Take a Ride..

It is with no small irony, after watching a film like Taxi to the Dark Side, that this should be the first thing on a loop all over the news...

The Oscar winning film unfurls all the ugliness and savagery of the war prisons, set up by the US, piece by piece till you see the whole damnable picture. It really makes you wonder "how little outrage there is" at these crimes.

The film is full of footage, not only of the horrific torture in the prisons and of the US soldiers admitting to it, but of officials, in the smug safety of their untouchable positions, using slippery language to defend their indifference to the suffering they have unleashed upon so many people.

This week Cheney says " he was directly involved in approving severe interrogation methods" LA Times

Then there is: "So What?"

The latest Harper's has an article called The Torture Presidency

The legacy of the presidency is outlined in this video from Keith Olbermann

Of course we have to expect the nauseating string of comments like Arabs/Muslims see shoes as a supreme insult... As if a shoe thrown at you anywhere else in the world is like having roses sprinkled on your cheeks.

How is the shoe story spreading?
A Flickr group has already been set up for people who would like to photograph the shoes they would like to add to the mix... A facebook group is also sending shoes in protest and solidarity...There is a game out where you dodge the shoe...Here are measurements of how quickly the video spread...And the spoof videos that are already out there are collected here.

Wouldn't you wish that the places the shoe thrower might end up in would get as much coverage and outrage as they deserve.

I know that changing the world is not easy
but it remains necessary nonetheless.
Fadhil Al-Azzawi

Can't get enough of this, so I thought I'd share...

Greenland, the big bear of the north, is rattling in its chains.. I must visit soon.

Yay! Patrick Fitzgerald is back :) .. (remember him)
Here is a current film that is related to the whole 2005 drama.
Here are the comedians on the 2008 scandal.

And talking of things you shouldn't pick...Picking your nose can lead to this...
And talking about all round bad ideas...yup, here you go.

Arundhati Roy writes in The Guardian about the Mumbai attacks..

Did you hear music under the big bright moon this weekend?

I leave you with Rumi..

Quietness is the surest sign
that you’ve died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.
–Rumi,

Don’t worry about saving these songs!

And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn’t matter.

We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.

Rumi

I am winning the battle against cat scratch fever, or maybe that is the hopeful delirium that comes at the end...

The cat and I have worryingly similar notions of playfulness, but while I spend my time-between swatting and wrestling- biting my nails, she has a rigorous routine of honing her wolverine paws to the point where it's just dumb of me to go near her. But apparently I do dumb well. And do pain well too. Dumb pain.

How pretty is the weather these days? Very, I'd say.

We are so small, so small... But we dream big, poor creatures..
Here are some more crazy pictures of teeny tiny things from National Geographic.

Musicians out there try your hand at the YouTube Symphony Orchestra and music lovers, enjoy the Smithsonian Global Sound site.

Now onto matters more deathly serious:

Finally the DR Congo is on people's radars, too late for the millions that have been killed in the past decade... But not enough is being done, and activists are trying to draw attention to the 'rape as a weapon' horror going on there.

Want to help? Visit Women for Women International
----

I leave you with Paz, Williams, Seferis and Lenny... Because I have been reading too much.

Two bodies face to face
are two stars falling
in an empty sky.
–Octavio Paz

this morning for someone I’m not even sure exists
I waste tears. I count down by fractions
through the ash. I howl. I use up everything.
–CK Williams

but your heart's anguish
didn't cry out, became
what gives the world
a star-filled sky
--George Seferis

O friend of my scribbled life
Your heart is like mine—
your loneliness
will bring you home.
–Leonard Cohen

If you are anything like me (and believe me these days I would recommend anything but) then your heart races a little faster every time you hear that creaky little voice coming from the mighty and deadpan Ms. Sarah Vowell...

So as I debate whether allergies or closed coffin-like rooms are more palatable, and whether it would be annoying for people if I eat a LOT of nachos at the movies tonight, I find my very own Quantum of Solace by trawling the web for the lady that makes me look so much less nerdy than I am accused of being.

Why am I bringing this up? Well, this is my version of shouting off the rooftops, so bear with me, because I need there to be something worth shouting about these days.

It all started when I fell for her book Assassination Vacation, which was just the right amount of history, hilarity and quirky self revelation to hook me for life. Now she has The Wordy Shipmates which I am waiting for audible.com to make available already. You see, I have been dying to know about the Puritans, but have been wanting someone to tell me about them in a way that won't make me want to die.

ok enough personal memoir, here are some of her articles:
The Pessimism Deficit
When Bush Falls in Love

Yes, I bet some of you were thinking that if I were going to talk about matters of the heart I was going to bring up Potter Stewart again, my sexiest man ever to have graced the supreme court crush... Well you were right. Potter Stewart. There.

There must be some love stories left in the world after all... And then there are those loves you wish could be explained... And still other pleasures you wish didn't sound like this.

I guess we'll be seeing everyone Tuesday on that lawn we all know so well..

Have a peek at The Crisis and What to Do About it, by George Soros in the NYRB

If you feel like hunting for expensive art pieces that will be left out for free all around the city then get yourself to London... Or just enjoy them and leave them where they are for others to enjoy too.

And I leave you with Rilke..

Every single angel
is terrible!
And since that's the case
I choke back my own
dark Birdcall
My sobbing...
...Strange
To wish wishes no longer.
Strange
to see things
that seemed to
belong together
floating in every
direction.
...Is the old tale pointless
That tells how music began
in the midst of the mourning...
Duino Elegies

As if I needed another reason to recoil at having to touch elevator buttons: radioactive scrap from India was used to make buttons for Otis elevators in France. It makes me worry where we are getting our scrap from, considering we are in that part of the world where people like Larry Summers think dirty industries should be transferred.
See his old notorious creepy memo.
---
Yemen is flooded by a tropical storm..Dozens dead and tens of thousands displaced.
---
Jordan arrests a poet for using quotes from the Quran in his love poems... Though, it seems that we don't get enough arrests when people use quotes from the Quran to add flourish to hatred.
---
The Guardian has compiled 1000 artworks you should see before you leave the world.
---
A McCain worker's hoax might spell doom for him... But then again, scary movie characters always get back up when you think they're finished. Here is some more on the hoax including video.
---
Have a listen to some music that astronomers have recorded from stars... The beat of their pulse helps tell us their age and size and what they are made of... and it's pretty haunting.

I leave you to keep picking up all the pieces I have to put back together...
-
"Green eyes
Blue bedroom
bright machinegun sun"
love is a dog from hell

Since misery loves company, the planet and the economy in meltdown should offer some sort of comfort to my dwindling sanity... but planet you are gonna have to come up with a lot more crazy to make me feel matched.

Where do we start...oh where do we start?

The IMF said the "global financial system was on the brink of meltdown" which is triggering descriptions like "utter carnage" and "a titanic battle between greed and fear"... Last week was apparently the worst week ever... indeed.

And today the little green market arrows are pointing up... who feels reassured?

HuffPo has a list of economists who told you so (one of whom just won the Nobel Prize) and another list of those who got the economy to its dark depths...

Entire countries are feeling the strain, the beautiful Iceland is "on the brink of collapse" according to an interesting and worrying article in the Guardian.
And:

"Iceland is bankrupt," said Arsaell Valfells, a University of Iceland professor. "The Icelandic krona is history. The IMF has to rescue us." Link

And if you were quaking in your boots about the financial crisis where the hell were you when Earth got pushed against a wall and stripped of every last bit of its dignity?

A study by a Deutsche Bank economist says deforestation alone leads to financial losses that make the financial crisis look like piggy-bank pennies... The UN suggests a Green New Deal to save the economy.

Speaking of New Deals, the great Sarah Vowell has been turning to Roosevelt's Fireside Chats to deal with the panic of the economic crisis... I have been turning to the classic film channel for all sorts of other panic.

I leave you with one of my favourite quotes which has never been more stuck in my brain...

"Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead"
King Lear

Yeah.. I am in a video mood these days

Tina Fey as Palin

Palin' before Palin

That icy rush you feel is just brain freeze from the new republican VP.

We can look forward to hearing more frozen-in-time comments that will still manage to warm the toes of those dinosaurs who disrespect all the science and history and philosophy that has blown such huge holes in their mythologies. It's been great news for those frozen relics who belittle all the rights that our beautiful human minds and human hearts have given birth to since that dusty ancient time they so worship.
And just as insidious is the nonsense on the environment and oil.

Here it goes:

The same party that turns off the lights every night and snuggles with oil, coal and gas giants, and then wakes up in the morning and hops into their poisoned pockets is suddenly going to pretend to be against their excesses.

How many times did Palin say she was tough on oil companies in her speech?
A great marketing gimmick since Americans for the first time in a long time are not thinking like oil addicts.

But really? Palin and oil companies, enemies?

"And she has been a friend of Big Oil, opposing a windfall profits tax on the oil industry that could fund affordable clean energy for more Americans." - Friends of the Earth Action Vice President Brent Blackwelder." Reuters

"Palin opposes greater protections for beluga whales found in the Cook Inlet, where oil and gas drilling and other development is proposed"LA Times

She sued to stop polar bears being placed on the endangered speceis list:
"She and other Alaska elected officials fear a listing will cripple oil and gas development in prime polar bear habitat off the state's northern and northwestern coasts..." Anchorage Daily News

"We believe that the ...... decision to list the polar bear was not based on the best scientific and commercial data available" Reuters, August 5, 2008

Not only that, But in an opinion piece she had in the NYT she had delusional symptoms brought on by oil fumes which makes you say things like:

"In fact, there is insufficient evidence that polar bears are in danger of becoming extinct within the foreseeable future"

Really?
Uhm what do experts say?

1-"She's either grossly misinformed or intentionally misleading, and both are unbecoming," said Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity. Anchorage Daily News
2- A study by the U.S. Geological Survey "predicted polar bears in Alaska could be wiped out by 2050".
3- "The governor's decision was clearly based on politics, not on science, and was primarily designed to protect the oil and gas industry stampede into the Arctic Ocean," said Steiner, the University of Alaska marine biologist. LA Times
4- This summer for the first time:
Nine polar bears at risk of drowning in global warming meltdown
Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom August 2008
"Nine polar bears are at risk of drowning after the ice floe where they lived melted because of global warming"...

"Professor Richard Steiner of the University of Alaska’s Marine Advisory Program said: “While these bears are swimming around in an ice-free coastal Arctic Ocean, the only thing the State of Alaska is doing is suing the federal government trying to overturn the listing of polar bears" Science Daily

Oh if you think that, and her 1930's german headmistress look, isn't attractive enough to make you want to draw pink hearts to her on your voting card... There is always this:
She also supports the aerial hunting of wolves.
(oh wait, you use those unreliable electronic voting machines there don't ya? Maybe you you carve pretty hearts on the screen with a nice hunting knife)

And she is, of course, thirsting for drilling in ANWR (also known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) I repeat the words wildlife and refuge...Smoke that for a few minutes.

Here is her quotable quote on the topic :
"I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can’t drill our way out of our problem or that more supply won’t ultimately affect prices. Of course it will affect prices."

hehehehehehehe
hehehehehehehehehhaaaaaaaaa
That laughing interlude will get no apologies from me
As I continue, you can have a gander at:

1- "the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an independent statistical agency within the Department of Energy, concluded that new oil from ANWR would lower the world price of oil by no more than $1.44 per barrel—and possibly have as little effect as 41 cents per barrel—and would have its largest impact nearly 20 years from now" US NEws and World Report

2- "even if we drilled the entire state of Alaska and pulled new refineries out of thin air, the impact on gas prices would be minimal and delayed at best" Time Magazine

Links:
Palin’s first lie as VP candidate
From Salon: " It is hard to think of a more cynical and contemptuous political act this year than John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his vice -presidential running mate."
Here is Grist's opinion.
The Worst Vice-Presidential Nominee in U.S. History Robert J. Elisberg,
An Alaskan blogger's perspective
Sarah Palin, Wrong Woman for the Job The Nation., NY

And now back to local news:
got none for you tonight...
thank you

In our current days of darkness and superstitions... A little history goes a long way.

Science already known BCE/BC:

1- 500BCE/BC : Pythagoreans taught that Earth is a sphere

2- 470BCE/BC : Anaxagoras suggests that materials are made of "seeds"(atoms) (Near Izmir in Turkey)

3- 445 BC/BCE: Leucippus suggests possibility of indivisible atoms (Turkey)

4- 384-322 BC/BCE: Aristotle said it was common knowledge that earth was round.

5- 350s BC - Heraclides explained the rotation of Earth ( Turkey)

6- 220 BC/BCE: Eratosthenes of Cyrene estimated earth’s diameter correctly (in EGYPT)

In Ancient astronomy the seven known 'planets' that could be seen at the time were known as the 7 heavenly objects.

The others were not seen until the 1800's

The name of the sky/heavens god in Cannanite mythology was Shamayim the husband of earth (Eretz).
Their child was El, the supreme god.

In everyday Hebrew the name for sky and heaven is Shamayim and earth is Eretz.

Shamash was the common Akkadian name of the sun-god
(Akkadian Empire: 1050-100 BC/BCE)

Map of trade routes used by 1st century BC/BCE

The Guardian has some nice images of the day of the Eclipse.

Ideas that blow

Nuclear waste containers likely to fail, warns 'devastating' report
August 2008

Power madness: With spiralling costs, leaky reactors and dangerous cost-cutting at plants..
Jeremy Leggett

Greenpeace files complaints on Areva nuclear leaks
Reuters - Jul 31, 2008

100 employees at French nuclear site contaminated
BusinessWeek - Jul 23, 2008

Spanish nuclear plant closed after fire in electrical generator
AFP August 2008

Partial List of accidents

Meanwhile:
UAE invites bids for nuclear power project
GulfNews, United Arab Emirates -Aug 16, 2008

Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook?

And 'meet your meat'




Forget about the ad for PETA at the end, that's not the point...

It's just that:

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Kuwait plans to flex its muscles on web offenders... playground rules...

This is the week of explosions, what is going on? Bangalore, Gaza, Istanbul, Ahmadabad, China, Qantas, Greece, Queens... And weeks and endless weeks for Iraq.

Want to see serious competition for our local brand of ignorance and hatred? Watch this film.

And blowing through our dusty landscape are some cries for justice, that have been long ignored...

Reminders of the human desire for doing the right thing:

Article 23 of the UDHR
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work...
Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

Article24
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Visit:
Anti-Slavery
The ILO

When did it become ok for a magazine to edit (by inserting more errors) and dumb down your articles without letting you know?
I have a growing suspicion that certain editors are actually robots that can't compute more than one layer of meaning in a text.
I will have to get myself a metal detector.

What was the fast moving white blur that just settled over everything and then went away?

I am tired of this place. I go away soon, to refresh the spirit that has no place here.

If I take a multifunction approach, one perk for an obsessive-compulsive like myself is the increase of human brooms in our parliament.
Hey, I could have taken the 100% pessimism in an endless darkness route.

Soon enough.

Us in the news these days:

Kuwait's parliament: It just slows things down

Democratic road to nowhere

Kuwait should liberate itself

My slightly unsteady hand just put my voting card and every document anyone could possibly ask me for into my overstuffed bag...ready for my first ever vote.

I managed to find three candidates in my really frighteningly regressive district that were pleasantly surprising. So even if me and the two other voters in my house are the only support they will get, it will be a small victory against the darkness in these parts.

May the day be hopeful for those of us who want to love this place a little more like we once did... and want to feel like it loves us back, in all our different colors.

Good luck to those that will reap what we sow...
Hope they'll have reason to thank us for our choices.

Who no longer trusts the weather here?
I find myself having to chaperone open windows...
Dust pneumonia, you haunt me.

===

The second most abundant element in our universe was first discovered on the sun, and so was named after the sun God Helios...
It is the second element on the periodic table...
It is produced from radioactive decay...
It is used to help rockets take off and microchips come to life.
We suck it up into our lungs and along the way our vocal vibrations travel 3 times faster than through air, rising in pitch.
Last week a priest strapped himself to 1,000 balloons filled with Helium, floated away, and has not been seen since.
Those 1,000 balloons were filled with a noble gas our planet is running out of.
It is used as a coolant in all them dangerous reactors everyone wants to stupidly build.
So, tick tock...

===

The Herald Tribune says people are playing games
Akh...preemption...Pandora has nothing on you...
Dark comedy, like all comedy, is all in the timing... Interesting that now is the time chosen to point fingers at a country that has a mutual defense treaty with the one place someone wants an excuse to do this to...
Setting it up... Setting it up...setting it up, Setting it up,
So, tick tock...

===

Chin up people, all is not lost. Pierre got a suit. And Owen's got a new mama.
Here is a short folktale for you folks.

===

And from the people at Wired:

"I think people don't understand that e-voting is a bad idea not just because of its insecurities but because it's really bad public policy to have these really expensive machines. The cost never goes down. In fact the cost only goes up as the machines age and need more parts and upgrading.

"They take up huge amounts of warehouse space in warehouses that need to be air-conditioned," she continues. "They have to recharge the batteries every six months. And (yet) we only haul them out about once a year (for elections)."

===
Now there ought to be some yodelin' in this song;
Yeah, there ought to be some yodelin' in this song;
But I can't yodel for the rattlin' in my lung.
Woodie Guthrie

Good luck with most other ideas though...

الصقر: «التصويت والفرز» إلكترونياً.. أفضل

Hmm.. Really hope it's not these machines though...or these...or these...or these...or these...or these...or these... or these... or these...

--
YouTube:

Should electronic voting machines be outlawed?-CNN
Democracy at Risk: Ohio Voting Machines Flawed- CNN
Computerized Voting Machines: Who is Counting your Votes?- Google Tech Talks
Voting Machine Failures- CNN
Demonstration of Electronic Vote Flipping - Fox News
Hacking Democracy- The Documentary
---

"One-by-one, states across the country are finding critical flaws in the accuracy and security of electronic voting machines." Democracy Now with Amy Goodman

But I bet we will get the efficient and non-corruptible machines here though...'cause we get all the reliable stuff.

"Kurzweil is 60, but he intends to be no more than 40 when the singularity arrives."
hmm... read on.
-----------------------
Manga does the Bible
-----------------------
"Today, our public discourse is dominated by people who have been wrong about everything" damn skippy...
-----------------------
While we are too busy deciding whether people kissing on the cheek is a sin... The world continues on...
-----------------------
...and on, so beautifully, without us.
-----------------------
Who was Cassini?

• First to observe 4 of saturn's moons
• He also discovered a gap between Saturn's two ring layers which is now named the Cassini Division
  
• The first to measure the true size of the solar system after figuring out our distance from Mars.
• A crater on Mars and another on our moon are named after him
• Born in 1625
  

I can barely think through these new allergies I have developed in this country but here are some things for you to look at that might give you allergies too..Or worse.

• It’s the ‘Oh Shit!’ Moment on Iran by Dave Lindor
• Drying Up Palestine- Watch this short online film about water issues in the Occupied Territories. (Great site called The Hub)
  
• Iraqi Refugee Children and Prostitution
• 2 Schools in Nablus- Watch a series on schools under occupation. Well made.
  

Numbers:

• Over 4 million Iraqi refugees...and counting
• 70% of Iraqis have no access to clean water
• Over 90% of Iraqi children have learning disabilities due to trauma
• $5,000 a second are spent on the war, how much is being spent on aid and peace?
• Hospitals in Gaza have 12 hour a day power cuts
• 80% of families in Gaza survive on food aid
• 70% of Gaza households earn less than $1.20 a day/person.

For the price of a side of fries...or a new cd...or a cinema ticket...you can save a life. If you are feeling generous the price of your flat screen, your laptop, your fancy shoes, the money we spend on all the things we can live without can provide safe drinking water, life saving medical care, school supplies, protection from exploitation, a future...

• Save the Children are helping Iraqi refugee children in Jordan
• Unicef- You can choose where your donation goes.
• Oxfam- Gaza crisis appeal
• UNRWA- Emergency aid to the Gaza and the West Bank

The petty parliament is finished, here's to the coming scramble. Are we going to be given the chance to hope, or just some more of the same clatter around our aching heads?

Obama is running on a platform of change, and everyone desperate enough to want it is following his pied piper tune even if they don't always know what it's saying...I think maybe we are desperate enough to become addicted to that siren song of 'change' too... And why not? We have tasted that rock called bottom, and in the immortal words of Yazz, y'know, there is only one way we can be headed...
I think.
But thinking is not one of my strong points these days so forgive me if I sound a little silly.

Don't you think it's time we grabbed that beautiful, dusty, crazy old dame called Kuwait and gave her a big shameless and heartbreaking kiss? Then with the blush of rekindled love on our cheeks we got out there and grabbed every single moron who thinks that he can have a piece of her to hang on his trophy wall... every single frustrated lump of hatred who wants to cover up her beautiful, ugly, seductive, funny, living, breathing, different parts because they offend him...every single lazy regressive coward who wants her to be the Miss Havisham she has turned into... and gave every single one of them a big fat kiss goodbye?

This mixed up, repressed lady needs some air and we are taking her out on the town to remind her, and ourselves, what it feels like to be free again...to be proud again...to be in love with everything. And once she can stand up straight again, maybe this beautiful place can take us all back in to her arms and we can finally be home.

No Comment

Gideon Levy of the Israeli Paper Ha'aretz writes:

" Two days earlier Israel killed more Palestinians than have been killed by all the Qassams over the past seven years. Among the dead were four children and an infant. The next day Israel killed another five boys. And who is the victim? Israel. And who is cruel? The Palestinians."
------------------
Ira Chernus Writes:

"Palestinian deaths this week outnumbered Israeli deaths by about 30 to 1, and the count of serious injuries is even more lopsided."
-------------------
On March 2nd The Observer's Peter Beaumont wrote:

"Israel is again deliberately obstructing the transfer of urgent medical cases for treatment outside Gaza in the latest extension of its policy of collective punishment of Palestinians."
--------------------
Nimer Sultany writes in The Guardian:

"Perhaps it is easy to dismiss this suffering by blaming the victims and resorting to ready cliches. Indeed, Israeli propagandists go out of their way to repeat the soundbite: we withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and since then the Palestinians have been firing rockets on our southern towns."..."In his most recent report (pdf) of January 2008, the UN rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied territories has recounted Israel's actions in Gaza, calling them "war crimes" and demonstrating how these have been relentlessly producing a humanitarian crisis."
--------------------
B'Tselem: The Israeli Information center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
--------------------

3:15 pm
AUK has been evacuated after a bomb threat...
Or some kind of threat that is still not clear.
Check on your family and friends.
The authorities are at the university.
All is fine so far.
Earlier in the day, witnesses say, there was an apparent threat at a bank, some say Burgan.

Hell and a hand basket, we know you well.

I need to recharge the fuel that is sapped by the depression of being dunked daily in the vat of ignorance and regressive philosophies of this manufactured majority...the majority created by decades of ensuring that education is no more than recitation... like those ads, these days, that suggest if children learn pages and pages by heart their parents' yellow brick road to heaven will be paved..

When you are too busy trying to learn something by heart you don't have time to understand it, to filter it through that amazing thing we are blessed with called a brain...you have no time to read anything else...and the ignorance works so well for those who have you hanging over a precipice staring into the hellfire that will swallow you up if you think too much.

If you think too much you are liable to tire yourself out, and if you are too tired you won't have the strength to wrap so many things around you to cover that other blessing we have; that body that is so complex, so miraculous and so apparently offensive to some people who claim to love its maker.

We get this one chance at living on this planet... I can't help but pity that so much of it is spent having to stop our society from continuously going into rewind...

Humans have managed to count 70 sextillion stars (that is 70 +21 zeros, chew on that for a while) and yes I am sure they will find something blasphemous about the name of that number. Get ready to waste time and fight that fight next...

We know that our galaxy has 300 billion stars... 10% of which are like our sun...and there are, as of a recent count, 125 billion galaxies in the universe...

We have walked the moon...we have created machines that spin around our planet and watch us and help us watch each other online, on tv, and eventually in little chips swimming around our brains... yes, it is only a matter of time before nano-technology, that frightening new frontier, will allow us to upload our minds onto machines...

We have cured diseases, we created light and flight and breathing underwater....we have painted things we can see and things we only dream of... we have written heartbreaking poetry and thunderous philosophies that have carved new passages in our brains...we beautiful humans have done all this, and more, and yet some of us would still prefer to pick the nose of the past, with faulty interpretations of a text they have the gall to think they can chain us with.

Our religion and all religions are greater than the small minded, blistered, malformed ideas pasted on them by some neurotic men's grandstanding.

I am not ready to suffer for the therapy and medications they didn't get.

Yes, I need to refuel, or rather purge this anger. So when I am not on youtube to satisfy a surprising new addiction to snooker...I like to feed on things that can lift the fog a little.

If you missed any of the events or interviews, to do with the anachronistic battles to regain the last tattered shreds of any self respecting human dignity and freedom, you can watch them at this great youtube collection.

Some news for those who think that all the proof out there supports segregating humans:

Single-sex schools 'no benefit for girls' The Observer,Sunday June 25 2006
"Half a century of research 'has not shown any dramatic or consistent advantages for single-sex education' for boys or girls"
---
"Studies show ..." is the usual lead-in to any defense of single-sex education. In fact studies do not show that girls fare better in single-sex schools. "There does not seem to be research support for this perspective," The Atlantic
---
"Lately the so-called boy crisis in public schools has become every lazy media outlet's topic du jour, fueling the perception that girls get better college preparation than boys. That theory has been officially debunked with genuine research -- race and class turned out to be two of the real culprits for educational disparities, not gender -- but the Bush administration has yielded to the overblown boy crisis hysteria anyway." Salon

I'm tired...But can't sleep...but I will try anyway...like we all do everyday with everything else.

I'm stuffed with rice krispie treats and jalapeno peppers and some organic ketchup... I realise, only faintly, that it might sound sickening, to some of you, but frankly if you can stand being here without flying away forever or flying out a window, then you can handle my eating habits.

Are you tired of being controlled by sex obsessed, self-hating, repressed apes who have no idea that their hair-brained ideas about holiness went out of fashion in the medieval gutters of history?

If some people read anything other than childish mini-books on how to beg God for the things they are too busy in rituals to get for themselves, they would realise that the world has moved light-years ahead of the puerile phobias these emperors of a poisoned panacea peddle to the frightened and the foolishly frustrated.

I am tired of them turning the beauty and peace of spiritual quests into claustrophobia, into the cunning commercialism of stickers and celebrity holiness, into a festival of ignorance and a denial of the miracle of human experience in all its forms.
Our middle ages are upon us, and frankly, I don't intend to pass them onto the next generation.

For a huge collection of free 'written-for-non-readers' versions of viral indoctrination take a trip to some of our ministries. If you can hold your food down long enough to make it through the vulgarisation of the original architecture, through to the debasement of offices that are supposed to house tomes of legal and political thought and professionals that look...well, professional, you will get to the offices filled, no not with books...guess again...no not with paperwork that makes it look like they have work....guess again...no no, silly, not with computers you are getting carried away.

The most you can expect from some of these rooms that represent our country are walls lined with stickers of palpitating hearts, that have confused material expression with experience of the divine. You will find handwritten supplications that look like the ones we used to paint back in kindergarten, hanging crookedly by the tired small sticky tape strips struggling to understand what they are doing suspended like this in official places of work.

There will, of course, be desks... empty except for the stacks of little books that tell you how you can spend all day murmuring " please Lord give me stuff, please don't let me do things someone said are bad, please, please, please let me just continue sitting here on my behind while you ensure that I get rich and healthy and happy."

I fear the nation that is made up of adults who have read nothing but little elf-sized books with one idea and one fear central to them all. Where are history, and philosophy and science and art and music and all those miracles that bubbled up from our depths during our short time in this universe? Why is it that some choose to fear admitting that we are more developed than our single celled ancestors that wriggled about waiting to evolve into things more diverse and colorful and complex?

This planet was alive 4 billion years before our cameo appearance. These painful proselytizers are all just actors with bit parts that still manage to strutt around like they own the place. The world will forget soon enough, the ignorance and fear belched out by these perverters of the religion they dare to suggest, in their hateful arrogance, that they represent. I just can't help but feel a sorrow for our time, for our youth that has passed in their ugly shadow. I grieve, but I will see everyone at 6 tomorrow, and something will be lifted.

I am buying a soccer jersey and its going to be red.

The clouds today wrapped round the blue sky like a belt, a line of white all around the horizon... If you tilt yourself upside down it would look like a real sky with all the pieces where you thought they should be.

Sorta like if you were upside down, this country might look like a real country...

Not the kind of country where universities are expected to be prisons, and straitjackets and where silence is your best friend and independent thought is a handicap...
Not the kind of place where surveillance and a hysteria of scandal mongering have become absurdly holy, and liberty and diversity are considered atrocities...
Not the kind of place where genders are supposed to be so protected from each other, so unknown to each other, so alien that the only thing they know how to do when they meet is no more developed than the feral coming together of wailing cats in our streets...
Not the place where art is dangerous unless it is as still and lifeless as we are supposed to be...
Not the place where families protect you by strapping on the very weapons they want to protect you from and riddling you till there is nothing left of you, or your freedom, to protect...
Not the place where politics is a zoo and we are helping to feed the monkeys.

Maybe if we are upside down long enough, the pressure on what is left of our brains will squeeze out an original thought, or a wild and free idea...

Or maybe just something close to the kind of courage it takes for a woman in this upside down place to stand firm and unswaying... close to the kind of calm that hushes the room when a woman defends against the pranks that should have been left long ago in the backward schoolyards that are the last places that bullies still reign. For the kind of solidarity that comes with people who stand together against the little tyrants that have slithered into the people's house, and smeared our still weeping newborn democracy with a meaninglessness that makes me eye one way tickets like they were the love of my life.

I think maybe some of you have been upside down for a while...because it seems so pretty once again that people are gathered in the building built for the people... And the sky looks right again.

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." Camus