The Troublemaker

Separate were heaven and earth, good and bad, birth and death. Day and Night never mixed. Woman was woman and man was man.

But Exu, the errant bandit of Africa, liked to entertain himself by provoking outlandish minglings. And he is still at it.

His devilish tricks erase borders, join what the gods divided. Thanks to his clever deeds the sun turns black and the night burns bright. From the pores of men sprout women and women sweat men. The dying are born, the born are dying. For everything created or yet to be created, backward and forward get so confused you can never tell boss from bossed or up from down.

Later rather than sooner, divine order reestablishes its hierarchies and geographies, and everything and everyone gets put in place. But sooner rather than later, madness reappears.

Then the gods lament that the world is such a difficult place

--Eduardo Galleano, "The Troublemaker." Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone. Tr. Mark Fried. (New York: Nation Books, 2009) p.2.

"So What?"

Masters of blues:

The American Empire is Bankrupt

Chris Hedges:

"This week marks the end of the dollar's reign as the world's reserve currency. It marks the beginning of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signifies the last gasp of the American imperium. That's over. It's not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful."

Did they get you to talk or did you hold out?

Thanks a lot -  RMN, LBJ, Milton Friedman's Chicago Boys, RR, (& GRF) and, yes, even JEC and WGC:  http://tinyurl.com/m8h5dy

War is Sin

Chris Hedges:

The crisis faced by combat veterans returning from war is not simply a profound struggle with trauma and alienation.  It is often, for those who can slice through the suffering to self-awareness, an existential crisis.  War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about about ourselves.  It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions.  Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home.  We are not a virtuous nation.  God and fate have not blessed us above others.  Victory is not assured.  War is neither glorious nor noble.  And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight.

Those who return to speak this truth, such as members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, are our contemporary prophets.  But like all prophets they are condemned and ignored for their courage.  They struggle, in  a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. . . . 

Marx's Relevance Right Now

Also:

http://tinyurl.com/lb7kur

Remember when WalMart lobbied in favor of upping the minimum wage?

Williiam Carlos Williams "The Dance"

 . . . . Kicking and rolling about  / the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those / shanks must be sound to bear up under such / rollicking measures, prance as they dance / in Breughel's great picture, the Kermess

Night

Back when she was a child, Helena pretended to be sleeping and then slipped out of bed.
She dressed all in white, as if it were Sunday, and without a sound snuck out on the patio to discover the mysteries of the Tuscuman night.
Her parents slept, her sisters as well.
She wanted to see how the night changed and how the moon and stars moved. Someone had told her that the heavenly bodies shifted and sometimes fell, and that as the night advanced they changed color.
That night of nights, Helena watched without blinking. Her neck ached, her eyes hurt. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. She looked and kept on looking, but the sky did not change and the moon and stars remained firmly in their places.
Dawn awakened her. Helena shed a tear.
Later, she consoled herself with the thought that night doesn't like anyone spying on its secrets.

- Eduardo Galeano, "Night." Voices of Time: A Life in Stories. Trans. Mark Fried (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006) 40.

Torture

The debate about whether "human rights" can ever truly be separated from politics and economics is not unique to Latin America; these are questions that surface whenever states use torture as a weapon of policy. Despite the mystique that surrounds it, and the understandable impulse to treat it as aberrant behavior beyond politics, torture is not particularly complicated or mysterious. A tool of the crudest kind of coercion, it crops up with great predictability whenever a local despot or a foreign occupier lacks consent to rule: Marcos in the Philippines, the shah in Iran, Saddam in Iraq, the French in Algeria, the Israelis in the occupied territories, the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. The list could stretch on and on. The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system--whether political, religious or economic--that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain "indicator species" of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections

As a means of extracting information during interrogations, torture is notoriously unreliable, but as a means of terrorizing and controlling populations, nothing is quite as effective. It was for this reason that, in the fifties and sixties, many Algerians grew impatient with French liberals who expressed their moral outrage over news that their soldiers were electrocuting and water-boarding liberation fighters--and yet did nothing to end the occupation that was the reason for these abuses.

-- Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (New York: Picador, 2007), 155-156.

Harold and Maude

HAROLD: You sure have a way with people.

MAUDE: Well, they're my species!

Lumpenproletariat

lum-pen-pro-le-tar-i-at
noun
(esp. in Marxist terminology) the unorganized and unpolitical lower orders of society who are not interested in revolutionary advancement.

ORIGIN early 20th cent.: from German (a term originally used by Karl Marx), from Lumpen "rag, rogue" + PROLETARIAT.

Oxford American Dictionaries

Desiree & Medea's Great Act at the Correspondents' Dinner

The best act didn't make the main stage.

Nassim Taleb in one of his sunniest moods

from OPACITY: WHAT WE DO NOT SEE

#111:  Some people think they attend opera for the story.

It is the same with language.  Language is largely made to show-off,  gossip, confuse people, delude them, charm them, seduce them, exploit them, etc.  And as a side effect, convey information.  Just a side effect, you fools.

Honeymoon's Over for Obama ( with more thanks to Taibbi)

Weird decisions from the get-go.  More Goldman Sachs thieves?  Talk about crooked cops!

Taleb's Ten Principles for a Black Swan free world

As I understand it a "black swan" is an odious random circumstance that affects history.  You could probably think of some.

Eric Cantor: Flunkie for Extortionist Thugs

Gosh I'd hate to see anything happen to your paycheck. How's the wife and kids?

One of the Heroes

Someone who reminds us that (abridging Frank Zappa) it's great to be alive.

Usury & foreclosures - not so much.

Larisa Alexandrovna on shabby reporting

At a recent John Edwards appearance at Brown.  Sad.

Anybody Want More War?

We got it!

Christopher Smart

18th century English poet.  From poets.org