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...But of these sophisms and elenchs of merchandise I skill not... |
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Sunday, February 19, 2006 Comments exist, in the sense that they get made and they go somewhere and as that happens a notice is sent to me through the convoluted pipeline that exists for that purpose, but they don't exist in the sense that they can be recalled, or pointed to afterward, or summoned to any kind of consistent definable presence outside the abstract periphery of things that are, but are not ours. They don't belong to me, or to you who have made them, but to that larger amorphous presence that squirms like a well-fed toddler in its theoretical basinette - too big for that, too small for the world - alternately frustrated and cooing with delight, bearer of promise all unknowing, alien, new. Which is well and good, but a complete subversion of the function of the application. Which purports to be dialog and is, as well as being remonstrance, grooming, confirmation, denunciation, intellectual hitch-hiking and other less-easily catalogued services and tools. So nuts to that. On the positive tip Informant38 may have come back to its relative senses, or - like an adolescent colorless and dull in the grinding morning-after, slumped sullenly in semi-toxic isolation at the breakfast table in a too-bright kitchen, may just merely be willing to be, for now. And that will have to suffice. Saturday, February 18, 2006 Camp Concentrate: The mouse is clean because he isn't dirty. Like Jesus he has no genitals - he isn't in the world that way, doesn't engage the world, isn't engaged by it that way. He didn't come here to reproduce. What works through the architects of both these hive-prospects is bitter I think, desperate, until it submits to what has to be its fate. On particularly bad days I imagine it beginning in a human life and purchasing its immortality right at the threshold of extinction. And then living forever, until the whole system shuts down and it's back to the threshold. This time it buys a return ticket and spirals on out to the origin, to the real beginning of organic life. Then pong! back to the other end. After a few eons of that yo-yo shuffle it's insane, bored, sadistic past anything puny mortals can get up to, and it knows the territory inside and out. Building its scaffolding and tearing it down, starting over with gained knowledge but always depending on the outer shell of life, the actual living beings, because it needs them to move around in time. I know it's odd and not very glamorous but it accounts for the inhuman laughter, that sound that's identical and omnipresent in both places - the plastic city and the grim pragmatic abbattoir. Like the 60-cycle hum, when it's been there all your life you don't hear it, the brain tunes it out - until it stops, and the silence becomes a presence, a sound in itself. - What ought to shock and terrify Americans is that the Greenland ice sheet is melting five times faster than predicted and the parasitized figures at the head of our government are building detention camps. My blogging software [at Informant38 anyway] is behaving as though it needs a good nap. Or some firm discipline. It keeps reverting to an archived state from yesterday [17.Feb]. Even when I delete posts from then, they come back - and any new posts erase anything in between the revert-state posts and the newest one. And then after a few minutes it all reverts back to the archive state. The actual blog page shows the latest application state. The only workaround I've figured out so far is to save the inbetween posts and repost them en masse. Which if this keeps up for a week or so is going to get painful. Still, it's a wonderful time to be writing things, all in all. So much material keeps popping up unexpectedly - so many turns of event, so many characters, so many clues. - This may or may not hold. The archives at Informant38 are here. "The first line of NASA's mission is to understand and protect the planet." Jim Hansen - director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space StudiesIndependentUK/CommonDreams 17.Feb.06 The United States has asked the Palestinian Authority to return $50 million in US aid because Washington does not want a Hamas-led government to have the funds. Aljazeera.Net 17.Feb.06 BEYOND CHUTZPAH Heavy rains induced by La Niña blamed
Heavy rains, illegal logging blamed Why use them? Why show them? One reason might be to gloat, to remind, the equivalent of the crowd screaming and kicking at the captured enemy as they're led into camp. Back in the old days. Now it all happens in the semi-abstract world of images, and reflections of images that are images themselves. One reason might be to humiliate not just the Iraqis shown in the pictures but Muslim men everywhere. If you start from a different point of view than the given, then obviously everything's going to look different, too. If you start from the idea that this is happening to gratify lust for revenge and hunger for empire - the nucleus in a constellation of motives that include raw greed and religious delusion as well as simple-minded patriotism, but that the real driver, the core, the engine, is that greater long-time hunger - it makes as much sense, in fact more, than the official version and its shadow twin. Those versions would be the in-this-context nonsense phrases of "democracy" and "freedom", and shadowing them the knowing explanations of "oil" and "corruption". We're asked to believe, by both sides in the polarity, that what's happening in Iraq now is the result of incompetence, entirely and solely the inability of the invading powers to manage what they took away from Saddam. One version says the incompetence is poor planning, the other that it's the backwash of unbridled greed. The result no matter what being chaos and a fragmented infrastructure. The result also being, intentionally or incidentally, a broken nation that will be no threat at all to the frightened and psychotically-charged little country to its northwest. A broken nation that sits on top of what may be one quarter or more of the last accessible reserves of oil this world will ever see. In that light - enmity, vengeance, scorn, vendetta, harnessing the dupes of self-interest to their chariots - the consistent goading of Islamic fundamentalists to get them to prove their violent irrationality - before the watching eyes of basically decent people who are still a little undecided about all this - makes strategic sense. Those basically decent people are bankrolling the whole enterprise after all. Consider the possibility that the immediate p.r. goal is to refute the humanity of the Muslim world, then add the vindictive kick of shoving these images of degradation into the faces of the already outraged and enflamed, who will then prove their inferiority by violence and rioting - thus justifying the scorn and derision, as well as the clampdowns and denials of freedom and democracy in what's purportedly the "free" and "democratic" West, and building support for further attacks against these violent fundamentalists, in people aghast at murderous rioting over a few cartoons. What argues against it? Common sense? Common sense is so far out of the mainstream now it sounds like beatnik poetry.  
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