what matters is what we see, not what is

The image. The video clip. The soundbite. We have reduced our world to a digital shadow of its' formal self, and what's worse, we have elevated the meaningless to the paramount--were but Nero alive he would laugh and find our little circus to be but the democratization of Rome--we are all free to be little Nero's in our own little world, masters of our moment and fixated on its' maintenance. Nothing matters nearly as much as the equilibrium, the status quo, the illusion that nothing changes. We plant lawn grass for houses on the beach for crying out loud! We build communities right on the water and wonder why hurricanes and tropical storms cause so much damage. We manufacture items to last a few years, cell phones for example, and while I understand that we're undergoing a rapid increase in the rate of technological development, items should be huilt to last. My sister's 1990 Volvo 240 has for instance 250,000 miles on it and it will keep running as long as someone maintains it. But, to look at it, it isn't anything to look at--the reality is though that car is fantastically well built.

somebody should be reading...

Mostly I write for catharsis. My own personal catharsis. Not release, not to open up to the world, not because I think that there's any real effective way to change much of anything anymore and as a consequence I'm not really that bothered by it. I mean, actually, I'm really quite bothered by it and still can't find a way to express it in any meaningful way. Although I do find it interesting that the inventor of the neutron bomb was punished by his mother in a rather odd way--she forced him to eat soap and gave him enemas, which of course, made him throw-up and have diarrhea (and you know what, I'm sure there's some better way to spell that but I really just don't care right now) and he invented a weapon that when put into action would cause exactly those kinds of symptoms in its victims before they succumbed to the radiation. Now, netiquette, as Andrew Sullivan would lead us to believe, should prompt me to give you a link, his name, and at least one cross reference and maybe I should also go post comments all over the place about how awesome this post that I just wrote was and maybe somebody should link to it and then yay! somebody is reading my blog. I hate netiquette. If I feel the need to provide a link, then I will, but mostly the process of accumulating links is about as tedious as filling out any form in triplicate. In the same way that the vanity of myspace permeates the music world, so too does the utter inanity of the post/comment process only reinforce whatever the reader already believes. We live now is self-contained spheres of thought and information--whereas before, Before Blogs, BB, I like that, everyone had access to much the same information. We shared the experience. And now, every pissed off liberal living in Amerika thinks that Buschitler is the worst thing since Richard Nixon and we are faced with the very real threat of balkanization, of the United States splintering into multiple self-contained factions, each with their own memes, their own beliefs, their own historiers, each fighting against each other, each unable to see that our strength is our common belief in the imperfectibility of man and the reality that we need each other, now more than ever. I think of my own family, split politically, and thus split in actuality, living in two separate worlds that never intersect.
I think of the reality that we can't win if we can't wake up and realize we're in a war. And what can one man do, what can one man do in the face of such, ambiguity, such shameless inattention to the fact that life can quickly descend into the short, brutish, Hobbesian nightmare that we have never had to experience. In fact, we relish in this absence of fear by exploring it through our postmodern obsession with apocalyptic scenarios (Terminator, The Matrix, even Harry Potter is a sort of battle between good and evil in an end of the world sense, and of course, Lord of the Rings, which if you're a liberal and you've seen it and you can't find the right parallels bewteen Tolkien's work and today, move!) yet we are so totally unprepared for even the mildest of emergencies.
But we are on the very brink of an apocalyptic scenario: say Israel finds Iranian Revolutionary Guard units acting in collusion with Syran agents in southern Lebanon providing Hizbullah with material, logistical and leadership support, the United States provides Syria and Iran with a timetable for ending their support of Hizbullah and Iran says forget about it. Granted, Assad the younger might blink, but the madmen of Iran won't. They've been waiting for this moment for too long to miss an opportunity such as this--the Iranians are devious--why let such a valuable asset like Hizbullah go to waste for nothing?
Indeed, why? Iran has nurtured Hizbullah for the better part of the past twenty years, and since Shiite's in Lebanon are politically underrepresented despite nearly constituting a majority of the population it would be ridiculous for Iran to allow what would eventually become a friendly sharia abiding satellite expire prematurely.
This leads me to the following: the Iranians are either about to test a small scale nuclear weapon and basically follow the US's own lead as it did during World War II when we told the Japanese that we could continue using nuclear weapons on their cities unless they surrendered or, and this is the more probable option, they are trying to test the operational capacities of Hizbullah and Hamas against Israel and see Israel's response and of course, how long the "international community" allows Israel's response to continue. It would be interesting to see how the "international community"would try and stop Israel if Israel were to prove uncooperative in cease-fire arrangements.
Let us not have any illusions about what faces us: open confrontation with Iran. Syria's association as Iran's proxy won't last the first two days of conflict with us. Hizbullah and Hamas wouldn't survive either. Of course, all of this ignores the fact that what we are dealing with now is not Sunni Wahhibism, rather, Shiite extremism. Never mind that the basic disagreement between the two is over whether only members of the Prophet's family can rule or not, but the phenomenon of Islamofascism is not isolated, it is across the board. Only Sufis appear to be immune. The train bombings in India, as in Madrid and the attack in London all Muslims. Ask Israel. They know. What we as a civilization don't want to believe is that for them, for the Islamofascists, this is as much about pride now as it faith. It really has sort of veered swiftly away from the religious component and has embraced an arrogant and simplisitic form of cultural pride that goes beyond superiority--it has wandered into the realm of the insane, and clearly, any religion that forces free men and women to submit to a theocracy would lead to insanity because the demands of such a system are so contrary to human reality. Never perscribe, always describe. That's a rule I have that I try to follow. Sort of like where life can exist, life will exist. Or, it doesn't matter that you don't want. That's irrelevant. Sorry, I'm trying to sum up my sayings.
The only way to beat somebody who thinks they are better than you is by stomping them into the ground. If they really are better than you, they'll win. But free men and women will always triump over the statist and theocratically oppressed peoples. Which is why we should view the recent events in southern Lebanon as an opportunity. An opportunity to finish off the largest sponsor of terrorism in the world: Iran. And it is an opportunity that will not last.
Ahead one quarter impulse.

like a festering sore......

The talking continues unabated. Talking, talking, talking....feelsl like a gaggle of girls, did you know that's what you call a group of girls, a gaggle. Like a flock. But a gaggle.
The self-perpetuation of the commentary crowd continues unabated. Have you seen townhall.com lately? I suppose that ultimately we have to wait until November for all this to stop for but a few short months before the Presidential race in '08 begins. If only I could work for Rudolph Guiliani. Regardless as to the outcome, my life would be complete. I could go on and abandon civilization and find some nice island in the Pacific. Ahhhhh......
What happens in the next several months will be extremely interesting....of course, what's happening now in the world is fairly interesting...modestly interesting at least. Okay, so soccer is the most boring game ever invented. The ought to just have the shoot outs the whole game that way we don't have to watch them run around the field for an hour passing the ball back and forth. Dull. Alright so Mexican elections are about as fun as listening to Joe Biden talk about how you have to be an Indian-American to walk into a 7-11. We all knew it was going to be close. Have you not noticed that virtually every nation-state that has a representative government has had a really, really, really close election in the past several years? Let's see..United States, check...actually we had a succession of close elections, Bill Clinton won the 1996 election with 49% of the popular vote, George W won the 2000 election with 48% and 51% in 2004. Germany had a close election recently, with the CDU holding only a few seats more than the SPD. The last British election resulted in a lopsided majority forLabor because of the way that the British allocate seats, but it was a relatively clsoe election with the Tories only a few percentage points behind. Italy had a nailbitingly close election just a few weeks ago. Interesting isn't it, that at exactly the moment we need decisive action we find that our chosen form of government isn't cutting the mustard. At the very moment we need leadership we find vacillation. We find that even the revolutionary leaders, such as the President and even Osama himself are tied to their parochial vision of humanity, a vision that lies trapped in the postindustrial void of deconstructionism-what's worse, is that most of the world is unaware how much we are faterd to failure, fated to fail because our intellectuals paved the way for our collapse. We are no better. We aren't noble. We aren't good, in fact, we're actually evil. Is it no wonder that some 40 million people watch American Idol, to watch mediocrity publicly displayed, when Chuck Barris was indeed the millenarian prophet of the television age and that maybe, just maybe, we ought to consider that there is something to be said about a nation that graduates more degrees in the leisure industry than engineering...what an age in which we live. Anyone can publish anything they want online. Anyone. I could go to townhall and start a hundred different blogs tonight and talk about nothing for the rest of my life. I could assert fallacious and inopportune ideas that no one really wants to talk about, like why we can't make our traffic lights synchronous. Seems pretty simple, synchronous lights. Yes. Or paying for only the shows you want to watch. Or being spared the incessant rampant advertising that pervades our every day existence and that you have to make an effort to avoid in almost any form, whether you're watching television, listening to the radio, surfing the web, driving down the road. There's a billboard going down into Atlanta on I-75 that says simply "I pooted." Now if that's not evidence of communist infiltration in the ad departments of every, wait, what was that, oh that's right, sorry, not communist infiltration, alien, no, not alien either? Well, will somebody please tell me what is was, oh yes, Islamist infilitration of every advertising department in the country. We will subvert your culture, by showing you women dressed in scantily clad outfits to drive the impoverished Muslisms of the world into hissy fits over cartoons. Sounds about right right? A bunch of imans who have applied to work in the Coke and McDonald's ad departments, what about a Prophet doll someone suggests? Yes, yes and we can have him date Barbie only then to have Ken steal Mohammed away from Barbie and have evil homosexual relations. Yes, yes, relations.
And what about the state of our relations? Is there actually a cohesive block that we can call collectively the West anymore? Does it exist, or does it only exist in outposts, like the monasteries of Ireland in 8th and 9th centuries, protecting the knowledge that the West has accumulated but apparently is no longer in need of. The knowledge that people, are animals and that if we fail to civilize and teach how to learn as children that they will spend their lives as servants, servants unto masters they are unaware of. Servants, as the netroots community is, to their own foolish visions of their own perfectability. Servants, as the uninformed are to the whims of the learned and the desires of the powerful. Servants unto others who are not interested in their well-being, only in the part they play, like poor Cindy Sheehan. You must first find pity for those who still think communism was good idea. We must find ways to forgive our brothers and our sisters for their ignorance, for their bigotry, and I mean our brothers and sisters on the left, those very people whose lives have been enhanced by the policies of center right governments in this country for most of the past quarter century. We must find a way to end this pitiful 51/48 split and push it into a comfortable 55-45 or 58-42. A place where the winner can speak with some authority. Where our gang is big enough to make the nutroots completely irrelevant. My prediction for the next three and half months: watch while the Democrats implode and the President starts to find his course again. And then watch while the media try to explain yet another GOP victory. The cries of stolen election, fradulent voting, blacks intimidated will reach a fever pitch, but it will be the cigarette smokers who lead the way, and show those health nazis what's up. Maybe it will be more interesting. We'll see.

everybody just shut up

There is a curious thing about learning how to listen. You begin to forget that you, too, have a voice. You begin to lose the need, the almost daily need to vocalize what you think and instead thinkg about what you think. And across what constitutes the vast bloated, bloviating sphere of the American intelligentsia, a swath of mandibular excrement emanates from the newspapers, the blogs, the magazines, the ezines, the people who pay for their own personal commercials at two in the morning, every poster on every BBS board, everybody who is saying, writing, promoting basically any and everything. But who is listening to all of this? Who is listening and more importantly, who is absorbing all of this, and what impact does any of it have?
And thus, when you make a conscious effort to not say anything about what's happening in the world, about what's happening in the part of the world that only reacts to what's happening in the world, you begin to realize that what you have to say about anything doesn't really matter. In fact, you notice, that the more people there talking about any one thing, the less is matters. And then you notice that perhaps never before have so many voices had so little to say all at once. That never before have so many been people been empowered with technology and had no real use for it. That never before have so many people had the opportunity to improve themselves, to improve their awareness, to improve their knowledge of this life and so few of them, across the breadth and depth of the political spectrum, have taken advantage of it.
I've said it just now and I'll probably say it again, but never before have so many had so little to say about the massive complexity that is this little planet, and so little of consequence. Most of what qualifies as commentary on the left is as tired as it is noxious. Much of what qualifies as commentary on the right is as empty as it is paranoid. Nobody who is "qualified" to speak about what passes for American civilization these days really has any idea what the "ordinary" American life is. The party of the common man is the party of the limoliberal and the party of federalism is the party of the countryclub "mexicans take care of the fairways" republicans. It ought not be a secret that I consider the fact that structure of the major parties and the structure of the Communist Parties of the former eastern bloc are remarkably similar. It ought also not be a secret that at this point, I consider serious reform to be impossible. If six years of a Republican President and a Republican Congress, and a Republican appointed Supreme Court (only two of the sitting justices were appointed by a Democrat) can't bring about at least a flatter tax system, a reduction in the overall size of government, partial, even just partial privitization of social security/medicare/medicaid, or outright victories in Afghanistan or Iraq (thus seriously alienating Jacksonians of all stripes), and at least beginning the long process of undoing the welfare state, with none of this having happened at all, in the least, in the past six years....let's just say it ought to be obvious to anyone watching that the American system of government has become paralyzed, worse, unable to use any of the powers granted to it to any effect. The Left moans and complains about the President being essentially a fascist precursor or a fascist himself, yet what actual power does the President have over you? Can the President even order the border closed? Can the President order what dictators and tyrants alike have had the power to do, protect the territorial and demographic integrity of their nations? Can the President do that? If not, then how much power does the President actually have?
And what about all those people out there who aren't talking and they aren't listening...they aren't even aware that there is a, discussion, no, a shouting competition taking place. Or, worse, they could simply be talking, exalting their status online on such fetid, purile nonsense like myspace or friendster where people show off how many "friends" they have and list all of their daily interests in a tiny side bar, which is of course, where interests truly belong. And then they think that this, like, so normal, this is what everybody has always done...oh my GAWD aren't we just so important.
I feel sick to my stomach. I feel completely unable to make any sense other than this: something has got to give. And sooner, rather than later. Something, because this False War that we've been engaged in since 9/11/01, much like the False War of September 1939 through 1940, cannot continue indefinitely. I know this sounds ridiculous to say, but the longer we go without an attack, the sooner we are to the next one, which will undoubtedly be a much larger, more coordinated strike against multiple targets.
I want everyone, and I mean everyone, all the talking heads, all the posting fools, all you Instapundit wannabees and Katie Courics and everybody, I want everybody to just shut up. Be quiet, sit down and listen to yourself for a while, maybe a whole day, say nothing, turn your cell phone off and your house phone and the computer and the tv and everything and just sit, drink some tea, collect your thoughts, find your thoughts, and then, maybe when you've had a while to think about what you've been saying everyone might pull their heads of out their collective asses and we can get some things done. Until then, we continue at roughly one half impulse...ahead full Mr. Sulu.

i can say god but god is but a word...

Oh if only Frank Herbert had been right about Islam and Buddhism and the Sufis. In the Dune universe, while the eventual inheritors of the ZenSunni credo, "I can say god but god is but a word" are in fact still interested in complete and total domination, for the first ten thousand years or so, the ZenSunnis are known only as the "cowards who ran from the machines" (of course, I suppose this is really Brian Herbert's universe, but what the hell). If only somewhere in the wilds of the past Buddhism could have had a calming, Zen effect upon Islam's unwielding desire to make everyone part either the umma or the dhimmi. And my ass doesn't bow before anyone, so the buck pretty much stops right there. Instead, we're faced with the apparently unending possibility, no scratch that, some of us have become aware of the threat posed to the inherited cultural traditions of the West is the same threat that Sultan Suleiman posed when he stood at the gates of Vienna. A threat that can only be said to have been saved by an act of God, for had the mud not forced him to leave behind his heavy cannon, we wouldn't even be worried about any of this. History gave us a second chance then, and history is not often inclined to do so. Civilizations die, and ours is imperiled beyond belief.
Step back, take a breath. Breathing is the only autonomic function in our bodies that we can directly regulate and influence; there are two sets of nerves that control the regulation of our breathing. Go ahead take a breath. Now forget about it. Your body will keep breathing of its' own accord, unwilling to let you just lapse into unconsciousness from lack of oxygen. The West, scratch that, because there is no more West. The West's dead Zed. All that remains are pockets, our own oil spots, just waiting to be added to the growing area that is the umma. Paris is virtually surrounded by little Fallujah's, every major Germany city has it's own Turkville, the Netherlands, well, we don't have to go down the list, do we? What kind of people riot and kill in the name of a cartoon? What kind of people believe that the public and the private sphere are one in the same, that men may have the kind of judgment and sway that we leave to the true higher authorities, whomever they may be. One of my fundamental precepts is that anyone who says that they have knowledge of God is lying, flat out lying. It doesn't matter to me whether its' Ghandi or Mother Teresa of John Paul or Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or any Reverend, Minister, Iman, Priest, Talmudic scholar, whatever. Yet here we see evidence that more than one billion people believe that their imans know precisely what the Prophet and Allah want and that they are willing to attack foreign embassies and kill each other accidentally and anyone else willfully.
People ask where are the voices of Muslim discontent? Where are the moderates? What is a moderate Muslim? Can there be any moderation when the word Islam means submission? Can there be any moderation when the Koran is the word of God breathed directly through his messneger, Mohammad? Can any Muslim in the world actually separate their "church" from their "state" or are ultimately going to be faced with the application of sharia law throughout the entirety of the Muslim world, a theocratic society, and more importantly, a theocracy that is of the people, by the people and for the people, people who are Muslims. For Muslims, the freedom to choose is itself the evil--the evil that one practices, that is forgiveable, the freedom to choose, the freedom that we don't even think about anymore when we live our lives according to our interests, that is what the Muslim world abhors. They don't want to choose, they're not interested in personal choices for themselves. They have submitted. There will is the will of Allah. Allah Akbar! God is truly great, but who are we to know God? Bin Laden and his cohorts believe that they are freedom fighters, that they are not only fighting a strategic war to undermine our power, but they are fighting to free the Muslim peoples of the world so that they can live, freely, having submitted to Allah in heaven and the iman of Earth. For them, there is state and no individual, there is only the umma, and Allah gave Mohammad the word and Mohammad gave Islam its fundamental form of government to this day: theocracy.
How does one battle a theocracy? More importantly, when do we recognize that Huntington was not only right, but that he had no idea just how right he was? When? After Hitler invaded Poland in August, the elites began to call World War II, the "false war". England and France had both declared war on Germany, yet the Wehrmacht and the divisions of Panzers and Tigers sat still, the Maginot line untouched, Britain's fleet unattacked. A few skirmishes here and there, but nothing sizeable. Nothing one would call World War II. We have been engaged in a longer version of the false war since September 11, 2001 and something's gotta give. Civilizational tensions are just like the fault lines of the continents: convergence zones are under tremendous pressure, and when the plates slip, the resulting energy does things like shake the planet of it's axis and alter our orbit. The friction between the umma, the community of Muslims who have submitted their personal autonomy for a religion that undermines their very humanity by making women second class citizens, by making choice a word that doesn't exist, for choice is to sin as the West is to choice--they see our choice, our freedom to choose and they resent it. They hate that we have the freedom to choose whatever we want, at the same time their religion tells them that they ought to see themselves as above that freedom, that freedom is a distraction from the pursuit of that which I'm telling is more important: Allah. Submit and all your troubles will just fade away. Submit you fools and we won't have to cut off your head. Submit infidel while there is still time.
But we still haven't answered the question: how we do we fight a religiously oriented society that has no other culture. Sure, there are groups of people who have withstood the harsher interpretations of Islam, the Kurds, for the most part the Turks, but these are people for whom Islam was merely the next religion of the newest conquerors. The fact that the next conquerors converted to Islam is telling though...Islam obscures all other aspects of culture. It supplants culture just as the federal government in the United States has supplanted the father in the black community. And look what that has wrought: the destruction of the black family, the ghettoization of black culture, the radicalization of hip-hop (Kanye West) and people who think they are entitled to something. Just like Islam. Muslims believe that they are entitled to what the West has to offer but that they don't have also accept modernity's values: the rule of law, sexual equality, market economies, separation of church and state, constitutional limited governments--oh no, they can enjoy KFC and Pizza Hut but not the benefits of the Enlightenment.
There is only way to fight a theocracy: destroy the theocracy, and to do so, we must begin the long demographic fight of conversion. Although I myself am not a practioner of religion, one must accept that religion is a potent political force, witness the reaction of both the cartoons and the Port deal: faith is a huge motivator. And while I may disagree with the events of Christianity, the teachings of Christ, the Golden Rule, the Beautitudes, the desire to help one another, those are ethical morays that I can agree to participate in because they have a deeper truth beyond whether or not Jesus was the son of God. I believe that to say God is to say but a word and what is word? Certainly it wouldn't help if our government was more ferverntly supportive of Christian missionaries in the Muslim world, forcing governments such as Saudi Arabia to allow Christianity to be practiced there, realizing along the way that Islam is America's fastest growing religion. It's either that or convince the Sunnis and Shiites to become Sufis, because nobody has ever heard of Sufi terrorist, they'd rather have you over for tea and hashish then a fight against the West.
And if that doesn't work, then the only option that remains is to defeat them, defeat them militarily, defeat them politically, defeat them humanitarianly, socially, and of course, religiously.

we only swim in the current..

Something from the Reimagined Battlestar Galactica, which totally kicks ass. And I'm totally in love with the entire idea of the series because it challenges all of my conventional, yes my conventional notions about science fiction. For me, Star Trek was once the opiate of sci-fi. But now, after having probably absorbed more Trek than is healthy for the average individual, and after having watched Trekkies and Trekkies 2, I have concluded that ultimately, no matter the popularity of Trek and the immense passion for which Trekkies and Trekkers have for the ideals of the Federation, I have concluded, that really, Star Trek sucks.
It sucks because all of the characters aren't people that you and I can relate with. They aren't colleagues who have that annoying habit of smacking their gum while they talk to you, or tapping their pens against their noses, or aren't crunching down a bag of cheese doodles every ten minutes, or whatever; in other words they aren't like anyone I know. For that matter, knowing what I know about people living three hundred years ago, they aren't all that dissimilar from you or I. Edmund Burke or Roger Bacon or John Locke or even Newton, despite all of his "issues" (most of which indicate that Newton was what we consider autistic). Even if every bit of the possibilities promised by the Singularity comes true (if you haven't been paying attention to the Sphere lately, then you'll know there's a rather torried undercurrent of it's own going on in which the theists are ridiculing the Singularitarians, calling the Singularity "rapture of the nerds"; it's pretty funny) then we will still have human problems that we have today in three hundred years. It's very likely that the Singularitarians alive today will be among those still having those problems three hundred years from now. Just because we can process information faster doesn't mean that we won't still have disagreements, moral qualms, ethical considerations, and the like, it just means that we'll have them faster, and with improved storage capacity, we will be able to reach faster conclusions, because we'll be able to play upon our interior mental landscape the exact memory that we recorded that particular day of that particular event and compare it to the one we are currently experiencing.
Again, we only swim in the current. Most of the time we are unaware that we part of the stream, that all that we are emanates from it and without the stream we are nothing. What fascinates me right now is the wholeness of things. There is no keyboard. There is only this imagined tactile space upon which I communicate my thoughts to you. I forget about the keyboard--I am only the words that are now on the screen and they are coming to you as fast as I can type them. Imagine how many words I could produce for you if all I had to do was will my mind to type--what thoughts, experiences, novels, music, what could I do if I had the ability to transcribe mind to matter immediately. If reality is truly only the intersection of my consciousness and extrusions from the substrate, the implicate matter of the universe, then there is nothing that is not part of the entirety. In other words, the separateness, the divisive need to categorize, label, name, analyze independently, the entire way that our minds have been trained to deal with "reality" only exacerbates the experience that most of feel that we somehow alone, that regardless of ones ontological and tautological views of the universe, we are ultimately limited by the reality that to truly experience God is an impossibility. To know infinity, to stare back at it and still not realize, really realize how truly tiny we are. How insignificant. How more likes electrons we are than thinking individuals and how little protection we have against the universe. How easy it would be for one really dedicated group of individuals to wipe out most of the human race. And how lackadaisical we all are, as the Left rants and raves about the next wooden horse that they have rolled into the square, this time the NSA "scandal." I don't think there's a Leftist alive today who would be able to relate to Bismarck or Metternich or even Truman--Democrats don't have strategy, they have strategery, and again it's a shame, because no amount of infighting within the Gop will do what a disciplined opposition party could do in terms of forcing the Gored on Porkers to come to terms with the fact that there are right now a substantial number of people within the conservative movement who aren't quite sure yet what we are going to do in 2006.
My feet are freezing. Of course I'm not wearing any socks, but Socrates used to stand in the snow barefoot. I'm going to go eat some dinner. Another moment in the current, but it's only carrying me forward. I want to be able to stand on the shore and watch the current move.