"Life without meaning is the torture of restlesness and vague desire."

An idea, perhaps

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 21:34:26 GMT

This splendid vision of beauty denies
to me the right to either accept or to
deny, here in this place where everything
is perfected of its own accord, in accord
with the one secret thing, which thing I
hope to be.

This splendid vision of beauty denies, me,
the right to either hope or fear, illusory
projections sure to be let down or fulfilled

So, then, set down, burdens that need not be
or be carried, and fulfill life's central point.

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 03:53:39 GMT

In looking over my old livejournal entries, from 2004, I've had occasion to laugh at the dead man that I used to be, and to realize how different I was then. I've grown, but I've grown up in exile.

It's time to come out of exile, I believe.

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 07:14:50 GMT

I read a letter to the editor recently which referred, not directly, to this country as a Christian nation.
That is an assertion which is, to say the least ... quite interesting.
I read some statistics awhile back, about the percentage of teenage pregnancies that are aborted per country. In this "Christian nation" of ours, it was something like 50%, while in the Netherlands (where they are paid for by the state!), it was around 15%.
Or perhaps this is a "Christian nation" because of the cops who electrocute people with tasers, or simply skip the formalities and gun them down execution-style, without any punishment?
Or perhaps it's because of all of the child-molesting, wife-beating snakes who get up and sing with the rest of the congregation? (I've known of more than a few.)
Or perhaps it's a "Christian nation" because of the half a million dead in Iraq, the other half a million starved or dead from cholera in the 90s (which was, after all, "worth it",) and the who-knows-how-many who die nightly in the fevered dreams of wolves in sheep's clothing who worship power, death and violence?

Nietzsche said it was not their love for man, but their impotence, that stopped them from burning people.
And now that they've cast off the impotence and openly advocate wreathing half of the world - Iran, China, Syria, North Korea, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia - in a cloud of fire and blood, what should we do? Simply turn our heads and refuse comment?
I think not!

In memory of Rusty, who died too young

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 22:26:24 GMT

As I write,
the woprds are somehow fugitive,
and are gone too soon

And yet-
I cannot deny the deep, deep depths
of sorrow
turning in a place left empty
by your sudden departure

And yet-
all things are like this.
Coming or going,
together or apart,
many or solitary,
nothing that is born can last.

And yet-
the deep, deep depths of sorrow sing out
and I cannot deny this utter aloneness
pried away by the cold hands,
while I could do nought but watch
helplessly
And I sing out my sorrow for you.

And yet-

Every nerve sings!
With pain or with joy,
Every nerve sings
With sorrow or with gladness
Every nerve sings!
With life or with death,
Every nerve sings!

One, unique, individual, eternal.

Goodbye, Rusty. I love you. Fare well in the future world.

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 02:43:47 GMT

From here

"That’s why it is so imperative that we take action, and take it now. The college is revamping the gen ed program. Maybe it’s time to require a class in diversity. Or maybe we start branding perpetrators with a scarlet letter, like in that Nathaniel Hawthorne book. Except instead of an A for 'adulterer,' as is the case in the novel, we use a B for 'bigot;' or an I for 'intolerant;' or maybe an S, for 'small-minded-prick-that-will-be-left-behind-the-times.'"

It's interesting how adaptable sheep-pen morality is. When Christianity no longer cuts it, the filthy slut who sleeps around can be, quite conveniently, replaced with another outgroup for the Respectable members of society (in this case, private liberal-arts college kids) to witchhunt (in this case, nasty Bigoted people.)

The role of "tolerance" in a corporate liberal culture is, essentially, to simultaneously change and limit the number of acceptable behaviors in a given society - "diverse" activities become generally acceptable, and anything done by "diverse" people is included under a broad rubric of being at least potentially defensible, if not fully; simultaneously, genuine forms of dissent, such as refusal to pay taxes or fulfill other government mandated obligations, or any thorough-going objection to the commonly prevailing way of life becomes totally unacceptable. People who choose, for instance, to home school their kids, to break contact with society at large, or to do any number of other things, which, under less "tolerant:" systems, would have been mere personal eccentricities, now become (or rather, are now recognized to be) vital threats which could, potentially, strike at the heart of the ruling order.

"Tolerance," then, is a means by which tyranny, or at least social control, is focused - behaviors irrelevant to the State and its attendant institutions (such as alternate sexual expression, moderate drug use, other odd cultural choices) are ignored so that greater resources can be concentrated on those who pose a greater threat (peace activists, secessionists, drop-outs, "gun nuts", people who "think different.)

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 22:30:31 GMT

The real difficulty of putting things back together is not to learn how to read for sustained periods of time, or how to attack, or how to apply sustained effort of any other sort to some problem. The difficulty is, rather, learning how to attack with joy, with Nietzsche's "laughter of the heights."
Putting joy back into conflict is a marriage hard to achieve. One might do well to remember what someone once said:

The Key of Joy is disobedience.

A poem for these times...

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:13:58 GMT

Contemplation of the Sword
Robinson Jeffers

Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide.
The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel,
formerly used to kill men, but here
In the sense of a symbol. The sword: that is: the storms
and counter-storms of general destruction; killing
of men,
Destruction of all goods and materials; massacre, more or
less intentional, of children and women;
Destruction poured down from wings, the air made accomplice,
the innocent air
Perverted into assasin and poisoner.

The sword: that is: treachery and cowardice, incredible
baseness, incredible courage, loyalties, insanities.
The sword: weeping and despair, mass-enslavement,
mass-tourture, frustration of all hopes
That starred man's forhead. Tyranny for freedom, horror for
happiness, famine for bread, carrion for children.
Reason will not decide at last, the sword will decide.

Dear God, who are the whole splendor of things and the sacred
stars, but also the cruelty and greed, the treacheries
And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish: now that this
thing comes near us again I am finding it hard
To praise you with a whole heart.
I know what pain is, but pain can shine. I know what death is,
I have sometimes
Longed for it. But cruelty and slavery and degredation,
pestilence, filth, the pitifulness
Of men like hurt little birds and animals . . . if you were
only
Waves beating rock, the wind and the iron-cored earth,
With what a heart I could praise your beauty.
You will not repent, nor cancel life, nor free man from anguish
For many ages to come. You are the one that tortures himself to
discover himself: I am
One that watches you and discovers you, and praises you in little
parables, idyl or tragedy, beautiful
Intolerable God.
The sword: that is:
I have two sons whom I love. They are twins, they were born
in nineteen sixteen, which seemed to us a dark year
Of a great war, and they are now of the age
That war prefers. The first-born is like his mother, he is so
beautiful
That persons I hardly know have stopped me on the street to
speak of the grave beauty of the boy's face.
The second-born has strength for his beauty; when he strips
for swimming the hero shoulders and wrestler loins
Make him seem clothed. The sword: that is: loathsome disfigurements,
blindness, mutilation, locked lips of boys
Too proud to scream.
Reason will not decide at last: the sword will decide.

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:27:16 GMT

Endeavor is the path to bliss. Or at least a large part of it.

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 04:43:50 GMT

"I hope Nancy chokes on her filet mignon tonight.
After all the wolf crying, fear mongering by Congress, bet the market goes into the dumper anyway. So those of us paying for this fiasco, will still see the value of our retirement savings greatly reduced. What in the hell are we getting for all the taxes we pay? Unsound bridges, highways that are 20 years behind capacity, broken health care system, NO energy policy, more wooden arrows, lots of lazy ass americans and illegal immigrants eating on my dime, and politicians who lie as easily as they breathe.

Let's revolt, secede or leave. Whatever is possible because this country sucks."

Perhaps this is what Wiston Smith meant when he wrote that the only hope lies with the proles...

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 01:03:28 GMT

"If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.

If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet-!

He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices women's voices -- had burst from a side- street a little way ahead. It was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud 'Oh-o-o-o-oh!' that went humming on like the reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It's started! he had thought. A riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When he had reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy things, but cooking-pots of any kind were always difficult to get. Now the supply had unexpectedly given out. The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others clamoured round the stall, accusing the stall- keeper of favouritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another's hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came off. Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?

He wrote:

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:44:21 GMT

I'm going back into New Orleans to get the five cats that I had to leave behind. Wish me luck.

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:54:11 GMT

It almost seems that if I don't prepare, the storm won't come, and if I leave, I won't come back. None of that is true, but the mind likes to play games.

colorquiz.com negrido

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 02:54:58 GMT

"The fear that he might be prevented from achieving the things he wants drives him to the exploitation of all types of experience, so that he may categorically deny that any of them has any value. This destructive denigration becomes his method of concealing hopelessness and a profound sense of futility."

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:28:48 GMT

I'm thinking about adding a math minor. For a long time, I've believed that I can do anything that I decide to do.
Well, shouldn't this be subjected to testing?
YES. Hence the math minor.

I've BSed for long enough. It's easy to hold on to remembrances of past accomplishments while the present fades. It's not so easy, however, to watch the present fade away. And so this is, if anything, the easier path.

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:03:43 GMT

"But tho' obscur'd, this is the form of the Angelic land."

everything i see is sent to me for a purpose

Thu, 29 May 2008 06:21:20 GMT

everything i see is sent to me for a purpose, and
everything i hear lands somehow jarring on innocent ears
and everything i see serves to justify, somewhere, somehow
a narrow prejudice, and a sneaking glance
everything i hold is sent to me for a purpose - holding
back, holding it together (though only barely)
holding true to form, time after time

Sat, 10 May 2008 23:31:47 GMT

If I have ever sinned, it is that I cast down my shield and ran, that I withdrew before the contest had even begun so that some glimmer of cheap hopes and easy rewards would not be denied me.
If I have ever sinned, it is that I have forgotten who I am, and that I have been through unimaginably worse things than anything I can imagine happening now, and survived.
If I have ever sinned, it is that I did not realize the futility of my efforts and the utter and inherent worthlessness of the ends toward which they were directed.
If I have ever sinned, it is that I placed my own cheap comfort ahead of holding aloft the banner of the inherent dignity and divinity of Man.
"The word of Sin is Restriction."

Sometimes, the only answer is to

Mon, 05 May 2008 06:05:09 GMT

Attack.

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:27:57 GMT

"The mendicant laughed and said: 'In the triple world, there is no permanent residence; there is no fixed place in the world of transmigration. Sometimes my home is in heaven; sometimes, in hell. Sometimes I may be your wife or your son; at other times, your father or your mother. Sometimes the Tempter King is my teacher and heretics, my friends. Ghosts, birds, and animals may be our parents, children, or wives. From the beginning to the present, there has been no such thing as first and second. How can there be a fixed state of existence from the present back to the very beginning! Turning like a circle or a wheel, beings transmigrate by changing their forms and states of being. Your hair may be completely gray, but it does not necessarily mean that you are my elder brother. My side locks may resemble a dark cloud, but this does not necessarily indicate that I am the younger brother. From the beginningless beginning, you and I have been transmigrating continuously without stopping in any fixed life. Therefore, essentially speaking, I have no permanently fixed birthplace or parents. However, in this present temporal existence, the visionlike being you see before you is residing at a bay in Japan, where a huge camphor tree spreads its shadow. Having yet to attain what I am searching for, I have already reached the age of twenty-four.'"
-Kukai, Indication of the Goals of the Three Teachings

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:58:09 GMT

With the aid of the Rosetta Stone program, I've begun learning four languages (Arabic, Latin, French, and German) and will soon add Greek. Hell, I might even add two more (maybe Spanish and Farsi) just for kicks. :-p
Man, productivity is fun.

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:47:16 GMT

"Gold and laughter, however, he takes from the heart of the earth: for, that you may know it - the heart of the earth is of gold.'
...
And once again Zarathustra shooke his head and wondered. 'What am I to think of it?' he said again.
'Why, then, did the phantom cry: "It is time! It is high time!"?
For what, then, is it - high time?'
Thus spoke Zarathustra."

I should like to delay here awhile, but it is high time (for what? though it doesn't really matter) and not time to delay.

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:45:47 GMT

This is a disaster.

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:42:48 GMT

Flying at 5000 feet above the earth,
the red baron pulls another one off
flying at the top of the world
flying at the top of the world
flying at the top of the world
- the north pole, lonely and cold

crazy post

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 05:25:01 GMT

California is America, and one of my long-term goals is to capture in thought and words, to pin down in words exactly what it is; what this huge California suburban nightmare monster is, this slightly-buzzed on good pot and completely gymed-out hedonistic thing that rolls over the landscape and devours everything to leave behind only numb, hedonistic stupidity, mass-obedience to the gods of mass produced luxury on the cheap for the masses.

Robinson Jeffers was slightly incorrect. It is true that we used to be individuals.
We used to be individuals, and then Los Angeles happened to us.

How it happened, and what it means for it to have happened is the object of thought to be captured.

After that, I will come to terms with Mississippi. An ever more difficult task.

(x-posted) How many GOP presidential candidates does it take to beat Ron Paul?

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 23:20:33 GMT

In Louisiana...all of them.

Louisiana has a two-part caucus to select GOP national convention delegates; (the primary is basically a beauty pageant). See explanations of how it all works here and here. Various pro-Paul groups around the state were able to amass enough qualified individuals to submit a full slate of delegates - more than any other candidate; one third of all delegates submitted were Paul delegates. In anticipation, supporters of Giuliani, Huckabee, McCain and Romney banded together to submit a slate of uncommitted delegates labeled "Pro-Life/Pro-Family;" this hybrid slate beat the Ron Paul slate in all 7 districts. It is currently unknown as to how many supporters of each candidate were on the hybrid slate.

Here's the Pro-Life/Pro-Family ballot:

Unofficial results are in, and the final results (when ready) will be here.

McCain is in first so far, followed by Ron Paul then Mitt Romney. Five-hundred provisional ballots remain to be counted. However, the Paul campaign is contesting the results and requesting that the LA GOP count all of the ballots and even check the credentials of some of the delegates.

::Update:: The original deadline for submitting delegates was January 10th. After the huge slate of Ron Paul delegates was submitted, the LA GOP extended the deadline to January 12th to allow other candidates to submit more delegates.

Additionally, quite a few Democrats and Independents switched parties in order to participate in the GOP caucus. The deadline to register as a Republican to be eligible to participate was November 30th. However, the LA GOP used a voter list from November 1st at the caucus locations to check eligibility. Voters who had registered after November 1st (but before the deadline) were forced to use provisional ballots, 500 of which have not yet been counted - though the results of the race are already being trumpeted.

In a few cases, even state-certified, pre-approved Ron Paul delegates were forced to use provisional ballots.

Spread this far and wide - tell your friends what happened in Louisiana, and don't let them get away with politics as usual.

http://www.thinkmoderate.com/2008/01/how-many-gop-presidential-candidates.html