The idol that is fear

We must make an idol of our fear, and call it god. The Seventh Seal Sendt fra Yahoo Mail på Android

Forecast

The forecast says blizzard

The forecast says earthquake

The forecast says mountains block the path

The forecast says floods

And yet the blizzard wears a nice hat

And yet the earthquake has ample savings

And yet the mountains enter long cars

And yet the floods have the police at their disposal

(B Brecht)

*

It's somewhat curious that the architects of  the s.c project for a new American century were very well versed in Lenin -- as if knowing or even appreciating the great masters of Marxism didn't give a direct (i.e. necessary) relation to a Stalinist programme.

Brecht would himself know intimately what it was like being persecuted by a party line. Before the failed putsch in Munich his name had been put on a list of people scheduled for incarceration. As you may know he famously fled Germany in the 1930s, lived in Denmark for a number of years, before taking refuge in the US, where he was marshalled before the Committee of Un-American activities during the McCarthy-regime.

Peace in Bosnia Herzegovina (Allen Ginsberg, 1993)

General Mother Teresa
Emperor Dalai Lama XIV
Chief of Staff Thich Nhat Hanh
Army Chaplain John Paul II

followed by the shades of Ghandi
Sakharov, Sartre & his uncle
Albert Schweitzer

went to the bombed out streets
talked to Moslem Bosnians in
the burnt out grocery stores

parlayed with Croatian & Serbian Generals & Parliament

asked them to quit shooting & firing
artillery from the mountainside

overlooking villages
emptied of grandmothers --

So now there was quiet -- a few fires
smoldered in back alleys

a few corpses stank in wet fields
-- But who owns these houses? The
cinema theatres with broken doors?

Who owns that grocery store, that City Hall,
that windowless school with broken
rooftiles?

Who owns these little apartments, now
all worshippers of Allah

pray in towns besieged 100 miles away
overcrowded in tenements & tents, with
UN portosans at the crossroads?

Who owns these abandoned alleys &
drugstores with shattered bottle shards over
the sidewalk & inside the door?

Who'll be the judge, attorney, file
legal briefs,

bankruptcy papers, affidavits of ownership,
deeds, old tax receipts?

Who'll council who lives where in the rubble,
who'll sleep in what brokenwalled hut

in the full moonlight when spring clouds
pass over the face
of the man in the moon at the end of May?

May 6, 1993, 3AM

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997),

poet, icon, prophet

it is the moral authority of abstinence over greed that keeps austerity alive as a viable alternative

(1) does decreasing government spending in times of Great Recession renew economic growth?

(2) the dismal track record of austerity policies over the course of their long history: from Aristotle to Margaret Thatcher, no argument against spending has ever successfully refuted the Keynesian logic of anti-cyclical government stimulus.

(3) austerity’s long life is due to its moral and political underpinnings – not to economic justification. The moral authority of abstinence over greed has kept austerity alive in public discourse despite empirical shortcomings.

On Florian Schui, _Austerity: the Great Failure_ (Yale UP, 2013).

Nancy on the "just meaning" of the ex-istant

"For [Jean-Luc] Nancy, sense is there, like the world, 'just like that', as he puts it. This 'just like that' means that existence is ungrounded, that we are 'just' open to existence and to the world. The 'just' is of course the whole problem. At a time when every 'us' is under suspicion and we allegedly live in a 'crisis of sense', the evidence of 'we' and/or 'sense' is so to speak no 'common sense'. For Nancy, this so-called crisis makes clear that we are, that existence is nothing but sense: 'One must think against the times, or despite the times, since it is still the time of the crisis' (Nancy, 1997a: 15). In other words, that there is sense and that we are there is the radical consequence of the unfolded space that the 'global' world is to us today."

Ignaas Devisch, "The Sense of Being(-)With Jean-Luc Nancy," _Culture Machine,_ Vol 8 (2006). http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/36/44

But: Doesn't Nancy's assertion that we' re "just open" to meaning entail some kind of non-dualist system ala Berkeley (esse est perciipi) or perhaps Derrida (there's nothing outside language) positing reference sans refererer?

phatic

Florida

Lost & profound

definiendum, witt-knit, v definians, 1. to knit an abject so as to resemble the figure of Witt, the pduct of which is referred to as _a_ witt-knitt; 2. to knit in such a manner as to be consistend with that of Witt.

T

Everyday apocalypse Sky and sea Like upper And lower jaw Between them Men with anatomic posters In the company of skinned cats and phoenix witches Collecting small flames to nourish their spawn in lanterns Though this lantern is one in which we From Tor Ulven, _shaded by the first bird (1977)