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Talking to myself. [25 Nov 2008|08:59pm] [ music | Ry Cooder: Paris, Texas ] Lots of stuff is going right, but I'm feeling restless, spiritually. I want a spiritual guide but I don't trust preachers of any stripe, they're always dopes or con-men or both. I'd like to find somebody to follow, but everyone I find is in a lot worse shape than me. Where's my old grey man who knows things beyond knowing, tells things beyond telling? Where's that guy? Funny how you can regulate your emotions with the music you play. I think I'll regulate myself to a less restless state. Think I'll take off the Rage Against The Machine and put on the Morcheeba. I expect shortly my mood-congruent cognitions will lead me from those rare zones of my mind in which I am perturbed and agitated, into those far more common areas in which I am laid back and happy. Interesting. I always find those old gray men in books, where real old gray sages wrote things that resonate and echo across time. I feel isolated and alone because I can't speak back to them- "But Mr. Huxley, Mr. Orwell, what do you have to say about the rise of private military contractors in Africa?" I'm researching Africa. I hardly know where to start. I have come to realize that it's one of many of these huge vast expanses of the human experience, about which I know friggin' nothing. So I found this book, "Mercenaries", going into, well, the rise of private military contractors in Africa. Incidental to addressing that topic, and whether it's good or bad (and given the black-and-red bookstore I found the book in I expect a lean towards the latter), this diverse host of writers support their thoughts by going into all kinds of detail about the problems facing the place. It's a big damn place! Can't just say "Africa," it's all separate places. That's where I start, but it seems like surely there's some common ground. Maybe not. I'll figure it out. All I know is that every time I hear "Africa" on the news it's preceding or following some story about some horrible atrocity. A friend of mine is going to Morocco for Christmas, where apparently $50 will buy a house. So I'm sending her with $50 and said "find me some art, or a painting, or a book." I like those things, the things I like from other places. Apparently $50 is gonna go a long way, so I expect some good art. See this? Already the therapy's working, I'm musing softly on cool and froody topics. Temple Grandin says (or was it someone else? all those evolutionary anthropology books run together after awhile) that music precedes and is more functional a communication than words. I know that the goats and the cat and the cows and the dogs all verbalize in tones that are intuitively comprehensible to me- wordlessly, I know what they're saying. I know that the toneless exhortations of a keypad voice synthesizer are obviously tonally gutted to anyone listening to them. It makes me think that music, scales, notes, are triggering the harmony- and tone-sensors in our heads that are normally devoted to making us react emotionally to tiny subtleties in a speaker's tone of voice. Even Morcheeba is too busy for me now. I need to minimize. It's time for some Ry Cooder. I like the minimalist stuff. Maybe the sensory deprivation of my childhood left me over-sensitive, but loud noises and busy songs bug me. Much as I love the explosions of life and greenery that erupt from a wet gully by the side of the road, I love the sparse simplicity of the west-Texas desert even more. Maybe this is a sort of emotional refractory period after getting all mad. Kellie says Baumeister showed a correlation between self-control and glucose levels somewhere in the brain- I don't understand how they'd measure that but of that I am assured and I trust her readings. The experiments showed that self-control was not a constant, that it could be depleted and you could experimentally induce impulsivity in someone. Does that make you wonder who's inducing impulsivity in you? Do the supermarket ergonomists design the store so that the average person's reserve is depleted just enough, by the time they get to the impulse-buy aisle? So I like the desert. I like being able to see to the horizon, to the mountains, with a landscape filled with thorns but empty of threats. Everything out there just wants to not be bothered. It's peaceful. Do not take this in any way amiss, I'm just surfing strange emotional drifts. I'm reminded again of that passage, from Edward Wilson's The Diversity of Life. For another way to visualize the tenuousness of life, imagine yourself on a journey upward from the center of the earth, taken at the pace of a leisurely walk. For the first twelve weeks you travel through furnace-hot rock and magma devoid of life. Three minutes to the surface, five hundred meters to go, you encounter the first organisms, bacteria feeding on nutrients that have filtered into the deep water-bearing strata. You breach the surface and for ten seconds glimpse a dazzling burst of life, tens of thousands of species of microorganisms, plants, and animals within a horizontal line of sight. Half a minute later almost all are gone. Two hours later only the faintest traces remain, consisting largely of people in airliners who are filled in turn with colon bacteria. I find a somnolent comfort in those elements of that description, in which life is rare and all is dark and silent. The concept of those few critters deep in the wet earth, hidden and gone, comforts me. I imagine that nothing is threatening, there, and sleep is eternal and life is easy. Freud would say this is because I want to fuck my mother, and Freud would, of course, be A: wrong and B: projecting his own issues on me as he did all his clients. Just another old gray fellow who's not quite worth following. In our cosmology we see the world organized by a perfect god above and generated top-down, but when we look at history and the fossil record it's evident that that's not how things happened. They grew bottom-up. Had to have spliceosomes before cells, cells before worms, worms before lancelets, lancelets before fish, fish before mammals and mammals before scientists. At each stage more aware and thoughtful. At this stage we can see other galaxies and track the sum shifting of the entire universe in different directions, debate on the nature of creation. What if there's nobody above us? What if our job is to pave the way, to be the giants on whose shoulders other giants can stand, until we've birthed the God we've been talking about for thousands of years? Well if that's the case I expect I should spend less time masturbating and thinkin' bout fights. Maybe the next smartypants ape to come along will be good at that. In the meantime I'll read the words of the gray men that went before, 'til I turn gray myself. Maybe someday I'll say something that somebody will find worth reading. My whole life, richness of experience, crystallized into a few pithy phrases, maybe even a book-full, that makes some future smartypants ape sit back and say "hmm." I think I'd like to try Mescaline, surfing the strange currents of my free-associations in technicolor. But first I've got to read this book before me, The Doors Of Perception by Aldous Huxley. Research is important. Which is why I'll reserve my nascent thoughts on the problems facing the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, until I've finished this other book as well. 1 banana| Feed me

Stories. [20 Nov 2008|10:09pm] The meat goat project is going great. (In case I never explained: I'm teaching afterschool enrichment program to middle-school kids. Two days a week is the meat goat project, wherein we're raising six meat goats from kid to sale. We feed, water, tame, walk, groom, treat and medicate, everything. It's teaching the kids responsibility, consistency, self-mastery, gentleness, firmness, aggression, control, everything. My kids are visibly better behaved in other people's classes as a result of the project and, I hope, my superior execution of it.) Today I had the opportunity to see a bunch of other goats at other schools. Same age, same time spent raising them... their goats are universally ill-behaved, borderline insane (that's unfair- they're just totally not tamed) and like half the size of mine. Same resources, teachers had way more experience with 'em than me. I don't get it. Don't really see how it's possible that everyone else should be producing such an inferior product. Seriously, I'm not bragging. Okay I'm bragging a little bit but damn this is just all going phenomenally well. Bad things yesterday- two of my students dropped out, one because... she's always been kind of uninterested, and one- my best!- because her grandma didn't want her coming home with goat crap on her shoes anymore. But somehow it's not really bugging me in the grand scheme of the thing because the project is otherwise so damn great. My kids are mastering it, we learned so much yesterday, even the kids who didn't get to lead 'em were enjoying themselves shoveling and fixing a gate. Now that's character development- two girly-girls enjoying hard labor. Excellent. I've been making a point of doing that- not reserving all the grungy jobs for the boys, so that the girls can develop those skills and be competitive in that regard. They like it, seem to take well to being treated like equals. They see me dive in and get dirty, I expect them to do the same, they do, and they get congratulated for it. It's perfect for motivating them. I've taken to showing up an hour or two early every day, and just going out there and being around them. It makes 'em progressively less nervous around me. Previously I was, in their experience, that big scary human who comes around and drags us around the place. This was because I had limited time to work with 'em privately, so I was trying to soften them up for the kids, get 'em used to being handled and walked. Problem is that meant that time spent with me was exclusively competitive and abrasive, right? So I figure, what if the majority of the one-on-one time is just me sort of being around, with a little walking every day? It's working well. After just two days of it they're not nervous when I come around, and if I let them out of the pen to browse and sit against a tree to read/watch 'em, even the skittish one (I call him PickleJuice because he is sour in temperament) comes up and examines me. Periodically they will try to eat me and my pants and shirt, but I explain to them that those things are made of pants and not grass, so they can't digest them. Most understand. One, whom I call UglyEar (because when he came to us he had a fungus on his ear that made it have funny scabby lumps and a strange color pattern) , was bottle-fed so he's very aggressive about trying to get a meal out of people. In his mind, somewhere on that person is a source of milk and he just needs to chew all over until he finds it- starting with fingers, moving to pants and then shirt. He was fascinated by the white 4-H clover pattern on my green shirt yesterday- I suppose it looked just like a flower- and insisted on eating it. I pushed him away. He pushed back. We pushed each other for awhile, and he decided to use a forehoof to just slap my arm away and sort of jump on top of me. This I found uncomfortably reminiscent of a mount attempt, so I decided to speak his language. I did a dominance display and headbutted him. Just leaned forward from my seat and bonked him with my head. That goat was so confused. After a moment he decided to go after the clover again, so I headbutted him again. This happened about a dozen more times in sequence before he got the point and stopped trying to eat my shirt. I wonder if he registered it at all as "ah he seems to be expressing dominance towards me" or if he was just thinking "what". In any case he got bonked on the head over and over again so he finally quit. There is a goat who I couldn't think up a name for, so I called him Bob, who has emerged as the total asshole of the group. He's a little skittish like Hercules (who is hugely muscled but small-built), but not nearly so much as Picklejuice. They follow PJ's lead and since he runs away from everything ever those two run, and then the other three are like "Oh shit we're running now?" and run run run until they're Away. And Bob has, by great fortune, been the only goat to keep one of his horns (we clipped most of 'em). And the kids have taught him, by panicking and abandoning his collar when his head is in certain positions, that by applying his horns to our hands he can make us let him go. Add this to Bob's existing tendency to freak out and refuse to walk at seemingly random intervals*, and you have a very nasty little dude. So I've been having to take him over a lot and grit my teeth when he digs that horn into my metacarpals. Sometime Bob elects to function as an inefficient sled. He does this by bracing his legs forward and requiring that you drag him along. However he typically can be trusted not to do so when you have him in the middle of the herd, so... I'd rather not bruise my hand anymore. That goat's going in the middle. Today the building project came to ultimate fruition and everyone finished their projects at once. This stuff is great. (The remaining goats are named Baby G and Carmello. They're easy to get along with.) *actually he has very consistent phobias of certain areas, textures, and lightings. 8 bananas| Feed me

quote [17 Nov 2008|10:51pm] I have seldom had my mind blown so many times in the space of three pages. I share with you this selection from The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience, by Thomas Szasz. The German-British philologist, Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900)- famous in his time- picked up Kant's theme and made it his own. He wrote: "Some of the Polynesians would seemt o have a far truer insight into the nature of thought and language than some of our odern philosophers, for they call thinking 'speaking in the stomach.'" Anticipating Gilbert Ryle by a century, Muller offered the following rebuttal to those who would locate the mind in the brain: We cannot see without the eye, or hear without the ear; ... but neither can the eye see, or the ear hear... without the will of what we call our self. To look for the faculty of speech in the brain would, in fact, be hardly less Homeric than to ook for the soul in the midriff.... The brain may be a sine qua non of intellect, as the eye is of sight, and the ear is of sound, but as little as the eye can see and the ear can hear, can the brain think. Among contemporary scholars, the person who best articulated the significance of the dialogic character of speech is Mkhail Bakhtin. He wrote: The fact is that when the listener perceives and understands the meaning of speech, he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it. he either agrees of disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its execution, and so on.... Any understanding of live speech... necessarily elicits it [a response], in one form or another: the listener becomes the speaker. Bakhtin's insight that "The listener becomes the speaker" explains both our ability and inability to understand the Other. We understand him, if we want to assume a responsive attitude twoard his voice, because we love, like, or respect him, or want him to love, like, or respect us. People who are fond of each other often say, "We understand each other." Conversely, we do not understand the Other, if we reject assuming a responsive attitude toward his voice, because we regard him as insane or otherwise unworthy of being listened to. As the sympathetic listener becomes the comprehending hearer, so the unsympathetic listener becomes the uncomprehending hearer; He distances and disidentifies himself form the speaker and experiences difficulty understanding him. This phenomenon is writ large in the relationship between the psychiatrist and his psychotic patient. Although psychiatrists are reputed to be especially understanding and adept at decoding the communications of mentally disordered persons, actually the opposite is more often the case. It is the social mandate of the mental health professional to define the (crazy) Other's speech as gibberish, the unintelligible discharge of his diseased brain. In a famous experiment, conducted by Stanford psychology professor David Rosenhan, a group of normal volunteers, pretending to be crazy, got themselves admitted to a mental hospital. Once defined as mental patients, the hospital staff interpreted the volunteers' ordinary behavior as symptoms of insanity. Rosenhan concluded: "t is clear that we cannot dstinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals." In a dialogue, speaker and listener form a reciprocating dyad or pair. "What is heard and actively understood," wrote Bakhtin, "wll find its response in the subsequent speech or behavior of the listener." Skolov put it thus: "The hearing of speech is not simply hearing. To a certain degree we, as it were, speak together with the speaker." This process is at work with respect to the printed word as well. Echoing Muller's credo that "Language and the word are almost everything in human life," Bakhtin added: "Fro the word (and, consequently, for a human being) there is nothing more terrible than a lack of response." Lack of response severs the linguistic bond between the reciprocating pair intrinsic to dialogue. Our deep-seated dread of silence-as-loneliness explains why religion and madness- faith-and-prayer and hearing-and-talking-to-Voices- are two of the most enduring elements in human life. They constitute the "cures," as it were, for the elemental human fear of death as existential-semantic abandonment. Fantastic. Szasz (the writer/compiler of that passage) has a consistent grudge against the practice of mental health through the book so far. So I thought, "Maybe he's been institutionalized?" thinking, as I often do, that folk's focuses tend to fall around their fears. So I looked it up. As it turns out, he is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York. Sort of the very opposite of an ill-informed quack barking about his jailors. He's still alive. I... might contact this guy. This guy has blown my mind. But first I'm gonna finish the book. It was published 1996, and the library list there shows it was checked out frequently in 97, 98, 99, and 2000, but shows no checkouts since. Eight years silent? A book that nobody's reading is a book that's dead. That's why I like to loan mine out/give em away as often as possible. But then I realized that when I checked it out, they just did a computer printout of the due date and taped that to the book. So it might just be that the checkouts haven't been recorded in eight years. I don't like that- it loses the connection, the sense of shared experience and legacy. Like the "owned by" section of the textbooks from my middle school, wherein you'd see written the names of who'd held your book before. I wish they still did that, here. Feed me

"A Princess" [17 Nov 2008|08:08pm] Had one of my kids today, a little girl, ask me to draw something for her. "What do you want me to draw?" "Umm... a princess!" So when I had a few idle minutes I grabbed a sketchpad and saw what I could come up with. I'm always a little disappointed in my females- they don't come as naturally as the men do, I always feel like I exaggerate the eyes too much. Plus I never know how to do a proper mouth. But of course the first thing that came to mind was a Barbie/Cinderella/Princess Peach amalgam, right? That's "a princess". But it was an African-american* girl who'd asked me to draw it, and I was reminded of those experiments from the fifties where they'd show black and white kids a doll and say "which is the beautiful baby?" and everyone picked the white one. I'm thinking, I don't want to say to this wonderful little girl, "the standard for your fantasy is unattainable to you and you cannot achieve it by virtue of birth," right? I don't wanna say, "A princess is blonde and european." So I summoned some creativity and mixed Erykah Badu with an attractive black female co-worker and gave it a Disney Princess/Classical Persephone look, and decorated her with general African stuff from a book on tribal art I'd been reading. The end result looked... well it looked like a damn convincing black African princess, combining the best of both worlds. I was pretty proud of that, to have thought of that and to have executed it. Maybe I thought about it too much- she didn't even look at the little picture when I gave it to her at the end of the day. It also occurred to me that she's very much been raised in a European culture, so that might have been a mistake- maybe the ideal would have been to make a black woman in Anglo regalia. But I dunno, I did my best. And it's not like I brooded over it too long, it was just a snap inspiration and execution, a little doodle, a little sketch. I'm pretty proud of myself for even thinking of it. *that's such a shitty term. Seven syllables, whereas "black" is one. But "black" is so blunt and unappealing, so... German. I wish there were a phrase that was neither tedious nor vaguely demeaning. I like "negro," it's a little latin, sounds sophisticated and classy in its own right. I wish it didn't carry whatever offensive connotation it carries that caused it to fall out of use. 1 banana| Feed me

important lessons learned [12 Nov 2008|04:28pm] Mm. Went to a urologist monday afternoon, got X-rayed again. They said that the kidney stone was actually 6mm cross section- when the hospital CAT scan showed it as 3mm, that was because they were measuring axially (Computerized Axial Tomography=CAT), sideways. It was football-shaped, longways oriented in the ureter- would've taken a coronal/saggital axis scan to see that. Of course that's the way you'd expect it to be oriented, with the long dimension in the ureter. So the stone was 6mmx3mm, football-shaped, jammed about an inch from my kidney with like a foot to go before the urinary bladder, and then it would rattle around in there until it passed through my freaking urethra. So the options were: wait for it to pass/stay drugged for something like a month, or use laser lithotripsy to stick a laser up my dick then up my ureter, shoot the thing and scoop it out wtf and then leave a tube in there for a week, or use shock lithotripsy to break it up from the outside. The latter two options were each outpatient surgery. The laser lithotripsy was gonna be about $5,000, the shock lithotripsy was gonna be $15,000. In either case, my insurance says I pay 20% of cost until I've payed $1,000, at which point I'm covered 100% (until the cost exceeds $50,000). Do the math on that, it means that any procedure greater than or equal to $5,000 is of totally equal cost to me. So I'm actually rewarded for seeking costlier treatment. YOU BET I DID. I said you do the one-new-car-priced operation and let somebody else pay for it. I went in, they did it, and the first two times I whizzed afterward sand came out. I've got a little filter full of gravel in there that came out of my wing-wang. ... What the hell, life. How do you come up with these crazy ideas? ... One of the interesting bits is that, starting Saturday, I had to get over my trypanophobia- that is, extreme and pathological fear of injections and IVs- and fast. Cuz people were standing around, you see, with needles and basically just itching to stick em in me just all the time. I did it. More on that later. What's important to know is that in addition to surviving a pain which I am assured is, yes, far worse than pregnancy, and feels like you're going to die, I overcame a long-standing pathological phobia, with the power of cleverness, long study, self-mastery, and gigantic balls. I am so the man. 2 bananas| Feed me

ow. [09 Nov 2008|09:11am] Went to the hospital yesterday morning. Sitting around today trying to pass a kidney stone. Fuck you too, weekend. 1 banana| Feed me

You call that a knife? [06 Nov 2008|09:58pm] Today we started building bridges out of popsicle sticks, using hot glue guns. As this class is the really mixed-age one, from six to eleven, the kids were at all different levels, and had different expectations. Thus for instance, I was ecstatic to see (six-year-old) Lorena building a two-dimensional zigzag shape. They were all, as best they were able, reproducing my model I'd made for them. So, she was showing me what in her mind it looked like- a really interesting insight into her perceptions. What mattered was she was taking initiative, laying out an ambitious structure, and using the tools given. Great! On the other hand, I was disappointed to see the eleven year old allowing herself to be led around and dominated by younger students, and not taking the initiative. But I'm never especially impressed with her, the girl is long on mouth and short on everything else. Anyway her group was pretty uncreative, but accurately reproducing the structures ("triangle," "braced square", "long beam") I'd showed 'em how to make. But then those older kids aren't regulars in my class, they just show up for one hour a week. My two best builders were eight years old, interestingly. They're the ones who spend the most time with me, and one of them is especially artistically creative. He made a hell of a bridge, then decided it looked like an airplane, put a tail on it and started spinning around. Oh well. At one point in the class, like three kids burned themselves on the hot tip within a minute of each other and came complaining to me. So faced with these presented little hands and complaining faces, this was my solution: I picked up a hot glue gun and pressed it into my hand, burning myself. I didn't wince, and then said something like, "See, now we're all burned. And it'll get better in a couple minutes. Go back to work, be more careful." Concerns evaporated and they were working again almost immediately, but they seemed a little confused about the experience. I'm not entirely sure whether I did the right thing there, but it sure worked well. I was trying to show them- look, this pain is just temporary, and to prove it I will inflict it on myself. I've learned that with kids of that age, when they injure themselves in some way they take the cues of the adults/authority figures as to how to feel about it, and I know that the worst part of the pain is the worry and the emotion associated with it. So I showed concern and engagement, and at the same time showed that the wound was nothing to worry about. All problems of a little kid are solved- the wound itself, after all, is seldom anything but a sort of novel stimulus around which the kid can interact with the elder. I like to think that experience made those kids a little tougher, stronger, wiser. Certainly it was better than cooing or fretting and Oh-No'ing over the burns, but I might have used a more moderate approach. Time will tell whether I was right, but I feel pretty good about it. 2 bananas| Feed me

Wow. [24 Oct 2008|09:48pm] When we started to walk away, we all began to sob. The cockcrows faded, only to make us aware of our silence, the silence that asked, Who will be next to leave us? The question was in our eyes when we looked at each other. We walked fast as if trying to stay in the daytime, afraid that nightfall would turn over the uncertain pages of our lives. Ishmael Beah, Long Way Gone Wow. Amazing. And universal, too. Though he's writing about the day after a friend died of disease, while he and his fellow refugees were trying to survive a civil war in Sierra Leone. Hell of a book. I remember reading this essay by George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, where he talks about dried old crusty phrases and dull works written by supposedly well-educated and well-read people. But they're uninteresting, boring, they make the eyes glaze over and the mind shut down when one reads them because, really, they rely so much on stacks of qualifiers and reflexive phrases, even entire sentences that aren't original, rather you have entire works composed of air. Repeated, derivative ideas and phrases and sentence structures, mounds of unnecessary words, all of it coming together to make something that looks erudite, but when you're reading it you realize you're totally disengaged and its useless. This is the opposite of that. The concreteness of his writing, I suppose it reflects the concreteness of his experience, and that comes through. He doesn't need to pump up the things he's saying with a bunch of hot air and inflation, because the experiences he's writing about are so intrinsically intense. Ever read somebody's poem- maybe some of the PostSecret stuff, or something like that- and think, "This is a lot of hot air expended on really no core emotion or experience"? We're starved for that in the AC and the beige and the cubicles with the paper. This life devoid of real experience comes out in our writing and our art- paintings of nothing (Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko), poems about nothing, music about nothing ("Top 40"). News about nothing, TV about nothing, politics about nothing. This guy uses the English language better, more artfully, more affecting, than I've seen in a long time and it's not his native language. It's not the use of language that makes one a good writer, it's what they're writing about. ... On the other hand, maybe it's just too much literacy. Maybe being exposed to all this writing from birth is what sucks the creativity away- we just use, secondhand, the devices of others because that's easier than coming up with the expressions ourselves. Like, if there's a million phrases and words we're exposed to, there's going to have been one that reasonably approximates what we're getting at, and so that is used rather than hand-crafting a perfect phrase, much less developing the skills to do so. Cheaper to go to Wal-Mart for your words than to make them yourself. 1 banana| Feed me

election lasting more than 48 hours [23 Oct 2008|08:59pm] Oh you guys Joe Wuzzlebutter got OWNED. http://www.youtube.com/v/vFC9jv9jfoA&hl I love it. Joe all shoves his way up to the mike to make a Sean Hannity style stupid sound-bite accusation, and Obama's like, "Let me respond to your foolishness with a long, well-researched, entirely reasonable, polite answer." And totally takes control. And Joe fusses a bit but by the end is just completely schooled, silent and speechless, his ignorant ass without a word to say when confronted by somebody so erudite and intelligent. I love it. A red-state, Fox News generated Frankenstein lumbered up and got slain by the white knight. That could not have gone better. It looks like a teacher patiently lecturing a surly, immature student. Obama is so masterful here. How could you not vote for him? http://www.youtube.com/v/VoprZ0KKhjE&hl " "I think you may have noticed that some of Senator Obama's supporters have been saying some pretty nasty things about Western Pennsylvania lately, and you know, I COULDN'T AGREE WITH HIM MORE!!" I couldn't disagree with you, I couldn't agree with you more with than the fact that Western Pennsylvania is the most patriotic, the most God loving, the most patriotic part of America, and this is a great part of the country. My friends, I could not agree, could not disagree, with those critics more, this is a great part of America, this is the heartland of America, this is where people love their country, and they service." Oh that's just priceless. And then Sarah Palin spent $150k on clothes and haircuts, after refunds and returns. And then it turns out that some of that was just outfitting her family. And then it turns out that she misused her power in Alaska to get people fired. And then it turns out that she committed fraud billing Alaska for her family to take plane trips around the country. I mean this whole damn election is just a cartoon. Even if there wasn't such a huge damn difference in the policies they support, and Obama wasn't far-and-away superior in that regard, you'd just see one set with the competent leader and the other set with a bunch of retards and be like "whoa, how can you vote for them?" I know they're getting votes. It's a tribute to Fox News and racism and Karl Rove, I guess, I mean it's pretty inexplicable, I don't understand it. I feel a little sorry for John McCain. I don't think this is the real him, I think he's playing a part, reading the lines and dancing the dance given to him by the Most Evil Fucks of the Republican machine. I think he may be internalizing it, limited so much in the information he's exposed to that, brain-in-a-jar style, his worldview has come to mesh completely with the bullshit he spits. I wonder if that's what happened to George Bush. Why bother having your candidate lie, when you could just keep him so out of touch and stupid that he genuinely believes the things you're having him say? I wonder if that's what happened to Reagan. I guarantee that's what they're counting on happening with Palin as president, she'd eat it up. Anyway, this shit is wild. I hope eight years of Obama is enough to get people around the country respecting brains and competence again. Today in my little-kids-class, six-to-nine-year-olds, we carved jack-o-lanterns. I had an Obama logo pattern. They didn't like it, so we carved faces instead (and a Longhorns logo, this being Austin), but every one of my fellow teachers loved it and wanted one for themselves. Me too. :) 4 bananas| Feed me

Things ain't so bad. [17 Oct 2008|08:21pm] [ music | Blind Melon- Dear Ol' Dad ] Usually I'm not the type to post lyrics, but: "my eyes are dry and my hands are clean and I can't believe all the things I've seen"-Blind Melon, Dear Ol' Dad. Don't assume that just because my last post was a wore-out Puf sighing about a broken car, that my days are filled with sorrow. They're filled with achievement, success, satisfaction. Shredded red tape and smiling faces and the song of a brighter future. Life is good, and it is fast, and the days pass quickly and I end them with sore feet and aching back, but every time I know that that day I did something great. I know I made the world a little better. I'm being that change I wish to see in the world, and it's so damn easy. Hard work, sweat, blisters and scrapes? These things fade away, they don't matter. What really sucks your soul away, what really takes the effort that leaves us exhausted at the end of the day, is not the physical labor of our work, but the spiritual toll. I mean this in the sense that an atheist can appreciate. It's the emotional drain of self-control, of self-regulation, of forcing yourself to sit in a beige place and toil over paper that nobody will ever read or care about except insofar as it discharges their obligations to a larger bureaucracy. It's forcing yourself to smile and tolerate and submit to some useless little man or woman who can have your job for a trifle but couldn't do it themselves. It's paperwork and deadlines and friction and micromanagement and complex motives and the tedium of a day-to-day job where what you do doesn't matter. We have a boss like that, above our whole organization- it's inevitable, I suppose, that in any hierarchy there will be, somewhere distantly above you, somebody you don't like. She tries to do the things that bosses do, that make a workplace bad. I don't know why. But it doesn't work, because our job is so immediate, so concrete, so real. You may complain that I didn't fill out that timesheet, but just try and find somebody at my school who has a sour word about me. You may say that I wasn't at the meeting, but that's because I was out there hustling funds for a project to teach my kids about electricity. And understand- I don't teach my kids about electricity, that electricity, that chemistry, that biology, that's all incidental to the real lesson, which is that we teach the kids self-determination, discipline, creativity, hope. Stories and anecdotes happen every day, cute, strange, sad, happy, but every day is immersion in the stuff of life. Jesus Christ, how could anyone be an accountant? The car got fixed. Money happens, and because money happened I've been liberally giving it to my friends, buying gifts and things and yesterday I threw a party. I sent out an invite to the whole office- "everybody come!" and most didn't but that's the way I expected and wanted it. We had a nice homey party of nine and I made vegetarian chili since half of 'em were vegetarians, and bustled in and out of the kitchen the whole time, a transient entity interrupting conversations to press food (fresh-baked sweetrolls, chips and dip, chili, beer, liquor) on everybody, until I was out of food to press and finally joined in. It was great, it was just right for everyone to be engaged together, a big circle of chairs and constant, happy conversation, no cliques, the wheels of society lubricated by ethanol, sugar and fat. Brought everyone together a little bit. I saw this story about this couple in the Atchafalaya river basin (that's pronounced "shuffa-lya") who, in the sixties, built a houseboat and lived there. They built it on a river barge, which is an unpowered big-huge float which you'll see tugboats pushing around, anyway it means they had an abnormally titanic houseboat, with garden and everything, built with a hammer and a saw. It's easy to build things if what you care about is them doing their job, and nothing else. It was just so Edenic a description, and this guy came along and started shooting pictures for National Geographic, of the whole basin, and he lived with them. Understand, the Atchafalaya Swamp is a flyover part of Louisiana, if you ever see it you will most likely see it from the bridge as you drive over the thirteen-mile-long bridge that passes through it. It's unsettled and wild. People live there, but not like you and I, with apartments and houses and cars and jobs and books. They live like people used to live, with wide open land, bugs, snakes, coughs, homemade food, hunting, fishing, freedom. That place is what you think of when you think your Hollywood image of Louisiana. But there was this guy they talked about, this old man in the swamp who had a shack, and he would hunt, and trade, and every day- every day!- he would cook up a whole big mess o'food, and hope somebody would show up. Kellie said this was sad, lonely, but it wasn't, for one critical reason: somebody always showed up. And there would be food, and talking, and companionship. That was what I wanted to achieve, with the party, the soiree, the gathering last night. And it went off perfectly- I couldn't have asked for a superior event. How do people live, with the desk job, and the paper, and the starched shirts and the stilted conversation and the church and the life of quiet desperation? Why do so many people put up with that? There's something about blisters and sore muscles and sunburn that makes me think I'm living right. It's the way we were born to live, those flint-knapping nomad great-great-granddads sing in our veins to see us live right again. I've volunteered for several days of labor, building things at schools around town, next month. I look forward to it. I'll let these pampered city types show me whether they know which end of a hammer to hold, I expect a lot of laughs. It's all in good fun. ;) 2 bananas| Feed me

Tired. [08 Oct 2008|10:34pm] [ mood | tired ] [ music | Morcheeba- Fragments of Freedom ] Shiiiiiiit. The car broke. It had been making a noise at the left front wheel while running that went crnk crnk crnk crnk crnk crnk crnk, with said crnks rhythmically correlated to the speed. Then it stopped making that noise. Then that wheel started going cwap cwap cwap whenever I made long right turns- turns that mean the weight of the car leans towards the left side. Then I parked it and went in to teach. Then I came out and in the parking lot it went cwap cwap cwap groooooooan wump RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. Decibels to make a low-class person proud of their stereo system. I looked underneath it. See this? See the bit called "lower control arm"? It was resting directly on the lower wheel rim, 'bout three or four inches low. It was resting on it, suspended solely by the wheel rim and the tire pressure. So the RRRRR sound is the sound of the wheel rim grinding against my suspension, pressed upon by the pressure of at least the front left quadrant of my car. When I started it and tried to go it went RRRRRRR rundgrundgrundgrundgrundgrund. So I parked. I sighed. I don't have money to repair the car's suspension. I'm working a volunteer job. I did not plan for this. I went inside. I don't have a telephone because mine was lost soon after coming to Austin, so I had to use the school's phone to call triple-A. The woman who answered was very colorful. She spoke in a tired prozac monotone and said phrases like, "let's try it, life is a journey." "the computer, as computers do, is giving us more information than we need." And was generally strange. But she sent the truck there. She told me that the truck would not go to pick up Kellie. Kellie was waiting for me at her school, which is some distance from my school, and her phone is in our old area code. We share a car, because my car died long ago and I spent $1500 and it still doesn't work. The school's phone wouldn't call her. It wouldn't call outside the Austin area code. I asked the janitor if she would let me in the main office, as it was well after hours. She told me to use the phone I had access to. I explained that it wouldn't call outside the Austin area code. I showed her. She let me in the office, and I tried the office phone. The office phone wouldn't call outside the Austin area code. The phone book also did not have the listing of the garage I wanted to take the car to. I'm fortunate that earlier today- this very morning- we'd had to take the car to fix a flat tire, and found a good mechanic. Otherwise I'd have had no idea to whom in the city I could turn. The triple-A man would have said, "where are you towing it to?" and I would have said, "I don't know." I tried making a collect call and it said "this user cannot accept collect calls." I tried the office phone that said "authorized users only," and it said "you must have an authorization code to make this call." I looked around the desk and tried the numbers that looked like codes, but none of them worked. And I was waiting for the tow truck to get there, but Kellie was waiting for me to pick her up and would have no idea why I was over an hour late. Nobody was left at the school who knew me. There were several kids still left, being watched by an older couple. I didn't want to beg for a phone, but I didn't see any other way. I went across the room to the older man and said, "Excuse me sir, but could I borrow your cellular phone?" From the first words of the conversation, his (I assume) wife, an ugly, sour hispanic woman with a frizzy red perm and expansive dress, was looking the other direction- away from me- and shaking her head emphatically. Not the head-shake of resignation or disapproval, but rather, telling her husband "tell this guy to go away." He spoke mostly Spanish, and suggested as did the Janitor that I use the other phone. I explained that it was a long-distance call, and her number was for a different area code. I offered to pay. The woman shook her head more, he looked at her uncertainly. He gave me his phone, and nodded. I I hate that woman. Right now it's a simmering, low-key sort of hate. Right now all of my emotions are that way, because I'm so tired, so worn out. But what a wicked way to be, what a pinched and tiny little disposition, to by default... to have your default answer be "no". The opposite of my own grandmother. My own grandmother who taught me how to be. That woman accomplished nothing but to make him feel uncertain, and to make me feel... degraded. For begging. It could have been straightforward, hell, I had the money to make it a transaction. She made it shameful. I hope that one day her selfishness humiliates her. I don't hope for her to suffer, but for her to be laid low and to grow from it. How can people be so old, and yet so... small? It would be satisfying to see her punched in the face. Just to... just to try and fuck it up. For no reason other than an innate ornery selfishness. Fuck you, old woman. You humiliated me. Why? But I have no fire in my anger. I'm all burned out right now. The man let me use his phone, maybe in rebellion, maybe in solidarity, maybe out of the goodness of his heart. Maybe all three. I made the call, showed him the number, left Kellie a message, thanked him and gave it back. I'm grateful to that man. The whole exchange took maybe sixty seconds. I waited outside, and sighed. Time passed quickly, and a man drove up with a truck. I told him that we needed to pick her up. He was uncertain, even though the triple-A plan covers me for one hundred free towing miles. But he didn't have to go the three miles out of his way. I told him I could pay him extra, and his eyes lit up. "You'll make it worth my while?" "Yeah," I said resignedly. "Twenty bucks cover it?" "That'll do." I got in. He had a song playing on the radio with a man saying "I want to lick you baby, I want to lick you right." I picked up Kellie. She was really strong about it. She didn't have a negative word. I said, "This sucks, doesn't it?" She said, "We'll get through it." She's right, you know. The tow driver was complaining about driving around. We got to the garage, and knocked, and walked around the shop looking for a drop box for the keys. We came up with an idea to make some extra money- we've got all this tutoring and teaching experience, and we haven't done that gig since leaving Beaumont. Time to try and start that up again. We came around, and the owner answered the door. He was in late doing finances, he invited us in and bought us each a soda from the machine. He said he'd take care of us. I told him our story, and that we didn't have much money, but I'd be happy to work it off, or do an installment program. It grinds at me to kneel like that, but it was what I had to do. Really grinds at me. He said no, politely. Said they work through creditors and would give us a good fair estimate and help us find something. He said, "But we work through it, we persevere!" He was a republican, you could tell, but he was a cool guy to us. We left the key with him. I paid the driver his $20 and we left. The driver complained when he drove us home. Turned out he had been off-shift fifteen minutes before he arrived to pick me up, but the other driver wanted to go to his daughter's birthday party, so the driver took the call for him. He'd been working an hour and a half after he was supposed to go home, when he dropped us off. He'd taken the call because where he picked me up- on the other side of town from where he was dropping me off- was close to his mother's house, where he wanted to go. So he was a good guy, too. Sort of. I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't have this much money, and we need the car to get to work. I'm going to... I want to make up fliers and put them around, advertising tutoring for biology, chemistry, mathematics. I want to call up the high schools in the area, particularly the private schools, and tell the principals to send struggling students to me. I will charge $25/hour, maybe less if I need to stay competitive- there are more intellectuals, and thus more tutors, in Austin than in Beaumont. But I'm tired right now. I don't have the energy to do that. I don't want to depend on people. But I'm getting a ride to work tomorrow. I need to find a way to make money. It's just been a really trying day. Just so damn tired right now. 3 bananas| Feed me

End of the Line [06 Oct 2008|07:38pm] Woo, y'all. Lookin at the news.google.com, it's lookin an awful lot like the end times. Pope Says World's Financial System 'Built On Sand' And I'm inclined to agree with him. Watching all these pundits and the hearings on Fuld going on right now, I'm struck, again, that there is no damn reason I should listen to Financial Industry Experts about anything. Seriously there are these people saying "god you all just listen to an economist already," but the most intuitive and obvious thing said so far in all of this was said by the old-ass pope, when he stood up and said, if you'll permit a paraphrase, "Global finance is bullshit." US Stocks Decline, Dow Falls Below 10,000 It's down 568 with no slowing in sight, so far today. This shit is voodoo, y'all. The people who congratulate themselves so much on having it all figured out are just fooling themselves, the finance markets are so big and complex and with so many factors that what you're looking at is not a rational and predictable machine, it's a force of nature. And sometimes you get hurricanes. Quarter of World's Wild Animal Species at Risk of Extinction And while we're worrying about all this, the Holocene Extinction Event keeps flying forward. And the elephants are dying, and the rhinos are dying, and the megatheriums and mammoths and glyptodons all died out ten thousand years ago anyway so why are we acting like this is new? The only time I ever saw somebody bring this up, on a stage, with a mic, in a forum to be listened to, was two years ago when Eric Pianka gave his "Book of Life" speech and Forrest Mims wrote up a libel saying he (and the rest of us in the Texas Academy of Sciences) all want to kill everyone on earth. It's like as soon as somebody says, "Hey maybe we should look honestly at the way we're burning through this planet, killing everything, forgetting what we've killed, never looking back, and try to consciously control ourselves, whatcha say guys?" somebody else has to say "YOU HERETIC BURN!". I know why. It's because the thought that we're destroying the planet, the thought that we in our short tenure on this planet, represent a hellified extinction event paralleled only five times in the last HALF BILLION YEARS, that is to say in the entire history of life (look it up), is a hell of a thought. And a person's sense of value and self-worth really takes a nose-dive if that person stops seeing themselves as a beautiful and complex creature and starts seeing themselves as an ecological plague vector. And I know why people want to be creationists, and why people want to believe in an impending Rapture. Because it's so big and scary at this point that it's easier to stick your head in the sand and say "this is the way it's always been," and it's easier to stick your head in the sand and say, "this is all in God's Plan, and neither we nor anyone else will ever have to live with the consequences," and it's easier to stick your head in the sand than to look at it and look at the other six billion people on the planet and start trying to figure out a way to get them to stop it. It's not a fun thing to think about. I'd rather read about King Arthur too, no doubt. But the world is empty now, even compared to how it was a thousand years ago, and it's more empty every day. And the other day, reading about the financial crisis, I happened across this article written by this economist, and he was saying that the housing bubble was the fault of urban planning, and wrote that, "It's meant to control urban sprawl, which isn't a real problem." And I thought, isn't a real problem to whom? It isn't a real problem to him, because he sees lots of land to be gobbled up and no reason not to, because it's terribly efficient, from an economist's perspective, to do so. Because an economist's perspective, it seems, doesn't last 65 million years. And an economist's perspective doesn't put a price on living in a world with diverse and beautiful fauna. We're a unique kinda creature, because what we do is expand our biome. Everywhere humans go, stops being Desert, or Forest, or Tundra, or Plain, and becomes Town. And as such those wise few species with the luck to have adapted to the Town biome- rats, cockroaches, dogs, cats, pigeons, lice, and all sorts of diseases- expand, and kick out anything that goes ahead of them. And so we have more rats and cockroaches and pigeons than ever before, but we're starting to run low on elephants. And people are unhappy about that, but nobody's willing to just stop expanding. Just stop growing. We keep expanding and expanding and growing and growing, and Wall Street panics if your company doesn't show growth for a year, and the government panics if your GDP isn't growing, and everyone calls it a Fertility Crisis if your population stops growing. But dammit, guys, those are good things. We need all these things to stop growing, in a manner that's controlled and intentional, because if we don't, we will keep expanding and rutting and breeding and we'll end up in a world entirely populated by high-rises, power plants, smog, cockroaches, and pigeons. And that world will suck. It's inevitable. Either we stop growing or we don't. If we don't we'll rape the whole planet and then we'll stop- with nothing left to burn- and there'll be no recovering. People always flip out if you talk about this, call it classist or communist or whatever their bugaboo is, but nobody wants to admit that it basically comes down to that- we can stop growing, or we can keep growing until we collapse. I don't know about you but I'd much rather live in a world with regulated fecundity, than in a world with NO FUCKING FOOD. I don't see why this isn't obvious to everyone. There are limits. We can't just keep expanding. Hell, if you look at us as having a certain rate of expansion per certain amount of time, whatever that rate is, we'll end up, after sufficient iterations, exceeding the room on the planet. And hell if we keep expanding into space we'll end up, after sufficient iterations, having an expansion rate greater than light speed, and the crash occurs then. Sustainability. Constant growth is not a viable long-term option, and as long as it goes on we keep burning the world. We have to stop growing, as a species. We have to limit the expansion if we want to preserve a world where we can think and observe and have leisure and write and make art, because if we fuck it all up we'll end up scratching to survive. Give that a couple million years of selection pressure, and you won't have big-brained poets and philosophers, you'll have post-human apes. We need to set limits. We need to stop expanding. 2 bananas| Feed me

Good. Fuck those guys. [30 Sep 2008|12:03am] [ mood | schadenfreude ] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6rE0EakhG8 The stock market just crashed and I feel great. The most hideously overpaid, evil, unsympathetic bastards in the country just got told "no"! Let me tell you a story: The evil President (who I will consider to be roughly synonymous with the Republican Party, thus, here I refer to the President as an institution, rather than the wetbrained goober puppet who actually holds office) spent five of his eight years in office giving exorbitant amounts of government money to contractors to do nothing in Iraq (except hang onto that money for when he's out of office and wants it back). During that time he encouraged every financial institution in the country to de-regulate. I loan you $500,000, then write down in my books that I have $500,000 worth of assets in the debt you owe me, then you write down in your books that you have $500,000 worth of assets in the money you have, then you loan that out, and so on and so forth. Imaginary fake money. Then the retards who own the financial markets all spend a lot of time giving out loans for tons of money to people who aren't good for it, then selling that debt to debt collectors and so on, all based on the assumption that the government (the Republicans) will bail them out if they get in trouble. "Predatory Lending," right? Following the tale? And now, with two months of his presidency left to go, the secretary of the treasury (appointed by the President) said "GOSH YOU GUYS THE ECONOMY'S ALL BAD WE HAVE TO GIVE THEM .7 TRILLION DOLLARS WITH NO STRINGS ATTACHED OR ELSE YOU'RE ALL FUCKED" And the President came on the TV and said, "GOSH YOU GUYS THE ECONOMY'S ALL BAD WE HAVE TO GIVE THEM .7 TRILLION DOLLARS WITH NO STRINGS ATTACHED OR ELSE YOU'RE ALL FUCKED" And then Fox News, who supported him every day of his presidency, had a lot of pundits say YEP YOU'RE ALL FUCKED IF YOU DON'T GIVE THEM .7 TRILLION DOLLARS WITH NO STRINGS ATTACHED. It sounded a whole lot like when, five years ago, the President had come on and told everybody that it was SUPER HUGE CRISIS TIME and EVERYBODY PANIC WE GOTTA GO TO WAR WITH IRAQ. Why Iraq? BECAUSE OMG DISASTER CRISIS EVERYBODY PANIC. Nobody can really pin down the reasons, but the President's saying it, and the guys on the news are saying it, so there must be some reason why we should go to war with Iraq, right? There must be some reason why we should give up .7 trillion dollars to the most evil fucks in the country, no strings attached, right? Bizarrely, half the country seemed ready to fall for it again. But then a bunch of heroic congressmen and -women, listening to the people around the country saying OMG ARE YOU SERIOUS, voted against giving .7 trillion dollars to the most evil fucks in the country. And then the Dow, (which is owned by the same guy who owns Fox News btw), dropped a bunch and lots of rich people lost lots of money, and kept insisting, YOU GUYS YOU'RE ALL FUCKED. And somehow, somehow, I ain't too worried. Listen, President Bush running his mouth about a big impending vague crisis, accompanied by a media blitz and a big huge amount of money to be given away? Why is that not setting off huge red flags for everybody? Why is everybody acting like they haven't seen this show before? Why is everybody suddenly trusting this evil little turd of a president? I don't have a 401k, I don't own a home, I don't have a mortgage, I'm not in trouble. You say "The Economy"- whatever the fuck that means- is going to go bad? First, I say, "how?" Second, I say, "Why should I care?" I know how to do an honest day's work, and I know how to budget in a crisis, and I have a wide set of skills and am adaptable to change. I'm gonna be just fine, and if you know how to do an honest day's work, so are you. There will always be a job open for someone who can work. But the more the stock market crashes, the less money there is to go around, the less fat there is for the fat cats to hog. Imagine, if you will, a scenario- suddenly, CEOs around the country have to stop making ten million dollar salaries,, because they have to pay that money to keep their companies running. Wild idea, I know. Mind-blowing, I know. But just think about it. You say there'll be less money for government programs, I say there'll be more once President Obama raises taxes on the rich. You say there'll be economic problems when the troops come back, I say we can afford to pay everyone in the country a full-time salary to sit on their ass for the price we pay to keep Iraq running a month. You say credit and lending will be restricted, I say, good, maybe people will start repairing things and we can make a step towards solving this "throw-away lifestyle" of waste everyone decries but never stops. You say we're about to be broke, I say we're about to lose all the pretend-money that the rich people have been throwing around, and be no more broke than we were last year, except that now we'll have a realistic appraisal of it. I'm going to be fine, with this "crisis," and so are you. The problems will be had by those sorts that Ayn Rand called "parasites," the guys who provide nothing but preying on honest working people. They'll try to pass on those problems. They tried to pass them on today. But the congress said "no". 'Bout goddamn time. 2 bananas| Feed me

more adventures in electricity [28 Sep 2008|06:41pm] It was one of those ideas where if it fails, I'm a doofus, but if it works, I'm a genius. My laptop wasn't working :( Because my power cord wasn't powering it anymore. For days I'd been having to push it into the socket at funny angles and strange pressures to keep it in contact, and finally it'd given up altogether and I'd been computerless for a few days. So I took laptop and computer to Best Buy and said "tell me what is wrong," they told me the cord was broke, not the laptop. Good news, right? "What's a new cord cost?" "About a hundred dollars." This is ridiculous, offensive, bananas. I say so, verbatim. They say that I might be able to get one for $65. I make it clear that the price I consider acceptable for a freaking power cord is more like $10. They tell me I'll need to look elsewhere, but one recommends the Goodwill Computer Store (for y'all non-Americans, Goodwill is a shop that people give things to to be sold cheap to poor people, so their overhead is just rent, electricity, and minimum wage). I go there. I dig through their laptop power supplies, and while there are some with the right volts and amps (Dear Diary: today I learned to look for volts and amps ratings on the backs of power supplies), none had the right head. I sigh. I am struck with an idea: I know that my power cord has been able to work just fine for a long time, as long as I push it in at funny angles. That tells me that it's delivering power through the converter, just not through the head/contact thingie. So I figure, I'll just take the power supply for some totally other device, clip off the head and use it to replace the head of my existing power cord, right? Does that sound potentially suicidal? Damaging to my computer? Or does that sound like thinking outside the box? I find a power supply for some little unknown widget, with a perfectly matching head, but with wayyyy too low volts and ampage (needs 18.5V and 3.5A, has 15V and 1A). I can plug it into my computer and my computer will work, but at 0% power and in general the computer is confused about whether anything is plugged into it, right? Not enough amps to charge the thing up, not enough current. I buy it ($5). I take it home. I take a deep breath, and clip the heads off both. I deal with some difficulty (the laptop power cord is what I understand is called a "coaxial cable, so it's got one wire wrapped around another wire- I have to unwrap the outside wire and roll it up into a prong for me to attach to), I strip the wires, I separate them, I connect head to cord, do some creative work with electrical tape, and then... I have a perfectly functional laptop cord. My computer works again. I am a genius. Today, I learned that the value of ingenuity, skill, and the balls to do things that technicians cringe at, is $95. 1 banana| Feed me

Fuck those motherfuckers. [22 Sep 2008|10:27pm] A Sense Of Resentment Among The For Sale Signs He recounts a conversation with a new neighbor who moved into a deluxe home: "How did you afford that house?" Bejtlich asked. "I don't know. I just signed," the neighbor said. Well. I sure am pissed off about this bailing out of people who stupidly bought things they couldn't afford. I sure am pissed off about these douchebag CEOs who ran the companies into the ground and are now taking off with million-dollar "golden parachute" retirement funds. I sure am pissed off about the prospect of me paying for those evil fucks to take advantage of the country and then turn around and run. "Fuck That": Anonymous Democratic Congressman Wants To Fuck "Those Mother Fuckers" Paulsen and congressional Republicans, or the few that will actually vote for this (most will be unwilling to take responsibility for the consequences of their policies), have said that there can't be any "add ons," or addition provisions. Fuck that. I don't really want to trigger a world wide depression (that's not hyperbole, that's a distinct possibility), but I'm not voting for a blank check for $700 billion for those mother fuckers. Nice. I want to vote for that person. I think that person, were they to to become nonymous, would stand a reasonable chance of winning the 2008 presidential election in a landslide third-party victory. McCain's campaign financial advisor got a 45 million dollar retirement fund. I sure as shit won't be supporting anyone who supports this and I hope the spineless weasels in the democratic party know it. Got a problem with money loss? File a class-action lawsuit against these evil motherfuckers and make them sell their jets and ranches and mansions and harems and gold-plated AK-47s or whatever until they can pay back every cent. Ruin them. Fuck rich people. Got a problem with money loss? Deal with it. I don't, I'm fine, because I did not sign a stupid lease for a stupid house that I can't pay for. Got a problem with money loss? It's not mine. Don't wave your hands about "the economy" and talk to me like I'm supposed to bail your stupid asses out. Fuck that. What makes it all worse is, to paraphrase the old man I spent this morning wrangling goats with: "This kind of fucked up handout to the most evil people in the country has been going on for five years in Iraq." Feed me

Paper, concreteness, bureacracy. [21 Sep 2008|12:20pm] Susan Schaller has spent twenty years traveling and researching language-less people completely on her own. The experts she tried to get help from when she first started out were dismissive, uncooperative or hostile. She even got yelled at by one researcher who shouted, "Who are you?" A graduate student told her,"Nobody's interested in that subject anymore- that was popular last century." Susan became interested in language-less people when she volunteered to teach Ildefonso, a deaf mute Mexican immigrant who was raised in a town that had no education for deaf children. A Man Without Words is the story of her work with him. Susan discovered that Ildefonso had no concept of language at all. Later she learned he had a deaf brother, and that the two of them had figured out some simple ways to communicate as children. But he had absolutely no idea that spoken or written language existed. He understood that the other children did something important with their schoolbooks, but he did not know what that was. It took Ildefonso ony six days with Susan to grasp the idea of language. In the book, he has a revelation that's a lot like the water pump scene in The Miracle Worker when Helen Keller suddenly understands what language is. Although he got the i>idea</i> of language quickly, it took much longer for him to be able to learn and use the language Susan was trying tot each him. One of the most powerful parts of the book, for me, is the day when Susan tries to teach him the words for color. Susan is teaching him the names for colors, like red, yellow, and green, but when they get to "green" suddenly he becomes highly agigtated and mimes running and hiding while signing, "Green! Green!!" Susan couldn't understand why he was so frantic, until she learned that green was the most important concept in Ildefonso's life. Ildefonso was an illegal immigrant who supported himself working harvesting crops and picking apples. All the good things in life and all the bad things in life were green. Green money and picing green crops let him feed his family in Mexico. Border Patrol agents wearing green uniforms and driving green trucs were the bad people who would grab him and take him back to Mexico, to the place where there was less work and food was scarce. The most important thing in life was the Green Card that magically repelled the bad green men. Susan writes that it was impossible for her to imagine Ildefonso's world. I expect she knows a ot more about the world of language-less people now that she's spent to decades searching them out, and I'm looking forward to her next book. She did perceive differences in Ildefonso that I think directly aply to animals, as well as to people with autism. The main difference between Ildefonso and people who have language is that he was missing a layer of abstract thinking. For instance, he didn't have the categories of real and fake. He just new that some Green Cards worked to keep the green men from taking you back to Mexico, and some Green Cards didn't. He didn't know why. He also didn't have just and unjust as abstract categories. It's not that he didn't have mroals or a conscience. Susand oesn't say a lot about this, but she writes that Ildefonso became upset one day when she kept insisting on paying for his lunch after he had signed that he wanted to pay. Ildefonso got more and more angry until finally he signed, "God. Friend. Burrito buy I." "He connected God andfriend and placed them above burrito buying," Susan writes. "His anger was that of a religious instructor. I was properly rebuked for my concern for the material world. Who had more money was trivial." Later on he asked her what "God" meant, but he had already figured it out on his own. Susan writes that he had guessed that the word "God" stood for "unseen greatness, apart form and more important than the tangible stuff in front of us." --Temple Grandin, Animals in Translation, p257-258 The kid nailed it better than ten thousand years of philosophers, didn't he? I like Temple Grandin's work. By her own report she thinks, not in words, but in pictures. Which means she is not really capable of having a thought that doesn't correspond to something real. Her writing, while technical, complex, and deep, is concrete, simple, and real. Something I can't say for many books on similar topics. There's a clarity of meaning, every word evokes a real image, every position she takes clearly flows from evidence she puts forward. It makes her readable in a way that most academics aren't. You don't have to work to squeeze meaning out of fluffy nonsense. Over the years I've developed my own approach to psychology- when you hear someone describe a situation, you ignore words about guilt and shame and pride and prejudice, and you only listen to the people involved, who is dominant, and who is treating someone else as if they aren't dominant. In doing this you wipe away the artifacts of culture and self-deception and get straight to the core of the matter, the apes having a conflict over sex, status, or resources. Same story, every time. And it's amazing how uncertainty and confusion melt away and you end up, every time, with a very clear conflict with a very clear solution. Those other things really only exist in our heads, they're fictions, they're elaborate ego-defense mechanisms that just serve to hide the truth from ourselves. So why should somebody who's trying to figure out the real problem even listen to them? "For my animal welfare audit, I came up with five key measurements inspectors need to take to ensure animals receive humane treatment at a meatpacking plant: *Percentage of animals stunned, or killed, correctly on the first attempt (this has to be at least 95 percent of the animals). *Percentage of animals who remain unconscious after stunning (This must be 100 percent). *Percentage of animals who vocalize (squal, bellow, or moo, meaning "ouch!" or "you're scaring me!") during handling and stunning. Handling includes walking through the alleys and being held in the restraining device for stunning (no more than 3 cattle out of 100). *Percentage of animals who fall down (animals are terrified of falling down, and this should be no more than 1 out of 100, which is still more than would fall down under good ocnditions, since animals never fall down if the floor is sound and dry). *Electric prod usage (no more than 25 percent of the animals). I also have a list of five acts of abuse that are an automatic failure: *Dragging a live animal with a chain. *Running cattle on top of each other on purpose. *Sticking prods and other objects into sensitive parts of animals. *Slamming gates on animals on purpose. *Losing control and beating an animal. This is al you need to know to rate animal welfare at a meatpacking plant. Just these ten details. You don't need to know if the floor is slippery, something regulators always want to measure. For some reason whenever you start talking about auditing the plants everybody turns into an expert on flooring. I don't need to know anything about the flooring. I just need to know if any of the cattle fell down. If cattle are falling down, there's a problem with the floor, and the plant fails the audit. It's that simple. The plants lvoe it, because they can do it. The audit is totally based on things an auditor can directly observe that have objective outcomes. A steer either moos during handling or he does not. Another important feature of my audit: people can remember two sets of five items. That level of detail is what normal working memory is built to hold on to. But I find that people in academia and often in government just don't get it. Most language-based thnkers find it difficult to believe that such a simple audit really works. They're like the people in the lever-pressing experiments; they think simple means wrong. They don't see that each one of the five critical control points measures anywhere from three to ten others that all result in the same bad outcome for the animals. When highly verbal people get control of the audit process, they tend to make five critical mistakes: *They write verbal auditing standards that are too subjective and vague, with requirements like "minimal use of electric prod" and "non-slip flooring." Individual inspectors have to figure out for themselves what "minimal use" means. A good audit checklist has objective standards that anyone can see have or have not been met. *For some reason, highly verbal people have a tendency to measure inputs, such as maintenance schedules, employee training records, and equipment design problems, instead of outputs, which is how the animals are actually doing. A good animal welfare audit has to measure the animals, not the plant. *Highly verbal people almost always want to make the audit way too complicated. A 100-item chekclist doesn't work nearly as well as a 10-item chekcclist, and I can prove it. *Verbal people drift into paper audits, in which they audit a plant's records instead of its animals. A good animal welfare audit has to audit the animals, not the paper and not the plant. *Verbal people tend to lose sight of what's important and end up treating small problems the way they treat big problems. Sounds like all the problems with every bureacracy you've ever fought, doesn't it? Some control freak with a little bit of knowledge who wants to make a nice thick stack of paper, pleasing to him or her, but ultimately useless to the job at hand. I'm teaching my kids two classes- one is goats, and the other is electrical engineering/earth science. The other day I taught little 2-3rd grade girls how to make circuits, and they loved it- here's a battery, here's two wires, here's a buzzer. Go nuts! Everybody keeps coming up with all these lesson plans that involve cutting and pasting and writing and reading and big pieces of paper, but somehow that seems to me to miss the whole point of an afterschool enrichment program*. The kids don't want to hang out and mess around with paper for another three hours, they want to touch actual things with actual tactile flavors, to have a kinesthetic connection to all these dull, abstract concepts that all these dull, abstract teachers have been shoving on them all day. So I provide that. Every day there is something real, concrete, for them to do and learn in my class. There might be an abstract component of the lecture, sure, but I attach it, somehow, to reality. We have to learn about the cycles in nature, I connect this to the innate sense of rhythm by making it a drum lesson- something they can really have fun with, but at the same time I use the lecture to connect that tangible, kinesthetic sense of rhythm, to the more abstract idea of seasons changing and the water cycle. Then I go from that to showing them how the electricity in the circuits has to run in a circle. They made me sit and read SOPs** for a month at that other job! This is my vengeance on the paper-fiends of the world. *arguably it is 'free daycare' but that's another issue. **Standard Operating Procedures for every dull-ass aspect of their operation. 4 bananas| Feed me

LEVEL UP [14 Sep 2008|05:27pm] [ music | Simple Minds- Don't You Forget About Me ] Who is the cleverest little monkey? I am the cleverest little monkey! The horn on the car was broken, it would just stay beeping, just perpetually, until it blew the Horn fuse and then would not honk, right? So Kellie looked it up and that means the Clock Spring is broken. The Clock Spring is in the steering column and apparently it's supposed to let the steering wheel rotate while keeping electrical contact. Right? Claro? Because you can't otherwise rotate while keeping a circuit intact, this is why there are no wheels in biological organisms, you'd have the blood flow all getting cut off all the time. So anyway apparently the clock spring done got sprung and is keeping itself in contact all the time. I infer that it's just an ordinary ol' clock spring, and of course to be springy it can't be insulated, and of course that means if it's gotten a kink in it that it's short circuiting and bypassing the horn button in the steering wheel, right? So what can we do? There's this thing where you install a Horn Button, and it's basically just a button with wires, so it basically just lets you close a circuit, right? And everyone says "Run the wire from the battery to the button and then from the other post of the button to the horn (to the actual electric device, the horn, not the button)," thus bypassing the usual horn button, the one in the steering wheel. Right? But we can't find the horn! It's somewhere up under the manifold and behind the heads, in the engine compartment, and it's basically totally impossible to get to and don't even talk to me about trying to run some POS ad-hoc wire, attached to safe sites and not getting cut apart, all through the moving parts of the engine, I mean come on that's bananas just in concept, not to mention in execution, all having to get the damn car lifted up in the air so I can root around underneath it and get it dropped on me because all I'm using is cinder blocks, right? Anyway so that's out, and Kellie says, jokingly, "Well I can leave the fuse in the socket and just tap it and that's kind of like having a horn, right?" And then this is where I'm the cleverest, because I said "aha!": I'm thinking, that fuse box with the busted fuse is right here next to the steering wheel. Why don't I just hook the wires of the horn button to that? And I do! I measure, cut and strip, tape and screw, tape the button to the dash (I wanted to bolt it in place but I don't have a drill handy and Kellie doesn't particularly want me drilling in there anyway), and in what I assume to be complete and hideous violation of good electrician practice, I just shove the naked wire ends into the sockets of the fuse. Oh my god so dangerous, so bad. I thought, "Surely this is the sort of thing that every good electrician everywhere would throw rocks at me for." Then I thought "Surely this is the sort of thing that you haven't really become an electrician until you've confidently done something that's superficially dangerous and stupid yet in effect bypasses a horrible problem and saves a bunch of work." And it works perfectly. Tap the little button, and that perpetually-closed circuit closes across the button and it beeps just like it was meant to. Bypassing the steering wheel's horn button and taking advantage of that existing short-circuit across the clock spring! Finding the solution in the very nature of the problem! Brilliant! Aikido! I'm so excited because I've never done any electrical work at all before, and I just looked at this, bought a wire stripper (knew what it was because I saw it sitting in dad's workshop once, as a kid, and brought it to him mistakenly thinking it was pliers), some spade contacts, wire, and electrical tape, and just said, "I will figure this thing out." It's like when I hand-made my big huge bookshelf- I knew I had it in me to figure out how to do carpentry, but had never had any opportunity to do so. So I say, "I will take some lumber, some measuring tape, some power tools, and I will figure this thing out." And now even with no real experience, I think of myself as being a competent carpenter. And now even with no real experience, I think of myself as a competent electrician. Testing circuits? Wiring up a house? These things would be huge challenges, but they're no longer in the vast field of Magical Things That Only Other People Can Do. They're within my potential purview, I just have to sit down with the tools and figure it out. So exciting! So rewarding! And the horn beeps now when you tap the button, so neat! I did that. I didn't pay someone to do it, I did that. I just figured that out all by myself. I am so dang proud. This post probably doesn't make any sense but don't worry about it the punchline is I did electrical work myself with no instructions, planned and executed, and I've never done anything like that before and now my horizons are widened. 1 banana| Feed me

I Am Rolling My Eyes At Hurricane Ike. [12 Sep 2008|04:50pm] Man don't fall for the whole OMG A HURRICANE IT'S CATEGORY 1 IT'S THE END TIMES spiel. Hurricanes are the media's new celebrity disaster bugaboo. We went my whole life without hearing about any of the multifarious hurricanes that hit every year, and now after Katrina and the administrative clusterfuck that represented, it's all EVERY HURRICANE IS A DISASTER. Katrina was bad because New Orleans got rid of their wetlands and because every politician was looking out for his/her self rather than getting their jobs done. They let us out of work three hours early today, for Hurricane Prep I have been hearing people fuss and moan about it, "oh no is it gonna hit us?". Austin is 160 miles/260 kilometers inland. Austin is 160 miles inland. I grew up in Lumberton, which is 40 miles inland, and spent last year in Nederland, which is like 17 miles inland. We only ever had to evac twice. Hurricanes every year, rain, storms, power outage, school closed. We call it "Hurricane Season" around here. And now suddenly after decades of living here, all the people who sit around watching Fox News all day have gotten it in their heads that we need to evacuate. They have called a mandatory evacuation, and I am proud to say that my family, back home in Lumberton, has elected to disregard it. I ain't worried, neither are my folks- they've moved the perishables to the mini-fridge in the shed, hooked up the generator, and got out the can opener, and they're sticking around. We've been living with this all our lives, and this hurricane ain't shit- it's just a little bit stouter than the one I slept through a few months ago. Expect mild flooding and wind damage, just like every time. Boggy Creek's going to overflow, cutting my folks off from the city, for a day or seven. It was twenty-three years before I met a hurricane worth worrying about, and that wasn't Katrina, it was Rita (the one a month later that nobody heard about because they were so engaged by NOLA's pathos). I recall fondly the days of my youth spent playing in the cold floodwaters, watching the landscape transformed. This happens every year, multiple times. The media's just crossing their fingers that there's a nice juicy disaster, but I'm not worried. I have had to calm down friends up here who have family in places like Houston, (50 miles inland), who were wailing and squalling about how everything's going to end. People. This is the way things are in Texas. We know this. What are we freaking out about? Why is it newsworthy for somebody to stand around and get rained on? P.S.- on the other hand, Galveston is probably pretty fucked, I ain't gonna lie about that one. But hey, that's the inevitable result of building your city on a barrier island: details here. 1 banana| Feed me

Raisin Goats [10 Sep 2008|10:25pm] Well, come Saturday I'll have been in Austin, Texas, live music capital of the world, for a whole month. Nice. I am . . . tired. I just thought I'd check in, oh LJ. I still read it, I just don't write so much. The status of things: I'm paying $420/month for an apartment in a great big Student Housing complex (off of east Riverside on the south side). This place is awesome. It's on the third floor, which means we have a big vaulted roof that's like 14 foot high, and nobody making noise on our ceiling. It has a single big huge room, with a kitchen (that came fully furnished with stainless steel appliances, hardwood floors and new cabinets). The room is maybe 15 foot wide, 30 foot long, big open space with our TV/couch zone at the other end. The TV/couch zone is right next to the big huge natural-lighting window, which opens onto our spacious third-story patio. The patio, regrettably, opens over what is basically a parking lot, but it provides a good view of our rambunctious college-kid neighbors acting foolish. We have the big room minimally furnished, so that there's tons of living and walking-around space. Very feng-shui. My room is furnished with My Stuff. My big giant bookshelf (the one that was too tall to fit in any normal house, when I made it, so I sliced off the top shelf and turned it into a perfect coffee table, three-foot-by-one-foot-by-one-foot, sturdy, utilitarian, efficiently built) that I made (my carpentry pride-and-joy) holds every book I deemed necessary-to-bring in like its bottom four shelves, so I've got all this extra storage. Plus I stole one of the furnished bed frames and put it under my mattresses, so that leaves a huge storage area there, and I have my own bathroom, and guys basically what I'm getting at is $420 ALL BILLS PAID including a swimming pool not fifty feet from my door including cable with HBO and internet including a gym, basketball courts in Austin, Texas. Everybody was all OMG AUSTIN'S SO ESPENSIVE YALL ARE GONNA GET ATE ALIVE AND RENT A CLOSET FOR $6,000 A MONTH. Everybody please. Have a lil faith. Things go great, they just do. I roll twenties. I mean sure, if I wanted to I could emphasize the clusterfuck aspects of the move-in. I mean sure we had a sixteen foot truck packed full of our stuff and it all had to go up three flights of stairs. Sure the AC didn't work for the first week and it was something like 99 degrees the whole time. Sure the AC still doesn't work in the car and the inspection's out and things need work and we're sharing the one ride. Sure I have some annoying co-workers and I just started a new job. Sure Obama just dropped behind McCain in the gallup poll. But guys. Why would I emphasize these things when there are so many good things I can think about? I roll twenties, in my own recollection, simply by not remembering all the ones. This is constructive solipsism. Today I got up, did some light paperwork, got in the truck with an old veteran of the program, took shovel in hand and dug out the overgrown areas impeding the free swing of the gates at the goat pens. Then the old man took me for delicious mexican food lunch, paid. We talked politics and religion. We agreed. Then 'round two I went to work and taught some at-risk kids about goats and self-discipline for three hours. Sure I could emphasize the sweat, the heat, the fact that I did more shovel-work than the old man, the fusses with the kids, the staying too late. But why would I? I love my job. I leave that school and the phrase leaps from my heart through my head and out my mouth, and I exclaim it in the car to nobody. Why? Why? Because it's real. Sounds like a baloney thing to say, sounds like a backwards thing to say, when I'm arguably spending my time dicking around with Volunteer-Type-Work when I could be Getting On With My Career. But I don't want to Get On With My Career, get on with my process of chasing the next status symbol (hello y'all I worked for a Lincoln dealership for a month if you'll recall), the next promotion (ExxonMobil), the next day off, the next carrot dangled in front of me to keep me on that treadmill going nowhere. I don't want to get on with my career, I want to get on with my life, and do things worth doing and live a life worth living, and this is what I'm doing. I sweat and work and stress and fret and at the end of the day I've made the world better, and I've made enough money to pay my cheap rent and maybe get a few toys in the meantime. I have good books and lots of video games and what do I need? Let me make this clear- I am saying that what most people do, with the house and kids and job 9-5 and boss and Casual Fridays and My Reserved Parking Spot, these things are what is usual, what is expected, but these things are not what is Real. Take the red pill. When I die, I will rot and nobody will remember my Lincoln Navigator or my Plasma TV or my Whole Foods Organic Apple Juice or my Elegant Living Home Furnishings Catalogue or my thousands of hours of drudgery. I won't give my life jumping through somebody else's hoops and I won't piss it away on video games and beer. I'm going to do something worth doing and I'm going to sweat and be dirty and also do science. I said today that I enjoyed working with the animals (in case you've not inferred it I'm teaching an animal science class, this involves raising goats, or 'raisin goats' as my Southeast Texas* accent made it sound, prompting a kid to say 'ewww what's a Raisin Goat?'), and my boss, to whom I was speaking, and whom I respect, said "It's the clarity of it." Yeah. The clarity of purpose. I am feeding the goat so it can eat. I am giving the goat shots so it won't get sick. I am giving the goat water. I am trimming its hooves. I am herding it into its pen. I am repairing its pen. These things are simple, declarative, concrete. The reality of it, missing from a world of cable TV and packaged meat products and fluorescent lights and TPS reports and sinecures and bullshit politics and Sarah Palin** and Sean Hannity and BET and commercials for cooking products and makeup. The clarity of it. Yeah. The whole job is clarity. I am helping these kids. I am not helping myself, I do not have complex motives. Other people may but that's only out of habit, it's a flaw they have, they can't help it. My Big Head Boss annoys me, she reminds me of Hillary Clinton. She inserts herself into conversations I'm having with someone else, and gives advice that's simplistic and unnecessary and I'm obligated to appreciate it or whatever. But I'm good at my job. I'm so good at my job, you don't understand how good I am, and when somebody comes and says "durr you should do this totally obvious thing that's simplistic and yet vague enough to be useless," it just sucks away the good vibe I have and I can. not. smile. I need a boss who is not a boss. I review my past and the bosses I didn't like were up in my business yet didn't know my business, and the bosses I liked were the bosses who knew their stuff, and knew I knew my stuff. They put me on a task and let me go and I do my thing, and when I need help they give it, and when I'm done they say "Goddamn, you sure know your stuff." Pat me on the head and stay out of the way and know your own business. I am competent. I don't respect rank, I respect competence. I hate a boss who's a boss and shouldn't be. Which is why it's excellent that my Big Head Boss is somebody I hardly ever see/deal with, and my Boss is somebody who I respect and who respects me. Life is good. I just felt like dogging out my Big Head Absentee Boss. And what I was saying is I do not have complex motives, here. There is no dance, that I perceive, of back-biting and foolishness. I volunteer for hard work, I do it, I go home. My work is meaningful and accomplishes things and uses my strengths and talents. Life is good. I'll talk about the details of work some other time. I'm really proud of my flag/banner idea. I'm sure the anarchists I know would flip a shit*** to hear of me "militarizing" kids but hoo-wee, if it hasn't worked like a magic wand. *People don't talk like me here. People don't talk like me here! OMG XD For the record, Southeast Texas sound to everyone else like we're from Louisiana. **with her fucking hockey moms. Fuk yew Sarah Palin. Go drill in your own arctic. ***what's that even mean 3 bananas| Feed me

On the practice of killing each other [25 Jul 2008|10:10am] So I was reading about this guy Radovan Karadzic, The Butcher of Bosnia. Who played a starring role in the Balkan Wars. I don't have much recollection of those wars, beyond having read a passing reference to them in a Bloom County strip when I was a kid. So I'm sure ms_daisy_cutter won't be offended if I steal her Radovan Karadzic's Greatest Hits rundown: In summer and fall 1992, during his presidency of the Bosnian Serb Republic, the Bosnian Serb army and Serb paramilitary groups occupied about 70% of Bosnia and systematically drove Muslims out of towns they captured — or killed them. Their loathsome euphemism for this soon entered the English language: "ethnic cleansing." Another aspect of "ethnic cleansing" was the rape camps instituted by Karadzic, in which tens of thousands of Bosnian women were sexually brutalized and otherwise tortured. The goal was to destroy Bosnian Muslim families by attacking their "honor," and to force Bosnian women to bear half-Serbian children (which the Serbs called "ethnic pollution"). The "silver lining," if you will, was that the world finally began to take systematic rape during war seriously as a war crime. Karadzic was also instrumental in the three-year siege of Sarajevo, which killed upwards of 12,000 people. (Nine-minute BBC video from 1992, early on in the siege, here.) In July 1995, his Serb forces occupied the city of Srebrenica, which the United Nations had declared a "safe haven" and which was supposed to be protected by UN "peacekeepers." The Serbs rounded up about 8,000 men and boys and slaughtered them. Which makes me ask- how do you do that? How do you get to where you can even do that, give that order, kill those people? What the hell? ****************************************** I'm not unfamiliar with the way crazy hateful apocalyptic genocide is so depressingly ubiquitous throughout human history. What I'm getting at isn't "wow that's rare," but rather, how does a single person come to that point? Where "I want you to go into this city and murder every man, woman and child of the other group" passes their lips, passes their mind? I mean sure, dopey rednecks can say "Hur dur let's nuke the Middle East 'til it glows" but I always sort of imagine that if their finger were hovering over the button there'd be some sense of scale that'd kick in, some "Goddamn, I am talking about ending tens of thousands of families," thought or idea. You'd think that, maybe, the people carrying the thing out would say, "hell, this is insanity." That maybe when it's not just you pushing a button and seeing numbers on a screen, but rather, when it's you holding a knife and seeing fear in a mother's eyes, you'd say "this is bullshit." But I know that when I read the history books it doesn't work out that way. And the experiments (The Milgram experiment) say people, once given an order, will do all sorts of evil things so long as they can fob off the responsibility on their commander-type. So I suppose it just takes somebody on the "giving orders" end who's detached enough from the event that they can just say "Do this horrible thing" and then go back to playing backgammon or molesting the cabarets of the conquered, and then somebody on the "taking orders" end who's detached enough from the responsibility that they can look at the people around them following orders, and just go along with their tribe. And I suppose on the "giving orders" end you just have to work yourself to where you don't know or understand the other people and think of them as subhuman. I guess it's all the glory of groupthink, everybody can shift, in their own conception, the responsibility for what they're doing to somebody else. And since there's no external, objective measure of "responsibility," nobody has to think of themselves as actually bearing any. Everyone can dissociate from the horrible things they're doing. What's fucked up is that there's somebody who's a True Believer, who says "Yes, it is good that I should personally, with a knife, slit the throat of everyone in [outgroup]." What's fucked up is that that guy's probably gonna be called a hero two hundred years later- assuming he wins. What's that Nietzsche said? "One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear." Sums it up pretty well, I guess. The guys giving the orders are vain, the guys carrying them out are afraid. ****************************************** I don't know if I've said this before, but I attribute the decline in this kind of stuff to the rise of a mass media. I am not talking about Fox News- Fox News is bullshit. But the idea that, suddenly, the whole world actually is watching when people do horrible evil things to each other, and say "What are you thinking?" is both a welcome reality check from outside the groupthink maelstrom that I imagine dominates these sort of things. "The world does not know what the hell you are fighting about and indeed cannot tell you apart. The Russians love their children too. Stop it." It gives a sane influence to counteract the generals and priests saying OMG WE HAVE TO KILL THOSE PEOPLE WHO WEAR DIFFERENT HATS. At the same time, that awareness of the media probably acts as an implicit sanction- a threat of action- against it. Though since President Bush went eight years saying "Fuck you, world," that is likely weakened a lot. For the types that would have been Caesar or Alexander before, the conquering types, you can no longer get away with being basically the only significant power in the world, so "if we kill all of them we'll never have to deal with the consequences, because nobody will know except us and we'll write the history books," is no longer a viable approach. ****************************************** While I'm posting, I have another sentiment I'd like to share: Fuck Rich People. I'll elaborate on that some other time. Though I think it's largely self-explanatory. 2 bananas| Feed me

[21 Jul 2008|04:17pm] Guys, my specialty is not world geography. Sometimes I make mistakes. Sometimes I get confused about where places are, and I know that the middle east can be confusing. I can sympathize with people who make such mistakes. But I'm not running for POTUS. And even if I was, I would not say something like this: For reference, I have included a map of the Iraq/Pakistan border which Senator McCain mentions: Gaffe, or implicit campaign promise? You decide. Me, I'm thinking he's taking this whole "ape the Bush legacy" thing too far. Obama needs to put that clip, just the "The Iraq/Pakistan Border" part of it, in a campaign commercial, cut with a map of the Middle East. And then edit that in with some quote from John McCain being all "Barack Obama can't be a good military leader" or whatever. Ya know. Just let the irony sink in. Do you think America would catch the drift? I'm not certain. But it'd at least give everybody repeated exposure to an actual map of the Middle East, and that'd be handy. List of McCain Gaffes, just from this week. I like the "I'm gonna cut taxes and increase military spending and eliminate the deficit" one. I suppose that's the "with magic money from out of my ass" school of economics. There's a famous economist who had a book titled that, right? 'Course the real favorite of this week is when Prime Minister Maliki said "Basically we like Obama's plan" and, you know, there's no coming back from that. "No, we in Iraq think it's best that the Americans go ahead on home." "But but but flabbergasted!" I think McCain's probably a good and stand-up guy in person, and I know he's got this long record of breaking the Republican party lines. It's disappointing to see him sell his principles out for votes (coughflipflopcough), it's disappointing to see him flounder like a doofus in this election, but I suppose he's really just reaping the benefits of what was going to be an impending Republican disaster, anyway. And all I can say is thank goodness the other half of the country has finally, finally, eight years later, started to figure out that we should all hate Bush. I heard a conservative talk radio host this morning struggling to say something good about him, and thought, "Okay. Excellent. Eight years behind the curve but at least you're starting to see the difficulty in this proposition." Seriously. I know people are trying to be all disaffected and disinterested and cool and above the messianic Obamahype, but come on. I'm ecstatic about Obama because he generally says honest and wise and good things. I will be happy with his presidency- not disappointed- if he just honestly tries to do good. He does not have to wave his hands and raise Lazarus from the dead. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In other news, I saw Aliens last night, finally. Why is it that nobody wore face masks? When they knew there were face-hugger aliens there, why did they not pass out face-masks to every marine? Also fuck that "give up all your bullets" noise. And if I'm ever leading a squad of space marines into a techno-organic alien lair, I'm definitely not gonna have us all bunch up in the middle of a big room with no plan for a retreat. Shee-it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Also, have you seen Batman: The Dark Knight? Oh I did. It was excellent. Now I find myself wondering how and if they can fit the Harley Quinne character into that Joker. And who they're gonna have play that Joker next. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I suppose the biggest news is that, come August 18th, I will be moving to Austin. No more Southeast Texas, no more carcinogens in the air. No more buddies, no more trips on the bayou with my dad. No more being surrounded by rednecks. No more roads that I know by heart. I'm homesick already. But I'm looking forward to a change. I'll be working for Americorps, teaching 4H in at-risk middle schools, teaching biology. Being poor, poor, poor as heck, making roughly half what I'm making even on a public schoolteacher's meager salary. But it looks great on your CV, right? And it's a good thing to do. And it's a ready made role to act as a bridge to get out. This town has the people I love in it, but I know it has a way of sucking people back in. And I'd like to see the world outside. 1 banana| Feed me