The nightmares were out in force last night. One, with an elfin face in which two giant eyes were black bottomless voids, a mouth shaped like an anteater''s with a prehensile tongue and rasping circle of teeth, and a shock of pale spiky hair, sat next to me, gingerly holding my hand in the two hooked claws that jutted from her wrists and gnawed the flesh from my fingers. Another perched at my feet: a diminutive creature of unearthly beauty wearing a corset and blue furs, peeking at me from underneath half-closed eyelids beneath which nuclear fires rages and smiles demurely. Her lips parted; her teeth were thousands of shiny fat sowing needles. A third climbed up onto my chest; all sparkly edges and angles and an impossible multitude of sinuous limbs, grasping me, crushing me to her terrifyingly sharp surfaces while fluting some profoundly Lovecraftian gibberish into my ear. Yet another one loomed by the window: I couldn't make out the details of its face shrouded as it was in the shadows, but the madly swirling patterns of dull grey liquid that I could see hinted at the details I was better off not knowing. There was a sound like the flapping of giant rotting wings outside the window. The music playing on my computer sped up and slowed down, became softer and louder in tune with the brightening and fading auras around each object in the room. A roaring patch of bleeding darkness moved about the floor, throwing writhing pseudopods in all directions, and, as always, far in the distance those giant gods vaster than the universe and yet smaller than my hand moved about the mad landscape and watched me mutely with eyes the size of planets.

I woke up and opened a beer. The song--it was something by the 3rd and Mortal--ended and the creatures faded slowly into shadows. It was quiet, except for an insistent blue-jay outside and the fizzing of bubbles in the beer-bottle. Then, suddenly, the walls of my room rushed away from me, shrieking like a flock of insane geese and I was suspended in a pattern of delicate trembling light, each strand a set of arcane equations running with fire along their infinite stretch, fluttering, a moth at the everpresent heart of this infinite cosmic web, impossibly convoluted and full of meaning. I could see all the way to the edges of the infinite universe which are its center, where blind idiot gods churn out more mathematical monstrosities, where everything and nothing begins and ends and is and isn't, and for a second I could hear all the music ever written all at once. Everything expanded at the speed of light and disappeared into a void without stars.

I woke up and opened a beer. It was quiet.

I woke up and opened a beer.

I woke up.

I.

Down here in the swamp at night, digging for treasure. I seen it; many times; I know it is here somewhere. So here I go: waist deep in the muck, fingernails broken, fingers bleeding, tearing into soft wet soil, black water, mud, blood, whippoorwills, mad will-o-the-wisps cackling at me; the pit getting deeper, its walls above my head, and still nothing: no glint of metal, no flash of a precious stone, not even bedrock, and I dig deeper and deeper, my guitar at the edge of the pit, strings broken, screaming at the sky and the frogs and the slugs and then it starts raining and the walls collapse; almost drowning, sobbing in rage and terror and still clawing at the soft tangle of mud and roots, where the fuck is it? I just saw it there!

And the rising sun burns the clouds away and here I am sitting at the edge of the pit, blasting my nagant at the disappearing will-o-the-wisps (they give one hateful cackle and pop like little hellish venomous fireworks) as the pit by my feet is slowly filling with black, thick, fetid water...what the fuck am I doing in this swamp? Look at the trees: not a single straight one in sight, only twisted, poisoned boles. This is a deadly place. This is a deadly place. This is a deadly place. No treasures here: only misdirections, dissimulations, twisted little paths going nowhere, pale rotting mushrooms for sustenance, a labyrinth, despair, mud, quicksand, loss and blood. Nothing here. What the fuck am I doing here? I am going to go climb a mountain, will give everyone a shout once I get to the top. It is morning: with luck I'll make it by mid-afternoon. But even if I don't, I'll get there tomorrow. By the forest spirits, by echoes and tree-nymphs and elfshot and fairy-rings and berries and aspens, I have forgotten how good it feels to shout!

Bouncing from Slade to Boney M.

Curiously and perhaps I am getting over the idiotic writer's block that has been sitting in my skull for a while now. A bloody brick disrupting the flow of my thoughts that seems to have been finally worn away by the acidity of my subconsciousness. It still feels a bit awkward, sentences do not easily fall into shapes I want them to and words wriggle through my fingers like minnows but at least some form of coherent thought is captured.

The southern railroad's terminus is about 60 km south of the City, at Wormfell. A relatively decently maintained highway leads further south into the woods, eventually curving west and connecting the City with the mining and woodcutting villages of the coast ranges. To the east, wide fields of rye stretch across an ancient floodplain, eventually running into a range of hills about 70 km away. The hills are barely explored; several expeditionary parties have been sent there; some did not return; the findings of others were suppressed by the government. It is rather certain that a large population of fylgja makes these hills their home; they keep mostly to themselves only occasionally descending upon the scattered farmsteads of the fields below to steal children. There has been talk about extending the tracks further south, but it all came to nothing due to lack of funding. To the west, a low-lying (mostly) swampy spruce and pine forest without a name stands between the village and the coast; its edges are relatively well-explored and are a popular spot for mushrooms and berries, but further in it grows completely wild and generally untouched by anything human. There are many paths leading into it, and brave souls that have ventured there bring back tales of tunnels into the sky, several gravitational anomalies, shifting geographies and vast bulks of breathing, rattling and coughing--but somehow almost invisible--matter moving between trees at night. I have gone there several times, on mapping expeditions, and the experience has been similar tho the feeling one gets when climbing the remnants of a tower in those curious ruins on the hill north of the city, in Sosnovka woods: slowly growing dread that becomes thick and palpable, filling the air, when one comes to realize that something lies beyond the field of one's vision, something waiting to pounce, but unable to for some convoluted reason of its own and only waiting for a chance to do so, some action of yours that would set it free to rend and tear and do whatever such things do to their victims and to warmth and life in general. The tower is much worse, perhaps because the dread in it is concentrated in a smaller space. The woods west of Wormfell are wide and there are places where the sun is shining and heather blooms wildly and wild strawberries are perfectly safe to eat. When in doubt, head uphill. As often is the case, low lying swampy areas are the most disconcerting ones. Curiously, some entities, perhaps human, have lived there before. For unknown reasons they chose to build their structures in the lowest spots of the forest, as if they craved the sick silence of swamps and could not stand the sun. Their stilted and deformed huts still stand in some places; they are strangely repellent, whether because of their shape, or the sounds they make settling into the swamp on their stilts (as if they are ready to lift those stilts and move towards you), or unrecognizable smells wafting from them on windy nights, but apparently they are not too dangerous. The most deadly things in these woods are mobile and seldom come within a kilometer from the forest's edge.

Wormfell itself is a scatter of shops and two or three cafes and pubs; it is a semi-popular place for weekend crowds to go mushrooming, as long as they do not stray too far from the highway or into the woods. Still, each year several fail to come back. But it is hardly more dangerous than spending ones weekend in some parts of the City, and potentially much more profitable. Local mushrooms have strange reputations, and rumoured qualities from growing too near to holes in the fabric of the universe. The said fabric however, is thin and worn in most places in the City and around it it has been my fortune to visit; the whole world is threadbare and things leak into it from the outside at each crease, angle, corner or a turn of the road.

Last night, I was wandering about in a huge building: all elevators and transporter belts, giant stairways leading into enormous concert halls, bright hallways full of people hurrying somewhere, balconies and belvederes opening onto foyers and esplanadas fit for titans, turrets, cupolas and spandrels galore! I am no longer sure where I was going, but the security was quite tight: there were checkpoints on each corridor intersection, and they all looked long at my papers and checked my compliance with some esoteric rules and procedures taking entirely too much time to do so, and meanwhile I became convinced that wherever it was that I was going was not goint to be there for much longer, and at a checkpoint on an internal bridge, with a creek rumbling below, I finally lost it, slugged one of the guards in the face, and vaulted over the railing and...flew, of course. It was a bit difficut to stay above water (water always drags me down on such occasions: it is fundamentally opposed to the idea of me flying), but I managed, until we reached an opening in the wall, and I followed the creek outside the building...only to find out that the building rose out of the cloud layer far below, and disappeared into glare far above, and that there was no ground, nothing solid at all. Faces peering out of the windows that irregularly dotted the enormous wall behind me seemed to wink; a couple gave me thumbs-up, most frowned. Then I fell.

Some dreams, they leak across the edges.

Survival? Sanity? A brief restriction in the slaughterhouse?

Shucks, there are voices: one in my ear one without:

telling me things I cannot understand or care or grow flowers in: whence syntax?
Come on, someone must have at least a comma but none do: flags abaying their madness
which only scrapes its way as cover for my solitude.

Transference? Well, fuck no.

There are some points which jut their way into my bed, my brain, my lack of conscious kindness. They must be blunted, There is no other way, but sanity and softness: wherefore you come from? Maybe puddles?

Who is this? Knocking on my skull! I know you are a figment of the fog that covers me besides and underneath and all throughout this long and lonely night unfathomed by vaginas or a brain. Hey!

Do not run: there are no others here but us, stuck slowly in the sugary remains of past reminders (slow suction, death, and monolateral slow motion), platitudes, vertebral pain and useless alliteratives...and consonants!...

I know I am insane, The fourth voice tells me so; and I'm loath to take advice (it is most persuasive!), having banished the first seven. Embrace me. No, embrace the fucking tree. A pinniped. a hedgehog. A softly deformed me.

Ta da. one cannot type or celebrate the highness of the bridges or artifacts that one's mind places on the mat (the purple mat! disaster! pain, and more!!!)--so get it off already, you, convex and bejewelled in your resplendescent treason.

You are not one or two or seventeen or other, You have no reason, neither do I, honestly. I cannot stop, for fear that doing so uncovers some travesty of lies, some insignificant betrayer cowering mildly in the bushes at the roadside as flashing metal objects hurtle by, chewing her thirty silver pieces just like rusty donuts. Don't. Fuck off!!! Tonight's the night. The greenest thing, the most unctuous plant is that it is not you, or you, or you.

Or you.

Until next life, I present you with this cake and horror: obliquely, counterfactually yours,

I am myself: if only I knew what that was.

It has passed. I would like to take this moment to thank the audience, their fluffers and the suppliers of the fuel for everyone's favourite chainsaw: it was great. Before I log off, I want to encourage everyone to listen to Janka Djagileva and learn Russian in the process.

...og jeg længes ud i alle mine dage

1931 - Ådalen Shootings

Lapponia (book)

Lapponia is a book written by Johannes Schefferus (1621 - 1679) covering a very comprehensive history of Northern Scandinavia topology, environment and Sami living condition, dwelling-places, clothing, gender roles, hunting, child raising, shamanism and pagan religion. It was published in late 1673 and closely followed by English, German, French and Dutch translations. Adapted and abridged version were also followed where only original chapters on shamanism and religion was preserved but the others replaced with tales on magic, sorcery, drums and heathenism.

The book uses "Lap" mainly to notice that Samis are still pagan and it is concluded that Lap is a word introduced by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus (ca. 1150 - 1220) to distinguish Sami peoples living near the ocean (coast-fenni) and in the woodland (lapp-fenni).

It was aimed to meet rumors, or as the council Magnus De La Gardie saw as degrading propaganda, from (particular German) pamphlets claiming the Swedes had used "Sami magic" on the European battlefields.

The book was not until 1956 (after 300 years) fully translated to Swedish (as "Lappland", Acta Lapponica 8, Uppsala 1956). Its references is, however, based on "clergy correspondence" letters, i.e. reports made by priests.

A smaller part of the geographical region described in the book is today named Lappland (or Laponia.)

See also

*Sápmi (area)

Оригинал статьи Lapponia (book) на сайте Словари и энциклопедии на Академике

Triple cheer!!! Woot!

New Scientist is not a bad magazine. I read it regularly, despite the occasionally weirdly wanky physics story that looks as if it were published for sensational value only. But overall it is no bad, coming out strongly on the side of reason. However, I am very close to cancelling my subscription and encouraging others to do so.

Last week, the print issue carried an article by Amanda Geffer concerning creationist code-words and how to recognize them in pretend-science publications. It was an excellent, rational and thoroughly admirable article.

Apparently, someone complained to the editors about it and the article is currently removed from the online edition of NS, apparently “while they investigate”.

I encourage everyone to follow the link and leave a complaint in the comment section. If the editors do not restore the article in question immediately, or, at least, provide a reasonable explanation for their action (not that I think there can be one, besides intellectual cowardice), I will be cancelling my subscriptiion.

Since the article in question is no longer available at the NS site, I reproduce the complete text of it below:

How to Spot a Religious Agenda, Amanda Gefter, New Scientist, Sat, 28 Feb 2009 22:35 UTC

As a book reviews editor at New Scientist, I often come across so-called science books which after a few pages reveal themselves to be harbouring ulterior motives. I have learned to recognise clues that the author is pushing a religious agenda. As creationists in the US continue to lose court battles over attempts to have intelligent design taught as science in federally funded schools, their strategy has been forced to... well, evolve. That means ensuring that references to pseudoscientific concepts like ID are more heavily veiled. So I thought I’d share a few tips for spotting what may be religion in science’s clothing.

Red flag number one: the term “scientific materialism”. “Materialism” is most often used in contrast to something else - something non-material, or supernatural. Proponents of ID frequently lament the scientific claim that humans are the product of purely material forces. At the same time, they never define how non-material forces might work. I have yet to find a definition that characterises non-materialism by what it is, rather than by what it is not.

The invocation of Cartesian dualism - where the brain and mind are viewed as two distinct entities, one material and the other immaterial - is also a red flag. And if an author describes the mind, or any biological system for that matter, as “irreducibly complex”, let the alarm bells ring.

Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience, usually of the New Age variety, but some religious groups are now appealing to aspects of quantum weirdness to account for free will. Beware: this is nonsense.

When you come across the terms “Darwinism” or “Darwinists”, take heed. True scientists rarely use these terms, and instead opt for “evolution” and “biologists”, respectively. When evolution is described as a “blind, random, undirected process”, be warned. While genetic mutations may be random, natural selection is not. When cells are described as “astonishingly complex molecular machines”, it is generally by breathless supporters of ID who take the metaphor literally and assume that such a “machine” requires an “engineer”. If an author wishes for “academic freedom”, it is usually ID code for “the acceptance of creationism”.

Some general sentiments are also red flags. Authors with religious motives make shameless appeals to common sense, from the staid - “There is nothing we can be more certain of than the reality of our sense of self” (James Le Fanu in Why Us?) - to the silly - “Yer granny was an ape!” (creationist blogger Denyse O’Leary). If common sense were a reliable guide, we wouldn’t need science in the first place.

Religiously motivated authors also have a bad habit of linking the cultural implications of a theory to the truth-value of that theory. The ID crowd, for instance, loves to draw a line from Darwin to the Holocaust, as they did in the “documentary” film Expelled: No intelligence allowed. Even if such an absurd link were justified, it would have zero relevance to the question of whether or not the theory of evolution is correct. Similarly, when Le Fanu writes that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species “articulated the desire of many scientists for an exclusively materialist explanation of natural history that would liberate it from the sticky fingers of the theological inference that the beauty and wonder of the natural world was direct evidence for ‘A Designer’", his statement has no bearing on the scientific merits of evolution.

It is crucial to the public’s intellectual health to know when science really is science. Those with a religious agenda will continue to disguise their true views in their effort to win supporters, so please read between the lines.

OK, then, regarding my earlier excommunication post: vatican officially approves. What a bunch of fuckwits.

An article in Catholic News tries to defuse the evolution “controversy” (itself a product of deranged creationist minds) by claiming that evolution is not to blame for the recent surge in atheistic books and the open spread of atheism. Rather, scientism is the evil beastie here (an old claim!). And they define scientism as “the use of science beyond its proper sphere of investigating physical nature”.

Of course the dolts do not realize that such a definition is certainly begging the question of whether there is anything at all “beyond physical nature”. Meh, they never cease to amuse me.

Kepler telescope, an instrument that will look for Earth-sized exoplanets, will be launched today. It may find thousands of them, another step in our search for life elsewhere in the Universe, and a boon for future navigators of sublight colony ships...;)

...to know that religion and the Church are great forces for evil in our world: here.

Excommunication may be a weak concept, but they are excommunicating the wrong people! These scumbags are punishing the people who have saved the life of the 9-year old girl while refusing to pass a moral judgement on the actual perpetrator. And they feel persecuted? they fucking dare to complain (about trivialities: notice the prominent place given to The Golden Compass in this one)?

So the bankers are saying that they do not need the TARP money and that taking is was a mistake. So, why don’t they give it back now, instead of possibly within 2-3 years. I am sure that I am not the only one puzzled by the discrepancy: for fuck’s sake, if they really don’t need it they should cough it up now...

and we stood there, blinking in confusion and only cognizant of the possible significance to our survival of the other bodies crowding into our space, complicated by sunlight.

Ah, now that is out of the way, don't you think that Låt den rätte komma in (Let the right one come in) is possibly the best (and most emotionally beautiful) of all possible vampire movies?

Everybody really should read this. Especially those of you that are religious fundamentalists and/or followers of some form of a diviine command ethical theory (which is probably very few, if any). So fucking bite me.

In fact, perhaps those of us that are sane should seriously consider making home in certain places in Northern Europe; or conversely, using them as an example towards which to strive in our work here in the USA.

(Don’t try this at home...)

1. Find an attractive prisoner of war, bring her home, shave her head, trim her nails, and give her new clothes. Then she’s yours. - (Deuteronomy 21:11-13)

2. Find a prostitute and marry her. - (Hosea 1:1-3)

3. Find a man with seven daughters, and impress him by watering his flock. - Moses (Ex 2:16-21)

4. Purchase a piece of property, and get a woman as part of the deal. - Boaz (Ruth 4:5-10)

5. Go to a party and hide. When the women come out to dance, grab one and carry her off to be your wife. - Benjaminites (Judges 21:19-25)

6. Have God create a wife for you while you sleep. Note: this will cost you. - Adam (Gen 2:19-24)

7. Agree to work seven years in exchange for a woman’s hand in marriage. Get tricked into marrying the wrong woman. Then work another seven years for the woman you wanted to marry in the first place. That’s right. Fourteen years of toil for a wife. - Jacob (Genesis 29:15-30)

8. Cut 200 foreskins off of your future father-in-law’s enemies and get his daughter for a wife - David (I Samuel 18:27)

9. Even if no one is out there, just wander around a bit and you’ll definitely find someone. (It’s all relative, of course.) - Cain (Genesis 4:16-17)

10. Become the emperor of a huge nation and hold a beauty contest. - Xerxes or Ahasuerus (Esther 2:3-4)

11. When you see someone you like, go home and tell your parents, “I have seen a ... woman; now get her for me.” If your parents question your decision, simply say, “Get her for me. She’s the one for me.” - Samson (Judges 14:1-3)

12. Kill any husband and take HIS wife (Prepare to lose four sons, though). - David (2 Samuel 11)

13. Wait for your brother to die. Take his widow. (It’s not just a good idea; it’s the law.) - Onana and Boaz (Deuteronomy or Leviticus, example in Ruth)

14. Don’t be so picky. Make up for quality with quantity. - Solomon (1 Kings 11:1-3)

15. A wife?...NOT? - Paul (1 Corinthians 7:32-35)

Every time my brain shows any kind of intelligence or independence, whether by dreaming, or a mathematical or coding renaissance, or even just growing gravid with simple snatches of song and poetry, I duly get a couple of liters of vodka and pummel it into submission. Bludgeoned into inactivity with several casual shots, it gives up on fancy creative ideas and—after a morning’s disoriented nausea—settles into sullen drudgery again, keeping me breathing, walking and functioning at work—and even smiling and happy, or at least providing a veneer of happiness to fool even itself. I do not require alcohol or any other kind of distraction for several days. Then it rebels again. Poor thing, it is obviously not that comfortable with its role as an automaton whose job consists in keeping this body coordinated enough to pay the rent and assure its continued survival and supply of further tranquilizers.

Do I really hate myself and everything I have to say that much? Occasionally I even get angry at myself; but then I get angry at my own anger, and that leads to another episode of imaginative attempt at independence, another uprising which my imagination loses with due repercussions. and so in the circle again. If I had a tail, I’d be chasing it quite properly and even with a pretense of joy. Brain vasectomy: efficient if only ever temporary.

OK, my lovely little morsels! Happy VD to all of you, and may whichever orgy you go to today turn out happy, friendly, full of reasonably clean, attractive and not too smelly people and orgasmilicious! Think of petals! And enjoy the fuck out of it!



(Special thanks to xkcd)

OK, why didn’t I know about this until now? What a fucking brilliant idea!

Or, more to the point, how stupid does he think the rest of the world is?:

“House Republicans had the wisdom to continue to talk to the Obama White House. This made them look gracious, even as the president edged toward a ‘my way or the highway’ attitude.”

(Karl Rove)

I hope this buffoon keeps on babbling; with luck, he’ll bring the GOP approval ratings into single digits by 2010.

OK, so last night was even more interesting. After the science-fiction tinged dreams of the last few days, it was quite a change into full-blown High Epic fantasy territory, and even Meta-fantasy at that.

I was on some strange and giant Ringworld, and I had a set of maps and on them was every Universe I had ever visited in my dreams; I just had to get to the right sector. The world extended in time as well as in space, so all the events that had ever happened in those major epic dreams of mine (and believe me, there are a-plenty, and many graphically violent, up to and including the destruction of whole civilizations and wholesale slaughter of millions) were accessible, concurrent, in some strange sense.

The problem, of course, was that there was no good transportation system. I could choose a destination, in space and in time, and have a very reasonable certainty that I would get to it, but the path was determined by the goal, and I still had to traverse many intermediate places and times. At least I seemed to be liberated from the most obvious constraints of linear time: not only did I appear to have all of it in the world, I was also not required to relive all the events leading to the event I was interested in getting to. I could inject myself into the given narrative at any moment I wished, but it came at a cost of having to travel through several other narratives on the way.

All in all, rather confusing, and hauling these maps around (there were, like, many cases of them) was a pain, what with having to fight off everything from Orc-like entities to hot punk-rock wenches to weather patterns, not to mention angry insane deities and faceless dreads each step of the way.

“This bill, which both chambers of Congress are expected to approve this week, marks a huge political victory for President Obama. He has only been in office a bit over 3 weeks and already made good on two of his biggest campaign promises: a middle class tax cut and a bill to stimulate the economy with the hope of creating 3.5 million jobs. The bill is popular in the country and any Republican who walks around in a T-shirt saying ”I voted no“ is not likely to pick up any new voters as a result.”

(from electoralvote.com)

Everybody dance, everybody sing, eveybody laugh at creotards!

Law student Cath Anderson is plucked from her motorcycle in LA and finds herself at some time later, together with a group of other people, arriving to a very strange place: a planet in the system of Pollux (observed previously via the terrestrial planet finder), a subsurface forest world populated by giant snakes travelling along the pathways and tunnels, cleaning and reorganizing; a world of lost toys, sinister apparitions and forgotten and suppressed memories come to life; where there already is a sizable human population and some people act as spokesmen for the snakes, where both human pets brought to the planet with their owners and people are taken by the snakes for unknown purposes and giant pale mushrooms grow in the dark tunnels. The welcoming committee for the new arrivals explains some of the facts of living on the planet, but most of the activity the snakes and other denizens indulge in as well as the ecology of the planet is a mystery. What’s more, activity further in from Pollux towards the Norma galactic arm indicates that something much more involved and on a much larger scale goes on there, and some of the humans are selectively sent there (the disappeared ones?).

I have several inklings of the ecology of the planet, but they are vague as most dreams are. I will attempt to go back to sleep and try to get to that planet again. It seems to be quite a wondersome place as well as the first new location I have dreamt about for quite a while. While beautiful and feeling slightly safer than my usual city, there still is an undercurrent of menace in the air, and the massive galaxy-restructuring (?) activities further out certainly appear to be sinister in some way.

The snakes themselves are a bit frightening, but mostly because their sheer size and the nonchalance with which they snap up (but do not destroy?) objects in their way; they do not appear to be actively malevolent. If their human spokesmen are asked, they sometimes return whatever they have taken in perfectly good condition (as they did with three cats they picked up, apparently out of sheer curiosity, when I was there). Sometimes they don’t. I am not sure whether I was the woman protagonist, but I was certainly observing the action either directly through her eyes or just a bit to the side, so to speak.

The landscape was beyond weird: with deeply forested--and snowed under--patches right next to warm underground warrens, some quite organic, others apparently constructed from giant Lego blocks. Some of the passages between interior rooms appear to be non-euclidean in their geometry. Doors and other apertures open and close seemingly at random; other objects are brought with people from Earth (the motorcycle made it!).

And what about the human spokesmen for the inhabitants? Are they voluntary collaborators, or meat puppets? And what is the status of the snakes? Are they the masters of the world (and beyond) or simply worker drones?

OK, then, I am definitely going back there...see y'all in the morning!

Tax cuts? Oh, for fuck’s sake: here. Pay close attention to the graph.

The most fascinating thing about the Republican opposition to the economic stimulus is the question of whether they really know so little about economics, and if so, why did anyone let them govern in the first place.. Of course the other alternative is that they are well-aware of basic macroeconomical principles at the heart of Obama’s plan, and pretend that they do not work only to win some political points. Interestingly, had Democrats done something like that in the ast 8 years, the Repugs would have quickly accused them of treason (and, in fact, they did: anyone expressing opposition to any of Bush’s foreign policy goals and methods was indeed attacked for alleged “anti-Americanism”).

I suppose the good thing about it is that the GOP is only further marginalizing itself and will join the American Communist party and the American National Socialists in irrelevance over the next few years, leaving Democrats as the standard party of the center-right and allowing some kind of a coherent left movement to emerge to challenge them. All in all, it’s about time USA found some political sanity and caught up with the rest of the Western society in this way.

I am proud to report that all of my blogs and social websites have registered 0 on the Quackometer test; that means I can still lay some claim to being on the side of raitonality and enlightenment! (Strangely, the only place that had generated any negative comments was my wordpress blog, long dormant; Quackometer reported that it was “dabbling in some postmodernist nonsense”, which I am at a loss to explain since part of my infamy was developed putting postmodernists down...)

Google Mars, anyone? Ha!

Creotards quoting Ken Ham and Answers in genesis are worse than any Cthuohoid nightmare I may have been having. The brains1 (the lack of them, to be exact!)

Yeah, yeah. Three fifths of booze in the last 48 hours. Svankmayer’s Faust (with all the congruent bits and pieces jumping right up and trying to grab my eyeballs (and The Most Amazingly Beautiful Woman in the Multiverse never having seen it)); with a bit of Bowie (y’know , The Man Who fell etc era; back when he looked inhumanly beautiful; ) Shit! closing parenthesesesesesesssss.

Anyway, pleased to meat you; and I am only reporting my failure to go to a random drunken fuck-bashery so I would know why I went to sleep in my bed tonight. Chillun...Anomie Belle are playing at Rotture next Fri; perhaps I shall pray to good music in the spirit of sobriety and celibacy by then.

A new LJ client. Does it work? If so, now I can make entries from 3 different places: browser, blogging software, and this: logjam!

I am still burning through last.fm Check out user/vodyanoj again; I've managed to rack up 31000 plays since July and you may get a taste of the sonic horror that is my life...

I have just installed vimperator plugin on my Firefox. It enables vi key bindings in the browser. Oi! Why did I not know about it back in my young days?

Those that don't know what vi is should ignore the previous sentence and concentrate on something else.

Is it going to have a kick on it like a pint mug of 151 or a half-gallon bottle of Australian table wine, or will it be just another glass of fizzy drink, an Alka-Seltzer on its way to stagnant calm?

CFI-UN Hamid Karzai Letter
by Center for Inquiry
The Center for Inquiry urges the Afghan government to release Sayed Pervez Kambakhsh, a 23-year-old journalism student at Balkh University and reporter for the local daily Jahan-e-Naw (The New World), sentenced to death for insulting Islam.

Mr. Kambakhsh was arrested on October 27, 2007, in Mazar-i-Sharif, Balkh province, for allegedly downloading and distributing material from a Farsi website which suggested that the Qur'an and Prophet Muhammad legitimize the oppression of women.

On January 22, 2008, Kambakhsh was brought before a Islamic court, without a lawyer or public oversight. Accused of un-Islamic speech and activity, socialism, rebelliousness, and improper instigation of religious debate, he was convicted of blasphemy by the court and sentenced to death.

To sign the petition go to:

http://ga1.org/campaign/CFI_Karzai_Letter

Today: the 100th anniversary of Tunguska. Still unresolved. I want to go to Lake Cheko sometimes next year...