Shaving it down to the essentials
Mark Fiore. Good.
Trail Mix
A little summary of some of my thematically linked wanderings this evening…
Student to be put on trial for heckling Bush I…
..”At some point I think Bush made a reference to Nicaragua,” said Kenneth Houp, one of Markovich’s attorneys. “That’s when Markovich stood up and yelled (an expletive) and was hauled off by the gendarmes.”
What was that pesky f–king thing called again? The constitution?
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Bill Bennett to Noam : Jane, you ignorant slut.
“Noam Chomsky : …Well, for example, the United States happens to be the only state in the world that has been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism, would have been condemned by the Security Council, except that it vetoed the resolution. This referred to the U.S. terrorist war against Nicaragua, the court ordered the United States to desist and pay reparations. The U.S. responded by immediately escalating the crimes, including first official orders to attack what are called soft targets — undefended civilian targets. This is massive terrorism.”
Bennett : Yeah, well you’re a big poopyhead! Nyah!†
Bennett : Yeah, well you’re a big poopyhead! Nyah!†
Bush II, meanwhile, is back to his usual jukes-and-kallikaks action :
“During a conversation between the two presidents, George W. Bush, 55, (USA) and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 71, (Brazil), Bush bewildered his colleague with the question “Do you have blacks, too?”
As the search for a scapegoat other than the blindingly obvious unelected pResidential one really gets underway :
Dear Director Mueller:
I feel at this point that I have to put my concerns in writing concerning the important topic of the FBI’s response to evidence of terrorist activity in the United States prior to September 11th. The issues are fundamentally ones of INTEGRITY and go to the heart of the FBI’s law enforcement mission and mandate.
[…]
To get to the point, I have deep concerns that a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts by you and others at the highest levels of FBI management has occurred and is occurring.
[…]
I feel that certain facts, including the following, have, up to now, been omitted, downplayed, glossed over and/or mis-characterized in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper political reasons…
I feel at this point that I have to put my concerns in writing concerning the important topic of the FBI’s response to evidence of terrorist activity in the United States prior to September 11th. The issues are fundamentally ones of INTEGRITY and go to the heart of the FBI’s law enforcement mission and mandate.
[…]
To get to the point, I have deep concerns that a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts by you and others at the highest levels of FBI management has occurred and is occurring.
[…]
I feel that certain facts, including the following, have, up to now, been omitted, downplayed, glossed over and/or mis-characterized in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper political reasons…
What is happening to your country, my American friends? How sad it is to watch it all fall slowly apart.
†OK, I made that part up. See, I told you I wasn’t a journalist!
The Birds!
How the heck did I get a referral from here? No WonderChicken listed, I looked. Funny ha-ha and the other one too.
A request for assistance
Shelley has asked : “If you work with Linux (all flavors), Darwin, Solaris, HP UX, FreeBSD, etc. – any version of UNIX – and you have a tip or trick based on the following subjects, could you please send me an email with your suggestion […] If you’re the first with a tip, I’ll make sure you’re accredited for it in the book. I need to get these chapters finished next week, so I’m hoping to get tips and tricks this weekend.”
If you’re one of them Unixfolk, please go help the ‘Bird – you’ll get a BurningBird™ Brand Flame Retardant Beanie*!
*not really, but you will get credited in her book.
Well, I guess somebody was listening…
or
Great minds think alike.
I had this idea recently about using Daypop or Blogdex to track ideas and conversations, and lo and behold, someone’s written something that is a first step in that direction. I have implemented it here, to give it a whirl. The magic may take a while to appear, as the script runs after the page is fully loaded, and my instant referrer doodad is acting up a bit. When it does load, click on the little [b]’s beside any link to see who else is talking about that link…
The toy erroneously puts a Blogdex [b] beside my category links, too, which I’ll try to fix tomorrow, but otherwise it seems pretty cool. Let me know if it floats your boat or chafes your scrote (or appropriate other body part, as required).
Bow to the riff lord.
Edit : I’ve disabled it. Too obtrusive.
This is pretty cool…
..although there are possibly many like it that I’ve not seen. This answers, perhaps, some of the questions about syndication that Eeksy-Peeksy was asking here last week, which Shelley attempted to answer.
Confused? Don’t be. Just have a look. Kinda neato.
Recycling
I swear by all that’s holy, by the sweet unsucked nipples of the mother of jesus, by the small but nonetheless annoyingly itchy watery little bumpy things on the sides of my fingers, by the lords of the underworld and Timmy too, by gum, by gemorrah, by sodom and moloch, by the dirty diapers of the baby jesus, by Aunt Jemima and her god-blessed pancakes, by all the prime numbers up to and including 29, by land (one) by sea (two), by the funniest number that exists (fourteen), in the name of the whiskey and the beers and the holy smokes, by the SUVs and the Naderites, by chimptacular presidents and semi-masticated pretzels, by the barney and the rubble and the smoking crater, by the inescapable haiku and the inevitable goatsex, by the fat guy and the troll, by the pedant and the pederast, by the vegetarians, the vegans the omnicores the omnivores the omniwhores the carnivores and the single cry in the dark of a lone drunken chicken begging to be eaten, just a f–king nibble you bastards, by the Portuguese scribblers, the Australian nutjobs, the Yankee heroes and the dismemberment of thousand-headed Purusha, by the subtle, supersensuous spiritual essence which pervades all space, by the mythical tortoise which upholds the earth, by the shrimplike scent of my swinging dad-balls, by the sacred and inextinguishable fires of the Magi which alone remain to illumine the horizon, by the dirty little chuckle, the self-referential injoke, by the ineluctable modality of the f–king boneheaded, by the end of this post it’ll be time for another beer, by the oft-licked nuts of Cerberus, the three-headed watchdog at the gates of Hell, by good intentions, bad intentions, simple misdirection, sleight-of-hand and honest-to-goodness magic, by the great big ball of thread beside the chest of drawers, by the time I figure it out I’ll be dead, by the sweet sweet liquor, by the weed and the hash, by the speed and the coke, by the dimethyl goddamn tryptamine, by the wind and the waves, by the quiet talks on the beach and the naked dancing on the rooftop, by the unreachable goal and the short-term workaround, by the self-obsession and the reaching out to a friend, by the pastoral idyll and the urban hubbub, by the purple steaming mess that spills out onto the pavement as I die, by the husker and the du, by the #006699 and the #CCCC00, by the Math and the Owie, by the wife, the horse and the moustache, by all that’s holy :
I’ve been here before. Archiving. Yeah. That’s it.
Misdirection is the soul of magic
They lied about one vital thing : replace the word ‘pigeon’ with ‘wonderchicken’ and all will become clear…
(I guess I missed this the first time ’round.)
Reamweaver
Whenever I want you, all I have to do is rea-ea-ea-ea-eam (also know as the ‘ream sequence’).
As a certain friend and coworker would say : thas innerestin’.
Naked Apes
I’m struck once again at how even the most literate, erudite and presumably intelligent of thinkers, no matter where they lie on the political map, can be depended upon, when cornered, to bare their yellowed tusks and, with frenzied screeching and flinging of their own excrement, reveal their true simian nature.
This little internecine sh-tfight is instructive to read, while also being sad, pathetic and so completely unnecessary as to bring tears of somedamnthing to my eye. It’s no wonder that America (and it can be said of other nations, a multitude of them, I know) has been ruled by this endless procession of greedy, evil bastards for so long. How sad and ineffectual are those who agree on a common enemy, and then proceed to destroy one another in an argument about how to defend themselves against that enemy.
And this fandangled new personal publishing revolution (read that in a 1950’s TV-huckster, over-amped voice) in which we’re all so proud of participating has at times given me some hope that this time ‘it might be different, really it might,’ but the recent pointed and pointless screeching and feces-hurling in blogland, sparked by differences of opinion about the bloodthirsty tribal warfare of yet another gang of naked apes busily shedding one another’s blood over in the eastern mediterranean… this has left me less optimistic than I once was. How sad and pathetic it is to agree that killing is wrong, then become so involved in arguing about who deserves to die less that we do nothing to stop that killing.
Do I feel smug and superior in pointing this out? No, I do not. Mostly, I feel tired.
The revolution will not be blogged.
Some Nice New Shiny Things
It's a damn good question
The question on the table is : ‘who do you believe‘?
My answer is : not even my own mother.
Edit : Stuff like this – “As U.S. officials continued to issue warnings yesterday about the possibility of attacks by suicide bombers and terrorists, the White House quietly acknowledged that the threats are not urgent and that they are partly motivated by political objectives” – makes me considerably less inclined to believe The Little President That Could and his pack of weasels, though. How about you? Is it excessively hyperbolic to call them worthless scum?
No, no, I didn’t think so.
[via the usual suspects]
Kiss me Noam, you old fool
People love to hate cranky old uncle Chomsky, and it’s no surprise really, with the stuff he goes around saying in these dissent-discouraging times. This recent CBC interview with him shows him in fine form, talking about the same things he usually does, jumping up and down on the head of the interviewer, uttering the word ‘No’ more times that I’ve ever seen anyone say it before in a single conversation. For what it’s worth, though, I agree with many of the things he has to say about governments, and about the press. I’m aware that’s an unpopular thing to say, and that many consider him a loon.
Something like this, though, doesn’t seem to me to be the words of a lunatic. On the contrary, it seems quite lucid indeed :
“What I’m saying is that as long as people, ordinary people, are able to free themselves from the doctrinal controls imposed on them by their self-appointed betters and mentors, as long as they’re able to do this, they’ll continue to be able to struggle for peace and justice and freedom and limitations on violence, and constraints on power, as they’ve been doing for hundreds of years. And I don’t see any end to that. Where it’ll end up in the long run, I’d tell you where I’d like it to, but I wouldn’t even dream about that.
The immediate problem is to free ourselves from the shackles imposed, very consciously, by the kind of people you’re talking about. Who don’t want the facts to be known. And for very good reasons. Because if people know the facts they aren’t going to tolerate them. So therefore you have to prevent them from knowing. You have to indoctrinate them, you have to tell them stories about how we’re really good guys, and if we use violence, it must be for the general good because we represent the course of history.”
The immediate problem is to free ourselves from the shackles imposed, very consciously, by the kind of people you’re talking about. Who don’t want the facts to be known. And for very good reasons. Because if people know the facts they aren’t going to tolerate them. So therefore you have to prevent them from knowing. You have to indoctrinate them, you have to tell them stories about how we’re really good guys, and if we use violence, it must be for the general good because we represent the course of history.”
[more]
Speaking of hypocrisy, and the Chomster does, this piece covers well-trodden ground, but worth a read nonetheless, perhaps :
“Hypocrisy, as La Rochefoucauld observed, is the homage that vice pays to virtue. In the case of Bush, campaign lies are the homage that Republican sloganeering paid to the popularity of Democratic ideology. […] As ideological fraud, then, George W. Bush remains in a class by himself. It’s understandable why he does it: Democrats’ domestic positions are basically popular. But why does he get away with it? He pulls it off, I think, for several reasons (of which September 11 is fairly far down the list). “
[more]
Are we in the weblogging community shouldering the burden of that responsibility to preserve the right of people to know the facts, as traditional media increasing fails in its role as watchdog?
I cetainly don’t know. But that should be clear, sporting as I do a tagline like the truth can blow me.
Edit : An interesting exchange between the Chomster and Christopher Hitchens.
It Just Feels Right, Baby
Cheesily riffing on the erudititudinosity and linkeriffomafication of Tom’s recent post, I give you this darn-near equally-recent popular image (which I did not make) found at the Site Which Must Not Be Named.
Heh.
Edit : I have discovered that this image originally came from the SomethingAwful forums. SA rocks. Or is that San Dimas Football? sh-t, I dunno. But the bad, bad man who posted it to Filepile didn’t credit it. Apologies.
Best.Blogroll.Evar.
I’ve got to agree with Jon here : even if I’m not on it, this b(l)ogroll from yet another Metafiltron, malevole, made me smile quietly to myself. Which, considering how grumpy I was earlier today, is the humour equivalent of setting off a neutron bomb in my underpants.
Also, do not miss the homepage, which is a marvel. Super extra double cool, with a light dusting of methamphetamines on top. ‘Cause they’re crunchy.
Metaphor saves me from the fact that metaphor cannot save me
…Instead I sit here alone at 4 AM arranging words to describe what is indescribable or what is not worth describing. And his arms tangle with the arms of someone else, for no better reason than that they just do. The heart of this pain: there is no why. There is no reason. Things just happen this way, and we have to stand by, silently, and watch.
Some lovely writing from a fellow Mefiosi, Evanizer. Via yet another member of this growing Metafilter-centred new kids on the block gang of bloggers, this nascent B-List, this renaissance of sorts, Iconomy.
War on Intelligence
Walters admits that the nearly $1 billion spent on anti-drug messages needs to be better used, and promises to refocus the campaign. Congress is expected soon to consider re-authorizing the $18 billion-per-year National Office of Drug Control Policy activities.”
Turns out the TV ads that these twisted, evil, moralistic little icepickers (to lift an epithet from Mojo Nixon) have been coming up with are actually encouraging kids to do drugs. That is sad and beautiful.
Sad only because the One Billion Dollars they spent on f–king advertisements telling people what they should and should not put into their very own personal bodies could actually have gone towards doing some good in the world. How many lives could 18 billion dollars save if it were spent on health care for the 40 million Americans who don’t have any, for example?
More Mojo :
“We’re gonna have a war on drugs?
a war on drugs…
We oughta have a war on war, suckers
We oughta have a war on this senseless condominium new car
shopping mall hell…”
a war on drugs…
We oughta have a war on war, suckers
We oughta have a war on this senseless condominium new car
shopping mall hell…”
Harrowing
Spare a thought and, if you’re the praying kind, a prayer, for Mike and his family.
Taking My Own Advice
So this evening I took my own advice : I started at a weblog I like, and proceeded to check out the sites in his blogroll that I’d never seen before, looking for groovy new folks who might prod my brain a bit.
Slightly unfair, perhaps, but I tried to limit myself to reading the two most recent entries from each weblog I visited, and if something went *ping* in my wee chicken brain based on that small sample, I decided right then bingbangboom that it was a keeper. (I should mention that I am not much interested in weblogs which are primarily links to other things, unless those links are truly mind-blowingly cool. Nor am I terribly keen on reading about your adventures in buying coffee at the local Starbucks, unless in the telling of said adventures your words are so cunningly crafted as to make me grin like a monkey (and even better, leap up and down and fling my excrement), or otherwise evoke some feeling other than ‘well, that’s five minutes of my life I’ll never get back.’ Do as I say, not as I do!)
A fruitful random walk, some results of which I present to you now. If you like the stuff I say here, or the way I say it, or just the way my bum wiggles when I walk, you might just like these folks too :
“Why kill the Buddha? Because the Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha, but an expression of your longing. If this Buddha is not killed he will only stand in your way. ” – Killing The Buddha
“zy’-mo-glyph’-ic, adj. [Gr. zyme leaven + Gr. glyphe carving] Of, or pertaining to, images of fermentation, specifically the solid residue of creative fermentation on natural objects” – Riley Dog
“But before your heart jumps with the possibility that I might just stop following you through malls and staring at your darkened bedroom window all night from that car across the street (yeah, that’s me out there, sorry if it’s creeping you out, but well, you know), my memory is still strong from eating iron-rich foods and popping 10 to 20 times the RDA of chewable Vitamin C before breakfast every day.” – The Evil Twin Theory
“This is a love story about a man and a white snake.” – Plep
“And yet, he was trying, as we all tried when we were fourteen or fifteen, and still are trying, though we disguise it better, to achieve this thing he had in his head of this person he wished he were and wasn’t and could never be. ” – caterina.net
“The map isn’t the territory, as the model isn’t reality. The map is a referential structure; inside a coordinate system all can be referenced laying the gridwork for reality.” – context weblog
“The larger dream scenario has drifted away, but I was momentarily in a skit, acting the part of two ladies in a line dance. As I moved into the position of the saucy woman and donned her shoes, I found I was missing one of the pair. I saw it floating down a river. ” – Daily Vexation
“zy’-mo-glyph’-ic, adj. [Gr. zyme leaven + Gr. glyphe carving] Of, or pertaining to, images of fermentation, specifically the solid residue of creative fermentation on natural objects” – Riley Dog
“But before your heart jumps with the possibility that I might just stop following you through malls and staring at your darkened bedroom window all night from that car across the street (yeah, that’s me out there, sorry if it’s creeping you out, but well, you know), my memory is still strong from eating iron-rich foods and popping 10 to 20 times the RDA of chewable Vitamin C before breakfast every day.” – The Evil Twin Theory
“This is a love story about a man and a white snake.” – Plep
“And yet, he was trying, as we all tried when we were fourteen or fifteen, and still are trying, though we disguise it better, to achieve this thing he had in his head of this person he wished he were and wasn’t and could never be. ” – caterina.net
“The map isn’t the territory, as the model isn’t reality. The map is a referential structure; inside a coordinate system all can be referenced laying the gridwork for reality.” – context weblog
“The larger dream scenario has drifted away, but I was momentarily in a skit, acting the part of two ladies in a line dance. As I moved into the position of the saucy woman and donned her shoes, I found I was missing one of the pair. I saw it floating down a river. ” – Daily Vexation
Apologies for coming off all wide-eyed and Macauley Culkinesque, but there are just so many people out there, aren’t there? I think I might have to make my little stroll through the neighbourhoods a weekly ritual…
Only One Question
Who teaches logical positivism, and is he (or she) also in charge of the sheepdip? If not, I hereby volunteer for ‘Professor Emeritus of Being In Charge of The Sheepdip’.
Update : As the Good Reverend has seen fit to put me in charge of Analytic Philosophy and cruelly denied me my request to be in charge of the Ovine Excreta, I figured I’d read up on it. Most interesting.