- Ashcroft Unveils DNA Proposal: Which political donors are gonna get the fat contracts for this jobby job?
- Drug habits die hard: Cocaine and amphetamine drug users struggle with the residual effects of their drug habits for up to a year after going cold turkey – much longer than previously reported.
- Cool art, via Metafilter
- ‘Superbomb’ Video Will Be Sent to Scare Iraq: I’m upset. You mean we’re not using nucular bombs to shed innocent blood anymore?
- US Secretly Urged Israelis to Walk Out of Peace Talks
- Movie Men Add Special Effects to Media War
- Bush apologizes to Afghan leader Karzai: Interesting timing considering Afghanistan’s puppet president has been talking to Russian officials and diplomats. If Afghanistan’s government came out against the Iraq war it would be a huge black eye for the American war establishment.
11
Mar 03
Things can only get better
11
Mar 03
The mortal coil
While some animals die, or slowly vanish due to overkilling and destruction of habitat, other animals are seizing the opportunity to become even more successful. Sometimes growing much larger, breeding more frequently, and becoming vastly more numerous. You have to admire the stubbornness and indomitability of life. Nature is various and complex, never failing to seize any opportunity for expansion. Nature is optimistic.
Sometimes I like to imagine that if there were beings on a higher plane of existence, nearly immortal and outside the bounds of time and material constraints they might regard the biological infestation of earth with curiosity. It’s almost as if our planet were a roiling mass of things coming into and going out of being, feeding off one another, birth and death, consumption and elimination, like a fungal mass or vegetable bloom, or infected sore, or a giant heart, pulsing with life.
Even when I consider my own body I am ignorant of everything that is going on there. I have some understanding of my digestion, respiration, etc., but I still don’t understand why or how I think or behave the way I do. Is it determined by chemicals, hormones, and biological processes? In some way, I am simply a well-developed colony organism. If you were able to keep my cells fed with oxygen and sugars I would continue to ‘live’, if you were somehow able to compel my pilotless body into exercising its muscles I would continue on in much the same way I do now, physically-speaking. My living cells could be grown in petri dishes for countless millenia, long after ‘I’ have departed. What is it that makes me who I am? In this sense I understand reincarnation as my life is arguably little different in substance than anyone else’s. These same questions have been asked and the general trajectory of my life has certainly been experienced by my predecessors.
I’m not so sure that humans are the height of earth evolution, or the masters of creation, but we are certainly its witnesses. We pop into being thrown right into the mix of it, eyes open and questing. One moment a drop of fluid and the next a handful of dust. Slaves to the movements we barely comprehend and acknowledge. Not until we have that real awareness that we are tied to it and that the only lasting significance we possess is in our relationship to its whole. And nothing last forever, our short lives and everyone and everything around us and after us will disappear in the same quiet way. No posthumous monuments can preserve your memory. Even our known universe is powerless against time. By current theories either expanding forever outward until all matter and energy is infinitely diffuse or collapsing back into the tiny nugget of matter and energy that preceeded the birth of our universe.
11
Mar 03
Whipping up the proles
When the Germans were the ones we were supposed to revile during WWI and WWII government propagandists changed hamburgers into Salisbury steak, sauerkraut into ‘liberty cabbage’, German measles into ‘liberty measles’, and liverwurst into ‘liberty sausage’. Germans became huns. It was necessary to the war machine to foster hatred and mistrust of anything foreign, so that when you saw or heard anything German your mind would close up and your brain would go into a paroxysm of fear.
This is happening now to the French because their government is opposing our government’s movement towards war. Americans are peace-loving and independent yet we allow our emotions to be swayed by slander and emotional appeals and insults against the French people? Now the French, who helped us against the British empire during our seminal moment, are our sworn enemies? Now they are ‘smelly, cheese-eating, surrender monkeys’? This only makes Americans look like uneducated assholes and does nothing to build support for American interests if that’s what you’re after. To this end, our ship of fools in Congress has passed a ‘symbolic’ measure to rename French fries “freedom fries.” When will the Orwellian irony stop? I’d like one bottle of Victory gin please.
11
Mar 03
More lies
Our government has been peddling a pack of lies. The whole case against Iraq amounts to a deception. As Heather pointed out, the US intelligence that Iraq had been seeking nuclear materials for a nuclear weapons program was fabricated. In other words, our government used false information because it suits their purposes and then tried to fool the rest of the world with it to garner support for their military takeover. The government has been trying to link Hussein to bin Laden since 1993 after the first WTC bombing. With a budget of trillions they have found NOTHING. It is a lie. As for regimes supporting terrorist, we have been guilty of that. When bin Laden was our ‘terrorist’, a mujahadeen fighting against the Soviets using the same guerrilla tactics, he was a freedom fighter. When we funded the Taliban and helped build Islamic training schools in Pakistan to ‘destabilize’ the Soviet Union with terrorism we were supporting ‘freedom’. Our freedom loving government brought Islamic radicals to the US to learn ‘sabotage techniques’. Now to me, this means terrorism.
If you think for a moment, you’ll realize that governments will always use ‘terrorists’ or guerrillas or partisans as proxies. This is the reality of warfare now. When you use or support ‘terrorists’, which most governments do, you make it very difficult to trace who did what and you can launch covert wars without any governmental or public oversight. To the military and to war planners terrorism is a beautiful thing so long as it is not used against you. The US funds terror groups. At the very least, they have in the past. We funded bin Laden a few years ago to do the same things he has been doing now against American interests. He was just as much of a zealot then as now.
Our government has no ethical problem with terrorism. That must be clear. Any claim to the contrary is a lie. We have supported narco-trafficking fascist guerrillas in Central America, narco-trafficking Islamic radicals in the Mideast, narco-trafficking Albanian Islamic ‘freedom fighters’, the Phillipine’s Abu Sayyaf, terrorists in Italy, even White Russian guerrillas against the Bolsheviks way back in 1918. Terrorists everywhere owe a debt to the US government.
10
Mar 03
Today in Babylon
- Markets threatened by ‘new world disorder’: A study by Lehman Brothers’ chief economist John Llewellyn says that regardless of who backs any action there is a one in 10 chance of an ‘open-ended conflagration’ which would lead to a Viet nam war-sized bill for the US, ‘equivalent to 12 per cent of contemporary GDP’, or $1.2 trillion.
- Bush Sr warning over unilateral action: Mr Bush Jr, who is said never to forget even relatively minor slights, has alarmed analysts with the way in which he has allowed senior Administration figures such as Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, aggressively to criticise France and Germany.
- Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?
- Frist yanks poll from web site after blaming anti-war results on “hackers”
- Supreme Court to hear police questioning case revising landmark Miranda decision
- Danger of super germs is immediate, doctors say
- China Moves Away From Communist System
- Kids’ viewing of TV violence linked to aggression as adults
10
Mar 03
The Man
The man pictured above, in the banner, is Toshiro Mifune. It didn’t occur to me when I changed it that some people wouldn’t recognize who that was. At various times, I have built shrines to great men. Men I admire yet identify with and aspire to. My idols. My pantheon. The embodiment of the qualities I desire for my ideal self. Individuality, depth of emotion, strength, intelligence, intensity, sensitivity, humor, rebelliousness, and beauty. My religion is the worship of humanity in general and the worship of individual men and women.
Here are a sampling just off the top of my head. They should possess all of these qualities in varying degrees:
John Brown, Havelock Ellis, Voltaire, Bruce Lee, Paul Newman, Morrissey, Jesus (my idea of him), Marcus Aurelius, Kurt Vonnegut, Che Guevara, John Lennon, Marlon Brando, Albert Einstein, Toshiro Mifune, Charlie Chaplin, Wilhelm Reich, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Carl Jung, Mark Twain, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Clarence Darrow.
What piece of work is a man
How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form
And moving how express and admirable, in action
How like an angel, in apprehension how like a god :
The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals
Hamlet (Act II, scene 2, 303-307)
10
Mar 03
The Fray
Last night after I got home from work and conked out in a brief nap with all my clothes and even my shoes on in the style of Marty McFly at the close of Back to the Future, I went to the Mercury Lounge down on sixth street to attend this open mic thing George had suggested. It was nice to get out and do something I wouldn’t normally do. Much of it was entertaining, but I’m afraid I wasn’t in the highest of spirits. I was simultaneously indulging in and fighting one of those black moods I’m prone to. I got to meet Prentice Riddle, a guy who has one of those nice eclectic blogs I enjoy, but I faltered and unloaded my black mood in the form of a petulant, cynical opinion or two lobbed into a conversation on Afghanistan I had not even been a part of. It’s almost as if I impulsively decided at that moment to externalize my bad feeling and to recklessly violate rules of propriety with people I barely knew. This would have been sufficient to make me feel out of control and shitty, but then it just reminded me of how far I have to go and how I seem to be repeating myself and never learning from past mistakes.
I’m reminded of one of my favorite writers from history, Michel De Montaigne. One of those with the stoic, prudent, and composed attitude I admire and envy. In this essay he captures that feeling, the surprise and familiarity you experience when you behave in those ways you hate yet are prone to.
‘Tis wonderful from how many idle beginnings and frivolous causes such famous impressions commonly, proceed. This it is that obstructs information; for whilst we seek out causes and solid and weighty ends, worthy of so great a name, we lose the true ones; they escape our sight by their littleness. And, in truth, a very prudent, diligent, and subtle inquisition is required in such searches, indifferent, and not prepossessed. To this very hour, all these miracles and strange events have concealed themselves from me: I have never seen greater monster or miracle in the world than myself: one grows familiar with all strange things by time and custom, but the more I frequent and the better I know myself, the more does my own deformity astonish me, the less I understand myself.“
On the way back to my car I argued with someone very close and special to me on the phone, someone I punish for caring about me, only adding more and more and reminding me of my crimes and misdeeds and selfishness and the way I’ve involved unsuspecting people in my problems. The word for the day, for the year, is opprobrium.
09
Mar 03
The J-man
Jesus was gother than you. Jesus was way cool. Jesus was a feminist. Jesus was a vegetarian. Jesus was a false prophet. Jesus was a terrorist. Jesus was a gook. Jesus was an anarchist. Jesus was a Jew. Jesus was not a Jew. Jesus was left-handed. Jesus was a stoner. Jesus was your substitute. Jesus was no sissy. Jesus was hung in a tree, not on a cross. Jesus was gay. Jesus was a bear. Jesus was asylum seeker. Jesus was a heretic. Jesus was an alien. Jesus was an omnivore. Jesus was an idiot. Jesus was my girl. Jesus was a capricorn. Jesus was not God. Jesus was a counsellor. Jesus was a known drug dealer. Jesus was a country preacher. Jesus was the perfect life-coach. Jesus was pro-choice. Jesus was an immortalist. Jesus was a better carpenter. Jesus was a stepchild. Jesus was a loser and a coward. Jesus was a cross maker. Jesus was an analog man in a digital age. Jesus was a revolutionary. Jesus was the Dalai Lama. Jesus was indignant. Jesus was sane. Jesus was a killer whale. Jesus was not a historical figure. Jesus was homeless too. Jesus was a b-boy. Jesus was my feet. Jesus was the beast. Jesus was a sinner. Jesus was sinless.
Jesus was holding me. Jesus was a sailor. Jesus was a street ballah. Jesus was a bastard. Jesus was wealthy, lived in a mansion
and wore designer clothes. Jesus was not poor. Jesus was not a nazi.
08
Mar 03
Some of my current favorite adjectives
licentious
corrupt
libertine
profligate
salacious
debauched
lascivious