The Pam Omidyar Memorial Stump, or “Why They Put Rich People’s Heads on Sharpened Pikes During the French Revolution” (Chapter the Twentieth of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”)

Allow me to say

at the outset today that I’m not

advocating putting anyone’s head on a pike;

I’m not in favor of that, though some who read what follows

may feel a dark desire. But also allow me to encourage you to put a bucket

at your feet before you read any further, because you are going to hear

about extreme violence toward people — The Baroness Pamela

“No limits on love” von Omidyar’s extreme violence toward

people — and the sorrow of it all may just

make you puke blood.

I first learned of

Her Royal Hiney in 2004, reading

an article about her and her husband The Baron

Pierre von Omidyar and how they established a very cool website

so that people could approach them with good ideas that needed funding and

help them channel their tens of billions of Ebay dollars to help and heal the world.

Admirable, hip, cool, awesome!  I began to talk to them about my idea for

EarthNationLive, which, like Ebay, makes use of the internet to bring

people all over the world together for a purpose.  Right up

their alley, I reckoned, and the concept is

viable in the extreme.

I thought the idea

would appeal to them especially

because they seemed to really feel for people

in disaster situations, and one of the features of EarthNationLive

is that it could close the ridiculous amount of time it takes to get medical,

food, shelter, and other disaster aid moving down to a few hours, like so. It needs

a few million bucks to build up front, because it requires a huge piece of software,

but hey, Pierre von Omidyar is a software engineer par excellence, and the

few million I needed to borrow for a few months wasn’t even a drop

in the bucket to Pam and Pierre.  It was a molecule in

one of the drops.  An atom in one

of the molecules.

This was a polite conversation,

not at all like what you’ve been reading here

since January 12.  I could copy a bunch of polite emails

and videos and ENL website writing for you, but never mind —

it was polite.  But after watching the disasters-after-the-disasters in

Katrina, the tsunami in Banda Aceh, the tsunami in Thailand, Cyclone Nargis

in Myanmar — where in each the disaster event itself killed thousands, and

in each the disaster-after-the-disaster (that two week period it still takes

to get aid moving while people die of standing in raw sewage with

a cut or broken bone, no water to drink, and no food) killed

vastly more people — I got tired of being

patient and polite.

Because these Omidyar folks,

richer than God, versed in the internet,

insanely enriched by it, knew of a way to cut the lag

time for aid down to a matter of hours: EarthNationLive, or

something like it.  And rather than bothering with it, they had shut

down that noble website and set about accumulating the enormous luxuries

of billionairehood.  Hypocrisy, theirs, led me to write about Pam Omidyar as the

Biggest Hypocrite on Earth after the earthquake leveled Port-au-Prince on

January 12 of this year and once again hundreds of thousands of

people died in sewage, lost limbs to hacksaw amputations,

and stabbed one another trying to get

to a molded loaf of bread.

One of the people who

lost a limb in Haiti was Fabienne Jean,

the proud owner for six months now of The Pam Omidyar

Memorial Stump. Here’s Fabienne

pre-gift-o’-the-Omidyars:

Beautiful, no?

Talented, too, a dancer with the

Haitian National Theater.  Her leg was broken

in the quake — not crushed to bits, just broken.  According

to Dennis Acton, who has been helping her ever since, “Fabienne could

have easily recovered from her injury.  It was simply a broken leg at the time.

She laid among the living and the dead at the University Hospital for three

days without food, water or medical care.  When she finally received

care, she was fully infected and on the verge of dying.

The surgeons saved her life but

had to take her leg.”

That happened to

thousands of people, tens of thousands

of people, in Port-au-Prince. They were the lucky ones,

the ones who lay without food, water, or medicine, in agonizing pain,

listening to the death rattles of people around them for days,

feeling the suck of death as their own simply broken

bones became infected and the infection

coursed through their bodies.

As Dennis wrote to me,

“Horror stories abound of people cutting

their own legs and arms off to get out of collapsed buildings

while the rescue teams circled overhead waiting to land at the airport.

Funny enough Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell had no problem flying in to pick

up a load of orphans at this time which forced a commercial jet full of surgical

supplies and doctors to divert to the Dominican and get trucked in

which took at least an extra 24 hours.  This was at the point

where 20 thousand a day were dying from

infection and lack of care.”

Because the aid network

was like it always is in the disaster-after-the-disaster,

Fabienne Jean lost her leg. The beautiful young Baroness Pam Omidyar surfed,

and the beautiful young Fabienne the dancer lost her leg.

Pam Omidyar tweeted and skated –

and tens of thousands

had hacksaw amputations

to save their lives.

Because the aid wheels turn

as ponderously as they ever did, in spite of the fact

that Pam and Pierre Omidyar know how to dramatically change that,

have the money to do it, have the skill sets and friends and

employees to get it done with little more effort

than changing a baby’s diaper.

Instead, Pam Omidyar visited

in her private jet for a few hours, tweeted,

and flew back to building her collection of resorts.

Mirtha, trafficked into slavery as a child and owned by a wealthy

Haitian couple, lost her leg — and her usefulness as a slave,

so “she has nothing to her name now except

a beautiful smile and a nice

new prosthesis”.

There are too many of these

“Thank you for my stump, Mr. & Mrs. Omidyar!”

stories to even begin to tell:

But I told Fabienne’s on April 16,

and Pam Omidyar and her husband Pierre and

many of their employees and lawyer/goons and manservants

and maidservants read it within hours:

And then they went

back to collecting luxury resorts,

palling around with the Dalai Lama, and

pretending to give a cat’s ass about

“the small people”.

Pam Omidyar has known

about Fabienne Jean for over three months.

During that time, Fabienne lived in her father’s yard,

amid rubble, after losing her leg, with little food, no clean water, and

in danger of kidnapping because she’d been written about in the New York Times

and might be worth some ransom money to someone. Then Dennis, operating

on a shoestring budget, helped her move back into her old apartment on the

outskirts of Citie Soleil, the most dangerous slum in Port-au-Prince,

“complete with no locking door and the same rubble that

that broke her leg lying in the street.”  This because

that was a move up, and the presently affordable

one (this in the middle of a fundraising field

day for the provenly corrupt Red Cross,

who have so far disbursed about

12% of their ginormous

Katrina haul).

Pam Omidyar has spent

more money on flowers in her homes

and resorts since January 12 than on Fabienne Jean

or anyone in a similar boat who’s hopping around in raw sewage

with little or nothing to eat, waiting on a cheap prosthesis and a sweaty wool

pad for the end of their stump. She’s done that knowing about them all the while,

controlling billions upon billions of dollars all the while, posing as a pal of the

Dalai Lama and a do-gooder-extraordinaire all the while. Having known

all along about a way to prevent virtually every bit of it

before it ever happened. Likes she knows how to

save the whales, and is shining that on, too,

while the baubles pile up.

Hope you have some

really good spiritual advisors, Pam,

hope you have the excellent access to the Dalai Lama

you and your husband tout, hope he’s as serious a guy as he seems

to be, I don’t know if he is or not, I just don’t know, never met him. I hope

on high that he was ordained by God Herself, whatever She is,

wherever She is, and I hope he knows he answers

to Her when he counsels people

like you.

Because you need counseling.

You’re in a position of enormous power on

this planet, just like your friend Barack Obama is,

the guy to whom you’ve given over ten million dollars so

you could sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom. And just like Barry Magic,

you sit day and night at a panel with a green button and a red button, and

over and over again you keep pushing the little red button that says “Death

and Greed” instead of the little green one that says “Life and Hope”.  He pushes

the “drone strike some Pakistani kids” button, and you push the “broken leg / no

aid / sewage infection / hacksaw amputation / live in hunger and fear” button.

Over and over and over again.  For Fabienne, for the hundreds of thousands

before her in the last five years, for the hundreds of thousands or

millions that will follow her while you fart through silk in the

ostrich skin chairs at your jillion dollar resorts, in your

fabulous homes hither and yon, in the private

jets that take you between them.

No wonder you’re

willing to break the law to try to use

unethical cops 3,000 miles from your home to try

to shut me up. To censor a writer in the United States of America

in which you yourself live! Amazing, appalling, but at the same

time, little wonder. I’d want this story crushed to earth,

too, before the film got made and released,

before “the small people” got wind of it

and put my head on a pike.

Chapters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”

 

Tomorrow, a fresh visit to The Pam Omidyar Memorial Stump! Today, the thuggish lengths to which she’ll go to quell this conversation. (Chapter the Nineteenth of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”)

friend

Time for a brief roundup

and a preview of a gory conversation.

As regular readers here will recall, a few months ago

I told the story of The Pam Omidyar Memorial Stump. That’s a photo

of it above.  It’s carried in this photo, and every minute for every day for the rest

of her life, by the beautiful Fabienne Jean.  Fabienne was a dancer with

the Haitian National Theater before the earthquake in

Port-au-Prince on January 12.  She would

like to dance again, but she

lives in Haiti.

According to my new friend

Dennis Acton, whose NEBCO Foundation

put one of the first prosthetic teams on the ground

in Haiti after the earthquake, and is at work there still, and could

use your financial assistance — hey Pam, they take Paypal, which you own! —

the realities of life there require the fitting of “technology that is no longer used in

developed countries. For instance, a new amputee in the US would most likely recieve

a prosthesis that uses a silicon liner and pin suspension system for securing

the fiberglass or carbon fiber socket to the residual limb. The problem is

that the liners cost over $300 each and only last for about 6 months.

That is far too expensive for for most patients in Haiti to afford.

Secondly, it is difficult to keep the liners clean. They must

be washed often and this is difficult living in

a tent city or amongst the ruins where

clean water is difficult

to obtain.”

So what you get in Haiti,

and what Fabienne Jean will get if the skin graft

at her amputation site ever heals,

is something like this:

Cheap, crude,  heavy,

and hot as hell.  In the States, the foot

you’d get could cost north of $5,000 (just the foot,

mind you, not the entire prosthesis, which could cost over

$50,000) and be made to look like your own.  That one’s about

a hundred bucks.  But the whole clunky thing is very low maintenance,

if you can get the sensitive skin on your stump to accommodate itself

to the scratchy wool pad that lies between it and what’s left of

your leg.  And you don’t have to wash it much, which is

handy for someone living in

a place like this —

– and doing her

personal bathing and laundry in

conditions like these:

So tomorrow I’ll tell

you quite a bit more about Fabienne’s

Pam Omidyar Memorial Stump, and about that hunk

of junk she’s going to have strap onto it every day for the rest of her

life, and we’ll try to figure out how she’s going to dance with it.  I’ll tell you

about sending one like it to Pam Omidyar, and asking her to carry it

around for a while to see what it’s like to live with — not on

the end of her chopped-off leg, mind you, just

under her arm or something.

But to close today,

I want to bring you up to date on

my conversations with Mark Beckner,

Chief of the Boulder Police Department.  As I

related at length in my post of June 30th, our hypocritical

billionaire would like for me stop talking about her.  Understandable,

I suppose, if you’re trading on your reputation as a greenie and a do-gooder

while quietly piling up tens of billions as artfully as any hedge fund manager.

But it isn’t illegal to call someone a hypocrite, so she can’t have me thrown

in jail.  And in America, you can’t sue someone into silence for telling

others about what sort of person you are, which her incredibly

pricey and very numerous lawyers

have explained to her.

So her options for

shutting me up were limited.

The one she chose was to persuade some

plainclothes detectives from my own local police

department to make a threatening visit to my home.

While not incapable of appreciating the humor in how lame

and bush this was, I’m also not fond of people with guns pounding

on my door, and I complained to Chief Mark Beckner.

Mark took a few minutes off of solving the JonBenet

Ramsey murder that he’s been working on

for nearly fourteen years to explain

to me that they had done

nothing wrong.

I took, and take,

issue with that.  Strongarming

people on behalf of billionaires isn’t the

business of the police.  I don’t know Chief Beckner

and don’t have any reason to dislike him or question his

professionalism, but I asked him if he’d be willing to run a similar

errand for me:  ”My neighbor Alex downstairs was a real terror in the noise

department for months, as you know. Your guys were here a bunch in the middle

of the night. That seems to be resolved, and we’re friendly to one another, but his

brother always gives me the stinkeye when we see each other in the parking lot.

Send a couple of dudes with guns in plainclothes by his house one evening

and tell him I don’t want him to look at me askance anymore, that I don’t

want him doing it anymore. You know, just a courtesy knock, ‘Proactive

policing’ (a term Chief Beckner used to describe the door-pounding

visit on behalf of the Omidyars) so nothing heats

up between us (he lives right here in town,

unlike Pierre Omidyar, who lives 3,300

miles away in Honolulu). Cool?”

He wouldn’t answer that,

no matter how many times I posed that

or similar questions.  Nor would he, for most of the

day and many emails exchanged over weeks, answer the direct

question, “To whom do I complain about your approval of Boulder PD officers

making threatening visits to my home on behalf of Pierre and Pam Omidyar?”

He tried to tell me that he was the person to receive the complaint.

I declined to accept that and after repeated prodding

finally got him to tell me that he answers to

City Manager Jane Brautigam,

whom I’m contacting.

In the same exchange

of emails, Chief Beckner declined to appear

in the documentary film of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”

and explain how he came to be using public funds and

public employees to run intimidation schemes

on behalf of the wealthy:

People live in all kinds

of prisons.  The prison that a great many

police officers live in is called, “I can do no wrong and

you do not question what I say or do.”  The prison that a hypocritical

billionaire who used be the helpful smiling girl in the information booth at the

student union lives in is called, “You shall not speak my name unpraisingly

and when you do I will use all the powers of my mighty billions

to discipline you, including making illegal use of police

officers more than 3,000 miles from

my own home.”

And the prison

Fabienne Jean lives in is called

“tending the Pam Omidyar Memorial

Stump”. More about that on

the morrow.

Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth,

Chapters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Omidyar Celebrity Billionaire Reality Show Armagedda-extravaganza-catastrofuck! (Chapter the Eighteenth of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”)

kate beaton

To: Your Royal Hineys The Baron Pierre and The Baroness Pamela von Omidyar

From: Brian Browne Walker, lowly taoist poet

re: Reality show proposal

Date: 19 July 2010

Hi Pam, hi Pierre, happy belated Bastille Day!

If it’s okay,

I’m gonna just write all my

emails to you in public from now on.

You’re all for openness and transparency, right?

At least when you’re not hiring goons to send plainclothes cops to my house

to warn me not to ever write about you again (which, in addition to being in poor taste,

and showing a paucity of sack, is — har! — against the law). Plus, you haven’t

been responding to my private invitations to tell your side

of this awful story on film. So, big hug, and onward

and upward with transparency — let’s show ‘em

how the sausage is made!

Mileamne, via Sex in Art

Been working hard

on the documentary of “Eat the Rich”.

Had someone get some terrific footage this week

of a couple (okay, three) of your mack-daddy rich resorts.

(There’s nothing quite as ubiquitous or unremarkable these days

as a couple strolling around with a palm-sized HDV camcorder,

is there?)  Also got a fun little document from one

of your law firm’s investigators; more on

that another day, hmm?

Anyway, as things evolve

and we write and plan and shoot and edit

the film, new ideas constantly come up. I was thinking

after seeing the Montage Resorts footage how cool it would be

to interview your kids for the film. Nothing crazy or intrusive, no

“60 Minutes” treatment, just one simple question, really: “If you could

choose one of two paths for your family, which one of these would you pick:

(a) Mommy and Daddy surround us with billions of dollars, private jets, real estate

baubles out the wazoo, and the ever-present Omidyar Security Teams necessary to

keep us budding little Donnie Trumps and Paris Hiltons safe from the unwashed

hordes; or (b) Mommy and Daddy save the whales and use our family’s power,

billions, and internet brilliance to organize the people of the world against

the cancers of war and greed and economic injustice and environmental

degradation, thereby integrating us with our fellow humans,

thus giving us a future more “Cousteau

grandchildren” than

“Doris Duke”.

Wouldn’t that be

a fascinating bit of film? Children

of the obscenely wealthy chart their own future,

plead with Mommy and Daddy to spare the whales from

exploding harpoons, call off the bodyguards! People have always

been fascinated with the crazy rich, and not least with their poor miserable

treasure-twisted children. We’d have to tread carefully, of course, one must protect

children — not the little girls that your friend Barack Obama is drone-striking into

cinders all over Southwest Asia, not the little ballerinas you yourselves gifted

with anesthesia-free amputations in Haiti, but your children, anyway,

certainly, above all. Those children are sacred. So we’d want

to do this tastefully and carefully, if

we’re going to do it.

Thinking about that,

and about extending this exquisite

oceanographer-versus-resort-developer choice

to your lil’ billionaires-in-training, made me realize:

this whole dang thing is a brilliant reality show! Hypocritical

billionaire refuses to break off a few bills, save whales! Lowly scrivener

records it all, turns spotlight on Omidyar hypocrisy! Law firms are scrambled,

“security networks” set into motion, chiefs of police seduced into running strongarm

errands for rich folk! The fingers of accountants fairly fly, keeping track of the

money you spend on investigations, psychological profiles, etc. of me!

Wee bairns cry out plaintively, “I wanna be a

Cousteau, Daddy, not a Trump!

Paris Hilton is icky!”

Or, who knows,

maybe the little tykes go the other way,

and there’s a “Nip & Tuck” sort of spin-off, where your kids

plead with you for plastic surgery to get their

Trumpian sneers in place, their glowing

Hilton-esque celebrismiles.

Then we watch

as you train them in how to

manage manservants, the proper ex-NSA

or ex-CIA criterion for security personnel, how

to deliver a message to a government

official that their wicked bidding

must be done!

Either way, it’s great television.

Really, you’re the perfect modern family

for a reality show. You’re richer than God, and telegenic

as all get out — hanging with the Dalai Lama, pals

with Barry Magic, the Clintons, all your

celebri-wealthy-peers!

You’re young, sexy, faux-green,

the best of the billionaires. (Okay, admittedly that’s

a bit like being the wisest of the profundities uttered by Glenn Beck, or the

clearest-minded American general, or the most justifiable current American war,

but never mind that for now, let’s do a slow reveal on the show). All those

qualities — and the internet as the source of your staggering wealth –

is why I naively picked you as most-likely-to-fund

EarthNationLive so long ago!

So how about this:

we embed reality show crews

(note to self: Bravo tie-in with Whale Wars?)

with me, my film crew, you, the kids, your lawyers,

your security goons, Chief Mark Beckner at the Boulder

Police Department, and we tell the whole story of “Eat the Rich” –

the web hijinks, the book, the film-as-it’s-being-made, your luxo-resorts

opening left and right, all the whales dying right and left (which of course you

now own) — as a reality show? Where your efforts to suppress the story and

maintain your reputation as humble do-gooding greenies are pitted

against my use of cheap, ubiquitous technologies — internet, Mac,

iMovie, Final Cut Studio, camcorder, social networks, etc. —

to reveal your hideous Carnegie-esque hypocrisy.

Does that sound like some spell-binding

tee-vee, or what?!

We toss in a bunch

of cool sidebar stories on wealth and

privilege and the lack thereof — the knee replacement

surgery I’m about to have for about $75,000 cash-on-the-barrelhead

because we don’t have national health care, writers don’t have health insurance,

and Obama’s health care help arrives, if at all, in 2014! The 1/2 of American children

(yours ain’t in there) who will spend some part of their lives on food stamps, in this

country which produces 1/4 of the world’s economic output! Chief Mark Beckner

scraping DNA off my doormat and planting it to kill two birds with one stone:

shut me up to please your rich arses, and solve the JonBenet Ramsey

case which has been vexing him for lo these 13 years (like that

Susannah Chase case he couldn’t solve for over a decade

until the Bureau of Prisons did it for him)!

The possibilities are endless, and the

crime-and-sex-and-sleaze factor

is over the top!

Wait, it gets better.

Look what I found yesterday

out by the dumpster:

Is that priceless, or what?

I scooped up this magnificent Holy Unicorn

of the Golden Horn and gave it pride-of-place in my home,

right atop the toilet tank (I only have one of those, how many hundreds

y’all up to now?)  And looking upon it, swelling with pride as I did, led me to think:

Let’s make this an Omidyar Billionaire Hypocrites vs. Lowly Taoist Poet

Winner-Take-All Cage Match! Eight weeks of riveting reality TV

as the film is being made and you pull every string a

billionaire can pull, legal and otherwise,

to try and stop it!

I’ll have as my

target date for the completion

of the film September 24th, the submission

deadline for this winter’s Sundance Film Festival — ‘cos

wouldn’t it just be awesome as all get out to have a documentary

opening about you at Sundance in January just as you’re rolling out the

red carpet at your new Deer Valley Montage Resort?! What a ‘licious juxtaposition,

even if it is a mad-tight schedule. We’ll let America vote at the end of the next-to-last

show by text message, just like on American Idol! If I win, you hand over your

billions on the last show, and I use them to save the whales, spool up

EarthNationLive, turn the crazy raging ocean liner that is Earth

in another, more hopeful direction. If you win, I hand you

the Holy Unicorn of the Golden Horn, and your

magnificent collection of baubles shines

anew, plus you have something to

distract your kids with when

they say, “Mommy, where

did all the whales go?”

“Look, sweetie,

it’s a Unicorn with a

Golden Horn!”

Or, maybe if I win

you just give Sea Shepherd the dough

for the whales. That’s a few tens of millions — you can keep

all the other thousands ‘pon thousands of millions

you have for lil’ Donnie and

lil’ Paris.

It’ll be a landmark event,

the first reality show that’s really about something,

which is entitlement: how people who a moment ago were as

ordinary as dirt can become as inflated as Caesar — like scrappy Barry

from Punahou, now setting other people’s daughters on fire for political and

monetary profit; like innocent Pam from the info booth, casting the

whales and oceans to the dogs; like George W. Bush,

world’s most accomplished dry drunk, explaining

that God spoke to him directly about

how to run things.

We can get into all

those delicious entitlement issues: What

are humans entitled to on Earth, its wholesale destruction?

What are white people entitled to on the continent of North America,

their own holocaust? What are rich people entitled to? Cops? What about whales,

or Native Americans, or sea turtles?  What about the nearly

7,000,000,000 people who aren’t billionaires,

what about them?  Are they entitled

to life, or freedom from police

harrassment, or a

sense of self?

Maybe you could talk

on the show about what it’s like to be

exposed as frauds and hypocrites just as your wealthcelebrity

was beginning to really gel — it could be sort of a John Muir “The tides of

meanness and poverty gathered around me, and lo’, creation widened to my view”

moment.  Maybe I could work in a side story about Sasha, and how

someone can apparently be sustained on love alone,

even when death was supposed to

have come long ago.

Would a love like that

work for the whales? If one person, or a few,

loved them enough, could they survive? What about the Earth?

Would love and tribe sustain children better than treasure?

Is love greater than a necklace of riches, greater than

a Unicorn with a Golden Horn?

There it is, then.

I’ll reach out to the reality

show producers.  You run the idea past

the kids, see how they feel about it, call me. Might want to put

them in touch with Ozzy’s kids to survey their post-reality

show states of mind.  Hey! Ozzy’s kids as

mentors to the Omidyar kids!

New wrinkle!!!

I’ll be in touch

in this space again

soon.  Peace.

“If one’s life is simple,

contentment has to come. Simplicity

is extremely important for happiness. Having few

desires, feeling satisfied with what you have, is very vital:

satisfaction with just enough food, clothing, and shelter to protect

yourself from the elements. And finally, there is an intense

delight in abandoning faulty states of mind

and in cultivating helpful ones

in meditation.”

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

“Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it.”

Aang San Suu Kyi

When my propane ran out

when I was gone and the food

thawed in the freezer I grieved

over the five pounds of melted squid,

but then a big gaunt bear arrived

and feasted on the garbage, a few tentacles

left in the grass, purplish white worms.

O bear, now that you’ve tasted the ocean

I hope your dreamlife contains the whales

I’ve seen, that one in the Humboldt current

basking on the surface who seemed to watch

the seabirds wheeling around her head.

Jim Harrison

Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth,

Chapters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Real beauty makes a person in its presence

feel “This moment here is enough,” or

even “This life is enough because

sometimes there’s beauty.”

Anne Herbert

 

 

A few thousand

wealthy weaklings hoard

tens of trillions of dollars in resources

to calm their nervous palpitations about having enough –

while saying there’s no money to build a sustainable energy grid,

or give a billion and a half people something besides a filthy puddle to

drink from, or end the slaughter of whales, or educate or

care for the health of children without leaving

their parents in rags.

“What is our threshold

to recognize the death spiral?

What is our threshold to realize that

we don’t live in a functioning democracy?”

 

put your feet up for an hour and listen to Derrick Jensen and Chris Hedges

There is One God, the Eternal,

the Only Being; None exists save She.

There is One Master, the Guiding Spirit of all souls,
Who constantly leads all followers toward the Light.
There is One Holy Book, the Sacred Manuscript of Nature,
the only Scripture that can enlighten the reader.
There is One Religion, the unswerving progress
in the right direction toward the Ideal,
which fulfills the life’s purpose

of every soul.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

For two days I’ve been saying, that’s just the way I roll.

Try things on is a good philosophy, and look outside yourself

is advice that smells of lilac in the morning.

I would experiment with a tractor for my heart if I could,

the blood plowing, the rooting around for love.

It’s embarrassing, though.

Are you sure you don’t want the medium fries for a penny more?

That’s just the way I roll.

Why don’t you crawl off and die?

That’s just the way I roll.

Daddio was before my time, I was born

into far out, psychedelic, man but the vernacular

rejected my tongue, cool was as hip as I got

but everyone says cool, our grandmothers, Caesar, I can hear Manson,

it was cool, how they begged for their lives.

Revolutionary, such tiny changes

as using the red cup for coffee, as sleeping sideways

on the bed, then there’s sharing,

noticing all the chicken noodle soup I have,

then there’s not swatting the fly

because any killing’s the beginning of all killing,

but when I open the door to let it out, two more come in.

Like nature or God, whatever, is saying,

that’s just the way I roll, fuckboy, and so I’ve named them.

That one’s Ellen and that’s Kaisha and the one

flying upside down is Frank O’Hara, who I warn, when he lands

on the lampshade, beware the dune buggy ride.

Do you know flies fly backward?

It’s tragic, that out of the billions there’ve been,

not one fly with its sesame seed brain

has ever thought, cool, I’m flying backward,

maybe next I’ll fly inside out until I’m pretty

as a bee.

We don’t get to know what we don’t know, like right now,

every other direction this poem could have gone

is lost to me, like this, “the orioles are saying

copasetic,” or this, “the night was a cliche of crickets

and humping.”

I know that dirge, I am that applause, the grinding,

the slapping of thighs against ecstasy, and a Mobius strip

begins life as a flat piece of paper, a line,

but add a twist a bit of glue, and we have no idea

where beginning ends or ending begins, and maybe

they don’t.

Free Bob Hicok

This Modern World (or, “The Wronger One Is, The Harder One Must Exert One’s Self to Ignore It”)

Prince, Houston, 1981 (or, “How in the Petraeus does the one-time baddest, dirtiest little cat on the planet get to releasing his new album in a newspaper because the web ‘fills your head with numbers’”?!)

When I was in my early 20’s,

my best friend and I read an article about Prince’s

entourage at Paisley Park, his home/studio/Princeworld in Minneapolis.

“Where Prin’?”, its many members walked around the house all day saying to one

another, “Where Prin’?!”  That gem of a phrase cracked us up and we used it as

a signifier for years to denote a situation involving people who seemed to

be sharing our planet but who had in fact left it to live in the

purple clouds of Venus, transporting themselves

there by flying up their own asses.

What lies below is

the full version of Kevin Smith’s

spontaneous conversation about being asked

to make a documentary about Prince.  It’s all priceless,

but my favorite stretch involves some talk from Prince’s producer

Stephanie about long Prince has lived in Prince world,

where it’s not only possible but sort of ordinary

to send out for a camel at 3 in the morning

in Minneapolis in January.

Prince just released

his new album in a newspaper.

He did this, and refuses to sell his music through

iTunes, because “computers fill your head with numbers and that

can’t be good for you.”  Speaking of numbers, the former best-selling musical

artist in the world, a man with a still-colossal following, got a one-time $250,000

payment from the paper, which distributed 2,800,000 copies of the CD, which

is now everywhere on the interwebs for free.  Plainly the best way

of softening one’s brain is to live in one’s own insulated

world, be it the Pentagon or

Paisley Park.

I’m making a movie about

some folks like this now — rich,

Venusian folks, smelling of ass and crazy.

The process is bizarre, and painful,

but also regularly funny.

Where Pierre?!

Many intelligences are deciding and peacefully agreeing

While you are eating

a piece of bread, try to recall the events

that collaborated to let this take place. The oven’s

heat that baked the bread, the plowed earth before that,

sunlight, rain, harvest, the winnowing, the being carried to and

from the mill, the complex idea and the building of the mill itself.

The many motions of weather in the turning of four seasons. And don’t

forget the knife that cuts the bread, the metallurgy and the skill of forging

that blade, and your teeth, those original grinding devices. Then there’s your

stomach digesting the crust and there’s the rest of your body being nourished,

each part in unique ways. Two hundred and forty-eight bones, five hundred

and thirty muscles, three hundred arteries, ligaments, tendons, cartilage,

your organs and limbs, your brain. As the bread dissolves, many

intelligences within you are deciding and peacefully agreeing

on how to divide the benefits. If there were discord,

you would feel pain and cry out,

but you don’t.

Now notice the

unified human awareness

thoughtfully living inside your body

a soul in communion with other spirit-intelligences.

Observe how it sits at the junction of two worlds as a human being

looking with kindness on other human beings. Some say this is the culmination

of the body’s long development and the beginning of the next transformation, that you

that live with gratitude for food and thankfulness also for any difficulty, pain, or

sudden disappointment, seeing those too as grace, that you live inside and

outside time as an angelic breadeating witness taking in this myriad

convergence of providential motions and that you are

in yourself an individual soul being made

from divine wisdom.

Bahauddin

One thing above all

amazes me about these American

industrial ruins: they’re not really very old.

My grandfather was already reading law and drinking

beer when some of this stuff was brand-new (or not even here

yet!). Unlike Rome’s long, dawdling descent from greatness, America’s

industrial fall seems to have happened in the space of a handclap. I suppose

it was in the nature of the fossil fuel fiesta that these activities could only last

as long as the basic energy resource was so cheap you hardly needed to figure it

into the cost of doing business. Which is not to say that the human element didn’t

change, too, since obviously it did — as America went from a cheap labor nation

of immigrants eager to join in the security of factory regimentation,

to adversarial relations between unionized workers and

business owners, and finally to game over,

as off-shoring and out-sourcing

savaged American

manufacturing.

…The reality I spend

these days rambling the river with

is the reality of a nation riding a great wave

of entropy into the unknown. Only at this stage of

the ride can we indulge in our Goth fantasies of the charming

vampire nether-life. Believe me, when things really get dark we will all

be wishing desperately for something more like lambs-in-the-meadow

and the kindly touch of a loving hand and the dim memory

of what it was like to care about

anything or anyone.

Where we are now,

to me, is the real dark time, the proverbial

moment before the dawn. The depravity of our culture,

Disney merchandise, cool ranch Doritos, and all, is something that

people of the future will marvel at for centuries to come. The purity of

our surrender will fascinate them. They will conclude that

we looked into the abyss…and decided that we

liked what we saw in there.

James Howard Kunstler

101

If there were

no girl in the entire universe

that men could point to and say, “well, she likes it,”

they’d still keep doing it, because, here’s

the secret: Misogynists don’t

care what girls like.

Sady Doyle

DoubleFine

click it to enlarge it

Buddha replied,

“Whatsoever you do, do it with awareness;

this is meditation. Walking, walk attentively, as if walking

is everything; eating, eat with awareness, as if eating is everything;

rising, rise with awareness; sitting, sit with awareness; all your actions

become conscious, your mind does not travel beyond this

moment, it remains in the moment, settles in

the moment, this is meditation.”

she’s from Texas and weighs

103 pounds

and stands before the

mirror combing hairs of oceans

of reddish hair which falls all the way down

her back to her ass.

the hair is magic and shoots

sparks as I lay on the bed

and watch her combing her

hair.  she’s like something

out of the movies but she’s

actually here.  we make love

at least once a day and

she can make me laugh

any time she cares

to.  Texas women are always

healthy, and besides that she’s

cleaned my refrigerator, my sink,

the bathroom, and she cooks and

feeds me healthy foods

and washes the dishes

too.

“Hank”, she told me,

holding up a can of grapefruit

juice, “this is the best of them

all.”

it says: Texas unsweetened

PINK grapefruit juice.

she looks like Katherine Hepburn

looked when she was

in high school, and I watch those

103 pounds

combing a yard and some change

of reddish hair

before the mirror

and I feel her inside of my

wrists and the backs of my eyes,

and the toes and legs and belly

of me feel her too,

and all of Los Angeles falls down

and weeps for joy,

the walls of the love parlors shake-
-

the ocean rushes in and she turns

to me and says, “damn this hair!”

and I say,

“yes.”

Charles Bukowski

Gentry had to be pitied.

They had so few advantages in respect of love.

They could say they longed for a kiss from a bouncy wife

in a vicarage garden.  They couldn’t say she roared

under me and clutched my back, and I shot

my specimen to blazes.

Roger McDonald

And God wept

Evolutionary psychology’s

standard narrative contains several changing

contradictions, but one of the most discordant involves

female libido.  Females, we’re told again and again, are the choosy,

reserved sex.  Men spend their energies trying to impress women…all to convince

coy females to part with their closely guarded sexual favors.  For women, the

narrative holds that sex is about the security — emotional and material

of the relationship, not the physical pleasure.  Darwin agreed with

this view.  The “coy” female who “requires to be courted”

is deeply embedded in his theory

of sexual selection.

If women were

as libidinous as men, we’re told,

society itself would collapse.  Lord Acton was

only repeating what everyone knew in 1875 when he

declared, “The majority of women, happily for them and

society, are not very much troubled with

sexual feeling of any kind.”

And yet, despite

repeated assurances that women

aren’t particularly sexual creatures, in cultures

around the world men have gone to extraordinary lengths

to control female libido: female genital mutilation, head-to-toe chadors,

medieval witch burnings, chastity belts, suffocating corsets, muttered insults

about “insatiable” whores, pathologizing, paternalistic medical diagnoses

of nymphomania or hysteria, the debilitating scorn heaped on any

female who chooses to be generous with her sexuality…

all parts of a worldwide campaign to keep the

supposedly low-key female libido under

control.  Why the electrified high

security razor-wore fence to

contain a kitty-cat?

Sex at Dawn

see also

And Man did not hear Her

Kevin Dunbar is a researcher

who studies how scientists study things —

how they fail and succeed. Philosophers have long

theorized about how science happens, but Dunbar wanted

to get beyond theory. He wasn’t satisfied with abstract models

of the scientific method — that seven-step process we teach schoolkids

before the science fair — or the dogmatic faith scientists place in logic and

objectivity. Dunbar knew that scientists often don’t think the way the textbooks

say they are supposed to. He suspected that all those philosophers of science —

from Aristotle to Karl Popper — had missed something important about

what goes on in the lab. Dunbar’s findings stated that science is a

deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were

mostly using established techniques, more than

50 percent of their data was unexpected.

(In some labs, the figure exceeded

75 percent.)

How did the researchers

cope with all this unexpected data?

How did they deal with so much failure?

Dunbar realized that the vast majority of people

in the lab followed the same basic strategy. First, they

would blame the method. Then the experiment would be

repeated. This is when things get interesting. According to Dunbar,

even after scientists had generated their “error” multiple times — it was

a consistent inconsistency — they might fail to follow it up.“People have

to pick and choose what’s interesting and what’s not, but they often

choose badly.” And so the result was tossed aside, filed in

a quickly forgotten notebook. The scientists had

discovered a new fact, but they

called it a failure.

The reason we’re so resistant

to anomalous information — the real reason

researchers automatically assume that every unexpected

result is a stupid mistake — is rooted in the way the human brain

works. Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth

of objectivity. The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence

that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists —

our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered,

especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories.

The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail —

it’s that most failures are ignored. But the unexpected

result could be the major breakthrough in

particular scope, so we should

keep our eyes open.

Jonah Lehrer

July 12th, 2010 » Comments »