Saturday, December 11, 2004

Consult the Oracle, or WWGD?

Until very recently, if you were to search for "Bush's foreign friends" on Google, you would have gotten this page: "Zero results. Did you mean 'Bush's former foreign friends'?" A much more reasonable search. If you search it now, there still aren't any foreign friends, but you will find scores of people like me marvelling at the fact.

If you find yourself in a pinch and need some cryptic, oracular, double-edged advice, I suggest consulting the great ersatz mind of Google. Douwe Osinga of Zurich has put together an interesting algorithm called "Google Talk". For example, if I type "Roger Stahl is" into Google Talk, I get "Roger Stahl is being hunted by the police. You can be a woman soon." Thanks, Google! Consider it done. That'll throw 'em off the trail.

Check out his other projects as well, which include various AI simulators and tests for whether "peace" or "war" will prevail in great cybermind.




Thursday, December 09, 2004

Wakeful

Here's some Robert Graves to pass the time.

Counting the Beats

You, love, and I,
(He whispers) you and I,
And if no more than only you and I
What care you or I?

Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.

Cloudless day,
Night, and cloudless day,
Yet the huge storm will burst upon their heads one day
From a bitter sky.

Where shall we be,
(She whispers) where shall we be,
When death strikes home, O where then shall we be
Who were you and I?

Not there but here,
(He whispers) only here,
As we are, here, together, now and here
Always you and I.

Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.

Stairways to Heaven



I was listening to a choir ensemble sing American composer Randall Thompson's "Allelujia" on NPR's Performance Today. It's a haunting piece inspired by the destruction of WWII. This particular rendition was performed at Santa Fe's Loretto Chapel, which is perhaps most famous for its peculiar spiral staircase. The staircase is quite gorgeous, having two full turns. What's most remarkable is its lack of a center support and the fact that it was constructed by a "mysterious wayward carpenter" between 1877 and 1881 without nails or glue. A lovely story, though there are, or course, skeptics.

The spiral is perhaps a near universal mystic symbol and can be found in ruins and paleographs around the world - from Celtic stone carvings to swastika to paisley to kundalini to yin-yang to the cosmic egg and cadeucus. Many of them are astronomically associated, though to gaze into the heavens without the help of the Hubble, one would not find many spirals. In 1979, the spiral was revived by Starhawk and her version of goddess worship with the book The Spiral Dance. The ritual of the spiral dance involves a line of folks whose center turns on itself, resulting in a swirling double-spiral formation. I've never tried it, but it sounds great. The spiral is also a recurring motif in mathematical fractals, the Greek golden ratio or the Fibonacci sequence, a standard of mathematical/architechtural beauty. The conch shell is built on a golden ratio. The poet H.D. writes in "The Walls Do Not Fall" that "there is a spell, for instance, in every sea shell." A whole host of flowers and plants are governed by this principle, including the lotus. You may have gazed at the face of a sunflower or daisy and been mesmerized by its fibonacci-ness. This was a symbol of the Art Nouveau movement. The spiral nature of trees becomes readily apparent when they are struck by lightning. In the same way, bones sometimes fracture spirally. Of course, on the microscopic end of the spiral staircase, we have the DNA double helix, the 3 meter strand to be found in every cell.

The spiral is much maligned in language and culture. Geometic language tells us that we are orderly when we have our "ducks in a row" and things "squared away." Christianity is linear (the migration of the soul to heaven). Circles represent and often foster a communal, protective, and egalitarian atmosphere. Buddhism is in many ways circular. On the other hand, things may "spiral out of control" or we may undergo a spiral of self loathing or exaltation. The spiral appears as a will-less process of letting go, which is why, I suppose, it is associated with natural processes and the goddess. It is too large (or too small) for our feeble egos. We may think we are rendering our daily lives when we are really caught up in sweeping spirals of political, technological, and social consolidation and dissolution. Jose Luis Borges has said that history does not repeat itself circularly; rather, it spirals through time.

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

His Dudeness

Linguist Scott Kiesling of the University of Pittsburg ferrets out every last variegation of the word "dude." (AP)

In greetings ("What's up, dude?"); as an exclamation ("Whoa, Dude!"); commiseration ("Dude, I'm so sorry."); to one-up someone ("That's so lame, dude."); as well as agreement, surprise and disgust ("Dude."). Kiesling says in the fall edition of American Speech that the word derives its power from something he calls cool solidarity - an effortless kinship that's not too intimate. Cool solidarity is especially important to young men who are under social pressure to be close with other young men, but not enough to be suspected as gay.

Historically, dude originally meant "old rags" - a "dudesman" was a scarecrow. In the late 1800s, a "dude" was akin to a "dandy," a meticulously dressed man, especially out West. It became "cool" in the 1930s and 1940s, according to Kiesling. Dude began its rise in the teenage lexicon with the 1981 movie "Fast Times at Ridgemont High."

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Big Oil Eats Itself (and us with it)

For those still convinced that global warming is a well-orchestrated hoax by environiks and primitivists - or that the evidence is "inconclusive," here are two of what we call "reluctant witnesses."

1. The Bush Administration, while lifting regulations left and right and refusing to enter into the international dialogue regarding the Kyoto pact, has stolidly maintained that warming is a virtual non-issue, only recently paying it lip service. The Pentagon, on the other hand, pragmatic as it is, has already taken it as a foregone conclusion and is crafting military strategy based on its likely disasterous effects: that weather patterns will change, droughts and floods will capriciously descend, and that water will become the "new oil" - the precious resource that will determine future political alignments. Weather will outpace terrorism as the main security threat. Take it from none other than Fortune magazine. Read the Pentagon report.

2. Big Oil itself is feeling the pinch. In Alaska, the permafrost is melting, which is making it difficult to patrol and maintain the Alaska pipeline. Large areas are being turned into marshy bogs over which heavy machinery cannot pass. Blissfully unaware of the irony of the situation, oil companies are lobbying congress to lift environmental regulations that limit heavy machinery on soft earth. In 1970, there were 200 days per year of permafrost to drive over. That number, much to the chagrin of the oil companies, has shrunk to a narrow window of 103 days.

The War for Terror

The BBC has been running a documentary series called "The Power of Nightmares" that has apparently hit quite hard. Here is a rundown posted on Commondreams.org. The doc argues that the engines of the U.S. Cold War military build-up were none other than Ford's Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld and Chief of Staff Cheney, who, with defense industry ties, instigated a campaign to whip up fear of new Soviet armaments whose non-existence could not be proven (sound familiar?). Nixon's good faith talks with the Soviet Union did not cut it for the arms industry. So while the CIA maintained that the USSR would not last another decade or two, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the gang formed "The Committee on the Present Danger" to manufacture a sense of threat, stock interview shows with experts, etc. And the people predictably said, "Better safe than sorry." Tried and true politics of fear. As it turned out years later, excepting the detractors, "We were all wrong."

The documentary can be viewed in its entirety in multiple formats to those blessed with BitTorrent. If you don't have BitTorrent, get it; you'll need it later.

Here is a great site for accessing recent progressive documentaries online.

Hyper-evolution of the news

Blogging got you bugaboo? Curious about the net and the seemingly simultaneous decentrallization/monopolization of the news? A group calling itself The Museum of Media History has put out a fine prognostication in flash form (8 min). Amazon individualization meets IndyMedia meets Friendster meets Google. Multitudes working in oceanic free-market media economies. Lovely. And probably not too far off the mark, except for the Google-zon nonsense about the strip mining of news to create personalized bricolage news stories. This one certainly deserves the adjective "apocalicious."

On a similar note, Tom Englehardt of Tomdispatch.com has a nice piece on the prescience of science fiction.

Two Faces of Fallujah

The Seattle Times does a nice job of contrasting the public exposure of both the Pentagon PR machine (text of briefing and PowerPoint slide presentation) and a popular anonymous photo-blog of the Fullajah tragedy. Though I applaud the story on one level, we see once again the press shying away from delivering a truthful image-account of the situation in Fallujah. In lieu of this, the "higher" press is content to cover the investigative work of the "lower" press, framing it instead as a larger PR battle for the hearts and minds of Americans - something akin to the widespread preference for horse-races over fact-checking in presidential elections, a conventional wisdom monitor as it were.

Monday, December 06, 2004

May Sarton

I've become quite enamoured with May Sarton lately. She was a prolific poet and writer of the middle twentieth century. Sensuous, vast, cruel, sojourning, sapphic, exacting, celebratory, mystic - long, sweeping, musical, synesthetic phrases. Reads like a prayer. One wonderful unitarian. It baffles me that her poetry doesn't have more of a presence on the web.

Here is a wonderful Harper Audio collection of May Sarton reading her own poems. For best quality, try the ".au" suffix files. Of these, I would recommend "The Olive Grove" and "The Lady and the Unicorn/Cluny Tapestries."


Here are two for the season:

FIRST SNOW

This is the first soft snow
That tiptoes up to your door
As you sit by the fire and sew,
That sifts through a crack in the floor
And covers your hair with hoar.
This is the stiffening wound
Burning the heart of a deer
Chased by a moon-white hound,
This is the hunt, and the queer
Sick beating of feet that fear.
This is the crisp despair
Lying close to the marrow,
Fallen out of the air
Like frost on the narrow
Bone of a shot sparrow.
This is the love that will seize
Savagely onto your mind
And do whatever he please,
This the despair, and a moon-blind
Hound you never bind.

(originally published in ENCOUNTERS IN APRIL, 1937)


Girl with a Cello

There had been no such music here
Until a girl came in from falling dark and snow
To bring into this house her glowing cello
As if some silent, magic animal

She sat, head bent
Her long hair all aspill over the breathing wood
And drew the bow

There had been no such music here
Until a girl came in from falling dark and snow
And she drew out that sound so like a whale
A rich, dark, suffering joy
As if to show all that a wrist holds and that fingers know
When they caress a magic animal
There had been no such music here
Until a girl came in from falling dark and snow




Prairie Dogs

I've always thought of human beings as resembling super-colonies or super-organisms (ants, bees, schools of fish, naked mole rat, prairie dogs) more than anything else. We find that super-organisms often have highly developed communication systems - not just for sexual seduction or territorial reasons. The super-organism must be regulated from within so that it can survive as a system.

The AP ran a story of Con Slobodchikoff, a biology professor from Northern Arizona University who studies the language of prairie dogs. Slobodchikoff has documented a language of about 100 words the prairie dogs use to signal predators. Through his experimentation, Slobodchikoff has discovered they have words for height and colors - say, if a short man were to approach the colony wearing a red shirt. Like songbirds and humans, too, prairie dogs have regional dialects.

We normally think of complex linguistic ability as the last sole province and essence of humanity - even beyond tool-making. We are of course wrong.

Jane Goodall: " “Every time some new discovery appears, there is an instant hostile reaction, not necessarily from the scientists but also from religious people in some cases. There is a real strong need in the minds of many people to keep that line sharp between humans on the one hand and the rest of the animal kingdom on the other. I think the chimp, more than anything else, has helped to blur that line. The first paper I wrote for “Nature,” the scientific periodical, they actually crossed out where I put “he and she and who,” and put “it” which, I thought, this is crazy. So we have come a long way since then."



"Shhhhhhh, don't give away our secret code."

Sunday, December 05, 2004

Decidedly Undecided

A psychographic analysis.



Some of my favorites:

The Undecided Voter thinks a chocolate ice cream cone would be a pleasant treat on a hot summer day.

Undecided Voters feel a sense of pride and satisfaction when thinking about their spouses, and the children they are raising together.

Undecided Voters were also open to the idea of having their families shot execution-style right in front of their eyes. It would make for a great book and probably get them on the Oprah show.

The Undecided Voter enjoys many of the action-oriented films produced by large Hollywood movie companies.

The Undecided Voter also admitted a thrill at the thought of being hurled out of a rolling charter bus leaving Branson, Missouri, at four in the morning after the 77-year-old driver had fallen asleep.

Ain't Over

Here's the clearest analysis I've found thus far as to why we ought not close the book on the presidential election. While the gap in Ohio narrows, Florida appears to be the state in question: exit poll data, votes for Bush wildly exceeding registered Republicans, electronic voting machine discrepancies, and increased voter turnout. Try these:

Upcoming Congressional Hearings on Voter Fraud
Black Box Voting
Election Inquiry (Wired)
Zogby take
Kerry Calls for Recall

Saturday, December 04, 2004

The Two Viktors

"Democracy" these days can wear many hats. The administration appears to be bent on "spreading democracy" everywhere in the world with the exception of the U.S., where democracy has taken a big hit. Of course, wars of economic and political imperialism need lofty justifications, and democracy is right up there. We have become used to hearing "democracy" come out of administration mouths sounding like "domination."

Given the janus-faced nature of all this democracy talk, many on those who really do support democracy were stunned by a sudden and hearty agreement with the administration regarding the voter fraud controversy in the Ukraine. Suddenly everyone was united. We could finally "heal," in the words of John Kerry's capitulation. This was shocking. Yes, there are some people in the U.S. who remember a certain stolen election (or two) like they remember 9/11. The real question is, why does this administration care? Two reasons.

1. Time for the administration to cash in on some more "tear down this wall" rhetoric - and a very public chance to prove that all this democracy talk is legit.

2. Putin's Russia - what is left of it - is still a significant economic and military threat. It has become more and more hostile in the last decade, especially in the lead up to the recent Iraq invasion (oil changing hands). Russia has got the second largest military at $60 billion (compared to U.S. $420 billion). The U.S. would like to remain the world's only superpower, and it will pursue divide-and-conquer techniques to achieve this. This is why it is essential that the Ukraine, the largest of the former provinces, not become a Russian client state. The European Union and the humbling strength of the euro is bad enough.


Thursday, December 02, 2004

Progeny


President Bush at Halifax. Who's behind door #1?