Jose Marti: Part Two

Happiness exists on earth, and it is won through prudent exercise of reason, knowledge of the harmony of the universe, and constant practice of generosity. He who seeks it elsewhere will not find it for, having drunk from all the glasses of life, he will find satisfaction only in those.

Like stones rolling down hills, fair ideas reach their objectives despite all obstacles and barriers. It may be possible to speed or hinder them, but impossible to stop them.

We must say no once more.

Jose Marti (1853-1895)

We are free, but not to be evil, not to be indifferent to human suffering, not to profit from the people, from the work created and sustained through their spirit of political association, while refusing to contribute to the political state that we profit from. We must say no once more. Man is not free to watch impassively the enslavement and dishonor of men, nor their struggles for liberty and honor.

"...insisting that her story have a happy ending"

There are plenty of legitimate reasons for the country to be obsessed by Terri Schiavo, and by the plight of her parents and husband--and you probably know most of them since they've been interminably discussed in every conceivable forum. Here's another one: For every American feeling compassion for Schiavo, there are at least several more who feel a consolation and satisfaction, maybe even a sense of triumph. Events have complicated, peculiar resonances in the mind. As the instincts seem to be set loose to an unimaginable degree in American society and overseas, Schiavo's unfathomably suffering face, with its strange beatific-seeming smile, is like a justification for all the carnage. This vale of woe is what life is, it seems to say--at least to those who want to keep her face just as it is, forever. It's a chilling complement to "The Contender," whose fixation on pummeling seems to say that this is what society is.

But there is something more. In a stroke of utter fascinating inanity, "The Contender" has made its motto Nietzsche's overquoted epigram, the war-cry of every hormonally imbalanced adolescent: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." This seems to be the message extracted from Terri Schiavo's condition by the Christian legions. They don't, as good Christians would, want to leave Schiavo's death in God's hands and allow her to ascend to heaven. They don't, as no one has the courage to point out on the talk shows--the lions are throwing themselves to the Christians--see a contradiction between their opposition to stem-cell research and abortion on the grounds that God's will must not be tampered with by science, and their insistence that science must interfere with God's will and keep Schiavo alive. (And there was Senator Joe Lieberman on "Meet the Press" Sunday, describing America as having been founded on "Christian" premises. But the origins of the Constitution lie in the Enlightenment, in deism, and in Voltairean revulsion against religion. Is Lieberman now afraid to say so?) These Christians really think that if Schiavo is kept alive long enough she'll come out of her vegetative state--she'll win. Just as those poor pummeled guys on "The Contender" might win if they allow themselves to be pulverized enough. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger--even if it kills you. You realize that pulling punches on the show is like imploring death to pull its punches with Schiavo. In both cases, the spectacle of suffering is prolonged to the satisfaction of some observers.

So for the Christian right, Schiavo has become something like a human antidepressant. Her plight, perhaps, makes them feel better about themselves and not Left Behind by Hollywood, or by sophisticated Northeastern elites, or by urban decadence, or urban mores, or urban wealth. And by arguing, no, insisting that her story have a happy ending, they can cheer themselves up about the society they are helping to create every day, a society in which being able to celebrate the spectacle of the weak getting pummeled, and the weak wasting away from within in a vegetative state, is the measure of one's strength. Nietzsche and Christ, together at last.
Lee Siegel, The New Republic

On Hols - Back soon...

If I can just be perfect, then I will be saved...

Sitting In Wind

Existential dread is always lurking in the shadows (for all of us so the psychologists say) and here, alone, I come face to face with the darkness. Often it is the wind that seems to trigger it. There is also sorrow and grief and loneliness. One of the difficult aspects of solitude, and one of its most powerful benefits, is that there is pretty much no way to avoid experiencing difficult feelings and thoughts for very long. I tend to try to lose myself in puttering around doing this and that to stay on the surface of things, but to no avail. All the existential questions and doubts that we are supposed to resolve or resolve to ignore in our youth are somehow still with me; neither resolved nor firmly put aside: what am I doing with my life? what should I be doing? how can I come to accept myself and the world and stop this endless judging and self justification? why so much fucking pain? and on and on. It is often so noisy inside my head with internal conversations that I might as well be in downtown Vancouver. And I have brought my anxieties, obsessions and compulsions with me: if I can just... get all my food and propane here; get this cabin built exactly the way I want it; get the electrical system working; get a couple more loads of firewood in; read and remember all those books on my shelf; get rid of this pain in my shoulders; just somehow have things be different than they are... then I will feel OK. If I can just be perfect, then I will be saved. I brought my dreams and illusions with me here; I brought myself.
www.bobkull.org

I too would like to hear words...

I don't write out of
knowledge
when the phone rings
I too would like to hear words
that might ease some of this

that's why my number's
listed
charles bukowski

Better Than Anything On Tonight...

During the early days of television development it was necessary to monitor and adjust the quality of the transmitted picture in order to get the best definition. To do this, engineers required an 'actor' to constantly be under the burning studio lights as they tweaked and sharpened the image, and Felix fit the bill perfectly. He was the right colour (black and white), impervious to the heat from the lights and worked cheaply (in fact a one-off payment was all that was required). RCA's first experimental television transmissions began in 1928 by station W2XBS (New York-Channel #1) in Van Cortlandt Park and then moved to the New Amsterdam Theater Building, transmitting 60 line pictures. The 13" Felix the Cat figure made of paper mache was placed on a record player turntable and was broadcast using a mechanical scanning disk to an electronic kinescope receiver. The image received was only 2 inches tall, and the broadcasts lasted about 2 hours per day. By 1931 the station became part of NBC and began to transmit from 42nd St. These early broadcasts consisted of objects like Felix the Cat or early test patterns and photographs. Felix remained on his turntable for almost a decade as the early experimenters strove towards the goal of a high definition picture.
http://felixthecat.com/history.htm

We require a work of art to speak to this...

How to describe it? It is Hats. The band is the Blue Nile. They have existed for over twenty years, but have released only three works to the public (Hats is their second album), totalling less than three hours of music.

I mentioned the word “lunacy” before. Melancholic beauty has a certain lunacy to it, if only in the sense that we are very much alone as we experience it, lost inside perception, helpless to persuade another human being of its source—but because of that helplessness I believe there’s an album of this lunatic sort for each of us. It’s an album very like a novel, one of those novels, the few you hesitate to press on friends for fear they will prove unworthy of your friendship. And for fear that you have disclosed too much of yourself, let something slip which you should at all costs keep private. A private, broken love is always more interesting than perfect love. We dislike perfect love, and dislike hearing about it. But miserable love? We require a work of art to speak to this, to contain the misery, perhaps leaven it—at the very least to preserve it for some reason as part of memory and desire, thus remaining a reliable connecting point for that desire. Andrew Solomon once wrote that “depression is the flaw in love.” I do not want to debase clinical depression by throwing that word around when I mean something far less crippling. But for the common sadness of daily—not to mention nightly—living, there is a language of flaws, cracks, bits of experience that stick in perception. Art is among those flaws. If you don’t believe me, investigate what your imagination calls up as random associations the very next time you find yourself staring into familiar landscapes. That picture? That sound? Welcome to your own theory of the melancholic. You are not alone.
Paul Winner, www.maisonneuve.org

...we live side by side---and sometimes collide.

everything but the girl

When I was ten, I thought my brother was god---he'd lie in bed and turn out the light with a fishing rod. I learned the names of all his football team, and I still remembered them when I was nineteen.

Strange the things that I remember still---shouts from the playground when I was home and ill. my sister taught me all that she learned there, when we grew up, we said, we'd share a flat somewhere.

When I was seventeen, London meant Oxford Street.

Where I grew up, there were no factories; there was a school and shops and some fields and trees, and rows of houses one by one appeared. I was born in one and lived there for eighteen years.

Then when I was nineteen, I thought the Humber would be the gateway from my little world into the real world. but, there is no real world---we live side by side---and sometimes collide.

When I was seventeen, London meant Oxford Street. It was a little world; I grew up in a little world.
ebtg

''I surely don't know what I would do if a group of people were hauling me off to kill me.''

Sister Helen's account of her experiences with the criminal justice system, as a spiritual advisor to those condemned to death, is a wonderfully sad and disheartening expose of a system where truth does not count - only procedures. In the first chapter she speaks of Roger Coleman, a Virginia coal miner who was executed in Virginia on May 20 1992, because of a procedural technicality.

His rookie lawyer, trying her first capital case, filed Coleman's petition one day late - 24 hours late - and so they took his life.

The two other cases Sister Prejean discusses in ''The Death of Innocents'' -- of Dobie Gillis Williams, a poor black man from rural Louisiana with an I.Q. of 65, accused of rape and murder, and Joseph Roger O'Dell, a white man with a long record, arrested for murder, rape and sodomy in Virginia -- are typical. The evidence against them was not insubstantial, but some of it was inconsistent, some of it suggested other potential killers and much of it was open to question. In both cases, a decent lawyer could probably have gotten them off. A decent lawyer certainly could have saved their lives. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said, ''People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.'' Williams's lawyer did not conduct rudimentary testing on blood evidence, failed to object to an all-white jury and offered almost no evidence at sentencing that might have allowed the jury to show leniency. O'Dell foolishly decided to represent himself, though it is hardly clear that the typical court-appointed lawyer would have done better. Once the trials were over, rules of appellate procedure limited the ways the two men could attack their convictions and sentences.

In O'Dell's case, Virginia prosecutors acted shamefully in denying him and his estate the chance to test biological evidence. Had Williams and O'Dell brought their appeals in the Northeast or in California rather than in Louisiana or Virginia, appeals courts would probably have found a way to save their lives. Indeed, O'Dell at one point came within one vote in the Supreme Court of a new sentencing hearing. The decision had nothing to do with the evidence in the case. Instead, the court said that one of its rulings, about jury instructions, did not apply retroactively. It came, that is, too late to help O'Dell. There is something appalling in seeing a man's life or death turn on a 5-to-4 vote. Williams also had the misfortune of being tried too soon. In 2002, three years after his execution, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution bars the execution of the mentally retarded.

She is a tough nun. When O'Dell confides that he does not intend to go quietly, she does not try to dissuade him. ''I surely don't know,'' she tells him, ''what I would do if a group of people were hauling me off to kill me.''
Sister Helen Prejean, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions

In economoid-speak...

You'll be pleased to know that communism was defeated in Pennsylvania last year. Governor Ed Rendell signed into law a bill prohibiting the Reds in local government from offering free Wi-Fi throughout their municipalities. The action came after Philadelphia, where more than 50 percent of neighborhoods don't have access to broadband, embarked on a $10 million wireless Internet project. City leaders had stepped in where the free market had failed. Of course, it's a slippery slope from free Internet access to Karl Marx. So Rendell, the telecom industry's latest toady, even while exempting the City of Brotherly Love, acted to spare Pennsylvania from this grave threat to its economic freedom.

Pushed by lobbyists, at least 14 states have passed legislation similar to Pennsylvania's. I've always wondered what almost $1 billion spent on lobbying state lawmakers gets you. Now I'm beginning to see. The telcos' argument isn't much more subtle than that of the simpleton who began this column: Businesses shouldn't have to compete against their governments. What the market can do, the government shouldn't. Or so the fall of the Soviet Union should have taught us. Although this principle is true enough in most cases, it is obviously not true in all. The government should certainly not do what private enterprise can do better (e.g., make computers). And the government should not prohibit private enterprise from competing against it (e.g., FedEx). But the government also should not act as the cat's paw for one of the most powerful industries in the nation by making competition against that industry illegal, whether from government or not. This is true, at least, when it is unclear just what kind of "good" such competition might produce. Broadband is the perfect example. The private market has failed the US so far. At the beginning, we led the world in broadband deployment. But by 2004, we ranked an embarrassing 13th.

There are many places, like Philadelphia, where service is lacking. And there are many places, like San Francisco, where competition is lacking. The result of the duopoly that currently defines "competition" is that prices and service suck. We're the world's leader in Internet technology - except that we're not. The solution is not to fire private enterprise; it is instead to encourage more competition. Communities across the country are experimenting with ways to supplement private service. And these experiments are producing unexpected economic returns. Some are discovering that free wireless access increases the value of public spaces just as, well, streetlamps do. And just as streetlamps don't make other types of lighting obsolete, free wireless access in public spaces won't kill demand for access in private spaces.

In economoid-speak, these public services may well provide positive externalities. Yet we will never recognize these externalities unless municipalities are free to experiment. That's why the bipartisan Silicon Valley advocacy group TechNet explicitly endorses allowing local governments to compete with broadband providers. City and state politicians should have the backbone to stand up to self-serving lobbyists. Citizens everywhere should punish telecom toadies who don't. Backwater broad­band has been our fate long enough. Let the markets, both private and public, compete to provide the service that telecom and cable has not.
Lawrence Lessig , www.wired.com

Buy Every Album You'll Never Regret It

Jane Siberry

THAT CERTAIN BIRD
This morning I awoke at 6 and found myself walking out the door at 6:03 not knowing where I was going. Rode and rode and rode, awash in Spring bird songs. Cherry blossoms only slightly lighter than the grey. Then around the corner and there was Dawn. Forgotten with the enclose of Winter. Hello!

I AM FINALLY CLOSING SHEEBA
It will have been 9 years on May 17, 2005. It has been a very special time of learning and struggle and sometimes deep satisfaction. I wanted freedom and it has come in a different fashion than I expected. Now as I let go of more and more things, not always knowing why I have to and resisting it, I see the signs of a greater hand at work. I am sure you know what I mean.
www.sheeba.ca

Just move on up and keep on wishing...

Hush now child and don't you cry
Your folks might understand you by and by
Move on up towards your destination
You may find from time to time
Complications

Bight your lip and take a trip
Though there may be wet road ahead
You cannot slip
So move on up and peace you will find
Into the steeple of beautiful people
Where there's only one kind

So hush now child and don't you cry
Your folks might understand you by and by
Just move on up and keep on wishing
Remember your dreams are your only schemes
So keep on pushing
Take nothing less - not even second best
And do not obey - you must have your say
You can past the test

Move on up!
curtis mayfield

Here comes Mister Cool, along the walk of fame...

Once upon a time, I was on my own
Once upon a time, like you've never known
Once upon a time, I would be impressed
Once upon a time, my life would be obsessed
Once upon a time, once upon a day when
I was in my prime, once along the way

If you want to know my secret
Don't come running after me
For I am just a painter
Passing through in history

Yesterday is gone, yesterday's allright
Yesterday belongs, in my dreams at night
Yesterday is swell, yesterday is great
Yesterday is strong, remembering can wait
Once upon a time, once upon a day when
I was in my prime, once along the way

If you want to know an answer I can't turn your life around
For I am just a painter passing through the underground

I was in my stride, always at my game
Here comes Mister Cool, along the walk of fame
I was in demand, always in control
The world was in my hands, my touch had turned to gold
Once upon a time, I was in a daze when
I was in my prime, once along the ways

If you want to know my secret don't come running after me
For I am just a painter passing through in history
gordon lightfoot

Bubba We Hardly Knew Ya: Part Two....

Trip to the zoo proves too much for oversized 10-kilogram lobster

PITTSBURGH (AP) - He survived two world wars and prohibition, but a trip to the zoo proved too much for a 10-kilogram lobster named Bubba.

The leviathan of a lobster died Wednesday afternoon at the Pittsburgh Zoo and PPG Aquarium, about a day after he was moved from Wholey's Market, said zoo spokeswoman Rachel Capp and fish market owner Bob Wholey. "They're very finicky. It could have been a change in the water. You have no idea," Wholey said. Bubba spent a week at the market after he was pulled from the waters off Nantucket, Mass.

He died in a quarantined area of the zoo's aquarium, where he was being checked to see if he was healthy enough to make a trip to an aquarium at a Ripley's Believe It or Not museum, Capp said.

Bubba will be examined to try to determine the cause of death - Capp and Wholey guessed it may have been the stress of being moved.

Based on how long it typically takes a lobster to reach eating size - about five to seven years to grow to a pound - some estimated Bubba was about 100 years old.

Marine biologists said 30 to 50 years was more likely.

Bubba We Hardly Knew Ya: Part One....

No butter for Bubba, 10-kilogram lobster bound for Ripley's museum

PITTSBURGH (AP) - He could be older than Warner Bros. studio, General Motors, the Boy Scouts and the states of Arizona and New Mexico. He could have survived two world wars and Prohibition.

He could have been dinner. He's Bubba, a 10-kilogram leviathan of a lobster pulled from the waters off Nantucket, Mass., and shipped to a Pittsburgh fish market. The lobster has been kept in a tank near a fish counter in Wholey's Market since Thursday while owner Bob Wholey tried to figure out what to do with it.

"It is overwhelming," Wholey said. "If you see it, you will never forget it. Customers are just in awe."

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent Wholey a letter asking him to work with the group to release Bubba back in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Maine.

Another group calling itself People For Eating Tasty Animals reportedly offered Wholey a hefty price for the lobster. At Tuesday's price of about $35 US a kilogram, Bubba would retail for $350. A woman offered to buy him for $500 and then send him to an aquarium.

On Tuesday, Wholey gave the lobster to the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium, which will send him to an aquarium at a Ripley's Believe It or Not museum.

Based on how long it typically takes a lobster to reach eating size - about five to seven years to grow to a half-kilo - some estimate Bubba is 100 years old.

That would make the crustacean older than Warner Bros. (1907), the Boy Scouts (1910) and the states of Arizona and New Mexico (1912), not to mention the first commercial radio station (1920), television (1927) and computers (1943).

Bob Bayer, executive director of the University of Maine's Lobster Institute, is skeptical and estimates that Bubba is likely 50 years old, but doesn't know for sure. Warm water and plenty of food may have more to do with a lobster's size than how long it's been alive.

"We have looked at all kinds of things to figure out if there is any way to age a lobster. I'm guessing 100 years is probably too high but I can't argue with it because you don't know," Bayer said.

Some large lobsters haven't fared well after they were caught. In 1985, a 11.5-kilogram lobster that the New England Aquarium planned to give to a Tokyo museum died when the water temperature rose and the salt dropped in its aquarium. In 1990, an eight-kilogram lobster named Mimi died just days after being flown to a restaurant in Detroit. Last year, a six-kilogram lobster named Hercules that was rescued by a Washington state middle school class died before it could be released in off the coast of Maine.

Bubba will be kept at the Pittsburgh Zoo's aquarium, where he will be checked out to make sure he is healthy enough to make the trip to his permanent home at Ripley's, said zoo spokeswoman Connie George. He will be kept under constant watch in a quarantine area and won't be on display, George said.

Although his business is to sell seafood, Wholey says Bubba was never bound to be boiled and buttered. And he's become a little philosophical after seeing the lobster, which could be twice his 54 years.

"I don't think you could eat something that big. . . . What range of emotions does a lobster have? Greed? Lust? Love? I'm just going to give him to the zoo and hope he lives another 100 years," Wholey said.

"If you sat down and ate this thing, wouldn't that be a bit shellfish?"

On God....

When a man meets his maker he shall have to account for those God given pleasures of life he failed to enjoy.
Kiddishin

Everything may change in our demoralized world except the heart, man's love and his striving to know the divine.
Marc Chagall

God is the Father and the destiny is our step-father and the man who is destined to drown will drown in a glass of water.
Talmud

Coincidence is the diminution of Providence.
Anonymous.

There is only the dance.
T.S.Eliot