Zeitgeist Spam

Public Service Strike in the UK

Reblogged from the LA Times (I've inserted a few comments and ellipsed some of the pure rightwing assholery):

Hundreds of thousands of teachers, police workers, immigration officers and other government employees walked off the job Thursday across Britain in a mass strike that could augur a summer of industrial action over deep cuts in public spending.

The picket lines went up to protest proposed changes to state-sponsored pension plans, which would require public-sector workers to increase their contributions, retire later and collect less than they do now.

The government says overhauling the system is imperative in light of the country's huge budget deficit and Britons' longer lifespans. [COMMENT: This is shock doctrine bullshit, as the govt's pension costs will decrease over time. See "30 Jun 2011: Forecast that cost of pensions will fall in the future leads to row over David Cameron's claim that system could 'go broke'" at Guardian.uk]

...

The unions declared the strike a success, estimating that up to 750,000 employees, mostly teachers, took part. Classes were canceled at more than 10,000 schools across England and Wales. Some passport-control officers at airports across the country began striking Wednesday night.

...

This week, Prime Minister David Cameron appealed to workers to stay on the job. But Emily Cotterill, a history teacher in East London, said she had no choice but to participate.

"We have to go on strike to protect ourselves.... No one's asking for the moon on a stick, just for things to be fairer," said Cotterill, 27, who joined her colleagues in a noisy march through downtown London. "It will raise awareness at least. And if things don't change, there are likely to be other strikes."

The demonstration here in the capital was mostly a peaceful affair, although a few scuffles broke out between police and suspected anarchists in hooded shirts. [COMMENT: ooo-eee-oooh, the anarchists are coming, the anarchists, the anarchists! What would a newspaper do without anarchists? Actually report favorably??]

Security was heavy around Parliament and along Whitehall, the government quarter.

The planned pension changes are part of the government's effort to rein in spending and pare down a public debt that is among the largest in Europe. The Conservative-led coalition has pushed through a plan to slash the budget by a $130 billion in four years, the deepest cuts in a generation, which will leave almost no element of public services untouched. Nearly half a million state jobs are to be axed. [COMMENT from ALAN Baker: "Interesting facts. Total cost to UK govt of pensions in 2010: 117.2 billion pounds. Combined wealth of the 20 richest people in the UK: 124 billion pounds. (Sources: ukpublicspending.co.uk, The Times Rich List)" The LibCon slash and burn is just another wealth transfer as in Spain, Greece, the US, etc etc]

Union activists have promised to keep up their protest against the cuts, which are expected to bite later this year.

...

In the House of the Hangman 544-548

So when the buff guy in the grey Audi A5 pulled up next to me and flipped me off for an admittedly lame lane change, and the beautiful dark young woman next to him grabbed his arm and pushed it down with just the right amount of honey, put yr dick back in yr pants, I fell in love. Not with her so much, tho not not with her, but with life, my life, all over again. Which was good, because my knee was up to 8 on the pain scale, and the whole left side of my head was clogged. And Vromans was 30 miles away, and so was “my” copy of Spurious. To get all early Springsteen-y on you, we were driving into the mass extinction, (it was the 10 west), we were driving into the sun.

*

We dust the walls.
                And of course we are weeping larks    And the rooftops are falling apart like applause.

*

Walking around the area, what’s striking is the sheer size of the complex. The various smaller buildings resemble a bomb site, with the roofs looking as if they will cave in any moment, while a decaying Trabant stands outside, the guts of its engine ripped out and the windows smashed. In one of the larger main buildings, the eerie sound of doors slamming, blown by the breeze, can be heard in the distance. Winding corridors reveal rooms full of defunct equipment and peeling walls. Slogans in Russian are joined by graffiti in German. At the side of some stairs leading up, someone’s daubed “romantische Bilder, anyone?”

*

YES I’LL GO OUT WITH
U! the software converted 20
seconds of noise into a
single string of 5 numerals.
Ah world, ah love, ah
mes amis, you give me
everything! And no, I won’t
calm down. << scholar-editor: no
translation / no possible transcription of
original text possible>>. The two

far edges of the road.
The blurred Debatable. The brain
has become a blur in
the discourse is mostly fat
and if p then maybe. Yeah
if p then word, bird
and world flying bufo bufo.
Disaster is always, resembles the
man in the train compartment
who never stops talking. What

time is it now? Are
we there yet? What do
they call this town? If
p then the world would
eat nothing but  purple-colored
ice cream. Then take a
pic of the freshly ..... not
scoopable. Squid ink [Reply] :x.
[Reply] ... If (Ax)P(x) is true,
then P(c) is true, where

c is a constant in
the domain of x. “MODEL”
means me and includes my
appearance, likeness and form, at
some time the music, its
infinite gash, a dull clicking
in my chest, so much
bread, so much oil, so
much this or that. All
rights revert to. It’s one

of those things, like the
sex of lips, like bring
an old book to a
cemetery and bury it, though
that’s not what’s known as
having the last laugh. Who
believes in air, nowadays? I
acknowledge and agree that I
have consented to publication of
my ethnicities, and to recite

backwards the two hundred<
and twenty one alphabets. Milk
say the heavens regarding the
white sand. Like the color
of Wet, from which excess.
A no, a no since, a<
no since when. For reasons
of all too oblivious. So
now when people smile and
say, “Hey, you’re one of

us,” I say, “Not only
Aimi Eguchi’s a CG creation.”

*

The Bildergberger globalists are taking DMT and discussing interdimensional cyborg immortality with Ray Kurzweil and the clockwork elves. Man robs bank of $1 to get healthcare in jail. “Oh fucking shitting bollocks with a huge slice of bollocks on toast for good measure.”  

[Note: Sources: 544. For Richard Lopez. JBR, real-life incident on the west 10 yesterday, near the Haven Ave off ramp, approx. 6 PM PST, on my way back from Dr Kumamoto’s office, where they’d just taken x-rays, drawn blood, prescribed antibiotics and steroids and cough suppressant with codeine, and generally poked and prodded and worried over why it hurts like hell for me to walk. 545. Frank O’Hara, “Aus einem April”, not quite as quoted in John Latta, “What is good is always derogatory”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 28 Jun 011 (Latta: “How quickly O’Hara rejects the merely programmatic amusements of homophonic translation [of a line in Rilke’s poem with the same title-JBR]—“Wieder duftet der Wald” become “We dust the walls,” a thing Albert Cook initially noted in a short piece in the O’Hara Audit.”). 546. Dominic Simpson, “The ghosts of communism continue to haunt East Germany. Yet changes are afoot”, at Mute Magazine, 28 Jun 011. 547. JBR, 50, 2^nd opening; JBR; Brian Ashcraft, “Is This Girl Real or Virtual?”, at Kotaku, 14 (?) Jun 011 (“Located in Japan's geek heaven Akihabara, AKB48 is the country's most popular female pop group. With give-or-take 48 members, you'd think AKB48 would have enough idols to appeal to all fans. Its latest member is Aimi Eguchi, who has rocketed from obscurity to become the poster girl …”). 548. “Welcome to the Craziest Thing Alex Jones Has Ever Said (Video)”, at Disinformation, 28 Jun 011; Jacob Sloan, “Man Robs Bank Of $1 To Get Health Care In Jail”, Disinformation, 21 Jun 011 (“Amazingly, many people’s reaction to the story is outrage…that our prisoners receive medical treatment.”); Timothy Morton, “Take the Dark Ecology Challenge 6: Collapse of Anthropocentrism”, at Ecology without Nature, 26 Jun 011 (last line of TM’s coda to Juliana Spahr’s “Gently Now, Don't Add to the Heartache”)]

In the House of the Hangman 543

As we all know by now, Lars’ sickness is that of the “the damp.” Where did I read, “I like to look at clouds, but not because I think A Voice will speak to me from one of them”? They say ‘world’ comes from the Latin ‘mundus,’ a box, a hut—we find the Etruscan goddess Munthukh, whose role was to gild and adorn, represented in mirrors—but how deep is a spot? There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent: order a custom-made bathtub. Clown in a tux / drives all over a rain drop. “I'm fairly certain that I’m the only person in the group who cannot play a single musical instrument, open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: spread out the bats’ wings of the palate and its damp basements, whatever he said dead imagine. Our last stop of the evening’s a space where a tightrope’s bolted a foot off the floor. I grow, therefore I am. I am destined to continuously generate new leaves without, however, feeling any fear of losing them. It is in my nature to produce leaves without ever keeping count. However I do count, I count a lot. I take it easy and only grow a leaf every two or three months. “For how long?” has a simple pathos to it—“Woran glauben die Motten, wenn sie zu den Lichtern streben?” It’s all our fault, isn’t it? The whole thing is our problem in some way, as though we were behind everything. Yes, we’re responsible. We’re resigned to it: we’re not just part of the problem, we are the problem. The road is blocked—our road, everyone’s road. We should just get out of the way. But how can we get out of the way of ourselves? We should throw ourselves off the cliffs, we agree. … But what good would it do, our bodies prone and bloody on the rocks, seagulls pecking out our eyes? How could we apologise then? Because that’s what we ought to do—we should spend our whole lives saying nothing but sorry: sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, and to everyone we meet. Sorry for what we’re doing, and what we’re about to do, sorry for what we’ve done … Who would be there to say that for us if we jumped from the cliffs? Ever since first reading that story, I’ve occasionally attempted to imitate the “shambling” gait of Innsmouth residents, but can’t quite get it. The truth is it was wicked hot, some tainted barbecue had entered the picture somewhere along the way and the wee person in the metaphysical compartment was still cowering back there in the tremulous transit of White Sands. The sky goes up and the wind twirls, it pretends to be dead and blows bubbles of gold where money laughs itself into mid-bowel movements swappable with x disposable time units marking here the gift exchange of reverie spillage eating KFC and deciding the bad throat to rip out as the white hush of pathological ellipses slammed into a fuzz the static fuzz so loud there is no way to ensure the blankness of that blank continues. So park rangers are still important. By contrast, in its mimicry of life and nature, Tree of Life dissolves narrative–at least linguistic narrative–to its most visually fluid state, allowing iconography to flow into swirling eddies of pictorial flux, not merely convergences of information, but projections of uh well first Hormel gutted the union. Then it sped up the line. And when the pig-brain machine made workers sick, they fired them. Oh, and by the way, the amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan is $20.2 billion. That’s more than NASA’s budget. It’s more than BP has paid so far for damage during the Gulf oil spill. It’s what the G-8 has pledged to help foster new democracies in Egypt and Tunisia. BS: Do you go against the grain of it, do you acknowledge it, do you knuckle under? AB: I was acknowledging it by taking from it and then mixing it, and often it was sourceless. I wanted to show that I couldn’t keep a straight margin. BS: It’s raw, careless, and three or four places at once.

[Note: Sources: JBR; Brad Johnson, and Lars Iyer, Spurious, as quoted in Johnson’s “Review of Lars Iyer’s Spurious”, at An und für sich, 27 Jun 011; JBR (I did read something like that, either yesterday or the day before …); Jennifer Cazenave, “Les Maladies de la Peau / Maladies of the Skin” (tr. Charlotte Mandell), as quoted in John Latta, “Reading Notes: Stonecutter”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 27 Jun 011; phaneronoemikon, “Fandango”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 27 Jun 011; JBR, 50, 3^rd opening; Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand, “Affording entrance: Rethinking accessibility”, at Jacket2, 25 Jun 011; “extracts from Le Bonheur d'Être Plante by Patrick Blanc, translated and adapted into a short story by Giovanni Aloi”, at Antennae 17; Lucy Davis, “In the Company of Trees”, at Antennae 17; Ralo Mayer, as quoted in Graham Harman, “Schurkenplaneten” at Object-Oriented Ontology, 27 Jun 011 (“What do moths believe in when they strive towards the light?”); Graham Harman, “eeriest moment in Lovecraft”, at Object-Oriented Ontology, 27 Jun 011; Tom Clark, “Inconsequential”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 27 Jun 011; Josh Stanley, “To the Sky”, in Sous les Pavés 2, as downloaded from Sous les Pavés; Frances Kruk, “There Is No Other Cheek To Be Turned”, in Sous les Pavés 3, as downloaded from h Sous les Pavés; Alex Reid, “humanities, national parks, and conversation”, at Alex Reid digital digs, 27 Jun 011; Roger Dernson, as quoted in Adrian J Ivakhiv, “Malick’s tangled bank”, at immanence, 27 Jun 011; JBR; Ted Genoways, “The Spam Factory’s Dirty Secret”, at Mother Jones, Jul/Aug 011; JBR; Alex Tabarrok, “Sentence of the Day”, at Marginal Revolution, 27 Jun 011; Bethlehem Shoals and Anselm Berrigan, “Strangers in the Nest: A poet and a sportswriter go on a macrophenomenal tour of everyday irrelevance. ANSELM BERRIGAN INTERVIEWED BY BETHLEHEM SHOALS”, at Poetry Foundation]

In the House of the Hangman 542

“Men of Chu …” … saggy baggy elephants … 1,000 years of nonlinear history … you can’t put yr jelly back in yr jelly bean. We come into the world. We come into the world and there it is. Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache. What’s left of my jazz is not “in any sense whatever not a form of knowing, not” “but rather … HARD HATS REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT … a pharmakon” hard-wired into the Oy, and Ooo-we baby, the fly doesn’t flap her wings she doesn’t flutter them, my approach to the subject almost vacillates. But plankton in the North Atlantic? And a gray whale off the coast of Israel, thru the Northwest Passage? Bought me a how-to manual and dipped into it to achieve a crazed mindframe. Variously sized trees are hanging on the corner outside Rite Aid. “It’s a kind of weather unique to this place.” This is a hamster car. The Center for Investigative Reporting calculates $15 per gallon as a reasonable pump price reflecting the true cost of gasoline. That is not a real flower, is it? Dot dot dot and slowly. Glish scratches. A single strand of silk (hair) half a mile long. A single s makes a way. The long version. Touch me      you      shimmering gifts      zzar zar     zzar zar      Nipple, penis and clit are cut from the same uninhabited parenthesis. Agents AND SPACE devil on top of devil and ass and devil and patience, which doesn’t leave mi cuerpo mucho tiempo for otras actividades. That’s your terabyte of history. I tried a gobo but it left me spluttering. The Dalai Lama said he met with Mao several times, and that once Mao announced: “Your mind is scientific!” -- an assessment that was followed by the famous line, “religion is poison.” The good house – it is heavy. So the other day while I was online teaching myself Shakira songs for mandolin I was overjoyed to discover that Isabella Rossellini has a new show called Seduce Me. I loved the dolphin episode, which features blowhole sex. The new show even has a great episode about Noah’s Ark, in which we learn about the scourge of heteronormativity. And why can’t one have it all? We can be noisers and we can have lyrics that are about things. So it’s not a matter at the QT scale of colorless quanta that gain color when they interact. Liquid butter and totally green stockings. The baby cries because a pin is sticking into the baby. Dizap. Does anyone know the math of mass extinction?

[Note: Sources: Lu Yu, “Drunk Song”, in The Old Man Who Does As He Pleases (tr. Burton Watson); JBR, memory quote of children’s book title; Manuel DeLanda, One Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (to “retranslate Lu Yu/Watson’s “A thousand years of history’s ups and downs before my eyes”); JBR twist on Kathy Bloomberg-Rissman’s upon-waking version of something I drunkenly shouted at her in one of last nite’s dreams (“put yr jelly back in yr jelly bean!”); Juliana Spahr, “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache”, at Tarpaulin Sky v.2 no.2, via Timothy Morton, “Take the Dark Ecology Challenge”, at Ecology without Nature, 26 Jun 011; JBR, 50, 4^th opening; Daniel Kane, “Beginning with Flapping”, at Tarpaulin Sky v.2 no.2; Timothy Morton, “Plankton in the North Atlantic”, at Ecology without Nature, 26 May 011 (re: the plankton, “...it hasn't existed there for 800 000 years.”); Paul Foster Johnson, “Author Statement for Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms”, at Portable Press & Yo-Yo Labs; Sasha Watson, “Spirit”, at Tarpaulin Sky v.2 no.2; something I think I just heard in a car dealer’s ad on NBC, 26 Jun 011 approx 3 PM PST; Jacob Sloan, “A Gallon Of Gas Should Cost $15”, at Disinformation, 26 Jun 011 (“We know the approximate price of gas for consumers, but what is the price for society? The external costs borne may be as high as $1.7 trillion per year for the United States alone — that’s from health problems caused by pollution and toxic fumes, damage to crops and plant life, et cetera. The Center for Investigative Reporting calculates $15 per gallon as a reasonable pump price reflecting the true cost of gasoline. My only complaint: it should be significantly higher still, as they forgot to factor in the huge sums of tax dollars spent on foreign aid and military operations for the benefit of the oil industry.”); Rick Wiggins, “YogurtSubstitute”, at livedeadcatpress, 26 Jun 011; Cathy Lynn Grossman, “‘I’m a Marxist,’ Dalai Lama tells Chinese students”, at Faith & Reason, 10 Jun 011; Rod Smith, “from The Good House”, in Nineteen Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology (ed. Lytle Shaw); Alli Carlisle, “Everything I know about animal sex I learned from Isabella Rossellini”, at Full Stop, 23 Jun 011; John Gallaher, “EMA / Language Poetry / Sincerity / Spirituality / Meaning It”, at Nothing to Say & Saying It, 25 Jun 011; Timothy Morton, “Quantum Realism”, at Ecology wthout Nature, 26 Jun 011; Nada Gordon and Gary Sullivan, “from Swoon”, in Shaw; Charles Bernstein, “Thinking I Think I Think”, in Shaw; wv word encountered when appending a comment to Tom Beckett, “Nature scares me …”, at l’amour fou, 26 Jun 011; Timothy Morton, “Mass Extinction Math”, at Ecology without Nature, 26 Jun 011 (Morton writes: “So if the previous mass extinction 55 million years ago took two thousand years as a result of 2 gigatons per year of carbon being released: Does that mean that this one, given 30 gigatons per year, will take fifteen times faster, namely about 130 years?” Paul Reid-Bowen replies with this comment: “Depends whether you mean the likelihood of an extinction event, in which case you are looking at the many variations of the Doomsday argument. These are for the most part applications of Bayesian probability theory, begin with work by Brandon Carter but find more developed forms in John Leslie's The End of the World and many articles by Nic Bostrom. However, you seem to be asking about the actual math of the extinction timescales. These depend on the primary causes of the extinction event, but for some of the more common suicide attempts by life, the leading theorist of the day is Peter Ward with the Medea Hypothesis, Under a Green Sky and The Life and Death of Planet Earth. It also depends how much of a decline in biodiversity and biomass you think counts as a mass extinction event. It's quite plausible that the Anthropocene is the one that takes hold, what with multiple tipping points being approached and some disparate and gaping holes being torn in the ecological mesh. I tend to agree with Levi and yourself that homeostasis is not the norm, and doesn't autocorrect life in accord with some telos of omega point. Life is just careening around. Oddly one hundred and thirty years seems a pretty good midpoint between a dozen or so predictions I've seen in the last couple of years. …” Doesn’t look like I have to worry whether my art is eternal, I guess)]

In the House of the Hangman 541

I said lunch, not launch! But don’t laugh. Don't do it. And don’t look her in the eyes; don't let Bachmann smile at you. She believes that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats. She’s trying to look like June Cleaver, but she’s actually the T2 skeleton. Our universe becomes a territory all dimensions of which, it’s sort of like when you fly from America to Australia and lose an entire day - somewhere - somehow - it just doesn’t exist – and yet it does – and so I want to know where it is to know where it is, trying to underline a verb in a text without any: aaaa aaaaa aaaaaa aaaaaaa aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaah aaaaaaauugh aaaaaagh aaaaaahhhhh aaaaaaugh aaaaagh aaaaah I want to believe it makes a difference / our crowding together like this / pooling our burden of neurological disaster / Ublopia or Otivion, tinfoil glitter superglue toothpicks – wonderful – toxic, yes – wonderful – sublime – Everyone begins making thunder and stuff. Here we go and there you go, as in again. “What is the good life?” In my onticology, at least, the thesis that entities are independent of their relations is the thesis that entities can always break with existing regimes of relations and enter into new ones. I watch the strange golden children with hammers attend the gargantuan foetus whose sky blue blood feeds a fountain which looks like a cloud of sky blue steaks on a bbq of neon louvres. Soul rolled over. Ever spun a 360, faceplant as motor, stomach as pivot. “No way. I have no money right now. I just paid $2,000 for you know what … No, don’t cop a plea to a felony! … Why not? Because, good luck trying to get a job after that. … All right, fine. What? Oh yeah, I get it. A porn star is allowed to receive stolen property. No problem.” I took a shower in the hotel valium. But does that mean the next big thing’s Collapse-in-Helium-Release-Mode or Gigadeath or Artilect War? This is the first Rumor: dolor was general in the metropoles: barbershops invaded by headless men demanding endless haircuts, ungodly cantos posted at crossroads. By noon the vendors of flowers had poisoned themselves. Unions dissolve, and high in the mountains the voices of unicorns! I mean the voice of the unicorn … My skin was looking tarnished, a shade of green. I went out into the air, pulling my anvil. I climbed the lighthouse with a knife between my teeth. I lift my eyes to the hills and what do I see? Cube after cube of evil. It isn’t sex. It isn’t anything. It’s an arrangement between myself and the avatar. I AM (MERELY) SANE on this day of the solstice night in nazi America.

[Note Sources: Matt Taibbi, “Michele Bachmann’s Holy War”, at Rolling Stone, 22 Jun 011; JBR, 50, 5^th opening; Levi R Bryant, “Eudaimonism and Ecology”, at Larval Subjects, 25 Jun 011; phaneronoemikon, “Heavy Deep Brocade of Dreaming (Poodle Bull’s Solemn Ole’)”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 25 Jun 011; JBR, re: my talented grandsons; anonymous, as quoted in Graham Harman, “weird conversation overheard in New York”, at Object-Oriented Philosophy, 25 Jun 011; Todd Colby, “Surprise”, “Alien Lemon Egg”, in Riot in the Charm Factory; JBR; Nick Land, “Hard Futurism”, at Urbanatomy, 13 Jun 011; JBR; Gerrit Lansing, “Rumors”, in Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth; Juan Sweeney de las Minas de Cobre, The Lost Notebooks (tr.. Chad Sweeney); Aharon Shabtai, “The Wall” in War & Love, Love & War (tr. Peter Cole); Alan Sondheim, “Capture”, in Deep Language; Michael McClure, Swirls in Asphalt 30, in Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems]

I can't make this shit up

Reblogged from Think Progress:

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has a thing for John Wayne. In an interview yesterday with Newsmax, she said she wants to live in “John Wayne’s America.” And in the Iowa town of Waterloo today, where she announced her presidential candidacy, Bachmann told Fox News, “John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa. That’s the kind of spirit that I have, too.” But unfortunately for historically challenged Bachmann, as the Washington Times points out, the John Wayne born in Waterloo is John Wayne Gacy, the notorious serial killer who murdered 33 teenage boys and young men, not the iconic Western actor.

In the House of the Hangman 540

Having a self becomes an inherently commercial operation. But he says if you know how the program works, you’re less likely to be hypnotized by it. “There’s two ways to experience magic,” he says. “And I don’t mean stage magic.” You can either experience it as a spectator, watching a priest or guru. Or you can participate. “Having a guru will only take you so far,” he said. “It’s up to you to render ‘reality’ unacceptable.” I’m finally reading Nature’s Metropolis and it must be one of the greatest works of economic history ever produced. Cast as a history of Chicago in the mid-19th century with an environmental focus, it recounts the birth of the commodity form from the spirit of the railroad. The chapter on how the railroad and the invention of the grain elevator culminated in the first ever futures market at the Chicago Board of Trade may be the best prelude to Marx’s Capital, and Smithson’s Vancouver Glue-Pour. Take it slow. After a while, you will be lifting full pails. After each layer had been removed. For each full rotation of a wheel. After 135 cycles. Where are the pelicans? This is / isn’t messiness, is it, Geof? This is not the nostalgic desire to construct a radically simplified world. The stone age did not end because we ran out of stones. R sez bees r her totem animal. G says Yeah, I tend to be musical, they they they.  Knuckle. So the baby he moans. THOORAH! I am Otaku-grrrl. “Everything is statistically impossible.” Pli selon pli. But all is held as if the war were a history we were told when we were children. But all is held as if the war … Kent Johnson is the author of Beowulf. The hot/cool discovery & epistemology takes place in the “same” “again and again”. God knows, we used oodles of trike and acetone. We did lots of degreasing. The Naugatuck River had been transformed into an ugly gray tube!

[Note: Sources: Jacob Sloan, “The Age of Perpetual Self-Branding”, at Disinformation, 24 Jun 011; Douglas Rushkoff, as quoted in klintron, “Douglas Rushkoff On Kicking The Consensus Reality Habit”, at Disinformation, 24 Jun 011; JBR; Luc Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, and Charles Peterson, as quoted in “N1BR Reading, Part Two: Summer Edition”, at n+1, 22 Jun 011; Mary Burgur, “Spiral Discourse”, at Sous les Pavés 4 as downloaded from The Other Room; JBR, 50, 7^th opening; David Hadbawnik, “KENT JOHNSON IS THE AUTHOR OF BEOWOLF: LITERARY HOAXES AND THE ‘DESIRE FOR ORIGINS’”, in Sous les Pavés 1 as downloaded from Sous les Pavés; Jack Collom, “Dear Brenda –“, in Sous les Pavés 2 as downloaded from Sous les Pavés]

Alice Walker: Why I Sail

Reblogged from the Guardian:

*

"Why am I going on the Freedom Flotilla II to  Gaza? I ask myself this, even though the answer is: what else would I do? I am in my 67th year, having lived already a long and fruitful life, one with which I am content. It seems to me that during this period of eldering it is good to reap the harvest of one's understanding of what is important, and to share this, especially with the young. How are they to learn, otherwise?

Our boat, The Audacity of Hope, will be carrying letters to the people of Gaza. Letters expressing solidarity and love. That is all its cargo will consist of. If the Israeli military attacks us, it will be as if they attacked the mailman. This should go down hilariously in the annals of history. But if they insist on attacking us, wounding us, even murdering us, as they did some of the activists in the last flotilla, Freedom Flotilla I, what is to be done?

There is a scene in the movie Gandhi that is very moving to me: it is when the unarmed Indian protesters line up to confront the armed forces of the British Empire. The soldiers beat them unmercifully, but the Indians, their broken and dead lifted tenderly out of the fray, keep coming.

Alongside this image of brave followers of Gandhi there is, for me, an awareness of paying off a debt to the Jewish civil rights activists who faced death to come to the side of black people in the American south in our time of need. I am especially indebted to Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who heard our calls for help – our government then as now glacially slow in providing protection to non-violent protesters – and came to stand with us.

They got as far as the truncheons and bullets of a few "good ol' boys'" of Neshoba County, Mississippi and were beaten and shot to death along with James Chaney, a young black man of formidable courage who died with them. So, even though our boat will be called The Audacity of Hope, it will fly the Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner flag in my own heart.

And what of the children of Palestine, who were ignored in our president's latest speech on Israel and Palestine, and whose impoverished, terrorised, segregated existence was mocked by the standing ovations recently given in the US Congress to the prime minister of Israel?

I see children, all children, as humanity's most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left. One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.

As adults, we must affirm, constantly, that the Arab child, the Muslim child, the Palestinian child, the African child, the Jewish child, the Christian child, the American child, the Chinese child, the Israeli child, the Native American child, etc, is equal to all others on the planet. We must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid.

I once asked my best friend and husband during the era of segregation, who was as staunch a defender of black people's human rights as anyone I'd ever met: how did you find your way to us, to black people, who so needed you? What force shaped your response to the great injustice facing people of colour of that time?

I thought he might say it was the speeches, the marches, the example of Martin Luther King Jr, or of others in the movement who exhibited impactful courage and grace. But no. Thinking back, he recounted an episode from his childhood that had led him, inevitably, to our struggle.

He was a little boy on his way home from yeshiva, the Jewish school he attended after regular school let out. His mother, a bookkeeper, was still at work; he was alone. He was frequently harassed by older boys from regular school, and one day two of these boys snatched his yarmulke (skull cap), and, taunting him, ran off with it, eventually throwing it over a fence.

Two black boys appeared, saw his tears, assessed the situation, and took off after the boys who had taken his yarmulke. Chasing the boys down and catching them, they made them climb the fence, retrieve and dust off the yarmulke, and place it respectfully back on his head.

It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put – without delay, and with tenderness – back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.

That is why I sail."

You know we're screwed when even the pitiful Yahoo! notices ...

Reblogged from Yahoo!:

* 

The American Police State is the 'New Normal'

Jared Spurbeck, Jun 25, 2011

COMMENTARY | According to The New York Times, the FBI just raided a data center in Virginia and seized many of its servers, causing websites owned by "tens of clients" to go offline -- including those belonging to people who hadn't broken a law, and were not suspected of any crime.

It may seem silly to get upset about the police taking down websites you don't use. A certain quote may come to mind, though, as we look at other ways that the police in America abuse their power.

Tasering nonviolent people to death

A 72-year-old woman named Kathryn Winkfein got tasered not too long ago after she lost her temper at the cop who pulled her over. Her offense? Shouting at him.

Luckily, she "learned her lesson" about talking back to America's authority figures. She was also awarded $40,000 in damages, which her County Constable, Richard McCain, complained was a reward for "bad behavior." Apparently putting 50,000 volts through the heart of someone's great-grandma is not bad behavior, as long as you wear a police uniform.

Winkfein was lucky. In what Digby calls the "Taser Atrocity Of The Day," a man who took groceries without having paid for them was tasered continuously for 37 seconds, after he became "aggressive and was communicating loudly." He died in the hospital.

The police officer who killed him was suspended for five days.

Stealing your cellphone (and its data)

Recordings of government workers performing their duty are, by law, in the public domain. So if you think a police officer is going to do something untoward, try filming him so you have evidence. Right?

Not so fast. Prepare to have your cellphone taken from you and stomped on. The Miami Beach, Fla., police in particular have a history of doing this, and they aren't alone. But the people who have their phones stolen and vandalized by the police are lucky; a man named Michael Allison faces up to 75 years in prison for trying to record a judge, and was arrested without any warning.

Meanwhile, the Michigan State Police is taking people's cellphones when they pull them over for traffic violations, and using "extraction" devices on the phones. The ACLU is trying to find out why they're doing that, but the police department placed a price tag of over $500,000 on their Freedom of Information request. How much justice can you afford?

Arresting nonviolent activists

Want to feed homeless people free meals in the park? Prepare to be arrested. Or how about dancing in front of the Jefferson Memorial? Prepare to get tied up and beat up.

Our country's police has a long history of suppressing nonviolent activists, and it hasn't stopped with the Civil Rights Era. Environmental activists like Tim DeChristopher are served 10-year prison sentences for civil disobedience, that harms no one but impedes oil companies' profits. Meanwhile, the FBI labels nonviolent activists as "domestic terrorists."

They were recently granted more power to go through your trash and your data, so expect things to only get worse. Actually, expect things to get worse in general. The police state is the new normal.

In the House of the Hangman 536-539

No. A feather is imperturbable. And then we laugh so hard and so long we think we will die laughing.  So: the “I” is a concatenation of voltes ... the “subject” is ultimately/intimately a matter of fidelity to a miracle ... One could throw up one’s hands ... Or say: But anyhow. And be destroyed and rearchitected new and improved and completely bent as they say in the utterly confusing bodhisattva process, jesus what a headrush, a popcorn-machine hooked up to a laptop hooked up to a microphone. I’m practically disintegrated. Do you think you could find such a description, such a fantasy, in a masculine text? that old · dull slub-mobled diamond, now idylls only aidle · void of new endearing. Dernely formed atningas · stalk the dearth-dealth wishness, and we crave but “Nothing falls out as we imagine it.” Ig ak abberflappi.Mogh & hmog. In VazoOn. Heh d sogA. A fragment of a fragment, and witness thewitness the witness the I submit: Is that the merda, or what!? ^He that searches hearts and weighs our actions is my witness— I love ... » Top Picks · » Comedy Events · » {=merka} X .... sometime the website layout is broken. and when i click submit tell a lie mentula = penis the mantis kidshaving breakfast: Witness also the Colossus,  ..... two dorsal rib fragments, what this means: When you pass one phonon into your chilled tiny tuning fork, it vibrates and doesn’t, simultaneously. That's like having a Cantor set where the lines and gaps are superimposed on each other. To achieve this magic you have to pass the phonon through a qubit, which can be ON, OFF, or BOTH OFF AND ON. And the days slip by like whisps of field mouse toner dust, and The Audacity of Hope sails against the blockade of Gaza, which has imprisoned and impoverished 1.6 million civilians.

While this was happening
a wave of nostalgia invaded the country’s
     beds
and the couples look at each other as
     strangers
and twilight was served for lunch by
     mothers and fathers
and the pain or the hurt slowly dressed the
     little ones
and the chests fell off some and the backs
     off others …

and old men flew through the air holding
     tightly to their dried testicles
and old women hurled exclamations and
     felt painful stitches in their memory
     or oblivion
and various dogs approved and toasted
     with Armenian cognac
and they found a man dead several times

near a carnival Friday ripped from the
    carnival …
… blue elephants standing on Mr.
     Hollow’s cheek …

There is duck tape round / Everything It looks / Wack / It wouldn’t hurt you to be a little nice would it  / Just into the camera while we pretend you’re a little nice (“The lead-in syllables, collectively, / The full measure Melismatic / Countenance / Of good tasting / Or locate your gills / You will be ever more & so / Where citadels coat wax & / We are burnt licking of that”). Would globalization, then, as the enactment of a state or status, be the truth of globalism? Or would globalism, as the “final” resting place of globalization, be its truth? If these parallel but quite different questions have no answers, it is because they circulate as idealities (economic, religious, political, etc.) above or below, outside or within, the geopolitical spaces that bear their material effects. Globalism and globalization are, as one, the gift one never knew, will never know, as gift. But what if the anthropological concept of the gift is precisely what one gives even if the Derridean notion of the gift is what one receives? And vice-versa? Is not this anthropological/ philosophical hierarchy precisely what it means to be subaltern? To be interpellated? To be, that is, born? To enter a world already in the making one appears, too, as a gift, in both the anthropological and Derridean sense of the term. And so to take on responsibility, morality and ethics one wages [wagers? – ed.] that the anthropological gift one leaves behind in the world is not the Derridean gift even if one knows, in advance, that one will never, in the final analysis, be able to tell one from the other. Such knowledge can be paralyzing or liberating; in any case it demands the impossible and necessary from each of us: that we both forget and remember that we are always global and never global enough. You can sample cord blood

                        find rocket fuel there
Find rocket fuel in breast-milk

          also lettuce

I wear a Sponge Bob Square Pants Bandaid
hear the running toilet

Money goes

What the [fist] first sees
the cheek feels later

instead of the fits of dawn.

[Note: Sources: 536. 50, penultimate opening; Timothy Morton, “Phonon”, at Ecology without Nature, 8 Mar 011. 537. Ezra Pound, “And the days are not full enough”; Otoliths 2; Nic Abramson, Johnny Barber, Medea Benjamin, Greta Berlin, Hagit Borer, Regina Carey, Gale Courey Toensing, Erin DeRamus, Linda Durham, Debra Ellis, Hedy Epstein, Steve Fake, Ridgely Fuller, Megan Horan,Kathy Kelly, Kit Kittredge, Libor Koznar, Melissa Lane, G. Kaleo Larson, Richard Levy, Richard Lopez, Ken Mayers, Ray McGovern, Gail Miller, Carol Murry, Robert Naiman, Henry Norr, Ann Petter, Gabe Schivone, Kathy Sheetz, Max Suchan, Brad Taylor, Len Tsou, Alice Walker, Paki Wieland, Ann Wright, 14 Jun 011 letter to Obama, as quoted in Pierre Joris, “The Audacity of Hope — Comes to Gaza”, at Nomadics, 24 Jun 011 (“Instead of calling on the Israeli government to let a flotilla of unarmed civilians sail to Gaza, the United States government is pressuring its own citizens to refrain from legal acts. On Wednesday, the State Department sent out a “travel advisory” urging Americans not to participate in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. According to the statement, U.S. citizens are advised against traveling to Gaza by any means, including via sea, noting that previous attempts to enter Gaza by sea “have been stopped by Israeli naval vessels and resulted in the injury, death, arrest, and deportation of U.S. citizens.” “Apparently, the State Department subscribes to the view that Israel’s anticipated violence against unarmed protesters is an immutable act of nature,” said Hagit Borer, a professor of Linguistics at the University of Southern California and a passenger on the U.S. boat. “This is a remarkable attitude, coming from a government that provides the Israeli government with billions of dollars in military aid and routinely uses its veto to protect the Israeli government from censure of its occupation policies by the UN Security Council.” Passengers on the boat noted that the U.S. State Department has a legal obligation to act to protect U.S. citizens when they are traveling abroad. “So far, U.S. government officials have failed to use their influence to discourage Israeli authorities from ordering a physical assault on us,” said Just Foreign Policy policy director Robert Naiman, another passenger on the U.S. boat. “Of course, State Department officials have an obligation to speak out against threats to attack us. It is deeply disappointing that they have so far failed to do so.”); Juan Gelman, “lament for the death of parsifal hoolig” (trs. Katherine Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez), as quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Juan Gelman: From ‘The Poems of Sidney West’”, at Poems and Poetics, 24 Jun 011. 538. Emily Critchley, “Nothing About Love”, at Sous les Pavés 4 as downloaded from The Other Room ((“The lead-in syllables… burnt licking of that”) is as quoted in “Get Yer Sous les Pavés”, at Harriet); Sous les Pavés 4 as downloaded from The Other Room. 539. Hoa Nguyen, “You Can Sample”, at Sous les Pavés 4 as downloaded from The Other Room; Jerome Rothenberg, “Variations & Visions: after a poem by Kenneth Rexroth”, at Sous les Pavés 4 as downloaded from The Other Room; Petrarch, “#327” (tr. Tim Atkins), at Sous les Pavés 4 as downloaded from The Other Room]