The big black boot

Here's the latest update on Laura Ling and Euna Lee's situation in North Korea. Does not look good even with the US State Department on the case, although i've little doubt this was exactly what Kim Jong-Il craves: Down on your knees, imperialist dogs! When Orwell described the ultimate totalitarian state as a black boot stepping on a human face, i doubt he had the image of a cartoon dictator in mind.

And in Sweden, the fab four of Pirate Bay have been found guilty and sentenced to both an enormous fine as well as one year prison terms. They are going to appeal - of course - but as Wired pointed out at the start of their trial, the premises put forth for innocence are weak at best and shameful at an anarchistic worst. Back in the pre-electronic age, non-violent subversives of the system used to throw their defiance into the face of the courts and wear their gags and prison sentences as badges of honor. Nowadays, it seems like subversive movements are all about wacking the system and then trying to escape. My own sympathies have shifted towards this latter approach as the state apparati for contain and control have increased in both scope and offensiveness. Still, if young IT rebels are looking to the pirate bay founders as scions of radicalism, it seems that on that note, the trial's been a major disappointment.

Fully aware i've been avoiding blogging for longer than usual, it's no small irony to be returning here on the same day Adbusters are calling for a week of digital detox. They've even supplied a twitter message: @adbusters I’m celebrating Digital Detox Week! Offline for 7 brain-restoring days. #digitaldetox. At first this struck me as a paradox, but i guess it's no different from putting a message on one's voice mail or email autoreply to inform people not to expect an answer anytime soon. i don't use twitter; my facebook attention span is undergoing a major endurance slump, ergo the option of switching to a condensed facebook experience which would infect not only my computer but also my telephone is simply out of the question.

After watching Ashton Kuchner beat CNN in the rush to reach a million twitterers (tweeters?), it's obvious that Adbusters use of 'detox' is totally on the mark. Receiving constant bite-sized tidbits about celebrities' activities is like hanging out in elevators because you can't live without the monoregisters of muzak: both have the power to make us feel surficially at ease while simultaneously melting our brain capacity. i know that 'aplusk' is using twitter to raise money for a good cause, and i appreciate his analysis of what the new media means for the society blahblahblah but that doesn't change the addiction paradigm.

So here's to detox for a few days, during which i will probably end up spending a fair amount of time writing for this blog - the imprisoned don't get a break, how dare i take an even longer one? Besides, if i've never twittered and continue to not twitter for the coming week, that should work out in my favor in terms of maintaining an nontoxified balance, right? i'd do the math, but that would require using a calculator, which in pure Einsteinian terms would be comparable to twittering the gods and therefore make a pure calculation impossible to pull off since every number keyed in would immediately alter the equation. This is exactly the problem that Fox News has everytime they describe themselves as 'fair and balanced,' which actually speaks in favor of total detoxification so long as one does so with an open mind towards those less almighty than ourselves.

earth2tycho blogging/not blogging update

As i don't want to start with an apology and thereby discredit myself out of the gate, i'm writing to let you know, first of all, that i've updated my links lists a bit and have added an RSS feed. If you have faith that i'm going to come back to life here and offer up acid punch bowls full of witty, if not brilliant, insights into the nature of existence in the 21st century, then by all means feel free to subscribe. i believe you'll get an email every time i post something new, a useful psychological tool for your disheveled writer, who could then use her blog posts in lieu of writing personal emails and thus avoid being accused of neglecting friends' inboxes. i've also added a Personal Links gadget, if you want to check out what strikes me as worth saving from the Guardian or read my anti-Bush limericks at MySpace.

My old comrade Jim is now working with the franciscans at Nevada Desert Experience, involved in various Las Vegas community works as well as maintaining their decades-long focus on shutting down the Nevada Nuclear Test Site and returning the land to its rightful owners, the Western Shoshone Nation. Kudos to Jim for being willing to live in Vegas and may the neon lights of Sin City not blind him. They're scheduled to do another action this week as part of Keep Space for Peace International Week of Protest to Stop the Militarization of Space. Coordinated through the Global Network Against Weapons and Nukes in Space, i believe the lengthy names of both event and organization speak for themselves.

This past summer, i also hooked up with Che Sudaka from Barcelona, a frenetic band with a big ska-loving heart. They have taken on the independence movement in Western Sahara as a cause celebre and deserve lots of kudos for doing so, it is a much-ignored part of the world aside from in Morocco, which insists on occupying it. This territory has the unique honor (?) of being the last place in Africa where one can still see the "curious institution" of slavery, alive but hardly well... More on that probably at a later date - CS are a great band and you should definitely go see them and support their work if they play in your locale.

Now for the apology.... well, not exactly an apology, but i've been getting lots of positive feedback about the blog and consequently, some ??'s about why i've been neglecting it in these trying times, so i feel i owe my small but illustrious fan base an acknowledgment (along with a note of thanks!) that yes, i've been a total flake in terms of producing words, but largely this is due to too much uptake of other people's babble... informative but mesmerizing... and i can be very easily mesmerized, especially when sick and trying to make sense of something that at heart, i really could care less about. Specifically, that would be the Obama-McCain-Palin circus and the public coffers bailout of Wall Street heavies, with its ripple effects throughout the globalized economy. At this point, i think i'm following the US election stuff out of pure addiction (it sure beats Brad and Britney); this must be so since the first song i listen to every morning is now Ship of Fools. Aside from Tina Fey's and Alec Baldwin's great Palin impersonations, the US electoral spam is not even entertaining. Just insane nastiness, and stupidity, more of the same old crap: nuclear vs. extinction, killing Iraqis vs. killing Pakistanis, helping the rich get richer vs. being rich and becoming richer... Palin's bounty on wolf paws is nauseating - literally - and she's yakking nonsense about climate change while her fellow - native - Alaskans are literally seeing their land disappear underneath a rising sea level. The Comedy Central folks have been on her ass big time, there's really not much i personally can add to their analysis. John McCain is a major creep and anyone who thinks he's a leader must also harbor secret fantasies about immolating Sikhs and polar bears.

As far as financial news is concerned, it's hard for someone who's never been very interested in money/finance to suddenly dig in and collect hoards of details which, all told, only reinforce my original position that the unreal nature of extreme wealth creates its own kharma of deserved yet likewise (somehow) unreal extreme crises. However, like everyone else whose got nothing to lose, i do have thoughts about the what's happening and a load of links to share offering comprehensible, tho sometimes offbeat, analyses of what's happened and where it's all potentially going. Subscribe to the blog and be the first to read a (loosely) anthropological deconstruction of the capitalist neaderthals' road to perdition.

Ok, that's my awkward lumbering back into the blogosphere after an undesired and delinquent hiatus. Leaving you with this curious piece about Truman Show Delusion, the ultimate 21st century plague, a culmination of all that individualism has to offer.

Apologies for the alliterative outburst last night. i've had to teach several classes on adjectives this week and obviously they overran my thought processes.

Yesterday i read this article about the non/use of blogs, which in some ways characterizes my own internet habits right now (write more than read - tho i read a fair amount - list links i rarely check, etc). Pondering it all, i was reminded that while it's good to be evaluating what we do with our time here (within limits) i personally need to avoid using philosophical dilemmas as justification to stop whatever project is or could be at hand. Neither healthy nor intelligent. The author's position is that blogging has become pretty much a wash out - most people writing about shopping lists, weekends on the lake - so, unless you are a pro who'd be publishing anyway, don't waste anymore of our bandwidth/your time, it's all too self-reflective and inertial. To me, this doesn't seem so different from telling people they've got to vote for Obama, Abbas or MSZP if they want to be part of the liberal solution. It appears that in the US, if you don't go where pollsters would like you to go, then you'll screw things up for everyone (on top of being totally shunned by all your favorite celebs). i'm asking (for example): why shouldn't people vote for Ralph Nader if he offers them a platform they want to endorse? 'Oooh, nooooo, don't do that - we must we must have Obama!' Besides, Ralph can't possibly win you're wasting your vote.

ERGO

Why shouldn't i or anyone else send our thoughts out into the virtual void? Does it diminish my thinking them if i'm not able to write a 2000 word treatise on each (any) idea? As my grad school advisor used to say Keep It Short and Simple. Given the current zeitgeist simple probably isn't doable, but otherwise... this pressure to be at the top of the class - the winner - or don't bother at all is not a healthy one for any society but especially a world in crisis. It's everywhere and feels so global, permeating nearly everything i come in contact with in the public sphere.

i'm tired of that and of course i'm continuing on with the blog, hopefully with more frequency. If nobody reads it that's ok. i can't play the piano, but i still have the right to make noise, no? The whole point of this is to find our voices and make them resonate. How many drummers would it take to make the wall around Palestine crumble? Aspiring to write like Salmon Rushdie or Margaret Atwood is always going to be a ridiculous aim, that's just never going to happen. Blog on, i say, and alliterate at will!