Saturday, February 25, 2006
Jailbait
I have an online friend that I speak to infrequently. I'm not sure how she found me, but she writes me whenever I switch my Yahoo Messenger program off of "invisible"mode. She (if it is a she) claims to be 16 if I remember correctly. She has shown a tendency to try to steer the conversation in directions that I don't think are appropriate for a 38-year-old man to discuss on the internet with an underage teen.
For example, just now:
For example, just now:
Katrina: hey, u know what?She didn't respond.
Joel: ?
Katrina: on account of me being ur friend, u should send me something free.. like a vibrator or handcuffs or something
Katrina: lol..
Joel: How about some history books? Or maybe a how-to-become-an-FBI-agent handbook...
Carbs Are Cheap / or / Very Important Personhood
I am in a so-called VIP lounge called "THE MORE" at the Taipei airport. The price of VIPhood -- or should I say VIPness -- here is a sum of the local currency which was described to me as "about $30US." I don't know the local x-rate, so I can only speculate on exactly what that will mean on my credit card bill. Maybe about 38.50. Which is cheap, if I consider it in relation to how much money I saved by flying economy class instead of business class, which would have entitled me to free use of the China Airlines VIP lounge, where I was politely refused entry earlier.
It's not a bad dealio. Sitting areas, TVs, meeting rooms, internet access, mechanical massage chairs... I think I even see a rack of free liquor across the room, but I don't drink, so that's of little concern to me.
And then there are the refreshments. Help yourself. All you care to consume. Ice cream (green tea, peanut, vanilla, and strawberry), sweet frozen concoctions, soft drinks, porridge (also corn-based, I figure-- white and carbo-licious), corn and seaweed soup, sticky buns, fruit cocktail... The theme I see here is: Carbohydrates are cheap. Protein, on the other hand, tends to cost about 10 times as much, and if you give people unrestricted access to it, you'll have difficulty running a profitable business at appealing prices. No, better to let them load up on sugar and sticky buns, until either the sugar high or the gluten stupor reaches the necessary threshold for a sense of satiation (or queasy aversion or simple paralysis) to take hold and stop the consumption cycle.
...
I once saw a description of my Myers-Briggs temperament type, ISFP, that described us as being both cynical and hopeful. I thought that was insightful, since those are two qualities that might seem superficially incompatible, but I think actually they're not, and I feel I have a lot of both. There can be hope in cynicism.
It is nice to be once again free of the vortex of Los Angeles. I am on my way to Thailand again, to see friends there for about a week. I also have a trip to San Diego planned after this, and then I'm off to Morocco for an EO conference. So I will be mostly away from L.A. for the next month. Works for me.
My music recording project has been on hiatus while I paid more attention to my "day job" for a while. But I expect to crank it up again in the coming months.
Time to hit the showers before my next longish flight to Bangkok. From there I will fly to Chiang Mai, barring unforeseen diversions.
See? Cynical, yet hopeful.
It's not a bad dealio. Sitting areas, TVs, meeting rooms, internet access, mechanical massage chairs... I think I even see a rack of free liquor across the room, but I don't drink, so that's of little concern to me.
And then there are the refreshments. Help yourself. All you care to consume. Ice cream (green tea, peanut, vanilla, and strawberry), sweet frozen concoctions, soft drinks, porridge (also corn-based, I figure-- white and carbo-licious), corn and seaweed soup, sticky buns, fruit cocktail... The theme I see here is: Carbohydrates are cheap. Protein, on the other hand, tends to cost about 10 times as much, and if you give people unrestricted access to it, you'll have difficulty running a profitable business at appealing prices. No, better to let them load up on sugar and sticky buns, until either the sugar high or the gluten stupor reaches the necessary threshold for a sense of satiation (or queasy aversion or simple paralysis) to take hold and stop the consumption cycle.
...
I once saw a description of my Myers-Briggs temperament type, ISFP, that described us as being both cynical and hopeful. I thought that was insightful, since those are two qualities that might seem superficially incompatible, but I think actually they're not, and I feel I have a lot of both. There can be hope in cynicism.
It is nice to be once again free of the vortex of Los Angeles. I am on my way to Thailand again, to see friends there for about a week. I also have a trip to San Diego planned after this, and then I'm off to Morocco for an EO conference. So I will be mostly away from L.A. for the next month. Works for me.
My music recording project has been on hiatus while I paid more attention to my "day job" for a while. But I expect to crank it up again in the coming months.
Time to hit the showers before my next longish flight to Bangkok. From there I will fly to Chiang Mai, barring unforeseen diversions.
See? Cynical, yet hopeful.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
State of the Union
Last week, while George W Bush was giving his "State of the Union" address, I was swimming in a pool at the YMCA in downtown Los Angeles. I didn't go out of my way to listen to the address, because I expected it to be mostly lies and propaganda, and I knew I could read the text of it later online anyway, and not have to deal with quite so much of the churning of my insides that happens when I sit and listen to W for too long.
While I was swimming in the pool at the YMCA, a young man was being shot and killed near the front door of our new building. I was alerted by a text message and two voicemails from employees when I got out of the pool.
By the time I got back to our building, the whole area (including a section of Sunset Blvd) was taped off and swarming with about 30 officers from LAPD's Northeast Division. The police were very courteous and professional. They said they were acquainted with the victim, who they believed to be a member of a gang on L.A.'s west side. Apparently an altercation started next door in front of the Olive Motel. The victim was shot and subsequently collapsed and died outside our door.
One officer I spoke to said that most of the murders in the Northeast Division end up being gang members killing gang members. So there is some cold comfort in that for those of us who aren't in gangs. But they're still murders... and real facts, and therefore more relevant as a barometer of the "state of the union" than the president's speeches.
I still have not learned the victim's name, or anything else about him. I don't know who shot him, or what the status of the case may be, though we will probably inquire with the LAPD at some point.
Many of our staff were in our offices upstairs when the shooting occurred, and they heard the shots. We had a staff meeting the following morning to talk about it. As with any such traumatic event, the way people reacted and felt about it varied. But all of us were affected in one way or another. I think talking about it helped. We also made sure that people knew we would assist in getting counseling appointments through our health care provider for anyone who thought it might be helpful. Some time has passed since then, and people seem to have recovered their equilibrium pretty quickly. But concern about violence in the neighborhood and in the world in general remains.
Today, George W's words were in the news again. His speeches are written by handlers and specialists that we never see, and read off of teleprompters, leaving the general population to guess for themselves at the authorship and the level of sincerity behind the reading. If it even occurs to them to guess, instead of just passively letting the words wash their brains without critical filtration.
There was so much redundant hypocrisy, manipulation, doublespeak, and lying in the State of the Union address, it was hardly worth the time it took to read it, but I read it anyway. The most surreal and Orwellian element is the emphasis on ending tyranny and spreading freedom, liberty, democracy and peace throughout the world. In fact, it seems to me, the Bush administration has done more to undermine all of those values, both within the US and on the global scale, than I ever imagined it could have done in my darkest daydreams. And in my analysis, the motive behind it all is ultimately nothing more complex than greed and piracy.
Deserving of honorable mention is the rhetoric about America's "addiction to oil." This sounds at first like an amazing admission (coming from an oil man) about one of our planet's most pressing problems. But it turns out the proposed solution is mainly just to drill for the oil in different, more biologically interesting/vital/beautiful spots, while throwing a few million dollars towards the research into alternatives, and even less to conservation. A few million sounds like a lot to many people. But the administration spends in the hundreds of billions on its corrupt projects that stand to enrich its friends. Million, billion, what's the difference? Those numbers are so big, most people can't tell the difference. But, technically speaking, sorry to get into hard mathematics in this otherwise airy-fairy essay, a billion is a thousand millions. That's like, a thousand times as much as a million! However much that is. We're doing our bloated federal budgets in the trillions now... That would be a million millions. How much is that? No human mind can quite wrap around a trillion dollars, with the possible, partial exception of those who have engineered the theft of sums on that scale. For example, the Oil Family Bush and the shadowy figures that they represent.
W's words were in the news again today. His topic du jour: Supposed specifics of supposed terrorist attacks which have supposedly been thwarted by our supposed anti-terrorism forces.
W said that his administration had thwarted a planned al-Qaida attack in 2002 on the tallest building on the West Coast, which is Library Tower here in Los Angeles (subsequently renamed as the Bank of America Tower). Supposedly, terrorists were going to use a shoe bomb to gain access to the cockpit of an airliner, take control of the plane, and then fly it in to the building.
That story, from my perspective, is a complete fabrication, concocted solely to manipulate the American masses. The primary tactical purpose of making this announcement now is firstly to distract the masses from the widening current of scandal regarding the administration's various forms of corruption. The announcement is also part of a longer-term strategic project of using fear to soften any resistance to the ever-tightening control of the public by the government, and the ever-tightening (and illegitimate) control of the government by the faction of the Republican Party that is currently in command.
The alleged plot is ridiculous and implausible. Even if you believe the official stories about 9/11, to suggest that evil-but-organized-and-intelligent would-be hijackers thought they could get away with the same trick a second time, despite increased security measures and losing the crucial elements of novelty and surprise, is not credible at all. The supposed plan also hinged on blowing through cockpit doors with shoe bombs. But an explosion that would rip those doors open would also be likely to blow a hole in the outside of the plane, and/or kill the pilots, and/or render the instrumentation ineffective, and any of those things would quite likely cause a crash. Meanwhile, there would be a planeload of people on the scene who had all seen this trick before (or who believed they had at any rate), and who would be emboldened by their outrage and their belief that they had nothing to lose by resisting; They would therefore be very difficult to control, and likely to foil the hijackers in getting the plane to its target.
But my favorite part of the story is this: In reading his script off the teleprompter, W mistakenly referred to the building as "Liberty Tower" instead of Library Tower. Think about it. Bush has repeatedly said that the terrorism/security issue is the #1 focus of his administration. If that were true, and if this grave threat were real, there would've been discussions of it at the highest levels, including Bush, right? And, although he may not care enough about the general geography of the USA to know the name of the tallest building on the west coast beforehand, Bush would've heard the name of the goddamn building in all those high-level security briefings and strategy sessions enough times to be able to say it right. Right?
I know that one small misstatement isn't proof of anything by itself, and there are other plausible explanations for it. But based on all the other data I've seen (and which is available in the public record for anyone who cares to dig around), the meaning is obvious. And in a grim way, it passes for entertainment to me in this day and age. I imagine the frustration of the people who actually do the work. His handlers had to go to school, study their history and mass psychology (with particular emphasis on thinkers like Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, and Joseph Goebbels), do the calculations, plot their strategies, make up the cheezy "Liberty Tower" stories, write the lines, and make sure they appear properly in large print on the teleprompter. W is the front man who gets a lot of cool perks and attention, and all they need him to do is just deliver his maudlin lines in a remotely believable way... And he even fucks that up. Yes, it's a disaster for the species and the rest of life on earth, but there's a little comedy to be found in it.
A better blogger than I, author and former conservative Douglas Anthony Cooper, had fun things to say on the topic:
My friend Rob, who is less persuaded by conspiratorial interpretations of current events than I, nevertheless shared some of my amusement over the "Liberty Tower" flub. However, his simpler explanation of the misstatement was that W just doesn't like to say the word "library," because of the cringing reactions of his handlers when he mis-pronounces it as "libary."
While I was swimming in the pool at the YMCA, a young man was being shot and killed near the front door of our new building. I was alerted by a text message and two voicemails from employees when I got out of the pool.
By the time I got back to our building, the whole area (including a section of Sunset Blvd) was taped off and swarming with about 30 officers from LAPD's Northeast Division. The police were very courteous and professional. They said they were acquainted with the victim, who they believed to be a member of a gang on L.A.'s west side. Apparently an altercation started next door in front of the Olive Motel. The victim was shot and subsequently collapsed and died outside our door.
One officer I spoke to said that most of the murders in the Northeast Division end up being gang members killing gang members. So there is some cold comfort in that for those of us who aren't in gangs. But they're still murders... and real facts, and therefore more relevant as a barometer of the "state of the union" than the president's speeches.
I still have not learned the victim's name, or anything else about him. I don't know who shot him, or what the status of the case may be, though we will probably inquire with the LAPD at some point.
Many of our staff were in our offices upstairs when the shooting occurred, and they heard the shots. We had a staff meeting the following morning to talk about it. As with any such traumatic event, the way people reacted and felt about it varied. But all of us were affected in one way or another. I think talking about it helped. We also made sure that people knew we would assist in getting counseling appointments through our health care provider for anyone who thought it might be helpful. Some time has passed since then, and people seem to have recovered their equilibrium pretty quickly. But concern about violence in the neighborhood and in the world in general remains.
Today, George W's words were in the news again. His speeches are written by handlers and specialists that we never see, and read off of teleprompters, leaving the general population to guess for themselves at the authorship and the level of sincerity behind the reading. If it even occurs to them to guess, instead of just passively letting the words wash their brains without critical filtration.
There was so much redundant hypocrisy, manipulation, doublespeak, and lying in the State of the Union address, it was hardly worth the time it took to read it, but I read it anyway. The most surreal and Orwellian element is the emphasis on ending tyranny and spreading freedom, liberty, democracy and peace throughout the world. In fact, it seems to me, the Bush administration has done more to undermine all of those values, both within the US and on the global scale, than I ever imagined it could have done in my darkest daydreams. And in my analysis, the motive behind it all is ultimately nothing more complex than greed and piracy.
Deserving of honorable mention is the rhetoric about America's "addiction to oil." This sounds at first like an amazing admission (coming from an oil man) about one of our planet's most pressing problems. But it turns out the proposed solution is mainly just to drill for the oil in different, more biologically interesting/vital/beautiful spots, while throwing a few million dollars towards the research into alternatives, and even less to conservation. A few million sounds like a lot to many people. But the administration spends in the hundreds of billions on its corrupt projects that stand to enrich its friends. Million, billion, what's the difference? Those numbers are so big, most people can't tell the difference. But, technically speaking, sorry to get into hard mathematics in this otherwise airy-fairy essay, a billion is a thousand millions. That's like, a thousand times as much as a million! However much that is. We're doing our bloated federal budgets in the trillions now... That would be a million millions. How much is that? No human mind can quite wrap around a trillion dollars, with the possible, partial exception of those who have engineered the theft of sums on that scale. For example, the Oil Family Bush and the shadowy figures that they represent.
W's words were in the news again today. His topic du jour: Supposed specifics of supposed terrorist attacks which have supposedly been thwarted by our supposed anti-terrorism forces.
W said that his administration had thwarted a planned al-Qaida attack in 2002 on the tallest building on the West Coast, which is Library Tower here in Los Angeles (subsequently renamed as the Bank of America Tower). Supposedly, terrorists were going to use a shoe bomb to gain access to the cockpit of an airliner, take control of the plane, and then fly it in to the building.
That story, from my perspective, is a complete fabrication, concocted solely to manipulate the American masses. The primary tactical purpose of making this announcement now is firstly to distract the masses from the widening current of scandal regarding the administration's various forms of corruption. The announcement is also part of a longer-term strategic project of using fear to soften any resistance to the ever-tightening control of the public by the government, and the ever-tightening (and illegitimate) control of the government by the faction of the Republican Party that is currently in command.
The alleged plot is ridiculous and implausible. Even if you believe the official stories about 9/11, to suggest that evil-but-organized-and-intelligent would-be hijackers thought they could get away with the same trick a second time, despite increased security measures and losing the crucial elements of novelty and surprise, is not credible at all. The supposed plan also hinged on blowing through cockpit doors with shoe bombs. But an explosion that would rip those doors open would also be likely to blow a hole in the outside of the plane, and/or kill the pilots, and/or render the instrumentation ineffective, and any of those things would quite likely cause a crash. Meanwhile, there would be a planeload of people on the scene who had all seen this trick before (or who believed they had at any rate), and who would be emboldened by their outrage and their belief that they had nothing to lose by resisting; They would therefore be very difficult to control, and likely to foil the hijackers in getting the plane to its target.
But my favorite part of the story is this: In reading his script off the teleprompter, W mistakenly referred to the building as "Liberty Tower" instead of Library Tower. Think about it. Bush has repeatedly said that the terrorism/security issue is the #1 focus of his administration. If that were true, and if this grave threat were real, there would've been discussions of it at the highest levels, including Bush, right? And, although he may not care enough about the general geography of the USA to know the name of the tallest building on the west coast beforehand, Bush would've heard the name of the goddamn building in all those high-level security briefings and strategy sessions enough times to be able to say it right. Right?
I know that one small misstatement isn't proof of anything by itself, and there are other plausible explanations for it. But based on all the other data I've seen (and which is available in the public record for anyone who cares to dig around), the meaning is obvious. And in a grim way, it passes for entertainment to me in this day and age. I imagine the frustration of the people who actually do the work. His handlers had to go to school, study their history and mass psychology (with particular emphasis on thinkers like Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, and Joseph Goebbels), do the calculations, plot their strategies, make up the cheezy "Liberty Tower" stories, write the lines, and make sure they appear properly in large print on the teleprompter. W is the front man who gets a lot of cool perks and attention, and all they need him to do is just deliver his maudlin lines in a remotely believable way... And he even fucks that up. Yes, it's a disaster for the species and the rest of life on earth, but there's a little comedy to be found in it.
A better blogger than I, author and former conservative Douglas Anthony Cooper, had fun things to say on the topic:
Repeatedly, when the Straussians step down from the ivory tower, they just get it wrong. Wolfowitz is certainly doing an effective job as the Machiavellian advisor to princes, but Jesus: look at his advice! Everything he has done has simply served to cause America terrible grief abroad, or to undermine the foundations of democracy at home. Hannah Arendt has pointed out that philosophers almost always get it wrong when they enter the real world -- and in fact generally end up in support of tyranny. She wrote this in defense of Heidegger's flirtation with Hitler, and she referred back to Plato's embarrassing attempt to become math teacher to the tyrant of Syracuse.You can read the full text of that article at http://dysblog.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_dysblog_archive.html, and the main link to Cooper's blog is http://dysblog.blogspot.com/.
The walking disaster that is George W. Bush is responsible for my final break with ideological conservatism. It is impossible to support this man, much less admire him. He proudly flaunts the worst of human attributes: avarice, numbing piety, slack-jawed stupidity wedded to absolute certainty. To remain a conservative, with this dangerous buffoon stalking the planet, is to abandon self-respect.
My friend Rob, who is less persuaded by conspiratorial interpretations of current events than I, nevertheless shared some of my amusement over the "Liberty Tower" flub. However, his simpler explanation of the misstatement was that W just doesn't like to say the word "library," because of the cringing reactions of his handlers when he mis-pronounces it as "libary."
