from the Washington Post, 4 Nov 06:
"The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the 'alternative interrogation methods' that their captors used to get them to talk. The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national secrets and that their release--even to the detainee's own attorneys--'could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.'"
"You asked me once," said O'Brien, "what was in Room 101. I told you that you know the answer already. Everybody knows. The thing in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world."
Let us recap the story thus far:
1. The President reserves the right to jail, without due process of trial or even contact with attorneys, anyone in the world, including United States citizens (for example, Jose Padilla), whom he deems to be "enemy combatants."
2. The determination of who is and who is not an "enemy combatant" is soley the jurisdiction of the President, without appeal or judicial oversight. No evidence need be presented. The criteria upon which the President makes this determination are secret. The sources of the information are classified.
3. Even if contact with an attorney is approved, one may not communicate information about one's detention, though the conditions of the detention might themselves constitute a crime. Imagine that if you are picked up by the police and beaten, then try to tell an someone about the violence, you will be charged with revealing police department secrets, while the officers will remain unpunished.
We are at war with terrorism. We have always been at war with terrorism.
I never know when it's going to hit me--but today it did, while standing in line at a clothes store. It staggered me so bad that when I returned home I felt so drained I immediately launched into a 3 hour nap, not that I could afford the time, but I had nothing left. I drifted off into deep sleep, where I imagined myself driving up and down 680 and 24, trying in vain to find a particular rock outcrop.
In this case, the cause of my funk was an obese woman trying to purchase $211 in clothes. It's hard to find clothes when you're fat--I should know. I had just spent a half hour flipping through clothes I liked, but which were made for someone just a fraction of me. When you're fat like me there's not much choice; you look first not at the price or at the style, but at the size. I suppose most people first look for a style they like, then try to find a size that fits. But everything is reversed for the obese.
This woman had a lot of clothes. It had probably taken her a long time to find them. But as the cashier rang her up, he politely informed her that her card had been declined.
Ouch. Embarassment. I shifted on my feet and considered finding another register, but there were no others available. I tried to avert my gaze. A few more people came into the line. And then it hit.
I was overwhelmed with empathy for this woman. I considered, for a fleeting moment, paying for her clothes, but I am unsure how the gesture would have been interpreted. I felt myself transported from where I was standing into her, feeling her anger and humiliation. I know on an intellectual level that the brain can easily be stimulated into faux out-of-body experiences, and that these moments I have of extreme empathy are just a manifestation of some deeper psychological complex. I remember though, as a child, how it would feel to look at myself through someone else's eyes and to feel their thoughts and emotions. I suppose that this is one reason why I've always felt so disconnected from myself--sometimes I scarcely recognize my face in a mirror. Nor do I easily recognize the faces of those I know; perhaps this is some minor form of agnosia
Images of the woman flash back to me even now. There was a time when these images would be overwhelming to me, when I would literally crowd out every other thought in my mind thinking about this, over and over. Now I've learned to control this better.
America worships the skinny and the rich. Paris Hilton, then, is the apogee of everything American, and that's why I so frequently mention her. America has no place for the fat or poor. You find whatever clothes you can in the reject pile. America has devolved into the fascist Abercrombie & Fitch ideal--everyone is beautiful, white, skinny, and posed in overexposed black and white photos right out of a Leni Reifenstahl film. Those who don't fit this mold--off to the camps with them. This is what America has become.
Sometimes I wish I could not feel the empathy, that I could somehow block it out. My years of flirtation with conservative views were, I think, just an attempt to block out the feelings of the raging, howling sorrow of the world that crashes uncontrollably at me in every direction all day long. When I was at Berkeley, in order to walk to class I literally had to step over unconscious homeless and ignore beggars. Every day I would pretend that many of the people around me were not people. I had to close my heart to the suffering as a defense. How much easier it would be to see the misery as the fault of the homeless, blame the sick for their sickness; how much easier it is to blame the poor for being poor, even though in the back of my mind I have never forgotten that I was a welfare baby.
I suppose that these thoughts are what lead me to Steinbeck, and Hemingway, and Faulkner, and help me understand how their work defines the inevitable suffering of life. I've been listening to Hemingway on CD in my car this last week, and his raw humanity has touched me. If I were not an atheist I would be a Buddhist, for the Buddha teaches that all life is suffering, and the biggest cause of suffering is the false expectation that you will somehow be immune to the pain.
Thoughts on Matthew Barney:
I recently had the opportunity to see the new Matthew Barney exhibit at the SFMOMA. I had missed his previous Cremaster Cycle exhibit, much to my regret, and was excited that this had come to
This multimedia exhibit was called “Drawing Restraint,” and involved a feature length film and several rooms filled with plastic castings, with drawings and short videos. Barney’s theme again derives from his experience with sports: Restraint on muscles affect and shapes them. Exercise transforms the body. And as always, Barney uses his body directly as part of the art.
At the opening Barney climbed up the 100+ foot atrium at SFMOMA, 
using a climbing rope and clipping himself on anchors along the wall. He climbed underneath a walkway and hanging suspended by the rope, began to draw on a high wall. He has done an original drawing in a similar way at each Restraint exhibition. This climbing also reminded me of the five levels of climbing from Cremaster 3, where Barney also employed a harness and climbing equipment as he scaled levels in the Guggenheim.
One of his works echoed the idea of drawing with encumbrance. He combined several heavy free weight plates with a pen, then evidently tried to make a drawing by pushing the weights.
The theme of transformation was echoed in a sculpture of ambergris. Ambergris is regurgitated Sperm whale digestive material. It is thought that it may help passage of hard squid skeletons out of the whale. Ambergris is highly prized in the perfume industry; in fact, beachcombers can expect to reap about $8000 per pound of the rare substance.
Ambergris must remain at sea for approximately a decade to be valuable. During this time it loses its initial fecal odor and develops a sweet fragrance. So Barney’s theme of transformation is echoed in a huge, 20 foot+ sculpture of faux ambergris using glued squid shells. This sculpture also plays a role in the film Restraint 9.
No Matthew Barney exhibit would be complete without something made with petroleum jelly. In this case, Barney filled an enormous mold with petroleum jelly and allowed it to settle once solidified. The resulting shape was then cast in white plastic. The textures and fractures on this were very interesting.
The Japanese whaling ship featured in the film is the Nisshin Maru, which in 1999 was involved in a collision with a Greenpeace vessel. This event is mentioned in one of the rare moments of dialogue in Barney’s film, in which a member of the crew discusses the mark (both literal and figurative) left by the collision. The collision can therefore be seen as itself a kind of transformative event, altering the shape of the boat and bringing to worldwide attention in a dramatic way the fact that the Japanese still practice whaling, an unnecessary and barbaric fact that should be a source of great shame to the Japanese naton.
Barney chooses not to address the whaling issue. However, as the film progresses The Field sculpture dissolves on the deck of the Nisshin Maru, looking remarkably like a whale being cut apart by flensing knifes. Flensing also takes place in the scene between Barney and his wife Björk.
Barney and Björk arrive on the ship separately, and are immediately cleaned in preparation for a tea ceremony; Barney’s scraggly beard is shaven and Björk is bathed, and they are each dressed in elaborate costumes, transforming them. Following the ceremony, they embrace and lovingly cut each other with flensing knives until they are transformed into whales. Indeed, this very act is happening on a whaling ship which transforms whales into oil—much like the petroleum jelly that gradually fills the room until Barney and Björk are swimming in it.
In sum, this was a very thought-provoking exhibition by that most rare and unique of persons: An important contemporary artist.
ron jeremy (runner0555@yahoo.com
Dude... how long does it take to put some scan trons through the machine and read the short answer questions. all my other teachers had my grades in yesterday! you said they would be in on Monday. it's Tuesday night and there are no grades. get off your fat ass and put in the goddamn grades!!! Jesus Christ. if you stopped drinking sodas and slurpies, maybe you would be able to see your dick without having to look in the mirror. do your job and submit the fucking grades!
_____
Well. Ironic--considering that I had alread turned in grades. :)
In response, I think of the famous Chris Rock Horoscope bit: "Taurus...you're gonna die. Virgo ... you're gonna die. Gemini... you're gonna die _twice_." If you're this concerned about a grade, you didn't pass. If you need to know this bad, you flunked.
Now the real Ron Jeremy has an MA in Special Education. This means he's taken and passed a lot of classes. And I'm quite sure that the Hedgehog was never quite that rude to any of his instructors. :)
A recent article, deeply buried, said:
In a letter released Tuesday to The Associated Press, the Corps' chief engineer in Sacramento attributed the decision to local and federal studies that have unearthed levee vulnerabilities.
"Based on this information, we can no longer support our original position regarding certification of the levee system surrounding the Natomas area," wrote Thomas E. Trainer, chief of the engineering division.
The letter was forwarded to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which certified the Natomas levees in light of the Corps' 1998 finding the levees provided 100-year flood protection.
The certification led to skyrocketing development of the Natomas area — a section of the state capital north of downtown that flood experts now say could be submerged by at least 13 feet of water if the levees failed.
An area with 100-year protection has a one chance in 100 of flooding in any given year.
If Natomas were to lose its 100-year designation, flood insurance would become mandatory for people with federally insured mortgages, insurance rates would increase, and building restrictions could be implemented.
But local officials described the Corps letter as an expected formality, which they have been told should not change FEMA's current assessment of Natomas.
That's because the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency, which commissioned a March study that first identified the gapping weaknesses in the levees, has already begun a $370 million project to upgrade the system to 200-year flood protection. That is twice the protection required by FEMA.
"We're not going to wait for FEMA to act, we're got to act to resolve this," said Pete Ghelfi, director of engineering for the Sacramento flood agency.
He said construction should begin next year to fortify the Natomas levees over the next five years.
In total, 20 of the 26 miles of levees surrounding Natomas need some kind of work, including erosion protection, deeper walls to prevent seepage and greater height to withstand bigger floods.
FEMA spokeswoman Kim Walz confirmed that the agency would not re-evaluate the Natomas area if Sacramento officials fix the levee problem.
Jeffrey Mount, a professor at the University of California, Davis, said local planners now face a real decision about whether to temporarily curb construction behind levees that will not be strengthened for another five years.
______________Jeff Mount is a great geologist, who has done a lot of work in rocks near and dear to my heart (the White Mountains and the Poleta Formation, in particular). He was also fired from a flood advisory position by Schwarzenegger for daring to suggest that Sacramento could face a Katrina-like disaster because of its weak levees.
Now we see the Army Corps retreated, trying to shift blame away from itself before all hell breaks loose. Remember that the levees in the Delta are even more dangerous; a breach in them will flood the California Aqueduct, and cause SoCal to lose half its water. No one wants to talk much about this, no one wants to spend the money now to shore up the weak levees.
I find it grimly funny that the Natomas area of Sacramento, built in such a bad place only because of the assurances of the Corps, now finds itself abandonned and subject to increased mandatory flood insurance. Could this get any worse? Yes--when the levees fail.
A student writes (in text exactly as I received it):
And about your tests. I think we should be aloud to bring in a note card of some type. There are way to many weird definitions to remember. All this information is really just going to be to memorize for the test and then brain dump. We just want to fur fill a science requirement. We don't want to devote our lives to rocks.”
Because this missive expresses concerns that many students have, although do not articulate to me, let me respond issue by issue.
> That is going to cost 40 dollars for gas, 3 dollars for toll
Some students have this idea that tuition is the only cost of going to college. I don’t know who told them this idea, but in my experience the tuition is about half of the accrued expenditures of going to college.
> time spent off work
More and more colleges are changing their schedules to allow gaps of hours between classes, stretching the classes out over the course of the entire day, in order to prevent students from going to part-time jobs. These colleges find that students who are also working are distracted from their studies and achieve poorer grades.
> a waste of a weekend
Or was it just one day?
> We have to do a write up on top of that?
You will be hard pressed to find a science course at a 4-year school that does not require a write-up in order to get credit for a field trip. And as this class is required to be equivalent of a university course in order to qualify for transferablility, I feel I should follow this standard.
> And Why are the Field trips so far away? There are rocks everywhere!
Of all the comments in this email, this is the one that get to me the most. It reminds me of the biology instructors who, when arguing for splitting up funds between bio and geology, say that they should get more money because “You can just go pick up a rock anywhere.”
I really feel like I’m not getting through to a person who thinks this. But I’ve come to expect that with some minds there is only so much I can do to reach them.
> There are way to many weird definitions to remember
Yes, indeed. If you already knew the vocabulary, then there wouldn’t be any challenge to the class, would there?
> All this information is really just going to be to memorize for the test and then brain dump.
I know what you mean. The analogy I always made when I was a student was to shitting. You eat all this food, digest it a bit, trying to extract something useful from it, then in one cataclysmic moment, you blow it all out, using the paper of the final test as toilet paper. Of course, this is hardly an original thought; students have probably been noting the brain dump as long as there have been universities.
> We don't want to devote our lives to rocks
Is one field trip a lifelong devotion to rocks? And why not, anyway? :)
In my dream my parents live in an enlarged, vertical version of their real house, with an ornate rococo roof, replete with gables and terraces. And scampering around on this roof I see a small humanoid. It pounces with Gollum-like ease over the roof, and as it rushes toward me, screeching, I see that it does indeed resemble Gollum, although the face looks like Macaulay Culkin with large eyes.
I try to alert my father to this thing I have seen, but no matter how many times I explain it, he refuses to believe it. There are other people in the house, however, and they are curious. They open windows and peer out trying to see this monster.
It is then that I understand the monster had planned this all along. As people lean out to look, a cold, muscular hand reaches from above and yanks them headfirst out the window. They die as they hit the ground far below.
As I pass a window, desperately trying to shut it, I find myself face to face with this monster, which growls at me between yellowed fangs. I awake screaming.
Normally, the quality of what passes as "news" on Fox News is such an affront to journalism, good taste, and a fact-based perspective on the world that criticizing Fox News becomes an exercise in arguing against a lunatic. A good rule of thumb: Don't argue with a fool, because people won't know the difference.
However, recently John Gibson, one of the Fox talking heads, made a statement that bears examination.
On 11 May 2006, as part of his show The Big Picture, John Gibson made the following pronouncement, in response to demographic data showing high birth rates among Hispanics:
"By far, the greatest number [of children under five] are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic. To put it bluntly, we need more babies."
When I studied eugenics (back in another life, when I was a history major at Cal) I came across innumerable such statements expressing white fear in the early twentieth century of a creeping "ethnic" population takeover. This fear was, in part, responsible for atrocities such as California's forced sterilization programs. California's aggressive sterilization of those "unfit" to breed in the early twentieth century was later used as a model for Nazi sterilization efforts, which were planned on a scale that would allow the Nazis to use the entire population of the Soviet Union as slaves, yet make that generation the last generation of Soviets, because these workers would be sterilized en masse.
Here's another quote:
"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind."
This isn't from some raving Fox News talking head, but from the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Oliver Holmes, writing in the infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell decision.
I had thought that such pseudoscientific nonsense had long since passed into the region where only ignorant rednecks espoused such views as they denied the Holocaust, argued that mercury in their fillings was poisoning them, and feared the Trilateral Commission.
Sadly, I now see, eugenic views have crept back into the public discourse, and hardly a peep of protest is heard. Score: Fox News 1, America 0.
I dreamt I was in a Matthew Barney movie, the sculptor who works in giant blobs of Vaseline.
I was touring a college campus, being introduced to the rooms where I would teach. One was a giant amphitheatre, such as the ones at
Then as I tried to leave, I found it impossible. Stairways turned me back into the auditorium. I waited for elevators, but they were too small for me to fit in. Finally I emerged o the outside, where it was not night. As people milled about, I saw strange flashes. I looked at a homeless man on the ground in a sleeping bag, and FLASH! I saw that he was some sort of grotesque demon.
This happened on the sidewalk too. As I wandered around, FLASH, and the people would reveal themselves as monsters.
Far, far away from the classroom, on the summit of a grassy hill, was a set of elevators that would take me to another part of the campus. I was very angry at having to walk through mud and grass just to get to where I was going.
A constant feeling throughout this dream was the Americans with Disabilities Act, and my anger that this campus was not built to
I had an argument in a hallway with a student about gangs. I told her she need not worry about minor street gangs, as they were small time. I suggested that she should instead be worried about gangs such as the IRS, because they had so much more power.
As I wandered, I found myself swimming, then diving into mucky, distasteful water. I saw a car submerged. It looked old, grown over with weeds, as if it bad been there a long time. Yet there was pounding coming from inside the car, as if someone were trapped there.
FLASH—I would see a man and a woman making love, then FLASH! I saw that it was actually a demon, a small blue demon, forcing himself into her mouth. She could not see what I saw.
Blobs of Vaseline became more and more part of the landscape. Soon I was wading through Vaseline as I solidified. I sought escape, but there were only the elevators that led no where.
