i don't break laws, i make laws (analogy to the Bush Doctrine)

The Good American People

Above and below you will find some pictures from www.yourewelcomeeverybody.com. Here the good american people congratulate themselves on behalf of the world for a job well done, a job they took a part in, a job for which they are wholly unapologetic. What I like about these pictures is that they are a kind of synechdoche or, 'part for the whole'. That is, they seem to reveal in interesting ways, in tiny details, the whole political ideology which they mean to express. I like to think of them as anthropomorphisms of the state. "They" are America. What comes across is the the arrogance, the ignorance and violence, the piggishness, and the inability to recognize in their communication to the world the hideous ugliness that they are become. I have provided some captions in a crude attempt to augment through rational reconstruction what might also be present in their minds. It is my hope that the dear reader will enjoy these photos as a Dutch aristocrat might enjoy paintings of peasant brawls. For these pictures also show the low grade squabbling of lesser beings. But they add more to our knowledge than did the peasant brawls of Brueghel, for they reveal the political false consciousness of redstate america. These features are unmistakable here and now. It is no wonder that our rulers behave as they do because these are the people who have elected them. And it is no wonder these people are as they are because this is how their rulers have ruled them. These are the values that have been taught to them and, coupled with their own intrinsic human limitations, produce monstrosities.

keep on rockin in the free world 

Pocafatass says, "i'm redneck, whitetrash, and bluecollar: deal with it!"

The principle of the paterfamilias? Answer: peace through superior firepower.

"I serve at the pleasure of m'lord" says Blackhawk, "though my allegiance is to no man here or on any of the 9 planes of existence."

A white male once said "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance." We white males have to stick together and protect our property rights!

We get our feistiness from the european wild boar on our daddy's side. Our smooth fat physique comes from some Lancashire Sow on our mamma's.

a-rabs, you just opened up a whole can of whomp ass

i ain't going back into the pen if I has to

dat's my boy, da one I nannied 

They're so not sorry

Feng wishes to thank the lawsloths for their brilliant commentary on photographs of Bush supporters and their messages to the world. A must see, ***** : http://lawsloth.blogspot.com/ I have used their manner of exegesis as a model, and it comes naturally to one if you would look long enough into these photos. It seems a good time to for the nation to reflect on the meaning of this sentiment now, almost 9 months after the fact.

Primary source: http://www.yourewelcomeeverybody.com/index.php

A Drunk Talks to the Thistle

The poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid in streaming audio from UPENN. Audiosurf the gaelicisms of an ancient scotsman. http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/MacDiarmid.html

steel plates and long injections of crude oil 

Needle and the Damage Done

I caught you knockin' at my cellar door
I love you, baby,can I have some more
Ooh, ooh, the damage done.

I hit the city and I lost my band
I watched the needle take another man
Gone, gone, the damage done.

I sing the song because I love the man
I know that some of you don't understand
Milk-blood to keep from running out.

I've seen the needle and the damage done
A little part of it in everyone
But every junkie's like a settin' sun.

-Neil Young

Chomsky on Geopolitics after Democratic Iraq

Streaming video of a recent lecture "Discourses on Iraq and the Middle East" (5/05) by Chomsky. A first rate account of where the U.S. interests lie, the new Shi'a alliance emerging--Iraq,Iran, and Northern Saudi Arabia--around possession of the worlds largest remaining oilfields. He argues for the U.S. to pay reparations for the atrocities committed by U.S. support of Saddam and the economic damage of the sanctions of the 1990's. Link: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/272/

Cohos 

An Interview with Norman Solomon

An interview of Norman Solomon by KQED host Michael Krasny, August 02, 2005. http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R508021000

This view, and one which many callers from the Bay Area expressed as well, may very well be called a crisis of confidence. Here, Solomon has ripped the ideological mask off and shewn forth the most violent, aggressive, acquisitive beast that is our foreign policy. Solomon questions the first assumptions of the media establishment. These assumptions function as whips and may be conceived along the lines of a metaphor: "A well trained dog will roll over at the crack of a wip---but a better well trained dog will roll over even without the whip."

Fishing in the ruins: Interpreting the Lake Michigan Mass Balance Study

The Environmental Protection agency released its Lake Michigan Mass Balance Study in 1997 in which the exact quantity of contaminants such as PCB's, Mercury, Non achlors, Atrazine, and others are determined, by watershed, throughout the air, and in the lake waters, in the fish, and in the waterfowl. http://www.epa.gov/grtlakes/lmmb/index.htmlThe results of this document, properly understood, basically put the kaibosh on any serious use of Lake Michigan fish as a source of food. This spells the death knell for any commercial fishing industry and casts an eery pall of death over the entire food aquatic world. Rates of bioaccumulation of PCB's--especially the select group of congenors known by the WHO to have dioxin-like toxicities--in the flesh of salmonids and trout are such that no rational person would be willing to risk consuming even the minimum amount recommended. For adult males thats no lake trout, and 6 servings (a deck of card size) of salmon (coho or chinook) in a calendar year. Thats insane. For women, especially women nursing, there is to be no consumption period. Thats a shame.

I remember seeing these old guys with a stringer of cohos and chinooks last fall on the Milwaukee River. I asked them if they knew what they had there, if they knew about the levels of pcb's in those fish. They brushed it off saying they've been eating these fish for years. Poor old guys, long may you run. Its a shame we can't follow you.

Maass' New York Times article on peak oil and Kunstler's reply

Peter Maass, "The Breaking Point " New York Times, Sunday, August 21, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/magazine/21OIL.html?pagewanted=all

A nugget found within: "Husseini, for one, doesn't buy that approach. ''Everybody is looking at the producers to pull the chestnuts out of the fire, as if it's our job to fix everybody's problems,'' he told me. ''It's not our problem to tell a democratically elected government that you have to do something about your runaway consumers. If your government can't do the job, you can't expect other governments to do it for them.''"

James Howard Kunstler, Delusion and the Media http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary14.html

Maass' article appeared on my birthday, August 21st, 2005, the day upon which I buried my thirty-fifth year.

The sleeping dragon doth move

The Chinese, after failing to acquire Unocal, buy Kazakhistan's PetroKazakhstan for 4 Billion Dollars. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/business/worldbusiness/22cnd-oil.html?hp&ex=1124769600&en=0039bfd490c6ee8d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The Ravaged Lion 

Looking into The Face of the Ravaged Lion On 'Bukowski: Born Into This'

In the film "Bukowski: Born Into This" (see link: http://www.movienet.com/bukowski.html) director John Dullaghan traces the life story of Charles Bukowski from his abused childhood, through the brief lassitudes at LA City College, through the years of working in the post office, and on into the florescence of Bukowski's exploding fame from the late 1950's onward. The archival footage includes Dullaghan's own short of Bukowski's famous City Lights reading as well as exquisite black and white footage from German filmmaker (###) driving with Bukowski around the freeways, to the laundry, discussing his views on poetry and life. This film also includes footage from Dullaghan's over 150 interviews with people who knew Bukowski and/or acted as his patrons. This film is a gem, a must see.

My first experience with Bukowski was through a book of poetry--Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame-- given to me by a friend. I was of the impression then and as I read more of Bukowski that he felt suffering was the very precondition and essence of knowledge . His realism stands in the presence of the reality that life is cruel. As the boy in "I met a genius"tells Bukowski: its ugly. Readers of Bukowski savor the nihilism, the pessimism, the black humor of Bukowski's wit. But the structure of Dullaghan's film imposes a kind of teleology on the life of Bukowski which sheds insight into the genuine moral improvement of the man over time. The salvific relationship with Linda, his wife, is explored in interviews with her. We see him drinking less, being faithful to his wife, and genuinely enjoying the fruits of life. Her description of his last breaths and the knot that was unravelled upon his deathbed is a veritable epiphany. Dullaghan's film describes Bukowski's story through the lens of a path of suffering, transformation, and moral improvement. I realized that my initial understanding of Bukowski concealed what is revealed here, namely that Bukowski did not like to suffer and maybe more importantly that he came to realize that he did not have to suffer as much. And this is the light in which Dullaghan's film portrays him.

Dullaghan's choice to focus on the personal and psychological, of necessity has left that much less room for the poetry of Bukowski. Some of his poems are read, though it does not cover adequately any period of his poetry. In this way, the film may misrepresent the integration of his felt need for suffering with the art, of Bukowski's self-imposed dramaturgy of proletariat blues. One gets the impression from the film that Bukowski's poetry was instrumental to the increased freedom, respect, and dignity with which he was treated his later years. That may make one forget that the writing of his poetry was to him an intrinsically important end. It was for the sake of the art that Bukowski lived throughout his productive career. By failing to represent the poetry--the content of that poetry--alongside the emotivisitic descriptions of his psychological state, there is a failing to see the whole of his consciousness. That may be a falsification engendered by Dullaghan's editorial hand.

Regardless, Dullaghan has produced a masterpiece--rough hewn as Bukowski's face. The kind of film that makes your girlfriend cry.

Fox News Fellatrixes

Here it comes

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/business/17oil.html?hp&ex=1124337600&en=1e12652021c8134c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Hogs, Humans, Rorty, Moral Personality and the Wisconsin State Fair

Perhaps it was the beer, the heat, or something *else* altogether but my one and only visit to the Wisconsin state fair lead to unusual new theses on the nature of moral personality and considerablility. My soul was unusually sensitive this evening, worn thin to the flesh as skin removed by sandpaper might appear, capturing the light-bulb soul in all the living things. Great red pavilions housed the hogs and swine, cows, poultry and humans--all in competition for the prize. The oceanic pink tide of flesh, caged and free, milling about together in the sawdust and heat, coalesced in my mind. And all of a sudden the old distinction long cherished and enshrined in the metaphysical and religious traditions of the west and first heard from the mouth of Father Koterski, namely, the distinction between a difference of degree and a difference of kind came crashing apart for me. As I stared at the crow's feet around the sleeping eyes of a pink pig, I saw so much "humanness" in it, so much intelligence and world-weariness. The eye blinkered open and I saw the sagacity there, the intense intelligence of the hog. The flesh of the hog, carried around its strong back and haunches, no different really from human beings. Do they not use pig hearts in human heart transplants? Sure, I thought, this pig's practical interests revolve around a thinner circuit of goods--food, sex, sleep, safety--but the life, the life, was there in it. I felt sure that with some proper care and cuddle the pig could manifest love just as my cat or dog manifests love. And, indeed, if what biologists tell us is correct, pigs are amongst the most highly intelligent of mammals. The life in it was, with minor differences, equivalent to the life in the great pink-fleshed horde of humanity ogling at it from the rim of its cage. The squeals of pleasure echoed forth from the human and hog hordes alike.

The difference, if there was one, lay in a thin capacity rooted in the somewhat larger brain of the human. There, nestled in the neurons and synapses lay rooted the deep structures of a higher order language and grammar. There, nestled in the cortex lay capacities for memory and conviction, "reason" and mathematics. But that capacity is a mere potentiality and if left unactualized was equivalent to never even having the capacity at all: there is no manifestation of higher-order capacities. As I surveyed the ocean of flesh extending backward out of the pavilion, into the alleyways, consuming the candies and crap, riding the rides, driven forth by sentiments and instincts peculiar to the human animal, it was not hard to imagine that these hogs were at least the moral equivalent of humans in many respects. And perhaps (though it sounds a bit cynical to say) these humans were, in many ways, the moral equivalent of hogs. And I, beer in hand, stood amidst the horde one of them too.

Thank God for Golden Handshakes

Thank God the courts have decided to let stand Michael Ovitz's 140 million dollar golden handshake (he worked for Disney for 14 months) against the surreptitious claim (brought by shareholders) that the Disney Board acted irresponsibly. See link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/10/business/media/10governance.html?hp&ex=1123732800&en=8f4ddbd3577db810&ei=5094&partner=homepageThank God that the courts have chosen to defend the plutocracy! I mean, what is this world coming to when a guy can't take home his hard-earned pay?

The housing bubble, petroleum costs, personal savings, debt

Krugman on the bursting of the housing bubble: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08krugman.html?? Krugman notes that the personal savings rate has fallen to zero.


Kunstler, in a florid mood, covering it all at once: http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary14.html

Book of Thel, Blake. Notice how Thel, spelled backwards is "Leth". The Stream of Lethe is described in Plato's Republic as a stream of forgetfulness. Here, Thel turns Lethe on its head: Thel's is a book of remembrance.