Homophobic? Maybe You’re Gay

WHY are political and religious figures who campaign against gay rights so often implicated in sexual encounters with same-sex partners?

The Human Cost of Animal Suffering

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/the-human-cost-of-animal-suffering/

How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Global Taxes

"'Still, some, including De Anza College’s president, Mr. Murphy, say the philanthropy and job creation do not offset Apple’s and other companies’ decisions to circumvent taxes. Within 20 minutes of the financially ailing school are the global headquarters of Google, Facebook, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco.

“When it comes time for all these companies — Google and Apple and Facebook and the rest — to pay their fair share, there’s a knee-jerk resistance,” Mr. Murphy said. “They’re philosophically antitax, and it’s decimating the state.”

“But I’m not complaining,” he added. “We can’t afford to upset these guys. We need every dollar we can get.'”

Here's the article...

Sesame Noodles with Tofu

This then was tonight's dinner. 
Next time, I'll use half the oil.

May the the minority prevail

Beyond its undeniable didactic function, it would seem that writing has questionable value, other than to advertise one’s self, or to publicize one’s personal experience or opinion. Since the accuracy of one’s opinion is inherently dubious, what good is it in the true air? Of course I understand that such an idea obviates the institution of art in its entirety—a in feat itself—but do you see where I’m going? Think of it this way: everyone has personal ideas about life and how to live it; unfortunately, these ideas tend to coalesce in political terms. "Honey, for you own good, think what I think." So, whither truth? When the majority successfully asserts its ideas over minority views, it’s erroneously called democracy; the voice of opposition is contained, and ultimately defeated. And as always, the status quo squeaks by. It’s nuance, propaganda, obstructionism and ego. Jesu! Up with true democracy! May the the minority forever prevail.

Shapeshifter

Fuck the Bach

Corrine was less than forthcoming about her extramarital activities, and who could blame her? 
Doing it was one thing, talking about it with her husband quite another. Which is why Larry was forever loath to inquire after his wife’s nocturnal outings. He knew he risked a shot to the mouth or a slap across the face just for asking.

Like for instance the rain-soaked morning she arrived home, panties in one hand, flip-flops in the other.

“You must be freezing,” he said, having risen from a fitful slumber to answer the bell. “And where’s your key?”

“Mind yer own freakin’ beeswax. Laaarry.” She’d said, sauntering to the shower, tracking mud down the hall behind her. 
Had she rolled her eyes when she said his name? Larry couldn’t decide.

As always, he was cordial and obedient. In all his life he’d never known a woman like this. She was paradise run amok, a wild, untamable mystery, and in the thrall of that mystery he was lily-livered, yellow-bellied, gutless—putty in her hands his father liked to say. 
Larry could no more protest her infidelities than he could defend his own pathetic groveling. He simply adored every inch of this woman and had long ago decided that he would tolerate any abuse she might see fit to rain down upon him, so long as he could daily inhale her divine scent, so long as he could snooze an occasional night away at her blessed side.

He smoked a cigarette and tidied the magazines on the nightstand while he waited for her to return from the bathroom. He looked out the window. There were people in the street. It had stopped raining. Maybe they could go for a walk.

Finally he heard her coming. She was whistling “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”, a favorite of his.

“Oh, I love the Bach,” he chirped as she entered the room.

“Fuck the Bach,” she said. “I need a nap.”

Top Sergeant Vernon Williams

I should mention Top Sergeant Vernon Williams here. Williams was a 40-year old African-American, a Spec 8 with twenty-three years in the service. He'd done time in Korea and other hotspots, and had recently returned from a third tour of Vietnam, where he'd been wounded and commended for bravery under fire. He was a soldier's soldier: ramrod straight, uniform always immaculate and sharply pressed. His boots shone brighter than any I ever saw in a world where shiny boots are the undisputed badge of the fully actualized fighting man.

Top had his shit together. He had developed the Williams Method, a technique for shining boots that had no equal: It started out with the tried and true spit shine, a method of applying a mixture of boot polish and saliva with a soft cotton rag.  A tight circular polishing motion was employed to work the mixture into the leather. Practiced for hours at a time, spit-shining eventually yielded up a startlingly bright finish, but the diligent Sergeant had taken the process to new heights. He had determined that by alternately polishing the boots and baking them for ten minutes in a slow oven at 175 degrees, mere brightness became eye-blinding brilliance. Boot polishing amateurs were warned to wear sunglasses when staring directly at his boots. I remember us toiling for hours to raise a dull luster on our own footware; when Sgt. Williams arrived, no eye could ignore the blazing mirrors that adorned his toes. We begged him for the secret and sat adoringly at his knee as he revealed it.

Of all the men I met in the military, Top Sgt. Vernon Williams was the ablest, most effective leader I encountered. He won admiration and loyalty simply by being direct, kind and fair. Whether you were a conscientious objector or a Green Beret, he viewed you as a human being and he treated you with the respect he held for any soldier that might one day fight by his side. It was that simple. He was the first of several men I met during those years who showed me that even in that vast sea of inhumanity and ineptitude, there were fine people who maintained their personal dignity and, within the limits of the social order, their individuality and independence.

Anthem

I wouldn’t call drinking so much a problem as I would a habit. And once you get into a habit, why then it becomes a problem. So how is one to drum on such a conundrum? Well, probably let it go. Live with it, let it eat away on certain parts of you, and die with it; the rest is history. Oh c’mon you progeny of the middle class, the greatest generation since the greatest generation. Bunch of stooges, electors of Bush and Bumsquat. Non-thinkers. No. We know what’s up and we know what’s down. For we have pocket TV sets and twitter accts. Long may we drink, long may we wave.

Up and tap-tap-tapping

Not sleeping too good tonight, hell, I never have slept too good, so I’m up and tap-tap-tapping, trying to make some sense out of this life of mine, of this world of ours. I’m not sure there’s any sense to be made of it, but at my age you delude yourself. I can compare it to a book I’m reading, A Universe Of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination by Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi: a couple of brain scientists hypothesizing about how consciousness happens, how we generate thought. A tall order, no? While they succeed in giving the reader a new and deeper respect for the complexities of our brains, they shed little new light on how the process happens, no more than say William James did a hundred years ago in his masterpiece Principles of Psychology. WelI, OK, maybe that’s unfair, but you get the feeling of two perplexed scientists fumbling around trying to be the first on their block to come up with an acceptable explanation of something that is essentially unexplainable—at least at this point in our development—because they’re using the brain to explain itself. Brain-generated language doesn’t suffice. Can thought fathom thought? Can language reveal its source? More to the point, can thinking extricate itself from the thought process in order to understand the thought process? Quien sabe, Kemo Sabe? But these dudes have the cred, bravado, and intellectual self-assurance to give it a shot. Unfortunately it comes out mostly as wishful thinking. Close, but no banana. Which, to return to where I started, is pretty much where I’m at at 2:00 in the morning trying to make sense out of life and the world: wishful thinking. I suppose this is what happens when you get to your mid-sixties and start looking across whatever number of years you have remaining and suddenly realize you don’t know shit and never did, and there’s this long lonely gulf where you fall away from life as you’ve known it and you’re faced with an image of a tiny pea rolling around in a vast, dark, unfathomable cosmos, unanchored, untethered, unprepared for what’s to come, so you start telling yourself stories that are guaranteed to keep you awake at night. Eventually you get out of bed, throw a log on the fire, eat some peanut butter toast and, like I said up top, try to make some sense of it all. I suspect I’ll have about as much success with this as Edelman and Tononi did with their self-consciously twisted image of the mind all doubling back on itself in the throes of thought-birth, or re-entrance, as the process is known to brain explorers: the idea that consciousness is a roaring flow of energy coursing through our neural nooks and crannies at the speed of thought, incessantly recirculated to new compartments of the brain for nourishment and inspiration, over, under, around and through the neural mass, until the un-thought thought train hits all required neuronic stations, is tinkered with, touched and retouched, adjusted and readjusted, until each of billions of participating nerves and sparking synapses has made its infinitesimal contribution. Thusly are thoughts--and consciousness itself--born and reborn like stories from nowhere, like shimmering fish from the white-hot volcanic depths of the seething cauldron we call mind. But what the heck. What else is there to do?

 

 Cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss joins a chorus of physicists and cosmologists who have been pushing into sacred ground, proclaiming more and more loudly in the last few years that science can explain how something — namely our star-spangled cosmos — could be born from, if not nothing, something very close to it. God, they argue, is not part of the equation. The book, “A Universe From Nothing,” is a best seller and follows recent popular tomes like “God Is Not Great,” by the late Christopher Hitchens; “The God Delusion,” by Richard Dawkins; and “The Grand Design,” by the British cosmologist Stephen Hawking (with Leonard Mlodinow), which generated headlines two years ago with its assertion that physicists do not need God to account for the universe.

Going to the Demnition Bowwows

Movie poster: NY, NY. USA. February 2007.
News clipping: found among my deceased uncle's few worldly possessions. February 1998.
TV image: January 2005.

Coming to a precinct near you

Thanks, Bill. It don't get no better than this.

The Umbrella Man

 This may be worth talking about. Humankind’s natural tendency to make something out of nothing. To cast irrelevant coincidences as meaningful symbols in lives unlived. Excitement generated where none exists. Mountains from molehills. Titillation of a lonely nation with the feather of desperation.

All we know

All we know about humanity, all we know about God, someone else has told us. Why should any of it be true? Each consciousness probes the Universe on a spider's thread, blindly intersecting with infinite others at the velocity of thought; yet each consciousness remains a universe unto itself. We know for certain nothing, save love, and that, too, requires the Other.

Occupied Wall Street Journal

I went down to Wall St. for four days to see what was going on. I'll write more about it soon, but I thought I'd post a copy of the newspaper put out by the occupiers. It's about a week old and much has transpired since, but it gives good info on what the protest and the protesters are all about. Occupied Wall Street Journal

Game

Maxine Kumin

Before he died
Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
gunned down in Sarajevo
to jump-start World War I,
bragged he had shot three
thousand stags and a miscellany
of foxes, geese, wolves, and boars
driven toward him by beaters,
stout men he ordered to flush
creatures from their cover
into his sights, a tradition
the British aristocracy
carried on, further aped
by rich Americans
from Teddy R. to Ernest H.,
something Supreme
Court Justice Antonin
Scalia, pudgy son of Sicilian
immigrants, indulged in
when, years later, he had
scores of farm-raised birds
beaten from their cages and scared
up for him to shoot down
which brought him an inner joy.
What happened
to him when he was a boy?

Chinese Protesters Accuse Solar Panel Plant of Pollution

By Sharon LaFraniere

New York Times Published: September 18, 2011

BEIJING — In a fresh indication of growing public anger over pollution, hundreds of demonstrators in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang on Sunday were camped outside a solar panel manufacturing plant that stands accused of contaminating a nearby river.

The demonstration was the latest move in a four-day protest that has sometimes turned violent.

The unrest began Thursday, when about 500 residents gathered outside the plant, in Haining, roughly 80 miles southwest of Shanghai. Some protesters stormed the five-year-old factory compound, overturning eight company vehicles, smashing windows and destroying offices. The next day, four police cars were damaged.

The factory is owned by JinkoSolar Holding Company, a Chinese firm with more than 10,000 employees that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and reported total revenue in the second quarter of 2.3 billion renminbi, or about $360 million. Some investment analysts described the company last year as a promising upstart in the solar-energy products business.

“Return our lives to us, stay away from Jinko,” read one protest banner that was photographed by a news agency. Company officials could not be reached for comment on the unrest.

According to Chinese news reports, residents claimed runoff from solid waste laced with fluoride and improperly stored at the plant had been swept into the nearby river after heavy rainfall on Aug. 26. They said that a sea of dead fish rose to the surface, covering hundreds of square yards of water. Pigs whose sties had been washed with river water also were reported to have died. The state-run China News Agency reported that government inspectors later found that the water contained 10 times the acceptable amount of fluoride.

The Haining demonstrations follow a mass demonstration last month in Dalian, in northeast China, in which 12,000 people protested a new chemical plant that produces paraxylene, a toxic chemical used to make polyester products. Government officials promised to relocate the plant after the protest, one of China’s largest in nearly three years.

Ma Jun, the director of the nonprofit Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in Beijing, said in an interview last month that protests over pollution are on the rise.

“People have a growing awareness of the damage caused by environmental pollution and a growing sense of rights,” he said. “There are an increasing number of cases that can be characterized as ‘not in my backyard.’ ”

According to Chinese news reports, the Zhejiang solar-panel plant had been faulted for improper waste disposal in April, and the government had ordered the company to suspend production until it constructed a facility to store solid waste safely.

The factory sits just more than 100 yards from an elementary school, and about 300 yards from a kindergarten, reported National Business Daily, a newspaper based in Beijing. A few protesters were reported to have been arrested on charges of theft or vandalism.

In one sign of the government’s growing concern over the potential of Twitter-like microblogs in China to stir unrest, a 33-year-old resident was arrested on charges of posting false rumors that 31 people had developed cancer and that six were stricken with leukemia in the nearby village of Hongxiao, which is close to the plant and has a population of 3,300.

The authorities said only six villagers had been given a diagnosis of cancer since the start of last year.

Meanwhile in Beijing, Chinese regulatory authorities curtailed a popular television talent show known in English as “Super Girl,” saying it exceeded the limit on broadcasting time. The show, similar in format to “American Idol” and highly rated by Chinese audiences, involves online voting via text messaging or other means to select a winning singer.

Li Hao, a spokesman for Hunan Satellite Television, said this weekend that the show, whose Chinese name can be translated as Happy Girl, would be replaced by programs that address social morality, public safety and “practical information about housework.”