Honesty

It’s not the best policy, it's the only policy. I’m going a little lite on the political slant this week *cough* in order to air my laundry on the H word.

Ever since I was a little kid, I despised people who lie to navigate their way through life, so much in fact that I would totally distance myself from someone, even if they only lied to me once. Well first off I should establish that I have varying rings of social relationships, which all require various levels of trust etcetera. Most people share this behavior, however they often don’t have the rings as clearly laid out in there heads as I do. I don’t think it at all inappropriate or mean to hangout with someone, and totally not trust them with your spare change. Some people are just like that, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still be fun to hangout with from time to time. Also, I don’t determine the level someone is at with me based on how others perceive or have been treated by them. In other words, I’ve had friends that hate my other friends because they’re asses to each other (which only applies within criminal/extreme norms… I wouldn’t stay friends with someone if they stole or violently attacked another friend etc….). When neither party is an ass to me, I don’t see the point in being on sides. I don’t apologize for that, and one of the biggest disappointments is when a friend asks me not to be friends with someone else. I will almost always pick the friend who didn’t ask me, even if I like them less.

I digress.

Without honesty, what do we have to base reality on, as well as our perceptions within a relationship (any relationship, not necessarily romantic)? People who lie their way through life often live in a scary world where at any minute their secrets could be found out and their world turned upside down. I live in a world of unknowns too, but not because of the unknown propagated by our own design, but because of the unknown that is this random world. There is one difference between how I live my life and how the dishonest live theirs: I’m not afraid of the unknown. I have friends better then family who I trust and who trust me. I know they are there and will help me get through the unknown if ever I need their help. I know that they will be there because they know me for who I am, and not who I’ve created myself to appear as (which at any point could be revealed to be false).

However, and you may judge me a hypocrite for this, I rarely share my whole self with people I trust. I don’t think it dishonest not to geek out in front of someone when I know they have no interest in geeking out with me. If you ever asked me about it however, I would be obliged to answer. I just don’t see the point in trying to express every nuance of my personality with someone if they express no interest in understanding said nuances. For some people I’m too much, so I think that’s fair.

Anyway, the phrase “only god can judge me” has been rattling around in my head all morning (as sung by Tupac). I don’t personally believe that she exists, but if so, that is a totally arrogant thing to do. Who is she to judge her own work, really? I think most of my art is crap and usually throw it away (which I later regret). I would hate to be thrown away (supposedly to the pits of hell) just because that asshole of a goddess was being too critical of herself and her work (which is this world). If anything, she would be the last place I would expect judgment, rather I would expect compassion and acceptance as we are all working with what she has given us… theoretically speaking.

Signing off…

PS. currently reading the autobiography of Nikola Tesla, so be prepared to hear about the late great saint of modern technology in the near future….

PPS. I have been obsessed with him for most of my life so you can always contact me if you want to geek out on Niko anytime.

Keith Oberman's Countdown

Thanks to sEvenMeaD for binging this to my attention:



I think I might try to get Keith to adopt me. Wouldn't that be great!

The Mother of all Pretexts

You should take a minute to read Uri Avnery's latest essay. It's pretty amazing:

The Mother of all Pretexts Uri Avnery

13/10/07

WHEN I hear mention of the "Clash of Civilizations" I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.

To laugh, because it is such a silly notion.

To cry, because it is liable to cause untold disasters.

To cry even more, because our leaders are exploiting this slogan as a pretext for sabotaging any possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. It is just one more in a long line of pretexts.

WHY WAS the Zionist movement in need of excuses to justify the way it treated the Palestinian people?

At its birth, it was an idealistic movement. It laid great weight on its moral basis. Not just in order to convince the world, but above all in order to set its own conscience at rest.

From early childhood we learned about the pioneers, many of them sons and daughters of well-to-do and well-educated families, who left behind a comfortable life in Europe in order to start a new life in a far-away and - by the standards of the time - primitive country. Here, in a savage climate they were not used to, often hungry and sick, they performed bone-breaking physical labor under a brutal sun.

For that, they needed an absolute belief in the rightness of their cause. Not only did they believe in the need to save the Jews of Europe from persecution and pogroms, but also in the creation of a society so just as never seen before, an egalitarian society that would be a model for the entire world. Leo Tolstoy was no less important for them than Theodor Herzl. The kibbutz and the moshav were symbols of the whole enterprise.

But this idealistic movement aimed at settling in a country inhabited by another people. How to bridge this contradiction between its sublime ideals and the fact that their realization necessitated the expulsion of the people of the land?

The easiest way was to repress the problem altogether, ignoring its very existence: the land, we told ourselves, was empty, there was no people living here at all. That was the justification that served as a bridge over the moral abyss.

Only one of the Founding Fathers of the Zionist movement was courageous enough to call a spade a spade. Ze'ev Jabotinsky wrote as early as 80 years ago that it was impossible to deceive the Palestinian people (whose existence he recognized) and to buy their consent to the Zionist aspirations. We are white settlers colonizing the land of the native people, he said, and there is no chance whatsoever that the natives will resign themselves to this voluntarily. They will resist violently, like all the native peoples in the European colonies. Therefore we need an "Iron Wall" to protect the Zionist enterprise.

When Jabotinsky was told that his approach was immoral, he replied that the Jews were trying to save themselves from the disaster threatening them in Europe, and, therefore, their morality trumped the morality of the Arabs in Palestine.

Most Zionists were not prepared to accept this force-oriented approach. They searched fervently for a moral justification they could live with.

Thus started the long quest for justifications - with each pretext supplanting the previous one, according to the changing spiritual fashions in the world.

THE FIRST justification was precisely the one mocked by Jabotinsky: we were actually coming to benefit the Arabs. We shall redeem them from their primitive living conditions, from ignorance and disease. We shall teach them modern methods of agriculture and bring them advanced medicine. Everything - except employment, because we needed every job for the Jews we were bringing here, which we were transforming from ghetto-Jews into a people of workers and tillers of the soil.

When the ungrateful Arabs went on to resist our grand project, in spite of all the benefits we were supposedly bringing them, we found a Marxist justification: It's not the Arabs who oppose us, but only the "effendis". The rich Arabs, the great landowners, are afraid that the glowing example of the egalitarian Hebrew community would attract the exploited Arab proletariat and cause them to rise against their oppressors.

That, too, did not work for long, perhaps because the Arabs saw how the Zionists bought the land from those very same "effendis" and drove out the tenants who had been cultivating it for generations.

The rise of the Nazis in Europe brought masses of Jews to the country. The Arab public saw how the land was being withdrawn from under their feet, and started a rebellion against the British and the Jews in 1936. Why, the Arabs asked, should they pay for the persecution of the Jews by the Europeans? But the Arab Revolt gave us a new justification: the Arabs support the Nazis. And indeed, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, was photographed sitting next to Hitler. Some people "discovered" that the Mufti was the real instigator of the Holocaust. (Years later it was revealed that Hitler had detested the Mufti, who had no influence whatsoever over the Nazis.)

World War II came to an end, to be followed by the 1948 war. Half of the vanquished Palestinian people became refugees. That did not trouble the Zionist conscience, because everybody knew: They ran away of their own free will. Their leaders had called upon them to leave their homes, to return later with the victorious Arab armies. True, no evidence was ever found to support this absurd claim, but it has sufficed to soothe our conscience to this day.

It may be asked: why were the refugees not allowed to come back to their homes once the war was over? Well, it was they who in 1947 rejected the UN partition plan and started the war. If because of this they lost 78% of their country, they have only themselves to blame.

Then came the Cold War. We were, of course, on the side of the "Free World", while the great Arab leader, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, got his weapons from the Soviet bloc. (True, in the 1948 war the Soviet arms flowed to us, but that's not important.) It was quite clear: No use talking with the Arabs, because they support Communist tyranny.

But the Soviet bloc collapsed. "The terrorist organization called PLO", as Menachem Begin used to call it, recognized Israel and signed the Oslo agreement. A new justification had to be found for our unwillingness to give back the occupied territories to the Palestinian people.

The salvation came from America: a professor named Samuel Huntington wrote a book about the "Clash of Civilizations". And so we found the mother of all pretexts.

THE ARCH-ENEMY, according to this theory, is Islam. Western Civilization, Judeo-Christian, liberal, democratic, tolerant, is under attacked from the Islamic monster, fanatical, terrorist, murderous.

Islam is murderous by nature. Actually, "Muslim" and "terrorist" are synonymous. Every Muslim is a terrorist, every terrorist a Muslim.

A sceptic might ask: How did it happen that the wonderful Western culture gave birth to the Inquisition, the pogroms, the burning of witches, the annihilation of the Native Americans, the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansings and other atrocities without number - but that was in the past. Now Western culture is the embodiment of freedom and progress.

Professor Huntington was not thinking about us in particular. His task was to satisfy a peculiar American craving: the American empire always needs a virtual, world-embracing enemy, a single enemy which includes all the opponents of the United States around the world. The Communists delivered the goods - the whole world was divided between Good Guys (the Americans and their supporters) and Bad Guys (the Commies). Everybody who opposed American interests was automatically a Communist - Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Salvador Allende in Chile, Fidel Castro in Cuba, while the masters of Apartheid, the death squads of Augusto Pinochet and the secret police of the Shah of Iran belonged, like us, to the Free World.

When the Communist empire collapsed, America was suddenly left without a world-wide enemy. This vacuum has now been filled by the Muslims-Terrorists. Not only Osama bin Laden, but also the Chechnyan freedom fighters, the angry North-African youth of the Paris banlieus, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the insurgents in the Philippines.

Thus the American world view rearranged itself: a good world (Western Civilization) and a bad world (Islamic civilization). Diplomats still take care to make a distinction between "radical Islamists" and "moderate Muslims", but that is only for appearances' sake. Between ourselves, we know of course that they are all Osama bin Ladens. They are all the same.

This way, a huge part of the world, composed of manifold and very different countries, and a great religion, with many different and even opposing tendencies (like Christianity, like Judaism), which has given the world unmatched scientific and cultural treasures, is thrown into one and the same pot.

THIS WORLD VIEW is tailored for us. Indeed, the world of the clashing civilizations is, for us, the best of all possible worlds.

The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is no longer a conflict between the Zionist movement, which came to settle in this country, and the Palestinian people, which inhabited it. No, it has been from the very beginning a part of a world-wide struggle which does not stem from our aspirations and actions. The assault of terrorist Islam on the Western world did not start because of us. Our conscience can be entirely clean - we are among the good guys of this world.

This is now the line of argument of official Israel: the Palestinians elected Hamas, a murderous Islamic movement. (If it didn't exist, it would have to be invented - and indeed, some people assert it was created from the start by our secret service.) Hamas is terroristic, and so is Hizbullah. Perhaps Mahmoud Abbas is not a terrorist himself, but he is weak and Hamas is about to take sole control over all Palestinian territories. So we cannot talk with them. We have no partner. Actually, we cannot possibly have a partner, because we belong to Western Civilization, which Islam wants to eradicate.

IN HIS book "Der Judenstaat", Theodor Herzl, the official Israeli "Prophet of the State", prophesied this development, too.

This is what he wrote in 1896: "For Europe we shall constitute (in Palestine) a part of the wall against Asia, we shall serve as a vanguard of culture against barbarism."

Herzl was thinking of a metaphoric wall, but in the meantime we have put up a very real one. For many, this is not just a Separation Wall between Israel and Palestine. It is a part of the world-wide wall between the West and Islam, the front-line of the Clash of Civilizations. Beyond the wall there are not men, women and children, not a conquered and oppressed Palestinian population, not choked towns and villages like Abu-Dis, a-Ram, Bil'in and Qalqilia. No, beyond the wall there are a billion terrorists, multitudes of blood-thirsty Muslims, who have only one desire in life: to throw us into the sea, simply because we are Jews, part of Judeo-Christian Civilization.

With an official position like that - who is there to talk to? What is there to talk about? What is the point of meeting in Annapolis or anywhere else?

And what is left to us to do - to cry or to laugh?

Source

Significance

We are a plagued society. Plagued by the idea that there is something better out there. That our lives can somehow be better then they are now. Hoping life is somehow more significant then it seems to be now. For some whose hope clouds their own judgment, life will never bring them the release from the drudgery they face on a daily basis.

However, some don’t feel this sentiment and are happy with whom they are. It seems on the diametric scale, we as humans tend to move fluidly up and down throughout the courses of our lives. The scale ranges from being pleased with ones station in life, to being plagued by the idea that we are not living up to our potential or that we are somehow insignificant to the world (not pleased). This feel tends to manifest itself as a hole in our lives. One of the most popular ways to fill this hole is by escaping into a world of fictional fantasy. The stories are familiar and yet diverse in their portrayal of alternative lives. Lives that we are potentially searching for. I have mulled this escapist sentiment in my head for the last few months and have hence written to you all about what I’ve been philosophizing.

The fiction can be a simple as a scenario of being LOST on a mysterious deserted island, or it can be complex, whereby we have extraordinary powers that allow us to become HEROES to society. Still at the core of these escapist fantasies is our inability to feel important in our real world lives, and how these stories allow us to see a life that transcends the monotony we face in reality. Otherwise why would we have to imagine ourselves in these fantasies? How many times have you imagined that if your life was just slightly different you could fulfill a potential that the lack of said difference is not allowing? That maybe if you had made a slightly different choice, your life would somehow be more satisfying. What is at the bottom of all this? Is it just that life in reality sucks, or is it more innate then this?

Often times I wonder about ancient humankind and if the lives of daily humans where riddled with the same type of desire. How long has the grass been greener on the other side? Or is that idea a product of modern (post industrial revolution) life, not shared by our ancestors whose lives were filled with a constant struggle to survive? In a certain sense I would argue the latter point, that we have the free time now to wonder how life could be better, that humans half a millennium ago had their lives filled with enough toil to make them feel satisfied, or potentially be distracted from how mundane life was (if it was). If you ever get the chance to work land in order to eat, you feel more satisfied that your work has gone towards something important. At least I do. Maybe that too is a factor in this phenomenon. How many people in this day and age see the final effect of their work, and how significant it really is?

The idea of superhuman powers and abilities has attracted my interest since I was a young boy. Enough that one of my most popular questions I ask people is precisely: “If you could have any superpower, what would it be?” You can learn quite a deal about a person’s desires and goals based on their answer to this question. That is if they are fun enough to know what I mean by superpower. I also have put quite a descent amount of thought into what my power would be: the ability to absorb/copy all the information in a persons mind by only touching them. I am a sucker for honesty, so of course my power involves seeing a person for what they are, and not how they present themselves via a corporeal existence. It also involves learning things about people that I would never get the chance to under normal circumstances, including but not limited to immediately learning their tongue/language. Could you image the type of relief a person might feel when a complete stranger could literally speak their language after only meeting them (and shaking hands of course, which I understand would make it hard for me to “absorb” some people based on their cultural background)?

But I don’t want to dwell on that in this blog. That is I don’t want to condone losing yourself in a fantasy world rather then come to terms with the real one. In fact I posit forth the idea that we all have “powers”, just not in the traditional comic book sense. Everyone has semi-unique abilities that, while many might share, not every human has. These are generally referred to as “skills”. In my opinion everyone has skills, whether or not they recognize those skills or not is a different story. Fore example: some musicians can play-by-ear, whereby they can listen to a song and play it back for you, often times having only heard the song once. Some people have a natural sense of others and glide through society with ease, while others find themselves at constant odds with people. Some people are good at math, while others are good at English. These are only small examples of our unique abilities that we take for granted everyday. I count myself lucky that I was personally born with a number of gifts, many of which I am currently squandering. At the same time I can see the powers others have, often when they can’t recognize it for themselves (one of my powers).

That is a challenge that I would like to put forth to you, my readers, all five of you. If you can’t see the importance of your life, and how your work is significant, I challenge you to seek out that significance. Look inside yourself to see what powers you have, and whether you’re happy with how you are using said powers.

So Dubbah is prepping for his Invasion on Iran. Scheduled to roll out this week, so if you're not like me and have cable, be prepared to hear a lot about how messed up Iran is, and how Tehrah is the "new" center for the Anti-american/terrorist community.

Of course this is all bullshit, and of course mostly packed with lies and sensationalism. But that is what makes it so fun, right?

So a little background and predictions on how this might affect our future in this country:

In case this is the only one of my blogs you've read, as highly unlikely it might be, and how highly unlucky you are to be reading such a politically center grouping of words, I have mentioned war with Iran in previous posts.

So, shortly after starting to "rebuild" Iraq, within the second year of being there, it was quite obvious to most folks that Iran was next on the short list of countries bush wants to annihilate. To the few who read as much information as possible, it was apparent that Iran was always a target in the overall "War on Terror" model since before the beginning. Why, you might ask? Based on the moves of the current administration, "why not?" Iran represents everything that the bushies hate. The president is fairly decent person who likes to start waves in the UN against the fascist-imperial-american-state, which any decent person should do. He wants to establish a nuclear power program in his country because NUCLEAR POWER WORKS. Against the common misconceptions, nuclear power is clean, efficient and fairly readily producible for a majority of the countries of this planet. In america however, during the era of decent that folks have in recent times begun to forget (the 50's-70's), the Oil companies spread a little information on how evil nuclear power was, and with a few sabotaged power stations had the fodder to smear the good name of nuclear power. Countries like France, you gotta love the dissenting and generally well intentioned rebels known as the French, said "*cough* BULLSHIT *cough* *cough*" and created their own nuclear programs. France's national power is 70% provided by Nuclear power for the last few decades at least. So Iran wants to start up too. While I would personally push for the development of ambient energy within all countries, Christmas is still a few months away so I'll back off.

Maybe not: with a concerted effort, large scale ambient power companies could easily be "graphed" onto existing power grids to provide free clean energy to millions of people with the only cost going into the production of the plants, and at most one person to monitor them. Let alone a large scale production of individual power boxes that could be provides to "off grid" persons who carried about the planet enough to make a statement against the power elite….

I digress… So of course the boy emperor knows all about Iran's plans, and isn't having it. We can't do much about France, but luckily they are a joke to most americans. In fact I would be willing to argue that most of the region is a joke to americans, but for some reason Iran developing a nuclear program just seems against god's will…or something. Regardless, there has been a rather large Navy fleet (when I heard about there departure last October, the fleet included four aircraft careers, which are the bread and butter of naval operations and come with a rather large complimentary force to protect them) cruising the Persian Gulf since last year (officially). Poised and waiting for any excuse to obliterate Iran, or any other trouble makers, the operations look to be going into effect this week. Bush is of course is unilaterally making a mess of the whole region, and with little explanation really. Somewhere along the line, before the war against Iraq began, congress decided that they were a bunch of spineless sea urchins, wait I take that back because I actually respect spineless sea urchins, and are allowing this dude and his cabinet to go around breaking constitutional and congressional mandates, which of course the most blatant disregard comes in the area of requiring congresses approval to declare war. The wording of course is unless dire emergency, which made the crashing of planes into american buildings a necessity. Since then (and actually since the second world war if you look at it) presidents have had this weird control. The weird part of course is that they are supposed to be representative of the american people, yet they are allowed to live outside of the laws that government and restrict said americans. I'll have to go back and look in my notes from school, but I think that's called fascism. Right?

…. Okay, so with some predictions cause the rambling is out of control. I predicted last year that the POTUS (piece of total unadulterated shit) would strategically poise the war against Iran at a crucial point in his presidency for one sole reason. This asshole could potentially use war anywhere, but most likely with Iran, to declare a state of emergency, put himself at the reigns of a Marshal Law coup de grâce, allowing the 2008 elections to be postponed. This sounds crazy right, well it should. However it is totally possible and written into the constitution of this country. The original intention of course being that if for some unforeseen reasons, we happen to be at war or in a state of emergency, elections would be highly disruptive and nearly impossible to survive politically. After all, how is a president supposed to protect democracy while attending political debates? Dubbah could potentially set at the helm for as long as the state of emergency is effective. This would totally suck, and unfortunately I'm not crazy enough to see it as an impossibility (i.e. I won't be surprised if it happens). Short of getting impeached this week, Bush ain't got shit to worry about.

We are in a war with terror, war with drugs (I think still…right?), war with our brethren across the various ponds and we are at war with ourselves. We are in an invisible, and seldom discussed national economic depression. The country borrows $2Billion a day and spends $0.5Billion on warfare. A DAY!! Most people are completely oblivious to these realities. Some due to sheer blindsiding by the american media, some just don't want to deal with it because their life sucks so bad they spend all their energy trying to get through the day.

We are in a disparaging place this little world of ours. We are faced with a primal desire to live our lives. Of course this basic part of us drives the uglier parts, when hurting people becomes your life. At what point is living your life not good enough, when the lives of others become more important? Will the masses ever realize that we will have to live at peace with other people, let alone the environment that we trash on a minute-by-minute basis, in order to survive the next millennia? According to the smartest people on the planet, we are stuck here with our current technological limitations, which means going to fuck up another planet is not an option. (Unfortunately those smarties are Russian, and america could give a flying fuck about Russians)

This is a depressing time yall, but we have to stick to the bigger picture and try a forge a future for the life on this planet, or believe me it will find a way to purge our destructive species for good.

One more thing real quick, and this is not my prediction, but that of some smarter political analysts. Some folks believe that if dubbah strikes Iran, he will instigate WWIII. I don't think the world has the guts to do this, or they would have when the boy emperor first declared war on the decency of the human race….

As always, go read about it for yourself. Don't trust my crazy ass for anything. I believe america faked the moon landing for crying out loud!!!