a monody for our planet
rough-hewn minstrels
roam melancholy chardonnay fields,
long ago sewn and harvested
by hands that knew greater pains and melodies;
because life was not always so solemn,
but instead was a language shared between the earth
and everything;
but now we wander with our lutes and lyres,
tired and parched and exposed on the naked land;
we can no longer discern the whispers that plead around us,
but can only focus on our weathered anxious hands, clenched
tight, wrinkling at such a young age
because we used up the water long ago.
we hear tales of a green and blue earth
and, with mouths watering, try to imagine such beauty.
we lick our lips at the prospect, as our wrinkled hands and
cracked feet mold the gray terrain into coffins and coffee tables.
beleaguered poets draw wisps of sympathy
but they are swiftly caught in an exhaust-pipe draft, and
are gone, and we are back to the ground
where the sounds of round mourning doves
echo and haunt,
and we mourn along with them
in the unspeakable way of doves
the bittersweet speech of those creatures who remember the language of the
earth,
lament its loss,
pity the deaf ear-to-ground minstrels
who have nothing to hide in their lyricist hands,
but everything to gain.
laid-to-rest charlatans are scattered
with gravel and ash, among other things,
and we wish that our facade could be so great,
that our dirge could also scale such mountains,
but we settle for a proud pilgrimmage through the desert to the past,
kicking up dust the whole way, only to find
a catacomb
where the earth was irreverantly placed,
another lost language of lovers and fools
littered with those who died along with it.
it is only now, a time among times
that we realize the weight of our plight,
that we understand the somber shadows standing
between us and the sun.
if you indeed be a lover, a minstrel, a poet, a steward of life,
rinse your cracked hands a take a drink,
and you will find that the fields are ablaze,
are alive,
are breathing,
just waiting for your call to arms.
Monday, July 31, 2006
first Iraq article i've recommended- it's visceral
Sunday, July 30, 2006; B01
"I came over here because I wanted to kill people."
Over a mess-tent dinner of turkey cutlets, the bony-faced 21-year-old
private from West Texas looked right at me as he talked about killing
Iraqis with casual indifference. It was February, and we were at his
small patrol base about 20 miles south of Baghdad. "The truth is, it
wasn't all I thought it was cracked up to be. I mean, I thought
killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I
did it, and I was like, 'All right, whatever.'"
He shrugged.
"I shot a guy who wouldn't stop when we were out at a traffic
checkpoint and it was like nothing," he went on. "Over here, killing
people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it's
like 'All right, let's go get some pizza.' "
At the time, the soldier's matter-of-fact manner struck me chiefly as
a rare example of honesty. I was on a nine-month assignment as an
embedded reporter in Iraq, spending much of my time with grunts like
him -- mostly young (and immature) small-town kids who sign up for a
job as killers, lured by some gut-level desire for excitement and
adventure. This was not the first group I had run into that was full
of young men who shared a dark sense of humor and were clearly
desensitized to death. I thought this soldier was just one of the
exceptions who wasn't afraid to say what he really thought, a frank
and reflective kid, a sort of Holden Caulfield in a war zone.
But the private was Steven D. Green.
The next time I saw him, in a front-page newspaper photograph five
months later, he was standing outside a federal courthouse in North
Carolina, where he had pled not guilty to charges of premeditated rape
and murder. The brutal killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her
family in Mahmudiyah that he was accused of had taken place just three
weeks after we talked.
When I met Green, I knew nothing about his background -- his troubled
youth and family life, his apparent problems with drugs and alcohol,
his petty criminal record. I just saw and heard a blunt-talking kid.
Now that I know the charges against Green, his words take on an
utterly different context for me. But when I met him then, his
comments didn't seem nearly as chilling as they do now.
Maybe, in part, that's because we were talking in Mahmudiyah. If
there's one place where a soldier might succumb to what the military
calls "combat stress," it's this town where Green's unit was posted on
the edge of the so-called Triangle of Death, for the last three years
a bloody center of the Sunni-led insurgency. Mahmudiyah is a deadly
patch of earth that inspires such fear, foreboding and uneasiness that
my most prominent memory of the three weeks I spent there was the
unrelenting knot it caused in my stomach.
I was nervous even before I arrived. Although Mahmudiyah is only a
15-minute drive from the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, I
was taken there by helicopter. Military officials didn't want to risk
my riding in a truck that might be hit by a roadside bomb. I'd chosen
to go to Mahmudiyah because I wanted to be on the front lines of the
war and among the troops fighting it.
When I arrived in February, Green's battalion -- the 101st Airborne
Division's 502nd Infantry Regiment -- was losing an average of about
one soldier per week. Whenever I asked how many of the nearly 1,000
troops posted there had been killed so far, most soldiers would just
frown and say they'd lost count.
Danger was everywhere. Inside the American base camps, mortar shells
fell almost daily. In the towns where U.S. forces patrolled, car bombs
were a constant threat. On the rural roads, the troops kept watch for
massive artillery rounds hidden under piles of trash that could shred
the engine block of an armored Humvee and separate a driver's limbs
from his torso.
About a month before I arrived at Green's base -- an abandoned
potato-packing plant lined with 20-foot concrete walls -- the soldiers
there fought off a full-blown assault that rallied dozens of
insurgents in a show of force almost unheard of for a shadowy enemy
that typically avoids face-to-face combat. It took more than an hour
to quell the attack of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades coming
from all sides of the camp.
Morale took another nosedive soon after, when the hastily rigged
electrical wiring system caught fire and burned down the Americans'
living quarters. The soldiers watched as the early-morning blaze
destroyed all reminders of home: the family photographs, the iPods and
the video games that provide brief escapes from combat. When I got
there a week later, a chow-hall storage room, packed with radios and
satellite maps, was serving as the base command center. The sergeants
were still passing out toothbrushes and clean socks to the young
troops who had lost everything.
The company commander in charge of Green's unit told me that the
situation was so stressful that he himself had "almost had a nervous
breakdown" and had been sent to a hotel-style compound in Baghdad for
three days of "freedom rest" before resuming his command.
And yet despite the horrific conditions in which they were daily being
tested, I found extraordinary camaraderie among the soldiers in
Mahmudiyah. They were among the friendliest troops I met in Iraq.
Green was one of several soldiers I sat down with in the chow hall one
night not long after my arrival. We talked over dinner served on
cardboard trays. I asked them how it was going out there, and to tell
me about some of their most harrowing moments. When they began talking
about the December death of Sgt. Kenith Casica, my interview zeroed in
on Green.
He described how after an attack on their traffic checkpoint, he and
several others pushed one wounded man into the back seat of a Humvee
and put Casica, who had a bullet wound in his throat, on the truck's
hood. Green flung himself across Casica to keep the dying soldier from
falling off as they sped back to the base.
"We were going, like, 55 miles an hour and I was hanging on to him. I
was like, 'Sgt. Casica, Sgt. Casica.' He just moved his eyes a little
bit," Green related with a breezy candor. "I was just laying on top of
him, listening to him breathing, telling him he's okay. I was rubbing
his chest. I was looking at the tattoo on his arm. He had his little
girl's name tattooed on his arm.
"I was just talking to him. Listening to his heartbeat. It was weird
-- I drooled on him a little bit and I was, like, wiping it off. It's
weird that I was worried about stupid [expletive] like that.
"Then I heard him stop breathing," Green said. "We got back and
everyone was like, 'Oh [expletive], get him off the truck.' But I knew
he was dead. You could look in his eyes and there wasn't nothing in
his eyes. I knew what was going on there."
He paused and looked away. "He was the nicest man I ever met," he
said. "I never saw him yell at anybody. That was the worst time, that
was my worst time since I've been in Iraq."
Green had been in country only four months at that point, a volunteer
in a war he now saw as pointless.
"I gotta be here for a year and there ain't [expletive] I can do about
it," he said. "I just want to go home alive. I don't give a
[expletive] about the whole Iraq thing. I don't care.
"See, this war is different from all the ones that our fathers and
grandfathers fought. Those wars were for something. This war is for
nothing."
A couple of days later, I ran into Green again, and he invited me to
join him and another soldier in a visit to the makeshift tearoom run
by the Iraqi soldiers who share the base with the American troops. It
was after dusk, and the three of us walked across a pitch-black
landing zone and into a small plywood-lined room where a couple of
dozen barefoot Iraqi soldiers were sitting around watching a local
news channel.
"Hey, shlonek ," Green said, offering a casual Arabic greeting with a
smile and a sweeping wave as he stepped up to the bar. He handed over
a U.S. dollar in exchange for three Styrofoam cups of syrupy brown tea.
Green knew a few words of Arabic, and along with bits of broken
English, some hand gestures and smiles, he joked around with the
Iraqis as he sipped their tea. Most U.S. soldiers didn't hang out on
this side of the base with the Iraqis.
I asked Green whether he went there a lot. He did, he said, because he
liked to get away from the Americans "who are always telling me what
to do."
"These guys are cool," he said, referring to the Iraqis.
"But," he added with a shrug, "I wouldn't really care if all these
guys got waxed."
As we talked, Green complained about his frustration with the Army
brass that urged young soldiers to exercise caution even in the most
terrifying and life-threatening circumstances.
"We're out here getting attacked all the time and we're in trouble
when somebody accidentally gets shot?" he said, referring to
infantrymen like himself throughout Iraq. "We're pawns for the
[expletive] politicians, for people that don't give a [expletive]
about us and don't know anything about what it's like to be out here
on the line."
The soldiers who fought alongside Green lived in conditions of
near-constant violence -- violence committed by them, and against them.
Even in my brief stay there, I repeatedly encountered terrifying
attacks. One night, about a mile from Green's base, a roadside bomb
exploded alongside the vehicle I was riding in, unleashing a deafening
crack and a ball of fire. In most places in Iraq, soldiers would have
stopped to investigate. In the Triangle of Death, however, we just
plowed on through the cloud of smoke and shower of sparks, fearing an
ambush if we stopped. Fortunately, the bomb was relatively small, its
detonation poorly timed, and the soldiers all laughed about it moments
later. "Dude, that was [expletive] awesome," the driver said after
making sure no one was hurt.
A few days later, I was standing outside chatting with an officer
about the long-term legacy of the Vietnam War when a rocket came
whistling down and struck the base's south wall. A couple of days
after that, a mortar round blew up a tent about 20 feet from the
visitors' tent that I called home.
My experience, however, was nothing compared with that of Green and
the other young men of his Bravo company who spent months in the
Triangle of Death.
In the end, I never included Green's comments in any of the handful of
stories I wrote from Mahmudiyah for Stars and Stripes. When he said he
was inured to death and killing, it seemed to me -- in that place and
at that time -- a reasonable thing to say. While in Iraq, I also saw
people bleed and die. And there was something unspeakably
underwhelming about it. It's not a Hollywood action movie -- there are
no rapid edits, no adrenaline-pumping soundtracks, no logical
narratives that help make sense of it. Bits of lead fly through the
air, put holes in people and their bodily fluids leak out and they
die. Those who knew them mourn and move on.
But no level of combat stress is an excuse for the kind of brutal acts
Green allegedly committed. I suppose I will always look back on our
conversations in Mahmudiyah and wonder: Just what did he mean?
andrewtilghman1@yahoo.com
Andrew Tilghman was a correspondent in Iraq for the military newspaper
Stars and Stripes. He lives in Houston.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
"I came over here because I wanted to kill people."
Over a mess-tent dinner of turkey cutlets, the bony-faced 21-year-old
private from West Texas looked right at me as he talked about killing
Iraqis with casual indifference. It was February, and we were at his
small patrol base about 20 miles south of Baghdad. "The truth is, it
wasn't all I thought it was cracked up to be. I mean, I thought
killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I
did it, and I was like, 'All right, whatever.'"
He shrugged.
"I shot a guy who wouldn't stop when we were out at a traffic
checkpoint and it was like nothing," he went on. "Over here, killing
people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it's
like 'All right, let's go get some pizza.' "
At the time, the soldier's matter-of-fact manner struck me chiefly as
a rare example of honesty. I was on a nine-month assignment as an
embedded reporter in Iraq, spending much of my time with grunts like
him -- mostly young (and immature) small-town kids who sign up for a
job as killers, lured by some gut-level desire for excitement and
adventure. This was not the first group I had run into that was full
of young men who shared a dark sense of humor and were clearly
desensitized to death. I thought this soldier was just one of the
exceptions who wasn't afraid to say what he really thought, a frank
and reflective kid, a sort of Holden Caulfield in a war zone.
But the private was Steven D. Green.
The next time I saw him, in a front-page newspaper photograph five
months later, he was standing outside a federal courthouse in North
Carolina, where he had pled not guilty to charges of premeditated rape
and murder. The brutal killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her
family in Mahmudiyah that he was accused of had taken place just three
weeks after we talked.
When I met Green, I knew nothing about his background -- his troubled
youth and family life, his apparent problems with drugs and alcohol,
his petty criminal record. I just saw and heard a blunt-talking kid.
Now that I know the charges against Green, his words take on an
utterly different context for me. But when I met him then, his
comments didn't seem nearly as chilling as they do now.
Maybe, in part, that's because we were talking in Mahmudiyah. If
there's one place where a soldier might succumb to what the military
calls "combat stress," it's this town where Green's unit was posted on
the edge of the so-called Triangle of Death, for the last three years
a bloody center of the Sunni-led insurgency. Mahmudiyah is a deadly
patch of earth that inspires such fear, foreboding and uneasiness that
my most prominent memory of the three weeks I spent there was the
unrelenting knot it caused in my stomach.
I was nervous even before I arrived. Although Mahmudiyah is only a
15-minute drive from the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, I
was taken there by helicopter. Military officials didn't want to risk
my riding in a truck that might be hit by a roadside bomb. I'd chosen
to go to Mahmudiyah because I wanted to be on the front lines of the
war and among the troops fighting it.
When I arrived in February, Green's battalion -- the 101st Airborne
Division's 502nd Infantry Regiment -- was losing an average of about
one soldier per week. Whenever I asked how many of the nearly 1,000
troops posted there had been killed so far, most soldiers would just
frown and say they'd lost count.
Danger was everywhere. Inside the American base camps, mortar shells
fell almost daily. In the towns where U.S. forces patrolled, car bombs
were a constant threat. On the rural roads, the troops kept watch for
massive artillery rounds hidden under piles of trash that could shred
the engine block of an armored Humvee and separate a driver's limbs
from his torso.
About a month before I arrived at Green's base -- an abandoned
potato-packing plant lined with 20-foot concrete walls -- the soldiers
there fought off a full-blown assault that rallied dozens of
insurgents in a show of force almost unheard of for a shadowy enemy
that typically avoids face-to-face combat. It took more than an hour
to quell the attack of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades coming
from all sides of the camp.
Morale took another nosedive soon after, when the hastily rigged
electrical wiring system caught fire and burned down the Americans'
living quarters. The soldiers watched as the early-morning blaze
destroyed all reminders of home: the family photographs, the iPods and
the video games that provide brief escapes from combat. When I got
there a week later, a chow-hall storage room, packed with radios and
satellite maps, was serving as the base command center. The sergeants
were still passing out toothbrushes and clean socks to the young
troops who had lost everything.
The company commander in charge of Green's unit told me that the
situation was so stressful that he himself had "almost had a nervous
breakdown" and had been sent to a hotel-style compound in Baghdad for
three days of "freedom rest" before resuming his command.
And yet despite the horrific conditions in which they were daily being
tested, I found extraordinary camaraderie among the soldiers in
Mahmudiyah. They were among the friendliest troops I met in Iraq.
Green was one of several soldiers I sat down with in the chow hall one
night not long after my arrival. We talked over dinner served on
cardboard trays. I asked them how it was going out there, and to tell
me about some of their most harrowing moments. When they began talking
about the December death of Sgt. Kenith Casica, my interview zeroed in
on Green.
He described how after an attack on their traffic checkpoint, he and
several others pushed one wounded man into the back seat of a Humvee
and put Casica, who had a bullet wound in his throat, on the truck's
hood. Green flung himself across Casica to keep the dying soldier from
falling off as they sped back to the base.
"We were going, like, 55 miles an hour and I was hanging on to him. I
was like, 'Sgt. Casica, Sgt. Casica.' He just moved his eyes a little
bit," Green related with a breezy candor. "I was just laying on top of
him, listening to him breathing, telling him he's okay. I was rubbing
his chest. I was looking at the tattoo on his arm. He had his little
girl's name tattooed on his arm.
"I was just talking to him. Listening to his heartbeat. It was weird
-- I drooled on him a little bit and I was, like, wiping it off. It's
weird that I was worried about stupid [expletive] like that.
"Then I heard him stop breathing," Green said. "We got back and
everyone was like, 'Oh [expletive], get him off the truck.' But I knew
he was dead. You could look in his eyes and there wasn't nothing in
his eyes. I knew what was going on there."
He paused and looked away. "He was the nicest man I ever met," he
said. "I never saw him yell at anybody. That was the worst time, that
was my worst time since I've been in Iraq."
Green had been in country only four months at that point, a volunteer
in a war he now saw as pointless.
"I gotta be here for a year and there ain't [expletive] I can do about
it," he said. "I just want to go home alive. I don't give a
[expletive] about the whole Iraq thing. I don't care.
"See, this war is different from all the ones that our fathers and
grandfathers fought. Those wars were for something. This war is for
nothing."
A couple of days later, I ran into Green again, and he invited me to
join him and another soldier in a visit to the makeshift tearoom run
by the Iraqi soldiers who share the base with the American troops. It
was after dusk, and the three of us walked across a pitch-black
landing zone and into a small plywood-lined room where a couple of
dozen barefoot Iraqi soldiers were sitting around watching a local
news channel.
"Hey, shlonek ," Green said, offering a casual Arabic greeting with a
smile and a sweeping wave as he stepped up to the bar. He handed over
a U.S. dollar in exchange for three Styrofoam cups of syrupy brown tea.
Green knew a few words of Arabic, and along with bits of broken
English, some hand gestures and smiles, he joked around with the
Iraqis as he sipped their tea. Most U.S. soldiers didn't hang out on
this side of the base with the Iraqis.
I asked Green whether he went there a lot. He did, he said, because he
liked to get away from the Americans "who are always telling me what
to do."
"These guys are cool," he said, referring to the Iraqis.
"But," he added with a shrug, "I wouldn't really care if all these
guys got waxed."
As we talked, Green complained about his frustration with the Army
brass that urged young soldiers to exercise caution even in the most
terrifying and life-threatening circumstances.
"We're out here getting attacked all the time and we're in trouble
when somebody accidentally gets shot?" he said, referring to
infantrymen like himself throughout Iraq. "We're pawns for the
[expletive] politicians, for people that don't give a [expletive]
about us and don't know anything about what it's like to be out here
on the line."
The soldiers who fought alongside Green lived in conditions of
near-constant violence -- violence committed by them, and against them.
Even in my brief stay there, I repeatedly encountered terrifying
attacks. One night, about a mile from Green's base, a roadside bomb
exploded alongside the vehicle I was riding in, unleashing a deafening
crack and a ball of fire. In most places in Iraq, soldiers would have
stopped to investigate. In the Triangle of Death, however, we just
plowed on through the cloud of smoke and shower of sparks, fearing an
ambush if we stopped. Fortunately, the bomb was relatively small, its
detonation poorly timed, and the soldiers all laughed about it moments
later. "Dude, that was [expletive] awesome," the driver said after
making sure no one was hurt.
A few days later, I was standing outside chatting with an officer
about the long-term legacy of the Vietnam War when a rocket came
whistling down and struck the base's south wall. A couple of days
after that, a mortar round blew up a tent about 20 feet from the
visitors' tent that I called home.
My experience, however, was nothing compared with that of Green and
the other young men of his Bravo company who spent months in the
Triangle of Death.
In the end, I never included Green's comments in any of the handful of
stories I wrote from Mahmudiyah for Stars and Stripes. When he said he
was inured to death and killing, it seemed to me -- in that place and
at that time -- a reasonable thing to say. While in Iraq, I also saw
people bleed and die. And there was something unspeakably
underwhelming about it. It's not a Hollywood action movie -- there are
no rapid edits, no adrenaline-pumping soundtracks, no logical
narratives that help make sense of it. Bits of lead fly through the
air, put holes in people and their bodily fluids leak out and they
die. Those who knew them mourn and move on.
But no level of combat stress is an excuse for the kind of brutal acts
Green allegedly committed. I suppose I will always look back on our
conversations in Mahmudiyah and wonder: Just what did he mean?
andrewtilghman1@yahoo.com
Andrew Tilghman was a correspondent in Iraq for the military newspaper
Stars and Stripes. He lives in Houston.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Sunday, July 30, 2006
so this is what those funky symbols on US dollars mean...
masonry! w00t
check it out: http://altreligion.about.com/library/weekly/aa111604a.htm
check it out: http://altreligion.about.com/library/weekly/aa111604a.htm
werebrock fragment #2
Me: Wow, what are those things?
Tomas: Those are radio towers, put up a few years ago by... (scrunches up eyes for english adjective, then shurgs) Christians. To convert people. It sends out very, very strong signal. Now every little village in Ecuador, if they have a radio, can hear these crazy people. No other radio station reaches as far into the jungles and mountains.
(The things are fucking huge.)
Me: Hey Misha, what are we going to do if we meet missionaries while we're traveling.
Misha: Well, it depends on where we are. If we're in the city, we'll line them up against a wall and shoot them. If we're in the jungle, we'll drown them in a river.
(Laughter all around!)
Tomas: Those are radio towers, put up a few years ago by... (scrunches up eyes for english adjective, then shurgs) Christians. To convert people. It sends out very, very strong signal. Now every little village in Ecuador, if they have a radio, can hear these crazy people. No other radio station reaches as far into the jungles and mountains.
(The things are fucking huge.)
Me: Hey Misha, what are we going to do if we meet missionaries while we're traveling.
Misha: Well, it depends on where we are. If we're in the city, we'll line them up against a wall and shoot them. If we're in the jungle, we'll drown them in a river.
(Laughter all around!)
Friday, July 28, 2006
the usual poperie of cool, misspelled schlock
currently reading: a scanner darkly by philip k. dick, the oganization man by william whyte, the tao of pooh by benjamin hoff. i just finished two graphic novels starring mike mignola's hellboy (my first ever! pretty cool), and am watching rebel without a cause starring james dean. also starting a zine called the chinese anarchist movement by r. scalapino and g.t. yu
damn, there are a lot of nuclear weapons. that is some crazy shizzat. look at this from the ben and jerry's fella, you'll see what i mean. http://www.truemajority.org/bensbbs/ note: i don't endorse the political process.
ummm, k. i want to draw your attention to three other blogs. very noteworthy. one is keeping track of the violence in the israel/lebanon violence. http://meastpolitics.wordpress.com/ dude's a lebanese grad student, an anarchist. he also digs phillip k. dick. the other is by the singlethorn writers' collective out of new brunswick, NJ USA. good stuff! http://casyslantern.blogspot.com/ finally, there's a limey with a blog called taognostic. good for green anarchy, spirituality and reams of nice writing. specially, considering he's my age. http://www.taognostic.org/
call for submissions: come let la paz be your muse. let's make some art, ant farm or andy goldsworthy style, or whatever! and who wants to reintroduce lizards to northern kentucky?
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Rush Limbaugh ... ain't it a shame
I think the vast differences in compensation between victims of the September 11 casualty and those who die serving our country in Uniform are profound. No one is really talking about it either, because you just don't criticize anything having to do with September 11. Well, I can't let the numbers pass by because it says something really disturbing about the entitlement mentality of this country.
If you lost a family member in the September 11 attack, you're going to get an average of $1,185,000. The range is a minimum guarantee of $250,000, all the way up to $4.7 million.
If you are a surviving family member of an American soldier killed in action, the first check you get is a $6,000 direct death benefit, half of which is taxable.Next, you get $1,750 for burial costs. If you are the surviving spouse, you get $833 a month until you remarry.And there's a payment of $211 per month for each child under 18. When the child hits 18, those payments come to a screeching halt.
Keep in mind that some of the people who are getting anaverage of $1.185 million up to $4.7 million are complaining that it's not enough. Their deaths were tragic, but for most, they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Soldiers put themselves in harms way FOR ALL OF US, and they and their families know the dangers. We also learned over the weekend that some of the victims from the Oklahoma City bombing have started an organization asking for the same deal that the September 11 families are getting. In addition to that, some of the families of those bombed in the embassies are now asking for compensation as well.
You see where this is going, don't you? Folks, this is part and parcel of over 50 years of entitlement politics in this country. It's just really sad. Every time a pay raise comes up for the military, they usually receive next to nothing of a raise.
Now the green machine is in combat in the Middle East while their families have to survive on food stamps and live in low-rent housing. Make sense?
However, our own U.S. Congress voted themselves a raise.Many of you don't know that they only have to be in Congress one time to receive a pension that is more than$15,000 per month. And most are now equal to being millionaires plus. They do not receive Social Security on retirement because they didn't have to pay into the system.
If some of the military people stay in for 20 years and get out as an E-7, they may receive a pension of $1,000 per month, and the very people who placed them in harm's wayreceives a pension of $15,000 per month.
I would like to see our elected officials pick up a weapon and join ranks before they start cutting out benefits and lowering pay for our sons and daughters who are now fighting ." When do we finally do something about this?" If this doesn't seem fair to you, it is time to forward this on
If you lost a family member in the September 11 attack, you're going to get an average of $1,185,000. The range is a minimum guarantee of $250,000, all the way up to $4.7 million.
If you are a surviving family member of an American soldier killed in action, the first check you get is a $6,000 direct death benefit, half of which is taxable.Next, you get $1,750 for burial costs. If you are the surviving spouse, you get $833 a month until you remarry.And there's a payment of $211 per month for each child under 18. When the child hits 18, those payments come to a screeching halt.
Keep in mind that some of the people who are getting anaverage of $1.185 million up to $4.7 million are complaining that it's not enough. Their deaths were tragic, but for most, they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Soldiers put themselves in harms way FOR ALL OF US, and they and their families know the dangers. We also learned over the weekend that some of the victims from the Oklahoma City bombing have started an organization asking for the same deal that the September 11 families are getting. In addition to that, some of the families of those bombed in the embassies are now asking for compensation as well.
You see where this is going, don't you? Folks, this is part and parcel of over 50 years of entitlement politics in this country. It's just really sad. Every time a pay raise comes up for the military, they usually receive next to nothing of a raise.
Now the green machine is in combat in the Middle East while their families have to survive on food stamps and live in low-rent housing. Make sense?
However, our own U.S. Congress voted themselves a raise.Many of you don't know that they only have to be in Congress one time to receive a pension that is more than$15,000 per month. And most are now equal to being millionaires plus. They do not receive Social Security on retirement because they didn't have to pay into the system.
If some of the military people stay in for 20 years and get out as an E-7, they may receive a pension of $1,000 per month, and the very people who placed them in harm's wayreceives a pension of $15,000 per month.
I would like to see our elected officials pick up a weapon and join ranks before they start cutting out benefits and lowering pay for our sons and daughters who are now fighting ." When do we finally do something about this?" If this doesn't seem fair to you, it is time to forward this on
Sunday, July 23, 2006
"quantification of the obvious"...
i don't recall what that means, exactly, but it is one my tutor's favorite sayings. today we talked for 4 hours.
the conversation ranged over such diverse topics as Catholic iconography, architecture, Cincinnati history, chauvanism in 60's hippydom, Taoism, the transition of the rugged individualist image into the nameless cubicle of corporate paper pushers, and the origins of the swastika. (wow, you might not believe it but check out the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika) and of course, no discussion with this guy would be complete without learning how much US culture in the 50's sucked. read a recent article of his at http://www.bluechipreview.com/The_Feminization_of_the_American_Male.html
i met a numerologist. i'd like to write a short story bout the encounter, but now i don't have the time to spare.
lots of other nice stuff... now, on another fascinating topic, i will reprint my cry for help from the Books 4 Prisoners Yahoo! Groups message board:
Howdy Y'all,
1.) Uh, did you read about last week's anti-logging blockades in Indiana?
The folks who were doing that are holding a training
camp of some sort this coming weekend around Bloomington, IN and I'd like to go. I don't have
a car. If someone wants to hitch or carpool (I'll throw you gas money) than that would be
all kinds of dandy.
2.) The Great Lakes Anarchist Gathering sounds like a smash. LET"S GO, PLEASE
EMAIL ME ABOUT GETTING UP THERE. It twill be in Bowling Green OH August 19th and 20th, at
the UCF community center at 313 Thurstin.
It "begins each day at 11am, with programs and workshops running until 6pm and concerts and special events going all through the night. The goal is to improve our ability
to interact, coordinate, and network with other anarchists in the region, so
that we may all operate more safely and effectively. Workshops on deschooling, collective
houses, and zines & self-publishing have been added to the lineup which already includes
workshops on direct action, insurrectionary anarchism, hand-to-hand combat,
communications/ networking, and a regional ARA caucus.
Local groups involved include BG Anti-Racist Action,the type A collective, MDC, and the October 15th Anarchist Collective
Sleeping spaces and some food will be provided. There is no cost to attend
Most of the workshop slots are full, but we are still trying to fit a couple more in. Those
interested should contact the type A collective at typea@riseup.net
Healing: An Alaskan Prophecy
From an article entitled, "Let Goodness Take Its Place" by Larry Merculieff
(Larry Merculieff is former commissioner of the Alaska Department of Commerce and Economic Development. He is considered a leader i
n Alaska Native and environmental issues. Merculieff currently works as an independent consultant with a focus on cross-cultural communications, conflict resolution and mediation, environmental program development and organization, use of traditional knowledge and wisdom, and community healing processes.)
Larry gave this speech to a meeting of Aleut elders who had assembled to hear his important message. Larry began his speech in the Aleut language with the saying, "The afternoon tastes good." He continued...
"You are the second group of people that have invited me to talk on something that is very special. I have been asked to give you some messages from the spiritual leaders of the Hopi and [also the] Maori people from New Zealand. When I went up to Canada one and 1/2 years ago, I went there to be with the Stony Elders. They invited me to go there. While I was there, they said the Hopi and Maori sent the messenger to meet me. I do not know why me, but they gave me some messages to bring back here to Alaska. They must have known things that I do not know or can not see yet. And this is one of the things that I think they knew: that I was going to be invited to speak in places like this.
One thing to know before I start. The people who are here today are here for a reason. It is no accident that you are going to be here to hear this message, and it is up to you whether or not you want to use this message of wisdom that has been given by the Hopi and Maori. If you do not use it, I would ask you pass it along to others.
I used to write my speeches, you know, when I left the University. They train you to write everything down. As Commissioner, you have to write everything down for the public record. I stopped doing that when an old man, Howard Luke, and I were exchanging tape recordings with each other. He sent me this tape and said, "Anybody that gets up in front of a crowd of people and has to read from a piece of paper has no business being up there!"
So for the first time in my 43 years, today, I say "OK, the papers are going to be put away." I will speak from the heart. There is a great deal of wisdom in speaking from the heart instead from a paper. It was a relearning for me. I learned it very well, I think. When I have to speak before a group, I never know what I am going to say. The only thing I can do is clear my mind, clear my body, and pray for the messages given from the people that I have been sent here to give the messages for. And I pray to the Creator to help. When I came here, I also prayed for the help of the Spirit of the land; The Spirits of your ancestors; The Spirit of the river; The Spirit of the animals; The Spirit of the trees; and The Spirit of the wind, because each area of the world has their own guardian. Even this group now has it's own guardians. They are here now they are sitting with us, and so, I ask for their help when I talk.
The Hopi and Maori sent a messenger, her name was Beverly, to meet me when I was up in Canada. The messages come from the Hopi, Maori and the Stony Elders, who are part of the great Sioux Nation in Alberta, also from the White Bison Society. I will explain what this is.
What the Hopi [and the] Maori wanted us to know here in Alaska and all the villages, is that we are moving into the what they call the World of the 5th Hoop. The Navajo called it moving into the 5th World. Maybe amongst some of the elders of the Athabascan people there are similar things that are being said about this time. It is a message of hope. They know of the sicknesses that made them suffer. They know of the fights that have been going on between the organization and the villages. They know of the struggle between villages and within regions and between regions. They know about the alcohol abuse and accidental deaths due to alcohol, the suicides, the high blood pressure, failing health, heart problems, all these things that our people in Alaska have been facing. In my years working for my people, I have traveled all over the State. And it is pretty much the same everywhere... the kind of problems we are experiencing.
That is not what this message is about. They know about our business in the villages. This message is a message of hope. They say that moving into this time, of the World of the 5th Hoop, is a time when all the four sacred powers are going to be reconnected. They are the red-white-black-yellow. They wanted me to know that, among the Hopi, they are the keepers of the sacred stone tablets for the sacred red power - that includes all of us. They wanted me to know that they have the sacred stone tablets in Tibet, in the mountains, kept by the Tibetan Monks, in the same way that the Tibetans have their sacred stone tablet with the Hopi.
There are four sacred stone tablets that were given. The sacred black color has theirs in a small village in Africa. They cannot exchange it with the sacred white color because they lost theirs. But the Hopi wisdom keepers say that they are soon to find this stone. Very soon in this time. If you look at the maps where the people of Hopi live and Tibetans live, [it] is exactly on opposite parts of the world of the Mother Earth. The Hopi word for love is the Tibetan word for hate. And the Tibetan word for love is the Hopi word for hate. The same word, but exactly opposite meanings. They say that this is necessary to help keep the balance of Mother Earth. And that there are keepers of this balance that are around the world like us.
In moving into this time of the World of the 5th Hoop, it is going to be a time of great healing. There is going to be great healing that is going to start, and the Hopi say that it is going to start in the North. I have learned just recently that it is going to start in Alaska.
The Hopi told me that this time of great healing is going to be shown by several signs. One is when a hoop of a hundred eagle feathers is completed. And I have met the person from the White Bison Society in Colorado, who are the keepers of this hoop. I met the person while I was in Anchorage. While we were having dinner, a lady came in from Kodiak and she had an eagle feather in her hand. She said, "I know this had to go to some special place, and I guess it is you." And [she] gave it to this guy who was sitting there. His mouth dropped open. He could hardly speak. He said that this was the eagle feather that was to be the axle-- the center point in this hoop of 100 eagles that was described to him exactly by the wisdom keepers. The eagle feathers numbered 57 at that time.
Since that time, two more [feathers] have come from Alaska. One from an all white eagle. This white eagle had called to this man. (This is true, as I was a witness.) He was a white man. He calls me up and he says, "I do not know why I am calling, but this morning I looked up in my yard and there were 13 ravens in a circle. And in the middle of the circle was an eagle." He said he knew that was pretty weird. He had never seen anything like it. The people in the village had never seen anything like this. This was just about a month and a half ago. He said that he had heard the story of the hoop of the 100 eagle feathers. He said, "That night the tribal chief delivered to me the dead eagle." That morning he saw the eagle alive, surrounded by 13 ravens, [but] that evening, it was delivered to the camp. He did not know why. And so he heard of the story and knew that, if he asked permission properly, one of these eagle feathers was to be delivered to this hoop. And so it was. A person who was on his way down to Colorado delivered the white eagle feather or the feather from a white eagle. So now there were two feathers delivered.
In this time of healing, the message of hope from the Hopi [and] Maori and the Stony Elders, I was invited to Sacred Ceremony by the Stony Elders. The youngest was 77 and the oldest was 106. No one spoke any English during the whole time I was in the Sacred Ceremony, which lasted 3 hours. They spoke English one in the middle, and the person who spoke said "I am speaking English for the benefit of our friends from Alaska." We know that your people in Alaska, in many villages, believe that they have lost their culture, the cultural wisdom and their ways. We are praying to the Creator. We want you to know of the message that has been given to us so that you would take it back to Alaska.
The message that they received for us is that our cultures are not dead. All the wisdom that has been collected in our cultures, since time immemorial, is being kept for us, waiting for us, to awaken in our spirits. We will awaken our spirits again. When that happens things will be revealed of the old wisdoms. Things that have been forgotten for a long time are going to be brought back; Art- Music- Song- Dance- Storytelling- Spiritual- Wisdom- knowledge, and the wisdom of how to work with Mother Earth, will all be restored.
They also want us to know that among the Hopi and Maori there are people who do nothing but pray 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, every year of their lives. That is all they do. In rotation, they pray around the clock for other people. In this prayer is where they have seen some of these things that are about to happen. The healing that is going to take place, the advice that has been given to us, is "Seek not to fight evil-- do not fight it-- let goodness take its place." So when we see bad things happen and when we fight those bad things, what we do hurts everybody. Fighting evil has spiritual energies that go to the ends of universe, affects everybody in the community.
When I come into community, I can feel the energies that are created. We are all affected by it. You know, sometimes you watch little kids when a stranger walks into the room [and], all of a sudden, the child just cries. Sometimes this happens, or, they love the stranger. What they are doing is taking their God given, Creator given, way of talents, skills, gifts, to feel the spirit of the other person. Because everybody give out these energies. So we have to, they say, be very careful. This is part of the wisdom amongst the great Athabascan People and most indigenous people throughout the world. We must take care of how we think-- how we feel.
The signs of this time of healing that is to start are: When the children bring back the spirit to the village; when the young start speaking with the wisdom of the elders; when the leadership energies start shifting to the feminine side; when this hoop of the 100 eagles feathers gets completed. And when the White Bison shows up. These are all the signs of the movement from the 4th to the 5th Hoop.
Now, I know that some of this is in language that you may have not heard in your lifetime. But I know inside, you will recognize these words to be true. Your intuition is going to tell you what I am saying is true. The world for the last 4,000 or so years has been stuck in the male energy side. The male energy is thinking from the brain. It is a management from the top down. It is more aggressive. It does not use intuition or feelings from the heart. It is a different kind of energy. It is not a bad energy. It is just different than the female energy. Female energy is healing, nurturing, loving, caring, touching, sharing. And that the world spiritual leaders know now that these energies have been male and now have shifted to the female side.
The center of the top of the energy entrance to the Earth Mother is here through Alaska. The spiritual leaders say that a host, hosts of angels, are coming through Alaska-- spreading out throughout the world for this healing to take place
I see what is happening to our young people. I spent most of my life thinking I was a leader, for 25 years working for my people. I realized, when I finally woke up, I was not a leader because I was stuck in the same place with the same kind of sickness they had.
Harold Napoleon, who wrote the book, The Way of the Human Being, talks about the Great Death. Why, people ask, are we suffering like this today? Why are our kids this way? Why are we having this alcohol problem? It is easy to understand when you get back in touch with your heart. Harold Napoleon talks about the time of the Great Death. My people faced it. Eighty percent of our people were wiped out in 50 years. We still have stories of those times. How many men can a musket ball kill? The Russians were betting about the Aleuts, so they lined them up back to back, shot point blank, and the answer is 9. There is one community where the Russians went to take all the women and girls for their sex slaves. The women and girls said, "No, this will be a violation of our spirit!" And they all got on top of a cliff and jumped, in mass, and died. There is a story in a village in Akutan, where it used to take a year to build meat boats from hide. It was one of the most sophisticated kayaks in the world. It took a year to build because it had to be dependable. They had to go out on the high seas for weeks on end. They knew this, and the Russians knew this. The fur traders, who were greedy, went into the village at night and destroyed all the boats. The village starved to death. There was one old woman who survived out of 300 people.
So we have these stories. The first people who were killed among my people were the Shaman and their apprentices. Because of their religion, or way of life of spirituality, the Russians did not understand so they destroyed it. They thought it was a threat. Can you imagine our people who are survivors-- we are survivors here today, having gone through that time-- experiencing for 50 years, 8 out of 10 people dying in a horrible way? Your loved ones? Your grandchildren? Your children? Your mother? Your wives? Your husbands? [All] dying by horrible ways for 50 years? Year after year, seeing horrible death? And being subjected to all this? The American doctors have a name for this now, they call it Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
The Vietnam Vets have also experienced this syndrome. The veterans, when they came back from Vietnam, were depressed. They took drugs. They took alcohol. They withdrew from their relationships. They could not be close to people because it hurt too much. They did anything to escape their feeling and what they were thinking. When they did that, they separated from their spiritual side. When this happened, the depression started. So they experienced this in Vietnam after 2 or 3 years. Sometimes people had 4 trips over there. Our people experienced it for generations. Not only did we not have the support that the Vietnam Vets had, [but] they still had their culture intact when they came back.
Our cultures were eliminated, or attempted to be destroyed. So that the survivors, who had survived, were without hope. Having gone through such misery and pain, the only thing they could do to defend themselves, the only way they knew how to defend themselves, was not to feel
I know and I understand it. Harold Napoleon understood it. Many of you understand it. Because as a child, like many of our people, [I] grew up in a family the abused alcohol. And the first thing that I did as a child to defend myself was to shut off my feelings. They were shut off for over 20 years. And when that happened, it is a state of constant depression and addiction. Addictions can be cigarettes - alcohol - TV - noise; big loud music, and even thoughts could be an addiction. Anything to take us away from feeling right now the way we feel. We try to run away from it. That is what happening when you see a kid walk down the street with big earphones blasting and they are not hearing anything else because they do not want to be here. No.
The wisdom keepers say that the only place to find the power of the Creator is to be present in this moment. If we have fears, we are projecting them into the future. Into a future time that does not even exist. If we have guilt, we are living in the past, for the past things we did. We are not living now. All the spiritual keepers, of all groups in the world, be they Buddhists, be they Islamic, be it part Red Pack, be it medicine pack-- you name it-- say [that] the only way to find the power that has been given to us from the Creator is to be here, now. Not to escape.
So you see, this addiction that has happened from the Great Death, the survivors are separated from their feelings. Can you imagine the kind of children they raised? It was hard for them to love and be close to another because they were afraid. "If I became too close and love somebody, they would be destroyed, and I would suffer the pain all over again. So, they stayed away from that feeling. Those kids grew up and had their own kids, and from generations to generation to generation, until today, we have the legacy the inheritance of this spiritual sickness that was given to us a long time ago. And so the answers from the wisdom keepers is to work at being present and that will first revive the key.
The spiritual keepers also say that the first step towards healing yourself, before you can heal others or help heal others, is to love that which we may hate or who may hate me. We may hate ourselves. We may hate an organization. We may hate the people from outside who have interfered. We may hate somebody. The first step towards this healing is to stop the hate and turn it into love. And it will transform everything. This spiritual sickness that we have is going to move now. It is going to change
There are some predictions in the sacred stone tablets among the wisdom keepers about what is going to happen here in this World of the 5th Hoop. Not only are we going to have this healing but the Earth Mother is going to shake in a way that it has never shook before. It is going to move in a way it has never done before. There is going to be a lot of fear because of this, and the wisdom keepers want me to convey that, when this happens, we should not be afraid. Because, what is happening is that the Earth Mother is trying to help us remove the stuff that we have stuck in our bodies, inherited from the spiritual sickness of generations and generations out. And one of the ways that we do that is to scare the life out of us. This is why there is going to be time for healers.
Healers are being called from all over. Women are now taking their place as the original healers around the world and some of the strongest original healers are starting here in Alaska. Not only [will there be] the shift to the feminine side of leadership, but the women are going to start taking their place as healers. I think this is an exciting time. The Dalai Lama went down to Yakutan during the last change of the moon, with all the spiritual leaders, to pray for this time of the shift, this time of healing. And he has 'chosen'-- and this is the words that they use, which are hard to understand-- he has chosen to take the spiritual energies that they have been keeping in Tibet and move them from Tibet and bring them here to Alaska. Which they did a few weeks ago. The reason they did this is because the Chinese are wiping out the Tibetan Monks and destroying all the temples. So the Dalai Lama moved its spiritual energy here to Alaska, because this is the place where the healing is going to start. And this is the place where all the Angels are coming in by hosts. This is the place where the hoop of a hundred eagle feathers will be finished. And, interestingly enough, some of the healing ways are being revived from all the cultures. People are being woken up.
How do we start this healing? When you are quiet within yourself and you sit next to the river-- ask. Do not be afraid to ask. Ask the Creator. Ask whoever you feel is your higher power, "Please help me find the way because I do not know how to heal." "Make me your history." And when you ask that, with humility in your heart, you will get it. You will find it. And it will be given to you, you will see this healing starting to spread like wild fire. It is just exciting. Exciting to see. And the key to it is staying here, now.
Now, last thing I am going to say: I ran the village corporation in St. Paul for 10 years. I was city manager for 4 years. We started from no economy out there. In 1983 the government pulled out. That was our only economy. They pulled out and we lost 80% of our jobs. That year we had 100 suicide attempts out of 600 people. We had 4 people who killed themselves. We had 3 who were murdered-- things that had not happened in our village for 150 years! The last person ever murdered in our village was over 150 years ago. And it all happened in this one year. Big shaking up. And we thought, the leadership thought-- including me-- that, if we worked to bring the economy back so that everybody got a good paying job, our kids would return to our village. And that it would solve our problems. We had [a] growing alcohol problem, 60% of population [were[ alcoholic and 1/3 of our kids have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. We had suicide attempts all the time. I have been to 44 funerals here in 4 years-- 44 funerals! Goodness sakes.
So what we learned from this and what I want to share with you is what happened when we got our economy [back]. We have the strongest rural economy in the State of Alaska right now. Our per capita income is $34,000.00-- $34,000.00 per person! That is what was accomplished in 10 years. But did it solve our problems? No. The spiritual sickness is still going on. The money only feeds the addiction. We have a community that is already addicted in some way because of the spiritual sickness. We have inherited this sickness from the time of the Great Death.
Bringing money in, in large numbers, will fuel the addictions just like gasoline to fire. It will make it worse. Bigger. Because it is what we do with the money. Look at St. Paul. We are buying cars. Everybody has got a car now. We bought, maybe, 300 cars in last 3 years. Everybody has got 1 or 2 TV sets-- big ones. Everybody has got 4-wheelers. Everybody has got boats. Everybody has got nice clothes. Everybody has got nice houses. Things. Everybody has got things. But yet they are saying, "We are not happy. What is wrong?" What is wrong is [that] we were looking outside for feeding for a hunger inside-- a hunger that we did not understand. And that hunger is the hunger of the spirit.
When we have addictions, it is a hunger to fill the spirit. It is like a big stomach inside you that wants to feed all of the time. And no matter how much we feed it with these addictions, [it] is never enough. And it just goes down and down and we get so depressed that we feel we can not get out of it. At that point, you die either physically or your die spiritually. Hopefully, many people will not have to go through that.
So, that is the message that I have brought to you. This is a message of hope and a message of good wisdom. Remember, our cultures are not lost. The wisdom of it is already here with us. We just do not know it yet, because we are spiritually sleeping.
The Sacred Hoop of 100 eagle feathers has been completed. It is carried by Don Coyhis and members of the White Bison Society to community gatherings around the country to encourage abstinance from alcohol. See the hoop and learn about the White Bison Society at this link:
http://www.whitebison.org/wellbriety_movement/journey.html White Bison Wellbriety Movement
Saturday, July 22, 2006
AMBER ALERT / PLease Sign This Petition
AMBER ALERT!!!!!!!
http://tashilhunpo.org/amber_alert.htm
Read, Spread, Distribute, Contribute
Gedhun has been missing for over 11 years!!!!
http://www.petitiononline.com/ftpl/petition.html
It is with the Utmost Urgency that This situation is taken care of, despite chances of it being rare, we must try and make efforts none the less.
"I Truely belive that individuals can make a difference in society. Since periods of great change such as the present one come so rarely in human history, it is up to each of us to make the best use of our time to help create a happier world."
-His Holiness the Dalai Lama
( the following is taken from http://www.tibet.ca/en/panchenlama/ )
Who is the Panchen Lama?
Birthday: April 25
Age: 17
Born: Lhari, Tibet
Address: Unknown
The Panchen Lama was 6 years old when he and his parents were kidnapped from their home in Tibet by the Chinese government. He is the world's youngest political prisoner and he has been missing for over 6 years.
Panchen Lama is a title like Vice-President or Prime Minister that Tibetans give to the second greatest leader of Tibet. Panchen means "Great Scholar" and Lama is a word Tibetans use for a religious teacher. We believe that the Panchen Lama is the protector of all the world's living beings.
This all means that the boy in this picture will grow up to be a very powerful leader of Tibet and perhaps the world.
Why did the Chinese Government Kidnap The Panchen Lama and his Parents? Tibet used to be its own country but China invaded it in 1949. After the Chinese took over, Tibetans in Tibet were no longer free or happy. China kidnapped the Panchen Lama, his parents and brother from their home in Tibet and are holding them under house arrest somewhere in China. We are still not sure where they are and hopefully through this web page we can spread the word about this boy and help him and his family.
Tibet's stolen child is Gedhun Choekyi Nyima
the boy recognized by His Holiness the Dalai Lama as one of Tibet's most important religious leaders. He is known as the Panchen Lama and is one of the young victims of China's brutal repression of the Tibetan people.
Determined to control religion in Tibet, the Chinese authorities kidnapped this young boy and his family in 1995 just days after he was recognized as the Panchen Lama. He is growing up under house arrest. Despite repeated appeals to gain access to him, no international agency or human rights organization has been granted contact with the young Panchen Lama or His family.
But the story is not over.
Suspicions that he had been kidnapped were confirmed in 1996, when the Chinese government admitted to holding the boy and his family in "protective custody."
After repeated attempts to locate and visit the boy, not one international agency or human rights organization has been allowed to meet with the Panchen Lama or his family, and their condition remains uncertain.
Furthermore, in an attempt to establish their pre-eminence in all "internal affairs" of China, political or otherwise, the atheistic Chinese government nominated and selected their own 11th Panchen Lama in November 1995. Their selection, a six year-old boy named Gyaltsen Norbu, is another young victim in China's plan to undermine and control the Tibetan people, their religion, and their nation.
--- ( http://www.panchenlama.info/ )
give the new blogger some love, and Indiana: account of last weeks anti-logging blockades
as you might have noticed, there's a new contributor on the blog. i hope you're digging her, cuz then we'd all be digging her and that would be nice
incidentally, i heard that psychosylum mushrooms grow like grass on the cow paddies of Alabama. could this be true?
the below story's copied and pasted from feed://www.infoshop.org/inews/backend/news.rdf. please, locals, read it and jump in the fray! let's make some fracas
Indiana: Account of last week's anti-logging blockades
Friday, July 21 2006 @ 01:46 PM PDT
Contributed by: Anonymous
Views: 17
On Thursday, July 13, an anti-logging occupation outside of Bloomington was evicted by more than a dozen officers from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and the Indiana State Police. This eviction occurred under the pretext of investigating a supposed "meth lab." Officers, armed with sub-machine guns, cordoned off the area and temporarily detained everyone present at the blockade. Another person was forced off of a platform that was hanging 30 feet above the ground when the DNR brought in climbers and threatened to pull him down.
A Growing Threat to Indiana Forests
In the state of Indiana the DNR is charged with the responsibility of managing the state's forests. The health of wilderness areas has, unfortunately, never been their priority. Instead, psuedo-scientific language is used claiming that "over-mature" (healthy and old growth) forest must be eliminated to allow the development of younger trees. This destroys the diversity of the forest and conveniently justifies having private loggers harvest trees from public land. In a profitable coincidence, these over-mature trees also yield the only lumber that fit the high-quality standards for furniture and veneer.
Instead of questioning and publically reviewing these policies, they are massively expanding them- a major factor leading to the occupation. The new state forest plan, outlines a 400% increase in logging. In addition, it permits greater continuity between logging sites, allowing large cuts to be placed next to each other. Furthermore, a DNR spokesman has stated that 40 acre clearcuts will now be allowed, a development which will be devastating to Indiana's state forests.
Unfortunately for Indiana, this new state forest plan is part of a broad turn towards privatization of public resources. In addition to increased logging, the plan includes provisions encouraging the entry of multinational logging
companies into the Indiana market. In concert with these destructive forest policies, there are also efforts, under the direction of the current Governor Mitch Daniels to privatize the Indiana Dunes State Park and sell off both the Indiana Toll Road and the I-69 project.
Resistance and Occupation!
Across southern Indiana people have been organizing against the new state forest plan. Responses include the efforts by the Indiana Forest Alliance to stop the plan by challenging it in the courts. Unfortunately, their lawsuits have been systematically impeded through a variety of underhanded moves by the DNR and state legislature. Due to this impasse and the fast-approaching harvest of vital forest areas, the Hoosier Forest Defense Network acted early last week to create a blockade across a logging road in Morgan-Monroe State Forest, 20 minutes
northeast of Bloomington.
More than two dozen people set up the blockade, which included a campsite and a 30 ft. tall bipod built across the road. The occupation sought to cut off the logging road to an 89 acre cut, situated on steep hills and including hundreds of oak, maple, hickory, and beech trees, scheduled to be logged by September 22.
DNR Response and the Militarization of Law Enforcement
The DNR's claim is that they raided the camp believing it to be a meth lab. This allowed the officers to bring automatic weapons and keep the HFDN's supporters out of the area. The DNR has claimed ignorance, however it is clear they were aware of the blockade as there were environmental protest experts and trained climbers on hand.
People at the site were forced to the ground under the sights of M-16
automatic rifles, and handcuffed for more than an hour and a half.
Upon release, five people received tickets for "illegal camping" and the person
on the bipod was forced down by DNR climbers.
Nearly 30 supporters responded to a request for help from the forest defenders at the occupation. They were able to help document the eviction and help move supplies into and out of the camp, though this was hampered by law enforcement efforts to close the area around the camp. In fact, one person, Bryce Martin, was arrested for attempting to bring water to detainees. Although he was released the next day, he now owes hundreds of dollars in legal fees.
A New Beginning
While the initial blockade was shortlived, and the repression unexpectedly severe, last week's action signals a new beginning for resistance to logging on Indiana's public lands. The DNR's policies will be challenged at every level, with continued efforts to hold them accountable in the courts, to educate the public about the reality of "forest management" in Indiana, and to occupy the forests that we love to prevent their destruction.
Information for action:
www.indianaforestalliance.org is an excellent resource for information of Indiana's state forests. The DNR's new state forest plan has been posted there.
The DNR can be reached at (317) 232-4105. Consider calling to demand that the DNR rescind the new state forest plan and that they return confiscated equipment to the HFDN.
The Hoosier Forest Defense Network can be contacted at hfdn@hushmail.com.
The HFDN is in serious need of help with legal costs. If you can, please consider making a donation. You can either email the address above to arrange meeting up with someone or drop off a donation at Boxcar Books, located at 310A S. Washington, Bloomington, IN.
EMERGENCY FOREST DEFENSE CAMP | 29 & 30 JULY 2006
Please join us for a forest defense skill share and to build momentum in
the continuing effort to stop loggin on state forests. Email
hfdn@hushmail.com for more information.
incidentally, i heard that psychosylum mushrooms grow like grass on the cow paddies of Alabama. could this be true?
the below story's copied and pasted from feed://www.infoshop.org/inews/backend/news.rdf. please, locals, read it and jump in the fray! let's make some fracas
Indiana: Account of last week's anti-logging blockades
Friday, July 21 2006 @ 01:46 PM PDT
Contributed by: Anonymous
Views: 17
On Thursday, July 13, an anti-logging occupation outside of Bloomington was evicted by more than a dozen officers from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and the Indiana State Police. This eviction occurred under the pretext of investigating a supposed "meth lab." Officers, armed with sub-machine guns, cordoned off the area and temporarily detained everyone present at the blockade. Another person was forced off of a platform that was hanging 30 feet above the ground when the DNR brought in climbers and threatened to pull him down.
A Growing Threat to Indiana Forests
In the state of Indiana the DNR is charged with the responsibility of managing the state's forests. The health of wilderness areas has, unfortunately, never been their priority. Instead, psuedo-scientific language is used claiming that "over-mature" (healthy and old growth) forest must be eliminated to allow the development of younger trees. This destroys the diversity of the forest and conveniently justifies having private loggers harvest trees from public land. In a profitable coincidence, these over-mature trees also yield the only lumber that fit the high-quality standards for furniture and veneer.
Instead of questioning and publically reviewing these policies, they are massively expanding them- a major factor leading to the occupation. The new state forest plan, outlines a 400% increase in logging. In addition, it permits greater continuity between logging sites, allowing large cuts to be placed next to each other. Furthermore, a DNR spokesman has stated that 40 acre clearcuts will now be allowed, a development which will be devastating to Indiana's state forests.
Unfortunately for Indiana, this new state forest plan is part of a broad turn towards privatization of public resources. In addition to increased logging, the plan includes provisions encouraging the entry of multinational logging
companies into the Indiana market. In concert with these destructive forest policies, there are also efforts, under the direction of the current Governor Mitch Daniels to privatize the Indiana Dunes State Park and sell off both the Indiana Toll Road and the I-69 project.
Resistance and Occupation!
Across southern Indiana people have been organizing against the new state forest plan. Responses include the efforts by the Indiana Forest Alliance to stop the plan by challenging it in the courts. Unfortunately, their lawsuits have been systematically impeded through a variety of underhanded moves by the DNR and state legislature. Due to this impasse and the fast-approaching harvest of vital forest areas, the Hoosier Forest Defense Network acted early last week to create a blockade across a logging road in Morgan-Monroe State Forest, 20 minutes
northeast of Bloomington.
More than two dozen people set up the blockade, which included a campsite and a 30 ft. tall bipod built across the road. The occupation sought to cut off the logging road to an 89 acre cut, situated on steep hills and including hundreds of oak, maple, hickory, and beech trees, scheduled to be logged by September 22.
DNR Response and the Militarization of Law Enforcement
The DNR's claim is that they raided the camp believing it to be a meth lab. This allowed the officers to bring automatic weapons and keep the HFDN's supporters out of the area. The DNR has claimed ignorance, however it is clear they were aware of the blockade as there were environmental protest experts and trained climbers on hand.
People at the site were forced to the ground under the sights of M-16
automatic rifles, and handcuffed for more than an hour and a half.
Upon release, five people received tickets for "illegal camping" and the person
on the bipod was forced down by DNR climbers.
Nearly 30 supporters responded to a request for help from the forest defenders at the occupation. They were able to help document the eviction and help move supplies into and out of the camp, though this was hampered by law enforcement efforts to close the area around the camp. In fact, one person, Bryce Martin, was arrested for attempting to bring water to detainees. Although he was released the next day, he now owes hundreds of dollars in legal fees.
A New Beginning
While the initial blockade was shortlived, and the repression unexpectedly severe, last week's action signals a new beginning for resistance to logging on Indiana's public lands. The DNR's policies will be challenged at every level, with continued efforts to hold them accountable in the courts, to educate the public about the reality of "forest management" in Indiana, and to occupy the forests that we love to prevent their destruction.
Information for action:
www.indianaforestalliance.org is an excellent resource for information of Indiana's state forests. The DNR's new state forest plan has been posted there.
The DNR can be reached at (317) 232-4105. Consider calling to demand that the DNR rescind the new state forest plan and that they return confiscated equipment to the HFDN.
The Hoosier Forest Defense Network can be contacted at hfdn@hushmail.com.
The HFDN is in serious need of help with legal costs. If you can, please consider making a donation. You can either email the address above to arrange meeting up with someone or drop off a donation at Boxcar Books, located at 310A S. Washington, Bloomington, IN.
EMERGENCY FOREST DEFENSE CAMP | 29 & 30 JULY 2006
Please join us for a forest defense skill share and to build momentum in
the continuing effort to stop loggin on state forests. Email
hfdn@hushmail.com for more information.
Friday, July 21, 2006
It Wasn't so EAsy upon that day, When All that i wanted was someone to play,
Away from the beings that encompass this world, and just be myself and just to be heard.
Go play in the mud, and the dirt and the rain
Walk AGAINST gusts of winds that whisp around us insane.
.
To dance in the night & howl at the moon, bask under the stars and listen to you.
But playtime always ceases and realities be faced, go back into societies and stand in my place. Talking about freedom and talkin of change, talking in hopes that the pure can be saved.
That which isnt tainted by money and greed, that which isnt superficial by material needs. I'll keep up resistance as much as i can, protect it from being superseded & repressed by the man.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Dirty Sombreros
While peering out from under dirty sombreros, Sonnets blasting thru sounds everlasting too! Screams are demanding to see the light!
Never cease flight
It is a sure shot, So DON’T STOP! Fight it and co-exist to better thru upheavals of morals Mal consume newfangled nomenclature intercepting the furiously writhing.
Flustered desires are subdued with melodramatic inquiries, such as arrogant manipulative rogues fastened upon intermittent satisfactory.
I see you drowning climb aboard! Soldiers are needed to do the same help inform!
In tuned and expanded pulsating rhythms of sacred intramurals.
Neither aspect of diluted or transferred calamities
Septer Fine Los Tienjo Nattae Isse Do!
Hast not pondered upon arrival clashing out against survivalists of the fit masked out in animosities
Do not seek out useless knowledge to fill creeds with desire while packing them onto vessels. Seek out not for the youth and the brave, but brazen embers of hope laying and lingering, balancing on tightropes inter the spectral planes
Seek out charitable vast antiquities of bliss, Mastermind diverse counter projects.
Bashing, Lashing, Falsely crying out. Praise that which you seek unto levels of glorious virtues
Hedon assumed. Shingles of restlessness have fallen dormant upon apocalyptic times. Brazen Conspiring of loathing wenches. Asphalt jungles are filled with lions and cheetahs.
Well Adios mi amigos we shall all drown in this fire shall we not raise up our fists and punch out the glass everywhere containing us, enslaving us in these systems only shunt remains.
Sarcasm
Sacrifice that which you hold sacred to be a better henchman. Why would you take off your financial and psychiatric blinders? It would only open your eyes to class separation and the non existent sanity.Big money, Big money, Big money spin that wheel! Bow down to the fat cats and work under a whip like their mule. Do not unite the people, it may cause a revolt, and surely that would bring no good. Fight with your peers. Do not bite that hand that holds you down while feeding you material status and greed.
Do not pay attention to art and music. It does not hold messages of a higher learning institution. Babylon is not falling. NO truth lies dormant inside you. If you do not choose to see something, turn your head. Do not pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Give into the GAP and ABERCROMBIE & FITCH. Conformity does create the illusion of happiness. Visual Propaganda is not seeping into the minds of the meek. Allow brainwashing tactics to stimulate your mind. Eat this and drink that and prove your worth by dressing in this manner.
Depression! Why be depressed? Everything is hunky dory! A OK! I tell you A OK!
Run to your doctor and ask for these prescriptions. Eat these pills for numbing your subconscious is a good thing.
Buy this gas guzzling monster to trek thru rugged terrain in which you travel in so often. It is ever so vital to your survival. Build! Build! Build! More concrete, more blacktop, more pavement. What good is this fertile land in which we live upon? It is much better to mass produce food in a more factory like atmosphere. Break free from farming roots. Preservatives + pesticide makes for nutrient enriched vitals.
Why Respect your fellow man. Heaven is after all only a fable. A mere story tale told to frighten little children into behaving. God, what is god? Surely not the energy manifested in each and everything, animate or not.
Apparitions of a better life should not flood your imagination. Inferiority, regression, malnutrition, subdivision, erosion of morals, this is our freedom.
A Fun exploration Webpage
http://chaozation.com
Dedicated to the disruption of the modern ego If you fear seeing the nothing you are blind to everything welcome to Chaozation23
Feed your mind, Expand your knowledge, Fight that which supresses us all.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Land and Liberty: towards an organically self organized subsistence movement
this is from Oystercatcher #1, available for the fist time anywhere on the web. you may have to fiddle with it for legibility's sake, but it's worth it!
Lloyd Library; intristing topiks from un intristed frens
i spent a few hours researching at the Lloyd Library. incredible place. they're a closed stacks outfit, incredibly well endowed, and a reference librarian is always ready to go into da stacks and pull out a stack or sheaf of rare material on whatever plant or medicine related subject you're into. here's a nice page from my notes there
i have a couple of friends that i'd love to write for this blog. they aren't so enthused about the idea though, so i'll just share with you some stuff they're laying on me.
one dude, I don't remember what I called him on here before. I'll just say he's a good hearted, bisexual christian who hates mysogeny, loves music and doesn't care if you call him a fag. he told me about a crew called the Psalters. i'm digging. they're a christian anarchist tribe of traveling musicians, their site is here http://www.psalters.com/ and their flag is here
i got a new friend, into gypsy punk, zapatisma, etc., who shared with me this story. it's by the Sup, or maybe Don Durrito, Subcommandante Marcos's small Scarabaeidaen friend, pictured here. the story's available at http://www.ezln.org/documentos/1996/19960930.en.htm, or in the Sup's book "Our Word is Our Weapon".
THE STORY OF THE MAGIC CHOCOLATE BUNNIES
(Neoliberalism, bunny libidos, and the children)
(Dedicated by Durito to the westerns, (remember?) that one about "The good, the bad, and the ugly..."?)
There were once three children, one was good, one was bad, and the other was the Sup. Arriving from different directions they came to a house and went in. Inside the house there was only a table. On that table was a plastic jar, one of those they use for ice cream or snow cones. Inside each white plastic jar (note: no trademark or logo) there were two chocolate bunnies and a piece of paper. The paper said:
"Instruction for the use of the two chocolate bunnies"
"After 24 hours, this pair of chocolate bunnies will reproduce themselves and will have a new pair of bunnies. Every 24 hours, the pairs of chocolate bunnies inside this white plastic jar will multiply into another pair. That way the owner will always have in this magic plastic jar (Those used for ice cream or snow cones) chocolate bunnies to eat. The only condition is that at all times there must be a pair of chocolate bunnies inside this plastic jar, the same one used for ice cream or snow cones."
Each child took his white plastic jar , those used for ice cream or snow cones.
The bad child could not wait for 24 hours and ate his two chocolate bunnies. He enjoyed the moment, but he had no more chocolate bunnies. Now he has nothing to eat, but the memory and nostalgia for the chocolate bunnies remain.
The good child waited for 24 hours and was rewarded with 4 chocolate bunnies. After another 24 hours he had 8 chocolate bunnies. As the months passed, the good child opened a chain of stores of chocolate bunnies. After a year he had branches in all the country, he associated with foreign capital and began to export. He was eventually named "The Man of the Year" and became immensely rich and powerful. He sold the chocolate bunny industry to foreign investors, and became an executive of the company. He never tasted the chocolate bunnies, in order not to diminish his profits. He no longer owns the magic white plastic jar. He doesn't know the taste of chocolate bunnies.
The Sup child, instead of chocolate bunnies, placed ice cream with nuts in the white plastic jar, like those used to hold ice cream or snow cones. He changed the whole basis of the story, packed half a liter of nut ice cream between his chest and back, and ruined the moral of the story of the chocolate bunnies, deducing that all final options are a trap.
Neo-moral: The ice cream with nuts has dangerous implications against neoliberalism.
Questions for reading appreciation:
Which of these children will become president of the republic?
Which of these children will belong to an opposition party?
Which of these children should be killed for violating the law for dialogue, reconciliation and a peace with dignity in Chiapas?
If you are a woman, would you like to give birth to one of these children?
Send your answers to "Huapac Leaf #69" with copies to the Interior Ministry and the Cocopa.
Tan-tan and The End.
Good. What do you think? Oh come on now. Don't hold back from saying it is marvelous! I'll wait until you get a good editor, one of those who organize readings with Carlos Monsivais and etceteras. Over and out.
Don Durito of the Lacandón.
P.S. Oh! I forgot about the recipe for getting down from the ceiba. It's simple, just follow the Following Instructions for Getting Off the Top of a Ceiba. Are you sure you want to get down? Walk to the edge with your eyes closed. Do not fear (although, yeah, a parachute would be good right now). You will soon arrive at your destination (?).
End of Durito's letter. Nothing to add.
Section "From the ceiba to the ground there is the same distance as that between sorrow and hope". I fell. I don't know why they accuse us of violating the law. It's clear that among others, the law of gravity is rigorously observed by our stubborn flight.
P.S. The one that worries. The little gray man believed that he barked so much with arresting us when we leave that now he has to worry. Look at the postmark on Durito's letter. It comes from Mexico City, together with a postcard from the Templo Mayor. Its postmark is September 16th and it wouldn't surprise me if among so many war tanks, Durito went unnoticed.
P.S. FOR POLITICAL COLUMNS - According to confidential reports, Mister Bernal will soon leave his position with the government delegation in San Andres. Bothered because now it is impossible for him to become a PRI candidate (because the statutes changed) for the governorship of Tamaulipas, Bernal now aspires to replace Chuayffet as head (Bernal is the one who now writes the communiques of the Interior Ministry, thereby explaining their poor quality). To his closest colleagues (Del Valle and Zenteno) Bernal has confessed that if he does not become the Secretary of the Interior Ministry, he will ask to be admitted to the FZLN. What should we do?
P.S. The one that says goodbye - Olivio left saying "Goodbye Compañero Supcomandante Sup" And then now what? Why does this always happen to me? I who always dreamed a James-Bond-like introduction in his first movie, saying "My name is Marcos, Subcomandante Marcos..."
Vale with nuts. Health and "What is that which shines in the highest halls?"
SUPMARCOS
The Sup hiding under a bed, not because he's afraid of being killed, but because, he says, that bed is much too wide especially when one is alone....
Translated by: Cecilia Rodriguez, National Center for Democracy, Liberty and Justice, USA.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
hooray for plant teachers; books
i got some sage and have been drying it for a week or two. today i used to it to sorta clean out my ma's car, lighting it on fire and letting it smolder in a bowl on the floor.
later, on a "whim", i dumped the ashes in a my bath. it felt unusually nice to bathe in. and i rubbed the ashes on my right foot, which has some sort of painful parasite growing on it. it gave relief that i haven't experienced for a good while. now i'll put some tea tree oil on it, see what happens.
right now i'm reading 'journey to the ancestral self', 'giovanni's room', 'Weeds', 'The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism', 'exploring natural mystery: kamana one', 'the book of the damned' and 'gaviotas: a village to reinvent the world'. this is an abridged list, as ya might expect ;)
i hit up a library sale today and got a shit ton more books, or as tamarack song might more rightly call them, "elders". so's u can check some of these out, if ya want, i'll write out what i got. no quotation marks or author
earth prayers from around the world: 365 prayers, poems and invocations for honoring the earth
great american folklore: legends, tales, ballads and superstitions from all across america
black elk speaks
jesus: a revolutionary biography
the lost years of jesus revealed
readers digest north american wildlife
i wish i could tell you what THESE ones are, but i can't
weeds
endangered grassland animals
endangered wetland animals
wildflower guide northeastern and midland states
how to draw birds
the abandoned baobab: the autobiography of a senegalese woman
a birder's guide to the cincinnati tristate
cry of the leopard
summer of the red wolf
the wanderer
lights out in the reptile house
hanta yo: an american saga
the bunyip archives
the year of the horsetails: an epic novel of nomads and warfare in a primitive and ruthless time
trevanian: four complete novels: The Eiger Sanction; The Loo Sanction; The Main; Shibumi
well damn, that's a lot of books. i might have picked up 'the story of b' or something by carl hiason if they'd had any. o yeah, and they hooked me up with mad dictionaries to send to prisoners. that was sweet of them
later, on a "whim", i dumped the ashes in a my bath. it felt unusually nice to bathe in. and i rubbed the ashes on my right foot, which has some sort of painful parasite growing on it. it gave relief that i haven't experienced for a good while. now i'll put some tea tree oil on it, see what happens.
right now i'm reading 'journey to the ancestral self', 'giovanni's room', 'Weeds', 'The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism', 'exploring natural mystery: kamana one', 'the book of the damned' and 'gaviotas: a village to reinvent the world'. this is an abridged list, as ya might expect ;)
i hit up a library sale today and got a shit ton more books, or as tamarack song might more rightly call them, "elders". so's u can check some of these out, if ya want, i'll write out what i got. no quotation marks or author
earth prayers from around the world: 365 prayers, poems and invocations for honoring the earth
great american folklore: legends, tales, ballads and superstitions from all across america
black elk speaks
jesus: a revolutionary biography
the lost years of jesus revealed
readers digest north american wildlife
i wish i could tell you what THESE ones are, but i can't
weeds
endangered grassland animals
endangered wetland animals
wildflower guide northeastern and midland states
how to draw birds
the abandoned baobab: the autobiography of a senegalese woman
a birder's guide to the cincinnati tristate
cry of the leopard
summer of the red wolf
the wanderer
lights out in the reptile house
hanta yo: an american saga
the bunyip archives
the year of the horsetails: an epic novel of nomads and warfare in a primitive and ruthless time
trevanian: four complete novels: The Eiger Sanction; The Loo Sanction; The Main; Shibumi
well damn, that's a lot of books. i might have picked up 'the story of b' or something by carl hiason if they'd had any. o yeah, and they hooked me up with mad dictionaries to send to prisoners. that was sweet of them
they've ruined the term tree hugger. not really. bastards
"TreeHugger is a fast-growing web magazine, dedicated to everything that has a modern aesthetic yet is environmentally responsible. Our influential audience stops by frequently to check out the latest news, reviews and recommendations for modern yet green products and services. Consumers also rely on the directory to help facilitate their buying processes. TreeHugger is the most effective way for them to find well designed products that are also ecologically sensitive."
i was just ranting about bitches the other day. know what i read on the blog this came from? on a list of 5 eco-friendly beverages, there was Coca-Cola. yessir, same company that rots everyone's teeth, beats tortures and kills workers where they can (sort of) get away with it, drains aquifers, and generally clutters the world with their presence.
and the editors of the blog stood up and said Our bad, we are trying to say that they've taken steps in the right direction, and need to be affirmed so they'll keep going.
BITCHES
i was just ranting about bitches the other day. know what i read on the blog this came from? on a list of 5 eco-friendly beverages, there was Coca-Cola. yessir, same company that rots everyone's teeth, beats tortures and kills workers where they can (sort of) get away with it, drains aquifers, and generally clutters the world with their presence.
and the editors of the blog stood up and said Our bad, we are trying to say that they've taken steps in the right direction, and need to be affirmed so they'll keep going.
BITCHES
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Mokele Mbembe
aight y'all, pay close attention. for years, Christians such as my aunt have supported expeditions to the Congo to look for dinosaurs. when they find them, they hope this will certainly further their cause by disproving the government and university backed chronology of Mother Earth. after all, the bible says we coexisted with dinosaurs, so we fucking coexisted with dinosaurs.
i encourage all my Theologically inclined comrades (with lots of money), to hold off on converting the animists for a minute and go find the dinosaur.
here's a good link on these intrepid conquistadores
http://www.creationgeneration.net/PDF/Mokele.pdf
Sunday, July 09, 2006
wild and crazy fermentation
the world cup was amazing. they're so fast and athletic, it's as if we were watching a pack of veloca raptors instead of bad-ass international athletes. i favored the Italians more than the French. this is because Italy's serious trouble makers have been far more insurrection oriented, and have scored interesting victories. Italy was also home one of the last strongholds of European grey wolf populations. France, on the other hand, has lots of people who will throw molotovs and block traffic, but only if someone is fucking with their welfare. and if i recall correctly, France exterminated all thier wolf people in one fell swoop, walked the ENTIRE BLOODY country in a line shoulder to shoulder with guns, over mountains and rivers and everything, wiped them out.
i particularly admired the way these guys fall. the grace of a meditating swan, i'm telling ya. one Italian did a barrel role in the air to deflect the ball from his goal, then did a cartwheel sourt of thing to keep from hurting himself when he landed.
picked up a new friend, dropped an old one. pleasure and pain, yin and yang. 'sall good, though loosing friends is always tough.
La PAZ is looking so sweet, and this fall it will be fortified with all kinds of crazy and right on new plants. But because amongst my dear readership there may be malignant strains, I necessarily maintain a generalness as to who and what the new community members are.
speaking of La PAZ, there are a lot of thistles there. skin and steam the stems for vegetable, or eat the root raw or cooked. there is a flock of gold finches that dig the La PAZ thistle, and we dig them. hopefully we're good enough neighbors that they dig us, giving a full circle to this series of relationships.
and now, a DISCLAIMER: None of the following is difficult, expensive or hugely time consuming to prepare. I'll email you any of the recipes verbatum if you ask.
currently I am inviting a bunch of microscopic organisms into some of my foods. they will make the food more healthy, digestible, longer lived and add their unususal tastes to the mix. for more information, look up Weston A. Price (http://www.westonaprice.org/index.html) and read some of their information on this interesting subject.
k, so here are the fermentation projects i'm working on or will be in the near future:
to start with, REAL FUCKING SOURDOUGH BREAD, unlike the WHITE flour TRASH of San Francisco. check out Ran's site, he did a nice tutorial on how to capture feisty microbes for cheap-as-hell sustenance. http://www.ranprieur.com/misc/sourdough.html
then there are these two recipes from the book 'Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods' by Sandor Ellix Katz. One is Gundru/Kyrtse, aka Nepalese pickled vegetable greens, and Essene Bread, a sprouted grain, sourdough that is dried in the sun instead of baked in the oven.
also will make capers out of the young seed pods of milk weed plants, if i can find another milk weed community that is strong enough to approach for pods. my stupid ass picked the pods in the wrong stage of development @ La PAZ's patch. keep your eyes peeled for milkweed and lemme know.
Black Berry Ginger Brew, as found on the message board of the DIY tribe at tribe.net
OK, special thanks to Vlad and Tom Cat for their suggestions.
3/4 cup sugar
2 tbsp finely grated ginger
1/4 tsp yeast
3 cups fresh blackberries
water to fill 2 litre bottle
Funnel
Bottle
Balloon
Place sugar in bottle and yeast using funnel.
Grind blackberries with some water in blender to create blackberry slurry.
Fine grate ginger.
Pour slurry into bottle on top of ginger.
Place balloon over bottle neck.
leave on counter 72 hours, then refrigerate for 12
There will be a bunch of nasty looking crud on top. just get the worst of it out when you decant, don't worry about most of it resettling in the bottle.
Serve in glass mason jar. Ice optional.
Frickeen-A People!!! This is the best sheeyat I ever drank ! Woo hoo≤ damn boy I am loving this need to make me more bottles of this right pronto yee haw!!!!!!!!!!!
_______________________
finally there is the Ruso-Sino fermented black tea drink, known to me by its Ural Mountain name: kombucha. You make black tea with lots of sugar (cheap ass brands like Lipton and Domino work best). Let the brew cool, then add the critter culture. This is a specific mix of yeast, bacteria, and other critters. Let it sit loosely covered in a warm, dark environment for a few weeks and drink up! But not too much all at once, maybe 4 oz. a day for some months. It's a blood cleanser, toniccy drink, and you drink to much and the toxins in your fat will come rushing into your bloodstream too quick for your kidneys and liver to deal with and you'll feel like shit. After you are more or less toxic free, it helps you stay there and you can drink it to get you buzzed. http://www.kombuchatea.co.uk/ you can by kombucha culture to get you started, but best to get it on the gift economy. gimme a hollar and in a few weeks i can hook you up, after starting back up again.
Friday, July 07, 2006
i'm still in love with crimethinc.
wow, crimethinc is supposed to be "just a phase" in the lives of todays radical activists. but i'm still in love with them, because they are in love with life and they're badass about it. here is the wisdom from the back flap of 'an anarchist cookbook; recipes for disaster":
"You must always have a secret plan. Everything depends on this: it is the only question. So as not to be conquered by the conquered territory in which you lead your life, so as not to feel the horrible weight of inertia wreckin your will and bending you to the ground, so as not to spend a single night more wodering what there is to do or how to connect with your neighbors and countrymen, you must make secret plans without respite. Plan for adventure, plan for pleasure, plan for pandemonium, as you wish; but plan lay plans constantly.
And when you come to, on the steps of the presidential palace, in the green grass beside the highway, in your cell's gollmy solitude, your secret plan finished or foiled, ask your comrades, ask your cellmates, ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the sea, ask everything that ponders, everything that wanders, everything that sings, everything that stings--ask them what time it is; and your comrades, your cellmates, the wind, the waves, the stars, the sea all will answer: 'It is time for a new secret plan. So as not to be the martyred slave of routine, plan adventure, plan pleasure, plan pandemonium, as you wish; but plan, plan secretly and without respite.'"
please visit me
my foot is broken, and while i've been pretending it's not for two weeks, the bone has not refused. so if i don't treat it better in this new cast for the next few weeks, i will need surgery. so i'm on my ass being contemplative, reading and surfing. please visit me, my room isn't meant to be a fortress of solitude! here's my number if thou should want to call: 513-827-0367
gnarly
hung out wit some old friends today and eventually cooked a meal of gathered edibles with one of em. twas very nice.
i'm reading tropic of cancer by henry miller, if that means anything to ya. very sexually active, off the hook free thinker who emmigrated to Paris in the 30's or 50's. he knows how to write
gonna post a senseless pic of me so i can put it as my profile pic. love yas
Thursday, July 06, 2006
change of plans
i make a u-turn
i'm making a u-turn: not going to california or mexico right now. planning to stay in town for a few months, get an apartment and job in order to get a platform to blast off from. anybody looking for a roomate? i am.
Monday, July 03, 2006
origins of gunpowder
i thought this was funny
http://www.teenink.com/Past/1998/10093.html
Foomp!
Justin P., Smith Center, KS
Our story begins with a small-in- stature, humble, Buddhist monk named Foo (later lengthened to Foomp, but only after he discovered the explosive qualities of black powder). For the most part, Foo was a normal monk. He meditated, ate bread, drank water, and occasionally he even breathed. This was about all a Buddhist monk could do in his search to be pure. Anything more radical would be considered an unpardonable sin. As time went on Foo became rather bored with his meager existence and took up gardening. This pastime was looked upon as extremist. Foo was allowed to stay at the monastery simply because he was the only monk who could bake a decent loaf of bread. The fact that Foo took up gardening may seem rather insignificant, but it became the sole reason he invented black powder.
By and by Foo noticed his garden was not doing so hot; namely, his plants were shriveling up and dying. This phenomenon can probably be explained by Foo's incessant reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self Reliance to his plants. Recent scientific studies have shown that continuous reading of this literature (if it can be called that) has a shriveling, withering effect on humans. Scientists have reason to believe it would have the same effect on plants. At the time, though, Foo had no knowledge of this study, so he deduced his problem to be lack of fertilizer. Immediately, he took steps to remedy this predicament.
It is also a well-known fact that with a large amount of spare time on their hands, monks occasionally dabbled in science. This was another extremist pastime, but was allowed because, without it, the monks would have no bread. All the scientific findings of previous monks were compiled in the monastery library. This library was where Foo began his search for a decent fertilizer formula. Foo's search led him to an abundant source of fertilizer in the caves surrounding the monastery: bat guano. Foo raced off to the caves to gather the guano and save his garden.
While gathering guano, Foo noticed some funny, white, crystalline forms in the guano. Scientists have since identified them as potassium nitrate, which often takes up residence in caves (as does guano). Foo did not know about potassium nitrate at the time, and no funny, white specks were going to get in the way of his fertilizer. Foo threw them into the pail with the guano.
When Foo arrived back at the monastery, he searched for a suitable place to crush and mix his fertilizer. The fireplace was the logical answer, since the leftover guano could also be used as fuel. Foo heaved the guano into the fireplace to rest with the already existing charcoal. As the mixing process neared an end, Foo noticed that his fertilizer was a drab, dull black. Foo decided that the addition of some powdered, bright yellow rocks he had found in the cave would liven the mixture up a little and give it some character. The yellow rocks were later identified as sulfur. For those who have flunked high school chemistry, the mixture of three equal parts of potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal is commonly called "black powder." Foo, of course, had not taken chemistry so he did not know this. After a thorough mixing, Foo liquefied the mess - uuuhhh, fertilizer - for ease in spreading, and headed for his garden.
Foo became so caught up in baking and meditating that he did not make it back to his garden for a week. What he found threw him into a fit of rage (an emotion monks were never supposed to reveal, and which led to the first testing of black powder). What Foo had expected to become a green, luscious garden was now a flat, black mat of a grainy substance. In his enraged state, Foo lost all control and set his garden on fire. Mayhem erupted, with a loud foooommmppppp!! Foo's garden disappeared in an acrid cloud of smoke. What became the first testing of black powder also became the first controlled burn. This led to the first EPA regulations and burning bans, and also the first sighting of Smokey the Bear. Finally, it became the basis for use of explosives in terrorism.
The other monks were definitely terrorized and unhappy with Foo. His garden had been viewed as radical in the first place. In an attempt to save face, Foo also invented the first fib. He came up with a story about seeing an orange U-Haul truck parked beside his garden just before it blew.
Foo's story did not help. He was eventually expelled from the monastery and became a vagabond and mercenary under the alias Foomp. IRA and PLO scouts were sent to check him out. He eventually went to Ghengis Khan as a second-round draft pick. With Ghengis, Foomp perfected the black powder and named it explosewoo batfu popoowong, which translates to explosive bat poop in Chinese. In English the name translates into a more tame version: black powder. And that is the story of how it was invented and developed by a humble Chinese monk. 1
http://www.teenink.com/Past/1998/10093.html
Foomp!
Justin P., Smith Center, KS
Our story begins with a small-in- stature, humble, Buddhist monk named Foo (later lengthened to Foomp, but only after he discovered the explosive qualities of black powder). For the most part, Foo was a normal monk. He meditated, ate bread, drank water, and occasionally he even breathed. This was about all a Buddhist monk could do in his search to be pure. Anything more radical would be considered an unpardonable sin. As time went on Foo became rather bored with his meager existence and took up gardening. This pastime was looked upon as extremist. Foo was allowed to stay at the monastery simply because he was the only monk who could bake a decent loaf of bread. The fact that Foo took up gardening may seem rather insignificant, but it became the sole reason he invented black powder.
By and by Foo noticed his garden was not doing so hot; namely, his plants were shriveling up and dying. This phenomenon can probably be explained by Foo's incessant reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self Reliance to his plants. Recent scientific studies have shown that continuous reading of this literature (if it can be called that) has a shriveling, withering effect on humans. Scientists have reason to believe it would have the same effect on plants. At the time, though, Foo had no knowledge of this study, so he deduced his problem to be lack of fertilizer. Immediately, he took steps to remedy this predicament.
It is also a well-known fact that with a large amount of spare time on their hands, monks occasionally dabbled in science. This was another extremist pastime, but was allowed because, without it, the monks would have no bread. All the scientific findings of previous monks were compiled in the monastery library. This library was where Foo began his search for a decent fertilizer formula. Foo's search led him to an abundant source of fertilizer in the caves surrounding the monastery: bat guano. Foo raced off to the caves to gather the guano and save his garden.
While gathering guano, Foo noticed some funny, white, crystalline forms in the guano. Scientists have since identified them as potassium nitrate, which often takes up residence in caves (as does guano). Foo did not know about potassium nitrate at the time, and no funny, white specks were going to get in the way of his fertilizer. Foo threw them into the pail with the guano.
When Foo arrived back at the monastery, he searched for a suitable place to crush and mix his fertilizer. The fireplace was the logical answer, since the leftover guano could also be used as fuel. Foo heaved the guano into the fireplace to rest with the already existing charcoal. As the mixing process neared an end, Foo noticed that his fertilizer was a drab, dull black. Foo decided that the addition of some powdered, bright yellow rocks he had found in the cave would liven the mixture up a little and give it some character. The yellow rocks were later identified as sulfur. For those who have flunked high school chemistry, the mixture of three equal parts of potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal is commonly called "black powder." Foo, of course, had not taken chemistry so he did not know this. After a thorough mixing, Foo liquefied the mess - uuuhhh, fertilizer - for ease in spreading, and headed for his garden.
Foo became so caught up in baking and meditating that he did not make it back to his garden for a week. What he found threw him into a fit of rage (an emotion monks were never supposed to reveal, and which led to the first testing of black powder). What Foo had expected to become a green, luscious garden was now a flat, black mat of a grainy substance. In his enraged state, Foo lost all control and set his garden on fire. Mayhem erupted, with a loud foooommmppppp!! Foo's garden disappeared in an acrid cloud of smoke. What became the first testing of black powder also became the first controlled burn. This led to the first EPA regulations and burning bans, and also the first sighting of Smokey the Bear. Finally, it became the basis for use of explosives in terrorism.
The other monks were definitely terrorized and unhappy with Foo. His garden had been viewed as radical in the first place. In an attempt to save face, Foo also invented the first fib. He came up with a story about seeing an orange U-Haul truck parked beside his garden just before it blew.
Foo's story did not help. He was eventually expelled from the monastery and became a vagabond and mercenary under the alias Foomp. IRA and PLO scouts were sent to check him out. He eventually went to Ghengis Khan as a second-round draft pick. With Ghengis, Foomp perfected the black powder and named it explosewoo batfu popoowong, which translates to explosive bat poop in Chinese. In English the name translates into a more tame version: black powder. And that is the story of how it was invented and developed by a humble Chinese monk. 1
lonely on the blog
i haven't gotten the fullfillment out of the internet that i think it could offer, a.k.a. a psychic link to everyone else, so...
what does a lonely person do? they get attention any way they can!
so i'm putting an interview with a jewish conspiracy theorist up so people will yell at me. i came upon it through the website of a video that raises questions about 9/11 and the bullshit inherent in the official line.
surely my jewish friends will finally put their mark on here. remember guys, i love my friends and i dislike all religion! and i don't actually buy this stuff
http://www.erichufschmid.net/Hufschmid-ChristopherJonBjerknes.mp3
what does a lonely person do? they get attention any way they can!
so i'm putting an interview with a jewish conspiracy theorist up so people will yell at me. i came upon it through the website of a video that raises questions about 9/11 and the bullshit inherent in the official line.
surely my jewish friends will finally put their mark on here. remember guys, i love my friends and i dislike all religion! and i don't actually buy this stuff
http://www.erichufschmid.net/Hufschmid-ChristopherJonBjerknes.mp3
Sunday, July 02, 2006
request
does anyone have any writings of Ron Sakolsky, such as The Oystercatcher 1 or 2? If so, I'd like to read them, let's get in touch.
here's an interestin lil poem fo yas
Ginsberg etc.
http://cda.mrs.umn.edu/~beaversg/ginsberg
HOWL
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
street!
III
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful
typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the
abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're
free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night
http://cda.mrs.umn.edu/~beaversg/ginsberg
HOWL
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
street!
III
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful
typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the
abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're
free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night
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