04.30.06
Posted in Politics, Science at 9:55 pm by Moody
If you base it on the plurality, Al Gore should have won the election and become our next president, and G.W. Bush should have gone on his failure’s way without harming the nation. Instead, of course, we have been mistreated by more than a term’s worth of the Texas playboy’s non-stop foolishness, his social and linguistic gaffes, his simpleton’s peevishness and pseudo-messianic chutzpah. Science has been all but blacklisted, the so-called Christian religion has been held up as a governmental foundation, and we’ve found ourselves plunged into a war with Iraq on grounds that, even if you believe that the president and his administration are sincere, are faulted and shaky. As we near 2,500 U.S. dead in Iraq, as religious zealots continue to attempt to gain control of the government, as scientists continue to struggle against a nation largely ignorant of and often hostile to science’s findings, you have to ask yourself: what would it have been like if Al Gore had, based on the plurality and not upon the Electoral College (I will not here discuss the racial issues surrounding the Electoral College, but you might want to know that they’re there), — what if, I ask, Al Gore had won?
Ponder that for a bit.
And now turn your attention to what Gore has done since the election. In particular, turn your attention to his movie, An Inconvenient Truth (see the trailer here), opening in select theaters on May 24th. It is a movie about global warming, about what we as a society are doing to the environment, and about the very real, long-term consequences of our short-sighted behavior. Kottke has a lot to say about the movie, and I recommend reading his post. At the risk of looking like a copycat, I have to say that I, too, could not improve upon the words of David Remnick of the New Yorker, who said:
It is, to be perfectly honest (and there is no way of getting around this), a documentary film about a possibly retired politician giving a slide show about the dangers of melting ice sheets and rising sea levels. It has a few lapses of mise en scène. Sometimes we see Gore gravely talking on his cell phone—or gravely staring out an airplane window, or gravely tapping away on his laptop in a lonely hotel room—for a little longer than is absolutely necessary. And yet, as a means of education, “An Inconvenient Truth†is a brilliantly lucid, often riveting attempt to warn Americans off our hellbent path to global suicide. “An Inconvenient Truth†is not the most entertaining film of the year. But it might be the most important.
There are plenty of attacks on both Al Gore’s position on global warming and climatologists’ findings (witness the stark divide in opinions summoned by a relevant Google search). Indeed, it appears that our fearless leader may well have given his personal blessing to Michael Crichton’s crackpot point of view (see Crichton’s wingnut potboiler State of Fear). However, it’s Al Gore’s position that is backed by legitimate science and real findings. The questions that are still on the table are being assiduously researched, but the basic findings regarding global warming are not in doubt any more than the basic fact of evolution is. That is to say, only naïve, uneducated, or genuinely foolish people think that these are in question as basic premises upon which current theories are being debated by the highly educated scientific community.
Thus Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth arrives on the scene ready to both stir and confront a controversy that is, in reality, a controversy formed of spin and misunderstanding and not a genuine controversy. And so, too, it arrives on the scene in need of a supportive audience. It needs an audience who will talk about it, recommend it, share what they’ve learned from it and promote it’s message to a general American public for whom such movies are usually eschewed in favor of more “entertaining” fare, such as The Day After Tomorrow, the danger of which lies in the commonly faulty hyperbole and slipshod treatments such fare offers an audience. Realistically, a Crichton film, however faulty and politically motivated, will draw a larger audience so long as the general public is unsure of the truth, because a Crichton film will be more “exciting” for a general audience soaked in and blinded by so-called “fair and balanced” reporting that fails to shut out misleading, ill-informed or genuinely deceptive “points of view”. Al Gore’s movie deserves all the help it can get. I hope that you will consider lending your support to it. I hope you will help it reach the eyes and ears of those who, in large enough numbers, could change the world for the better.
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Posted in Politics, Things on the Web at 2:28 pm by Moody
Saving the Internet
Yes, it’s that time again: it’s time to save the Internet from nefarious schemers (most of them Republicans) and their rotten plots (most of them serving giant businesses) to take over the last, great, free (as in freedom, not beer) medium. But before you complete the eye-roll you just started, you might want to consider exactly what’s up this time around, because this time the threat looks pretty serious. We’re not talking about email postage stamps, all right?
According to the folks over at MoveOn.org,
Congress is now pushing a law that would end the free and open Internet as we know it. Internet providers like AT&T and Verizon are lobbying Congress hard to gut Network Neutrality, the Internet’s First Amendment. Net Neutrality prevents AT&T from choosing which websites open most easily for you based on which site pays AT&T more. So Amazon doesn’t have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to work more properly on your computer.
In an email I received from MoveOn, they informed me that my representative, Hilda Solis, stood up for Network Neutrality “every step of the way”, and they encouraged me to blog about it. So I am. Kudos to her and all the others who stood up and voted for me and you and our rights. Apologies to those of you whose scoundrelly reps attempted unceremoniously to bend you over and spank you….
Anyway, I recognize an important issue when I see one, and this one has the potential to impact all users of the ‘Net. Like much of US policy, it starts here but its effects won’t stay here, because people nearly the whole world over access servers right here in the United States. So this could become everybody’s problem in future, given the size and power of the corporations interested in controlling the ‘Net for profit.
If you’d like to see how your representative voted on the Markey Amendment (which “[contains] enforceable Net Neutrality provisions”) and the COPE act (”the Communications Opportunity Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006, or the COPE Act for short — which marks a dismal overhaul to federal laws concerning media, internet, and telephones in the United States” [source]), the Save the Internet.com Coalition has provided a page that tallies the vote counts for both. The results of the first round were not pretty, and split along partisan lines as you might expect, with Dems for protecting the Internet and Repubs for selling our souls, one ‘Net connection at a time. But the fight is not over.
Please — I urge you to get involved. Understand what the threats could be, learn if your representative is on the committee, sign the MoveOn Petition.
More resources for you to peruse are:
- Statement: SavetheInternet.com Coalition (MoveOn, Gun Owners of America, etc.) after yesterday’s vote.
- Article: “Panel Vote Shows Rift Over ‘Net Neutrality’” Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2006.
- COPE: All about the nasty little Communications Opportunity Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006.
Don’t let corporations gain control of the Internet. Don’t let your government ignore you and sell you out. Don’t just sit there: blog, concerned ‘netizen, blog!
Thank you.
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04.28.06
Posted in Personal at 7:39 pm by Moody
There in your limousine of indifference, ensconced in the deep, plush seat in the back, you pretend to care. It’s an effort that rather tires you, and one that you are less and less convinced you’ve any reason to make. Nowadays, that old religious notion of “being aware of your fellow man” — the one trotted out on Sundays or on occasions when someone needed to feel pious, or maybe even was actually pious — has become, conveniently, “being on the lookout for him”. It’s the difference between “looking out” for a loved one and “looking out” for falling rocks. A so-called smile, one as self-centered as a black hole and sharing many of the same frightful properties, slides up your usually somewhat slack face like the sort of disease that causes a sudden rigor in otherwise healthy people, momentarily rendering your usually slack countenance nearly mawkish in its demeanor (were such an illusion not so easily overcome by the permanently etched lines of your face’s usual expression of lazy sarcasm and bourgeois distaste for the world “out there”). Things are going well for you and your kind, and, almost soon enough, you’ll finally be able to drop the whole “caring” pretense, which for so long has led you into any number of uncomfortable situations involving “sympathy” and the morality of “good people everywhere”… and, you think, forcing the smile to swell like an infected wound, good riddance to that crap!
Read the rest of this entry »
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04.24.06
Posted in Mine, Personal, Poetry at 6:57 pm by Moody
i.
From those two hands wring silence, iron wrought,
Mold it as clay, as if by willing dream,
And lay it there upon a page. There, caught,
Pinned and framed, ready for the book's close seam,
What is it you have found? A nightingale?
A frog? an imp? a rose imperious?
Have you a tiger by her paper tail? --
How sweetly disappoints the quietus.
Nor could you (though so you'd hope to have it)
Know aught of such silence in its habit.
ii.
The dark descends as stardust ocean bound,
To mix its dissolution with the salt
Of that rich blood, upon which we were found,
Thence to bear no word. Harder than basalt,
Sharper than diamonds, heavier than lead,
The darkness of the silence spreads its wings
And rises from the page. Not live, not dead;
Itself alone, the kin of other things.
Nor could you (though so you'd hope to have it)
Know aught of such silence in its habit.
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04.23.06
Posted in Personal at 4:35 pm by Moody
Allow me to write, to find something really inspiring and to commit it to a post. If I can just get some inspiration, I promise I’ll take the time to post the results here. I promise myself.
These last few weeks have been good, but of a goodness not so easily translated into fodder for a blog, and I realize clearly that this may be a good thing — yet how does it help me in my endeavor to write a decent post? These last few weeks have also cemented for me a trending from self-expression and toward some kind of personal silence. No dreams have I lately had; my life is all lived, at least in terms of conscious recollection, in the hours between waking up and falling asleep. Most of that time awake is boring.
Is it that there really is nothing to disturb me in my sleep? I’ve issues to disturb me, but for some reason they fail to penetrate beyond the waking hours of my day, or else I have become adept at “forgetting” them at the moment the jarring bell of the alarm clock abruptly calls me from their grip. I honestly do not know.
But I hate the banal normalcy I feel condemned to, even as I am more grateful than ever I could say for the love in my life. Something needs to happen, but I can’t imagine what it would be. Walking around Target, listening to metal, wearing nice clothes but feeling grubby, buying shaving gel, sugar, nuts, coffee, driving to Taco Bell for lunch…. Is that supposed to be my Sunday? No. There’s also playing The Kingdom of Loathing, which is certainly fun (I’m at Level 4 — Jiggy Grifter). There’s also reading The New Yorker. But tomorrow, I return to work.
It might help me if I were to stop seeking deeper acquaintance with any of my coworkers. The time I spend talking with any of them is, more often than not, wasted (regardless of whatever they get out of it). They are not interested in what I am interested in. Their interests are either kept from view or are not interesting to me. I’m wasting their time or they’re wasting mine. My frustration with the situation is weakening me. Discontentment can breed, can become a malaise, can consume mental and physical energy. Discontentment may turn into a wasting disease. How do I boost my immune system?
What’s happening to me?
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04.09.06
Posted in Politics at 1:16 pm by Moody
Back in mid-February I posted about a Gallup poll finding that “the American public [is] worried about Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and [views] the country as a threat to the United States”. I snarked about the issue of a potential war with Iran, pretty much indicating my belief that the situation is distressing, to say the least.
Well, PZ Myers is also quite worried, as should we all be, wingnut dismissal notwithstanding. Even if you don’t care to visit the linked post, do take a look at the article in today’s Washington Post, which says in part:
According to current and former officials, Pentagon and CIA planners have been exploring possible targets, such as the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan. Although a land invasion is not contemplated, military officers are weighing alternatives ranging from a limited airstrike aimed at key nuclear sites, to a more extensive bombing campaign designed to destroy an array of military and political targets.
We should be asking ourselves very seriously what such an attack would result in, what the worldwide consequences could be. Nobody (except Iran and its allies) wants Iran to have nukes, to be sure, but no sane person or country wants to strike at that particular hornets’ nest, either. Still, I don’t honestly believe that you and I have much we can do about this issue; the switches and levers of the “theater” of world politics are completely remote from our daily world. I think it’s important, however, that we pay attention to what’s going on, to what’s developing, however unpleasant it might be to do so, because, one way or another, it is bound to affect our lives by dint of its sheer enormity.
PZ Myers is right when he says, “If [Bush] does this, we are all going to have blood on our hands, and we are all going to be paying the price for generations”.
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04.08.06
Posted in Politics, Science at 1:27 pm by Moody
You may or may not have heard about Eric Pianka, he’s an apparently eccentric (self-described hermit and “desert rat”) professor of zoology (U of T, Austin) currently under attack for allegedly making some distressing statements about disease and the uncertain future of humanity. Specifically, at a lecture he gave before the Texas Academy of Sciences, he basically said that humans have overbred and are, as a consequence, inexorably sliding toward a global epidemic. He also indicated that, for a variety of reasons, an airborn strain of the ebola virus would be very effective at killing us humans… which is, of course, a long way from advocating that someone release just such a virus, or saying that it would make him happy. He has publicly stated that he meant no such thing, and would never advocate mass murder.
Yet, that is just what a number of people are saying Pianka said or meant. Forrest M. Mims III, editor of The Citizen Scientist and a creationist and the man who started the attack against Pianka, unsurprisingly goes so far as to spout the most abominable hyperbole, suggesting that we might “worry that a Pianka-worshipping former student might someday become a professional biologist or physician with access to the most deadly strains of viruses and bacteria” and attempt to let some super-disease loose on humanity. He has stirred up quite a few reactionaries, like fellow pompous blowhard Shawn Carlson, executive director at The Citizen Scientist. But fellow creationist William Dembski actually went so far as to call the Department of Homeland Security to report Pianka. It has been reported that Pianka is scheduled to be interviewed by the FBI.
Pianka, meanwhile, has been receiving a great deal of bad press, hate mail, even a death threat, despite the fact that he did not say what he was accused of saying. Defense for Pianka may be found over at Pharyngula, The Panda’s Thumb, The Anthropik Network, and numerous other places on the Web. But the damage has been done.
Such are the times we are living through, sadly.
The fact is, because of our large numbers, we human beings have put ourselves at enormous risk for a particularly virulent pandemic to sweep through our midst. We are also seeing the first fruits of global warming, a phenomenon that will see massive upheavals in our way of life within a very few generations. Pianka may be considered to be an alarmist, but I’d like to point out that alarms are what you want to have go off before the big bad takes you by surprise. Pianka is not spouting nonsense any more than scientists concerned with global warming are. There is a solid scientific basis for such concerns. Yet there are many other voices attempting to shout down people like Pianka. The answer to “Why?” is as complex and simple as human nature is. But voices like Mims’, Carlson’s and Dembski’s are easily identified for what they are: they are the voices of petty, myopic trolls with a political agenda and an axe to grind.
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04.04.06
Posted in Mine, Personal, Poetry at 8:35 am by Moody
They say that life `round here is tragicomic,
With a-bombs and aplomb and much sardonic;
It depends on point of view
(though these words i might just rue),
But much there is that simply says "moronic".
Of course I don't refer at all to you.
I know there isn't fuck-all one can do.
There's what we have, for what it's worth,
Like Queequeg's coffin was his berth,
And everyone should know that this is true.
Perhaps this is not pedagogical --
This consideration, ontological --
But it's something kin to biological
In all its dubious necessity.
And if you're thinking theologically
Then the answer will come pathologically
To shake your wide world ecologically --
If it should ever come to you at all.
For in lack there comes a certain sort of mirth
That grows with the diminishing of girth,
And though the truth is grim
And is careless as a whim,
Its laughter's prettier than tears at birth.
But thusly are our chances also slim --
The wind of fate's immune to our best trim.
We reap what we shall sow
As I'm fairly sure you know --
For it's blindness that the dark is set to limn...
It's blindness that the dark is set to limn.
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04.02.06
Posted in Music, Personal at 2:07 pm by Moody
The world is restless, unceasing in its motion, never still even in its longest moments of apparent stillness, and forever creating and raveling out patterns. Life is myriads on myriads of patterns, some so great as to be unknowable in their full extent, even when they are inferred by our meagre intuition from our personal experience of life. Put more simply, although we may know ourselves as existing along some threads of the web of life, we shall not ever see the whole web as it is.
Of late, I’ve not been able to talk of anything through the medium of a keyboard and Internet connection. My blog has been languishing for what seems to me like millions of years, drifting like a ghost ship or the space-bound fragment of a planet with a lone handprint on it. I’m not trying to be melodramatic, maybe just the tiniest bit poetic; these are simply the images that come to my mind to describe how it feels.
Though I’ve been reading a lot (mostly online), and working a lot, and Kisha and I have been sharing our lives with each other, my ability to string words together in a meaningful fashion, and the gumption and steadfastness to act on that ability, have been sorely lacking. Numerous times I’ve sat here and tried to write something, only to delete or abandon the result (if any). I honestly don’t know why this is the case. I suspect that it has something to do with my current job situation, especially as that relates to my debt situation. But I think I’d be less than totally forthcoming, if only to you, dear reader, if that was what I pinned my writer’s block to, because there is certainly more to it than money worries. There is, in fact, something existential to it, something of the existents-forhold ( the ‘condition of existence’). I’ve been caught balancing between two opposed points, and the strain of being so balanced has nonetheless become rooted in inertia. Perhaps it even grew from the inertia of just living day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, paycheck-to-paycheck.
All entirely unsatisfactory as any kind of real explanation, this. Perhaps it’s not writer’s block at all. Perhaps it’s that I have nothing, really, to say. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…. But let’s leave that at the quay for the time being. Let me, instead, address something more illustrative of the “opposed points” I mentioned.
Music, as ever, has been a major component of my daily life. What have I been listening to lately? What have I recently put on my iPod? Two recent additions spring handily to mind, which will also serve here as handy reviews for those so interested.
![[image]](http://verywide.net/blog/wp-content/images/misc_others/cannibalcorpse_kill.jpg "Cannibal Corpse: KILL")
A band that is no stranger to controversy and vehement disparagement over their awesomely graphic, ultra-violent, perverse lyrics, Cannibal Corpse are most parents’ nightmare. The cover artwork for the majority of their albums (done by Vince Locke) has been, in itself, frightful enough for many. Bob Dole went so far as to blame the band (along with two other groups) for contributing to the moral decay supposedly ruining America’s youth, and Germany banned outright the group’s first three albums, Eaten Back to Life, Butchered at Birth, and Tomb of the Mutilated (disallowing even the performance of any song from those albums). Many would assert that, thematically, Cannibal Corpse far exceed what would usually be called “going too far”.
Their newest release, simply titled KILL, is another exercise in high-speed hardcore metal mayhem, saturated with staccato bursts and prolonged growls of “cookie monster” vocals and replete with ear-splitting shrieks of demonic cacophony. It can but hardly be called music, honestly. The blistering pace almost never slows throughout, from the first track (”The Time to Kill Is Now “) to the last (”Infinite Misery”), and if you can catch any of the lyrics along the ride then you are sure to wonder how you’re going to get to sleep that night.
I love it.
![[image]](http://verywide.net/blog/wp-content/images/misc_others/cristinabranco_sensus.jpg "Cristina Branco: Sensus")
I also love the second recent addition, Cristina Branco’s Sensus, which is an album of beautifully sung and gorgeously played modern Portuguese fado. Recently interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered, she proves herself to be a shy, friendly, gifted artist and loving parent. Her voice is phenomenal, exhibiting a clarity and delicacy that are intimate and immediate. Sensus is a work of loving, passionate, sensuality, and Branco easily touches all those points whose presence makes us blush not with embarrassment but with anticipation and desire. If the music is the strawberry, she is the pure gourmet chocolate it is dipped in. Her work is not simply a dessert treat, however, it is nourishment for the yearning heart and energy for the mind.
I love it.
So what does that say about things? What does that say about where I stand? Oh, well. Whatever it says to you, what I know is that I am managing to live my life, and I’m doing better than I ever have in the most important ways.
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