Socio-Political Diatribe

Framing (Again)

2011-10-26T01:12:00.001-05:00

Originally I read this in an adbusters years ago: "The cold war was World War III, the war on terror is World War IV".

I didn't think much of it at the time, in fact I thought it was stupid, because nobody else thinks that. In history books in my public education I was told that the cold war was an era of almost war with examples of the cuban missle crisis, but never actual war. I learned later that pax americana was hardly peaceful with WARS(call it what you want but if it looks like war and quacks like war...) in just about every Latin American country, and every region of the globe. If we weren't outright going to war we were selling arms to Indonesia for use in the East Timor genocide, because us small arms sales are 50% of world sales.

It reminded me of Einstein's quote that "we don't know what world war three will be fought with, but world war four will be fought with sticks and stones". Apparently his metaphor was wrong, but his idea was right: War is more dangerous than its ever been.

My point is that this quote had some truth to it. It was a reaction to the war on terror, but there is a much better term which both Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt have used "Global Civil War".
The correct phrasing should be: "The cold war was World War III, and we are in the midst of World War IV which is a Global Civil war".

Is this not truth?
The cold war was a bipolar competition for sovereignty of the globe. The "low-intensity warfare" or "proxy wars" are still wars! The united states and the USSR fought a war against each other during those years. The USSR could not continue the war because their political and economic systems had to be drastically changed starting with Perestroika and Glasnost. When the USSR broke up the United States was the victor of World War III, and global hegemon. WTF is the difference between the hegemon and the sovereign? I have stated this before that the United States is the world government. The UN does not have police, the US does in the form of a military which receives the largest percentage of GDP of any nation. The US enforces its will around the globe and empirically is willing to pre-emptively strike in order to enforce that will.

As I have also stated before the global hegemon/sovereign can only maintain that position if it doles out energy supplies and has a steady cheap supply for themselves. Lets look at some(I have to say some because the list is a mile fucking long) of our "interventions"(see: "wars") since the USSR's break up. First is Saddam former scumbag and confidant of United Statesian intelligence scumbags. He rose to power and is now leading Iraq, he invades tiny kuwait. Need more historical info, Iraq has the 2nd largest proven oil reserves and Kuwait is up there.. Recently the situation has changed apparently last year Venezuela's got way higher, but back in 91 we're talking here. Back then Iraq had proven reserves of 100 billion barrels, Kuwait had 96.5, and Saudi Arabia had 260.9. THe UAE is also on the arabian peninsula and has like 98 bil. we're talking about 800 Billion worldwide proven.
So Saddam doubles his oil supply, Instead of about 12.5% hes up to 25% of world oil. Saudi Arabia is freakin' out they have shit for an army: an air force full of toys and muttawa thugs enforcing wahabbism. Mister Osama Bin Laden himself goes to the Sauds and hes like "let me bring my buddies from Afghanistan over here and we'll fuck saddam up for you." The Sauds were like "Ha! yeah your guerrilla army is going to confront Saddam's soldiers, we'll be executed within days, Ameicans said they want at him, they just need a place to park their troops, so we're letting them chill here while they take Saddam out, we'll have to make sure there are no women driving when they get here, we don't want them to think us savages." Then Bin Laden is all like Fuuuuuuuu!!!!!!!! and rage quit saudi arabia because they let infidels(Americans) in the land of the two holy shrines(saudi arabia[mecca and medina]). 20 years later: 9/11, but I digress. Saddam is sitting at 25% and all he has to do is go next door and take out a few cities because like 99% of Saudi Arabia is uninhabited('cept for nomads) and he'll be sittin on more than half of the world's proven oil supplies. Holy fucking shit, you have to go through Saddam to get a gas pump. So Sauds let the US in, US drives Saddam out of Kuwait, a regional hegemon has thusly been deterred and the US grip on energy becomes even better because they now have better relations with Saudi Arabia and fucking troops there. If the US ever really needs oil they just need to knock off a few asshole royals that the entire country('cept the muttawa) hate anyway and bam Americana Arabia, Or I guess they already decided they want to call it Syriana. This was an effort to maintain global sovereignty from a potential threat(saddam controlling 50%+ of world oil).
There are trends like this in foreign policy, countries ask the US for help and they send troops, sometimes the troops hang around for awhile.

The next major event comes with 9/11. Which was a perfect excuse to engage in the project The PNAC and many other neo-realist intelligentsia wanted: to finally go back to Iraq and just take the fucker over.
It was also the perfect excuse to engage in the project recommended by Brezenzki of the CFR and many other neo-liberal intelligentsia: to take over Afghanistan for its geopolitical value.
In an academia that pictured itself with the gods eye view of Science and Cartesian rationality, they often end up blind to the most obvious prejudices. Orientalist discourse constructed the middle east as a place of conflict that needed the managing our masculine western whiteness naturally gives us.Iraq and Afghanistan give the US a jumping off point for a land takeover of most of the middle east, specifically potential regional hegemons like Iran.

The United States has been and continues to further its position of power in the world. This position of power is admittedly based on the ability to project power(i.e. violence) across the globe quickly and effectively(i.e. kills lots of people). This is different than a state who passes laws and has the police enforce them with violence. I do not mean to say that this isn't sovereignty, just that this doesn't even remotely resemble what we refer to as "democracy". The US still has some set of universal values which can sometimes be discerned by reading the writings of corporate shills that political science supplies us with, but whether or not the universal rules are codified, as is the case in a democracy, what we can be sure of is that the US visits violence upon those who do not obey. This is a form of sovereignty. When no other country on earth has this ability or if they do have it, but not engage in it, this is evidence that the US is the sole world sovereign.

So I would like to frame history differently, I do not wish to propagandize but to use evidence to support my point, obviously if you refer to world war three or four people will not understand, but don't these labels stand up to scrutiny? Are we not in the midst of a global civil war?

P.S. Another framing I find interesting these days is the bracketing of "occupy wall street" and "arab spring", why is this not part of one global phenomenon that is a reaction to a declining economy and an increasing rich-poor gap(which can also be read as a declining middle class)?

America

2011-10-18T00:27:00.000-05:00

Is the United States a democracy?

The executive has the ability to kill US citizens without charging them with a crime. This is in direct contradiction of Habeus Corpus.

The united states has been occupying Afghanistan for more than a Decade, without specific legislation declaring war. Instead a state of exception in which the Executive has sole authority to decide when to prosecute war has become the norm.This is in direct contradiction to the war powers act and the constitutionally explicit rules governing warmaking.

The United States has been occupying Iraq for nine years. Originally people scoffed at Wolfowitz saying we could be there until 2010. This war was clearly an illegal pre-emptive strike by the United States. The justifications for invasion turned out to be complete bullshit: WMDs, yellow cake from Niger, active chem. weapons, complicity with 9/11, and harboring of Al-qaeda have all turned out to be false. When revelations of these lies started to be printed there was no mandate for intervention. The public has not supported this war once given halfway decent information. Before the media realized the bullshit it was peddling a majority of Americans actually believed Saddam had something to do with 9/11. There has NEVER been any evidence of this, a potential meeting between a jihadist does not mean that Saddam is al-qaeda, if you think that evidence is convincing you don't understand what Al-Qaeda and Ba'athism are. Saddam is a ba'athist which is essentially the IRaqi version of Nasserism, generally it can be described as an arab nationalism, sometimes being pan-arab and socialist. Ba'athists are secular, ok? If you weren't aware of these nuances are you starting to see my point? How does al-qaeda feel about secularists? Saddam and what we call "al-qaeda" (which appears to be a phrase that is applied to any Muslim who believes that temporal and spiritual power should be more conflated[Shariah]) hate eachother!

Wealth has been and will be continuing to shift towards the super-rich, which means less money for the other 99% as this chart shows.

Inflation adjusted percentage increase in mean after-tax household income in the United States between 1979 and 2005.

That statistical data is old though, this process has accelerated since 2005 as a result of numerous events, the most important in my opinion being rising gas prices driven by rising oil prices. Because its pretty fucking obvious that if you keep taking something, and you start to take it faster and faster. Eventually you will run out, because all things are finite. Whether that means you run out in a million years or tomorrow is of little relevance, the fact remains that demand will begin outstripping supply on carbon based energy sources. The demand will continue to accelerate, but once supply shocks occur, the acceleration will increase exponentially. In my opinion we are nearing the end of the age of oil. The scrambling for practices of resource gathering which is far worse for the environment and produces less product, is evidence for my belief. Shale gas and tar sands being my examples. Because capitalism claims that it will solve peak oil by causing it to be such a high price that alternatives will appear. But these alternatives are just much worse versions of the original, and really just amount to grasping at straws. There is no effort to get in to rehab for our addiction to carbon energy.
I apologize for digressing, but my point is that there are currently structural factors which have further accelerated the wealth redistribution that we see taking place from 1979-2005. The middle class is being destroyed further. A post-industrial service based economy does not produce a strong middle class in the first place, if we add rising living costs and shrinking salaries/wages we will see a slow destruction of the middle class.

Most political theorists will agree that the middle class is where most of the stability for any regime is located. These are all individuals with a vested interest in making the system work, they are reformers because the system rewards them with a decent lifestyle. An evaporation of the middle class creates revolutionary instability because the lower class does not have a vested interest in maintaining the system of the status quo, they don't have much to lose. Whoever the boss is, they're going to go to work at their job and have the same skills they had before. They will still fit in to the same niche in the world economy no matter the regime. The upper-class being small cannot resist these changes.

My first point is that democracy in America is not a very convincing argument right now. Although materialism is important, (one must eat and stay warm) it is also important to know there is no point in living if you are going to be evil. Economic concerns are important, but we must also pay attention to Politics(which is the ability to justifiably kill people) because the two are related. The United States spends as much as the next 27 countries combined on their military. The US with its huge GDP even has the highest PERCENTAGE of gdp that goes towards military spending. The global civil war that the United States is prosecuting must stop if we are to save the middle class(which in my opinion is of more concern than the entire 99%, because the middle class is key to the stability of any regime).

My second point is that the upper-class should be embracing the messsages of occupy wall street, because without some sort of reform to save the middle class united states might see some REAL class warfare.

It does make me smirk when I think of a wealthy politician, who proclaimed attention to class in discourse as "class warfare", being killed by the real revolutionaries we will see if current trends continue, but violence is a question without a satisfactory answer.

We do not need to fear revolution, because if we do not have a democracy what the fuck do we have to lose?

We do not need to stoke revolution, because the structural trends will make one inevitable.

To those who are trying to silence or marginalize Occupy Wall Street: Don't blow your one chance to reform the system before you make peaceful revolution impossible.

Class Warfare

2011-09-26T15:01:00.001-05:00

I have 5 minutes to write what I wish to say. This should be easy.

Currently there are efforts to relieve the tax burden on individuals of the working and middle class(even upper-middle class) within the party in power.
Consequently, there are efforts within the opposition party to characterize such attention to the specific social, political, and economic harms of being lower or middle class, as "class warfare".

If the current mainstream media is dominated by a handful of wealthy corporations, who are legal persons obligated by law to their shareholders to seek profit no matter what the human cost, most likely these corporations will have political agendas which favor the wealthy. Because the individuals who can arguably be said to hold the levers of power are assuredly of the upper class. And if there are no levers of power because the institution runs itself like some kind of organism or legal person, then that organism is wealthier than the vast majority of humans(those are the people that aren't corporations).

I only bring up the preceding paragraph to make the point that in the status quo, before this event of relieving the tax burden came in to the focus of the agenda setting machine of the media, class warfare was a non-existent topic, only surfacing when George Bush Jr. made the same claim previously in regards to Kerry. My argument is that the dominant understanding of the idea of "class warfare" is discourse on class is not ok.

I only bring up the preceding paragraphs in order to argue that whether or not you agree that Obama is engaging in "class warfare", you should understand that class warfare is constantly taking place in the status quo.

Wealth is ALWAYS being redistributed in some way. Or else nobody would be spending anything. If nobody spent anything there would be no wealth. Thusly, we can see that wealth is constantly being redistributed in some way.

My thesis: Currently in the status quo wealth is being transferred from the middle class to the upper class in great quantities. The more discourse on class is silenced the more effective and accelerated this redistribution can take place. The fact that we have reached this Orwellian point where the middle class starts finally fighting for its life and realizing their shared experiences and goals have real significance for the political role they should play, and its called class warfare. During times we DON'T talk about class, "class warfare" plays a much larger role, than in times we DO talk about class.

Concession: Or we can just allow such activity to be called class warfare, just make sure we label the times when we are not talking about class as: Class Terrorism. Because the middle class should start fighting back rather than just hoping the economy doesn't come for them next.

Diaglogue with Owl #2 Death

2011-06-19T13:09:00.001-05:00

To: Jimothy
From: Owl
DEATH
“We can only know something by what it is not”
-K. Beanhouse
This contradictory idea was espoused by the great scholar and cheeba smoker, K. Beanhouse, in his musings on Money, circa April 2011. It exemplifies the noted thinker’s distrust of words and his skepticism towards the human mind’s ability to grasp something objectively and truthfully, in and of itself, without the ineluctable obfuscation that language and the process of thought bring to any subject.
Taking his pithy tenet as a starting point for studying death, we must first understand what is NOT death, before we can tackle the question of what is death.
The simple and quick answer is: The opposite of death is life. End of story, right? Not so, because as anyone who has ever suffered under the inconsolable reality of being/becoming knows, life is much more than the four letters l-i-f-e and all the preconceived notions this four letter word implies. Indeed, the purpose of life, the reality of life, the truth, meaning and fabric of life is deep, murky and unknowable.
Say, to begin the argument, that life is consciousness; then death is lack of consciousness. Sleep would be a temporary death, an unconsciousness that we can experience and still recover from - a fleeting experience of death that we are able to recall, partially or wholely or not at all. True death, then, is the permanent state of unconsciousness, a sleep from which we are unable to awake. Without ever awaking, we can never recall, and therefore it is nothing, a permanent unconsciousness.
But, life is more than consciousness. Trees and plants, even fish and empty-eyed dogs, are alive but it would be tough to argue a sentience at the level of which I refer to when speaking of humans. Perception, data processing, the ability to react to an external environment, these are all factors in defining consciousness, but they are as easily attributable to a mid-tech machine as they are to a “living” being. So, it seems life is also something biological, captured in the fragile construction of cells, chemicals and organic compounds that enable life to exist and propagate. Death, then, would be the destruction, or entropy, of this ordered organic life. The decay of the system until the final feather falls and the system collapses, irretrievable and lost.
Consciousness and order are life. Death is the negative of these states.
And now for a narrative interlude:
One day while I was at work in the hospital, the EMTs brought a dead man into the ER. These days, with the technology and medicine our society possesses, death and dead are not the same thing. A heart can be arrested, the flow of oxygen ceased, any recognizable form of consciousness absent and the order of the mind and body rapidly crumbling to chaos. In short, the body can be dead, but life is not completely lost. Pump the heart artificially, apply electric stimulation to re-boot the cardiac muscles, force air artificially into the lungs and suddenly the dead is living once again.
The docs and nurses did all this and more and for a few precious minutes and, as his extremities turned blue and his body grew stiff, they kept the blood pumping to his vital organs and oxygen exchange occurring in his lungs. In the end, the state of unconsciousness became permanent.
I stood off to the side for most of this, as I lacked the skill level to be immediately helpful, only occasionally handing someone a tube or apparatus when asked. One of the EMTs who had been at the scene when the patient was found stood near me, searching the man’s wallet for some form of identification. In the wallet, he found a hand-written business card which had apparently been prepared by the dying man in anticipation of exactly this situation. Although I can’t recall exactly what it said, it read something like this:

Do Not Resuscitate

Do Not Intubate

Any attempt made to revive to life the person holding this card will be met with legal action and will be sued to the fullest extent of the law.

        There was also a lawyer’s office and contact information listed. Whether the lawyer or the address was valid I never found out. What I do know is that this homemade disclaimer was ineffective and, contrary to its demands, every effort, including resuscitation and intubation, was used to preserve the man’s life. I was thankful when the doctor finally called off the efforts and a time of death was declared.
        What I didn’t say earlier was the man’s age, which was somewhere in the eighties, and why he was in the ER in the first place. He was found breathing his car’s exhaust in an empty lot in an attempt to kill himself. He’d left a carefully lettered note resting on his expiring breast asking anyone who found him to please leave him the fuck alone and let him die.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Death, in our society, is to be feared, fought, struggled with. It is quite barbaric. It is also quite stupid when your consider the inevitability of the event. Quite stupid, yes, but simultaneously noble.

        I have failed to develop my theories on suicide here. They may be more appropriate for another topic, but are essential, at least in part, to the understanding of death. I personally think of suicide any number of times a day or week, but in the same way that I dream of writing a genius novel or leaving my quotidian life in search of some hermetic nirvana. They are dreams to bring me to the other side of the anger, depression, pain and fear of life.

To: Owl

From:Jimothy

Your last paragraph sent chills down my spine, because it is exactly how I employ the idea myself. There is an exit door at all times and I am in control of whether or not I wish to pass through. I do not think life represents order, I think life is a chaos unto itself, life is the origin of chaos. Without life the universe remains balanced(although it will balance itself against the human life's decadence eventually). But it is possible to destroy our earth with our technology it is possible to use chaos to destroy the order of earth, this makes me believe that life is chaotic rather than orderly.
Order lies with the knowledge of death. The only real finish line, from which stems all our understandings of morality. Suicide seems like such a crude word and euthanasia sounds too euphemistic, but employment of the option of death is a powerful tool for thrusting oneself back in to life, as I think your last paragraph agrees. I will go back to my point on morality.
I did a little research in my health/insurance class on DNRs. For the most part they don't work there are multiple situations where people were prepared way ahead of time with actual legal documents and family members with power of attorney in the room. Paramedics are required by law as they see it to do everything possible to make a person live. They cannot debate about the legality of a document when there is no turning back if the argument turns out to not merit a DNR, because the patient will be dead.

Another interesting idea I came across was in Oregon's assisted suicide program. Individuals were given a lethal pill if they applied for assisted suicide. Many of the individuals never took the pill, but the vast majority said that it comforted them. That it gave them control at that point in life where control was to be lost. Not only the control that you and I find comforting that we can always choose to take the exit if we decide to, but control over their bowels and brains. They feared a loss of dignity and wouldn't even have the strength to kill themselves. The pill gave them back power over their own destiny.

I wanted to talk a second about my morality claim. This is a quote from John Locke that was quoted in a journal I'm reading (I have the entire journal from like 2000 to 2010, and i'm only at like 2002 or something, its called "Theory and Event"). Locke as the classical liberal(not the "liberal" that o'reilly/limbaugh rail against, but the liberalism of the US constitution[checks/balances] combined with free market economics[economic liberalism]). So Locke is all about toleration. Hes like we should tolerate everything and that way the government can decide what we can and cant tolerate. Obviously hes facing a world divided by religions and nationality(wars) and he believes that trade can reduce wars.

But there is one exception in the population that cannot be tolerated: "those are not to be tolerated who deny the being of God." "Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all."

In our discussion of money the idea taken for granted in Star Trek TNG is that “plenty” pervades rather than “scarcity”. And humans seek to do, simply because they desire to, not because they need to earn their next meal or find antibiotics for their kid. The morality of TNG seems atheist. Unlike the explorers from history who sought to spread Christianity and proto-capitalism, star trek explorers only seek knowledge and friendship. This may be a little too utopian, I think that there are evil things in all humans. Not that humans are basically good or evil, such a decision no matter what side it came down on would only justify evil. What makes humans good is the possibility of death, but death and its smaller degree variant "pain" are also the condition for evil. The times when humans are most noble and "good" are times of sacrifice. When individuals submit themselves to pain or death in order for another to live or be safe. Christianity is based around this archetype of nobility and self-sacrifice. Death seems to be almost a boon, not almost, it is. Without death there would be no possibility for good. There could be no evil, nobody could steal someone's meal or drive them out of their home if they need neither home nor meal.

I may be simplistic in this way but two ideas that I think are somewhat opposites that are interesting are "jouissance" and "schadenfreude". You know a little French. My font just changed cause I copy pasted that word, weak. jouissance is like a passing joy and schadenfreude is german for deriving joy from someone else's suffering. I feel like such a utopian, but I think that death opens the possibility of good. And therefore the possibility of reducing the degrees of unfreedom any individual or group faces. Death is the possibility for justice(never a pure justice, only steps towards a pure justice by reducing degrees of injustice, that can never fully attain "Justice" with a capital J). Without scarcity and without fear of death humans could live for the jouissance of knowledge and friendship like Picard's bad ass, instead of today's scarcity producing pervasive desire for schadenfreude.

So specifically, death for me is the possibility of morality, because I do not believe that if there is a God we can understand its laws. So effectively even if there is a God, we must function as atheists, because to believe we could understand a God's will is tantamount to proclaiming yourself a God. These individuals argue that there isn't death, that death is only a threshold to the next world, so many and so passionate, LIKE THEY'VE SEEN WHAT LIES BEYOND! I think Locke is stating the exact opposite of truth. Atheists are the only individuals with a possibility of acting (not morally) against immorality, because they accept death. People who believe in an after-life cannot possibly comprehend the value of life and therefore cannot work to protect it on earth. Suffering for many is expiation of sin, how can such an outlook lend itself to fighting immorality.

I think the main problem with my theory is that human morality being based on self-sacrifice and suffering for others(love), then where does that leave us after the sacrifice. After pontus pilate(is that right lol?) stabs a sacrifice, and we all perceive the action as immoral and the action of the sacrificed as moral. Where does that leave us next time? If self-sacrifice is moral and violence immoral, it leaves us in a self-fulfilling prophecy where those who wish to do good are killed by the evil. Is this how life is until the end of time? What I'm trying to get at without doing it, is why can't the people kill pontus pilate? To make sure he doesn't do it again? Obviously because “this is violence” is the answer, but what if he does it again and again. When can you use violence to stop violence? Or does that violence beget more violence? If we know death is not to be feared(as Atheists do) should we offer ourselves as sacrifices to protect the weak or should we offer ourselves as soldiers who fight evil?

To: Owl

From: JImothy

Two more ideas that I could wait until your response to introduce in to the conversation, but I think they're too cool too wait.
First of all I have to submit the subject to my three points of analysis which you kind of broke in to. "1. Locate the contradictory notion within the text of an idea that relies on a metaphysics of presence.
2. Examine how the idea "became" through a genealogical analysis of history (as we are all always in a process of becoming, never human being only human "becoming")
3. Examine how the word "became" through etymology"

1.I don't know if death necessarily relies on a metaphysics of presence. I suppose the argument would be "how do you know you're alive?" DeCartes "cogito ergo sum" doesn't work, thinking does not prove existence how do we not know a rock or tree thinks? So the metaphysics of presence that we rely on to understand death would be we ASSUME we are alive. lol Hard not to.
2.Number two is always too complicated, need shit tons of research. Death is something that was not socially constructed though, death is a cessation of life. When people no longer respirate and shit, they no longer exchange discourse with others: they are dead. But If we only really know death through the fact that the individual who is dead is removed from the interaction of humans, then death falls upon many political, ethnic, religious, etc. minorities WHILE THEY ARE STILL ALIVE! I suppose a genealogical understanding of death would look at the rituals that surround death and where they came from. One example that comes to mind is from the book "the myths of babylonia and assyria" by donald mackenzie. He talks about how assyria went through multiple periods where priests became too powerful and there were "revolutions". The priests controlled the death ritual and therefore controlled who got in to heaven, elysian fields, etc. whatever. So when they started charging more and more so the priests could do more blow and hookers(or the equivalent back then) people rose up. The taboo on killing priests or overpowering priests was broken by the threat of no afterlife...So in order to protect one part of their belief structure they violated another...
3. The word structure I'm not too interested in. I mean we both apparently know the greek word "thanatos" but I don't see its etymology in other words off the top of my head.

Ok the two ideas I wanted to talk about.
First is Zoe vs. bios (on the topic of greek words lol). These are from Giorgio Agamben's "State of Exception" in which he divides the world in to two types of life. His book explains that the exception of sovereignty is the norm, so the state is just choosing to let us live every day. In effect every state/government/territory is just one big concentration camp in which we are allowed to live at the whim of the sovereign. I couldn't find it in the book in my hand but found it on wikipedia: "bios(citizen) and zoe(homo sacer)" Essentially there are two types of life. There is the life of bios which is the citizen who participates in the state who has a political life(for lack of a better description). Zoe is the bare fact of existence, a respirating and shitting body. This type of life he shows is how the modern state treats its members as homo sacer (sacred human, before the word sacred meant what it means today). Homo Sacer in old timey days was able to be murdered legally, but not used in any type of sacrifice to the gods. Agamben says that the future holds a paradigm of universal Zoes or bare life.

THe second is Derrida's book "The gift of death" which I haven't read yet. But I believe it talks about mourning and how mourning shows whats best in humans. The book looks fucking incredible its sitting right in front of me, i'll let you know.

more later.
lookin forward to ur response

To: Jimothy

From: Owl

A quick note before I re-enter the discussion: I recently (about two or three months ago) attempted to increase my reading speed by following one of those speed reading books. It had a bunch of interesting skills that could be developed into a faster WPM, but I lost interest in the exercises and eventually had to return the book to the library. In light of our discussions, and the gaping hole left by too little research, I am contemplating giving it a go once more. END OF NOTE.

Now, I think that life is exactly what you claim. To believe, or assume, that you are alive, or more to the point, to have the ability to believe or assume you are alive is the essence of life. It is the conscious awareness of life, and thus the realization that this life will end in death, that defines life. I forget where I read this example, some eastern-based philosophical tract or another, which talked about living in the moment. It used a fish as an example of immortality. A fish, as the common thinking goes, cannot remember more than a second of its life. Every moment is full of stimuli and sensation which pushes any and all earlier experiences out of the mind. So, without a past nor the ability to project the future, a fish just "is" until the day that it isn't.

To: Jimothy

From: Owl

Sorry...didn't mean to send that out. I pressed a few wrong buttons in quick succession and all of a sudden I had unwillingly sent off that half-finished email.

Anyway, to continue...

A fish cannot comprehend death and in this way it never dies. It lives forever, infinite moment after infinite moment, until these moments cease.

This direction of thought brings me to another of my half-baked ideas that I pretend to live by, yet, simultaneously and contradictorily, haven't been able to fully develop into any real philosophy or values for daily living. The idea is that, at death, the world ends. Whatever we discuss, all we understand and fail to understand, depends on our existence and without the self to interpret it all, then all of it truly doesn't exist. So, either death is the end of the universe, or at the very least, death is the end of MY universe, which is the same thing for ME.

Life is so intrinsic on our ability to think that death as a personal and subjective phenomena cannot exist. We are unable to experience, think, or reflect on the death because it is this absence of these abilities that defines death. It is therefore impossible to comprehend death, it being beyond what is essentially and foundationally life.

Oh, man, I feel like I have a word on the tip of my tongue but I cannot quite express it. This idea of individual life and the entire universe as being connected at the basic and fundamental level is so appealing to me. And, yet, I know it to be untrue. I know my parents lived before I ever was, and I know the world, its ills and loves, will continue after me. But, there is no other way to see it: when I am gone, so will be the world.

To change streams...I want to argue about order and chaos. I adamantly believe that life is order, death chaos. I said:

So, it seems life is also something biological, captured in the fragile construction of cells, chemicals and organic compounds that enable life to exist and propagate. Death, then, would be the destruction, or entropy, of this ordered organic life.

You said:

Without life the universe remains balanced(although it will balance itself against the human life's decadence eventually). But it is possible to destroy our earth with our technology it is possible to use chaos to destroy the order of earth, this makes me believe that life is chaotic rather than orderly.

First of all, I want to define some terms. When I spoke of entropy, I used it in the colloquial sense of the word, that is: a movement towards disorder. There is another meaning for this word, which is more scientific and used, mainly by physicists, to describe a specific state of matter. In this more technical term, entropy is the complexity of a given system, or the number of possible combinations its individual pieces could form. Entropy, then, is discussed in terms of how much entropy a given system possesses. A single particle has little entropy because there are not many distinct ways this state could be different. A human body, with its trillions of cells and big-ass-number of atoms has an incredibly high entropy, the universe as a whole has mind-boggling entropy. The other part of this technical definition is that, in nature, everything always attempts to even out. For example, when you let fall of drop of dye into a glass of water, the tiny drop quickly diffuses and soon the whole glass is a similar light pink. This happens naturally. To hold back this tendency towards conformity takes energy. The human body is built cell by cell in near-perfect order, gaining entropy as it gains order. Vast amounts of energy are needed to maintain this order and keep the carbons and hydrogens from dispersing and evening themselves out. So in this view, buildings are unnatural. But so are trees and rivers, even planets and solar systems. Something, call it energy, is holding all of this together in a vast and pervasive order. Now, I have mixed to levels of understanding which you distinguished between, but which I think are bound together. Those being "nature" and "manmade" But, what I have argued, is that "manmade" and our terrestrial or solar systemic "nature" are both unnatural in a broader sense and that their unnatural order is a result of energy. Moving back to life and death, in life there is that inexplicable movement towards order, death, lack of energy, chaos, are all a move towards that natural state of complete equilibrium, where each and every particle in the universe is evenly spread across the infinite reaches of space. FUCK, I AM OUT OF TIME ON THE COMPUTER AND HOVE THOROUGHLY CONFUSED MYSELF. 'Till next time.

To: Owl

From: Jimothy

Ok, I need to make a quick response/clarification. It is a silly assumption of binary opposition between man and nature that has been disproved on so many levels that clouds the ground I stand on in this argument. I opposed man and nature and made the universe synonymous with human. Man and nature are one and the same intimately imbricated in their Heidegerran "worldliness". I can see clear faults in my argument, as there are exceptions, but I think that life more closely represents chaos than order. I think the entropy which is evident in my three cleavages of the cosmos: man, nature, universe (which are delineations that only cloud the point) is the evidence of chaos. Entropy to me is chaotic, whereas ZERO is order. In fact lets not call it the cosmos, lets call it the "big bang". To me the big bang was not an event, it is a noun. It is our cosmos, it was an event in which the huge balloon which is our cosmos was created(I won't say from nothing, because outside the big bang is a nothing much more profound than the word nothing can convey). Within the big bang nature and life are possibilities. Eventually though the Big Bang will either become so large the fabric of reality will simply tear or it will reach an apex and collapse back in on itself. Maybe to reopen again some time(does time exist outside the big bang?) in the future(does the future exist there? can "there" denote an area outside the big bang?). The point being eventually man, nature, and the universe will end. There will eventually be zero. The big bang's current iteration (if there has been or will be any others) will eventually achieve order by not existing...I didn't make any sense.

I think that your statement "The idea is that, at death, the world ends." is the antithesis of morality. It is solipsism, the closest approximation of opposite to the idea of empathy. I would advise you to reject this axiom in favor of what you were saying earlier which in philosophy is called immanence.
This is the dictionary.com definition but its not 100% accurate I think.

im·ma·nent

Show Spelled[im-uh-nuhnt]

–adjective

remaining within; indwelling; inherent.

Philosophy . (of a mental act) taking place within the mind of the subject and having no effect outside of it. Compare transeunt.

Theology . (of the Deity) indwelling the universe, time, etc. Compare transcendent ( def. 3 ) .

Origin:
1525–35; < Late Latin immanent- (stem of immanēns ), present participle of immanēre to stay in, equivalent to im- im-¹ + man ( ēre ) to stay + -ent- -ent; see remain

First of all it is not imminent, which is what people tell me is what I mean when I say it, because its a pretty obscure word. The first definition makes it seem like a synonym of intrinsic which literarily(lol thats not a word) makes sense, but philosophically does not. The second definition is complete bullshit and makes it seem like a synonym to what i was trying to provide an alternative for! solipsism! That shit is wrong. And the third definition makes it seem similar to transcendence which is exactly what it is developed in opposition to in philosophy! FUCK! ok so that definition was bad but allows me to draw a few lines around it and I can do a quick explanation here then I'm waiting for ur full response. This is similar to the way a fish lives as you were saying, it is somewhat post-modern and therefore resembles Zen in a few ways so may overlap with eastern ideas in that way as u mentioned. So Sartre was the recent big name in philosophy (and we'll say Thoreau/emerson). Sartre said that every individual is responsible for everything that happens in the world (in what is essentially a big interpretation of Heidegger). So morality lies in two transcendent values: universizability and reversizability (its been awhile since I researched this i'm probably spelling it wrong). Universizability is the question "if everyone else in the world took the action I'm taking would it be ok?" (simply put lol). Reversizability is the golden role "If someone else took this action (that i'm about to take) against me would it be ok?". So there are two simple UNIVERSAL and transcendent rules to live by in order to have a moral life. Thoreau and Emerson's philosophy is actually named Transcendentalism. So they are like late 1800s sartre is writing in the 40s(i think). Before this modern paradigm are the ancient equivalents. THe Kantian categorical imperative. Essentially philosophies of ethics and morality which are based on universality or transcendent values.

Immanence is developed as an alternative to transcendental/universal moralities. It is impossible for anyone to live an authentic life under Sartre (of course the whole world would die if we all lived like my fat united statesian ass) and (of course I would not be ok with being a slave making clothing and shoes, but I still buy clothes and shoes rather than go naked) and to accept responsibility for everything is tantamount to self-flagellation as Foucault said.

Here is a paradigmatic (and quite viscerally offensive) example of immanence producing a more morally defensible reaction than transcendence:

You are hired to be a chauffeur for a junior high field trip. You are traveling on a school bus full of children and 2 other adults who are sitting in front, you are in the back of the bus. At a stoplight a man boards the bus shoots both other adults, drops his weapon which is out of ammo, and proceeds to immediately start raping a child. You are dumbfounded at first but quickly realize that you are not hallucinating and remember that you have a loaded gun concealed on you and have already pulled it out instinctively. THe children are all ducking down in their seats and it is a clear shot at the man who does not notice you as he is deeply concentrated on his task. As you are about to level the gun and take the easy shot you realize that not only are you a christian, but it is illegal and immoral to kill. Having a clear universal moral compass has saved you from inauthenticity again as you holster your weapon trying to ignore the child's screams.

If the world ends when you die then others are not human like you, they are simulcra. They're GTA animations on a playstation.

GIVE ME MORE

To: Jimothy

From: Owl

Dear Professor Bean House,

I have been busy with work, moving, reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead, etc and those are my excuses for taking this long to respond.

Now, I must say that I like this idea of yours, this immanence, though I am still unclear what it means and what the implications of such a world view are. As you realized yourself after you had presented the three dictionary definitions, they are not really helpful in defining what immanence means on a philosophical level. It is good and right to define your terms using established institutions, but in much of what we discuss these established institutions are unable or unwilling to encompass what we are arguing and I would therefore deem them less than useful, in general.

However, by defining what it is not, e.g. universizability/reversizability, I began to grasp the main idea and I liked what I was hearing. Now, if I may jump ahead and discuss your final statement:

If the world ends when you die then others are not human like you, they are simulcra. They're GTA animations on a playstation.

This is not what I meant when I said that the world ends when I die, because what you have written implies that the world was dead the entire time I was alive and that I was never a part of an external reality. But I was. People were real, consequences were real. Pain, anger, love...all of the experiences were real. But, as a subjective being, inseparable in mind and body, when my body dies so does my mind. I guess you could argue that under this view, I would be OK with a nuclear detonation ending life at the very moment that I died. And I would be, as long as it was not I who brought about annihilation. If I died at the very moment of destruction, I would never know it. It would be the same thing if the world ends or if the world continues, for I will not longer exist.

However, this doesn't mean I am solipsistic while I am alive, because I choose not to live my life like that. I feel empathy and I feel hate and I act according to my mish-mash of morals that I have developed over my 28+ years. The fact that my death means "That's all folks" is an inconceivable inevitability and although rationally, with words and abstract ideas I can define that event, I find it impossible to accept it as long as I am alive and thinking. Until that day arrives, I am human and aware and I must do what I feel or have been raised to believe is right/good/copacetic.

And so, we arrive again at your term: immanence.

Your final HYPOTHETIC example confused me. Did the act of holstering one's gun because of arbitrary moral beliefs give an example of immanence. If so, I completely disagree with the philosophy. I believe that we are all responsible for both our actions and our lack there of, and the person who sits idly by as a child is savagely raped before his/her eyes, while simultaneously holding the clearcut ability to stop the pain, is a fiend. But, you have wallpapered over a moment of life, albeit a very specious and impossible moment, with an abstract and useless philosophical ideal. This misses the point. What I am trying to get at is that, maybe, life is, on a moment to moment basis, transcendent of philosophy. Fear, physical strength, a fleeting disposition one way or the other, would have more of an effect on how I acted than would any philosophy that I thought I possessed. So much of what we do is beyond our philosophy, beyond even our rational decision-making mind. It is, I think, this very fact that makes life such a funny, retarded romp.

I have some more to add about death, based on the readings I have been doing on Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, but Nick is wanting to smoke a bowl and I am feeling the urge myself. So, I will write again soon, with some of what I have gleaned from the yellowed pages of my Cambridge library edition of the Bardol Thosol. However, I'll leave you with the main issue I am having with the whole afterlife/reincarnation/heaven/hell problem. When we die, I know as if it were fact, that we are gone, baby, gone. I am unable to see it any other way. Which makes the entire book and others like it quite silly. But, it is still fun as a discussion of human consciousness/unconsciousness and our penchant for phantasy and art in our lives.

Peace brother,

To: Owl

From: Jimothy

My mouse has been broken and I have yet to get a new one so I can't like copy paste or navigate easily. Thusly i've been putting off my reply til i get a mouse, but I have decided to spend mouse money on other things.

What I mean by philosophy being behind everything is somewhat like the unconscious. It is not a set of morals as you seem to be constructing it, that is just one school of written and studied philosophy marked by a desire for universality. Philosophy is ontology, epistemology, and ethics. There are other marginal discourses but these are the big 3. We are always deciding our being by continuing to be, thusly not dying is ontology: philosophy is behind everything. We are always deciding what we know when we act or don't act, speak or not speak etc. thusly consciousness is epistemology: philosophy is behind everything. We have a name for an emotion called guilt and it comes in a million shades and we have words for all of them, we question whether we have done right we plan for doing right in the future, thusly living is an exercise in ethics: philosophy is behind everything.

There is nothing without philosophy, even thoughts within your own head are imbricated with philosophy before they are spoken. Just because there are not names for them and scholars have not written them out, they are philosophy.

I'm down for any topic.

To: Owl
From: Jimothy

Now that I have a mouse I can quote your words. Let me just add this response to the death discussion to respond to ur points and to make a point about philosophy that can only be made in the discussion of death.

You said: “Life is so intrinsic on our ability to think that death as a personal and subjective phenomena cannot exist. We are unable to experience, think, or reflect on the death because it is this absence of these abilities that defines death. It is therefore impossible to comprehend death, it being beyond what is essentially and foundationally life.”

This was very well stated and sums up the “radical otherness” of death. Which is one of the points I want to make about philosophy, specifically the dialectic.

You said: “ As you realized yourself after you had presented the three dictionary definitions, they are not really helpful in defining what immanence means on a philosophical level. It is good and right to define your terms using established institutions, but in much of what we discuss these established institutions are unable or unwilling to encompass what we are arguing and I would therefore deem them less than useful, in general.”

This statement reminded me of a thought I’ve been having A LOT recently. And when I read this paragraph the second time I misinterpreted it to think you were talking about philosophical terms rather than the dictionary definition. To which I was going to respond that all words are institutions. But dictionary definitions seem to be lacking recently when I look for meaning.

You said: “what you have written implies that the world was dead the entire time I was alive and that I was never a part of an external reality.”

I think this is a tenuous delineation though, because if there is any assumption in your brain that relies upon thinking of the world as dead after your death it would breed solipsism, even if you can’t even conclude you’ll be dead tomorrow.

As for the Tibetan Book of the Dead: it’s an allegory in my opinion. It makes death in to life in order to make it seem less alien. It makes death a journey in which you’re tripping balls the whole time. Sounds pretty much like life: a journey where nothing makes sense but certain things seem strangely significant (love, family, art, human touch, etc).

As for the point I felt was important to make on THIS subject concerning philosophy, I speak of the dialectic. The idea that ideas, history, etc. function dialectically. With a positing or “thesis”, followed by whatever disagrees or is in opposition to the thesis known as an “antithesis”. This inevitably results in a “synthesis” or aufheben or supralation or sublimation there are a hundred translations and phonetic arrangements of the idea.

So lets take a classic political science idea of the “state of nature” Hobbes says that before the state it was a war of all against all.

Thesis: War of all against all

Antithesis: Violence/conquering. growth of the strong/domination of the weak

Synthesis: The State. This synthesis is thusly a feature of history henceforth. It seen as a neutral and normal thing to have the weak dominated by the strong with violence.

Thusly that synthesis is a new THESIS!

Thesis: The state is the only agent of justified violence.

Antithesis: states that go too far

Synthesis: revolution of who is in control of the state apparatus.

Omg that synthesis is a new thesis!

Thesis: The state is the only agent of justified violence, because of its seizure of the state apparatus.

Antithesis: State goes too far

Synthesis: Revolution of who is in control of the state apparatus.

This is one specific examination which ignores a trillion other dialectics happening simultaneously, but it is a simple one to understand that the dialectic can explain everything because it takes TIME(as the condition for anything to be possible) in to account and it takes IDEAs(as the currency of the human mind) in to account, as well as allows for infinite iteration.

The problem with the dialectic is its so fucking radical. Things are either thesis or antithesis in every episteme. Once a paradigm shift occurs and a synthesis has become the new thesis(which can happen a billion times in a day, but not to big firmly established ideas).

Life and death are the hardest thesis/antithesis pair, because there is no ground for synthesis. But it is also the greatest way to understand how radically different thesis and antithesis are.

In my current understanding of what is effective resistance to immorality number one is to know the dialectic and instead of ever cheering for the winner, always be a dissident. If a paradigm shift occurs the new synthesis is not a victory, it is the new enemy.

Many philosophies are based on claims that certain subjects have had their dialectic play frozen and a thesis has become congealed and won’t flip over.

The dialectic is also sometimes seen as similar to the Socratic method.

I think its super helpful for understanding big ideas that go through large chunks of time. Like Marx used an ideal dialectic which claimed that capitalism will destroy itself because of surplus value.

The antithesis to this arrived in the form of marketing as Pierre Bourdieu states. Surplus value pays for more marketing in order to get us to buy the shit we don’t need. Its easier to notice changes in the dialectic if you have perspective looking farther back in history. Or maybe the antithesis was distraction/delirium as Guy DeBord writes, that we are distracted from the fissures on purpose by the media. But both agree that the next synthesis after marx’s identification of surplus value as the internal contradiction has to do with media/marketing which are both encompassed by the phrase: mental environments

It is much harder to establish the Theses and potential synetheses of today, because of myopia and lack of historical intel to see patterns in. But the words for the current thesis pervade: episteme, paradigm, millieux, etc. It is that thing that we accept as neutral that is here because of a succession of dialectic.

Maybe Zizek is right that after capitalism created a new capitalism in order to avoid the pitfalls identified by Marx, it stumbled in to new pitfalls which DeBord and Bourdieu are best at identifying, and then created a new capitalism to overcome that, and the main thrust of this latest synthesis is based on making people experience chemical rewards for consumption. Making people feel they are altruistic for consuming, or that they are saving the environment by consuming, or that they are contributing to fair labor practices by consuming. Just look at your Starbucks cup as Zizek says or as Derrick Jensen says just look around you, look at all the unsustainable shit that is telling you that to purchase it will save the world from environmental degradation.

Ok end rambling, back to current topic.

Dialogue with Owl One: Money

2011-05-14T23:01:00.001-05:00

Upon the suggestion of the erudite and linguistically talented Owl we will be corresponding on set subjects. I will post these rambling diatribes here for posterity.

4/30/11
From: Jimothy
To: Owl
"money is cool I'm only human/but they use it as a tool to make the workers feel excluded/like the shiner the jewel the more exclusive the truth is/bullets don't take bribes stupid they shoot shit"-Aesop[Rock]
First of all as to age it is very true we are probably getting weaker at this point physically, but we can still level up with our intellects for many years to come. Which is why I am very excited about this idea.

I have been thinking about this subject for a couple days and really didn't come up with any meat and potatoes, only that aesop quote. So I feel like I haven't been able to discourse face to face in a long time with you and I want to kind of lay groundwork. Although I feel orthodoxy is the true evil in this world I think that I have found some things which are universal to either the human condition or reality. I feel that Derrida's "Metaphysics of presence" or Lacan's "lack in the big Other" are a universal aspect of humanity. We create illusions of presence, truth, authenticity, etc. We create subordinated and privileged ideas and identities through our discourse.
One example of this illusion of presence, truth, or authenticity is the (re)production of history. Humans must believe history to be truth in some respect, especially their own memories(Or how they reckon they felt about something in the past. Those are two ideas that I just want you to be aware of and I have a third to continue to bore you off topic: semiotics. Symbolism or specifically the lack of universal meaning in any symbol or system of symbols. Because the meaning of these symbols is recreated through our use of these symbols on and on in to the future. So another Derridean concept that I am finding very helpful in understanding reality is "differance" which is two ideas smashed in to one word.
The first idea is that we can only know something, by what it is not. So it is a model of our consciousness based on negativity essentially, which corresponds to how philosophy treats "the other" (or people outside the self). We perform selves to be "different" than the other and only know our "selves" by performing this difference.
The second part of "differance" is that meaning is never fully grasped, meaning is always deferred in a million different ways. We defer meaning until the end of a word, end of a sentence, end of a paragraph, end of a book, end of a semester, etc. This is one reason I am having so much trouble with my big text is because after locating the idea historically the idea(or the word which signified the idea) began to change.
In conclusion to my long introductory paragraph on methodology I just want to say that I think the best way to determine "meaning" is to
1. Locate the contradictory notion within the text of an idea that relies on a metaphysics of presence.
2. Examine how the idea "became" through a genealogical analysis of history (as we are all always in a process of becoming, never human being only human "becoming")
3. Examine how the word "became" through etymology

2 and 3 can be accomplished with a justifiable amount of certainty through shit tons of research, number 1 is really fucking hard to do. So if these are my established heuristics for accessing ideas and "reality" then let me give it a whirl without any research.

I mean fuck, I can start anywhere and its all interesting shit that I want to think about and write and read. Lemme get a pinner going.

Ok i'm gonna have to do a little research
I"m gonna start with number 2, I think number three is kinda stupid for this subject and number 1 is actually too easy on this subject. I mean money IS number one. It is a piece of paper which is said to be the presence of value even though it cannot be eaten, cannot keep you warm, and cannot cure sickness. It is evidence of the metaphysics of presence because our entire society functions BECAUSE we all continue to believe in money's substitution for value.
THe research I wanted to do is I know there is a specific discipline which studies coinage or the origins of money,I almost ruined the whole point by reading some wikipedia about money but I found it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numismatics
ok but no research, fuck numismatics. One book that I loved that I read was Gerda Lerner's "THe Creation of Patriarchy" I"ve probably told you about the ideas it had about sovereignty. I feel like I should start the whole Email over, sorry I'm a rambler, but I think I can focus in now.
I mean money is a representation of value, thats above, so what is important is the value I guess? I mean I could say what everybody already knows but doesn't care that money literally isn't backed by anything. THat paper money at one point could be exchanged for gold, but is now just kind of an investment in a country...which means a bet on the confidence of people who hold the most of the not backed by anything pieces of paper.
But that was above that was the illusion of presence, but I don't think that this is something that only manifests with what we regard as capitalism, unless we regard capitalism as a system based on property. In which case we can consider virtually all post-agrarian societies capitalist and many agrarian societies capitalist. So then the function of money is to represent or stand in for property we can disregard its specific character(the metaphysics of presence above) for this train of logic and just understand money as one category of things representing value. So money is then interchangeable with labor and property(even cultural capital). So Money is a symptom of property or an inevitable structural aspect of a property based system.
Lerner's book explains the origins of property. So lets start with a theoretical background. If there is such a thing that is positively identified as "property" this therefore means that property is something that was not always positively identified and known as "property". So there was a point in time in which there was not property. Not in any specific place but in every locality in the world. Lerner theorizes that property becomes positively identified because of knowledge of biology. As it became necessary to work fields in order not to starve societies in a transition from these hunter-gatherer societies to agrarian societies needed more people. At the point that woman's reproductive capacity was identified the necessity of owning women became apparent. At this point the woman and child slave became the norm. As that became the norm the slave in general became accepted. We can also see the origins of "war" in this narrative as localities or tribes would raid other localities to obtain their slaves. I find this narrative very convincing and the book does a great genealogy of assyrian law and old testament law. The origins of money, which is property lies in the commodification of other humans. The violence against individuals and the theft of free will that slavery entails is at the very heart of this shit in my wallet, but....it IS my wallet as well. HOLY SHIT its my brain also, nobody else owns it! It is in the assumption my sentence on free will relies upon! I can't even think without recourse to property as a meme!
So is there an alternative? I mean all I'm doing is bitching if I don't have an alternative. I guess democratic socialism is the best I got or maybe thats a glorified fashionable term and I should just say the alternative is: politics. And by that I mean using the power of the state(which is an inevitability) to protect the welfare of the citizens. This can manifest itself as making fun of people who think a market free from government intervention is even a possibility, protesting against stupid wars which just create terrorists, writing a letter to the editor in favor of legislation which makes health care more affordable and sustainable, etc.
Money is reducible to property, I think a society without money is possible in history they're called barter economies, but money is just a symptom of property eliminating money would do absolutely nothing to solve the harms which can be attributed to money. If property had an origin there must be a way to eliminate it, but it seems that property is so far back through these millions of layers of dialectic that it is not possible at this point. In order to make property "good" we would have to come to terms with all these heuristics of presence or of privileging identities that were built on the last new norm(like the transition from female/child slave to slaves of all ages and gender). In fact I think that the way in which to solve for the social harms of property is to deconstruct these bullshits one by one: gender, class, race, sexual orientation, age, nationality, religion, ethnicity, and just about every other category we put people in so we can think easy. The process whereby people realize that the privileged identities in each of these subjects are no more secure than the subordinated identities. This seeking of presence that we look for in masculinity, whiteness, wealth, heterosexuality, americaness or whatever identities are performed in your neck of the woods is the problem. Instead of relying on a presence which we think we know, we should understand that presence can never fully be arrived at, only deferred. But most people in the world don't want to know things, they don't want to know where they came from(not nationality) I mean where humanity came from and our ideas came from. Now i'm the old man and a really arrogant old man, but I don't mean to say I'm any better. TV and identity performance often convince me to act stupid, stupidity is glorified; constructed as a privileged identity of security.

I think one more aspect of property/money is how property became property is quite different from today's property. Property back then was probably the one with the most power owned everything and shared enough to keep the others from banding together to take him out. But the female slave was property, because nobody had the power to say otherwise. Property was clearly overlapped with violence. TOday Property necessarily presupposes a government or state which portends to be an objective arbiter in any property dispute. ok well, i just though of eminient domain, maybe nothing has changed. If eminent domain exists then all land/property is on loan from the government much like the neolithic despotism i was just talking about. Despite this exception my point is that the government is the agent of the violence to repossess something in a dispute, but does not take it for itself. Today one only considers property in reference to the state that protects it, property is something that you can sue for if it is unfairly broken or stolen. The house is only yours as long as the government says so. Money is a good example of the physical manifestation of the bridge between state and property, in fact it has traditionally been a way to cement political support. Issuing a coin was a way to kind of claim to be king I forget where I read this, but it was because assyria or rome or something had coins so others started making it in order to say they were king. Might have been clovis or something. So maybe money is just the symbol a king gives to people that represents that all property belongs to him and shit your life does too because whos gonna arrest him for killing you.
I think i've written too much, sorry for rambling, i'll just end here lol. lookin forward to ur response

From: Owl
To: Jimothy

“The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century.”

-Captain John-Luc Picard

I have never watched this movie, but the quote is apt in its de-contextualized form as a starting point for my argument. And also, before I begin, it should be said that I had a great start on this typing earlier in the week, when suddenly my broke-ass, third-hand laptop switched off and stayed off. So, this is a second attempt and might lose some creative flair in its redundancy.

I believe, through this quote, that the writers of Star Trek are revealing a subtle clue about the true identity of the humans aboard the Starship USS Enterprise. That being that those aboard the future craft who claim the title of H. sapien are anything but human in nature and solely on the basis of this quote and the fact that their society has no need for money, I diagnosis Picard, Riker and the rest inhuman.

I call on my misty and fractional understanding of Nietzsche and his argument for the Will to Power. As humans, or defined in a more meaningful way, as intelligent creatures, we are, at our core, motivated by a struggle for power. Power, as your obsession with semiotics should inform you, is not a clearly definable noun and is objective in its application. But, that is one of the clear benefits of money, in that it contains within it nearly every individual’s idea of power in its universality. It is also the main reason why money must exist if the human species is also to exist, because if ever money wasn’t needed, if ever people worked, endeavored or even got out of bed for the lofty purposes of self-improvement, personal satisfaction, or communal humanism rather than power, we would no longer be human.

Don’t give me any specific examples of some bull-shit monk who lives day to day on beggar’s scraps and owns no worldly possessions. This behavior is in conscious rejection of the ubiquitous fact of money. Given a society made up entirely of these hermetic monks, money would necessarily arise in some form or another.

I have only read the first half of your piece. I was trying to wait until I’d finished mine before I read any of it, but I was sitting around at work and had a printout in hand and couldn’t help myself. Before I stopped reading, I saw your three main points of interest/interrogation. The one regarding history would be interesting to research and would provide more substantial evidence of what I am about to say, or, conversely, prove me completely wrong, but in either case: I believe that money is an intrinsic aspect of humanity.

Furthermore, I do not believe that this is a social evolutionary phenomenon. To live without money would require a foundational, DNA-based genetic change. The color of money is cultural. Which dead guy’s face is printed on the bill, how you carry and save and spend that bill, all this is cultural. The money is part of humanity.

I am having difficulty making a clear, logical argument for this claim. In part, like so many other aspects of humanity, money is here and has been for ages, so this fact in itself proves my point. Did money exists back at the dawn of man? Maybe not, but this prehistoric being was not the same species as we are today.

Maybe money needed civilization in order to be effective...

Shit. I’ve lost my flow. But this has been a good start.

From: Owl

To: Jimothy

5/11/11

Date: Wed, 11 May 2011 00:53:22 -0400
Subject: Re: Proposal

So, this guy comes in to the ER for detox. He'd been snorting heroin every night for months, some how decided he should stop, and at the time I spoke with him, he claimed to have been sober for 11 days. He was in his early 60s and seemed to be more or less with it. I asked him at some point in our conversation how much the heroin had cost him. A bag was 50 bucks he told me. So I asked him what quantity "one bag" would be and he didn't really know the answer. He could describe it only by how long it would last him and by how much it would fuck him up. After he'd developed a tolerance, a bag would just be enough to put him out until the morrow. So, he'd spent five grand on heroin in about 100 nights. $5,000 to anaesthetize life for 1/3 of a year. Chew on that...mmmmmmmmmm.

One main issue I found in writing my little tra-la-la on money was the lack of research I had on the subject. I felt that sending you my preconceived notions, my biases and uneducated, inexperienced hunches was not worth the bits of RAM they'd require. Of course, that is exactly what I did, because I had nothing fact-based or quantitative to say. Now, as I write this, I can't see how that should be a problem; a subjective truth about money could be worth writing and reading/ But, no, real knowledge is in things objective, not the mystical esoteric understanding that only the individual can experience. Anyway, all this conspired to steal my inspiration and I found that writing what measly paragraphs I was able to paste together was very difficult. Maybe we need a new subject.

But, first... "lemme get a pinner going"

I agree with your approach in going back to the beginnings to try and find some clues to our question. But, I disagree with the interpretation. To look back at a time when, as you reference Lerner mentioning, property "was not", is to look back at a time eons before any history exists. Now, was this time before or after or during our evolution into human beings...ahem, pardon me, human becomings? To have language and to be able to manufacture such ideas as property is intrinsic in what we could all agree constitutes a human. Whether or not this ability to understand precludes the advent of a monetary system, or even the evolution of language, is hard to say. The latter would be a sort of Adam and Eve hunter/gatherer paradise, where fully developed, communicating human becomings lived in a edenic confines where the natural resources were plentiful enough not to warrant the words "mine" and "yours". However, in my opinion, this would also demand a perfect 50/50 man to woman ratio, a personal knowledge or naive trust in everyone you met, as well as a number of other similar impossibilities. By arguing that the moment property became a firm idea or an expressable thought defines also the moment property came into existence is wrong. So there is no definite line when humans became...there is only just a long line of past events stretching off into infinity, seen darkly if at all. Property exists in the animal kingdom; property exist where ever these is the struggle to survive.

Now, going back to what I wrote before, or tried to express, I can be sum it up in the following question: Can society, as we know it and understand it to be intrinsically human, ever exist without a form of money? This question encompasses the past that we have been mucking our way through. It also demands all that psychological b.s. about human nature, as well as the greater sociological questions about the nature of humankind. It encompasses the question of what is money and what roll it plays in our lives. It also encompasses the present and future as well.

Hmm...let's leave that and look at one of your sentences I underlined: Money is a good example of the physical manifestation of the bridge between state and property. This is dope and here's why I think that. I defined money as physical, which is an extremely important idea. Taken further, money is physical and yet totally without value in the physical world...kindling and TP are the only possible exceptions. But it is not the adjective that matters, it is the noun: manifestation. Money embodies whatever the state is in relation to whatever it is money can buy. Money can buy property, and its disturbing connection to the state is clear in you example of eminent domain. But it does not stop at property. If we see eminent domain as a symptom of the all-powerful state, the meaning of money becomes larger. And so, I put to you that money is not so much a representation of property. I would argue that money is the representation of power.

New topic...do you want to choose? If so, let me know what it is. If not, then we can use my idea which is encoded below:

-Q S A A C Q Q

(add three letters in alphabetical order from each character to decode the topic)

From: Jimothy

To: Owl

5/11/11

I do think your quote needs to be contextualized a bit. This guy Carl G. Hempel says that things can never be fully explained (well he stops short of saying the same thing about the natural sciences unfortunately[but about the social sciences, things can never be fully explained)]. I've already woven myself in to some writing trap trying to fit ideas in there. But there can be "explanatory sketches" that can be "filled out". I so I would like to give a rudimentary sketch of your quote from Picard. Picard's world is different in only ONE way from ours. In the star trek universe they have invented the "warp drive", which is just the name for a source of infinite, renewable, and non-pollution producing energy. That very simply put is the end of money. A post-money world. This is a good provisional context for Picard's quote. Beyond that there are still numerous problems with violence or the show wouldn't be fun.

As to your diagnosis of the denizens of the Enterprise and the star trek universe, I think you may be close if you look to the philosopher you name in the next paragraph. Nietzsche also thought of man as the middle-ground between simian and ubermensch(superman). His invocation of the will to power stems from a critical outlook on institutions. Humans were not being themselves...I'm saying it wrong, but humans were ceding their free will(will to power) to others and to machines(institutions). Nietzsche would most likely diagnose Picard similarly, but differently. "Inhuman" is a cold dehumanizing(lol redundancy) word, Nietzsche would call them Ubermensch I think.

Your statement "money...contains within it nearly every individual’s idea of power in its universality." I think may be a little too strong. If we can imagine a world without money and simple way to get there(energy) this is good evidence that power can exist in a post-money world. I think my argument for a pre-money world falls short. I am thinking about it like this: electricity was not invented it was discovered, same for penicillin, and same for all medicine. These things already existed but eventually were discovered by humans. At one point in time there was not money, we know from history there was a barter system(which is such an expansive term). But even before that there was a time before humans realized the value of things: how to use tools. Well most non-human animals use tools, but they use pieces of their environment. A chimp does not carry around his favorite long grass blade that he likes to lick and stick in the termite mound for a quick snack. These tools cannot be considered akin to property or money for bartering. Although your example of the monkeys who were conditioned with using money to buy food, then stole all the money not realizing they had noone to buy from if they stole from their vendors. Is money becoming too amorphous if we say it has always existed (In the form of value, like valuing the life of your family, valuing game in hunting, or valuing the crop harvest)? I think those left out by the statement "nearly every" are actually quite numerous. Power to the victims of rape is clearly not money, I use the most obvious example, but I think we could say the same about any victim of violence or even perpetrators of violence. Especially people who can enact justified violence(violence they can get away with) like police, soldiers, abusive husbands,priests, etc. their power derives from the threat of violence not from their wealth.

Your sentence: "if ever people worked, endeavored or even got out of bed for the lofty purposes of self-improvement, personal satisfaction, or communal humanism rather than power, we would no longer be human." I think I agree with you and I think Nietzsche would agree with you. You are demarcating a threshold between man and ubermensch. It does not make what you say impossible for humans, it just means the circumstances need to be right and humans need to level up.

Your cynicism of humanity can be coupled with hope for the future. Just because humans cannot reach that point where they can live in a post-money world does not mean that humans can' t level up once the circumstances are right. Although there is no such thing as freedom, sometimes it is very easy to see degrees of unfreedom. I think many places on the globe have managed to get a few degrees closer to the unreachable horizon of freedom. But technology and mass production of human minds has made unfreedom all the more insidious over the years. It is hard to clearly see without perspective, like looking back at a time long ago or looking at a culture in present day completely different than your own, but using its epistemology as a mirror of your own culture.

"Furthermore, I do not believe that this is a social evolutionary phenomenom. To live without money would require a foundational, DNA-based genetic change."
I don't necessarily think we need genetic conditioning. I think DNA is given too much credit, soon it will be neuroscience that is given too much credit. The milieu of our culture is certainly what constructs a meaning for money, there is no ingrained meaning for money in our DNA.

What you are doing is exploding the metonym of "money". If money is also "anything people have value in" then of course there will never be a post-money or pre-money world for humans. Which follows our hermeneutic circle right back to semiotics. We need provisional or operational definitions to draw clear lines around "money".

On to your second part!
To spend so much money in order to sleep is so crazy to me. I don't wanna join the idiots and put people in cages who do the shit, but what a useless fucking drug. If you are going to be dealing with these people you should know its a revolving door. You met *, well she would have frequent hospital visits for multiple days. She was a full blown "drink a shitton when you wake up" alcoholic and was just recently charged with felony possession of heroin. I am pretty sure she applies for financial aid to go to the hospital in order to have shelter and get opiates. I think a lot of junkies spend a lot of time in hospitals chasing endorphins after they have killed their ability to feel them.

" I would argue that money is the representation of power." I think I would agree that money is ONE representation of power. I think violence is a much more naked manifestation(manifested in a violent act) of power. I think you may be right that humans cannot be free of money, but maybe a new human can be when the circumstances are in his/her favor. I think energy is the only thing to make this possible. Although that seems utopian it is the number one threat to human existence, because of the obvious degradation of the earth and dwindling energy supplies.

Osama Bin Laden Killed

2011-05-01T22:49:00.002-05:00

I have to give my thoughts on an event of this magnitude.
My first reaction is to the news already painting Al Qaeda as more dangerous without Osama. This rebranding is an effort to manufacture consent for the continued occupation(we all know the deadline is bullshit and will continue to be pushed forward). Although there is a new martyr for maximalist violence, this should be the complete destruction of Al Qaeda. This is because Al Qaeda was simply the merging of Zawahiri and Bin Laden's respective groups. This group in its original announcements called themselves the "united front for jihad against zionists and crusaders" calling for withdrawal of US forces from Saudi Arabia. Later including us support for Israel in Palestine as part of their grievance.A loss of one of their two top leaders(the one responsible for fundraising) will be devastating.

The second impression i get is the fact that this is being painted as justice. This is a strong precedent for murdering criminals rather than giving them trials. It is not justice to kill criminals. This is the longest war in us history and we can't capture the criminal?

I hope that this leads to a quick withdrawal of our troops and I think that Obama's speech made some appealing arguments that the war on terror is not a war against Islam. But is this just an effort to modulate distress while the occupation of sovereign countries which are predominately Muslim continues?

Now finally I am curious about the operation. Was this a small arms assassination or a drone strike? How was the kill confirmed? DNA photos?

Hopefully more information will come out about exactly how we know it was Bin Laden: do you remember when the Saddam sons were killed? Will there be front page spreads of OBL's body tomorrow?

I won't celebrate murder no matter how evil the victim, this is the same way I feel about the death penalty. Even more so in this situation though: I will not celebrate the execution of a suspect without a fucking trial.

We learned nothing from 9/11.

Ikebana Boat by the Owl

2011-04-17T22:27:00.001-05:00

This poem was inspired by a MFA exhibit of the works of the monocular Fagin of the glass art world, Chihuly. The art was titled, "Ikebana Boat," thusly, the poem is eponymous. Might add some more, but I think the brevity is one of its most alluring assets. Google search images for Ikebana Boat for a number of pale imitations.

unfinished fragment on violence

2011-04-15T16:24:00.006-05:00

The thought that deserves being written: violence as abnormal, but the reproduction of the narratives that justify or make sense of the event expose a hierarchy of corpses.

Sometimes I will read an old blog, see a reference to something from current events that I don't even label and don't remember what I was talking about.I am referring in this blog to the multiple homicide and attempted assassination of a congresswoman that took place in Arizona.

I would first like to point out that when these acts of violence take place they are recognized almost universally as heinous and punishable. As I have stated earlier weapons to take life have become more effective at taking life over time and this trend will continue. One cost of free will is that some others will choose to use that free will to end the free will of others with violence. My criticism is located on the borders of this area where certain acts of violence are placed as universally an evil or heinous act. Certain acts of violence are not in this frame. The bombing of a wedding in Afghanistan pushed on these borders, but was not even close to reaching this zone of universal immorality and revulsion. The 500,000 deaths in Iraq between 1991 and the latest invasion because of our destruction of the electricity and water supply as well as the average once a week raids are hardly close to being seen as bad.

Since creating this blog and not finishing it another flare up in the media concerning drones took place because Pakistan is finally standing up to the country which is regularly bombing them: the United States.

Facts:
Lets step back and look at the picture here.
1.Pakistan is a country.
2.The United States is a country.
3.Both have populations they should keep happy to avoid violent uprising(lets just assume this provisionally because it is very statist and in a way justifies violence against citizens in order to "stabilize" the state[violent uprising might be good sometimes]).
4.The US has established a firm pattern of bombing Pakistan
5. Dropping bombs on Pakistan will lead to killing Pakistanis.

6.Lets look within the state/country now. Heuristic structures we can cling to in order to make this journey inside the bowels of the state quick are: families, religions, and economy. The first is a simple exercise: if one of your family members was killed by a US operated drone how would your attitude towards the US change? The second: how would you feel if a member of your local or national religious community was killed by a US operated drone...how would your attitude towards the US change? And if your resources, business, tools/machines...you know your livelihood, was destroyed by a US operated drone, etc. etc.
I'm going to say that the attitude of the person who has had their families, religion, or economy hurt by US operated drones will experience an attitude shift towards the United States. I am not claiming all people in this situation will experience a dramatic shift towards ~~"anti-americanism"~~ but there will certainly be some shift towards distaste with the United States. So this sixth fact of our train of logic is that US killing of Pakistanis will cause a net attitude shift towards disliking the United States by people in Pakistan.

Future World

If our current world is based on finding security within state institutions(which it is for the sake of this train of logic because we have to stay within the confines of our provisional fact number 3) then the people of Pakistan will look to their government to protect them from the drone terrorism. The Pakistani government will be put in a double bind, either they can (ONE) keep eating shit from the US and reap huge benefits from their benefactorship . OR (TWO)Pakistan can really push hard for ending drone strikes by rejecting aid from the US and refusing to cooperate with intelligence.

If the future continues along the same trajectory we will see one of these two outcomes in Pakistan.

The first outcome will make it far more likely that we will see a revolution in Pakistan. The drones constant killing of civilians is a propaganda tool for violent groups. Violent actions and actions against the government will become more widespread in this future Pakistan. Pakistan will be forced to adopt a Saudi style balance between US patronage and hardcore repression. Thusly the US will be propping up another dictatorship. Or Pakistan will not strike a balance and be taken over by extremist elements...the thing is Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal.

In the second outcome Pakistan may be able to keep its population's support, but may be making an enemy of the US. Which means they just have to hire a few more gamers to fly a few more drones and the Pakistani body count will get higher. Or worse yet Pakistan becomes the new place to occupy for the war on terror. One reason the US has had such tight relations with Pakistan over the years is intelligence and halting cooperation might be one of the only cards Pakistan can play.

My advice: Pakistan should tell the United States that next time they drop a bomb on Pakistan that they're going to receive a nuclear warhead to the face. Then hopefully they will back off, because Pakistan is a nuclear power and can kill everyone if it feels like it.

What will happen- Pakistan and the US have a shared enemy: the radicals that are using the drones as a recruiting tool, sooooooo Pakistan will most likely just call the US and say:

"AIM BETTER!.....please?"

At least we can all clearly see that this US policy creates terrorists, which is a valuable lesson that can be applied back to such events as 9/11. And without going in to such a huge topic exposes the hypocrisy of labeling political agendas as "anti-american".

Axioms in Epistemology

2011-02-07T15:03:00.001-06:00

I have been trying to figure out my own blindsides. As in trying to ascertain where the holes in my critical epistemology lie. The places inevitably that will lie the most effectively are the ones that I think are not lies, but truths. I would like to explicate what I faithfully believe as truth at this snapshot point in my being/becoming.

1. Pain is real and every living thing experiences pain.
Although You will never experience My pain and I will never experience Your pain, our pain is real. Suffering CAN be worse than death: life as torture is not a life worth living. Although such a belief can lead to an extreme of solipsism on the one end or an extreme of utilitarianism on the other, the reality of pain and pain residing in reality is an important element of making morally justified decisions in life. This assumption about reality is very important for understanding empathy and agency.

2. Death is real and every living thing dies.
Although nobody has died and lived to tell about it, we can safely assume that the corpses are not all pretending. No matter your religion we can all agree that "death" is an event that happens at the end of one's life when whatever a person was (apart from their fleshy shell) exits this reality. Some people think this consciousness is a soul which will be assigned a specific home, a single unchanging role to play in an "after-life". The point being that this life is only a temporary place for our consciousness whether you are a religious person or not. This exiting consciousness and vacant fleshy shell is real and inevitable. In fact believing otherwise leads to ridiculous narcissism and political action to control random events. Immortality is impossible in this world death could be around any corner, and as blind Oedipus would tell you: trying to escape the inevitable just exacerbates the problem. Although there is much traffic regulation motor vehicles are still a top killer, although there are endless ways that have been shown to increase the probability of not dying from heart disease it is still a top killer, and although there is endless credible evidence linking health problems with smoking the activity still continues. Death is something often cognitively deferred and is therefore not as ubiquitous in human's motivation for action as suffering or empathy for a sufferer.To borrow an already loaded phrase and employ it differently: "the sanctity of life" is another important baseline assumption for moral decisionmaking. When evaluating this sanctity one must reject the idea that any life outside of our current life is more valuable than our current life. By current life I mean the de facto life you are living demonstrated as life through consciousness and actions in this world or this here-and-now. Dying this life for a life that cannot be demonstrated as real is pure folly. This idea is what my assumptions about the sanctity of life have arisen out of.

3. History is real. History explains reality better than simply sensing it.

History is real in multiple ways the two I would like to draw out are: History is real insofar as the narrative we (re)produce is viewed as the true story of our past and History is real insofar as our past restrains us because we are on a certain historical trajectory. It is not possible to colonize space next week or next year in our current historical trajectory. It is not possible to stop the over consumption of carbon based energy in the next week or year in our current historical trajectory. History is then something that makes the future possible in the latter definition. The former definition that our (re)production is viewed as a true story is a necessary pre-requisite for any other analysis of history. Because one is always (re)producing history in their present actions/inactions then this history must be viewed as real by the people (re)producing it.

For even if we forget that we have had a history (which our memory forbids) for example we were all struck with simultaneous amnesia, this event of forgetting would be the defining moment of our history and our successive present(s) from then on. We would excavate the buildings we now live in and stare curiously at complicated machinery. Writing down incorrect assessments of the artifacts as we allowed such assessments to discipline how people lived their lives in this alternate present.. In this extreme example our forgetting of the past would be central TO our past in such a situation where history CAN be forgotten.To forget history would be an infinite amnesia, an end to self, and an end to homo sapien.

Because history can never be forgotten is why people will continue to need to believe it is real, even though it is just a recreation of the past from an interpreter's flawed memory in the future, and can therefore never be "real" or even adequate to explain an entire time period or all the nuances of an event. The most effective type of history that I am aware of at this point is using historical trajectory as the point of analysis: genealogy. An investigation of the various turning points/syntheses or dialectics that twist and turn their way through history to reach where we are standing today. But an ideal genealogy is impossible, it is too much information to be written. So genealogy is historiographical or episodic, written in big brush strokes thusly homogenizing/essentializing just like history before it. The attempt to come to terms with subjugated or counter-hegemonic truths by looking at the dialectic "losers", still disciplines identities and assumes stable subjects. It is more informative though to see the dialectic's aufhebung as a domination rather than a synthesis in this regard.It is a more "justified knowledge" than regarding the here-and-now as universal and neutral. Instead it should be acknowledge that the hear-and-now is built upon the battles of the past. I think a helpful concept in understanding this idea of history is another Foucauldian concept, that is the inversion of Clausewitz: "politics is war by other means". Even our shared homogenized(nationalized) identity or any other type of identity is marked by battles that are not war because they are happening within the state, but are still oftentimes violent (see: Matewan).

4. The Social (or the creation of inter-subjective reality through discourse with the other)

Human is a political animal: Zoon Politkon ; the self cannot exist without differentiating from an other ; without contact with other humans: psychosis manifests. These are three basic reasons why I feel that the need for human interaction is inherent in all humanity. This also has implications for how one can read philosophy. The idea that the path to truth or enlightenment comes through seclusion cannot provide answers to political questions. This long standing belief that removing yourself from the milieu and objectively observing from this other place is the preferred form of philosophy, social science, or any explanatory measure cannot be true if humans need other humans. The most effective form of philosophy, social science, history, etc. is to explain these narratives, being attentive to the fact that theory and practice are one. Any narrative of explanation will (re)produce a certain reality, to pretend otherwise will just lead to discourses which are not conducive to humans as a whole. Instead, by focusing on its' theory as practice, these justified narratives immerse themselves in the milieu giving far better explanatory sketches than epistemologies of feigned objectivity ever could.

5. Hybrid human motivation
My final attempt to assemble justifiably factual or legitimate evidence for my own de facto epistemology that is constantly changing but must be used whenever I make a decision or make a decision not to make a decision. Every keystroke and every pause between them is a decision that I am making with whatever formed my snapshot of an epistemology for my arguments and the ontologies of the words I'm using to explain them. What is my motivation for writing this down? I want to practice writing, I want to practice interacting with concepts I find interesting, I want to interact with the world through this medium of the internet, I want to rant, etc. Can it be said that either Emotion or Rationality is my primary motivator? Socrates' and Decartes' rehashing of stoicism just to name two are huge events in philosophy which still dominate modern western thought on what makes a good decision and what motivates individuals to make decisions.
The Stoakon was a porch, dudes hung out on it and talked. Sounds like the opposite of classy right? But it turns out between them they hammered out a plank of thought that has become an integral part of western epistemology ever since and became especially supercharged after the enlightenment: emotions bad, logic good.
Socrates followed their thought and then Plato started writing shit down, philosophy apparently being dominated by speaking rather than writing (although there are many writings). Rationality and logic became the panacea for all that is good. Sex as an emotional paroxysm was irrational. Desire became the enemy of good decisions. Whether this evolved out of an attitude towards gender or whether this discourse helped create a an attitude towards gender I am not in a position to say. Feminist authors point out that this same discourse is applied to gender where males are seen as logical and rational (neutral/normal) while women are seen as overly emotional. When you go to a movie theater and a guy is crying holding a woman's hand is that normal? I don't want to discipline, crying is something humans do, but for the most part this act is associated with femininity. This attitude still pervades, I just give that one example, but we should understand that there is philosophy behind everything whether someone recognizes it or not. There is philosophy behind who cries at movie theaters. This discourse is so tied in with gender that it makes suppression based on gender easier and easier.
Orientalism shows us that cultures are feminized. Through our discourse(or the accumulated academic and media works) we create an image of an exoticized other in the east. This other is either feminized by being painted as emotional and sensual. Picture the exotic harem. Or they are hyper-masculinized as too stoic and thusly irrational based on the fact they are too rational! Think about the discourse of the japanese man as the us was opening that country to capitalism. Inscrutable and unpredictable because of their inscrutability far too stoic.
Once a culture or population is feminized it then becomes easier to authorize violence against such populations. The populations are irrational! What they need is management. The subordination of the feminized population is neccesary, because as we were constructing the other as irrational it meant we were really constructing ourselves as rational. The next logical step then is to manage the emotional population for their own good, to subordinate their feminized identity with our performance of masculine identity.
I am taking a long time to get here, but my point is that all motivations for human action are hybrid motivations. There are elements of materialism/self-interest and emotional/intrinsic motivators in all action. In fact if there was not an "irrational" emotional element to decisionmaking amongst humans war between families would be the norm and we would not understand the meaning of the word friend. Why do we stand by our friends and families when they have tough times? Why do we fall in love? Why do we wake up every day for work? It is not simply because we will receive material rewards, it is also because we seek to perform our selves. We adopt roles in order to use the discourses within those roles. We desire to be ourselves and being is a constant process. Work is not just money it is an identity, a social event, a disciplining of time, a responsibility, etc. When countries go to war with each other it is not ONLY because they want to control their natural resources. It is also because a discourse was used to justify violence against such a country which gives the population some intrinsic motivation to fight. People do not join the army because if they didn't then foreign invaders would kill them or for money, they also want to adopt a role. Oftentimes the roles we adopt are based on masculine and feminine identities, if we can start to move away from this bifurcated model for human motivation and instead move toward a hybrid model I think it is a way in which to deconstruct the violence which is visited upon subordinate identities and justified through feminizing discourses, the same discourses which are guilty of subordinating the identity to begin with.

With that said all of these ideas have aporiae with eachother and internal contradictions. Also my epistemology has changed since I began writing this and when I finished it changed again. :D

The Alluvium of Lake Michigan by The Owl

2011-01-31T15:27:00.001-06:00

Every year, in early summer, a certain fish dies in droves and is deposited on the sandy beaches of Lake Michigan. The carcasses are layered three, maybe four, deep along an undulating line where the gentle waves exhaust themselves and leave behind their morbid cargo and depart to whence they came.

Sunbathing sucks when atop a pile of fish rotting in the summer sun; you want clean beaches for the summer months, then you got to shovel away the dead. Piled black garbage bags filled with fish guts and flies and copious amounts of sand form tar-black mountains on the curb of the street. The mountains are heavy with death, rot, and earth.

And then, the beach is handed over to, in what one human described as “The two species making up the overwhelming majority, after everything smaller than your fingertip is discounted, are Larus smithsonianus and Homo sapien.

The beaches of Chicago’s North Shore are up-current from the mega-industry to the south, and the water was usually clean enough to swim in, clear enough to hunt for stones. Oh, those were good days, when I was young. The world was one long beach. It began with a parking lot, under the looming shadow of The Tower. Adjacent, were crowds of blankets, coolers and pale skin slathered in sunscreen roped in by the floating boundaries of the swimming area; the beach then became private property, more peaceful and solitary, though with a hint of menace that grew as you moved further down the beach, away from the familiar crowds and into the freedom of very rich peoples’ private, and mostly deserted, beaches.

I don’t know their condition today. I haven’t been back in a while and have no reliable source to attest to the cleanliness of the sand, or the cold, crystal purity of the water. I imagine the seagulls are still there, since they feed on trash and there cannot be a shortage of trash in the greater Chicago area.

The one problem was always people, that was always what would bring you down, and, ironically, you would bring them down as well. To some it is safer to hide than risk the shame of a shared humanity.

I learned to drink and take drugs on those beaches at night. Sometimes blind, black skies, with Bic lighters as the only illumination; other times a shining moon and an endless shimmering path reflecting on the water. These brilliant nights could make one believe there was such a simple way into the infinite mysteries of life...no, the true paths are grossly less picturesque.

Oh, praise the lord, who deposited me on the shores of the lake. Under blessings and immorality, beauty and beastliness, I lived innocently, then not so innocently, then rebelliously, then decadently, then, I would like to believe, maybe morally. I got out of this metamorphosing dance around the lake by finding a new source of aquatic wonder in a different city. I burned most of the memories on my final trip down the track, or tarmac, or where ever I made my escape, I cannot remember.

Revolution in the Middle East

2011-01-26T14:08:00.002-06:00

In Tunisia there were popular protests that caused a president to resign in a currently boiling over endless struggle of politics. In Egypt there are similar protests going on in another active struggle for democracy.

In my opinion one cannot "have" a democracy, one can only constantly (re)create a democracy which if it were truly investigated is hardly democracy. Which is why one must keep reaching for democracy as if one does not have it, but this process of reaching for democracy is itself the closest thing to actually "having" democracy. The protests (or to put it in a different way to leave the negative connotations our corporate media has attached to that word): "a conglomeration of public politically active peoples" is a good thing in any country. People need to engage in the political process as individuals not as pieces of an illusory homogenized whole that is then "represented". As an individual against orthodoxy, I would like to explain why I can hold such a view when I am critical of all epistemologies because of internal contradictions.

It is my belief that the best way to explain anything is to historicize it. How can I justify holding a belief that people within any country no matter how the government is labeled(democracy, dictatorship, oligarchy etc.) will benefit from actively engaging the political process?

Lets start with Egypt, which is the center of a question for US policy right now: Should the US support the protesters against one of the largest recipients of U.S. Aid? Support the protestors against the regime which moderated enough to recognize Israel(thats why the Aid)? Support the protestors against the regime which houses many of their CIA black sites?

The easy answer for the United States is to just be quiet and stay in the background like Tunisia. The problem with that is that silence is violence for the United States, because of its ubiquity in the domestic governments of many countries. Current conceptions of sovereignty which are not fluid cannot recognize that the United States is in many ways a de facto world government. Certain countries have surrendered autonomy in certain places to get things from the hegemon(US). In Okinawa the soldiers can rape, murder, and drive drunk all day. They can't be prosecuted, because of the Status of Force Agreement between Japan and the US. This is in return for the United States military protection of their country cerntrally and military protection of the energy supply more loosely. When the United States does nothing about a spontaneous flare up of democratic tendencies, it is giving an OK to the regime which will tamp it down.
The United States should not take the easy way out and instead follow the advice of Jefferson and MLK jr: democratic revolution. The american revolution was not a divinely ordained event and it did not expose any universal truths. What I mean to say by these two qualities is that the american revolution can be exported, what I mean by the latter is that this revolution is not a universal truth so we should not engage in violence which would be an action of forcing democracy on a people which is a farce as we see in Iraq. The revolution should be exported, but with ideas and support(monetary, logistical). The only problem is that our revolution was too violent, our country was created by terrorists, in order to make sure that part of our revolution doesn't get exported we need to support peaceful revolutions WHENEVER the opportunity presents itself. Like in Tunisia and Egypt. But that is simply an ethical concern, why would I really be able to justify such a strong statement that these flare-ups of democracy are good and crushing them is bad?

The only justified knowledge comes from history, so lets look specifically at Egypt. Egypt was a country colonized by multiple powers, but eventually the British got a monopoly. During this time Britain controlled the political apparatus of Egypt through their puppets the Monarchs. Eventually nationalist groups or groups that are united by their national identity starting growing. These individuals felt that monarchs who pretended to be pious while allowing Britain to run the country were not good for their interests. Many nationalist uprisings were slaughtered by the British. In an example of where democratic action was not allowed to happen by an overbearing government. In a policy that is still alive today in Egypt any political parties had to be licensed in a process that no party except those which were puppets of Britain were allowed to exist. In this context the Society of The Muslim Brethren was formed. Religion being the one area which the regime would shy away from regulating. This society was a welfare and community service oriented entity. Through writing, criticizing, and activism using religion as the justification for demands the Muslim Brotherhood made attempts to better the political situation of Egyptians who faced an uncaring colonial power and later an autocratic nationalist regime.

The next generation of Brotherhood leaders included an individual named Sayyid Qutb. Qutb was put in prison and tortured for his political activism. Many other members of the brotherhood were treated in similar ways. The torture effected Qutb's outlook and thusly influenced the outlook of the entire Muslim Brotherhood, which by this time had proved a huge success (in terms of membership) with international potential. Qutb essentially opted out of the peaceful means of his predecessors. How can one be peaceful and criticize through the language of Islam, but face torture and imprisonment for it? What was the brotherhood going to gain from repeating this process? The people in power will stay in power and people who speak out for Muslims or Egyptians will receive the worst of all possible existences: life as torture. It was time to turn the page on these ineffective attempts at democracy and take a cue from the American Revolution: use violence.

Qutb became a lionized figure of violent jihad to such a degree, that it is impossible to imagine 9/11 without the life experience and subsequent writings of Qutb. I do not mean to say that Qutb bears responsibility for 9/11 and I do not mean to say that the hijackers, wahabbi, saudi, or pakistan do not bear their responsibility. I am only pointing out that things become possible by their historical trajectory. If Britain had brought democratic reforms they might still be in a great mutual beneficial relationship with Egypt, far more advantageous to Britain in the long run then blowing money keeping democracy down and eventually getting thrown out. If the nationalists had learned from the mistakes of the monarchs/britain and made political parties an accepted part of democracy the Brethren wouldn't have had to go underground. If the Egyptian government hadn't been dead set on imprisoning, torturing, and martyring the leaders of a religious movement maybe violent jihadis wouldn't have so much motivation and empirical evidence for the justification of violence.

Non-violent democracy should be cherished and supported. If one does not support such events, there are two alternatives: do nothing or actively destroy. Doing nothing is seen as complicity with the current regime, because of the close relationship Egypt has with the United States, they cannot feign ignorance with such a key ally. Which means they lend legitimacy to the efforts of the Egyptian government to actively destroy. This has taken the form of violent counter-democratic actions: beatings, chemical warfare, rubber bullets, etc.

When groups attempt to achieve their agenda peacefully and are met with violence, these groups learn that they cannot achieve their agenda peacefully. This leaves one option: violence.

If instead when groups attempt to achieve their agenda peacefully they are met with debate and compromise, that group will feel that they have won and will feel empowered by their inclusion in the political process, reducing the probability of violence to a negligible amount.

If we don't want more Al-Qaedas and more violent idealogues with the scars to justify such venom, then we should use our foreign policy to support groups who engage in the political process.

six-legged giraffe(Why oh why didn't I choose the red pill?) by Da Owl

2011-01-11T14:36:00.002-06:00

She’s near;

hear the tramp of her step,

tchick, tchock!

like empty, hollow skulls upon an infected tree

that sound, like jumpin’ jazz riddims

banged out in groups of three.

...a cold night, when the roof loomed low and the walls were like

Imperial Star Ship trash compactors,

the six-legged giraffe was in a cold corner

her two eight-ball eyes locked on me.

The pit of my stomach: hollow,

the weight of my head: 0 lbs, 0 oz,

and a marvelous, masochistic tingle in the head of my penis.

Dialogue with Scuba

2010-12-29T17:40:00.001-06:00

A conversation between scuba and I over Steam that was fun. It is rife with unresearched claims and misspellings.

Never tell your password to anyone.

Jimothy: dude

Scuba: dude

Jimothy: i just was reading this declassified military document about the effects of nuclear weapons on my kindle

Jimothy: and i figured out why you wearing black is functional

Jimothy: one sec i'll just copy it

Jimothy: "once the victim is beyond the radius at

which light-colored fabrics are directly ignited, even simple precautions can greatly

reduce the extent and seriousness of thermal injuries. Many examples exist of people

severely burned on their faces and arms, but unburned beneath even a thin shirt or

blouse."

Jimothy: so if you're outside the blast wave of a nuke

Jimothy: and wearing dark clothing

Scuba: will it retard the absorbsion of radioactive materials

Jimothy: and you do'nt look at the thing,

Jimothy: bam you're good

Jimothy: first of all light colored fabrics ignite

Jimothy: from the heat pulse

Jimothy: and then if you happen to be in the direct line of sight for the light pulse

Jimothy: if you have clothing it like won't burn u

Jimothy: the clothing stops the haet

Jimothy: i never knew that only light colored fabrics ignited at a certain distance

Jimothy: loooool

Scuba: that is so weird

Jimothy: http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/mctl98-2/p2sec06.pdf

Jimothy: pg 18

Scuba: do you think it has something to do witht he heat being reflected from the light colors?

Jimothy: i found this in this torrent it downlaoded awhile ago

Jimothy: it has to

Jimothy: liek some kind of spectrum is ok some kind is not

Jimothy: for this like super brief pulse of heat

Jimothy: like dark colors absorb it or reflect it or something

Jimothy: and light colors just ignite

Jimothy: amg

Jimothy: At about 0.1 second after detonation, the shock front becomes sufficiently transparent

that radiation from the innermost, hottest regions becomes visible, producing a

second thermal peak. Before the second peak begins the fireball has radiated only

about one quarter of its total energy. About 99 percent of the total thermal energy is

contained in the second pulse. The duration of this pulse depends on the yield of the

weapon and the height of burst (HOB); it ranges from only about 0.4 s for a 1 kT

airburst to more than 20 s for a 10 MT explosion.

Jimothy: i don't think its declassified actually, i think they mad eit public on purpose

Jimothy: for ppl everywehre to benefit from their nuke testing so they didn't feel they had to do their own nuke testing

Scuba: that makes sense. your commment that is

Jimothy: The response of any given system to the thermal pulse depends on the absorption

properties of the test subject but also to the distance from the burst and the atmospheric

conditions between fireball and target such as clouds, snow, aerosols, and dust. The

atmosphere is not equally transparent at all wavelengths, so the spectrum of the radiation

incident on a target must be correctly calculated and then simulated

Jimothy: so will aerosol protect us from nukes?

Scuba: so the first wave is the blinding light. then its the second wave with the heat

Jimothy: which contains most of the energy of the heat

Jimothy: so you have a chance to react

Scuba: right but a quater of all the energy is produced in the wave of light.

Jimothy: but hopedfully the news at least has the balls tob el ike, whast up nukes comin

Jimothy: so most of the energy when added all up is in the blast wave

Jimothy: the blast wave goes farther than the heat

Scuba: but the timing will only give you a few min at most

Jimothy: but it goes at the speed of sound so you can get behind shit

Jimothy: so you'd notice light colored fabrics igniting around you

Jimothy: that means get behind shit

Scuba: think the blast wave would turn you to vapor?

Jimothy: and you might have been far enuff awy to survive

Jimothy: no thast the heat when you're really realyl close

Jimothy: its like every megaton

Jimothy: is one mile of vaporizing it hink

Jimothy: or its one mile of like catching everytihg on fire, and a fraction of miles for vaporizing

Scuba: so why dont we still have bomb shelters?

Jimothy: lol

Jimothy: no russia

Jimothy: but they still scare us with nukes

Jimothy: which would make more sense to have a bomb shelter

Scuba: but lots of countries with capability

Jimothy: bc if its a rogue state or terrorist

Jimothy: it would be highly localized the intial impact

Jimothy: and people would want to stay underground to swee which way the wend blew

Jimothy: i started reading thsi bc i'm interested in radiation

Jimothy: get this

Jimothy: so in debate

Jimothy: i'm judging and coaching i told u

Jimothy: but in debate you can have 2 types of impacts

Jimothy: overall

Jimothy: one is utilitarian the other is moral

Jimothy: for the most part, people stick with utilitarian

Jimothy: like "if you vote for me i save tons of lives"

Jimothy: instead of "if you vote for me my plan is morally right so fuck the people who ahve to die for it"

Jimothy: so because most of the arguments are utilitarian/consequentialist/body count

Jimothy: everyone links their shit to nuclear war

Jimothy: so there is this argument called "spark" and I don't know if it is an author's name or what but thats what everyone calls it

Jimothy: which says "nuclear war good"

Jimothy: it starts by claiming that nuclear war is survivable

Jimothy: then it says that our current use of energy leads to extinction

Jimothy: that there are type I type II and type III civilizations based on energy consumption

Jimothy: which is their ability to harness solar energy

Jimothy: then there is defense

Jimothy: like nukes get better with time so now is the best time to have a nuclear war

Jimothy: because if nukes get better nuke war won't be surivviable

Jimothy: then later they read cards about how in order for us to get off planet we have to become a type II civilization

Jimothy: lol

Jimothy: so i want to know how survivable long term a global nuclear war would be

Jimothy: because I think that a nuke war in which russia or the us launched any fraction of its stockpiles would lead to extinction

Jimothy: because it woudl kill off so many humans in different places and cause them to be infertile and cause a population bottleneck and kill the water and crops

Scuba: its not like they can target every area on the planet though. least not yet

Jimothy: i guess it depends on the amount launched, but I do believe ther eis a point at which extinction happens when a certain number of nukes of a certain number of megatons is launched

Jimothy: i dion't know what that numbe ris, but its somewher ein my head

Scuba: humans tend to be crafty though

Jimothy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nukecloud.png

Jimothy: our shits way bigger than 10 megatons

Jimothy: lets find out though

Jimothy: what we woudl launch

Jimothy: in my opion

Jimothy: is a trident sub

Jimothy: which could get cut off

Jimothy: i think they mad ea movie about htis

Jimothy: they thought they got orders for nukes

Scuba: trident subs are a fail safe

Jimothy: to make sure we have second strike capability

Scuba: bombers would be first

Jimothy: which means they always have to be ready to receiv ea signal to launch

Jimothy: what if that signal was sent

Scuba: yeah. they are the back up

Jimothy: somehow in some mistake

Jimothy: they woudl have no way to check it

Jimothy: ok

Jimothy: lets say

Jimothy: korea builds an icbm

Jimothy: would we retaliate?

Jimothy: if they could hit the us

Jimothy: if they nuked LA

Scuba: they dont have to hit the us.

Jimothy: if Iran nuked Israel?

Scuba: they would just have to hit japan

Jimothy: and we would retaliate with nuclear capability?

Jimothy: just for them nuking japan/.?

Jimothy: i mean japan is hearty when it comes to nukes

Jimothy: they're nuclear grizzled

Scuba: no. we have conventional weapons that would decimate that country

Jimothy: no we can't say that

Jimothy: we've seen that logic

Jimothy: in afghanistan the graveyard of empires

Jimothy: and mess o' potama

Jimothy: potamia*

Scuba: if we didnt have to worry about casualties. we would glass citys with thermoberic shits

Scuba: we wouldnt need nukes

Jimothy: bc thats all we'd do

Jimothy: is nuke civilians

Jimothy: ppl that are basicaly being held hostage by the powerful

Jimothy: especially evident in that country

Scuba: afganistan is fighting a guerilla war. armies are not good with guerilla

Jimothy: loose dark clothing i guess

Scuba: warfare

Jimothy: ick

Jimothy: afgthanistan is a tribal land

Jimothy: it was never afghanistan

Jimothy: it was a bunch of tribal and local governments

Jimothy: we shoudl just get the fuck out and stay out

Jimothy: iraq we're never leaving

Jimothy: ever

Jimothy: until the next hegemon takes over

Jimothy: its germany its japan its korea its kuwait

Scuba: isnt taking terrioties part of warfare?

Scuba: strategery speaking

Jimothy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions#Summary_of_the_effects

Jimothy: but this isn't warfare

Jimothy: its not a state

Jimothy: they've acknowledged that

Jimothy: its a failed state

Scuba: i guess we would have to nuke afganistan

Jimothy: thats the logic behind their "enemy combatant" bullshit

Jimothy: its police action

Jimothy: its fucking weird

Jimothy: its a manhunt

Jimothy: think about htat fuck

Jimothy: this is an effort to prosecute someone for a crime

Jimothy: and it turned in tot he longest war in US history

Scuba: so yeah. we are still at war right. and 8 year long war right

Jimothy: they call it conflagaration on this chart when u burn up

Scuba: why did we ever cut taxes?

Jimothy: yes...

Jimothy: and i suppose it worked

Jimothy: he got bitpartisanship

Jimothy: got dadt repeal passed

Jimothy: got start passed

Jimothy: but nobody will notice those things

Jimothy: or realize how amazing they are

Jimothy: and in order to do it we pay a really high cost in my opinion which is another tax cut for millionaires

Jimothy: he was also over a barrel, he had to get unemployment benefits extended

Jimothy: that would have crushed the economy if it wasn't passed

Scuba: but the start treaty and the 9/11 bill should have been nonissues.

Jimothy: there would be fucking bread lines

Jimothy: exactly

Jimothy: so republicans have better political maneuvers

Jimothy: they're more cohesive than democrats

Jimothy: democrats are pussies

Jimothy: they're not allowed to be liberal

Jimothy: or else they're soft on crime or pinkos or fuckin whatever

Scuba: they dont need to be liberal though.

Scuba: or very liberal

Jimothy: but people should have noticed that republicans were going to force a recession if they didn't get a tax cut for millionaires

Jimothy: everybody should have notied that

Jimothy: but the media is conservative

Jimothy: the myth of the liberla media is shattered again

Jimothy: except for msnbc's marketing strategy now

Jimothy: which just spits the weak ass liberal shit

Jimothy: the colmes bullshit

Jimothy: bounding the debate on the left

Scuba: the media isnt liberal or conservative. they are just trendy and shallow

Jimothy: dude the media is controlled by a few corporations

Jimothy: those corporations are very wealthy

Jimothy: many of those corporations have actualy companies they own that produce weapons

Scuba: i know that.

Jimothy: if they don't actually directly own them they have huge investments in the military industricla complex

Jimothy: the media will therefore be pro business, whcih means anti-labor

Jimothy: the media willb e pro-war, which means anti-dissent

Jimothy: the media will be pro prison, which means they'll be anti common sense drug laws

Scuba: thats why npr is so epic.

Jimothy: true

Jimothy: lots of politicians trying to shut them down

Jimothy: they say "starve the government"

Jimothy: thats their platform

Jimothy: but the things the govenrment is gorging itself on they don't touch

Jimothy: they kill little tiny social programs like a subisdy for npr and shit like that

Scuba: dude all news orgs and hospitals need to be nonprofit. thats my new belief

Jimothy: i'm pissed at obama and republican and democrats!

Jimothy: th;at could be a good middle ground between public and private

Jimothy: i don't disagree

Jimothy: i'd support a policy like that

Jimothy: did you see that thing the loner stoner put on my facebook?

Jimothy: about julian assange's next target being a bank?

Scuba: things that are for the peoples benifit should not be allowed to make large profits

Scuba: yeah. heard about that in october

Jimothy: i totally agree, certain things are social goods and as people with political needs and taxpayers we should protect them from the market

Jimothy: because the market doesn't give a fuck about what you want

Scuba: exactly

Jimothy: all these banks are refusing to process donations to assange

Jimothy: but bc of all the media

Jimothy: he got tons of high rollers to donat ei think

Scuba: the market can totally survive with out trying to make a buck on everything

Scuba: its epic

Scuba: it truly is.

Jimothy: i think he must have known

Jimothy: that he was going to secure massive funding

Jimothy: in order to make such a suicidal statmeent

Scuba: hopefully this is the catalyst the people will need

Jimothy: or maybe its like a "if they say i killed myself tomorow, its because i'm about to take down a bank"

Scuba: well its not like he is the sole owner of this information.

Jimothy: well he hasn't relaese it yet

Jimothy: i mean u got any idea how many spies and keyloggers that guys got?

Jimothy: they prolly know weveryone who has it or the servers that its on

Scuba: yeah but he and his droogies have it and could release it

Jimothy: that was one of anon's missions was to mirror all the info so that it was literally impossible for the government to censor it

Scuba: its the internet you cant keep shit off it

Jimothy: i can't vbelieve time didn't make him man of the year

Jimothy: the online poll was ridiculous

Jimothy: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2028734_2029036_2029037,00.html

Jimothy: zuckerbergis number 10

Jimothy: ffs

Scuba: he will get it next year when this controversy dies

Jimothy: so ridiuclous

Jimothy: not him but him being the face whatever hes an arrogant prick apparently

Jimothy: but wikileaks is so fuckign important

Jimothy: its like the internet culture of open source and opposing censorship flowered and is acting on the real world

Scuba: important people tend to be pricks imo

Scuba: doesnt mean their causes arent worth while

Jimothy: oh listen to what i got my sis and bro for xmas

Jimothy: i got them both the first manga of death note first of all

Jimothy: then my bro got 2 tpbs of the boys

Jimothy: andy my sis 3 tpbs of irredeemable

Scuba: i just saw that there are five volumes of irredeemable.

Scuba: wtf!

Scuba: my brother in law loved the boys

Jimothy: that means a new one we haven't read?

Scuba: so many. there is also two volumes of incorruptable.

Jimothy: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,2039711,00.html

Jimothy: the people who the tea party elects are fascists

Scuba: dude. im starting to like scott brown

Jimothy: whats he been doin?

Scuba: pissing off the teaparty

Jimothy: lol

Jimothy: lololol;

Jimothy: they organized that thing fo rhim in boston

Jimothy: and he didn't show up

Jimothy: he didn't wanan be associated with them

Jimothy: i give him props for htat

Scuba: i know. cause mass doesnt want a teaparty

Scuba: we had ours

Jimothy: lol

Scuba: it sure was weird how much got done in the lame duck.

Jimothy: because democrats are afraid of next term

Scuba: but know what i find really interesting.

Jimothy: wut

Jimothy: wiki sez he was one of five republicans who tried to get the jobs bill passed immediately

Jimothy: actually i don't know

Scuba: the republicans with a minority were able to strongarm everyone. so when the tables are reversed next session. everyone already assumes that the dems will roll over. even the dems seem to feel that way.

Jimothy: it sez cloture

Jimothy: i think thats the media

Jimothy: creating a narrative

Scuba: but no one is trying to refute it.

Jimothy: i think it was an effort at bipartisanship

Jimothy: i mean it was a compromise

Jimothy: a millionaire tax cut sucks ass

Jimothy: but a bunch of shit got done

Jimothy: i guess thats what obama said he'd do in the campain is aim for bi part

Jimothy: obama was hoping this would be cast as a win for him

Scuba: which people are saying it is

Jimothy: but then whats next

Jimothy: he should get some of the other shit he said he'd pass

Jimothy: he said he'd get the senate to ratify ctbt

Scuba: whats ctbt

Jimothy: comprehensive test ban treaty

Jimothy: clinton signed it awhile ago

Jimothy: but it just gets tabbled in the senate

Scuba: there should be a limit on tableing

Jimothy: he said in the campaignhe'd passit

Jimothy: well its better this way for this policy

Jimothy: because the military has acted as if the senate were about to ratify it fo ryears

Jimothy: that document from the army i linked to you

Jimothy: said that they stopped testing in 96

Jimothy: and i was like wtf, ctbt never was ratified

Jimothy: that was like jessie helms capstone

Jimothy: just an old white supremacist conservative

Jimothy: any policy that restrained the military was bad

Jimothy: he'd be okay with the military being police

Jimothy: how about a little work on gitmo

Jimothy: whatever

Jimothy: but the state of the union is in jan

Scuba: gitmo is never going away dude

Jimothy: next month we'll hear the state of the union

Jimothy: we'll see if he can carry the bipart over

Scuba: nope.

Scuba: he wont.

Jimothy: so people ar ejust going to be in this state of exception until they die at gitmo

Jimothy: its so fucked up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Scuba: i know

Jimothy: at least he gave like half of 'em trials

Jimothy: anybody tlakin shit about eric holder

Jimothy: he may be a douchebag

Jimothy: but him and obama are not bringing the federal marshalls down on states with open pot laws

Jimothy: and he managed to get a few trials

Jimothy: better than nothing

Jimothy: scott brown voted for the repeal?

Jimothy: baller

Scuba: hell yeah he did. he is from mass

Jimothy: jobs bill and start

Jimothy: not bad

Jimothy: the eloguence

Jimothy: lol

Scuba: i just wonder how long he will be able to keep this up

Jimothy: perfect i'm not even gonna fix that spelling

Jimothy: "There’s enough of an underground movement in the Tea Party movement as seeing him as not being conservative enough.

Jimothy: presidnet of the greater boston tea party

Jimothy: shes obviously stupid

Jimothy: why couldn't she just be like "there are a growing number of people in the tea party movement that believe he is not conservative enough"

Jimothy: or like

Jimothy: lots of people don't think hes conservative enough

Scuba: in my opinion. there is voting witht he party no matter what. then there is doing what you think is best for your state and country.

Jimothy: underground movmeent in the movement which see things

Jimothy: he represents massachusetts

Scuba: underground movement adds a layer of intrigue

Jimothy: if he keeps voting for easy bills and not being extremist douchebag he'll get re-elected

Jimothy: i mean wtf start?

Jimothy: why would you oppose it?

Scuba: i know

Jimothy: its a simple check on accidental launch and proliferation

Jimothy: the repeal of dadt?

Jimothy: wtf

Jimothy: its not like NOW there are gays in the military

Jimothy: its like we just got rid of this antiquated thing

Scuba: but dadt is going to be tricky though.

Jimothy: yes this is what i have heard

Scuba: with all the fine details.

Jimothy: it might be used to discriminate

Scuba: it will work. its just going to end up setting an example for the rest of the countries policy

Scuba: obvioulsy it will.

Scuba: people are still discriminated becasue they are colored.

Jimothy: which is good

Scuba: but no as much anymore

Jimothy: i mean the firs thting u said

Scuba: yeah.

Scuba: it will be. but it will take a while and not fun

Scuba: not be fun

Jimothy: modeling is important as well

Jimothy: maybe asking is important

Jimothy: maybe its really really bad

Jimothy: because if they ask

Jimothy: they can figure out if there is discrimination

Scuba: but they dont have to tell

Scuba: why should they have to

Scuba: if they dont want to bring their sexuality into their job they shouldnt have to.

Scuba: but. what do you do about dependents for teh gheys

Scuba: do they get the same rights as the non gheys?

Scuba: if so where does that apply? only foriegn bases, only certain states?

Jimothy: does anythign need to be changed?

Jimothy: i don't think so

Scuba: so they can serve but they cant get married?

Jimothy: well

Jimothy: lets get that taken car eof

Scuba: cant bring their loved ones overseas? share the same insurance and back accounts?

Jimothy: if gays wanna make themselves misreable with marraige and die for vague ideas of nationalism then shit we oughtta let 'em

Jimothy: well lets get that taken care of!

Scuba: i know right

Scuba: im just saying that dadt is going to have to answer these questions

Jimothy: elaine donnely's think tank si called the center for military readiness

Scuba: and those answers will have to carry over to the states the personel live in

Jimothy: the acronym CMR, can also stand for civil-military relations

Jimothy: I hope they are answered correctly

Scuba: me too

Jimothy: and i'm glad the military supported this

Scuba: me too.

Jimothy: it shows a very politically conscious military

Jimothy: even though they're getting shit on by politics left and right

Scuba: my friend whos in the army brought up some interesting questions.

Jimothy: maybe thats why i guess

Scuba: lets say there are two people in a unit. ones gay the other has a problem with it.

Jimothy: then he can suck it up and follow orders lol

Jimothy: i mean fuck

Scuba: can the commander request transfers on this bases with out violating anyones rights?

Jimothy: or he gets booted jsut like a white supremacist serviceman beating a jewish or black serviceman

Scuba: they only got booted cause they beat the guy.

Jimothy: the commander can request transfers and he'll choose whichever he thinks is best

Jimothy: exactly

Jimothy: at the point its reaching violence its fucking with discipline

Jimothy: up until then who cares

Jimothy: you may ahte someone u still gotta follow orders

Scuba: but verbal and emotional abuse happen with much more frequency and goes unpunished.

Jimothy: and u might as well be nice bc you neve rknow if he'll be ur supreior officer down the road

Jimothy: thats true, but I don't think this policy was restraining such instances

Scuba: not everyone thinks that way

Jimothy: i think there were still many instances before this policy, and most people were aware if people in their unit were gay

Scuba: oh yeah it was well known.

Jimothy: means that others will have to get used to the idea of being exposed to people who may be sexually attracted to them

Jimothy: lol

Scuba: we have had queermos in the service for as long as weve had queermos

Jimothy: thats what donnely sez

Jimothy: its like do these peple not udnerstand that gays wer ein the military before dadt was repealed?

Jimothy: i norite

Scuba: why do people think that every gay person they meet is going to hit on them or rape them?

Scuba: just now the military has to recognize that fact

Jimothy: thats the other thing people conflat homosexuality with sexual violence and pedophila

Scuba: which will be sweet, in the end

Scuba: proabably be pretty bitter before then

Jimothy: there is possbility for backfire, but we might see a good result in terms of long term acceptance of homosexuality as a social inevitability

Scuba: when those instances are usually done by the straights

Jimothy: ok i should hav eleft for work like 5 min ago, i'm supposed to get in to logan at 11pm, and my bro flew today and said that the airports are complete clusterfuck terrible so we'll see

Jimothy: i'll talk to you before my flight though peace

Scuba: later

Counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency are the same thing

2010-11-04T15:18:00.001-05:00

This blog made me angry, this is my way too long comment, I hate "experts" They haven't read anything you can't read.

Number one: There is no difference between counter-insurgency and counter-terror. WTF, I feel like i'm taking crazy pills! Lets take out the counter and we end up with insurgency and terror(short for terrorism).
WHat is the difference between insurgency and terrorism? The definitions of both are exactly the same they just use different words. A terrorist IS an insurgent it just depends on HOW YOU WANT TO LABEL THE ONGOING CONFLICT: a civil war or a few fringe violent radicals who want regime change. An insurgency is just a larger pattern of terrorism. WTF!? is nobody else seeing this? Is it really that hard? How would "insurgency" manifest itself? violent actions against civilians or government? in order to destabilize a regime? OH SHIT! well how would "terrorism" manifest itself? VIOLENT ACTIONS AGAINST CIVILIANS OR GOVERNMENT IN ORDER TO DESTABILIZE A REGIME!

How can you say, end A, but begin A(with a different label). How can you be so naive as to think the two are different and how can you be so naive as to not realize that we are in Afghanistan until we fall, just like Korea, Germany, Japan, Gitmo, Iraq, etc., etc. YOU ARE ONLY HELPING THE REGIME RE-LABEL AN UNSUSTAINABLE WAR!

Now I would like to address this next point You said: "The U.S. could "win" in Afghanistan where victory is defined as a stable, legitimate central government that can project power within its own borders."

There has NEVER been a central government that can project power to all of Afghanistan. As you claim to have some knowledge of geopolitics you should really really know this. Pakistan through the Taliban could never do it, Russia could never do it, and we will not be able to do it. You should also be aware that when you use neutral words like "project power" what you really mean is that the central government has the ability to regularly enact violence in all geographical areas within those borders. We don't need your pedantic euphemisms to efface the utopian violence you are advocating Mr. COIN expert.
Regaining hard power he says. All you "experts" on hegemony have not historicized your discourse. Let me give you a quick history lesson: Its world war I!!!!! omg a multipolar hegemonic system! Many different "poles" or world powers duking it out over vague concepts of ethnicity and economic bitterness. OMG its world war 2!!!! The vague concepts of ethnicity have become completely entrenched in nationhood and are now conflated with "race" in what will be the final act of a multipolar hegemonic system two winners will emerge. CCCP and USA. Now look! A bi-polar hegemonic system! The concept of race's imbrication with nation has been effaced by the feigned revulsion of the holocaust's eradication of the other(even though the need to fill the psychic ontology of the self through destruction of the other is still part and parcel of modernism), now we are on to ideology! Two different poles of thought police: USSR and United States, labeling their justifications for violence "Communism" and "democracy" respectively. who will win!?!?

There are a lot of ideas about the transition from bipolar to unipolar out there. The only one that matters is the narrative of energy. Without energy the lights go out no more typey typey on computer, no more lithium from bolivia for ipods, no more IPODS!!!!! No more food, no more movement, no more credit, etc. Our current historical trajectory requires immense amounts of energy or else everything crashes. In order to become the unipolar world power the USSR and USA engaged in ideological battles, proxy warfare (for ideology, energy, drugs etc.) but in the end the country that controls energy will be the unipolar hegemon. The USSR suffered internal collapse before any ultimate confrontation could take place: rumors of a travel visa causing the berlin wall to fall. THen glasnost and perestroika causing the fissures of an already troubled society to become apparent. Without the competition from the USSR it was now the USA's turn to dictate the terms of global organization. Actions like Kosovo, the first gulf war(being the iran-iraq war[which was a policy actively supported by washington's agenda:making iran and iraq batter eachother in order to make sure a regional hegemon never appeared]), the other two gulf wars, special forces deployment in Iran, destabilization campaigns in Iran. Were the efforts of the US intelligence community in destabilizing Iran insurgency or terrorism? Do you understand yet?

A stable democracy in afghanistan, point out a stable democracy in this world. Were you paying attention to the midterm elections? we are a divided country. There is no such thing as some utopian stable democracy, everybody has problems, internal contradictions, and unsustainable institutions.

Now here is where your argument goes completely off the wall: you claim war fatigue is the undergirding support for your argument!!!! WAR FATIGUE!! in this day and age? Iran and Iraq aren't even on the fucking list of issues this election, nobody gives a shit, war has become entertainment! We eradicate the other through our remote control bombers(which by the way Iran has started building [I hope you're the first one to get hit by one, for advocating terrorism through remote control aircraft in the first place you ignorant americunt]) to create a "stable"(like you say) ontology of self. There are no stable ontologies of self and no stable democracies, in fact nothing in this world is stable we re-create THE ENTIRE FUCKING THING EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY! Why should we be killing people for your utopian dream! because you re-label the violence?

How will "overextension" manifest itself n00b? lol can't we just....RECRUIT MORE! lol, elect more republicans to cut social spending send more to the military? Well we've BEEN DOING THAT FOR A LONG LONG TIME! Why does this war which is the longest in US history and STILL HAS NOT CAUSED WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT happen all of a sudden now?

China "free riding" lol what is this mancur olson? Are you aware of the joint military drills China and Russia regularly engage in? are you aware of SEATO and various other asian military, economic, and political treaties? Why would the chinese collapse the dollar? It would destroy their growth and the rest of the world's economies. There is no danger of China calling in debts it knows it can't be paid, in the same way there is no danger from a state launched nuclear missile because of mutually assured destruction. Now comes the real reason you want to get out of Afghanistan: TO REDEPLOY ELSESHWERE! To be ready for various other paranoid "red dawn" fantasies.

OH no theres more! we will use the money to PAY INTEREST ON THE DEBTS THAT WILL NEVER BE CALLED IN! rofl, this is so epically absurd.

"Only the B-52 Effect will prevent a resumption of frank civil war along ethnic lines,"

The B-52 effect is terror of what we can drop on them from above right? some kind of....terrorism? right?

"To paraphrase the line from Kaplan's Warrior Politics that changed my mind: At the end of the day, America's power to do good is strongest when American hard power is both abundant and largely held in reserve."

The quote that changed your mind is Kaplan's rehashing of the white man's burden?!!?!? When has the US ever done "Good"? When it happened was it not just serendipity that caused it while the US was pursuing its reified agenda?

We're in afghanistan to stay, if you're gonna advocate the opposite, at least strap on a nutsack and say it like you mean it none of this re-labeling equivocation bullshit.

"32" of Liquid Crystal anodyne" By The Owl

2010-11-03T12:56:00.002-05:00

Got a contribution from a friend of mine The Owl, this is what he writes:

Empty is modern life. Void of a purpose, we live in physical comfort and security but writhe in mental anguish at the dismal aspect of meaningless existence. How the fuck, then, do we get by?

Reading Kaczynski's Manifesto, among what amounts to paranoid venom against an innately evil, yet strangely ambiguous, "technology", something of a truth appears. Modern man, supplied with all the necessities of survival, obtainable with a minimum of effort, must supplement his psyche with "surrogate activities." These activities are our jobs, aspirations, hobbies and passions. They are, in the accepted morality of today, all of what constitutes a healthy and useful life.

It is unfortunate, however, that they are all bull shit. At the root, each an every pursuit not focused on the basic survival or gratification of the basic senses is a pathetic attempt at fulfilling that empty hollow hole we all feel deep inside.

Whether Kaczynski is right to blame technology for these woes is a mute point, since it is obvious that technology and humanity walk hand in hand. Thus, to denigrate technology is to denigrate homo sapien as well, which, all of us being human --or am I writing for future A?I-- is pointless.

Taking technology, and all its circumstances, as a priori, we see that this vapid, wasteland of purpose is unavoidable and must be dealt with as a force outside our control.

How to deal? Suicide? Hedonism? Some form of blinder that allows us, in the words of Peter Gibbons, to "just come home and think I've been fishing all day or something?" Or is the ability to deal simply, turn a bilnd eye to what's apparent and plow on ahead, what most of us term "growing up"?

Last weekend, these existential woes had me deep in a shadowy valley. A highly anticipated day off from work, without school or any other obligation, should have been blessed, but instead I awoke with a terrible feeling of anguish. I could think of nothing to do, or more to the point, nothing that I wanted to do.

So, at her suggestion, Ellen and I wandered down to the Charles river to watch the regatta. (By the bye, did you not know that I now live with my girlfirend, ******?)

It was boring. The boats moved endlessly down the river and it was impossible to know what you were watching. Who was winning? Who was racing? The fluid strokes of the rowers and the boats cutting through the water were aesthetically pleasing, but so were the clouds in the sky and I could have watched them just as easily (which I did).

The most notable aspect was the veritable fair the grew up along the river banks, having nothing to do with skulling or Vespolis and everything to do with Consumption. Apparently, the Head of the Charles is a great place to stock up on free samples of junk food, shop for overpriced clothing and be more or less cerebrially inundated with commercial ectoplasm. I had no wish to push through a crowd like an infant pig to the fat teats of the Dunkin Donuts truck handing out free shot glass sized Pumpkin Spice Lattes, so I applied myself to naviating safely through the masses and not sobbing out of pity for the all those present.

This has nothing to do with my overall argument other than to set the scene for my emotional state of mind. Any other day, any other time, the setting and circumstances are different, but the basic story is the same. Without a surrogate activity, I am depressed, lost, confused, antisocial and altogether, so pathetically, sane.

Now, the day continued in this blase manner, growing ever more tedious and unendurable. Naturally, my ill feeling permeated the air around me and infected my significant other (who doesn't share my former sentiments, or at least refuses to acknowledge them) until we were both exhausted with the effort of living effortlessly.

Towards evening, Ellen brought up the current Best Buy sale. Our apartment was without a television, one white wall in our living space glaringly vacant, the whole room some how incomplete. We were living in American sin. She suggested we atone for this sin by buying a TV, and in the process, though this was not stated, only implied, supply ourselves with a purpose.

Consuming - not the food we need, nor the sights, sounds, smells and touches of an active life- but commercial goods, is an extremely effective surrogate activity. From the moment I agreed to the plan, I felt immensely better. We looked up bus schedules, purposefully gathered the necessary cards, bags and clothing for the trip, all the while feeling more and more sure of our own agency. Throughout all of this, I was aware of the fiction, and yet it still affected me positively. I knew how pathetic, how false and, may I use the word, EVIL this turn of events was, but like scratching your ass in public, once you give in to the craving, even the disapproving glare of a beautiful girl cannot stop you from sphincter spelunking.

We took the trip, the deal went down. All the way home we guarded our precious new purchase like it was the physical manifestation of that happy feeling. It really (and this is totally without sarcasm) was a wonderful night. All because we were able to fill that drafty void of existence with this greedy, self-centered activity.

You could argue that there are many other surrogate activities that are not so base. But with each example, e.g. jogging, reading philosophy on the internet, volunteering at a hospital, smoking phat-ass blunts etc. you must acknowledge that at the root, these are all desperate attempts to paper over a structural fracture at the cornerstone of our being.

There is no conclusion here, only complaint. Please respond.

Please do not vote for Mark Kirk tomorrow

2010-11-01T14:31:00.001-05:00

For those of you who have not read this blog(thats everyone but me), I have been paying close attention to Mark Kirk since he first became a congressman. I would just like to write down the reasons why I would vote against him even if he was running against Satan.

1. Mark Kirk claimed that he had special classified intelligence that confirmed the fact that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq we just had to trust him(I cannot find this cite online [the Giannoulias website sez its chicago daily herald, 10/27/02; Chicago Daily Herald, 10/8/04] I have not managed to confirm that).
Now kirk claims that Bush lied to him! http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/gop-senate-hopeful-bush-official-lied-iraq/

but please take 10 seconds out of your day and watch this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gupBSG09YpY

I might be crazy here, but I think he got Bush and Saddam mixed up.

2. Mark Kirk claimed to have been in Operation Iraqi Freedom, which is to say he claimed to have killed hajis in the Iraq war in order to make us safe. This article explains how he equivocated out of it, but any intelligent person wouldn't buy his bullshit http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/06/kirk_campaign_mum_on_another_a.html
This is part of a larger pattern of packing bullshit behind claims of military service: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeFf4JNx3tc

3.Mark Kirk claimed to have been the Navy's "Intelligence officer of the year" a claim which gets broken down by research at this blog: http://ellenofthetenth.blogspot.com/2010/05/details-on-kirks-award-show-kirks.html Long story short he claimed the navy gave him an award the navy doesn't give. Claimed it was a prestigious award with a similar name even though it wasn't. Claimed that he was intelligence "officer" when in fact it was given to an entire "combat wing". Kirk's role within that combat wing is marginal at best.

4. Now I want to dwell on what we haven't been addressing directly: MARK KIRK IS A SPOOK! Kirk is a spy! He works for the ONI(Office of Naval Intelligence). The intelligence community works to achieve the agenda of wall street, the 1% of the 1%. A spy will never represent what is best for you, a Spy will do whatever it takes to barely stay in office in order to push money to his real constituency. But you may just say: "ONI is the oldest intelligence agency and its within a branch of the armed forces, whats so bad about that?". So I ask you to read this quote: http://cryptome.org/kirk-cia.htm
"To my knowledge, there are only three current Members of Congress who work with the CIA: our chairman, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss), the author of this amendment; the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Simmons);and me, who is detailed to the CIA from navy intelligence." So as of 2005 Kirk was "detailed to the CIA". Now is it a little more apparent? Intelligence is an area of the executive in which a shadow government can be created because THERE IS LITTLE OR NO OVERSIGHT. During wartime (not our bullshit wars of choice, but wars like world war II) it may be justifiable to have a robust intelligence community with some independence. But when there is not an existential threat we do not need the lesser evil of a shadow government within the executive to check the greater evil of a total collapse in government. The more we let the foot soldiers of wall street infiltrate the legitimate political apparatuses of the United States the more we will see more militarization in our policy: Imperialism abroad(kirk's efforts to lie in order to get a war with Iraq, then say anything to make people forget/forgive for the lie), repression at home through the expansion of the drug war/prison industrial complex(The only bill Kirk has authored in recent history is a bill to make incarceration/penalties harsher for more potent marijuana[thats right if you have bad marijuana its a lesser sentence than if you have high grade marijuana{this is such a perfect example of a wall street policy}]), and anti-progressive fiscal policies(tax cuts for the rich[because rich people have to eat too!]). Those are the three themes you will find in wall street's agenda. Now I'm going to move to the borders here.

5. Another thing that wall street loves is money laundering. There is a good deal of evidence that vast amounts of money are laundered through US banks, stock markets, and corporations the most famous of which being: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/imf-loans-to-russia-sold-on-sly-alleges-skuratov-1119438.html The massive IMF loan to Russia to stabilize the rouble before the turn of the millennium saw a large portion of its money rerouted through US banks most notably the Bank of New York. As you can imagine this influx of liquid can have very positive effects for an economy, and thusly it is in the interest of wall street to make sure that the United States stays a haven for money laundering. In order to achieve this agenda the banks most be quite independent, there must be very little corporate financial oversight, and there has to be massive amounts of illicit money sloshing around in the economy. This is one reason why the CIA who was providing the Hmong militias in the plain of jars with funding and logistics necessary to keep the barracks open(as a tripwire to communist chinese land invasion of southeast asia) and the poppy fields plowed (exports of opium) ensured that some of it make it to the United States. I'm not going to go to in to the specifics here if you are not familiar with this then check out (professor at University of Wisconsin) Doctor Alfred McCoy's book "politics of Heroin". The reason I bring this up is because a non-fiction book "shadowplay" by Tim Marshall (not to be confused with the novel of the same name)

"He quotes one source, quoting Mark Kirk a US intelligence officer saying that: 'Eventually we opened up a huge operation against Milosevic, both secret and open. We gave KLA both military, technical, officers as directors, logistical support, we smuggled drugs, ran prostitution rackets and murdered civilians, and blamed all this on the Serbs and Milosevic.'"

I had to give you the background because some people would ask: "why would an intelligence officer slang drugs and pimp hoo'ers?": Its the economy stupid. Specifically the most important part of the economy the cash economy. Because if you have cash, you can borrow more! Credit can't get you more credit, but cash? cash gets you more credit.

6. This one is rumor, but I have to at least mention it after Kirk voted against the DADT repeal. Certain males have claimed to have had relationships with Kirk in the past and recently.

Thats right folks Mark Kirk is a spy, a pimp, a drug dealer, a liar, an anti-gay closeted homosexual, murderer, and the only legislation hes written is to make pot more illegal.

Mark Kirk's career may be in intelligence but attempting to brand Bush a liar as the sole source of WMD info when this youtube video is one click away, shows what he thinks of your intelligence. United Statesians may have a short memory, but it cannot possibly be this short! Please do not vote for this man tomorrow.

MARK KIRK IS NOT A MODERATE: "I will lead the effort to repeal" and "we're well on our way to making this guy a one termer"

halloween

2010-10-25T13:32:00.002-05:00

I've thought about this before and it is probably well known, but it is interesting to note. Writing off the top of my head so no real research I suppose, but it is popular knowledge that Halloween stems from a holiday known as "all hallows eve" or something along those lines. I don't intend to claim this is universal, but just in my certain(anglo) historical trajectory this is where Halloween is situated historically.
All hallows eve was the point in time in which the border between the world of the dead and the world of the living became most porous and started to strengthen itself again. This is much like other pagan(for lack of a better metonym) rituals in which the waxing and waning of natural phenomena were encoded(pine trees at the winter equinox, fertility symbols at the rebirth of spring). But instead of something that we have encoded in to scientific discourse(like the cycle of seasons because rotation around the sun and pine trees not losing needles in winter because of their evolution) this border between the world of the living has been effaced with Halloween. Not to make it seem like this was the agenda of someone, this was just a result of one more successive layer of dialectic atop an ever more specific historical trajectory. The culmination of structures of micro-power or the "mutual, indefinite blackmail" of power relations reifying yet one more concept by shuffling it through the zone of exception.

Halloween originally meant that one had to disguise oneself from shades and creatures who might happen to cross the border between the world of the dead and the world of the living. Old religions along my historical trajectory mostly did not have a heaven, simply a world of the dead and a world of the living. Greek religious structures, Roman, Assyrian, and Old Testament all have/had a world of the living and a world of the dead. The idea that there is third world in play is a relatively new innovation. This need to be disguised from the ghouls and lost souls meant a subversion of the general social order. Much like episodes in the winter equinox(x-mas) throughout history: spontaneous ceasefires, the replacement of the king by a town drunk or possibly insane person and killing the unstable individual at the end of the day to symbolize the death and rebirth of the kingdom itself(Sacea). These older rituals that have become encoded in to our culture represent points in time where subversion of the general norms WAS the norm.

So now most people regard Halloween as a day in which dwelling dwellers buy candy and give it to people who come to their door. These people are children dressed in costumes and their guardians. But there is also another halloween in which the older nature of Halloween is made apparent: gender roles, specifically the female role of "slut". I don't mean to slap you in the face with the word, but this is the best description I can come up with. There is a role out there for females to play: "slut", but this role is considered not what "good" females do. For the most part the role that we have created for female demands that they not derive pleasure from sex and not desire sex. Most importantly though: that they never notice the power that comes with sex and exploit it. Such male paranoia about such obvious things has bled in to modern ideas of femaleness. Lets be honest here we all derive pleasure from sex(assuming its not terrible sex), we all desire sex (not all the time but often), and we all seek our own agenda using most of the tools available to us whether it be sex or not. But even though logic cuts through these roles quickly and easily we are still shackled by these roles (male and female alike). We are all stuck policing each other in to these roles.

This other Halloween still celebrates the old pagan rituals' theme of subversion of the existing order and it is adult Halloween. The double standard of "pimp vs. ho" in which men are celebrated and respected for being sexually involved with multiple partners. In colloquialisms these are referred to as "conquests" and other loaded words that betray this double standard. Women on the other hand are ostracized and placed in counter-factual roles if they are perceived to be sexually involved with multiple partners. During Halloween there is a subversion of the existing order in that as we are policing each other in to these reified roles, we no longer can place women in the "slut" role as a result of their knowledge of their own sexuality. On Halloween women having knowledge of their sexuality is normal, so have fun. But keep in mind the reason I am bringing this up, is because it is so apparent when it is not Halloween. Without a subversion of the existing order we may have never known that this double standard is not a universal truth.

Muslim Paranoia (THE mosque at [emotional heuristic here])

2010-08-17T13:33:00.001-05:00

I will not say the same shit. I will not say: "In this country we have freedom of religion!". We do not have freedom of religion we have an old document that says we do, many in the USA do not have freedom of religion. It is also too simplistic for the people who don't have a reason for their objections to a mosque somewhat spatially near the wound in Manhattan. I will not say: "Islam is different than other religions, it is significantly more dangerous!". Islam is whatever Muslims (and non-Muslims) make of it. It is an idea, if that idea is used to kill people than is it any different from our ideas of law and war? Do we not justify our own killing? Every breath we take is a breath stolen from someone else, freedom=inequality.

I would like to side-step to explain the phrase" "immutable ontology". First the word immutable means to never change...EVER. The second word traditionally in philosophy means the study of the body or bodies. Recently in philosophy it has become the response to the question: "What Am I?", "What is Human?", or "What is Being? or to be?". The way I like to use ontology in this phrase is to imply a bordered area or metonym (when used in this fashion a metonym is the area which a word represents[if you and a friend both picture a chair in your mind's eye, you will never picture the exact same thing, but you will both agree that each other's picture was a chair]). These definitions of ontology and metonym are not in most dictionaries, so please don't think that this is something I didn't look up. These words attain different meaning depending on what stimuli you expose yourself to. In my research ontology and metonym are great functional words for communicating ideas.

So you have probably figured out what I'm getting at by "immutable ontology" by now. The idea that something has the potential to not change: whether it be ideas, non-living or living things. The modern world pits humans against impermanence, locking them in a losing battle to attain security through immutable ontologies. These privileged identities of security are illusory. Reality is random and nothing will ever change that. Existentialism teaches us to adopt a lifestyle based on the assumption that you could die tomorrow. This kind of idea is one of acceptance of death, and therefore to live your own life better. This seems to be a better response to paranoia.

Instead responses to paranoia usually take different directions, but are easily mapped. Both groups create an immutable ontology concerning Islam. The reasoning for this creation is because of a media blitz after 9/11 that blamed Muslims to the extent that the USA went to war with a country completely unrelated to the attacks(as of the time of this writing the US is still engaged in the occupation of Iraq, and with that massive military base it'll be a wonder if they're not there for good). But lets just ignore the flawed reasoning that led to United Statesians associating Islam with terrorism to the point of crippling paranoia, when terrorism has a slight fraction of the body count the United States military actions have racked up. If it is more likely the United States will murder than a Muslim will murder in the name of Islam, than at what point does the racism become some Freudian protection of the ideal self image.

So both groups construct an immutable ontology of Islam as uniquely violent and uniquely worse than other world religions.
Group number one's immutable aspect of Islam is that: "Islam did 9/11". Therefore group number one thinks that a mosque being built near the world trade center site would mean that Islam not only did 9/11, they won the war! Pretty soon it'll be like red dawn, only this time it'll be like green dawn or Quran dawn. We'll have to take to the hills and use Cuban revolution tactics to destabilize their regime! Wolverines!

Group number two's immutable aspect of Islam is that: "Islam is uniquely violent over all other religions". In this respect the mosque represents an action of bad taste, that should be deferred for later. For example: making a joke at the expense of a recently deceased celebrity, and then asking 'too soon?'

My personal opinion is that Mosques are not a fucking issue. This is exactly like gay marriage: another non-issue (wedge issue) brought up for no apparent reason and the agenda setting corporate media shoves it down our throats for fucking months before an election. If people wanna build a center of worship to zuul at ground zero more power to 'em if they can afford to put it up, who gives a shit? At a very basic fundamental level you personally: how often are you personally going to walk by that site? New Yorkers like to think they're the big apple, but they ain't that big United Statesians are spread pretty wide and NYC is just another city. If you don't spend time in NYC: SHUT THE FUCK UP! It has no affect on you whatsoever!? Why do you want to play the role of policing Muslims? Just because you can get away with it? Just because thats the role TeeVee told you to play? Is this Zimbardo's prison study? Ok, not you you, but the individual people, wtf can they think their interest is in this issue that they can tell people what they can and can't build? The last thing that bothers me about this issue is that these people telling people what they can and cannot build are the same fuckers who thought Iraq was responsible for 9/11. I still can't stress it enough ladies and gentleman: read about 9/11. Read the crazies and read the whitewashes, but to be honest with you the in-between is just a bunch or bullshit, its actually more like a bullshit sandwich though where the normality such sources convey is the bread, lulling you in to a false sense of security before the taste of bullshit fills your mouth and nostrils.

In my opinion they should build whatever they can fucking build on, near, and around ground zero. Not that I think the immutable ontology of capitalism (infinite growth) is real, but because when you live in a city sometimes you can sense its soul. To have such a wound on the city, cannot be good for its soul. I would like to see a museum that would quickly be filled with bullshit regarding 9/11, but it would provide a geographical space in which to struggle for the visibility of certain subordinated truths from that day.

I wanted to talk about one last thing which I will label "Apocrypha": The World Trade Center worship/spiritual center. The world trade center had at least one non-denominational center of worship. So I would like to point out that Islam already was practiced at the WTC. People have opposition to this mosque, because they believe that it represents a change from the status quo, but hopefully this can help them realize that there has been no change if we continue to allow worship of any deity on or near the world trade center.

The Political philosophy of Jeet Kune Do

2010-06-18T12:47:00.001-05:00

In early history sovereigns were conquerors and it was well known. The violence was apparent and easy to identify.

Now sovereigns are law givers who ask you to die for the country/race.

To paint a romantic picture of the age of conquer as better than the effaced violence in our age of laws is too fall in to the same utopian trap. It is also worth pointing out that attempts to create romanticized golden ages usually result in overt totalitarianism. We should be looking to the future, where technics/biopower/disciplinary power will usurp the life-taking power found in the conqueror and the eloquent justifications of violence found in the law. These new sovereignties will amplify old powers of sovereignty by locking them in to pre-established patterns that are insulated further and further from human action. Slowly ceding control over humans' social world to machinery and science in the from of economics. The path we are on leads to an omnipresent panopticon.

We need to find some kind of sovereignty outside of these 5 metonyms, or at least excise the portions that are just baggage.

One possible way to accomplish this may be to resort to Jeet Kune Do. This is a martial arts methodology developed by Bruce Lee, the full name is Jun Fan Jeet Kune Do (Jun Fan being Bruce Lee's chinese government name), or: Bruce Lee's Way of the Intercepting Fist.

In martial arts one is expected to choose a style or a few style and master them. Bruce Lee decided instead to create a methodology: the way of the intercepting fist. This method was to take what was most valuable from all the styles he knew and discard those elements of the styles which were non-competitive in comparison. In this fashion a specific type of "way of the intercepting fist" arose: bruce lee's way of the intercepting fist. Bruce was very explicit concerning the fact he was not creating another style, but a methodology to create one's own style.

The philosophy of Jeet Kune Do much like the name implies is a counter-offensive method. Meaning that Jeet Kune Do does not involve naked aggression, but counter-attacks. In Jeet Kune Do one does not attack until attacked. Once attacked, the fist is intercepted, and a counter-attack is used.

I think that Jeet Kune Do may present a space in which to construct new ideas of sovereignty from the discarded husks of previous epistemes. To create a democracy that will not allow sovereign emergency powers under any circumstances we will need to utilize the whole human knowledge both at present and throughout history. To create a sovereignty that includes easily available participation in politics, some sort of permutation of direct democracy and micro-computing we have to be prepared to discard antiquated theories. Such as: democratic peace theory, libertarian corporate de facto ownership of the world, communist government de facto ownership of the world, or realism's inability to recognize why people care about friends and family (because you should be at war with them).

At the same time we are enacting an idea that has not been thought of yet, we will also have to be escaping the traps: Hobbes's trap: in order to overcome a great sovereign power, one must always resort to the use of an even greater sovereign power. How can one practically overcome this? Schmitt's trap: politics is marked by defining friends, and enemies. One cannot have politics without enemies.

"I have not invented a "new style,"...On the contrary, I hope to free my followers from clinging to styles, patterns, or molds... My movements are simple, direct and non-classical. The extraordinary part of it lies in its simplicity. Every movement in Jeet Kune-Do is being so of itself. There is nothing artificial about it. I always believe that the easy way is the right way. Jeet Kune-Do is simply the direct expression of one's feelings with the minimum of movements and energy...Again let me remind you Jeet Kune Do is just a name used, a boat to get one across, and once across it is to be discarded and not to be carried on one's back."
-Bruce Lee

the revolution

2010-06-16T12:48:00.001-05:00

Many individuals seem to believe that the current systems of control are oppressive.

Most of these same individuals believe that if they were the sovereign that things would be better. That under their control the world would know true justice.
Others argue that if they had their way the current system of sovereign control would be eliminated. Not under their control, but under their guidance the world would know true justice.

What I mean to say is: OK, revolution whatever, now what?

It seems centralization of power or control over massive amounts of people leads to tyranny. But complete decentralization is not possible, theoretically anarchists cannot paint a picture of a post-sovereign world. Communists would abolish private property. This is a basic practical fact of how to achieve "communism". Anarchists would abolish sovereignty. Both these actions seem simple, but we cannot truly define private property or sovereignty. We cannot make concrete linkages between these metonyms and their physical representations in physical de facto reality. Even if such linkages were established they would be inter-subjective in nature and subject to drastic changes over time. Not simply because of the evolution of language. This would be a result of the constantly detourning meanings of powerful words. Every individual in this world occupies a tactical position, every meal you eat is a meal another person cannot eat. Rewarding yourself with altruistic chemical rushes if you pull the convulsing fly from the web out of pity only means you have effaced the spider's suffering from starvation. Think about the debate over our current inter-subjective construction of "terrorism". Every different political agenda has a different definition for this word "terrorism", even every agency in the US federal government has disparate definitions. To create a world free of private property or state sovereignty would only mean to create a world in which the meaning of these words has been effaced. The definition of these phrases can be stretched so far as to make it impossible to ever accomplish the tasks of Communism and Anarchism.

CommunisM:
Private property can be construed to mean anything under the immediate dominion of a living human body. To wear clothes is to possess them, if only for a short time. So in application: the abolition of private property would mean a huge increase in state power. Essentially there are two tactical positions: the state and the individual. There may be intermediate entities, but for the most part they will fall on one side or another of the border. Organizations with any type of fiat or veto power over individual's lives and/or actions can be grouped with the state. Any organization that does not control human action through implicit or explicit force would fall on the side of the individual.

At the point where the individual does not possess private property, the other tactical positions outside of the ontology of "individual" will receive the private property. We cannot define pieces of reality out of existence with wordplay. At the point an entity controls whether or not you are clothed or housed they are controlling an overt amount of veto and/or fiat power over your actions: they are grouped with the state. The abolition of individual private property can be phrased in a different way: The complete ownership of all non-human matter by the state. When phrased in this way the teleological aspirations of Communism seem more like totalitarianism, than democracy.

Sovereignty:

And now I must backtrack. First of all my grouping of entities with the state relies on my own definition of sovereignty which is the exercise of veto or fiat power over individuals. If you pull a gun on someone and steal their shoes you had sovereignty over that individual. And you will say: thats not a state, its not recognized by the UN or some shit. Bullshit. Sovereignty resides in individual actions their perception of truth and responsibility. Just because your robbery can be prosecuted does not mean that the entity prosecuting you is not a fucking criminal!

State Sovereignty:

States are just criminals that got so big they couldn't prosecute each other for criminal action, this does not change the basic fact of sovereignty: it resides in the individual. Sovereignty is (re)produced every single second of every day in the words, thoughts, and actions of individuals. If we all decided that the situation in the city where the police have the guns and we are unarmed should be reversed, it would be. If one by one Nazis refused to pour the Zyklon B, there would have been no holocaust. Soldiers that decide to put down their weapons and even interact with eachother because they have holidays derived from the same proto-holidays: Sacea, Winter Solstice, Christmas, etc. have denied the preceding day's truth of sovereignty. But much like Sacea the spell of absurdity/revelry fades as every other individual who refused to go along with the new tactical position of the revelers assimilated them back in to the old paradigm. This definition relies a great deal on Foucault's definition of power as "mutual, indefinite blackmail" (in Power/Knowledge). The popular definition of a state or sovereign state is one that is recognized as a sovereign state by other sovereign state. How tautological a definition in the first place? It sounds like a rule the winners invented to make sure nobody steals the legitimacy that arrives with the title "state".

Operational definition:

The reason I point out and defend this definition is because I essentially pushed on the definition of words to make sure this argument went through. Without seeing the reasoning behind the "mutual, indefinite blackmail" it is sleight of hand to use my operational definition of sovereignty in order to deconstruct two emancipatory goals.

If I didn't provide valid reasoning for sovereignty as the exercise of veto and/or fiat power over other individuals, then I would be succumbing to the same trap that attempts to put in to praxis these emancipatory ideals fall into. I do not wish to complicate further the pallimpsest of inter-subjective definitions, I want to simplify. Our non-material world is already too complex. I believe that this complexity leads to what social psychology calls paralysis of choice. The idea is that if there are 20 different cereals to choose from it would take forever to choose without some heuristic: brand name or maybe price. Cereal is a terrible metaphor for every choice a human makes. When a human makes a decision they do not write it down and weigh it down, they do not have a long time to figure out the pros and cons. Most of the time a human accesses what they know quickly and using the mental heuristics they have established to come to a decision.

Complexity of knowledge => Paralysis of choice => stupidity

I believe that the paralysis of choice has led to a plague of stupidity in humanity. This pestilence is not tamped down, but exacerbated for profit. Use of cheap psychological tricks in marketing (and everything is marketed today) amounts to mind control as it seeks to usurp veto and/or fiat power from your own mind. Such marketing may be sub-narrative, this is not pseudo-science subliminal messaging. These are the reproductions of the dominant episteme through what is not said. One cannot help but read between the lines. These sub-narratives condition individuals to never think of certain questions. To question the wisdom of a presidential administration's justifications for a two front illegal war located in two countries that were not primarily responsible for 9/11 is never even thought of.
It is not that the question is taboo, but that the question just never forms in an individual's mind who has immersed themselves so fully in the dominant paradigm. As the complexity becomes more paralyzing the adaptive youth become less susceptible and the envelope gets pushed. This is the status quo. This scourge spreads as marketing gives us false heuristics and normalized sub-narratives. Marketing is imperialism of the brain. Not simply metaphorical like Kalle Lasn talks about, it is real. Your thoughts are real, not only are these thoughts physical chemicals being tossed around your skull, but they create the conditions for physical reality. One cannot write a word until one thinks of it, one cannot build an object without a plan in mind, the only thing that grants continuity to our perception of this reality is knowledge/memory. As technology allows for proliferation of the nodes of knowledge normalization, the further immersion of individuals in to the current paradigm is a foregone conclusion. As Hegel said:

"What is 'familiarly known' is not properly known, just for the reason that it is 'familiar'. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account"

As technology changes our physical reality by making stimulus that comes from entities rather than individuals the norm it is easier to make these agendas in to "truth". Like Goebbels says:

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over”.

Bounding the thoughts of your own mind, limiting what you see, the words you use, and the questions you ask. This is the the imperialism of the brain that is everywhere you look and listen. I do not know how to fight the modern contagion of stupidity, but its existence seems obvious at this point. People just gotta level up.

Back to Anarchism:

Although Anarchism has a valid aspiration and seemingly better thought behind it than other domination ideals. Liberalism/democratic peace theory is an ideal in which the world is conquered by liberal democracy. Libertarian theory is an ideal which would create a world in which all non-human matter will be owned by corporations. These involved domination.Communism required abolition of private property, which meant ceding of property to some non-individual entity. This would mean domination by a state or corporate entity. Anarchism seeks to overcome all these ideas by destruction of the state, to remove the tool of domination is to prevent domination.

Anarchism suffers from the same fault of all teleological ideals: Ends just provide a justification for immoral means.

Anarchism suffers from the same outcome of libertarian ideology and communism: where is the power displaced to? We see the power of private property displaced from individuals to entities in communism and libertarian ideology. Where is the power of sovereignty (de facto) and law (de jure) displaced to in anarchism? The power is displaced to individuals, in this fashion war is made a relic. But in our effort to erase war, we focused too much on the definition of war as a contest between state entities, by eliminating state entities we eliminate war. The praxis of such an ideal would mean that war between individuals would take the place of state war. We moved the borderlines of definitions in our heads, but there is still murder and injustice. The potential to kill another individual at will shall always reside within the human, nothing can remove this potential.

Any ideal to emancipate individuals from the tyranny of an oppressive power, has to become a more oppressive power in order to subordinate the original oppressive power. This is Hobbes' trap.

The most damaging turn to anarchist ideals in practice comes with the aftermath. In a world without state sovereignty nothing prevents tribes/nations from forming and engaging in war. So as soon as a revolution to destroy the apparatus of government has succeeded, 10 other governments will form in its place.

This is why I brought up my original question: ok, revolution whatever, now what?

We have not found a way out of Hobbes trap. Schmitt further entrenched us.

How do we overcome a great power without resorting to the use of a greater power? If there is no way to do so then sovereignty is inherently totalitarian and democracy is nothing but a dream for the future. As long as a head of state can proclaim their state of emergency which justifies their torture or disobedience of the Geneva conventions law on POWs; as long as the sovereign can proclaim themselves outside the law through this emergency, then law created by the people is an illusion.

The law of the people/representation/suffrage is a privilege that will only remain as long as the sovereign's whim allows it. Don't tell me that this is the fluke. There is no such thing as democracy in practice thus far. Until the exception/emergency/new norm falls outside the sovereign's power there will never be democracy.

Then the question is: where is the exception/emergency/new norm displaced to?

nada

2010-06-11T15:08:00.001-05:00

So why am I writing this. I had thoughts in my head, but writing them down ~~doesn't~~...it seems...no it is self-indulgent. I like reading things that I have written before. I hope that a few people have read a bit and gotten something from it. That is at the back of my head, but to make it my focus would be to think that I have something to say that is more important. The aporia of life, the fact of existence being a denial of some other existence. If you save the fly, you starve the spider. We are all in a constant process of deferral of our moral responsibilities. Myself most certainly included, I bear personal responsibility for the choices I make. Nobody can deny free will or the sovereignty of the self. There is no escaping this fact. Every living thing has a tactical position that they defend and push. If this was not true, these living things would have chosen to stop living. Anyone who can read this, any living thing has a reason for existence that keeps them going, a tactical position that must be secured against the randomness of suffering, and an agenda in order to further secure such illusory safety. Again, identification of all security narratives as false hope does not mean that I have found the true hope. This does not mean that I can see the truth, but only that it seems apparent from the de facto state of reality that the future can never be predicted. Not simply the social activities of complicated life forms, but the entire fabric of reality. The amount humans do not know is staggering, we know god damn nothing about death. We do not comprehend insanity, is it simply socially constructed abnormality? completely biological? completely psychosomatic? permutations of these? Death, sickness, insanity, etc. can happen to any individual at any time. No matter how effective we become at tilting the probabilities in our favor. God does play dice with the fate of the world, every fraction of a second of every blink of an eye trillions of dice are rolled where the stakes are human lives and suffering. Empirically proven systematic ways to shift probabilities lead to the fantasies of immortality and invulnerability for the wealthy ubermensch. The finish line, the winners circle: celebrity. It is not a profession to be on television it is some sort of pseudo-religious ritual. One does not want money anymore, only to have their image reproduced and beamed to the far corners of the world. The reward is their clones spread out, repeating the thoughts and words: making them significant. The american dream is ....cliched. But this is another word for normal.

Vocations are a joke in this dream. Vast swaths of individuals sitting at desks pretending to do work. Their high credit limit gives them the fleeting feeling of celebrity. The feeling flees, because it is being chased with such bloodlust. The ignorance as to the cost: the slavery. The husb/ife the slow (re)production of magistrates, professionals, and land owners. The drugs. Be honest: The drugs. Something to dull the noise that crescendos as years pass. The stress, the isolation, the long hours, the money troubles...the divorce.

Then there is labor. Labor sells the hours of a human's life for gold... Well... you know... metaphorically; literally labor sells the hours of a human's life for fiat currency. But the deal is rigged. The contract was written by the boss's lawyer. The contract is enforced by a jurist who is the boss's BFF. But this is Upton Sinclair shit. Nowadays labor is no longer useful, it is obsolete. A sign of an older paradigm of economic growth. It is not a worthy profession, it is looked down upon. In the same way that smiles' self help gave people canon which legitimized not feeding the poor, the homeless non-people. That you and I see often when we walk in the city (that is any fucking city or town, humans without money to make rent are everywhere). This same mentality affects the working class. This condescension that "they are not doing the best they can considering their tactical positioning" that exemplifies attitudes towards the homeless is now how people look at labor. Which is silly considering the shrinking of the middle class and that the strike-slip fault lines of global laissez-faire capitalism are becoming apparent. The laborer spends a large portion of their time working, but not actually getting paid. In fact, they spend a large portion of their time working, and paying for the privilege to be able to do so. They spend their time and money procuring the correct attire for the environment. They spend the time before punching in waiting to be able to punch in not getting paid.Commuting an hour there and an hour back (if you're lucky). The commute means you pay before you even work: either exorbitant gas prices or overpriced antique public transit. But these are very simple little things. Now that the industrial economy is in its death throes (I do not say this like it is bad, I don't fucking know whats good or bad, just a subjective observation). The service industry. I want you to ask yourself how many people do you actually know and chill with that work in the service industry? If you are young or a minority my money is that the answer is a lot: Bartenders, Waiters/waitresses, cooks, cashiers, landscapers, essentially these are all things that people can easily do for themselves, but they pay a premium to others in order for them to do it for them. I mentioned earlier how the middle class is shrinking. This may seem to be unrelated, but in my opinion there will be a strong correlation. As the middle class shrinks(go into this next) they will have less disposable income. Less disposable income will lead to less consumption of service products: They will just make their own coffee, or their own drink, or mow their own lawn. If this correlation is true, than the service industry will suffer a decline leading to an extended period of high unemployment. I do not know how this will be alleviated, clearly these individuals will seek training and other jobs. But such an extended period of high unemployment, would have other repercussions on the entire economy. But most importantly would further catalyze the dissolution of the middle class. Because the people who utilize the service industry the most are the middle class. I love eating out, getting a delicious plate of food with a friend or two. But I am just passing the service industry paycheck I get to another worker and letting the bosses take a cut. If there was a database of individuals and their skills (free schools and post-crash sites starting to do this) I could just go to the cooks house and trade a service directly for a delicious plate of food. In this fashion there would be no graft given to the bosses. Most other service industry workers are the same way we perform a service others could easily do and we use our disposable income to do the same. Bartenders and waiters/waitresses are the best tippers out there. The service industry keeps itself afloat, because they are not paid a living wage. So two jobs, and your disposable income is the chance to play the role of the wealthy for a short period of time by consuming a service. To express fiat power over another human, to command and to have obeyed. A small taste of sovereignty of the other, a small taste of control, but it costs money. Ironically the people who daily (re)produce the bourgeois ideology of self-help that made homelessness a crime and labor a dirty word will be the same people slandered with it later. The edges of the service industry is where this is clearly evident, but this vicious cycle will spread until it engulfs the entire economy if the rules of our game don't change.

But why would the middle class shrink and the answer is two things, which we should be thinking of as one thing: Transportation and Energy. I even capitalized that shit. Cars. The personal automobile. An entire country constructed around the institution of the personal automobile: the highways, taxes for maintenance, subsidized steel, subisidized auto-industry. A history written by the personal automobile: The suburbs, white flight, property, status, fashion. A future of blood in the name of the personal automobile: Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia. In order to defend its tactical positioning the United States must ensure access to energy. Whoever has the energy can divvy it up for political allegiance. I'm not saying its a simple handshake thing, but Japan isn't thinking about invading the mainland for oil anymore. Its the energy stupid. And if a country spends such a vastly disproportionate amount of money on military spending like the United States does then they can afford to "control" the oil fields. As long as massive amounts of money are funneled to the military industrial complex then the oil fields can be occupied. As long as the oil fields can be occupied then the United States can maintain global pre-eminence. This is how our security is constructed. The security of our overconsumption. The bliss of never having to build a civilization that can fly. Even if such security is not an illusion, it is predicated upon the insecurity of others.

Labor is not the correct translation for how the products we consume are made. Our clothes, our shoes, our electronics, our everything. They are made by slaves. I will not say that there are certain places where children are and putting children to work is bad. The united States was putting children to work years ago, who are we to chastise when it is our own fault. We chastise, because in that way we can deny our responsibility albeit ever so slight. We know that we buy shit those slave children make, you and I know we share responsibility. But if we can do a two minutes hate every once in awhile. Kathie lee, nike, etc. Then we can ignore our complicity, we ignore the fact that it was not a few bad apples and we ignore the fact that there might be a solution. We ignore the fact it is not just children. There are more slaves today than at any other point in history. Let me give you the meta picture: There are two ways to develop an economy today. Number one is to protect your industry, because they may be new and can't compete yet on the world market. This runs the risk of making an inferior product and inferior industrial infrastructure in the long run, because of lack of competition. But in developing nations the only indigenous entity with the money/credit to build industry is the state. If a country wishes to maintain control of their own natural resources or control of their own product they have very few options. Most of the time this import substitution industrialization does end up creating products that can't compete in the world market. The other option (to develop while maintaining sovereignty) instead of industrialization is to produce a cash crop or natural resource. This can create jobs and infrastructure for an extended period of time, but there are downfalls. First of all if a country is selling off its natural resources they are being used to create a different product. The amount of money and jobs that would be created by an industry that created an end product would be substantially more, but would have the same pitfalls mentioned before. Nothing is infinite, eventually the natural resources will dwindle and what will a developing economy rely on then? Where will all the laid off workers go? These are just internal problems. The main problem with a cash crop or natural resource is that it is all you have. If you don't sell this fucking copper, your country will go bankrupt and they'll overthrow you! But there is one country that buys most of just about everything. The United States. So who do you think decides the price of copper?

*ring Ring*
United States: Hello?
Country A: Hey Sam whats up? oh boy it is your lucky day, have I got a shit ton of copper for you!
United States: O rly? You selling it for what 10 bucks a ton?
Country A: Haha! ya right, you old sly fox. Same as last year 15 a ton.
United States: ouch. See the thing is I just got off the phone with Country B and she just said that she had copper for 12 a ton.
Country A: Country b!? those assholes? You know you can't get better quality than my copper Sam.
United States: I mean that is an awful lot of mon-Click- oh one second I have another call. Hello?
Country C: Sam Listen, you drive a hard bargain but I'll do 9.
United States: One second -click- That is Country C on the other line telling me he'll sell them to me for 8 bucks a ton, if you don't make a better offer I'm hanging up...

and on and on.

Its called a race to the bottom. So what ends up happening you ask? Countries run out of resources, their currency defaults, there is a revolution, there is a slump in commodity prices and: enter the IMF. The IMF believes the only way to economic growth is through foreign direct investment (FDI). Essentially they want to make the country in to a stock and sell it on wall street. In order to do so a few conditions have to be satisfied: privatization of nationalized industry; massive loans with interest rates and payment schedules everybody knows can't be met; and the transfer of sovereignty to economist-priests. But why would they do that then? Two reasons: 1. Its the boss who signs the document, if shit goes down he'll just ship off to the caymans. 2. The only other choice is to disqualify themselves from the world economy.

One resource that does not suffer from all these predicaments is humanity. Humans are being shit out by the billion. Developing nations just as any nation have ample human resources. In the same way the proletarianization of the american immigrant took place global capitalism spreads with CIA death squads instead of pinkertons. Humans are not given a living wage, in order to survive their children must work. Everything is so fragile the second an income producer becomes sick or injured their security collapses. Why don't they quit? you ask. Why don't YOU quit? The same reason I don't quit I think: because I don't know any other way to live. This is how I've figured out how to manage so far. In same way a simple narrative of a farm family that had two sons. Meaning the farm was split in half. Maybe one of them sold his to share croppers, maybe one of them let it go to waste, maybe one of them sold it to a big landowner, maybe one of them sold it to the other to have enough land to actually farm and left for the city to seek wage work. Why did he go to the city? because that is where the narratives say is opportunity, in the same way they lied to american immigrants it was not opportunity it was fresh meat for the grinder. New humans to subordinate to some great inhuman machinery of wealth manufacture.

Last time I checked 85% of the world lived below what the United States calls the poverty line, which is somewhere around 18.5 I think.

But this is only pseudo-economics. I did not even touch upon the state of the police state. And even more topical I didn't even mention that eventually we're going to run out of oil. We need to build a civilization that can fly.

framing

2010-03-25T09:08:00.001-05:00

Originally Published Dec 31, 2009

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/31/2783377.htm?section=w...

The above article is about a group of protesters in Egypt who are opposed to the blockade of Gaza. Most likely if you are reading this it means that you have yet to fall in to the trap of the post-literate world view and are probably aware of Cynthia McKinney's attempts to protest the blockade as well which ended with her being released from an Israeli detention facility.

Many things about this article piqued my interest, but one glaring omission is what motivated me to try to share this with others.

Where are the Palestinians?

In this article there are no Palestinians. There are no Palestinians with a voice. They have become palestinians, this idea/word that steals a voice, that de-politicizes, and therefore dehumanizes. Maybe Palestinians love the blockade its like the greatest thing thats ever happened to some of them. But I don't fucking know that if I view the world through the stimuli available to me such as Disney's ABC. In this life where the world comes to me in sound bites, articles, talking heads/pundits, etc. I have been distanced from the Palestinian, I have been told of the palestinian, that amorphous blob of victims that deserved the collective punishment because they are inhuman.

How am I to know the palestinian? We all know that direct action whether peaceful or violent only has an effect if it has publicity. If I have no methods available to me to access what direct actions Palestinians are taking and what words they are writing/saying I am only learning about how others view the Palestinian, so I am truly only learning about the palestinian.

Where is journalism? Without it a democracy cannot function. Where are readers? Without them a democracy cannot function.

What, if anything, is available to me as an action to effectively achieve the abolition of the blockade? Will these same means help abolish the Cuban blockade? From what I can tell the ability to directly effect either of these things is beyond my economic means(lobbying/corruption), beyond my charismatic means(trying to lead a popular movement), and beyond my intelligence(hacktivism). The only means I have are to speak to others to see if they also see the divide between the human Palestinian and the de-politicizsed palestinian. If I had access to more words of the other, I could disseminate such words this would be effective resistance. Not to speak for the palestinian, but to put the words of the Palestinian through my, albeit small, megaphone is an act of resistance against the blockade. The blockade itself can only be achieved because of the conflation between inhuman de-politicized palestinian and Palestinian in the mainstream media. I can cut away at those assumptions by reproducing the truth of humanity in Palestinians. The truth of the everyday suffering of any human who is proclaimed less than, who is proclaimed a second class citizen, a criminal, a terrorist, who must have their construction helmets marked with a spraypaint X. It is not enough to proclaim the less than human status of the Palestinian, they must be marked off with borders to demarcate where order ends and chaos begins in this fashion the state/identity one was born in to looks so safe. When the other does actually get over the border(because depoliticized subjects make for a great cheap labor source) to do some construction work for example, make sure to spraypaint a large X on their helmets. When a palestinian gets over the border we must mark the border with an X. With this X we can demarcate this inhuman, de-politicized, realm of uncivilized savagery to help us remember that we are peaceful and democratic.

I can't find the picture on the internet, big surprise, and can't remember which book it was in, but palestnians were wearing badges of an x on the helmet when in Israel at certain sites. When certain press outlets found this slightly too dehumanizing it changed because people got angry. We all know that our participation in the dehumanization of Palestinians is part of what keeps it going, but we also know that its wrong. Every last one of us knows at some level as situations like this prove when too big of an increment of change in the ongoing process of dehumanization occur that people actually do get bothered and change it. But of course the adage holds true if you throw a frog in boiling water it jumps right out, if you bring the pot to a boil with the frog in it he'll boil right up. And no the Palestinians are not the frog, you're the frog, we're all the frog who need to re-examine what we take for granted. For example that the water is 10 degrees hotter than it was 10 minutes ago, or that Palestinians are human and have a voice and deserve the opportunity for some sort of self-determination which usually takes the form of the creation of a nation-state as it did for Zionism. Just don't fucking get it, the answer to a depoliticised, dehumanized subject is: a voice, self-determination, and usually a state/autonomy. The problem in creating autonomy/state is everyones already got territory staked out. But in this situation there is already a large chunk of land that nobody has a more legitimate claim to than the Palestinians. They also have the UN backing because Israel according to a UN directive has to relinquish "territories gained in the recent conflict" the UN thing that was written in 1967. The de facto "being on the territory" combined with a UN directive is more than enough legitimacy to create a state. Not to mention that Jordan has formally forfeited all claims on territory outside its current borders.
But Palestinian states have been proclaimed, multiple Palestinian leaders have stepped forward to offer Israel recognition in return for their own recognition. Why is Palestine still not a state?

http://www.amazon.com/Sharon-My-Mother-Law-Ramallah/dp/0375423796
This book "Sharon and my mother in law" by Suad Amiry is an incredible read. It is the words of a Palestinian the voice of a Palestinian, not Disney giving voice to someone speaking for a palestinian. The book is incredible I noticed two great themes in it. First of all the mundane nature of the occupation from an individual's point of view. The occupation is always there a sword of Damocles hanging over everyone's head, but it articulates itself in such interesting ways. The absurdity of the form the occupation takes and its intervention in to the daily lives of humans trying to survive and help their loved ones lends itself to this Kafkaesque world that is: occupation, dehumanization, etc it is all these things. Many argue that Kafka was an anti-colonial writer (this article you may have to sneak on to a college campus library to look at it if you're really interested i can find it and copy paste: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/tae/v008/8.3kohn.html ) that article focuses on the book "in the penal colony". If you've ever read Kafka you will find this book doubly amazing. Of course Edward Said is a Palestinian whose book "Orientalism" was apparently just purged from Scribd.

reality will not be televised

2010-03-25T09:06:00.001-05:00

Originally published Oct 20, 2009.

The year is 2020 and we are in the back office of a taco bell(because everyone knows taco bell won the fast food wars).
Hiring Manger: "So we got your application here, Mr. Heene...falcon...that name sounds familiar."
falcon heene: "well I called a number of times trying to arrange an interview."
H.mgr: "Falcon...hey, aren't you the balloon boy?"
Falcon: "well i'm 19 now-"
mgr: "ha! balloon man i'm sorry. Hey frank! get in here I gotta show you something!"
Frank: "hey whats up?"
mgr: "guess who this guy is."
frank: "I don't know"
mgr: "balloon boy, we got fuckin balloon boy in our store!"
frank: "wow! Hey I saw that thing on teevee! Are you really him?"
falcon: "...yes..."
mgr: "frank you gotta get my picture with the balloon boy, my wife is never going to believe this."
(pose and picture)
falcon: "So I really want this job, its hard to get hired because of my name. How does it look?"
mgr: "oh, yes, oh, i mean..well no. I mean I can't hire you I'm sorry, bill at corporate would never let me hear the end of it if I hired the balloon boy. But good luck out there, seriously. I'm sure you'll do fine, after all you're famous!"

Rambling

2010-03-25T09:05:00.001-05:00

Originally published Oct 2, 2009, around midnight.

cause and effect lol, serendipity? chance luck , writing energy.
I've been listening, no farther back I watched this anime, no even farther back hahahaah.

The only reason I originally gave a fuck about the internet is because of 2 games one called Mechwarrior 2 and the other called ultima online. Mechwarrior 2 I purchased specifically because it had this shit called netmech so I could turn on my game in my room, I could connect to some motherfucker really far away and play them in the game, just like you'd play against a friend in nintendo.
I wished to be the best player alive, by the time I saved my nickels to purchase the game, the game had been around. I was the n00b, and just like every other fucking online game since I went about getting my shit kicked routinely. In order to get better I had to get fights.
Mechwarrior was a game where you're in a big bipedal robot trying to shoot the shit out of another bipedal robot. When playing against someone you would play first to 2, 3, etc kills. So once you landed a kill you were damaged and had to face a new mech, it was hard to turn around if you didn't get the first kill(this is before q2 made everyone say "frag" for online kill[i had understood fragging to be the practice of vietnam foot soldiers fragmentation(frag) grenading terrible POGs]).
In order to get better one could not own noobs constantly, one had to fight against those better than oneself. But in your mission to become the greatest swordsman you cannot just attack the Master of the dojo. You have to fight your way up, prove yourself, or why would they waste their time on you? Unless...You can goad them in to fighting you, find their buttons through stimuli such as conversation or just observing other conditioning elements happening to the target. Lie, insult, shame yourself whatever it takes to get that battle on even terms with everyone watching, talk more shit than is generally a good idea. Make them passionate about beating you, rile them up focus their spirit and mind. Make it so incredibly shameful to lose this match, knowing full well there is 50%+ chance you'll be the loser. If your goal is to make people like your presence, or your goal to become some sort of leader among humanity then these are the opposite of the actions you should take. If your goal is to improve yourself in one specific way, combat or competition can help. You will lose most of these matches, that one that you do win because you used some cheap strat like ranging make sure to add as much insult to injury as possible, it is the only way they will play even harder next time. Altruism doesn't exist, there is nothing pure or real in this world, we are mired in a sewage pool of reified intellectual diarreah. Its too late, just lament the downfall. Laugh, laugh out loud, lol if you will at the fucking IDEA of sustainable humanity. We are the descendents of those members of our species that murdered the other humans. Human evolution at this point(and in the recent history)is based on murder. Those who survived the thousands of life/death struggles with other humans they found themselves in during our probably half a milliion year history on earth(more than half spent in Africa).
Napster fucking rocked, fuck the RIAA, fuck the MPAA, fuck lars and u other greedy ass celebrities. Just to get it out of the way i'm not "stealing" and thinking its ok. The legal definition of theft is dispossession or deprivation.
If I: 1. Never intended to purchase said piece of information
AND
2. Did not dispossess anyone of the information in order to obtain it
THEN
it is not theft.
You can hire expensive lawyers to argue otherwise but the above will still be true. Also if you already owned a hard copy of the information purchased through the free market (LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL). So if you ever get court papers and you're the example: call every1 u know and get copies of the shit you d/led and just say you lost the receipts.
The internet has a culture, a culture being a shared set of values, rituals, and language. The internet has all three ad nauseum, individuals who are on the internet are far more likely to support the freedom of information and oppose censorship. Apart from those 2 issues opinions seem to diverge. They killed napster, they killed scour, they killed gnutella, they killed limewire with fucking spyware. Then: Enter the Torrent.
They made it to transfer big files fast, it turned out to be the perfect vehicle for the information trade movement on the internet. This is because the file is not hosted on some website, it is not connected directly to some dude's harddrive, it was uploaded, but now its on every1's computer. Downlaod little random pieces of information in 1 or 2 mb chunks(i forgot). If you open up any of these little chunks they are garbled and useless. Can downloading a few useless pieces of information from jim and a few useless pieces of information from sally and putting 'em together to make a britney spears song be illegal? Illegal for who? lol what a clusterfuck.
Its the internet and I know not to take it to seriously, but what if the internet could be responsible for a flowering of human thought before the end of this recent 20,000 year population boom. What if the last few generations before Malthus turns out to be right have the ability to become more enlightened than any other generation in history. For the first time you(you being the person reading this and I(being the person you think i am due to the image i've inadvertently marketed for myself through words) have FREE (no economic requirement) access to the entire breadth of human art, knowledge, and history.
There are efforts to stop this. To bring the internet under corporate control, to scare people with billion dollar lawsuits against people that make 25k a year, and legal prosecution of torrent hosting websites(TPB). I do not mention this as a call to action against such efforts, most likely you are not in a position to influence the outcomes of these examples. I point this out because you and I should be taking full advantage of this. Download every piece of art you've heard about, YES they do have shittons of books that you can torrent, yes classics are already free on gutenberg.org and manybooks.org and sometimes obscure texts can be found on pdf-search-engine.com (watch out last one full of popups and such). Books.google.com and scholar.google.com you can search through journals and books. MOst of these books you can read the vast majority for free, some pages are gone that sucks but you can read thsoe pages later if you don't get it from what you read.
Information is free, both as an ethical statement and as an objective observation of our present reality.
There is the one caveat: the haves and have nots. This is why direct action protests and activism are great, but do not lose sight of your community. Make sure you have a library, that your school is well funded(sorry illich), and support efforts to get tools of information gathering to the youth. The people who do not own a computer or are not adept at navigating through information on the internet are exactly the people that need to learn how to. I'm sure you meet them everyday. Oh you're talking about tv(jesus everyone talks about tv, i guess i catch a few shows on hulu but don't have an actual tv anymore). Oh they know about hulu? DO they know what a torrent is? They speak a different language? is there any show or music they can't find here thats in their native language? do they know about torrents? It IS activism to educate someone on how to use a tool of information gathering. It may the most non-hierarchical and non-manipulative way to empower people.
But they got azureus...now its vuze and it give me advertisements, i fucking hate advertisements(as my eyes drift rightward to bernakes debt solution, is your bank in trouble, save on heating oil now, ann coulter-free, buy anarchism apparel) I guess google words is somewhat entertaining guessing at which keywords it stole out of your history to make the ads. Who knows when torrents will disappaear.
So I used torrents like fucking crazy downloading discographies, shows, and movies. I love comics, I hadn't seen much anime in my life apart from ninja scroll, akira, and ghost in the shell. But I downloaded all these fucking awesome anime series. Downloaded obscure movies i could never find, downloaded the commercial movie the day it was out in theatres, downloaded movies by following writers and directors of movies I liked that I would have NEVER heard of if I hadn't downloaded the movie I originally associated with them in the first place.
I downloaded this anime called "death note". Little did I know that this was the fucking rage worldwide. The manga had been banned from China's classrooms or criminalized i can't remember. Everyone has read the manga and seen the anime(I haven't finished the manga hehe). Great story about this guy who...i can't tell you I won't do it justice. Mangas and anime are the best at starting with a premise and completely turning it upside down over and over. In the second half of the series the opening and closing songs piqued my interest, watched a youtube video, youtube video led to another, torrent the discography. This japanese band called Maximum The Hormone, I can't put them in a genre because I would just be ascribing values I ascribe to genres. They combine a lot of styles and sometimes get real poppy, but I guess I can tolerate the poppy cause it makes the scream vocals contrast so much more. Could never find much information about the band, lyrics or anything just the music which I really liked. It was all in japanese, but for some reason i felt like I could understand them sometimes. Then there is my attraction to scream vocals, the entropy, I fucking love it. Destroying yourself to make your art, so romantic eh? makes me want to read hunger artist again. The lead singer is having throat surgery, the guy does both screamo and growl vocals, how long can you keep that up? I mean a live show, you're screaming so hard your throat is taking permanent damage every time no matter how much training you've had to scream from the back of your throat. Not even recording, destroying oneself to create a piece of art that will disappear forever as soon as it has been created. But it can be done wrong haha, what if thats you? screaming away for an album nobody will listen to lol won't be able to afford throat surgery.
So recently I found a single they put out with a couple songs and one of 'em is this song F.
I mean I really dig all their songs so its just another to throw on the pile of great songs. But just recently I found this video on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVwZxyeKZoc
Finally translation!!! I can never understand what they're saying because when its english its engrish and sung so its fucking impossible, when its japanese I dont' knwo what they're saying and I haven't found any lyric translations that didn't suck. So it turns out this song is about well you have to see the lyrics. First there is this:

"Overfishing, deforestation, overdevelopment
The repetitive destruction of the environment
Oppression, torture, no human rights
Propaganda is implanted within us "

I love it, and then this:

His upper arms are pink pink pink
His head is sick sick sick
He has a floating vehicle
And a power level of 530,000

The song is about Dragon Ball Z, the title and song are about frieza lol!

There is no point to all this, but I do want to ask you for some help.

I seek stimuli that I have not been exposed to.

liberation is not possible

2009-11-23T22:39:00.004-06:00

I'm trying to do Foucault and Derrida here, I would love your feedback. And by feedback I mean argue with me, don't ever tell me i'm right, i'm always wrong, tell me why please. ty

The liberation ideals of Marxism have been elaborated over the years. Not only is human's relationship to production key in systems of oppression, but we have learned that class is not the only apparatus. Race, nationalism, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. Are all structures of oppression that are just as important as class. Marx's arguments have been shown to have different effects in the long term, over production has led to over consumption. Fashionable consumption which sells us shit we don't need made by slaves shipped back and forth across the world in carbon energy wasting airplanes. Your Ipod which needed lithium which was mined by slaves in Bolivia. No there is no social mobility for these slaves, if they ever demand a living wage the multi-nationals will find slaves in another country. In the case of lithium though Bolivia being one of the only real sources, instead of finding new slaves, the IMF owned government will send paramilitaries to gas and kill some slaves to prevent them from organizing. The slave's children will need to be pulled out of school and put to work in order to keep their family alive and then get injured putting them out of work because of unsafe working conditions leading to an endless cycle of poverty and suffering, I mean shit we've all read The Jungle here. For the most part though these slaves are coming from rural areas where their subsistence farming has been ended by the encroachment of massive factory farms, overpopulation(you leave the family farm to two kids, and neither of them will be able to raise a family on half the land), and the endless fight between the peasants and the patrons. Peasants make their way to the city, become proletarianized: separated from the product of their work, selling their life away in one hour increments, and falling prey to the endless scams of the thieves who use a pen to steal.

We all see the immediate effects of the present crisis. We can call it by the umbrella term "globalization" but that means something different to everyone. To me it is the name given to the capitalist project and its' domination of the entire world.

Many of you may self-identify as anarchists, but modern anarchist theory is totally rooted in a para-marxist or neo-marxist analysis. Modern anarchist theory relies on historical materialism, it relies on mindset changes, and it relies on the myth of the rational individual. All liberation theories rely on the myth of the rational person and they all rely on immutable ideals.

There is nothing immutable in this world.

The myth of the rational person is a holdover from the Stoics, we all know now that a person who acts only according to cold rationality is a sociopath.

Liberation is not possible with current methods.

Look at Rome, the USSR, american revolution, french revolution. Things always end up the same. Liberation ideals theorize that this is due to institutions. To destroy the institutions would bring humans liberation. This is where you might find your anarchists, your illichs, your heideggers. . These people are only partially correct. The tools of the human have enslaved the human to a certain extent, but the oppression, coercion, etc. emanating from these institutions only represents efficiency in normalizing. To destroy the institutions, would still leave us at square one dealing with how to liberate ourselves from eachother in a new era of primitivism. A primitivism that cannot help but be born from the norms of a humanity that depended on their Tool Masters. Humans are too fucking stupid to survive without all the shit we at first didn't need, but we all bought it. Now as it turns out we literally cannot survive without it. I guess i'm kind of proving that the normalizing of an entire world to liberate themselves from institutions of states, banks, hospitals, schools, etc etc etc. would basically never happen, but i'm going to fiat its existence just for the sake of the point i'm trying to make in a very roundabout fashion. So anarchists and marxists win, every human has simultaneously stripped the institutions of power, shed the normalizing aspects of the juridico-political system, overcame racism, overcame sexism, overcame homophobism, and just for the hell of it: there is no such thing as an STD anymore.

Will this moment last? NO. NOTHING, NOTHING is immutable, nothing. Absolutely nothing is immutable. Everything changes, the present is an illusion. It is only a fleeting feeling, a sound, a snapshot that will fall in to the next in an endless series of repititions until you die. Nothing is immutable.

We just keep building the same damn thing over and over. Who is to say your(anyone, not just the subjects of these past paragraphs) group will be any different?

So maybe you've gotten point number one by now: Immutability is a lie. Anyone or anything that claims to know the truth is lying, because the truth does not exist. The closest to the truth we can get is a series of snapshots, and endless parade of truth. A constant study, a constant worldwide dissemination. I will not sully such an idea with a broken down word like democracy. What I speak of is a global web of connections where information is completely liberated, and that we all work together in a constant process of interpretation and opinion. The more people that hear truth(not universal truth, the truth I speak of above) the more people will be correct in how we handle anything. Is the issue human extinction? Is the issue Justice? Who the fuck knows, the question will always change, the truth will always change, and jesus will never fly down with a sword to seperate the non-believers. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, there is no winner's circle, and there is never a point in time where humanity can be liberated. Liberation would be an endless process itself, in which no immutability would exist. The word liberation would change its' meaning, what it signifies would be understood to be something different, in the process certain norms might be established that give rise to a counter-hegemony that would flip the idea of liberation upside-down. There is always an agent in modern ideals of liberation. Someone always must lead, there must be a spark for the powder keg, there must be an intellectual class, there must be some sort of leader of the biggest brigades, there must be someone that is the least hated of everyone, any random person who is seen as charismatic, intelligent, or attractive. Always a leader in ALL modern liberation movements. Always an ideology, who helped reproduce that ideology in order to normalize it as knowledge to a broad enough base that such an ideal for liberation became widespread? A newspaper? Internet Site? journalist? artist? There is always an agent in these broad liberation movements, there is always someone willing to seize the rein of power and thousands others to support it.

So that was supposed to be my conclusion but I didn't mean to skip point two. All modern liberation ideals derive from a rational choice model. Humans who act entirely rational are sociopaths. Humans make decisions through a combination of socio-emotive and material(rational) motivators. There is very good evidence of this, social psychology is filled with it, any mid-size group is evidence of it, the many "phineas gages", sports teams, any altruistic act, etc. Essentially you're going to have to market the revolution. And it seems that most modern liberation movements are based on repressions: capitalism represses empathy, marxism represses greed, anarchy represses the impetus to create the state, primitivism represses technological discoveries, feminism represses masculinity. I mean how long do I have to keep this up for. There is always an enemy.

So I figured out how to create a new conclusion, and this will be even more betterer than the last one.

Human brains are made to exist in an environment filled with other human brains. Humans have evolved as social animals, depending on eachother to survive against stronger foes. This is only a suggestion I do not claim it to be fact, but it seems that humans are stuck in the way their brains function, due to evolving in social groups, to identify with a group identity.

If any of you don't know what "alterity" means I suggest you check it out. The ideal of anarchism is to bring the entire global humanity in to the unity of a better idea. This idea that we are all the same, we're all in this together, we can survive without oppression and war, to make all humans value eachother as humans. This is intelligent, because alterity is necessary for murder. One does not kill a human without othering them first.

By removing the other from the political equation, anarchists intend to create a world better suited to survival and justice.

But without an other, any one individual has no identity. Without an other, you are not a self. Or at least cannot construct an identity without something to define yourself as NOT. You demarcate a boundary between self and other those boundaries are important for your identity.

"There is no universal truth" is an untrue statement. It seeks to disprove what it proves simply by being posited. Immutability being a constant is the exact same idea. Alterity may be an anomaly that is a result of some universal normalizing process that possibly can be changed, but unless it can be changed humanity is fucked. If it cannot be changed than othering is what makes us human, and humanity won't be able to survive without.....whos read Watchmen?

Habeas Corpus again

2009-11-14T00:25:00.001-06:00

This is a draft I never finished, but I'm gonna publish it anyway without reading it over. There may be a link or piece of info that is interesting.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-guantanamo14-2009nov14,0,4700402.story

I would like to do something with this text: deconstruct, dissect, analyze, interpret, etc.

The first Sentence is "Setting the stage for a historic criminal trial, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Friday that the government would prosecute the self-proclaimed architect of the Sept. 11 attacks and four others in a civilian courthouse just blocks from the scene of their alleged crimes."
The first part of the sentence argues that this is a "historic criminal trial", this is not true with a basic look at verifiable facts. When the law is broken by a person in the United States they are tried for their crimes and the decision of the individuals guilt or innocence is decided by a jury of his or her's peers.

The individuals being tried are not part of a war. I understand that the idea was packaged as a war, but just like the war on drugs and the war on poverty. It seems to just be an effective way to rally political capital, by attaching the significance and all the weight of the word "war". There was no war declared, congress passed the authorization to use military force. The AUMF authorized the executive to send the military anywhere it deemed necessary to find terrorists. OIF and OEF were not wars that were ever declared, there is no actual "war on terror", because war can only take place between two state entities. War cannot take place between two guys standing on the street. When Scarface yells "do you want to go to war?" he does not actually mean hes going to fight a conventional war, because he is not a state entity.

If these individuals have committed a crime they should be tried in a court. This is not historic the United States has prosecuted numerous "terrorist" trials. Even though the word "terrorist" is not a crime, one cannot be charged with one count of terrorism anywhere. If these individuals are responsible for 1st degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and I bet a whole mess of further crimes then bring them to trial and convict them just like we have always done. How is this trial historic? Google FLorence ADX (I think thats what it is) its a supermax prison which is basically the real life arkham asylum. Its got every "terrorist" your friend teevee ever showed you. This trial is not historic.

The other statement I have an issue with is "self-proclaimed architect of the sept. 11 attacks". I'm not a doctor or anything, but I'm preeeeeety sure any human alive would say anyfucking thing in the world in order to stop being tortured. The paper already told you he is guilty. Do you truly believe he is guilty without seeing any of the evidence? I will only believe he is guilty after he is given a trial and I can see the information the jury saw, and decide for myself. Hes already convicted, its a media circus before its even started.

So Holder did good he brought some people to trial, but it really isn't good enough. Everyone who committed crimes in violation of United States law should be tried. But of course if john mccain had won NOBODY would have gotten a trial. So if I conclude that this decision would rest with the executive, and our choice for executive is always limited to two, then isn't this the best possible outcome we could hope for? But its still not everyone, gitmo is still up, they're going to use the archaic death penalty and make everyone a martyr. Things could be better, but at least Holder did a little.

Then the article goes to this guy "...top Pentagon lawyer in the George W. Bush administration...". oh noo!! they're gonna use counterintelligence!! pew pew, spies and stuff, its like totally super secret. WTF is it, its been 8 years you dumb bastards, is there seriously still shit in there that compromises counterintelligence 8 years later? What kind of crazy deep cover shit are you doing and why does it suck so much fucking ass? What is your counterintelligence worth in balance with the U.S. constitution, fuck your counter-intelligence. Give the information to the public, don't do this bullshit.

top Pentagon lawyer in the George W. Bush administration: They're guilty! But the damning evidence is really super secret!

defense attorney: Secret evidence is awesome! just take his word for it, why would he lie? He doesn't have any type of legal questions surrounding his administration's treatment of prisoners.

top Pentagon lawyer in the George W. Bush administration: Jury, look at that guy, hes clearly a Muslim. And like I said I've got awesome evidence, its like 100% completely conclusive evidence, and I would show it to you I would...but its just this national security. Its counterintelligence, let me just give you a taste of how deep our cover goes, we have an inside man at the top rung of the ladder. I mean Bin Laden is actually our guy hes just spying on whos going to follow him after he did a big attack. That way we'd know who the next bin laden was if we created the first one, I mean thats how deep that cover is. We can't be blowing that type of cover can we?

Defense Attorney: And if we let people know who the snitches are, then nobody will trust us with their snitching needs. Then how are we supposed to tell who to torture until they confess? answer me that mr. big shot jury!

Oh they will spew propaganda!! oh no!!! fuck, grow up. The judge will do what they always do with disruptive defendants.

A few more paragraphs down the article contradicts itself. "The detainees are expected to be held at the same federal prison in New York that housed other suspected Al Qaeda operatives before trials related to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the embassy bombings in Africa and other terrorist plots. Virtually all of those men were convicted in trials marked by heavy security and now are serving long sentences in federal prisons around the United States."
Well damn that sounds pretty similar to this trial...why the fuck is it historic, why does the text separate this trial with historic

not gonna finish his here are the 5 that aren't getting trials
The other detainees slated to appear before military commissions are Ahmed Mohammed al Darbi, Omar Khadr, Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi and Noor Uthman Muhammed.

the 5 getting trials: ksm
Waleed bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi and Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali will do the same in civilian court.

I look forward to the information that will be made public by this trial. I look forward to the chance for the United States to re-affirm its values if only in a half assed way.

crap

2009-11-01T01:18:00.000-05:00

Apparently I need to write in order to survive. Not for any economic reasons, but for sanity? I’m not sure if it is that or fostering a delusion of meaning in my mind. If this life is all there is, ha I ask like the answer can ever be found. I will never know if this life is all there is, but I can use rational thought to look at the scurrying homicidal humans and understand where some of the ideas come from. I can see that they coddle eachother and manipulate with ideas like religion, so this life most likely is all that there is. The entire idea that this life is not all there is was created in order to sell religion. The religion was sold so well, because of our epistemological limitations on knowledge. We can never know if this is all there is, we will never know when consciousness first manifested or even if consciousness is just reified human superiority complexes. What if all animals possess a consciousness, why can I read the facial language of a dog or cat? Haven’t I seen a dog’s attempts at stifling their expression of guilt in order to avoid being blamed for something they thought they could get away with? How did life come about, we have good rational ideas on this, some good theories. But the fact of the matter is that we can never have the answers to these questions.
If this ignorance is a part of the human condition, then I can see why religion springs up. By looking at the lessons of religion, by looking at the stories of gods and goddesses, and through etymology of deity’s names we can see the imprint of family. Although these stories come to us only because they have been transcribed, which besmirches them with an earthly impurity, this means that the individual was literate which represents a class indication. We each have our own creators our own Mom and Dad. Our own mother earth and father sun in each of our subjective worlds. Odds are our creators will die before we the offspring have died. The creators of the past on most occasions would teach their offspring how to survive and would pass on their mythos. Where did these mythos come from? The creator’s creator of course! Contemporary forms of ancestor worship such as Shintoism represent a background of one of the first examples of sacred ideas.
The reason these stories must have been told is in order to focus the mind on survival in order to continue the process of creation. If the human condition is uncertainty(epistemological limitation that science claims to have overcome), passionate ambivalence(Philip k. Dick’s short story The Chromium Fence), or contradiction(Dostoevsky’s theme); then it seems reasonable to understand the mythos of humanity as a survival tool. First of all to encode key cultural rituals of a certain time/space in to a sacred mythos(such as a prohibition on the eating of pig) is in order to protect the family/tribe. Humans are not eating if they are paralyzed by uncertainty.
Parents are gods, after all they created you. If living gods tell you a sacred idea, how can you disparage it? This worship of ancestors, because our creators are most often our teachers became canon. As the cycle continues down the line, until someone codifies the sacred idea and the idea becomes a millstone necklace. The idea is used as a cudgel and the idea is used as a mask for its’ antithesis. The codification of the idea transmutes it from sacred to profane.
What was once the internal strength of a tribe/family and a set of encoded morals and survival rituals becomes a tool used to fight the world outside the tribe/family. To seek power in the classical realist terms, to subjugate other families. The families at this point are controlled by the class of people that could codify the ideas in the first place.
But it doesn’t fucking work. There is idea trading, there is language trading, there is genetic material traded in the form of miscegenation, a word that would not exist if it weren’t for man’s innately(for lack of a better contemporary word) racism. It becomes apparent that we don’t have a good word to unmask the idea of racism. Which in a dictionary means prejudice, discrimination, or hatred towards a different “race” I am using this word here to mean the hatred of any “other”.
The tribes are illusory they were a necessary construction for humans’ early survival along with their mythos. Survival tools, tools meaning they were created by humans for humans. It is not a tool that humans innately respond to group identities. Response to group identities is an a priori or instinctual feature of the human condition.
The “race” is illusory, to argue that the 200,000 years that represent the human diaspora and subsequent collapsing back in have left some kind of different “races” is based on a confluence of nationalism(which I use as synonymous with group identity in the context of this crap) and fear of those different than self. Language is a very strong divider among humanity, but we all speak a language that is derived from the same source. Physical appearance is a very strong divider among humans, but we all came from the same original adam in Africa and eve in southeast Asia. The idea that the social construct of “race” can first of all be readily identified, and that second of all it should be considered sacred is as old as human tribes/families. Who is the one making these judgments? Who decides who is what race?
Race is not a social construct they say! DNA they say! Well how many races are there? Then you must elect a single person’s genetic structure THE structure of the (insert racial label here), then what? Is it a spectrum? The idea is absurd. I only obsess about race because it is one of the tools that is pervasive in this time/space I exist in. Many will say otherwise, the country I am a citizen of outlawed slavery over one hundred years ago, my country outlawed de jure segregation 65 years ago, my country outlawed de jure discrimination 45 years ago. But in that past 45 years the prison population has quadrupled. The joke that a “black” human says to another “black” goes something like this: “Justice? Yep, go to prison and you’ll see that: just Us”.
The idea of an Us and Them, is not a tool. The idea of statehood, sovereignty, the western conception of the social contract; they’re all constructs. They are tools created to achieve some end. There are those that argue our institutions as tools have failed us. That the institutions we have created are not like the Golem or the Frankenstein monster, but instead like a fleet of slave machines that slowly gained self-awareness. What if the human brain just represents a controlled set of patterns? If a tool we created was stuck in its’ own loop or pattern, couldn’t this be understood as simulated brain activity?
Because it is naïve to believe that some one or some cohesive group is controlling these patterns. Why in 2001 were 74% of people incarcerated for drug crimes “African-American” when this social category makes up 13% of the United States population?
There is not some demagogue out there paying off police, judges, and juries to bust dark skinned united statesians. They are not told at their jobs(at least in most situations, and it is prosecutable) to seek out dark skinned united statesians. Then why is it this systematic re-enslavement of dark skinned united statesians is taking place?
It is my belief that the phenomenon referred to as “racial profiling” is a scar left on the psyche of the united statesian. A people were taught to believe it was ok to enslave other people that were proclaimed “others”. They were taught that these humans were actually sub-human, they were animals so it is ok to treat them as such with slavery. Then when justice was sought, in the babysteps justice takes(which I am not criticizing, if a few things had been different we would still be living under the totalitarian spectre of “racial hygiene”), when these sub-humans were given equal protection under the law, the group did not internalize the change. To many these dark skinned united statesians represented animalistic tendencies, sub-human qualities. They had been taught this for so many years and this assumption was used to justify social control measures such as narcotic and anti-immigrant laws, the dark skinned united statesian retained its image as the model of the criminal.
Now we are stuck, we are mired in the reified diarrhea of our ancestors’ mythos. How are we to break away from this social construct of race in order that it not be used to prosecute ends of murder and oppression if we are still so stuck in it that we need to reform what the idea of justice means?
Has not the institution of slavery then enslaved or at least imprisoned our minds? We cannot let people be incarcerated because of their race, this is genocide in the long term. But if we must remain ever vigilant how are we to transcend race?
I just used the word genocide, but if race is a social construct doesn’t that make genocide an obsolete idea? My response to this is that race being a social construct, it can only be ascertained through self-identification. Of course the limitations on this are myriad, and the most pronounced of which is that in order to self-identify the category must already be an idea. Most likely in the process of self-identification an individual(in our mechanized world) would be choosing a box next to words that represent a “multiple choice” of racial identity. For many years there was not a “multiracial” box on these forms.
It is much easier to understand my main point by looking at the idea of the multiracial box. An individual with one parent who self-identifies as “black” and another parent who self-identifies as “white” is presented with an insurance application/job application/tax form/loan application/housing application/driver’s license application. This form has options for black or white, but what is he/she?
The individual either chooses one thusly attempting to suppress part of their own self-identity and fosters an idea that this individual is an “other”. They are an other in their own home, they do not have a “race”. Thus implying that the institution who created the form judges multiracial individuals as less than human, because they do not have something every other human has: a race.

Trusting the past and not scrutinizing the tools is has left us may turn us in to the machine.

I do not offer this critique without an alternative. The alternative I offer is a way to use our tools to sublimate our nature. A world government, a supranational entity much like the EU(before the EU created an office for a president[big mistake]). An entity founded upon a written set of laws limiting the power of the entity. The entity would be incorporated through plesbicites in any country that wanted to participate. In this fashion we could use the tool of the state to harness the power of nationalism in order to foster the idea that all humanity is one family/tribe.
This is of course just another crusade or religion. This idea is just another idea that if it took hold in a few countries would not be voluntarily adopted by so many countries that it would just create another division. This division would be used to prosecute wars in the furtherance or “defense” of the supranational entity. Although this idea seems to be the antithesis of anarchism, it seems to have a lot in common with anarchism. Both ideas would need a mindset change among humanity as a whole, the only difference being that in order for anarchism to work every human would have to experience a mindset change, in order to establish a supranational world government only a majority of each state would have to experience a mind change. Both options are idealistic unfortunately.
How would one cause a mindset change? We argue and disseminate ideas, we convince and evangelize. We’ll reason with people and show them logic. This is all fucking bullshit, its propaganda and it always is. The only way a mindset change like either of these things would happen is with a massive and I mean MASSIVE media apparatus to condition humans over and over and over. You can call it convincing, or marketing, or preaching, but its all conditioning. Every one of us in our own little skinner box, in our case pushing the button to change the channel rather than get the cheese.
So if you ever see anarchy or world government on the rise, just remember that the only way that is possible was with a huge effort at mind control/marketing/conditioning. The only way such an effort is possible in our current reality is with huge amounts of “money” another tool that has imprisoned us. So question their motives, because the people at the helm of such an effort are the same ones destroying the world in furtherance of greed.
Any solution I have of course is just from the frying pan in to the fire. I just see that our current system is clearly broken, capitalism is so inherently contradictory its sickening. While we think that we’re fine tuning this institution, there are so many suffering that the institution must be broke. The organizational basis of humanity at this point in space/time is personal greed/objectivism. If we came up with another way, wouldn’t that way still be rife with contradictions?
Then am I at odds with our means of social organization, or am I at odds with humankind because of the epistemological limitation on our knowledge that is a universal feature of the human condition?
Is my ambivalence and disillusion in itself a microcosm of the globicidal social organizing principles whether they be based on greed, love, hate, etcetera?
Then is this all just my own simulated brain pattern/loop of solipsist masturbation?

CELEBEGEDDON 2009

2009-06-28T18:39:00.001-05:00

I just wanted to finish this comic i've been reading, i guess technically its a manga called Gantz, I foud the anime somewhere and dug it so now i figure out its still being published: pretty sweet, so i'm trying to catch up. I have a cut on my finger so it causes a light amount of pain whenever i strike a key with my middle finger, but sometimes i just want to respond with words to the stimuli i receive and this place works for that.

So obviously i'm not paying to read the comic there are myriad free manga sites, but no such thing exists for the english counterpart. Although most of the good comics(I just can't say graphic novels without feeling like a douchebag) at least recent ones and the classics are available in torrents (isohunt is the shit for ebooks and comics). Of course the cost of getting something free is usually that you have to deal with some advertisement, which is cool if thats what you choose to do, but if you're getting advertised to and you're not getting something for free? You're a mark.

The advertisement is for a cosmetic pharmaceutical for women(i suppose it would work for men as well, but that is obviously not a large enough demographic to market to, nothing this: their marketing director may be looking for a new job after advertising women's beauty consumption on a manga site) this product "lengthens, thickens, and blackens"; now before you draw the conclusion that i'm being paid to guerrilla market on my blog(no ads on any of my sites), I feel like this is an interesting time to talk about this type of consumption and marketing. Especially because judging by the sales numbers of magazines like maxim, vogue, etc there are a lot of easy marks out there willing to pay you money to hand them a packet of advertisements. Shit these people are paying more than a meal for a single person, more than a pack of cigarettes, more than 3 gallons of gas, more than... you get the picture.

We are waiting for the nickname for this week lets see if I can without any actual physical effort (besides happening to read every headline thrown my way) list the paragons of humanity who have been sent up to dog who art: farrah fawcett, micheal jackson, billy mays and ed mcmahon(I had to go to google to remember ed mcmahon, YOU ARE CORRECT SUH![i definetly saw more phil hartman than ed mcmahon in my life]. So despite the fact that when you die: all your victims become unmolested; United Statesians are ' superficial to the fuckin Nth degree! For fucks sake there are people crying??? Michael Jackson was a civil rights hero?!?!?!?!?! WTF!!!!!! So in order to profit from the deaths of others I think we have to come up with the perfect catchphrase for this week and patent it quickly. If we get it in time before the news cycle ends all we need is one single headline and it has to be witty and/or funny, then bam every publication in the country will be using it and we start the court proceedings against 'em. We can come up with a reason why its not naked self-interest for the media, first of all anyone who wants to contribute and work together in making this you have to know that you have to be extremely attractive and bisexual, this way we can use you as the face for the media and you can sleep with the attorney to pay for all of our suing. I think i got a pretty suitable solution to why we are so intent on creating a catchphrase and getting money for it, its not the money or that we'll not have to wait in line for anything anymore. To create a catchprase is actually completely and totally altruistic because it may become an institution and pretty soon celebrities will start getting culled on an annual basis every last week of june, this would create a much better world for everyone, possibly causing many useless people (who only keep breathing in order to live vicariously through a celebrity) to start thinking orrrrrr...maybe do themselves in...arguably a win-win. So these are a few we've been kickin' around the office:
Celebicide(although we decided this one could be too easily associated with suicide)

Celebegeddon(I think this is the winner so far, so I'll throw it in the title)
Celebrity Deathmatch(we may have problems trademarking that one)

Celebritydeathapalooza
The Celeb Slayer(This is one where we have to get a media headline alleging that all the deaths were murders, and they were all...done...by........THE SAME PERSON!(were u n suspense?)
The Great Celebrity Die Off
Quadcelebritydeathweek
"Fame more dangerous than cancer"(this is where we get a headline saying a ridiculous statistic that is actually quite spurious[you've seen 'em they're in every paper or magazine you ever read])

thats all i got

Our world is very strange, our modern world, because there is no real truth.

There is no philosopher-king to determine whether it is right or wrong to spend the wealth we have on compulsive vanity or over anxious insecurity. There is no oracle to consult on whether or not it is right to use our resources to build bigger and more efficient tools for murder instead of using our resources to prevent death and suffering. There is no priest to answer whether using the great minds of our generation to create anti-male balding, penis enlargement, "erectile dysfunction", or lash thickening pills rather than work towards something that brings humanity closer to fulfilling its potential.

We know that all those recipients of inquiry are just more assholes, just like the people you walk past on the street every day, friends, family, everyone you've ever seen, nobody knows any more than anybody else about the REAL questions, the eternal questions, nobody even knows the answers to the ethical and moral questions!!!! "Idiocracy" is humanity's future if it proceeds along the same trajectory it is currently on.

Humans: There is nobody to turn to but yourselves.

In order to survive humans need to learn to read again. I do not know the truth that will be your truth in regards to climate change, overpopulation, kim jong il's death rattle missile launch, Iranian british relations souring, or even something as simple as good and evil. Only you yourself can figure that out, and thusly only every single other human on the planet has to learn reality themselves. Reality to the self is objective, but that objectivity transmogrifies in to a subjective, preachy and evangelistic..............OPINION, there I said it. Nobody on earth knows a fucking thing, but everyones got an opinion. Now if there is an actual objective reality that exists apart from objects perceiving it or in a vacuum (whatever helps wrap the head around what i'm sayin) that means that there is an actual objective truth(if this is true that truth is god in my opinion). This means that most likely one or more out of the many many people's OPINIONS that exist out there are actual statements of objective fact.

The challenging part is that we cannot check this objective fact, reality does not fit into our mathematics, not yet. Maybe one day we will have such fast computers and such vast amounts of storage that someone can create a program to predict human action based on algorithms obtained from the observation and study of the effect of every stimuli possible. These effects may be replicated and sequenced, observed, tested, and pretty soon human action becomes an equation, but until then there is no way to check our math the earth(the reality we have so far managed to bring under human dominion) is too damn complicated.

So far in this hypothesis we have a world that we assume objective truth exists in. Next you take a large number of people who after research have a theory about...lets say...molemen invading from the center of the earth. There are scientists, and professors and all kinds of other assholes writing about the evidence of the molemen and their zealous belief in manifest destiny over the surface.

Now if these individuals are correct, we(being the omnipotent creator of this hypothetical world know they are correct, and that molemen ARE going to invade, and in fact we know they'll invade in 3 and half years, they're just building the last of their drills.) can take a look at two different groups which I will arbitrarily fiat.

The first group being the humans on the hypothetical world I first mentioned, but with the qualifier: all the people in group one researched the possibility of moleman invasion.

The second group being the humans on the hypothetical world I created, but with the qualifier: NOT all the people in group two researched the possibility of moleman invasion.

Here is the question I pose to you: Which of those groups/worlds are more likely to see the survival of humanity, which of those groups is more likely to see the enslavement of humanity?

Although this is a futile scream in to the emptiness, I do feel that in my OPINION every single living human should take an active interest in seeking the truth about reality, about themselves, and about their fellow humans. The prescription that humanity really needs is the one that causes Reading, Thinking, and Talking. Or maybe what we need is a week every year where celebrities are open game, and maybe one day there will be no airbrushed exhibitionist to live vicariously through.

But what we need and what we get aren't always the same.
shittyblogbutatleastiwrotesomething

The New Obama!

2009-05-24T19:23:00.003-05:00

This is a quote from the blog I wrote on January 23rd:

"First of all I just want to say that this the first time in my life I've been actually surprised in a good way about a sitting president. I was worried that Obama would be all talk, but instead he dove right in from day one. He set in motion progress on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, ended extraordinary rendition, ended Bush's spending freeze on overseas family planning, stopped legally sanctioned torture, and stated that Gitmo must be closed within a year."

It WAS too good to be true!

HOW YOU GUYS LIKE NEW OBAMA?!?!?
Remember how Obama signed that executive order 2 days in to office holding up his campaign promise?
Do you remember the eloquent language with which he simultaneously brought justice to those in need of it in the form of Habeus Corpus, as well as invoked a stern didactic tone concerning the constitution?
Well thats not Obama.
Thats OLD Obama. There is a new Obama in office, I’m not going to post a link you should all keep up with the news if you’re not a fool. Apparently a trial is too good for certain prisoners. Have you also heard that extraordinary rendition is essentially going on under a different guise? If we are able to store our prisoners overseas we can be assured they are doing so for one or both of the following reasons:
1. protect themselves from legal prosecution
2. to engage in torture
Although the federal government is still engaging in holding prisoners overseas, that is apparently ALSO too damn good for certain people currently locked up in Gitmo.
So lets get down to the info. There are apparently THIRTEEN individuals currently in gitmo who can’t POSSIBLY EVER BE TRIED IN A COURT!!!! Our courts are too weak for terrorism, they don’t have the stomachs!! and the ladies?!??!! and the children?!? how can we protect them from the blasphemy and coarse language of the terrorists????? Obviously the only answer is secret military tribunals. But we’re marketing a fuzzier name, and we're gonna market it with a little more effort than we did for “tribunal”. From here on out these secret military tributnals are “Commissions”. Did you know that the EU has a council of “Commissioners” they make up the most intense concentration of power vested in single individuals in the entire EU system? I mean whats wrong with a little commission? Its like we're all salespeople now, we all get a piece of the commission. Baseball for example is run by a commissioner and thats america's god damn pasttime! There was a show “the comish” or something right? or a movie? Whatevever it was, it was good wholesome fun for the whole family! I mean this secret kangaroo court is like a household name already, so back to american gladiators!

But of these 13 (whom I cannot find all the names of btw), 4 of them are charged with THE CRIMES OF related to THE ATTACKS OF THE TERRORISTS OF FOREIGN LANDS UPON THE HOMELAND UNITED STATES OF AMERICA NEW YORK ON THE DATE OF NINE ELEVEN IN AN EGREGIOUS ACT OF COWARDICE. So seriously, don’t question it.But wait a second, they're not "charged" with anything...they are "involved" or "connected to" (or something along those lines) to NINE ELEVEN in the articles of the mainstream media. Well I'm not a doctor or anything, but if they're so wholly convinced that this individual is complicit with 9/11 shouldn't they have been tried and either acquitted or sentenced by now? Why won't we try to bring some justice to the perpetrators of 9/11? And by that I don't mean lock someone up without a fucking trial! That is an injustice, we cannot move forward if we are constantly reacting to injustice with further injustices. These people that are connected to 9/11 how are they connected? All we have been told is that they knew bin laden or are in al qaeda or some shit. If people are so secure in these individuals' guilt that they imprison them, shouldn't their evidence be good enough to convict the individual?

Of course not. And we all know that no matter where you fall on the political spectrum we all know that if cops, military, or intelligence agencies were allowed to just imprison people they thought were guilty, it would VERY OFTEN be an individual who would not be convicted by a jury of their peers.

But the praises continue to be sung, the veneer of unity and the brand name of being different than bush are still holding up.

The truth is that very little has changed in the substantive issues, and by that I mean issues relating to the constitution, geneva conventions, and military aggression. Maybe the torture won't continue on american soil...wait...bush never even tortured people on american soil(at least not the continental US[gitmo]). So......I ask everyone: what changed?
A sane tax system is good, credit card legislation, etc. but these have very little to do with moving away from the dangerous policies of bush.

The change offered by Obama is superficial at best.

And Obama I had kept my hope low, but you didn’t even live up TO YOUR OWN hope. so fuck you

And What the fuck is the deal with cheney? He actually has influence on Obama, apparently a SHIT TON! Just put cheney on fox news a few hours a day complaining about terrorists being about to attack trying to scare americans and all of a sudden obama doesn’t care about torture, extraordinary rendition, or even habeus corpus, we have not seen an improvement over Bush in the stubstantive issues.
Wait obama scared of cheney’s dire prognostications of terrorism…hmm….I wonder if there is a reason for Obama to be so scared….what do you guys think Cheney is capable of? ;)

Is it truly a radical concept for people to be charged with a crime and given a trial if they are to be imprisoned but are not prisoners of war?

Just charge them with a crime, or do not

2009-01-23T23:23:00.001-06:00

First of all I just want to say that this the first time in my life I've been actually surprised in a good way about a sitting president. I was worried that Obama would be all talk, but instead he dove right in from day one. He set in motion progress on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, ended extraordinary rendition, ended Bush's spending freeze on overseas family planning, stopped legally sanctioned torture, and stated that Gitmo must be closed within a year.

The last thing is what I wanted to write a few paragraphs about. Most importantly why the fuck is it that we are just NOW having this debate? When we are finally going to start bandaging this wound, thats when all of a sudden the press makes the public aware of the details.
Here is a quick summary:
-Gitmo stands on a territory that the US never gave back to Cuba after driving the Spanish out in the very late 1800s. They pay a pittance in lease, which is why there can be a US military facility in a country that the US has an embargo on.
-Gitmo was chosen as the camp for captured "enemy combatants"
-Gitmo was chosen because it lay outside of any state, commonwealth, or province of the United sates. This meant that it could be argued that civilian law or even federal courts were outside their jurisdiction to regulate it. (Obviously this is fail, the federal government has jurisdiction over all military bases and BIA reservations, etc. basically everything in between)
-There is no such thing as an "enemy combatant", it is nowhere in the Geneva conventions. It was created so that the captured individuals would not be "prisoners of war" and thusly be protected under the Geneva conventions(that treaty everyone signed to prevent Naziesque atrocities from being committed in the future).
-Can't remember which legal stooge came up with this bullshit (my guess is either gonzalez, thurmond's scion, or the taft scion) but they wanted to ensure they wouldn't be prosecuted for the warcrimes they were going to commit. If these attorneys had come in to a possession of a pair of testicles at any point they could have written the exact opposite and these chickenhawks probably would have never tortured in the first place for fear of punishment. That of course assumes they weren't just told what their legal justification should say. The point is they argue that because Afghanistan is a "failed state" that makes the people captured "enemy combatants" rather than "prisoners of war". Precedent? Fuck precedent!
-A brand new secret military tribunal process was set up to try "enemy combatants" just for the war on terror.

So now that Gitmo is going to be shut down, all of a sudden the media finds it journalism to write about what Gitmo was in the first fucking place. So now the debate is: Where will they go?

The first suggestion comes from Christopher Bond(R-Missouri) to reopen Alcatraz. Ok...so I guess the Republicans aren't still salty about their loss(sarcasm). Ok so apparently the Republicans think that incarceration in a maximum security federal prison is a terrible idea, because the prisons will become magnets for attacks! Firstly it gave me pause that any Republicans would have have concern for the lives of a prisoner. Like there would be planes flying in to supermaxs all over the country. I realized that they could be arguing it would put the guards lives at risk, which I suppose is understandable. The argument though is ridiculous, prisons are made to hold criminals, they act like this is the first time prisons have been used to house criminals. Mcveigh, Unabomber, Moussaoui , Abdel-rahman(the blind sheikh), etc are all in the ADX Florence and they haven't gone through a terrorist attack or a terrorist break out.

How about if you fucking idiots stop making shit up and creating new laws for this and that, new exceptions to why we can't possibly live like we used to, and how the post 9/11 world will destroy us all?

Have a Federal prosecutor's office evaluate the cases and decide whether or not to charge these individuals with crimes. If they have committed a crime then have a trial.

OR

Establish that they are in fact prisoners of war, and go through the maritime/military law.

Where will they go?? They're not fucking superheroes we don't need to build an Arkham Asylum here or a fucking "negative zone", just put them in a cell. Like abdel-rahman already is in a fucking cell, just like binalshibh is already in a fucking cell, and just like every other CRIMINAL that has been convicted is in a cell.

I hope Obama keeps going. This is the kind of shit that Clinton would never do for fear of being labeled liberal. Obama knows what he wants, and how to get it, I just hope that what he wants is what he has been talking about. Most importantly we need an exit strategy immediately. I hate presidents, but honestly I have to say this was good shit the past few days.

generic title #1

2008-10-25T21:27:00.002-05:00

So I've been away from this blog for awhile, but for some reason I'm drawn back to it after a long time. I read it every once in awhile, the realization that blogging is largely masturbatory is important. Fuck i've been writing too formally recently, I wanted to start a sentence, but I don't wanna start the sentence with I, even though I didn't capitalize the I in "i'm" back there. I haven't written a blog in awhile, I had deceived myself in to thinking I was somewhat anonymous on this site, but that is largely not true. I thought it would help if I created random blogs post a couple things and forget about it, this would make me truly anonymous meaning I could speak however the fuck I wanted, could express my deepest emotions and sentiments...Didn't really work...largely masturbatory. So with that in mind I like coming back here to read the bullshit I believed a long time ago. This is evidence of both my recalcitrance and my willingness to keep an open mind for the sake of learning. How it can evidence two contradictory aspects of myself?
I read it seeing how fucking self-righteous I was, and this is not historical. This aspect of the writing maybe is who I am, I can be nice to myself and call it passionate or rejection of nihilistic aspects of post-modernism. It is only evidence that I'm a stubborn arrogant asshat. This evidences my stubbornness.
I also read the posts and see the things that I thought I knew and today I...know better. Things I believed that are incorrect, but it would be wrong to go back and edit them, they're not fucking eternal permutations of one message they're a snapshot of what one asshole thought at that time.

I got my password back, emailed google or something and logged in and here I am, I had something I was going to write about...was profound...probably won't come back to me. Ok so it came back to me, but its not really profound, but in the spirit of being a stubborn arrogant asshat i'm not going to delete the above.
I found this killer search tool :
http://www.pdf-search-engine.com/

Its great for finding free e-books. If its pirating its pirating, but I don't have the money to buy 'em and the library never has the shit I want to read. Anything that is in your library can for the most part be found on: http://www.gutenberg.org (an Australian non-profit that legally puts e-txts on line) and http://www.manybooks.net
At my job I'm in front of a computer and one never knows if that day will be filled with endless downtime watching the seconds tick or non-stop action standing all day so I generally look for shit to read, because online games do get boring (but still fun http://www.nintendo8.com).
Ok so to get back to the point, I found this cool video:

Its the Tool song Lateralus and the narrator has some theories about the song. So my roommate and I passed a little time reading about "synchronicity" which is supposedly a word that Jung invented. Tool allegedly make a lot of their music with themes from Jung. So we both talked about the synchronicity we would enjoy in college which was watching the movie "Legend" and putting the Aenima album by Tool on pressing play right when the title of the movie appears in the opening credits. Tool's music is very open to synchronizing with stuff youtube has two videos of different fantasia's synching with the same song. But the thing is we heard about this years ago and assumed that many other people have heard of it. The "darkside of Oz" is well known, and is pretty cool, but not as good as Tool's music with a visually exotic Ridley Scott film. Apparently though nobody has ever heard of it as a long perusal of numerous google links, wikipedia entries, and even a site dedicated to these things(to the extent people have elaborate instructions on cd changer timing for multi-disc changing and complex instructions for random combinations of songs[even from separate albums/artists]and movies). So whatever, interesting stuff I like the archetypes, I always think of that Philip K Dick short story "beyond lies the wub" where the wub reads the guys mind and says something like "we have something similar to your Odysseus in our mythology" good shit, but I don't really but it. I still find the theory very interesting and want to explore it further.

THIS is why I wrote this: I have this desire to learn, I don't know if it is a mental instability, some fucking chip on my shoulder, part of my arrogance, genetic, or whatever, but I want to know more things. I want to read like crazy all different things, not finishing lots of them, but Reading shit tons of random stuff. This always makes me think of the Self Taught Man in "Nausea" (who turns out to be a pedophile). This character had a mission to read through all the books at the library, starting at A and going to Z (apparently this is before the dewey decimal system[i made a blog joke]). He talks about this person's purpose his essence, which was reading these books, but what the fuck would he do when he finished, what would he be without this purpose? Could be my human instinct that piece of our brain that makes us fucking regress to cavemen seeking for meaning through purpose, some divine thing to believe in. I mostly think that anyone who tells me I'm chosen, or have the opportunity for heaven or immortality, or that I have a piece of divinity in me just wants my money to sell me false hope. Life has no significant meaning, it is a mandala(which I found out is another fucking Jungian theme[holy shit synchronicity!]). Its nice to write informally again, but anyway I've been going to school spending all my money trying to get another piece of paper, there are various reasons and I won't go in to them here, but I think this is good that I'm spending all my money apart from rent/food/bus/bills on school. Its nice to be in class learning and being given deadlines, that is the key for me, fuck what the teacher tells me is truth I never kiss their ass, I don't got confrontational but I say what I know and back it up with reasoning/evidence. Ivan Illich was dead on in many of his critiques on schooling, but the deadlines make me finish something which is good.

So all my downtime is dedicated to reading shit for class, for example "UN Human Development Reports" holy shit I've had to read a lot of these, and the semester is only like halfway in. I suppose this is the extreme, lots of the other readings are interesting, but these reports are shit
So I want to read about Jung, because thats what I stumbled upon and I'm always trying to read more about Foucault and this PDf searching thing just returned like 100 fucking things and I want to read all of them!

Through participation in formal schooling, my self-education has been retarded, mainly due to the fact that time is zero sum game.

oh the urge to delete it all and close the box! haha, crave the anxiety of being open it seems.
Thats it, just downloaded Existenz gonna go check it out, never seen it before heard it was really loosely based on "Ubik" later.

blogging sucks

2007-08-24T01:37:00.001-05:00

I've been watching some 'one flew over the cuckoo's nest', great flick and its on a channel that has commercial breaks in the movie. I was struck by the juxtaposition of the advertising symbolism, the sales heuristics and the plot of the movie. If you've seen the movie or read Kesey's book the part that strikes me about the asylum is of course the power relationship and the fact that the real asylum is on the outside. They keep saying 'they're not ready' to leave the hospital and the truth is nobody is ever ready to leave the hospital. None of us are ready we're all just floating through this universe trying to survive. The nurse wielding power and loving that she is overlord of these poor patients. Ratchett(rat shit) seeks this power, she gets off on it. She is a metaphor for the power everywhere, authority without legitimacy, she is ruler 'just cause' and her word is final. Outside of their world is our crazy world where things are no different. Tradition, faith, nationalism, etc. the blind leading the blind. Our world is one big insane asylum where the good guys always lose and the our prophets are killed in front of us as we cheer. Foucault and R.D. Baird talk about insanity being a social construct. The point is if you define insanity, we are really defining sanity in opposition to what we define as "insane" which is another way of saying "abnormal". It helps us to retain normalcy (a made up word, created during our depression, to "modulate distress" a powerful sales heuristic) to point out a group of "others" that are not "normal". I remember my cousin who had a large chunk of his leg burnt off in a car accident that killed his father and caused his sister to have to amputate her leg below the knee. Just in case he ever forgets that his Father is gone forever, god(I do not believe but I make mention, cause god is one sick son of a bitch to do this to anyone, let alone a child, so if by chance there is a god, he/she deserves to be chastised for what he/she did to this individual[and not just my cousin, but every child in that burn ward and every child in that hospital]) left a large burn scar on his calf that he needed to have grafts on in order to keep enough skin and muscle to avoid amputation. In summer camp I was told by my Grandmother that a boy was picking on my cousin by making fun of his scar. When my cousin informed him that that's not cool because his dad died in the accident that caused that burn, the teasing turned toward the fact his father was dead. What others thought around me when this story was relayed was how cruel the boy was and how his parents must be something like escaped nazis. What I said was this was nothing new all the people judging this boy did the same thing every day. They identified someone else as the outsider and possibly aurally decried said individual as an outsider. By doing so they artificially defined themselves as in the group that is not involed with the outsider. This individual created an "us" and "them" quickly and easily in sweeping motions. Although the us and them was completely illusory and poorly distinguished he tricked himself in to thinking that he belonged by ostracizing the kid with the scar. By defining him as the outsider he defined in opposition to that, making him if not an insider at the very least not an outsider.

The commercials though are like the power that Ratchett seeks. They sell products, but what they're really selling is emotions or even states of mind. The late night commercials are so overt in this it is incredible, if one were an extra- terrestrial observer one would conclude that 99% of our population were mentally retarded. Doing whatever we are told, staring at the flashing lights, and never using reason. A commercial for a penis enlarger showing a woman explaining how the medication works. You are buying confidence, you are buying sexual prowess, and you are paying for love in the end. I like Mazlowe's hierarchy, very poignant, and so easy to exploit now that its out there. So many genies out of so many bottles, we as consumers are always one step behind. Now another commercial telling me that I can talk to beautiful women who are tanning poolside over a telephone. She will be impressed and interested in everything I say, and sexually aroused at the sound of my voice. I am a stallion, an Adonis...oh it was all a dream...worse it was all a lie and now I've got buyers remorse. Five bucks down the drain half an hour of work, and that's because I'm lucky, that would be a full hour of work for most people, you know the ones on minimum wage that run just about fucking everything. But the only people on the phone conference were guys, and the penis enlarger was a sugar pill! Not to fear there is an aerosol can full of 5 cents of actual garbage culled from various sources. Well now its a body spray and its 8 bucks and unless you hose yourself down in the plastic scent of consumerism women will not fuck you. Did people want body spray 6 years ago? No, but they held a few focus groups and they realized (just as our alien observer would rightfully conclude) holy shit this place is filled with stupid people that do whatever you tell them to do. They believe you every time you make them a promise. Another commercial for a weight loss drug actually stating verbatim "we couldn't say it on tv if it wasn't true" the sheer audacity of this statement made me laugh out loud at first. I realized though that they are making this statement, because they're playing(as any salesperson will tell you) the 'law of averages'. If they show the commercial to 2 million people roughly 1.999 million of them are dumb enough to believe it, see? So it works perfectly, the law of averages. Now this chubby lady is saying she was even fatter before she had a plastic ring placed around the top of her stomach, it can be adjusted for tightness. It lost her weight, it made me think about getting some kind of surgery to open up my stomach so I could be the bane of all you can eat food deals everywhere, but I digress I was rambling about something wasn't I? Oh yah, the jist of ALL these fucking commercials is what mazlowe was talking about. People may not believe they are unattractive, obese, or posses diminutive genitalia. This is why you have to tell them that they lack any of many positive characteristics. Then make it apparent that if they can just purchase your product they can alleviate, if only temporarily, their disability.
They sell us what we want and never what we need. Television doesn't even write stories anymore its all half improv-half scripted and called "reality". I wish that Guy DeBord could have witnessed the phenomenon that is "reality television". We have made a spectacle of our spectacle, and now we love the cameras we are all voyeurs and exhibitionists. We want "fame", for some reason all or most of us are willing to go out on a limb so that people you've never met will know who you are.
The beer commercial shows a famous sculpture of a man with his fist on his head, in deep thought. One of the most simple and simultaneously amazing pieces of art. Its nothing more than a thinking monkey, but that's the point. He is just thinking and he can because he is human it is cartesian before Decartes. Well in this commercial the sculpture comes to life and goes to get beer. Now I have seen this sculpture in pictures before it is famous, but how many times have I possibly seen it in my life? 10..20? at the most, well by the time I've seen this commercial for the 30th time, I will associate this famous sculpture with a certain brand of beer. Or how about that beatles song, the led zeppelin song, or the rolling stones song? They are all associated with different models of cars and now when you flip on the radio cadillac or pontiac or whatever the fuck it is just got free time in your brain. Adbusters states it most concisely: "Advertising is imperialism of your brain". Vast sums of money are being tossed around and they are fighting over your mind...well not really...but they're definitely at war for all the stupid people's minds.

This scientologist was explaining why his religion was good he used the same words as a mormon television commercial, and as it turns out the same words as a pharmaceutical commercial. "Have you ever been depressed?" "Have you ever felt sad?" "Have you ever felt alienated?". Well let me tell you something folks: If you haven't felt sad, alienated, or depressed a few times in your life, guess what? It turns out you're an android, go get your voigt-kampff. Religion may be the most dangerous of all, because it does not promise you temporary pleasure, reprieve, release. Religion actually promises eternal happiness, paradise, whatever you wanna call it. This is what I used to think religion was a poison above all others, but it is apparent that the allure of pseudo-science, the use of scientific terms sways individuals as well. Ritalin and SSRI anti-depressants are 2 of the most over prescribed drugs on the market. Ritalin is pushed in to kids at a young age, teachers play a part in picking out the "disruptive" ones. And what a surprise in our patriarchal world the teachers would give it to females more than males, because women who speak when not spoken to are quite undesirable and they'll never make a good housewife. So dope 'em up and sit 'em back in class, It wasn't because you've been talking about some random stupid fucking lesson for an entire week that they were bored, its because they're all ADHD. Every commercial break there is an effort to get you to want some kind of medication. Allergies, sleep, depression, anxiety, weight loss, impotence...

It seems that much like the cruel child we have told ourselves that we cured unhappiness, and believed our lie in order to alleviate some fleeting feeling. We reach for our mood organ, but we entertain no thoughts of self-reflection. "Great happiness begets tragedy" is the Eastern saying. The time we live in..."the present" is no different than it ever has been. One cannot control their emotions, which is why it is unfair for these commercials to manipulate us, tell us to buy things we don't need and can't afford. But we can put our ability as the hard thinking monkey in to use, we can understand that if we feel dark, morose, or depressed it is only one more emotion on the path of life one of millions we will experience and most importantly it will fade in to the next emotion.
The only thing constant is change, Buddhists got that one right, impermanence is everything. It will not help us to pretend we are a mental construct like "normal" or a fleeting emotion like "happy".
Socrates said call no man happy until he is dead, because nobody knows what will happen tomorrow. It is one of the more existential things Socrates said and it is a good reminder that no matter what chemical is ruling your brain at the present moment the grass is not always greener on the other side.

Diminuitive Addendum to aforementioned subject matter

2007-08-19T14:22:00.000-05:00

I wanted to add a quick piece to the schools vs. prison comparison. I just bitched and didn't offer any real opportunity to change just a vague reference to the 14th amendment. There are simple ways to reform both the education and justice systems. First is the justice system the first step that must be taken is to end prohibition and record racial information of individuals searched, arrested, or pulled over. As the very specific evidence regarding how disproportionally the law is enforced come to light policy reformation will logically follow. Although simple steps towards prohibition would be nice, the end result is to decriminalize victimless crime. Abolition of Mandatory minimums sentencing, legalization of medicinal marijuana, or spending more money on treatment and education than incarceration for drugs. To accomplish the positive effects of all these one would only need to abolish prohibition. End the drug war and positive effects would be forthcoming, such as the crippling of all street gangs and the entropy of many militant groups across the globe.

The other element schooling can be reformed through a case that already exists called Rodriguez vs. San Antonio Independent School District. In which under a 14th amendment argument the court decided that in order to receive equal protection under the law(equal public education) funding had to be comparable. The case was overturned on appeal, but the logic, morality, and overall legality of the original decision still holds water in my opinion. As I argued in the last essay unless the funding is comparable the education won't be. Instead of local property taxes being the funding for local schools creating little suburban bastions of gated communities and public schools that can actually afford decent teachers, there should be a state fund that is divided proportionally. Per capita, or per school, or per teacher needed; if funding is made somewhat comparable then we would see a rebirth of intelligence in our country. The Ingenuity gap that Thomas Homer-Dixon talks about would be hurdled in a single generation.

Although these 2 simple, morally sound, and easy to implement plans will have the positive effects I listed and have almost no negative effect, the odds of them ever being adopted are minute. These reforms are deemed radical, most likely by the individual even reading this. The first one is "radical" because "drugs are bad" just like "ford is in his flivver". Just another post-hypnotic suggestion, a "normal" ideal, a "tradition", or just another way to say faith.
The second would be seen as "communist". Our culture is still recovering from the cold war, which was nothing but a propaganda war. The Governments bullshitted both their enemies and their own people. They had to make their own people believe that a massive theft of wealth from the entire spectrum of people to the individuals who own the defense contracting corporations which have the best relations with the ruling faction was necessitated. So now any attempts at social justice, welfare, or just to alleviate the suffering of those who are not from the middle or upper class are seen as "Communist" or "Socialist". Truth is, social justice has more than altruistic consequences it has utilitarian and social consequences that effect everyone, and you and I are both included in "everyone".

Whatever enough rambling from the "radical".

School vs. Prison

2007-08-12T11:01:00.001-05:00

So why not write about what I see as two similar institutions in United Statesian life. The first being the School and the second being prison. In order to proceed first we must provide an operant definition of both institutions.

School for the purpose of this essay is to include public and private schooling from preschool to at least the end of secondary education. I shall elaborate on the reasoning behind this definition as we proceed.
Prison for the purpose of this essay is the entirety of Corrections or Incarcerations, whether public or private.

Schools are similar to Prisons in many ways the first of which being they are both compulsory. It is illegal for an individual to not attend school until they are 16, which is the age they are given the choice to discontinue schooling. Incarceration is punishment by a court of law for a violation of the codified universal moral code, or temporary imprisonment before trial for infractions. If one chooses to discontinue their education prior to 16 they can be incarcerated for choosing to do so.

Before Columbine, schools were mainly afraid of one thing: black kids. I mention this merely to point out that one focal point of the wholesale of fear leads to another. I have not been to secondary school in some years so I do not know if today it is not Columbine, but Islamic militants which are the focal point of paranoia transforming the public school in to a panopticon. When I first started attending Secondary School the news would let us know that gang members(Politically Correct speak for “black male youth”) were shooting people in schools. Spawning films about the heroism of Kipling’s “white man’s burden”, white woman or white man saves the savages from cannibalism, just without evangelism(i.e. "Dangerous Minds", I don't feel like dedicating the percentage of my brain it would take to remember the names of the other ones which were basically all the same plot). Then, an event: two angry youth decided to use their freedom which granted them easy access to a large amount of power(i.e. firearms) to hurt others. The ability has always been there and it always will, as we move forward in time weapons will become more powerful and it will become even easier for one person to gain life taking powers of greater magnitude.

This is one cost of freedom, but after it happened black youth were no longer the boogeyman, instead the kids who others picked on, they were dangerous. The kid that just wanted to be left alone, cause people talked so much shit to him was the boogeyman. So cameras had to be put up, to use the language of our contemporaries each and every school in North America had been infiltrated by splinter cells of murder-suicide militant activists. Willing to use violence to push their agenda of murder-suicide, so cameras needed to be put everywhere. In ETHS on the very sign there are more than 3 cameras. Wait I want to write this again so you can read it twice: This high school had 3 cameras on their front yard sign, you know the ones with all the landscaping around them? Well if you look on either side of the name just above the flowers you’ll see the dead eye of hal-9000 staring right back at you. Just as Bentham said and Foucault expounded upon the panopticon coerces by means of the illusion of omniscience. As long as there is an electric eye somewhere the individual assumes they’re being watched whether or not someone is manning the control room. So they act as the individual possessing power on the other side of that eye wants them to act.

Now one of my favorite similarities is of course the objective of prisons and secondary schools: getting their visitors a GED! Many prisons claim they don’t let a prisoner go until they have taken the required classes to get their GED. At the very least most prisons have literacy programs, sorry most PUBLIC prisons.

Which brings us to our next similarity they are both just SO damn marketable! With Wackenhut and Corrections Corporation of America making a set contracted amount, then making money off each bed it fills, and even beyond that money they are publicly traded on wall street! I know, I know you’re thinking “Shit! I’m quitting my job and selling my possessions to get in on that business!”
Well hold on there may be a more lucrative opportunity in a different private sector job: schools are also marketed, in most cities around the country private schooling is the only decent education there is. Which means its great business and people gotta get educated so who cares how high tuition is, they’ll always pay it, classes will always be filled, and hell they’ll even thank you for allowing them to pay the king’s ransom. They'll love you forever for allowing you to pay them 20thousand a year, because their child was "admitted". Not only that but if you are a religious school you don’t even have to pay taxes! Oh wait it gets better, just like government efforts to encourage more private prison, many plans circulate (some have been passed at city and statewide levels) for “vouchers” or government subsidies. These “vouchers” are a pittance when compared with a single semester’s tuition, but its free money from the government…Even if you’re a religious school, Establishment clause be damned!

The best critique on compulsory schooling out there is Ivan Illich who wrote “Deschooling Society” and pointed out the inherent power relationship between student and pedagogue in the classroom environment of compulsory schooling. Foucault also expounded upon the relationship between truth and power which grants credence to Illich’s conclusions. The student believes the teacher, the teacher could say anything and because the teacher is not only in a position of power and is therefore correct and should be obeyed (A la Stanley Milgram), but also the teacher actually has the power to punish for not believing their truth. I mean i'm not talking go sit in the corner or go to the principal's office, corporal punishment is still legal in most places.

So being a successful student or prisoner means training in one or both of two things:

1. Evasion, pretending to agree in appearance, but disagreeing and keeping your mouth shut. This quality is key for any population that will accept a totalitarian state, knowing things you see are wrong yet still keeping your mouth shut and shuffling onward is needed to get through school or prison with less punishment.

2. Blind acceptance more easily understood as “faith”. My dad always said his dad always used to say “never trust a person that says ‘trust me’”. To me this meant that one should not just believe blindly, instead one should think critically and evaluate the credibility of anything for yourself. Instead to get through schooling, one memorizes the “facts” declared as truth by the teacher. This student will fail if they spend time questioning instead of memorizing and answering, because there is only so much time for research in a day. Not only that but it becomes a social acceptance issue and a competition issue among your peers. One is stupid or smart in these worlds, very black and white. Tests are administered to gauge the extremity of the students' intelligence or stupidity, in direct relation to the other students.

In conclusion prison and schools are so similar, because their money making potential was recognized years ago by the same individuals who sit on top of the largest companies profiting from them. Prisons suck money out of our pockets when all we have to do is end prohibition. Schools are a place to learn, you should not forfeit your constitutional rights at the door to quote Tinker. Leave the kids alone and let them do their thing.

Don’t get me wrong I am not for dismantling the education system entirely at this point, I’d say it needs dramatic reform. Fortunately the means are already available its called the fourteenth amendment. If the system cannot be reformed then yes it is true that the internet provides an alternative to schooling through its’ vast forums which can be used as “learning networks” as Ivan Illich describes them. All their needs to be is a site that allows the free expression of ideas without any form of censorship.
Now after wading through my bullshit here is your reward: Some of you will say this represents an extreme example, but this is the norm of modern schooling especially in the ‘inner-city’ a.k.a. minority districts. It seems this school took its preparation for acceptance of a police state to a higher level. We can only say this because this is the only example we have footage of. The reason we have the footage is someone with access to it actually had a conscience, and probably lost his or her job, because of their morality.

Rome for the Romans

2007-03-16T20:58:00.001-05:00

The job I recently started used to belong to a Mexican.

Take that immigration critics.

Everyone one of you had some ancestor that was an immigrant in the first place, its very likely you've all had an illegal immigrant for an ancestor.

Unless you're 100% "American Indian" this country is just as much yours as someone that speaks spanish.

***************

I went in to a 7-11 with 2 of my freinds. It seems we've become quite smitten by a beer called Hacker-Pschor Weise. So the nearest distributor of pint bottles of the beer is this 7-11 near a cop station so its always filled with police cruisers getting coffee/doughnuts and its in a somewhat diverse neighborhood. And when I say diverse I don't mean it is somewhere on the spectrum of gentrified or shared between latinos and whites or blacks and whites. I mean there are many different languages spoken around the area, as well as people from all over the globe.

Anyway I got off subject. So we walk in to grab a buncha beers and I notice a guy behind us coming through the door. He got out of a white van and had a comcast hat on, so at first I assumed he was a cable guy or something. Then I noticed how obviously drunk he was and how he had a lady with him. He wasn't a cable guy just some dude getting some beers for him and his lady to continue drinking while driving.

Walking in to the store we pass by the owners of the 7-11 who are of middle eastern descent and speak with an accent that shows English is a second language. Going around the counter we pass by a young mother with a few kids. They speak spanish to eachother the siblings teasing and playing with one another, just bear cubs.

Walking through the turnstile in to the beer section I point out the vast reserves on display of the moment's favorite beer. Turning to consult with my 2 cohorts on how many beers we shall procure-comcast guy sez to someone around him "I'm sick of this Ishmael shit."

Looking me directly in the eye he asks "Know what I mean?".
Normally I ignore the drunk look straight through him and while looking straight through him say something to my freind behind me or say "excuse me" and closely examine the bottles on the other side of him.That day I was in a weird mood and plus I get tired of individuals shitting on certain groups of people.

So I said "What are you talking about?"

He said "You know America...This is America...speak the language."

I said "What America are you talking about? America is the whole of the western hemisphere, do you mean the United States of America?"

"oh getting technical" he says with a twinkle in his eye that I interpreted as foreboding. "I like that"

"Well its true" I said as I looked through him, focusing once again on my task of making him disappear.

He muttered to his ladyfreind then audibly "I was in the marines for some years."

Remembering my interpretation of his stare, I bit my tongue before I could ask him if he thought it was worth it.

I paid for my beer and exited the store. Looking to my left were 2 polish guys jabbering away in their native language.

***************************************

Sometimes it makes you feel good to be a smart ass....well maybe all the time. When I was doing door to door sales we went to this shop that had a sign on the cash register:
"You're In America, Speak English".

I said to her "shouldn't the sign say 'you're in England speak English'?"

The sheer stupidity of the sign had not dawned on her
"Real funny" she said with a 'shut yer smart ass up' tone of voice.
Not only is America the whole of the western hemisphere so there are more Spanish speakers than English, but English is not even from the United States, which is what her sign is assuming people interpret "america" as. Is that the mainstream? Am I just out of the mainstream? Or is this lady actually that stupid? Or was it the nationalism requiring faith thusly overwhelming reason.

This woman worshipped America, but didn't even know what it was.