nine billion names and counting

let's blog

2010-09-03T11:54:00.001-07:00

Methinks we are seeing something wildly wicked and strange coming this way into a sea change.

bring me a cuppa coffee..

2009-09-24T19:12:00.000-07:00

...to mu grave, and I'll wake up.

talent

2009-09-24T17:34:00.000-07:00

Imagine this guy as Jaco Pastorius not dead for 20-somwe years but alive and pickin'.

Arthur C Clarke

2009-09-09T19:37:00.000-07:00

"Communications satellites can bring to every home on earth sadism and pornography, vapid parlor games or inflated egos, all-in wrestling or tub-thumping revivalism. Yet they can also expose lies and tell the truth; no dictator can build a wall high enough to stop its' citizens listening to the voices from the stars."

The Social Consequences of Communications Satellites, 1945, Arthur C Clarke

free the dogs!

2009-09-05T12:04:00.001-07:00

cuz if they ran free...

yet another moron

2009-08-28T07:49:00.000-07:00

Ruben MNavarette, Jr., is scared of justice creating animosity

Aw, so the CIA and FBI won';t be best friends, maybe.

As if they ever were.

Moron.

Tesla, Einstein, squaring the circle

2009-08-18T08:11:00.000-07:00

Tesla was critical of Einstein's relativity work, calling it:

"...[a] magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king ... its exponents are brilliant men but they are metaphysicists rather than scientists ...[76]”

Tesla also argued:

"I hold that space cannot be curved, for the simple reason that it can have no properties. It might as well be said that God has properties. He has not, but only attributes and these are of our own making. Of properties we can only speak when dealing with matter filling the space. To say that in the presence of large bodies space becomes curved is equivalent to stating that something can act upon nothing. I, for one, refuse to subscribe to such a view.[7]”

I think one reason Tesla didn't like relativity is that it removed the Cosmic Backdrop, the Cartesian grid of properly abstract space, and replaced it with a world where everything is local, everything is the center of its cosmos, every atom a solipsist. This appeared to Tesla, I believe, as removing the great bedrock of inertia from which Tesla theorized we could draw virtually unlimited power from the very air.

But Einstein was right: there are no straight lines. The only straight line would be an overall lambda wave looping on itself, just as walking on the ground -- a curved surface -- is the only straight line there is in relation to Terran gravity.

As I walk the curved surface of this flat earth, I also move 1k mph as the planet spins, move ? fast as the planet orbits the sun, ? fast as the solar system orbits around the center of the galaxy and in whatever (round!) eddies form in the turbulent galactic tide.

Circles, circles, circles.

Saying space cannot be curved because it can't have properties, being a mere abstraction of human thought, assumes that space is simply a product of human thought.

And human thought is the most roundabout thing in the cosmos.

Every standard 3-d map of any space of the cosmos using rectilinear grids, will suffer circular forms to be imposed upon it as soon as the Four Forces (gravity, electromag, weak nuke and strong nuke) are accounted for. Classic blackhole visualization shows a round vortex forming within a grid of squares. The curved forms caused by gravity and the other forces are real: it is the Cartesian grid that is entirely abstract.

Einstein didn't square the circle but he circled the squares.

Tesla also believed that much of Albert Einstein's relativity theory had already been proposed by Ruđer Bošković, stating in an unpublished interview:

“...the relativity theory, by the way, is much older than its present proponents. It was advanced over 200 years ago by my illustrious countryman Ruđer Bošković, the great philosopher, who, not withstanding other and multifold obligations, wrote a thousand volumes of excellent literature on a vast variety of subjects. Bošković dealt with relativity, including the so-called time-space continuum ...'.[78]"

Let's hear it for our illustrious countrymen!

On pending healthcare reformlegislation...

2009-08-16T08:09:00.000-07:00

Some wise guy at the Poor Man summed it up well:

"They really need to rewrite the bill(s).

If you are dumb enough to believe in Death Panels, you go before a Death Panel. Which doesn’t think highly of stupid people.

If you have a modicum of smarts, will then, as you were, carry on, keep up the good work.

Is that so hard?"

quasisymettrical signal artifact or genuine hail sign...

2009-08-14T06:50:00.000-07:00

...for Radio Caroline?

＼(^o^)／

Discovered unexpectedly in the Comments of a YouTube.

Shatner comes close -- at last! to something like redemption

2009-08-08T12:09:00.000-07:00

His shining moment.

For this was he not born, yes?

But the man on bongos is, we know, the true once and future king of space, the final frontier.

can we let the South go ahead and secede now?

2009-08-06T16:28:00.001-07:00

Alabama stooopid!

I hear a symphony...

2009-08-02T12:12:00.000-07:00

love

how could I have orgotten?

2009-08-02T09:41:00.001-07:00

Verizon SUCKS. Really really really really SUCKS. This is the company that bought MCI from bankruptcy.

Anyway, they SUCK. Itty bitty gnats' testicles. All day long.

If you have Verizon, I pity you. I do, and removing them from my life is like removing a tattoo that has metastized.

I HATE this company and you should too. Unless you like rape. In which case, by all means...

what the wise woman said

2009-07-24T15:30:00.000-07:00

Helen Highwater, of www.unknownnews.org :

"Says you: 'There are foreign interests equally evil and committed to American corruption.'

"Equally evil, certainly. Committed to American corruption, I suppose. But if anyone outside America is as capable of America's destruction and as dedicated to exactly that as the Republican Party's leadership, you'd need to tell me whom you're referring to, because I don't see it. There are countries like China that hold enormous power over America's economy, but that's not evil, it's just business. America hasn't had an enemy worth fearing for its dedication and determination to destroying America since the Soviet Union collapsed, except for the Republican Party."

Sadly, I believe this is true. Nixon killed the GOP.

profundity at last

2009-07-18T08:56:00.001-07:00

via W. Gibson's blog

superstition

2009-07-15T07:25:00.000-07:00

My inner Falwell predicts a major terror attack soon. Why? The news has resumed its tabloid fetish cycle. MJ,murders, celebrity divorces.

The God of relevance must soon smite us with wrath.

Out For a Good Time

2009-07-13T08:42:00.000-07:00

vocal harmonic of the tree of knowledge of good and evil

2009-07-12T21:18:00.000-07:00

By way of the bad'uns at The Poor Man Institute:

Give Up

Further Along

Stand By Me

I spent the morning in church today. I did. Don't ask. But it made me crave something more like real church music, not necessarily Palestrina but matching suit gospel singing.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

cool waves

2009-07-12T20:57:00.000-07:00

I found this guys somehow and felt that young surf/Golden Age sci-fi vibe riding one sine carrier mothership wave:

Wingnut's Theme

did you know?

2009-07-12T20:54:00.001-07:00

That destrudo is the opposite of libido.

why not a bit more Boz?

2009-07-12T06:20:00.000-07:00

Not that he didn't experience massive success, but Boz Skaggs remains, I feel, an underappreciated musical auteur. Man can truly *sing*, plays several instruments not virtuosically but in a manner consummately integrated with his singing and does so live, real-time, multi-tasking, and wrote many exceptional song, both melodically, harmonically, rhythmically and, finishing touch, lyrically (in both senses of that word).

The following song has always been a favorite of mine, partly because about the time it came out I was living in NE Georgia. Athens area, but lacking contact with the local college crowd, I missed the initial incarnations of REM and, many tears and mea culpa, The B-52s. I was ensconced in the backwoods redneck ne'er-do-well scene, and had to get by on Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bob Seger. Fortunstely, the local pool-beer hall juke had a copy of Skaggs' Harbor Lights. That and an obscure Joe Walsh B-side ballad, Pretty Maids All In a Row, were almost my sole musical nutrition during those engagingly degenerate, culturally deelevating, and often way too fun times.

Georgia

"...your daddy was high the night he dreamed of you... your backseat boys and drive-in noise... Christmas in your eyes..." and a perfect nod to Irving Berlin and Hoagy Carmichael: "...moonlight through the pines..."

And the main narrative POV:

"Georgia, we will be together, dear
If they ever let me out of here"

Love, lust, backwoods, illegal activity for a woman, jail: I remember Georgia well, and fondly. Only her name was Susan. I think. Been a long time. But Georgia... so rich and pure in its distillation of human fever and folly. Raymond Chandler only wrote about LA because he was stuck out there. He would have had more fun and better subject matter in Georgia, even with Hollywood's Babylonian factor.

Listen to me. Old Rockin' Chair's got me again...

extinct species

2009-07-11T15:22:00.000-07:00

Only 100 years ago, images like this were common:

types of liverworts

while species like this:

a liverwort

and

another liverwort

had yet to evolve from images like this:

botanical daguerreotypography

(The 2nd image, BTW, is called false Unicorn root.)

when just one racial stereotype won't do

2009-07-06T17:30:00.000-07:00

visch many glottal stop fricatives

Devil w/ a gun metal grey dress on

from the blue mountain tenements of Detroit

the lake Couer d'Alene

2009-07-03T21:20:00.000-07:00

82 years old

2009-06-25T21:44:00.000-07:00

Stravinsky Rises Into His Ashes

lunar canine

2009-06-17T16:09:00.000-07:00

Music by Mr. Moondog

A man whose biography is as enriching and delightful as his music.

makes me think of Mollita...w

2009-06-11T14:25:00.000-07:00

whom I can hear singing this very eloquently...

when supper sings...

2009-06-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

Ladies of the Bulgarian Ivy League

a new form of...

2009-06-09T21:38:00.000-07:00

air giutar

's coo...L

2009-06-09T21:25:00.001-07:00

ee Konitz and a clade of cats

What's the difference between a pole and a poll?

2009-06-06T17:13:00.000-07:00

The former has more polish than the ladder.

the wonders of humanity

2009-06-06T07:37:00.000-07:00

Eventually you learn that throwing stones at people because they're throwing stones at people is a poor way of asserting the principle of 'let he who is without sin cast the first stone'.

When Jesus said 'Turn the other cheek', He perhaps meant 'Just walk away'?

Bartok

2009-06-05T13:28:00.000-07:00

a movement from Bartok's sonata for solo violin, from an ancient studio recording so incredibly hot-miked there are harmonic artifacts in it, presumably from its many transitions through various record/display media to its current YouTubalization.

I Remember When It Took Drugs to Make Paintings Do This

2009-06-05T13:25:00.000-07:00

Kinetic Kandinsky

spring is full

2009-06-05T13:22:00.000-07:00

Everything but the Packaged Picnic Lunch

It's Like Some People Can't Spell Smell

2009-05-28T19:05:00.000-07:00

entrancement at the thaumatruge

2009-05-27T16:33:00.000-07:00

Nemo Gould

CONCERNING THE BEARD OF MACROPROSOPUS IN GENERAL.

2009-05-25T07:58:00.000-07:00

via

The Kabbalah has a lot to say about beards, which I shall now proceed to quote. There is much, much more of these beard-related activities, but the following should be enough to convince you that the terrorists are hopelessly out-classed in the beard department. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.

Ahem [Clears throat]:

CONCERNING THE BEARD OF MACROPROSOPUS IN GENERAL.

209. RABBI SCHIMEON began, and said: Woe unto him who extendeth his hand unto that most glorious supernal beard of the Holy Ancient One, the concealed of all.

210. This is the praise of that beard; the beard which is concealed and most precious in all its dispositions; the beard which neither the superiors nor the inferiors have known; the beard which is the praise of all praise; the beard to which neither man, nor prophet, nor saint hath approached so as to behold it.

211. The beard, whose hairs hang down even unto the breast, white as snow; the adornment of adornments, the concealment of concealments, the truth of all truths.

212. It is said in the “Book of Concealed Mystery”: That beard, the truth of all (truths), proceedeth from the place of the ears, and descendeth around the mouth of the Holy One; arid descendeth and ascendeth, covering (the cheeks which it calleth) the places of copious fragrance; (it is) white with ornament: and it descendeth in the equilibrium (of balanced power), and furnisheth a covering even unto the midst of the breast.

213. That is the beard of adornment, true and perfect, from the which flow down thirteen fountains, scattering the most precious balm of splendour.

214. This is disposed in thirteen forms.

215. In the first disposition are classed the hairs from above, and it commenceth from that portion of the hair of His head which is above His ears; and descendeth in one tress before the apertures of the ears in the most perfect equilibrium, even unto the corner of the mouth.

216. In the second disposition are classed the hairs from the comer of the mouth, and they ascend even unto the other corner of the mouth in perfectly equated order.

217. The third disposition is from midway between the nostrils; beneath those two apertures there goeth forth a certain path, and the hair is wanting in that path; but on either side of and bordering that path it is fuller and in perfect order.

218. The hairs which are classed under the fourth disposition descend below the mouth from the one corner even unto the other comer, in perfect order.

219. The fifth disposition. Beneath the mouth proceedeth another path, from the region of the superior path, and those two paths are impressed on His mouth on this side and on that.

220. The hairs which are classed in the sixth disposition ascend and come from beneath upwards unto the corner of the mouth, and cover the places of copious fragrance, even unto the upper corner of the mouth, and the hair descendeth at the corner of the opening, and across below the mouth.

221. In the seventh disposition the hair terminateth, and there are seen two apples in the places of copious fragrance, beautiful and joyful in aspect, because (in that aspect) is the universe maintained. And this is that which is said, Prov. xvi. 16: “In the light of the king’s countenance is life.”

222. In the eighth disposition a certain tress of hair proceedeth round about the beard, and (the hairs) hang down equilibrated even unto the chest.

223. In the ninth disposition the hairs of the beard are interwoven and mingled with those hairs which hang in equilibrium; which hang even thus, so that none is preeminent over another.

224. In the tenth disposition the hairs descend beneath the beard, and cover the throat beneath the beard.

225. The eleventh disposition is, that no hairs are preeminent over other hairs, and they are restored into perfect proportion.

226. The twelfth disposition is that the hairs do not hang over the mouth, and that the mouth is uncovered in every part, and that the hair surrounding it is beautiful.

227. The thirteenth disposition is that the hairs hang down on this side and on that beneath the beard, furnishing a covering in beautiful adornment, even unto the chest.

228. Nothing is seen of the whole countenance and of the places of fragrance, except those beautiful white apples which produce the life of the universe; and they radiate gladness upon Microprosopus.

(as channeled or translated or spontaneously combobulated by Herr Doktor Bimmler)

cowabunga!

2009-05-16T13:47:00.000-07:00

Do you want to help Sean Hannity keep his promise to get waterboarded for charity?(opinion poll)

REFUGEES: OH THE HUMANITY!

2009-05-10T06:12:00.001-07:00

They're 14 years old, slept outside in my front yard. I know them. One is my son.

Such a shame, eh? Poor people with no summer cabana...

2009-05-10T06:12:00.000-07:00

haircut

2009-05-01T14:12:00.000-07:00

good name

2009-04-13T07:11:00.001-07:00

ditto

bare emotion expressed in grease paint, enormous PVC tubes, tolerable drumming, and the prettiest girl in a conical electro-strobe hoop skirt...

2009-04-07T17:04:00.000-07:00

... and a voice like Caruso's granddaughter

I Feel Love

That's love. C'est la vie (after some life form or at least it's fetal offspring has died to provide you a meal).

Following is libido which, as my old friend Mitch Richmond said, "is the raw ability to give a damn":

and get your back into your living

Well, it's kinda hard to make babies if you can't get your back into your livin', seewuddahmean? And making babies is THE ultimate giving of damnage ever thar wuz. Even God had to use His Only Begotten Son to show the world he really cared.

Life's like that. Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be Messiahs.

These serve as a testament to limbic biochemistry and the perils of prescribed drugs.

In my case, SSRIs which, I think, almost killed me. As a lifelong alcoholic, who am I to judge? I am whom knows that a hangover only lasts a day while SSRI withdrawal can last months. I oughta write a book, as they say, but I won't. Maybe I'll publish research and opinion on this bloggie, though.

And yes, Tracy Bonham is excellent, but the Girl in the Flickering Skirt (Annette Strean) is ice cream in bed.

Sadly, her throat experienced 'fold nodule' problems and she had to seek speech therapy and learn to sing again.

mo bettah

2009-04-07T15:41:00.001-07:00

holy shit

2009-04-07T15:05:00.000-07:00

this explains alot???

2009-04-02T00:58:00.000-07:00

what went wrong; where all the good times went.

2009-04-01T13:38:00.000-07:00

as if anyone read this thing

2009-04-01T13:32:00.000-07:00

But I nonetheless feel duty bound to warn folks that SSRIs are wickedly addictive things that can take months to come off of.

Wild wild WILD-ass side effects.

U bin warned.

god is not dead merely napping

2009-03-31T08:56:00.000-07:00

In Search of the One
8-97 reworked 8-99

Theocrasy (mystical union of the soul with God) and theophany (visible manifestation of God) seem sublimely marvelous when viewed from an aesthetic remove, as in Renaissance religious art. A touch of gold leaf halo, eyes rolled heavenwards, a slackness of jaw evoking the dignified shitface of divine enlightenment – verily, these are divine illuminations. Likewise, the ten thousand Buddhas reclining across Asia in various trances of beatifica portray union with the Mind of All as no more than a passing dream – which it may well be.

I do not think I truly seek to know the mind of God. I feel certain that such knowledge would be devastating to my mental health; in fact, I’m not sure my physical self could survive the encounter. Thoughts of spontaneous combustion or inexplicable vanishings come to mind or, at best, a stunned body carrying a gibbering tortoise shell of a mind that has learned too much to contain itself, and so become gnostically incontinent.

What I seek, and what I believe so many others have sought, is that part of myself which is directly of God. Whether all of me and what I do are directly of God, or there is but a core of Godness within me, or a conduit between God and I, or an original genesis of self from God whose ripples can be traced... or if God is only these questions I ask myself...

It could be that God is just that: an answer to a rhetorical question, the Big Answer that appears just when or only because it was never truly expected.

I believe it is impossible to know this oneness through the normal siftings of thought. In view of the swarming multiplicities of life, it seems impossible to positively identify a Unifier, Grand Theme, Holy Spirit or Creator amid the myriad patterns of meaning and awareness, even though it is life’s harmonious integrity of swirling diversity that begs for a unifying intelligence to both sustain and explain it all. Not to explain it as a textbook offers detailed explanation of, say, the workings of internal combustion engines (replete with cutaway diagrams and illustrations that have been, as the drafting community so quaintly terms it, “exploded”, in order to help us visualize crankshafts, cams and pistons cycling in a ludicrous choreography reminiscent of cinema’s old Silent Era Keystone Cops movies, wherein 15 or 20 helmeted constables bob up & down and in & out of a weaving flivver as if they were the engine itself)... but to explain it as light informs sight and sound imparts hearing. To explain it directly, without artifice, without mediation, the way sunrise and birdcalls reveal a summer morning... or a poetic evasion nevertheless constrains the essence of what is sought.

However scientific is one’s reasoning in approaching the One, and however rigorous is one’s method of approach, the quest inevitably refines itself to something more akin to faith, intuition and desire. To wonder upon the pure invokes pure wonder. I believe that many, even most, of us have reached or touched or talked with the One, with or without recognition or understanding on the part of our consciousness. I believe that I just don’t know, much as I know that I just believe. It is not something that one ‘knows’ except in the way one knows that one’s heart beats or one’s mind thinks. (One can’t verify the heart’s palpitation nor the brain’s cognition without severe consequences. One doesn’t perform open-heart surgery upon oneself; likewise, one doesn’t think about thinking without disrupting the very thoughts one wishes to think about.)

So it is being one among the One. Union is a form of knowledge that defines itself through conscious ignorance: the ability to know what it is that one doesn’t know, to fulfill the vacuum within one’s sphere of knowledge, to perceive those regions that won’t sustain nor endure the scaffolding of rational ideation, to identify the void that can only be filled by one’s awareness. This conscious inability to apprehend the riddle of existence is commonly referred to as surrender or ‘letting go’ or ‘giving up’: “Let go yore sorrows and reach yore haynds up to Gawd, brothers & sisters!”

As easy as it sounds, full surrender is impossible. We can’t stop can-ing any more than we can start can’t-ing. My mind, at least the one on myshoulders, pursues itself with the relentlessness of a ventriloquist’s dummy determined to convince its interlocutor that they are, after all, one and the same, but this act of dialogue defies the One even as it encourages the Same. (Perhaps one head is better than two, but in trying to prove it to one of you that very singularity is lost upon the two of you.)

It is not something one knows except insofar as it is something one does. Its seeming shadow may be inferred from semantic riddles in which it is easy to see that, for example, a single hand cannot clap itself. The Mind of God cannot know the Mind of God any more than one can keep tabs on oneself by following oneself around. “Someday”, said the late and notoriously loudmouthed Miles Davis, “I’m gonna call myself up on the phone and tell myself to shut up!” It would be interesting to see who won that confrontation:

RING!

”Hello?”

“Listen, motherfucker, why don’t you just shut up!”

“Why don’t you quit calling me?”

”I’ll call me any goddam time I like.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Hey, you can’t tell me to shut up!”

“Exactly. Goodbye.”

So it is with the One. We presuppose a divine source of light, posit our self-reflecting awareness as a pair of talented hands, and admire the clever silhouettes of God projected upon the phenomenal canvas in beautiful reflections of a Divine Self. Should we try and touch it, however, the act of approach and attempt of apprehension forces a loss of focus which dissolves One’s shadow. As we approach the screen with hands together, still folded in a projectionist’s prayer, we find the silhouette vanished, obscured by the same hands which cast it: absorbed by the One.

In search of the One, one does well to remember that seeking and finding are not the Same, even if the two endeavors are one, too.

The Blue Rajah

(footnotes)

(*) That’s just the way Miles talked.

In Search of the One

2009-03-05T06:44:00.000-08:00

In Search of the One
8-97 reworked 8-99

It could be that God is just that: an answer to a rhetorical question, the Big Answer that appears just when or only because it was never truly expected.

RING!

”Hello?”

“Listen, motherfucker, why don’t you just shut up!”

“Why don’t you quit calling me?”

”I’ll call me any goddam time I like.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Hey, you can’t tell me to shut up!”

“Exactly. Goodbye.”

In search of the One, one does well to remember that seeking and finding are not the Same, even if the two endeavors are one, too.

The Blue Rajah

(footnotes)

(*) That’s just the way Miles talked.

coolest spades of recent time

2009-02-24T18:54:00.000-08:00

(WARNING: if you immediately register a sense of offense at the term 'spade', go home, yo mama's callin')

Miles Davis was one of THE chillingest cats of the 20th century, the cool shadow of Papa Armstrong's hot smiling sun. In the late 60s, John McLaughlin, legendary jazz guitarist, took Miles to see the famous movie of Monterrey Pop Festival whereby Jimi Hendrix, another of the very coolest cats of the last century, pretty much became a household word.

McLaughlin tells the tale. Sitting in the theater, as Jimi does his thing, Miles keeps turning to McLaughlin in the darkened theater and saying, in that damaged, hoarse voice of his, "Damn!" And again: "Damn!" And again: "DAMN!!!" And again...

He had seen the future of pop, jazz and virtually all forms of contemporarily evolving music. He had seen a visionary leader.

Tonight, watching Obama's first address to Congress, I saw the first coolest cat of the 21st century (and the coolest first lady of same), a spade's spade and a honky's honky, and most of all, I see a leader.

I see not Franklin Delano Roosevelt but Theodore Roosevelt in blackface, no mustache, and vision that is so strong and needed that one KNOWS that a major portion of his agenda, the most necessary portion (and there's little if any that isn't necessary) if not all of it, will become manifest.

I see FDR and Teddy in some theater elsewhere than our realm, watching this speech in a darkened bijou, and I see Teddy turning to FDR again and again, saying, "Bully!" And again: "Bully! And again: "BULLY!!!" and again...

It's in our human nature to be optimistic if at all possible...

...and seek our freedom

they warn't all bad, folks

2009-02-22T22:02:00.000-08:00

"My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them, or indisposed me to serve them; nor in spite of failures, which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge; or of the present aspect of affairs; do I despair of the future.

"The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow, and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope."

-General Robert E. Lee

how to cook a national/global economy

2009-02-20T07:22:00.000-08:00

via

and likewise, if you what those lyrics to the infamous 'numa-numa' song were...p

2009-02-19T18:57:00.000-08:00

polyglot advantages

Dr. Doom

2009-02-18T17:47:00.000-08:00

via

On Sept. 7, 2006, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, stood before an audience of economists at the International Monetary Fund and announced that a crisis was brewing. In the coming months and years, he warned, the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence and, ultimately, a deep recession. He laid out a bleak sequence of events: homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the global financial system shuddering to a halt. These developments, he went on, could cripple or destroy hedge funds, investment banks and other major financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

***

The ’90s were an eventful time for an international economist like Roubini. Throughout the decade, one emerging economy after another was beset by crisis, beginning with Mexico’s in 1994. Panics swept Asia, including Thailand, Indonesia and Korea, in 1997 and 1998. The economies of Brazil and Russia imploded in 1998. Argentina’s followed in 2000. Roubini began studying these countries and soon identified what he saw as their common weaknesses. On the eve of the crises that befell them, he noticed, most had huge current-account deficits (meaning, basically, that they spent far more than they made), and they typically financed these deficits by borrowing from abroad in ways that exposed them to the national equivalent of bank runs. Most of these countries also had poorly regulated banking systems plagued by excessive borrowing and reckless lending. Corporate governance was often weak, with cronyism in abundance.

I have for you...

2009-02-16T21:42:00.000-08:00

because this is a blog and I can do what I want...

2009-02-16T18:10:00.000-08:00

...and Michelle Malkin is a psychotic twit and loves attention and uses her nonexistent cleavage as an ashtray.

magisterial Joni

2009-02-03T22:10:00.001-08:00

Trouble Man

the way it's done

2009-01-29T20:27:00.000-08:00

I remember when 'what a rush' was a good thing

2009-01-25T19:19:00.000-08:00

Limbaugh responds to Obama comments

Obama was angry that Merrill Lynch used $1.2 million of TARP money to remodel an executive suite. Excuse me, but didn't Merrill have to hire a decorator and contractor? Didn't they have to buy the new furnishings? What's the difference in that and Merrill loaning that money to a decorator, contractor and goods supplier to remodel Warren Buffet's office? Either way, stimulus in the private sector occurs. Are we really at the point where the bad PR of Merrill getting a redecorated office in the process is reason to smear them? How much money will the Obamas spend redecorating the White House residence? Whose money will be spent? I have no problem with the Obamas redoing the place. It is tradition. 600 private jets flown by rich Democrats flew into the Inauguration. That's fine but the auto execs using theirs is a crime? In both instances, the people on those jets arrived in Washington wanting something from Washington, not just good will.

Well, we were hoping the money would go to shore up the foreclosure market, or maybe enable global shipping to get moving again after being virtually halted for reasons like no financing available for insurance. Stuff like that. Hadn;t realized the upscale decorator market was in such deep trouble that Merrill Lynch's CEO had to personally dispense funds.

And I didn't know it was a bad thing for rich Democrats to fly jets on their own money, although I never like it when elected Democrats (he ain't good at specifics, Rush ain't) use public funds to fly private jets.

Good ol' Rush: he sure likes to blow that cigar smoke around, don't he?

first day in office...

2009-01-22T00:56:00.000-08:00

...I like. A lot.

an aborted irony, perhaps

2009-01-21T08:54:00.000-08:00

~~scratched~~

hidden masterpiece

2009-01-16T23:51:00.000-08:00

Love

It's just in the middle, when Stevie begins the lyric. For a minute there, he hits the raw wringing truth.

O love...

1st prize? honorable mention? Nobel peace prize?

2009-01-16T22:08:00.001-08:00

Little clue at best. But dang, it's GOOD:

Dixie Chicken

The piano break hearkens one to ol' Jess Stacy in Benny Goodman's infamous 1938 Carnegie Hall version of Sing Sing Sing.

(political subtext subtly delightful)

happy

2009-01-15T20:20:00.000-08:00

Smile

when mojo worked...

2009-01-12T15:41:00.000-08:00

promising abundant energy too cheap to bother metering.

fave mystery code

2009-01-10T01:35:00.001-08:00

&fmt=18

alternate history

2009-01-09T12:09:00.000-08:00

Mickey Rooney horses around with Brooke Shields in the Mickey Mouse Club rec room at Disney Studios, 1955:

on wings of song, or, theremin love

2009-01-08T17:54:00.000-08:00

Researchers at Cornell University have discovered that Aedes aegypti mosquitoes — the ones that spread diseases like yellow and dengue fever — alter their wing vibrations in a mating signal.

the blind leading the bamboozled

2009-01-08T17:48:00.000-08:00

We didn't see the financial crisis coming, says Cheney

In an interview with The Associated Press, Cheney also said that Bush has no need to apologize for not foreseeing the economic crisis.

"I don't think he needs to apologize. I think what he needed to do is take bold, aggressive action and he has," Cheney said.

"I don't think anybody saw it coming," he said.

I did. It was elementary.

Cheney also said:

Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday that he sees no reason for President George W. Bush to pre-emptively pardon anyone at the CIA involved in harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists. "I don't have any reason Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday that he sees no reason for President George W. Bush to pre-emptively pardon anyone at the CIA involved in harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists. "I don't have any reason to believe that anybody in the agency did anything illegal," he said.

He has no "reason to believe that anybody in the agency did anything illegal".

So much for Cheney as a man of reason.

cool is cool

2009-01-08T10:58:00.001-08:00

pitiful whine

2009-01-08T10:51:00.000-08:00

Palin claims media easy on Caroline because of class

Well, yeah. Caroline has it. Palin don't.

Favorite quote:

She also expressed frustration with Couric’s characterization of her since the interviews. After being shown a clip of Couric complaining to David Letterman that no post-election interviewer has asked Palin why she would not tell the CBS anchor what newspapers she reads, the Alaska governor responded: “Because, Katie, you’re not the center of everybody’s universe.”

Classy. I'm no fan of Katie, incidentally. But I'm sure discovering she isn't the center of the universe just broke poor Katie's widdle heart.

STOP duh music! STOP duh music!

2009-01-02T11:47:00.000-08:00

Fairy tales can come true...

which is my way of celebrating the fact that Obama will be sworn in only twelve days from now!!!

did I miss something?

2008-12-31T18:35:00.002-08:00

Merry Xmas!

(LAST DAY SALE!)

did I miss something?

2008-12-31T18:35:00.001-08:00

where you post just because it's been awhile

2008-12-28T15:01:00.000-08:00

Lotta freakin' snow here in Spokane.

If the shoe fits...

2008-12-14T13:33:00.000-08:00

video

story here

He handled it with considerable aplomb.

In fact, he seemed to have gotten a charge out of it at first.

Such a thing could not have happened in America: Bush's security is tighter at home. ;)

Gotta love spin: "...in terms of the agreement, this is a major accomplishment," said the president, referring apparently to the freedom of journalists to throw shoes at visiting dignitaries/conquerors/liberators/invaders/POTU's.

THAT is spin.

In which Kenmeer shares a home-brewed homily

2008-12-11T11:49:00.000-08:00

It is not what we tell each other about a thing that is true, it is what that thing tells us about itself that is true.

Most of all, what that thing tells us about oneself.

Grapic Aid Overlay for Red State-Blue State Comparison

2008-12-11T10:09:00.000-08:00

Color-Coded Map of Most Corrupt USA States

Red State/Blue State final outcome 2004

Red State/Blue State 2008 final outcome

Jingalingalinga

2008-12-09T21:04:00.000-08:00

Peggy Lee

I got tinsel on my twinkles, y'all!

What I Believe

2008-12-08T13:07:00.000-08:00

I believe in exploiting such questions as opportunities to belabor us with old treatments on metaphysical themes written ten years ago, whose profundity is matched only by their pretentiousness and occasionally excellent prose:

In Search of the One

Theocrasy (mystical union of the soul with God) and theophany (visible manifestation of God) seem sublimely marvelous when viewed from an aesthetic remove, as in Renaissance religious art. A touch of gold leaf halo, eyes rolled heavenwards, a slackness of jaw evoking the dignified shitface of divine enlightenment - verily, these are divine illuminations. Likewise, the ten thousand Buddhas reclining across Asia in various trances of beatitude portray union with the Mind of All as no more than a passing dream - which it may well be.

I do not think I truly seek to know the mind of God. I feel certain that such knowledge would be devastating to my mental health; in fact, I’m not sure my physical self could survive the encounter. Thoughts of spontaneous combustion or inexplicable vanishings come to mind or, at best, a stunned body carrying a gibbering tortoise shell of a mind that has learned too much to contain itself, and so become gnostically incontinent.

What I seek, and what I believe so many others have sought, is that part of myself which is directly of God. Whether all of me and what I do are directly of God, or there is but a core of Godness within me, or a conduit between God and I, or an original genesis of self from God whose ripples can be traced... or if God is only these questions I ask myself...

It could be that God is just that: an answer to a rhetorical question, the Big Answer that appears just when or only because it was never truly expected.

I believe it is impossible to know this oneness through the normal siftings of thought. In view of the swarming multiplicities of life, it seems impossible to positively identify a Unifier, Grand Theme, Holy Spirit or Creator amid the myriad patterns of meaning and awareness, even though it is life’s harmonious integrity of swirling diversity that begs for a unifying intelligence to both sustain and explain it all. Not to explain it as a textbook offers detailed explanation of, say, the workings of internal combustion engines (replete with cutaway diagrams and illustrations that have been, as the drafting community so quaintly terms it, "exploded", in order to help us visualize crankshafts, cams and pistons cycling in a ludicrous choreography reminiscent of cinema’s old Silent Era Keystone Cops movies, wherein 15 or 20 helmeted constables bob up & down and in & out of a weaving flivver as if they were the engine itself)... but to explain it as light informs sight and sound imparts hearing. To explain it directly, without artifice, without mediation, the way sunrise and birdcalls reveal a summer morning... or a poetic evasion nevertheless constrains the essence of what is sought.

However scientific is one’s reasoning in approaching the One, and however rigorous is one’s method of approach, the quest inevitably refines itself to something more akin to faith, intuition and desire. To wonder upon the pure invokes pure wonder. I believe that many, even most, of us have reached or touched or talked with the One, with or without recognition or understanding on the part of our consciousness. I believe that I just don’t know, much as I know that I just believe. It is not something that one ‘knows’ except in the way one knows that one’s heart beats or one’s mind thinks. (One can’t verify the heart’s palpitation nor the brain’s cognition without severe consequences. One doesn’t perform open-heart surgery upon oneself; likewise, one doesn’t think about thinking without disrupting the very thoughts one wishes to think about.)

So it is being one among the One. Union is a form of knowledge that defines itself through conscious ignorance: the ability to know what it is that one doesn’t know, to fulfill the vacuum within one’s sphere of knowledge, to perceive those regions that won’t sustain nor endure the scaffolding of rational ideation, to identify the void that can only be filled by one’s awareness. This conscious inability to apprehend the riddle of existence is commonly referred to as surrender or ‘letting go’ or ‘giving up’: “Let go yore sorrows and reach yore haynds up to Gawd, brothers & sisters!”

As easy as it sounds, full surrender is impossible. We can’t stop can-ing any more than we can start can’t-ing. My mind, at least the one on my shoulders, pursues itself with the relentlessness of a ventriloquist’s dummy determined to convince its interlocutor that they are, after all, one and the same, but this act of dialogue defies the One even as it encourages the Same. (Perhaps one head is better than two, but in trying to prove it to one of you that very singularity is lost upon the two of you.)

It is not something one knows except insofar as it is something one does. Its seeming shadow may be inferred from semantic riddles in which it is easy to see that, for example, a single hand cannot clap itself. The Mind of God cannot know the Mind of God any more than one can keep tabs on oneself by following oneself around. “Someday”, said the late and notoriously foulmouthed Miles Davis, “I’m gonna call myself up on the phone and tell myself to shut up!” It would be interesting to see who won that confrontation: RING!

”Hello?”

“Listen, motherfucker, why don’t you just shut up!”

“Oh, do be quiet...”

So it is with the One. We presuppose a divine source of light, posit our self-reflecting awareness as a pair of talented hands, and admire the clever silhouettes of God we project upon the phenomenal canvas in beautiful reflections of a Divine Self. Should we try and touch it, however, the act of approach and attempt of apprehension forces a loss of focus which dissolves One’s shadow. As we approach the screen with hands together, still folded in a projectionist’s prayer, we find the silhouette vanished, obscured by the same hands which cast it: absorbed by the One.

In search of the One, one does well to remember that seeking and finding are not the Same, even if the two endeavors are one, too.

Still Got My Two Front Teeth...

2008-12-05T17:10:00.000-08:00

...so, somewhere between ridiculously intangible hopes like peace on earth and such, and ridiculously accessible but unnecessary tangibles like this which will find their way down my chimney somehow by next summer, I'm sure, so I can spend a week in the woods (something very good for me to do once a year) AND polish a novel for submission while I'm up there, what I'll ask for Xmas is something both reasonable, absurd, and not totally impossible but highly unlikely: to be able to do young dude things like this again.

The Season Commences...

2008-12-05T16:36:00.000-08:00

O Tannenbaum

Well, since the season is about death and rebirth, hopes for immortality or restoration or at least a sense of redemption:

All Over the World

The Flame Still Burns

Some background context for those who haven't seen the movie

I highly recommend it, and I don't much like movies nor am I a diehard rock'n'roll fan. I'm more what a dear old pair of wooden dancing shoes, who played guitar and sang in the original 60s Liverpool/Hamburg/Amsterdam European/British invasion rock scene, called a "more of a Stan Getz-y/Igor Stravinsky kinda zotz".

No one wants to live forever, I think, for all the talk of Heavenly Hereafter and Eternal Life, but we all wish we didn't lose old friends and wish we didn't have to go and leave others in our time, and we all would like to have a bit of a reunion now and then, aye?

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

Pentagon to Recruit Aliens

2008-12-05T15:32:00.001-08:00

via

Important information, yes, but I mostly like the headline.

Just Enough White Men Agreed

2008-12-05T13:48:00.000-08:00

He's One of the Good Ones

My only problem with Obama is I'm afeared I'm gonna masturbate to Michelle once I see her on Oprah. Oprah gets wimmin talkin' about they... uh-huh. (lemme 'splain: it's a joke based on this funny political vid)

OK?

These fellahs are upset. Hard to blame 'em. First Toby Keith, now the Detroit Big Three.

Whiskey!

Next we'll hear Dolly Parton's boobs ain't real.

Lester Save Us!

Tired, Tired, and Tired... but insurpassably beautiful

Miles cut his career with Dizzy and Parker, but everyone knew Lester was the torch they all went back to time and again to relight their flame. (And omigodzilla: it's a 50s Kinescopic American Jazz Idol. Amazing.)

Sarah we hardly knew ye...

2008-12-05T13:37:00.000-08:00

Graphic Visual Voter Aid

'potant plums

2008-12-04T19:53:00.000-08:00

via

Sec of Energy

Sec of Labor

Director of CIA

Director of National Intelligence

Chief Technology Officer

Ask me, these positions have far more import on our prospects than Sec of State, Sec of Treasury, even Sec of Def.

What Parent WOuld Name TheirMinimart THIS???

2008-11-26T07:46:00.000-08:00

(click on image to see the whole story)

SHEETZ

Once Upon A Time, Products Couldn't Read Their Own Labels...

2008-11-23T15:54:00.000-08:00

The act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of man‑produced things which have become independent (and which are imagined as originally independent) of man and govern his life. Also transformation of human beings into thing‑like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing‑world. Reification is a ‘special’ case of ALIENATION, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modern capitalist society.

via

There are those who prefer to buy only 'brand names'. This is understandable: symbol-standard-quality. But when Mattel contracts for cut-rate production overseas, the brand reputation is devalued. This too is easy to understand.

It is harder, it seems, for us to understand that the same thing applies to the stock market.

Excuse me; I never went to college, so it isn't incumbent on me to pretend I understand Marx or find him old hat. But it seems to me that much of ye olde post-modernism was just slightly dressed-up Marxist thought.

Or something. Whatever the brand name 'Marxist' still means.

Or, to quote the increasingly irresistibly quotable William Gibson:

"You know what really worried me about Second Life? Is that after I'd spent maybe like four or five hours checking it out last December, I was walking around in the Christmas shopping crowds here, and every so often I would see somebody from Second Life walking down the street. There are people, always well under 30, who look like they've escaped from Second Life."

The Bastard Makes Sense

2008-11-22T07:58:00.000-08:00

via

"In the appointment of Hillary Clinton, he has proved as well that he is a supple thinker, capable of changing his views according to experience. To elevate the junior senator from New York into his Cabinet, Obama had to set aside the criticisms of her that he and his surrogates had voiced during the campaign.

"If her experience in national security and foreign policy were as shallow as advertised back then, after all, on what basis could he offer her the position of top diplomat? If her judgment were as poor as charged by him and others over the past two years, then why would he place such heavy responsibilities on her shoulders? If her honesty were as questionable as his campaign sometimes claimed, then how can he trust her now?

"The answer is not necessarily that his campaign rhetoric was false or insincere, but that he developed respect for her over the difficult months of that harsh contest -- and came to believe that she would be as formidable at his side as she was in his face.

"The same contrast between then and now applies to Clinton as well, of course. To be willing to sacrifice her Senate seat -- and an apparent offer to join the Democratic leadership -- she must have come to a very different view of Obama's potential than the skepticism expressed by her and her supporters in the heat of the primary. In accepting this appointment, she will fully endorse his fitness to lead and the soundness of his worldview, without reservation. That acknowledgment goes far beyond the speeches of the general election campaign, which she delivered over and over on his behalf."

Considering that one valuable skill a good Sec of State should possess is the ability to tell bald-faced lies, or at least exaggerate the truth, Hillary is formidable indeed. Ducking low on the airport tarmac of Sarajevo to avoid sniper fire...

Political Arms Sales

2008-11-21T20:18:00.000-08:00

wherein partisans find their own weapons turned against them:

via

Beyond Impeahcment

2008-11-21T17:18:00.000-08:00

OK. So Maybe we don't have to impeach the bastard:

No one likes him

And we were going to let them run our ports

2008-11-21T17:16:00.000-08:00

via

"Whistleblower has learned that a classified internal report at the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has concluded that the pirates are funded by expatriate Somalis and Emiratis based in Dubai. This determination is based, in part, on an independent Interpol probe that managed to identify several moneymen behind the high sea piracy. All live in Dubai."

global climate change

2008-11-21T10:28:00.000-08:00

via

"Dark spots, some as large as 50,000 miles in diameter, typically move across the surface of the sun, contracting and expanding as they go. These strange and powerful phenomena are known as sunspots, but now they are all gone. Not even solar physicists know why it’s happening and what this odd solar silence might be indicating for our future. The last time this happened was 400 years ago -- and it signaled a solar event known as a "Maunder Minimum," along with the start of what we now call the "Little Ice Age."

"Although periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, this current period has gone on much longer than usual and scientists are starting to worry—at least a little bit. Recently 100 scientists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and North America gathered to discuss the issue at an international solar conference at Montana State University. Today's sun is as inactive as it was two years ago, and solar physicists don’t have a clue as to why."

Same Pattern, Again

2008-11-21T09:48:00.000-08:00

via

"Gates is a great choice because of the respect he has gained from all quarters after the fiasco that went before," says Anthony Zinni, a retired four-star Marine who once headed the U.S. Central Command. "He would also provide continuity at a critical time." The key to Gates' sticking around, Zinni suggests, is how many Pentagon political appointees Obama would let Gates keep if he stays, denying Democrats those key national security positions. "I think he won't stay without his team," Zinni says of Gates, "and the [Obama] Administration can't let him keep them." Then, uncharacteristically for this particular parlor game, Zinni adds: "But what do I know?"

My point? Like Hillary, Obama gives the top dog a sjot at it, but requires sacrifice.

Hillary has to rein in her former president of a husband; Gates has to give up his advisers.

Throw a bone in the ring and let the dogs have at it in the media circus ring.

Would Gates make a decent Sec of Def? More so than not. The stain on his reputation from the Iran-Contra affair is modest, and I think his post-Reagan foreign policy stances show chastened learning from the mistakes in which he participated as a former CIA director.

But he's gotta check his weapons at the door of Obama's administration and commit to the new team.

We'll see.

the facts of the matter

2008-11-20T10:03:00.000-08:00

Preludio:

"In 1956, Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert discovered a grand illusion in the American oil industry. For tax purposes, he noted, American oil companies regularly delayed the declaration of new oil reserves by years and even decades. The result was a false impression that new oil was being found all the time. In fact, discoveries had peaked in 1936."

via

"Simmons had become suspicious of the Saudis' claims about the vastness of their oil supply. In his four decades of working in the oil and gas industry, everyone he had ever talked to had taken it as gospel that the Saudis had enough oil to bail the world out when other supplies ran short. If that wasn't true, Simmons believed, the era of cheap oil was over. Demand for crude was on the rise worldwide, and supplies were getting tighter all the time. If the Saudis were pushing up against the limits of their oil production, the world needed to know.

"In his typically analytical fashion, Simmons went hunting for data. He found it in the form of hundreds of technical papers submitted by Saudi oil geologists to the Society of Petroleum Engineers over the past 50 years. Simmons spent the month of August 2003 sitting on his porch in Maine and grinding his way through the minutiae of technical accounts of, for instance, reservoir pressure and water-cut percentages, trying to piece together the challenges that the Saudi geologists had encountered in managing their precious oilfields. In the end, his conclusion was clear. "I finished reading the last paper on a Sunday afternoon," says Simmons, "and I sat back and I thought, Holy crap, this is unbelievable. I've just discovered the biggest energy illusion ever in the world. We're in big trouble. I'm going to write a book."

So he did:

"Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy"

Hillary Allegedly Unsure About Accepting Sec of State Position

2008-11-19T07:30:00.000-08:00

via

“She thinks Obama has been great to ask, and she has been well-treated during the process,” the adviser to Mrs. Clinton said. “But she’s unsure.”

"One complication that Mrs. Clinton will face if she becomes secretary of state is the mountain of campaign debt leftover from her presidential run.

"Mrs. Clinton has $7.6 million in outstanding bills from the campaign, Mr. Reines said, not including personal loans she made to her campaign."

Bill could pay off that debt, I suppose, if he didn't have to curtail his investments abroad which cause the current conflict-of-interest dilemma.

I still think (well, hope) that most of the tentative Cabinet picks Obama is making now are for show, straw samples to appease the old Dem party machinery and confuse the right-wing punditry.

Cover of Le Point magazine, March 19, 1979

2008-11-18T13:01:00.000-08:00

(PIA stands for Pakistan International Airlines)

In the pre-Beginning

2008-11-18T11:56:00.000-08:00

via

"Questions about a time before the big bang were once thought to be meaningless, because according to Einstein's general theory of relativity, the universe began at a singularity - a mathematical point with infinite density at which all calculations break down.

"However, physicists now believe that the theory of relativity is limited and the effects of quantum mechanics would have blurred out the singularity just a little, so at a crucial moment the density of matter and radiation was not infinite. If this was the case, it becomes possible to try to work out what led up to that moment."