bravery, repetition and noise

!

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 09:22:47 GMT

I got a free hot dog for voting

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:26:25 GMT

Amebix + Kylesa

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 01:56:32 GMT

!!!

We are doing a few shows with the legendary AMEBIX in late January!

Thursday january 29th
NEW YORK CITY
@bowery ballroom

AMEBIX
KYLESA
THOUGHT CRIME
ATTAKE

--------------------------------------------------------------
Friday january 30th
Boston/Providence
@TBA

AMEBIX
KYLESA
MORNE

--------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday january 31st

PHILADELPHIA PA
@Starlite Ballroom

AMEBIX
KYLESA
MISCHIEF BREW
BEHIND ENEMY LINES
PARASYTIC
LOST CAUSE

tickets / info:
www. r5productions. com

eurotrash

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 07:12:44 GMT

a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 23:25:22 GMT

“Mr. Wallace, 46, best known for his sprawling 1,079-page novel “Infinite Jest,” was discovered by his wife, Karen Green, who returned home to find that he had hanged himself, a spokesman for the Claremont, Calif., police said Saturday evening.” (New York Times, 14 Sept 2008)

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005 - David Foster Wallace

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I’d advise you to go ahead, because I’m sure going to. In fact I’m gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings [”parents”?] and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story [”thing”] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education — least in my own case — is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no-bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day-in, day-out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and non-human they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible — sounds like “displayal”]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

morrison cove produce auction/bridgeport

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 03:18:32 GMT

The motorcycle you're working on is yourself.

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 01:57:47 GMT

motorcycletrip08_17, originally uploaded by normanjsingley.

Norm rode the big Honda from Chicago to Missoula by way of Colorado!

Grant Farmers

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 01:56:45 GMT

motorcycletrip08_05, originally uploaded by normanjsingley.

Susie sells carrots!

fucked up inside

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 04:41:17 GMT

This weekend we went to P.S. 1 in Queens. There was a show of Finnish art called ARCTIC HYSTERIA. They had a replica Futuro house.
They also had chickens.

And the chickens had futuro nesting boxes.

There was an urban garden in the school yard.

It was mostly kale and marigolds.

The next day I saw A Warm Gun at ABC.

And then Spritualized's bus.

And then a Spaceman.

He played these songs:
you lie you cheat
shine a light
cheapster
electricity
soul on fire
sweet talk
sitting on fire
walking with jesus
oh baby
rated x
lay back in the sun
death take your fiddle
she kissed me
come together
take me to the other side
********
lord can you hear me

It was beautiful.

you shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you...

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:19:24 GMT

circle the roundabout one last time

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:16:15 GMT

wolves

Thu, 29 May 2008 21:40:26 GMT

some kind of spirit

Mon, 05 May 2008 20:18:43 GMT

RASQUATCH LIVES!!!

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 05:34:24 GMT

Glen Benton, vocalist and bassist for death metal legends DEICIDE, claims to have seen a Sasquatch or Bigfoot in a Florida state forest.

In the latest issue of Terrorizer magazine, Glen tells the tale of one strange night in the middle of nowhere, where he believes he saw "the Florida Sasquatch":

"I see this big fuckin' thing lurched down on the side of the road... It's this big grey thing... it fuckin' clears the road in one fuckin' leap, 'ROOOOAHHR!' then into the woods."

Glen describes following the creature into the woods in his jeep: "This thing's snapping down trees left and right. All around was a smell like the inside of a dumpster... This thing looked like a primate of some sort. Fuckin' huge eyes, but like part-orangutan and part-chimp."

After calling Florida Wildlife, the area was checked and tracks are said to have been found. Glen's experience was documented as an official sighting.

hella ride

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 22:53:40 GMT

View Larger Map

Obama n yinz

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:39:03 GMT

Steelers owner Dan Rooney endorses Obama's presidential bid
- The Associated Press
PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh Steelers chairman Dan Rooney on Monday endorsed Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's presidential bid.

In a statement released by the Obama campaign, the 75-year-old Rooney said endorsing political candidates is not something he regularly does.

"As a grandfather and a citizen of this community, I think Barack Obama's thoughtful, strategic approach is important to America," Rooney said. "When I hear how excited young people seem to be when they talk about this man, I believe he will do what is best for them, which is to inspire them to be great Americans."

The Obama campaign said the Illinois senator and Rooney met Monday after Obama spoke at a meeting of the Alliance for American Manufacturing.

Obama's Democratic rival, U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, also addressed the gathering in Pittsburgh on Monday.

Polls show Obama trailing Clinton in Pennsylvania ahead of the April 22 primary.

"True sports fans know that you support your team when they are the underdogs," Rooney said. "Barack Obama is the underdog here, but it is with great pride that I join his team."

Last month, former Steelers running backs Franco Harris and Jerome Bettis also endorsed Obama.

lucky man

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 05:24:30 GMT

great time in tennessee.

the first two days were sunny and we got a lot done. fixed up dino's future house and walked around the farm. did some shooting down by the river.

climbed up on the hill and the rain started.

the silkies get really soaked in the rain. this is after it dried off a bit.

they have a wild herd of mouflon sheep on the farm. they're a very old breed and have ram horns.

there are some baby goats too. and a new jersey calf.

this is the jersey bull.

the wedding was great, even in the rain. the ceremony was in an old house built in the 1830s. it was full of amazing antiques. the pictures should be posted pretty soon, they'll be good.

drove to DC on Sunday and got to have a B.A.D. dance party with my favourite guitar player and my best fren...

the next day I met Dan Rooney and got to hold a Super Bowl XL ring.

knoxville not memphis

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:05:55 GMT

going to tennesee

baseball season will be starting soon.
but we have no baseball team here.
i've got a house right on the river.
i can see arkansas from where i am.

the dogs are gathered.
and the birds are chattering
and the sun is setting on memphis.
and the sun is setting on memphis.

medicine bottle collection on the window sill
shakes when the cars go past on interstate fifty-five
you are standing above me.
you've washed your face with that apricot scrub again.
i'm glad i'm alive
and your skin is warming up.
and my skin is warming up.
and the sun is setting on memphis.
and the sun is setting on memphis.

like going to a family reunion and killing off all of the Smiths

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:00:57 GMT

jeff walker's cat and the original artwork for scum

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 03:48:00 GMT

Nader the Best Antidote to American Imperialism

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 08:40:38 GMT

The One Candidate Worth Our Vote

By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON

We want to express our strong support for Ralph Nader's presidential candidacy.

There are several reasons. The first is a response to the many who say that, because Obama cannot be seen to sympathize with the Palestinians or criticize Israel during the campaign, we should all lie low for now, not even press him on the issue, get him nominated and elected, and then work on him to change after he becomes president. With all due respect to this position, which we recognize as legitimate, and to those who believe this, we feel it is a pipe dream to expect that Obama will ever change after being elected on a platform of unquestioning support for Israel and its oppression of Palestinians. He will have huge debts of gratitude to the Jewish community, and particularly to his very pro-Israeli political endorsers as well as huge monetary debts to pro-Israeli contributors, that will keep him from ever looking honestly at what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and particularly from ever speaking out forthrightly against this oppression.

Secondly, Obama has taken an extremely immoral stand on the Palestinian-Israeli issue by, among other positions, actually applauding Israel's siege and starvation of 1.5 million innocent Gazans, and by mourning Israel's losses to Palestinian rocket fire (12 people in seven years) without bothering even to mention the approximately 2,600 Gazans killed by Israeli rocket fire, airstrikes, and assassinations in those same seven years. He made one reference last year to Palestinian suffering, was immediately dumped on by Jewish leaders, and has since said nothing honest about the occupation -- not even expressing support for the two-state solution.

This is so distasteful that it ought to be totally unacceptable to anyone who works for peace in the Middle East, not just in Palestine-Israel but also in the broader region. Many responsible people have said that Israel is committing or is nearing the commission of genocide against the Palestinians. How in God's name can we just sit back and wait for the Israel lobby to work its will before we complain to Obama about his silence?

There might be some mitigating factors here if Obama were truly committed to really ending the Iraq war, but his position on this is ambiguous and uncertain enough to make us believe that here too he is at least partly in the pockets of Israel and its supporters. Anything short of an immediate withdrawal from Iraq constitutes, in our view, a perpetuation of the militarism initiated by the Bush/Cheney/neocon/Israel conglomerate and backed by the centrist DLC. This is horrifying. We also see little hope elsewhere: although Obama is not bad on Iran, he wants to attack Pakistan!

Our concern about Palestine-Israel, and about the way that oppression of the Palestinians is always put on the back burner in the interests of not antagonizing a key voting bloc, is not overdrawn. U.S.-supported Israeli oppression of the Palestinians is the principal root cause of anti-American terrorism and of hatred of the U.S. around the world, particularly the Arab and Muslim worlds. However often Mubarak and the Kings Abdullah and Abbas assure us that there is nothing to worry about, that it does not really matter if Palestinians are oppressed, we should never forget that their people, the proverbial "street throughout the Arab world, do care and care very deeply. One day, the U.S. will pay dearly -- again -- for our obliviousness to Palestinian suffering. And that is quite apart from the hatred that Iraq and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo arouse.

We feel that Ralph Nader offers an alternative for anyone who longs for a candidate with principles, and we urge those who simply hope for the lesser of evils please not to interfere to limit our choices by denying him the right to run for election. Nader spoke very directly about Palestine-Israel and Iraq when he announced his candidacy on February 24, 2008, and we applaud him heartily. It's about time we saw a candidate with the courage of his convictions, the honor to speak out against injustice no matter how politically risky, and the guts not to sell his soul for the Jewish vote -- to say nothing of a readiness to speak out against the corporate interests that strangle us and limit our democracy.

As Nader himself said, if the Democrats can't win this election in a landslide, then they should fold their tent and reassess. He will not win the election, obviously. But if enough of us who care about the Middle East were to vote for him because he stands for a set of principles that greatly concern us all, then maybe we could send a message that cow-towing to Israel in order to get elected is not good enough. Some of us want some principle in the U.S. political scene, and only Nader offers this.

We will vote for him if he stays in the race. If he does not, we will probably -- and very deliberately -- not vote for president at all.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession. She can be reached at kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net.

Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence officer and as director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis.

They can be reached at kathy.bill.christison@comcast.net.

second-rate intellect incapable of entertaining two serious thoughts in a row

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:48:08 GMT

somewhere in the daily collegian archives is a photo I took of William F. Buckley spilling his bottle of water onstage at Eisenhower Auditorium. he looked shocked.

A Northern Soul

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 04:26:48 GMT

at madison square garden
April 28 and 29

I was hoping they'd tour with Oasis this year.

nader wins!

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:51:12 GMT

motherfucker=redeemer

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:10:14 GMT

Menuck, currently of A Silver Mt. Zion, has been the most vocal member of GY!BE since the Montreal-based collective took a break from touring and recording in 2003, though he is reluctant to be viewed as the group’s sole mouthpiece: “There are nine sides of the story here and at least nine reasons why we decided to place this band on ‘indefinite hiatus.’ For instance, bassist Mario Pezzente is waiting to see whether The KLF record a follow-up to The White Room before we make our next step. Sophie [Trudeau] and Thierry [Amar] are busy with A Silver Mt. Zion and [drummer] Aidan Girt is currently occupied with polishing off this big-ass bean burrito he purchased last week.”