Thursday, September 11, 2008

Fish Wrapped in Paper is Sexist Too....,

In this morning's edition of Crappy Hour, Megan Carpentier joked:
Anyway, what I want to know is how come since Obama's next line was about stinky rotten fish, no former female Massachusetts governor is calling out Obama for making inappropriate comments about the smell of Sarah Palin's vagina? Huh, Jane Swift? Did you miss that? Because I really think commenting on vaginal odor is, like, totally worse than saying she looks pig-like, not that he said that either but if this is taking-fake-offense day, that's the fake offense I'm taking.
When I read this earlier, I thought to myself, "Ha ha! Good one, Megan! That would indeed be THE STUPIDEST THING IN THE WORLD." But I'm not laughing anymore! Because "fish in a wrapper" is precisely the fake offense the McCain camp is faking being offended by now! Marsha Blackburn, in the course of going on MSNBC and making not a lick of sense at all, took up the very line of attack that Megan was satirizing, telling Tamron Hall:
BLACKBURN: It's what women of America are beginning to see. Because Senator Obama had the choice of Senator Clinton or Governor Sebelius to go in the number two spot on that ticket. He passed over them. The comments he made last night. He followed the lipstick on a pig comment with talking about old fish wrapped in paper. Senator Obama is a smart man. And he is very highly educated. And I think that it was unfortunate. He knew what he was speaking, the words he was speaking.
Yes, that's Marsha Blackburn, attempting to make something serious out of a point that Megan Carpentier satirized, mere hours before. Jason Linkins advocating for increasing retaliatory craziness from the Obama campaign in the Huffington Post.

Big Don's Library

"We have an excellent library here. You can use your viewer to zoom in on the titles. Turner Diaries has a hallowed spot on the top shelf next to The Bell Curve."

this picture is worth all the words I could ever muster, and well, some things you just can't make up and must be seen in order to be believed......, (click on the image to view detail)

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

on the next Jerry Springer.....,

Newsweek covering Sarah Palin's Troopergate scandal;
An Anchorage judge three years ago warned Sarah Palin and members of her family to stop "disparaging" the reputation of Alaska State Trooper Michael Wooten, who at the time was undergoing a bitter separation and divorce from Palin's sister Molly.

Allegations that Palin, her husband Todd, and at least one top gubernatorial aide continued to vilify Wooten—after Palin became Alaska's governor and pressured state police officials to take action against him—are at the center of "Troopergate," a political and ethical controversy which has embroiled Palin's administration and is currently the subject of an official inquiry by a special investigator hired by the state legislature.

Court records obtained by NEWSWEEK show that during the course of divorce hearings three years ago, Judge John Suddock heard testimony from an official of the Alaska State Troopers' union about how Sarah Palin—then a private citizen—and members of her family, including her father and daughter, lodged up to a dozen complaints against Wooten with the state police. The union official told the judge that he had never before been asked to appear as a divorce-case witness, that the union believed family complaints against Wooten were "not job-related," and that Wooten was being "harassed" by Palin and other family members.

Court documents show that Judge Suddock was disturbed by the alleged attacks by Palin and her family members on Wooten's behavior and character. "Disparaging will not be tolerated—it is a form of child abuse," the judge told a settlement hearing in October 2005, according to typed notes of the proceedings. The judge added: "Relatives cannot disparage either. If occurs [sic] the parent needs to set boundaries for their relatives."
Remember that this case sheds light on the pettiness and vindictiveness of Palin who has already demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that the well-being of her own teenage daughter and infant son takes a backseat to her personal and political ambition.

A theocrat is a theocrat...,


John McCain announced that he was running for president to confront the "transcendent challenge" of the 21st century, "radical Islamic extremism," contrasting it with "stability, tolerance and democracy." But the values of his handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God's will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts. What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist?

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

m e a n i n g i s l i k e t e l e p a t h y

Continuing from the same McKenna talk given in 1987;
Our cultural crisis is deepening. Deepening mainly because we have very poor connections among our fragmented and autonomous psychic structures -- within ourselves as individuals and within ourselves as a society. Our whole problem is that we can't communicate with each other, we can't express intention. Yet the psychedelics are sitting there waiting to unify us, to introduce us to the trans-linguistic intention. To carry us forward into a realm of appropriate cultural activity, which is to my mind, the realm beyond history. Beyond history lies effortless and appropriate cultural activity. And nature has proceeded us, as it always does, by laying out models that can be followed to realize this.

As an example, I'll point out that the 19th century had a titular animal. Its titular animal was the horse, idealized as the steam engine, the Iron Horse. Marx talked about the locomotive of history, and there was a whole focusing on the horse archetype. Which in the 20th century, gave way to the titulary animal, the raptor, the bird of prey, as exemplified by high-performance fighter aircraft, as the kind of ultimate union of man and machine in some kind of glorification of the completion of a certain set of cultural ideals.

In thinking about this and in thinking about how language is the cultural frontier of our species, I went to nature looking for models of how we might move beyond the bird of prey, which when you think about it, is the American symbol. It was also the symbol of the Third Reich. A lot of creepy scenes have actually been into birds of prey, when Alleric the Visigoth burned Eleusis, it was the crow that fluttered on his battle standard as the greasy smoke swept by. These dark birds have been ever with us.

In looking for a new titulary animal and drawing the conclusion of what it would mean, I was drawn to look, strangely enough, at cephalopods, octopi. Because I felt, first of all, they are extremely alien. The break between our line of development in the phylogenetic tree, and the mollusca, which is what a cephalopod is, is about 700 million years ago. Nevertheless, and many of you who are students of evolution know, that when evolutionists talk about parallel evolution, they always bring out the example of the optical system of the octopi. Because, isn't
this astonishing? -- it's very much like the human eye, and yet it developed entirely independently. This shows how the same set of external factors impinging on a raw gene pool will inevitably sculpt the same organs or attain the same end, and so forth and so on.

Well, the optical capacity of octopi is one thing. What interested me was their linguistic organization. They are virtually entirely nervous system. First of all, they have eight arms in the case of the octopods, and ten arms in the case of the squid, the decapods. So coordinating all these organs of manipulation has given them a very capable nervous system as well as a highly evolved ocular system.

But what is really interesting about them is that they communicate with each other by changing the color and texture of their skin and their physical shape. You may know that octopi could change colors, but you may have thought it was camouflage or something very passive like that. It isn't that at all. They have a vast repertoire of traveling bars, dots, blushes, merging pastels, herringbone patterns, tweeds, mottled this-and-thats, can blush from apricot through teal into dove gray and on to olive -- do all of these things communicating to each other. That is what their large optical system is for. It is to be able to see each other.

The other thing which octopi can do -- besides having these chromatophores on the surface of their skin --they can change the texture of the skin surface: can make it rugose, papillaed, smooth, lobed, rubbery, runneled, so forth and so on. And then, of course, being shell-less molluscs, they can hide arms, and display certain parts of themselves and carry on a dance.

When you analyze what is going on here, what at first seems like merely fascinating facts from natural history, begins to take on a more profound aspect. Because it is an ontological transformation of language that is going on in front of you. Note that by being able to communicate visually, they have no need of a conventionalized culturally reinforced dictionary. Rather, they experience pure intent of each other without ambiguity because each octopus can see what is meant -- this is very important -- can see what is meant. And I think that this heralds, or could be made to herald, a transformation in our own definitions of language and communication.

What we need is to see what we mean. It's not without consequence or implication, that when we try to communicate the notion of clarity of speech, we always shift into visual metaphors: I see what you mean, he painted a picture, his description was very colorful. It means that when we intend to indicate a lack of ambiguity and communication, we shift to visual analogies. This can in fact be actualized. And in fact, this is what is happening in the psychedelic experience. There we discover, just under the surface of human biological organization, the next level in the organization of language: the ability to generate some kind of acoustical hologram that is manipulated by linguistic intent.

Now don't ask me how this happens, because nobody knows how it happens. At this point it's magic. Nevertheless, the fact is it does happen -- you can have this experience. It represents a synesthesia in the presence of ongoing communication. It is, in fact, telepathy. It is not what we thought telepathy would be, which I suppose if you're like me, you imagine telepathy would be hearing what other people think. It isn't that. It's seeing what other people mean. And them also seeing what they mean. So that once something has been communicated, both parties can walk around it and look at it, the way you study a Brancusi, or a Henry Moore in an art gallery.

By eliminating the ambiguity of the audio signal, and substituting the concreteness of the visual image, the membrane of separation, that allows the fiction of our individuality, can be temporarily overcome. And the temporary overcoming of the illusion of individuality is a much richer notion of ego-death than the kind of white-light, null-states that it has imagined to be. Because the overcoming of the illusion of individuality has political consequences. The political consequences are that one can love one's neighbor, because the commonalty of being is felt. Not reasoned toward, or propagandized into, or reinforced, but felt.

i n t h e b e g i n n i n g w a s t h e w o r d

In Understanding and the Imagination in the Light of Nature - Terrence McKenna sez;

In fact, nature ultimately resolves itself into a self-reflecting, syntactical metasystem, right down to the DNA. DNA working as it does, with nucleotide sequences that code -- that means arbitrarily assign association -- code for certain amino acids. It means that organic objects are essentially utterances in three dimensional space and express of some kind of universally distributed linguistic intent. This is what it means when it says, "In the beginning was the word." Nature is that word. This infinitely self-adumbrating, fractal, syntactical hallucination with an infinite number of facets for potential regarding and self-regarding.

And having said all of this, I might invoke here Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which as I'm sure many of you know was Kurt Godel's brilliant contribution to theoretical mathematics where he showed that the possible set of true formal statements generated by any formal system exceeded the possible set of true formal statements which the rules of that system allowed. He showed this for simple arithmetic. And what this means, friends, is that what was called truth up until the beginning of the twentieth century, is absolutely impossible. That's what Godel's Incompleteness Theorem secures. It shows that there is no ultimate closure in an effort to describe a formal system.

And so in a way, my take on nature, and culture, and man, is that human language is a meta-linguistic system, generated out of the necessary formal incompleteness of nature. Nature is a self-describing genetic language and yet out of it arises something which is not formally predicted by its constraints and rules. There's a symmetry break there, and a so-called emergent property comes into view. This emergent property is our unique ability to provisionally code sound to meaning so that we then can freely command and reconstruct the world. We imagine that we do this for our own purposes of communication. The analysis that I'm suggesting would seem to indicate that actually we do it because we are complicated enzyme systems that are moving linguistic charge around inside some kind of metasystem. A metasystem that is very important for the emergence of new order out of nature.

The fact that it is contrived, provisional, is very interesting. It doesn't arise out of the gene structure. Rather it is agreed upon by individuals who are living at the time that the linguistic structure, whatever it is, emerges into consciousness. Since individuals are replaced, the language is much more in flux than the genome. The genetic component of an organism is a physical structure stabilized by atomic bonds -- possibly stabilized by a phenomenon like room-temperature's superconductivity. In that the way nature works is to conserve the genes. Molecular machinery has evolved to do that. But there is no mechanism in nature with the same kind of binding force that conserves meaning. Meaning is some kind of freely-commanded, open-ended, self-evolving system. The rules are that there are no rules.

Meaning consequently addresses itself to a much larger potential modality of expression than the genes. The genes basically repeat themselves, over and over. Almost like Homeric poetry, where the idea is that it be memorized and repeated. And that's what sexuality is about: memorizing and repeating gene structures, handing on parts of the story. But the epigenetic domain is different, the creation of linguistic systems, where meaning can be freely commanded, allows very rapid evolution of cultural forms.

Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life

Wired Magazine sez - Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life;
What most researchers agree on is that the very first functioning life would have had three basic components: a container, a way to harvest energy and an information carrier like RNA or another nucleic acid.

Szostak's earlier work has shown that the container probably took the form of a layer of fatty acids that could self-assemble based on their reaction to water (see video). One tip of the acid is hydrophilic, meaning it's attracted to water, while the other tip is hydrophobic. When researchers put a lot of these molecules together, they circle the wagons against the water and create a closed loop.

These membranes, with the right mix of chemicals, can allow nucleic acids in under some conditions and keep them trapped inside in others.

That opens the possibility that one day, in the distant past, an RNA-like molecule wandered into a fatty acid and started replicating. That random event, through billions of evolutionary iterations, researchers believe, created life as we know it.

Palin's Churches

Sarah Palin has refused to acknowledge belonging to any specific denomination or any particular religious stream. However, it is now well documented that she spent her youth in an Assembly of God church and has regularly attended another AoG church, as well as two Independent Churches. At least three of four of these churches have close ties to prominent organizations and leaders in the Third Wave movement, also known as the New Apostolic Reformation.

This is a worldwide movement so completely ignored by the press that there is no single accepted term that has been coined for the identification for the group. In addition to Third Wave and New Apostolic Reformation, it is also referred to by the names of some of its more extreme theologies, such as Joel's Army and Manifest Sons of Destiny. Its roots are in a revival of the manifestations and beliefs of the New Order of Latter Rain which has been repeatedly condemned by the General Council of the Assemblies of God since 1949.

Palin's Churches and the Third Wave Part One (Background on Third Wave)

Palin's Churches and the Third Wave - Documenting the involvement of Palin's specific churches in this movement.

Jesus Camp

Jesus Camp was a documentary about the "Kids On Fire School of Ministry," a charismatic Christian summer camp formerly located just outside Devils Lake, North Dakota and run by Becky Fischer and her ministry, Kids in Ministry International.

The film focused on three children who attended the camp in the summer of 2005—Levi, Rachael, and Tory (Victoria).

The film cuts between footage of the camp and a children's prayer conference held just prior to the camp at Christ Triumphant Church, a large charismatic church in Lee's Summit, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City.

Monday, September 08, 2008

Eurasian Alliance Against the U.S.

To put this in the right perspective, this image shows the Members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation - Russia, China, Kazakstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and the observers countries - Iran, Pakistan, India, Mongolia and the Moscow-friendly Belarus.

Russian nationalist advocates Eurasian alliance against the U.S. - Aleksander Dugin, a popular theorist in hard-line circles, advocates an alliance between the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. He says Georgia crisis could be start of a real conflict with U.S.

Writer, political activist and father figure for contemporary Russian nationalism, Aleksandr Dugin is the founder of Russia's International Eurasian Movement and a popular theorist among Russia's hard-line elite. He envisions a strategic bloc comprising the former Soviet Union and the Middle East to rival the U.S.-dominated Atlantic alliance. The Times interviewed Dugin this week at his Moscow office, a room draped with flags bearing the slogan "Pax Russica." The following are excerpts. Megan Stack in the Los Angeles Times.

t h e b r a i n i s a c t u a l l y a l a n g u a g e

Tractate 36:

In summary; thoughts of the brain are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements - change - in a physical universe; but in fact it is really information and information-processing which we substantialize.

We do not merely see its thoughts as objects, but rather as the movement, or, more precisely, the placement of objects: how they become linked to one another. But we cannot read the patterns of arrangement; we cannot extract the information in it - i.e. it as information, which is what it is. The linking and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language but not a language like ours (since it is addressing itself and not someone or something outside itself).

Tractate 37:

We should be able to hear this information, or rather narrative, as a neutral voice inside us. But something has gone wrong. All creation is a language and nothing but a language, which for some inexplicable reason we can't read outside and can't hear inside.

So I say, we have become idiots. Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangement of parts of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore we are language.

Why, then, do we not know this? We do not even know what we are, let alone what the outer reality is of which we are parts. The origin of the world "idiot" is the word "private." Each of us has become private, and no longer shares the common thought of the Brain, except at a subliminal level. Thus our real life and purpose are conducted below our threshold of consciousness.

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Seeing and Hearing is Believing...,

Some folks are bound and determined not to believe that the GOP is staging a pure identity politics campaign. Others clearly recognize it for what it is and accept it as part of the ugly necessity involved with winning an election. Lobbyist and McCain campaign executive Rick Davis spells out what they're doing in no uncertain terms. Chris Wallace does an astonishing job of trying to hold Davis' feet to the fire here. Something has changed in the climate of consciousness at faux noise....,

Elite Consensus

Joe Bageant dropped another gem from the APC titled Moving to the Center of Elite Consensus. Well worth reading in its entirety as a Rosetta Stone to the current presidential election.
It is important to understand that elite consensus itself is not static and can shift in moderate degrees, but it has definitive boundaries of which you can not cross and still be a viable player within the electoral system. These boundaries exist to the left and right within that consensus, but the institutional bias of the system is much harsher towards any moves to the left. This is because in its essence elite opinion is anti-populist and primarily concerned with protecting the fundamentals of the established economic order.

Every national campaign is in fact a dual conversation, one targeting voters while the other is directed towards the political, media, and economic elites. The purpose of the message targeting the first group is to win votes. The messages to the latter group is designed to form elite consensus, first for it not to correlate against you and secondly to have it help you win and eventually govern.

Surviving the contradictions of these dual dialogues is the primary element that makes a successful national campaign.
Should be very interesting to see how the three senators jockey for advantage around the sweet spot of elite consensus on the political talk shows this morning, and no wonder why the "girl from the hood" is being kept under wraps.

Missing From Action this Morning?

I can't wait to see Gov. Palin hold it down on one or more of this morning's news talk shows. Wait, there must be some kind of mistake;
As is The Ticket's custom, a post listing the entire roster of appearances on this Sunday's interview programs will pop up Saturday at noon PDT (3 p.m. EDT).

But here's an advance heads up, in part because of who WON'T be found on any of the chat shows.

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin campaigning with the top of the Republican ticket, John McCain Three of the four now-official candidates on the major-party presidential tickets are scheduled to sit down for questions: Democrat Barack Obama on ABC's "This Week," his running mate, Joe Biden, on NBC's "Meet the Press" and Republican John McCain on CBS' "Face the Nation."

Absent from this list, of course, is the GOP's star of the moment, the not-so-long-ago obscure governor of Alaska who is McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin.

Since she was thrust onto the national stage a week ago, her appearances on it have been tightly regulated by the McCain campaign: a few side-by-side campaign stops with him and, of course, her big speech to the GOP's convention Wednesday night.

Today, top McCain aide Rick Davis indicated the campaign isn't in any hurry to slot Palin for a Sunday show appearance -- and will do so only if he and other strategists determine it serves the ticket's purposes, not because some may view it as a required initiation for a major political player.
But we all have so many questions for the veepee select. Surely she's ready to drill, drill, drill - here, there, and everywhere to give us deeper glimpses into her vast wealth of experience and subject matter expertise in economics, foreign affairs, national security, energy and so forth - you know - all those pressing issues the electorate needs to mull over in order to arrive at a fully informed decision.

Letter About Palin Goes Viral

All Things Considered, September 5, 2008

This week in Wasilla, Alaska, a woman named Anne Kilkenny sent a letter to some college friends about her former mayor, Sarah Palin.

By week's end, the letter was pinging around the country and Kilkenny's phone was ringing off the hook. Waiting for the mainstream media to vet this person may be about as productive as waiting for the Alaskan legislators to issue their report on troopergate.

Why squatter cities are a good thing

Rural villages worldwide are being deserted, as billions of people flock to cities to live in teeming squatter camps and slums.

Stewart Brand says this is a good thing.

Why? It’ll take you 3 minutes to find out.

Stewart Brand's TED talk on squatter cities.

Saturday, September 06, 2008

Girls in the Hood....,

Any carefully observant person watching Sarah Palin's body language during her speech reading performance at the GOP convention probably noted a lot of telltale signs of serious moral malfunction. There was the sneer, the wrinkled lip, and the evident malicious glee with which she cast aspersions.
Like “yeah, I said it”. Arrogance and hatred are not leadership qualities.
Anyway, it looks like that other shoe, you know, the one accompanying troopergate, illegitimate OOW pregnancy, earmarks, budget busting, separatism, and rank opportunism - dropped very loudly on friday. Didn't take very long either.


Alaskans Speak (In A Frightened Whisper): Palin Is “Racist, Sexist, Vindictive, And Mean”
“So Sambo beat the bitch!”

This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama’s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
Before you ask, "well really a little bit after my man Rembom asked" here's the accompanying backstory from the original story's author, Charley James.
Alas, more often than not, the reality is that in a highly-explosive story such as my piece about Sarah Palin published here on Friday, granting anonymity may be the only way to get a source to agree to be interviewed.

So I am not surprised that a number of readers who wrote comments about the article raised questions about my sources. It has happened before, especially when I tackled a subject that raises a lot of dust, and it will happen again. Although I won’t reveal any sources – I honor promises of anonymity – let me explain how the story unfolded and sources came to my attention as I did the reporting.
Only time will tell, but at this juncture, in light of everything else that has emerged and in consideration of what I witnessed with my own eyes, I'm highly inclined to believe that Mr. James and his source Lucille are on the level.

This Sucks....,

Infectious, test tube-produced prions can jump the 'species barrier' - Researchers have shown that they can create entirely new strains of infectious proteins known as prions in the laboratory by simply mixing infectious prions from one species with the normal prion proteins of another species. The findings are reported in the September 5th issue of the journal Cell.

This new insight has profound implications for public health, according to the researchers.

"One of the scariest medical problems of the last decades has been the emergence of a new and fatal human prion disease--variant CJD--originated by cross-species transmission of BSE from cattle," the researchers said. BSE has also spread to other animals, including exotic cats, other primates and domestic cats, after they ate feed derived from diseased cows.

Keep it on the Down Low.....,

WASILLA, Alaska — Shortly after taking office as governor in 2006, Sarah Palin sent an e-mail message to Paul E. Riley, her former pastor in the Assembly of God Church, which her family began attending when she was a youth. She needed spiritual advice in how to do her new job, said Mr. Riley, who is 78 and retired from the church.[...]

One of the musical directors at the church, Adele Morgan, who has known Ms. Palin since the third grade, said the Palins moved to the nondenominational Wasilla Bible Church in 2002, in part because its ministry is less “extreme” than Pentecostal churches like the Assemblies of God, which practice speaking in tongues and miraculous healings.

“A lot of churches are about music and media and having a big profile,” Ms. Morgan said. “We are against that. That is why it is so attractive to politicians because they can just sit there and be safe.”
Say what you will, as far as I'm concerned, It Speaks For Itself and I quote here; I believe Alaska is one of the refuge states in the last days.., while I have no qualms about religion or religiosity -the intersection of politics and eschatalogical dominionism is cause for tremendous concern - as I've previously documented.

If you elect to believe that Palin is an American Cinderella story, you may also want to consider who specifically her fairy godfathers are...., particularly given the extent to which Obama has been charged with "hanging out with radicals". From what I can see, the Palin klan is about as radical as they come - so there may be a fair amount of projection going on with regard to Baraka....,

Dominionist Stalking Horse?

Sarah Palin is found to have some very interesting and very disturbing connections - among them, being potentially the first Assemblies-linked VP candidate and having a number of links to dominionist groups targeting kids via "bait and switch" evangelism.


There are quite a number of extremely troubling links between Sarah Palin and neopentecostal dominionists--enough that, in truth, she may be ultimately as much of a "dream candidate" for the dominionist movement as Mike Huckabee was. Even worse, she's running in a manner that has been frighteningly successful for dominionist groups since the early 80's--specifically, as a "stealth candidate".

Fuck Robert Kagan And Would He Please Now Just Go Quietly Burn In Hell?

politico | The Washington Post on Friday announced it will no longer endorse presidential candidates, breaking decades of tradition in a...