persistent memory

2012-01-01T09:57:00.000-08:00

Speech at Occupy Wall St., Zucotti Park..

“It’s easy to imagine the end of the world, but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism".

"Carnivals come cheap".

"The problem is not corruption or greed; the problem is the system which pushes you to be corrupt."

Slavoj Žižek

http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=1476

2011-11-10T17:41:00.001-08:00

"Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

Robert F. Kennedy Address, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, March 18, 1968

2011-11-10T14:21:00.001-08:00

"You must be the change you want to see in the world."
- Mahatma Gandhi

2011-08-23T13:06:00.000-07:00

Imitation of Christ

From the Rawganique ezine

A fun-filled week in Michigan, with the Kalamazoo Activists preceded my adventure with the United States Criminal Justice System. A week spent in the town that serves as a base for the companies Upjohn Pharmacia/Monsanto, leaders in Bio-technologies, a town with its vibrant Community Gardens projects adding to the rising consciousness visible throughout the town with people of all ages joining together with efforts to educate and participate in the transformation towards a sustainable culture. I had been on the train for a day, traveling across the country to Portland, Oregon, chatting with other passengers about current social and ecological issues, when the train stopped somewhere in Montana. Now, a cage or two may have been rattled, as not all participants in the conversation were in alignment with some of the subject matter. Information regarding the Hemp Industry, Organic Farming, the Raw Food Diet, Cob Housing, Bio-technologies, Slavery, Deep Ecology, Medical Marijuana, mass-consumption and over population etc. was a challenge for some. So there was a "buzz" in the air when the Border Patrol officer walked into the carriage and headed directly to me and asked to check my ID. Whoops! I had violated my immigration status and would have to be escorted off the train. Handcuffed and relieved of my bags, i was driven to the local county jail, fingerprinted, photographed and locked in a cell. Inside one of my bags i carried a supply of clean spring water and organic food. When asked if i may consume some of my own supplies i was denied and the option of a less pure water source was offered. I politely declined, stating my preference for clean personal and planetary health.

2011-08-18T09:15:00.001-07:00

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea”  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

2011-08-02T18:31:00.000-07:00

"You just imagine and that's it. That's how you get fun".

Paddy, aged 4.75, with an old plastic slide, an old sprinkler, in 110F weather.

2011-04-18T13:54:00.000-07:00

"The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles...when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones."

Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

2011-04-05T20:58:00.000-07:00

"The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.”
-Voltaire

2010-12-22T23:59:00.001-08:00

"What limits people is that they don't have the
fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone
direct it."

Tom Robbins

2010-09-05T16:36:00.000-07:00

Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay…”
– Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village

“Have we not seen, at pleasure’s lordly call,
The smiling long frequented village fall?
While, scourg’d by famine from the smiling land
The mournful peasant leads his humble band;
And while he sinks, without one arm to save,
The country blooms – a garden and a grave…

Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay…”

2010-08-16T13:43:00.000-07:00

"...the big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart." -- Kurt Vonnegut

2010-07-02T00:21:00.001-07:00

"Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life. . . . A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers ... Live things, things that lived -- that are conscious of us -- are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last to have known such things."
--Rainer Maria Rilke

2010-06-08T22:10:00.000-07:00

"Many times in our travels I have lost everything but the clothes I was wearing and Lizbeth. The things I find in Dumpsters, the love letters and rag dolls of so many lives, remind me of this lesson. Now I hardly pick up a thing without envisioning the time when I will cast it aside...
"Anyway, I find my desire to grab for the gaudy bauble has been largely sated. I think this is an attitude I share with the very wealthy--we both know that there is plenty more where what we have came from. Between us are the rat-race million who nightly scavenge the cable channels looking for they know not what.

"I am sorry for them."

Travels with Lizbeth by Lars Eighner

2010-06-08T22:07:00.000-07:00

"The purpose of welfare systems is not to help poor people. If the object were to help poor people, then that would be most surely done by giving money to poor people. But that is not the idea, as our tax code proves. If you give twenty dollars to someone on the street, there is not a way in the world you can deduct that donation from your taxes. To claim a deducation you must give the money to an organization that employs clerks and administrators and social workers and that, more than likely, puts nothing material into the hands of the poor... When the agency makes an accounting of the good it has done the poor, it will count the money it spent on paying social workers to hold the hands of the poor the same as money, if any, spent on bread. The purpose of welfare systems is to provide jobs for social workers and bureaucrats. I told Billy he should be grateful to have a job in the poverty industry, but to ask that such a job be meaningful is to ask too much."

Travels with Lizbeth by Lars Eighner

2010-05-30T15:06:00.000-07:00

“I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament,”

Christopher Lasch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lasch
http://www.tnr.com/article/jeremiah-american-style-0?page=0,0

2010-05-14T20:29:00.001-07:00

The Christian resolve to find the world evil and ugly has made the world evil and ugly.

Nietzsche

2010-05-05T11:50:00.000-07:00

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.

Samuel P. Huntington

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington#Quotations

2010-04-06T13:35:00.000-07:00

"At least the citizens of the former Soviet Union knew that their news was bullshit".

from blog: http://americathegrimtruth.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/america-the-grim-truth

2010-03-13T23:59:00.000-08:00

The French moral philosopher Albert Camus argued that we are separated from each other. Our lives are meaningless. We cannot influence fate. We will all die and our individual being will be obliterated. And yet Camus wrote that “one of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.”

“A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object,” Camus warned. “But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.”

The rebel, for Camus, stands with the oppressed—the unemployed workers being thrust into impoverishment and misery by the corporate state, the Palestinians in Gaza, the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the disappeared who are held in our global black sites, the poor in our inner cities and depressed rural communities, immigrants and those locked away in our prison system. And to stand with them does not mean to collaborate with parties, such as the Democrats, who can mouth the words of justice while carrying out acts of oppression. It means open and direct defiance.

The power structure and its liberal apologists dismiss the rebel as impractical and see the rebel’s outsider stance as counterproductive. They condemn the rebel for expressing anger at injustice. The elites and their apologists call for calm and patience. They use the hypocritical language of spirituality, compromise, generosity and compassion to argue that the only alternative is to accept and work with the systems of power. The rebel, however, is beholden to a moral commitment that makes it impossible to stand with the power elite. The rebel refuses to be bought off with foundation grants, invitations to the White House, television appearances, book contracts, academic appointments or empty rhetoric. The rebel is not concerned with self-promotion or public opinion. The rebel knows that, as Augustine wrote, hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage—anger at the way things are and the courage to see that they do not remain the way they are. The rebel is aware that virtue is not rewarded. The act of rebellion defines itself.

Chris Hedges:-

http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/calling_all_rebels_20100308/

2010-02-04T13:34:00.000-08:00

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality".

- Dante

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/26260

2010-01-18T07:34:00.000-08:00

Of that which one cannot speak, one should remain silent.

- Wittgenstein

2010-01-15T13:31:00.001-08:00

Steal this book

http://www.tenant.net/Community/steal/steal.html

2010-01-12T08:33:00.000-08:00

Who narrates governs

Regressives understand in ways that progressives tend to be clueless about, the simple idea that, who narrates governs

David Michael Green

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/26001

2009-12-26T09:29:00.001-08:00

The only gift is a portion of thyself.

Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing. This is right and pleasing, for it restores society in so far to its primary basis, when a man’s biography is conveyed in his gift, and every man’s wealth is an index of his merit. But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy me something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith’s.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

2009-12-22T17:24:00.000-08:00

Strength Thru Shopping

-Jello Biafra

2009-09-22T15:47:00.000-07:00

rant....

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/23901

2009-09-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

'There is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible and wrong.'"

H. L. Mencken:

2009-08-13T22:11:00.000-07:00

The American cult of founder worship.

2009-06-17T22:49:00.000-07:00

Review of Ulysses

http://www.amazon.com/review/R36V6DYQXY1PX0/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

2009-06-17T22:46:00.000-07:00

Review of "A Goats Song" by Dermot Healy

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3S6XQHAUKEO4Z/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

2009-05-06T10:26:00.000-07:00

Information == Knowledge

And I'm not sure that just because you can get more information you are actually better off. I think there is already too much information which is of no great use or purpose. So I think there's a bit of fine tuning needed there, which you can say about the 20th century in general.

Damien Lovelock, The Celibate Rifles

2009-05-06T10:04:00.000-07:00

Poverty comes in an exciting range of variegated colours.

Wealth always looks the same.

- AA Gill.

2009-04-17T21:36:00.001-07:00

It seems to me that people have vast potential. Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don't. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever.

Philip Adams

2009-03-13T18:27:00.000-07:00

You don't need to outdo the competition. It's expensive and defensive. Underdo your competition. We need more simplicity and clarity.
-Jason Fried

2009-02-02T10:36:00.000-08:00

"The unexamined life is not worth living"
- Socrates

2008-12-27T14:49:00.000-08:00

A special contribution of Zen to Eastern thought was it's recognition of the mundane as of equal importance to the spiritual.

- Kazuko Okakura, quoted by Laurence G. Boldt in "Zen and the art of making a living".

2008-12-26T23:18:00.000-08:00

What is your favorite instrument?

My soul.

Aaron Behrens - Ghostland Observatory

2008-11-15T15:22:00.000-08:00

Only through forgetfulness can a man ever achieve the illusion of possessing a 'truth'

- Nietzsche

2008-08-21T22:57:00.000-07:00

Happy are men who yet before they are killed
Can let their veins run cold

Wilfred Owen, "Insensibility"
- Quoted in "Bodies" by Jed Mercurio

2008-08-12T16:06:00.001-07:00

"I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer gods than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen F. Roberts

from http://davefaq.com/Opinions/Relativism/

2008-07-21T22:51:00.000-07:00

I got nothing against no Viet Cong. No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger.

- Muhammad Ali

2008-05-09T15:33:00.000-07:00

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." - Howard Aiken

http://www.paulgraham.com/googles.html

2008-05-07T16:28:00.001-07:00

Nothing is true unless it makes you laugh, but you don’t really understand it until it makes you cry. — _Illuminatus_, Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea

2008-04-11T21:22:00.000-07:00

"In many ways, the environmental crisis is a design crisis. It is a consequence of how things are made, buildings are constructed, and landscapes are used. Design manifests culture, and culture rests firmly on the foundation of what we believe to be true about the world... It is clear that we have not given design a rich enough context. We have used design cleverly in the service of narrowly defined human interests, but have neglected it's relationship with our fellow creatures. Such myopic design cannot fail to degrade the living world, and, by extension, our own health."

— Sim Van der Ryn, quoted in The Philosophy of Sustainable Design, by Jason McLennan

2008-03-16T05:42:00.000-07:00

2008-02-28T19:57:00.000-08:00

"Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?"

- Marine Corp Sargeant Dan Daly at the battle of Belleau Wood, leading his men into a storm of German machine gun fire.

2008-02-04T15:08:00.000-08:00

2007-12-14T20:38:00.000-08:00

War is Peace.

'To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them and to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary".

"The consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival".

George Orwell, 1984

2006-10-21T14:52:00.000-07:00

Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of their leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifist for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

-Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg Trials. Taken from "The last true story I'll ever tell" by John Crawford.

2006-10-21T14:51:00.000-07:00

Example isn't another way to teach, it's the only way to teach. -Albert Einstein

2006-06-23T14:09:00.000-07:00

"It's stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition."
- Bono, U2

2006-06-17T18:48:00.000-07:00

Nobel Laureate and rogue economist Gary Becker's blog:-

The Becker-Posner Blog

2006-06-01T16:54:00.000-07:00

The Filthy Critic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2006-05-23T00:02:00.000-07:00

How to Make Money From Your Blog

2006-05-07T19:31:00.000-07:00

Million Dollar Experiment

2006-03-31T13:43:00.000-08:00

OOP Criticism

2004-06-14T21:15:00.000-07:00

fuck dinosaur junior.
neo hippies

--------------------------------------

2004-06-14T21:13:00.000-07:00

We are here to drink beer

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

Charles Bukowski

-----------------------------------------------

2004-05-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

Mr Spud

PBS: Idaho, A Portrait - J. R. Simplot