FIRE IN THE LAKE

Grendel’s Laundry List: A Reading from the I Ching

FIRE IN THE LAKE

Ko / Revolution

above TUI  The Joyous, Lake

below LI  The Clinging, Fire

The Chinese character for this hexagram means in its original sense an animal’s pelt, which is changed in the course of the year by molting. From this the word is carried over to apply to the “moltings” in political life, the great revolutions connected with the changes of government.

The influences are in actual conflict, and the forces combat each other like fire and water (lake), each trying to destroy the other.

THE JUDGMENT

REVOLUTION. On your own day you are believed. Supreme success. Furthering through perseverance. Remorse disapears.

Political revolutions are extremely grave matters. They should by undertaken only under stress of direct necessity, when there is no other way out. Not everyone is called to this task, but only the man who has the confidence of the people, and even he only when the time is ripe. He must proceed in the right way, so that he gladdens the people and, by enlightening them, prevents excesses. Furthermore, he must be quite free of selfish aims and must really relieve the need of the people. Only then does he have nothing to regret.

Times change, and with them their demands. Thus the seasons change in the course of the year. In the world cycle also there are spring and autumn in the life of peoples and of nations, and these call for social transformations.

THE IMAGE

FIRE IN THE LAKE: The image of Revolution. Thus the superior man sets the calendar in order and makes the seasons clear.

Fire below and the lake above combat and destroy each other. So too in the course of the year a combat takes place between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, eventuating in the revolution of the seasons. Man masters these changes in nature by noting their regularity and marking off the passage of time accordingly. In this way order and clarity appear in the apparently chaotic changes of the season, and man is able to adjust himself in advance to the demands of different times.

Changes ought to be undertaken only when there is nothing else to be done. Therefore at first the utmost restraint is necessary. One must firm in one’s mind, control oneself…because any premature offensive will bring evil results.

When we have tried every way to bring about reforms, but without success, revolution becomes necessary. But such a thoroughgoing upheaval must be carefully prepared…The first thing to be considered is our inner attitude toward the new condition which will inevitably come. We have to go out to meet it, as it were. Only in this way can it be prepared for.

When talk of revolution has gone the rounds three times, one may commit oneself, and people will believe you.

When change is necessary, there are two mistakes to be avoided. One lies in excessive haste and ruthlessness, which bring disaster. The other lies in excessive hesitation and conservatism, which are also dangerous. Not every demand for change in the existing order should be heeded. On the other hand, repeated and well-founded complaints should not fail of a hearing. When talk of change has come to one’s ears three times, and has pondered well, one may believe and acquiesce in it. Then one will meet with belief and accomplish something.

What one does must correspond with a higher truth and must not spring from arbitrary or petty motives; then it brings great good fortune. If a revolution is not founded on such inner truth, the results are bad, and it has no success. For in the end the people will support only those undertakings which they feel instinctively to be true.

We must be satisfied with the attainable. If we should go too far and try to achieve too much, it would lead to unrest and misfortune. For the object of a great revolution is the attainment of clarified, secure conditions ensuring a general stabilization on the basis of what is possible at the moment.

I wish I thought President Obama was a revolutionary in the sense expressed by this excerpt from the I-Ching. But I do not. I think Barack Obama is the true conservative in this lethal pie fight in which our ruling class is currently engaged. I think his conservatism, and his hesitation in taking up the good fight against the Lords of Misrule that have taken over the political discourse and monkeywrenched the levers of legitimate government, is actually more dangerous than the antics of the duly-elected teahadists in Congress. Obama’s thirst for compromise has brought us to the brink of effectively repealing the New Deal and sending many of the citizens who voted for him straight to Hooverville, those of them that aren’t there already. The radical “conservatives” in the parliament of whores have shouted out repeatedly for all to hear that “compromise” is a dirty word, the ultimate blasphemy in their holy war against everything/anything that Obama and the Democratic Party care to stand for. But the members of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus are simply the equivalent of the Black Hand catspaws willing to shoot the Archduke.

This completely arbitrary, unnecessary, and fallacious not to say fraudulent debt ceiling crisis is not simply an episode of legislative hostage-taking on the part of the whingiest whingers of the whinge wing of the GOP. The idea that debt is our primary problem and reducing the deficit is the solution to it is a folie en famille or even folie à plusieurs, a species of induced delusion that has infected the governmental and financial elites not only of this country, but of the world. The current crisis is primarly a product and expression of this delusional psychosis of  global elites, not the rabid, mouth-frothing insanity of  the political puppets of a subset of our “Galtian Overlords.”  The cannibal clown pie fight in D.C. is not “a feature, not a bug,” it is both bug and feature.

As Mrs. Dr. Omed says, “It is very hard for someone to recognize a problem when their livelihood depends on not recognizing it.” The livelihoods, not mention the status, power, wealth, and position of our ruling classes depends on them not recognizing and addressing our true problems, not just publicly, but I suspect for most, even in thought. Those who do address our true problems (take your pick, I got my list, make your own) suffer the punishment–loss of prestige or influence or income or even the fate of heretics  at a modern multimedia Auto-da-fe.

President Obama’s reelection depends–or at least he and his administration behave as if they believe his reelection depends–on not recognizing our true problems, and instead focusing on “problems” for which the dominant but dysfunctional paradigm already has “solutions.” Let me go straight for the Godwin’s Law violation and suggest that more than one Wannsee Conference has met to promulgate the protocols of a “Final Solution” of our Finance Problem, and no tea party fanatics were invited. Wake up and smell the catfood. “Extremism in the cause of liberty” may or may not be “a vice,” but the extremities of triangulating centrists, not the extremism of extremists, brought us to this pass.

Today is 12.19.18.10.3 7 Akbal 11 Xul

517 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

Via ”A girl’s guide to taking over the world” on Facebook.

The deadpan, bored expression on the girl’s face as she flicks up her skirt to flash the giant, hairy merkin straped to her crotch just slays me. The various expressions on the faces of passers-by are priceless. Every time I play it, I dissolve into a fit of hyena-he-hes.

I’ve posted this Storm Large viddy before, but it makes a nice, um, matching bookend to the other, and the song brings similar good cheer to my black little heart—if the vagina fits, wear it:

Vaginistas of the World, UNITE!

Mercy Dotes

In the small hours like lost and found
gloves lacking mates,
my fingertips have closed the stars
embroidered on the wet folds
inside the peaked tent
of your vagina
like eyes brimming with unfallen tears.

My hands need you.

Lambs in wolves’ clothing,
conjoined twins creep
cloaked in their hairy pelts
among the sleeping pack—
all the moondogs held in sway
to the lucent
virtuoso play of cello,
a fit of gleams down your flank.

Sure as your own pups,
my hands find suck—
The little jaws work,
milk fangs nip,
red tongues lap at your teats,
swabs of damp velvet.

In these blind hours like spoons
asleep in a drawer
my hands are orphan ladles
dousing the witch
steam of your rich broth.
Romulus and Remus
keen to the alpha,
hungry for the weep
of beestings
startled from your nipples.

Embers

For forty thousand generations
we stirred the embers
of a low fire,

kept the audible prowlings
of the huge night
at bay.

A small tribe,
we looked up at the stars,
and the spaces between the stars,

tracked the transits
and transformations
of the moon, counted five wanderers,

As chert or clay came to our hands,
words came to us,
and we built them into stories

nested in stories,
tool kits for making memory
into myth,

to tell the children,
to tell the children,
to tell the children

how to compact the whole life of our tribe,
a small tribe,
into a bundle of words and pictures

small enough to carry
inside the head of an elder,

but enough
to survive a long trek,
and feed the whole tribe,

by the low fire,
in the great dark,
under a starry sky,

give us meaning,
give us meaning
give us the meaning.

by which we mean to survive.

Today is 12.19.18.9.19 3 Kawak 7 Xul

521 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

Aurochs and Horses, Chauvet Cave, southern France

Mrs. Dr. Omed and I recently drove to the local Mong-O-Plex to see Werner Herzog’s idiosyncratic 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I’m not a fan of 3D or of 3D glasses–neither is Herzog, as it turns out–but it was worth the headache and two days of blurred vision to see this film, and to see how the prehistoric painters used the contours of the cave walls to conjure the presence of the animals.

In his big book on Paleolithic art, The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry into the Origins of Art and Religion, the anthropologist John Pfeiffer proposes the hypothesis that cave paintings are part of the arsenal of “special effects” created by the anatomically modern Cro-Magnons reinforcing and dramatizing the “mnemonic systems” that preserved the technological, cultural, and general knowledge of the tribe.  Pfeiffer points out that “the notion…that knowledge of any sort…should be shared as widely as possible is a relatively recent thing.” Secret ceremonies, degrees of initiation in the mysteries of the tribal cult are also major components of the process of imprinting vital tribal memes.  Not to mention dislocation, pain, and fear. Learning by ordeal. Penile subincision with a stone knife, for instance, concentrates the mind wonderfully; the boy will remember what the elder whispers in his ear. Pfeiffer calls it “education for survival.” He also emphasizes that these are things done in the dark, the ritual drama playing out against a pitch black backdrop, the sputter of flames from fat-fueled lamps licking painted stone into life.

Despite the decimation of traditional tribal cultures in the world wide demolition derby of modern history, we are all becoming more and not less tribal. In the Information Age all the netizens of the Global Village are self-selecting in a frenzy of Lamarckian cultural evolution, into tribes. Not tribes based on kinship or territory, but on shared memes (on shared whims sometimes). Instant communication equals instant tribalism. The question is no longer “what’s your sign,” it’s “what’s your tribe” asked in any number of ways.

In the American midwest there are fundamentalist-run “Hell Houses” that open during the Halloween season with the avowed purpose of instilling the fear of Hell in their customers, and facilitating the conversion of the rubes by literally scaring them into the arms of Jesus. This is the ritual drama of recruitment into a tribal cult in a degenerate form.

As Lao Tzu said, there are many paths, one way. One possible path is to return to making dreamtime maps, epics and legends with plenty of “entertainment value” to transmit the nested data in continuing sagas to the post-illiterate electronic tribes of the noose-sphere, with a trickle-down to the post-literate society at large. Pilgrims and seekers, Dr. Omed has gazed deep into the blue screen of fate.  He sees some. He knows some.  Know it or not, some of you are the root workers, the conjure doctors, the shamans of  Little Sister.  Just keep on doing that hoodoo you do so well.

In related news: All Non-Africans Part Neanderthal

They hate our Freedom Fries! Viva La France!

As an adjunct to my belated post on Bastille Day, I offer this video clip from the movie Casablanca,  a scene in Rick’s Cafe Americain in which Paul Henreid as the resistance leader Victor Lazlo leads a rousing chorus of La Marseillaise to drown out German officers singing Die Wacht am Rhein. Both songs are rather bloodthirsty patriotic hymns. Never mind that Victor Lazlo is supposed to be a Czech resistance leader, and that Morocco was in colonial subjection to France. It makes no sense, but I always tear up when I watch it.

Viva La France!

Here’s a full version of the anthem with lyrics in French and amusing English translation:

La Marseillaise was written and composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle in 1792 and adopted in 1795 as the nation’s first anthem. The melody is an adaptation of a theme written in 1781 by Giovan Battista Viotti. It became the rallying call of the French Revolution and received its name because it was first sung on the streets by volunteers (fédérés) from Marseille upon their entry into Paris on 30 July 1792 after a young volunteer from Montpellier called François Mireur had sung it at a patriotic gathering in Marseille and the troops adopted it as the marching song of the National Guard of Marseille. A newly graduated medical doctor, Mireur later became a general under Napoléon Bonaparte and died in Egypt at 28.

Marchons! Marchons!

Today is 12.19.18.9.15 12 Men 3 Xul

525 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

Marie Antoinette is famously said to have said, when told that the peasants had no bread: ”Qu’ils mangent de la brioche. Let them eat cake.” The overseers at my place of employ bought doughnuts for the serfs yesterday. I added the caption in magic marker, purely for my own amusement, and the digital memento of the picture. I forgot the “s” in “Qu’ils.” Oh, la.

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts are favored in corporate venues when there is a need to reward the workers with a dose of the sweet grease jones. Were it not for the institution of the meeting in our work-a-day culture, I’m not sure that Krispy Kreme would still be in business. Modern American oligarchy, unlike the ancien régime, makes sure that the peasantry has plenty of cake to eat. For now.  If you try, I bet you can hear the voice of Republican princess Michelle Bachmann saying, “Qu’ils mangent de les beignets…Let them eat doughnuts,” and then the American Id in the voice of Homer Simpson responding, “Mmmm...doughnuts…”

Yesterday was Bastille Day. On July 14, 1789, citizen insurgents in Paris stormed the Bastille Saint-Antoine, a medieval fortress built by the French king Charles V and used as a prison by later French kings, including Louis XVI. There were only a few prisoners locked up in the Bastille that day. The Marquis de Sade had been transferred to another lock-up just ten days earlier. Nevertheless, the Bastille was to the citoyens of Paris a sinister reminder of their oppression under absolute royal power. The attacking crowd was not looking for cake, or to free a few prisoners. They were after the large store of muskets, powder, shot, and ball warehoused there. 30,000 pounds of gunpowder smells like revolution. Load up on guns and bring your friends.

Lafayette sent the key to the Bastille to George Washington as a gift. This key is still at Mount Vernon:

Give me leave, my dear General to present you with the main key of the fortress of despotism. It is a tribute, which I owe, as a son to my adoptive father, as an Aide-de-Camp to my General, as a Missionary of liberty to its Patriarch.   Marquis de Lafayette

A financial crisis caused in part by the debt taken on by the French crown in bankrolling the American Revolution was a prime cause of the fall of monarchy in France.  The French King backed our revolution against Britain, and in the end lost his head for it. Americans in general don’t know much history, and the French Revolution and its causes is probably not a popular subject of study. But many of the problems facing France in the years leading up to the Revolution have curious reverberations in these latter days when our own ruling elites are poised to lose their heads over massive government debt largely incurred by financing foreign wars.

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,

we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Today is 12.19.18.9.13 10 Ben 1 Xul

527 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

“Austrian driver’s license strains credulity.”

It’s a perfect headline. The lede is pretty good, too:

(BBC News) An Austrian atheist has won the right to be shown on his driving-licence photo wearing a pasta strainer as “religious headgear”.

Niko Alm first applied for the licence three years ago after reading that headgear was allowed in official pictures only for confessional reasons.

Mr Alm said the sieve was a requirement of his religion, pastafarianism.

The Austrian authorities required him to obtain a doctor’s certificate that he was “psychologically fit” to drive.

A self-confessed atheist, Mr Alm says he belongs to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a light-hearted faith whose members call themselves pastafarians.

Mr Alm’s pastafarian-style application for a driving licence was a response to the Austrian recognition of confessional headgear in official photographs.

It is the police who issue driving licences in Austria, and they have duly issued a laminated card showing Mr Alm in his unorthodox item of religious headgear.

The next step, Mr Alm told the Austrian news agency APA, is to apply to the Austrian authorities for pastafarianism to become an officially recognised faith.

The story would be perfect if Herr Alm had legally changed his name to “Al Dente.”

H/t Blag Hag

Brewster McCloud/See you in the next life

I once took a bus from Oklahoma City to Stillwater, Oklahoma to see the Robert Altman movie Brewster McCloud. In the midst of writing the last post, I flashed on Rene Auberjonois’ scenes as “The Lecturer” in that film. Altman made such gloriously weird movies way back when. I googled, and found this lovely combo of the last scene, Brewster’s Icarian flight inside the Houston Astrodome, and the song Next Life by Suede. Enjoy.

Today is 12.19.18.9.12 9 Eb 0 Xul

528 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

Blue Heron, Mohawk Park, Tulsa, Oklahoma

When I lived in Tulsa, I frequently saw both Greater and Lesser Herons along the Arkansas River and other waterways. They spook pretty easily and it’s very hard to get close enough long enough to get a decent photograph, so I was inordinately pleased to have stalked this one and gotten its portrait. Herons make a rather dismal croak and flap grumpily off when you crowd them. They seem to covet solitude, as I do.

Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

I see herons along the Ohio River, now that I live in Louisville, but not as many. With their large size and reptilian mien, herons betray their therapod dinosaur ancestry more than most birds. As we enter the Anthropocene with all the ongoing evidences of the sixth great extinction, I like to watch the birds and remember that even a starling or a wren is a little therapod, a living relative of Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor. Birds as a clade are survivors. There are about 10,000 living species in Class Aves, roughly twice as many as there are in Class Mammalia. We “featherless bipeds” are the last scions of  a recent, small, and dwindling genus, and we’ve just about killed off our remaining close living relatives.  Blake also wrote:

How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?

I can’t cut an airy way, but I can make scissors dance:

Thanks for reminding me, Fiona.

Today is 12.19.18.9.9 6 Muluk 17 Tzek

532 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

Little Sister Watch: Personal Drones

Parrot AR  drone

senseFly swinglet Cam

I haven’t mentioned Little Sister in some time, so let’s refresh…just over two years ago, I wrote:

Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, created the powerful meme, “Big Brother.” Since his novel 1984 was published in 1948, Big Brother and its associated memes have propagated, as we now say, virally, throughout the O’ Spheres of human culture. I would like to suggest a new meme as an overlay and even a successor to Big Brother: Little Sister.

Who is Little Sister? To quote another great mememaker, Walt Kelly, as spoken by his character and avatar Pogo,  ”Yep, son, we have met the enemy and he is us.”  We have met Little Sister, and She is us.  Put an Orwellian twist on the paraphrase, and it becomes,

We are Little Sister, and we are watching us.

Little Sister is everyone who carries a cellphone with a digital camera that can upload pics and viddy to the intertubes. Little Sister is the “Macaca” who provided now former Senator George Allen an opportunity to destroy his political career.  Little Sister is the 3 or more BART riders who viddied BART policeman Johannes Mehserle shooting Oscar Grant as Grant lay prone on the floor of the car. Little Sister is an emergent property of people interacting via the ever-faster global communications grid and all the technologies, software, and infrastructure that make, extend, and connect it.

In my opinion, Little Sister trumps Big Brother. To be a bit derisive about it, Big Brother is sooo Twentieth Century. Little Sister needs no Ministry of Love, no Ministry of Truth. Little Sister is distributed. Little Sister is every blogger, every person on Facebook or YouTube or Twitter or Vodpod or Identica or whatever the lubed up social tool is the latest trend–o-ware to backdoor the Internet. Little Sister is every person who has an email account, even if that person is a homeless person who accesses his email via a computer at the Public Library.

Big Brother is top down, Little Sister is bottom up. Little Sister benefits from the flatness of the infosphere as it now stands, Big Brother must contend with it.  Big Brother seeks total order; total control. Little Sister is random and nondeterministic, technology-enabled anarchy incarnate. Little Sister has the wide world under surveillance, yet defeats surveillance. Every discrete bit of Little Sister is like a subatomic particle: If you know where it is, you don’t know which way it’s going; if you know which way it’s going, you don’t know where it is. Big Brother is as often suborned by Little Sister as the other way around. I’m not saying that Big Brother is going away, but there’s a new gal in town.

Little Sister does have a significant, or shall I say signal, weakness: Her continued operation is utterly dependent on the Res Technica, the aforesaid global grid, the noose-sphere into which humankind has stuck its collective neck. Given a massive fail of any portion of the infrastructure, the blue screen of death awaits her, and we take the long fall.

It’s Little Sister versus Big Brother, but it’s also Little Sister interacting with Big Brother, and vice versa. Little Sister tends to disrupt the status quo, though on occasion Little Sister does bolster it as well. More the former than the latter. Depends on what the status quo is that day, or rather, that millisecond.

But Little Sister is a process, not a creed. It is powered by people who have access to the technologies that allow them to input and output to the grid, but it doesn’t necessarily promote People Power, anymore than evolution by natural selection promotes the political creeds of the very ill named Social Darwinism, Manifest Destiny, or any ism or  idea of human progress. Like the process of natural selection, Little Sister has no goal and no values of herself, even though  she is an unintended creation of human actions and human instrumentality.

The technologies are being exploited by everyone who has access to them, for any conceivable good or ill. Access cannot be controlled at all times by any one authority or set of authorities. Little Sister arises from the properties of these technologies, and creates user capabilities unforeseen by any authority. Big Brother is a nickname for totalitarianism, a political system that worships, and attempts to preserve, absolute power for the few. Little Sister is the nickname I propose for the fruitful high tech anarchy in which most of us find ourselves living. Big Brother was purpose made; Little Sister just happened.

I suggested Little Sister as a meme, but no one took the suggestion. I still think of the idea as one of my “greatest hits” but so far it’s only been a legend in my own mind. Writers like Clay Shirky have written entire books about Little Sister, but none have picked up my cool nickname, alas.

When I wrote the above text twits on Twitter were turning their avatars green in solidarity with protesters in Iran. The “Twitter Revolution” didn’t turn out so well. Subsequent social media assisted street actions have toppled governments. Instances of Little Sister in action, large and small, have proliferated. Weiner’s weiner on Twitter was, shall we say, a small one.  The protests, uprisings, overthrows and overall ongoing revolutionary ferment in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Syria, et cetera are the large instances. Wikileaks is an incarnation of Little Sister. She lives and breathes and moves. And now, Sis can haz flying eyeballs in the sky like Ceiling Cat, and the U.S Government. I “predicted” it:

Dr. Yoshev Omed (tinydoctor)’s status on Friday, 10-Sep-10 10:14:17 EDT

1. tinydoctorNext manifestation of #LittleSister: Drone technology for the masses. Personal Drones. Don’t taze me, bro, my drone is broadcasting live.

about 10 months ago from web

space
Turns out I was not really ahead of the wavefront. As I slyly suggest, personal drones could be used by protesters against authorities. When some of the protesters’ cameras have wings and are buzzing like a swarm of giant dragonflies above riot policemen’s heads, out of truncheon’s reach, it’s gonna be a lot harder to stop that insurgent live-to-Internet video feed. Of course, the policemen will have drones too.  Personal drone dogfighting may soon have its aces. Drones could also be used–could already be in use–by paparazzi, stalkers, and Peeping Toms…private investigators, Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe… birdwatchers and hunters…inspection engineers and terrorists…the possibilities shiver in the virtual ether like World of Warcraft sugar plum fairies.

If you’ve got a few hundred bucks and an iPhone, iPod, or iPad, you can fly one of these babies…you can fly you can fly you can fly…you can spy you can spy you can spy. Tinkerbell. Yes, Wendy, there’s an app for that.