I’ve mentioned John Chuckman before; he is definitely a master of the exquisite political rant. Anyway, he has a new rant, Drowning in Filth that touches on everything from George Orwell to Hillary Clinton-bashing to America’s legacy of slave lynchings to Terri Schiavo to flag-burning criminalization to torture at Guantanamo Bay to America’s use of napalm in Iraq to Deep Throat to Seymour Hersh.
Whew. But he’s an entertaining writer, so go read it.
…that in a time when there are millions
of
people
actively
resisting
capitalism, the biggest news item in the mainstream media is that beasts from the ocean
are
attacking
people
in Florida?
I take you back, dear reader, to late summer 2001, when before Nine-Eleven(tm), the media was saturated with similar coverage of carnivores from the sea.
A friend of mine recently predicted another major terrorist attack before the 2006 elections. Not sure it’s gonna be that long…
Last night, I read the Political Preface to Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse. It’s interesting stuff; an analysis of Freud’s theories from a Marxist perspective; in a sense he’s taking the notion of suppressed Eros and applying it to society rather than just the individual.
The book was written in 1955, but in 1966 it was republished and Marcuse wrote the political preface. There’s some amazing stuff in there:
I hesitate to use the word — freedom — because it is precisely in the name of freedom that crimes against humanity are being perpetrated. This situation is certainly not new in history: poverty and exploitation were products of economic freedom; time and again, people were liberated all over the globe by their lords and masters, and their new liberty turned out to be submission, not to the rule of law but to the rule of the law of the others. What started as subjection by force soon became “voluntary servitude,” collaboration in reproducing a society which made servitude increasingly rewarding and palatable. The reproduction, bigger and better, of the same ways of life came to mean, ever more clearly and consciously, the closing of those other possible ways of life which could do away with the serfs and the masters, with the productivity of repression.
. . .
The rejection of affluent productivity, far from being a commitment to purity, simplicity, and “nature,” might be the token (and weapon) of a higher stage of human development, based on the achievements of the technological society.
. . .
The system has its weakest point where it shows its most brutal strength: in the escalation of its military potential (which seems to press for periodic actualization with ever shorter interruptions of peace and preparedness). This tendency seems reversible only under strongest pressure, and its reversal would open the danger spots in the social structure: its conversion into a “normal” capitalist system is hardly imaginable without a serious crisis and sweeping economic and political changes. Today, the opposition to war and military intervention strikes at the roots: it rebels against those whose economic and political dominion depends on the continued (and enlarged) reproduction of the military establishment, its “multipliers,” and the policies which necessitate this reproduction. These interests are not hard to identify, and the war against them does not require missiles, bombs, and napalm. But it does require something that is much harder to produce — the spread of uncensored and unmanipulated knowledge, consciousness, and above all, the organized refusal to continue work on the material and intellectual instruments which are now being used against man — for the defense of the liberty and prosperity of those who dominate the rest.
The last paragraph is perhaps most interesting to me at the moment; in a sense it is a longing, from 1966, for something like the Internet, something “much harder to produce — the spread of uncensored and unmanipulated knowledge.” I wrote about this in The Virtual Enclosures; the fact that anti-capitalists now have a tool like cyberspace make it even more vital that this tool be kept functional to us. It should be kept Free and in the commons.
OK, I am formally committing myself to drinking the Everyday Systems Kool-Aid, which specifically consists of The No-S Diet, Urban Ranger, and of course shovelglove.
I am acutely aware of how boring it is to listen to people babble on about exercise programs and diets. So in order to spare my readers (both of you), I’ll make comments about how this is going on my daily log page on the Everyday Systems forum rather than here. The one exception to the “virtual representation of my mind” rule, since this stuff is on my mind quite a bit these days. But oh well.
It’s nearly 100 degrees in Portland today. Yow, it’s hot. But funny, I don’t hate hot days now nearly as much as I did several years ago when I was lazy and didn’t sweat or exercise much. But regardless, I’m working today, so I’m not actually complaining about sitting inside an air-conditioned building. For once.
But temperature extremes certainly affect how busy it is. When it’s extremely cold in the winter we get very busy, simply because cars don’t cope well with such cold. The same is true in the summer; when it’s really hot like today we get a lot of calls.
Back to the phones…
I do, of course, mean hack in the geek sense of the word, which means something like “a clever, thoughtful solution to a problem.” In this case, the problem is, how to get good exercise without having to deal with joining a gym. My readers will know that I’ve been babbling about Shovelglove for a while. Shovelglove is now officially the best workout — esp. in the upper body — that I’ve ever experienced. From the main shovelglove site:
Take a sledgehammer and wrap an old sweater around it. This is your “shovelglove.” Every week day morning, set a timer for 14 minutes. Use the shovelglove to perform shoveling, butter churning, and wood chopping motions until the timer goes off. Stop. Rest on weekends and holidays.
This insight is in itself a supreme hack. It is the very picture of what I would call “elegant simplicity.” It just works, and in the few months I’ve been doing it I have noticed some serious results.
The first hack has to do with the weight of the sledgehammer. My local hardware chaing carries 8, 10, and 16 pound sledgehammers. The 8 was too light, the 16 was too heavy, and the 10 was just slightly lighter than ideal. I think I would have preferred a 12- or 13-pounder, but alas, they simply weren’t available. So I went with a 10 pounder.
The first week was amazingly strenuous. This is hard work! My muscles ached — good ache — for several days after I started. And my strength increase has been palpable; I’ve been lifting weights off and on for about 4 or 5 years, and my strength has increased noticeably since I began “shugging.” I picked up my dumbells for the first time in months the other day to get a bench-pressing motion, and I was able to lift twice the number of sets, with about 30% more weight, than I was able to do in the past.
But the problem is, now the 10 pounder almost seems too light. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a good workout, but I find myself itching for more weight. So I thought of just picking up a 2nd sledgehammer, this one at 16-pounds. The problem is, the only 16 pounders they have at the shop come with fiberglass handles. Now fiberglass may actually be superior to wood (lighter, absorbs vibration, etc), but that just rubs me the wrong way. I want wood.
So I thought of another idea. Why not get adjustable ankle weights, and attach them to the sledge? So I went out yesterday and got 10 lb ankle weights, which are actually 2 – 5lb ankleweights. For now, I just rigged them directly onto the sledge with duct tape (no sweater on this shovelglove), but in the interest of removability and upgradeability I’m going to replace the duct tape with some heavy-duty straps to hold the ankleweights on, yet still provide accessibility to change the weights if I choose.
My first workout with the hacked sledgehammer (10 lb sledge + 5 pounds of ankle weight, ie, 15 pound sledge) was last night, and man. It was tough, in a good way. My arms feel today like they did when I first started shugging with the 10 pound sledgehammer. This rocks.
I decided to get 2 separate 5 lb ankleweights rather than one 10 lb one; this way I can have 3 different weights at the ready and can adjust the total weight fairly quickly and painlessly.
about the utterly illusory nature of “property ownership,” check this out: the Supreme Court has ruled that local governments can seize “private” property whenever they wish.
As I’ve said for many years, you don’t “own” “your” property. If you don’t believe me, try not paying your property taxes for a few years and see what happens.
Ownership is an illusion; it is arbitrary, conditional, and abstract. Intellectual property doubly so.
Now this is cool. It’s TiddlyWiki, which is “a reusable non-linear personal web notebook.” It’s hard to describe, as the front page of the TiddlyWiki site is itself a TiddlyWiki. The idea is you have a single HTML file, laden with all kinds of javascript, that allows you to make notes from within the browser itself, storing everything you type into that single HTML file. Useful for jotting down ideas, for later re-arrengement into something more coherent. Each entry is like a notecard. Or something.
It’s hard to describe, you just have to try using it. You can start with an empty TiddlyWiki file and just go from there. Or, there is a TiddlyWikiTutorial that explains how to Do Stuff in TiddlyWiki.
Very cool…..
Available for your downloading PDF goodness now at The Commoner.
I had a good day today. I went over to a friends house and did yardwork. We cut down a few trees, and a big branch that was hanging over a place where we wanted to stack firewood so it wouldn’t get wet. So now there is much more space around the firepit. There’s gonna be a Shindig(tm) there in early August, so we’re kinda getting ready for that.
Had a great meal, and came home to find that my wife had a beautiful evening herself with another dear friend.
Got to see the big, fat full moon rise tonight, before the sun had gone down. Still 2 days away (ish) from being full…