Sunday, June 21, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
We all need little get a little Wilde sometimes...
"Be yourself. Everyone else is taken".
- Oscar WIlde
Sent from my iPhone
Thursday, June 18, 2009
I dig a rant: "The American Empire Is Bankrupt"
From Truthdig: By Chris Hedges
This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.
Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.
There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”
It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.
I called Hudson, who has an article in Monday’s Financial Times called “The Yekaterinburg Turning Point: De-Dollarization and the Ending of America’s Financial-Military Hegemony.” “Yekaterinburg,” Hudson writes, “may become known not only as the death place of the czars but of the American empire as well.” His article is worth reading, along with John Lanchester’s disturbing exposé of the world’s banking system, titled “It’s Finished,” which appeared in the May 28 issue of the London Review of Books.
“This means the end of the dollar,” Hudson told me. “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America’s discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don’t have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.”
China, as Hudson points out, has already struck bilateral trade deals with Brazil and Malaysia to denominate their trade in China’s yuan rather than the dollar, pound or euro. Russia promises to begin trading in the ruble and local currencies. The governor of China’s central bank has openly called for the abandonment of the dollar as reserve currency, suggesting in its place the use of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights. What the new system will be remains unclear, but the flight from the dollar has clearly begun. The goal, in the words of the Russian president, is to build a “multipolar world order” which will break the economic and, by extension, military domination by the United States. China is frantically spending its dollar reserves to buy factories and property around the globe so it can unload its U.S. currency. This is why Aluminum Corp. of China made so many major concessions in the failed attempt to salvage its $19.5 billion alliance with the Rio Tinto mining concern in Australia. It desperately needs to shed its dollars.
“China is trying to get rid of all the dollars they can in a trash-for-resource deal,” Hudson said. “They will give the dollars to countries willing to sell off their resources since America refuses to sell any of its high-tech industries, even Unocal, to the yellow peril. It realizes these dollars are going to be worthless pretty quickly.”
The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America’s military domination. Our military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion, before we add on things like nuclear research. The next closest national military budget is China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.
There are three categories of the balance-of-payment deficits. America imports more than it exports. This is trade. Wall Street and American corporations buy up foreign companies. This is capital movement. The third and most important balance-of-payment deficit for the past 50 years has been Pentagon spending abroad. It is primarily military spending that has been responsible for the balance-of-payments deficit for the last five decades. Look at table five in the Balance of Payments Report, published in the Survey of Current Business quarterly, and check under military spending. There you can see the deficit.
To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters. This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our treasury bonds. This cycle appears now to be over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable.
“We will have to finance our own military spending,” Hudson warned, “and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive.”
The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.
“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism ... there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what’s happened.”
The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.
This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.
Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.
There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”
It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.
I called Hudson, who has an article in Monday’s Financial Times called “The Yekaterinburg Turning Point: De-Dollarization and the Ending of America’s Financial-Military Hegemony.” “Yekaterinburg,” Hudson writes, “may become known not only as the death place of the czars but of the American empire as well.” His article is worth reading, along with John Lanchester’s disturbing exposé of the world’s banking system, titled “It’s Finished,” which appeared in the May 28 issue of the London Review of Books.
“This means the end of the dollar,” Hudson told me. “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America’s discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don’t have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.”
China, as Hudson points out, has already struck bilateral trade deals with Brazil and Malaysia to denominate their trade in China’s yuan rather than the dollar, pound or euro. Russia promises to begin trading in the ruble and local currencies. The governor of China’s central bank has openly called for the abandonment of the dollar as reserve currency, suggesting in its place the use of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights. What the new system will be remains unclear, but the flight from the dollar has clearly begun. The goal, in the words of the Russian president, is to build a “multipolar world order” which will break the economic and, by extension, military domination by the United States. China is frantically spending its dollar reserves to buy factories and property around the globe so it can unload its U.S. currency. This is why Aluminum Corp. of China made so many major concessions in the failed attempt to salvage its $19.5 billion alliance with the Rio Tinto mining concern in Australia. It desperately needs to shed its dollars.
“China is trying to get rid of all the dollars they can in a trash-for-resource deal,” Hudson said. “They will give the dollars to countries willing to sell off their resources since America refuses to sell any of its high-tech industries, even Unocal, to the yellow peril. It realizes these dollars are going to be worthless pretty quickly.”
The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America’s military domination. Our military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion, before we add on things like nuclear research. The next closest national military budget is China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.
There are three categories of the balance-of-payment deficits. America imports more than it exports. This is trade. Wall Street and American corporations buy up foreign companies. This is capital movement. The third and most important balance-of-payment deficit for the past 50 years has been Pentagon spending abroad. It is primarily military spending that has been responsible for the balance-of-payments deficit for the last five decades. Look at table five in the Balance of Payments Report, published in the Survey of Current Business quarterly, and check under military spending. There you can see the deficit.
To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters. This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our treasury bonds. This cycle appears now to be over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable.
“We will have to finance our own military spending,” Hudson warned, “and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive.”
The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.
“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism ... there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what’s happened.”
The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.
Ritualism
Tamara Dean
Purification
Giclée print on archival photo rag 76 x 102cm
Limited edtion of 8
Limited edtion of 8
Sass showed me these photos last night from her friend Tamara's new photographic exhibition. I'm not up on the world of art photography, and so I've never seen anything like them. I've been haunted, intrigued, and captivated by the series all morning.
Check out the exhibition:
Ritualism
A series of photographs by
Tamara Dean
A series of photographs by
Tamara Dean
CHARLES HEWITT Gallery
335 South Dowling Street, Darlinghurst NSW 2010
335 South Dowling Street, Darlinghurst NSW 2010
Telephone: 02 9331 4988
Gallery hours Mon - Sat 10am -6pm
http://www.charleshewitt.com.au/artists/tamara-dean/ritualism
http://www.charleshewitt.com.au/artists/tamara-dean/ritualism
Opening 6.00 – 8.00pm Thursday 25th June
exhibition runs until Tuesday 14th July 2009
To be opened by Gavin Wilson, Curator and Author
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Leaving Home, A Reply to Another Me
... No maybes, it's definitely Wednesday. I had a late night again, but this time studying statistics. All these maths in a psych course would've otherwise been a drag, but a day and then some concentrating wove some order back into the chaos. And then some. Turns out being blown out with the fortitude to return opens wormholes I can surf. Maybe I'll take a dip in that volcano? Fuck all this talk of standing at the precipice - let's burn a layer off this onion for a change. That pharmacist knew his empirical evidence, but this week I'm the guy smiling at your dull all knowing eyes when you look up 'anecdotal evidence' in the medical dictionary. Bran, fruit, water, sleep, sauna, meditation, and a geekfeast of mathematics did what benzos could only mimic. Oh, and remembering the way you would've looked on that first night if I'd have had my eyes. Red lava flowing down your shoulders and through my veins. All kinds of Taras spinning white noise on the springtime air. Like a dream. I'm remembering beyond before, and I assure you my friend, that shit is most certainly possible. All standard deviations aside, today I was there, now, where I didn't know I hadn't been. And had. Beguiling, benificent, beyond before. Those stairs aren't going to break this stride. That couch'll be outta there tomorrow, and I'm gonna follow.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Kanzeon/Kwan Yin/Chenrezig and so on...
"the eyes of (infinite) compassion observing sentient beings,
assembles an ocean of blessing beyond measure".
assembles an ocean of blessing beyond measure".
- Lotus Sutra: 23.
Sent from my iPhone
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Leaving Home
… and I can't even scag out right, you dig? It's hard to tell if the nets are meshing me together, or whether I'm the mesh. We're praying the rope will hold these closets in when I cart them back to my parents'. Muscles already aching so much, I don't think I could handle my skeletons all over the place. Not tonight. Especially not in Punchbowl. But that toke means I don't get to choose, huh. You're doing 'your thing': coming and going, retiring, glowing. Not the usual connections, more like bubbles of lava - every now and every then blowing fluid form up into psyche and leaving me stranded at the apex, anxious of the rocks that'll surely come down. Surely? I've seen it before. Last time I ran away. Is that all I'm seeing up here? Forms of before? Bemoaning, befuddled, bereft: before. Now that's one heavy fuckin' boulder, even when it rolls back into the cauldron. I don't have the couch in me tonight, bro. Those stairs are too steep. I'll do it, but not tonight. I'm breathing from root to crown, but that last rock fell on my fuckin' toe, Joe. No chakras to balance down there – Valium's your man. The pharmacist said they're addictive, but it's been a difficult week. A deep breath, half a pill, and I'll stop when I carry the couch down on Tuesday. Or maybe, Wednesday?
Friday, June 12, 2009
Single Drops
and my tears
no longer feel sorry for me,
they just roll back
toward the heart I couldn't before see
no longer feel sorry for me,
they just roll back
toward the heart I couldn't before see
Sent from my iPhone
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
In Ramana's Eyes
"When the eyes of the student meet the gaze of the teacher, words of instruction are no longer necessary".
- Ramana Maharshi
Sent from my iPhone
Monday, June 8, 2009
Gazing
If you want to know God,
Then turn to your friend,
And don't look away".
Then turn to your friend,
And don't look away".
- Rumi
Sent from my iPhone
Mary Mackillop Outreach Centre
As part of my work's 160 year anniversary celebrations, the board of the company's benevolent foundation recently offered us the opportunity to trade a day's work in the ivory tower for some direct community service.
The Mary Mackillop Outreach Centre is a private initative through St. Vinnies which provides day-support services to the chronically disadvantaged. They do a sweep of the local boarding houses a couple of times a week and provide a healthy lunch, entertainment, social stimulation and emotional support.
After my inital confrontation with the severity and diversity of trials these folks were dealing with, I rested into an enriching day of uncommon resonances. I decided early on that I wasn't there to provide, I was there to share - and it was in this spirit that I fell upon unexpected pleasures...
... like cutting up chorizo with Nadine, an intellecually handicapped woman who had been abandoned by her family and left to the institutions. She revealed that despite never knowing her father she "still love(d) him. I say you forgive and forget otherwise you're all divided". She was a serious ACDC fan, and we sang All Night Long and Thunderstruck a few times while dicing a pot of garlic cloves.
... and spending a few lucid moments with the men I've been alongside but rarely with over the last year. We cooked a beautiful spanish bean stew, chopped up a salad, and baked macaroons for the whole centre, all the while pausing for a moment in a common humanity otherwise guarded in the daily grind.
The Mary Mackillop Outreach Centre is a private initative through St. Vinnies which provides day-support services to the chronically disadvantaged. They do a sweep of the local boarding houses a couple of times a week and provide a healthy lunch, entertainment, social stimulation and emotional support.
After my inital confrontation with the severity and diversity of trials these folks were dealing with, I rested into an enriching day of uncommon resonances. I decided early on that I wasn't there to provide, I was there to share - and it was in this spirit that I fell upon unexpected pleasures...
... like cutting up chorizo with Nadine, an intellecually handicapped woman who had been abandoned by her family and left to the institutions. She revealed that despite never knowing her father she "still love(d) him. I say you forgive and forget otherwise you're all divided". She was a serious ACDC fan, and we sang All Night Long and Thunderstruck a few times while dicing a pot of garlic cloves.
... and spending a few lucid moments with the men I've been alongside but rarely with over the last year. We cooked a beautiful spanish bean stew, chopped up a salad, and baked macaroons for the whole centre, all the while pausing for a moment in a common humanity otherwise guarded in the daily grind.
... and decipering drawings, colouring in boxes and circles, and playing join the dots with William, a deaf, mute, partially blind, schizophrenic and severely intellectually disabled man who had been in care from birth. We spent a half an hour slowly escalating the complexity of our games, and somewhere in the space between those dots, John, Fabian and I received the chance to share a quiet moment inside his unique world.
I remain perpetually cynical of the trickle-down corporate benevolence model's efficency for distributing social prosperity, but for as long as this form of social organisation predominates and I'm forced to spin as a cog in that often dissociated machine, moments like these are like holding solid gold in a fiat-currency economy. ;-P
Found in the fabric of existential crisis...
"And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost.
He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm
ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for
something to which to cling; that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely
sincere because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to
bring order to the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine
ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric,
posturing, farce".
He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm
ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for
something to which to cling; that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely
sincere because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to
bring order to the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine
ideas, the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric,
posturing, farce".
- Søren Kierkegaard
Sent from my iPhone
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
The Trapeze Swinger
Please, remember me
Happily
By the rosebush laughing
With bruises on my chin
The time when
We counted every black car passing
Your house beneath the hill
And up until
Someone caught us in the kitchen
With maps, a mountain range,
A piggy bank
A vision too removed to mention
But
Please, remember me
Fondly
I heard from someone you're still pretty
And then
They went on to say
That the pearly gates
Had some eloquent graffiti
Like 'We'll meet again'
And 'Fuck the man'
And 'Tell my mother not to worry'
And angels with their gray
Handshakes
Were always done in such a hurry
And
Please, remember me
At Halloween
Making fools of all the neighbors
Our faces painted white
By midnight
We'd forgotten one another
And when the morning came
I was ashamed
Only now it seems so silly
That season left the world
And then returned
And now you're lit up by the city
So
Please, remember me
Mistakenly
In the window of the tallest tower call
Then pass us by
But much too high
To see the empty road at happy hour
Leave and resonate
Just like the gates
Around the holy kingdom
With words like 'Lost and Found' and 'Don't Look Down'
And 'Someone Save Temptation'
And
Please, remember me
As in the dream
We had as rug-burned babies
Among the fallen trees
And fast asleep
Aside the lions and the ladies
That called you what you like
And even might
Give a gift for your behavior
A fleeting chance to see
A trapeze
Swing as high as any savior
But
Please, remember me
My misery
And how it lost me all I wanted
Those dogs that love the rain
And chasing trains
The colored birds above there running
In circles round the well
And where it spells
On the wall behind St. Peter's
So bright with cinder gray
And spray paint
'Who the hell can see forever?'
And
Please, remember me
Seldomly
In the car behind the carnival
My hand between your knees
You turn from me
And said 'The trapeze act was wonderful
But never meant to last'
The clown that passed
Saw me just come up with anger
When it filled with circus dogs
The parking lot
Had an element of danger
So
Please, remember me
Finally
And all my uphill clawing
My dear
But if i make
The pearly gates
Do my best to make a drawing
Of G-d and Lucifer
A boy and girl
An angel kissin on a sinner
A monkey and a man
A marching band
All around the frightened trapeze swingers
Happily
By the rosebush laughing
With bruises on my chin
The time when
We counted every black car passing
Your house beneath the hill
And up until
Someone caught us in the kitchen
With maps, a mountain range,
A piggy bank
A vision too removed to mention
But
Please, remember me
Fondly
I heard from someone you're still pretty
And then
They went on to say
That the pearly gates
Had some eloquent graffiti
Like 'We'll meet again'
And 'Fuck the man'
And 'Tell my mother not to worry'
And angels with their gray
Handshakes
Were always done in such a hurry
And
Please, remember me
At Halloween
Making fools of all the neighbors
Our faces painted white
By midnight
We'd forgotten one another
And when the morning came
I was ashamed
Only now it seems so silly
That season left the world
And then returned
And now you're lit up by the city
So
Please, remember me
Mistakenly
In the window of the tallest tower call
Then pass us by
But much too high
To see the empty road at happy hour
Leave and resonate
Just like the gates
Around the holy kingdom
With words like 'Lost and Found' and 'Don't Look Down'
And 'Someone Save Temptation'
And
Please, remember me
As in the dream
We had as rug-burned babies
Among the fallen trees
And fast asleep
Aside the lions and the ladies
That called you what you like
And even might
Give a gift for your behavior
A fleeting chance to see
A trapeze
Swing as high as any savior
But
Please, remember me
My misery
And how it lost me all I wanted
Those dogs that love the rain
And chasing trains
The colored birds above there running
In circles round the well
And where it spells
On the wall behind St. Peter's
So bright with cinder gray
And spray paint
'Who the hell can see forever?'
And
Please, remember me
Seldomly
In the car behind the carnival
My hand between your knees
You turn from me
And said 'The trapeze act was wonderful
But never meant to last'
The clown that passed
Saw me just come up with anger
When it filled with circus dogs
The parking lot
Had an element of danger
So
Please, remember me
Finally
And all my uphill clawing
My dear
But if i make
The pearly gates
Do my best to make a drawing
Of G-d and Lucifer
A boy and girl
An angel kissin on a sinner
A monkey and a man
A marching band
All around the frightened trapeze swingers
Monday, June 1, 2009
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Bush officials' defence won't cut it - Richard Clarke
While Obama continues to prevaricate on making Bush officials accountable for their role in post-9/11 policies, former national co-ordinator for security and counter-terrorism under US presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush, Richard Clarke, has drawn his pen and yelled a veritable ‘on guard’ in this piece for the Washington Post.
Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defence.
"Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans," Condoleezza Rice recently said. Last month, Dick Cheney called the morning of September 11, 2001, a "defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second look" at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued.
I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Centre tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice-president's office and remember glimpsing the day's horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while National Security Council staff co-ordinated the government response. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive.
I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armoured vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.
Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems they want to be excused for the measures they authorised after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of 80-storey buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."
I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But decisions made in the following months and years - on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping - were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules. The September 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings to pre-empt a major al-Qaeda attack.
When Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock. Fearful of new attacks, they authorised the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were a good idea.
This zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared their inaction prior to the attacks would be detailed before the next vote - which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission - and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.
The first response they discussed was invading Iraq. While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defence Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea.
On detention, the Bush team leaped to the assumption that US courts and prisons would not work, despite the fact that the US counter-terrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists and others and had a 100 per cent conviction rate in the US justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response available.
The FBI, which had successfully questioned al-Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, there was the immediate and unwarranted assumption that extreme measures - such as waterboarding one detainee 183 times - would be the most effective.
The Bush administration's response undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event. The White House thought that 9/11 changed everything. It may have changed many things, but it did not change the constitution, which the vice-president, the national security adviser and all of us who were in the White House that tragic day had pledged to protect and preserve.
Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defence.
"Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans," Condoleezza Rice recently said. Last month, Dick Cheney called the morning of September 11, 2001, a "defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second look" at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued.
I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Centre tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice-president's office and remember glimpsing the day's horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while National Security Council staff co-ordinated the government response. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive.
I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armoured vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.
Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems they want to be excused for the measures they authorised after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of 80-storey buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."
I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But decisions made in the following months and years - on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping - were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules. The September 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings to pre-empt a major al-Qaeda attack.
When Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock. Fearful of new attacks, they authorised the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were a good idea.
This zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared their inaction prior to the attacks would be detailed before the next vote - which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission - and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.
The first response they discussed was invading Iraq. While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defence Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea.
On detention, the Bush team leaped to the assumption that US courts and prisons would not work, despite the fact that the US counter-terrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists and others and had a 100 per cent conviction rate in the US justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response available.
The FBI, which had successfully questioned al-Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, there was the immediate and unwarranted assumption that extreme measures - such as waterboarding one detainee 183 times - would be the most effective.
The Bush administration's response undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event. The White House thought that 9/11 changed everything. It may have changed many things, but it did not change the constitution, which the vice-president, the national security adviser and all of us who were in the White House that tragic day had pledged to protect and preserve.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
What Makes Us Happy - The Atlantic
Sass sent this great link the other day on the Sydney Integral list. It's a story about an enormous longitudinal study done at Harvard on adult development across the lifespan. I couldn’t recommend the story more, and this vid is a neat taster:
George Friedman at the Sydney Writer's Festival
"We live in a world where people are prepared to see entire countries wiped out rather than disrupt their own pleasures."
Monday, May 18, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
The Strangest Baseball Game Ever
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Friday, May 15, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Friday, May 1, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
You Can Make Him Like You - The Hold Steady
You don't have to deal with the dealers
Let your boyfriend deal with the dealers.
It only gets inconvenient
When you want to get high alone.
You don't have to know how to get home
Let your boyfriend tell the driver the best way to go.
It only gets kind of weird
When you wanna go home alone.
You don't have to know the inspiring people
Let your boyfriend know the inspiring people.
You can hang in the kitchen
Talk about the stars and the upcoming sequel.
If you get tired of your boyfriends things
There's always other boys.
There's always other boyfriends.
If you get tired of your boyfriends scene
There's always other scenes.
There's always other boyfriends.
You don't have to deal with the dealers
Let your boyfriend deal with the dealers.
It only gets inconvenient
When you want to get high alone.
You don't have to go to the right kind of schools
Let your boyfriend come from the right kind of schools.
You can wear his old sweatshirt.
You can cover yourself like a bruise.
If you get tired of your boyfriend's things.
There's always other boys
There's always other boyfriends.
If you get tired of your football friends.
There's always other boys
There's always other boyfriends.
If you get tired of the the car he drives.
There's always other boys
You can make him like you.
If you get tired of the music he likes.
There's always other boys
You can make him like you.
They say you dont have a problem until you start to do it alone.
They say you dont have a problem until you start bringing it home.
They say you dont have a problem until you start sleeping alone.
There's always other boys.
There's always other boyfriends.
There's always other boys.
You can make him like you.
Let your boyfriend deal with the dealers.
It only gets inconvenient
When you want to get high alone.
You don't have to know how to get home
Let your boyfriend tell the driver the best way to go.
It only gets kind of weird
When you wanna go home alone.
You don't have to know the inspiring people
Let your boyfriend know the inspiring people.
You can hang in the kitchen
Talk about the stars and the upcoming sequel.
If you get tired of your boyfriends things
There's always other boys.
There's always other boyfriends.
If you get tired of your boyfriends scene
There's always other scenes.
There's always other boyfriends.
You don't have to deal with the dealers
Let your boyfriend deal with the dealers.
It only gets inconvenient
When you want to get high alone.
You don't have to go to the right kind of schools
Let your boyfriend come from the right kind of schools.
You can wear his old sweatshirt.
You can cover yourself like a bruise.
If you get tired of your boyfriend's things.
There's always other boys
There's always other boyfriends.
If you get tired of your football friends.
There's always other boys
There's always other boyfriends.
If you get tired of the the car he drives.
There's always other boys
You can make him like you.
If you get tired of the music he likes.
There's always other boys
You can make him like you.
They say you dont have a problem until you start to do it alone.
They say you dont have a problem until you start bringing it home.
They say you dont have a problem until you start sleeping alone.
There's always other boys.
There's always other boyfriends.
There's always other boys.
You can make him like you.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Beyond Good and Evil
"'I am a wanderer and a mountainclimber' Zarathustra said to his
heart. 'What returns, what finally comes home to me is my own self.
Alas, I have begun my loneliest walk. But whoever is of my kind cannot
escape such an hour - the hour which says to him 'only now are you
going your way to greatness'. Peak and abyss, they are now joined
together. For all things are baptised in a well of eternity, and lie
beyond good and evil'".
heart. 'What returns, what finally comes home to me is my own self.
Alas, I have begun my loneliest walk. But whoever is of my kind cannot
escape such an hour - the hour which says to him 'only now are you
going your way to greatness'. Peak and abyss, they are now joined
together. For all things are baptised in a well of eternity, and lie
beyond good and evil'".
- Fred Nietzsche
Sent from my iPhone
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Pretty in Pink
Caroline laughs and
It's raining all day
She loves to be one of the girls
She lives in the place
In the side of our lives
Where nothing is
Ever put straight
She turns herself round
And she smiles and she says
'This is it'
'That's the end of the joke'
And loses herself
In her dreaming and sleep
And her lovers walk
Through in their coats
Pretty in pink
Isn't she?
Pretty in pink
Isn't she?
All of her lovers
All talk of her notes
And the flowers
That they never sent
And wasn't she easy
And isn't she
Pretty in pink
The one who insists
He was first in the line
Is the last to
Remember her name
He's walking around
In this dress
That she wore
She is gone
But the joke's the same
Pretty in pink
Isn't she?
Pretty in pink
Isn't she?
Caroline talks to you
Softly sometimes
She says
'I love you' and
'Too much'
She doesn't have anything
You want to steal
Well
Nothing you can touch
She waves
She buttons your shirt
The traffic
Is waiting outside
She hands you this coat
She gives you her clothes
These cars collide
Pretty in pink
Isn't she?
Pretty in pink
Isn't she?
- The Psychadelic Furs
It's raining all day
She loves to be one of the girls
She lives in the place
In the side of our lives
Where nothing is
Ever put straight
She turns herself round
And she smiles and she says
'This is it'
'That's the end of the joke'
And loses herself
In her dreaming and sleep
And her lovers walk
Through in their coats
Pretty in pink
Isn't she?
Pretty in pink
Isn't she?
All of her lovers
All talk of her notes
And the flowers
That they never sent
And wasn't she easy
And isn't she
Pretty in pink
The one who insists
He was first in the line
Is the last to
Remember her name
He's walking around
In this dress
That she wore
She is gone
But the joke's the same
Pretty in pink
Isn't she?
Pretty in pink
Isn't she?
Caroline talks to you
Softly sometimes
She says
'I love you' and
'Too much'
She doesn't have anything
You want to steal
Well
Nothing you can touch
She waves
She buttons your shirt
The traffic
Is waiting outside
She hands you this coat
She gives you her clothes
These cars collide
Pretty in pink
Isn't she?
Pretty in pink
Isn't she?
- The Psychadelic Furs
One Taste
Just as the great ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so too, this Dhamma and Discipline has one taste, the taste of liberation.
(Uposatha Sutta, Udana Verse 5, translated by Bhikkhu Nanomoli 1992, p.162)
(Uposatha Sutta, Udana Verse 5, translated by Bhikkhu Nanomoli 1992, p.162)
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Monday, April 20, 2009
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Vale J.G. Ballard
"The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not"
- J.G. Ballard
- J.G. Ballard
Friday, April 17, 2009
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
"... so it is not a matter of building up the awakened state of mind, but rather of burning out the confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product, dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which us created must, sooner or later, die. If enlightenment were created in such a way, there would always be the possibility of ego reasserting itself, causing a return to the confused state. Enlightenment is permanenent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it".
- Chögyam Trungpa
Sent from my iPhone
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Integral Strategies for the Recomposition of Masculinities
My proposal for the Integral Anthology of Sex and Gender: Integral Subjects.
Integral Strategies for the Recomposition of Masculinities
Luke Fullagar
Via an integral philosophical ontology of bio/psycho/socio/cultural development, this paper will seek to situate critical historical moments in the modernist and postmodernist philosophical understanding and practice of (western) masculinity against key developmental continua (ie. evidence-based cognitive, moral and ego developmental models). This method will be invoked to suggest elemental aspects of a trajectory in the creation and investigation of, and responses to, the establishment of a social politics of (western) masculinity in the varying stages of feminist, gay and masculinist projects, and to point at a possible direction for contemporary research, philosophy and practice in the masculinities
This argument will act as precursor to the critical assertion that (following Connell) postmodern historical consciousness about gender as situated within liberal pluralism may be extended from the dualist perspectives of early Men's Liberation which vacillated between masculine annihilation in favour of androgyny on account of this historical construction perspective (ie. a 'myth of the given'), and the preservationist reactions to this early postmodern differentiation and critique of masculine dominance (e.g. the mythopoetic movement) which sought to erroneously adopt a liberationist political strategy for the dominating social practice of masculinity (e.g. hypothesising a 'deep masculine' essence in male bodies) in response to the perception of pro-feminist rejection of difference.
I will proffer a reconstructive postmodenist or 'integral' strategy which adopts this historical consciousness as leverage for the degendered recomposition and re-embodiment of social practices in all forms of human bodies absent their assignment as being characteristic of the sexed body. It is from this position that the thorough insight practices encouraged by integral communities for exploring embodiment of body, mind and spirit in self, culture and nature will be endorsed. Moreover, a critique of some dominant statements on gender from the (mostly North American) integral philosophical and practice worldview will be offered to define currently perceived errors and edges of development in this philosophical school.
By demonstrating how a rationalist, hegemonic, western practice of masculinity has been dominant in both pro and con investigations across gender literature, this paper will illustrate how an integral masculinities will be required to continue to address the important political strategy of delegitimising the documented sociological perils generated (in part) by this form of masculinity (e.g. violence, control of finance, technology and machinery), while not stymying generative movement in the philosophy, process and practice of gender reformation for those at the edge of the development of social justice projects. One critical point to be indicated here is the circumstances of an integral (heterosexual) male's existence in the current western techno-industrial societies (and in the aftermath of a decade of western neo-conservative politics) in the absence of historical crucibles such as feminism or queer theory which have delegitimised attacks against integral women or homosexuals at the level of societal norms, and therefore the concrete-operations or rule/role action-logics which dominate the rationalist western practice of masculinity. Heterosexual male-specific gender liberation practices will be postulated as an area of extremely poor attention by academia and social justice movements, and the philosophical difficulties for the development of such a socio-political strategy (e.g. the ability of postmodern feminism, for example, to mobilise females for the cause of 'women' versus the philosophical difficulty for integral male bodies to mobilise a genus group with a significant enough political voice) in the current climate will be further explored. This position will not be argued in opposition to feminist or queer projects, but rather, as a discrete aspect of the lagging plight of a recomposed masculinity as attached to heterosexual male embodiment at the site of western techno-industrial society and culture. It will be postulated that meeting this perspective in practice will be critical to navigating the differentiation between postmodern and integral stages of hetero-male bio/psycho/socio/cultural embodiment, which currently includes a number of subtly reactionary, modernist preservationist perspectives hostile to a perceived weakness in the western hetero-male's postmodern condition, and championing the mistaken guise of a 'new man'.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Thursday, April 2, 2009
JG Ballard on the economy of dreams...
"However hard we resist, our dreams still carry the legend "Made in
the U.S.A."
the U.S.A."
Sent from my iPhone
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
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