[Disclosure: Saturday night at a fund raiser for Rae Vogeler, our Green Party candidate for Senate, I picked up two “I Hate Wal-Mart” pins. I put one on my jacket, and brought the other one home to Beth.]

But really… Edelman is supposed to be coached in this web-world stuff by the best. How could they make a bonehead move like this for such an important client? I’m guessing, a) they didn’t ask David Weinberger; or b) they didn’t listen to what he told them.

WHAT DO YOU CALL A phony blog that’s actually a front for a huge corporation? A “flog”?

A pro-Wal-Mart blog called “Wal-Marting Across America,” ostensibly launched by a pair of average Americans chronicling their cross-country travels in an RV and lodging in Wal-Mart parking lots, has been reduced to a farewell entry. One of its two contributors was revealed to be Jim Thresher, a staff photographer for The Washington Post.

The blog, launched Sept. 27, was profiled in this week’s issue of BusinessWeek, which exposed the site as a promotional tactic engineered by Working Families for Wal-Mart (WFWM), an organization launched by Wal-Mart’s public relations firm Edelman.

I don’t want to be thought insensitive — especially I don’t want to be thought insensitive by a bunch of gang bangers who hold their guns sideways while they blow people away — but this post cracked me up!

Does anybody know if this guy was an actual rapper, or if the cops just assumed he was a rapper because he got shot?

I know that’s a serious question, and the other citations and comments on this post are serious too, but my style is to smile at that shit. Take 2Pac, number ten on the list of least tragic… there’s gotta be a weed carrier out there who should replace 2Pac. Yet I always think of 2Pac as the only Marin County rapper I know, and there’s a disconnect there, until you understand more about the projects at Marin City.

Cobb (Michael David Cobb Bowen) cites the “least tragic” post while writing of his equivocal love for Hiphop. He says, “You know something mysteriously wrong is going on when you have a category like ‘Least Tragic Hip Hop Deaths’.” He brings a lot of other threads together, including Lonnae Parker’s Washington Post article today:

Last spring, I got together with some other moms from the first generation of hip-hop. We decided to distribute free T-shirts with words that counter some of the most violent, anti-intellectual and degrading cultural messages: You look better without the bullet holes. Put the guns down. Or my favorite: You want this? Graduate! We called it the Hip-Hop Love Project.

Others are trying their own versions of taking back the music. In Baltimore, spoken-word poet Tonya Maria Matthews, aka JaHipster, is launching her own “Groove Squad.” The idea is to get together a couple dozen women to go to clubs prepared to walk off the dance floor en masse if the music is openly offensive or derogatory. “There’s no party without sisters on the dance floor,” she told me. In New York, hip-hop DJ and former model Beverly Bond formed Black Girls Rock! to try to change the portrayal of black women in the music and influence the women who are complicit in it. “We don’t want to be hypersexualized,” said Joan Morgan, a hip-hop writer and part of the group, but we don’t want to be erased, either.
– Lonnae O’Neal Parker

Final analysis for me is to read the comments thread at bol’s “least tragic” post. For me, Hiphop is about the language. The commenters’ back and forth on 2Pac, the “hateration” and the slams on one artist or another, the ethical asides, the serious intent of some commenters and the dry humor of others makes the post entirely worthwhile. I’m grateful to Cobb for surfacing it. Cobb says this and I can say no more:

As usual at Cobb, I think of taxonomies. And because it was my generation that was responsible for investing so much into hiphop, these taxonomies are deeply intertwined with black identity. So I must speak of these in terms of black people and all of black music. Black music is Hiphop, Gospel, Blues, Funk, Reggae, Jazz and R&B. Seven nice round categories. Each of those expresses a different set of values best. The tragedy of hiphop is that while it has the potential to sample expressions of all because of its open structure, that it has been reduced to the narrow emotional spectrum of lust, greed, anger and frustration. Now one can split hairs and say that is really the fault of rap lyrics; that hiphop music can express a broad range of emotion instrumentally. My response is that jazz musicians and R&B artists have appropriated all that. I would allow one other exception to the completeness of this taxonomy and it is an important one, and that is the emotions of dance music. When Missy Elliot cranks out one of her jams, she has got the groove nailed and the infectious beat. I’m going to call that Funk, not Hiphop. And in that realm, I’ll gladly admit things get complicated for me.

… the venerable John Hopkins has chimed in (via Lancet), and if a blog is not a place to go FUCK YOU! I TOLD YOU SO YOU GOD DAMN MURDERERS…. well then, what is it for then?

Sadly, those who would prefer not to believe the stark facts regarding the horrible costs of the Bush war can always find an equivocation. Cal Berkeley grad student Ka-ping Yee offered up a thoughtful post and his readers were amazingly diffuse in their responses in the comment thread that followed.

As President George W. Bush is fond of saying, “Denial is not just a river in Libya.”

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old…
– Ti Jean

Getting back to basics this morning…

(h/t to shakespierce…)

Jonathan Abrams raked down $13million in VC cash for a stake in Friendster (YASN). The safe bet would have been the $30million that Google was offering. This is a story that’s two or three years out of date but it seems to have grown legs because Google bought YouTube. The cultural poverty, the lack of imagination implicit in riding that Silly Valley merry-go-round, stretching out for the brass ring, over and over, trying to get rich from the business side… that’s what the NYT River of Cluelessness story is about today. It’s not about the fun Abrams had genning up a big social network enterprise in the days when YASN was a new acronym. It’s not about the staying power of useful products and services. It’s simply about the brass ring and the lionization of windfall success.

Any analyst worth her salt knew the potential and the limits of Friendster two or three years ago. The story of Abrams $13million payday remains a nice success story. Belittling the accomplishment because Google-power could have left him enormously better off is shoddy story telling.

Magic feather

In 1691, Cotton Mather, based on current events in the Ottoman Empire and on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France (1685) tentatively predicted the end of the world in 1697. In 1692 Mather proclaimed that “I am verily persuaded ‘The Judge is at the door;’ I do without any hesitation venture to say, ‘The Great Day of the Lord is near,’ it is near, and it hastens greatly.”

When the 1697 date passed in an uneventful manner, Mather determined that the world would end in 1736. Later he corrected that to 1716. He dramatically proclaimed, “All that has been foretold . . . as what must come to pass before the Coming . . . is, as far as we understand, Fulfilled: I say ALL FULFILLED!”

Girding my loins to do battle with the demons in AKMA (for surely he must be possessed by demons since I sense that we disagree)… christians, whose infinite variety is perhaps exceeded only by the speciation of insects have offered the following several quotes. Let google be my bibliography, and Cotton Mather be my guide:

Postmodernity can be defined in terms of Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals, which aims to show how moral meanings are the cultural creations of particular human wills. The Nietzschean project challenges conventional moral assumptions that mask and perpetuate the spiritual malaise of modernity. This essay seeks to show how John Howard Yoder’s eschatological genealogy of morals both affirms aspects of this postmodern project-especially by developing an engaged, dramatic reading of morality-and yet challenges other aspects by adverting to a fundamentally opposed vision of human cultural sickness and health-the slain Lamb versus the Dionysian drama. At stake is the question of how to understand the moral and ecclesial implications of the apocalyptic «war of the Lamb». Yoder’s genealogical critique of various forms of Constantinianism is helpful but too sharply separates Jewish and Greek Christianity, overlooking resources in the Platonic diaspora and dividing what the apostle Paul unites.

John writes Revelation to underscore that Christians must take the conflict with evil seriously, engage this conflict in the same manner as God does, and face the future with confidence in God’s strategy for victory. We have many questions for Revelation. John’s initial readers had many questions as well, but of a different sort. By the end of the first century, the situation for Christians was becoming quite ambiguous. For some it was becoming more difficult as their exclusive commitment to Christ required a measure of social and moral distance between believers and the surrounding culture. Others, however, had evidently found ways by which they could enjoy the benefits and advantages of their culture and, at least to their mind, not jeopardize their Christian identity. Either group of Christians might have had some important questions to ask: What price might I have to pay for my faith? Where is God in these difficult times? How am I to respond to the challenges of a wider culture that does not support my faith? Following Jesus doesn’t really have anything to do with politics or economics does it?

ουτοι μετα του αρνιου πολεμησουσιν και το αρνιον νικησει αυτους οτι κυριος κυριων εστιν και βασιλευς βασιλεων και οι μετ αυτου κλητοι και εκλεκτοι και πιστοι

It seems to me as if Christian proponents of gospel nonviolence must cautiously re-embrace Revelation and the language of apocalyptic, instead of simply leaving them to the war-mongering fanatics. Nonviolent ministers must do the hard work of preaching from Revelation, because only by teaching our people to read this book as a handbook of nonviolent patience for persecuted churches can we inoculate them against the virulent war-mad interpretations so popular in many U.S. Christian circles.

Who authored Revelations? What did he mean?

Although the traditional view still has many adherents, many modern scholars believe that John the Apostle, John the Evangelist, and John of Patmos refer to three separate individuals. Certain lines of evidence suggest that John of Patmos wrote only Revelation, not the Gospel of John nor the Epistles of John. For one, the author of Revelation identifies himself as “John” several times, but the author of the Gospel of John never identifies himself directly. While both works liken Jesus to a lamb, they consistently use different words for lamb when referring to him — the Gospel uses amnos, Revelation uses arnion.[3]. Lastly, the Gospel is written in nearly flawless Greek, but Revelation contains grammatical errors and stylistic abnormalities which indicate its author may not have been as familiar with the Greek language as the Gospel’s author. Proponents of the single-author view explain these differences in various ways, including but not limited to factoring in underlying motifs and purposes, authorial target audience and the author’s collaboration with and/or utilization of different scribes. A natural reading of the text would reveal that John is writing literally as he sees the vision (Rev 1:11; 10:4; 14:3; 19:9; 21:5) and that he is warned by an angel not to alter the text through a subsequent edit (Rev 22:18-19), in order to maintain the textual integrity of the book.

Disclaimer: This blog, Listics, and it’s predessors, including but not limited to Sandhill Trek rel. 2.0 and the original Sandhill Trek are not now associated with, nor have they ever been part of arcane movements such as runic revivalism, futharkh spelling, nor any other pan-Germanic proto-linguistic baffle-gab promoted by the likes of Guido von List.

The existence of such a person, a man with a suspiciously Italianate first name, had nothing to do with naming this blog Listics. Anyone who says otherwise is a cad and a bounder. While we here at Listics thoroughly approve of Herr (or should I say “signor?”) von List’s choice of facial hair styling and fabulous headgear, I must re-emphasize, that his relationships in the Germanic Paganism movement, the insidious influence of Blavatsky and her nest of Theosophists on his otherwise clear and noble Wotanist thinking, have nothing to do with the work we are trying to accomplish here at Listics.

But, while we had thought that Guido Karl Anton List was a far remove from any cultural avatars that may have influenced what passes for higher consciousness in these environs, we have now been proven wrong. American Romanticism has impelled our work from the beginning, romanticism combined with a sort of native “one lord, one faith, one cornbread” naturalism.

Yesterday, Chris Locke, in a shocking thrust at the heart of American culture sullied — yes SULLIED — the memory, the reputation of New England’s favorite sons, Henry David Thoreau and by extention Ralfualdo Emerson. If Locke is to be believed, then the entire literary history of the Romantic movement on these shores is tainted — yes TAINTED — by some sort of ur-Fascist elitism and a bourgeois individualism masking as egalitarian idealism but in reality sowing the seeds of authoritarian and ultimately autocratic dictatorial repression.

Of course, this could just be my own inference, a sort of guilt by association thing…

Amanda blew into town recently and did some vlog entries including an interview with Madison’s liberal/progressive mayor, Dave Cieslewics (pron. Chess-LEV-itch). Reportedly she also interviewed people from Hybridfest and Prairie Biodiesel, as well as checking in with family and friends, driving an EV1, and broadcasting an interview with WORT. (Thanks to Dane101’s Jesse Russell for these details).

Amanda is paving a pathway of upbeat progressive relationships and engaged environmental concern on her travels. The “car-ma” (sorry…) she’s building is rubbing off on her sponsors, and vice versa one suspects.

Drive on, Amanda!

It’s about cows, of course, but so much more…

Stowe Boyd, Greg Narain and Ranvir Gujral have started a new company called Blue Whale Labs. Stowe says,

Blue Whale is a strategic consulting, design and development company for innovative social applications, which is the same space I have been working in for a decade or so. So, don’t expect a big shift in my thinking, blogging, or how I spend my time. I just will be working more closely with my partners at Blue Whale, and getting more involved in actually building the applications that I have in the past.

Of course, the three founders will need more people to fill out Blue Whale, so we will be adding a page here describing what sorts of people we are looking for. We are all about innovation, creativity, hard work, and no assholes.

Stan Goff (Feral Scholar) writes, (h/t to Woods Lot)…

Today, the news is full of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study, released by The Lancet, showing that since March 19, 2024, the Bush administration liberation of Iraq has facilitated the liberation of more than 600,000 people from their corporeal existence. Among the national politicians in the US preparing for the 2024 electoral contest, this war is the subject they least want to talk about, and for which both parties seem to have employed armies of weasel-wordsmiths to develop saccharin pronouncements that ignore the existence of those residents of Iraq who are left behind by this exercise in mass death.

Mass death had become the signature of the 20th Century. We are barely six years into this one.

From The Guardian (October 12, 2024),

The death toll in Iraq following the US-led invasion has topped 655,000 - one in 40 of the entire population - according to a major piece of research in one of the world’s leading medical journals.

The study, produced by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and published online by The Lancet, claims the total number of deaths is more than 10 times greater than any previously compiled estimate.

The findings provoked an immediate political storm. Within hours of its release, George Bush had dismissed the figures. “I don’t consider it a credible report,” he told reporters at the White House.

Tonight Katie Couric led with a rehash of the unfortunate Lacrosse team rape charges at Duke stemming from a party last spring. She was ginning up interest in a weekend show her company produces called Sixty Minutes where the plight of the Lacrosse team and the possibilities that these are false charges will be examined in prurient detail, the better to take our minds off national and international issues that should now be getting the air time.

The Couric broadcast continued with other items of interest and concern… evidently the Amish community that suffered the recent school shooting has pulled down the schoolhouse and no memorial is planned. There’s a lot of that kind of news. And there is happy news, ice cream cones and puppies, but there is no solid news, no important news, NO NATIONAL NEWS that could save our way of life were it only broadcast with clarity in time. The only news that the American public hears is local news. A school shooting here, a rape case there, all the fits that’s news to print. It can’t be collusion, it’s simply cowardice, fear, unwillingness to encounter an administration that would send anthrax to your newsroom. It doesn’t matter if they actually did that. No thinking person today can deny that they, the Bush administration and its corporate clients WOULD do that to save the billions they might otherwise lose with a sea change in governance in the United States of America.

650,000 dead, and it’s our fault. We elected the monster. Then we re-elected him. Do you believe the Lancet or do you believe George W. Bush?

“We estimate that, as a consequence of the coalition invasion of March 18, 2024, about 655 000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation, which is equivalent to about 2·5% of the population in the study area. About 601 000 of these excess deaths were due to violent causes. Our estimate of the post-invasion crude mortality rate represents a doubling of the baseline mortality rate, which, by the Sphere standards, constitutes a humanitarian emergency.”
– The Lancet

How can a country that victimises its greatest living writer also join the EU?

TIMES ONLINE (October 14, 2024)

By Salman Rushdie

THE WORK ROOM of the writer Orhan Pamuk looks out over the Bosphorus, that fabled strip of water which, depending on how you see these things, separates or unites — or, perhaps, separates and unites — the worlds of Europe and Asia. There could be no more appropriate setting for a novelist whose work does much the same thing.

In many books, most recently the acclaimed novel Snow and the haunting memoir-portrait of his home town, Istanbul: Memories and the City, Pamuk has laid claim to the title, formerly held by Yashar Kemal, of Greatest Turkish Writer. He is also an outspoken man. Explaining his reasons for refusing the title of “state artist”, he said, in 1999: “For years I have been criticising the State for putting authors in jail, for only trying to solve the Kurdish problem by force, and for its narrow-minded nationalism . . . I don’t know why they tried to give me the prize.” He has described Turkey as having “two souls” and has criticised its human rights abuses. “Geographically we are part of Europe . . . but politically?” He is not sure.

________________________

Press Release

12 October 2024

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2024

Orhan Pamuk

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 is awarded to the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk
“who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures”.

Whatever the country, freedom of thought and expression are universal human rights. These freedoms, which modern people long for as much as bread and water, should never be limited by using nationalist sentiment, moral sensitivities, or— worst of all—business or military interests. If many nations outside the West suffer poverty in shame, it is not because they have freedom of expression but because they don’t. As for those who emigrate from these poor countries to the West or the North to escape economic hardship and brutal repression—as we know, they sometimes find themselves further brutalized by the racism they encounter in rich countries. Yes, we must also be alert to those who denigrate immigrants and minorities for their religion, their ethnic roots, or the oppression that the governments of the countries they’ve left behind have visited on their own people.

But to respect the humanity and religious beliefs of minorities is not to suggest that we should limit freedom of thought on their behalf. Respect for the rights of religious or ethnic minorities should never be an excuse to violate freedom of speech. We writers should never hesitate on this matter, no matter how “provocative” the pretext.
– Orhan Pamuk, “Freedom to Write,” New York Review of Books, May 25, 2024

October 12, 2024, Associated Press — The European Commission said Thursday that a French bill that would make it a crime to deny that the World War I-era killings of Armenians in Turkey was genocide will hamper reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia.

“Turkey has been called on many times by the European Union to achieve reconciliation on that matter, and to conduct an open dialogue with its neighbor Armenia, and also with the Armenian Diaspora in France,” said EU spokeswoman Krisztina Nagy.

October 12, 2024 Associated Press — “No one should harbor the conviction that Turkey will take this lightly,” Turkey’s foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, said. “The parliament will meet on Tuesday with a special agenda and no doubt we have measures to take in every field.”

Gul did not elaborate but his comments were interpreted by many as also being a reference to proposals currently being debated by Turkish lawmakers to recognize an “Algerian genocide” by France.

Writing recently about the Foley affair, Mark Morford said…

Which is not to say that the prayers of us liberals haven’t already been answered, in spades, well before Mark Foley proved himself to be the perfect icing on the cake of GOP doom, the money shot of poetic justice, the period in this never-ending Republican sentence.

Jack Abramoff was a damn fine answer to the prayer, though that beautiful firestorm dealt mostly with finance and slimy payoffs, and what good taxpaying American doesn’t fully expect every member of Congress to be rolling in dirty lobbyist payoffs? But Abramoff did have one glorious outcome: It put a stake straight through the heart of Tom DeLay, perhaps the nastiest and most thuggish political vampire in all of Congress, a worthwhile outcome all by itself.

Valerie Plame? Also a delicious scandal, given how leaked CIA info is always a powerful destroyer of faith in current regimes, and this one snared Scooter Libby and poked a sharp stick into Karl Rove. But still the GOP hobbled on.

The list goes on: WMD, Niger, bogus anthrax scares, Abu Ghraib, illegal wiretapping, gay male escorts hired to masquerade as sycophantic White House reporters — hell, it’s been a veritable fire hose of Republican scandals, indictments, violations, probes, investigations, arrests and abuses of power (not to mention all manner of sex scandals) lo these past years — so many it takes entire Web sites and multiple books to keep track of them all.

Had to miss our partner yoga session tonight to take Molly to the vet for a second chiropractic adjustment.

The story so far… June 24: Smooshed in the road by an ambulance racing at high speed, siren blaring, on a mission of mercy and unable to stop for a crushed pet, Molly crawled off into the windbreak, perhaps to die. In the house, Beth heard Molly’s shriek of pain and rushed out to find her. It wasn’t easy. She was hidden far off the road, unable to respond when she was called. Enlisting the aid of a neighbor, Beth beat the bushes from woodlot to windbreak and eventually found the pup, broken and bleeding.

Much stitching and binding of wounds ensued.

She was recovering nicely, so nicely that we left her boarded with the general prison population at the local kennel when we went to Massachusetts for a week in early September. She relapsed. She was in serious pain when we picked her up, in spasm from a week sleeping on concrete. After a few days we took her to our local vet, he drugged her to a point where every muscle in her body was ridiculously relaxed, and she began to improve. But the down side was thatwe discovered her injured tail that we hadn’t picked up on the x-rays in June. Local vet recommended surgery. Co-worker suggested we give her vet a try first, so off to the doggy chiropractor we went and damned if Molly doesn’t seem to be well on the way to recovery after only two sessions. The guy is good, offering advice about keeping her slowed down so she has to use all four feet, about exercising her to recover ranege of motion in the injured leg, about helping her recover lost muscle mass by walking her up hills, and most importantly knowing how to release the tightened muscles in her back.

Not cutting my dog open at the base of her spine is high on my list of priorities, higher even than partner yoga class.

Beth and I are going to back up to something more beginner-ish, less challenging than the circus acts we’ve been rehearsing at partner yoga. It sounded cool, but you have to be more advanced as an individual to get the most out of partner yoga I think.

That leaves Wednesday’s open for the 50 minute drive out to Dodgeville for Molly’s therapy.

Dental treatments yesterday involved injections that numbed the whole right side of my head. Felt like a chipmunk with a baseball in my cheek. Don’t know what he puts in the mix buit my dreams last night were frustration dreams. Woke this morning to find an email from Jill Draper of Cambium Creative thanking me for the link.

Jill’s blog shows up in the “fifty random links” section of my blogroll, having migrated here via a klugey OPML file transfer back in April when I shut down Release 2.0. Why she’s thanking me now, I can only guess… but her acknowledgement shook a visit out of me, and I was glad I made the trip, if only because of her pointage to The Wild Women of Wongo.

Hey, the head Lemur had a birthday Thursday and I just noticed. I’ll blame it on not using RSS.

Happy Birthday, Alan! You’re not as old as me but you’re catching up.

From Bush, Oprah and the San Diego Chicken to The Fool on the Hill… as if you didn’t have enough good stuff to read.

For the realistic, we have Rockstroh…

By way of a ceaseless bombardment of advertising imagery, we exist in a nonstop, holographic, corporate Nuremberg rally of the collective mind. We need not participate in old school, torch-lit processions of Brownshirts through the streets: This brand of all media penetration proto-fascism has been internalized. We, like maggots born into a pile of dung, find nothing malodorous about our place of birth.

For the moderate progressive, here’s the New Republic on last week’s news,

Dennis Hastert is a bumbling half-wit–something that became apparent to the world last week but had been common knowledge in Washington for almost a decade. It was roughly eight years ago, after all, that Tom DeLay installed Hastert as his front-man, knowing full well that Hastert was no more capable of being speaker than the average sheepdog, to which he bears a remarkable resemblance….

Here is Denny Hastert, master legislative strategist, peerless vote-counter, party-unifier extraordinaire. But, wouldn’t you know, absolutely none of these skills is evident in public. Invariably, one of two things strikes you about these stories. The first is that they’re so small-bore that they actually underscore the point that Hastert is a nonentity. Many of them even have a faintly patronizing tone, like a mother bragging that her 6-year-old poured his own bowl of Kix this morning.

When I hear someone say, “Oh yeah, I’m spiritual, but not — you know — religious,” I am reminded of Father Rageboy’s first commandment, to wit:

Vapid and narcissistic are they who repeat the mantra “I’m spiritual but not religious.”

Kneeling for communion at the temple of rage I heard the priest intone, “Take, eat this you whitebread muthahfuckah… it’s nobody’s body, we’re spiritual here but not religious, it’s just a metaphor… whitebread, get it? Do you get it!? Whitebread schmuck.”

I could see why they called it the temple of rage. The temple of rage, of course was but one stop on my metaphysical journey. I also spent a great deal of time at Starbucks seeking the clarity of an open wireless connection. And the Crate and Barrel outlet store down on 4th Street in Berkeley. Williams of Sonoma on Union Square. Pottery Barn at better malls across America. Nordstroms. The Nature Company in its original location just outside the tunnel on the Alameda. Smith and Hawken in Mill Valley… Ahhh, hippie capitalism at its best. Plant materials from Berkeley Hort. Sensual massage at Esalen down in Big Sur. A house in Marin, good dope, identical twins… little scorpios in their tandem stroller and identical maple cribs.

Spiritual was I, and bourgeois to the max. Dining out in the gourmet ghetto, riding BART with a New York Times done up in a commuter’s fold. The Larkspur ferry before that. Double vodka martinis and rubber bridge all the way home. My partner had some kind of three way going with Kaiser and Bechtel… Libyan bauxite, French refractories, and the best Bechtel built nuclear reactors available for offshore construction. We kicked ass. I was way spiritual on the commute home in those days.

I could balance the bindle and the straw and horn in copious quantities of Bolivia’s best in rough seas off Angel Island and never drop a crumb on the floor of the head. “Head.” That’s ferry boat nautical for toilet.

Was I spiritual but not religious?

When Locke writes these condemnatory tracts linking Emerson through Nietzsche to Hitler and Corporatist emergent fascism founded in post-war Allied fervid religious gratitude and shit, I pale. Is it me? All these people I hung out with were heavy into the Urantia Book and all that crap. Is it mean spirited and hypocritical of me to admit that I was only there then for the dope and the music.

All I can say right now is that I was NEVER that spiritual. And by the time I got religious I was well on my way to informed atheism, so screw the guilt. I can sit back free of guilt and enjoy his explication of the spiritual left and the spiritual right and the undercurrents that unite them, informed and aware and in concert with the idea that there is a lot of denial present whenever spiritual fundamentals overtake reason, common-sense, and altruism, whether that spirituality is founded in religion or the bourgeois mysticism that is vapid narcissism.

Something is happening here and I know what it is, I’m jonesing for more truth.

So there’s Doc, linking to Dean and I visit Dean and look in his blogroll and I see Annette Kramer, so I follow that link just because it doesn’t ring a bell, then I read a little, and then I feel rewarded.

(And that’s another reason I like blogrolls!)

Cross-X arrived late last week and it’s at the top of my reading pile, right under The God Delusion. Confession: I took some time out to read the new Stephanie Plum silliness, Janet Evanovich’s Twelve Sharp.

Truth be told, I’m enjoying Dawkins as much as I enjoyed Evanovich. My atheism is ad hoc, a by-product perhaps of a stoned reading of Being and Nothingness combined with a common sense understanding of my consciousness bookended by the darkness before my life and the darkness after my death. Dawkins hasn’t gotten that deep or maudlin, rather he’s giving me a good humored ride through the territory where ever so many earnest people wrestle with this stuff as if it matters in a larger sense than raw international institutional power struggles, Vatican turf battles and the occasional pogrom, genocide or crusade.

If my mockery of the blighted ignorance of those whose god is more than metaphoric sparks a simple conversation or two, I’ll be pleased. The whole “leap of faith” thing has been an arrow in my quiver since Norman Mailer bandied the phrase about as explanation for his need to explore other forms. I never thought a generation later would be mired in christian evangelical nonsense giving that commonplace phrase more weight than, say, “spirited venture.” I love Mailer in all his mawkish adolescent hostility and aggressiveness. Every mirror is flawed, but few writers are unafraid to live, to grasp the authenticity of their own experience and reflect it back to the world.

I’m looking forward to getting into Joe Miller’s book soon. And maybe Dickey’s Chasing Destiny while I’m at it.

Amos Moses Griffin says “I’m going pink,”

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer affecting one out of every nine females up until the age of 90. Although rare, one in 1000 men are also diagnosed with breast cancer as well. Educate yourself and consider a small donation to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. If you feel inclined to enter your own website in celebration of Breast Cancer Awareness month, check out Pink for October or try out the Pink October theme or the Pinky and the Brain theme

email from some nice folks thanking me for the support but kindly asking me to take down my pink monstrosity as it was more an embarrassment than anything. So I resigned myself to silent acknowledgment from afar. That is until I noticed a few bloggers releasing pink themes.

As a blogger I live off the kindness of strangers. I can rearrange the furniture pretty well but I can’t create something from scratch. I’m reliant on other good folks for themes and plugins and suck hungrily on the teat of goodwill. This morning I noticed Derek Punsalan released a free pink theme so others who may not be technological inclined can nod a show of support.

So really, why not? It’s a bridge I’ll jump off. FunkWad is going pink for October. The switch to a new theme will require ironing out a few wrinkles here and

Thanks to Cowtown Pattie for this link that got me all riled up.

It’s back to this. In the late sixties I did a quick real estate survey of downtown Madison, Wisconsin and in addition to all the land tied up by governmental and educational institutions, an appalling amount of the best locations and the fanciest architecture was in the hands of religion. The most valuable land was - and remains - off the tax rolls. Now huge evangelical republican shrines are being built across the country and generally they too are separated from this community obligation by the very laws they’re trying to neutralize when they meddle in civil marriage concerns, sexual health issues, scientific advances in medicine, and the public school curriculum. I say give them a shot at banning all the books they want. Let them bring it to a vote, book by book. But if they’re flushing their turds down my sewer and drinking my municipal water and increasing traffic on the public streets every Sunday when their flag decaled and magnetic ribboned SUVs caravan to their tax sheltered places of worship, then let them pay the taxes and be governed by the same rules that the rest of us follow.

In god’s name, can’t we tax and regulate the poor benighted ignoramuses before they swallow up the country like some plague of locusts? Roughly one third of Americans are stupid enough or twisted enough or suffered enough abuse that they believe that evangelical crap. Why should two thirds of us have to suffer under their oppressive nonsense? Tax them. Let them render a little unto Caesar for a change. The freeloaders have been sucking our communities dry long enough.

the world plays jazz when you’re quiet
October 3rd, 2024

Ancient Chinese symbols fog up the mirror.
Freud not yet born or else still musing
across the bathtub at his lovely mother.
Black lace drapes the white window.
The crickets slow down like they’re
running out of batteries. The I Ching
rolls in the corner pocket. One last
fly backflips from the ceiling.
The machines clink and halt
and come to a rest. If you listen
you can hear the sighs of the dead.
Lose yourself in the season’s first breath.

I’m familiar with Howard Stern, I saw a movie about him. Or a TV show or something. He’s a talk show guy. Thinks he’s out there. And I knew there was an Anna Nicole Smith… something to do with Paris Hilton, I think, and I saw the green Paris Hilton vid where she’s naked and everything.

So I had a connection to this news that Howard Stern and Anna Nicole Smith were to marry. Sort of. And during this morning’s idle clickage, I ran across a Salon link to the People magazine million dollar photos of the happy - sort of - couple. Her post partum depression couldn’t have been eased much by the death of her twenty year old son, but that’s a thought that came after the exposure to the People Smith/Stern Bahamas shoot, since before the exposure I really knew neither about the baby nor the son nor the life and times of Anna Nicole Smith. Now that I am better informed, I have to admit that I was surprised to discover that there is another Howard Stern… surprised and disappointed.

On my way through Salon to the Smith/Stern sort-of-nuptial photos, I saw the following letter to George W. Bush from his (ardent) admirer, Belacqua Jones. It explains things. Sort of…

Dear George,

One symptom of the Corporatist State’s emasculation of the media is the public’s belief that if a story is heavily covered, it is important, earthshaking, and trend setting. The opposite is true. The more coverage a story gets, the more trivial it is. The saturation coverage of John Mark Karr, JonBenet Ramsey’s alleged murder proves the point. Then there is the possibility that the midterms may turn on the size of Mark Foley’s pecker. The beauty of the trivialization is that it draws media attention away from your misdeeds.

Goebbels is in his grave kicking his own ass for not coming up with the sound byte that does more to corrupt a free press than the strictest state censorship: If it bleeds, it leads.

But the media’s greatest act of trivialization is their breathless willingness to lap up your rhetoric. You have given them the one morality play that plays well in Peoria, the Hollywood Western, a study in a celluloid morality for a celluloid people. Iraq burns, the Constitution dissolves, the Geneva Conventions are “quaint,” while the media sloshes here and there looking for the next trivial Dingleberry they can hold up to the pubic as if it were a nugget of gold.

The key is to keep the media preoccupied with mindless drivel until after the midterms. Maybe Tom Cruise could jump on a few more couches, or Brad could start seeing another woman. Never forget the golden rule of media relations: The media feeds on the trivial and chokes on the important stuff.

Your admirer,

Belacqua Jones

UPDATE: Wikipedia marks the critical distinction between Howard Allen Stern and Howard K. Stern (no relation, I think, to Howard K. Smith, although they were both in the show biz game at one time or another). Without Wikipedia, I probably never would have heard of the movie “Wasabi Tuna,” which grossed $7,950 in US ticket sales after its release in 2024.

There is some confusion now about whether or not Howard K. Smith and Larry King are the same person, and the earlier reports of Howard K. Smith’s death were part of an elaborate insurance scam.