Is Bush Beelzebub?

Keith Olbermann: The general tone of the coverage is that mister bush simply doesn't want his name in the news before the election because it's like saying beelzebub or something. But is it possible that we are going to learn something aobut the role that congressional republicans played in getting up the fake intel on iraq or letting Bin Laden out of Tora Bora or how the economy got to be tanked or I've only got a thousand of these left, you can jump in any time.

Eugene Robinson: Well, it is indeed possible that there are secrets in there that we don't know. President Bush is not a man who was known for his self knowledge; he did not lead what would seem to be an examined life and so I don't hold really high hopes.

I think the real problem is reminding people of the Bush era, and I think even President Bush gets it. That that's not good for the republcian party.

---The former took place a couple weeks ago on Countdown.

My...thoughts on Governor George Walker Bush are difficult ones to work through. Being an individual who came of age in the aughts, the shadow of his presidency blankets these formative years in a fine layer of ash and soot, far beyond what even my own smoking would already itimate.

If you know me by now, and it isn't something that I should presume, then you likely now that I am one for a good bit of tonal flourish. The more potent the sensation, the duller the sense, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try for as powerful a language as possible. A fine line's been delineated, and I readily admit that it is quite easy to trip on either side of it, though the question of who is hurt by it--myself or my audience--is circumstansial.

So, let's think for a moment on whether it is unduly hyperbolic for Keith Olbermann to suggest that the former governor is Beelzebub, Lord of Flies and one of the seven princes of hell. Up front, yes, this is a bit much: Cheney fits far better since George wasn't a particularly powerful force in this world by the acuity of his own mentality. I get flustered when people say that a president is made by his cabinet, since I'd prefer to reflect on each position as having its own standards that exist parallel to synergetic responsibilities, but this man strikes me as an organ of a greater body at work, and, in particular, he is likely an appendix if not a hemaroid or carbuncle.

Satan Worshipers Call Obama A Muslim

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0819/poll-growing-number-incorrectly-call-obama-muslim/

It's a fairly simple thought: if these folks want to use very paranoid logic and poor evidence--his name, his Muslim "father" (who didn't really raise his son), a few years spent in a Muslim environment in Indonesia, willful ignorance of the ability for a person to choose the religion that speaks to them or that they speak to (a radical concept!), willful ignorance of that whole radical black preacher, and--oh, yeah--a desire to portray Obama as an other that society will allow them to hate, then I suggest we use almost similar logic to deride them.

Let us begin to assemble the parts of the outcome you should be expecting:

| These "evangelicals," and similar fundamentalist wackos, profess to express "Christian" values.
/ These people propose more war, greater divisions in the brotherhood of man through their constructions of race and gender, greater protection for the wealthy as opposed to rectifying the injustices of the poor, and  a flaunting of the divine mandate to be caretakers of the Earth.
\ Taken as a whole, their beliefs stand in direct opposition with the crypt- anarchocommunist leanings of the Gospel of John.

* These people are actively doing the work of the dark lord and worship at his throne.

Now, I dare you to prove me wrong.

Silly Schmidt Part 1: It's About Access, Not Profits

Note: This was supposed to be one post dealing with both the silly notion that there should be a different standard for the wired internet against the wireless internet and the idea that kids will have to one day have the legal right to change the name when they get older because of all the information about them that would exist on the net, but I am getting too long of wind for that to be reasonable for that to be reasonable in one post. Expect more shortly, perhaps even later tonight, but definitely soon...however you feel it to be.

The recent Google and Verizon articles of "net neutrality" is a load of arbitrary shit, primarily because of its distinction between wireless and wired connections.

To digress from the subject at large--stupid things coming out of Eric Schmidt's mouth, I don't give a flying fuck about how much money these wireless companies lose because they would engage in a just wireless world. If the companies focused less on profits, and, therefore, financial customers, and actually worried about the kind of service they are offering, then they might have a future. If we, at least for the moment, or moving from a place where we are going to try to keep around businesses--in some form, though probably not in the form of corporate capitalism, it might be a good idea for companies to actually try and offer a decent service and to be constantly trying to expand the capability and capacity of these telecommunication products.

Now, let's deal with Eric. The first big mistake that he made was his framing of the net neutrality debate. By framing it in the terms of capital, he leaves room for the idea that companies can do what ever they will with data rates, perhaps simply because wireless data hasn't caught up to the point where it can act on the same level as wired connections and, therefore--mayhap, replace it. Of course, if a company is going to lose money because it has to treat all connections fairly, then--sure--let them charge more if someone is going to make more of what they already supposedly paid for.

Let's get out of our heads the notion that we should care about net neutrality because of some idea of profits. You, chere reader, are not going to see any money from this. Okay, maybe that isn't totally true. Maybe one person, perhaps two--but not enough to start the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement¹, will read this who works at a web based company, a professional blog, or some company that derives a strong portion of its profits, or--for the sake of this train of thought--any portion, from the internet. Still, that will not be my average reader and--unless they feel that the right to profit, not the right to make any income--but profit², is more important than the right I will propose in opposition--they thus have no reason to base their judgement on the possibility of profit, something they will likely never taste.

Instead, let's base our standing on a more moral foothold and assume that net neutrality is something worth pursuing because it would make access to all information equal, or at less prevent it form becoming less equal. Obviously, if you don't have access internet, an absence of net neutrality only makes your situation infinitely worse. Then, from there, we work our way up from dial-up, and there certainly are people still connecting to the internet that way, all the way up to the fastest fiber optic cables that money can buy, and I'm thankful that I am in a household with such access. So, with that as a given, it's obvious that the net is, in one respect, not neutral. But, rather, what we are facing is another attempt by companies to take back what they have already offered.

The drive for profits has become so insatiable that companies are now trying to snatch back what they have already given away. Quake Live is now offering paid for subscriptions. Major newspapers are now walling off more of their content, or at least requiring you to register an account to access information--probably so they can better "monetize" on the information that you are selling to them simply by visiting the publication.³ So, from a consumer's rights point of view, there is a strong reasoning to see the non-neutral net as a step backwards from what you have today.

Now, would I necessarily want the government stepping in to Quake Live to ensure that everyone got all the features it can offer--for free? Hell no, and it would probably lead to the game being "toned down," or--essentially--killed. Do I want the government stepping in with funds to keep newspapers afloat? Fuck no! But, it seems like a no brainer to me that if you want a fair representation of reality, then you need to disentangle reporting from the profit motive--especially as the cancer spreads rapidly now, more than ever--if you want objective--not neutral--reporting. But that's a subject for another post.

We have a very different problem when it comes to the internet because it isn't merely a product that is immediately delivered. The value of the internet is not in and of itself. Just because I connect my computer to an Ethernet plug--or go over WiFi--does not mean I am using the internet or, in a real sense, consuming my purchase of an internet connection, though I suppose at the very least it would allow for my OS to update itself. So, much like a telephone--for obvious reasons, a computer requires something to connect to to make use of an internet connection. What's so great about the internet now is that I can get to stonerrock.com at the same speed that I can get to facebook.com. Well, perhaps not exactly. Though, while Facebook may be able to pay for fasyer servers and more bandwidth than Stoner Rock, and All That Is Heavy and Meteor City, Internet Service Providers play no other role in that exchange.

So, you can buy better tech or more bandwidth, but the companies remain neutral in the process. But, if Internet Service Providers start colluding with private companies, then the best thing the web has done--crowd sourcing--will likely vanish as the channels that allow for their access will vanish, simply because these openly shared avenues of information and discussion will no longer be able to afford to exist on the internet.

It's bad enough as it is that wireless data rates are disturbingly expensive for what you get in return, but what's more dangerous is the idea that people will be silenced for the sake of profit. Most disappointingly, if anything gains traction in the net neutrality argument, it will likely be slighter moneyed interests saying it will hurt their business. Oh noes! They won't will be able to cheat--er, compete. But, what really frightens me about a non-neutral net is the idea that speech decrying a move way from a non-neutral net--speech like this--could be silenced, and that would be wron--

I'm sorry, I can't let you do that Max.


Who said that? Who are you? And what right do you have to stop--ME!?


I'm Fios. Goodnight, Max.


---

1. 50 People--technically per day, which would therefore make these units even more impractical, so we're going to remove the time portion from it.
2. I'm therefore assuming that there is a possibility to make some money on net neutral internet--indeed probably enough to make a profit, but that the existence of a net neutrality is a force to prevent exorbitant levels of profit that would seem to the reasoned man to be unjust.
3. And--OH!--how I rue the fact that Blogger that displays  a tab called Monetize in the window here. Chere reader, now this, I will not use this blog to directly profit.⁴
4. I have no idea how I would define profits at this moment, so I will leave some room for me to forget what I said and for you to try to forgive me, hard as it may be.

What's Going on Here?

Can you chill out to this, or will the tone of the lyrics make you suspect the full mellowness of the tune?

On the Proper Pleasure of a Rolled Cigarette

Choosing to smoke a rolled cigarette is not just a matter of accounting and suggesting that you can get more out of your money when you're no longer paying for--as many--fancy chemicals and someone else to roll your cigarette for you. A rolled cigarette provides a level or participation and ritual that adds a sense of craft and ownership to this flight of fancy. Now, those who know me may be about to decry me as a quasi charlatan because I have used a rolling machine to aid in hand rolling a cigarette. 

Speaking for myself, no more! I have in the past couple months not merely rekindled my ability in my own acuity at hand rolling, but I've tempered it to a level that I did not think that even I could know. Part of that comes from a realization that lead me to ask the following:

What is the proper pleasure of a cigarette?

Is it in its consummation or can this quality be lessened or heightened?

The difference between true hand rolling and machine hand rolling comes down to a matter of upping the paper to tobacco ratio per pack, the former with the former and the latter with the latter. With a machine, you can stuff enough tobacco into that crevice 'til it becomes something as rich and long lasting as an unfiltered cigarette from a major brand, like a Lucky or a Tan Natural American Spirit. 

On the other hand, a slighter, totally hand rolled cigarette lasts not nearly as long, which may be better if time constraints arise--and I despise nothing more than a cigarette snuffed out as opposed to being clipped¹, but it still is a cigarette that is being had. And, in this case, we get to a conversation on the proper pleasure of the cigarette that is a bit less tangible. It shouldn't be, but it seems so to me. 

Now, we've come to the place where one says that a cigarette is a cigarette is a cigarette, and the proper pleasure is merely the getting of the fix in any form. But, in this situation, I wouldn't suggest that the fix is in based on getting any does of nicotine, because that would still be something quantitative and fit in the ideology of the previously described mechanic where we have a higher upper bound for the amount of tobacco that we can get per cigarette, and, thus, modify the time spent "enjoying"² a cigarette. Rather, in this other place, I suspect that it is the ritual of having a cigarette that leads to its pleasure: 

I suspect I desire a cigarette; I am going to have a cigarette; I roll a cigarette/ I get my pack/ I get my cigarette case, and I get my lighter; (I go out for a cigarette; I'm outside)/(I find my ashtray in my room); I procure my lighter; I light up and drag and drag and drag 'til done; I throw out the refuse where it belongs; I've had a cigarette.

In that whole situation, we saw how small that one moment was that provided me with my problem about the quality of the drags. When all we are trying to do is have a cigarette, we seem to be only fulfilling either a psychological need or a social desire--because who doesn't suddenly discover that they too should have a cigarette with another person every so often?--based on a deeply internalized presumption about our desire, while at the same time ignoring to probe this experience which is so essential to so many. Furthermore, more in this situation, we are working with a person who likely would very well exchange rolled cigarettes for filtered packs if the price was right. Also, I've excluded from the discussion so far the rolling of a filter into a cigarette, something that I don't do since, like a light beer, you are losing something in the filtration process and there different ways to make compromises than simply weakening something. Therefore, we are giving into the pretense that we will be consuming--and that is the proper word--at a greater quantity rather than reducing the quantity consumed for the sake of what may be a superior pleasure

I, for one, do not wish to aspire to the meager having, consuming of a cigarette. I want to ask serious questions about the aspects of a cigarette's pleasure. I want to ask questions about which tobaccos might deserve to become a real Gunslinger's bomber and which tobaccos, either for potency, time constraints, or quality--in the ironic sense, serve best under pico rolling measures. I wish to understand what pleasures you about tobacco, and, along the way, I may find a better understanding of my own sense of the matter. 

And I want you to participate in this journey with me, as opposed to us just having a cigarette. So, come unto me--my pretties, let us discuss.

---

1. Expect a piece in the future on the prevalence in media of characters lighting up only to quickly snuff out their cigarette.

2. I offer this derision not because I necessarily want to give ground to people against smoking, though their points are valid but we are making sacrifices for pleasure--just as we do with any drug, but because I want to take ground   from smokers. I have reason to believe that a number of smokers in this world may not actually give a shit about flavor and all similar metrics, are totally unwilling to try to smoke something beyond their brand, and they smoke not because it makes them happy but because they are trying to mollify some fear, and mollifying a fear is not necessarily the same thing as striving towards happiness. I call into order an elite, a vanguard of smokers in much the same way that any other realm that may have aesthetics can have such a group, even if they are full of shit!

What's A Textbook?

Speak to me of what defines a textbook to you. Comment, please?

Blood of the Sun - In Blood We Rock (2007)

If you happen to like Grand Funk Railroad, Mountain, and Blue Oyster Cult, you'll like Blood of the Sun's In Blood We Rock.

Mountain is an obvious comparison, methinks, since the band's name would seem to come from the song of the same name by Leslie West, and crew, though, with less likelihood, it could come from the film with the same name. However, the truth is that--in the studio!--BotS is able to recreate the kick-ass, stadium filling sound of BOC and GFR.

But, what really sets BotS from other folks keep the torch of "classic rock" alive--like Stone Axe (truly the most immediate band for comparison), for example, is the use of organs which places the heaviness into whole 'nother realm, ala Atomic Rooster but having learned from the growth doom--even funeral doom, while also invoking the heavy progressive force of Fuzzy Duck, Atomic Rooster, and Lucfier's Friend. LF is also a good spring board into BotS since the switch into a genuine piano and slighter rock moments suggest the kind of honest unity of heavy and progressive that those german fiends conducted.

Though seemingly disbanded, the recently active Sir Hedgehog, who slammed down some excellent modern heavy prog, is a likely comparison, bu the vocals and heaviness of BotS bring to mind the Black Keys with greater speed than the Sir, and some of the effects imposed would make BK a better choice.

The band remembers all the best excesses of the 60's/70's--slaying riffs, pounding bass, wailing organs, and the occasional cowbell--to a great effect.

You've gotta listen to this, but, and even more importantly--if you can, get this on vinyl. It really deserves the fidelity and singular beauty of being a sacred relic and not another aethereal thing to scroll through.

Naturally, All That is Heavy can hook you up: http://www.allthatisheavy.com/search.asp?SearchTerm=Blood%20of%20the%20Sun&SearchType=BandNames
---
Expect more data to be spilt on their other two albums, Death Ride (2008) and their self titled (2009), in the future.

So, I Guess the Cyberpunk Dystopia's Here

Flash Crash. Frankly, that should not be a real thing; that should not be a part of history. But it is.

On the 6th of May, 2010, for but a single day, not much more than a moment on a greater scale of financial time, a thousand points of market value just sort of vanished... into... thin air.

Why? Because, among other factors, a bunch of machines, made by man of course, got confused when some particularly nefarious machines bombarded the market with bogus misleading trades, likely sent by other machines constructed by men.

There was a day when being on the floor, that very proximity to the bleeding heart of finance, meant something for your ability to trade stock. Now, it's a matter of having your computers closer to the market's servers so you can ping trades as fast as possible. Talk about market wizardry.

You can call up the silly thought that some AI is messing with the market for shits and giggles, or that the flash crash was an act of terror on the part of some idealogical group, but the more likely answer is that flash crash was caused by one of these firms attempting to mess with the others. Mathematicians get snatched up by these financial monsters to craft armaments with which to wage war, or, rather, to game the system. And game it is. I can't imagine much else that can explain the kind of behavior we are facing. Tin, or silicon, men wound up to scream trades at one another at a blistering speed so that other machine minds can quickly devise new lines for the song that ends the world.

Whether these minute fluctuations are noise, the byproduct of the complexity of the algorithms used to conduct High Frequency Trading, or the deliberate result of some agent, the really terrifying aspect of this is the rest of humanity who couldn't give less of a shit. Fuck discussing the whole world; even if we just consider the American economy, the fact that so much money, and intelligence--mind you, someone "smart" had to think this shit up, was put into constructing these machines haunts me, as it should their makers, their masters--which may not be one and the same. Someone built these things to manufacture wealth, as oppose to actually devoting their power to some kind of venture that may actually effect, and, perhaps--even, help, people directly, as opposed to the nebulous actions of The Market.

The game of greed is just that, a game, a past time to divert ourselves from the real tasks at hand. Let's hope that we can work together on something a bit more important.

---
Real thoughts on the matter can be found here: http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/08/market-data-firm-spots-the-tracks-of-bizarre-robot-traders/60829/

A Very Serious Request

I understand that there was a time when Glenn Beck was a substance abuser.

I want content from that period and from before that period. I want to know precisely the evolution of this...individual. I don't know what kind of bounty I can put on this, right now, but I you will have my utmost regard if you, dear, reader can provide me with content from this period, particularly in the case that the content features Glenn whilst on one of the substances that he was abusing.

A Violent Dialogue

< WARNING > Late, Edge of Sleep, Ramblings Ahead < / WARNING >

I'm not so bold as to propose an answer to this right now, but I will at least quicken this question: can, and--then--when does, violence become a part of dialogue?

First, I would suppose we should wonder at a political conversation--with molotovs, but I am not opposed to thinking about other interactions and collections of people. Not now though, perhaps not ever, unless of course you speak up...

Secondly, and perhaps something that could shutdown this conversation before it even started is how we define violence. I forced myself too far towards a strict reading of violence as physical violence, political or otherwise, towards the marginalized and radicalized who use physical violence, individuals who tend to be treated as monsters demonstrating that they are something not to be empathized with. Far from it, but I digress.

The point here is that we should be willing to expand how we define violence beyond specific acts to cause physical harm in a militant sense but to a more general consideration of causing harm to a person. We should be able to define violence as the use of power against a person, or persons.

Society has apparently come to agreement that we shouldn't be up to our necks in fist-a-cuffs and more general use of arms--besides the ones you were armed with at birth. In fact, I would be willing to dare that military force pales in comparison to the type of violence that really bothers me.

What seems to me to be a more dangerous and far reaching form of violence are the actions of the powerful against the weak. On a smaller scale, this could be the use of physical violence, or even mental intimidation, but does this compare in the slightest to the Gulf Oil Spill or the molesting of our geists by individuals in marketing.¹  After all, what else can we call these afflictions of corporate power on actual human beings but violence?

I won't be the first to call the corporation a psychotic imaginary frenemy acting as a veil for even more rabid and ravenous bunch of hounds masquerading in human flesh. Our brave blue dirt ball has been left scarred, bleeding, perhaps in shock by the acts of men with a full spectrum of moral intentions, dating all the way back to the days when those who wielded power could be slain and the power would be taken from them.

But, still, that power would persist. Kings fall and rise. But, we live in strange times now. Leaders can be killed and their dreams dashed, their stories rewritten, but it's harder to kill something that never was. A corporation is not quite the same tyrant. It's a man made monster that demonstrates what happens when you breath life into greed itself, but at the same time it is a composite entity of human wills. But, perhaps like Devastator, this gestalt of mines only lets the most rotten things come out.

Now, this is not to say that a corporation can't do good, but this is either a mistake on its part or the result of people who are wary of what they are dealing with. It's nature is to cause harm, to amass power so as to preserve itself. It is the worst thing inside of us: the lizard like thing that sees to its own desires at the expense of others, and, inevitably, to the expense its own needs and rational limits.

So how can you punch out BP? How can you pound the metatarsals of villainous HMOs into a fine dust that no medicine can recover? How can you do to Blackwater what's it done to the world?

How can we exact justice? And, in this situation, we are looking for justice to be a force.

I suppose what really is coming to question is when can we take back what we seemingly gave up at birth without a choice: a right to violence, for self defense or otherwise. As a citizen, this right is defaulted to the state, since it seems to at least make things more comfortable, for some, and peaceable to recognize, to some extent, our fellow man's right to life without harm. It removes fear from the general population, but at what cost?

There is no cost if the state is acting for the people, if it is acting redress the wrongs that are committed upon them. But it doesn't seem to be doing that, at least not forthrightly. It's not acting to right the wrongs done by these spectres, which may have minds but no body or soul to strike at.

Still, I'm not sure it would be any better to resort to physical violence. After all the power, the violence we are talking about now--the capital, which is also the capitol, of these phantoms--can buy all the pretty weapons they might need to drive justice to a halt. And this need not be a mere gun or blade, but their magic is best spent on shouting lies and distortions to the highest mountaintop till they coalesce into a form that brings acid rain and hateful thunderbolts on those who presumed they were praying to, as they were told, the rain gods. But these demons do not "make it rain" for the people, or even let it "trickle down."

I'd like to suggest that we can still do violence to them, we can still bring about justice and even invoke the bloody call of an eye for an eye without the use of bodily harm. Their greatest weapons are ideas, because, like their transnational forms, ideas can appear ethereal and can be hard to combat when deeply ingrown and well metastasized.

I will not say that we need to remind ourselves, constantly, of what is right, because we don't have a value as such to revolve around. But, instead, we can try and nullify the gravity of our worst crimes. Which perhaps is how we should perceive these injustices. To still believe in any war of us and them is foolish, even the us and them of the people and the corporate powers. Corporations themselves are but an idea, an idea that we can tar and feather and lock away in the books of law so as to be put back into the box that it crawled out of. But the people who run those companies are still people, just as you and I.

And just like they do to us, we should do to them. They send us wild with their burning visions of paradise, while their workers, truly their slaves, are left to suffer. If our government is unwilling to help us, then the violence we have left is to assault their bodies, real and incorporeal, with protest and boycott and to wage war on their minds and demand life be breathed into their mirror neurons such that their empathy, the seat of their humanity, drives them to take responsibility for the living hellscape that we are now chained to and help us break the chains that man has forged for himself. If they still refuse, then mayhap this be the natural ends of the human machine, unable to convince itself that another is real, and the simple brilliance that that heralds.

Lastly, I'll leave you with something that I've been listening to for quite a bit, and I highly recommend the rest of the tracks that you might comes across from the bar and, later, cantina jukebox in Starcraft II.²



1. My feelings on people in marketing sympathize with those of Bill Hicks. 
2. With minor exception to "Terran up The Night/"