United States of Anxiety

I'm not tired of this "capitalism will kill us all" trope. Yet.

I may have found the place where UBIK and VALIS are speaking to each other.

The "second sentence" can come from many places.

Posted this as a comment and just had to post it. Hehehe.

Where am I?
1. On a tiny speck.
2. Atop an incidental coincidence of elemental particles all happening to be together in a configuration to support me.
3. In a warm place surrounded by my beloved friends and their sharp teeth and claws.
4. In the BLANKET FORTRESS. Pow. Pow.
5. In love with all of you. (Okay, bad pun. Teehee.)

OMG, I love this quote so much I can hardly speak.

E. H. Gombrich:
"Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there."

http://brownsharpie.courtneygibbons.org/?p=623

On an unrelated note (get it? Un-related!), I’d like to give a super huge thanks to Ben Nolting, who came through at the last minute and agreed to look in on our cats this weekend. In return for your heroic gesture, Ben, I’d like to officially guarantee you and your officemates cookie support throughout the next year of grad school. I’m also going to give you a framed print of a Brown Sharpie comic of your choice. Thanks again!

---

Copyright © 2008 Brown Sharpie. Thanks for reading Brown Sharpie! Check out the shop: Brown Sharpie at cafepress
:)

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You all know I'm not exactly going to be patriotic here, so feel free to skip.

I said this in someone else's LJ:
It's such a messy place, this country, very scrabbling and squabbling and confused and the hugeness makes that dangerous for everyone, so everyone, inside and out, ends up trying to keep the mad giant standing and hoping no one else gets squished if it falls.
There's a reason children are small, I think, but nothing to do now but try to manage somehow...

Dear USA,

In your staggering about, remember to try not to step on anyone else. I know you mean well, at least most of the time, but sometimes your intentions do rather get lost in your actions. You're still a very young country and awfully big for your age. Keep working hard to grow up. You can do it!

Happy Birthday,
Jenny

1. A favourite book.
The Physician by Noah Gordon. I have always loved historical fiction, and this first book of the trilogy (the other two, Shaman and A Matter of Choice, are good too but nothing like this one) has me spellbound every time I re-read it, even if I know it practically at heart by now. The story of the 11th century English orphan boy who manages to go and study medicine in Persia is simply fantastic.

2. A book that affected you in your YA years.
Ragazzi di Vita by Pier Paolo Pasolini. This was Pasolini's first book which I read and it not only got me hooked on the Italian language, but also on the strange culture full of contradictions which is Italy. The strange mixture of ideology, perdition and growth in this book has made it a soundtrack for my late adolescence and early adulthood.

3. A favourite fantasy novel.
Lovecraft's The Shadow out of Time. The possibility of traveling in space and time and universes has always carried an enormous fascination for me.

4. A favourite sci-fi novel.
Michael Crichton's Timeline. The way he puts together popular fiction, history and science is certainly astonishing. (Did I mention I have a kink for time travel ;)?

5. An awesome book you think not many people around you have heard of/read.
Christine Wunnicke's biography of the Castrato Filippo Balatri, based on his own handwritten memories. Simply fantastic.

6. A book you own more than one copy of.
Dante's Divine Comedy. I have several different editions, also translations in German and English. I am still saving for the edition with Gustavo Doré's illustrations.

7. An author whose every single book you own/will buy.
Daniel Silva. His spy fiction caters to my Jewish paranoia :)

8. The worst book you've ever read.
Uh oh. Too many to name.. I often buy the craziest stuff when boarding airplanes or trains, and there has been an enormous amount of BS among that.
One of the more famous authors which comes to my mind is "Cell" by Stephen King. I did like King's earlier fiction, particularly "IT" and some of the more fantastic stuff, but what he is churning out lately.. bleh. And that novel about some kind of impuls killing via contackt with cell phones is pure idiocy, and also written badly.

9. A book you dislike that lots of other people you know like.
All the Harry Potter stuff. And I HAVE TRIED. MORE THAN ONCE. Since so many people continue to tell me I'll love them, I have started to read the first book several times, but I never get farther than the first pages.. the style and the plot just don't appeal to me.

10. The most difficult book you've ever read.
Trying to read Mircea Eliade's "La ţiganci" in Romanian after only 6 months of study of the language. LOL. But I made it to the end, and I loved it, and have read most of Eliade's other works too by now.

11. Tell me what kind of books your mum reads/read.
Nowadays, mostly meditative, edificating stuff, like Deepak Chopra. She reads a lot of magazines, from health ones to religiously-oriented things.

12. What have you read so far this year?
I read about 2 books a week, so how should I remember them all? A lot of that is obviously cheap fiction because while traveling I can't concentrate on anything else.

13. What are you reading now?
I just finished Daniel Silva's "The Messenger".

14. What are you reading next?
While I am waiting to get my hands on Silva's new book (Moscow rules) I still have nothing to read for this weekend, which is NOT NICE. I will have to delve in my mountains of book and find something to re-read. Dino Buzzati's "Seven Messengers" (in Italian, "I sette Messaggeri") is something I have wanted to meet again for some time. Or maybe Goethe's Italienische Reise, which is always lovely.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/timsusmanwriting/~3/326406231/uninspired.html

Sometimes none of the projects you're working on really excite you. If you're tired (as I am today despite having had reasonable sleep this week), it's a lot harder to make yourself work on things. I know I'm excited at some level about all of these things I'm writing. It's just that I haven't been thinking about them recently, so they're not front of my not-particularly-active mind.

But that just means it's a good time to do some reading. I'll have a review up for you pretty soon.

(Editorial note: Happy American Independence Day, or Fourth of July. In honor of the holiday, I wanted to interrupt this two-part series and insert a traditional, even for me, bit of patriotic glurge, because I really am like that. Fortunately, I came to my senses. There is nothing more patriotic, during a Presidential election year, than actually discussing with my fellow Americans what principles we want to be governed under for the next four years. So screw glurge; politics is my patriotism.)

This is another journal entry, like yesterday's, where in order to verify that I understood the facts of the matter, I had to wade through a ton of absolutely garbage journalism. Yesterday, I wrote about Democratic presidential nominee-presumptive Senator Barack Obama's announcement that he intends to vote for the current version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act renewal, the one that gives the telecom companies that spied on American's phone calls (whether or not anybody actually listened to the calls so tapped, it's technically still spying, technically) without the niceties of even the shallow fig-leaf of a FISA warrant application. Journalists all over the world have "knowingly" (cynically) assured people that Barack Obama doesn't "really" mean it, that he can't "really" mean to eliminate the penalties whenever the NSA taps Americans' phone calls without a warrant, that he's just pandering to the crowd who are afraid the Democrats will be "soft on terrorism." I spent yesterday's journal entry documenting the reasons why that theory is almost certainly false; it is much more likely that Senator Obama really does intend for America's spies to keep violating the law, and even the Constitution, and relying in in-agency and telco whistle-blowers to protect us from actual harm, just like every US President since Lincoln.

The case against the supposed political motivation of Obama's "tack to the right" in his speech outlining his plan to expand government funding to faith-based charities (PDF) is an even easier slam dunk. It annoys me what it says about how little the almost entirely white journalism establishment understands about black Americans that they think that the first credible black Presidential candidate would only shovel money to churches for political reasons. This is one area where black history and white history are diametrically opposed. First, the relevant white history: even the most religious white colonists who first came to America, the Puritans who made up over 80% of all the non-natives in America by 1640, came here fleeing from a church. From two of them, actually: the Catholic Church, and the Church of England. They had fought a war in England against the imposition of state-sponsored Catholicism. They took one look at what state-sponsorship was doing to their own Protestant faith and its ministers, and came here opposed, at least initially, to that, too. Stamped in the DNA of white America is a deep and abiding suspicion of organized religion. Even the most pious fundamentalist assures himself (delusionally, in many cases) that he, not some clergyman, let alone some government-supported clergyman, is his own highest moral authority after God and the Bible. For crying out loud, white American Catholics believe that, and that's 100% opposed to stated Catholic doctrine.

And in fact, even the limited extent to which the Southern Baptists have gone along with the current administration's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives has startled me. When I was being trained in Christian theology and Republican politics by Independent Baptist and Southern Baptist teachers back in the 1970s, they were entirely opposed to this kind of thing, for two solid practical reasons. First of all, they explained to me as a kid, just because your church is on the approved list for government funding this year, doesn't mean that it will be next year, not if the voters get any say in it, and we do elect a new administration every 4 to 8 years. And secondly, their own limited experience with accepting even the most indirect of government funding, through grants to private schools, left them with a sour taste in their mouths. They told me that every time, the politicians and government bureaucrats had waited until the churches' organizations were dependent on that money coming in, and then made intolerable demands in order to keep it. After one particularly horrific experience nearly bankrupted St. Louis's second-largest Protestant school back in the 1970s, the Missouri Union of Christian Schools passed a resolution forbidding any of their member schools from taking any government money. The state legislature had allocated funds "to promote physical education" by making grant money available to any school that wanted to build a gym, public or private. But then didn't allocate enough money to pay for one in one year. St. Louis Christian Academy had 2/3rds of the money they needed, paid the architect, got the permits, dug the foundation for their new gym. Then their legislator came in and said, in so many words, that the legislature was thinking of cutting off the funding to any school that didn't use the state-approved textbooks, including pro-evolution science textbooks. So SLCA said, fine, and tried to drop out of the program. The next day, a building inspector came by, asked them how they were going to finish that gym, and when he found out that no construction was ongoing, he condemned the building. It took fund-raising all across the state to raise the money in time and to pay the legal bills to fight that condemnation. So tell me why, with stories like that in circulation, churches want to let legislators and bureaucrats in Washington get their hooks into the churches' budgets? Can their greed have so thoroughly overruled their own knowledge and common sense?

What's more, at least two Christian legal organizations have already spotted one potential trap-door in Barack Obama's proposal, too, that's making them nervous. Obama gives what seems to him to be the reasonable requirement that if the taxpayers are funding someone's salary, then hiring for that job can't discriminate against applicants on religious grounds, or any other protected status like race, ethnicity, or Vietnam veteran status. He's on solid constitutional ground, there, in theory; I recall working indirectly on the case of a Wiccan clerical worker for the Salvation Army who won her case on the grounds that her duties were not in any way religious, so Sally's couldn't claim that sharing their Christian faith was a bona fide occupational qualification, a BFOQ. But as both the Center for Law and Religious Freedom and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations have pointed out, this gets problematic fast given Obama's commitment to roll these grants out to smaller and smaller churches, because those churches have hardly any paid employees, maybe even only one. Commingling of funds becomes automatic, impossible to avoid. And a commenter at the Center for Religious Freedom's blog pointed out an even bigger trojan horse in this proposal: the same law that Obama refers to covering discrimination in hiring, Title VII, is one that he's already promised gay and lesbian groups that he intends to amend to protect sexual orientation. So under Obama's proposal, any church that takes dollar one of federal funding and allows one thin dime of that money to commingle with church general revenue can no longer fire the pastor, or any other employee, if they find out he or she is gay.

But Senator Obama's proposal is neither proof that he's a right-wing Democrat in disguise, nor a dishonest attempt to portray himself as more moderate than he is, nor a liberal plot to advance the homosexual agenda. How do I know this? Occam's Razor. It is far, far simpler to believe that he is just that much of a believer in the black church, like nearly every educated black man in America. Remember that different black-versus-white historical experience I mentioned earlier? Let me finish that thought. Because, you see, black Americans' ancestors didn't come here fleeing any kind of church; they were captured by enemy tribes back in Africa and sold to white plantation owners as slaves. Those plantation owners lived in constant fear of organized revolt by their slaves; the term "monomania" was originally coined by southern plantation owners, for whom this "obsession" that black slaves had with getting free, their unwillingness to accept their fate, was seen as a mental sickness. But the one organization that black slaves were allowed, the one time they were allowed to gather under their own authority without white overseers, was in church on Sunday morning. At the time of emancipation, all black leaders in America were ministers, except for a tiny handful up north. And under the Jim Crow laws that were enacted to keep "freed" slaves enslaved in practice, and in the face of substantial barriers of institutionalized racism in education and hiring, it stayed true for another hundred years. Virtually the only black college graduates were seminary graduates in the American Methodist Episcopal and American Baptist churches; until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, practically the only good-paying job for black Americans was pastor of an AME or a Baptist church. As a result, up through 1964, the pastorate was a highly coveted job, one that without almost any exceptions attracted the best of the best, the brightest of the brightest. There have even been some black intellectuals who've complained about one of the unwanted side effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act being that the black church lost its monopoly on intellectual and moral authority, and a few of them blame that at least as much as they blame racist economics for the high rates of single parenthood in black America.

So given that difference in how white Americans and black Americans feel about their churches, if you thought that America's first black President wasn't going to funnel money any which way he can to the African Methodist Episcopal church, and probably the American Baptist Church, and conceivably even smaller black denominations like the Nation of Islam, by any means possible, whether you or I or any white person likes it or not? If you think you have to make up some implausible conspiracy theory to explain why he'd suggest he wants to do so? If you think that your conspiracy theory is more likely than that he just plain likes and respects the black churches that much and wants them to be richer whatever it takes? Then I think you just plain don't know what you're talking about.

• 07:16 Last day - I swear! - of my blog-by-blow posting of any average day @ wk.
• 07:18 Just arrived @ my office, sat down in my chair, & started up Outlook, Calypso Mail (hate Calypso), my GUI & the browser (MSIE 6 sucktastic.)
• 07:19 It's 7:18 am, says my Windows XP clock, & my workday starts @ 7:30. I will be checking my personal email for a few minutes.
• 07:33 TIme to tackle yesterday's unfinished part of the list! I am going to defeat it this morning. Rawr!
• 07:50 This morning's 709s were just delivered. I am not looking at them until I'm done w/ the list.
• 07:51 Time to stretch!
• 08:11 Just back from stretches, Daily Link, and a wee bit of office camaraderie. It is time to finish off the list!
• 08:55 Meh. Just spent about 15 minutes trying to help a coworker w/ Google Reader.
• 08:56 The office is jumping from doing so much via email; they still want email notification of new feed info!
• 08:56 I can't give that to them on IE6 w/ a "no download" rule, else I'd suggest a client or even Google Toolbar. Dare I suggest iGoogle?
• 09:00 Woo-hoo! The list is done to the penny! Time to start the 709s.
• 09:44 No AUD-3 709s this am; finished BKS-3 709s & placed in folder, just one FL-P 709 also finished & in bk. Working VID-3 709s atm.
• 09:59 You know how you buy printer paper in packages of 500 sheets I've a cust. who LOOOVES to request current movies...
• 10:01 ...In ONE DAY I used over half a package on his requests. ONE. DAY. & I can't fulfill even 1% of what he asks for 'cos of strict guidelines.
• 10:04 I cry when I see his name. Can't change the rules for just 1 cust, but he really overtaxes the 1 employee that's responsible for this stuff.
• 10:12 Taking a break to get the office mail.
• 11:04 GRRR! I Tweeted my return! Where did it go? This isn't useful if I don't get the time sigs! Anyway. Back from mail about 30-40 mins ago.
• 11:05 VID-3 709s finished & in bk. Time to pick up my check and take a break.
• 11:25 Back from break; working on BKS-2 709s.
• 12:21 Finished BKS-2 709s & placed in folder. Had to make changes in list due to new requests. Also got myself tea & water. THIRSTY!
• 12:24 Should probably work VID-2 709s or begin SRL, but want to input regrets into the excel file now. Get rid of some of this paper on my desk!
• 13:11 Got rid of less than 1/3 of the regrets. Now it's time for lunch!
• 13:29 Enjoying some of last night's leftovers (I forgot to mention the olives and feta). OMG I CAN HAS NOM NOMS NAO!
• 13:29 MICHAEL IAN BLACK HAS A BLOG! michaelianblack.typepad.com/blog/
• 14:19 Back from lunch. Starting the highlighting of this month's SRL.
• 16:19 Took break. Am in the Ms as far as annotating SRL. SRL still needs PPO highlighting but all regular highligting finished.
• 16:29 Have desk shored up against 3-day weekend. 2 minutes to go. Am turning comp. off now. Bye work!!!
• 18:01 Scott's @ band practice. I am ROCKIN' OUT to Ray Charles (Night & Day).
• 18:05 Good news! My Caruso steam curlers could be EXCHANGED; they were still under warranty! Yay! No more skanky hair!

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332.0 <--START (October 5, 2007)
327.5
323.0
318.5 <--START, Meal Replacement Diet (October 26, 2007)
313.5
309.0
305.0
302.5
297.0
299.5
291.0
289.5
287.5
284.0
282.5
278.5
277.0
272.5
270.5
262.0
265.0
258.0
256.5
257.0
250.5
248.0
246.5
242.0
239.5
238.0
233.5
233.0
230.0
230.0
228.5
225.5
225.5
223.5 <--CURRENT (July 3, 2008)

108.5 <--TOTAL LOST

2.780 <--loss per week (average)
93.50 <--remaining to lose to reach GOAL
130.0 <--GOAL

33.78 <--weeks to go at current average (February 7, 2009)

NOTES: Down two, though my other numbers are rather whacky. We'll know next week if they were anomalous (both I and my doctor feel they are). So, good week indeed, given the Feast of St. Anthrocon.

--Axiom

What's going on tomorrow?

(or, if you don't check livejournal obsessively and it's already Friday, what's going on today?)

Lysol: "Kills 99.9% of germs on contact"
It's that other .1% that's the problem. When they evolve into lysol-resistant strains.

Actually, you know, that The Jungle thing would work quite well with Forsaken.

I refuse to think about it until the "Rock and Roll Band in Space" game is well underway, however!

Uncomfortable white woman moment. I've been reading some threads about racism and white privilege, and I have some general suggestions. (No, I'm not perfect about this, but it's why I'm far more likely to read comments on these threads than to comment myself. In most cases, I don't know enough to add anything useful to the discussion.)

If you're white, and you're in a conversation about racism with a PoC, and they get angry and start yelling at you, there are some things to keep in mind.

For one, it's entirely possible that you've said something (or many somethings) stupid, and aren't listening when they try to tell you so politely. Stop reacting defensively to anger, and see if you can't school yourself to really listen to what's being said.

For another, if they say there is racism, they're right. They experience it and its results directly; a white person may never see it. See if you can't graciously accept the fact that on this one, they're the authorities.

Last, a PoC runs into incident after incident of racism every day. Spend enough time being treated like you're less than fully human, and a person might just get angry. Telling that person not to be angry is like telling them that what happens to them doesn't matter. It's not pleasant to have someone's anger directed at you, especially when you aren't sure what's causing it, but the only way you're going to learn is if someone calls you on it when you are being racist or expressing your privilege. Try to understand that as bad as they may be making you feel, they're probably doing you a favor. An awful lot of PoC will refuse to get into it with you because they've just had enough of a usually pointless discussion. The ones who will are doing a very tough job, emotionally and intellectually.

Healing takes time. For one thing, healing doesn't happen when the cause of the injury is still happening; don't expect a PoC to hide pain over things that are happening today, or whose bad effects they are still experiencing. For another, emotional pain heals better if someone hears it and accepts it as legitimate. It's even better if the person who is the cause of the pain hears it and accepts it as legitimate. Every time a white person listens to a PoC instead of fighting back, it's a step toward the end of racism.

This actually applies across the board to every ism, but racism is the one where I see the problem over and over and over.

As a first exercise, check out Unpacking the Invisible Backpack to begin to get an idea of why a PoC might be angry. You can also google Tim Wise -- his writings on race are very good.