Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Mark & Perry's Listening Salon (no. 5)

Listening Salon No. 5 invite

A couple of times a year my partner, Perry, and I host an audiophile nite. Everyone brings records (and CDs, tapes, iPods, and laptops) and we go round-robin and listen to music, chat and snack. The most recent listening party was Sunday, April 26th. We had 8 guests. 50 songs were played over 4 and a half hours.
Lots of great, fun and provocative music!

Here are some photos. The full playlist is below:

Everyone Listening

Mark with the Daydream Nation LP remaster

Another view of everyone

Mark with Patti Smith's Land

Kurt with Betty Davis— FIERCE!

Terry and Carlos

(L to R) Matt, Kurt, Brady, Perry, Mike, Nelda

Perry with Blackhouse

Perry introducing his selection

Dave White presents MARK McCOY

Dave shows us the etching on the B—side

Matt with The Besnard Lakes

Mike with Red Skelton The Pledge of Allegiance & Clint Eastwood's cover of Burning Bridges

Matt and Dave listening

Nelda with T-Bone Burnett

Dave with his Bump Your Booty cassette

Parenthetical Girls LP

Perry with Doc Wor Mirran's Screaming for Tittes sawblade 7"

Kurt offers a tribute to the late great Lux Interior

Terry with the exotic and hypnotic AIWA

Snacks!

Perry with the Last track of the night, Legendary Pink Dots' Mmmmmmmmmmm

Here is the full playlist:
1. THE FORESTER SISTERS “Show Me A Woman” (Terry)
2. NEKO CASE “Train from Kansas City” (Kurt)
3. JAN A.P. KACZMAREK “Evening - Original Soundtrack” (Carlos)
4. SONIC YOUTH “Within You, Without You” (Mark)
5. BLACKHOUSE “Totally Gone” (Perry)
6. GO HOME PRODUCTIONS Passenger Fever” (Iggy Pop/Peggy Lee Mashup) (Matt)
7. STRETCHHEADS “I Should Be So Lucky” (Dave)
8. DONNY OSMOND “Go Away Little Girl” (Mike)
9. ESTHER LAMANDIER “Amor Mi Fa Cantar” (Nelda)
10. THE PRETENDERS “What You Gonna Do About It” (Terry)
11. AMADOU & MARIAM “Sabali” (Carlos)
12. EVANGELICALS “A Mouthful of Skeletons” (Kurt)
13. PARENTHETICAL GIRLS “Windmills of Your Mind” (Mark)
14. CLAIR OBSCUR “Smurf in the Goulag” (Perry)
15. MICKEY GANG “Born in the "90s” (Naji Nahas Footloose Remix) (Matt)
16. ECSTASY, PASSION & PAIN “I Wouldn't Give You Up" (Dave)
17. TONY CAMILLO'S BAZUKA “Dynamite—Part 1" (Mike)
18. T-BONE BURNETT “Palestine, TX" (Nelda)
19. AIWA “Yi Yi" (Terry)
20. BJORK “Unison" (Live) (Carlos)
21. THE CRAMPS “Call of the Wighat" (Kurt)
22. FUCKED UP “No Epiphany" (Mark)
23. SPANDAU BALLET “Gold" (Sun's Golden Remake) (Perry)
24. SELDA “Ince Ince Bir Kar Yagar" (Matt)
25. MARK McCOY “Untitled" (Excerpt) (Dave)
26. (a) RED SKELTON “The Pledge of Allegiance" (excerpt) +
(b) CLINT EASTWOOD “Burning Bridges" (Mike)

27. TODD RUNDGREN “Mercenary" (Nelda)
28. TINDERSTICKS “I've Seen It All" (Kurt)
29. PATTI SMITH “Spell” (Live) (Mark)
30. IAMX “Spit It Out” (Perry)
31. THE BESNARD LAKES “Cedric's War” (Matt)
32. TENNESSEE ERNIE FORD “Let It Be” (Dave)
33. BEE GEES “I Started A Joke” (Mike)
34. BEL CANTO “Summer” (Nelda)
35. THE WOODENTOPS “Steady Steady” (Kurt)
36. KOSTARS “One Sunny Day” (Mark)
37. DOC WOR MIRRAN “Screaming for Titties” (Perry)
38. PAAVOHARJU “Valo Tihkuu Kaiken Läpi” (Matt)
39. LESLIE PHILLIPS “God Is Waiting For You” (Dave)
40. JIMMY CASTOR BUNCH “Bertha Butt Boogie—Part 1” (Mike)
41. BETTY DAVIS “Steppin' In Her I. Miller Shoes” (Kurt)
42. SLEEPING DOGS WAKE “Crows” (Nelda)
43. BECK “Gamma Ray (Jay Reatard Remix) (Mark)
44. THE TIDES “11:34” (Perry)
45. DEATH “Politicians In My Eyes” (Matt)
46. AVSOLUTIZED “Towards...” (Dave)
47. BOBBY RUSSELL “Saturday Morning Confusion” (Mike)
48. SIMPLE MINDS “In Trance As Mission” (Live) (Kurt)
49. RAMESSES “The Tomb” (Mark)
50. LEGENDARY PINK DOTS "Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm” (Perry)

A good time was had by all.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Fluxion 4: Expanded Notes, Part 7

Longitude, Latitude, Infinitude

"...The last bit of Earth unclaimed by any nation-state was eaten up in 1899. Ours is the first century without terra incognita, without a frontier. Nationality is the highest principle of world governance—not one speck of rock in the South Seas can be left open, not one remote valley, not even the Moon and planets...

...Within the fractal complexities of actual geography the map can see only dimensional grids. Hidden enfolded immensities escape the measuring rod."
—Hakim Bey (The Temporary Autonomous Zone)


The Fantastic World- As seen from an ancient perspective

The arc of modern civilization, for all it's achievements, has been distorted into the practice of making nothing out of something. The rich and powerful control almost everything, including us by proxy. The world and everything in it has been mapped in some form. There are no unknown mysterious places on the map anymore.

we live in a world dominated by knowns, limits and boundries. All owned by someone [else].
Do not step on the grass.
No trespassing.
Wait your turn.
Pay up-
or else.


With the advent of satellite technology the map closed completely in the 20th Century


No more frontiers

It seems this idea has crept off the map and into our imaginations too... as Hakim Bey has observed "imagination has been co-opted by the media"
also by corporate marketing of "cool" and their virtual monopoly on resources.

What space is left for art, for true individuality in a world of total commodity and the pathological pursuit of profit?

Unless that art or individualism itself fits into the revenue stream, nothing.

Nothing, except rebellion, transgression, petty theft and claims of psychic spaces, temporary spaces...

what we do have is what Bey called "
Hidden enfolded immensities [that] escape the measuring rod."

A multitude of horizons exist, not only in unseen mysteries of space by right here, in our everyday lives...


Map of the Universe

"Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we're so deeply interconnected with one another. Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is the supreme creative act."—Ram Dass

X-Ray view of our newest Star, Sol

Map of the internet

One of the central ideas I wanted to invoke and contemplate in this issue of Fluxion was
The concept of temporary autonomous zone.


In his book TAZ (The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy and Poetic terrorism), Hakim Bey says "The map is closed, but the autonomous zone is open..."

Fluxion 4, Section 1 lead-in TAZ

When I was working on themes and ideas for the issue in 2003 it felt like the world was being turned inside out... for me, as I imagine for many, it was a time of a radical rethinking of everything. In some respects it was like starting over. I felt like I need to reeducate myself, that I had been frivolous in my life so far and painfully naive...

"Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions. There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin--your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky." —Hakim Bey

One of the primary themes became the map itself— looking beyond the obvious, realigning with aspects of the magical, the imagination, with our inherent power as creative individuals, beyond out capacity as consumers and beyond our credit limits.

From Wikipedia
In the formation of a TAZ, Bey argues, information becomes a key tool that sneaks into the cracks of formal procedures. A new territory of the moment is created that is on the boundary line of established regions. Any attempt at permanence that goes beyond the moment deteriorates to a structured system that inevitably stifles individual creativity. It is this chance at creativity that is real empowerment.

Fluxion 4, Public Space spread

There is no (or extremely little) legal public space for art or the voice of the individual.
Guerrilla artists (I'm not talking about gang taggers here) claiming space is an act of the creative Temporary autonomous zone... in the moments they are working, they are defying the grid and reframing the conversation through sheer force of their creative will...

I wanted to create visual statments that examined the concept of the map, of the grid in contrast to various cultural and conceptual phoenomena...

I incorporated a directional compass and a map grid as symbols for the restrictions of life and direction, based on Beys statement "The map is closed, but the autonomous zone is open."
These symbols reoccur in various forms.
With the grid: incomplete, distorted, and eventually replaced by the more dynamic strange attractor. (more on that below.)

Scenes from Burning Man are another visual used to tie into the idea of the TAZ.

Fluxion 4, Overconsumption Spread


The concept of TAZ was first put into practice on a large scale by the Cacophony Society in what they called Trips to the Zone, or Zone Trips. One of their Zone Trips gave birth to Black Rock City, also called the Burning Man Festival.
Smart mobs and flash mobs are also examples of the concept of TAZ put into practice, if only very briefly.

It comes down to issues of control. Political, economic, reproductive, sexual, and psychic. The nature of the unorganized, underground, private, or short term public TAZ defies these controls. As Bey points out— like the map, revolution is closed, but insurgency is open.

Insurgency may be a misleading word these days. It now suggests only violence. Violence is a negative expression of this concept, but there are many positive forms, one of the most simple and surprising is the Dinner party...

"The highest type of human society in the existing social order is found in the parlor. In the elegant and refined reunions of the aristocratic classes there is none of the impertinent interference of legislation. The Individuality of each is fully admitted. Intercourse, therefore, is perfectly free. Conversation is continuous, brilliant, and varied. Groups are formed according to attraction. They are continuously broken up, and re-formed through the operation of the same subtile and all-pervading influence. Mutual deference pervades all classes, and the most perfect harmony, ever yet attained, in complex human relations, prevails under precisely those circumstances which Legislators and Statesmen dread as the conditions of inevitable anarchy and confusion. If there are laws of etiquette at all, they are mere suggestions of principles admitted into and judged of for himself or herself, by each individual mind..." —S. Pearl Andrews,
 The Science of Society (from TAZ)

Fluxion 4, TAZ spread

William S. Burroughs wrote extensively on the forces of conformity that would destroy the unique qualities of the individual in his novels, such as Naked Lunch, The Ticket that exploded, The Soft Machine,The Nova Express, Cities of the Red Night, and the Western Lands.

Fluxion 4, Magical Universe Spread

“In the magical universe there are no coincidences and
there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen.”—William S. Burroughs

Fluxion 4, Ideas Not Ideologies spread

So much of our lives are controlled, limited by routines and work with room for little else. To any aspiring artist these limitations weigh heavily, and I can speak from experience that over time they siphon away so much creative energy that at the end of the day you just want to give up. But as artists we can can't...
The TAZ offers a potential disruption of the routine. Even a little break from routine is exhilarating. To survive, to evolve, we must disrupt the routine whenever possible, even if we can't break free from it.

In little ways over time we can alter this trend.
The scale of participation is the key to how far reaching the effects will be.


I used to dream of breaking free (in the traditional sense) but that no longer seems realistic.
I'm hopelessly in debt, my pay is attached directly to hours worked, and I have no other equity or resources.
I still aspire to economic independence (the the creative independence that comes with it), but remained tethered to obligations like paying the rent and food, not to mention paying down debt from past attempts to break free, for the foreseeable future.


What I CAN do is create my zine, make photographs, write this blog, connect the dots, host dinners, salons, write my representatives, get involved in any small way and engage in civil conversation when ever possible....
These are little everyday little soul saving endeavors, mirco TAZs, like oxygen in a fish tank.

and through them anything is possible....

Fluxion 4, Drastic Change spread

“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change.

Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”
—William S. Burroughs

Fluxion 4, Escape Velocity spread

"I feel that change, the mutation in consciousness..."


"I feel that the principal instrument of monopoly and control that prevents expansion of consciousness is the word lines controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions of the human host."


"The forward step must be made in silence. We detach ourselves from word forms — this can be accomplished by substituting for words, letters, concepts, verbal concepts, other modes of expressions: for example, color. We can translate word and letter into color — Rimbaud stated that in his color vowels, words quote “words” can be read in silent color. In other words, man must get away from verbal forms to attain the consciousness, that which is there to be perceived at hand."


look beyond the grid


to the fractal, the chaotic, to the dynamics of possibility

The Strange Attractor

The four “Attractors” bring order out of Chaos. They are part of a basic law of four— a “fractal of four.” The Universe has a fundamental pattern of fourfoldness throughout all scales of magnitude. When applied to Nature, including Man, the Law of Four manifests as the four attractors. These attractors balance entropy, providing order from out of chaos. When applied at the microcosmic level “the four” manifests as the four basic energies or forces: electro-magnetic, gravity, and the strong and weak forces. In human consciousness it’s the four functions of sensing, thinking, feeling and willing. —Wikipedia



“We need to escape from the deterministic influence of the point, circuit and torus attractors into the unpredictability of the Strange Attractor. This attractor is the basis of Self Organization. There is no apparent order at all to the actions of the Strange attractor. On the surface it appears to be pure Chaos, but nevertheless there is order of a subtle kind which only appears over time when looked at in the right perspective. Its analogy in consciousness is the willing function. Yet, when tied to Awareness—the Zero—it is spontaneous, unpredictable. It appears to be chaotic, yet it has order of a subtle, fractal kind.” —fractal wisdom.com An attractor is a set to which a dynamical system evolves after a long enough time. That is, points that get close enough to the attractor remain close even if slightly disturbed. Geometrically, an attractor can be a point, a curve, a manifold, or even a complicated set with a fractal structure known as a strange attractor." —Fractalwisdom.com

“Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.”—William S. Burroughs
“In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas . . . a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.”—WIlliam S. Burroughs

It is time for us to get off the grid altogether....

The TAZ is "utopian" in the sense that it envisions an intensification of everyday life, or as the Surrealists might have said, life's penetration by the Marvelous. But it cannot be utopian in the actual meaning of the word, nowhere, or NoPlace Place. The TAZ is somewhere. It lies at the intersection of many forces, like some pagan power- spot at the junction of mysterious ley-lines, visible to the adept in seemingly unrelated bits of terrain, landscape, flows of air, water, animals. But now the lines are not all etched in time and space. Some of them exist only "within" the Web, even though they also intersect with real times and places. Perhaps some of the lines are "non-ordinary" in the sense that no convention for quantifying them exists. These lines might better be studied in the light of chaos science than of sociology, statistics, economics, etc. The patterns of force which bring the TAZ into being have something in common with those chaotic "Strange Attractors" which exist, so to speak, between the dimensions.— Hakim Bey (TAZ)

Find ways to disrupt your routine, create your own temporary autonomous zone (Micro) or seek and join (macro) ones you may find...open your mind to the unfolding hidden immensities of creativity...

Fluxion 4, Strange Attractor spread

At the intersection
of event,
memory,
and the subconscious—
a strange attractor—
a new map,
bursting with
possibility
...

A lifetime of reading

A comfortable reading room of ones own.

Since the economy when south I have had a lot more time for reading. I welcome this.
I love to read, and to discuss books and ideas with people.
One day I hope to have a large comfortable reading room (like the one above) to read, relax and host small gatherings for conversation and debate.

I decided to compile a list of great books. A very general list of great works that everyone be aware of and should consider reading or at least grazing through at least once in their lifetime.


When I was younger I had a very difficult time appreciating classic texts. It is much easier now. I have a much more open mind and have infinitely more patience. Both required to fully appreciate a wide range of achievements.

In 1990 I spent a year reading Joyce, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, and Genet. It was a serious challenge but very worth it. I was exhausted at the end of it.
I had to take a long break to absorb all that I had read, and after a long break and then lots of underwhelming new fiction, I started interspersing classics with contemporary works. That was a much better way of approaching it. Much contemporary work pales next to the classics and Gives me a deeper appreciation of those early achievements. When I run across a new work that stands out (and they are everywhere) I can see the influence (direct and abstract) of many works that preceding them woven in in subtle ways.

It's impossible to connect with every book, but every so often I have extraordinary experience. A few years ago I read Nathanial Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables. What a revelation! (Not for the impatient, though)
I found that I had to keep a dictionary close and on average would run across one to two words every few pages that were fantastic... and that I had never run across. It was a delight to discover new words (useful ones too) in additional to enjoying the wonderfully told story.

I rooted around the internets and compiled a list of my own. It's very incomplete and subjective of course, but a good starting point, and perhaps useful to someone else.

this list includes titles I've read with many more I haven't.

The recent works are all arguable... I wanted to add a ton of others but focused mainly on older established works that continue to engage and provoke.

Please feel free to share with me titles you think should be included.

The list is composed most recent to least.




Thomas Pynchon—Against the Day
Joan Didion—The Year of Magical Thinking
Cornel West—Race Matters, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism
Susan Sontag—Regarding the Pain of Others, [collected essays]
JM Coetzee—Disgrace
Vikram Seth—A Suitable Boy
Don DeLillo—Underworld, White Noise
Salman Rushdie—The Satanic Verses
Toni Morrison—Beloved
Alice Walker—The Color Purple
William Gibson—Neuromancer



Thomas Pynchon—Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying lot of 49, Vineland
David Foster Wallace—Infinite Jest
Samuel R. Delany—Dahlgren, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Yukio Mishima—Confessions of a Mask
, Runaway Horses
Noam Chomsky—Manufacturing Consent, Understanding Power
Howard Zinn—A Peoples History of the United States
Edited by Ralph Young—Dissent in America: The Voices That Shaped a Nation
Bertram Gross—Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America
Gabriel Garcia Marquez—One hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera
Philip K. Dick—Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Kurt Vonnegut—Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Sirens of Titan
Frank Herbert—Dune [1-6]
Jack Kerouac—On The Road, Visons of Cody,
J.D. Salinger—The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories
William S. Burroughs—Naked Lunch, Cities of the Red Night
Allen Ginsberg— Howl, Kaddish (Collected Poems)
Malcolm X—The Autobiography of Malcolm X
C.S. Lewis—The Screwtape Letters
J.R.R. Tolkien—The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit
Upton Sinclair—The Jungle
Aldous Huxley— Brave New World, Island, The Doors of Perception
George Orwell— 1984, Animal Farm
Rilke—Poems
Ralph Ellison—The Invisible Man
Herman Hesse—Siddhartha, Steppenwolf
Jean Genet—Our Lady of the Flowers, Miracle of the Rose, Prisoner of Love
Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea; No Exit, Being and Nothingness
Max Planck: Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory
William Faulkner—Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying


F.Scott Fitzgerald—The Great Gatsby

Naguib Mahfouz—The Cairo Trilogy
T.S. Eliot—The Wasteland, The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock
D.H. Lawrence—Lady Chatterly's Lover, Women in Love
Honore Balzac—Old Giriot
Franz Kafka—Metamorphosis, The Trial
Joesph Conrad—Heart of Darkness, Nostromo
Virginia Woolf—Night and Day, A Room of One's Own
James Joyce—Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake
Albert Einstein— Relativity
Thomas Mann—Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain


Oscar Wilde—The Picture of Dorian Grey, The Importance of being Earnest, Salome
Bertrand Russell—Problems with Philosophy
Bram Stoker—Dracula
Mary Shelly—Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
Marcel Proust—In Search of Lost Time
Anton Chekov—Uncle Vanya
Walt Whitman—Leaves of Grass
Henri Bergson—Intoduction to Metaphysics
Fredric Nietzche—Beyond Good And Evil
Henri Poincare—Science and Hypothesis
William Blake—Song of Innocence, Songs of Experience
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
The Brothers Grimm—The Complete Fairy Tales (Vintage Edition)
George Bernard Shaw—Pygmalion
Henry James—Daisy Miller, Washington Square, Turn of the Screw
William James—Principles of Psychology


Mark Twain—Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Leo Tolstoy—Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Resurrections, The Death of Ivan Ilych
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men, Essays, Journal
Henrik Ipsen—A Doll's House, Peer Gynt
Fyodor Dostoevsky—Brothers karamazov, Crime and Punishment
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories

Ludwig Wittgenstein—[collected writings]
Herman Melville—Moby Dick
Nathanial Hawthorne—The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables
Alexis de Tocqueville—Democracy in America
Soren Kierkegaard—The Essential Kierkegaard
Edgar Allen Poe—[collected writings]
Karl Marx—Capital, Value Price, and Profit, The Communist Manifesto
H.D. Thoreau—Civil Disobedience, Walden
Charles DickensA Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol
Charles Darwin—Origin of the Species


John Stuart Mill—On Liberty, A System of Logic
US founding Documents—Declaration of Independence, The Constitution of the U.S.
Jane Austen—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice
Hegel—Philosophy of History
Goethe—Faust, Poems
James Boswell: Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson
Edward Gibnon—The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Immanuel Kant[collected writings]
Jean Jaques Rosseau—Origin of Inequality, Political Economy
David Hume—Concerning Human understanding, History of England


Henry Fielding—Tom Jones
Voltaire—Candide
Montesquieu—Spirit of Laws, Persian Letters
Jonathan Swift—Modest proposal, Gullivers Travels
Isaac Newton—The Principa
Johannes Kepler—The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
Jean Racine—Phaedra
Spinoza—Ethics
John Locke—Concerning Civil Government
Moleire—School for Wives, Tartuffe


John Milton—Paradise Lost
Descartes—Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy
Shakespeare—[collected writings]
Cervantes—Don Quixote
Montaigne— Essays
Machiavelli— Prince
Chaucer—Canterbury Tales


Dante—The Divine Comedy
The Quran
The Bible
The Torah
The Bhagavad Gita
Joesph Campbell—The Power of Myth, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Ptolemy—Geography
Plutarch—[Tragedies]


Virgil—Aeneid
Lucretius—Nature of things
Euclid—Elements
Aristotle—Complete Works
Plato—The Republic
CiceroOn the Republic, Rhetoric [collected writings]
Aristophanes—Lysistrata
Hippocrates—Ancient Medicine




Thucydides—The Peloponnesian War
Herdotus—History
Euripides—Medea, Trojan Women
Sophocles—Oedipus Rex, Antigone
Aeschylus—Persians, Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound
Homer—Iliad, Odyssey
Beowulf



Tuesday, April 21, 2009

A silver Lining?

Is disaster the catalyst that reshapes the world?
(collage by Winston Smith)

Foreign Policy reports on ways the current economic collapse could change the country.

Like we didn't see this coming...

Islamic gothic

Big surprise! The Taliban expands control in Pakistan and refuses to disarm. Nope, didn't see that one coming. No sireee.

More from the Washington Post.

Secrets Inc.

Why is Obama continuing the the warrantless wiretapping program?

'A Ton More People Were Wiretapped Than We've Been Led to Believe'
FBI Whistleblower Thomas Tamm

Alternet reports.

Monday, April 20, 2009

High Expectations

Progress takes time

The New York Times reports that despite major plans, Obama is taking softer stands.
" President Obama is well known for bold proposals that have raised expectations, but his administration has shown a tendency for compromise and caution, and even a willingness to capitulate on some early initiatives."

Expectations are high for bold change. So far we haven't seen much, and to the contrary plenty of compromise on issues the GOP would NEVER have negotiated on. Are our expectations of the Obama administration too high?

I would guess that yes they are. He's only been in office for a few months... far too early to affect serious change.

There is a lot of disappointment growing on the left, and the polarization of the right is getting downright scary. It's going to be incredibly difficult for anyone to change these trends in a short span of time.

There never was a honeymoon for Obama, and I admire him all the more for his efforts... and for now I can set aside my concerns and to see what develops... he needs our help as much as we need his.

If we want change we are going to have to get involved to help him achieve it.


Join the evolution!

The End of the (401k) Line

"Please stay on the line, you call is important to us"

Check out this infuriating piece from 60 minutes on criminal corporateers and the 401k racket.
Yes, turns out it was mostly a racket.


So while millions of Americans have lost the ability to retire and the banks continue to cut lending to recoup their fortunes with taxpayer money I have to ask:

Where is the outrage?


Why do the banks get to walk away from this disaster without any consequences?

Why are the executives and managers not being prosecuted for wrong doing, or at least negligence?
Why are the offending companies not being dismantled?


The most infuriating thing is that we the public really have no substantive recourse.


I for one have lost what little confidence I had in the market. The financial industry is only interested in making more for themselves and a select few VIPs.
Everything else they say and do is LIES.


So, how can you save for retirement when you can barely survive week to week, have no equity, and no resources?

You don't.


The blowhards at Fox and in the GOP say "you just have to work harder."
That's an insult to all the people who have been working hard all their lives and have lost everything due to corporate greed and mismanagement.
The people who say "work harder" either already have secured income or are rich or have been brainwashed by the Right.


When you see headlines like these:

"How Can I Rebuild My 401(k)?"
"The Best 401(k)s In The Business"
"The Ultimate Retirement Fix"
"The Best Retirement Plans in America"
"Working Longer, And Liking It
"
"Why it Pays to Throw Good Money After Bad"
"Bankrate.com 401(k) Savings Calculator
"
Remember—they are all LIES. Bait and switch sales pitches. Don't be fooled.

Don't believe me—do your own research.
Don't trust one single source for anything. Get a second or third opinion from someone independent of the issue.

Here are perspectives on the 401k scam from the Consumerist, The Motley Fool, The Economic Populist and Willliam Wolman's The Great 401k Hoax.


need more proof the whole financial system is hopelessly corrupt? NYT reports on all the sudden Bank profits.
The government has changed, but sadly, so far it's business as usual.

Greenwald on drug decriminalization



Check out this fantastic piece in Reason Magazine.
Reason interviews Glenn Greenwald on lessons learned from Portugal's drug decriminalization eight years ago. I first saw this on Andrew Sullivan's blog The Daily Dish earlier this morning.
Very interesting.