When life conflicts with art.
A death of a cat/friend/family member, a construction project, and a wedding in Canada.
While driving, I had some podcasts to pass the time. Boing Boing had a great interview with Mr. Jalopy of Hoopty Rides. Check it out the site for some great...um...projects. Hard to explain.
A good quote from Mr. Jalopy "If you can't open it, you don't really own it."
REpurpose
I've tried to keep political commentary to a minimum, but every week I get more and more indignant. It's all I can do not rip the heads off of twittering idiots who want to continue to debate the rightness of the current American administration. There's nothing to debate.
THEY'RE A BUNCH OF LYING, ANTI-AMERICAN, NEO-FASCIST, CORPORATE CRIMINALS WHO WILL SAY ANYTHING TO PROVOKE YOUR BASEST, MOST VILE INSTINCTS TO MAINTAIN POWER AND BLEED THE COUNTRY OF ITS CAPITAL! THEY DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOU, YOUR FAMILY, YOUR COMMUNITY, OR YOUR COUNTRY!
THEY WANT YOUR MONEY!
THEY WANT YOUR MONEY!
Complex 39 envisions a not quite post-apocalyptic future in which the world is controlled by corporate mechanizations and the few highest placed profiters of the system. I think we've turned a corner that we're not coming back from. In the U.S., citizens are programed for consumption compliance and socio-political ambivalence. As with a frog in a pot, it's all about being slow enough so the frog doesn't know he's being boiled alive.
To paraphrase Penn Jellett, "living well beneath your means gives you an immense amount of power." Cut costs, live well, get off of the credit-go-round. Almost everything THEY offer is to keep you enslaved to the system. There's no end to it in their world. There's no real retirement from it.
With that, I also use this space to organize the myriad of sites/ideas/points-of-reference that support my own blend of living art in that aesthetic frame of reference.
Coming soon - Our attempt to augment home heating oil with Biodiesel. It's cleaner and costs about fifty cents to a buck a gallon to make.
"Knowledge is power" - Sir Francis Bacon
Last Word
First off, to make it clear, the rest of the world is at best thinking we (U.S.) as a nation are nuts. So many think we're just evil, arrogant, hateful bastards. At the wedding I attended recently, the Canadians were very gracious, but it was clear that there was a deep disappointment with our "War on Terror."
What I really want to say is that the war wasn't/isn't lost.
The war in Iraq was over in about a week or so.
The occupation, Operations Other Than War (OOTW), Low Intensity Conflict (LIC), counter insurgency operations, and/or civil war will last generations. The violence on the streets off Baghdad is nothing new nor unforeseen unless one is unschooled in basic history or if one is in the government and charged with protecting the nation, criminally incompetent. So if someone is yammering about someone saying "soldiers lives wasted" or "the war is lost", tell them to shut the hell up. They don't know shit about war if they're claiming we're at war. We're at a simmering pot of bullshit. We're at a never ending occupation of a former "country" that's sucked down $500 billion thus far. We're presiding over a region of disparate peoples who really don't want to live together.We're there because the boomers wanted SUV's in their aging hippy-dippyness rather than wake up after the first major oil crisis. The boomers ignored their responsibility to stay alert and vigilant to the same forces that got us into the likes of Vietnam. I don't ignore the responsibility of the coming generations to do something, but they were there first and they're massive in numbers. They're a political and economic powerhouse and they could have done something in the 70's that would have helped avoid all this.
I digress...
The fact is, right or wrong, the war is over and we won.
But then we stayed there and an occupation is not war.
3 comments:
who cares who won the war? people are dying. would more people have died if the US just stayed out of iraq? probably yes but either way the situation is shit. they did it for the oil and thats the point..and just like u say now that technology using heating oil as fuel is more than 10 years old ..if the industry would hasv reacted 10 years ago there would hav been no war.
I care about who won the war because it goes to the heart of the political manipulation that THEY've been using against the people. War on Terror. The semantics alone is an absurdity. Yes there are people who use terror as a tactic...have a war against them. But to fight a fucking tactic is impossible.
There is no war to be won, and so as long as "Winning a War" is the crux of the debate we can't address the bigger issues.
There's been a big PR campaign by the right to frame our occupation of Iraq as a war, therefore any withdraw seems a failure, thus appealing to the emotions of many who might otherwise support the end of an occupation. "Winning the war" as a concept is about the psychology of propaganda and social control.
The point is THEY've got us caught up in the minutia of the bullshit.
All former hardline communist and religious regimes used "outside enemy" as a (very effective) mean of social control, in which they were able to get away with much more then they othervise would.
Every time the oposition got strong enough to be risky, Milosevic started another war for example.
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