“If you meet The Buddha on the road, kill him.”

Posted on November 3, 2015 by ann li-summers

Israeli drone

By ann summers

All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else. -The Buddha

Marx: “constant revolutionizing of production uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all precious ones. all fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Unlike the Marshall Berman book, the reality of human conflict today is not so much about modernism as it is about modernizing in the pre-industrial context, the civilizing and evolving, uneven yet parallel, paths from primitive, pre-modern communism through feudal modes of production, many of which still operate today whether the American Taliban or their calabash cousins in South Central Asia. The Koch Brothers, as corporate despots, are no different in their ideological commitments to devoting their wealth to an Anti-Communist Christianity that memorializes a martyr like John Birch and promotes inequality and suffering from uneven economic development.

It is not a stretch to compare sacralized warfare and sectarian violence where today’s Oath Keepers see themselves as displaced Zen-samurai or Ronin of the Tokugawa Era. For example the original film The 47 Ronin directed by Kenji Mizoguchi is released near to the date of the Pearl Harbor attack. and the 1998 film of the same name by John Frankenheimer with script by David Mamet refers directly to the same historical event. ” The popularity of the tale grew during the Meiji era of Japanese history, in which Japan underwent modernization, and the legend became subsumed within discourses of national heritage and identity.”

The connection or family resemblance of feudal despotism and a repressive political state apparatus that attempts to control reproductive rights or democratic representation is now mobilized by ideology and ideological institutions such as Religions, Governments, and Mass Media and are mobilized much like Pat Buchanan’s meme of a Culture War. Its bastardization into a variety of discourses about race, class, and gender occupy much of the time and space of the Web.

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Posted in Afghanistan, Aviation, Buddhism, Capitalism, China, CIA, Communism, Countries, Foreign Policy, George W. Bush, History, information Technology, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libertarians, Media, Philosophy, Political Science, Religion, Socialism, Terrorism, United States, US Army, US Military, USAF, USMC, USN, Vietnam, War, War on "Terror", World History | Tagged | Comments Off on “If you meet The Buddha on the road, kill him.”

“I was drinking in thoughts of the Fanta Girl when the painting drew me in”

Posted on November 2, 2015 by ann li-summers

You break it, you’ve bought it

 By ann summers


Unlike delusional folks who attack artworks for unimaginable reasons, evidently this budding art historian felt the image lacked punch or Chinoiserie, and decided to violate the picture plane among other museum rules. Or had he decided that the connoisseurship was faulty and that to protest this failure of authenticity and scholarship, he decided to test the sublime itself in an academic act of 21st Century performative transgression. An empirical example of new restoration processes: head-butting to test for Rococo hardness. This young follower of the Ash-Can School has a future in selling rock-crushers, or maybe just soda can recycling machines.

A 12-year-old boy had the worst museum visit ever this past Sunday, at Taipei’s Huashan 1914 Creative Park. The boy tripped and punched a Paolo Porpora painting valued at $1.5 million as he was trying to keep his balance.

According to Focus Taiwan, the boy was with a guided tour group visiting the exhibition “The Face of Leonardo, Images of a Genius,” which gathers 55 paintings by key artists starting from the Italian Renaissance and going up to the 20th century.

The unfortunate incident was captured by CCTV and the footage first shows the teenager, who is holding a soft drink, admiring the Baroque masterpiece with the rest of the group.

Then, as he follows the group towards the next artwork, the boy looks momentarily back to something or someone outside the camera, loses his balance as he bumps against the platform and rope which are meant to protect the artwork, and hits the paintings as he falls, smashing the beverage container against it.

Posted in Art, Insurance, Media | 1 Comment

Word Cloud: THRALL

Posted on October 30, 2015 by wordcloud9

Word Cloud Resized

by Nona Blyth Cloud

Witches.

In cultures around the world, stories are told of women who have some extraordinary power: the gift of foretelling the future; of casting spells to alter reality; of mysteriously healing the sick; of cursing their enemies and their enemies’ descendants; or bending men to their will through sexual enchantment.

They have been known by many names: Circe, Baba Yaga, Hecate, Medea, Morgan Le Fay, and countless others.

One of the very oldest witch stories comes from The Poetic Eddur, anglicized as Eddas. John Bruno Hare describes them as “the oral literature of Iceland, which were finally written down from 1000 to 1300 C.E. The Eddas are a primary source for our knowledge of ancient Norse pagan beliefs.”

The Eddas lore has inspired music from Wagner to Jethro Tull, visual art from W. G. Collingwood to Marvel Comics, and the writings of Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, and Neil Gaiman.

As with any ancient text, the Eddas are open to many interpretations. I have pieced this reasonable version together as suits my theme.

Odin_and the Völven_by_Lorenz Frølich

That most ancient witch, The Völva, who knew nine worlds before the present World Tree,Yggdrasil, sprouted from the ground, is the “she” who remembers the first war between the rival deities, the Æsir and the Vanir, of which the trial of Gullveig, “Gold-Brew,” is a triggering incident. Gullveig was tried as a witch in the High Hall of Odin, and sentenced to death. Three times they raised her, struck through on their spears, but she still lived, so then three times she was burned, yet still she lived.

After Gullveig’s ordeal, she traveled from place to place, and was known as Heidr, “Bright One” or “Of the Heath” (related to the word heathen – pagan – someone who worships outdoors in nature.)

This translation is by Henry Adams Bellows (1885 – 1939).

Völuspá – “The Vision of the Witch”

She remembers the first war in the world
When Gold-Brew was hoist on the spears
And in the High One´s hall they burned her
Three times they burned the three times born
Often, not seldom, but she still lives!
She was called Bright One when she came to the settlements
The greatly talented Carrier of the Wand
She performed magic, ecstatically she performed it
She knew how to cast spells
She was always loved by wicked women.

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Posted in Mythology, Poetry, Scotland, Word Cloud | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 15 Comments

neo-classical liberalism: an idea whose time has come….

Posted on October 29, 2015 by ann li-summers

Classical libertarianism, per Wikipedia, “…is a political philosophy that upholds liberty as its principal objective. Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and freedom of choice, emphasizing political freedom, voluntary association, and the primacy of individual judgment.”

By ann summers

What would a neo-classical libertarianism look like and could it resemble a neo-classical liberalism? Could some of us liberals, progressives, and democratic socialists be neoclassical libertarians(sic) since the use of state power for liberals and progressives is selective for many people in terms of consent and representation: a social safety net and the use of force (in all things, scale counts). This of course is in contrast to a RW conservatism so afraid of democracy that the US is a republic that is stood for by flags (as in the pledge of allegiance) and nativism rather than actions like compassion. Why else would they need to specify a “compassionate conservatism” implying one devoid of compassion.

If such a neologism works at all it is because the Left’s version of the use of state power to correct moral injustice is so clearly driven by democratic ideals of pluralism rather than the RW ideological mania over fetal personhood and fear of some imagined foreign Other by its principal agents: large capitalists and megalomaniacs. Those same RWNJs also seem to believe that suffrage was a bad idea and that apartheid wasn’t really given enough time.

Fracturing this dichotomous selectivity are those liberals who would demilitarize the police and disarm civilians and those who know that even in a just society at this moment in history, pathological hatred of race, class and gender can still breed. “Why can’t we all just get along” Or maybe we on the left are just Romantic “cock-eyed optimists”. Or just classical liberals. The issue is much like modernism, is neoclassicism a sequential, even stylistic category for time periods or taxonomies, or is it a way of thinking about our sense of a material world, conflicted by idealisms

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Posted in American History, Art, Capitalism, Conservatives, Economic Policy, Economics, Enlightenment, History, Industrial Revolution, Liberals, Libertarians, Media, Neoconservatives, Neoliberals, Philosophy, Political Science, Politics, Renaissance, Socialism, United States, World History | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Is a WOMAN a PERSON? The Answer You Get Depends on Who You Ask

Posted on October 27, 2015 by wordcloud9

Womens strike for equality 1970.sm_a

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

“Is a Woman a Person?”

The answer “Yes, of course,” may seem obvious, but it’s not so clear-cut in American law.

When a sitting Supreme Court Justice says that the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment shouldn’t be applied to women because that was not the original intention, then you know the issue hasn’t been settled for the estimated 193,983,384 female Americans, who comprise 50.8% of the U.S. population.

And that makes me, as one of those U.S. females, very unsettled.

In 2011, in the legal magazine California Lawyer, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said:

“In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don’t think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we’ve gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?

Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that. … But, you know, if indeed the current society has come to different views, that’s fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws. You don’t need a constitution to keep things up-to-date. All you need is a legislature and a ballot box. You don’t like the death penalty anymore, that’s fine. You want a right to abortion? There’s nothing in the Constitution about that. But that doesn’t mean you cannot prohibit it. Persuade your fellow citizens it’s a good idea and pass a law. That’s what democracy is all about. It’s not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.”

This is from a Supreme Court justice who says that the “religious beliefs” of for-profit corporations are more important than providing reproductive healthcare for their employees, even if the corporation’s “beliefs” about abortion and birth control have been completely debunked by medical science.

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Posted in American History, Canada, Reproductive Rights, SCOTUS, United States, Women's Rights | Tagged , , , | 38 Comments

Jeb! wants to move the Department of the Interior to the Interior, because beyond the Beltway no one can see your pants fall

Posted on October 26, 2015 by ann li-summers

By ann summers

Jeb! the decentralizer wants to move everything closer to where the Cliven Bundys can more easily get people off their lawns or ranches.

Make it a closer drive for lobbyists wanting the Grand Canyon mined. The Department of Commerce needs to be closer to the world headquarters of Walmart, and since you’ll probably have a “Florida White House” in the tradition of Nixon’s San Clemente “Western White House”, Reagan’s Santa Barbara Neverland, and Bush 43’s “Land-o-Reagan-loved-clearing-brush” in Crawford, Texas, The Jeb!-House should be in Orlando within sight of Fantasyland, just as the 1%’s porch should have the Grand Caymans more visible.

We should applaud this deregulating gravity model of states’ rights, as though phones and overnight air freight had yet to be invented, and how so much more efficient would it be to put the Bureau of Prisons at Gitmo, and BATFE closer to wherever George Zimmerman happens to be in Florida. Video-streamed, teleconferenced governance while driving in Google Car One – from “Beast Mode” to Jeb! Mode!

And put the Department of State on Air Force One because that’s where it’ll need to be moved considering the number of new hot spots that comes with GOP presidents and how smart the relocation of bureaucracy makes costs go down. If federalist diplomacy doesn’t get to Benghazi in 30 minutes, the first missile strike is free.

The former Florida governor says he supports “moving the Department of the Interior headquarters” from Washington “to a location closer to the lands it manages and the people it most affects, such as Denver, Salt Lake City or Reno. Historically, presidents export a Secretary of the Interior from the West to Washington. It is time to import the Department from Washington to the West.”

Bush also takes sharp aim at the Obama administration, charging that it “has increasingly attempted to grab state authority and constrain the acceptable uses of federal lands. This needs to be reversed. We can conserve our natural resources and create economic growth while avoiding the pitfalls of federal bureaucracy.”

Posted in American History, Conservatives | Tagged | 3 Comments

Facebook’s homeless Neoliberalism rather than the homeland for Neo of the Matrix

Posted on October 25, 2015 by ann li-summers
Work has become a means to stay alive rather than life being an opportunity to do work. Living, mere existence, has always been a necessary pre-condition for engaging in productive activity, but in capitalism it becomes the operative motive.



By ann summers

In the US, the public library is one of the many spaces used by the homeless as shelter especially in cold or inclement weather and there is a contradiction of trying to both accommodate that public and the need to eradicate homelessness in the entire public sphere, regardless of regional war, national border or environmental circumstance, of which the current migrant/refugee crisis is an example of how can we (not) work together in the capitalists’ knowledge economy. Is there a global networked economy of media violence without negotiable borders that is not, “fracturing itself from within so as to produce parallax splits between irreconcilable layers and tiers of existence.”

For many in such marginalized populations, homelessness is a mind of state rather than a state of mind. All too often media is the means to escape a material reality by substitutability rather than seeing such technology as a complement even if it is ideologically suspect.

Considered here are two examples of virtuality and capital in two boxes, both of a kind of basic material that we encounter everyday as packaging for storage or transport which gets transformed into either ad hoc shelter or as a cardboard media device holder transformed into the inversion of the pinhole camera and a carrying device for entertainment devices worn as Virtual Reality (VR) goggles or glasses. Acknowledged as the base activity upon which all this occurs is an entire globalized, proletarian economy to produce the technologies that also create the deskilling, unemployment, and exploitation of those forced onto the streets and where the struggles of race, class, and gender constantly reproduce themselves.

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Posted in Animation, Art, Economics, Graphic Arts, information Technology, Internet, Media, Neoliberals, Silicon Valley, Technology, United States | 5 Comments

Word Cloud: APPARITION

Posted on October 23, 2015 by wordcloud9

Word Cloud Resized

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Samhain or Samhuin (SAH-win or SOW-in – rhymes with cow) was the first day of the new year in the ancient Celtic calendar, the beginning of the “darker half” of the year. Samhain is Irish Gaelic. Samhuin is Scottish Gaelic.

Special bonfires were lit, for protection and cleansing. Samhain was believed to be a time when the veils between worlds thinned, so faerie folk came amongst humans, and the spirits of the dead could visit their earthly kin.

So there is a very long-standing tradition of ghosts and uncanny tales connected with what we now call Halloween.

My friends and I, at an age when we were too old for trick-or-treating, but too young for teen-aged boy-and-girl parties, would sit in a circle on the floor, all lights turned off and curtains drawn. We’d take turns telling the scariest ghost stories we could come up with – a single flashlight would be held by the storyteller, lighting her face so the story would be even spookier.

Hughes Mearns (1875–1965) wrote this poem in 1899 for his play, The Psyco-ed. It was inspired by reports of the ghost of a man haunting the stairs of a house in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada. Later, it became the lyrics for a song called I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There.

AntigonishStaircase

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door… (slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…

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Posted in Canada, Holidays, Poetry, United States, Word Cloud | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Histories of commons repeat themselves as tragedy and farce

Posted on October 19, 2015 by ann li-summers

By ann summers

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who watches the watchers) Juvenal

Recently, a US rancher with unfortunate racist and fascist tendencies came to the attention of US media with unfortunate consequences but an interesting discourse path. I won’t repeat those issues here except to note that the concerns on which this dispute hinged were issues of common-pool resources. Those are publicly owned assets used by that rancher under a contractual agreement to pay for those property rights to the tune of $1 million.

In this case the rancher refused on anachronistic ideological grounds to pay those fees with the contradictory premise that his citizenship beliefs were historically special and autonomously sovereign and therefore exempt from the obligations to his original contract. The Rancher was first lionized by conservative media as a hero resisting an “overreaching” oppressive federal state by privileging the authority of the local state but at this moment in the dispute and due to various public statements and further investigation is now seen as more of a pariah engaged in social banditry. The rancher was contesting issues of exclusion or exclusivity especially in terms of the right to claim rents owed for the contract with the Bureau of Land Management. As Ellickson (1991) has noted, much of the issues are less about land than they are about negotiation as constituitive communication or the social construction of rights.

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Posted in Capitalism, Countries, Democracy, Economic Policy, Economics, Fundamentalism, Government, Green, History, Jurisprudence, Law Enforcement, Legal Analysis, Local Government, Media, Police, Political Science, Politics, Religion, State Government, United States | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

His book should not have been the only Counterinsurgency text available for an entire post-Vietnam generation

Posted on October 18, 2015 by ann li-summers

By ann summers

Yet if predicting the future is a hopeless endeavor, learning from the past is not. The counterinsurgency books that Nagl studied do impart an important lesson. The goal the United States hopes to reach in Iraq — a successful counterinsurgency that does not drag on for years and does not involve a large amount of killing — has never been achieved by any army.
Professor Nagl’s War By Peter Maass New York Times Published: January 11, 2004


I am a big fan of John Nagl. He is the kind of citizen-soldier whose quality academic scholarship was subsidized like many in the upper echelons by our tax dollars, and the problem as always is throwing more resources at a problem that is like eating soup with a knife it only gets easier when it gets thicker. This is one of the lessons of the co-authored Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual which suggests that adaptation to the rapid shifting network alliances in governance partnerships ultimately determines success against insurgencies which is precisely why the US isn’t leaving Afghanistan until 2017, and that date only depending on who wins the White House.

It is still all about what the real mission was in either war: WMDs and defeating Al-Q and more importantly, not allowing a new insurgency to emerge on multiple fronts rather than screwing around investigating documents and emails. The problem remains a non-military one, since the US ability to effectively “service targets” seems as strong as ever. What counts and what seems to have been neglected as theory went to practice is that diplomacy and the governable safety of civilian populations got short shrift even up to this day or to some day in 2017.

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Posted in 2016 Election, 9-11, Afghanistan, American History, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, CIA, Countries, Foreign Policy, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Government, Government Propaganda, Imperialism, Iran, Iraq, Media, Neoconservatives, Neoliberals, NSA, Political Science, Politics, Presidents, Syria, Terrorism, US Army, US Military, USAF, USMC, USN, War | 3 Comments