Cosmic Ocean Rain

One Step from the Third Reich?

2014-11-01T09:46:00.000-07:00

All I ask is that, in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being. Since this terrible dividing line does actually exist, it will be a gain if it be clearly marked. Over the expanse of five continents throughout the coming years an endless struggle is going to be pursued between violence and friendly persuasion, a struggle in which, granted, the former has a thousand times the chances of success than that of the latter. But I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward. And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions. – Camus

John Stanton: Fascism, American-Style

Antarctica Stops Here

2014-08-19T19:31:00.000-07:00

A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction.–Chris Hedges

Jennifer Hynes: The Arctic Methane Monster's Rapid Rise

Spot the Fascists

2014-08-14T16:11:00.000-07:00

Serving and protecting the fatherland

The F-Scale "fascist scale" for identifying fascists, this from Theodor W. Adorno's classic The Authoritarian Personality:

Conventionalism
Authoritarian submission
Authoritarian aggression
Anti-intellectualism
Anti-intraception (hostility towards subjectivity and imagination)
Superstition and stereotypy
Power and "toughness"
Destructiveness and cynicism
Projectivity
Exaggerated concerns over sex

Industrial Sonata

2014-08-11T21:10:00.000-07:00

What a set of pipes

The machine appeared
In the distance, singing to itself
Of money. Its song was the web
They were caught in, men and women
Together. The villages were as flies
To be sucked empty.
God secreted
A tear. Enough, enough,
He commanded, but the machine
Looked at him and went on singing.

Paul Kingsnorth Dark Ecology: Searching for Truth in a Post-Green World

Gaza and the Inversion of the Jewish Soul

2014-07-17T12:52:00.001-07:00

"I am a proud Jew; my wife reads Torah in our Saturday morning minyan. But I am a Jew of another generation, one involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements, one who experienced American Jewry as a progressive force.

I see Israel as a disgrace to the eloquence, humanity, and social justice of Judaism as a world religion and global ethical experience. Not Neo-Cons of today itching for war, not American Jews and Israelis alike, who see Palestinians as vermin and worse (Golda’s famous remark about Schwarzas), not Mossad with its assassinations, not the Israel of today who use disproportionate force to enforce the degradation of another people.

If things go hard with Israel on the international scene, it won’t be because of so-called “self-hating Jews,” the way Israelis and AIPAC described all Jewish critics of Israeli policies and actions, but God who punishes Jews who commit murder in His name.

I’m embarrassed by all the replies to my Comment, because, rather than reasoned analysis I find only this massive defense-reaction which ignores the initial ethnic cleansing of an indigenous population, the stranglehold of the blockade, the callous shooting of children in the intafadas. Would world Jewry of today be jubilant if all Palestinians were exterminated? My guess is Yes, so full of hate we’ve become as a people."–Norman Pollack 'Israel’s Goliath to Palestine’s David: The Inversion of the Jewish Soul'

American Hustle

2014-07-03T21:43:00.002-07:00

Nobody Home

Who is Barack Obama, in fact? If you look into his eyes through the medium of television or newspaper photographs, you see a certain type of vacancy there. Rhetoric, after all, is just rhetoric. Behind it lies an empty person.

He's chic, he's poised, and in a spiritual sense, he stands for nothing at all. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat captured this when he wrote just last month that Obama is basically a performance. The man is a shell. He lacks an inner moral compass, which is why Wall Street, the Pentagon and the NSA were able to seduce him so easily.

Since he's en empty vessel, he was quickly filled up with the agendas of the wealthy and the powerful such that even genocide is now part of his own agenda.

Of course the type of vacancy I'm talking about can be seen in the eyes of Mr. Clinton, Bush Jr. or Sr. or Mitt Romney. Remember that guy? He was little more than a walking haircut. He was one of the silliest people to ever step onto the American political stage.

What does it mean, however, that the American people want hollow men, as T.S. Eliot once put it, to represent them? Romney after all gained got 47 percent of the popular vote.

This finally takes us into media ecology because horizontal analysis goes way beyond merely identifying these individuals as the mouthpieces of the rich and powerful, they are, but they are also the mouthpieces of nearly everyone else in the United States, which is why they get elected to office, and why the choice always boils down to Tweedle-dum vs. Tweedle-dee.

What American, for example, doesn't buy into the American dream? Why do soup kitchens and tent cities fly the American flag above them in a strange parody of patriotism? As John Steinbeck put it many years ago, "In the United States, the poor regard themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires". As I argue in 'Why America Failed', the goal of the settlers on the North American continent as far back as the late 16th century has been capital accumulation; "the pursuit of happiness" as Thomas Jefferson subsequently called it.

...Rich or poor, nearly every American wants to be rich, and in fact sees this as the purpose of life. In this sense, we have the purest democracy in the history of the world, because ideologically speaking the American government and the American people are on the same page. To quote Calvin Coolidge: "the business of America is business".

Hustling is what America has always been about. This is why our elected leaders have a vacant quality about them. After all the American Dream is about a world without limits, about always having more.

But "more" is not a spiritual path, nor is it a philosophy of life. It has no content at all. And this is why when you look into the eyes of an Obama or a Clinton or a Hillary Clinton, probably our next president, you see not only nothing but a kind of terrifying nothingness.–Morris Berman 'In Praise of Shadows'

The House Always Wins

2014-06-09T11:25:00.001-07:00

Children of the Corn: Jerad and Amanda Miller's Wedding Day

Another day, another shooting spree. This time, a rather unusual one in that a twenty-something married couple, Jerad and Amanda Miller, ambushed and killed two Las Vegas police officers at a pizza parlor before fleeing into a nearby Wal-Mart, killing another person before shooting each other to death as law enforcement closed in.

The media narrative quickly hardened into, "racist neo-Nazi wackos who liked to dress as The Joker and Harley Quinn". Sifting through the sad social media detritus left behind by the couple provides a somewhat more nuanced portrait of poverty-stricken conservatives, marginalized Midwesterners stoked to heights of indignant paranoia by, well, by virtue of the fact that they had concluded they lived in a de facto police state and liked their drugs and guns and didn't want to be bothered about it.

At one point Jerad accused the government of acting like Nazis and featured a video by a black YouTube vlogger bashing the Obama administration. Kind of muddies the simplistic "racist Nazi" narrative.

There is such a pathetic atmosphere surrounding this event: cops trying to eat lunch, a father shot refilling a soda cup, a destitute young couple, idealistic in their way, with no real prospects of becoming anything more than economic roadkill or fodder for America's industrial prison gulag. All of it unfolds in the repressive, desperate, oligarchic, continent-spanning casino America has devolved into.

Wearing an ankle-bracelet in one video, confined to house arrest for a felony marijuana bust, Jerad wearily and cynically points his camera out of his front window at the town court house. He laments how everything he wants to do (buy a gun, get married) has to first be cleared in that big, impersonal brick building downtown.

The shooting itself appears almost a perfunctory ending to the lives of these two, as if they'd simply run out of better ideas. The manifesto posted by Jerad —there's always a manifesto— recycles tired rightist revolutionary rhetoric that even its author sounds bored with.

What to make of this act? Stochastic terrorism? Suicide-by-cop? The twilight of middle America? I look at these two, and see a couple of lost young people that were really not wanted anywhere, even finding themselves tossed off the Bundy Ranch for Jerad's having an arrest record.

All Jerad and Amanda seemed to really want was to defy their own obscurity, to finally feature prominently in some grand drama. In the end they dreamt up a revolution for each other, on behalf of the future children they would never have, and died some mixture of romantically and ridiculously in the aisles of a Wal-Mart.

Just outside, a vast city of casinos waited implacably in the desert for the next unwanted suckers to roll into town and try their luck.

Bruce Sterling on Abandoning the Intrusive Technologies of Large Tech Companies

2014-05-29T07:36:00.000-07:00

Now I would never claim that the humble little Arduino, here in its hippie box, is the equal of Google or Facebook or Amazon or Microsoft or Apple, because I really like Arduino, and I’m sick of all five of those other guys. I still use their products and services, but I don’t trust even one of them any more. Those titanic enterprises don’t give me what I want and need. I put up with them, but I don’t like them. I don’t admire them. They are impositions. They destroy my self-respect. They chip, chip, chip away at my self-esteem. They think they’re irreplaceable. It’s not true. They are junk in the waiting.

It wouldn’t bother me to toss every electronic object in my home into the junk-heap and replace it with Arduino everything. I wouldn’t mind if I had fab-lab furniture and an open source sink. If I’m entirely surrounded by dropout, dissident, Rasberry Pi weirdness that only some fringe eccentric would use —I’ve been a fringe eccentric. I don’t mind! When it’s done with a purpose it’s a very fulfilling way of life.

It’s time to build alternative computational systems which reflect our own ethics and values. We can do that. We’re never going to meet our creative needs from these gigantic Big Data empires that are algorithmically-optimized to make us into sheep. They didn’t start out that way, that wasn’t their original intent, but now they’re all feverishly busy being colossally intrusive. I don’t want any part of it! I can’t look at their logos now without thinking of the dismal history of fast food and bad cigarettes. Those are not technical advances, those are vices, those are bad habits.

In the tech art world we have to break with our long habit of living off other people’s crumbs. We gotta stop sleeping in the rich guy’s used car. We’ve got the means, motive and opportunity now to make fresh mistakes. We can build our own means of expression, starting now. If we quit being scavengers, and stop acting like the livestock of these new moguls, I have a feeling the rest of it will take care of itself.

...
People forget that technology and technology art are hard labour. And if it's nothing but decadent pointing and clicking, how will you know if you're any damn good? You're good if you're building something that people can use with some sense of decency.

I Read the Isla Vista Spree-Killer's Manifesto So You Wouldn't Have To

2014-05-25T20:10:00.004-07:00

The Banality of Spree

Sometimes it seems as if there's a spree-killing in the United States every three weeks or so. In fact, that's perhaps a lower figure than statistical reality. It's hard to keep up, as at this point they tend to blur into one another in a dreary haze of hand-wringing, police tape, cop cars and stunned, increasingly shabbily-dressed and impoverished American bystanders. Once in awhile there will be a YouTube video left by the spreemeister himself, other times there is no declared or publicly-known motive at all, and very occasionally there is a long and windy manifesto accompanying the bloodbath.

On May 23, 2014, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger went on a spree-killing in Santa Barbara, California, killing 6 people and wounding 13 others. His main target was a sorority house off of the UCSB campus. Young Mr. Rodger —having died during the spree of either a self-inflicted gunshot wound or by fire from pursuing police— left no doubt whatever about his motive. Rodger's 140-page manifesto, My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger, is something of a watershed for the genre. Surely such an extreme act documented so thoroughly would have to make for an interesting read, yes? So thought I, and I want to spare you the temptation of doing the same, as I can assure it's almost certainly not worth your trouble unless you're some sort of forensic psychologist.

The Mega-Manifesto

The first thing one notices about the tract is that it's a curious mix of a kind of impressive rigor and maddening stupidity. I didn't come across a single typo or misplaced word in the entire document, the grammar is serviceable, the sentences are crisp and direct. It becomes almost immediately clear, however, that this was an individual with an extraordinarily blinkered way of looking at the world. This harsh rigidity was paired with an extreme emotional volatility and truly vast sense of entitlement. Rodger would seem to always speak and think in absolutist terms, in the harsh, merciless language of certain rational judging types that are usually content to become accountants or lawyers.

Biographically, he was a child of privilege. Born in England, his family emigrated to the United States when he was 5 years old. His parents divorced when he was 7. Rodger was bounced between their Southern California homes for the rest of his childhood and teen years.

Rodger paints his childhood leading up to the divorce as idyllic, becoming nearly rhapsodic at memories of flying kites with his dad high up in the "London Hills", full of "tall straw-like grass", and he painstakingly details one childhood pleasure after another. He tells us not only the story of the arrival of each of his video game consoles, but every interesting title he enjoyed and who he played these games with.

There's a certain propulsiveness to the simply mind-numbing detail here. "Is this leading somewhere? Does this become important later?" Soon enough it becomes clear that this is a suicidal person "gathering all to mind" while trying to simultaneously write an account of and re-live a happier time in his life.

The Blondes of Puberty

Those happy times definitively end for our spree-killing, kite-flying madman at age 13. This is When Puberty Hits. It is an epochal moment for young Rodger, and his guileless accounts of discovering masturbation and seeing nudie pics and photos of sex on the internet are written with the kind of frank and humorless unselfconsciousness that only the truly loony possess.

It quickly becomes clear that the sensitive and shy Rodger is not cut out for the emotional rough-and-tumble of finding a girlfriend to have a tumble with. He cries, and he cries, and he cries some more. His parents spoil and indulge and pamper the wailing waif, taking him around the world where he stares puffy-eyed from seats in first class on trips to Paris and Morocco with boundless self-pity.

Anyone familiar with the case at all probably knows that Rodger had a grudge against the female half of the species for having left him a virgin at age 22. It's girls, particularly a kind of iconic and somewhat phantasmagorical class of such known as "the blonde girls" that trouble young Rodger. These blonde girls will only "mate" with "brutes" of the common human subspecies known as jockus obnoxioucus and not with a "magnificent gentleman" such as himself.

Magnificent Gentleman

Now, it cannot be over-emphasized how Magnificent a Gentleman our Mr. Rodger considered himself to be. We see a spoiled, racist, snobbish, rage-driven crybaby who arrogantly tries to "rub the noses" of those locked out of his glamorous life of pampered psychosis into his sheer magnificence. Anyone who spends even a moment watching him walk down a red carpet at a premiere (courtesy his film industry-connected dad) or board a plane before them courtesy his first-class ticket, is given a derisive look of disdain. Yet when Rodger looks into the mirror, which he does constantly, he sees only a Magnificent Gentleman staring back.

It's actually extremely impressive, in a way, how without even once looking at Rodger, women everywhere somehow had this preternatural sense that "mating" with such a nasty little weasel was simply out of the question. It must be conceded, however, that it's not quite clear what women thought of Rodger, as he evidently never spoke to one. Though obsessing about them night and day, he considered asking one on a date to be out of the question, as they'd surely consider him a creep and turn him down in the most hurtful way they could think of before having sex with a jock right in front of him. They have bad wiring in their heads, you see? Bad wiring.

Despite their wiring problems, Rodger spends endless hours wandering the suburbs of Southern California, desperately hoping some blonde girl will walk up to him and be his girlfriend. Needless to say, this never happens. I'm not sure this ever even happened in the Penthouse letters section, but somehow Rodger was sold on this fruitless strategy for finding the love and sex he "deserved".

Every Semester I Tell Myself, I Am the Cosmos

Oh yes, Rodger "deserved" this blonde girl. Actually, one gets the sense that he only wanted a "hot girlfriend" as yet another status symbol checkbox to make up for his frustratingly diminutive stature and perceived outsider status as a Eurasian male from increasingly déclassé origins. I'm no psychologist, but what we seem to have here is another Napolean or Atila without the troops to back up his planned global purification campaign. A few hundred years ago little pricks like this would have been out burning witches by the score.

And our Rodger is nothing if not shameless about detailing his basest political fantasies: he wants desperately to be a global dictator and carry out a purification campaign by exterminating the female gender. This appears to be because this girl did not say "hi" back to him when he finally got up the drunken nerve to slur a "hi" out as one passed him in the street.

College is a string of disasters and unimaginable sufferings, as there are happy people around him sometimes and that makes him want to "flay the skin from their bodies". He resigns from classes as soon as he signs up for them, lying to his family all the way through about what he's doing with his days. He does confide in them that he wants to get laid and yet no one will fuck him so his parents send him to therapy, social skills counseling, life coaches, they do everything but hire a blonde girl to date him themselves (wait, they kinda do that too). Nothing helps, Rodger is all about that learned helplessness when it comes to anyone treating such a Magnificent Gentleman the way he deserves. No choice left then but to kill everyone.

Not that Rodger was not bullied, he was. He's bullied at school, he's bullied by boys, he's bullied by girls, he is eventually thrown from a rooftop and beaten by a mob of drunken frat-creatures for being such an obnoxious little wanker. All the while his "weak" dad is off elsewhere failing to make it big in the movie business while his mom is frustratingly failing to marry any of the super-rich guys she's dating. It's all pissing Rodger off, and when he's done crying about it he's going to be very, very angry about this.

The thing that torments him most of all are couples. He throws coffee at them, he shoots them with an orange-juice-filled super-soaker before speeding off in his BMW 3 Series. If there's a "hot blonde" around, she's invariably "on the arm" of a "low class" jock in "shorts and t-shirt". Our Magnificent Gentleman can't fathom how women cannot be shallow enough to go for his immaculately douchebaggy Armani shirts and Gucci sunglasses, falling invariably instead for these tall beach boys with their tanned abs and social skills.

Less Than Zero

Rodger struggles through his sufferings to find a reason to live. The problem is, he's profoundly stupid. For someone of such self-proclaimed "high intelligence" he's singularly bad at math and keeps repeatedly driving all the way to Arizona to buy Powerball tickets in order to win the 100+ million dollar jackpot he requires to lord it properly over his inferiors (which would be everyone else on the planet) and get a blonde girl for "sex and love". Not having attended a statistics class he didn't resign from for there having been a couple present, Rodger does not recognize the odds of this as being even longer than that of his dream-girl walking up to him on one of his forlorn suburban prowls. Needless to say, he loses thousands of dollars doing this and cries into his piles of losing lottery tickets.

He ends his manifesto with a justification for his femicidal agenda in full Mein Kampf mode, extolling the necessity of concentration camps to rid the world of the "plague" of women. Women, says Rodger, are all crazy and irrational(et tu?), fuck and love only stupid, obnoxious brutes. Therefore, in order to save humanity from spiraling degeneracy, all women must die, preferably by being starved to death, with Rodger watching gleefully from a giant tower (paging Dr. Freud) at the center of it all. This eliminationist campaign is to be carried out by his cadres of "highly trained and fanatically loyal troops". Oh boy, it's a full-blown fascist utopia with Rodger as dictator-for-life.

Oh wait, not all women must die, a few (blondes presumably) are to be kept hidden where it is determined which men are Intelligent and Gentlemanly enough to procreate with them. I'm guessing only one would rate as Magnificent enough for the honor. But these women are to be kept a secret, a dirty little secret that only Elliot Rodger and a few of his henchman know about. And sex? That is to be forgotten, as sex is the absolute evil that led him to this sorry end.

Retribution of the Annihilating, Misanthropic, Fascist

Though Rodger loathes ladies with a burning, frustrated passion, he is, when all is said and done, a misanthrope, and wants the male gender exterminated as well: "I hate all of you, humanity is a disgusting, wretched, depraved, species. If I had it in my power, I would stop at nothing to reduce every single one of you to mountains of skulls and rivers of blood. And rightfully so. You deserve to be annihilated. ... And all of you men, for living a better life than me, all of you sexually active men - I hate you. I hate all of you. I can't wait to give you exactly what you deserve: utter annihilation."

Maybe he planned to recruit squirrels or bears to fill out his cadres of fanatically loyal troops. In any case, he makes good on his misanthropy and actually ends up killing more men than women when he finally goes crackers. You know the rest. Our Magnificent Gentleman buys a bunch of weapons, formulates a plan, writes a manifesto, stabs his roommates to death and shoots up and runs over a bunch of people in the Beamer before committing suicide-by-cop.

What to learn from this? What to take away? I actually don't think there's any great message to be gleaned from this, any profound insight to be had into contemporary gender relations. We live in a society in which people go crazy, particularly people who paint themselves into a logical corner and leave themselves no seeming alternative than to go out in a blaze of idiocy.

Despite the hatefulness of the place in which this young, deeply disturbed and misanthropic man ended his life and those of half-a dozen others, somehow after reading this horrific drivel I find myself wanting to extend to him the humanity he denied us all, and to imagine him beyond all this, back where he was briefly happy, flying kites in the tall straw-like grass with daddy, high above the London hills.

First Slaves, First Cages, First Robots

2014-05-20T08:52:00.003-07:00

It's so convenient...

I find that people can be broadly divided into two types: those comfortable exploiting others and those uncomfortable doing so. The first type, the exploiters, are encountered everywhere in contemporary capitalist society, where they tend to do very well. Exploiters see nothing at all wrong with the exploitation for personal gain of other beings, the environment, or their social and political milieus, and in fact see doing so as beyond reproach, if not the very benchmark of intelligence.

It amazes me how shamelessly exploiters will talk of their desire to have others work on their behalf, or to profit from another's labor. How did this ever become an acceptable way to think and act? Searching for the roots of this way of thinking, it occurred to me how fundamental it is to every other problem we as a species are facing: war, environmental ruin, interpersonal abuse, vast inequality, an expanding poverty of meaning and justice.

What I have concluded is that this impulse first manifested as a kind of original sin of civilization: at some point someone coldly deduced that, rather than seek to gather fruit where it grew, fruit trees themselves could be strategically grown together in an orderly, protected area. They realized that, if one were so callous and perverse and "intelligent", plants could be thought of and treated as mere "robots" (robot, of course, meaning slave).

Next on the agenda would have been animals. They too could be gathered, penned, and bred for consumption. Why hunt them in the wild when they could simply be caged and slaughtered as needed? The final disastrous step in this thinking was then obvious: people would make for the ultimate slaves, the ultimate robots. Think of the things they could be made to do if one could somehow force them to obey your wishes!

... and empowering.

Agriculture, factory farming, human slavery, wage slavery, in fact all of modern civilization grew from this fundamental quirk in thinking. Someone very strange, and very perverse, and very morally stunted, had the idea and the nerve to treat the vast and unknowably profound web that is the living, natural world as mere raw material, devoid of intrinsic worth, fit for exploitation.

Every cruelty and disaster followed, and we are today lost amid the ever-expanding waves of wreckage rippling outwards from that first ignorant and unforgivable impulse.

Interstellar Delusions

2014-05-16T22:03:00.000-07:00

The second trailer for director Christopher Nolan's forthcoming film, Interstellar, is emblematic of the kind of non-response, and the kind of nonsense, we can expect from our power elite as the global ecological collapse unfolds. Rather than responsibly confront and seek to mitigate the crisis, the planet and all life upon it are to be sacrificed, incinerated and ultimately abandoned. We are to be offered, as a substitute for lives of dignity, rank malarkey about spectacular technological raptures, fixes and daring escapes. A kind of high-tech crisis cult will be encouraged to take hold as the endgame of industrial civilization reaches its terminal point.

The failure of our political, economic and cultural elite to concede and confront limits to the exploitation of the natural world, and of their fellow humanity, will leave us all to suffocate, burn and perish in a bombastic miasma of corruption, ignorance, and delusion.

We are consumed by a mania for hope, which our corporate masters lavishly provide at the expense of truth... They peddle the fantasy of eternal material progress. They urge us to build images of ourselves to worship. They insist —and this is the argument of globalization—that our voyage is after all decreed by natural law. We have surrendered our lives to corporate forces that ultimately serve systems of death.—Chris Hedges, Captain Ahab & U.S. Empire

Death of the Culture of Irony

2014-04-14T09:20:00.003-07:00

Recently, the Onion spoofed an ad campaign in which Applebee’s encouraged hipsters to visit their restaurants “ironically” and middle-aged adults to make fun of hipsters. The parody describes four “with it” young folks “seriously” eating their dinner at Applebee’s while ridiculing the food, service and atmosphere. Behind them sit three sad, middle-aged adults mocking the hipsters, sarcastically saying “because I know who the latest bands are I am too cool to eat a cheeseburger without making fun of it.” Neither group is genuinely happy about their meal or station in life. The Onion’s satire points out that irony and formality have become the same thing. At one time, irony served to reveal hypocrisies, but now it simply acknowledges one’s cultural compliance and familiarity with pop trends. The art of irony has lost its vision and its edge. The rebellious posture of the past has been annexed by the very commercialism it sought to defy.

Likewise in contemporary fiction, Tao Lin has made a reputation off reproducing disaffected, hipster malaise. In “Shoplifting from American Apparel,” Lin inserts himself as the protagonist Sam, a vegan writer who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Sam often feels vaguely “fucked” in a generally affectless world of name brands, Gchat and Facebook. He shoplifts a couple times and winds up in jail for a night. Occasionally, he mindlessly mistreats others for a laugh: inexplicably throwing a friend’s drink, hitting someone with a stick, and ordering someone to jump over a bush. The entire narrative is as disconnected from the larger society as the characters are from each other, and therefore it reads as a mimetic rendering of a soulless world rather than satire. New Tao Lins publish every day, feeding the culture’s desire to watch its own destruction.~Matt Ashby and Brendan Carroll 'David Foster Wallace was right: Irony is ruining our culture'

Philip Roth Surveys the Ruin

2014-04-12T00:20:00.000-07:00

Very little truthfulness anywhere, antagonism everywhere, so much calculated to disgust, the gigantic hypocrisies, no holding fierce passions at bay, the ordinary viciousness you can see just by pressing the remote, explosive weapons in the hands of creeps, the gloomy tabulation of unspeakable violent events, the unceasing despoliation of the biosphere for profit, surveillance overkill that will come back to haunt us, great concentrations of wealth financing the most undemocratic malevolents around, science illiterates still fighting the Scopes trial 89 years on, economic inequities the size of the Ritz, indebtedness on everyone's tail, families not knowing how bad things can get, money being squeezed out of every last thing--*that* frenzy--and (by no means new) government hardly by the people through representative democracy but rather by the great financial interests, the old American plutocracy worse than ever....The fantasy that prevails is the all-consuming, voraciously consumed popular culture, seemingly spawned by, of all things, freedom. The young especially live according to beliefs that are thought up for them by the society's most unthinking people and by the businesses least impeded by innocent ends.–Philip Roth

American Consumerism's Entropic Legacy

2014-04-07T21:27:00.000-07:00

Rolling Acres Mall: Akron, Ohio

The first mall of this series is where I spent my childhood: Rolling Acres Mall. I made my first wish with a penny in a fountain here, played pinball in the arcade - Aladdin's Castle - with my dad. My ears were pierced here, it's where I saw my first movie, and I still crave the hushpuppies and gyros sold in the food court. I came with my whole family here. Sat on Santa's lap. I encountered the mystery of plasma globes and learned to see with the "magic eye".

I would marvel at the massive palm trees and dream of going to Florida someday to see them in the wild - dead fronds of one is pictured in the fourth photo down, taken just beside the glass elevator that I always longed to ride up and down, as if teleporting.

It became a central place for gang activity in the 90's, leading to the eventual closing. I am not sad that this is it's fate - I am sad that this was the landscape of my childhood in the first place, and that it's impermanence can bring me to tears.-Heather Michelle Burns, commenting on Completely Surreal Photos Of America’s Abandoned Malls

Corporate Totalitarianism

2014-03-29T22:42:00.000-07:00

The world has been turned upside down. The pestilence of corporate totalitarianism is spreading rapidly over the earth. The criminals have seized power. It is not, in the end, simply Assange or Manning they want. It is all who dare to defy the official narrative, to expose the big lie of the global corporate state. The persecution of Assange and Manning is the harbinger of what is to come, the rise of a bitter world where criminals in Brooks Brothers suits and gangsters in beribboned military uniforms—propped up by a vast internal and external security apparatus, a compliant press and a morally bankrupt political elite—monitor and crush those who dissent. Writers, artists, actors, journalists, scientists, intellectuals and workers will be forced to obey or thrown into bondage. I fear for Julian Assange. I fear for Bradley Manning. I fear for us all.~Chris Hedges 'The Death of Truth'

The Culture of Irony

2014-03-25T12:46:00.001-07:00

News clown Jon Stewart

The best we can ask of our films and filmmakers is to be "smart," "sassy," and "wised-up" (to the tricks, games, and overall fraudulence of the system) in the approved Pauline Kael way. The search for truth gives way to play with cinematic forms and pop culture allusions. The result is the stylistic back-flips and video-store in-jokes of Pulp Fiction, the narrative ingenuities of Fargo, the slick stylishness of L.A. Confidential, the world-weary sardonicism of Altman's work (and the critical praise heaped on them and similar works). It's all about playing with (and not being trapped by) the codes. If all art can do is to reflect on oppressive cultural rules and conventions, then the purpose of art is to negotiate them deftly, to deconstruct them devastatingly, to play with them puckishly, and throughout it all, to avoid taking any of them seriously. This stance appeals to teenage boys above all because it requires no emotional knowledge or commitment. It's easy. It's safe. It threatens nothing and asks nothing of the viewer.

The debased pop version is our culture of irony. The knowing wink, nod, and smirk are everywhere. From Letterman to MTV to life, the point is to be with-it, bouncy, weightless. Hipness, coolness, detachment are the supreme virtues. Art and life are reduced to "styles," "surfaces," "spin," "looks." It's a kind of cynicism or despair, of course, but don't worry. Everything is stupid anyway; it's all just a big joke, lark, goof, game. Don't you have a sense of humor? Art doesn't really matter. Only a fool would take any of it seriously or get upset about it. - Ray Carney 'The Culture of Irony: Mike Leigh's Challenge to Criticism'

Galleries of Propaganda

2014-03-23T07:59:00.000-07:00

Parisian Diet of Art Crap

"The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." -Milan Kundera

I searched for pain, and I found none.

In those enormous halls of the Louvre, I searched for reminders of the agony of the people from the Caribbean, from islands like Grenada, where the native people were entirely exterminated during the French colonial onslaught. I searched for at least one tear, one moan, one canvas saturated with sadness and remorse. I searched for confessions.

But I found none.

I was trying to catch a glimpse of the desperate, terrified facial expressions of North African women, dragged into some empty rooms, and raped brutally by French soldiers. I was looking for paintings depicting the torture of Vietnamese patriots, and their execution by decapitation, for nothing else other than fighting for freedom and for their fatherland, against the appalling French colonial rule.

No – I found nothing, nothing at all in the Louvre, or in any other major French museums.

I stood in front of bizarre, sick and cold religious artwork, full of adult looking, perverse baby Jesus’s, or of some saints with daggers sticking out grotesquely from their heads. It was mostly total kitsch, created to order from the Christian church – a morally corrupt religious entity responsible for the extermination of entire nations, of entire races, worldwide!

I could find no paintings depicting the destroyed people of Rapa Nui, no killing of Southeast Asians, Africans and the islanders from both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

I have searched and searched, for years, during my ever decreasing in frequency visits to that old and sick continent, responsible for dozens of holocausts on basically all the continents of the Earth. - Andre Vltchek 'Shameful, Cowardly European Art'

Dogs of War

2014-03-16T00:25:00.001-07:00

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.––Harold Pinter, Nobel Acceptance Lecture

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.––George Orwell

Siege of Leningrad, World War II

While watching the Putin and Obama governments wrestle over the fate of Ukraine like two pit bulls fighting over a bloody chew toy, I find it useful to consider what this world would actually look like when and if the United States’ agenda is ever realized:

It would be a fascist nightmare of terminal corporate pillaging, of unchecked environmental devastation, of vast political corruption hidden behind a facade of faux democracy, of art and culture reduced to tawdry commercial spectacle, of impenetrable and ubiquitous propaganda, of growing millions of human beings subjected to slave and prison labor, of total surveillance and military control, of a local death squad on call to murder any man, woman or child who might even think of resisting any of it.

Do you look at the above list and think, "aren't we already there?" Very nearly so. As before World War II, the lights are again going out all over the world. This time, however, it is a trans-national oligarchy led by elites in the United States, and not Hitler's Germany, that is plunging the world into darkness and madness.

If only to forestall the day this boot of “full spectrum dominance” begins stamping on the face of humanity forever, I’m hoping the Russians can save the world from fascism ––very clearly ascendent again but in a new, sleek, and highly refined form–– one more time.

The True Great Game: An Age of Industrial Disaster

2014-01-29T10:21:00.002-08:00

I realized a couple of years ago that I could start a news site that had nothing but links to the day's unfolding industrial disasters. Call it, "IndustrialDisasterWatch". The litany of catastrophic news at IDW every single day would be so overwhelming that it would be hard to look at, a bit like this image on the right, of abandoned oil fields in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Just over the last couple of days we learn that GMO crops are ending the seeming eternal migration of the monarch butterfly, Monsanto is readying an unbelievably terrifying new kind of pesticide, Fukushima bleeds radiation into the Pacific with no end in sight, India has even worse air quality than China, whale pods are dying in Florida, "Polar bears along the coast of Alaska are suffering from fur loss and open sores. Starfish on the West Coast are disintegrating into piles of white goo and Pacific Herring are bleeding from their gills and eyes", environmental activists are being slaughtered across the world as industrial capitalism accelerates its already dizzying race towards some terminal point of planetary desecration and devastation.

It's not often confronted or discussed, curiously, the fact that something has obviously gone seriously amiss with this very odd species, homo sapiens. In just a few hundred years it has charged off on a bizarre tangent that involves a comprehensive ravaging of the entirety of the natural world, a course so far advanced that it now threatens to take down the entire biosphere of the planet.

One way of thinking about being born into the capitalist system is that you have arrived in the midst of someone's unfolding prank, as if humanity had been hacked by some bitter, fourteenth century sociopath who left running a suicidal cultural program that no one in perpetuity could break free of. Here you, along with everyone you know, have become unwitting participants in a cruel joke.

Conceptually, the hack was pretty simple: engage people's greed, formalize it into a kind of game (he who dies with the most toys wins), make the penalty for refusing to play the game starvation, privation and death. Voila, a self-perpetuating exploitation machine that runs amok until doomsday. Simple and ruthlessly effective. I wouldn't think it possible if I didn't know people who would do precisely this if they could.

What is to be done then, if one does not wish to look out the window one morning and find the above image looking back? As has been said, it's easier for people to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism. You'll notice that the capitalist system, this hack of human nature, places one rule above all: it is forbidden to end the game of capitalism.

Unfortunately, we must find some way to end the game or the game is going to end us.

NetFlix Streaming Recommendations

2014-01-23T17:35:00.001-08:00

Paul Dano in So Yong Kim's For Ellen

There's a tremendous number of mediocre films available via NetFlix's instant streaming service. Worse, they tend to have only unrepresentative and minor works of many great directors (Antonioni, Fellini, Godard). There are some gems hidden amid the dreck, however. Here are a few recommendations:

Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt)
Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch)
Topsy-Turvy (Mike Leigh)
For Ellen (So Yong Kim)
Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda)
Pina (Wim Wenders)
Frances Ha (Noah Bambach)
Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay)
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)
Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)
Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola)
Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
Minnie & Moskowitz (John Cassavetes)
Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach)
Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont)
White Material (Claire Denis)
Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé)
Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh)
Downfall (Oliver Herschbiegel)
Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson)
The Great Happiness Space (Jake Clennel)

Why the NSA Must Be Inside Your Smartphone

2014-01-21T14:32:00.001-08:00

We can do this the easy way, or the hard way.
Your choice, but the NSA is going to get at your thoughtcrime.

In his book, Technics and Civilization, philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford put forward the notion of “technics”. Mumford defined a technic as, “the interplay of technologies with the specific circumstances they arise from and lead to”. He contended that technics could be separated into two broad categories: democratic and authoritarian.

An example of a democratic technic would be a passive solar system: you orient the windows and doors of your home in such a way as to maximize the utility of available sunlight. Anyone might do this, and it relies on no additional resources from elsewhere. As an example of an authoritarian technic, consider instead a solar panel array. Such a technic requires the mining and importation of rare earth materials, manufacturing, transport, waste infrastructure, and ultimately a military for purposes of securing access to all of the above.

If we accept the validity of Mumford’s insight, it seems that the contradiction facing advocates of Internet freedom is that they are demanding a quintessentially authoritarian technic serve democratic ends. We're surprised and outraged at the oppressive ends our purportedly liberating devices are "secretly" being put to.

Should we be?

While a smartphone may appear at a superficial level to be a fantastically empowering device, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that ubiquitous surveillance is embedded into its very existence, quite apart from any environmental devastation related to its manufacture and eventual disposal. After all, the people, those dispossessed of their lands by mining conglomerates serving manufacturing giants producing such devices for technology companies like Apple or Samsung, may be rather upset at and resistant to the destruction of their communities.

Think of those scary "Maoists", or those "ecoterrorists", all those moms and pops alienated by and opposing mining in India or fracking in the United States or the tar sands in Alberta. What if at some point you yourself decide it isn't worth it? As the hidden costs behind all of this glittering consumer gadgetry inexorably reveal themselves in your food, your working conditions, your weather and your tap water, what if you decide the price is too high?

That sort of dissent is going to take a military supported by a sophisticated surveillance apparatus to root out and suppress. And that is what Edward Snowden really dumped in our collective lap like a tub of dead sea lion pups. Suddenly your empowering device was rendered deeply disempowering, as you discovered that you are now a monitored subject of suspicion in addition to being manager of the cognitive dissonance involved in collaborating with slave labor and the annihilation of an indigenous community half a world away.

It could not be any other way.

If the fondest wishes of Internet privacy advocates were realized, and net communication were rendered completely invulnerable to government surveillance, what would change? The NSA would shift to even more invasive and sophisticated camera technology, satellites, acoustic devices, micro-drones, secret "national security" deals with popular net services for backdoor access to your data and activity and, ultimately, to your thoughts. It would have to. The necessity is built into the device in your hand. Remember, we can't allow the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

And all the while the mines grind on, the people are thrown off their land to get at the bauxite, the factories are dumping sludge, the underpaid factory laborers are daydreaming of suicide. The water is increasingly polluted, the air blackened, the forests clear-cut, the mountaintops blasted away; all to serve you, happy consumer, and your new SecureSmartphone®. What will your verse be?

Best not to think of it, and instead to try and enjoy your game of Angry Birds. And you should, as increasingly those are the only birds you'll ever see.

The Pain of the World

2013-12-23T12:20:00.000-08:00

Food Court

Nineteen years old~
a baby who made a baby.
She sits at the table,
waiting for the child
playing outside (the Ronald McDonald thingy).
A small Barbie doll, 8" high,
lies there, abandoned, smiling
in a short skirt and high heels
looking up
at nothing in particular.
I try not to stare,
Mother, child, doll;
How fragile we all are.

The mother has an identity (narrative) as a mother; the child, in turn, clings to the Barbie doll, dresses it up and down, and fashions stories around it. This, for me, is the pain of the world, tender souls trying to cope with things as best they can, just holding it together ~ Morris Berman Spinning Straw Into Gold

The Spectacular, Vacuous, and Hyper-Violent Denouement of American Empire

2013-12-21T01:01:00.002-08:00

Yeah I got the cultural critique that is 'Spring Breakers'
and know Harmony Korine would agree with this article

Each year children experience a shocking amount of violence due to abuse by adults and fueled by a gun culture that celebrates aggression in the name of freedom and security, but in reality is nothing more than a huge source of profit for the defense industries, corporations that trade in violence and death, and the growing incarceration state. The figures pointing to the deaths due to violence against children and youth are staggering. “Each year: More than 1,500 children ages 0 to 17 die from child abuse and neglect - about 80% of deaths occur among children younger than age 4. More than 5,000 young people ages 1 to 24 were murdered, making homicide the second leading cause of death for this age group.” The Republican Party’s response to such issues has been to curtail women’s reproductive rights, curtail valuable health-care facilities for low-income women, criminalize the behaviors of young people, engage in voter suppression, saturate schools with the police, and remove millions of poor children from valuable food stamp assistance.

America has not only lost its moral compass, but any vestige of credibility in its alleged support for equality, freedom, justice and democracy itself. The United States is not a banana republic, as some critics claim, but much worse. It has become the enemy of democracy and a symbol of the new authoritarianism. As Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Yates and many other theorists of inequality have demonstrated, power and wealth are now firmly concentrated in the hands of the 1% and translate into forms of material and symbolic violence evident in a range of policies designed to dismantle all vestiges of the welfare state from school lunch and food stamp programs to benefits for the unemployed. The social contract is not under attack by the plutocrats, it is being shredded.

This form of concentrated power is a machinery of social and civil death intent on waging wars, destroying public schools, public transportation, unions, the environment and all vestiges of the commons, social contract, and public good. Accumulating capital is the new common sense of the land, making exchange value the only value that matters, regardless of the social pathologies it promotes throughout the entire society. Unsurprisingly, faith in the defining institutions of democracy are at an all-time low as politics becomes simply another swindle created by a casino capitalism in which the house always wins. Instead of moral and political outrage manifested in massive demonstrations and new-found political struggles, there is a eerie quietude and sense of desperation enveloping the fast-moving darkness of authoritarianism that is engulfing the country.

America has become a society that thrives on a denial of reality - mistaking democracy for capitalism, massive inequality for meritocracy, ignorance for reason, war for peace, charity for justice, freedom for an unchecked individualism, and entertainment for cruelty. Casino capitalism’s Clinton-Bush “greed is good” image, made famous by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, has been replaced by the more realistic and sinister values represented by Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. As power becomes global, unrestrained by the politics of nation states, it has become more arrogant, less controllable and more vicious in its pursuit of resources, profits and wealth. This predatory ruling financial class are the new zombies - parasites sucking the blood out of everything they come in contact with while spreading misery, suffering, and death all over the globe. One consequence is that more and more individuals and groups are becoming imaginary others, defined by a free floating, largely unaccountable capitalist class that inscribes them as disposable, redundant and irrelevant. This is particularly true for a growing number of people, especially young people, who increasingly inhabit zones of terminal exclusion - lacking jobs, burned by overwhelming debt and written out of the discourse of democracy.

This grim reality has produced a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will, and open democracy. Casino capitalism destroys those institutions that generate the capacity for critique, dissent, thoughtfulness and collective struggles. In its place, it has erected a series of cultural apparatuses that revel in idiocy, celebrity culture, conformity and infantilization. Fox News is the new Pravda, only dumber. Ninety-five percent of talk radio is controlled by right-wing ideologues spewing out an endless tirade of racist, sexist, hate-filled discourse, parading as innocent escapism. Hollywood almost exclusively embraces big-budget films whose worth is defined largely through the aesthetics of hyper-violence and the number of people slaughtered graphically, often in slow motion. The mainstream media does not produce violence directly, it simply legitimates it as a form of public pedagogy, parading as innocent entertainment. This is the pedagogy of infantilism - an unacceptable obscenity of the stupid and arrogant trading in violence, spectacles, common sense, and, ultimately, repression. ~Henry Giroux 'Cultures of Violence in the Age of Casino Capitalism'

Red Water

2013-12-20T17:29:00.002-08:00

'The Cove' in Taijii Japan

Imagine this: it’s a beautiful sunny day and you are out enjoying it with your entire family- your grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters and young children. Then out of nowhere a man approaches your group and puts a gun to your back. Within moments, a gang appears and they have your entire family under siege. They kidnap you and using brutal force drive your family to a house. Once there, holding tightly onto your baby and trying to protect those you love from the grip of the kidnappers you watch in horror as your beloved mother is murdered before your eyes. As she cries out in pain, with her blood everywhere the killers turn and begin to come after you. They rip your newborn out of your hands and beat and wrestle you closer to the room where you just watched them your family. They choke you so that you can barely breathe as you struggle to get to your baby, who shakes and shivers crying out for you. You are stabbed to death as your teenage daughter is taken away where she will be locked up and become a slave. She will have to beg for food for the rest of her life. Your newborn son is taken deep into the forest and left to die alone slowly and in terror. Eventually, some hikers will come across his body, his mouth still open waiting for you to nurse him. He will die of starvation or at the jaws of predators.

Welcome to a typical day for a dolphin family in Taiji, Japan.~ Cry of the Matriarch: A Call to End Bloody Slaughter in "The Cove"

Everything But Justice

2013-12-11T20:17:00.002-08:00

Unfortunately the corporate state has done a very good job of creating this vast distance between the left in this country and the oppressed, and part of it was of course channeling energy on the part of the left into boutique activism; which has infected every college campus in this country. You know - multiculturalism, gender studies - all of which I support, but not when it is divorced from justice.

And so it was everything but justice, while the working class in this country was raped. And we did nothing but busy ourselves with gender politics which is just what they wanted us to do. And we have to reclaim that justice, the fundamental justice, the right of the poor and working men and women to have a decent standard of living. ~Chris Hedges 'Strategy for Radical Change at Green Party of New Jersey Convention'