Preview of Coming Attractions

Margin Call
Something Big is Going Down

La madre degli idioti è sempre incinta*

Far more people are now

being arrested for protesting

Wall Street's mortgage fraud crimes

than have been charged for

committing and presiding over them.

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*The mother of idiots is always pregnant.

Good Stuff

A griffon falcon collides with
a Russian paraglider’s chute in mid-air.
He opens his reserve while
retaining the tangled canopy.
After a dodgy landing
the bird is freed and flies away.

Good stuff.

But Land Does Not Beget

Man begets, but land does not beget.
--Cecil Rhodes

Untitled

Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one. But I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at N.S.A. and somebody puts a code on my desk, something no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East, and once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding---fifteen hundred people that I never met, never had no problem with get killed. Now the politicians are saying, oh, "Send in the marines to secure the area" because they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, getting shot, just like it wasn't them when their number got called, because they were pulling a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie over there, taking shrapnel in the ass. He comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from, and the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, because he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so that we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price, and of course the oil companies use the little skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices---a cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They're taking their sweet time bringing the oil back, of course, maybe they even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fucking play slalom with the icebergs. It ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's outta work, he can't afford to drive, so he's walking to the fucking job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids, and meanwhile he's starving because every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're serving is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holding out for something better. I figure fuck it, while I'm at it, why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected President.
--from Good Will Hunting (1997)

The Best Way to Rob A Bank Is To Own One

The cat joined the Re-education Committee and was very active in it for some days. She was seen one day sitting on a roof and talking to some sparrows who were just out of her reach. She was telling them that all animals were now comrades and that any sparrow who chose could come and perch on her paw; but the sparrows kept their distance.
--George Orwell

some thoughts on the kleptocracy from Bill Black

What Happens In Vegas

Hallucinations are bad enough. But after awhile you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip---the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs.
--Hunter S. Thompson
from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

A Few Words From Elizabeth Warren

more here ...

Panic of the Plutocrats

The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny.

--Paul Krugman
from Panic of the Plutocrats

Expect Us

There are countless horrible things happening all over the country, and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible.
--Auberon Waugh

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Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting
on what to have for dinner.
--Benjamin Franklin

Rut Roh

A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.
The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers,
network security specialists say.
And the infection
underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”
Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted
over the public internet to someone
outside the military chain of command.
--more here

The Whole Wide World Is Watching

The Pogues: When the Ship Comes In


oh the time will come up
when the winds will stop
and the breeze will
cease to be breathing
like the stillness in the wind
before the hurricane begins
the hour when the ship comes in

oh the seas will split
and the ship will hit
and the sands on the
shoreline will be shaking
then the tide will sound
and the wind will pound
and the morning will be breaking

oh the fishes will laugh
as they swim out of the path
and the seagulls they’ll be smiling
and the rocks on the sand
will proudly stand
the hour that the ship comes in

and the words that are used
for to get the ship confused
will not be understood
as they’re spoken
for the chains of the sea
will have busted in the night
and will be buried at
the bottom of the ocean

a song will lift
as the mainsail shifts
and the boat drifts
on to the shoreline
and the sun will respect
every face on the deck
the hour that the ship comes in

then the sands will roll
out a carpet of gold
for your weary toes to be touching
and the ship’s wise men
will remind you once again that
the whole wide world is watching

oh the foes will rise
with the sleep still in their eyes
and they’ll jerk from their beds
and think they’re dreaming
but they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
and know that it’s for real
the hour when the ship comes in

then they’ll raise their hands
saying we’ll meet all your demands
but we’ll shout from the bow
your days are numbered
and like Pharoah’s tribe
they’ll be drowned in the tide
And like Goliath
they’ll be conquered

--Bob Dylan
1963

Say What?

One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven---or even proven at all---to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn't there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car's ignition, then obviously there is an enemy; if public building or a political headquarters is blown up, then there is a political enemy. But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfiring--then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.
--Philip K. Dick
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bad lip reading: Michelle Bachmann edition

Meltdown

If there is only enough time in the final
minutes of the 20th century for one last dance
I would like to be dancing it slowly with you,
say, in the ballroom of a seaside hotel.
My palm would press into the small of your back

as the past hundred years collapsed into a pile
of mirrors or buttons or frivolous shoes,
just as the floor of the 19th century gave way
and disappeared in a red cloud of brick dust.

There will be no time to order another drink
or worry about what was never said,
not with the orchestra sliding into the sea
and all our attention devoted to humming
whatever it was they were playing.

--Billy Collins
Dancing Towards Bethlehem

Bad Lip Reading

I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes.
I said it was a dream, and he agreed,
but said it was the desert's dream not his.
And he told me that in a year or so,
when he had aged enough for any man,
then he would walk into the wind,
until he saw the tents.
This time, he said, he would go on with them.
--Neil Gaiman

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I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjuction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.
--Jorge Luis Borges
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bad lip reading: Rick Perry edition

Let The Puppies Burn

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.
--George Washington's Farewell Address

ad alert: the debate begins with a short commercial

Not Safe For Work

i miss deadwood

Another Abbreviated Republican Debate

another abbreviated Republican debate

WTC-7

In Case You Missed It...

...the recent Republican debate in 45 seconds.

Imagine

Reality
leaves a lot
to the
imagination.
--John Lennon




Leonard Cohen: "The Partisan"

The Old Man In The Sun

When one moves through 11 SDO images taken at the same time, and shown in order from the lowest temperature material being imaged to the highest, a funny thing thing happens: the features of a face in the sun begin to appear. The movie underscores the fact that images taken at different wavelengths do reveal different features. The images also start at the sun's surface and gradually move out to the sun's upper corona.
--NASA

No Confidence/None Of The Above

Shut up, be happy.
Obey all orders
without question.
The happiness
you have demanded
is now mandatory.
--Jello Biafra




There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke.
--Herman Melville
(from Moby Dick)

Don't Worry About The Government

Talking Heads


Don't Worry About the Government

$1200 Space Program

Hubble's Greatest Hits

a quartet from

Hubble's Greatest Hits



Tarantula Nebula


Ghost Head Nebula


Flocculent Spiral


A Rose Made of Galaxies

Chronological Harryhausen Creature List

Ray Harryhausen is an American film producer and special effects creator. He created a brand of stop-motion model animation known as Dynamation. Here's a compilation of every animated creature in his feature films, presented in chronological order .

Thoreau On Clouds

The drifting white downy clouds are to the landsman what sails on the sea are to him that dwells by the shore,--objects of a large, diffusive interest. When the laborer lies on the grass or in the shade for rest, they do not much tax or weary his attention. They are unobtrusive. I have not heard that white clouds, like white houses, made any one’s eyes ache. They are the flitting sails in that ocean whose bound no man has visited. They are like all great themes, always at hand to be considered, or they float over us unregarded. Far away they float in the serene sky, the most inoffensive of objects, or, near and low, they smite us with their lightnings and deafen us with their thunder. There are many mare’s-tails to-day, if that is the name. What would a man learn by watching the clouds? The objects which go over our heads unobserved are vast and indefinite.
Even those clouds which have the most distinct and interesting outlines are commonly below the zenith, somewhat low in the heavens, and seen on one side. They are among the most glorious objects in nature. A sky without clouds is a meadow without flowers, a sea without sails. Some days we have the mackerel fleet. But our devilishly industrious laborers rarely lie in the shade. How much better if they were to take their nooning like the Italians, relax and expand and never do any work in the middle of the day, enjoy a little Sabbath in the middle of the day.
--Henry David Thoreau
(journal entry for June 24, 1852)

Bodies Upon The Gears

There is a time when the operation
of the machine becomes so odious---
makes you so sick at heart---
that you can't take part.
You can't even passively take part.
And you've got to put your bodies
upon the gears and upon the wheels,
upon the levers, upon all the apparatus,
and you've got to make it stop.
And you've got to indicate
to the people who run it,
to the people who own it,
that unless you're free,
the machine will be prevented
from working at all.
--Mario Savio

Lettuce Pray

Some Reasons To Garden:

•It gives you another sense of time that spans past months and gives you a real appreciation for the seasons that other people won’t have.
•You will actually take notice of the weather. You’ll notice when it rains and can remember off the top of your head when it last rained. You’ll even be able to recall how much or how hard.
•When you get up in the morning to have your coffee, you will go outside and check all your plants in turn, and gradually you’ll begin to get a feel for the minute details that indicate that the plant needs more water, needs more shade, or what stage it’s at in terms of fruition, all like some kind of biological twitter feed. This will be immensely satisfying for you.
•It gives you a personal relationship with food; and you will actually pay attention to the taste of what you’re eating rather than just shovelling it into your mouth.
•Gives you the unique insight that freshly picked anything is 1000x more tasty and interesting than store bought anything; you will truly taste tomato for the first time in your life.
•You get to see the world from a new point of view (a plant's point of view). You’ll see them adapt to the local environmental conditions in ingenious ways; for instance my chilli plants form more aerodynamically shaped leaves compared to those grown inside and are far more bushy.
•Humans have had agriculture for thousands and thousands of years; we’re wired to do it. By growing things you’re tapping into an otherwise forgotten instinct.
Growing things is just plain good for the soul and wonderful for your mental well-being.
•By growing things, you’re inserting yourself into the local ecosystem; you’ll get to watch as bees pollinate your plants, insects will come to eat them and other insects will eat those insects. All because you set up some real estate for them. All life needs to flourish is for one of us meddling humans to plant a few seeds.
•Look at the pile of biomass you made. All of that took carbon, and that carbon came from the atmosphere. And you took it out of the air. Good for you!


paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Rapture

Lo, for my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.
--Hosea 16:14

Octopus Ballet

6600 feet down
200 miles off the Oregon coast

Poem On His Birthday

In the mustardseed sun,
By full tilt river and switchback sea
Where the cormorants scud,
In his house on stilts high among beaks
And palavers of birds
This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave
He celebrates and spurns
His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;
Herons spire and spear.

Under and round him go
Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,
Doing what they are told,
Curlews aloud in the congered waves
Work at their ways to death,
And the rhymer in the long tongued room,
Who tolls his birthday bell,
Toils towards the ambush of his wounds;
Herons, steeple stemmed, bless.

In the thistledown fall,
He sings towards anguish; finches fly
In the claw tracks of hawks
On a seizing sky; small fishes glide
Through wynds and shells of drowned
Ship towns to pastures of otters. He
In his slant, racking house
And the hewn coils of his trade perceives
Herons walk in their shroud,

The livelong river's robe
Of minnows wreathing around their prayer;
And far at sea he knows,
Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end
Under a serpent cloud,
Dolphins dive in their turnturtle dust,
The rippled seals streak down
To kill and their own tide daubing blood
Slides good in the sleek mouth.

In a cavernous, swung
Wave's silence, wept white angelus knells.
Thirty-five bells sing struck
On skull and scar where his loves lie wrecked,
Steered by the falling stars.
And to-morrow weeps in a blind cage
Terror will rage apart
Before chains break to a hammer flame
And love unbolts the dark

And freely he goes lost
In the unknown, famous light of great
And fabulous, dear God.
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true,
And, in that brambled void,
Plenty as blackberries in the woods
The dead grow for His joy.

There he might wander bare
With the spirits of the horseshoe bay
Or the stars' seashore dead,
Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales
And wishbones of wild geese,
With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,
And every soul His priest,
Gulled and chanter in young Heaven's fold
Be at cloud quaking peace,

But dark is a long way.
He, on the earth of the night, alone
With all the living, prays,
Who knows the rocketing wind will blow
The bones out of the hills,
And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last
Rage shattered waters kick
Masts and fishes to the still quick stars,
Faithlessly unto Him

Who is the light of old
And air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild
As horses in the foam:
Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined
And druid herons' vows
The voyage to ruin I must run,
Dawn ships clouted aground,
Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
Count my blessings aloud:

Four elements and five
Senses, and man a spirit in love
Tangling through this spun slime
To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
And the lost, moonshine domes,
And the sea that hides his secret selves
Deep in its black, base bones,
Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
And this last blessing most,

That the closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
And every wave of the way
And gale I tackle, the whole world then,
With more triumphant faith
That ever was since the world was said,
Spins its morning of praise,

I hear the bouncing hills
Grow larked and greener at berry brown
Fall and the dew larks sing
Taller this thunderclap spring, and how
More spanned with angels ride
The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
Holier then their eyes,
And my shining men no more alone
As I sail out to die.

--Dylan Thomas (Poem On His Birthday)

The Existential Menace

quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre

Rolling Through The Bay

Scott Weaver's 35 year work in progress features a tour of San Francisco made from over 100,000 toothpicks.

Red Pandas In The Snow

Wildebeest Migration

Happy Easter

Happy Easter!

Je Suis En Colere Et Je Ne Vais Plus Accepter Ca

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be! We know things are bad - worse than bad, They're crazy! It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone!' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone! I want you to get MAD! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad! You've got to say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!" So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now, and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell: "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!

--from Network (1976)

as yet untitled

each man must realize
that it can all disappear
very quickly:
the cat, the woman, the job,
the front tire,
the bed, the walls, the room;
all our necessities
including love,
rest on foundations of sand --
and any given cause,
no matter how unrelated:
the death of a boy in Hong Kong
or a blizzard in Omaha ...
can serve as your undoing.
all your chinaware
crashing to the kitchen floor,
your girl will enter
and you'll be standing, drunk,
in the center of it and she'll ask:
my god, what's the matter?
and you'll answer: I don't know,
I don't know ...
--Charles Bukowski
(pull a string, a puppet moves ...)

Mercy Mercy Me

Our environmental problems
originate in the hubris
of imagining ourselves
as the central nervous system
or the brain of nature.
We're not the brain,
we are a cancer on nature.
--Dave Foreman

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Marvin Gaye: "Mercy Mercy Me"
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animal tracks
what have they done to the rain?
koyaanisqatsi