Whatcha Reading?

[Mark]

Yesterday I noticed in one of his comments on COTO that Waldo is reading, Family of Secrets. I got that book from the library the other day and just started reading it myself.

Come across any good books lately?

I want to read Eva Golinger's recent book, The Empire's Web: Encyclopedia of Interventionism and Subversion, but it was published in Venezuela in Spanish and I don't know if it is out in English yet.

[waldopaper]

Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree. Altho I must admit... I've been spending WAY too much time and energy on this tea-fight on another website.

I can't help but feel that it's at the expense of my REAL RBC friends. But you know the deal. Anyway, "Buddhist Fiction" really got my attention... thanks to Brother Dave. Well, like anything else... some good, some bad. But Family of Secrets... wow... wotta fukkin trip. Most of it, you probably already know. But G HW Bush's complicity in the Kennedy assassination? THAT'S really fukkin creepy. O'course... we ALL used to "really fukkin creepy" by now.

Too bad most of the rest of the world has not a fukkin clue.

[Mark]

Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree looks like it will be a good read, and my library has it. Thanks, Waldo!

I had heard a lot over the years about Poppy's complicity in the JFK assassination, but not in much detail.

I'm off to an event tonight. The Peace Resource Center and Activist San Diego are doing a program on the unmanned aerial drones manufactured here in San Diego. They say, "Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) like the Predator and Reaper are developed by General Atomic, a company here in San Diego. These are the latest high tech weapons used to carry out surveillance and increasingly lethal attack missions in Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The Military favors these 'drones' because they may reduce the casualties among military personnel at the same time civilian deaths multiply. American drone attacks do not prevent or eliminate terrorism but incite more revenge, violence and retaliation."

But I'm taking Family of Secrets along to read on the bus going and coming back.

[Mark]

Rejections hurt, Stone. Like John Lennon said in Strawberry Fields, "It's getting hard to be someone, but it all works out. It doesn't matter much to me ..."

The talk I went to was by peace activist Jim Haber, one of the things I picked up there was the AK Press summer '09 catalog, and I just found a forthcoming book in it that I'm looking forward to and you might also enjoy:

Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex

Steven Best, Peter McLaren, and Anthony Nocella II, eds.

A powerful response to the modern-day McCarthyism on college campuses nationwide. Joy James, Henry Giroux, Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn, Bill Ayers, Robert Jensen, Ward Churchill, and scores of other prominent scholars and students examine the increasingly repressive academic atmosphere in the United States and engage with the broad socioeconomic determinants of academic culturs.

It give the publishing date as Summer 2009, but I couldn't find it listed on their website. No way to ask my library to buy it (not that they have any money to buy books) until it is published. Sure hope it hasn't been suppressed.

Another one, listed for publication late this year, comic book style by graphic artist Seth Tobocman, also has an interesting title: You Don't Have to Fuck People Over to Survive. The blurb says it's "...a candid portrait of a decade of struggle to preserve basic human rights and build a better world, and demands a place on the shelf of every historian of urban struggle." The decade is apparently 1979-1989, and the struggle is about the housing crisis in New York.

Gotta spend some time looking through this catalog--must be some stuff in an anarchist press catalog that I absolutely have to read, as opposed to stuff that I'd really like to read.

[Mouse]

I'm reading Terror on the Tube - Behind the Veil of 7/7 by Nick Kollerstrom.
Highly recommended. I started reading it on the last train home in the early hours after:

Yesterday I was on the London Underground, and was lost within minutes of descending from my familiar station. It all seemed changed. I couldn't find a map, they used to be everywhere. There were so many bare walls. I asked for help to find my way to an unfamiliar station and was given instructions and a map too small to read with the glasses I had. The instructions involved a circuitous and lengthy route. I won't bore you with continuing difficulties. The route back was much more sensible, but again made more difficult by a scarcity of maps and considerably less clear signposting than I've ever found before. It was not good for morale to find oneself adrift in such a setting late at night trying to find the way back to the mainline station for the last train home.
I lived in London for 9 years and had always admired the clarity of directions down there on the underground. I like maps and charts.

[Mark]

Thanks for the tip, Mouse. I'll check it out. Speaking of maps and charts, here's and interactive map of Pakistan's displaced people. But I think the slideshow gives a better picture although it seems to be somewhat misleading in depicting the Taliban as the bad guys without mentioning that the U.S. brought them to power by funding and arming them to fight the Russians, and that their popularity now stems largely from the fact that they are fighting against the U.S. invasion.

[waldopaper]

Charlie Wilson's War is another one of them Boy-HOWDY books... so much drama, it was made into a movie... which I haven't seen.

To underscore Hedges' point... look at the hype over the movie... personalities and intrigue... and it doesn't matter much that the basic story is fucking REAL... and as a little sidebar... this was the era when the "intelligence community" became "financially independent." No need for "oversight" or anything like that... it had to become "privatized." War Made Easy is another one of those.

The information is out there... this is the "New Censorship." It isn't hidden or covered up or anything like that... it's just more interesting to watch the simulacrum in "professional wrestling." I get this at home... running around with a specific passage yelling "boy-fucking-HOWDY" and getting my usual lecture on "negativity." In fact, I usually keep those BFH passages to myself these days... don't even unleash them on the stoods... unfair- they're a "captive audience," and one of the braver ones pipes up with the "negativity lecture" that I've heard a billion times.

"Awright, but where are the SOLUTIONS," they say, "...what can we DO?..." (...right now... that is not dangerous or too inconvenient). And, "...stop being a bunch of stupid fucks who don't want to THINK..." is NOT an acceptable answer. Fantasy is easier. Fantasy is "manageable." Fantasy is easier to "DO " What really jacks my jaws is the fucking "...political activism," and when anybody sez "call yer congressperp and DEMAND" I want to smack them with a board.

In his interview on NPR, Hedges said the public reaction to the "bailout" ran 100 to 1 AGAINST it. A hundred to fucking one. I'd have to check those figures, but it seems credible to me. "They" did it anyway. "They" just flat-out don't give a fuck. "They" couldn't if they WANTED to. Anyone who does is either marginalized, co-opted or murdered. Nobody "wants" to believe that. It's easier to lapse back into fantasy and spam the congressperps spam-bot boiler-plate response machine... or talk to a phone-bot with a script. And even people who do that are pretty fucking rare.

It's gotta become more "obvious," and my main mull is, "how fucking OBVIOUS does it have to GET?" IMO... it's heading toward where the only tipper will be when a certain % of the pop is homeless and hungry... where the toilets won't flush... or the electricity doesn't work. Then it could go ANYWHERE... and I'm too burnt-out now to go into the Nazi Germany historiography for the umpty-billionth time.

I'm replacing most of the Nazi Germany videos with The Pinky Show. I got the "no-classes-for-you-this-fall" from another Uni... and I suspect it will drop some more.

I could go on about that... also "rejections" from "publishers." But this post is long enough.

[Mark]

I never wanted a career, Stone. I wanted to die. So when I was 18 and got out of the nuthouses where I'd been since I was 16, I remembered being told by my parents that you had to have money to live, so I decided not to touch any money. Three months later, I was still alive and realized that didn't work. What you really need to live is food, and people had been feeding me. But the economy was better in those days.

The two writers I admire most at the moment are Ward Churchill, who was fired, and keith harmon snow. Another survival "truth" is "publish or perish," right? Well, keith is a Regents lecturer (he sends his stipend to Africa) who has never published a book. He regularly goes to the most dangerous areas of Africa, does research nobody wants done, and he's (knock wood) still alive. His most recent article is fully documented with 126 footnotes and nobody would publish it because they're afraid of being sued. I put it on a little website I help with because Gary is in Caracas and I'm on SSI and we have no money so we're judgment proof. They can sue you if you have no money, but they can't get any money and it could bring them a lot of bad publicity.

AK Press is a collective. Worker-owned collectives have been outperforming the general economy here. AK Press has a thing where people subscribe for $25 a month and get a copy of every new book they publish, plus a 20% discount on books in their catalog. That gives them a small but steady income even when they don't sell many books. I buy almost all my food these days from the People's Co-Op, a local worker/member-owned collective food store, or directly from the growers at farmers markets. Not only do I get safe, fresh, organic foods cheap, but no money is going to bosses and fatties.

You write, "'Career' to me meaning making simply enough money to do my next thing."

Is that how it is, or is "career" something to do while you're thinking about what you want to do next? If you already know what you want to do next, would a "career" finance it, or would it keep you too busy to do it?

The only time I had a real job was when I thought I needed one to help out my kids, and it was a disaster and didn't help my kids at all. As it turned out, one kid doesn't need any help (corporate attorney), and fate allowed me to help the other one without me lifting a finger. My mom died. She had always hated me and the feeling was mutual, so I hadn't expected to be in her will and had been told so many times. But it turned out that I was, and since I didn't need it (I'm on SSI now and that's more than I need, at least until the economy crashes, as I live rather simply) and I didn't want a dime from that bitch, I asked that it be given to my daughter.

When we're young, we want goals. I'm happy just to be alive now, but I remember once when I was young and homeless, I ran out of goals. I sat down on a park bench and couldn't think of what I wanted to do next. It was scary. Then I remembered somebody mentioning some local event, so I went there, ran into some people, thought of stuff to do, and was fine again. That was more than forty years ago and I still remember how terrified I felt.

I think you summed up the situation very well, "Here's the evil formula: speak truth and goodness and have no "credibility," therefore no entre to the bully pupits of the world. Speak wicked vileness and have "credibility" and the keys to the outer chambers of the palace are given unto thee."

So if you do what it takes to get that bully pulpit, you won't be allowed to speak truth and goodness. If you do, the pulpit will be taken away despite everything you did to earn it. Maybe the goal has to be EITHER to get the bully pulpit, OR to speak truth?

[Mark]

Money is impersonal and it can be replaced. If it is stolen or lost, it is possible to get more of it that is just as good as that which was stolen or lost.

But all the money in the world can't buy back a moment of your life that you wasted or have reason to regret. Your time is personal and irreplaceable.

[waldopaper]

Empire of Illusion
The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
Chris Hedges

"A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies. And we are dying now. We will either wake from our state of induced childishness, one where trivia and gossip pass for news and information, one where our goal is not justice but an elusive and unattainable happiness, to confront the stark limitations before us, or we will continue our headlong retreat into fantasy."

Heard about it on NPR



Heard about it on NPR

[Mark]

Oh come on, Stone. Pornographers can dish it out, so why can't they take it?

Criticism is not the same as censorship.

If you're opposed to censorship, then you wouldn't want to censor criticism.

If it is okay to censor criticism, then next thing you know it will be okay to censor porn or anything else.

Porn is no substitute for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or freedom from censorship, but millions of people seem to think it is. After all, why should it matter if a Ward Churchill can be fired for saying something some people didn't like, as long as there's plenty of porn available?

Catharine A, MacKinnon in Only Words makes an excellent argument that porn, in many cases, IS censorship. I haven't read the Hedges book, but I'd be surprised if he can "rip on porn" as well as Robert Jensen does in Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity

Why don't you feel that anyone should be allowed to criticize porn? Or does "That will never do" have some other meaning? Maybe it just means that nobody should ever buy or read the book? Or that if the book rips on porn, the worth of anything else it might say is thereby negated and therefore the book should never be recommended or favorably reviewed?

What's the beef, chief?

Is it okay to abandon the reality-based community and "retreat into fantasy," as long as it is a sexual fantasy?

[BO]

Marko, I wouldn't take Mr. Fruit's quips too seriously. I think his statement, "that will never do" was said in jest. Not that he doesn't mean it.

Not having read the book either, it'd be interesting to find out what Hedges thinks porn is. I believe it's one of those things that's best left to the eye of the beholder. And I'd have to agree with Woody Allen when he said, "Don't knock masturbation. It's simply having sex with the one you love the best."

BO thinks...all sex is fantasy. Nothing wrong with fantasy when you know it's fantasy.

[Mark]

He won his case, Pan, but then the judge overturned the jury verdict and said that the U did NOT have to reinstate him.

My brief summary of what happened is here.

A site that blogged the case (and hid my comments) is here.