You Will Never Die

I know this is meant to be sincere, but I thought it was some pretty goddamned funny gallows humor. I'm heading to the New York Times to do something more embarrassing than simply reading the New York Times, and I see an undeniable opine called: The Best Part About Global Warming.

By this shitbirds logic: warmer weather means less influenza. Got me thinking, if the sun went away, there wouldn't be so much skin cancer... not bad, eh? Here's the line before the curtain falls on this gem of denial:

Still, when one considers those who are most likely to die from influenza, often with shocking swiftness — children, the elderly, cancer and H.I.V. patients, pregnant women — the weather this winter comes to seem like a very cheerful development indeed. Even the loss of a season’s sledding, you might say, is a small price to pay.

Shocking swiftness! Hear me out on this one, shitbirds: there are 7 billion humans on this planet. And last year-ish, 2010, the global population grew by 1.1%. Through the wonders of simple math, if that 1.1% were to hold steady — neither rising or falling, there would be 14 billion people on the planet in 63 years, or 2075. We all seem to "get" that 14 billion isn't happening, so growth will collapse, meaning death will reign supreme... and yet... the best thing about global warming

But at least people with cancer aren't going to die from the flu. New York City will cease to be a home for millions of people, as they'll all be dead or fleeing... but fuck if I hate the idea of being stuck in bed battling a sickness that is related to temperature.

This fuck actually wrote: giving up sledding isn't so bad because people with HIV won't die from the flu quite so much. People with HIV... won't die... from the flu... quite so much.

Please, my goodness please... end the intern[m]e[n]t.

I'll quote Nietzsche, I think:

Something that has failed should be all the more honored just because it has failed — this agrees much better with my morality. — "God"

Does anyone has any... uh... ideas regarding how I might destroy the internet from, you know, outside the internet... I did put "The Martix" in my library queue, but if memory serves me, that movie was more of an inspirational bit than a how-to.

Seriously, the internet is awful. Go away.

David Graeber is Funny

Stinkin' thrilled the Sun God is keeping longer hours (my normal not-so-stable ways are tailspun by 8 hours of daylight), the chickens are ostensibly responding to the extra bits of lightlove, as eggs are back in regular creation. I've been reading Debt: The First 5,000 Years and much like a clump of essays bundled under the title Revolution in Reverse, Graeber is amusing, especially in the notes section — the polite (or not) take-down being his forte, this one cracked me up:

As I remarked earlier, both Adam Smith and Nietzsche thus anticipate Levi-Strauss's famous argument that language is the "exchange of words." The remarkable thing here is that so many have managed to convince themselves that in all this, Nietzsche is providing a radical alternative to bourgeois ideology, even to the logic of exchange. Deleuze and Guattari, most embarrassingly, insist that "the great book of modern ethnology is not so much Mauss' The Gift as Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. At least it should be," since, they say, Nietzsche succeeds in interpreting "primitive society" in terms of debt, where Mauss still hesitates to break with the logic of exchange. On their inspiration, Sarthou-Lajus has written philosophy of debt as an alternative to bourgeois ideologies of exchange, that, she claims, assume the prior autonomy of the person. Of course what Nietzsche proposes is not an alternative at all. It's another aspect of the same thing. All this is a vivid reminder of how easy it is to mistake radicalized forms of our own bourgeois tradition as alternatives to it (Bataille [1993], who Deleuze and Guttari praise as another alternative to Mauss in the same passage, is another notorious example of this sort of thing).

Perhaps not a passage that will cause you to run to the bookstore (maybe crab-walk) so here's another I just enjoyed:

Similar ideas have become the basis of that most basic, dominant institution of our present economic life: wage labor, which is, effectively, the renting of our freedom in the same way that slavery can be conceived as its sale. It's not only our freedoms that we own; the same logic has come to be applied even to our own bodies, which are treated, in such formulations, as really no different than houses, cars, or furniture. We own ourselves, therefore outsiders have no right to trespass on us. Again, this might seem an innocuous, even a positive notion, but it looks rather different when we take into consideration the Roman tradition of property on which it is based. To say that we own ourselves is, oddly enough, to cast ourselves as both master and slave simultaneously. "We" are both owners (exerting absolute power over our property) and yet somehow, at the same time, the things being owned (being the object of absolute power). The ancient Roman household, far from having been forgotten in the mists of history, is preserved in our most basic conception of ourselves—and, once again, just as in property law, the result is so strangely incoherent that it spins off into endless paradoxes the moment one tries to figure out what it would actually mean in practice. Just as lawyers have spent a thousand years trying to make sense of Roman property concepts, so have philosophers spent centuries trying to understand how it could be possible for us to have a relation of domination over ourselves. The most popular solution—to say that each of us has something called a "mind" and that this is completely separate from something else, which we can call "the body," and that the first thing holds natural dominion over the second—flies in the face of just about everything we know about cognitive science. It's obviously untrue, but we continue to hold onto it anyway, for the simple reason that none of our everyday assumptions about property, law, and freedom would make any sense without it.

See, kinda funny, right? Not more than a few pages go by without him making light of us confused you-mans.

I want to share the terrifying response to a infrastructural breakdown in town yesterday, real quick: the local grocery store shut-down, resulting from this problem (which will most certainly be more regular and longer lasting in the near future). After being turned away, very politely by a store-worker, I hung out for a minute to see how my neighbors would respond. Rage. Angry fucks. Shock. I can't choose from almost-everything-I-can-imagine-eating!?!? Ahhhh!!! If this was enough to get folk all riled up, a chilling scene, for those of us who see various "disruptions" as the mode of the future times.

"They" get "us" with their words

"Spill" is tangled with intent. And the way intent is used — particularly in the tales of war-death-destruction-despair — is often misleading (see, right there, the way I used misleading... is very misleading).

Easy example: when I make cocktails, I'm very often shaking for four. Squeezing four drinks into one batch brings the spirits near the stainless steel brim — the danger zone. When straining the sweet relief into glasses, some initial spillage can be expected — you know how this works... the shaker is just a little too full, the liquids surge to the edge, and if I don't pour fast enough, some of that icy tequila is going to run down the side of the shaker, de-stressing the tabletop. So... did I spill? Of course not. I had too much booze in the shaker to avoid the small spill, I knew this, and poured it anyway.

If the result of an action is known, speaking of intent is nonsense.

So when Royal Dutch Shell spills dumps oil onto West African land and water... every. single. day... it is not doing so by accident — therefore spill confuses what actually happened (which, of course, is in the interests of Royal Dutch Shell and the Culture of Destruction). As always, the ethical standards of having a Blogger account are high, so I'll be fair with Shell:

Apparently predicting interest in the spill would grow, Shell already had taken out Internet advertising Thursday on search engines, directing those searching for the spill to their website. Jonathan French, a Shell spokesman in London, said the advertising came in the "interests of full transparency" so people can read the company's updates on the spill.

Which brings me to Santa's big gift (assuming, like me, your portfolio is heavy on uranium futures), the new Westinghouse AP1000 is approved and ready to boil! I love the blue, but why did they do the outside in brown? Hopefully they'll have more colors for next year's model. At least it's safe:

But the chairman of the commission, Gregory B. Jaczko, said that all of the panel’s safety concerns had been fully addressed.

“The design provides enhanced safety margins through use of simplified, inherent, passive, or other innovative safety and security functions, and also has been assessed to ensure it could withstand damage from an aircraft impact without significant release of radioactive materials,-” he said in a statement.

Warning: Pass this point, and your face will look like mine

Well, if Dr. Jaczko (he is a doctor, I hope) thinks the safety margins are enhanced... and it's airplane-proof... we can get back to designing the signs that will remain coherent for... for... forever. It really sums it all up, does it not? A culture that can create death on a chronological scale so hilariously vast that it feels compelled (it's the right thing to do) to pass along warnings to our — it'll take you about 45 minutes, but please say "great" about 3,000 times — grandchildren. They are the future.

Nuclear Power is almost all-the-way-back. O-Bah-Ma, O-Bah-Ma, O-Bah-Ma

Birth of a Ham Monster: Seeking, Eradicating, Balancing Desire

The black cat — prodigious leaper, lover and fighter, combatant in games of "chicken" played against actual chickens — has been consumed by a new desire. Ham. He tasted ham, chewed ham, swallowed ham... and then something happened. The experience required repeating. It wouldn't be "nice" to have a little more ham some time, the strong-legged cat doesn't simply respond positively to the offer of ham, he pursues it. He requires it. Without it, he cannot be content. So what does he do? He sits at the refrigerator. And he demands to have his desire satisfied. For five years, this cat has known where his food is kept, yet, he never showed any desire for it. He ate it. Sure. But he didn't desire it... why not?  Desire? What could I mean...

I like desire as: an expression of a need to pursue that which is required. In other words, something you need (not want) but don't always or easily obtain.

The black cat always had his regular, everyday food. It sits in two places: wet food in the kitchen, dry food on the shelves outside the bathroom door. Ham doesn't follow this pattern. Ham is kept away, in a massive, mysterious, humming tank. So, I ask: is the black cat in a "good" situation. Should I, as keeper-of-the-ham, nurture this, or find a way to end it?

Recently, quite recently, I was informed — by a very confident person — that "people" should eliminate desire. I didn't know what the fuck they were talking about, so I asked: huh? To which I received a reply along the lines of: be content with what you have, satisfy your basic needs, and wish for no more.


Now, I know (I think I know) what they were selling: a fairly standard anti-consumerism idea. These are common messages, no? "If you think that the new car or new gadget will make you happy, you're mistaken!" And, of course, relationships with other subjectivities certainly offers a more varied experience than relationships with objects, like cars or telephones. But what about desire? I think the complexities that desire induces can be quite delightful. An example:


I desire — require but can not always have — at least an hour of alone time everyday. Some days (such as today) this is very easy to come by, and others (like tomorrow) it simply is not going to happen. But wait a second! Surely, if I require some alone time, I'll get it, right? Easy enough. All of tomorrow's car-travel, chit-chat, family time... just skip out on some of it. And I could do that — what is stopping me? Desire! A competing desire. A desire to have the family not think I'm a disagreeable asshole, incapable of going-along with the structure of family days. This is something I require (truly, despite all evidence to the contrary, if I couldn't at least obtain the status of: not a completely disagree asshole... this would be an unsettling situation).


Leaving me with this: Desire is delightful, it requires we pay attention to our own needs, and make compromises and adjustments when desires come into conflict. This is a life, conflicting desires. As for the cat, well, I require a sense that I'm feeding the cat food that won't result in bad health (salted cured meats probably fit the bill) but I also require that he shut the fuck up, so here comes some ham, Ham Monster.

Ripley's: In some parts of the world, the rulers make the peons do shit they don't want to do?

North Korean honcho dead, what have we learned? New Yorker knows (fun and easy game: change the proper nouns to make these nonsense sentiments sum-up Modern Death Captialism and the waking reality of the American Non-Dream):

Mandatory public crying. Those three words sum up about as tidily as possible the ghastly bondage—the incessant psychic and physical torture—that the Kim dynasty has made the North Korean way of life for more than half a century. No sooner did the state news agency release the news of Kim Jong-il’s death than the public plazas of Pyongyang began to fill with neatly assembled ranks of citizens, weeping and wailing on command, while state television recorded the spectacle, which was promptly uploaded to YouTube. Early in the most heavily circulated clip, the fakeness of the grieving is obvious: you can see the captive mourners forcing the sobs, moaning unconvincingly, and squeezing their eyes to produce tears. But by about half way through the clip, the atmosphere of absolute bereavement looks real: men and women prostrate themselves, writhing and howling in what appears to be acute and authentic agony. Here in the space of just a few minutes of videotape we see the method and the madness of the Kims’ grim dominion over North Korea enacted in miniature—we watch a lie become reality.

Apparently, in North Korea, there is an expectation  (I'm gonna try explaining this to you, but you'll be as baffled as a 83 year old New Guinean woman trying to learn the ins-n'-outs of being a sales associate at Baby Gap... you ain't gonna get it on the first try, so read slowly) there is an expectation that you have to offer fake sentiment in order to flatter your superiors ego! You can't just do your own thing, oh no: there is a code of conduct which demands a very limited range of acceptable social behavior. I know I know I know... fucking unbelievable, right? Like, you gots to fabricate yo' personality and shit, it's like all the peoples are a fiction, an invention — IL-LEGIT!

You know how in America, when the boss is trying to pawn off some bullshit, some new protocols that guarantee everyone in the cubicle of cubicles has to press a bunch more buttons that don't need to be pressed, we all tell the boss to get fucked! We ain't doing it! And yo' breath be stinkin' too! That's how America works, all genuine all-the-time.

Here's my favorite line in the article:

But what has always made North Korea really frightening is that, from within its own twisted worldview, Pyongyang behaves rationally. Never has such a small, economically weak state succeeded in making such a big deal of itself for so long. One of the main reasons for North Korea’s endurance is that South Korea is terrified of its collapse. Although the Korean War has never officially ended—and more than eleven million Korean families remain divided by the partition of the Korean peninsula—it has been Seoul’s policy for several decades now to try to prevent a North Korean implosion rather than to promote one. Why? Because South Korea, having watched West Germany pay for the integration of the former-Communist East Germany, is terrified of the cost that integrating the blighted North would entail. So our great ally in East Asia is complicit in propping up our great enemy there.

Our enemy?! Holy shit, it's almost like the lie has become the reality. Know this, dear reader, North Korea is a sham bogeyman, and the sham bogeyman is the absolute greatest ally of the American ruling class, FOR-EV-ER.

Surely, a more beautiful sight/site can't even be imagined, surely!

To the embassy!

Got it from Getty Images

Ugh, I am sooo jealous. Guy in the back left doing the grunt face (and the police guy in the riot helmet is helping, no?), next to him, shoulders dropped, torso angled — clearly steering this Royal Coat of Arms, and the front left (handsome and laughing?) is clearly too excited to be anything other than the leader of the team. I hope these guys live to tell the grandbabies about this one... over, and over again.

Science, you are the worst, please go away

Here's a definition that, with a reading or two, reveals the pathology of SCIENCE!! Ready to define? (a very scientific activity, no?)

The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.

Like a sadistic stalker, who can find no pleasure unless it "knows" its subject... SCIENCE!! I'm more than a little pissed that it's so hard to de-bug my system, for you — SCIENCE!! — have fucked me up good.


This is, as I recall, what happened to me:

4 days ago, I lamented that a green mug — nice for tea drinkin' — had gone missing. The powerful one and I looked around for it... didn't find it. That was that... who gives a shit? Just a mug. I think nothing of it.

I shower Thursday morning. When I'm dried and ready for clothes, I make my way to the pants drawer. In this drawer, I have maybe 8 pairs of folded pants. But this time, I have maybe 8 pairs of pants and... and And AND... the green mug — sitting, as if nothing were a bother, upon my pants pile.

This freaks me out a bit. I wake up the powerful one — not very subtly, I'll add — demanding to know: Did you find the green mug? Did you find the green mug? Groggy, the powerful one tells me she did not.

It's in my pants drawer! How did it get here? And it's not just in there... it's sitting on top!

I'll throw out a few possibilities:

1) I found the mug (which I don't remember doing) and I decided to place it in the pants drawer (don't remember doing) and then I went ahead and put it there (obviously).

This is surely not impossible, but I don't have a history (how would I know?) of doing things I don't remember doing (I know, I know)

2) The powerful one, or the roommate found it, put it in the drawer, and lied to me about it — as they're both humans, they're certainly liars... but they're terrible liars, and I can't put any faith in this possibility.

3) A human or animal put it there, without being noticed, or informing anyone that they're "into" sneaking into rooms, and putting mugs in drawers.

4) Magic? Spirits? Whatever, you want to call it. Note: I am not saying that the green mug mystery is inexplicable. Absolutely not. What I am saying: I lack the knowledge or wisdom to explain it.

Literally, I am incapable of understanding what happened. That's the explanation I prefer, and believe to be "correct". Something happened beyond my ability to know or comprehend.

Also, that this the conspicuous movement of the mug is a message, from someone or something that wanted to send me a message, saying, roughly:


Attention Jerkoff Cyborg: You know nothing. You don't know how to listen. If you learn to listen, you might be able to learn a thing or two, perhaps even develop a relationship with other things in this world... but as of right now, you're a fucking idiot. Enjoy, Mover-of-the-mug.