Eat Me!

Via my erudite colloquist, Santa Fe's and Las Vegas, NM's, most eloquent sarcast and talented filker, Jim Terr, the man in this "compelling" image is a cannibalistic, Hindu monk.

Jim wrote--and it sounds convincing, but you gotta also remember that he's also expert in "word games" (the one in which you invent meanings for real words--Izzat called "Wordsworth?"), so this COULD be entirely the production of his fevered imagination:

"Aghori: Human-Flesh Eating Monks The Aghori or Aghora are a Hindu sect believed to have split off from the Kapalika order (which dates from 1000 AD) in the fourteenth century AD. Mans. Because they believe that Shiva created everything they consider nothing to be bad. For this reason they engage in a variety of sexual practices (for example they perform a secret Tantric ritual involving sex with a lower caste, menstruating woman during which the Aghori becomes Shiva and his partner Shiva’s female energy), they drink alcohol, take drugs, and eat meat. Nothing is considered taboo. But the thing that makes their ancient traditions bizarre is that they are also practicing cannibals and their temples are cremation grounds.

He claims he just cut and pasted from the net; you decide...Me? If true, it seems to me to illustrate something I've long believed: "There's nothing of which humans are capable which at some time or another has NOT been both a sacrament and a sin."

Apologies? Not Quite...

This earnest and intense message appeared the other day, on Fuckerberg's Folly, and in reply I wrote:

Awwwwww. Isn't that sweet? (Or is it? Actually, depending on your reading, that line "Sorry People of IslaM' sounds kind of ironic and dismissive.)

A pretty, blonde girl explains it all...and that ALWAYS makes EVERYTHING all right!

Muslims, mostly--like the rest of us--are simple folk.

When their countries are occupied, USer/christian drones are dropping bombs and missiles on 'em, their friends, relatives, children and elders are slaughtered , and they are vilified in media and the pulpit, and even assaulted just for BEING "Muslim" in the west, they might be excused if they're confused about what "real" 'America' and/or "real" 'christianity' DOES represent and/or intend...

It would confuse me, too; maybe enough for me to reply violently...

Curiosity Lands On Mars

This is riveting. I couldn't look away.

Working frame-by-frame, it took me four weeks to produce this video. It was a painstaking labor of love. You can support my efforts with a donation or a message of support. Ultra-resolution, smooth-motion, detail-enhanced, color-corrected, interpolated from the original 4 frames per second to 30 frames per second. This video plays real-time at the speed that Curiosity descended to the surface of Mars on August 6, 2012. Share this video with your friends. I think it's wonderful that everyone on Earth has a chance to see this amazing footage from Mars :) Produced by Bard Canning.

Pitch-Perfect

Watts Up?

I'm 66. I started using cannabis recreationally, on a regular basis (every day, when I had it), since I got out of the Service (USAF) and went back to university in 1968. I still do (I just did!)...

 I met Alan Watts once; it was the fall of '70. Spent a week-end in a literature/philosophy retreat as part of a seminar, my first year on my first Masters (which I never completed), at which he was the featured guest.

Fot the class, we'd read Psychotherapy, East & West, and The Book (On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are). The gathering was held at someone's house, a sprawling place along the River, by the bosque, in the near North Valley. There were about a dozen or so of us, perhaps 15: faculty, students, and locals with connections with the profs or the hosts. It was informal, but serious, long-lasting, but good-natured discussions ensued.

This was the height of the '60s: Meals were prepared, cooperatively; everybody pitched in, washed dishes, emptied ashtrays, rebuilt the fire, whatever.  We students had sleeping bags and crashed wherever, whenever.

 The conversations occurred amid a gentle swirl of foods, snacks, wine, beer, and weed, over a Friday night, and all day (and night) Saturday, and then all day Sunday. I now wish, of course, that I'd had the ability to record those sessions.

Watts had to catch a plane Sunday evening, and I drove him to the airport. Upon delivering him, he shook my hand and remarked: "You're a remarkably clever young man." Which I took and still take, as a compliment.

Dog Day

This is utterly brilliant! I do not know what agency does VW's ads, but they're fuuking GENIUSES!

Give the Devil His Due..

Hola, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, hippies and straights around the world! This is your ol' pal, "Dr. Woody," John Konopak, citizen journalist in Albuquerque, rising today to bring you a World-Wide Hippies/Citizen Journalists Exchange "Citizen's Alert," in which we'll give the devil his due.
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I really, really hate to do it, but on a purely technical level, ya gotta hand it to the likes of Hannity, and Limbaugh and O'Reilly and the rest of that feculent crew.

Yes, they're reeking scumbags of racism, fascism, and elitism. What they do is egregious, transparent fear-mongering, and race-baiting, done with a straight face. They stoke the fears of the timorous, and ratify the prejudices of the bigoted, And they're "good" at it...

They specialize in the "Big Lie," and they're "GOOD" liars --like Ted Bundy was a "good" (successful) serial killer.

And now the whole GOPhux Party apparently is taking the campaign for President, to an even higher level of conscious, in-your-fucking-face mendacity.

For students of propaganda, this truly is an epochal development: the nuvo fascisti of the USer Right have actually IMPROVED on a proven, reliable propaganda tactic called the Big Lie. The Nazis appropriated it, wholesale, from the work of "vanguard intellectual" Edward Bernays, Freud's favorite (American) nephew. Bernays coined the phrase, and described the practice, of "the Big Lie,"
...though it was Josef Goebbels who perfected it...,
and now the Rovian GOPhux are rewriting it. (Aside: If Goebbels had had the cabloids and the 24-hour news cycle,  würden wir alle deutschen jetzt sprechen...aber dass einer ganz anderer Gedichte ist.).

You know the premise for the BIG LIE: It's assumed that everybody lies, pretty much all the time, but people are usually too afraid of social stigma to tell big lies. So, Bernays reasoned, people can be brought to believe a really big, really egregious lie--because they'd be afraid to lie that grandly--and that lie, repeated often enough, by ostensibly "credible" sources will eventually (sooner than later) become "true" in the public's mind.

The Jewish Problem, for example. And "Killer" weed....or God....

So, in one sense, at least, on national TV this week, in Tampa, at the RNC, there is history in the making:  the GOPhux are reaching BEYOND the one,"Big Lie." into the politics of total dissimulation and falsehood.

They've decided that they'll simply lie about EVERY-fucking-THING.

There is no misrepresentation, misinformation, or misstatement that is beneath them.

Apparently on the theory that 1) no one from the MSM/CorpoRat/SCUM "press" will challenge Rmoney or the Mini-Me-Ryan on "national television" and 2) that nothing that is NOT on national television is "real," the GOPhux apparently are going "all in" on a what amounts to a bluff. They got rags, but they're just gonna lie. About everything, and about anything, any and all the time, and dare the CorpoRat "press" to call 'em on it. One o f the most interesting exercises today (Thursday) in the wake of Shitstorm Ryan last night was to watch the SCUM "press" scramble for euphemisms to conceal the act of lying...

And it's fuuking GENIUS.

The issue with the Big Lie, of course, izzat if you get caught in it, and called on it, and revealed and the whole strategy collapses. Your opponent can tag you with the label, and it can stick.

But if you lie about EVERY-fucking-THING, as the GOPhjux--notably Paul Ryan, Wednesday night, but also the bloated, bilious bloviator Chris Christie, on Tuesday night--showed when  everybody just flat lied their asses off, about EVERYTHING, with virtually every breath, you leave your opponent with almost nothing to say.

Because, even though the lies exist, if you--as an opponent--call them on ALL their lies--if you ACCUSE them, no matter HOW validly--of lying about EVERY-fucking-THING, then it's YOUR accusations which look paranoid, hyperbolic, exaggerated, overblown, no matter the truth of them.

All lies, all the time. So many that you cannot tell 'em from the truth, because there is no truth spoken. If someone challenges one lie, or only a few, even if they are shown to be lies, it leaves the impression that the unchallenged lies are true.

It's fucking BRILLIANT! And if you've always wondered what it would be like if the rulers dropped all pretenses and ran things strictly for their own benefit and interest, this is how it would look.

Y'all c'mon down to the beach, we'll all swap lies...