somehow came up with the inspired idea that a long running affair with his daughter-in-law would be just the right thing for a Randian Hero like himself...
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2009/10/hillsdale-day-october-15.html

I think of myself more as a Social Libertarian, someone who yearns for inspiration, yet realizes that it must come to exist within a community - it needs to exist with Gelassenheit - maintaining composure while in a crowd of others.

Consider the miracle of the loaves and fishes: Jesus did not take the bread and fish and have merely enough to sate His own hunger; He made provender for the multitude.
Furthermore, the Sermon on the Mount means little if it be interpreted as applying solely to individuals, for what does it mean for the Meek to inherit the earth, if there is no 99% that is downtrodden or lower on the social scale? It means nothing.

In as far as Ron Paul admires Ayn Rand - and he did name his son after her - he is an atheist.
The philosophy of Ayn Rand has no room for a God.
God is subservient to the politics in Individual Libertarianism, for the moral agent and the moral code are within the same Individual, the Randian Hero.

--

Stress

Stress is not merely the inflammations and the highs of anger and worry; it is not hand wringing and pacing and obsession with what the future might hold. It is not merely sleepless nights.
Stress and pain is the day to day life when we all look quite normal. Stress is keeping on keeping on... but with a twist.
It is life with addictions and obsessions which may not be worthy of exploitation on cable tv, but they are real none the less. We can make a film with food and fats, booze and drugs, emotional highs and lows, and we can make ourselves look insane... or supremely sane: drinkers, but social drinkers; eaters, yet not bulemic nor anorectic.

We hide it from ourselves.
Stress is Life lived normally - so we think - day to day and on an even keel as we strive to hide from ourselves the black clouds on the horizon and even the black sails on our ship.

The more normal we obsess about being, the more finely strung out we are.
--

Super Committee: Give Us Something Real, and We Give Up A Small Part of Our Fantasy

In TPM:

Super Committee Republicans are floating a trial balloon that would produce new tax revenue, in apparent contravention of Grover Norquist’s taxpayer protection pledge, according to Wall Street Journal editorialist Stephen Moore.
But as Moore explains that the offer has a catch:

One positive development on taxes taking shape is a deal that could include limiting tax deductions, perhaps by capping write-offs on charities, state and local taxes, and mortgage interest payments as a percentage of each tax filer’s gross income. That idea was introduced on these pages by Harvard economist Martin Feldstein. 

In exchange, Democrats would agree to make the Bush income-tax cuts permanent. This would mean preventing top rates from going to 42% from 35% today, and keeping the capital gains and dividend tax rate at 15%, as opposed to plans to raise them to 23.8% or higher after 2013.

Interesting: in exchange for Republicans giving up their nonsensical fantasy world about no-tax Grover, Democrats give something real in exchange.
That is the downside of dealing with Dimwits:  for the longest time, you have to negotiate and you give up real stuff while they give up their flat-world theories.

This is supposed to be real world negotiations where we give real value for real value, not some Cargo Cult world where we get the deed to your island paradise in swap for a couple of cartons of Hershey's candy and Lucky Strikes.

--

V is for Vandergraff Generator

 V  is for Vandergraff Generator.
From Matthias Inks.

http://mattiasa.blogspot.com/2011/11/alphabet-in-26-pictures.html

--

Marxism Today

Is there a point to Marxism anymore? We have recently looked a Limbaughian analysis of Philosophic Materialism with Marx and the two Ancient Greek Atomists, Democritus and Epicurus, done during "the break"... the result of which was - oddly or expectedly enough - that the Ancient Classics seemed to be tarnished by their association with a German philosopher of materialism of the 19th century... thereby reversing the direction of Causality's Arrow and creating another paradox worthy of Zeno; a paradox we shall class with other Limbaugh paradoxes that have Greek names, like Oxycontin.

Some people believe there is more to it.
I had a post here on October 16, 2009, and repeat it here:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/the-18th-brumaire-of-barack-obama/article1181115/singlepage/#articlecontent

The Globe and Mail
The 18th Brumaire of Barack Obama 
("Brumaire" is history-type stuff and we can check it out "during the break" a la Limbaugh.)

Prof. Panitch and others point out that Marx predicted this collapse - right down to credit default swaps and other kinky tricks of finance. Marxism, they say, is a powerful tool with which to understand the mess we're in - so powerful it will make us question the system that produced the crisis in the first place. 

Will this article tediously assume that there is more to life than waiting on tenterhooks for the Super-Duper Budget Scooper Committee Report on November 23?... the report which shall say that there are blind men in Gaza and they are still waiting for that uni-ocular bloke:  the chappy with the one eyeball to make their king and lead them about.
--

Ronald Reagan and Herman Cain

In 1979, as Ronald Reagan was getting ready another bid for the presidency, he visited the NORAD mountain complex that was responsible for the ultimate defense of the USA against nuclear attack.
When he asked whether there was actually any defense against a nuclear attack, he was surprised to hear the generals answer "No."
The best we could hope for was 8 minutes warning before the missiles hit, and to launch a nuclear retaliatory attack to ensure Armageddon.

Reagan took this ghastly bit of information and came up with something new: a notion of a nuclear defense. One may not have agreed with it, but it was a good and rational response to the threat of annihilation.


In my mind, this is the paradigmatic difference between Republicans of 32 years ago and their degraded descendants of the present day.
--

Quality of Life

Our lives are Propaganda and Technology.

That's it.

--

The Opium Papers

 Afghanistan has had bumper crops of opium ever since NATO has spread its protective blanket over the region. I recall that it was the Taliban that frowned on poppy growing back before 2001. The story has changed somewhat now... and keeps changing.

If you have not yet noticed, there is a awful lot in modern day politics that is more extreme than in our parents' days: more extreme, more ruthless, more brutish... more like a gang of rich thugs.

 The Guardian
 12 December 2009

Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations' drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.
This will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. "In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor," he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims

Drugs run a good part of the world.
--

Murder, Inc.

"War is a breeding ground for unintended consequences." -
Matthew Hoh

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-cockburn-assassination-20111103,0,6016732.story

 Good article on the inclusion of Assassination as an important item in the arsenal of USA foreign policy. 

I would like to say that it is a "must read", but nothing is actually a "must read", is it?

--

Kim

Kim Kardashian is the Bernie Madoff of love.

--

Racism is Alive and Well

Prompted by conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer in a television interview, Cain answered yes to the question of whether "race [and] being a strong black conservative has anything to do with the fact you've been so charged."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-cain-20111103,0,1476336.story

 Mr. Cain immediate reaction shows what we all really know quite well: we are all very, very familiar with the racism of the USA - most of us living with it since our births - and so much in our lives revolves around racism.

Herman Cain certainly thinks so. He knows so. Mr. Cain is not used to the hypocrisy of democracy and the need to hide what one really believes, so he let it slip that racism is alive and well: in the charge maybe, in the discussion certainly, in the putative conspiracy, and certainly in our emotions and reactions... we all know racism is alive!
Like Frankenstein, we see another bolt of lightning and the monster moves its hand. "It' s alive! Alive!" we yell once more.

This always reminds me of Republican opposition to President Obama, which was expressed by many of them at his Inauguration, well before he had passed any laws that were anathema to them. Mr. Limbaugh, for example, fervently prayed for four years of national failure, just so his own political beliefs could somehow be vindicated in a general destruction.

I've been here for a long time. I know we're racists. I know racism when I see it. We all do. We have learned, however, the lessons of hypocrisy too well.

To quote Condolezza Rice from her book describing her decision to return early from vacation during the hurricane Katrina aftermath:

“’Mr. President, I’m coming back. I don’t know how much I can do, but we clearly have a race problem,’” she recalls saying.

--

Hands Across the Seas

http://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=200706121330.yeti-sasquatch_transpacific_brotherhood

The Event Horizon of a Bottomless Pit

I went to see Moneyball with Mike. The film was so good for the first 45 minutes; then it began to flag and fail. I spent most of my time trying to think of ways that I could have improved the story. Mike said he had read the book, and it was quite a good book: a sports book about baseball. Some of the greatest reading of my life have been baseball books. Something from the long ago known as You Know Me, Al is in memory, and that was a long time ago, indeed: more than 50 years.


Afterwards we pizzaed down and discussed the Republican Party and how gosh awful their situation was: a bunch of candidates who do not cotton to Science much and who most recently have unanimously condemned President Obama's decision to abide by the timetable for troop withdrawal negotiated by President Bush and Iraq.
The PM of Iraq let it be known that the deadline was set in stone, as it were, so the US is out.
The Republican candidates all disapproved.
Problem is, the overwhelming majority of the American people want out, too. The American people know a "Bottomless Pit" when they see one. It resembles one of those endless tubular things at the end of which there is a light... sort of a will-o-the-wisp light and not all that bright, but the best and brightest tell us that there is indeed a light yonder. (The concept of a Bottomless Pit was in the mathematics of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.)

Some guys and gals never learn. The Bail-Out was a bottomless pit, also, only the entire process was shrunk into a few months instead of being dragged out over years and years: the transfer of trillions of dollars should take some time, thereby creating a classical Bottomless Pit. When you are able to transfer all that wealth in an afternoon, it is still a bottomless pit, but done via Relativity... at the speed of light, so to speak.
What is the Event Horizon of a Bottomless Pit like? All the matter in the neighborhood - usually $ - are swept into the mindless maelstrom... like an MRI machine would pull iron coins from our pockets...
Now that we are talking about it, I realize how much Mitt Romney resembles Maximiliam Schell (sans beard) in the film The Black Hole.

--

The Bizarre Leading the Blind

Limbaugh had a tirade against studying the Classics, apparently because someone in Occupy Wall Street had a sign indicating she had studied the Classics.

Some people have tried to make sense out of it, but to me that is a waste of time.

An excerpt:

...Try this. Did a lot of research during the break. Karl Marx was a classical studies scholar. Karl Marx, philosopher, political thinker, studied Latin and Greek -- as did Churchill, I found out. Marx received a Ph.D. for a dissertation on ancient Greek philosophy entitled The Difference between the Democratean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature. Now, you'll note nobody hired Marx, so what he had to do was figure out a way to destroy humanity on his own -- and he was able to do it, but nobody hired him. His classical background is reflected in his philosophies. Indeed the term "proletariat," he coined from the Latin word referring to the lowest class of citizen. So Karl Marx was a classical scholar, ancient philosophy and literature....

  http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2011/11/01/deciphering_the_sad_sack_story_of_a_classical_studies_scholar

"Did a lot of research during the break."?  Isn't that profound? And he was able to come up with Karl Marx, Democritus, and Epicurus.

He seems to have missed the importance of that constellation of figures, all philosophers of some sort of Materialism, Democritus and Epicurus believing that the Universe was composed of "atoms". 
So here we are in the "Atomic Age", and the long traditions in Classical Times seems to slip by our intrepid researcher-during-break-time. The primacy of atomic theory being Classical Greek seems to be a nonce notion.

Later, a caller who send her kids to Catholic High School calls, and he slobbers all over positive about learning Latin, so maybe it is just Greek Classicism he is opposed to.


--

The Thing, 2011

I went and saw The Thing directed by Heijningen yester aft, and was I disappointed.
I do not think I need to see it twice. Nothing escaped me.

I had read a number of reviews and I feel as if we had watched a different film. I should say that I saw Howard Hawks version from the early 1950's at least 6 times and John Carpenter's from the 1980's at least 4 times. I have also read John Campbell's Who Goes There? at least twice. I am well versed in studia illius rei ( studies of The Thing ).

The idea of doing a film of what happened in the Norwegian Antarctic camp a few days before John Carpenter's story began was a great idea that could run 45 minutes tops. Then there was nothing left but blood, gore, kill, shoot, and burn, all of which have been done and done well before now.

Carter, Russell, and Moffat in The Thing (1982)

The characters were not that interesting. Not much effort was spent on characters. No one was like Kurt Russell's MacReady. There was absolutely no one like Keith David's Childs, nor T.K.Carter's Nauls, or David Clennon's Palmer. And the characters of Richard Masur, Donald Moffat, Wilfred Brimley, and Richard Dysart..... the list goes on; no one was allowed to stand out as an individual in the new film. They were just beards and frightened eyes.
Nor was there anyone such as were in the 1951 film: no one like Kenneth Tobey nor Margaret Sheridan nor Doug Spencer.

It came down to running around, burning, blowing things up, and that had all been done before, and there was nothing new or unique added to it.

The reviewers said homage a lot, which is a word I dislike. For me, an homage is an insiders' joke, and if you get it, fine; but if you do not get it, the film still moves along. There was no homage, there was grand larceny from people trying to patch a story together.
Even the alien's space ship resembles too, too much that of another Alien by H. Geiger.
The alien itself in the shot on the space ship when we see it with the face of the Norwegian mission leader is almost an exact duplicate of a monster from a movie made in the past 20 years whose name I cannot recall, but had something to do with a machine in the attic which could receive interdimensional waves of some sort, and the result was aliens intruding into our dimension like hemorrhoids from beyond!

Best Radio Operator in a series of films and re-makes:

Tex Richards, portrayed by Nicholas Byron (1951)

 --

If Democracy Weakens

The times remind me of the early twentieth century after World War I, when the chaos everywhere reflected badly on the democratic governments, and those governments themselves often added to the chaos. As Democracy became ineffective, fascism grew in appeal, resulting in Mussolini's elevation in 1922 in Italy: he made the trains run on time... again. (We can only assume they had run on time at least one time previously.)

Our democratic ways are on trial. Our "democratic" ways have, since 2008, not done all that well.

Suppose in 2008, President Bush had decided to hold a referendum on the Bail-Out? Interesting.

--

Speed of News

Things are really boiling when news outlets that have links to stories that are 7 days old are severely misleading the reading public.

Such as right now.

--

Arts and Letters Daily

Somedays... somedays just everything in the Arts and Letters Daily just bores me into a thick and treacly tedium so intense I despair of mind.


November 1, 2011