![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
Leave a comment
Jacob Freeze
17 November 2009 @ 02:34 pm
11 November 2009 @ 12:13 pm
14 October 2009 @ 12:00 am
Returns of an image search for "Chardarah," show very few photographs representing the aftermath of a NATO bombing which killed about 100 civilians on September 11, 2009. Only one photograph, as far as I know, shows one of the the burning fuel-tankers where villagers from Chardarah were retrieving fuel when it exploded.
This was a one-day story in the United States, and the first page of Google web returns for "Chardarah" mostly links to my diaries on several political websites, so it may be fair to say that I paid more attention to the fire at Chardarah than anyone else on the internet, at least in English.
Why?
My father was in and out of a VA hospital almost all the time at the end of his life, and the nurses pushed me out in the hall whenever they performed "procedures" which weren't appropriate for a child to see. So I met other veterans of other wars there, too, and one of the most impressive to me was a very old ex-cabbie who had joined up for WWII at the already advanced age of about 40.
He had served as a 7th Army pool driver all the way from Sicily to Alsace, and somehow survived almost all imaginable injuries... shrapnel, bullet-wounds, broken bones, and burns... and one day I asked him one of those questions that only children ask.
"What hurt the most?"
"Compared to the burns," he said, "everything else was just a tickle."
Just a tickle! They gave him so much morphine for the burns that he was unconscious almost all the time for a couple of weeks, but still, he said, "I could feel it in my dreams."
Anyone within the first radius around a large petroleum explosion like the fire at Chardarah is simply blown to bits, and literally nothing remains of them. A little farther out you may find something like charcoal, then fragments recognizable as flesh. Eventually you pass beyond the radius where everyone must have died almost instantly, and move into a rainbow from blue to red heat, where people survived for an hour, or a week, or until today, mutilated and tormented.
I can feel it in my dreams.
This was a one-day story in the United States, and the first page of Google web returns for "Chardarah" mostly links to my diaries on several political websites, so it may be fair to say that I paid more attention to the fire at Chardarah than anyone else on the internet, at least in English.
Why?
My father was in and out of a VA hospital almost all the time at the end of his life, and the nurses pushed me out in the hall whenever they performed "procedures" which weren't appropriate for a child to see. So I met other veterans of other wars there, too, and one of the most impressive to me was a very old ex-cabbie who had joined up for WWII at the already advanced age of about 40.
He had served as a 7th Army pool driver all the way from Sicily to Alsace, and somehow survived almost all imaginable injuries... shrapnel, bullet-wounds, broken bones, and burns... and one day I asked him one of those questions that only children ask.
"What hurt the most?"
"Compared to the burns," he said, "everything else was just a tickle."
Just a tickle! They gave him so much morphine for the burns that he was unconscious almost all the time for a couple of weeks, but still, he said, "I could feel it in my dreams."
Anyone within the first radius around a large petroleum explosion like the fire at Chardarah is simply blown to bits, and literally nothing remains of them. A little farther out you may find something like charcoal, then fragments recognizable as flesh. Eventually you pass beyond the radius where everyone must have died almost instantly, and move into a rainbow from blue to red heat, where people survived for an hour, or a week, or until today, mutilated and tormented.
I can feel it in my dreams.
30 September 2009 @ 12:10 pm
20 September 2009 @ 05:40 pm
Either nobody understands the recent financial meltdown, or nobody who understands it can explain it to anyone who doesn't. This resembles a certain period in the history of India when everyone knew someone who had seen the "Indian rope trick," but no one had seen it themselves.
In the "Indian rope trick," a magician holds one end of a rope and throws the other end high up into the clouds. Then his boy-assistant (jamoora) climbs the rope and slowly disappears.
So anyone who has seen the "Indian rope trick" is probably insane, and likewise anyone who claims to understand the recent financial meltdown. Although a few traders probably understood a few varieties of vanilla derivatives, like the most basic credit default swaps, all that vanilla was compounded over multi-national networks with much more exotic flavors like Asian options, "path-dependent" options like lookbacks, and options depending on a multitude of related or unrelated indices, like Altiplano, Annapurna, and Atlas options.
This was a mix which literally ran away to infinity through a garden of forking paths and mutually dependent asymptotic series summed over terms which themselves depended on hypothetical truncations of other asymptotic series, and so on.
So it was already almost impossible to understand enough about this mess to understand that you didn't understand it, and it was exponentially more difficult to understand that nobody understood it, and...
Here we are again exactly where we began, because no one who understood that no one understood the infinite tangle of derivatives could explain that no one understood them to anyone who didn't already understand that no one understood them.
In the "Indian rope trick," a magician holds one end of a rope and throws the other end high up into the clouds. Then his boy-assistant (jamoora) climbs the rope and slowly disappears.
So anyone who has seen the "Indian rope trick" is probably insane, and likewise anyone who claims to understand the recent financial meltdown. Although a few traders probably understood a few varieties of vanilla derivatives, like the most basic credit default swaps, all that vanilla was compounded over multi-national networks with much more exotic flavors like Asian options, "path-dependent" options like lookbacks, and options depending on a multitude of related or unrelated indices, like Altiplano, Annapurna, and Atlas options.
This was a mix which literally ran away to infinity through a garden of forking paths and mutually dependent asymptotic series summed over terms which themselves depended on hypothetical truncations of other asymptotic series, and so on.
So it was already almost impossible to understand enough about this mess to understand that you didn't understand it, and it was exponentially more difficult to understand that nobody understood it, and...
Here we are again exactly where we began, because no one who understood that no one understood the infinite tangle of derivatives could explain that no one understood them to anyone who didn't already understand that no one understood them.
15 September 2009 @ 04:58 am
12 September 2009 @ 08:32 pm
From the Guardian...
At first light last Friday, in the Chardarah district of Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan, the villagers gathered around the twisted wreckage of two fuel tankers that had been hit by a Nato airstrike.
"We didn't recognise any of the dead when we arrived," said Omar Khan, the turbaned village chief of Eissa Khail. "They were like burned tree logs, like charcoal."
"The villagers were fighting over the corpses. People were saying this is my brother, this is my cousin, and no one could identify anyone."
"I couldn't find my son, so I took a piece of flesh with me home and I called it my son."
07 July 2009 @ 01:03 am
07 June 2009 @ 11:11 am
Every time you walk into a shop,
you buy something.
Every time you see a rain-cloud
you start building an ark like Noah.
Sometimes people laugh at you,
but what if your whole life were
only one moment in a shop?
At least you weren't there for nothing!
20 May 2009 @ 06:47 am
Recent Paintings and Photographs
During the week of May 17, 2009, Paris Hilton was playing high-stakes poker in Cannes with her new boyfriend forever Doug Reinhardt, who formerly knocked boots with Amanda Bynes and escorted Lauren Conrad to the prom in their pre-celeb pre-history.
In Washington a Democratic President announced plans to regulate the automobile industry only a few months after the automobile industry went bankrupt, and after only seven years of a bloody occupation, the Pentagon finally acknowledged that "the United States cannot succeed in Afghanistan if the American military keeps killing Afghan civilians."
I guess you could call it progress, for the oblivion nation.
12 May 2009 @ 09:27 pm
12 May 2009 @ 01:44 pm
American "close air support" killed 95 children in Afghanistan last week, and when Hamid Karzai's demand that bombing cease was brushed off (as usual) by Obama's National Security Advisor ("We can’t fight with one hand tied behind our back"), the Afghan House of Representatives (Wolesi Jirga) issued an ultimatum: Within one week all American forces in Afghanistan will be subject to Afghan law.
This is one jump away from throwing us out of the country, or at least trying, and not even Obama and David Axelrod can sell an occupation that's at war with its own puppet government!
So noise had to be made, and what's the cheapest dog-and-pony show that will save our puppet Karzai and shut up the Wolesi Jirga?
Obama fired our commanding General in Afghanistan, Lt. General David McKiernan, and that guy was always a pain in the ass anyway. He wouldn't play follow-the-leader with Donald Rumsfeld, way back when Rumsfeld poo-pooed the idea that insurgents just might possibly play a significant role in Iraq, and McKiernan also agitated for a much bigger army to invade Iraq, because how can 150,000 soldiers stabilize a big crazy country with open borders?
What an idiot! And it only got worse when McKiernan opined that Obama's surge in Afghanistan was way too little! And way too late! We're losing!
So Obama replaced McKiernan with... the Prince of Darkness, Lieutenant General Stanley A. McChrystal.
This guy is the Richard B. Cheney of the US Army! For most of the last 5 years, nobody even knew where he was! "This is Lt. General Stanley A. McChrystal, speaking to you from an undisclosed location..."
McChrystal occasionally surfaced when his black-ops brigade killed a high-value target like Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, but he also got yanked out of the shadows when 34 of his boys were disciplined for torturing detainees.
McChrystal also played along with the cover-up of Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan by "friendly fire," but he distinguished himself among all the other players by warning everybody that it could all go wrong.
Let's cover up this public-relations catastrophe, but we shouldn't push our luck by encouraging the President to celebrate it!
So Obama's new man in Afghanistan is an outstanding public-relations General, and if we ever need another cover-up in Afghanistan (and we will), or if we ever decide to torture a few more prisoners at Bagram AFB (and we will), then Lt. General Stanley A. McChrystal is exactly the right man in exactly the right place... for Barack Obama.
This is one jump away from throwing us out of the country, or at least trying, and not even Obama and David Axelrod can sell an occupation that's at war with its own puppet government!
So noise had to be made, and what's the cheapest dog-and-pony show that will save our puppet Karzai and shut up the Wolesi Jirga?
Obama fired our commanding General in Afghanistan, Lt. General David McKiernan, and that guy was always a pain in the ass anyway. He wouldn't play follow-the-leader with Donald Rumsfeld, way back when Rumsfeld poo-pooed the idea that insurgents just might possibly play a significant role in Iraq, and McKiernan also agitated for a much bigger army to invade Iraq, because how can 150,000 soldiers stabilize a big crazy country with open borders?
What an idiot! And it only got worse when McKiernan opined that Obama's surge in Afghanistan was way too little! And way too late! We're losing!
So Obama replaced McKiernan with... the Prince of Darkness, Lieutenant General Stanley A. McChrystal.
This guy is the Richard B. Cheney of the US Army! For most of the last 5 years, nobody even knew where he was! "This is Lt. General Stanley A. McChrystal, speaking to you from an undisclosed location..."
McChrystal occasionally surfaced when his black-ops brigade killed a high-value target like Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, but he also got yanked out of the shadows when 34 of his boys were disciplined for torturing detainees.
In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball.
McChrystal also played along with the cover-up of Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan by "friendly fire," but he distinguished himself among all the other players by warning everybody that it could all go wrong.
A high-ranking general told Pentagon investigators that, when he approved a Silver Star citation for Pat Tillman, he suspected that the former NFL player had been killed by "friendly fire," according to testimony obtained by the Associated Press.
Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal said that suspicion led him to send a memo to top generals imploring "our nation's leaders," specifically "POTUS" -- the acronym for the president -- to avoid using the award citation's language of "devastating enemy fire" in their speeches.
Let's cover up this public-relations catastrophe, but we shouldn't push our luck by encouraging the President to celebrate it!
So Obama's new man in Afghanistan is an outstanding public-relations General, and if we ever need another cover-up in Afghanistan (and we will), or if we ever decide to torture a few more prisoners at Bagram AFB (and we will), then Lt. General Stanley A. McChrystal is exactly the right man in exactly the right place... for Barack Obama.
20 April 2009 @ 09:24 pm
12 April 2009 @ 10:19 am
The New York Times online today includes an article about national elections in Afghanistan now scheduled for August 20, 2009: Allies Ponder How to Plan Elections in Afghanistan.
The Times writer, Carlotta Gall, has obviously made an effort to balance optimism and pessimism about the situation in Afghanistan, and the article includes what was probably intended to be a very optimistic assessment by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who visited Kabul last Sunday.
Turning the tide! Apparently Admiral Mullen's unconscious mind is significantly more honest than Admiral Mullen's conscious persona, which was too obtuse to notice that he had chosen an image of impossibility to describe the NATO mission in Afghanistan.
King Canute got wet and repented, but the arrogance of our kings is incurable, although the thrones they set up in Vietnam were long ago washed away, and our empire in Iraq is even now dissolving like sand-castles under the tide.
The Times writer, Carlotta Gall, has obviously made an effort to balance optimism and pessimism about the situation in Afghanistan, and the article includes what was probably intended to be a very optimistic assessment by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who visited Kabul last Sunday.
“I am convinced that the additional military capability will certainly start to allow us to turn the tide."
Turning the tide! Apparently Admiral Mullen's unconscious mind is significantly more honest than Admiral Mullen's conscious persona, which was too obtuse to notice that he had chosen an image of impossibility to describe the NATO mission in Afghanistan.
Henry of Huntingdon, the 12th-century chronicler, tells how (King Canute) set his throne by the sea shore and commanded the tide to halt and not wet his feet and robes; but the tide failed to stop. According to Henry, Cnut leapt backwards and said "Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws." He then hung his gold crown on a crucifix, and never wore it again.
King Canute got wet and repented, but the arrogance of our kings is incurable, although the thrones they set up in Vietnam were long ago washed away, and our empire in Iraq is even now dissolving like sand-castles under the tide.
08 April 2009 @ 08:05 pm
12 March 2009 @ 12:41 am
Fifty strings on my inlaid harp
fifty for no reason
Every string like a year of my life
Fret-board covered with flowers
Chords like butterflies
lost between worlds
Sorrow only expressed
in the language of sparrows
Tears turned into pearls
Stone turned into smoke
and the songs we loved so much
were lost in dreams
fifty for no reason
Every string like a year of my life
Fret-board covered with flowers
Chords like butterflies
lost between worlds
Sorrow only expressed
in the language of sparrows
Tears turned into pearls
Stone turned into smoke
and the songs we loved so much
were lost in dreams
11 March 2009 @ 04:23 pm
President Obama's economic stimulus lost so much weight so fast that dieters everywhere have flooded Congress and the White House with requests for information about the so-called "Ivy-League Diet," named after an association of degree-granting institutions in New England which granted degrees to President Obama and most of his economic advisers. Thanks to my new job as a busboy at Washington's exclusive Alfalfa Club, I was able to get the inside story from Tim Geithner (Dartmouth '83), Paul Volcker (Princeton '49), and Larry Summers (Harvard '82).
"Excuse my humble self for disturbing your Lordships," I groveled, "but would you please be so kind as to explain the "Ivy-League Diet" that I hear so much about on TV?"
Larry Summers graciously replied.
"It's very simple. We shit on the economy and you eat it."
"Harharhar!!!" said Paul Volcker.
"Harharhar!!!" said Tim Geithner.
And even my humble self joined in the merriment.
"Harharhar!!!"
"What are you laughing at?" said Larry Summers.
"Nothing, your Lordship," I replied. "Enjoy your soup."
"Excuse my humble self for disturbing your Lordships," I groveled, "but would you please be so kind as to explain the "Ivy-League Diet" that I hear so much about on TV?"
Larry Summers graciously replied.
"It's very simple. We shit on the economy and you eat it."
"Harharhar!!!" said Paul Volcker.
"Harharhar!!!" said Tim Geithner.
And even my humble self joined in the merriment.
"Harharhar!!!"
"What are you laughing at?" said Larry Summers.
"Nothing, your Lordship," I replied. "Enjoy your soup."
11 March 2009 @ 07:57 am
Enormous crimes against humanity were trivialized by show-trials staged for pathetic hillbillies, imprisoned along with their prisoners in incomprehensible dreamscapes at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, where arithmetic devolved into sado-masochistic improvisation.
Arithmetic devolved into sado-masochistic improvisation...
All the money in every bank mysteriously disappeared, and more money even more mysteriously reappeared, and even more money even more mysteriously disappeared, and even more money even more mysteriously reappeared, and disappeared and reappeared and disappeared and reappeared and disappeared and reappeared...
Our great Dreamer who dreams our world, our God is insane.
Our God is insane, and enormous crimes devolve into sado-masochistic trivialities, show-trials staged by pathetic hillbillies, nightmare-arithmetic invented at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib...
Arithmetic devolved into sado-masochistic improvisation...
All the money in every bank mysteriously disappeared, and more money even more mysteriously reappeared, and even more money even more mysteriously disappeared, and even more money even more mysteriously reappeared, and disappeared and reappeared and disappeared and reappeared and disappeared and reappeared...
Our great Dreamer who dreams our world, our God is insane.
Our God is insane, and enormous crimes devolve into sado-masochistic trivialities, show-trials staged by pathetic hillbillies, nightmare-arithmetic invented at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib...
25 February 2009 @ 02:22 am
23 February 2009 @ 02:26 am
Dia ta thaumadzein hoi anthropoi kai nun kai ta proton erxanto philosophein, says Aristotle, "Both now and at the beginning men began to philosophize out of amazement," and likewise in the Theaetetus, Plato identifies philosophy with Iris, rainbow-messenger of the gods, the daughter of Thaumas...
At the beginning, and also now, amazement… a form of delight so seductive that Odysseus risks ship and crew to investigate Polyphemus, thaum’ etukto pelorion, a monster amazingly fashioned. The other Achaeans only want to steal some cheese and sheep, and sail away, but Odysseus hasn’t come for cheese and sheep, and he tarries in the cave to see the Cyclops, although he expects the worst, a savage power that abides by neither common law nor commandment, oute dikas oute themistas, the supposedly asocial man at the beginning of human evolution.
“And also now…”
And also now, philosophy begins again with amazement, or not at all.
Iris, emblem of philosophy, tears off her sister’s wings, because Arkhes has sided with Titans against the Olympian gods… wings for a wedding-gift to Thetis, again given away to her son Achilles, and reappearing in one of many Homeric epithets incomprehensible except in the underlying Olympian history... pod-arkhes Achilleus, wing-footed Achilles.
The Olympian gods are inextricably interwoven in every syllable of Homeric Greek.
Amazement resonates with amazement across the long Dark Age between Homer and Thales, five hundred years in isolated settlements where the lord of a valley was lucky to have one post-and-lintel doorway in his house.
Amazing Tales of the Olympian Gods and Heroes delivered the infinite articulation of Homeric Greek intact into the hands of Plato and Callimachus, but the patriarchs of early Christianity hated a naïve amazement that endows every grove and spring with a goddess of its own, and after the Ottoman Empire appeared and disappeared in Magna Graecia, all that remained of Homeric Greek was a minimal vocabulary embedded in minimal syntactic, grammatical, and phonetic structures. The Olympian gods disappeared, and the language in which they dwelled disappeared, and now we’re all barbarians, barking out a pitiful simplification of human language, unless we return to the very beginning…
Like flights of swans above the River Cayster, the Achaeans emerged from their camp, and the earth rang like brass under stampeding men and horses…
In the Dark Age of Greece all recollection was almost lost, and not only the stories of gods and heroes but even the concept of recollection was only preserved by the Homeridae, illiterate rhapsodes weaving dactlys and spondees in the primitive halls of dark-age barons, each rhapsode adding a shimmer of amazement in a line or two distilled out of odysseys between Iron Age villages, so the beautiful clarity of Homeric description was preserved as a living practice, and without it the untranslatable iridescence of Platonic irony would have been impossible.
“And also now,” philosophy begins with amazement, erasing the tedious elaboration of neo-Kantianism and logical atomism as if no such things had ever existed, and recovering the thunder-music of Aeschylus and the lightening of Socratic aporia in the wilderness of Todtnauberg or Skjolden, invisibly distant from the gravitational center of "philosophy" where Paul Natorp endlessly dissected the synthetic unity of apperception, or Bertrand Russell re-bracketed null sets into an endless arithmetic of ideas, and now none of it retains any more significance than a shoe-shine on a forgotten pair of shoes.
Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch...
"But where there is danger, there salvation also appears..."
So Heidegger rediscovered life-and-death uncertainty in the nearness of Being, and Wittgenstein intensified Socratic aporia into an instrument of mutual annihilation with which he assassinated academic philosophy...
...but that corpse is still twitching.
At the beginning, and also now, amazement… a form of delight so seductive that Odysseus risks ship and crew to investigate Polyphemus, thaum’ etukto pelorion, a monster amazingly fashioned. The other Achaeans only want to steal some cheese and sheep, and sail away, but Odysseus hasn’t come for cheese and sheep, and he tarries in the cave to see the Cyclops, although he expects the worst, a savage power that abides by neither common law nor commandment, oute dikas oute themistas, the supposedly asocial man at the beginning of human evolution.
“And also now…”
And also now, philosophy begins again with amazement, or not at all.
Iris, emblem of philosophy, tears off her sister’s wings, because Arkhes has sided with Titans against the Olympian gods… wings for a wedding-gift to Thetis, again given away to her son Achilles, and reappearing in one of many Homeric epithets incomprehensible except in the underlying Olympian history... pod-arkhes Achilleus, wing-footed Achilles.
The Olympian gods are inextricably interwoven in every syllable of Homeric Greek.
Amazement resonates with amazement across the long Dark Age between Homer and Thales, five hundred years in isolated settlements where the lord of a valley was lucky to have one post-and-lintel doorway in his house.
Amazing Tales of the Olympian Gods and Heroes delivered the infinite articulation of Homeric Greek intact into the hands of Plato and Callimachus, but the patriarchs of early Christianity hated a naïve amazement that endows every grove and spring with a goddess of its own, and after the Ottoman Empire appeared and disappeared in Magna Graecia, all that remained of Homeric Greek was a minimal vocabulary embedded in minimal syntactic, grammatical, and phonetic structures. The Olympian gods disappeared, and the language in which they dwelled disappeared, and now we’re all barbarians, barking out a pitiful simplification of human language, unless we return to the very beginning…
Like flights of swans above the River Cayster, the Achaeans emerged from their camp, and the earth rang like brass under stampeding men and horses…
In the Dark Age of Greece all recollection was almost lost, and not only the stories of gods and heroes but even the concept of recollection was only preserved by the Homeridae, illiterate rhapsodes weaving dactlys and spondees in the primitive halls of dark-age barons, each rhapsode adding a shimmer of amazement in a line or two distilled out of odysseys between Iron Age villages, so the beautiful clarity of Homeric description was preserved as a living practice, and without it the untranslatable iridescence of Platonic irony would have been impossible.
“And also now,” philosophy begins with amazement, erasing the tedious elaboration of neo-Kantianism and logical atomism as if no such things had ever existed, and recovering the thunder-music of Aeschylus and the lightening of Socratic aporia in the wilderness of Todtnauberg or Skjolden, invisibly distant from the gravitational center of "philosophy" where Paul Natorp endlessly dissected the synthetic unity of apperception, or Bertrand Russell re-bracketed null sets into an endless arithmetic of ideas, and now none of it retains any more significance than a shoe-shine on a forgotten pair of shoes.
Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch...
"But where there is danger, there salvation also appears..."
So Heidegger rediscovered life-and-death uncertainty in the nearness of Being, and Wittgenstein intensified Socratic aporia into an instrument of mutual annihilation with which he assassinated academic philosophy...
...but that corpse is still twitching.