Category: Uncategorized

For those of you in Portland, Freakwitch is playing a benefit show next Friday, Jan 20.

The show is for The Hurricane Autonomous Workers Collective who have been taking The Frida Bus down to the Gulf Coast to do volunteer work. And as you may have heard, the sad news is that the bus was involved in an accident in which several people were injured and Meg Perry was killed.

Those of you on myspace can
get details there.

My daughter and I took a walk today, where we stopped by The Peoples Free Space which is located around the corner from my house. It felt good to go, I feel a very strong political resonance with them. Plus the people there were cool.

So, come on Friday if you can. At least 2 other bands will be playing. More details will be forthcoming, I’m sure.

The “Left/Right” metaphor, in general, makes me crazy. It’s much too simplistic to say that the sum total of political perspectives can be contained in one spectrum.

So from now on, rather than Left(tm) or Right(tm), I say I am Bottom.

And there is growing evidence that Bottom-Up (as opposed to Top-Down hierarchical) power may be gaining momentum.

For example, the Official 9/11 Commission Report(tm) basically blames widespread incompetence, countless individual breakdowns on a systematic level, hundreds or thousands of unnamed underlings “dropping the ball,” which had the cumulative result of failing to stop 9/11. This is a bottom-up explanation. According to this theory, these mistakes, these power gaps, these negative assertions of power, flowed from the bottom of the hierarchy up. None of those at the top of the hierarchy is responsible.

I find it very interesting that this is an example of the Top recognizing that the Bottom has the power to shake the very foundations of society. And when framed in this manner, most people accept that the Bottom has enough power to cause something as dramatic and history-changing as 9/11.

Though I appreciate this admission from the 9/11 Commission (et al), I must point out that their example is nonsense. Bottom-up power, while considerable, is almost never directed toward tragic or warlike ends. This is clearly a Top-Down event being blamed on Bottom-Up power.

The New Pearl Harbor
I just finished reading The New Pearl Harbor. It’s a fantastic piece of work, a thorough yet somehow concise overview of the myriad of Grassy Knolls and Schoolbook Depositories of 9/11. It’s important enough that I think everyone should read it. Yet I can’t say I agree with his conclusion, which is basically that there needs to be an honest, official investigation. My prime objective is that this cannot be implemented by the US government, and I don’t see the US opening such a massive criminal investigation to an independent body; they don’t after all seem to cooperate much with bodies like the International Courts or the United Nations.

Obviously, I think much more than an investigation is needed. A real assertion of Bottom-Up power is more in order.

I ordered 5 books recently, and they came today. I’ve been interested more in political topics again, and ordered books in two categories:

• 9/11 books. I ordered 2 books by
  David Ray Griffin,
  who is actually a grizzled academic in the field of
  process philosophy, but has recently added investigations about 9/11 to his CV. The first is
  The New Pearl Harbor;
  the second is commentary on the official 9/11 commission report.

  Plus, I was in the mood for some fiction, so I picked up a copy of the
  9/11 Commission report
  itself, which had I realized
  was available in pdf form I wouldn’t have bothered. Ah well. At least it was cheap.

• Secondly were
  Empire
  (also available as
  download) and
  Multitude by
  Michael Hardt and
  Antonio Negri. Much meatier stuff.

From This weeks Brezsny:

“There’s no delicate way to say this, so please stop reading and come back next week if you’re offended by graphic references to pleasure. According to my analysis of the long-term astrological omens, you’re on tap to experience more orgasms in 2006 than you have in any previous year. On average, your climaxes are also likely to be longer and more intense. Other varieties of bliss, rapture, and joy will probably occur at record levels, as well. Think you can handle it? ”

So, queue up. mwah hah ha.

I’m thinking of doing a podcast. I have the technology, and the interest; the trick will be to find the time to sustain it. I have several ideas about how to proceed in terms of content, but my friend Mark asks a good question:

What would be your ideal podcast? What would make you want to download a few minutes of someone else’s audio every morning? Assume for a moment that the person making the podcast is confined to legally usable, or self-produced, music and content, and paraphrased/attributed news.

Though I can assure you my podcast won’t be daily; it will be weekly at most, probably closer to monthly. But yeah, what do you want to hear? I will probably cover topics also covered on this blog, ie, a reflection of what’s on my mind, but I’d also be interested in what my potential listeners would want…

Edge (not the U2 guitarist) asks: What Is Your Dangerous Idea?

Some very interesting replies. Reading it now…

…and as we all know, argument by authority essentially means “propositionialStatement(x) is true, only because authorityFigure(y) says so.” Which of course isn’t very authoritative, especially given the insistence of the scientific method upon repeatability and verification, not “because I said so” arguments.

I’d in the past gotten the drive from Maine to Ohio down to about 16 hours. Usually I take 95 south into Mass, and get over to 84 west through Connecticut, and then head across PA on either I-80, which dumps you in Northeast Ohio, or I-76/70, which dumps you into Columbus. The last leg is I-71 south to Cincinnati.

On our recent vacation, we remembered that the purveyor of our favorite Indian restaurant in Portland, Hi Bombay, also by some fantastic twist of fate had opened a branch in Cincinnati. So we looked it up and went out to dinner.

The guy remembered us! He told us he was planning on moving back to Maine once his children were out of college, and has made the drive in 14 hours, 20-25 times, successfully because he still comes back to Portland frequently to check up on the other restaurant there. He said he went out 70 to 76 to the NJ turnpike, and then north on 95 to Portland. 14 hours, he claimed.

So despite my reservations (it looks like it adds about 200 miles to the trip), we opted for argument by authority in order to check out a different route. The good news is that we got to see the Manhattan skyline.

The bad news is that it rained nearly all of the trip, except at the end when it gradually morphed into snow, spending a lot of time in the freezing rain and sleet category. Surprisingly, the roads were not too treacherous; the worst part by far is poor visibility. You try concentrating on the same thing for 20.75 hours straight. Not an easy task. It was precipitating for probably 20 of the 20.75 hours of the trip.

But I’m home, safe, in one piece, exhausted, and a bit wired. And in surprisingly good mood. In some ways I feel like I’m grounding a huge amount of energy. Like the rain that followed us home ALL FREAKING DAY is washing away an outer layer of dust or something.

So yes, the shortcut wasn’t overwhelmingly short by any stretch of the imagination. I think that even with the weather conditions slowing things down, and without the handful of traffic jams we hit in NYC, the drive could be done in probably 18 hours under optimal conditions.

So in this case, the authority was wrong. Too bad for us.

It’s kind of odd visiting home again, from a societal point of view. Ohio’s economy is much, much larger than Maine’s; there are certainly many more people, but it seems like there are more stores and places to buy Stuff(tm) per capita.

2-3 decades ago, I grew up in northern Cincinnati, in a town called Springdale, which was the outer edge of suburbia. All the main retail outlets were near us, it was glittering and shiny new. You could tell there was money there.

Now, all these glitzy new buildings are 2 or 3 decades older, and show wear and tear. Even the houses look older, which of course they are.

Last night, my wife and I had a dinner & movie date, and we headed further north, a couple exits up the highway, to the restaurant and the theater. There, 5 miles north of where I grew up, now looks like my area did when I was a kid. The radius of Cincinnati, or at least the suburban sprawl, is expanding.

It occurred to me that this sprawl expansion must look something like a nuclear shock wave in slow motion. Things heat up as they go outward, leaving slow decay in its wake.

Kind of a crude metaphor, I suppose. But it was an image that struck me, and I wanted to record it here for posterity. Perhaps I’ll develop the idea more.

Well, it’s Christmas morning, and I’m at my sister’s house.

This will be a brief entry, I’m doing a bit of research on my new Neuros Digital Audio computer that Santa (aka, my beautiful wife) got me. There are some sites that help with using this device with Linux, and I wanted to document them here:

• Positron, the linux client to sync to the Neuros… I’ll need to install this.
• Positron User’s Guide
• How to make the Neuros play Vorbis files

Wednesday afternoon at Sunset saw our now-traditional Yule circle, with the lighting of the bonfire. We keep the bonfire burning all night, on the longest night of the year, until sunrise the next morning. After we closed the circle at dawn, we returned home and I got several hours of sleep.

When I woke up, I showered, packed, and at sunset — again — we got into the car and headed south. Many hours later, we saw a beautiful sunrise in northern Ohio. There was a mist in the air, and the sun was behind trees moving by quickly, so we were actually able to get a glimpse of that stunning ball of fusing hydrogen atoms. It was gorgeous. My daughter loved seeing the newborn sun.