Friday, August 26, 2005

looks like I have a new blog

http://indexterity.blogspot.com

Friday, August 19, 2005

busy elsewhere, phoney home

http://liecause.tripod.com I seem to spend talking to Nick Land and northanger a lot lately. Theyh are fabulators of the worst sort; you know that cartoon from the Middle Ages with the fella on his knees upon an earth diminutized horribly and sticking his head out of the atmosphere to look at the stars? He erred on the side of caution cause folks who can't keep their greedy eyes off heavenly bodies are bound to stub their toes or worse, stumble, you're safer on your knees I guess .. . . .say, wasn't there some sorta falsely claimed Sphinx prize? How many legs has a rock anyway. OK, I'll treat you to a picture I like very much:

I be able to think fast but feel like this (very) distance relative of mine: like I'm sinking slowly

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Natives vs imperialist pawns

Yah, cause prior to the Churchill affair level headed, well footnoted, left understatement had produced a real domestic block to US imperialism and a real stage presence for the left. Has not Chomsky been doing that for the last thirty years? No comrade, since when was the American political scene dominated by level headed, serious debate? News flash, prior to the Churchill affair nobody was listening to the left...except of course the left. Are you arguing that fewer lefties will now be listening? Or that fewer on the right are now listening--were they ever listening? Or is it the beloved middle of the roaders that you seek. Is there any evidence subtle, sober intervention works on them? Do you cling to the Millsian fantasy of the market place of ideas ? And as for having to go out of your way to explain that "you are not an insane asshole," all I can say is the best defense is a good offense. Why in the hell would you apologize for the existence of your position at the out-set. What do they teach you in debating classes down south? When you talk to your less liberal left friends try the statement "Churchill was over the top in many respects but he made one point which is worth thinking about..." Thats how the right uses their militants. Just try it for thirty days as a rhetorical strategy, and if you don't like it you are under no obligation to continue on with the strategy. Travis -------------



Absolutely. It is worth adding that the in-your-face tactics employed by Churchill and other activists is totally counterproductive vis a vis the professed goal - it diverts public attention form the message and concentrates it on the messenger. I may also add that this whole notion of collective guilt and blame game is sure sign of impotence cum irrelevance. This is the last refuge for those whose influence on real life events has been reduced to zero. Instead of realizing their defeat and regrouping - they pull a Proyect and keep on haranguing their fellow travelers. Wojtek

------------- When I re-read Ward Churchill's essay (one that I had read some time ago in "Pockets of Resistance" No. 11 A a Supplement of "Dark Night Field Notes" Sept, 2001 at http://www.marxmail.org/ward_churchill.htm ) my reaction was the same the second time and I was again reminded of two of my favorite quotes: "If there is to be hope, we must all 'betray' our country. We have to save each other, because all victims are equal and none is more equal than others. It is everyone's duty to start the avalanche. Nowadays you have to think like a hero just to behave like a merely decent human being." (The character Barley Scott Blair in the film version of "The Russia House" by John Le Carre) and: "If the construction of the future and its completion for all time is not our task, all the more certain is what we must accomplish in the present; I mean, the ruthless criticism of everything that exists--the criticism being ruthless in the sense that it neither fears its own results nor fears conflict with the powers that be." (Karl Marx letter to Arnold Ruge 1843) I believe that Ward Churchill was correctly pointing out some of the forms of imperial hubris, narcissism, self-absorption, identity politics, chauvinism, jingoism, herd mentality, myopia, gross insensitivity, lack of empathy, just plain ignorance about anywhere outside the U.S.--as well as about most realities inside the U.S.--and willful blindness/depraved indifference to the real costs, pain and barbarism of U.S. imperialism past and present that are evident and clearly manifested among large sections of the U.S. population including some sections of the U.S. left and nominal left. In Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9-11, he focused on--and used in my opinion--the grief of a U.S. mother who had lost her son in Iraq and who had once been a "proud mother" of a daughter as well as a son in the U.S. military. But he did not have the guts to ask this mother why she still refused to see the pain of possible Iraqi victims of her son's military unit before he was killed. He didn't have the guts to ask her if she had ever wondered how many Iraqi mothers were crying because they had lost sons killed by her son and/or other members of his unit. That mother was filmed outside the White House wailing in grief about her son which was the only thing she could talk about when she came up to an Iraqi woman with an information booth protesting the bombing of Iraq.


As I travel throughout Indian country, and I am writing from Vancouver BC, I see Indigenous Peoples rising up in lawful and yet increasingly damaging (to the system) ways, and they wonder when the ongoing genocide inside the U.S. and Canada will be finally noticed by all those "tie-a-yellow-ribbon" types and even among some sections of the U.S. and Canadian left. They wonder why they are not seen as cute as baby seals or whales so that some of the limousine liberals of Hollywood might contribute to lawful avenues for exposing the ongoing genocide and realities of Indian Country. They wonder when the SUV-driving liberals, with their "Free Tibet" bumper stickers, will finally try looking a little closer to home and to the realities around them; perhaps they can actually stop for awhile and really look around them the next time they pass through one of the Rezes to buy tax-free cigarettes or booze or perhaps some "prima dope." They wonder why so many of the U.S. and Canadian populace can so reflexively lecture foreigners about the need to respect "human rights" in their countries of origin and yet not be able;e to find those countries on a blank world map or show any awareness of the extent to which their own states practice state-sponsored terrorism and violations of basic human rights right under their noses and at levels far greater than the nations being criticized. They wonder why two patently stolen national elections (even worse that the usual stolen elections on many reservations and reserves), wind up being ratified with little resistance while those who stole those elections, celebrate protests against --and the overturning of--comparable or less comparable stolen elections in places like the Ukraine. They wonder when all those "cyber warriors", whose only "battle wounds" might be a little carpal tunnel syndrome, are going to get off their asses and actually come out and live under, concretely investigate and help to directly challenge some of the conditions they write about from a safe distance. They wonder when some of those granola-eating, tree-hugging and "animal-loving" liberals are going to see Indigenous Peoples--and other oppressed Peoples--as also "oppressed animals", "endangered species" and as worthy of not being taken out as old-growth forests. They wonder when those who can wax so eloquently--and in exquisite detail--about the CIA-sponsored terrorism in Indonesia, or Chile, or other places, during various periods of history, will be as aware of past and present terrorism at places like the Marias River, Sand Creek, Wounded Knee and elsewhere where they live.This is some of the rage that Ward Churchill is picking up and passing along with a lesson in role reversals and arguments based on irrefutable facts and consistent application of some of the same "reasoning" and "principles" celebrated by U.S./Canadian triumphalism, national chauvinism, victim exclusivism and jingoism.


If we can--and are supposed to-- "overlook" the so-called "collateral damage" of U.S. bombing in places like Iraq (focusing instead, supposedly, on what horrors were supposedly being stopped with the bombing to justify, in NET "benefit" terms, the total human and other costs of the bombing itself), then "what is good for the goose is good for the gander." How does it feel to hear the argument that "Since so many crimes were being committed and so many innocents killed through the political, diplomatic, intelligence and economic decisions being made and carried out by many of the companies and U.S. governmental agencies that occupied the WTC, then, actually, in NET terms (lives saved minus lives lost) the WTC attack actually wound up saving lives--with all due and perfunctory respect to those innocents who were unfortunate--but strategically necessary-- "collateral damage"? Jim Craven By the way, surely there were some little Eichmanns in the Pentagon.

Dubofsky writes: >>Here we go again with the promiscuous use of language. Tom Mayer takes it as a given that European colonists (settlers) practiced or intended the "genocide" of the indigenous peoples. Admittedly, the European conquest (settlement) of the "new world" exacted an enormous loss of human life among the native peoples. As did nearly all colonial conquests historically. But did the conquerers seek to exterminate all the native peoples? Was there a conscious plan to do so? That has yet to be proved and there is little evidence to sustain such a thesis.<<> this openly racist crap on their website: > (http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/aboutus/creekjoa.shtml) > > The newspaper's founder was one William T. Byers. Showing that he was dead > serious about the advancing wave of Anglo-Saxon civilization subduing the > wild Indians, he called for the extinction of the Cheyenne in 1861. After > Cheyenne leader Chief Black Kettle had signed a "peace treaty" (in reality, > a surrender of all their land and rights at the point of a cannon), his > people chafed at the miserable hunting afforded them after resettlement and > began to launch forays against the colonizers. Cheered on by Byers, Colonel > Chivington made a speech on August of 1864 that included these infamous > words: "...kill and scalp all, little and big... nits make lice." > > This rancid newspaper has basically been leading the campaign to fire Ward > Churchill. ----------------



Lou, sometimes you astound me. The Rocky Mountain News is undoubtedly a rancid newspaper, especially for its campaign against Churchill. But putting this passage on their web site is the very opposite of rancidness. It's honesty about history, quoting words from its past which it describes as "infamous." Sometimes your understanding of history seems to be the very reverse of Marx's understanding, which is epitomized in the sentence, "The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape." Quoting that web page as evidence against the paper in effect assumes that "The anatomy of the gorilla is a key to the history of humanity." It isn't -- that's the point of Gould's _Wonderful Life_, which confirms that in evolutionary as in political history, the historical method is to read history backwards, not forwards. There are too many different results that can flow from the same beginning. Carrol



---------------- "We make our debut in the far west, where the snowy mountains look down upon us in the hottest summer day as well as in the winter's cold; here where a few months ago the wild beasts and wilder Indians held undisturbed possession - where now surges the advancing wave of Anglo Saxon enterprise and civilization; where soon we fondly hope will be erected a great and powerful state, another empire in the sisterhood of empires... "Fondly looking forward to a long and pleasant acquaintance with our readers, hoping well to act our part, we send forth to the world the first number of the Rocky Mountain News." --Rocky Mountain News, April 23, 1859.


To give you an idea of how shameless this disgusting rag is, they include this openly racist crap on their website: (http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/aboutus/creekjoa.shtml) The newspaper's founder was one William T. Byers. Showing that he was dead serious about the advancing wave of Anglo-Saxon civilization subduing the wild Indians, he called for the extinction of the Cheyenne in 1861. After Cheyenne leader Chief Black Kettle had signed a "peace treaty" (in reality, a surrender of all their land and rights at the point of a cannon), his people chafed at the miserable hunting afforded them after resettlement and began to launch forays against the colonizers. Cheered on by Byers, Colonel Chivington made a speech on August of 1864 that included these infamous words: "...kill and scalp all, little and big... nits make lice."


This rancid newspaper has basically been leading the campaign to fire Ward Churchill. If you go to the Rocky Mountain News website, you will find 139 (!) items that mention Ward Churchill. The charges against him are now focusing on his academic credentials, since it is becoming obvious that it is not possible to fire somebody for making unpopular comments about 9/11. It should also be noted that the U. of Colorado administration is working behind the scenes with the Rocky Mountain News and a hate radio outlet, according to today's Chronicle of Higher Education: "Newly released documents show that a vice chancellor at Boulder urged other administrators to hire Mr. Churchill in 1990, even though he did not have a doctorate. He earned tenure the next year, bypassing the usual six-year review. The documents were released by the university to Dan Caplis, a talk-show host on a Denver radio station, who shared them with the Rocky Mountain News." Colorado Indynews reports that Caplis was paid off to attack Ward Churchill:


>>An anonymous tipster working with, what was referred to as, a "faith-based think tank", claims that KHOW/Clear Channel's Dan Caplis accepted a "gift" from the unnamed group to spread the biased Ward Churchill story in an attempt to "frame the left", the anti-war movement, and the 9-11 truth movement into "one package". The person also stated this was a ploy to set-up an "Ideological Enemy" on "American Soil" and to re-invent Ward Churchill as a "sacrificial lamb http://colorado.indymedia.org/feature/display/10164/index.php


Of particular use to the Rocky Mountain News is the article by Thomas Brown that has circulated widely on the Internet, which charges Churchill with not substantiating allegations that the US army distributed smallpox blankets to the Mandan Indians in 1837. Brown has been cited in four separate Rocky Mountain News articles this month. Typical is this 2/8 contribution by Paul Campos: --- >>Thomas Brown, a professor of sociology at Lamar University, has written a paper that outlines what looks like a more conventional form of academic fraud on Churchill's part. According to Brown, Churchill fabricated a story about the U.S. Army intentionally creating a smallpox epidemic among the Mandan tribe in 1837, by simply inventing almost all of the story's most crucial facts, and then attributing these "facts" to sources that say nothing of the kind.<< ---- It should be mentioned that Campos, a law professor at the U. of Colorado, has also attacked Churchill for going too far in his remarks about 9/11. In an appearance on Bill O'Reilly's Fox-TV show, Campos said "that if he engages in conduct, including publishing things that bring into question his professional competence that the University of Colorado," his employer can "sanction him for behaving in that fashion." So we are talking about a rather well-organized cabal at this point, involving the U. of Colorado administration, a law professor who makes himself useful to Bill O'Reilly, a Denver hate radio personality allegedly paid for his services, Commentary Magazine and a newspaper that has the temerity to include an item hailing Anglo Saxon civilization's triumph over the wild Indian. As I told Thomas Brown on crookedtimber.org, when you lie down with dogs, you get fleas. Recently Brown joined Doug Henwood's LBO-Talk mailing list to make his case. (I should mention that whatever my disagreements with Henwood in the past, he has played a very positive role in stressing the "an injury to one is an injury to all" nature of the Ward Churchill controversy.) When asked by Henwood why he chose to launch his assault on Churchill at the very moment this carefully orchestrated neo-McCarthyite attack was being organized, Brown gave a highly revealing reply, which can be read in its entirety at http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050214/003589.html:


Brown writes, "I made the essay public now as a gift to the left, so that it would not be necessary to line up behind Churchill on the free speech issue."


With gifts like this, one might actually prefer a smallpox blanket. You can get vaccinated against smallpox; it is much more difficult to protect oneself against McCarthyism. When he characterized Ward Churchill's politics as "irredentist" on LBO-Talk, Charles Brown [no relation, as Charles was anxious to point out] questioned the relevance of this term to land claims by American Indians. The irredenta included Trentino, Trieste, Istria, Fiume, and parts of Dalmatia before WWI, areas that had a majority Italian population but that were not under Italian state control. The Italian nationalist movement to reclaim these areas agitated to enter World War I. Today, it is a term that has largely reactionary connotations. That Brown would apply it to a movement that, for example, fought for control over the Wounded Knee reservation is singularly perverse. It reminds one of Malcolm X's observation that "The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make a criminal look like he's the victim and make the victim look like he's the criminal." Although Brown fancies himself as some kind of expert on American Indian affairs, nearly everything he writes is tainted.

In a paper on his website ( http://hal.lamar.edu/~BROWNTF/PISCATAWAY.HTML) titled "Ethnic Identity Movements and the Legal Process: The Piscataway Revival," Brown seems consumed with the need to sniff out the true racial make-up of the Piscataways, something that is consistent with his burning desire to prove that Ward Churchill is not a real Indian.


He writes: "A comprehensive examination of the Maryland courts' handling of bastardy cases reveals consistent patterns that allow us to infer the race and class status of defendants whose status is not specified in the record. Free servant women who bore bastards by slaves were charged with bastardy, and punished by having their indentures extended and their children bound out until age thirty-one. Free servant women who bore bastards by free men were charged with a lesser offense--fornication--and received a more lenient punishment. "There are only four cases of free servant women charged with bearing bastards by Indians on the Western Shore (and some of these may well be East Indians, not native American Indians). These women were given the lesser charge of fornication. Thus when Wesort progenitors were charged with bastardy instead of fornication, and punished accordingly, it is a clear indication that the father was a slave--not an Indian. And no Piscataways were enslaved. In fact, none of the Wesort progenitors were ever identified as Indians in the colonial records. The courts' treatment of the Wesort progenitors' mixed-race unions in the bastardy proceedings clearly indicate that they involve people of African and European descent, and not Indians." My goodness, all this talk about bastardy and fornication. One imagines that if fascism ever comes to the USA, and if there are job openings in a new agency charged with the responsibility to define pure-blooded Americans, that Thomas Brown will be first on line. -- Most of the above was found at www.marxmail.org -----------------

Saturday, August 06, 2005

Tourist or terrorist? I say a Wammes Waggel type journalist.

http://www.netwerk.tv/index.jsp?p=items&r=netwerk&a=184366

watch this footage of a native Phallushahn refugee from the Saddam regime, Wesam al D (in jail as we speak, awaiting extradition HELP STOP THAT IF YOU CAN) who integrated well in Dutch society (all the superficial trappings tricks mastered including ass wiggle at national tv gameshow, now, that's cum lauda!). He had the pick of his nieces via video for years on end and the time came he actually went back to marry his choice, right thereafter he goes and sees how well he can reintegrate with her contemporary and conlocationists to really prove his manhood the arab way, I wrote a little something on that earlier this week but forgot on which of my blogs (oops) but who cares, nobody seems to succeed much at reading me any of if not all the time/way.

He has flair for spellbinding footage via handheld and as he crosses destroyed country he freely curses the Amis and within no time gets a chance to prove his mettle but gets beaten and blows a retreat after lessons in remote whatshahmakillit.

America wants Holland to give him to . . .eh .. . it (suffice it to say that the folks who started this war stem from or adhere to the culture that 'values' scapegoatism very highly - out of control demography and or lack of pleachtec will do that everytime).

I say let him roll more film and show us what it's like. He may have spoken and even meant the radical lingo but that helps him help us to an inside view; unlike the unfortunate fella in the Guardian today who wrote his last long blog entry before being kidnapped and murdered; not very smart to be too openly critical right in the middle of Basra I would think (absolutists want impeccable, not equal treatment, scolding the english take on things is not enough to get in their good books). LONG LIVE THE BORDER DIFFUSING AND DIFFUSE BORDER CROSSING DOUBLE AGENT. HELL, HE WENT AND SOLD A DUTCH CAR IN BAGHDAD AND MUST BE RICH ENOUGH TO SEND AN INVINCIBLE ARMY AGAINST THE 'AMEREEKY' NOW, COME ON YOU IDIOT DUTCHMEN, HERE'S YOUR CHANCE TO PROVE YOUR LOYALTY, DEPORT HIM; HAVE PITY ON THE AMERICAN JUSTICE DEPARTMENT LIVING IN FEAR OF THE LIKES OF THIS HAPPY GO LUCKY BLUNDERER.

Or come to your senses and give him a few free cameras and a crew, you have my plurimorhist publisharian vote on that route.

ps: study up on who wammes waggel was (a foolish goose in versatile pursuit of fun), I dare you, his father just died earlier this week at the age of 93, one of the best authors holland ever bore I kid you not.

Of course in as much as Wesam al D is nothing but a luxuries addicted corrupted and westernized arab we can conclude that

a: he has already reached the peak of his journalistic career and

b: he deserves to be disciplined.

Anyway the impression I came away with was: America has succeeded in paralyzing Iraq and oilbarons are still destroying civilization at a frightening rate. Fancy finding your selves in the midst of feudal days for fun and fallujah.

Friday, August 05, 2005

Redemption wellnigh planned; rocket at hand to soon be manned

... no .. . sorry, crackin core action correction; rock at hand to soon be plant

Roads are 2 way eventually (the e- bounceback from reject, etc.), more and more multi the longer and older they get. To curve/roll around back in on itself is a very natural way of learning to steady and stand even in the very teeth of time. Let Dan Winter shine his sorta fluffy sorta sterile light on that if you are sympathetic to modeled physics.

So causes, whether they rumble-ramble down real causeways or seem caught up in abstract momentae of progress are one way at most half the way/time but due to the great lapses and thorough reassemblages at and along sometimes literally out of sight elliptical ricochetage refitteries we don’t recognize ourselves in oncoming traffic.

Half the way as half of halfway sends our reckoning abilities into tailspin.
Half the time as halfway to halftime wrecks our accountability antics and that goes for most of whichever fault-, demarcation-, dream- and/or powerlines of flight vision we try follow and/or keep in mind. ---- Personally, I am still very fond of John Hamaker’s long wave views regarding climate and soil fertility cycles meshing very closely with the spread of prime ice age product numero uno: fine and fresh dust.

Taking patience to hand an rewarding it, picking some rocks to crush is the vastly more honourable way to deal with deathgrip type inertia these tough customers seem to so persistently embody.

Others project such earthly in your face opportunity to the on/off switches constituted by various planetary or even galactic constellations.

To illustrate, let me elaborate on an already very long post at highest-holiest-of-rainbow-chumpchamp

As we speak the old rookie at lastmentioned ‘might as well close my eyes if this is the firing squad’ type game, Jose Arguelles, is due in Switserland (http://www.sangit1320.ch/ found at http://www.lawoftime.org/content/switz.html to teach any and all comers about tuning into the iron octahedron at the center of the earth and all them sorts of nifty newagey cageyness (bring 200 euri).

http://liecause.tripod.com/Arguelles-kin-con2.htm an observ-, rumi- and occasionally fulmination series on .. . yet another cult of absolutist claimants? .. . .with kind and kinky fractions fetish triggered bonds and feuds? . .. . a new age network with low and preferably even no budget but nevertheless global aspirations?

Ladies and gentlemen, your special attention for the greatest latest kin con.
The credibility conjury by these con kin features the added twist and spice of claiming Muhammed for an equal (never mind the prophet himself tried to cut off all competition preemptively by telling everyone he was to be the last. I can believe that instead of coercing women they somehow felt as strongly about him as he thought highly of himself and so they just fell at his feet in series of bunches and generously shared him and only him while reserving their attention for only him to though due to the fragmentation of their great numbers they must have had plenny of time on their hands. Judging from your charisma mr arguelles, you don't make the grade and that's only a very minor fault of yours in my eyes. Over the last few years I have again and again examined your antics and decided to collect them in one place, for greater conveyance convenience, redundancy and challenge; the continuation of my interest depends entirely on you being courteous enough to take me at least as seriously as I do you and if possible find the time/peace to answer.

Lycos-europe opened its digital doors some years ago and the 2nd generation homepagebuilder tripod who’s mother they started out with halved its hospitality soon after which prompted to move half of my full 40Mb into a lycos.nl domain; however, last month this site proved a lo-choice environment for me rather abruptly ( though I didn’t try to tempt them into replying with promises to shell out nor reregister with another moniker, .. . perhaps I still will some day, once you know the backway onto the upload page nothing works quicker).

Redeem and/or re-esteem your self On (promises, memos, any and all notes, notions, missives , messianysticisms and reputations.
What’s your preference? Do you stubbornly stick to your guns and try make up a fall-off in scheduled, staked out, self-inflicted or hoped and worked for goals with a redoubling of effort .. . … .OR .. .. . .do you delegate it all to the greatest of redeemers you can find or those whose minions you can’t avoid getting beleaguered by (that would especially be those (all the more aggressive to the exact degree they are) convinced they have the only real one to help you help yourself to/with. They stand ready to convince you that all variety of individual resistance, no matter how choice and choosable is/are futile.

… .. OR .. .. do you take the origin-of-memory-aid and motivational plan drawing and see if it holds up in the light of present day practical imperatives?

You issue your money, you attempt to pay with a believable voucher that you must expect and are preparing to see returning in demand of whatever promise/value it holds; such money is successfully solicited credit and advertising at once; it also comes to relieve you of stuff taking up space in your store room, that is if such supplies indeed made it from the moment where you pledged/projected and placed value/staked your reputation on the daring announcement that all will be well long before expiration date on said superpersonal money.

In light of the above you will know what I mean when I say that making jesus out to be a redeemer for no less than all sinners and disempowered schlemiels bereft of notions, tools and time for implication of scenario as just described, is preposterous not to say diabolic and I am not at all sure Jesus would enjoy the position he presently enjoys in the consciousness of various folk, simply bycause, of course, it contradicts redemption being possible but only by owner and only of what he owns up to – REDEEM YOUR OWN – as in ‘clean up your act’.

Consciousness weaves in and out of promising acts and states of being promising; touting some ball and chain removing Christ around the world bleeding whities found stow-away messzionysticisms hi-hopes for crowned glory slipstreaming in their wake.

Talk about Class Clash and opportunistic(ally faked) opposition. Brace yourselves for the second sweep of clever semites, ready to flaunt and fling delusional grandesse of the universal and wrathful head/main/chief(and all the other equally fucked up beglorificatory betitled)god variety.

Anspruch erheben is schon lange nicht mehr ansprechbar sein – I am sorry to be dependably there for those who wish it were otherwise.

Augury augury, a storm warning: Zionism sizzles greenery to dust and lions don’t live in jungles, much less sleep in them; the zionlion, king of creatures with his played out and tired features will soon stop eliminating jungle and the terminally, determinedly termitelike semites and siblings taken by the hand (a long time before they have a change of heart (battle of infectiousness is not a pretty sight but if you can choose between walls and dykes, which will it be?).

On the other hand if Zionism doesn’t dissolve and its formerly green spawning grounds don’t revive we won’t arrive at the glorious point in time and place where we can rejoice over the end of delusional respite and impunity. Tripod, Lycos, Microsoft, AIPAC, Chrysler/Daimler Corp. the Treasury and all other rooms out of many in my father’s mansion must no longer grow at the expense of motha’s garden. Why not stop space exploration? Why not teach the reach of pleach?

Thursday, August 04, 2005

worth a gamble: lycos can't order tripod around

. .. and I bet on the latter showing a little more gratitude or when push comes to shove to show me a little more courtesy/honesty and all that could stuff they need to forget in order to make money too often already.. ..

on the 4th of august 2005 the files that came about (at vadercats) this year were relaunched due to host lycos-europe giving out on me; new growing (top)tip: http://liecause.tripod.com - all files older than nov04.htm can be found using a similar url formula.

No longer awaiting better days I (poetpiet) decided to go ahead and lie to lycos (as punishment for not telling me why they discontinued hosting vadercats very abruptly) and switch from their european free space meddle/peddle back to mama tripod where perhaps I shall be allowed to allow running my messengeritis its full due course and continue my colourful pseudobloggage tote tout and teazery (even if it kills me) .. . off we go hoping to be here to stay, for the past few weeks (since google dropped the cache; don't know exactly when they did, I was up and around a mountain for 3 weeks) the youngest version in this soon enough 8 year old series at all available was already over a year old: vadercats/nov04.htm is the last file available by way of this roundabout route add any desired url after //web.archive.org/web/*/

my first thoughts and findings after pondering and searching for the unearthly reasons why my vadercats site blocked (just when I was going to do some copious referring to the historically very real poet/statesman from the 15th century (golden age founding?) Jacob Cats): lycos is blocked in china, in fact a ridiculous number of the sites listed as blocked on this page http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/China-M.html are hosted by lycos tripod

.. . .. .heh heh. .. .I just realize I am acting upon the assumption that lycos-europe will at best get the cast-offs from tripod (if they get anything at all anymore rather than orders to give in and keep the name prominent or some such thing) but are more likely dissociated from and certainly not beholden to them; registering for a tripod.com thing shows otherwise but I'll take the gamble.serious anti-semitism (the hostility to arabs variety) doesn't seem to appear to be a problem: http://members.lycos.nl/whatsthisthen/links.html the site seems to have stopped receiving additions in februari, not long after adding this: Miracles of Nineteen by CroMagnon (pbuh): faithfreedom.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=108647

see http://rotsstof.blogspot.com/2005/07/monumentally-new-moment.html for a relevant post

Don't be new to this too much longer now!!!!!!

Juan Cole illustrated synopsis of neoconitis

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Excerpt from the Hitman's dilemma (Keith Hart)

Keith Hart (see the linklist)

Ordinary people exchange services as equals on the internet in their capacity as individuals endowed with personality and agency. The digital revolution, by radically cheapening the information attached to long-distance transactions, makes it possible for these individuals to enter several markets, notably those for credit, as persons with a known history. Governments and corporations need each other, for sure, but their interests are far from coincident. Both may be vulnerable to self-conscious use of internet resources by democratic movements aiming to subvert their respective monopolies.

The three classes of political economy

Resources ---- Environment - Money - Human creativity
Factors ----------- Land ---------- Capital -------Labor
Classes 1 ------- Landlords ------ Capitalists ----- Workers
Classes 2 ----- Governments -- Corporations -- - Persons
Income -----------Tax --------- Rent/Profit ---- Wages

In many ways, our world resembles the old regime of agrarian civilization and this is as a consequence of the unequal power concentrated in the hands of enforcers and rentiers. Hence the appropriateness of the term “information feudalism” for our era. The world is now witnessing the triumph of that “pseudo-aristocracy” of commercial monopolists that Jefferson once saw as the main danger to liberal democracy. It is as if the East India Company had never suffered the reverse of American independence.
We could do worse then than return to Ricardo’s focus on how wealth is distributed in human society and, in particular, on the contradiction between coercive demands for tax and rent and the formation of a world market where people in general might enjoy the benefits of the machine revolution, if they were left free to exchange goods and services as equals. This rather abstract formulation can be seen at work concretely in current conflicts over intellectual property rights.
The fight is on to save the commons of human culture, society and environment from the encroachments of corporate private property. This is no longer mainly a question of conserving the earth's natural resources, although it is definitely that too, nor of the deterioration of public services left to the mercies of privatized agencies. The internet has raised the significance of intangible commodities. Increasingly we buy and sell ideas; and their reproduction is made infinitely easier by digital technologies.
Accordingly, the large corporations have launched a campaign to assert their exclusive ownership of what until recently was considered shared culture to which all had free and equal access. Across the board, separate battles are being fought, without any real sense of the common cause that they embody. The “napsterization” of popular music, harbinger of peer-to-peer exchange between individual computers, is one such battle pitting the feudal barons of the music business against our common right to transmit songs as we wish. The world of the moving image, film, television and video, is likewise a site of struggle sharpened by fast-breaking technologies affecting their distribution and use. In numerous subtle and not-so-subtle ways, our ability to draw freely on a common heritage of language, literature and law is being undermined by the aggressive assertion of copyright. People who never knew they shared a common infrastructure of culture are now being forced to acknowledge it by aggressive policies of corporate privatization. And these policies are being promoted at the international level by the same US government whose armed forces now seem free to run amok in the world. But others, notably the European Union, are not far behind. In the case of the internet, what began as a free communications network for a scientific minority is now the contested domain of giant corporations and governments.
The free software and open source movement, setting Linux and an army of hackers against Microsoft's monopoly, has opened up fissures within corporate capitalism itself. The shift to manufacturing food varieties has introduced a similar struggle to agriculture, amplified by a revival of “organic” farming in the context of growing public concern about genetic modification. The pharmaceutical companies try to ward off the threat posed to their lucrative monopolies by cheap generics aimed at the Third World populations who need them most. The buzzword is “intellectual property rights,” slogan of a corporate capitalism determined to impose antiquated command and control methods on world markets whose constitutive governments have been cowed into passivity. The largest demonstrations against the neo-liberal world order, from Seattle to Genoa, have been mobilized to a significant degree by the need to oppose this particular version of global private property.

In my recent book on money, my first idea was that the cheapening of information transfers as a result of the digital revolution might allow the impersonal economy of the twentieth century to be “repersonalized,” by attaching more information to individual transactions and potentially granting individuals greater control over work, consumption and credit. But it did not take me long to realize that a fully personal economy would return us all to the world of gangsters, both medieval and modern.
We need new impersonal norms capable of standardizing social interactions where the nation-state can no longer reach – law, money, education, technology – the list is endless. So our task is not to replace impersonal society with personal life, but to discover new ways of combining them. The hit man’s dilemma is to be human or inhuman. It is a dilemma shared by kings, generals, presidents and CEOs, when they contemplate the human cost of an action undertaken on behalf of some collective interest. It probably won’t go away.
But I have argued in this essay that our ability to devise ways of curbing the undesirable effects of high-handed behavior on the part of the powerful has been deeply undermined by the legal culture granting business corporations the rights of living persons. The liberal revolution against the old regime -- especially, in view of later developments, the American war of independence – sought to grant free citizens equal (and therefore impersonal) rights in society. This meant being very clear about the difference between individual persons and impersonal institutions. Such a separation was intrinsic to the rise of modern capitalism, as we have seen. But capitalism took a bureaucratic turn in the late nineteenth century and this was the time that business corporations, beginning in the USA, sought to collapse the legal distinction between real and artificial persons. The impersonal society of the twentieth century flourished on this basis and, for many people, the idea that they might exercise personal responsibility in the economic or political spheres became simply inconceivable. Some intellectuals jumped onto the obvious corruption of liberal ideals to advocate a variety of anti-liberal ideologies, drawing on the same confusion of people, ideas and things that had become normal in economic law.
At the beginning of this present century, we have grown familiar with the spectacle of strong states and sometimes even stronger transnational corporations riding roughshod over human rights and international law itself in the name of the “free market,” especially for digital commodities. The struggle to reverse this “information feudalism” must take place at many different levels. Here I have argued that one of them might be to re-examine the metaphysics of where personal agency meets the impersonal conditions of its expression. We might begin by making such an enquiry explicitly historical. For the confusion of our times is fed by an indifference to history that allows the heirs of America’s anti-colonial revolution to reinvent the corporate monopolies of absolutist monarchy in the name of liberal democracy. If the Europeans can’t see through this, perhaps the Chinese, Indians or Brazilians will. We cannot return to the eighteenth century, but we can learn how we got from there to here in preparation for deciding what to do next.
To borrow one of John Locke’s preoccupations, we must deal with the semantic criminals who pollute our public discourse with their dissembling words. These are the hired spokesmen of the economic criminals who aim to hijack the machine revolution for their own immoral ends. George Orwell, where are you when we most need you? As for the notion that there is a difference between the operational standards of legal and illegal businesses, well, nobody believes that any more, do they? Yet at another level we accept the idea that plutocracy is in the general interest, as if the age of money were good for all of us equally. Perhaps it takes a Nixon to explode this doublethink, to show us that capitalism’s moral economy, resting as it does on the division of human experience into personal and impersonal spheres, is a dangerous illusion. I have already pointed out that the word “don” refers to both gangsters and academics. Each is willing to suspend their humanity in order to treat people as abstract ciphers, as a contract or just an idea. There may be more to the deconstructionist mafioso joke than was apparent at first.


Piet: Keith seems to have given up on lists such as this: http://www.oekonux.org/list-en/archive/index.html and I haven't even ever spotted him here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ijccr/messages (International Journal for Community Currency Research) - Todd Boyle shows up there less and less as well .. . . how high hopes unravel .. . .

best of recently explored authors: William Marina

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/marina7.html Missing Officers by William Marina - july 2005

http://www.independent.org/aboutus/person_detail.asp?id=951 23 articles

http://www.why-war.com/news/author.php?name=William+Marina 7 articles from 2004

William Marina teaches History at Florida Atlantic University and is an Adjunct Scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He has written extensively on the American Revolution as a People’s War.

http://www.why-war.com/news/2004/11/15/empiresa.html William Marina -
Empires as ages of religious ignorance; George W Bush's crusade and American fundamentalism
November 15, 2004
What is less understood is that all of the great empires in history have been characterized by a decline of reason and an increase in super-naturalist faith, combined with a belief in the empire with the emperor holding God’s “mandate” on earth.