Grey light, sound of rustling leaves, smell of concrete in the air. It changes my whole outlook on life, somehow. Yellow sunlight really does depress the hell out of me—it becomes obvious when I notice how much better I feel once it goes away.

Maybe I still have leftover effects from all of that Moab stuff so long ago. Or maybe it’s just that everything good in my childhood happened in fall and winter, never in summer. Who knows.

Rain!

It is my least favorite thing.

forest
trees
forest
trees
forest
trees
gaaaaaah

—

must . step . back . i . see

—

i am frying my head

Just saw a conservative talking head on cable news who did actually understand that current oil price increases are a function of expected high demand in oil futures thanks to increased consumption in the industrializing world.

What really got me was the argument that they made next, and which may seem familiar to you (it is a facsimilie of the “we get nukes but nobody else should” position). To wit, they said that we therefore had to understand that these prices were not the “fault” of Americans, but rather the “fault” of the Chinese and the Indians, and it’s them that we should “do something” about in order to reign in their demand and thus increase supply available to, and reduce costs for, Americans.

So… we should get all the oil, and they should get none. We should get one car per person, but we’ve got to reduce their car use, which currently stands at less than one car per thousand. We have the right to aspire to the standards of living of those ahead of us, but those behind us don’t have the right to aspire to ours.

Why, exactly? No argument was made. I presume, it’s once again because “We’re Americans and thus we deserve it, and they’re brown people and they don’t.” In short, cultural racism, classism, and the continued spectre and soul of manifest destiny, which haunts the American consciousness to this day, only on a global scale.

Mexican immigration, anyone? NIMBY oil refineries, anyone? Nuclear proliferation, anyone? News from outer space to Americans: you have more than almost everyone else. There is no moral nor natural reason why this should be the case. If it’s not immoral on its face for you to be in this position, then it’s certainly immoral to consider trying to beat the masses back and prevent them from aspiring to what you already have. You selfish bastards.

I’m sure this same conservative is relentlessly invested in “emerging markets,” earning nice dividends while the workers on the other end of the deal earn next to nothing under rotten conditions, and meanwhile making the claim that free trade is good since it will raise all our boats together. Heh. More of the morality of neoliberalist Americanism.

For further treatment of this morality, see also this nice list.

—

The mosquitoes are out in force tonight. My window is open.

I think. But I am having trouble making myself work. Maybe today is a day to go to the mountains, or to the lake. I don’t quite know yet. I’m still waking up.

be awake. I can’t sleep. I can’t be. I am not okay.

God I’m tired of being blindsided. It seems like it doesn’t happen to some people. It seems like it’s always happened to me. 🙁

I suddenly feel as though the rug has been pulled out from under me, like I don’t know anything, like I’ve been living a lie for years. I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know who to talk to. I don’t trust anybody. I don’t have anybody.

I don’t know where I’m going next.

Maybe it is time to start everything over, from scratch, from the beginning, from birth.

Maybe it’s too late for that.

I don’t know.

loneliness

All around, a silent hum, and space. Space.

It is the lack of things, and the lack of people that crowds me.

It is the lack of trust and the heaviness of histories, mine and not mine, and age. Age and broken ten-year-old dreams. To be a child is to have hope; to be an adult is to realize that your hopes have come and gone and already you are doing little more than making due.

For the first time in my life, I feel as though I want to have a child.

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what anything means as I look around me at all of this space, and sense—rather than hear, necessarily—the silent hum.

?!??!??!!!

—

i am 30
this is my life

On BBC News from Simon Poore, regarding the Bush “immigration plan” detailed last night:

“Bush asks Congress to fund 6000 troops, when he has continually asked Congress to lower taxes. The national deficit means that he is essentially borrowing the money from China. He has made 35 national addresses this year.

“When will the troops leave? When no more immigrants are attempting to cross the border, i.e. never. So now Bush hasn’t got an exit strategy from his own country.”

That, my friends, is MasterCard priceless.

Permanent border control of any kind is on its face immoral. There is only one reason for this conflict—for some people wanting to arrive at a place and others wanting to keep them out en masse—and that reason is a desperate attempt by the haves to ensure that the others remain the have nots.

Anyone who claims to want to protect “the American way of life” or to want to keep other people from taking “American jobs” is saying—in so many words—that they want to keep the other party from enjoying the same standard of living that they do.

In short, the entire American nation is screaming at the top of its lungs just now: “WE WANT BROWN BABIES TO CONTINUE TO BE BORN INTO POVERTY AND TO DIE YOUNG, SO THAT WE CAN HAVE THEIR RESOURCES AND THUS A HIGHER STANDARD OF LIVING, DAMMIT!”

Legal/illegal? Ptah. It’s all a euphemism for domination and racism.

be
very
afraid of
them

—

We now know why the 9/11 attacks seem so poorly investigated and why, if the WTC was destroyed by “our” people, the news media never covered it and independent investigators never investigated it. They have all been blackmailed, threatened, pressed—by a federal government heavy with leverage gained through domestic intelligence, thus having acquired the ability to make things go “very badly” for anyone in any food chain that dares to ask whether the PNAC and Israel are actually involved in 9/11, whether the Iraq war was really about WMD or oil at all, or what the true motives might be.

How deep does this thing go? Who’s really running the country? The world?

—

Watch the video. The whole thing.

—

It’s all just a theory, of course.

Oh, except for the secret prisons, torture during investigations, chlandestine detentions without evidence or trial, real-time cataloguing of ALL domestic communications activity, closure of any congressionally-mandated investigation into 9/11 or the NSA, 750+ signing statements, or threats against whistleblowers and press agents. Those are real.

The rest is just a theory…

—

As an aside, several in the technical community have made the point that the multiple petabytes on store at each of the NSA domestic spying sites is multiple orders of magnitude larger than the amount of storage required for a mere calling list, given the known call volume of United States citizens.

What else is taking up that space? And what could it be that Russel Tice is planning on telling the closed committee before which he’ll testify on Wednesday?

To these questions I add only the following facts about cell phones:

1) It already common practice for law enforcement (with a subpoena, traditionally) to log the movements of suspects by watching the movements of their cell phones through the communications network. This information can easily be recorded and aggregated.

2) Cell phones are just little computers. They do what they are told, and most of their instructions come from the cell towers (rather than the keypads as most consumers would assume). When you short the left, center, and right pins simultaneously on Nokia phones, the phone goes into a lock mode. Reset it and you’ll find that a new mode has been activated in the profiles section. Select this new mode and whenever the phone is dialed, it won’t ring but will instead let you listen silently to whomever is around it. There is no technical reason why such a mode (or indeed, any cell phone feature at all) cannot be activated used, and deactivated again from tower command without the user ever realizing it, and it is interesting that such a mode is present but initially hidden from users when the phone is purchased. There is also no technical reason why other brands or models of phones might not have similar “feautres” hidden in them.

Given 1) and 2) above, in combination with the equipment necessary to do endpoint tracking of all domestic calls in the US, now largely stipulated to, one could build a database that contains:

1) The data of all domestic calls in the united states, both endpoints and content.
2) The positional data of all cellphone carriers at all times.
3) A third body of content consisting of on-demand recordings of environmental sound made by cell phones while their owners were not actually talking on them nor aware of any recording going on.

Add to this the facts that all medical information, financial information, and electronic (i.e. World Wide Web) use information is already maintained by various institutions in database formats that would be easy to integrate into a single, larger database, and your mind is drawn back to the program that was supposely killed in the early days of the Bush Administration.

What was it called?

Oh yes… **Total Information Awareness**

—

Hi, big brother. I hope you are well today.

Two animal stories, one national and one local, show the utter thoughtlessness of the American lifestyle. Gator attacks in Florida have experienced a sudden and precipitous increase in recent days as new developments have pushed into formerly wild areas. And new residents in many suburban Salt Lake City developments are complaining heavily about vol (small outdoor rodent) “infestation.”

Now I’m not usually one to go on and on proactively about animal rights issues, nor is it anything new that the people who have moved to where the polar bears are will shoot them. But to me the fact that entire organizations of people are deploying man-hours by the hundred to try to eliminate the alligators and the vols in these areas, and that news organizations run these stories about “menaces” that need to be eliminated speaks to the same American thoughlessness that leads us into Iraq on the war front and to disasters like Bhopal on the commerce front.

It’s not about the animals, it’s about Americans feeling as though they should be able to get what they want as a matter of rights. If this property isn’t mine but I want it, I should be able to pay someone to make it mine. If I pay someone to make it mine and there are wild populations of small animals on it that have lived there since time immemorial, I should be able to pay someone to make them go away. The destruction of ecosystem, introduction of poison into the water tables, and need to explain to my children why it’s okay to kill 150,000 burrowing rodents who were there first are not problems. It is the damn animals that are the problems. After all, they’re the ones on my property. “It’s Mothers’ Day,” said the local official in Florida, “and this woman’s life has been snuffed out.” That’s why it’s right to hunt down the gators in response. Because they clearly have no respect for individual rights. Because it was done on Mothers Day, clearly demonstrating the alligator’s lack of respect both for property rights and for an individual’s right to undisturbed holidays. “To anyone who questons what I’m doing,” said the lady with the ‘vol infestation,’ “you’d do the same if they were on your property. It’s only because it’s on my property and not yours that you’re complaining.”

I am an American. Everything I want, not just in property but in basic terms of existence, I should be able to have—at most, I should have to pay a small fee to have it like I like it. Certainly, however, there should be no laws or rules, neither imposed nor even natural, that might disturb my acquisition of property.

That people will build housing developments in the middle of gator populations or entire vast valleys full of vols, that other people still will buy property in these developments knowing full well that animals live there already, that both will actively seek using massive resources to empty these areas of all non-human life after doing so, and finally that the news media will report this as a good thing, a problem in the process of being solved… lays bare a deep, putrid sickness in the American psyche, in capitalism, and in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny that still guides the American sensibility and spirit.

It doesn’t matter whether they’re vols, gators, indigenous peoples, political opponents, or even competitors in the marketplace. They can be killed. Not they must be killed, which as the bloodlust that it would characterize might at least grant some dignity to the victim. No, it’s much more banal and amoral than that. They are not even “the other.” They are the not-me. And to an American, whatever is the not-me can be ignored or destroyed at will, not with malice, but with little, if any, thought at all.

I remember being taught this in grade school by at least two teachers. “Worry about yourself,” they said. “Let the others worry about themselves. When everyone is worrying about themself and not anybody else, that’s when everything gets done right.” What a philosophy to teach to a five-year-old! But I look around and I know that this Locke-meets-Smith understanding of the world is much more a backbone of American consciousness than any other ideal.