A Long Time Coming . . .

“Hipsters, flipsters and finger**poppin’ daddies, knock me your lobes . . .”

And then there was His Royal Hipness, Lord Buckley . . . who reigned for a brief but wild wail against the machine way back in the way-back-when:

Hovering Around the Fringe . . .

“An A to Z of UFO Theories” is a fairly comprehensive catalog of Ufology put together by Jenny Randles at Fortean Times’ website, illustrating rather well the truism that a dearth of data generates a superabundance of hypotheses. Or perhaps it’s that a superabundance of data generates a dearth of actual evidence. Take your pick.

Poem of the Moment

“. . . so I give you this crucifix of Raymond Carver
nailed to a bottle of gin and a typewriter.”

Is a portion of the paternal writerly advice of “Indented” by Jesse Bradley, in the Winter 2009/2010 edition of The Battered Suitcase from Vagabondage Press.

Of Men as Mice

Whose plans gang aft agley, as we do well know . . .

“A Little Fable” is a comic adaption by Vincent Stall of Franz Kafka’s brief tale, archived at the Modern Word’s Das Schloss sub-section devoted to Kafka.

Get Your Peace On

“On December 10, 2009 at 2 AM, the Israeli military surrounded the Ramallah home of Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a high school teacher and the Coordinator of Bil’in’s Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements, and arrested him. Abu Rahmah is among the leaders of the West Bank village of Bil’in’s nearly five-year nonviolent struggle of protests, lawsuits and boycotts aiming to save the village’s land from Israel’s wall and expanding settlements. Abdallah Abu Rahmah joins Mohammed Othman from the village of Jayyous, Adeeb Abu Rahmah from Bil’in and many other Palestinians who are currently jailed by Israel for working for justice.”

Here is a letter of support you can send to Abdallah Abu Rahmah, and here a letter to Obama and U.S. Consul in Jerusalem Daniel Rubinstein demanding Abu Rahmah’s release.

Change We Can Believe in . . . Not!

“Like plenty of other Lefties, I was neither smitten with President Obama’s campaign platform nor was I entirely cynical about the prospects of having a smart, capable person in the proverbial throne. In fact, I was actually impressed by him on several occasions . . . . Thus, when Obama won the election, I was confident that he would initiate some of the few pseudo-progressive (though far from Leftist) reforms he laid out on the campaign trail, namely ending the war in Iraq. Yet in 2009, rhetorical gymnastics and hollow gestures toward ‘change’ are the calling cards of a PR-based administration that continues to legitimize illegal wars, preemptive military strikes, corporate tyranny, and the suppression of facts pertaining to U.S. war crimes. For example, putting an end to the ‘war on terror’ is supposed to mean something more than just getting rid of the phrase the ‘war on terror’.”

Both words and images from “The Obama Administration and the Rule of ‘Opposite Day!‘” by Zack Furness at Bad Subjects. Furness pretty much gets it right.

More Taliban Evildoers Assassinated by U.S. Troops

Or:

“Did U.S. Forces Execute Kids in Afghanistan?” by Dave Lindorff at AlterNet.

Lindorff compares divergent reporting by the Times of London and the New York Times. I don’t know if I’d characterize it as worse than what happened at Mai Lai, as Lindorff does, but it’s a pretty damned ugly story.

Poem of the Moment

“Breathlike” is a poem by John Ashbery, found at City Lights Books’ online bookstore pages, from his new collection Planisphere.

Mathematics Is Better Than Drugs Dept.

“Escher and the Droste Effect” is a fascinating website devoted to visualizing the mathematical structure behind M. C. Escher’s famous image “Print Gallery.” The original:

A representation of the original with the glowing orb–which perhaps Borges would recognize as the Aleph–containing Escher’s signature filled in:

Somewhere in the middle of the transformation:

And at last unwarped:

But of course “at last” is not appropriate, since this is a representation of infinity. There is a .pdf file available of the authors’ mathematical story, as well as some truly mind-bending animation.

Time to shake off the hopium . . .

Over the last year in the U.S. the Democratic Party from top to bottom has by and large demonstrated only that it can succeed in mostly being a slightly less evil version of the Republican Party. That they are polling nearly as badly as each other is evidence for this. Both parties have, in the esteem of much of the American public, reached a tie in their race to the bottom. One way or another, either in the form of primary challenges or third party/indie opposition in the final turns this coming election season, they’ve got a shakedown coming–not from the Right, but from the American public. About time.

“Those who look at the crises our states and country face and look at the legislative opportunity Democrats hold and nonetheless argue for ‘patience’ are making the very same ‘don’t go too fast’ argument made against every step forward we’ve ever taken. They are the Father Coughlins arguing against the New Deal, the Goldwaterites opposing Medicare, the tea party protestors angrily snarling at minorities and the uninsured.”

Thus David Sirota in “Hope Is Not Change” at In These Times.

Opium of the People Dept.

“The foundation of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion; religion does not make man. Religion is, in fact, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet gained himself or has lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, which is an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human being because the human being has attained no true reality. Thus, the struggle against religion is indirectly the struggle against that world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.”

Thus the eloquence and insight of Karl Marx, excerpted in “Opium Den” at Lapham’s Quarterly.

Poem of the Moment

Dug up from the ever-expanding internet junkyard, with expectations that this new year will doubtless be as full of  nonsense as the one just passed (if not fuller)–”Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. Or “Jabberwocky Classic,” as Lynn Gold, the perpetrator of Lynn Gold’s Archives, puts it with tongue doubtless firmly in cheek, comparing Carroll’s classic account of a battle with frumious creatures in the tulgey wood with  some of the slightly more frightening nonsense produced by sieving the text of the poem through the rough fingers of two different digital convenience technologies (Apple Newton and FrameMaker).

Have a happy. But beware of burbling and have your vorpal sword close at hand.

Another Year Evolves

“If T.H. Huxley was ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, the Oxford emeritus professor for the public understanding of science, Richard Dawkins, has been called his unmuzzled rottweiler . . . “

In “The Darwin Show” Steven Shapin at the LRB’s website assesses this passing Darwin Year with a look at its various festivities and dustups, including among other things Dawkins’ occassionally over-the-top evangelizing, current popular perceptions of Darwin’s character and personality, and a glimpse of the real debate, which has been largely left to languish in the background, within the scientific community of biologists, on evolutionary theory–pro or con adaptationism . . . gradualism or punctuated equilibrium? Or as Shapin puts it:

“. . . biologists themselves are not now singing from the same evolutionary hymn-sheet, and you might not know that from some of the enthusiastic accounts of Darwinism as ‘fact’.”

(By which of course he does not mean to suggest that evolution isn’t fact.)

Get Your Peace On

Gaza Freedom March.

Google Does Evil

And author Ursula K. Le Guin walks away from the bend-over-and-spread-’em cowardice displayed by the Authors Guild, which decided to cave to the terms of the unethical greedheads at Google.

“Forward, the Right Brigade!”

With “bipartisan” and “centrist” Barack Obama leading the charge now.

“When you start in the center (on, say, healthcare or Afghanistan) and readily move rightward several steps to appease rightwing politicians or lobbyists or Generals, by definition you are governing as a conservative.”

Thus media critic Jeff Cohen in “Get Ready for the Obama/GOP Alliance” over at ZSpace (ZNet).

I’d say it’s by more than mere definition. I think it’s pretty obvious by now that Obama is effectively and in fact governing as a conservative.

In the article Cohen cogently draws a parallel between Obama’s current actions and Clinton’s slide to the Right to get NAFTA–just one of the nasty neolib/neocon carve-ups of the New Deal commonweal he managed–passed by Republicans in Congress.

Great Detectives Never Die

They just get translated, with varying degrees of success, into cinema.

Timed to coincide with the release of the newest filmic portrayal of the Great Detective (which I haven’t seen yet), over at Vanity Fair’s website (and why else would it be there of all places if not for a blip in pop culture?) is a literary re-issue of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tale “The Adventure of the Priory School,” with vintage illustrations by Sidney Paget.

Dept. of Movers and Shakers

On the Left.

According to this recent poll at AlterNet, the top three are Bill Moyers, Michael Moore, and Rachel Maddow, and also on the big list are among others Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Arianna Huffington, Jim Hightower, and Barbara Ehrenreich. It’s notable how diverse the backgrounds are for all of them.

“Good Will to Some Men”

Here’s a very bitter Christmas cookie . . .

Here’s a very bitter Christmas cookie: in “How the Nazies Stole Christmas” at Fortean Times, David Sutton does a survey of how the Nazis attempted, with some success, to absorb Christmas traditions into their agenda of racism and conquest.

Get Your Peace On

Time to start walking away from these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 50,000 soldiers enlisted in the U.S. military already have. March Forward! (a.k.a. marchforward.org and/or thisisnotourwar.org) can help you to understand the situation and learn how you can do it.

Are We Still “Moving Forward”?

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.” Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it’s not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

From “Obama’s Big Sellout,” by Matt Taibbi, at Rolling Stone. Taibbi goes into great detail on the insider shenanigans that have characterized Obama’s economic brain-trust (or rather, his greed-head no-brain-trust), but the most illuminating bit may be near the end of the article, where he describes an encounter with an ignorant teabagger.

Poem of the Moment

“James Bond Suite” by Amit Majmudar, at Linebreak.

Get Your Peace On

stolenbeauty.org is a site under the wing of Code Pink focusing on Ahava cosmetic products, which are manufactured from resources stolen from the Palestinian people in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of Gaza. At the site you can get informed, sign a boycott pledge if you agree, and help spread the word; or “spread the dirt” as the site puts it–since some Ahava products use actual Dead Sea mud.

Get Your Peace On

Self-explanatory:

freethehikers.org

Poem of the Moment

“The Creation of the Moon,” at the Academy of American Poets’ website, is a translation of a Caxinua (Amazonian Indian) folktale/myth by W. S. Merwin. (The poem closely resembles in form Merwin’s famous dark ecological fantasia “The Last One,” which was collected in The Lice, which he wrote at around the same period, the late 1960s.)

More on Obama’s War

About Obama’s troop escalation numbers . . .

“Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post now reports, however, that the President granted Secretary of Defense Robert Gates the right to “increase the number by 10 percent, or 3,000 troops, without additional White House approval or announcement.” Think of it, in restaurant terms, as the equivalent of a surge tip. In addition, DeYoung adds that an unnamed “senior military official” claimed “that the final number could go as high as 35,000 to allow for additional support personnel such as engineers, medevac units and route-clearance teams, which comb roads for bombs.” So now, in surge math, we’re at 35,000 U.S. troops. Add in the expected NATO contribution of about 5,000 extra troops and — voilà — you have 40,000 on the button. No wonder the Afghan War commander is reportedly satisfied.“

In “Meet the Commanded-in-Chief” Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch illumines, among other things, who the new deciders are.

Obama’s War

“If we had wanted Bush’s wars, and contractors, and corruption, we could have voted for John McCain. At least we would have seen our foe facing us, not felt him at our back, as now we do. The Republicans are given a great boon by this new war. They can use its cost to say that domestic needs are too expensive to be met—health care, education, infrastructure. They can say that military recruitments from the poor make job creation unnecessary. They can call it Obama’s war when it is really theirs. They can attack it and support it at the same time, with equal advantage.”

Thus Garry Wills in “Afghanistan: The Betrayal” at the New York Review of Books’ website.

I would qualify my own view only slightly differently–this is Obama’s war now, as well as the Republicans’, no matter how much they piss and moan about it.

. . . Same as the Old Boss

Enough said already.

“Progressive Leaders Pan Obama’s Decision for More War in Afghanistan — 10 Reactions,” among them Tom Hayden, Jim Hightower, Glen Ford, Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Flanders, at AlterNet.

It’s time to start seriously looking for a different candidate for 2012.

Borges and His Reflections

“Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man” is a biographical documentary film on the great Argentine fantasist and literary prankster, on the shelves at UbuWeb.