Know who to kill

2012-01-27T16:24:00.000-08:00

Dang, the onion's teary effect creepeth into many a blog. Grist linked up this one: Solve Overpopulation with Death. Terribly funny.

And this one is great, too. McDonalds and Twitter, two things that I try to never use (except Shit My Dad Says, and the late-night biannual binge on Nuggets, Fries, Coke, Coffee, and Milkshake/burger frappe) combined to make a great social mirror. Meaning that McD wanted to have peeeEeeple tweeEeeet about their wonderful times and flavor/pleasure experiences at their restaurants. It didn't work. Yea, it backfired upon them. Great stuff in that link...click it. Poetry, in my opinion (onion? opinion - pi = onion).

The Optimism of Uncertainty

2012-01-17T16:47:00.001-08:00

by Howard Zinn

From an excerpt of Paul Rogat Loeb's book "The Impossible Will Take a Little While":
In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth.
Let's go back a hundred years. A revolution to overthrow the tsar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers, but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Given the Russian Revolution, who could have predicted Stalin's deformation of it, or Khrushchev's astounding exposure of Stalin, or Gorbachev's succession of surprises? Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II-the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?
And then the post-war world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, which Stalin himself had given little chance. And then the break with the Soviet Union, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone. No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere's Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent Uganda.
Spain became an astonishment. A million died in the civil war, which ended in victory for the Fascist Franco, backed by Hitler and Mussolini. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone. In other places too, deeply entrenched dictatorships seemed suddenly to disintegrate-in Portugal, Argentina, the Philippines, Iran.
The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective spheres of influence and control, vying for military and political power. The United States and the Soviet Union soon each had enough thermonuclear bombs to devastate the Earth several times over. The international scene was dominated by their rivalry, and it was supposed that all affairs, in every nation, were affected by their looming presence. Yet the most striking fact about these superpowers was that, despite their size, their wealth, their overwhelming accumulation of nuclear weapons, they were unable to control events, even in those parts of the world considered to be their respective spheres of influence. The failure of the Soviet Union to have its way in Afghanistan, its decision to withdraw after almost a decade of ugly intervention, was the most striking evidence that even the possession of thermonuclear weapons does not guarantee domination over a determined population.
The United States has faced the same reality. It waged a full-scale war in lndochina, conducted the most brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in world history, and yet was forced to withdraw. In Latin America, after a long history of U.S. military intervention having its way again and again, this superpower, with all its wealth and weapons, found itself frustrated. It was unable to prevent a revolution in Cuba, and the Latin American dictatorships that the United States supported from Chile to Argentina to El Salvador have fallen. In the headlines every day we see other instances of the failure of the presumably powerful over the presumably powerless, as in Brazil, where a grassroots movement of workers and the poor elected a new president pledged to fight destructive corporate power.
Looking at this catalog of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience-whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself.
No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just. I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I go, I find such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of each other's existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain.
I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement. It is this change in consciousness that encourages me. Granted, racial hatred and sex discrimination are still with us, war and violence still poison our culture, we have a large underclass of poor, desperate people, and there is a hard core of the population content with the way things are, afraid of change. But if we see only that, we have lost historical perspective, and then it is as if we were born yesterday and we know only the depressing stories in this morning's newspapers, this evening's television reports.
Consider the remarkable transformation, in just a few decades, in people's consciousness of racism, in the bold presence of women demanding their rightful place, in a growing public awareness that gays are not curiosities but sensate human beings, in the long-term growing skepticism about military intervention despite brief surges of military madness. It is that long-term change that I think we must see if we are not to lose hope. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act. Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society.
We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don't "win," there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope. An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places-and there are so many-where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Lincoln wants da goods

2012-01-11T19:17:00.000-08:00

"If this is coffee,
please bring me some
tea.

But if this is tea,
please bring me some
coffee."

The Argus He Cries...

2012-01-06T19:50:00.000-08:00

"...though love has its place under the sun, it's only man's fears that carry him on."
by Ween

Here's the entire song's lyrics:

Yesterday we lost our lives,
tomorrow we were born
Fortunes smiled upon us,
sacrifice the Argus
All that he might help us see

Magna eyes that track for miles,
looking for disease
Puzzled by the mountains-
tricked by the sea
and the argus is practiced compassion
with an eye on you, as one is on me
will the god eye grant his forgiveness
and allow he that's lived,
a reason to see
Counting days and building walls,
bells ring so's to warn
All the signs that guide us,
chosen by the Argus
Tell me he has chosen you

Led by form we shed our soul
Trusting like a child
See the dark face that saved us
Drink from his empty eyes

and the argus is practiced compassion
with an eye on you, as one is on me
will the god eye grant his forgiveness
letting droplets of light erupt from the sea....

Lying in bed of garlic and orchid,
he closes an eye , which closes another
And in his sleep he dreams, of watching and looking and feather clouds dancing
He curls up his lid and sleeps...

Swirling with visions on man's confusion
All of the work, done just to appease him
The Argus he cries, though love has it's place under the sun
It's only man's fear that carries him on...

The Argos was an all-seeing giant God in Greek mythology. Read up on it for few minutes and this song makes a lot more sense. Happy Weening.

Block Ads

2011-12-29T12:20:00.000-08:00

This is cool. You can download AdBlock Plus to, well, block ads while you surf. But wait, it gets even cooler: Steve Lambert, ana rtist who simply despises capitalism, has shown me Add-Art, which is a plug-in for Firefox that will replace the ads with art. Fuck yeah.

Jah, Pastafari

2011-12-28T09:12:00.000-08:00

Religious freedom rocks. Here we see a member of the Church of the Flying Pasta Monster. And yes, he is wearing a colander on his head....for his liscence photo! The idea behind this religion is essentially to reject all dogma. Pretty awesome, me thinks.

Food Not Bombs

2011-12-26T10:08:00.000-08:00

If you want to travel via plane with cupcakes, you had better not have any mysterious gels or liquids on it. Or just eat it before the TSA takes it away...and eats it.

Interpret #1

2011-12-20T14:41:00.000-08:00

Overheard: "Yeah, there's no season right now."

Walkin' on shaky ground

2011-12-17T18:39:00.000-08:00

All shifts. Time can trick us into expecting some sort of stability but....

In the clouds, on the earth.