the unlikely story of how America slipped the surly bonds of earth & came to
believe in signs & portents that would make the middle ages blush
this site is a labor of love. i.e., if you love me enough,
I'll be able to complete it. send proof of love via button above. please. if you can. thanks.
The Department of Veterans Affairs' top mental health official said Tuesday he made a poor choice of words when he sent his colleagues an e-mail about suicide data that started out with "Shh!"
I'm pulling in the Big Covers here so you can fully appreciate some of the pairings: St. Augustine with Carlos Castaneda; Marcus Aurelius with Deepak Chopra; Nelson Mandela with Michael Dell; Adam Smith with Rhonda Byrne (you know, The Secret babe); and -- my all-time favorite -- Sigmund Freud with Malcolm Gladwell. Folks, it just doesn't get much better than this. And at current prices, now you can own this entireLibrary of World Bullshit for only $67.85. Act now while supplies last!
On the off chance that you might be feeling extra generous, I've also added them to my...
Note that by gifting me with these exceptional books, you will be all but guaranteeing many more fine posts to this blog -- impotent rage being the mother of all babbles.
UPDATE: these items no longer appear on my wish list because some magnificently kind (and most likely crazy) reader bought them for me within 10 minutes of posting this.
Conversely, given the recent volcanic eruption in Chile and the cyclone in Myanmar, you might prefer to ignore this asinine balderdash and do something actually useful with the money.
There are no exact numbers for this largely hidden problem, but anonymous surveys among college students suggest that 17 percent of them have self-injured, and experts estimate that self-injury is practiced by 15 percent of the general adolescent population.
...Ben-Shahar is simply repackaging what the happiness researchers now know -- that the people who say they are happy are those who are part of a community, have purpose-driven lives, and don't sweat the small stuff. (The researchers also know from their surveys that the happiest of happy Americans are Republicans, social butterflies, and bigots.)
That last link points to a much deeper analysis in a New Yorker article titled The Experiment. Here's a clip...
According to a counter-terrorism expert familiar with the interrogation of the Al Qaeda suspect, Mitchell announced that the suspect needed to be subjected to rougher methods. The man should be treated like the dogs in a classic behavioral-psychology experiment, he said, referring to studies performed in the nineteen-sixties by Martin Seligman and other graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania. The dogs were placed in harnesses and given electric shocks that they could not avoid; they were then released into pens and shocked again, but this time they were given a chance to escape the punishment. Most of them, Seligman observed, passively accepted the shocks. They had lapsed into a condition that he called “learned helplessness.” The suspect’s resistance, Mitchell was apparently saying, could be overcome by inducing a similar sense of futility. (Seligman, now a psychology professor at Penn, has spoken at a SERE school about his dog research.)
SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. It's a program run by the US Air Force at Camp Carson outside Colorado Springs, roughly 100 miles south of where I sit typing this. And which city btw, although this fact is of course unrelated, has been called the Evangelical Vatican.
is that a dagger or a crucifix I see
you hold so tightly in your hand? blood of eden
Our text this fine Spring Sunday morning is a book titled Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Emphasis in original. As in Original Sin. For yes, brothers and sisters, that's what we're talking about here. But "sin," far from being original, is such a cliché these latter days. So no, this here is more of a cognitive sorta deal with a little Hindoo ego analog tossed in to make it more... gripping. You know all about hurtful acts, don't pretend you don't. Like that time you pissed on the American flag when you thought no one was looking. That's right, we're talking about your well deserved shame.
You see, you never grew up. Never wanted to grow up and face adult responsibilities. All you ever wanted to do was get ripped out of your mind and chant some Hopi bullshit as a neon harvest moon the size of a State Fair ferris wheel rose over the desert somewhere outside Santa Fe that you can't remember now where it was because you were too fucked up on weed at the time to even read the road signs. Think about what you've lost.
Confronted with the sheer enormity of life, you feel stunned, conflicted, confused. Understandable for one so morally defective as yourself. Van Morrison once said, "If I ventured in the slipstream,
between the viaducts of your dream..." What he meant by that, precisely, we shall never know, as this left-hand conditional element of his poetic hypothetical was the sideways outcome of some lysergic astral week now long lost to history. Before he went all Celtic on us. Ah well, not important, really. But I was reminded of Van being born again in a ditch where the back roads stop, et cetera, because over the weekend I watched a movie called Slipstream. And that's not really important either, except for this one part where a menacing psychopathic geek played by Jeffrey Tambor says something like: "People say I look like Dr. Phil. Do you think I look like Dr. Phil?"
So me, not knowing who the fuck Jeffrey Tambor was in the first place, I'm going holy shit, they got Dr. Phil to act the part of a homicidal maniac! Probably not all that great a stretch for him, but still, I'm all like wow how hip is that? Chalk it up to unwilling dispensation of misbelief. But it got me thinking about Dr. Phil and Oprah and all the helpful selfers out there in Amazonland.
It will come as no surprise to faithful readers that I have not read Word One of any of the psycho-spiritual books pictured here (emphasis on the psycho). And why is that? It's because, even without the annoyance of slogging through these dismal handbooks of the mod-ren spirit, I already know what they say. Allow me to summarize:
You are miserable.
You don't know why.
But actually, you really do know why.
It's because, deep down, face it, you're a fucking coward.
But cheer up, it's not too late.
If only you would take responsibility for your life.
This is my rifle and this is my gun.
God grant you the wisdom to know the difference.
But in your pride, you have turned away from the Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka -- from the Jewel in the Lotus to the babe in the Porsche -- and so, my friend...
It's all your fault!
It's your fault because, as we all know, you create your own reality! Don't believe me? Just click on that Google search link and see if you don't find, as I just did, 36,000+ hits for that exact phrase. Come on, people, haven't we already been receiving this precious teaching from Jane Roberts (a.k.a. Seth), Esther and Jerry Hicks (a.k.a. Abraham), and J.Z. Knight (a.k.a. Ramtha) for decades now? THAT is what the bleep we know!
And lest you be deceived into thinking that this is merely some New Age spiritual thing, note how nicely this miasmic theory of kultural karma meshes with the agenda of the Republican party. Poor? Well, you created that reality. Old, sick, black, brown, red, yellow? Fucked up on bad morphine in some Veterans Hospital after three tours in the Iraq and such as? Ditto, dude. Get your shit together. Semper Fi, motherfucker. No pain, no Jane.
...(don't ask why; the connections become obvious at a certain point) led me to Mission and Menace: Four Centuries of American Religious Zeal. The book description tells us that "Chapters include: Colonial Beginnings: The City Set Upon a Hill; The Second Great Awakening, Manifest Destiny, Reform and Reaction; From the Civil Rights Movement to the Vietnam War; The Political Distortion of Religion: Triumphant Fundamentalism, Impeachment, the War Against Terrorism; and more."
Oh yeah, so much more.
So no, far from being just some shuck pulled out of the asses of asses, so to speak, this self-fulfilling prophecy of reflexive reality creation is a Universal Truth, an essential element of The Tradition, the philosophia perennis et universalis, if you catch my esoteric drift. There is a cure. And make no mistake, the doctor is IN.
In what may have been the single most revealing paragraph anyone has reported about the Bush administration, the author Ron Suskind, writing in The New York Times Magazine two weeks before the 2004 election, recounted a conversation with a presidential aide who spoke sarcastically of journalists and their "reality-based community." The aide, who sounded uncannily like Karl Rove, informed Suskind with great condescension that a "judicious study of discernible reality" is "not the way the world really works anymore." The aide explained, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Main Entry: ruth
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English ruthe, from ruen to rue
Date: 13th century
1 : compassion for the misery of another
2 : sorrow for one's own faults : REMORSE
~ Merriam Webster 11th Collegiate Dictionary
The latest issue of The Economist, published yesterday, includes an article titled The new face of hunger. Here's a clip...
"World agriculture has entered a new, unsustainable and politically risky period," says Joachim von Braun, the head of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, DC. To prove it, food riots have erupted in countries all along the equator. In Haiti, protesters chanting "We're hungry" forced the prime minister to resign; 24 people were killed in riots in Cameroon; Egypt's president ordered the army to start baking bread; the Philippines made hoarding rice punishable by life imprisonment. "It's an explosive situation and threatens political stability," worries Jean-Louis Billon, president of Côte d'Ivoire's chamber of commerce.
Gosh, why is this happening? The article suggests a couple reasons, high among which is this:
The prices mainly reflect changes in demand -- not problems of supply, such as harvest failure. The changes include... the sudden, voracious appetites of western biofuels programmes, which convert cereals into fuel. This year the share of the maize (corn) crop going into ethanol in America has risen and the European Union is implementing its own biofuels targets.
Googling around a bit, I find that Oxfam Policy Adviser, Robert Bailey said: "People in poor countries are being driven off their land to make way for new plantations. They are working in punishing conditions for pittance. The price of food is spiralling rapidly out of their reach and rainforests are being destroyed."
And on November 6 last year, George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian...
It doesn't get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava. The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the district of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought. It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks. Doubtless a team of development consultants is already doing the sums.
I have long suspected that much of the populist bandwagon boosterism for "the ecology" (sorta like the Iraq and such as) has been driven by a turning away from deeper and more difficult social issues -- like the poverty and such as -- and instead toward a burning spiritual desire to get a pat on the head and a gold star from Goddess Gaia.
Kühl's book [The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism], when read in conjunction with Ronald Rainger's An Agenda for Antiquity, reveals that complicity took place at the very highest social, political, and academic levels; Rainger's suggests that intense racism extending well beyond anti-Semitism was intimately linked to the early conservation movement in America.
Zygmunt Bauman shows that the problem of coping with "wasted lives" — the "superfluous" populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts — provides a key for understanding some otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.
It's old news (you can tell by the use of such phrases as "John Edwards" and "front-runner"), but dig it: ABC News reported on October 5 last year...
In a scathing attack, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards went after front-runner Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., Friday, calling her a "corporate Democrat," comparing top Clinton campaign strategist Mark Penn to former Bush aide Karl Rove and assailing Penn's ties to Blackwater USA, the embattled private firm of military contractors accused by the Iraqi government of firing upon and killing 11 unarmed Iraqi civilians last month.
Well, Hilldog didn't give Penn his walking papers over that little dustup, but she did fire his ass this past Sunday. Something about Columbia. Maybe her shipment was late.
Blackwater, oh man. Hard to let that one slide. Check out the slick Flash slideshows on their site (try Advanced Training - Homeland Security). Or check this -- and be afraid. The photo to the left is from a Wired article -- also old news, same date as the above -- titled Blackwater's Hired PR Guns: Hillary's Helpers, wherein it is stated, and I quote...
UPDATE: Oooh, oooh. "In addition to his role as a top campaign consultant to the Clinton campaign, Mark Penn is the worldwide president and CEO of Burson-Marsteller. The firm's lobbying subsidiary BKSH helped Blackwater's top executive, Erik Prince, prepare for his congressional testimony this week."
From the tone of hand-rubbing glee, you might expect the author to be just another disgruntled ex-hippie, like me. But in that you would be so wrong. Sharon Weinberger is the author of Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld ("The story of how a lunatic fringe science project became favored by Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.") And as Wikipedia informs us: "She was editor-in-chief of Defense Technology International, a monthly magazine published by the McGraw Hill Aviation Week Group." Having worked Aviation Week in my chequered ex-hippie PR-puke past, I can tell you: that's some serious shit, kids.
Anyway: Hillary, Blackwater, Burson-Marsteller -- don't miss the video of ruthless pigfucker Mark J. Penn talking with senile child molester Harold Burson about "Communications and Corporate Responsibility."
And something about a homecoming queen, wasn't it?
One 2-star Amazon review of Daydream Believers (there are, as of yet, no 1-stars) complains that Kaplan "disappears deep into a dull history of RAND." As if we already knew that story all too well. The surprising fact is, there has never been a full-scale history of the RAND Corporation despite its central role in the Cold War arms race and all that went with that curious time, out of which we have yet to emerge. However, this exceedingly odd historiographic "oversight" is about to be remedied with next month's release of Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire. I ordered it on my birthday last November. I can't wait. The jacket copy apparently states...
In the Kennedy era, RAND analysts became McNamara’s Whiz Kids and their theories of rational warfare steered our conduct in Vietnam. Those same theories drove our invasion of Iraq forty-five years later, championed by RAND affiliated actors such as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Zalmay Khalilzad. But RAND’s greatest contribution might be its least known: rational choice theory, a model explaining all human behavior through self-interest.
I know, I know. You're saying "rational choice theory? give me a break." Too 'eavy fer yer head, innit? But wait. Did you see A Beautiful Mind in which Russell Crowe plays Nobel Laureate John Nash? You did, I know you did (it won four Oscars, so the probabilities are with me here). Remember the fantasy scene with the chicks in the bar? Nash says...
If we all go for the blonde and block each other, not a single one of us is going to get her. So then we go for her friends, but they will all give us the cold shoulder because no one likes to be second choice. But what if none of us goes for the blonde? We won't get in each other's way and we won't insult the other girls. It's the only way to win. It's the only way we all get laid.
A solution here means a determination of the amount of satisfaction each individual should expect to get from the situation.
That's originally from page one of Nash's 1996 Essays on Game Theory. Game theory -- hold that thought; it links everything in this (only seemingly scattered) post. And remember: Nash was mad. Not "driven to madness" by the implacable pressure of events, as the movie trailer romantically suggests. No. Barking at the moon mad, bonkers, cracked, insane. Dementia praecox, psychosis, schizophrenia. On his own Nobel Prize page he writes...
...after my return to the dream-like delusional hypotheses in the later 60's I became a person of delusionally influenced thinking but of relatively moderate behavior and thus tended to avoid hospitalization and the direct attention of psychiatrists. Thus further time passed. Then gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation.
A couple paragraphs later he refers to "the gap period of about 25 years of partially deluded thinking providing a sort of vacation..." This is not to take anything away from what I must accept (I'm unqualified to judge) as Nash's mathematical brilliance. And less from his honesty with regard to his madness -- an honesty in no way shared by RAND and the Pentagon.
OK, the hard part is over. Now you can kick back and watch the video. But do watch for the bit corresponding to this gloss I found on The Guardian (thanx and a tip o' the hat to BrainMeta.com)...
"I realise what I said at some times may have over-emphasised rationality," an elderly John Nash tells Curtis in an extraordinary interview, after emerging from years of battling schizophrenia. "Human beings are much more complicated than the human being as a businessman." In fact, the documentary notes sardonically, experiments show that only two kinds of people behave like perfect little economists in every arena of life: economists themselves, and psychopaths.
Hey, hey, we're the monkeys!
from "The Trap" - John Nash's Game: "Fuck You, Buddy"
In what may have been the single most revealing paragraph anyone has reported about the Bush administration, the author Ron Suskind, writing in The New York Times Magazine two weeks before the 2004 election, recounted a conversation with a presidential aide who spoke sarcastically of journalists and their "reality-based community." The aide, who sounded uncannily like Karl Rove, informed Suskind with great condescension that a "judicious study of discernible reality" is "not the way the world really works anymore." The aide explained, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Blackwater, oh man. Hard to let that one slide. Check out the slick Flash slideshows 
