"Here's the thing: to understand the next four years of American politics, you are going to need to understand something of the politics of ancient Greece and Rome."
"That's the first reason we need a bailout: it might turn out to be enough to save the industry, and even if it doesn't it buys us time that we desperately need. But there is a second reason for a bailout that has to do with nothing less than the question of the current economic age: was Marx right?"
"Pio?unówka is a very bitter alcoholic infusion (so-called Polish "nalewka") made by macerating wormwood in alcohol. Its name comes from "pio?un" which means "wormwood" in Polish."
"this is a place to post pictures of peoples' faces after they drink Jeppson's Malort. Malort is some nasty stuff and I think you can only buy it in Chicago (or around Chicago)
I have heard it described as 'if you drank water out of an ash tray'"
“Marx and Engels once remarked that ‘philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.’ Just about everyone else who’s written about philosophy has also criticized its lofty remove, except, of course, philosophers. And now the challenge is being mounted from within.”
"Remember, a party predicated on the notion that government sucks and can't do anything right can't possibly run an administration that doesn't suck and can do anything right. Competent conservative governance would instantly invalidate conservatism's core tenets. That's why Bush named horse lawyers to FEMA, and why fourth-tier law school grads have infested every corner of the Justice Department. George W. Bush wasn't an anomaly, he delivered the most effectively conservative administration in history."
"Today, anthropology is at war with itself. The discipline has divided into two schools of thought – the social anthropologists and the evolutionary anthropologists. The schism between the two is simple but deeply ingrained. Academics in the subject clearly align themselves with one side or the other; once that choice is made it defines their career.
The division lies in the question of whether or not anthropology is a science, and if it accepts that Darwinian evolutionary theory guides research into human behaviour and the development of societies."
"His recent book The Anti-Intellectual Presidency is not one more rant about the limited cognitive abilities of George W. Bush but a brisk, methodical deconstruction of 'the relentless simplification of presidential rhetoric in the last two centuries and the increasing substitution of arguments with applause-rendering platitudes, partisan punch lines and emotional and human interest appeals.'"
"Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news? A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model." "… the inability of individuals—human or otherwise—to assign causal probabilities to all sets of events that occur around them will often force them to lump causal associations with non-causal ones. From here, the evolutionary rationale for superstition is clear: natural selection will favour strategies that make many incorrect causal associations in order to establish those that are essential for survival and reproduction."
"Zalmen Mlotek is the Artistic Director of the city's last surviving professional Yiddish theatre – the Folksbiene.
With the help of his piano, he has been telling Radio 3's Dennis Marks how the language influenced jazz music – and the likes of George and Ira Gershwin."
"Read right to left, top to bottom, the text states that Kuttamuwa fashioned the stele during his lifetime, and that at its inauguration in the mortuary chapel offerings were made to various gods, including the storm-god Hadad and the sun-god Shamash. But the part that is causing the greatest stir is a line explaining that one of the offerings was 'a ram for my soul that is in this stele.'" "Although the inscription and image of the deceased remained intact, the machinery destroyed the top register, which once featured a winged sun-disk motif. Remnants of the feathers and 'curlicue' designs can still be seen."
"he cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly "cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.
The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China."
Zoë Keating will be at Wonder Ballroom on Dec 12th at 8pm. She’s on tour with headliner Amanda Palmer as well as The Builders & The Butchers, and The Danger Ensemble. Tickets are $22.
"… the idea that the system through which culture is transmitted is dictated entirely by profit should concern us, because that’s going to narrow the types of culture that are transmitted."
"A mile and a half (two and a half kilometers) underwater, a remote control submersible's camera has captured an eerie surprise: an alien-like, long-armed, and—strangest of all—"elbowed" Magnapinna squid."
"Raclette is also a dish indigenous to parts of Switzerland, Wallonia and France. The Raclette cheese round is heated, either in front of a fire or by a special machine, then scraped onto diners' plates; the term raclette derives from the French racler, meaning "to scrape". Traditionally, it is accompanied by small firm potatoes (Bintje, Charlotte or Raclette varieties), gherkins, pickled onions, dried meat, such as prosciutto and viande des Grisons, sliced peppers, tomato, onion, mushrooms, pears, and dusted with paprika and fresh-ground black pepper."
"The true importance of the Gnostic Scriptures is that they give us back a Christianity that, even in its own time, barely saw the light of day. They offer an answer to the restlessness of modern Christians who question the representation of the Jesus that has been presented to them, his place in history, the purpose of his life, his meaning in modern times."
"And in this blog you will find some postings from that list, along with other writings and clippings on architecture, urbanism, Classicism, Tradition, metaphysics and culture."
"Long referred to as the "church of the initiates," the Gnostic Church both serves and is was reinstituted for members of initiatory societies who may have been persecuted by the hylic orientation of the world, particularly in the mainstream churches.
The ancient church of the apostles and their direct heirs, the gnostic schools and churches of antiquity, the medieval Cathars and Bogomils, and most recently the gnostic and theosophical renaissance beginning in 19th century France are all part of the history of our Church."
"We hope that this site will answer most of your questions about this unique, yet profound movement by providing an information "gateway" to the various pieces of the still little-known French Gnostic Tradition. This tradition manifestated in Europe, specifically in France, out of the various Philosophical, Illuminist, Rosicrucian, Theosophical, Masonic and Gnostic movements essentially present during the renaissance of the 18th and 19th centuries. This tradition continues even today in many countries around the world."
"The "Srizbi" botnet returned from the dead late Tuesday, said Fengmin Gong, chief security content officer at FireEye Inc., when the infected PCs were able to successfully reconnect with new command-and-control servers, which are now based in Estonia."
"This morning, I went to Obama's website and began transcribing essentially all the specific policy proposals that he was willing to commit to publicly — as you will see, there are dozens and dozens of them. I then began classifying these positions on a truncated political spectrum running from liberal/progressive to center-right, further dividing the policies into economics and taxation (green), other domestic policy (yellow) and foreign affairs (blue)."
And then I opened it to questions, and a student, always a careful reader, asked [not an exact quote]: "Why two holes? Do otherworldly entrances normally have two entrances, or an entrance and an exit?" The line she meant is SGGK IV.2180:
Hit [the chapel mound] hade a hole on þe ende and on ayþer syde,
(It had a hole at one end, and there was one at the other)
My response? "The otherworldly entrances I know have only the one hole, so I don't know…..I'll ask an expert."
"Rings, swords – all these things circulate in human society, and when there is no one left to keep this circulation in motion, the impulse is to mourn the loss to humans. But in essence, these things are simply returning to the earth from whence they came – no more useful to humans than it was when they first found it."
"We would like to imagine that it is our agency that drives us, and that our lives are under our control. The truth, however, is that we are the ones under control. The reason we do not notice it is that this control is masked as security, which we have been told is synonymous with freedom."
"Connecticut teacher Julie Amero, accused of showing porn to students, has accepted a misdemeanor plea deal to avoid felony charges, despite proof of her innocence. The deal lets her avoid a previously-imposed 40 year sentence."
"That frenzy got another boost on Monday, when Twitter announced that it had acquired Values of n, a company founded by well-known programmer Rael Dornfest, the former chief technology officer at O’Reilly Media and one of the developers responsible for creating the RSS standard."
"Thinking through all this suddenly brought me to the realization that there are different forms of immersion. We talk a lot about immersion and suspension of disbelief in the game industry, but we seldom actually try to define it or to understand how it works. I think there are at least three kinds, and they are created and destroyed by different means."
"It is useful to think about the boundary between player and fiction as an elastic membrane — a threshold — rather than a wall, like Adams does. Drawing attention to how this threshold functions through self-reference can actually enhance fiction rather than destroy it. It can draw the player and game fiction together rather than driving them apart. "
"Players will be able to send their characters on quests that other members of the community will complete for them, basically allowing for a giant community quest-pool. Once your character has made the rounds, they return to your game with a wealth of experience and treasures galore."
"And so far, its views seem anything but rivalrous. Mainstream reporters and pundits lovingly refer to them as 'centrist,' but, in a Democratic context, they are distinctly right of center."
"With the Mars Phoenix Lander, NASA used Twitter, a microblogging service, to get its message out, and the Twitter feed attracted nearly 40,000 followers. Ars talked with the JPL's Veronica McGregor about the experience."
"As a black nationalist, I have considered myself an American only as a technicality or an accident of birth. I’ve never hoisted the red, white and blue, only the red, black and green. I gave up on the American dream a longtime ago. I have worked and looked forward to autonomy and self-determination in our communities. I never imagined that I would live long enough to see an African-American president."
"Bye-bye hacks and cronies, hello people who actually know what they’re doing. For a bunch of people who were written off as a permanent minority four years ago, the Democrats look remarkably like the natural governing party these days, with a deep bench of talent."
"It's naive to believe that most people making a killing in the Casino Economy will be overly concerned with a company's long term viability or collateral damage they inflicted any more than an unemployed ghetto kid, who makes a money dealing drugs, thinks about the long term consequences."
"People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.
Crunching the inflation adjusted numbers, we find the bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:"
"The key, she found, isn’t ability; it’s whether you look at ability as something inherent that needs to be demonstrated or as something that can be developed."
"I don’t think I’m really advancing an unpopular opinion when I say that Batman has the best villains in comics, but even among a crowd that strong, the Joker stands out. The best villains, after all, are the ones that bring out the contrasts within the hero himself, and that’s something Batman has to spare."
""Everything matters to everybody"
French provocateur Bernard-Henri Lévy on how the left is being destroyed by tolerance — and why Europeans love Obama.
"Of course, the whole "Bush as a teetotaler" story always had the appearance of being more propaganda than reality. Jane has written convincingly that Bush evinces the classic symptoms of the "dry drunk". But I've always wondered, honestly, just how dry he's really been these eight years."
"Both of Daghlian and Slotin's accidents were on Tuesday the 21st, both used the same plutonium core, and both died in the same room at the same hospital. The plutonium core was later named the "Demon Core" and was put to use in the Able test of the Operation Crossroads nuclear weapon test at the Bikini Atoll in the summer of 1946."
"The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports today that Freedom’s Watch, the right-wing advocacy group founded by Ari Fleischer and funded by Sheldon Adelson, 'is pretty much kaput.'"
"This is the usual post-election nonsense from the Braindead Megaphone, as author George Saunders famously calls our political and media noise machine. When George W. Bush wins by 3 million votes, the megaphone blares announcements about a conservative mandate that Democrats must respect. When Obama wins by twice as much, the same megaphone roars about Democrats having no mandate to do anything other than appease conservatives.
It's confusing, isn't it? We hazily recall backing Obama and his progressive platform. Yet, the megaphone's re-educative shock treatment aims to wipe away that memory and conjure eternal conservatism from our spotless minds."
"We intend to restore the fundamental necessities and environmental awareness of the species through the avocation of the most current understandings of who and what we truly are, coupled with how science, nature and technology (rather than religion, politics and money) hold the keys to our personal growth, not only as individual human beings, but as a civilization, both structurally and spiritually. The central insights of this awareness is the recognition of the Emergent and Symbiotic elements of natural law and how aligning with these understandings as the bedrock of our personal and social institutions, life on earth can and will flourish into a system which will continuously grow in a positive way, where negative social consequences, such as social stratification, war, biases, elitism and criminal activity will be constantly reduced and, idealistically, eventually become nonexistent within the spectrum of human behavior itself."
"I'm tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years, starting with software from Google and others and ending up in almost every gadget and computer system around. We need a change." (If only it really were new …)
"I am an American worker, and you are damn right I want the wealth to be shared and spread. I am talking about the wealth my hard work helped to create, but was taken from me by George Bush's base, the very rich, or as I know them, my corporate bosses."
"Why, then, can't Americans have the same kind of socialized medicine? Mostly, because of the health maintenance organizations and insurance companies, who take such a big slice off the top. So strong is their influence that almost no one of any clout in American politics dares to talk of a single-payer system that would simply do away with private medical insurance, except perhaps as the kind of top-up they have here."
So, on election night, Nov 4th, I was on my way to an election night party. I was on my bike heading west on Division and as I passed a car that was stopped at the intersection at 66th that car accelerated. The impact, all things considered, was not much; but, it pushed my bike out from under me and I went flying over the hood, maybe another 5 feet or more. I hit the asphalt, connecting in a few places, including my head, knee and wrist.
I soared through the air, screaming: “VOTER SUPPRESSION!!!”
Yeah, not really. I’d already voted weeks prior …
Ironically, this was my very first bike ride since my last biking incident when I bruised a rib back on Oct 18th. It was like the end of The Professional … I felt so free and wonderful riding along again after a long hiatus and then … blam-o! (That’s strike two of Goldfinger’s trifecta, but I’m not so sure I want to tempt my enemies into action a third time just to prove the point.)
Further irony can be had because I just switched from my old helmet and was wearing my brand new, expensive winter helmet for the very first time, which is now ruined.
Yes, that’s a big-ass crack in the front. So, you know, word to the wise: wear your helmet. And, yes, that’s a cast on my wrist.
Of course, when it happened I was so peaked on adrenaline that while I knew I was hurt, it didn’t feel like anything at all. So, you know, word to the wise: go to the ER, just in case.
I did go and found out that I got an avulsion fracture in my left radius. The damage was to the bone, not the ligament, which is apparently odd for someone as old as I am. (The ER staff kept coming in and asking, “You’re 39?!”) Subsequent x-rays have shown that the fracture branches into joint space, but it originally appeared quite cleanly broken. As long as the joint-space break doesn’t start to separate, I’ll have this cast off in mid-December. FREEDOM!!! Blah. I’m so very ready already for the cast to come off.
This is the first broken bone since I was a kid, back in the day when they still used plaster. Now, they’ve got a keychain of 10 different plastic mesh colours to chose from.
The fracture appears to be healing well enough, though it really is still quite sore. I ran out of vicodin over the weekend and, even though the break is in my other wrist, typing this is actually not the best idea; so, I’m going to stop. Being broken is really exhausting.
Last week I completed some promotional graphics for Sekhet-Maat Lodge to help people spread the word about the weekly celebration of Liber XV: The Gnostic Mass [also] every Sunday at 3pm. I posted the final images to the Lodge’s promotion page.
There’s actually three versions on the promotions page, including one for social networks and one for rich-text e-mail signatures. You can check out the various drafts I went through, starting with a pretty lame first draft, over here.
"People are often surprised when I tell them that my father invented the word "meritocracy"—they assume it must have been around for ever—and even more astonished to learn that he wasn't a fan."
"The celebritariat—and the illusion of easy access to it—has played the role in postwar Britain that my father expected to be played by the educational meritocracy."
"We can first of all define two main categories of detourned elements, without considering whether or not their being brought together is accompanied by corrections introduced in the originals. These are minor détournements and deceptive détournements."
"Several laws on the use of détournement can now be formulated."
"A controversial theory says ancient Egypt's Great Pyramid was built using a winding, inclined, interior tunnel through which huge blocks were pushed. The interior ramp would have required open corners (illustration at top) at which the blocks would have enough room to be rotated—probably by workers using wooden cranes—the theory says."
"Richard Shelby and his pals are hellbent to break the UAW and as many unions as they can get their hands on and that's what is really going on here, but the media will never say that."
"A while back, I had begun working on an article that dealt with some of the more extraordinary (and in some cases, even paranormal) aspects of James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s career with British Intelligence Services during World War II. As most who have read the novels or studied James Bond’s history otherwise may know, many of Fleming’s experiences in real life later inspired the adventures of the world’s most famous secret agent."
Well, how interesting that the topic of Magdalene and the Reclaiming approach to story came up over the weekend as a way to explore what I see as paradigmatic difference between my relationship with Reclaiming and my experience in O.T.O. [also]. Interesting because when I got back from an extended weekend away, at an O.T.O. conference on the Divine Feminine, I had a message in my inbox that the theme for BC Witchcamp 2009 is Magdalene.
Below are two selected bits from a message, which isn’t up on the site yet so I can’t link to, that BC Witchcamp actually did manage to select Magdalene, which I really didn’t think they’d manage to do, but also did exactly the thing I was afraid they would do to the story if they did select it:
“The Story:
Mary Magdalene
Activist, Lover, Priestess of Isis
Witness to Change”
and
“Story of Mary Magdalene: Request that teaching team assure a strong presence of Deity/Isis
Reclaiming Mary’s story, correcting the bad PR, like the witches, like so many strong and powerful women
Not focusing on Jesus story
Mary as high priestess of the Goddess
Tie into history, tie into current politics, age of Aquarius, group consciousness, feminism, social justice”
I’m trying really hard not to be a manic ex-pat, but I feel like snidely suggesting that next year’s theme be St. Patrick.
Only, without all that noise about christianity.
And, let’s explore the fact that St. Patrick was a Priest of Serapis and his relationship with snake worship. That whole bit about St. Partick converting people to christianity was just bad PR … we should set the record straight.
And, you know, not so much with the Irish either … so, let’s talk about his history as an enslaved Roman from Wales instead and just skip the part where he’s in Ireland. You know, because what the hell good is cultural context when it gets in the way of a good week of appropriation to a self-consciously politically aware tradition such as Reclaiming? And, you know, the source culture is historically oppressed so the less said about where we appropriate … er, respectfully honor and celebrate … it from the better.
Oh, and St. Patrick will now be St. Patricia [contra], because any male role that’s more dangerous than or different than sex toy or buffoon threatens an welcome level of self-examination. After all, it’s easier to stay in control of the bloody mess of revolution if instead of changing the system one simply exchanges dictators. The history of actual revolutions [see] not withstanding, of course; but, we’ve already established the inconvenience of research.
Oh, man, I’ve got to stop before I go on a rant. Ugh. Too late.
I get it; I do. But, what a horrid disservice to the richness of the source material to do Magdalene in name only. It’s like the worst example of a Hollywood translation from book to screen [also, et] … but, I offer the selected quotes from the announcement e-mail above as an example of the looseness with which such things are treated, which honestly surprises me at least as much as I understand it as an act of reclaiming and Reclaiming.
I mean, really, Magdalene as a priestess, sure, but of friggin’ Isis?! A woman in a self-consciously pro-Jewish, anti-Roman faction was the priestess of what by that time was a syncretic Hellenistic-Egyptian goddess?! Asherah will be pissed when she hears about this. Asherah gets stood up on Prom night … again!? And, I can really see in my mind’s and heart’s eye Magdalene going medieval on someone if they said to her face that Jesus had nothing to do with her story. She’s the real first disciple, to my own mind … and disciples tend to be focused on, oh, I don’t know … something other than themselves.
Don’t get me started on the irony of a retelling of a story about the loss of the Beloved that self-consciously scrubs out the Beloved. Don’t get me started on the irony of Reclaiming selecting a story and modifying an authentic Herstory in such a way that it silences the voice of the central female out of expediency and convenience because of a political and religious agenda.
I really do get the deep and dire need to take control of social, religious and political narrative because of the magical sympathy and contagion between consciousness and reality mediated and changed through narrative. I also get that the story doesn’t really matter in the end because the real work is about coming together in a religious and political collective to do community sustaining ritual and organizing. But, how sad that to achieve these goals means sanitizing a story to the point of denaturing it.
I think Magdalene, by which I mean that aspect of her fullness with which I have a relationship, and I will both sit this one out. While others are off at camp, we’ll commiserate over the loss of our Beloveds, dear Magda for what’s-his-name and I for Reclaiming. And, when camp is over, maybe we could get together over tea for a post-mortem on our various experiences. Let’s be sure to do that and remember to invite the gardener. Maybe some time around Ostara?
