Hi Frank,

I’m sorry, but I’m gonna kill all links to American web sites or
blogs in the next installment of Shutterclog. Your country has turned
fascist and you and your fellow Americans have allowed it to happen.

So excuse me if I can no longer take your blog seriously…

Niek

http://www.niekhockx.nu/ [UPDATE - content at this address may ironically not be safe for work, if you work in the US where Ashcroft draped the nude breast of the statue of Justice because he and his repressive ilk find beauty intolerable. -fp-]

I’m sorry you feel that way Niek. I certainly haven’t been doing enough to stop it from happening, but many American bloggers and web publishers are working hard every day to turn the tide of fascism. I have two books to review on my desk right now. One is Cross-X and the other is The God Delusion. Neither speaks directly to the political/economic realities of global fascism, but each addresses a facet of mindfulness and concern that I think will be valuable to illuminate. So while I understand your principled exclusion of American web-links, I hope you will find a way to survey Listics from time to time and make personal use of anything valuable you may find here.

There are dozens and dozens of American sites that don’t deserve the boycott… off the top of my head (and with some concern that I will leave out someone close to me and be embarrassed by it): The River, Mystic Bourgeoisie, One Good Move, PRWatch, Tom Matrullo, Kombinat, UFOB…

Hell, that’s a small sample of mindful and aware American bloggers that I read during each month. (UFOB remains mysterious, and if they’re a canuck conspiracy, my apologies since I deliberately tried to leave the Canadians like Moffatt - who shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush - out of my quick-links. And I left out the artists and the poets, arguably a stupid omission… people like Ray. And I left out the techies, from Shelley to Dean and in between… mindful and aware politically but not publishing darts aimed at the heart of the fascist beast. And I left out a raft of personal and professional and personal/professional people publishing on the web from Grace Davis to Jeneane Sessum to Ronni Bennett to George Kelly to Jon Lebkowsky to Tamarika Jacobson… and I left out all kinds of friends who I believe would help me hide a body or get out of town in the dark of night… some named above and others like jr and Winston and Ken who probably wouldn’t want to discuss it, but whom I feel I can trust on so many levels.

I can appreciate the need for people to take a stand against American fascism, and your boycott is a good one, a personal statement that says “when they turned away from freedom and democracy I stood up.” But I refuse to take it personally. I’ve been making these gestures myself for the last five years (and of course on and off since Vietnam when I began to understand some of the terrible choices global corporate capitalism forces on its flagship states). I think you know that. And on one level I am terribly disappointed because people offshore like you and Golby are people I think we will need to count on when things get even darker.

So cut off our links if it helps you draw a clear bright line against the fascist evil that has replaced American democracy, but don’t cut yourself off from us.

John Mather says,

I think of it as the accumulated trace of everything. The history is roughly this; the early universe, in the first submicroseconds, was extremely [word inaudible] and all of the cosmic particles, protons, electrons, unstable nuclear particles, neutrinos and photons and background radiation were all hot and were all together. Then, as the universe expanded, progressively each kind either disappeared, because it was unstable, or annihilated some other kind of particle, or did not. But in any case they all cooled down and so the cosmic microwave background radiation is actually a remnant that traces back to those very earliest moments. But we see features of it that were finally set later. For instance, the spectrum that we observed to test the big bang theory could have been modified as late as, say a year after the big bang. And even in most recent times of course things in our own galaxy, and other galaxies, can emit small amounts of radiation that would confuse the measurements.

George Smoot:

We’re looking back to a time which is between 300,000 and 400,000 years after the Big Bang, which seems like a long time, but we’re, you know, 15 billion years, 14 billion years after the Big Bang now. So, in human terms the analogy I usually give is that it’s like looking at an embryo that’s a few hours old. That’s how far back we’re looking, in terms of – you know, putting the universe in human terms.

But what these (big air quotes) “scientists” have (and again the air quotes) “demonstrated” flies straight in the face of our most revered Christian teachings, teachings themselves rooted in the enlightenment period when all biblical knowledge was fair game for analysis and such great minds as Bishop Ussher set themselves the task of dating the universe (but actually she had to stay home and wash her hair that night)… no — wait, not that kind of dating, I have it on note cards here somewhere… oh yes…

Andrew D. White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom,

…the general conclusion arrived at by an overwhelming majority of the most competent students of the biblical accounts was that the date of creation was, in round numbers, four thousand years before our era; and in the seventeenth century, in his great work, Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and one of the most eminent Hebrew scholars of his time, declared, as the result of his most profound and exhaustive study of the Scriptures, that “heaven and earth, centre and circumference, were created all together, in the same instant, and clouds full of water,” and that “this work took place and man was created by the Trinity on October 23, 4004 B.C., at nine o’clock in the morning.”

And most authoritatively, the Bishop himself:

And I have observed by the continued succession of these years, as they are delivered in holy writ, that the end of the great Nebuchadnezars and the beginning of Evilmerodachs (his sons) reign, fell out in the 3442 year of the world, but by collation of Chaldean history and the astronomical cannon, it fell out in the 186 year c Nabonasar, and, as by certain connexion, it must follow in the 562 year before the Christian account, and of the Julian Period, the 4152. and from thence I gathered the creation of the world did fall out upon the 710 year of the Julian Period, by placing its beginning in autumn: but for as much as the first day of the world began with the evening of the first day of the week, I have observed that the Sunday, which in the year 710 aforesaid came nearest the Autumnal Æquinox, by astronomical tables (notwithstanding the stay of the sun in the dayes of Joshua, and the going back of it in the dayes c Ezekiah) happened upon the 23 day of the Julian October; from thence concluded that from the evening preceding that first day of the Julian year, both the first day of the creation and the first motion of time are to be deduced.

— J. Ussher, The Annals of the World iv (1658)

So I aks ya… who you gonna believe? A man of god or some nukular physicsist?