Hitting the Refresh Button - Redux

The last CTA Council of Representatives meeting was held today at the Left Seat restaurant, the large windows overlooking some alternate runway of Sky Harbor Airport. As we trudged through our agenda, the only aircraft to touch down on this runway passed:



Obama was in town tonight to speak at this year's ASU Commencement ceremony. I was supposed to be there to accept my Masters Degree in Education. My professional obligations (teaching), the weather (blast furnace), and the absurd security precautions (2:30 check-in for a 7:00 Commencement) prevented me from attending. So as Air Force One rolled by, my fellow council members scrambled gleefully to get a photo through the windows, a mere football field away. I snapped the above photo with my phone. As we watched the assembled dignitaries await the emergence of the President, and spied for rooftop snipers across the tarmac, I reflected on the last 4 months or so.

A palpable political shift is taking place, but its precise parameters are highly confused. A sense of polarity is easily discerned by engaging with the "mainstream" media. The details of this left/right shell game are not necessary to go over. ("He's a socialist! No! He's a progressive!) Just think the Glenn Beck/Rachel Maddow nexus. In the so-called "progressive" media milieu (Pacifica/Democracy Now/Alternet), the approach has been slightly more nuanced. There has been a strange mix of revulsion and elation with the new administration, especially in places like Alternet. There may be one story praising Obama's approach to the health care problem, and on the same homepage, another condemning his continuance of Bush era policies on indefinite detention of prisoners. This schizophrenia might appear as evidence that this sector of the media is truly non-partisan, performing in true "watchdog" fashion, not like those "other guys" (Fox News, CNN, etc.).

The boundaries of debate are being re-established by the same internal logic that guided the system of domination and control during the Bush years. Are loyalties are simply being re-polarized for maximum pliability. Meanwhile, the Obama administration quietly, under the radar, radically extends the Panoptic gaze while professing its diminishment; the bombing of civilian targets in Afghanistan increases to grotesque levels; the so-called "black" budget is increased again for undisclosed uses; and torture is outsourced to other client states, or simply justified in public statements. The intelligence apparatus is also ramifying its approach to domestic dissent, while the continued recession propogates the ongoing class war (not the one that is discussed openly). These are not controversial facts, all of this can be found by conducting a simple search of the news media online.

After eight years of engineered popular contempt for the policies of the Bush administration, the Obama administration can now act with the same cool impunity, and in fact, can extend the horrifying effects of global capital and increased social control to the next level. The ultimate PSYOP... again, hitting the refresh button. The recent "Swine Flu" experiment was just that, as was this Somalian pirate nonsense. Just testing the waters of credibility and the current fear response. It has been remarkably effective. People actually believe that Obama wants to "redistribute" their wealth in a socialist coup, people actually believe that Obama will "solve the healthcare problem".

"But Obama has closed Guantanamo, given us a tax credit for first-time home buyers, and wants everyone to go to college! You know, he's going to give us all health care."

As for Werner Herzog:

Encounters At the End of the World. Highly recommended. Out on DVD now.

the irrational gaze

"On January 26, 2006, Phoenix was in a car accident in Hollywood on a winding canyon road that flipped his car over. The crash reportedly was caused by brake failure. Shaken and confused, Phoenix heard a tapping on his window and a voice say, "Just relax". Unable to see the man, Phoenix replied, "I'm fine. I am relaxed". The man replied, 'No, you're not'. At this point, Phoenix managed to see that the man was famed, eccentric German auteur Werner Herzog. After helping Phoenix out of the wreckage, Herzog phoned in an ambulance and vanished." - Wikipedia entry

Recall Crispin Glover's legendarily weird appearance(s) with Letterman, and his artistic and professional links with Herzog himself. Love this shit. We need more celebrities like this to gum up the works of that over-inflated, insidious myth machine.

Patrick Joseph McGoohan - 19 March 1928 - 13 January 2009

About a week late on this. Nevertheless...


"I think progress is the biggest enemy on earth, apart from oneself… I think we're gonna take good care of this planet shortly...there's never been a weapon created yet on the face of the Earth that hadn't been used. We're run by the Pentagon, we're run by Madison Avenue, we're run by television, and as long as we accept those things and don't revolt we'll have to go along with the stream to the eventual avalanche. As long as we go out and buy stuff, we're at their mercy. We're at the mercy of the advertiser and of course there are certain things that we need, but a lot of the stuff that is bought is not needed...

We all live in a little Village. Your village may be different from other people's villages but we are all prisoners."


—Patrick McGoohan, 1977

Lycia, live in Scottsdale

Below is my short review of last Saturday's Lycia show that was recently published on the Alterati webpage. Thanks to Wes Unruh :

The legendary darkwave/ethereal act Lycia played their first show in ten years Saturday night in Scottsdale, Arizona. There is an extensive history of the band on their wikipedia entry. They are absolutely essential listening in some circles, but totally obscure to most. They have been cited as an influence by numerous bands, most notably in my memory by Type O Negative during the October Rust era. Type O had toured at the time with Lycia as an opener, and Lycia’s influence permeates October Rust.



The crowd was varied, but the goth-industrial crowd seemed to be most fully represented, as expected. My contact with and knowledge of this subculture these days is severely lacking. To be frank, I never really “got it” in the first place. While in high school in the mid-nineties, my little group of metalheads and musicians was separated by one or two degrees from those hip enough to be part of the “industrial” crowd. As a Projekt records act, Lycia was lumped in with a crop of goth/darkwave bands popular with that crowd, but Lycia was different in that their music seemed to defy categorization, and avoided the “slit-your-wrists” lyrical content of other bands. Even the artwork was ambiguous, creating an ethereal atmosphere all on its own. And they were extraordinarily weird. Their music almost did not make sense, seeming to exist in a world apart. As Aaron Turner said of the psychotically bizarre doom band Burning Witch, “when I first heard Burning Witch I laughed…and then I did not”.

Also on the Scottsdale bill were Hotel Hotel, whom I missed, and local acts Bella Lune and Audra. I arrived just in time for Bella Lune, a Phoenix-based darkwave group. Their brand of lush, electronics-laden darkwave has always been too danceable for me. The “shoegaze” style Lycia exemplifies makes much more sense to my ears. Nevertheless, their melodic sense is brilliant, and singer Fuchsia has a slightly nasal vocal delivery that is actually quite amazing. It may help that she is stunningly beautiful. The interplay of harmony and melody on the last song they played was brilliant, and I will probably purchase their debut album for it alone.

Audra is another local band that plays a fairly indistinct style of post-punk influenced rock. They seem to be hugely popular locally, but they just didn’t do it for me, although a fair assessment of the band would require a show without anxious anticipation of an act I had waited 13 years to see.

After Audra, the crowd thinned a bit, and by the time Lycia took the stage, a good portion of the crowd had either left or settled to the back of the bar, as there was considerable crowd noise coming from the rear. There were probably 30-40 people huddled close to the stage as the sound-man played “Summerhead” from the Cocteau Twins 1993 album Four Calendar Café. As the last track played before Lycia came out, this seemed of particular significance to me, as I have always heard an odd parallel between Lycia and the Cocteau Twins. In fact, it was Peter Steele who mentioned both bands in a 1996 interview for the now defunct Guitar magazine.



The Lycia lineup consisted only of Mike VanPortfleet and Tara Vanflower. Mike explained before the show that in the absence of a full band situation, their set list would consist mostly of their synth-based output from the Estrella album. In the nineties, the press dubbed virtuoso Eric Johnson’s guitar tone the “violin tone”. Mike Vanportfleet’s incredible guitar sound could be described the same way, but more like a synthesized violin section playing delicate washes.



Due to feedback problems, Mike could not sing the songs he intended to, instead playing his songs without vocals. While disappointing (Mike’s semi-whispered singing voice is every bit as evocative as Tara’s), watching him play three instrumental tracks reminded me how much of Lycia’s sound was Mike’s vision from the beginning. You can hear this going back to their album Wake, a collection of early demos from the 80’s. The soundscapes he creates are like nothing else. It is hard to tell how many layers of synth are piled in there sometimes, but they never muddy, and are perfectly rounded out by the delicate guitar lines. Tara’s vocals on the other songs were beautiful, though most lacked lyrical content. Her voice is truly distinctive and beautiful, and fully realized in a live setting where she can just belt out the wordless cries of much of the Estrella material. Getting the live sound right is important for music like this, and I went in not knowing what to expect, but what they do translates incredibly well live. It is a shame that Mike’s voice produces so much feedback.

The setlist was short (they only played seven songs), and as Tara explains in a blog entry on her Myspace page, the technical problems they experienced cast a shadow over the show for them. Nevertheless, it was great to finally see such an important band live. Hopefully more live appearances are forthcoming.

There has been a predictable media outpouring over the death of Solzhenitsyn. I did not know this until today, but he lived in exile from Russia in Cavendish, Vermont from 1976-1994. Cavendish is a beautiful little town just up the road from Ludlow, where I lived and worked for six months.

I have been fixated on rereading Edward Abbey since my recent trip through Utah and Colorado. About ten minutes ago, I was flipping randomly through Edward Abbey's essay collection One Life at a Time, Please, and landed here:

Perhaps my hero Solzhenitsyn would scorn my saying so but I am tempted to believe that the systematic cruelty inflicted upon animals trapped in our food and research apparatus is comparable - for who can measure the aggregates of pain, the sum of suffering? - to the agony that contemporary despotisms have exacted from human beings caught in their archipelagos of tyranny. Not merely comparable but analagous. Not merely analagous but causally connected. Contempt for animal life leads to contempt for human life.

Please see Derrick Jensen

"Chomsky hash"

Thanks Alterati:

"Literature departments are still influenced by the legacy of Romantic poets and their latter-day heirs, the Beats, who used drugs to imagine alternatives to mainstream society.

Similarly, an offshoot discipline, cultural studies, is pervaded by neo-Romantics. For example, after his televised debate with Noam Chomsky in 1971, Michel Foucault was partially paid in hashish. For weeks afterward, his friends in Paris referred to it as the "Chomsky hash." Should we be surprised by that anecdote, related by Foucault biographer James Miller? Let's be honest here: No one could have written History of Madness or Discipline and Punish while sober."

Anthropologists will be in disagreement as to this tribe's "uncontacted" status. Some have already said they may be the remnants of an earlier encounter that fled deeper into the jungle. Here is a link to the original article : "Uncontacted" Tribe Seen in Amazon (Nat'l Geo.), and the NY Times treatment: Isolated in Amazon, Visible From the Air. My concern is the photos themselves. They just seem wrong. The colors appear to be exaggerated.

McCain's Tin Foil Hat

"My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East. That will then...that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East" - John McCain (at a campaign stop in Denver)

Thanks Qlipoth

"Cleaning Up" Ufology?

Albert Hofmann has passed away. He was 102 years old.


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in lighter news...

"and then he [George Noory] went to bed, and all the dye came out onto his pillow" - Jeremy Vaeni at the X-Conference

Fucking priceless. The sorry state of this "field" has now become the proverbial dead horse. It's systemic problems are a microcosm of the larger cultural malaise in which we are embedded. Vaeni and Biedny, keeping up the fight. Apparently Binnall is sick of it. I Love it, but am sorry to say that despite my deep interest in the topic, even this angle has become entertainment. Rarely do podcasts have me truly gut laughing out loud, in my classroom, at 7:30 in the morning, pre-coffee. So until we are post-disclosure, cradling beautiful alien babies in our arms, all I have to say is..."NO PENIIIISSS"!!

(Culture of Contact/the Paracast tear up the X-Conference)

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke CBE (December 16 1917 - March 19 2008)

"Savage and Holy Light"

"Is this at last the locus Dei? There are enough cathedrals and temples and altars here for a Hindu pantheon of divinities. Each time I look up one of the secretive little side canyons I half expect to see not only the cottonwood tree rising over its tiny spring - the leafy god, the desert's liquid eye - but also a rainbow-colored corona of blazing light, pure spirit, pure being, pure disembodied intelligence, about to speak my name." - Edward Abbey

ObZen

the wholly other:



To be released here in the US on March 11th.





I have cautiously high hopes for this "Cloverfield" thing. I will probably be at the theater if it is not revealed before January 18th. Incredible marketing.

How much of the "noise" is injected? Power so unstable (see previous post) would pump further vibration or instability into the system. At this point, the connection between "Mike Hagan, Occult of Personality, Red Ice, K-Punk, Black Metal, Psychedelic Salon, Paul Laffoley, Greylodge, Alterati, the reappearance of Tracy Twyman, the Esozone, etc." would seem to be simply that, "noise". Instability actively promoted in multiple forms, and with varying levels of sincerity, depending on the network of linkages assembled and relied upon. There are many on the web discussing this notion. In an informative universe (the internet's underbelly, you know where to look. If not, ask me) so rife with disinformation of the most insidiously convincing kind, where does the almost Discordian layering end, and serviceable threads begin?Red Ice and Paul Laffolley seem particularly questionable. My admittedly skeptical post on Laffolley seems embarrasingly forgiving after 5 months of further digging. Or am I being told where to dig?
Red Ice, ,Mike Hagan and other outlets are even more suspect in that they accept the claims of their various interviewees as legitimate "research", stroking them throughout, without question or challenge.

beyond the norm/transgression

For [Lewis] Call, following Baudrillard, power is less stable than indicated by Foucault’s rendering. Power exists through signs and symbols and is thus open to reinterpretation and quick reversals. All the prisons, gulags, and monitoring of citizens could not prevent the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Call notes that the collapse of the Soviet Union, which seemed as if it only took a few minutes, demonstrates what Baudrillard says about the unstable nature of power. “Baudrillard is attempting to unmask the state’s deepest, most closely guarded secret: that its power is unreal, that the state exists only as simulation.” Call quotes Baudrillard here: “The spectacle of those regimes imploding with such ease ought to make Western governments—or what is left of them—tremble, for they have barely any more existence than the Eastern ones.” If anarchists could cultivate practices that move beyond the norm/transgression dichotomy, so that they circulated as common currency throughout society, there is the potential that one day Western governments will disappear as quickly as their counterparts did in the East despite “Total Information Awareness.” - Michael Glavin

What about the twinkie?

Two posts back, I wrote :

Mike Hagan, Occult of Personality, Red Ice, K-Punk, Black Metal, Psychedelic Salon, Paul Laffoley, Greylodge, Alterati, the reappearance of Tracy Twyman, the Esozone, etc. It is difficult to place, but in some way, all of these threads seem to be tying together somehow. The recent highbrow treatment of "true" black metal is only one of the many zones of confluence. Southern Lord's recently elevated Wolves in The Throne Room is a perfect example. This, in connection with numerous occult podcasts running in all directions, with the same names appearing over and over, is revealing "the thumbprint of the editors" in Terence's bardic description of experiential textuality. Lengthy lists, links, and connections to follow when I have time. By then this will all slip away.

Tangles have turned to knots. I should have been surprised when Erik Davis weighed in on Wolves in The Throne Room in Slate magazine. Somehow, it makes perfect sense. The treatment is superb. During my recent experience at the Mogollon Rim, I was listening to Davis' talk on Gnosticism and the Archons in front of a wood fire next to an absolutely ancient Ponderosa. Deep Eco Metal indeed.



Also highly recommended along these lines, the Viking Youth Power Hour. Start with episodes 79, 67, 58, 44, and dont forget 37 for the Holidays.

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In other news:

(CBS/AP) A United Nations committee said Friday that use of Taser weapons can be a form of torture, in violation of the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Use of the electronic stun devices by police has been marked with a sudden rise in deaths - including four men in the United States and two in Canada within the last week. Canadian authorities are taking a second look at them, and in the United States, there is a wave of demands to BAN them. The U.N. Committee Against Torture referred Friday to the use of TaserX26 weapons which Portuguese police has acquired. An expert had testified to the committee that use of the weapons had "proven risks of harm or death." "The use of TaserX26 weapons, provoking extreme pain, constituted a form of torture, and that in certain cases it could also cause death, as shown by several reliable studies and by certain cases that had happened after practical use," the committee said in a statement. Tasers have become increasingly controversial in the United States, particularly after several notorious cases where their use by police to disable suspects was questioned as being excessive. Especially disturbing is the fact that six adults died after being tased by police in the span of a week. Last Sunday, in Frederick, Md., a sheriff's deputy trying to break up a late-night brawl tased 20-year-old Jarrel Grey. He died on the spot. The death came just weeks after Frederick police used a Taser to subdue a high school student. The NAACP says it appears the sheriff's office is using Tasers routinely, rather than as a weapon of last resort. Also this week, in Jacksonville, Fla., in two separate cases two men died after being stunned. One suspect, who fled a car crash and tried to break into a nearby home, struggled with a policeman, prompting the officer to tase him three times. The man continued to fight, and tried to bite the officer, while he was being tased. He was later pronounced dead at a hospital. Another man died Tuesday after a Jacksonville officer pulled over his car. When the officer approached it, the man took off running. When the officer caught up with him, during a struggle, authorities say the officer used his Taser to subdue the suspect. After being placed in the back of the police car the suspect became unresponsive. He was taken to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. Last Sunday, in New Mexico, 20-year-old Jesse Saenz died after Raton police used a Taser to subdue him. Police say Saenz was struggling and fighting with them as they attempted to take him into custody. Saenz died after being transported to a county jail. In Nova Scotia, a 45-year-old man who was jailed on assault charges jumped a counter and ran for the door as he was being booked. He died yesterday, about 30 hours after being shocked. And in Vancouver, where Royal Candian Mounted Police have been criticized for their use of a Taser against an irate airline passenger at Vancouver Airport last month, 36-year-old Robert Knipstrom died in a hospital four days after police used a Taser, pepper spray and batons to subdue him. More than a dozen people have died in Canada after being hit by Tasers in the last four years. ...in British Columbia, a tourist's video camera recorded the death of a man tased twice while in custody at the Vancouver Airport last month. That horrifying video shows Robert Dziekanski, a Polish man who spoke no English, become increasingly agitated. He was shocked twice, and then died. ...in Utah, a patrol car's dashboard camera caught an officer tasing a driver who refused to sign a speeding ticket. The officer is now under investigation, accused of being too quick on the draw. Amid a growing outcry, civil rights groups are urging police to put down their Tasers until more research is done. "The danger of Tasers is that they seem safe, they seem easy and therefore I think it's natural that police will be inclined to use them much more quickly than they would ever use a gun,"Amnesty International USA Executive Director Larry Cox told Chen.

34°25'56" N 111°16'16" W

Driving South through the blackness on my way back down to Payson, I recalled the oft-stated truth that human beings are increasingly encroaching upon the territory of other large predators. This results in a predictable rise in encounters, sometimes disastrous for both parties. Despite my lingering fear, I felt for the animal.

The State Loves a Parade

"What has been the response? We have petition campaigns, we have marches, we have rallies. We read alot of books...and some of us scribble quite alot and publish more. Make sure the word is out there...defy logic by announcing that we're speaking truth to power as if power didn't know what it was doing somehow. We might wish to consider perhaps speaking to people once in a while. But to what purpose? Well, apparently so diets can be changed. Ok we can have more bicycle paths, we can have no smoking signs on every flat surface in California. We can bear moral witness and feel better about ourselves because we're enlightened and aware when we go home from a rally which did absolutely nothing to change anything tangible in terms of the functioning of power." - Ward Churchill

I continue my long absence, but leave these for examination:


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"Untrue" will be released on November 6th. I will leave commentary to others, at least until I have a copy in my hands. For now, a Kode 9 mix of the new material is available here (right click and "save as" to download mp3). Originally aired on Mary Anne Hobbs' BBC RadioOne show, the mix is of decent quality, and requires the listener to ignore hyperbolic ass-licking by the hostess.

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I discovered the vbs.tv series on Gorgoroth's singer Gaahl about a month ago, and now echo the more recent sentiments of Erik Davis , urging all readers to view the series (click on "True Norwegian Black Metal"), or at the very least the final installment.
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Subtopia blog post, Peripheral Milit_Urb 20. An absolute must see.
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A friend of mine saw the world-famous boomerang last week floating above Sun Devils Stadium during a football game, and just five minutes before I showed up after not seeing him for a few months. This is the same guy I observed several craft with in the skies above Tucson last Fall. Upon this realization, we speculated that one or both of us must be Black Ops agents, or simple extra-terrestrials.

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Mike Hagan, Occult of Personality, Red Ice, K-Punk, Black Metal, Psychedelic Salon, Paul Laffoley, Greylodge, Alterati, the reappearance of Tracy Twyman, the Esozone, etc. It is difficult to place, but in some way, all of these threads seem to be tying together somehow. The recent highbrow treatment of "true" black metal is only one of the many zones of confluence. Southern Lord's recently elevated Wolves in The Throne Room is a perfect example. This, in connection with numerous occult podcasts running in all directions, with the same names appearing over and over, is revealing "the thumbprint of the editors" in Terence's bardic description of experiential textuality. Lengthy lists, links, and connections to follow when I have time. By then this will all slip away.

July 24, 2001

Dissenting Statement of Commissioner Gloria Tristani

Re: Transfer of Control of Broadcast Licenses Held by Subsidiaries of Chris-Craft Industries, Inc., to Fox Television Stations, Inc.

I dissent from today’s decision to permit Fox to acquire ten television stations from Chris-Craft. The transfer of these television station licenses violates the Communications Act and raises seriousconcerns regarding the ongoing concentration in the ownership of television stations and other media. Thisdecision also shows the lengths the Commission will go to avoid standing in the way of media mergers...

In the context of license transfers, the Commission has required merger applicants to pass a four-part test.91In the application before us, however, the Commission discusses only two of those four factors,the facts of which are not in dispute:(a) Does the transaction violate the Communications Act? Answer: Yes, it allows a single company to own television stations that will reach more than 35% of the national audience, inviolation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. (b) Does the transaction violate the Commission’s rules? Answer: Yes, in three ways. Thetransaction violates the FCC’s newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership proscription, the nationaltelevision ownership cap, and the local television ownership limits. Even using the Order’s own incomplete version of the public interest test, the transaction clearly should notbe approved. The decision finds that the newly-merged Fox/Chris-Craft will violate the CommunicationsAct and the FCC’s rules, and the decision identifies no offsetting benefits. Yet the majority deems this transaction to be in the public interest and proceeds to grant waivers of our most significant televisionownership rules so that Fox can close its transaction. - FCC : WT Docket No. 99-168

By now most have heard about NewsCorps' acquisition of The Wall Street Journal, unless the latest infrastructure disaster has cast too long a shadow on the news cycle. Goal: to fully realize the centralized management of information itself. Media consolidation is the real issue, but is swept aside by the "liberal vs. conservative bias" debate, a red herring for accelerating processes of noetic singularization. In 2001, NewsCorps acquired Chris-Craft Industries, and the FCC waived rules that would have forced Murdoch to sell one of his other New York media holdings. Just days before, NewsCorps sold Fox Family Worldwide to the Walt Disney Company, another giant worthy of annihilation:

Disney will buy the cable network for $3 billion, plus the assumption of $2.3 billion worth of debts.The network reaches nearly 81 million cable and satellite subscribers in the U.S. Disney CEO Michael Eisner told reporters the purchase would increase the reach of Disney's family-oriented programming. "These assets are a perfect fit for our company," he said. "We paid appropriately for a rare asset." The network will be renamed ABC Family after the Disney-owned broadcast network. - Media Watch

Someone interviewed on today's Democracy Now report raised the question: "what's next"?

New developments in PSYOP technology. The following article appeared in the Register on June 23rd. Honesty in red:

Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale
By Mark Baard

Perhaps your real life is so rich you don't have time for another.

Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.

The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.

Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project.

"SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP)," the paper reads, so that military leaders can "develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners".

SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.

Yank a country's water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.

"The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions between multiple sides," said Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, co-author of the SWS concept paper.

Chaturvedi directs Purdue's laboratories for Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations, or SEAS - the platform underlying SWS. Chaturvedi also makes a commercial version of SEAS available through his company, Simulex, Inc.

SEAS users can visualise the nodes and scenarios in text boxes and graphs, or as icons set against geographical maps.

Corporations can use SEAS to test the market for new products, said Chaturvedi. Simulex lists the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed Martin among its private sector clients.

The US government appears to be Simulex's number one customer, however. And Chaturvedi has received millions of dollars in grants from the military and the National Science Foundation to develop SEAS.

Chaturvedi is now pitching SWS to DARPA and discussing it with officials at the US Department of Homeland Security, where he said the idea has been well received, despite the thorny privacy issues for US citizens. [the standard media treatment: the only barrier for the public being the vague issue of "privacy".]

In fact, Homeland Security and the Defense Department are already using SEAS to simulate crises on the US mainland.

The Joint Innovation and Experimentation Directorate of the US Joint Forces Command (JFCOM-J9) in April began working with Homeland Security and multinational forces over "Noble Resolve 07", a homeland defense experiment.

In August, the agencies will shift their crises scenarios from the East Coast to the Pacific theatre.

JFCOM-J9 completed another test of SEAS last year. Called Urban Resolve, the experiment projected warfare scenarios for Baghdad in 2015, eight years from now.

JFCOM-9 is now capable of running real-time simulations for up to 62 nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence.

Military and intel officials can introduce fictitious agents into the simulations (such as a spike in unemployment, for example) to gauge their destabilising effects on a population.

Officials can also "inject an earthquake or a tsunami and observe their impacts (on a society)", Chaturvedi added.

Jim Blank, modelling and simulation division chief at JFCOM-J9, declined to discuss the specific routines military commanders are running in the Iraq and Afghanistan computer models. He did say SEAS might help officers determine where to position snipers in a city square, or to envision scenarios that might emerge from widespread civil unrest.

SEAS helps commanders consider the multitude of variables and outcomes possible in urban warfare, said Blank.

"Future wars will be asymetric in nature. They will be more non-kinetic, with the center of gravity being a population." [In other words, future wars will be urban campaigns against recalcitrancy.]

The Iraq and Afghanistan computer models are the most highly developed and complex of the 62 available to JFCOM-J9. Each has about five million individual nodes representing things such as hospitals, mosques, pipelines, and people.

The other SEAS models are far less detailed, encompassing only a few thousand nodes altogether, Blank said.

Feeding a whole-Earth simulation will be a colossal challenge.

"(SWS) is a hungry beast," Blank said. "A lot of data will be required to make this thing even credible."

Alok Chaturvedi wants SWS to match every person on the planet, one-to-one.

Right now, the 62 simulated nations in SEAS depict humans as composites, at a 100-to-1 ratio.

Qlipoth, in some recent posts, has responded to further attacks on so-called "conspiracy theory" over at Lenin's Tomb. A good question is raised: why does Lenin continue with this line? Is it really necessary at this point? Most useful is the quotation (which I repeat here) of Jamey Hecht on the topic:

THE TERM ‘CONSPIRACY THEORY’

This phrase is among the tireless workhorses of establishment discourse. Without it, disinformation would be much harder than it is. “Conspiracy theory” is a trigger phrase, saturated with intellectual contempt and deeply anti-intellectual resentment. It makes little sense on its own, and while it’s a priceless tool of propaganda, it is worse than useless as an explanatory category.

As well as this:

Australia admits oil motive in Iraq Which is really no revelation at all. This is well known.
______________________________________________________________

Paul Laffoley recently offered up some information in Radiorbit that could explain it all away. In two interviews with Mike Hagan (there had to be a second, almost identical interview due to overwhelming listener interest in the 9/11 topic, which they only briefly touched), Laffoley recounted his brief time as a designer at the construction of the World Trade Center. He claims that explosive charges were actually built in to the very structure of the towers, but that the general public, for obvious reasons, would never have known about it. He was approached by members of a Saudi firm brought in during construction, and asked where the best place for explosive charges would be. When he pressed them as to why they would want to know this, they told him something akin to "thats the way it is done nowadays". He later found out that this practice was commonplace. His theory is that these charges were built into the structure, and that the system was triggered by the planes. The electrical system that controlled the charges was for the entire complex, explaining the collapse of building 7 as well. Taking it further, the Saudi firm in question was linked to, or part of the Bin Laden family, which would explain the choice of targets as well.

I would love to believe this explanation. It seems very neat and clean, but there are of course some holes and inconsistencies. It does not matter in any case. The layers of mutually exclusive information and speculation have again increased. Mike Hagan is amazed that nobody has picked up this story. Why has Lafolley's claim not come into the mainstream? There are many possible reasons. It threatens the 9/11 Truth industry for one, or at the very least its claims on a massive government murder coverup. Is it disinformation designed for a very small crowd? I do not buy the story, but download it here, and listen for yourself.

Subtopia

Today I stumbled upon Subtopia, another one of those pop architecture blogs. Normal fare, akin to BLDGBLOG, but clicking through the archives, I found periodic posts on military technologies, systems of control and surveillance, urban architectures, and other assorted paranoia. Most of these developments are not news to me, but it is nice to see them periodically compiled somewhere. Here are some things I discovered:

RFID chips in passports

Red Cross fearmongering billboards

Talking CCTV cameras in England (very creepy)

Pentagon spying on social networking sites such as Myspace and Friendster

Total Information Awareness program lives on

The most recent military post on Subtopia details BAE Systems' press release on the completion of HAARP. It is linked to an article on Wired, as well as the original announcement. Great work.

"We must reform the current immigration laws so we can secure our borders, implement a mandatory biometrically enabled, tamper proof documentation and employment verification system, and increase legal immigration into America."

- from the campaign website for Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate.


There is not much to say on this. There was the case of the Malaysian car thieves who cut of their victims finger for easier access to his Mercedes S-class. A minor concern, I think. Most popular opposition to biometrics involves concerns over "privacy". The bad news is that privacy no longer exists in any real sense. We are all data-mined. Such considerations are a mask for something far deeper. Is anybody else simply creeped out?

"Controlling physical access to buildings is one of biometric’s more popular uses, with one estimate predicting a market of $389 million by 2004. That’s just a fraction of the total market for biometrics, predicted to grow from $116 million in 2000, to $2 billion in 2006, to $5 billion in 2010. After all, if you can sell biometrics to measure schoolchildren, you can push it in the workplace too. Currently less than 1 percent of North American companies use biometrics to secure their computer systems. Bentham’s ghost would be proud to know that number is soon to rise.

Funny, even if the technology were available to those of us in the outer ring of the Panopticon, we don’t see how using high technology to 'authenticate a person’s claimed identity from his/her previously enrolled pattern,' will do anything for us. We already have our own technologies for doing this: they’re called eyes, ears, memory, discernment, and a process called 'getting to know a person.' We can see, however, how mechanical (and thus far less sophisticated) technologies would be useful for those running a massive prison. " - Derrick Jensen

HDB004 : Burial - Ghost Hardware 12"

This guy is a genius. While many of us, particularly in the states, are still trying to integrate the self-titled debut, this slab of deep space drops. The mp3 release can be purchased here. Unreal.



Will k(er)-p(l)unk weigh in?

the ecstacy of disintegration

Tonight, the local news here in Phoenix ran a segment in which they interviewed Arizonians about their dissatisfaction with the continuous coverage of this absurd spectacle.



"The problem raised by history is not that it might have come to an end, as Fukuyama says, but rather that it will have no end - and hence no longer any finality, any purpose" - J.B.

"livermore lab and u.c., tuition part of the daisy chain"

Middian : at The Sets (Tempe) 5/29/07

"that was then, this is now" - Mike Scheidt, in response to repeated requests for YOB classics.

Country Thunder 2007

I just returned home from Country Thunder USA. Held in Florence Arizona, it is a four-day orgy of drunken debauchery and country music in which we willingly participated as pedicab operators. Now in its fourteenth year, the scale of this event is staggering. Planners were expecting one hundred thousand people. Headliners included Big & Rich, Trace Adkins, Gretchen Wilson and Reba McEntire, all hugely popular. The clash of cultures between our crew and the attendees was striking, but not usually threatening. Saturday night was an exception. Nearly all of us came back to camp with tales of abuse by the crowd which had already been drinking for three days. A drunken "cowboy" called me a faggot for not wanting to pile five people on my cab, and flicked a cigarette at me. I then departed with his four obnoxious girlfriends jumping and cursing in the back. As we came through the campground gate, they jumped off my cab and walked. As I rode alongside them, asking to be paid, they pretended not to hear. When I cried theft of services, two of them then ran into a port-a-john . Fair enough, I blocked the door with a metal garbage drum. This was not my only disturbing encounter. Other riders shared similar stories.
The days were hot during the early afternoon, but not overwhelmingly, as a nice breeze was blowing all weekend. At night it was cold and uncomfortable, but nothing a warm tent couldnt cure. On the whole, the weather was mostly cooperative. The ranch where it is held, just West of Florence, is surrounded by a vast landscape of undulating hills and mesas covered in scrub brush and saguaro cactus. To the West, there is a clear view of a massive mountain ridge and cliff face, absolutely beautiful in the clear light of a blue Arizona sky. Some pictures below of the event campgrounds, and our own camp. There were 12 riders, spread out in a private campsite next to the canal. None of us made as much money as we wanted, but any time away from the nasty Phoenix sprawl is highly valued by nearly all of us. I got to know some of the guys better on this trip. The varied cast of characters on our crew is absurdly amusing, and provided hours of entertainment while at camp. A therapeutic weekend in the "savage and holy light" of the Sun.

"I don't think you'd sleep so well..."

I am posting this WAY late, but again, I have been so busy with student teaching that I have an entire folder of workable material sitting idle. I had grand designs for a post on this article. I wanted to elaborate on the occasional seepage of such activity out of the sequestered realm of elite playtime. This story was no surprise to me, of course. This guy, and apparently a few others in the Israeli diplomatic community have just happened to "slip up". Other interesting tidbits are highlighted:

JERUSALEM (AP) 3-12-07 -- Israel has recalled its ambassador to El Salvador after he was found bound, drunk and nude, according to information reported Monday by Israeli media and confirmed by a government spokeswoman.

The longtime diplomat, Tsuriel Raphael, has been removed from his post, and the Foreign Ministry has begun searching for a replacement, ministry spokeswoman Zehavit Ben-Hillel said.

Two weeks ago, El Salvador police found Raphael in the yard of his residence, tied up, gagged and drunk, Israeli media reported. He was wearing several sex toys at the time, the media said. After he was untied, Raphael told police he was the ambassador of Israel, the reports said.

Ben-Hillel said the reports were accurate and that Raphael has been recalled although he did not break any laws.

"We're talking about behavior that is unbecoming of a diplomat," she said.

The ambassador did not file any police complaint in connection with the incident, she said.

Raphael had served for six months as the ambassador in El Salvador and for several years at different missions around the world, she said.

The embarrassing affair was one of several involving Israeli diplomats in recent years. In 2000, Israel's ambassador to France died of cardiac arrest in a Paris hotel under circumstances the Foreign Ministry refused to publicize. Media reports said he was with a woman who was not his wife at the time.

Last year, Israel replaced its ambassador to Australia, Naftali Tamir, after he said Israel and Australia are "like sisters" because both are located in Asia and their peoples don't have the Asian characteristics of "yellow skin and slanted eyes." [!!]

In 2005, Israel canceled the appointment of a diplomat to Australia after it was discovered that he published pictures of nude Brazilian women on the Internet while on a mission in Brazil.

Bloomberg Throws a Bone

The NY Post article I saw at PedicabBlog seemed more optimistic and promising than the reality, mostly because it was written by a lobbyist for the New York City Pedicab Owners Association. Looking deeper, it turns out that Bloomberg's opposition to the pedicab regulation bill is on much narrower grounds than most riders would have hoped for, and a severely restrictive regulation on pedicabs will more than likely still go through. Nevertheless, this controversy has raged for some time, and it looked like the industry had no support against the powerful taxi and hotel industries. Bloomberg's decision to veto after initially supporting the bill was apparently in response to the testimony of industry advocates. The pedicab lobby seems to be powerful enough to get a sympathy move, the ultimate import of which is probably something we need not celebrate in excess. Please excuse the pessimism. Yesterday's New York Times Article on the veto is reprinted below:

Bloomberg Vetoes Bill Limiting Pedicabs
By RAY RIVERA
Published: March 31, 2007

Saying the free market should dictate how many pedicabs roam the streets, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg vetoed a bill yesterday that would cap the number of pedicabs operating in the city at 325 and impose other regulations on the growing industry.

The move is certain to provoke a showdown with the City Council, which passed the bill last month. Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, who has had a largely cordial relationship with the Bloomberg administration, promised to push the Council to override the mayor’s action.

The veto was foreshadowed two weeks ago at a bill-signing ceremony when Mr. Bloomberg, who brought the original legislation to the Council and whose staff spent months negotiating its fine details, was swayed by last-second pleas from pedicab advocates and delayed signing the measure. He said then that he wanted more time to think about it. Yesterday was the deadline for him to take action.

In his weekly appearance yesterday on WABC radio, the mayor said that he agreed with much of the bill, including its enhanced safety and insurance requirements, but that he objected on “free marketplace” grounds to the cap, which pedicab advocates say would put some 175 drivers out of work.

“If the public wants more pedicabs, why shouldn’t the public be allowed to have more pedicabs?” Mr. Bloomberg asked. “And if the public doesn’t want them, then nobody’s going to drive them because they can’t make a living. So let the free marketplace decide.”

The mayor said he hoped the Council would return the bill to him without the cap, or with a higher cap of around 500, the estimated number of pedicab drivers currently on the street.

His action drew praise from pedicab supporters, who hope to use the reprieve to persuade the Council to strip the bill further. In particular, they hope to eliminate a provision that prohibits pedicabs from using electric-assist motors, small battery-powered engines that help them pedal. They also want measures in the bill removed that would allow the police to ban pedicabs from Midtown during certain periods.

The City Council passed its bill on Feb. 28 by a vote of 38 to 7 with 4 abstentions. Two-thirds of the 51 Council members, or 34 votes, are needed to override a veto.

Pedicab advocates along with Norman Siegel, a civil rights lawyer, and a handful of council members who voted against the bill began a campaign yesterday to try to sway additional council members and stop the override. The Council has 30 days to strike down the veto.

“The reality is that many of my colleagues now have the opportunity to rectify a bill that was flawed,” said Councilman Hiram Monserrate of Queens, who voted against it. “I don’t always agree with the mayor, but I applaud him because he had a strong moral conscience when he decided not to sign this bill.”

But Ms. Quinn was unmoved yesterday.

“Anyone who has been to Columbus Circle or Times Square in recent years has seen the hundreds of pedicabs that circle around the streets,” she said. “While most drivers are responsible, we need to establish clear rider guidelines and passenger rights, and make sure pedicabs don’t clog our streets or endanger pedestrians.”

The proliferation of the three-wheel conveyances around Times Square and the theater district has been an irritant to theater and hotel owners, who say the pedicabs cause congestion, and to taxi drivers, who say their licenses with the city give them exclusive rights to people who hail cabs. The taxi and hansom cab industries are both capped.

Michael Woloz, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, said the number of pedicabs on the street was already unsustainable.

“Just because the industry has been allowed to grow unregulated for several years doesn’t mean the city should accept the current number of pedicabs that has only reached that level because of a lack of regulation,” Mr. Woloz said. “The city needs to come in and regulate this industry, and that includes a strict cap.”

Councilman Leroy Comrie of Queens, chairman of the consumer affairs committee, which held hearings on the bill, said he was disappointed at the mayor’s change of heart.

“Every facet of the pedicab issue was laid on the negotiating table and fully discussed,” he said.

Riders in the Valley are in full support (most of us) of insurance and other reasonable regulations, but the ban on the electric assist is absurd. Here in Phoenix, those who use so-called "e-bikes" are knocked merely for being pansies, as they are not really necessary here (except maybe for that hill on 5th St. in Tempe, and the Cherry Ave. Hill in Tucson). In Manhattan, the small boost from an "e-bike" must be a godsend for those long distances, while the driver competes with the extremely aggressive New York traffic. The Post article:

The bill included a first-in-America ban on pedicab use of "electric assist" power. This "assist" power is less than half that needed to operate a hairdryer, and can't be used unless the pedicab is being pedaled. It's important because 1) it lets pedicabs use heavier safety equipment and 2) it provides a little extra help for drivers who are older, less strong, disabled or just tired after a long day.

Ironically, to satisfy the demands of the taxi industry (which incomprehensibly views pedicabs as competition), the council justified its ban of safety-enhancing electric-assist power by claiming it was unsafe. The only support for this absurd claim came from the taxi industry itself - via a false assertion that electric-assist pedicabs use three-cyclinder motors that essentially turn them into motorcycles.

The motors on an electric assist sound like a small remote control car, a far cry from a motorcycle. More later...

Faaip De Oiad (?)

Saturn's polar hexagon was first glimpsed by Voyagers 1 and 2 over 20 years ago, but the Cassini probe has sent back this beautiful, brand new, thermal image photograph. NASA's statement:

“This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.”

The hexagon is similar to Earth’s polar vortex, which has winds blowing in a circular pattern around the polar region. On Saturn, the vortex has a hexagonal rather than circular shape. The hexagon is nearly 25,000 kilometers (15,000 miles) across. Nearly four Earths could fit inside it.

The new images taken in thermal-infrared light show the hexagon extends much deeper down into the atmosphere than previously expected, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) below the cloud tops. A system of clouds lies within the hexagon. The clouds appear to be whipping around the hexagon like cars on a racetrack.

“It’s amazing to see such striking differences on opposite ends of Saturn’s poles,” said Bob Brown, team leader of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, University of Arizona, Tucson. “At the south pole we have what appears to be a hurricane with a giant eye, and at the north pole of Saturn we have this geometric feature, which is completely different."

Baines was also quoted by the Discovery Channel, "it's ubelievable...perplexing...a bizarre pattern".
Why should NASA be stunned? Should there be no organizing principles in the universe? We already have those though. Should our lifeless mathematical formulae be just that, equations that are utterly meaningless? As if these equations "arose from nothing, in a single instant, for NO reason". For scientists like Baines, it is simply some cosmic accident, a simple but bizarre "pattern", which will hopefully be explained away. There is no room for the mystery. But accidental causation does not preclude its significance, as I have argued elsewhere. Again, refer to the symbolic history of humankind, the vast universe of pattern and reference.
Notions of meaning, "the sacred", or intelligence of any kind, and immediately the wolves come out. For me, this hexagonal structure makes perfect sense. There is a reason temples are built with geometric or stellar orientations, one that is completely divorced from airy notions about "G-d". This is why the dark matter problem seems to ridiculous to me. There is no real split, just tenuous points of contact between the rational and the inconceivable that are continuously worked out of our cosmic myth. Hence, NASA's confusion.

Link to MSNBC story

"God exists, but I don't believe in him" - Cool Memories II

Jean Baudrillard (June 20, 1929 – March 6, 2007)

I could not do this man justice without saying nothing at all. In the manner of all of the bad jokes and banal references to The Matrix today in most of the obituaries and commentary, these words will not take place:

Fall 2003, Stonybrook University, Herman Lebovics' Intellectual History, my first exposure to Baudrillard, many years too late. Lebovics told us not to try to understand Simulacra and Simulation, but just simply read it and take what we would. At the end of the semester, he showed us the clip from The Matrix with Neo's hollowed out version of the book, five or six times as thick as it appears on my bookshelf. I marvelled at his enthusiasm, seeing a bad joke unfold in front of me as he expected some kind of reaction. I knew even then that I was witnessing the simulacra in action in one scene only, not the one on the screen, but in that ugly classroom. Since then, J.B.'s thinking has overdetermined my own extreme skepticism, even of itself. In that kind of world, everything imaginable is in question, especially the critical distance to think that thought. Then in fact, this has always implied certainties: "the code", "fatal strategies", "impossible exchange", etc. Paradoxically, there is a hard metaphysical kernel in there somewhere. So contradictory, so incredibly simple.

NPR revealed his continued relevance..

March 7, 2007 · Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher and sociologist, wrote dozens of books. But his ideas may have found their biggest platform in the movie The Matrix. Baudrillard died Tuesday at the age of 77.

..as well as their complete ignorance of how the logic (if any) functions, as dictated by their role in simulation. J.B. was quoted on this topic, "The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment ... The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce."

Or Reuters:

Baudrillard argued that mass media and modern consumerist society had built up such a complex structure of symbols and simulated experience that it was no longer possible to comprehend reality as it might actually exist.

What they forgot was that "mass media and modern consumerist society" is itself a production, the "third order" beginning much earlier in J.B.'s McLuhan-esque model. Refer to the rise of movable type, arguably the most powerful accelerant this side of homonisation.

A few respectable tributes:

AGORAVOX

ANTIGRAM

THE GUARDIAN

"and the fire spread from piers to the great library"

A tragedy indeed. The personal library of Terence McKenna, housed next to a Quizno's at some storage offices for the Esalen Institute, burned to the ground on February 7th. The entire collection, including his personal papers, and a 1659 folio of Isaac Casaubon’s A True and Faithful Relation of what passed between Dr. John Dee and some spirits was lost. That this priceless, unique window into McKenna's life and research was living next to a Goomba's and Starbuck's (which both, thankfully, burned with it) is sad in itself. Esalen eventually planned to house the books on campus, which for me is almost as sad, but that is another story. The full article, by Erik Davis:

Last Wednesday, February 7, a 5-alarm blaze erupted in an old building in downtown Monterey. The fire started in a Quizno’s sub shop, that exemplar of tasteful dining, and went on to thoroughly destroy a number of joints, including Goomba’s Italian Restaurant, a Starbucks, and some storage offices belonging to Big Sur’s Esalen Institute—the ground zero for the human potential movement, now with all the trappings of an upscale New Age resort. Esalen lost little of their own archives, the vast bulk of their books, photos, audio and videotapes residing elsewhere. Unfortunately, the institute was also using the offices to store the amazing library of Terence McKenna, the visionary psychedelic bard who passed away in 2000. The plan was to eventually install the books at Esalen, a place that Terence loved but which is not widely associated with scholarly pursuit. That plan will never be realized. For those who knew Terence or enjoyed his library, the fire is a tragedy, and not simply because it consumed his private papers. Terence's library reflected the multidimensional facets of his own mind: mysticism and history, drugs and dreams, science fiction and systems theory, natural history and art. Terence was a head who fed his head with books more than the drugs he became known for. I will never forget the sheepish look he gave me six months or so before his death, as he forked over a fistful of twenties for a copy of Empson’s Cult of the Peacock Angel, a rare book on the Yezidis that he bought from an esoteric book dealer I knew. It was a look that said, Please don’t tell my girlfriend. Terence became a bookhound as a wee lad, and stumbled across amazing finds along his tangled way. One time, on the way to India, he came across a Theosophy library in the Seychelles that was closing its doors, and picked up its large collection of occult literature, all bound in red leather, for peanuts. The top floor of the home he built on the big island of Hawaii was designed partly to gather his thousands of volumes in one place. I visited there once towards the end of Terence’s life, to record his last formal interview. When he napped, I had the choice of poking through the library or exploring the gorgeous hideaways of Hawaii. I never left the lair. Terence's brother Dennis owns an index of Terence’s collection, which will at least give us an overview of his library—sorta like a playlist without the MP3s. But even this valuable document will not replace the body of knowledge itself—a body that had become, in the weird ways of the memetic world, a kind of second body for Terence’s fabulous and fascinating mind. No budding head will ever be able to poke through this collection again, with its faintly perfumed volumes on Chinese alchemy and butterflies and hash. And the world has one fewer 1659 folio of Isaac Casaubon’s A True and Faithful Relation of what passed between Dr. John Dee and some spirits, and one fewer old-school copy of Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, which Terence swapped for a pound or two of yummies back in the day. The content of these books, at least, is reproducible; Terence, of course, was one-of-a-kind.

Anyone care to explore the funding links between McKenna and Laurence Rockefeller? This was an interesting idea I have seen floating around. Maybe an email to Lorenzo is in order.

You Still Won't Hear

Oh! I could not bear it. I should soon be left alone in the midst of an infinity of space. And now more and more every moment increased the conviction that I was watched. I did not know then, as I learned afterward, that suspicion of all earthly things and persons was the characteristic of the hasheesh delirium.

- Fitz Hugh Ludlow (The Hasheesh Eater: Being Passages From The Life Of A Pythagorean, 1857)

A small(?) victory for the Multidiciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Those of us that still have hopes for this kind of research should be cautiously happy with this one. The MAPS press release is reprinted below :

Contact Jag Davies, MAPS Director of Communications
(831) 336-4325 or
jag@maps.org

For Immediate Release
February 13, 2007

DEA
Judge Recommends End to Government Obstruction of Medical Marijuana Research
Historic Step Toward Nation's First Privately-Funded Marijuana Production
Facility

Washington, D.C. - University of Massachusetts-Amherst Professor Lyle Craker, MAPS, the ACLU, and a broad array of medical and public policy groups nationwide enthusiastically supported today's official recommendation by Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Administrative Law Judge Mary Ellen Bittner that Prof. Craker be permitted to grow research-grade marijuana for use in privately-funded government approved studies that aim to develop the marijuana plant into a legal, prescription medicine. Judge Bittner ruled that it is in the public interest to end the federal government's monopoly, which it has maintained for over six decades, on the supply of marijuana that can be used in FDA-approved research.

"This ruling is a victory for science, medicine and the public good," said Prof. Craker. "I hope the DEA abides by the decision and grants me the opportunity to do my job unimpeded by drug war politics."

The 87-page Opinion and Recommended Ruling by Judge Bittner, who is appointed by the U.S. Department of Justice, marks a unique window of opportunity in the six year struggle by MAPS and Prof. Craker to gain a Schedule I DEA license to grow research-grade marijuana for use by scientists in MAPS-funded, DEA- and FDA-approved studies.

"For decades, politicians have said that marijuana has no proven medical value while
scientists have been denied the ability to prove otherwise," said Rick Doblin, Ph.D., president and founder of MAPS.

The court¹s ruling is only a recommendation to DEA Deputy Administrator Michele Leonhart, however, not a binding ruling; thus, the DEA retains final decision-making authority. In response, scientists, researchers, doctors and medical marijuana patients nationwide are joining MAPS and the ACLU by encouraging the DEA to comply with the court¹s finding and to halt federal obstruction of medical marijuana research.

Prior to this recent ruling, organizations that had already written to DEA in
favor of Prof. Craker's application included the Multiple Sclerosis Foundation, the Lymphoma Foundation of America, the National Association for Public Health Policy, the United Methodist Church, Americans for Tax Reform, the American Medical Students Association, several state nurses' associations, the Massachusetts Dept. of Public Health, Massachusetts Senators Kerry and Kennedy, 38 members of the US House of Representatives, and the California and Texas State Medical Associations, the two largest US state medical associations.

If the DEA grants Prof. Craker a Schedule I license, his proposed research-grade medical marijuana production facility will be funded by MAPS, a non-profit research organization that plans to design, fund, and obtain government approval for the clinical trials necessary to bring marijuana to market as a fully legal, prescription medication. MAPS has had two FDA-approved marijuana studies blocked by NIDA, and would require a reliable, high-quality supply of research material to justify the time and expense to sponsor FDA-approved clinical research evaluating the risks and benefits of marijuana as a potential FDA-approved medicine.

The ACLU and the Washington D.C. law firm Jenner & Block, LLP are co-counsel for the case and are assisted by Steptoe & Johnson, LLP.

give up your inquiries

"the mass psyche has begun to hallucinate, because the destiny of human beings is to live in the imagination" - Terence McKenna

Calling from the end of time.
This post is not anything like what I had hoped. It was originally conceived on January 10th, but student teaching took over, and I have been trying to find the time since to complete it, but simply could not. The events in Boston last week finally fleshed out the story in my mind, and for me, announced the necessity of its posting. It is much shorter than planned, gladly, as a full exploration of this topic would be incredibly lengthy and nearly impossible to read, and was completed quite hastily. The nature of the topic itself is so hard to fully articulate without numerous references to the work of Carl Jung, but I simply do not have the time. I would like to leave this for consideration by my readers whom remain to me, a mystery...





The New Year began another ascendancy of the weird, with some truly disturbing simultaneous events occurring worldwide, but the personal magnitude did not become apparent immediately. If the planetary consciousness is not working overtime, producing these phenomena, then they are being actively constructed psychically. It could be a combination of both processes, or nothing comprehensible. Even if the explanation is, in all cases, pure coincidence, this would not take away from the strangeness, and would in fact add to it. In any case, the cycles of absurdity are becoming increasingly ramified. No big deal really, the "big surprise" beckons from the eschatological frontier...or something like that.

The pervasive and unpleasant odors reported throughout New York City on January 8th did not immediately arouse more than a passing interest in the expected press emphasis on “fears of terrorism” amongst New Yorkers. The article in the New York Times was interesting however, first of all, for its mention of “conspiracy theories”. The language of this did not seem to be a reference to fears of a terror attack, and was not followed up with an explanation of said theories. Thus far, merely a strange occurrence made stranger by Mayor Bloomberg’s assertion that the smell could not be identified but that it was not dangerous. I followed the story for several days thereafter: the source of the odor was never discovered, it appeared again the next day on Staten Island, and while New York and New Jersey publicly passed the blame back and forth across the Hudson, coverage disappeared completely.

But what followed from other elements of the story led me down a road of speculation which opens up and connects to questions I have been asking myself for some time on seemingly unrelated events, and broader ideas on the nature of reality and synchronicity. This line of inquiry linked the original story with events in my own life, bridging the synchronistic world of the larger culture with that of my own more immediate experience.

Below, a shortened version of the article in the New York Times, emphasis in red, for those unable to read it all :

NY Times (1/09)A Rotten Smell Raises Alarms and Questions

It was the odor associated with natural gas — the telltale, unpleasant sulfur scent that typically signals a gas leak. But this time, it was lingering in many areas of Manhattan and northeastern New Jersey, coursing through buildings and leading to fears that it could ignite or that a dangerous chemical had been deliberately released. Schools and office buildings were evacuated. A subway station was shut, and commuter trains were rerouted. Government security officials were put on alert. Fire trucks raced through the streets, while Coast Guard vessels patrolled New York Harbor, communicating with tugboats and container ships. Twelve people with complaints of minor illnesses or injuries were taken to hospitals.
The source of the odor? As of last night, city officials still did not know. But it lingered for an hour after first being reported around 9 a.m., leaving New York with another mystery on its hands and more than a few conspiracy theories to sort through. With anxieties about gas leaks rattling the nerves of the city, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg held a press conference to assure residents that the city’s air-quality detectors had found no cause for alarm. He hypothesized that the odor could have been caused by the release of mercaptan, a compound that smells like rotting eggs and is added to natural gas so people can detect and report leaks. Throughout the day, possible culprits — among them a minor gas leak in Greenwich Village and natural-gas pipelines in northeastern New Jersey — were considered and ruled out. The olfactory mystery in the New York region was matched by strange activity elsewhere. In Austin, Tex., police cordoned off 10 blocks of the downtown business district early yesterday after more than 60 birds were found dead overnight along Congress Avenue, which leads to the State Capitol. Air testing there failed to find a cause, but preliminary results determined that people were not at risk. In New York, the piercing odor was the talk of Manhattan, and it called to mind another mystery: the maple syrup odor that people reported smelling on separate days in late 2005 and whose source has never been established. In yesterday’s case, several people said they were overcome by the odor. “I feel faint,” said Ivolett Bredwood, a legal assistant who noticed the odor once she stepped off a New Jersey Transit train at Pennsylvania Station around 8:45 a.m. The smell trailed her as she walked to her office, at 99 Park Avenue, which was briefly evacuated. “It’s an awful, nasty smell.” The widespread uncertainty and potential for danger led the authorities to take numerous precautions as thousands of reports of the odor flooded into 911 and utility hot lines.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority briefly closed the subway station at 23rd Street and Avenue of the Americas, as well as a control tower at West Fourth Street. Service was temporarily halted on PATH lines terminating at 33rd Street.
The major gas utilities — Consolidated Edison in New York and Public Service Electric and Gas in New Jersey — checked their transmission lines and reported no leaks, changes in pressure or other abnormalities. The city’s Department of Environmental Protection dispatched a mobile laboratory to the West Side with meters to test for ammonia, chloride, cyanide, methane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide and volatile organic compounds. “That’s the hardest part, finding the source,” said Christopher Haas, a department specialist in hazardous materials. “Air is very dynamic.” Officials were reluctant to discuss terrorism precautions in great detail, but they said that the city regularly monitors the air with machines that can detect the presence of chemical, biological or radiological substances. At the Port Authority Bus Terminal, some alarmed passengers thought that their buses had problems. And at the Equitable Center, on Seventh Avenue between 51st and 52nd Streets, air vents were closed to keep the odor out. Two schools were evacuated. Norman Thomas High School in Midtown was emptied for about 50 minutes beginning at 9:30 a.m., while students at Public School 11 in Chelsea were taken to Public School 33 nearby. Jeremy Fleishman, a worker at a computer repair shop in Chelsea, said it smelled as if “somebody left the Bunsen burner on” in chemistry class. By 10:30 a.m., he said, “it mostly dissipated — or maybe we just got used to it.” At 980 Avenue of the Americas, a building that was briefly evacuated, a guard, Ralph Supino of Secaucus, N.J., said he called Con Edison but reached only recorded messages. “They were overwhelmed,” he said. For some, it seemed logical that the odor was tied to some sort of terrorist plot. At 1250 Broadway, which was also briefly closed, a guard, Miguel Contreras of Irvington, N.J., said that thought raced through his mind when he noticed the smell upon arriving at the bus terminal on his way to work. "You pray to God that everything is fine and it’s just a leak somewhere,” he said. Adding to the alarm was the strength and duration of the odor, which may have been aggravated by a weather phenomenon known as a temperature inversion. Inversions, which often occur when a warm front moves over a cooler, denser air mass, cause the temperature closer to the ground to be cooler and the air higher up to be warmer — a reversal of the usual pattern. Inversions can trap pollutants and odors, preventing them from being dispersed upward. David Wally, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s forecast office in Upton, N.Y., said a warm front approached the city between 7 and 8 a.m., making it “very possible” that an inversion trapped the pollutants and gaseous odor closer to the ground. The inversion eroded later in the morning, he said. The city recorded 4,500 more 911 calls than usual between 9 and 11 a.m., with most of the increase in Manhattan. The Fire Department responded to 450 calls, 41 of them for emergency medical assistance. Dr. Kristin E. Harkin, an emergency-medicine physician at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, said that strong odors can worsen the symptoms of people with chronic respiratory ailments like asthma and emphysema. Some suspicion fell on New Jersey, given the path of the prevailing winds and the prevalence of chemical and petroleum facilities in the state. Calls about the smell were received in West New York,Weehawken and other places. In Hoboken, the downtown police headquarters and several office buildings were briefly evacuated, according to Mayor David Roberts, who said he took an anxious call about the smell from his wife. Jack Burns, coordinator of the Hudson County Office of Emergency Management, in Secaucus, said that officials had ruled out the possibility of a mercaptan spill there. He added, “If it’s in New York and people can smell it in western Hudson County, that’s a lot of it, whatever it is.” Michael Williams, an accountant in Jersey City, said he delayed taking a smoking break for more than an hour because the odor was so intense. “I didn’t want to spark an explosion or anything,” he said.

At first glance, just another crazy day in the post-apocalypse. But the truly unsettling parts for me were the mention of last year's maple syrup smell, and the dead birds in Texas. Why? What was unmentioned, and I was unable to find anywhere else, was that this same smell wafted through the streets of Phoenix, Arizona last year. I was there, on my bicycle, all afternoon. I asked other people if they smelled it, they did. The smell dissipated quickly, but it happened once or twice more on “separate days”, and never occurred again. Aside from some brief paranoia and speculation, I soon forgot about the smell. I do not remember the dates, but I am willing to bet that it was simultaneous with New York’s maple syrup event. My experience went unreported in the local press, as far as I know, but apparently not in New York. It seems to have been notable enough for the New York Times to mention in connection with the more recent smell. Why maple syrup?

It gets even better… Austin was not the only place where birds were dropping from the sky. The apparently simultaneous maple syrup odors are mirrored by the apparently simultaneous large-scale discoveries of avian corpses. These were all reported on January 10th, occurring in Texas, Colorado, and Esperance, Australia. All three articles are reprinted without permission below.

Bird Deaths Shut Down Downtown Austin
The Associated Press
Tuesday, January 9, 2007; 4:41 AM

AUSTIN, Texas -- Texas health officials are trying to determine what killed dozens of birds whose remains prompted a temporary shutdown of 10 blocks of downtown Austin.
Police closed a section of downtown for several hours Monday after 63 birds were found dead in the street, but officials said preliminary tests found no threat to people.Workers in yellow hazardous-materials suits tested for contaminants in a cordoned-off area near the state Capitol and the governor's mansion before authorities finally gave the all-clear in the afternoon. Dr. Adolfo Valadez, medical director for the Austin and Travis County Health and Human Services Division, said the dead grackles, sparrows and pigeons were to be tested for signs of poison or viral infections. Officials did not believe bird flu was involved...Some experts said the most likely cause of the die-off was a deliberate poisoning. "It happens quite frequently," said Greg Butcher, director of bird conservation at the National Audubon Society in Washington. The dead birds were found overnight along Congress Avenue, a major downtown thoroughfare.

Bird deaths being investigated
The Daily Times-Call
1/10/2007

LONGMONT — About 40 dead birds littered a short stretch of U.S. Highway 287 south of the city Tuesday. Boulder County health officials and the Colorado Division of Wildlife were still coordinating efforts late afternoon to investigate the site, just south Mooring Road. From an initial description, division veterinarian Laurie Baeten said the birds were likely starlings killed by a passing truck. Considering whipping winds in parts of Boulder County on Monday and the fact that starlings tend to flock at night and in large colonies, Baeten suspects a gust might have thrown the colony into the path of a tall vehicle such as a semi truck. “Starlings tend to sit on the road and fly low,” Baeten said. “This wouldn’t be out of the ordinary.” While farmers on granaries and feedlots have been known to poison starlings — a non-native species from Europe originally brought to America as pets — such cases are rare in Boulder County, Baeten said. Poisoned birds are generally found within a few miles of the site where they were poisoned, and in smaller numbers. County health spokeswoman Chana Goussetis said West Nile virus is not an issue this time of year, and she doesn’t suspect any other kind of virus caused the die-off. Avian flu is carried by migratory birds, and starlings are not migratory, she said. Niwot resident J. Morley reported the dead birds to the county health department after he drove past them on U.S. Highway 287 at about 1 p.m. “There were slews of starlings on the (telephone) lines, like they were in mourning. Then I saw all these black balls on the road and realized they were birds,” he said. “It was kind of eerie, kind of Steven King-ish.” Morley said he wouldn’t have reported the incident had his wife not mentioned a news report that Austin, Texas, shut down 10 city blocks after discovering dozens of dead birds there Monday. Esperance, a coastal town in West Australia, also reported Monday that several thousand birds mysteriously dropped dead out of the skies. Health officials at both those locations have not yet determined the cause of the die-offs. Boulder health officials said they contacted animal control officers to investigate the birds on U.S. 287. If there’s reason for concern, they’ll send a carcass to a state laboratory. “We don’t believe there’s a public health risk,” Goussetis said.

Several thousand birds mysteriously drop dead in Australia
Malaysia Sun
Tuesday 9th January, 2007

A major phenomena has occurred over the West Australian coastal town of Esperance. Several thousands of birds, of many different species, have mysteriously dropped dead out of the sky. Investigations by scientists and vetinarians in the West Australian capital of Perth have failed to discover the cause of the mass deaths.The Australian newspaper says all the residents of flood-devastated Esperance know, is that their 'dawn chorus' of singing birds is missing. The main casualties are wattle birds, yellow-throated miners, new holland honeyeaters and singing honeyeaters, although some dead crows, hawks and pigeons have also been found. Wildlife officers, say The Australian, are baffled by the 'catastrophic' event, which the Department of Environment and Conservation said began well before a freak storm last week. On Monday, Esperance, 725 kilometres southeast of Perth, was declared a natural disaster zone. District nature conservation co-ordinator Mike Fitzgerald said the first reports of birds dropping dead in people's yards came in three weeks ago. More than 500 deaths had since been notified. But the calls stopped suddenly last week, reportedly because no birds were left. 'It's very substantial. We estimate several thousand birds are dead, although we don't have a clear number because of the large areas of bushland,' Mr Fitzgerald said. Birds Australia, the nation's main bird conservation group, said it had not heard of a similar occurrence. 'Not on that scale, and all at the same time, and also the fact that it's several different species,' chief executive Graeme Hamilton said. 'You'd have to call that a most unusual event and one that we'd all have to be concerned about.' The state Department of Agriculture and Food, which conducted the autopsies, has almost ruled out an infectious process. Acting chief veterinary officer Fiona Sunderman said there were no leads yet on which of potentially hundreds of toxins might be responsible. Some birds were seen convulsing as they died. Michelle Crisp was one of the first to contact the DEC after finding dozens of dead birds on her property one morning. She told The Australian she normally had hundreds of birds in her yard, but that she and a neighbour counted 80 dead birds in one day. 'It went to the point where we had nothing, not a bird,' she said. 'It was like a moonscape, just horrible. But the frightening thing for us, we didn't find any more birds after that. We literally didn't have any birds left to die.'

Less than a month before, in December, the same phenomena was reported in Maine…

Lewiston residents unnerved by unexplained deaths of crows
December 19, 2006

LEWISTON, Maine --Residents unnerved by the unexplained deaths of dozens of crows in a neighborhood next to the Promenade Mall hope tests by the U.S. Department of Agriculture will provide some answers. To residents, it seems almost as though dead crows were falling from the sky. Damien Perreault, 71, said he disposed of 10 dead crows he found on a walk Monday. That didn't count crows dead in the trees. Ray Beaudoin, a resident of Summit Avenue, called animal control officials when the dead crows started appearing a couple of weeks ago. State environmental control officials were not interested in testing them because the season for West Nile virus is over. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture accepted a couple of the birds last week and will run tests. For now, residents have no answers but plenty of theories involving pollution, bird illnesses -- or intentional poisoning. Dan Marquis of the Stanton Bird Club said the notion of intentional poisoning is worth looking into. For now, Beaudoin said there's no noisy cawing. Hundreds used to roost in a tree line that separates the parking lot of the Promenade Mall and Summit Avenue. "In the last three or four days, the crows are nowhere to be found," he said. "It's quite eerie," he said.

Again, so what? Well, I have observed the same phenomena here in the Valley, again, unmentioned in the local press. My movement around Phoenix has been primarily by bicycle for the past year, and I have seen more dead birds on the side of the road than I ever could have imagined possible, usually along stretches of sidewalk in Tempe, occurring in spatial/temporal clusters. Riding home from my former job at a Tempe office, for a time I feared the much hyped avian flu, but never explored the issue. I am not quite sure how to articulate my thinking on all this, but in my mind, I am seeing some kind of connection between these events, but I feel like it may be much more intangible than words can express. Some larger framework or structure of reality is attempting to assert itself somehow. I am reminded of Carl Jung’s book on UFOs published in 1959, still the most important statement on the phenomena, going way beyond anything published since. He posited the UFO as a sort of mythical extrusion into reality of something more ineffable, a felt need in the modern collective psyche for a unifying symbol. This need had been satisfied in the past with other miraculous symbols, but the modern form was the flying saucer. The eruption of synchronicities has reached a fever pitch. Maple syrup, and dead birds? Even those simultaneous events that are purely physical, and easily explained, indicate to me in some way that reality is knitting itself together more tightly. The whole thing is just too weird.

Finally, this past week in Boston, and other cities:

Suspicious Devices Not Bombs, Boston Officials Say

ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 31, 2007

BOSTON -- Several illuminated electronic devices planted at bridges and other spots in Boston threw a scare into the city Wednesday in what turned out to be a publicity campaign for a late-night cable cartoon. Most if not all of the devices depict a character giving the finger. Peter Berdovsky, 29, of Arlington, was arrested on one felony charge of placing a hoax device and one charge of disorderly conduct, state Attorney General Martha Coakley said later Wednesday. He had been hired to place the devices, she said. Highways, bridges and a section of the Charles River were shut down and bomb squads were sent in before authorities declared the devices were harmless. Turner Broadcasting, a division of Time Warner Inc. and parent of Cartoon Network, later said the devices were part of a promotion for the TV show ''Aqua Teen Hunger Force,'' a surreal series about a talking milkshake, a box of fries and a meatball.Authorities are investigating whether Turner and any other companies should be criminally charged, Coakley said. It wasn't immediately clear Wednesday who might have hired Berdovsky. ''We're not going to let this go without looking at the further roots of how this happened to cause the panic in this city,'' Coakley said at a news conference. Those conducting the campaign should have known the devices could cause panic because they were placed in sensitive areas, she said. Turner did not notify officials of the publicity campaign until around 5 p.m., nearly four hours after the first calls came in about the devices, she and others said.
At least 14 of the devices were found, Coakley said. ''The packages in question are magnetic lights that pose no danger,'' Turner said in a statement. It said the devices have been in place for two to three weeks in 10 cities: Boston; New York; Los Angeles; Chicago; Atlanta; Seattle; Portland, Ore.; Austin, Texas; San Francisco; and Philadelphia. ''We regret that they were mistakenly thought to pose any danger,'' the company said. As soon as the company realized the problem, it said, law enforcement officials were told of their locations in all 10 cities. The marketing firm that put them up, Interference Inc., has been ordered to remove them immediately, said Phil Kent, Turner chairman. ''We apologize to the citizens of Boston that part of a marketing campaign was mistaken for a public danger,'' Kent said. ''We appreciate the gravity of this situation and, like any responsible company would, are putting all necessary resources toward understanding the facts surrounding it as quickly as possible.'' Interference Inc. had no immediate comment... Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke praised Boston authorities for sharing their knowledge quickly with Washington officials and the public. ''Hoaxes are a tremendous burden on local law enforcement and counter-terrorism resources and there's absolutely no place for them in a post-9/11 world,'' Knocke said. Authorities said some of the objects looked like circuit boards or had wires hanging from them. The first device was found at a subway and bus station underneath Interstate 93, forcing the shutdown of the station and the highway. Later, police said four calls, all around 1 p.m., reported devices at the Boston University Bridge and the Longfellow Bridge, both of which span the Charles River, at a Boston street corner and at the Tufts-New England Medical Center. The package near the Boston University bridge was found attached to a structure beneath the span, authorities said. Subway service across the Longfellow Bridge between Boston and Cambridge was briefly suspended, and Storrow Drive was closed as well. A similar device was found Wednesday evening just north of Fenway Park, police spokesman Eddy Chrispin said...' Messages seeking additional comment from the Atlanta-based Cartoon Network were left with several publicists. ''Aqua Teen Hunger Force'' is a cartoon with a cultish following that airs as part of the Adult Swim late-night block of programs for adults on the Cartoon Network...The cartoon also includes two trouble-making, 1980s-graphic-like characters called ''mooninites,'' named Ignignokt and Err -- who were pictured on the suspicious devices. They are known for making the obscene hand gesture depicted on the devices.

ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 1, 2007

In nine cities across the country, blinking electronic signs displaying a profane, boxy-looking cartoon character caused barely a stir. But in Boston, the signs - some with protruding wires - sent a wave of panic across the city, bringing out bomb squads and prompting officials to shut down highways, bridges and part of the Charles River. Something that may have been amusing in other cities was not funny to authorities here, the city that served as the base for the hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks. Officials defended their reaction Thursday even as two men charged in the case, and some residents, mocked the response as overblown. Young Bostonians familiar with the unconventional marketing tactics used by many companies tended to see the city's reaction as unmitigated hysteria. Tracy O'Connor, 34, a retail manager, called the police response "silly and insane," contrasting it with that in other cities where no one reported concerns about the devices - an advertising gimmick for the Cartoon Network show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force." "We're the laughing stock," she said. Public safety officials and a large segment of Boston's older generation condemned the publicity campaign as unthinkable in today's post-9/11 world. "Just a little over a mile away from the placement of the first device, a group of terrorists boarded airplanes and launched an attack on New York City," police Commissioner Edward Davis said in an interview with The Associated Press. "The city clearly did not overreact. Had we taken any other steps, we would have been endangering the public," he said. Davis said that as calls were coming in about the electronic signs in rapid succession Wednesday afternoon, police also received reports of two devices that resembled pipe bombs and had a confirmed report of a man walking down the hallways of New England Medical Center making a rambling speech about "God getting us today" and "This would be a sorry day." Davis, who took his job in December, said he didn't know of any calls coming in to the Boston 911 line. Officials found 38 blinking electronic signs on bridges, a subway station, a hospital, Fenway Park, and other high-profile spots in and around the city. In New York, officers went to various locations and found only two of the devices - both attached to a highway overpass. Police said it did not appear it was targeting any landmarks such as the subway, Empire State Building or Brooklyn Bridge. "People can be smug and say all you have to do is look at this and know this is not an explosive device, but the truth of the matter is that you can't tell what it is until it's disrupted," Davis said. Officials have vowed to hold responsible Turner Broadcasting Inc., the parent company of the Cartoon Network... Two men who authorities say were paid to place the devices around the city pleaded not guilty Thursday to placing a hoax device and disorderly conduct. Peter Berdovsky, 27, and Sean Stevens, 28, were released on $2,500 cash bond - apparently amused by the situation, even though they face up to five years in prison. They met reporters and TV cameras and launched into a nonsensical discussion of hair styles of the 1970s. As they walked off, Berdovsky gave a more serious comment. "We need some time to really sort things out and, you know, figure out our response to this situation in other ways than talking about hair," Berdovsky said...The devices didn't prompt calls of concern in any of the nine other cities where Turner said the devices were placed. Police in the other cities fanned out to find and remove them after Boston's scare. Some enterprising people got to the devices before police: At least seven were for sale Thursday afternoon on the Internet auction site eBay, ranging in price from $500 to $2,100. Most of Boston's colleagues in law enforcement in the other cities chose their words carefully. "I wouldn't want to give my opinion but in today's world it's better safe than sorry. Someone (in Boston) clearly thought there was a threat," Atlanta police Officer Joe Cobb said. In the Seattle area, authorities thought the devices were "obviously not suspicious." "In this day and age, whenever anything remotely suspicious shows up, people get concerned - and that's good," King County sheriff's Sgt. John Urquhart said. "However, people don't need to be concerned about this. These are cartoon characters giving the finger." Tobe Berkowitz, an advertising professor at Boston University, said it's easy to understand why there is a generational gap between the way the target audience for the promotional campaign reacted and the way older Bostonians reacted. "For people who are hip and live in the world of blogs and all sorts of cool alternative media, it's one thing," he said. "But for the rest of us ... they don't get it as a marketing or a clever event, they see it as a huge disruption of their lives." The publicity campaign was conceived by the Adult Swim marketing department and approved by the head of the Cartoon Network, Turner spokeswoman Shirley Powell said Thursday. She said the devices had been up for two weeks around the country and the network had not received any calls about them. "We were simply promoting a TV show," she said. "If we had ever perceived this to be something threatening safety, we would never have proceeded with it." The network told the marketing company to decide where the devices should be placed, with the mandate they should be in places likely to be seen by young men. Adult Swim's target audience is men aged 18 to 24. The marketing company that placed the signs, Interference Inc. of New York City, did not return calls seeking comment and its offices were closed Thursday.

The complete folly and embarrassment aside, I think this story says quite a bit about our present condition. No further comments are necessary on this one. So...

The dead birds:
HAARP?
Chemical Testing?
Random coincidence?
Synchronicity?

The odors:
similar list (see above)

Aqua Teen Bomb Scare:
Cultural Exhaustion?
etc., etc.


There is obviously no concrete connection between these three stories, but the numinous psychological element is there, for me at least. The absurd simultaneity simply reveals the novelty of the moment. Again, name-check Carl Jung. As for the dead birds found in several cities worldwide, and the pervasive, unexplained odors, I have had direct experience with both of these phenomena. This is mildly disturbing. The Aqua Teen thing for me is some kind of signpost. I cannot take this any further.

"Best of..." blurbs

Below, the blurbs I had originally planned for my best of 2006 list :

Burial - Burial
Easily takes record of the year. Highly recommended. While ignorance does not allow me to place this in its proper London dubstep context, or make appropriate reference to the "hauntology" debate, it has revived my interest in "electronic" music. See also Kode 9 & Space Ape's Memories of the Future. Amazing stuff happening in London.

Jeremy Enigk - World Waits
Enigk returns with a hauntingly beautiful solo album. Purists be damned, SDRE's later work was incredible, and this record retains/revives much of what made How it Feels... and The Rising Tide so beautiful and epic.

Scott Walker - The Drift
Disturbing and bleak...awesome. Not much to say. Has to be heard.

Jesu - Silver
Justin Broadrick has gone far beyond the confines of metal. The self titled debut revealed his new direction, and Silver proves his "shoegazer" credibility, reaching for the heights of melody and structure. Truly haunting music. Like speed, landscapes, distance...a North Shore beach in winter. Check out the Japanese version for the original cut of the title track. Much more synth heavy, different chord progressions, and missing the main guitars altogether.

Deftones - Saturday Night Wrist
To be placed alongside Silver as the most emotionally evocative metal album of the year. While the label "shoegazer" has been thrown around too much this past year, the influences are definite, and undeniable. I am tangentially reminded of the most dreamy and atmospheric qualities of Siamese Dream. (By the way, stay cautiously tuned for a new Pumpkins record) Saturday Night Wrist proves the continued relevance of this band, in a climate where almost nothing is.

Sunn O))) & Boris - Altar
The charm is definitely receding, but the teaming up of of these two Southern Lord behemoths yields wondrous results. It is getting harder to imagine SunnO))) taking things any further. Hopefully this is not the last gasp of innovation from either band. This is an awesome record, the two bands blending together with drone, melody, ambience and quietude. "The Sinking Belle" is exemplary. Ex-Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil came out of hiding for the last track.

Thom Yorke - The Eraser
Click for my previous post on what Jesus Himself has called "video game music". Yorke's theoretical statement on active memetic digestion.

Napalm Death - Smear Campaign
Extreme metal album of the year. 25 years and counting, these guys will not quit. Silly liberal anti-establishment politics aside, still a killer band.

Isis - In The Absence of Truth
While it fails to top 2004's Panopticon, Isis remains on the razor's edge of what makes hipster rock/metal so very... lame? They push the envelope of acceptability, but retain their respectability. The final track alone is worth the price of admission. Don't miss the U.S. tour with Jesu winter '07.

Tool - 10,000 Days
Tool has abandoned the mysticism of Lateralus in favor of anger and nostalgia. Great album, despite the meanderings of interlude addiction. Takes a few listens to sink in. Traces of their early work surface in spots. Tool is clearly aging well.



Honorable mentions:

Pat 'O'Leary - 7 Demos
It is a shame nobody really gets to hear Pat's music. This man is a true talent.

The Devin Townsend Band - Synchestra
(these comments were part of a planned review of this album that was never completed) Glimpses of the hysterical re-surfaced on SYL's 2005 "Alien" record. This monolith of the bizarre was simply confounding and sublime. The massive guitar resonated with an urgency unmatched since well, "City". But to compare those two albums would be fruitless and sentimental. Townsend's latest release, "Synchestra" is a Devin Townsend Band record, the second under the current incarnation of his prog-rock brand name. The things to be expected from a Townsend record remain. It seems, as with all of his work, to be the logical continuation of a career that has not slowed down a bit (until the birth of his son). References/reflections of "Infinity" (1998) era bombast, and a return to the lush, organic heaviness which permeated "Terria"(2001) take his work to the next step in a brilliant trajectory.

In recent print, Townsend has openly acknowledged the tendency of some of the tracks to linger on riffs for some time before any launch into the song itself. It sounds as if he has applied a drone/doom aesthetic in some half-baked way. It works, sort of. Picture Townsend's signature production style of reverb-to-the-heavens mixed with slow, deep riffage. The use of female vocals on "Pixillate" is nice. Listening to this, I find myself questioning the limits of "progressive". I wish this album could have made the top ten, but ultimately it just doesnt do what I would need it to. It took two or three listens to arrive at the point of recognition. A false recall of something already there, or a remainder? What was left out last time? There is a strange kind of continuity from album to album, but nothing truly (r)evolutionary happening here. Devin has recently stated that he is recording a new solo album on his own, without the DTB, using Drumkit From Hell. Like the forthcoming Pumpkins release, I will cautiously await this one as well.

Best of 2006

First, this nicely done wrap-up at K-Punk... 2006 Rewind.

Following others, I offer my favorites of 2006:

Burial - Burial

Jeremy Enigk - World Waits

Scott Walker - The Drift

Jesu - Silver

Deftones - Saturday Night Wrist

Sunn O))) and Boris - Altar

Thom Yorke - The Eraser

Napalm Death - Smear Campaign

Isis - In The Absence of Truth

Tool - 10,000 Days



Honorable mentions:

Pat 'O'Leary - 7 Demos

The Devin Townsend Band - Synchestra

I wanted to write a paragraph for each, but have to be out on my pedicab in time for the festivities here in Tempe, which happens to host one of the largest New Year's Eve parties in the country. According to City Search :

Tempe, Ariz.
At midnight, the world's biggest tortilla chip drops into the world's biggest bowl of salsa. The Annual Tempe Tostitos Fiesta Bowl Block Party has become one of the nation's hottest New Year's Eve celebrations. What better place to greet the new year than Arizona State University, one of the most notorious party schools. The celebration includes five blocks of big-draw musical acts, pep rallies and a blazing fireworks show at 10pm and midnight.

The above could generate its own post, along with one on New Years itself. For now, I will ride out into the cultural void of this desert cancer, moving amongst tweakers and drifters, and hopefully take home some cash tonight.

History of a Non-Event

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander - Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC




Bystander? Or perpetrator?

Cordyceps Fungus

Thanks Non-Prophet, via N8.

Below, a lengthy article on the extended logic of the time-tested wiretap. Lyotard wrote, "it is what we might call the most 'intimate' space-time...which is attacked, hounded and no doubt modified by the present state of technology". All are familiar with this process. Private spaces are increasingly colonized. We pay monthly bills for this imperialism, and we love it. Was Diana familiar with this as well? In a much ignored story (headlines appeared for several hours on Google News, then all but disappeared in favor of stories about the Iranian Holocaust conference, Pinochet, Barak Obama and Taco Bell's problems), the NSA has denied allegations in a forthcoming British report that American intelligence was listening to Princess Diana's phone conversations in the hours before her death. I saw a headline somewhere suggesting that conspiracy theories will finally be laid to rest by the report, alongside countless others stressing the opposite point. Certainly, "conspiracy theorists" will be wasting time asking questions on the internet, where there are more websites claiming credibility than can be counted. They are wasting their time. Of course she was being monitored. It is not necessary to propose some occult motive (or any of the others really) for her murder. Of course she had knowledge of esoteric practices in those circles. We know about it too. It is not a secret anymore. Get over it. Of course her relationship with Dodi and the possible pregnancy was a problem. The question of her murder is inconsequential. It may not be so fundamentally, but the world of facts and information is sufficiently confused and distorted as to make any rational discussion of the matter useless/impossible.

Maybe this is paranoid, but the attempt to irrationally manage information has increased concomitantly with the necessity of management itself. This obviously involves a tremendous amount of dis-information. Much of the conspiracy culture is just that, I think. The success of this can be debated, but it almost seems that the British report is tailored to a specific audience. If someone else sees it along the way, fine. It filters through news sources very quickly, and is picked up by those looking for it, specifically on the internet. In other words, the conspiracy culture loves this stuff. These people then rehash the story, adding fuel to the confusing world of paranoid, complex connective webs between the pyramids, The Bohemian Grove, Charles Manson, the Bush family, The Beatles, the Anunnaki, and Atlantis. In this model, paranoia is actively promoted. The resurgence of the Diana conspiracy debate can only be beneficial in this system, regardless of its status as truth or falsity. It does not matter at all.

Wait, back to the point of this post. Damn. Let's pay attention to the fact that the practice detailed below has been deemed legal by a judge. This, my friends is not a conspiracy. It seems useful to take Chomsky's advice and pay full attention to what is actually happening on the surface, not what is being actively hidden. There is plenty to talk about. Let the "9/11 Truth" campaign pilot light be kept on, and maybe it will be of use someday. I doubt it, personally. The fact that it is widely known and accepted is for me evidence of its impotence. For now, the facts:

By Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache
December 1, 2006, 2:20 PM PST

update - The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a "roving bug", and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

Nextel cell phones owned by two alleged mobsters, John Ardito and his attorney Peter Peluso, were used by the FBI to listen in on nearby conversations. The FBI views Ardito as one of the most powerful men in the Genovese family, a major part of the national Mafia.

The surveillance technique came to light in an opinion published this week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He ruled that the "roving bug" was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a suspect's cell phone.

Kaplan's opinion said that the eavesdropping technique "functioned whether the phone was powered on or off." Some handsets can't be fully powered down without removing the battery; for instance, some Nokia models will wake up when turned off if an alarm is set.

While the Genovese crime family prosecution appears to be the first time a remote-eavesdropping mechanism has been used in a criminal case, the technique has been discussed in security circles for years.

The U.S. Commerce Department's security office warns that "a cellular telephone can be turned into a microphone and transmitter for the purpose of listening to conversations in the vicinity of the phone." An article in the Financial Times last year said mobile providers can "remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the owner's knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its owner is not making a call."

Nextel and Samsung handsets and the Motorola Razr are especially vulnerable to software downloads that activate their microphones, said James Atkinson, a counter-surveillance consultant who has worked closely with government agencies. "They can be remotely accessed and made to transmit room audio all the time," he said. "You can do that without having physical access to the phone."

Because modern handsets are miniature computers, downloaded software could modify the usual interface that always displays when a call is in progress. The spyware could then place a call to the FBI and activate the microphone--all without the owner knowing it happened. (The FBI declined to comment on Friday.)

"If a phone has in fact been modified to act as a bug, the only way to counteract that is to either have a bugsweeper follow you around 24-7, which is not practical, or to peel the battery off the phone," Atkinson said. Security-conscious corporate executives routinely remove the batteries from their cell phones, he added.

FBI's physical bugs discovered - The FBI's Joint Organized Crime Task Force, which includes members of the New York police department, had little luck with conventional surveillance of the Genovese family. They did have a confidential source who reported the suspects met at restaurants including Brunello Trattoria in New Rochelle, N.Y., which the FBI then bugged.

But in July 2003, Ardito and his crew discovered bugs in three restaurants, and the FBI quietly removed the rest. Conversations recounted in FBI affidavits show the men were also highly suspicious of being tailed by police and avoided conversations on cell phones whenever possible.

That led the FBI to resort to "roving bugs," first of Ardito's Nextel handset and then of Peluso's. U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones approved them in a series of orders in 2003 and 2004, and said she expected to "be advised of the locations" of the suspects when their conversations were recorded.

Details of how the Nextel bugs worked are sketchy. Court documents, including an affidavit (p1) and (p2) prepared by Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Kolodner in September 2003, refer to them as a "listening device placed in the cellular telephone." That phrase could refer to software or hardware.

One private investigator interviewed by CNET News.com, Skipp Porteous of Sherlock Investigations in New York, said he believed the FBI planted a physical bug somewhere in the Nextel handset and did not remotely activate the microphone.
"They had to have physical possession of the phone to do it," Porteous said. "There are several ways that they could have gotten physical possession. Then they monitored the bug from fairly near by."

But other experts thought microphone activation is the more likely scenario, mostly because the battery in a tiny bug would not have lasted a year and because court documents say the bug works anywhere "within the United States"--in other words, outside the range of a nearby FBI agent armed with a radio receiver.

In addition, a paranoid Mafioso likely would be suspicious of any ploy to get him to hand over a cell phone so a bug could be planted. And Kolodner's affidavit seeking a court order lists Ardito's phone number, his 15-digit International Mobile Subscriber Identifier, and lists Nextel Communications as the service provider, all of which would be unnecessary if a physical bug were being planted.

A BBC article from 2004 reported that intelligence agencies routinely employ the remote-activiation method. "A mobile sitting on the desk of a politician or businessman can act as a powerful, undetectable bug," the article said, "enabling them to be activated at a later date to pick up sounds even when the receiver is down."
For its part, Nextel said through spokesman Travis Sowders: "We're not aware of this investigation, and we weren't asked to participate."

Other mobile providers were reluctant to talk about this kind of surveillance. Verizon Wireless said only that it "works closely with law enforcement and public safety officials. When presented with legally authorized orders, we assist law enforcement in every way possible."

A Motorola representative said that "your best source in this case would be the FBI itself." Cingular, T-Mobile, and the CTIA trade association did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mobsters: The surveillance vanguardThis isn't the first time the federal government has pushed at the limits of electronic surveillance when investigating reputed mobsters.

In one case involving Nicodemo S. Scarfo, the alleged mastermind of a loan shark operation in New Jersey, the FBI found itself thwarted when Scarfo used Pretty Good Privacy software (PGP) to encode confidential business data.
So with a judge's approval, FBI agents repeatedly snuck into Scarfo's business to plant a keystroke logger and monitor its output.

Like Ardito's lawyers, Scarfo's defense attorneys argued that the then-novel technique was not legal and that the information gleaned through it could not be used. Also like Ardito, Scarfo's lawyers lost when a judge ruled in January 2002 that the evidence was admissible.
This week, Judge Kaplan in the southern district of New York concluded that the "roving bugs" were legally permitted to capture hundreds of hours of conversations because the FBI had obtained a court order and alternatives probably wouldn't work.

The FBI's "applications made a sufficient case for electronic surveillance," Kaplan wrote. "They indicated that alternative methods of investigation either had failed or were unlikely to produce results, in part because the subjects deliberately avoided government surveillance."

Bill Stollhans, president of the Private Investigators Association of Virginia, said such a technique would be legally reserved for police armed with court orders, not private investigators.
There is "no law that would allow me as a private investigator to use that type of technique," he said. "That is exclusively for law enforcement. It is not allowable or not legal in the private sector. No client of mine can ask me to overhear telephone or strictly oral conversations."

Surreptitious activation of built-in microphones by the FBI has been done before. A 2003 lawsuit revealed that the FBI was able to surreptitiously turn on the built-in microphones in automotive systems like General Motors' OnStar to snoop on passengers' conversations.
When FBI agents remotely activated the system and were listening in, passengers in the vehicle could not tell that their conversations were being monitored.

Malicious hackers have followed suit. A report last year said Spanish authorities had detained a man who write a Trojan horse that secretly activated a computer's video camera and forwarded him the recordings.

40 47'50.97" N 73 03'45.39" W (The unseen, rational gaze and banal novelty)

I am almost positive that the white car is my ridiculous Firebird with the t-tops off, sitting in the parking lot of the building I grew up in. That would date this satellite photo at mid-2002 the very latest. Fun stuff.

Continuity. why comment?

Number 2 this year. Documentation on voting practices at the UN is available here. The US took a break in 2005, after 4 straight years of 2 vetoes each on UN resolutions critical of Israel. More information on UN votes, and in particular vetoes, is available here, and here.

UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 11 — The United States vetoed a Security Council resolution on Saturday that condemned Israel for its military actions in Gaza and called for an immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from the area.

The United States ambassador, John R. Bolton, told the Council that the resolution “does not display an even-handed characterization of the recent events in Gaza, nor does it advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

The resolution, introduced by Qatar, the Arab representative on the Council, had been amended during two days of negotiations to meet objections that it was not balanced. But Mr. Bolton said it remained “in many places biased against Israel and politically motivated.”

In the vote, 4 countries abstained — Britain, Denmark, Japan and Slovakia — and 10 were in favor — Argentina, China, Congo, France, Ghana, Greece, Peru, Russia, Qatar and Tanzania.

The original draft had made no mention of Palestinian rocket strikes into Israel and accused Israel of conducting a “massacre” of civilians in its attack at Beit Hanun on Wednesday that killed 18 civilians.

New language was inserted condemning the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel and calling upon the Palestinian Authority to take “immediate and sustained action” to end the rocket fire. But while the resolution named Israel as liable for the attacks on Gaza, it was silent on who or what group was responsible for the attacks on Israel.

In other changes, a reference to “indiscriminate” Israeli violence became “disproportionate” violence, and the words “military assault,” “aggression” and “massacre” were dropped in favor of the general phrase “military operations.”

Another provision had proposed that a new United Nations observer force be sent into the area to monitor a cease-fire, but it was substituted with language suggested by France that called for the creation of “an international mechanism for the protection of civilians.”

Mr. Bolton said the United States considered this “a promise which is unwise and unnecessary and which, at any rate, raises false hopes.”

The resolution that was voted on requested that Secretary General Kofi Annan establish a fact-finding mission to investigate Wednesday’s attack and report back within 30 days and called for the resumption of international efforts to achieve peace by the so-called quartet — the United Nations, the European Union, Russia and the United States.

Israel has apologized for the deaths at Beit Hanun, blaming a “technical error,” and has announced its own investigation of the episode. But it has said it will continue to try to stop militants from launching rockets into Israel from Gaza.

The United States traditionally opposes what it considers one-sided Security Council resolutions on Israel, and Saturday’s vote was the fourth time in three years that Washington had taken such action.

In July the United States vetoed another resolution on Gaza; in March 2004 it vetoed a resolution condemning Israel for killing the Hamas leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin; and in December 2003 it blocked a measure protesting the construction of the Israeli separation barrier in the West Bank.

Almost all of the 45 nations that spoke during a daylong debate on the Middle East on Thursday condemned Israel. Arab nations are now expected to move for a vote in the 192-member General Assembly, a path they have followed in the past when such measures have failed to pass the Security Council.

Unlike Security Council resolutions, those passed in the General Assembly are nonbinding and largely symbolic. But they generally attract widespread support when Israel, and, by extension, the United States, are the targets.

Jean-Marc de la Sablière, the French ambassador, said he felt the final negotiated text was “a balanced one” and would have sent the right message to both Israel and the Palestinians. He added, “I hope that the fact this text has not been adopted will not renew tensions on the ground.”

Gotta love the NY Times for revealing much about the thinking behind policy. The nearly unwavering US support for Israel now may extend to secret military presence at notable "massacres", and the use of bizarre, sci-fi weaponry developed by the American military. These so-called "flesh-melting" weapons are previously unknown, and produce some of the most disturbing distortions of body I have ever seen.



I implore the reader to take a look at this post. Terence McKenna was known to say that the interwar German Fascist period was the most sci-fi moment in the 20th century. V-2 rockets raining down on London, a dictator with plans for a 1000-year racially pure empire, etc. One could apply this to the use of previously unknown, flesh-melting weapons by the client state of a world juggernaut with plans for strategic domination of the globe. These characterizations mean nothing at this point. There are no distinctions. The fundamental unreality of the moment has disappeared into banality. As Jodi Dean has discussed in the context of the 9/11 conspiracy theories, the split is a report on the status of knowledge itself. This too, will disappear, be absorbed, erased, even in its eventual revelation.

Sunn O)))

On October 9th, Celtic Frost headlined a show at the Marquee Theater in Tempe. Also on the bill were Servile Sect, Goatwhore, and Sunn O))). I rode my bicycle through a light rain over the Mill Ave. bridge, dodging lighting, stopped on the street, got a little oila-loila, and paid my $28. The crowd was very light, and a good mix from tight-jeaned ASU students, to bikers, to guys in suits. I was interested in one band only. Servile Sect was a local noise(?) act I found mostly uninteresting and derivative. Goatwhore was exactly as they should be, brutal meathead death metal with a corresponding level of intelligence. The requisite comments were made about the classic status of Celtic Frost. Something like "I was listening to Morbid Tales when I was 12". The guitarist chimed in with, "you fuckin pussies probably downloaded it last week". Sometimes it amazes me that I have found any shreds of sublimity in this "scene". My former bandmates in The Fatal Effect will be playing a show with this band on Nov 27th. Goatwhore was followed by Sunn O))). I think I may have been too young, or maybe not metal enough to get into Celtic Frost. I left before their set began.
The absurdity and irrelevance of a band like Sunn O))) is not incommensurate with its importance. In fact, their very inconsequence is paramount. Their singularly ridiculous aesthetic has somehow gained mainstream credibility in the past year or so, and they recently appeared in a major article in New York Times Magazine, where they were described as "not unlike listening to an Indian Raga in the middle of an earthquake." This elite recognition begs other questions I will ignore for now. Refer to the extensively documented occult underpinnings of the upper crust. When I first discovered this band, I felt that they were completely boundary dissolving. This is incorrect. Banality has taken hold. Their power now lies in sound alone, for its own sake. I am pretty sure that a local friend of theirs took the stage with them for vocals, and provided the predictable pseudo-satanic backwards chanting. It was dark, ,green, and the entire venue was filled with fog for the duration. The photo below was deeply manipulated to tease out the little bit of light and color that is there. There was little to no experimental sound manipulation. This was a full on guitar drone that went on for at least 40 minutes. They may have been the loudest band I have ever heard. The Moog, the bass guitar and the twin Les Pauls created resonance that cannot be explained. My insides shook, and my senses blurred a few times. It was ultimately unsatisfying though. I am looking for the next level of shamanic sound. How unfeasible would it be to assemble several thousand yidaki playing the same note somewhere? Sunn0))) doesnt cut it anymore, but is the best I've got.



Photo: Michael Hojjatie

the process

This is how it works:

Foley's Follies at Jodi Dean's blog

Be sure to concentrate on school atrocities as well. The timing could not be more perfect. The legalization of torture has been absorbed. I wonder if there even had to be a mechanism for this. Was it even necessary at this point? I hang on to the hope that the Real has not been completely effaced. This is up for debate. Again, the logic of banalization, fully functional.

I discovered this a long time ago, but didn't get to delve into it until recently.

the new construct

moderates vs. extremists

4:45am Pacific Time. Sleep eludes me again. I slept from 10:15pm to 2:15am, dreamt of some serious crimes and dentistry, then my guts woke me up. I hate sleeping with undigested food. This schedule is hard to manage. My alarm goes off in 45 minutes.

In an utterly predictable move, I quote extensively :

"That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree, — this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly measured by the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it.

It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it. If one does not take that into account, the event lost all symbolic dimension to become a pure accident, an act purely arbitrary, the murderous fantasy of a few fanatics, who would need only to be suppressed. But we know very well that this is not so. Thus all those delirious, counter-phobic exorcisms: because evil is there, everywhere as an obscure object of desire. Without this deep complicity, the event would not have had such repercussions, and without doubt, terrorists know that in their symbolic strategy they can count on this unavowable complicity.

This goes much further than hatred for the dominant global power from the disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong side of global order. That malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share (this order's) benefits. An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive power is happily universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center embodied perfectly, in their very double-ness (literally twin-ness), this definitive order...

Numerous disaster movies are witness to this phantasm, which they obviously exorcise through images and submerge under special effects. But the universal attraction these movies exert, as pornography does, shows how (this phantasm's) realization is always close at hand — the impulse to deny any system being all the stronger if such system is close to perfection or absolute supremacy...

In a way, it is the entire system that, by its internal fragility, helps the initial action. The more the system is globally concentrated to constitute ultimately only one network, the more it becomes vulnerable at a single point (already one little Filipino hacker has succeeded, with his laptop, to launch the I love you virus that wrecked entire networks). Here, eighteen (dix-huit in the text) kamikazes, through the absolute arm that is death multiplied by technological efficiency, start a global catastrophic process...


It is the system itself that has created the objective conditions for this brutal distortion. By taking all the cards to itself, it forces the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because the stakes are ferocious...Terrorism is an act that reintroduces an irreducible singularity in a generalized exchange system...Terror against terror — there is no more ideology behind all that. We are now far from ideology and politics. No ideology, no cause, not even an Islamic cause, can account for the energy which feeds terror...

Terrorism, like virus, is everywhere. Immersed globally...secretly linked to the internal fracture of the dominant system...

Thus, it is no shock of civilizations, of religions, and it goes much beyond Islam and America, on which one attempts to focus the conflict to give the illusion of a visible conflict and of an attainable solution (through force)...

Terrorism is immoral. The event of the World Trade Center, this symbolic challenge is immoral, and it answers a globalization that is immoral. Then let us be immoral ourselves and, if we want to understand something, let us go somewhat beyond Good and Evil. As we have, for once, an event that challenges not only morals, but every interpretation, let us try to have the intelligence of Evil. The crucial point is precisely there: in this total counter-meaning to Good and Evil in Western philosophy, the philosophy of Enlightenment. We naively believe that the progress of the Good, its rise in all domains (sciences, techniques, democracy, human rights) correspond to a defeat of Evil. Nobody seems to understand that Good and Evil rise simultaneously, and in the same movement. The triumph of the One does not produce the erasure of the Other. Metaphysically, one considers Evil as an accident, but this axiom, embedded in all manichean fights of Good against Evil, is illusory. Good does not reduce Evil, nor vice-versa: there are both irreducible, and inextricable from each other. In fact, Good could defeat Evil only by renouncing itself, as by appropriating a global power monopoly, it creates a response of proportional violence...

one could perceive a resurrection of history after its proclaimed death. But does reality really prevail over fiction? If it seems so, it is because reality has absorbed the energy of fiction, and become fiction itself. One could almost say that reality is jealous of fiction, that the real is jealous of the image… It is as if they duel, to find which is the most unimaginable.

The collapse of the towers of the World Trade Center is unimaginable, but that is not enough to make it a real event. A surplus of violence is not enough to open up reality. For reality is a principle, and this principle is lost. Real and fiction are inextricable, and the fascination of the attack is foremost the fascination by the image (the consequences, whether catastrophic or leading to jubilation are themselves mostly imaginary)...

This terrorist violence is not then reality backfiring, no more than it is history backfiring. This terrorist violence is not "real". It is worse in a way: it is symbolic. Violence in itself can be perfectly banal and innocuous. Only symbolic violence generates singularity. And in this singular event, in this disaster movie of Manhattan, the two elements that fascinate 20th century masses are joined: the white magic of movies and the black magic of terrorism.

One tries after the event to assign to the latter any meaning, to find any possible interpretation. But there is none possible, and it is only the radicality of the spectacle, the brutality of the spectacle that is original and irreducible. The spectacle of terrorism imposes the terrorism of the spectacle. And against this immoral fascination (even if it engenders a universal moral reaction) the political order can do nothing. This is our theatre of cruelty, the only one left to us, -extraordinary because it unites the most spectacular to the most provocative. It is both the sublime micro-model of a nucleus of real violence with maximal resonance — thus the purest form of the spectacular, and the sacrificial model that opposes to historical and political order the purest symbolic form of challenge...


There is no solution to this extreme situation, especially not war that offers only an experience of deja-vu, with the same flooding of military forces, fantastic news, useless propaganda, deceitful and pathetic discourses and technological deployment. In other words, as in the Gulf War, a non-event, an event that did not happen…"

-Jean Baudrillard. The Spirit of Terrorism.
Translated by Dr. Rachel Bloul.

It begs to warm its blue limbs by your fire

The Eraser has earned my $15 cash. Thom Yorke's first official solo outing would be appropriately characterized as the stripped down, logical continuance of a trajectory begun with Kid A. It is a bare bones, melodically focused experiment in sound manipulation, requiring repeated listens before it begins to imprint and create a context for itself. There is very little to accurately compare it to, other than some trite post-1997 Radiohead reference. Many aspects of disjointed emptiness and attention to space are explored...quivering synth and piano lines, periods of swelling analog sound mixed with rough hewn sampled beats. A highly textured environment results from a confounding excercise in cut and paste compostition, sounding mostly like laptop experimentation. Recent interviews have confirmed this approach. Bits of unused songs and newly composed portions were compiled, deconstructed, and reconfigured. A massive editing job by Radiohead producer/collaborator Nigel Godrich completed the project.

The digital and analog clicks and pops, along with a variety of light distortion, were left in the source material, or simply added to the finished product. The cut and paste approach more than likely produced some of these effects. They are almost perfectly placed. The digital hiss beneath the opening piano phrase on the title track, for example. Many of the synth textures sound primitive, analog. Jesus Himself has commented, "by the 10th track you feel like yr trapped in a video game from the 80's". The intentional paucity of bits certainly calls this to mind. Yorke's purposefully unsophisticated approach to electronic sound continues to amaze, and is given an open forum on the Eraser. It would be useful to avoid the label "minimalist"... and it is not completely electronic, as plenty of guitar and bass contribute to the overall melodic structure, along with his beautifully focused vocal work.

Eroc asked, "he's worried about something..yathink?", in reference to the video for Harrowdown Hill. The montage of nature, cities, riots, protests is unsettling in a way that is hard to define. Strangely enough, the most disturbing clips are the flyovers of roads and other infrastructure. They resemble highly articulated small-scale models. He is worried, but that Something appears to be of a more personal nature this time around. Human relationships, love, with all of its terrors and triumphs. This album will likely help to perpetuate the threadbare axiom of Yorke as the introverted, disturbed talent, awkwardly positioned fronting one of the biggest bands on a planet he is uncomfortable inhabiting. This image is simplistic, but enough of that paranoiac sense of urgency truly carries over from the Radiohead aesthetic.
Few gaps of actual silence are left open, but there is a sense of the mix allowing space for a deep tension, ultimately unresolved. Lyrically, it follows. The question of human relationships is apparently laid wide open, and left that way. Black Swan brims with the constant, lingering, remainder of ambiguity, "You cannot kickstart a dead horse...I'm for spare parts". The hintegedanka, concealed, but nauseatingly immanent. From Skip Divided, "I'm known to bite in tight situations, And I head into your french windows,I thought there was a big connection, I only got my name I only got my situation, I just need my number and location...yeah you're a fool for sticking round". Some of the more disturbing aspects of Bjork's work could be referenced here. In fact, in another interview on shelves this past month (not sure which publication), Yorke mentions his desire to cover "Unravel", from Homogenic, describing it in terms of sonic mastery.

As for worries about the world itself, which Yorke frequently acknowledges, the lyrics do not seem to explicitly examine the digestive model of active banalization or erasure, in his lexicon. Yorke clearly had this nearly untraceable phenomena in mind. Few have touched on it in pop music. In a recent interview, this principle is addressed directly"

From Paste Magazine, August 2006, Issue #23, by Jay Sweet:

Fortunately, when he explains why he titled the album The Eraser, he’s more forthcoming.

“I was reading this book about the death of Aldo Moro, the head of the Christian Democrat party in Italy who was murdered by the Red Brigades in the ’70s—which was a big deal when I was a kid. Before he died he’d written all these letters and was disowned and ‘erased’ from Italian Politics. Even before he died everyone was saying, ‘Well, he’s obviously lost his mind; the person writing these letters to newspapers in desperation is obviously not the real thing.’ It got me thinking. For me, a lot of the record is about living in a world where things like Iraq happen. You pick up The New York Times and there’s one little column saying ‘a bunch of soldiers blow away 100 people they’re trying to save because they were on speed’ and over on another column there’s some other small piece on how they should be brought home, OK and next page—the ability to erase these people from one’s [consciousness], partly in order to exist day-to-day, exists. Also, all these nightmare scenarios that are going on in the background. In Britain, it’s almost too much the other way. People in the U.K. are constantly talking about climate change right now, but the big fear is that it’s become some bizarre fad, and I’m a bit freaked because it doesn’t really work like that. Talk about ‘erasing,’ what about New Orleans? I mean Stipe and some other artists have been talking about it, but, oh my God, how can you do that? How can you erase all these people like they don’t exist? Obviously there’s the personal thought of me trying to erase this or that from my mind to move on because there are all these things going on, and then I thought, ‘No, the record is much more a response to the political environment and general public psyche.’ It’s a response to the ability to [snaps his fingers] and these issues can just go away."

An increasingly active process. So many potentially threatening developments are simply forgotten, not stricken from the record, but relegated to what the perennial MIT favorite calls "the memory hole". What is frightening is the speed of re-absorption into the machinery of historical coding. Certain things need not be hidden any longer. Just today, President Bush finally acknowledged the existence of a network of secret CIA prisons in foreign locations. This was uncovered months ago, but the administration has remained nearly silent until today. The moves are more perfectly planned than ever.

“In Britain there was a massive thing called the Hutton Inquiry, where there was this scientist, David Kelly, who was the chief chemical-weapons person in Britain. He was a whistle-blower on the lack of WMDs in Iraq. He was rather inconvenient, much like [outed CIA operative] Valerie Plame, so he was outed by the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense by saying he was a leak, and that he was the one talking to the press when he shouldn’t, and he ended up ‘committing suicide.’ I feel really funny talking about it because he lived locally to us and I have friends who know his family, and to me, it’s this incredibly dark period in British life, where basically the entire country held the prime minister responsible for it because his press man said, ‘I want this guy rid of, I want him erased; I want him gone.’ So there was this Hutton Inquiry, which naturally said the Ministry of Defense was probably at fault with the way they handled his outing, so obviously the prime minister can’t be held responsible, which everyone thought was a crock of shit, but—poof—it went away; it was whitewashed. It was erased, and the culprits are all still there, and this poor man died for whatever reason. It seems like this very, very small thing, but it’s an expression of something much wider and much more frightening.”

The September Issue of Rolling Stone has an article on Daniel Pinchbeck, and his apparent status as the new cultural icon of psychedelia and the transformation of global consciousness. Commentary is in a first draft. Expect it soon.

What a comfort for the widow,a light to the child

An internet query of the NY Times produced 10 stories mentioning the search term "real wages" since May of this year. A similar search of the term "living standards" produced 8 results. These numbers are instructive. A search for "inflation" produced 450 stories ..."productivity", 138 results..."profits", a staggering 547 results...and "terrorism", 742 results. Well, actually not staggering, given the constituency of the Times. It does not require much analysis to determine what these numbers signify. This is not a "Marxist" interpretation, it is just that nobody discusses it. When this kind of media analysis is conducted, almost invariably you get, "So what? You act like you are surprised.When are you going to abandon your adolescent Utopian fantasies?". I am not surprised at all, but these numbers are simply not discussed. Profits? Of course we can talk about those. So here, in my tiny corner of this idiotic ego-sphere, I offer these findings as a simple reminder. It took me all of 3 minutes to perform the research. I gently urge those reading this to take a few minutes out of your day to look into the resources that are widely available.

The following NY Times story is one of eight mentions of "real wages" since May 1st of this year. The Times has provided a rare mainstream glimpse at an important topic. Sure, one must read it carefully to tease out the information of particular importance, but I thank them for this one of eight. It details the continuing decline of this indicator, and what it means. This is a longstanding development though, a continuing trend that has had the right economic results for those who matter. All the more necessary then, to avoid the discussion, unless it is in terms of profits and productivity. Now that electoral outcomes may be slightly altered, it is permissible to broach the topic. Notice that great emphasis is placed on the effect this may have on the mid-term elections. The Republicans fear that they may lose their position of dominance over the bureacracy that does so well for their constituency. The calculable social effects do not matter. What is important it that corporate capital is doing just fine, as worker productivity is way up. As if Democratic victory would alter the forward thrust of the past 300 years. "Forward escape" is the only option we seem to be offered. Insert pseudo-intellectual pomo reference here : I refer the reader to Baudrillard's Fatal Strategies. The solution thus proposed would be a complete surrender to the forces of de-humanization, transformation of the self from a subject to inert object. This unlikely/unmanageable situation would somehow short-circuit the all pervasive code, as yet completely inescapable.

Read the article if you have time. Emphasis and comments have been added:

Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity - August 28, 2006

With the economy beginning to slow, the current expansion has a chance to become the first sustained period of economic growth since World War II that fails to offer a prolonged increase in real wages for most workers.

That situation is adding to fears among Republicans that the economy will hurt vulnerable incumbents in this year’s midterm elections even though overall growth has been healthy for much of the last five years.

The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable...because productivity...has risen steadily over the same period.

As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”

[A standard comment. Similar examples can be found, and are repeated often.]

...Since last summer, however, the value of workers’ benefits has also failed to keep pace with inflation, according to government data.

At the very top of the income spectrum, many workers have continued to receive raises that outpace inflation, and the gains have been large enough to keep average income and consumer spending rising.

[The Times does not hesitate to reveal the sectors actually benefitting.]

Political analysts are divided over how much the wage trends will help Democrats this fall in their effort to take control of the House and, in a bigger stretch, the Senate. Some see parallels to watershed political years like 1980, 1992 and 1994, when wage growth fell behind inflation, party alignments shifted and dozens of incumbents were thrown out of office.

But others say that war in Iraq and terrorism, not the economy, will dominate the campaign and that Democrats have yet to offer an economic vision that appeals to voters.

But polls show that Americans disapprove of President Bush’s handling of the economy by wide margins and that anxiety about the future is growing. Earlier this month, the University of Michigan reported that consumer confidence had fallen sharply in recent months, with people’s expectations for the future now as downbeat as they were in 1992 and 1993, when the job market had not yet recovered from a recession.

“Some people who aren’t partisans say, ‘Yes, the economy’s pretty good, so why are people so agitated and anxious?’ ” said Frank Luntz, a Republican campaign consultant. “The answer is they don’t feel it in their weekly paychecks.”

But Mr. Luntz predicted that the economic mood would not do significant damage to Republicans this fall because voters blamed corporate America, not the government, for their problems.

[Ignorance among the masses of the significantly tangled nexus of corporate/state, must be maintained.]

Economists offer various reasons for the stagnation of wages. Although the economy continues to add jobs, global trade, immigration, layoffs and technology — as well as the insecurity caused by them — appear to have eroded workers’ bargaining power.

Trade unions are much weaker than they once were, while the buying power of the minimum wage is at a 50-year low. And health care is far more expensive than it was a decade ago, causing companies to spend more on benefits at the expense of wages.

Together, these forces have caused a growing share of the economy to go to companies instead of workers’ paychecks. In the first quarter of 2006, wages and salaries represented 45 percent of gross domestic product, down from almost 50 percent in the first quarter of 2001 and a record 53.6 percent in the first quarter of 1970, according to the Commerce Department. Each percentage point now equals about $132 billion.

Total employee compensation — wages plus benefits — has fared a little better. Its share was briefly lower than its current level of 56.1 percent in the mid-1990’s and otherwise has not been so low since 1966.

Over the last year, the value of employee benefits has risen only 3.4 percent, while inflation has exceeded 4 percent, according to the Labor Department.

In Europe and Japan, the profit share of economic output is also at or near record levels, noted Larry Hatheway, chief economist for UBS Investment Bank, who said that this highlighted the pressures of globalization on wages. Many Americans, be they apparel workers or software programmers, are facing more comptition from China and India.

In another recent report on the boom in profits, economists at Goldman Sachs wrote, “The most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor’s share of national income.” Low interest rates and the moderate cost of capital goods, like computers, have also played a role, though economists note that an economic slowdown could hurt profits in coming months.

For most of the last century, wages and productivity — the key measure of the economy’s efficiency — have risen together, increasing rapidly through the 1950’s and 60’s and far more slowly in the 1970’s and 80’s.

But in recent years, the productivity gains have continued while the pay increases have not kept up. Worker productivity rose 16.6 percent from 2000 to 2005, while total compensation for the median worker rose 7.2 percent, according to Labor Department statistics analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. Benefits accounted for most of the increase...

..Average family income, adjusted for inflation, has continued to advance at a good clip, a fact Mr. Bush has cited when speaking about the economy. But these gains are a result mainly of increases at the top of the income spectrum that pull up the overall numbers. Even for workers at the 90th percentile of earners — making about $80,000 a year — inflation has outpaced their pay increases over the last three years, according to the Labor Department.

“There are two economies out there,” Mr. Cook, the political analyst, said. “One has been just white hot, going great guns. Those are the people who have benefited from globalization, technology, greater productivity and higher corporate earnings.

“And then there’s the working stiffs,’’ he added, “who just don’t feel like they’re getting ahead despite the fact that they’re working very hard. And there are a lot more people in that group than the other group.”

In 2004, the top 1 percent of earners — a group that includes many chief executives — received 11.2 percent of all wage income, up from 8.7 percent a decade earlier and less than 6 percent three decades ago, according to Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, economists who analyzed the tax data...


...At the same time, he said that the Bush administration was not responsible for the situation, pointing out that inequality had been increasing for many years. “It is neither fair nor useful,” Mr. Paulson said, “to blame any political party.”

[One must not draw connections between huge corporate profits, and economic policies that favor them. To do so would be inexcusable. Politics, of course, has no stake in the success of accumulative capital.]

...

And Tucson remains a cmall city, though growing like a melanoma on the face of the rare Sonoran desert. Everything unpleasant about Tucson is three times worse in Phoenix, a monster megalopolis of one and a half million beset, betrayed, beleaguered souls. Phoenix vies with Denver and Los Angeles for the filthiest air in the United States. Phoenix should never have been allowed to happen. - Edward Abbey

no gels or fluids

A multitude of topics worldwide merit special attention and analysis. A major "insurgency" and Taliban presence in Afghanistan, the resumption of extreme violence in Iraq, Israel's war in Lebanon, and the beginnings of the buildup to the mid-term elections are only a small sample of notable topics I am sure other more well-informed observers are agonizing over. I have been disinclined to participate. Lately, I find myself more generally disinterested, and preocuppied with goings on in my corner of the desert. I have been preparing for a Master's in Ed. program at ASU which starts this upcoming Monday, and for the past few months have been tinkering with a home project studio I've begun piecing together. Some of the song ideas have been sitting around for years. These diversions have kept me from my usual fixation on the media. The events of the past month however, are notable in many respects. Other obligations prevent a lengthy discussion, but I will submit for inspection the following news items. All conform to the prevailing logic of absurdity.

Events in the U.K. dominated this past week, "President Bush said Thursday that a foiled plot to blow up multiple flights from Britain to the United States shows 'this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation'. The president laid the blame for the would-be attack squarely on al-Qaida-type terrorism. " - (AP).

There is a violence that cannot be overstated in the use of the term "fascist" to describe any group. The gratuitous employment of meaningless pejoratives, and their function in the immediate atmosphere of paranoia and reaction should be transparent, even in a multi-layered, fully functional system of propaganda. It is effective to reference the moral themes of WWII, implying equivalency between the forces of monolithic state Fsacism under the Axis powers, and the dispersed Al-Quaeda organizational structure, if one's aim is to promote jingoism among the population. Read the quote again. The words of the President would be more properly addressed to naive children. It is almost embarrassing to read or listen to. The emphasis on "Islamofascism" has steadily increased, and will likely continue to do so.

Transparency should apply as well, to Republican commentary on the nomination in Connecticut of Ned Lamont as Democratic Senate candidate:

"At the same time, Republicans began a concerted effort to use Mr. Lieberman’s defeat to portray Democrats as weak on national defense, reprising a theme that they made central to the last two national campaigns. The attacks came in searing remarks from, among others, Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee and Vice President Dick Cheney, who went so far as to suggest that the ouster of Mr. Lieberman might encourage “al Qaeda types...It’s an unfortunate development, I think, from the standpoint of the Democratic Party, to see a man like Lieberman pushed aside because of his willingness to support an aggressive posture in terms of our national security strategy,’’ Mr. Cheney said in a telephone interview with news service reporters. - (NY Times 8-10)

Absurdity pushed to the extreme. The actual suggestion is that the excercise of democracy (i.e. voting) leading to a shift in leadership elements, will encourage terrorism. Continuous reprisal of themes being pushed since 9/11/01. I dont remember it being this explicitly stated. Flash has referenced the continuity of this discourse since Wilson. Regardless of the democratic position on national security, Cheney's suggestion amounts to support for "fascism", if it were more accurately defined by passionate ideologues. It has been known for some time that current U.S. policy has in fact contributed significantly to terrorism. Recruitment is up, as are basic sympathies in the Muslim world with anti-imperial sentiment.
Lieberman, a Democrat, has been a favorite of the GOP and the White House for some time. The defeat of such an important administration ally is clearly unacceptable. Flash has also pointed out that Lieberman, in announcing his plans to run as an independent, has performed a rare act of real democracy, disrupting the two-party system. On cue, the immediate and predictable Democratic response was that Lieberman should have simply accepted defeat. It is another question how a more progressive Democratic policy would differ in practice. I am constrained by my own ideological convictions enough to say, not much. An elaborate stage show, of which many of the actors are themselves unaware. Underlying absurdity of the performance, making possible the avoidance of core issues by both sides.



July 17th
(CBS/AP) It wasn't meant to be overheard. Private luncheon conversations among world leaders, picked up by a microphone, provided a rare window into both banter and substance — including President Bush cursing Hezbollah's attacks against Israel. Mr. Bush expressed his frustration with the United Nations and his disgust with the militant Islamic group and its backers in Syria as he talked to British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the closing lunch at the Group Of Eight summit. "See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this sh*t and it's over," Mr. Bush told Blair as he chewed on a buttered roll. The unscripted comments came during a photo opportunity at the lunch. The leaders clearly did not realize that a live microphone was picking up their discussion. The president also bluntly expressed his frustration with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, telling Blair, "I felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone and call (Syrian President Bashar) Assad to make something happen." CBS News chief White House correspondent Jim Axelrod says the open microphone only made public the reality that had been emerging in private: the lack of agreement on the best way to stop the violence in the Mideast is raising tensions among the leaders who are trying to come up with a plan.

For me, this was the most strikingly (in)dispensable story in quite some time, for many reasons. That it remained deserves commentary beyond the platitudes about slow news cycles. To begin with, the notion that this was "unscripted" is slightly dubious. Assume that it was an entirely candid moment, providing the citizenry with a glimpse at the real, human, in-the-moment thinking of the most important public figure in the world. In this case, it simply reveals the maximal level of incompetency and ignorance of world affairs and foreign policy. A frightening prospect indeed. Who is the "they" that needs to "get Syria to get Hezbollah" to stop firing rockets? I am assuming this would be the U.N. That's it, just tell Kofi Annan to ask Syria to stop Hezbollah. This rests on the the assumption that Syria is the lone hidden hand operating Hezbollah from behind the curtains. Hardly a comprehensive model, and one avoided even in mainstream punditry. It could be true, I guess. The U.S. had the power to stop Indonesia from decimating its population with just one word, it just took a quarter century to say it. But I digress. Very simply, I find it impossible to believe that these comments illustrate the framework of foreign policy as understood by Bush and Blair. This could easily have been articulated by a simpleton, a relatively uninformed American citizen, suddenly thrust into the Oval Office. Some would argue that this is exactly what happened in 2000, but that is another matter. Moral considerations aside, Bush is surrounded by a group of highly intelligent, competent cabinet members and advisors. Many of them possess decades of experience in the nuances of Realpolitik. After 5+ years in office, one would think the influence of Daddy's friends had rubbed off.
The other possibility is that this exchange was somehow scripted. I find this hard to believe as well, but cannot dismiss the nagging thought. Media fixation on the exchange was not necessary, and also functioned as a method of bringing the man himself back to the people, to get inside his head. Reinforcement of the public image that has been cultivated since day one in spite of the Bush legacy as wealthy oil men, that of a down-home Texan with cowboy credentials. A side note: in Latin America, the myth of the cowboy has been celebrated for just as long, but never was integrated into political imagery to the degree it has in the U.S.
In any case, the story reveals continued frustration with the United Nations. The administration attitude towards the U.N. as an obsolete institution is no secret. Why then, did Bush think that pressing Kofi to talk to the Syrian President would have any effect? It is important to keep in mind that the U.S. opposed a full cease-fire from the very beginning of this conflict, preferring instead a "sustainable cease-fire". The resulting international impasse has contributed to the length of the conflict.

I have to cook dinner.

of absence

I am not idle. Been working on my first DAW. Resuming posts soon.

the telos...the goal...the return. ouroboros?

"governments, scientific industrial democracies are simply now managing the terror of apocalypse, because they have no clue as to how to halt, direct, manage or control the processes that they have set in motion. Population growth, extraction of minerals, toxification of the environment, the raising of middle-class expectations in the hearts of billions of impoverished people in the Third World." - T. McKenna, New York 4/29/94

Colbert and Disarmament

So many are hailing Stephen Colbert as a “genius”,who displayed unmatched guts during his speech at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner on April 29th. Throughout the online community, commentary and video postings of the event have circulated like viruses, particularly among the 20-something crowd, those who assert confidence in the subversive, anti-establishment quality of the Daily Show. The speech was clearly intended for this demographic, a group that has inherited a self-conscious political apathy from the previous generation. For many, a comedic recognition of our lack of democracy is the only form of political engagement. When they DO vote, there is a sense of resignation to the fact that it doesn’t "mean anything".

I put myself through the torture of watching Colbert's "roast" of Bush. Most press coverage of the event has placed undue emphasis on the reaction of the crowd, and the subsequent denunciation by the political class. Looks of shock, dismay, disagreement were widely reported. What I saw was indifference, a quiet recognition, as if those present were aware of its underlying performative necessity : satisfaction of the felt desire for a superficial, but personal criticism of Bush himself. The type of critique one hears in most college age circles. "he's stupid, uneducated, and cannot speak properly". As Mark Crispin Miller has demonstrated, this popular image of the president as a simpleton has been carefully cultivated, and reveals much about the way figureheads are used. In a similar way, the Colbert exercise was well-planned and flawlessly executed. He spent alot of time simply poking fun at Bush. The cameras alternated between shots of laughter from those Colbert targeted, and looks of complete disinterest. The editing failed to mask the odd, almost choreographed nature of its project. The current debate over why the major media either ignored, downplayed, or criticized the speech is simply another layer in an extremely complex, confusing web of social control.

The jokes themselves were not particularly funny, but more importantly, they did not touch any core issues. Colbert ran through the list of topics which have been routinely scrutinized in the national media, often with an anti-administration, “liberal bias". Everyone knows these issues, they are far from secret. The failure of the new Iraqi government; Bush's dismal approval ratings (below pre-9/11 levels); the administration's use of photo-ops; illegal NSA wiretapping; the Cheney hunting incident; allegations of "secret" military prisons in Eastern Europe; criticism of Rumsfeld. These are all standard issues that have been filtering through the news cycles. This was no real critique of the administration, or the corporate state system itself, just the usual litany of failures. To explain is to explain away, and this fulfilled that function perfectly. The wealth of available information seems to do us no good. Understand that this is far from a conspiracy. This stuff is out in the open. The use of the media in shaping public perceptions is well understood. There are simply more layers of information being stacked atop one another than ever before, and it becomes more difficult to peel away. One could easily see a paranoiac impulse behind such extreme skepticism, but this is simply an extension of old theories about propaganda. Nothing new here, nothing sinister. The system's internal logic takes care of itself, automatically, and builds upon previous successes, or one could say, novelty.

Those familiar with Colbert’s style recognized the strange, awkward delivery. This is characteristic of his humor, and not well-known to those outside of the Daily Show audience. Just another reason to believe this speech was addressed to his nightly audience. It helped to lend an innocuous quality to even the most controversial topics he addressed. But the comedic treatment of these stories is no more controversial than the fact that they are major news items. Disregard proclamations that this was some sort of coup. The truly disturbing aspect is that those issues with real seriousness, and with possible consequences for political freedom, civil liberties, and our democratic institutions were re-inscribed again into use-value for a discredited administration. The Valerie Plame affair was mentioned, and she herself sat in the audience, the camera focused on her laughing deeply, dutifully participating. That an issue so serious can be addressed in this way with no critical comment in the mainstream is fascinating. There is a terror in this, an otherworldly vertigo that continues to accelerate.

Hitting the Refresh Button

Things are wound very tight this week. High tension allows certain energies to be set loose, spun through, and reset. Quickly, equilibrium reasserts itself. Most of the vibrations are part of a historical feedback loop, with elements of “deep structure”, lines of causality that one could take the time to parse. But there are events, media fixations, and blatant provocations that seem clearly intended to actively increase these systemic instabilities with a purpose in mind, but perhaps not completely conscious. In my paranoid but hopeful universe, the buildup to a conflict in Iran, the financial strangling of Hamas, and a Homeland Security spokesman accused of soliciting sex from what he thought was a 14 year old girl, while generally unrelated, seem to be connected to the underlying trend of acceleration towards a singular event of absolute magnitude. (Abstraction is an easy way to make grand statements and avoid facts. I love it)

I struggle not to belabor an emphasis on the circulatory speed and disintegration of oppositional energies, but it appears to be so fundamental, and increasingly so. Any serious, objective analysis of the media in recent weeks would mention the extremely rapid circulation of critical currents. It is a truism but one that goes unmentioned in the mainstream public sphere, that this process is highly functional, resetting the limits of criticism, and leaving opportunities for real change far behind, quickly forgotten, consigned to the oblivion of our televised reality principle. It is almost as if critical currents are purposely designed, generated, and implemented with this in mind. This reduces the possibility of real public opposition, in an environment where the media sets the boundaries, providing the illusion of debate. As serious corruption is constantly uncovered and debated in the mainstream, the more such revelations of corruption become banalized.

It is easily recognized that the widely publicized White House “shakeup” this past week will leave normal administration functioning and policy entirely intact. The resignation of Scott McLellan is inconsequential in any real sense. A new media spokesman in his place lends a sense of novelty to the proceedings, and the cultural system will waste time analyzing the character of this new public persona. (“no wonder your president has to be an actor, he’s gotta look good on television”) Most media outlets seem intent on portraying the diminished role of Karl Rove as a major change. The NY times on April 20th revealed the position of the spinster himself :

“In a telephone interview Wednesday night, Mr. Rove brushed aside suggestions that the change was a diminishment of his role. ‘It is something different,’ he said. ‘I've got a new boss,’ he continued, a boss ‘who says I want you to do more of this and less of that.’ Mr. Rove will retain his title as a deputy chief of staff, as well as his catch-all designation as Mr. Bush's senior adviser. He said he would continue to oversee broad policy issues. ‘The president and the new chief of staff said they wanted me focused on the big strategic issues facing the administration,’ he said. Joel D. Kaplan, now the deputy White House budget director, will assume Mr. Rove's duties as the manager of policy development at the White House and will take the title deputy chief of staff for policy. The change in Mr. Rove's responsibilities was at a minimum a signal that the White House was serious about reorganizing itself to get Mr. Bush's presidency back on track, and was widely interpreted in Washington as a step down in stature for Mr. Rove and an acknowledgment of policy failures in the last year. Mr. Rove had taken the lead on what was supposed to be the main domestic policy initiative of the second Bush term, the president's proposal to remake the Social Security system. The effort to sell the plan to a skeptical Congress and voters flopped. Similarly, Mr. Rove had trouble driving forward another of Mr. Bush's priorities, an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws. He also came under criticism for the White House's slow response to Hurricane Katrina.At the same time, Republicans on Capitol Hill have grown increasingly unhappy about Mr. Rove's dual political and policy roles. Mr. Rove was seen as spread far too thin, and was also distracted by the investigation into his role in the C.I.A. leak case. The investigation has lingered far longer than White House officials expected, and Mr. Rove has not been cleared of wrongdoing, although his lawyer has said he is confident that he will be. “

Put simply, the administration will largely retain its current configuration, with the same group of Reagan era planners shaping policy development. Donald Rumsfeld was widely quoted in the national press on Monday saying, “This too, will pass”. He was referring to the recent barrage of calls for his resignation as Secretary of Defense by retired military generals, who charge him with mismanagement of the war in Iraq.

“The effort to counter global terrorism is ‘a test of wills,’ Mr. Rumsfeld said, and cautioned that ‘if you started chasing, running around chasing public opinion polls or a handful of people who are critics of this or critics on that, you wouldn't get anywhere in this world.’ “ – NY Times, 4-18

I will leave the insulting quality of this gangster’s words for what they are. Rumsfeld clearly states his understanding of the role public opinion plays in the formation of policy. He is also well aware of the principle of banalization. The story will circulate, prompt a simulated “shakeup”, and “will pass” into nothingness, having served the useful function mentioned above. The desires of the majority of the population are not a real factor, when they can be channeled in this fashion. People will discuss the matter in their office break-rooms, and forget that afternoon, while they sit in traffic listening to liberal radio such as Air America rail against the “conservatives” in the White House.

some comments

The Bush administration has reaffirmed its commitment to the nearly unilateral repudiation of established international law. The New York Times reported on March 16th, "with the United States in virtually lone opposition, the United Nations overwhelmingly approved a new Human Rights Council on Wednesday to replace the widely discredited Human Rights Commission". The US was joined in it's opposition by Israel (normally in sync with US votes), the Marshall Islands and Palau. Belarus, Iran and Venezuela abstained from the vote. The language used by the Times would lead one to believe that despite the US vote, the commission was approved. What they failed to mention is that by casting a dissenting vote, the US has effectively vetoed this General Assembly resolution. With the election of council members set for May 9th, and the inclusion of the United States "a critical consideration for the panel's future", this body is rendered non-functional in any significant sense. The official US position, from the Times article:

"John R. Bolton, the United States ambassador, said the proposed council was 'not sufficiently improved' over the commission, which has been faulted for permitting notorious rights abusers to join. 'We must not let the victims of human rights abuses throughout the world think that U.N. member states were willing to settle for 'good enough,' ' Mr. Bolton said in a statement after the vote. 'We must not let history remember us as the architects of a council that was a 'compromise' and merely 'the best we could do' rather than one that ensured doing 'all we could do' to promote human rights.' "


But is the US in practice such an unyielding champion of human rights? It is interesting that violations of human rights perpetrated by the North are never even considered. It is absolutely unthinkable to mount a serious critique in this arena. The countless human rights reports condemning Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo bay are routinely dismissed as a joke. How about our "Third World" client states? How about our good friends the Saudis, who hold one of the world's worst human rights records? Indonesia, another perennial favorite, has re-established it's position on our list of states receiving military aid. Why not mention it's continuing crimes in West Papua? To return to this troubled corner of the globe,

"Police and rock throwing demonstrators clashed during a protest against the American mining company, Freeport-McMoRan, today leaving three policemen and one Air Force officer dead in the remote province of Papua, witnesses and officials said...The demonstration outside the university in Jayapura turned violent as several hundred students demanded that Freeport, which owns a huge gold and copper mine in the impoverished province, close its operations.
The students, many of whom support independence for Papua, also demanded that the Indonesian Army and police withdraw from the province. The army and the police in Papua, most of whom come from outside the province, are widely viewed as an occupying force, and the Freeport mine is protected by these forces. Protests against the mine have escalated since last month, when local people who live near the mine were prevented by the police from panning the mine's waste for gold. " (NY Times 3/16)

Freeport-McMoRan, making headlines again. See posts on Indonesia below and make your own connections.

Bush has also recently restated the administration's insistence on the sovereign right of the US to mount pre-emptive, defensive strikes. That such oxymoronic propaganda goes umentioned in any critical fashion is testament to the media's proper role in establishing doctrine.

Borgesian echoes

I got a strange feeling when I discovered this a couple of weeks ago while searching a two volume bibliography of works on Philo Judeas. We were searching for references to nature, but for some reason this seemed more interesting :



" 6724 J. Gurov, Philo’s exegesis and theology – a comparison with the Hebrew Bible and the Rabbinic commentaries (diss. Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, Ohio 1967)
This study, recorded but not summarized in the Dissertation Abstracts, cannot be located, not even at the Institute where it was submitted as a dissertation. "

- Radice, Roberto/Runia, David T. (E.J. Brill, 1985, Leiden, New York) Philo of Alexandria – An Annotated Bibliography, 1937-1986

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them – Mark Twain

triumph of pessimism

Dick Cheney's hunting story effectively diverted attention from the previous week's media debate over internet privacy, and the intensified discussion of NSA domestic surveillance. Since then, the Senate has opted not to investigate the scope and legality of the program, and coverage has ceased altogether. Entirely predictable, and no forum for the curious exists to force the issue through the political/business nexus. With most people getting their news from the internet these days, the speed at which these debates move through society is bewildering, and has no effect. The average American now spends something like 13 hours a week on the internet, reading rapidly digested news, and filtering through online communities like Myspace (which also attracted much media scrutiny that same week). This bizarre social network and its ilk have introduced an entirely new dimension to American social life, increasingly complex, simulated, confining, alienating, and creepy (I count myself among the creeps). Claims for the emancipatory potential of the internet are curious, and ambiguous at best. Put simply by Zizek : "the more cyberspace brings us together, enabling us to communicate in 'real time' with anyone on the globe, the more it isolates us, reducing us to individuals staring into computer screens". This process intensifies. Tempe, Arizona now boasts one of the nation's first municipal wireless networks. New towers are being erected daily, and the city is now blanketed in a grid of public access points, available nearly anywhere in town (house, car, favorite restaurant, street corner, or the park). The next level of noogenesis. If we do not accept the revolutionary quality of these developments, this type of ubiquity may be seen as a new production of false needs generated by late capital. These anti-democratic qualities can be placed in a context parallel to the Google/Yahoo vs. US/China debate. Google has refused to permit the U.S. Justice Department access to millions of user search records, while at the same time censoring searches on its Chinese version, in compliance with the Chinese government. Rival Yahoo recently revealed the identity of a Chinese dissident journalist, leading to his arrest and imprisonment. Can these ambiguities be parsed? What happened to long-hailed potential of the internet as a harbinger of Freedom itself? Here was an ostensibly open network, encouraging debate and democratic possibility. In the 1988 Massey Lecture, Chomsky discussed the role debate plays in our version of advanced industrial society. In a free society like the U.S., it is actually encouraged, providing the illusion of a fully functional democracy :

"Debate cannot be stilled, and indeed it should not be stilled, in a properly functioning system of propaganda. The reason is that it has a system reinforcing character if it is constrained within proper bounds. What is essential is to set the bounds firmly. Controversy may rage, as long as it adheres to the pre-suppositions that define the elite consensus. And it should furthermore be encouraged within these bounds; that helps to establish these doctrines of the very condition of thinkable thought, and it reinforces the belief that freedom reigns".

Chomsky was mainly concerned with the news media, and could not in 1988 predict the world-transforming potential of the world wide web. But it seems that the web, despite the thousands of brilliant independent media web sites (ex. Democracy Now) with open access, has gone down a familiar path. The work these outlets are doing seems to generate no changes. If there is no real oppositional character to the further integration of human beings into a global electronic network, where to look? Mass political action? Street demonstrations seem a cruel joke nowadays, where selected coverage distorts their nature, and the mass of bodies is herded by riot police into tightly regulated corrals.

Why does individual or collective protest have no effect on the Real? The code, as a (now) autonomous, self-generated, self-sustaining procession, first disengaged human capital from any actual participation on the level of development, and at present, has liberated its need for this mass. As for (entrenched) figureheads, the illusion of power is effectively maintained, on an increasingly sophisticated level. As the liabilities of effective administration become asymptotically unsustainable, this illusion must be rendered permanent. The ingenious methods applied are so commonplace, they are barely noticeable. In fact, they become the present itself. We should not forget the more concrete element to this, the publicly unspeakable brutality of persistent and escalated class warfare. The new budgetary proposal takes a further step in this direction, with the unsurprising expenditure of further billions on the most expensive of luxury goods, quickly used, destroyed, and re-purchased (we all know what those are). The Abramoff scandal, Tom DeLay's indictment, criticism over the response to hurricane Katrina, UN demands for the closure of Guantanamo Bay: All externalities, all trash-heap newsreel. The media recognition of massive corruption at the uppermost levels properly performs its legitimizing function. "Leaked", reported, (re)-circulated as sign-value for the retention of perpetual, illusory politics. Absence of a functioning dialectic. How is this not hopeless? Zizek, on Jameson, on modernity :

"More than ever, Capital is the 'concrete universal' of our historical epoch....while it remains a particular formation, it overdetermines all alternative formations, as well as all noneconomic strata of social life...the alternative social formations display the same ontological attitude, this merely confirms that they are, in their innermost core, mediated by Capital as their concrete Universality, as the particular formation that colors the entire scope of alternatives, that is, which functions as the encompassing totality mediating all other particular formations."

...and Jameson, on the impossibility of multiple modernities as an alternative:

"but this is to overlook the other fundamantal meaning of modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself".

The alternatives to capital, historically and in the contemporary period, are impotent to the degree that they posit their program in relation to the prevailing order of things (which they do...invariably). In a Marcusian sort of model, we have the triumph of "positive thinking", where resistance is pathological, or becomes a highly functional element of the system, mediated by linguistic mechanisms out of control. All we seem to have left, is the certainty (?) of imminent global economic collapse, and/or the eruption of explosive energy from the increasing percentage of the world's population confined to unbelievably massive slums, no longer simply a "Third World" phenomena. See Mike Davis' "Planet of Slums" for more on this.

Wolf Schafer never mentioned...

Jared Diamond's role as a celebrity academic caused quite a stir when the Feb. 2nd talk at ASU was announced. An entire ballroom at ASU's Memorial Union was filled to capacity (best guess... at least 500 people), and the tremendous overflow was ushered into another large room where the lecture was transmitted via closed-circuit tv. Diamond's current god-like status notwithstanding, this book tour style engagement was brief, disheartening, and betrayed his status as another subservient intellectual in the long line feeding at the trough of government subsidies. As if his current position at the RAND Corporation was not revealing enough. The lecture consisted of a short recounting of a case study from Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. A brief question and answer period followed, where he displayed no uneasiness in telling a large crowd (with many historians in attendance) that the "nation state" is a 1000 year old structure; that the U.S. is the only nation with real historians, and as such, can finally "learn from the past". His self-professed "cautious optimism" on the contemporary situation leads to the conclusion that everything will be fine if we simply leave things as they are and hope for the best. He reductively defines globalization as the extension of communication technologies around the globe, which affords us a technological advantage never witnessed before.

Diamond's analysis of human macro-development on the global level in Gun's, Germs, and Steel slammed shut as many doors as it opened. Initially, the model seems perfect: The trajectory of agricultural, sedentary development proceeded in a manner consistent with the domestic suitability of indigenous flora and fauna, and the alignment of the continental axes. These and other factors determined the relative success or failure of the cascading spread of this lifestyle from its various points of origin. The answer to Yali's question was that any human group with the good fortune of a perfect setup could have become the force of global dominance, with no reason to apologize. Prior models of racial superiority could be thrown out the window. The book heeded the long call for a multi-disciplinary historical analysis, fueling intense jealousy on the part of historians, and making its way onto many syllabi of Global and Environmental History (Donald Worster made plain his envy when he lectured here last Fall). But Diamond's defensive denial of a new ecological determinism was weak at best. His model denies ideology, subjectivity, agency their proper place as catalysts of historical change. This refusal, clothed in a half-hearted environmentalism, feeds another vulgar apologetic.

Palestine and democratic process

We can dispense with any suspicion of the election result itself. In the U.S., where public relations firms run elections, this brutal perversion of our championed mechanism produces little more than an empty analysis, or some quiet criticism. We can also reject the Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations". There is no clash, the U.S. has forged close relations with the most fundamentalist and repressive regimes in the Muslim world, as democracy would run counter to particular interests of world order and capitalist accumulation. On the other hand, democracy is cynically imposed in other, less affluent areas, where legitimacy and power hang in the balance. These curious relations with the idea of democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere in the "developing" world allow for a kaleidoscopic lens through which to examine the Hamas victory. One finds no consensus, no rational, single line of analysis. The situation complicates further daily. This can only be a good thing. The only certainty is that Fatah has run it's course... for the time being(?). A choice has been made by the people on the ground, right or wrong. Very real circumstances impelled this victory. But beyond good and evil, it stands as it is.

The U.S. should recognize the outcome of a free, democratic election it lended support to. This week's triumph of Hamas was feared, but the U.S. refused to allow the postponement of the election. It is probably safe to rest easy. As is well-known, the transcending, negative political forces within are almost invariably incorporated into the rationality of the prevailing order. The within or without of Hamas is up for debate, but this transformation occured with Fatah, rendering it impotent, corrupt, and ultimately stripped of power.

"Through me you enter into the city of woes, through me you enter into eternal pain, through me you enter the population of loss" -Dante

The genius of Bryan D. Palmer

The following is an excerpt from Bryan Palmer's book, Descent Into Discourse (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), p.31. This Marxist tirade against the "linguistic turn" may be slightly out of date, but remains a cogent reminder that many in the historical profession sold out to abstraction after Foucault. Absolutely hilarious, for those in the know:

There was, and is, much to learn from Lacan. That has unfortunately been obscured in the appropriation and promotion of Lacan's postructuralist surrender of signification to the mystifications of signifiers forever broken from any relation to reality. This overdetermined Lacan's fate, pitching him into the wild playfulness of discourse that produced some of the most unfathomable prose known in the annals of critical theory and that made words the prison-house of subjects ultimately detached from the real. The Lacanian rereading of Freud thus produced some odd pages:

"We therefore invariably rediscover our double reference to the Word

and to Language. In order to liberate the subject's Word, we introduce

him into the Language of his desire, that is, into the primary Language,

in which, beyond what he tells us of himself, he is already talking to us

unbeknownst to him, and in the symbols of the symptom in the first

place.... The Word is in fact a gift of Language, and Language is not
immaterial. It is a subtle body, but body it is. Words are trapped in all the

corporeal images which captivate the subject; they can make the hysteric

pregnant, be identified with the object of penis-neid, represent the flood of

urine and urethral ambition, or the retained faeces of avaricious jouissance."

In Lacan the psychoanalytic implosion of poststructuralist theory re-imploded, in Catherine Clement's phrase "setting itself ablaze on a pyre of its own excrement".

The City of Dis

briefly...waiting for food at a Denny's in Elk City, Oklahoma, near the Texas border. Restaurant is packed because church just let out. The elderly stand waiting for tables in their best clothes. Been driving for 4 days. Cornfields, cows, Ozark Plateau, St. Louis arch, Bill and Evelyn West, wind farm, roadkill, Pakistani/Indian-owned motels. We have finally driven West of the trees, and are climbing up the high plains...there is red dirt all around. 10-hour days of driving... coffeee has become my best friend. "I want to touch the dirt" - Karen

UNOCAL bid and Free-Market Rhetoric

As I previously mentioned on June 23rd,the Chinese National Offshore Oil Co (CNOOC)has made an unsolicited bid to purchase UNOCAL, a California oil giant. This has sent shockwaves through the business and legislative community in the US, sparking a major debate over the role of China in the world economy. What is clear is that China is presenting a challenge to American economic hegemony. It is about time. The bid has been denounced by lawmakers in the name of "national security". Part of the objection rests on the fact that CNOOC is a 70% state-run company.
This issue is challenging American rhetoric regarding so-called "free trade". This phrase has been the clarion call of politically correct economic language for decades now. It is actually code for American economic imperialism. The phrase sounds fairly benign, and is meant to look that way. But the question we should ask is, "free-trade for whom?". Not for everybody. Free trade generally means the increased ability of the advanced industrial capitalist nations to extend that system into areas previously marginal. To subject the entire planet to this model, and turn it into a productive apparatus. Another familiar, benign sounding word for this is "globalization". Sounds nice, doesnt it? Not nice for the people this process exploits and displaces.

Terence McKenna once said of free trade,"This point in time is a point at which we should be buying less, selling less, manufacturing less, transporting less. And what's the battle cry? FREE TRADE EVERYWHERE! What does free trade mean? It means my right to come into your country and sell you the most outlandish crap, and because it's 'free trade,' you have no right to turn me away". He was right, but it also means the movement of American manufacturing into areas previously restricted. Basically, the increase of inward and outward capital flows. CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Agreement)will soon be passed. This plan, modelled after NAFTA, will extend the US economic model to Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. It will bring the usual spectrum of effects associated with "free trade" agreements : loss of American jobs, decline of social services, decreased labor power, privatization, environmental degradation, lower wages...the list goes on and on. In other words, despite the rhetoric, the citizens of the nations in question will be worse off than before. Is this type of trade really "free"? Again, free for whom? The rhetoric of free trade is used to justify and extend American dominance in the global economy, but when a nation such as China attempts to apply the ideas of free trade to their economic expansion, America says no. Is this free trade? I dont care if they are a communist monolith bent on world domination (bullshit really, most people know this), it is all the same. If we are in the business of destroying the planet for financial gain, why not let everybody buy into the game? We dont have much time left anyway. Let us push the system (which is no system) to its limits, break all the rules, unify all opposites. In the words of Jean Baudrillard, "a system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization".

I met with two old friends tonight. We dont see each other very often. But after long periods of limited contact, it almost always turns to something which at least seems profound, especially with these two individuals. They have always been the ones most willing to talk about real shit. To write about our conversations would spoil it. Almost as if da Vinci had told us why the Mona Lisa was smiling. The immanence defies representation. a quotation will suffice :

"...this alienation goes very deep. Thats why the psychedelic experience is illegal and, and repressed and suspect. Its because nothing less than the whole kit and kaboodle of this civilization hangs in the balance against it. It is forbidden to know that the dynamics of the mind have such depth and breadth. We are supposed to live in a narrow canyon of consciousness, walled in between awake and asleep. And anything else is considered pathological. And we make a little place for artists as long as they dont get too uppity or obscene, and othwerwise it's all closed off." - T. McKenna

Watch The Sky

notice the lack of sunny days? even the days that are warm and semi-clear have a strange haze throughout. pay attention to the skies. something strange is going on up there. this is not conspiracy theory, this is something real, observable with your own eyes. ill leave it at that.

I have had a recent revival of interest in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Their collaborations in "post-modern" (i have become increasingly uncomfortable with that designation) philosophy are some of the most interesting and bizarre.

"Felix Guattari and I have always remained Marxists, in two different manners perhaps,but both of us. It's that we don't believe in a political philosophy that would not be centered around the analysis of capitalism and its developments. What interests us the most is the analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that constantly pushes back its proper limits, and that always finds them again on a larger scale, because the limit is Capital itself" - Gilles Deleuze


"Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Body, the stationary Voyage, Anorexia, cutaneous Vision, Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation." - D.& G.

"Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment...Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos... The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. F lix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation...Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill. " - G. Deleuze

Frankfurt School

A friend of mine likes to ridicule my general distaste for and lack of interest in mass-culture, so I suggested that he read The Culture Industry by Theodor Adorno. Here is the basic introduction to Adorno and the Frankfurt School that I wrote for him, to give him some background. I doubt he will read it, or the book, but I got enjoyment out of writing some more anyway :

It would help to have some background in philosophical and historical terminology/vocabulary, but you are not a moron, and will probably be able to logically connect a lot of the stuff. Before you read any of this book, you will have to have some idea where these people were coming from.

The Frankfurt School was the name given to the group of theorists at The Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany from the 1920s to the 1950s. Almost all of them continued writing after the Institute was disbanded. One of the guys who came in later and made a name for himself there is still alive, and remains an immensely influential figure in contemporary philosophy. (Jurgen Habermas - this guy is big on the emancipatory power of unrestricted communication. His main thing is what he calls “communicative rationality” but don’t worry about that. He is one of the guys who entered the debate on the “post-modern” later on, and became well known in that context.).

All of them were Marxist in orientation, but recognized that the failure of the Revolution in Russia, (The Soviet "Revolution" of 1917 had led to a nightmare society, culminating in Stalinist totalitarianism.) World War I, Anti-Communist Fascist regimes, and of course the devastation of World War II and the Holocaust had reduced Europe to ruin. It was clear to rational Marxists that the hopes and promises of the Revolution had not delivered the goods Karl Marx had promised in the 19th century. A revision of Marxist thought was what they were after, updated for the needs and situations of the mid 20th century. The theories they formulated ended up being called “critical theory”. For me, the ideas these guys came up with are more powerful than anything before or after, at least as it relates to the 20th century. From the 70s until now, philosophical theory has increasingly gone in some surprising directions, and most of the “post-modern” guys don’t agree with each other about what is really going on in the world. Theory moved into analysis of the nature of language itself, and this changed everything, allowing some of these people to come up with very bizarre theorizations. This is called the “linguistic turn”, and influenced not only philosophy, but all of the social sciences (history, anthro., sociology, etc.). Basically, language is seen as actively constituting reality, contributing to our empirical world, rather than simply reflecting it in words. As an undergraduate in the social sciences, you are generally spared this stuff, but some professors start drilling this stuff into you during your last few semesters… it is sort of a preparation for grad school, where Foucault is shoved down your throat. The linguistic turn is interesting, and a few of these guys are fucking awesome…Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Jameson. But if you check it out on your own, you have to wade through a lot of crap to get to the good stuff, after 1980 especially, when things go off the deep end.
So…. the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, in my opinion, still had their feet on the ground, still concentrated on concrete happenings in economics, linguistics. Basically, they make the most sense for normal people. One of the problems with later theory (post-modern, post-structuralist) is that it tends to defocus on things happening to real people on a day to day basis, and relies more on abstract theorizations.

Ok, back to the thread… Adorno’s critical theory contains/involves some basic assumptions about the nature of society/culture/economics/politics that you must understand before proceeding with this stuff.

He believed that culture, in the past, was a reflection of the reality of a particular people, a reaction to the entire social/economic mileu. For example, the Aztecs worshipped a sun-god because they depended on the sun for a plentiful corn harvest. If the sun-god was not satisfied by human sacrifice, and harvest was bad at the same time, this was reinforced. A cause-effect type of principle. Or, medieval art reflected the culture of strong Christianity in Europe. These aren’t the best examples, but you get the idea. As capitalism ascended to its dominant position from the 15th to the 20th century, culture became something to be sold (commodified), rather than a reflection of society itself. The culture created by consumption began to feed back into itself, creating a new cultural reality, which now has gone out of control in a sort of feedback loop based on culture-for- profit. (It has been speculated as to how Adorno would have judged the spiraling acceleration of our current cultural situation).

He also felt that there had been, before the 1930s or so, a distinction between what was know as “high” art, and “low” art. High art was highly critical of society, low art was not. High art could be plays, novels, epic poetry, things of that nature. It was generally considered to be very high quality, and appealed to the upper classes, even though it tended to be critical of the world. High art was supposed to be timeless, transcendent.
An example would be some modernist novel that was critical of power itself, or something like that. William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, etc….stuff they made us read in high school. Low art would be the decorative or applied arts. Things which reflected popular opinions, tastes. Low art was seen as lesser quality. As the 20th century progressed, and art took on new, more inventive forms, high and low art began to blend. With the rise in technologies of mass communication, this separation disappeared. The invention of cinema (“moving pictures”) was a landmark event for most people, and was seen as a big part in this blending of high and low art. This is why many theorists were obsessed with deconstructing cinema in the early years, something we don’t see much of anymore. If you think about it, the invention of movies was absolutely earth-shattering in that context. So high art, which formerly criticized society itself, was mostly available to the upper classes, the lower classes didn’t really bother with it. But as the separation disappeared, this critical, high art got absorbed into capitalist production, and its critical power was eliminated. “culture is taken over by the very powers it criticized” (introduction to the Culture Industry). This is a big part of Adorno’s theory.

The introduction to this book was written by J.M. Bernstein, and gives a brief overview of Adorno’s views on culture, and kind of puts a postmodernist spin on things. Here it is in a nutshell, and it will help clarify some things.
It is important to remember that Adorno is not being objective or unbiased, and he never made any claims to be. He is speaking strictly in terms of the culture industry’s relationship to the possibility for social transformation (i.e., liberation). He was trying to transcend an earlier form of Marxism that saw in capitalist development the hope of emancipation. I don’t know if you remember any of this from high school, but Marx said a society had to move through capitalism before coming to Communism, which would be ultimate freedom. So Marx felt that capitalism had elements of emancipation in it, even though it would be overthrown. Adorno, on the other hand, saw that capitalist development leads to more integration, more domination. I mentioned world wars, facism, Stalinism, etc earlier…this was a big part of Adorno’s thought on this. A lot of these guys were trying to come to terms with what the original hopes of the Enlightenment had brought forth…namely, horror. The Enlightenment was supposed to be a great enterprise, not spawn historical nightmares.
Adorno’s theories on the culture industry first appeared in Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored by Max Horkheimer. In it they wrote that Enlightenment rationality, which led to freedom from feudal structures, ultimately turned on itself, “the reason which was to be the means to satisfying human ends becomes its own end, and thereby turns against the true aims of the Enlightenment : freedom and happiness.” (intro)
Under capitalism, instead of all production being for the satisfaction of human needs (which it should be), things are produced for the sake of profit, the accumulation of more capital. Exchange value begins to dominate use value. This idea was taken to extremes by some of the later postmodern guys, my favorite example being Baudrillard. If you have gotten this far, and care at all, ask me about him, he’s a trip.

Adorno was one of the people that really began to bring the language thing into this type of philosophy. I don’t think he could have forseen how far it eventually went. The basic idea for the critical theorists is that language is being manipulated, especially in the media, and also takes a life of its own, so it cannot be trusted. So since public opinion is now bought and sold, and language is the medium of exchange for this, linguistic conventions cannot be trusted. This is why these people were big on street language, and oppositional language. So Herbert Marcuse in the 1960’s wrote about the phrases “far out”, “head trip”, blah blah blah. This still happens today. If you look at the mainstream media, the language is so stifling and ridiculous, dumbed down. The post-moderists and post-structuralists took the language thing much further, as I have said, but the Adorno and the Frankfurt School stayed on fairly stable ground with it.

Here is another important point. He is not condemning the culture industry for parading any particular ideology, or for hiding how things really are from the masses. It’s power rests on its ability to remove the thought of “any alternative to the status quo” (intro). So…even when things like death, destruction, poverty, war, and injustice are shown to everyone, it loses its poignancy. “to explain is to explain away” (intro). Somehow, by letting things out, it is ok for it to be happening, or not, but either way you are no longer required to think of alternatives in some sense.
Another point... Adorno also makes it clear that the behavior promoted by the culture industry makes people perform on themselves “the magic that is already worked upon them” (intro). “doing the work of the man, for the man” (Terence McKenna).
For me, this is perhaps the most important part : Adorno does not think it is necessary for people to be naïve, “duped”, convinced, or whatever, (e.g. “they’ve got you hooked, Dan”) for the culture industry to succeed - “the triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them” (intro).

But who cares, right? What makes Adorno, or any of these other people think that they have the answers? Why the sense of righteousness? Adorno recognized that the cultural critic has a very curious position to take, and is easily criticized himself. The cultural critic voices a profound discontent with the very culture that he owes his discontent. He wrote quite a bit about this problem, but I recommend starting at page 20, which is the end of the introduction to this book. Here is where Bernstein talks about critics of Adorno, and what problems they have with him. I think it would be a good idea to start there and read to the end of the intro. If you can get through all this without killing yourself, read just two of the essays in here, The Schema of Mass Culture, and Culture Industry Reconsidered. If you get through all THAT, then try How to Look At Television, and Free Time. Throughout, pay attention to the brackets and underlines I made when I first read it, they may help narrow the focus. Have fun…


Read this addendum if you want more information about Herbert Marcuse. His theories about the ideological character of advanced industrial society may shed some light on Adorno, and critical theory in general. His book One-Dimensional Man, published in 1964, was quickly picked up by the American counterculture of the 1960's New Left, and was a major influence in that era. I am about half-way through reading it right now, and here is a sample of what I have read so far. Some quotes and analysis follow :


"the distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation - liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable - while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefication; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets" (p.8)

"can one really distinguish between the mass media as instruments of information and entertainment, and as agents of manipulation and indoctrination? Between the automobile as nuisance and as convenience? Between the horrors and comforts of functional architecture? Between the work for national defense and the work for corporate gain? Between the private pleasure and the commercial and political unity involved in increasing the birth rate?" (p.8-9)

Marcuse liked to emphasize the fact that in our current mode of existence, where the needs of most people in advanced society are provided for, protest is presented as something silly, unnecessary, and childish. Even talking about these things becomes a joke, because everyone is happy, right? not so, 97% of the world, outside our little bubble (advanced industrial capitalism), lives in poverty, fear, and violence. "its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced...the intellectual and emotional refusal 'to go along' appears neurotic and impotent." (ibid).



Here is another guy's take on Marcuse...this comes from a weblog I found a while ago. the guy that writes the blog is hilarious. i like this post :


This Christmas day, I reread the last chapters of Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. If you don't know it, this book is the most profound critique of modern industrial society ever written - published in 1964, it remains a laser beam of analysis and articulation. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse attacked the fundamental "irrational rationality" of our present system. Mechanized progress could - and logically should - have led to a reduction in labor time and the creation of a post-work and post-scarcity global society - what Marcuse calls a "pacified" existence. Since World War Two, the response to this deep threat to the ruling elite was the creation of "false needs" in the consumer; the perpetuation of the fear of nuclear war and terrorism; and the use of the mass media to enforce consensus consciousness.

Marcuse wrote: "Perhaps an accident may alter the situation, but unless the recognition of what is being done and what is being prevented subverts the consciousness and the behavior of man, not even a catastrophe will bring about the change." This was clear after 9-11: Awareness opened for a moment, but the media and the government worked overtime to close it and reinforce the usual trance.
The last chapters of One Dimensional Man are tragic - I wept as I reread them. Marcuse realized that with the increasing power of technology, the human imagination - rather than any abstract "necessity" - had become the determining force in creating social reality. Marcuse writes: "In the light of the capabilities of advanced industrial civilization, is not all play of the imagination playing with technical possibilities, which can be tested as to their chances of realization? The romantic idea of a "science of the imagination" seems to assume an ever-more-empirical aspect." If the imagination running a technological society is one of dominance and death and control, then you get what we now have in the world.
The global misery we are currently enduring is not a problem of reality: It represents, in fact, a failure of the human imagination and of human consciousness. The mass culture, advertising, and propaganda industries work to limit consciousness to a low vibration - a frequency of mindless fear and insatiable material greed - to construct the subjects, the workers and consumers and soldiers, who are the requisite "biomass" needed to feed the technosphere's doom spiral. Yet, as Marcuse puts it, "the chance of the alternative" hovers over every manifestation, every moment, of this dreary dystopia.
A post-Marxist, Marcuse could see no practical or realistic way to transform the society from its doom-orientation to a happier one. In the end, he writes, "The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative." His book ends on a note of sorrow: "It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us."
Posted by spiros at January 6, 2004 08:32 PM

The level of strangness has increased in the past week or so. Or maybe that is just my perception of it. Last week, Karl Rove (Bush's senior political advisor) came to NY to speak at a Republican fund-raising event, and attacked Democrats over their response to 9/11. The June 23rd New York Times report gives the details. Rove said, "liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for out attackers". Rove also said that because of Senator Richard Durbin's remarks about detainee abuse US troops have been put in greater danger. "Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the MidEast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals". So, liberals want to put our troops in danger, Mr. Rove? I could go on for pages and pages, but to deconstruct these comments misses the point. There are so many layers to the play of political discourse, it is impossible to really know what is happening. Everyone knows that "liberals" are not trying to put our troops in danger. I dont think Karl Rove truly believes what he says. The media, and the political discourse ( the same thing ? ) immediately jumped on the Rove story. Democrats lashed out, calling for Rove's resignation. The White House of course fully supported him, and he has not resigned. in fact, the story has been paved over. This story then got placed in a media context of skepticism of the war and generalized criticism of the administration, and the emphasis shifted to Rumsfeld, Bush, and Cheney. I read an article online somewhere which called Rove a red herring, and called for everyone to keep an eye on the situation. Well, I did. It is so strange how these things filter down in the media, and get absorbed into the whole mileu of strangness. ----- On the same day this story appeared, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision to extend the policy of imminent domain for "economic development". This means that it is now easier for homeowner's property to be seized by the government, and handed over to the highest private bidder if the development of this property serves the "public good". Justice Sandra O'Connor was among the dissentiing voters. ---- Again, on the same day, June 23rd, the Ny Times reported that "one of China's largest state-controlled oil companies made a $18.5 billion unsolicited bid" for UNOCAL, a large California based oil company. This is the first time something like this has happened, and testifies to China's increasing economic power. This has sent shiver through the business community and media. Are things being shaken up a bit? Is the illusion of the "end of history" crumbling? AGAIN, on the same day, it was reported that 4 car bomb blasts killed 17 people in central Baghdad. ------The acceleration of all processes is absolutely bewildering. I am reminded of Jean Baudrillard's notion of the "code", an interplay of signs, symbols, running this whole neo-capitalist cybernetic order. The "code" is not some conspiracy being run by the social engineers and politicians, but is an unwritten, self-sustained process of cybernetic control. It is writing itself as it proceeds. Even the political crypto-facists of advanced industrial capitalism are subject to it, though they are in considerably greater control than the masses. When the Karl Rove story broke, this was what came to mind for me. There is some goal which is striving for it's own achievment, and even Rove does not REALLY know why he is saying these things, regardless of the multi-layered logic behind such ridiculous political events. It is obvious that the Republicans and Democrats are the same. This was realized and written about decades ago by perceptive intellectuals, and has become a truism in many circles. But most people do not even know this material exists. It does not fit into the dominant discourse. Both parties play these back and forth games, and the public follows, thinking that political debate still exists in any real sense. But even those people feigning politics have no idea what is ahead, and are scrambling for control. This is why Karl Rove poses as a red herring, and the Democrats play their prescribed role as the noble opposition. Witness the involution, keep your eyes wide open. Or do I really believe this?

Highway 212

(6-8-05) New York Times - Highway 212, the 68-mile road that winds into the Northeast corner of Yellowstone Park through Red Lodge, Montana has been closed due to mudslides. On May 19, these slides covered 13 sections of Beartooth Highway, about 12 miles worth. An estimated 500 million tons of mud and rock now block the road. During the road's open season, about 900 cars a day drive over it. The tourist town of Red Lodge expects revenue to fall far below normal levels this year. Opened in 1936, the road climbs from 5,555 feet at Red Lodge to Beartooth Pass at just under 11,000 feet, in Montana's highest mountains. "The serpentine drive can take three hours or more. Most of the road climbs through pine forest and across open slopes. At the top, however, the road travels above timberline to a place known as the Top of the World, which is breathtaking and surreal - broad, grassy tundra, small, still lakes that mirror the sky and huge rounded boulders in the meadow. There are expansive views of snow mottled mountains for miles in every direction. On his CBS travel program, On The Road, Charles Kuralt called it 'the most beautiful roadway in America'." Repairs are expected to take some time.

--The New York Times, and of course Charles Kuralt (!) were not kidding. This is indeed, some of the most beautiful country I have seen in my travels. In late July, early August of 2002 I traveled this road on my way North out of Yellowstone Park in my 1984 VW Rabbit convertible. I had no idea it was such a well-known place, but was blown away by the beauty of it. The road climbs from the valleys of Northeast Yellowstone into an incredible and absolutely surreal highland environment. It looked like a dreamworld up there. The area around Beartooth Pass was unbelievable. It was bumpy, green, rocky, and sparsely dotted with clumps of pine trees. Alpine lakes were scattered around this bizarre, warped tabletop in the clouds, shining like jewels. I exited my car, stood on a huge bank of cold, white snow, and had someone from another car take a picture. It began to rain, then turned into an intense hailstorm. The weather cleared up on the drive down the pass, and I wound my way down into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, on to the flatter ground of the Montana high plains, where the city of Billings sits. I then chased the storms across Montana and North Dakota for the next day. I've often thought about that day during the past few years, and this article brought it back to me again. I was in an odd state of mind at the time. It was cool, grey, and wet, and I was alone, with my music and my pipe for 2 weeks. Definitely an experience I would call formative. I hope highway 212 gets repaired in short order so more people can see this place. I've posted some photos below of my trip through the area.

Before the climb, Northeast Yellowstone


on the way up...


the Top of The World


happy tree


surreal landscape


summer snow


on the way down...

old news, but worth reading

Commentary on a March 1st, 2005 New York Times Article : The State Department has issued a report detailing "an array of human rights abuses last year by the Iraqi government, including torture, rape, and illegal detentions by police officers and functionariesof the interim administration that took power in June". The report said the Iraqis "generally respected human rights, but serious problems remain".

--A curious position to take, dont you think? Kind of half-assed, if you ask me.--

"reports of arbitrary deprivation of life, torture, impunity, poor prison conditions, particularly in pretrial detention facilities".

--oh yeah, the places where most Iraqi prisoners are kept because they havent even been charged with anything. Some are never charged, but are kept there for an unreasonably long time before being released to their families.--

The report also criticized US allies such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

--arent these the same people we are selling billions of dollars in weapons to as we speak?--

"the report did not address incidents in Iraq in which Americans were involved, like the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib" the document stressed positive accomplishments such as the Jan. 30 election. A senior official said "we dont hesitate to call a spade a spade".

--right. why not own up to our own abuses, instead of calling Amnesty International reports critical of the US "absurd". One of the best ways to stop international human rights abuses and terrorism is to set an example and stop contributing to them ourselves. Noam Chomsky has articulately represented this position. By abusing terror suspects, and selling incredibly destructive weapons to foreign countries, we are simply contributing to the problems we are supposedly trying to eliminate (terrorism, torture, etc,).--

The report cited a Human Rights Watch document accusing the Iraqis of torturing prisoners,including "beatings with cables and hose pipes, electric shocks to their earlobes and genitals, food and water deprivation". In one case, enough evidence had been gathered against police officers to prosecute them for "systematically raping and torturing female detainees". Two of the men were sentenced, the other four were "demoted and reassigned". The report said that there have been improvements over Saddam's regime, but prison conditions still fall below international standards.

--A "democratic" Iraqi government? can this last?--
_____________________________________________________________________

NY Times 4-10-05
"Tens of thousands of Iraqis marked the second anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein by marching" in Baghdad Saturday to demand the withdrawal of American forces.
--that sure sounds like a lot of people. how many Iraqis do we have to kill to eliminate the "insurgency", which is not an insurgency, but a populace that simply does not want us there. Most Iraqis are potential insurgents, they just have not picked up guns yet.--

Addendum to comments on Pablo Vila's - Crossing Borders

"My grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite" - Borges (The Library of Babel)


"he's real, you can touch him. And he'll say 'dude!' "
- Dave Band 3-01-05

Here is an addendum to the short piece I wrote on the Vila book :

Early on, the influence of the "post" project in this realm seems to have tended towards notions of a "hybrid" border identity. More recently, scholars such as Pablo Vila have moved in the direction of multiplicity, and "narrative" identities. Following fashionable trends in academic discourse, scholars from multiple disciplines have mounted a critique of the "post" project as originally manifest in the social sciences. In the border context, Claudia Sadoswki-Smith's collection of essays cuts across many disciplines and offers illuminating insights. The idea seems to be to expose the post-structuralist approach as politically impotent, and intellectually static. The idea of the hybrid, transitional border subject is said to de-politicize, while paying lip service to cultural flux as an emancipatory possibility. Vila's approach does not seems to fall into this trap, despite his seemingly uninformed invocation of Derrida, Baudrillard, and others. He has tried to make his interviewees more aware of the narrative structure of their identity, with the goal of bringing them closer to their respective "others". Here lies the possibility of political action, community, and change.

Indonesia and Foreign Policy Update

A May 27th New York Times article describes a recently published study by the New School University based World Policy Institute. The research found that American weapons sales to foreign countries has increased dramatically since September 11th, 2001. This seems to explode the administration smoke-screen that a world armed to the teeth is a threat to America and its people, and that we need to keep powerful weapons out of the hands of dangerous states. "Well," one ignorant American may say, "as long as we are only arming friendly, democratic countries, it is ok". Fair enough, uniformed citizen. But who are we really selling weapons to?
The report reveals that some 2-dozen nations have become first-time recipients, or have been allowed back into such programs after long abscences. The largest of these aid programs, Foreign Military Financing, increased 68 percent from 2001 to 2003 to a $6 billion peak before dropping back to $4.5 billion currently. "More than half of the top 25 recipients in 2003...were countries that the State Department has defined as undemocratic" (NYT). Such nations include Saudi Arabia ($1.1 bill in sales), Egypt ($1 billion), Kuwait ($153 million), and the United Arab Emirates ($110 million).
Some of the countries on the list have serious internal conflicts or poor human rights records, such as Nigeria, Tunisia, and Nepal for example. I hope they have a damn good reason for arming all these people. "Policy makers in Washington have said that the aid is necessary to secure overseas bases or reward allies" (NYT). How about this for conspiracy theory? Maybe we arm all these little countries so they can continue waging war on each other and their own citizenry. Why would the American establishment (the government and it's associated military corporations) do such a thing? Maybe because some of the same politicians that allow this to happen sit on the Board of Directors' of said military contractors. Just a thought. Who stands to gain here? This incessant arming and re-arming of small, warring nations also puts America in a position of greater power over the developing world.
William Hartung, the author of the study, notes that these weapons could actually end up "fueling conflict, arming human rights abusers or falling into the hands of U.S. adversaries". That this even has to be stated reveals the sad state of public awareness of these issues. You do not have to be Noam Chomsky to realize that the sale of weapons will lead to their use. Is this the most responsible approach to our foreign policy interests? you decide. "arming human rights abusers"...this is exactly what we are doing in Indonesia. How? The Times article makes no mention of the Indonesian case, so I located the World Policy Intstitute report myself, and this is only some of what I found :

(Read on, but I suggest you read my February 8th post if you have not already before going any further.)

"one of Condoleezza Rice's first acts as Secretary of State in the Second Bush administration was to certify Indonesia for IMET military training programs over the objections of members of Congress and non-governmental organizations" (mentioned on Feb 8th)
"President Susilo Bambang Tudhoyono recently told reporters 'if we had a stronger military, we could have done a lot more', to bring aid to tsunami victims, and called for fivefold increase in defense spending to build a 'strong and modern military' ". How nice, he is playing the benevolent humanitarian card to call for more American made weapons to support the brutalization of his citizens by an out-of-control military branch.
The report also cites Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on his January, 2005 visit to Jakarta, when he said that military relations are a "resource we need to rebuild". Resource for what? How are our renewed military relations with Indonesia a resource to us? Yes, they are cited as a major player in the War on Terror, but I don't see massive contingents of Indonesian soldiers dying in the streets of Baghdad.
Since the announcment earlier this year of renewed military relations, contact between the 2 militaries has been on the increase. "Indonesian military participated as an obserer in military excercises in October and November 2004, which brought them into contact with the U.S. Navy". Apparently this process began long before the formal announcement was made.
So, considerable tax-payer funds are being invested in this project to arm violent governments around the world. Indonesia is just one interesting example. "For fiscal year 2006, President Bush has requested $800,000 in IMET, up from the $459,000 that Congress froze in 2004. Jakarta also expects to receive $70 million in Economic Support Funds and the $6 million in Anti-Terrorism Activities Funds to train and equip the police SWAT-like counter-terrorism force".
Do you, as a taxpayer, feel comfortable with your money being spent to train a military that consistently attacks its citizens, and represses anyone who dares to speak out? America, is the supposed beacon of "freedom" and "democracy" for the world to follow, and does the citizenry even know what is going on? Of course not. How does our government justify the use of our money in this way? Here's how : "The Congressional Budget justification for 2006 notes that 'Indonesia's contribution to the Global War on terrorism is also a vital U.S. interest". Fine, prove it to me.
In closing, let me re-visit Indonesia's war on it's citizens. In recent months, the situation in West Papua district has remained the same. Indonesian troops continue to jail and kill separatists, destroy villages, and brutalize protesters. I risk repeating myself, but will reiterate. How does this war against the Papuan separatist movement benefit the US? Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, Inc. continues to operate in the contested region. Papuan independence could mean the end of massive profits for the New Orleans based corporation running the worlds largest copper mine. The company earned a net income of $130 million in the first quarter of this year. Revenues were $803 million, more than double the $360 million in the same quarter a year ago (Times Picayune, April 20th). Certain American shareholders would be quite upset if Papua gained independence, and nationalised its mines. If I had the time, I would research its board members, and see what kind of connections they have to the current administration.
Pay attention...

so, Transfixion played Wildwood Lanes in Riverhead last night. I can say with confidence that it was our worst show ever...and a big, fat, horrible joke. First of all, it was at a fucking BOWLING ALLEY!! There should not be shows at a white-trash bowling alley in middle-of-nowhere Riverhead. But the local radio station "The Bone" sponsors shows there every weekend, and my drummer Jay is friendly with the guy that sets them up and does the sound board, so we got on the bill. It was supposed to be a "great show", with a huge turnout..you know, 200 people or so. The bands that played before us were absolutely terrible punk bands with no talent, and brought no people in. Apparently, there was a total of 48 people there, including band-members. Just before we went on stage, the fire marshal showed up with a noise complaint from nearby houses, but we played anyway. We were supposed to go onstage at 11pm the latest, and did not get up there until 12:30 am. Most people had left at that point, aside from our friends, a few stragglers from the other bands, and some employees of the place.
It being so late, we had all been drinking from early in the evening (half price drinks for the band), so everyone was pretty fucked up, leading to some onstage sloppiness. We didnt play well at all. Jay couldnt hear the guitars through his monitor, so we mangled the first three songs. My guitar sounded slightly out of tune the entire time, but no-one in the crowd seemed to notice. My vocals were abysmal, as was my physical condition. I had finished a 24 hour fast the day before, and was still somewhat weak. This, in combination with the alcohol, caused me to become lightheaded with every long scream. At one point, my fingers became numb and I almost passed out on stage. During the parts in "All Hail The New Flesh" that require me to sing actual notes instead of scream, my voice wasnt capable.
But our friends are always very supportive, and cheered us on the whole time. If not for them, we would be fucked. Most of them paid a $10 cover charge for a shitty show, at a shitty venue, and did not complain at all. Dago, Gilberti, Josh, and Moff showed up with black "security" t-shirts on. Best guys ever. Moff spent the whole time puking out of the car with a stomach virus, and shitting his brains out in the woods behind the building, wiping his ass with his socks. That's a real friend. My metal friend Katie came down all the way from Connecticut, and saw us at our worst. Ridiculous.

selected quotes from Kurt Vonnegut's - God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

he drove away his rich friends by telling them that whatever they had was based on dumb luck. He advised his artist friends that the only people who paid any attention to what they did were rich horses' asses with nothing more athletic to do. He asked his scholarly friends, "Who has time to read all the boring crap you write and listen to all the boring things you say"?

But from somewhere something is trying to tell me where to go, what to do here, and why to do it. Don't worry, I don't hear voices. But there is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life in New York. And I roam. And I roam.

He rambled on, said such things as, "You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them"

'Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here...'

The thing was that Earth was the only place in the whole known Universe where language was used. It was a unique Earthling invention. Everybody else used mental telepathy, so Earthlings could get pretty good jobs as language teachers just about anywhere they went. The reason creatures wanted to use language instead of mental telepathy was that they found out they could get so much more done with language. Language made them so much more active. Mental telepathy, with everybody constantly telling everybody everything, produced a cort of generalized indifference to all information. but language, with its slow, narrow meanings, made it possible to think about one thing at a time - to start thinking in terms of projects.

The New York Times reports today that senior U.S. military officers have pulled back from the idea that positive developments in Iraq after the election there would allow for a substantial withdrawal of American troops. They also note that U.S. forces may be there for 'several years'. On Wednesday, an un-named senior officer noted that the 21 car bombings that have taken place this month almost match the 25 of ALL LAST YEAR. These bombings have killed nearly 500 people, about half of them Iraqi soldiers, police, and recruits. There have been 126 such car bombings in the last 80 days. How will these developments impact the morale of the Iraqi forces we are supposed to be leaving in charge? Absolute mess.

A letter arrived last week, no return address, unknown author. Tortured and barely intelligible, clearly, a trembling appendage created this. It spoke of the one and the many…the error of creation…One. Lucid, screaming from behind a curtain of layered intentionality. To witness, or to succumb, the glorious gift of beings…all. Membrane formation, sensory development... finally clothed in muscle, tissue, and bone…a strategy for transcending time, seeking itself in differing forms…a reverse teleological afterimage. Convergences…systems entwined, birthing a cosmic atom. A singularity.
I had seen talk of this before in certain works, pregnant with possibility, but relegated to dusty library stacks and other buried places nobody with a real life took the time to explore. But I had spent hours in those dimly lit corridors, piecing together scattered ideas and meta-theories, which were claiming not to be. Same search for the Logos, same lunge for the wordless…the unspeakable. That which can be told is not?

At some point in what we call “pre-history”, an understanding of this whole complex exploded onto the walls of caves…scraped, painted, intentionality. Art emerged. The social resonated with the natural, the social resonated with the social. Feedback into new emergence. The noosphere blinked into existence, encircled the planet…and drove towards higher dimensionality. Planting and herding shot the roots of a new psychism deep beneath the telluric surface… branching out, dividing abstract productions of planetary space. Particular continental axes aligned, directed flows of being, energy, quality, food production, animal domestication, societal advantage. New convergences, concresences…membranes, cultures, spheres.

"you dont hurt my sister, thats a bad move."
"what im trying to say is justine slips up, cheats on jeff...not trying to diminish your sisters character"

i am trying...

The Image
Mountains standing close together:
The image of Keeping Still.
Thus the superior man
Does not permit his thoughts
To go beyond his situation.

The Lines
Six in the fifth place means:
Keeping his jaws still.
The words have order.
Remorse disappears.

So Cimino-fest was a complete success. After a harrowing three hour drive from Ludlow Vermont during which I was pulled over twice for a blown tail-light, I arrived in Albany at 3 am. Though the party was mostly Dave organized, he decided to spend the night "club-clubbing" with Danny Pizzo and Mike Davis. When they finally showed up again at 5 am, hilarity ensued. Cimino kicked Dave out for not coming to the party he himself organized. A barrage of timeless quotes emerged from this exchange : "leave, when you're ready...the clock is ticking" "I'll move your body" "I'll clear the party" "put your shoes on out here, and get the fuck out" "you're fake".
Aside from this, the party was awesome. Dirty Gennies, Overtired rantings, Moff flatulence, and Denny's.....best.

Awesome time. Thanks so much Cimino for having us at your place, so glad I got to see you guys and get ridiculous. Hope to do this again before I flee the East Coast.

"Trout was the only character I ever created who had enough imagination to suspect that he might be the creation of another human being. He had spoken of this possibility several times to his parakeet." - Vonnegut

"With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another." - Borges

"one can see the thumbprint of editors..we are embedded in something like a novel...and immediately, life became art...plot elements began to unfold." - McKenna
_____________________________________________________________________

"The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveller were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder(which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope." - Borges
___________________________________________________________________

Looking at the theoretical discussion in the appendix to Pablo Vila's analysis of identity construction in the Texas Border Region (Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders : Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the US-Mexico Border, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2000), I am beginning to see how social scientists love to invoke post-modernism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction, often without truly understanding the relationships between these terms and the various names they toss around (Foucault, Derrida, Laclau, etc.). This is not surprising in Vila's case, as he is dealing with the complexity of subject positions in a contested border region, and how they are created through narrative structures. His mention of Baudrillard, Foucault, and Derrida in the same sentence as "post-structuralist authors...[who] concur in this characterization of the postmodern subject", stumped me. He also freely tosses around Gramsci in this discussion. While I have an interest in most of these theorists, and am not opposed to the use of their models, there are some issues here. I guess I am agreeing with Bryan Palmer in his insistence that the social sciences have latched onto the highly misunderstood tenets of authors commonly referred to as "postmodern", without actually understanding what these theorists are saying. Post-modernists are not neccessarily post-structuralists, and most are certainly not deconstructionists. It does not seem intellectually responsible to toss out these names, and equate them with each other based on limited knowledge of their work. This is not to say that I understand completely what any of these authors have said. I would assume that an accomplished scholar such as Vila would have more in-depth knowledge of the "post-modern" phenomenon than an aspiring grad student such as myself. Perhaps not. But either way, it is not necessary to wantonly lump together these theorists to advance the idea of provisional identity, fluctuating subjectivity, and all the rest of it.
Vila's methodology is wonderful, and the interviews reveal quite a bit about identity construction on the border. But his seemingly uninformed discussion of the post-modern lends credence to Palmer's theory of it's ineffectiveness as a transformative enterprise. From a Marxist perspective such as Palmer's, these narratives reveal something actual, a temporary experience, conditioned by the globalization of capital. For example, when the interviewed subjects were made aware of the narrative structure of their self-image, much of it gleaned from the dominant culture and it's need to preserve hegemony and power, many of them changed their story the second time around. For a Marxist, how these narratives of identity have been, or could be applied as an emancipatory strategy would be more important than highly abstract discussions about post-structuralism.
Ok, Ive had enough. It is way past my bedtime...and nobody cares about this anyway.

Cimino Fest

Attend Cimino-Fest! Dave has planned an exquisite gathering for the March 4th weekend. It will be held at the Cimino residence in Albany, NY. For more details, check out the informative website... Adoborific ...click on the juice box link and witness the insanity.

I may end up in Tempe, Arizona before the year is out. Karen was notified last week that she has been accepted to ASU. I have not received any such notification yet, but even if not accepted, I may go there anyway and take classes as a non-matriculated student. more later...

U.S. Moves to Mend Ties With Indonesian Military : A Critical Analysis

The Bush administration has made moves to resume a working relationship with the Indonesian military. In fact, $1 million of "spare parts" were "dispatched" in January for Indonesia's aging military transport jets (NY Times, Feb 7, 2005)
From the 1970's-late 90's, the US supported the Suharto regime, a brutal government with a horrible human rights record, one of the worst in the world. Anyone remember East Timor? According to the NY Times, the US "curbed military ties in 1992 and cut them back further five ears ago after the army was involved in the killings of hundreds of civilians in East Timor, a province that has since gained independence". Actually the US continued training the Indonesian military, only secretly, illegally, in defiance of Congressional intent. The program was code-named "Iron Balance", and was uncovered by Britian's Observer in September, 1999. The training included "urban guerrilla warfare, surveillance, counter-intelligence,sniper marksmanship and 'psychological operations' ". But it is ok not to talk about that?? This training continued until 1998, when the world finally noticed the brutality of the Suharto regime.
From February-July 1998, the Indonesian military, according to credible church sources, actually killed thousands, not hundreds. After the population of East Timor voted for independence, they were invaded, a quarter of a million were flushed into Indonesian territory, and around 100,000 remain in concentration camps.
The US broke off relations following these events, but did not intervene, as it has in many other nations where so called "murderous regimes" exist. Why not here, why anywhere else (Iraq, Afghanistan)? The Western powers wouldnt even drop food on the thousands of civilians stranded in the forests, starving and dying of disease...."it is their responsibility" was the official stance. All the while, the Indonesian government was busy pardoning the military leaders responsible for the atrocities.
The NY Times article stressed that for the US to resume the training of the Indonesian military, Congressional approval is necessary. Congressional dis-approval never stopped us before, why should it now? Only when things got completely out of control, and potentially disastrous for our image, did the US act in any positive way. Now we move back into support of a brutal regime, which continues to mount atrocities against its own citizens. In West Papua Province, a separatist movement has arisen, aiming for independence from Indonesia. Predictably, the military has waged a continuous campaign of terror, intimidation, and outright warfare against the mostly Christian population of this area. A militant Muslim group has even arisen as of late, further muddying the situation. This group has been used as a tool by the military to wage a "jihad" on the "heathen" (Christian) separatists. A simple web search on these topics will easy uncover credible sources on the unfolding of these events.
The Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights-Indonesia Advocacy Team has been preparing regular reports on conditions in the region. Their latest release (Feb 4, 2005) cites church sources, claiming that the Indonesian forces have continued their operations, "forcing thousands of Papuan civilians to flee into the forests where lack of food, shelter and medicine have caused deaths and extensive illness". Additionally, the military has expanded its operations in neighboring districts. I think it is safe to assume that similar results will follow for the local population in these areas.
Here's another wrinkle. Some of the human rights abuses in the disputed area (West Papua) documented by the RFK Memorial Center have taken place in and around the mining operation run by PT Freeport Indonesia. Being the worlds largest copper and coal mine, PT Freeport's parent company is Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc., based in...you guessed it, the United States!!!. New Orleans to be exact (Reuters). Now I dont mean to draw irrelevant connections so...come to your own.
Or, put this in your pipe: according to the Feb 7th NY Times article, China has recently opened its arms to Indonesia, offering to sell fighter jets at "concessionary rates", and extending an invitation to meet at Beijing. Could this be a motivating factor behind the administrations decision? A rosy relationship between China and Indonesia would certainly not be beneficial to the US, or the New Orleans mining company running things down in West Papua. The US cites international aid surrounding the recent tsunami disaster as the impetus for renewed communication between the two nations. The US sees Indonesia as a"potentially crucial player in its campaign against terrorism". Check out the story about the two American school-teachers murdered in West Papua District in 2002. This story, and the subsequent investigation, continues to play out, with interesting developments. First it was blamed on the Indonesian military, by the Indonesian police themselves. More recently, the US Department of Justice has levelled charges against a member of the West Papuan separatist group I spoke of (OPM). What a surprise. But the full investigation remains unresolved, and continues to develop.
Invest an hour of your time and look into these issues, then ask yourself if it would be wise/humane for the US to resume military relations with such a brutal government. After that, ask yourself why certain choices may be made, and who they benefit.

I need to vent a bit. This Ward Churchill thing is absolutely ridiculous. Any excuse for anti-intellectualism in this country. This man co-authored one of the most politically pertinent books ever to go to print, The Cointelpro Papers. He is a highly respected academic and American Indian activist. Admittedly, his comments were somewhat extreme, and could have been framed differently. He made it VERY easy for the media to run away with this one. Some of his students appeared on the O'Reilly factor the other night to mount a defense, which predictably, the producers of FOX made impossible. So, I went to the source. This is a link to the University of Colorado Ethnic Studies department, containing his public statement on the matter ...http://www.colorado.edu/EthnicStudies/ . I feel strongly about this because the information I imbibed from the Cointelpro Papers profoundly changed my view of American freedom, just at the time when I became seriously politically conscious. Using documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, Churchill exposed decades of political violence by the Federal Government against activist groups.
Next.....the US has dropped all charges against Sabrina Harman, the soldier who posed in front of a pyramid of naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison. So, we prosecute one soldier, give him a miserably weak punishment, raise it up as another triumph of "freedom" , and now it is ok to let everyone else off? Unbelievable. Something is seriously wrong here. And nobody knows, or even cares. Nobody is even reading that story today. Why? Because one of the biggest cash cows of the year is taking place. Go ahead, sit in front of your stupid TV today and watch the Super Bowl, you fat fucking morons. Eat chips, drink beer, worship your brainless idols smashing each other into concussed idiocy. Become one with the images, they will show you the way. Buy buy buy. We are so fucked...

Frank

Frank was one of Dave's first roomates at Binghamton back in '99. He quickly turned out to be an extremely paranoid character. Just weird in general. Dave once told me that he was afraid to sleep when Frank was around. The kid reappeared periodically for a few years, and even made some trips out to Long Island...which we exploited for our entertainment and/or profitablility. After Dan punched him in the face through his car window, he dissappeared for a while. Every once in a while though, he shows up on my buddy list under one of his hundreds of possible screen names. He likes to harrass me generally, and ask me to jam with him, usually getting hostile when I reject his offer. This conversation occured a couple of weeks ago :

Lucille De Ville: hey jay
Oiliboilum: hi frank
Lucille De Ville: listen
Oiliboilum: ?
Lucille De Ville: what scales do you know
Lucille De Ville: like how many different ones do you know?
Oiliboilum: not much anymore,
Oiliboilum: i dont know the names anymore
Lucille De Ville: wel how many did you know
Oiliboilum: I just play what sounds good
Lucille De Ville: like how many about
Oiliboilum: i used to know them all
Lucille De Ville: how many did you know?
Oiliboilum: there are 7 i think
Lucille De Ville: ah
Oiliboilum: ionian, dorian phrygian lydian mixolydian aeolian locrian
Lucille De Ville: i think i know a few
Lucille De Ville: right
Oiliboilum: I dont punch like mohammed alo
Lucille De Ville: i know like the major
Oiliboilum: ali*
Oiliboilum: Ionion
Lucille De Ville: yeah
Oiliboilum: Ionian
Lucille De Ville: so um
Lucille De Ville: isnt axl rose pretty?
Oiliboilum: he has a sweet ass
Lucille De Ville: like he's pretty right
Lucille De Ville: doesnt he though
Oiliboilum: i want to shave it
Lucille De Ville: you like gnr?
Oiliboilum: then shave my face with the same razor
Lucille De Ville: hehhehhe
Lucille De Ville: yo you like gnr?
Lucille De Ville: seriously
Oiliboilum: i dont listen to them
Oiliboilum: but Use yor illusion albums rock
Lucille De Ville: yeah
Lucille De Ville: like some of it is wack but they got some good shit
Lucille De Ville: lot of unrealized potential i think
Lucille De Ville: so did it snow up there?
Oiliboilum: a few times
Lucille De Ville: yeah we got some snow
Lucille De Ville: yo jay
Lucille De Ville: lemme ask you
Lucille De Ville: who are like your top 5 bands
Lucille De Ville: that you like
Lucille De Ville: just humor me ok
Lucille De Ville: cmon jay seriously
Lucille De Ville: who you like
Lucille De Ville: like top 5
Oiliboilum: impossible
Lucille De Ville: what
Lucille De Ville: just tell me some of your faves
Oiliboilum: always becoming, never being
Lucille De Ville: ok at the moment
Oiliboilum: P. Oleary
Oiliboilum: Strapping Young Lad
Oiliboilum: Deftones
Lucille De Ville: ?
Oiliboilum: mastodon
Lucille De Ville: those first 2
Oiliboilum: High on Fire
Lucille De Ville: are those legit
Oiliboilum: yeah
Oiliboilum: P. Oleary is a friend of mine who records at home
Lucille De Ville: cool i'll look em up
Oiliboilum: and Strapping is the best metal bandin the world
Lucille De Ville: yo
Lucille De Ville: like i dont mind metal
Lucille De Ville: it's not my fave kinda music
Lucille De Ville: but i figure
Lucille De Ville: with my tastes and style
Lucille De Ville: and yours
Lucille De Ville: we could like
Lucille De Ville: put some shit together
Oiliboilum: jam?
Oiliboilum: no
Lucille De Ville: seriously
Lucille De Ville: why
Oiliboilum: cant
Lucille De Ville: why
Oiliboilum: busy
Lucille De Ville: with what
Oiliboilum: life
Lucille De Ville: like what
Oiliboilum: tossing salad,
Lucille De Ville: jay
Oiliboilum: drinking man's-milk
Lucille De Ville: stop bein a bitch
Lucille De Ville: cmon yo
Lucille De Ville: seriously
Oiliboilum: ill make you my bitch frank'
Oiliboilum: you wouldnt want that
Lucille De Ville: fine
Lucille De Ville: i'll be your bitch
Lucille De Ville: just stop being difficult
Lucille De Ville: damn yo
Lucille De Ville: i think yer passin on an opportunity here
Lucille De Ville: and its fuckin bs dude
Lucille De Ville: i'm not askin for all that much
Lucille De Ville: wait you still up in vrmont?
Oiliboilum: ya
Lucille De Ville: ok can i ask you this
Lucille De Ville: who do you like jam with on the isalnd
Oiliboilum: my band
Lucille De Ville: where do they live
Lucille De Ville: like nassau?
Lucille De Ville: or holbrook?
Oiliboilum: suffolk
Lucille De Ville: are any of them on line
Lucille De Ville: like do they have screen names?
Oiliboilum: yeah
Lucille De Ville: can you give em to me
Oiliboilum: absolutely not
Lucille De Ville: shy
Lucille De Ville: why
Lucille De Ville: ?
Oiliboilum: because you are pathological, and people's lives are too complicated enough
Lucille De Ville: pathological?
Lucille De Ville: in what way?
Lucille De Ville: ja
Oiliboilum: from the perspective of the subject, it is nearly impossible to visualizr
Lucille De Ville: yo
Lucille De Ville: you know i'm cool
Lucille De Ville: but you just like being a lil bitch
Oiliboilum: cool as ice baby
Lucille De Ville: does it make you feel better about yourself or somethin
Lucille De Ville: whatever dude
Lucille De Ville: its fuckin lame
Lucille De Ville: but whatever
Lucille De Ville: most ppl are like that
Lucille De Ville: but i thought you werent like most ppl
Lucille De Ville: fine dude
Oiliboilum: join us, frank
Lucille De Ville: join who?
Lucille De Ville: most ppl?
Oiliboilum: most ppl
Lucille De Ville: no thanx
Lucille De Ville: i'm past that point
Oiliboilum: :'(
Lucille De Ville: i thought you did too
Lucille De Ville: but i guess not
Lucille De Ville: honestly
Lucille De Ville: i'm not just like wastinh my time here
Lucille De Ville: or yours
Lucille De Ville: but i thought we were on the same page
Oiliboilum: you are sick
Oiliboilum: i love it
Lucille De Ville: sick?
Oiliboilum: so entertaining
Lucille De Ville: how
Lucille De Ville: whatever dude
Lucille De Ville: i'm smarter than you
Lucille De Ville: but i thought that maybe
Lucille De Ville: you were like at least 1/2 as smart as me
Lucille De Ville: and that might be enough to keep you along
Oiliboilum: nah, just 1/8
Lucille De Ville: but i guess not
Lucille De Ville: whatever bitch
Oiliboilum: i havent grasped the Ultimate like you yet, frank
Lucille De Ville: youre so fuckin stupid dude
Lucille De Ville: i'm tryin to like
Lucille De Ville: yo nevermind
Lucille De Ville: have a nice life
Oiliboilum: always
Oiliboilum: why do you get so upset?
Lucille De Ville: becuz
Lucille De Ville: i'm tryin to fuckin talk to you
Oiliboilum: i care about your feelings frank
Lucille De Ville: and all you can do is patronize me
Lucille De Ville: yo
Lucille De Ville: i know how i am
Lucille De Ville: i do it on purpose ok
Lucille De Ville: and if you dont get it
Lucille De Ville: if you dont get me
Lucille De Ville: then there was never anyting there to begin with
Lucille De Ville: so nothin was lost
Lucille De Ville: good luck with your path
Lucille De Ville: and wish me good luck on mine aight
Lucille De Ville: later b
Oiliboilum : you dont have to go away frank
Lucille De Ville: look whatever
Lucille De Ville: just dont call me sick
Lucille De Ville: or whatever
Oiliboilum: sounds good
Lucille De Ville: becuz it insults my intelligence
Oiliboilum: i didnt say anything about your intelligence
Lucille De Ville: whatever yo
Lucille De Ville: indirectly
Lucille De Ville: but seriously
Lucille De Ville: i dont really know you that well
Lucille De Ville: or your friends
Lucille De Ville: or dave or whatever
Lucille De Ville: but i've been scouting for boys
Lucille De Ville: and maybe you just dont make the cut ya know
Lucille De Ville: no hard feelings
Oiliboilum: scouting for what?
Oiliboilum: your next feature man-flick?
Lucille De Ville: right
Lucille De Ville: obv youve been conditioned like the rest of em
Lucille De Ville: take that how you will
Oiliboilum: uh huh
Oiliboilum: falling into line, frank
Oiliboilum: dont you realize, there is only one way
Lucille De Ville: and that is...
Oiliboilum: oh, you will see, you will see
Oiliboilum: beater
Lucille De Ville: yeah you def from long island
Lucille De Ville: i just thought you were different hay
Oiliboilum: what is that supposed to mean
Lucille De Ville: you know exactly what it means
Lucille De Ville: or maybe
Lucille De Ville: maybe you just have a small cock
Lucille De Ville: it's cool
Lucille De Ville: i understand
Lucille De Ville: i mean i dont
Lucille De Ville: but i can imagine
Lucille De Ville: i'm just tryin to put myself in the place of how it feels to be a lil bitch like yoself
Lucille De Ville: no offense or anything
Lucille De Ville: if anything i'm the one who feels bad
Lucille De Ville: metal sux anyway
Lucille De Ville: later jay
Lucille De Ville signed off at 11:35:42 PM

1st semester grades are due on Monday. Time to go through all my student folders and organize, assess, and calculate. They have been getting away with alot lately. 2nd semester will be more challenging. I want to send them back to their schools actually knowing something.
A decent sized snow storm is predicted for tonight into tommorow. Powder day on the mountain tommorow!! And no work for me! I will actually be able to make it to my cousin's race.

I need a disk erasure, soon. I am not referring to my computer. A compressed disk erasure. It has been more than a year, and it is time to shed some ego, for sure. This became painfully evident this morning. This has to stop.

Governer Bush kicked off a weeklong, $40 million inauguration party today. His speech stressed "freedom" and liberty as the "calling of our time". We must spread our our particular vision of these concepts throughout the globe. How does this translate into uncolored language, exposing the ideology behind it ? Four more years of re-making the world in our image...... see the NY Times Article

....

driftless (?) babble

So, I've joined the rest of the crowd and started one of these things. The major media has recently taken an interest in the phenomena, as if it won't get absorbed into the pre-apocalyptic, post-McLuhan-esque social milieu. Or maybe this is what Habermas was talking about. Emancipatory? Who knows, who cares? sleep tight...