Facebook is creepy

Forecast of Heavy Storms

McCain will lose.
This goes without saying. Barack Obama is young and charismatic and gets all the positive media attention; while McCain is, well, a fat old man with cancer and dementia and a hundred year war in Iraq ahead of him.
But there was never any contest. Not between Obama and McCain, not between Obama and Clinton, not between Obama and any other candidate. Obama's place was chosen quite some time ago by his corporate sponsors, who choose the presidential candidate who will never change anything that would get in the way of corporate profiteering. This is the symbiotic relationship that politicians have with corporations; the corporations make the politicians powerful and the politicians make the corporations rich. It's easy to think that Obama is winning because of his hard work and courage, his 'audacious hope', the picture is certainly painted that way. Painted that way by the corporate media, which functions as the voicebox of conglomerates that have their tentacles in every conceivable business interest, in energy and war, in weapons and communications, in television and newspapers and more. MSNBC, which is a joint venture of NBC and Microsoft and in and of itself provides news to millions of Americans. NBC Universal, and therefore singularly controls the content of numerous television channels in many languages and countries and in basic and cable and satellite.

NBC Universal is in turn owned by GE. General Electric is the most successful conglomerate and the sixth largest corporation in the world. And it is here where the levels of corporate collusion grow frightening. GE was the fourth largest producer of toxic waste in America in 2000, and in it's 130 year history has caused untold ecological damage. Throughout the last century, GE managed to discharge 1.3 million pounds of Polychlorinated biphenyls into the air and water. PCBs are carcinogenic compounds produced by GE's capacitors, and for decades GE fought a media and legal battle to refuse to clean up their waste. Moreover, GE is, through various subsidiaries a weapons manufacturer, and profits from the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If GE and their ilk; these vastly destructive, diabolically involved groups hadn't made Obama their candidate long ago, he wouldn't be where he is right now. And though the phrase "corporate masters" calls up imagery of demons with pitchforks and conspiracy panic, it is only logical to imagine the businessmen in suits around a table, discussing who they think would rock the boat the least while still maintaining a facade of progressive politics and 'change'. And what better way to drive people towards such a snazzy new puppet than a foil, that of a bumbling old idiot who can be painted as the polar opposite of the candidate of choice, to present to the people the illusion of a free choice.

John McCain is just that foil. And if people don't feel great about voting for Obama than they can at least good about not voting for McCain. The corporate masters never intended for him to win the election, and he can choose any vice presidential candidate whom he chooses. Even a pro-life, pro-death penalty governor from Alaska. It doesn't matter. His job is to flock people to Obama, and then come the day that Obama is president they can be told that they are responsible for having voted for him. They can be told that they participated in a democracy and that their options were either to vote or to refuse but that if they refuse then it's their fault that another candidate wasn't elected.

As though choosing between the lesser of two evils is democracy.

Really?

"WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush said Monday that an angry world should condemn the way Myanmar's military rulers are handling the aftermath of a devastating cyclone."

Oh, come on.

So..

This could come from an unenlightened perspective but lately I've been reading a lot about conservative ideology and frankly, I'm not so impressed. I think that these ideas of nationalism, imperialism, and dualism are inherently violent and hypocritical.
I get that preservation of social norms is important to some people, but I also find that there are many social norms that, unexamined, lead to a lot of violence and to blame the oppressed and subjugated for violence unto itself and the culture around it is asking for more.
I don't respect the Machiavellian view of power as a game of love and fear, I don't respect power in that way. I think we should have left behind all notions of The Prince when we declared independence from Britain. There's also all this stuff about expansionism and colonialism, cultural and otherwise, through the World Bank and so on and so forth, that I think is evil in it's conception and really, the co-incidence of conservatism and Christianity is laughable. Christianity is supposed to be about non-violence and the historically conservative governments in America and Europe have tended to be extraordinarily violent. Compassionate conservatism is kind of a load of crap because not only are the poor often passive victims of societal and economic racism and subjugation, they're often the active products of such. Capitalism essentially demands that there always be a working class to produce the things that need to be produced and as long as that working class needs it's daily bread it will be the wage slave of the owners of the means of production.

Conversely though I respect some aspects of conservatism. The emphasis on the family I think is really important, I think that families are extremely important, and that we should keep together and close-knit. Fiscal conservatism is also kinda rad because, as a pragmatist first and an anarchist second, as long as there's going to be a government it should arbitrate the will of the people and only that and should not be spending the people's money and incurring debt to drop on the heads of the tax-payers.

Even so, conservatism is pretty wack.
Capitalism is totally wack, thinking of human beings in terms of monetary value really sucks, and slavery is entirely crap.

Carl Schulz once said, and he's often misquoted. "My country right or wrong". There's more to that though; "My country right or wrong. If right to keep it so, if wrong to set it right."

Exactly what the hell is going on in Burma?

Almost a year after the precipitately named Saffron Revolution, in which tens of thousands marched peacefully in want of democracy, and in which hundreds of Buddhist monks were killed for their participation, a Very Severe Cyclonic Storm swept across the Indian Ocean and through Burma, dealing massive damage. Though the current death toll is hovering around 60 thousand, as of May 12th, there are potentially 80 thousand more people to account for.
The Burmese government, which is run by a military junta in possession of a human rights record fraught with abuses, has dealt with the situation in an absurdly awful way, first refusing aid, and then refusing all aid except for food and medicine, putting many tens of thousands of people in extreme danger. According to AP, “the relief workers have [only] reached 220,000 cyclone victims, only a small fraction of the number of people affected”, “and only one out of 10 people who are homeless, injured or threatened by disease and hunger have received some kind of aid since the cyclone hit May 3.” There are a number of other painful figures, some more personal than others. “”All my 28 family members have died,” said Thein Myint, a 68-year-old fisherman who wept while describing how the cyclone swept away the rest of his family. “I am the only survivor.”"

Concurrently, the Junta proceeded with a previously scheduled constitutional referendum; a referendum that seeks to “ensure the creation of a “discipline-flourishing democracy” in the words of the Burmese government. Proposed amendments include:

# a quarter of the parliamentary seats would be reserved for military officers
# the Ministry of Home Affairs would fall exclusively under military control [5]
# anyone married to a non-Burmese would be barred from running for the presidency.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the internationally celebrated Burmese opposition figure, (her own late husband of British origin) remarked that voting in the referendum was a “consumedly unacceptable act”. Beyond the thinly veiled fascism promised by the new Constitution, the conditions regarding voting in disaster-torn Burma are riddled with controversy. As reported by the Philippine newspaper, The Inquirer:

“Songs extolling the new proposed constitution, which was drafted by a committee hand-picked by the generals, fill the prime-time airwaves of government-owned television and radio stations.
The draft constitution book is now available in many bookstores in Yangon, albeit at a price of nearly one dollar — far beyond the means of most people in this impoverished country.
[The] National League for Democracy (NLD) party is urging people to vote down the charter, but said last week that their activities were being curtailed, sometimes violently.
In the western town of Sittwe on Tuesday, at least 23 people wearing T-shirts bearing just one word — “No” — were arrested, the party said.”

Further, in a public poll by Mizzima, a Burmese News Agency, 64% of those surveyed still intended to vote in the referendum. However, 71% did not know what the constitution was, and 52% have not yet decided whether they will vote to support or oppose it. Among those who voted, electoral fraud reigned, with fraud allegations including:

* Officials giving out ballot papers already filled in with a tick.
* Voters ordered to complete votes for their relatives.
* Government officials sitting close to the ballot boxes and telling voters how to vote.
* Voters bribed to vote yes.
* Officials closing polling stations at 11am and then going to the houses of people who hadn’t voted and making them vote then.

Burma is the poorest country in Asia, and among one of the poorest countries on the globe. It’s economy is essentially an export economy, with main exports of various illicit drugs, precious gems, oil, lumber, and recently, hydro-electricity. Though the country is rich in resources, the GDP is strikingly low, growing at a rate of 2.9 per year. The regime depends on export to continue it’s existence, and since 1989 has liberalized (read: neo-liberalized) certain areas of the economy, including the lucrative gem, oil and forestry industries, of which the profits funnel directly into the pockets of the junta and the various international corporations it is partnered with; including Total, the French oil giant. In the name of development, extraordinarily violent human rights abuses take place, raping and murdering villagers in the northwest of Burma to force them to vacate their resource-rich land. According to the Guardian, “the prize is a bonanza of foreign currency from gems, gold, logging and hydro-electricity that will bolster the repressive regime. The largest and most lucrative project is a series of four dams on the Salween river generating cheap power, mostly for export to Thailand.”

Burma’s long history of abuses and usurpations and the recent climate disaster and it’s complications are calamitous on their own, but they are not standalone. They are the result of our world’s modern economies that depend on genocide and slavery in far off places to keep the gears turning. Although Burma is about as bad as it gets, it’s government and economy are condoned and even encouraged by Western “Democracies” including the United States and the European Union. And while we are not living under quite so absolute despotism, that our governments are supporters of regimes like Burma gives us an idea of exactly what image our own despotic leaders would like to mold our countries in, but have not yet succeeded.

Lech Lecha

“Friends are forever”, she says, “Boys are whatever”.

“Get lonely”, I hear, missing her and what she meant.

It’s been months and there’s still, there’s still a puzzle piece missing that my veins pump blood into, this void into which my blood freezes as it flows. It’s just south of my heart, just north of my soul.

“You liar”, I wake up some nights mumbling. “You liar, you fucking liar.”

She stole my heart and ran, ran a hundred miles and kept running and ran and buried it like the stolen treasure that it is.

Hair creeps up my chest, my father’s voice echoing, vibrating on each follicle, telling me that I’m growing up and each day I revel in the magic of youth.

But I’ll be fine; I already am and have been for so long. I was fine before that first, that first and so real and heavy and big love, a fossil to be dug up with my heart.

Random stuff

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
-Stanley Milgram, The Perils of Obedience.

Freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice and Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.
-Mikhail Bakunin

"No one today can afford to be innocent, or indulge himself in ignorance of the nature of contemporary governments, politics and social orders. The national polities of the modern world maintain their existence by deliberately fostered craving and fear: monstrous protection rackets. The “free world” has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of greed which cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire which cannot be satiated and hatred which has no outlet except against oneself, the persons one is supposed to love, or the revolutionary aspirations of pitiful, poverty-stricken marginal societies like Cuba or Vietnam. The conditions of the Cold War have turned all modern societies — Communist included — into vicious distorters of man’s true potential. They create populations of “preta” — hungry ghosts, with giant appetites and throats no bigger than needles. The soil, the forests and all animal life are being consumed by these cancerous collectivities; the air and water of the planet is being fouled by them."

-Gary Snyder, Buddhist Anarchism

ZEN is Meditation. ARCHY is Social Order. ZENARCHY is the Social Order which springs from Meditation.

As a doctrine, it holds Universal Enlightenment a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn.

"Having said that zen study is knowing yourself, the roshi went on: In America you have democracy, which means for you government of the people, by the people, and for the people. I in my turn am bringing democracy to Japan. You cannot have democracy until people know themselves. The Chinese said that government was unnecessary and they were right. When people know themselves and have their own strength, they do not need government. Otherwise they are just a mob and must be ruled. On the other hand, when rulers do not know themselves, they push the people around. When you do not know yourself, you busy yourself with other people. Zen study is just a matter of getting your own feet on the ground."

Kerry "Ho Chi Zen" Thornley, First Non-Prophet of Discordianism, on Zenarchy.

A starved and stuffed beast

In Buddhism, there is a certain type of hell reserved for addicts, for people futilely attempting to fulfill their illusory physical desires, for greedy and jealous people.
This hell of sorts is called called the hungry ghost realm and these ghosts, known as pretas (from the Sanskrit "pra ita", "one who has gone forth") are intensely pitiable beings.


"They are described as human-like, but with sunken, mummified skin, narrow limbs, enormously distended bellies and long, thin necks. This appearance is a metaphor for their mental situation: they have enormous appetites, signified by their gigantic bellies, but a very limited ability to satisfy those appetites, symbolized by their slender necks. Pretas dwell in the waste and desert places of the earth, and vary in situation according to their past karma.
Some of them can eat a little, but find it very difficult to find food or drink. Others can find food and drink, but find it very difficult to swallow. Others find that the food they eat seems to burst into flames as they swallow it. Others, if they see something edible or drinkable and desire it, it withers or dries up before their eyes. As a result, they are always hungry."

While this is a parable, a metaphor, these beings that are described are not unimaginable, we come into contact with beings remarkably like them quite often. The Wall Street businessman is one that comes into mind, who in between aggravated bouts of investment and profiteering is viewable on the street smoking entire cigarettes in one drag.


What's really remarkable is that the immediate effects of this lifestyle are not immediately noticeable and in desire of change on the part of the partakers. I'm not talking about lung cancer or emphysema, I'm talking about the callous disregard for life and health and humanity that occurs on a widespread level in the world that is run by these specters who, as they run back upstairs to resume their building of empires and states, leave behind only a cloud of smoke. The reason that I find this remarkable is that I feel that I have some respect for life, and liberty, and it was my assumption that respect for these things is pretty universal. Unfortunately, there are daily reminders that this is not the case. A quick scan of any newspaper, from rag to respectable, produces an overview of corruption in it's many manifestations, whether it be the media itself that is sick or the topic that the media is covering. The New York Post is fantastically good at effecting a decidedly jingoist perspective among it's readers, while appearing to be nothing more than a tabloid or perhaps even a muckraker, an agent for the people of the city. Whether it be fanning flames of nationalist pride against foreign heads of state or ousting public school teachers with alternative politics, the Post has managed to make itself ubiquitous. The New York Times, which at least is pretty reputable, produces routine examples of good journalism, and tends to expose the hungry ghost realm in which we live. Racism is the order of the day, from New Orleans (have we forgotten already?) to Iraq (oh, yes we have), to the rising food prices that starve poor nations to the institutional policies that make minorities again and again the greatest victims of any given disaster. Especially the subprime mortgage crisis, which has hit hard across the board, has been the markedly worse for black and brown peoples who happened to be the most likely candidates for subprime loans.

From the NY Times:
"Home buyers in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods in New York City were more likely to get their mortgages last year from a subprime lender than home buyers in white neighborhoods with similar income levels, according to a new analysis of home loan data. In Jamaica, Queens, for example, where the majority is black and the median household income was $45,000 in 2005, 46 percent of the mortgages were issued by lenders who specialize in subprime loans, the second highest rate in the city. In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, which had a median income of $50,000 and is mostly white, the rate was among the lowest in the city, with 3.6 percent of home loans coming from subprime lenders."he Indypendent reports: Your Pain is Wall Street's Gain

"As recession sets in government officials, business, workers and consumers report and witness signs of pain. Between January and March the United States lost 232,000 jobs. Home prices are falling quickly. The loss experienced in millions of households is staggering. At least 10 percent of people in in the United States now live in homes that are under water — that means more than 10 million households owe more on their homes than they are worth.

The early months of a recession are always difficult. As time passes and pain intensifies, fighting begins over who gets help, how much help and when. So far the help offered to the public has been little and lagging. As debates have raged about how much help is needed, the best connected and positioned firms have been demanding and getting generous sums.

The “merger” of Bear Stearns and JP Morgan is a case in point. In a deal worked out with the Treasury Department and the New York Fed, the larger and better positioned JP - Morgan gets a $29 billion loan, while $30 billion worth of Bear’s distressed portfolio is put up as collateral for the loan. The bigger and stronger help themselves to the smaller and weaker with generous government assistance."

Somehow we need to begin chipping away at the leviathan that is swallowing up our lives and spitting us out emaciated, that will always be hungry and can never eat enough, that is capitalism. There comes a point at which we have to recognize that capitalism, the market, can only be stable at a rate of constant growth. Unfortunately, for everyone, constant growth is inherently unstable. Protesting is a whisper in a hurricane, as the fetishes of the market forces govern our existences, truly unfortunately, in an almost divine manner.

William Butler Yeats wrote famously,

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Haitian government falls after bloody week of food riots

What does it mean to believe in anarchy?

To glance head first into the abyss of man, machine, and glory, to stare blindingly into light and knowledge and wisdom and intellect and spit on it, to cover building with ooze, to shuffle inside corridors and plant crops, to grow like wild weeds in ugly cities, to dance richly, celebrating a pregnant storm.

To live life in the bowels of a Basquiat painting, tongues wagging in time to the rhythm of sacred dances long forgotten, to touch peace constantly, your every atom vibrating, to inhabit vessels wrought by vipassana only to plunge deep into acid and freedom. To sit beside statues on trains, to prank call God and the Universe, to piss into oncoming traffic and paint the sky with the yellow liquid of "I live". To dream of ghosts.

To borrow love from martyrs, to spray the air with venom, to poison us all, to taint the water supply with ancient ebola--

this whole world is a star garden, a car port at the end of time, a slightly awkward sun, a forgotten portal, this is purgatory, to be free is to be in hell--

to be in hell is to love. Ye, though it may hurt to love, like flames under foot, a drowsy paranoia pulsing through our hearts, a brimstone death-- it will only hurt more to not love.

When we realize that love is rage, when we realize that this life goes on forever, that it will stop, that there is no tundra, no dessert, no asphlat, there are no rolling waves of grain, no salty sea, no swampy marsh, no rangey mountains, no thick thicketed trees, when we realize that art and harmony and life and money and sex and the sweet nectar of our fellow beings, that our body parts are his, hers, ours, no one's and every one's;

we activate Sacco and Vanzetti, we ressurect Goldman, we suck on the teet of Thoreau, we put soap in the ponds at Walden, we wheat paste signs to a light pole "This is the handsome penis of Martin Luther King, Jr.", we make drapes out of food stamps, we worship peak oil like shadowy dates on the Mayan Calendar, we decorate caves with our chakras and whisper to blow out candles;

to move like a grimey piece of stealth, to wander into the Bleed, to look down, up towards, and through everyone and everything... because we want to.

from this amazing thing

How Many Angels Dance on the Head of a Pin?

Why are you an anarchist?

All'a y'all Anarchists out there have probably been asked this question more than a few times.
What kind of answer do you give? What do you say? Do you give a lengthy dissertation on injustice and oppression and hierarchy? Do you attempt to condense all your Marx and Goldman and Bakunin and Kropotkin and hooks into a short, neat explanation? Do you feel insulted at the question and more, feel annoyed at your inability to give a straight answer and say something just as cryptic as either of the above options; do you just tell the person asking to fuck off?

Why are you an anarchist? Why? What is it about you that makes you see the violence inherent? What makes you want to fight it?

Why are you an anarchist?

Because Fuck Fascism, that's why.

I was fond of saying "I was a radical before I knew what that word even meant" for a while, and I still think it's a pretty excellent descriptor. Something about the way I was raised or maybe something deeper than that gave me a sense of things that I'm just not comfortable with and I don't like the way things are headed and I don't recognize that the system has any intention or ability even to voluntarily begin behaving in a sane, sustainable, just way.

This is not about destroying the system, this is not about "smashing the state", this is not about killing anyone or blowing anything up, this is about recognizing that we have a better way and that we are everywhere. We are your children. We are your grandparents.

Quote

This one is from Michael Parenti, who is featured on the No Gods, No Managers album by Choking Victim.

“The function of that ‘police action’, those interventions in Central America and the middle east, the function is system sustaining. It is to maintain that overall system! And you don’t look at the particular costs; I can demonstrate to you that in every single bank robbery, that in every single case practically, the cost of the police was more than the actual money that the robbers took from the bank. And, Oh! You see that there’s really no economic interest involved then. The police are not protecting the banks, the police are just doing this because they’re on a power trip, they’re macho, or they’re control freaks; that’s why they’re doing it. NO! Of course it’s economic; of course they’re defending the banks, of course, because if they didn’t stop that bank robbery, regardless of the cost, this could jeopardize the entire banking system. You see, there are people who believe that the function of police is to fight crime. And that’s not true; the function of the police is social control and protection of property.”

Quote

I'm reading this amazing book by an anthropologist named David Graeber, it's thick so I have to take it a few pages at a time but that's good because that's usually all the time that I have to read.

It's called Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire.

"A mode of production (MoP) is born of the relation between two factors: the forces of production (FoP) and the relations of production (RoP). The former is largely concerned with factors like the quality of land, level of technological knowledge, availability of machinery, and so on. The latter are marked by a relation between two classes, one a class of primary producers, the other an exploiting class. The relation between them is exploitative because while the primary producers do in fact create enough to reproduce their own lives through their labors, and more to spare, the exploiting class does not, but rather lives at least in part on the surplus extracted from the primary producers. This extraction, in turn is carried out through one or another form of property arrangement: in the case of the slave mode of production, the exploiters directly own the primary producers; in feudalism, both have complex relations to the land but the lords use direct jural-political means to extract a surplus;, in capitalism, the exploiters own the means of production and the primary producers are thus reduced to selling their labor power.
The state, in each case, is essentially an apparatus of coercion that backs up these property arrangements by force."

Insanity With the New York Piglet Department

I was lying down, stomach down, telling my friend I was gonna turn in early because I am feeling sick.

I close my eyes for a second and at that moment comes a THUMP UMP BUMP UMP clang and I don’t think twice and run; pull open my door and race round the corner and the most dreaded thing I could imagine was there; my mother lying in a pile on the floor in front of the stairs on top of a piece of artwork she’d made years ago out of a big industrial spring and a car wheel sans tire, that had made the clang noise at the bottom of the stairs. My mother is lying on the floor almost in a fetal position and she’s twitching. My mother, on the floor, twitching.

My mind does backflips and twice forward and I ask her if she’s ok and I don’t know but she’s twitching so she’s alive.

I ask her if she’s ok but she doesn’t say anything and, and I figure what must have happened, she’s twitching and making motor movements as though random neurons are firing, she’s seizing up, she’s having a seizure.

She’s having a seizure, alright, she must have fallen down the stairs.

I squat down on my knees and look up at simon who is mirroring what was probably my expression of what the fuck?

I grab my phone, wrench it from my pocket.

I called 911, but I get a dial tone and a screech and for a brief second I question reality but I hang up, I call again. Is she dead?

No, she isn’t I don’t think, the operator picks up. “It’s always a woman”; I think.

“I need an ambulance to 732 broadway.”

“What borough?”

“Manhattan, seven thirty two broadway. Seven Three Two.”

“One second, I’m connecting you to the EMS.”

“EMS, A480”

“A480, the address is Seven Thirty Two Broadway” *click*

“EMS here, who’s the patient? Man or woman?”

“It’s my mother, a woman”, I say.

“What happened?’

“She had a seizure, she fell down the stairs.”

“Alright, we’ll be there in a second.”

“Mom! Are you alright?!” I enunciate each syllable loudly and clearly. She doesn’t reply.

“Mom!” She turns her head half an inch in my direction but not actually bringing her eyes toward me.

She’s not dead, she’s not dead, she could be paralyzed, she’s not dead, fuck”.

My dad opens the front door which is down the short hallway to the stairs that mom fell down. I blurt as much as I can out at once in that way children do when there’s much more to say than can be said very quickly and so it all comes out at once, “Mom fell down the stairs she’s having a seizure I called an ambulance she fell down the stairs!”

I still have my phone in my hand.

A minute later we hear sirens blocks away and Simon and I run out the door to the apartment and down the flight of stairs and wave down not an ambulance but a firetruck, it stops and a few firemen get out.

“My mom had a seizure, she’s upstairs, I lead them up and I burst through the door prepared, no, not prepared for the worst and I see my mother, my mother, standing up.

Isn’t her back broken? Isn’t she paralyzed? No?

The firemen follow me over to her, just a few steps into the house and I ask her if she’s ok. She doesn’t seem to understand what’s going on.

“Are you ok?” I ask.

The firemen have shoes on their feet and I grit my teeth knowing that if there’s anything that she’ll say it’s that she doesn’t want shoes in the house.

She doesn’t understand what’s going on.

“Mom, are you ok?”

The firemen ask me what happened and I tell them that I was lying down and I heard her fall down the stairs and I thought she was dead, I thought SHE WAS DEAD, and I called an ambulance.

“Mom, are you ok?”

“Why are these people here?” she asks.

“Mom, you had a seizure and fell down the stairs! Are you alright?”

She looks angry, my mother, she looks angry, decidedly pissed off at me.

“Why do they have shoes on in here?” she demands of me.

“Mom, priorities! Are you alright? You fell down the stairs!”

“I am not alright; I am surrounded by three people who want only to see me dead!”

The Firemen look puzzled, one of them asking her if she’s ok, and telling her that I can’t want to see her dead, I called an ambulance for her.

“Mom! I don’t.. fuck. Mom, are you alright?”

“Ma’am, are you alright? Do you want to sit down?” She’s still standing.

“Mom, you had a seizure! Are you hurting at all?”

She doesn’t reply, she rotates her head and looks around as though she were underwater, the air seems thick around her.

“Mom, you had a seizure! Are you hurting at all?”

“?” She gives me a look as though I had told a great big lie about her. “I didn’t have any seizure, I am just in pain from my coccyx, I have physiotherapy. And I have troubles that he is making false allegations about me, false allegations.”

The Fireman has graduated from being puzzled to being distinctly perplexed and bewildered.

“Ma’am, are you alright?’

He turns to me and asks if this is common and I hear my dad saying to the other Fireman that she has a seizure condition and has petit mals seizures often and sometimes once a month and other times several times a day.

My mother continues to monologize.

“They are making false allegations, there is no reason for you to be here, I did not have any seizure, I have seizures sometimes, this is a false allegation and he makes false allegations to the ACS and…”

“Mom! Why would I lie about this!?”

“You tell me!” she demands of me, almost spitting it at me.

“Why would I lie?! I heard you fall and then I saw you on the ground and I thought you were dead! Why would I lie?!”

Two EMS workers walk in, and with shockingly soothe voices ask her if she can sit down, ask her how she is doing, and her what is going on, to take her blood pressure and what is wrong.

She re-begins her monologue, explaining as though she was asked, that her husband is a criminal and an abuser and that we are trying to get rid of her and that we are making false allegations, and again that she doesn’t want shoes in the house.

“Marguerita, please, calm down. We are only here to help, can we be of help? We want to take your blood pressure.”

“He is an abuser, they want only to get rid of me and I was in bed! I was in bed and I was sleeping, I just want rest! The problem here is that he has stolen from me and cheated me for twenty three years and he has stolen from me and he has liens on his name for millions of dollars from the IRS and now he is trying to get rid of me. I don’t want any help, I don’t need any help, I just need help getting back my name that he has…”

I find that under stress I have a tendency to joke.

I say “yep, yeah, it’s all true,” to the EMS worker, who looks up at me and I have a halfa smirk on my face and I think to myself, that I’m not being helpful.

Dad is talking to the other EMS worker, who is a large, rotund black guy with a voice softer that truffula tufts and embodies in him the strangest combination of having a large presence but a feeling of being totally unimposing. His name is Derek.

I squeeze past the EMS worker who is talking to my mother.

“Ma’am, could you tell me what week it is?”

My mother doesn’t seem to hear her. She’s still perhaps in a seizure although now she’s more likely post ictal and still disorientated and phasing from relative lucidity to wakeful unconsciousness but it’s hard to say- she can’t usually hear worth a thimbleful of mead.

The EMS asks me if she has takes any medication and I say yes, I run and grab a handful of orange pill bottles and run back and offer them up to the EMS.

Mom regains some level of consciousness if at that moment a negative consciousness and she says “What are you doing?! These are my medications!” And I tell her the EMS wanted to know what medication she uses and the EMS corroborates my claim to this absent woman, this Stranger in her own home disorientated and lost on her mind’s return to lucidity.

“Ma’am, I just want to know if there’s anything else wrong. Could you tell me what day of the week it is?”

“er, isn’t it Monday?” It was Wednesday.

“Ma’am, Marguerita, we want to make sure you’re ok. Can we take you downstairs to get a better look at you?”

“No! I’m not going anywhere, I was in bed, I didn’t ask for any of this.”

I’m standing in front of the door and it erupts open halfway and I jump out of its way.

A man with a buzzcut, eyes that are wild and make my heart scream DANGER and a uniform that has fruit salad pinned on the lapel and above that a little American Flag crossed with a little Swedish flag. This man looks at me with his eyes that I’ve seen once before, on Jack Nicholson’s Johnny in The Shining. I step back and he takes a step forward into the house in a ready stance and the realization comes to me that this man that my stomach is now screaming danger at is a police man.

His partner is just behind him and says something about a brawl that I don’t catch I think they got bad information on why they’re here.

They come in and see my mother talking to the EMS workers and the cop with the electric eyes calls on his radio “No Continue, no continue”.

He asks what’s going on as I notice more cops come up the stairs, two, three, five more and I tell him as they push into the house that my mother had a seizure and fell down the stairs. I climb through the mess of cops that has filed into the small hallway in my house and I ask mom if she’s alright again. She looks thoroughly upset, and I can only imagine what it would be like to wake up and have firemen, EMS, cops, and your family telling you that you fell down the stairs. And you have no recollection but everyone is telling you what’s so and it doesn’t make any sense.

The EMS says that mom needs to go the hospital.

“I am not going to any hospital. This is a home invasion, this is invasion of my privacy”, says mom, repeating that she is not going to the hospital a few times more, earnestly and seriously.

About ten cops had filed in, with perhaps another five outside the door, although maybe I’m miscounting. One of the cops pulls it out of his ass and says, “She has to go to the hospital, she has TEN seconds to comply! She can either come to the hospital by choice or we’ll handcuff her and take her by force, that’s her choice. She has TEN seconds to comply.”

I say to the officer, “Officer, there is no reason to handcuff my mother, she’s sick, she’s frail, she just had a seizure, handcuffing her would be too traumatic for her. There is no reason to handcuff her.”

“She has TEN seconds to comply! You had better go talk to her if you don’t want her to be handcuffed!”

I climb back through the mess of cops and back over to my mom to see if I can get through to her and communicate the necessity that she complies, but no luck; there is far too much stimuli for anything to get through and then, then, then I notice the orange electric-screwdriver looking thing in the hand of one of the cops and my blood boils, these fucking cops are threatening this brutal behavior of handcuffing and removing by force a woman who just had a seizure and fell down stairs; is in no imminent danger, is no threat to anyone; NOT even herself, and at this moment is saying only that she wants to go back to bed and to sleep and that she wants only not to go to the hospital. And then, then, then I see the taser.

“OFFICER, YOU PUT THAT WEAPON AWAY! THERE IS NO REASON TO HAVE A WEAPON DRAWN IN MY HOME! YOU PUT THAT WEAPON AWAY!”

The officer, an asian man built like a sack of bricks and roughly the same color too, who is holding the taser, drawn and at the ready, looks at me with violence in his eyes and yells right back;

“WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?! THIS IS FOR HER PROTECTION!”

“OFFICER, THERE IS NO REASON TO HAVE A WEAPON DRAWN, THERE IS NO ONE YOU CAN PROTECT WITH THAT WEAPON, YOU PUT YOUR WEAPON AWAY!”

Another cop, this one with a receding hairline, who is standing right by me starts pushing me, jabbing with his palms and out and pushing me across the room away from my mom and the officer and the taser and the whole thing and is yelling all the while “Kid, you shut the fuck up and sit down or I’ll take you to jail RIGHT NOW!”

I yell right back in his face, “You tell that officer to put his weapon away; there is NO reason to have a taser drawn in my home--”

The officer with the bright electric blue eyes that inspire in me a deep hatred for each individual atom in his body, has shown up as well and cuts me off--

“When you call 911 you relinquish all rights to make any decisions here! This isn’t your home, this is our home right now! This place belongs to us when you call us!”

At this moment, without me in the fray of the mess of the cops who are occupying every square inch of the hallway, they all realize what it is they are there to do, that is to behave fantastically violently and it seems almost cinematic; nightmarish: they all jump on my mom and pick her up and turn her over and pin her down and handcuff her, one of them yelling “You’re not under arrest! You are not under arrest!”

She screams and my boiling blood curdles, sick and spastic and squelched by the shock of her scream.

She screams and screams, arrhythmic and only sometimes forming words;

“YOU’RE MURDERING ME!!!”

She struggles and kicks and screams and screams.

They pick her up and fasten her to this chair thing and take her out of the house.

“YOU’RE MURDERING ME!!!”

I hear a thbump that could only be them dropping her.

She screams more and it echoes up the stairs and through the hall and past the door and right to my ears.

I stand up.

I just called for an ambulance though.

I thought she was dead.

I only called for an ambulance.

Simon shows up in my peripherals and then I see him but I’ve walked several steps already, still fazed by what I had just seen.

I grab my boots and pull them on and run out the door and down the stairs and to the front door of the building and the built-like-a-sack-of-bricks asian man walks back to me and looks with that same violence and says, he says, “Kid, I had that weapon drawn for her protection, for her protection!”

“Bullshit! You can’t protect anyone with a weapon, that’s bullshit! She’s fifty-eight, she just had a seizure, you don’t need a weapon drawn!”

He looks at me again and tosses at me; “you wouldn’t understand, you’re just a kid.”

He turns away and starts walking back and I take that brick and throw it right back at him; “you wouldn’t understand; you’re just a cop!”

Once upon a time the writer Kurt Vonnegut said that true terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

Poem

I dance and run and jump through the street.

Maybe I’ll meet someone someday who feels
the same and we’ll run and dance and jump in the street all day until we’re gray and old.
Maybe we’ll be running and dancing and jumping through the street and we’ll dance into each other's arms and laugh and keep running.
Maybe they’ll feel just the same as I do and not be able to hold that scarlet fire hot fervor just within them.
Maybe we’ll have fits of rage together? And lie in bed and in fields and look for gods in the clouds?
Maybe we’ll run till we’re tired and then some more, run right into bed and jump every
trashcan?
Maybe we’ll never get tired?
Maybe everyone will be too tired to keep their minds constant with our energy?
And we’ll piss them all off and go run somewhere else?

Maybe I’m ready for love.
Maybe my heart has been soldered by the heat in my lungs.

Is this good?
Is this not really anything at all?
I have only questions and no answers.

Forces of Stupefaction

I am a high school senior at a small new school on the Lower East Side. There are about 80 students in the senior class, of which about 60-70 are graduating; far above the city graduation rate. It's a good school, an inner city school, and that comes with it's own set of issues but there is a dedicated, caring faculty and administration. Most of the teachers are Ivy League graduates, many others graduates of the Teach NYC program. While I've never let school get in the way of my education and the curriculum hasn't always been able to keep up with my desire for knowledge and critical analysis, I've found the teachers there to be helpful aides in my auto-didacticism.
I'm in my senior year and I still have one class there, a morning class, and I work for a newspaper, the Indypendent, the rest of the day. It's a powerfully noticeable difference; two entirely different paradigms in which one promotes voracious intake of new and constant knowledge; and the other involves frustration and stagnation. The latter is high school.
When I do go to school, I take in as much as I can, doing my best to find a story in it all.

This small inner city high school has a team of police that patrol it's halls, which suggests something about the criminalization of inner city youth, in that were a student in the unpoliced suburbs to get into a fight, he or she would be suspended, perhaps expelled.
At my school, which is predominantly black and Hispanic, if someone gets into a fight, it's an assault case and they end up in bookings.
A few weeks ago there was a gang-related fight a few blocks from the school in which not only the offending parties were arrested, but also many of the onlookers and even a bystander or two.

For a number of days the following week there were metal detectors, baggage inspectors and several teams of cops in my school. Upon being searched and telling the cop who was searching my bag that I didn't consent to his looking into my bag and that this was violating my 4th amendment rights, he told me that I gave that up when I walked through the door, and that he didn't need reasonable suspicion to search me; I'm a New York City student.
It's clear that our legal system is one that is almost entirely geared against the average person; the police are against us, the lawyers are often incompetent, the judges are against us, the politicians are corrupt beyond all conceptions of rottenness, and new prisons are being built every day. What's more is that we are being treated with the understanding that we are guilty until proven innocent, and more than that, there are many who aren't lucky enough to be told the terms under which they are being held. Perhaps their skin is too dark?

In our Orwellian age of perpetual war with constantly changing sides and distrust that has been ingrained into our psyches, we barely have a source from which we can get a clear view of the world. The levels of collusion between media, corporation, conglomeration, government, military, industry, agriculture, and food service and every conceivable facet of our existence that has been handed down from the top is at a level that is imperceptible and almost all of us are implicit. Who is to be targeted? The politicians are often little more pawns of the corporations, and the corporations themselves are the aggregated collection of many different stockholders who are represented by a CEO and a board of directors to protect their assets. The stockholders are every day folks, that guy in a shirt and tie on the train, that guy in the baseball cap who trades from home. The every day working person is either part of the industry that is traded constantly piece by piece among millions of hands, or services that industry in some way, shape or form. The middle class is an empty euphemism; those of the 'middle class' may seem as though they have material wealth to some degree, but they are more often than not up to their ears in debt. The poor don't even have such an illusion to hide their lack.

The Indypendent's Nick Turse reports that "the Pentagon's payroll is a veritable who's who of the world's top companies: IBM; Time Warner; Microsoft; NBC and its parent company, General Electric; Columbia Tristar Films and its parent company, Sony; Sara Lee; Sodexho; Proctor & Gamble; Hershey; Nestle; Walt Disney; and Johnson & Johnson... The Complex is an omnipresent, all encompassing, cleverly hidden system-of-systems that invades all our lives - a military-industrial-technological- entertainment-academic-scientific- media-intelligence-homeland security- surveillance-national security-corporate complex that has truly taken hold of America."

In this age of collusion and confusion there's barely a ray of light in the gloom, a solid voice to lead us out of the cacophony. Every day my school gets deliveries of The New York Post and the New York Times, which serves only to keep the truth at an elusive distance. The New York Post's front page breaking news story this morning was an update on a dead scandal, the gay sex scandal of New Jersey Governor James McGreevey. The New York Times had a number of articles on it's front page, of which I only caught a glance. Invariably there was fine print about the economy, election fraud in a small African nation, and equally unattractive, unexciting, difficult articles. I can imagine which newspaper caught most people's eye including mine; the one that had BOY TOY SCANDAL written across it in bold letters. This is news; either unimportant or inaccessible. These are the forces of stupefaction. These are the most visceral and viewable aspects of the complex; the media (to the level that it is even transparently viewable) and the police, who represent state power with weapons and the threat of force against those who don't get in line.

And to help you forget the pressure of daily life; the Post is available to bring you the breaking news of somebody else's life, McGreevey or Spitzer and so on. Not a word on the 5th anniversary of a war for profit and imperial might. It is understood that George Orwell was insightful, but his vision was prophetic at the very least. There is state hatred against fill-in-the-blank groups of any denomination chosen perhaps at random each year, there is a perpetual war, there are slogans that promise oh, so, little. "Change We Can Believe In" is analogous to "War Is Peace", "Freedom Is Slavery" and "Ignorance Is Strength". The complex that is the government and every commercial interest has injected itself so deep that we may as well be cleaning it from under our fingernails.
That is, if you have any.
I bite mine.

Who then, is to trust? Who will report clearly and with tact and be accessible on top of that? Who will tell us how we're being attacked this month and what we can do to fight back?
These times demand an Indypendent voice.

concept

Limerence

I grew up a little bit today.

So two things;

At the bookstore I volunteer at and I got wind that people think that I've been acting a fool for a little while now and being overactive and unproductive and also disrespectful at times. Today I went in and apologized sincerely without implicating the birdie who told me what was up and my apology was well accepted and I felt awesome.

My old man has this habit of raising his voice when he thinks I'm doing something wrong and wants to help me fix it. I put bread in the freezer and he yelled that it would get freezer burn if I didn't cover it with plastic wrap. I followed his advice and then told him that while I appreciate his trying to help, raising his voice is unproductive and sucks. He apologized.

This site has nice pictures, if a little bit stereotypical in their being misty and far off.

Smash the state.
Start by getting in the way of the politricksters and supporters of conservative government.

Recreate '68
Anti-RNC

When I was just a little boy

I think I was about 9 or 10 when I decided my given first name was entirely incongruous with the person I think I am. I instead decided to use my middle name, which is Jacob, and I told everyone to only call me Jacob from then on. Some people had a bit of trouble, after nigh on a decade of calling me Armand, but everyone eventually caught on, and only when I get into discussions of name-changes (which is actually rather frequent. Hm.) do I bring it up.
I don't much like the name, I just don't see how it relates to me. The ancients knew that if you knew someone's real name you had power over them.

One of my favorite things about the name Jacob is that you can anagram it to be Caboj, which is pronounced as Cabbage, which is also a name I rather like.
I've been introducing myself as that lately, and I think I will keep it up. Maybe I'll spell it as Caboj just in general.

לך לך

Where did all my friends go?
In the last year or so, a whole lot of people whom I held dear kind of just disappeared in all directions, perhaps save for west. No, even west.

I miss you all.
What adventures we had.

So a few things.

Is it not clear now that Politicians are by and large, the scum of the earth?
Really, now, I mean, now, the worst, worst, worst, most hypocritical, vehemently evil people are those in power. What does this mean? Why are such disgusting scum in power?The structure of our society is based in part on a Hobbesian conjecture; that life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" and that given this, we need government, a "sovereign" to protect us from the "war of one against all."

This gross dude is Hobbes. No wonder he thought the way he did.
He was Gross!

I refute Hobbes' conjecture on two levels; first on his own terms to the reductio ad absurdum argument; in that if humans are in their natural state "nasty and brutish", then, how is it at all conceivable that we can trust humans, politicians, again, nasty and brutish, to rule over us? To protect us from ourselves? To protect us from their own selves?
The second level on which I refute his conjecture is from my own experience. I've spent quite a bit of time with people. In my experience; unless for mitigating circumstances, I've found people to be on a whole pleasant, caring, empathetic, and loving. I've found children, again, save for mitigating circumstances, to be on a whole, endearing, compassionate and wonderful.

Is it not about time that we recognize that those who are truly the evil of society are those who strive above all else for power? The unduly privileged? Through the power games they and their lineage have set up, in which entire societies are brainwashed and implicated, these people, these privileged power-hungry snobs continue to rape and abuse and steal and fuck and fuck over everyone it may take to become ever more powerful, to gain more in their vast medieval resource wars.
For instance; Check This Out. Read the top, and scroll all the way down to the bottom.

Yes, it is in fact true, Paris Hilton is in fact related to royalty; homegirl is descended from, yes;

William I, King of Scots

I also have it on good information that all the political dynasties in America are in fact related by a more than few chromosomes. I was taught in grade school that we did away with monarchy and state-religion around 1776.
I was also made to believe that we live in some sort of... democracy?
Now don't get me wrong, the Constitution is a tidy little business document, it's nice and all, but it's also got some pretty bad history; it's authors and such. And it could be much, much better. But even that, even that principal document that outlines our rights and privileges and the separation of powers, even that has been thrown out.

These are some twisted Orwellian times.

----
Asides from all that,
I'm not so sick anymore!
Yay!

Madeline Adams is playing two shows in NYC coming up, and possibly a third. She's great by the way.