A culture that just uses a pig as a pile of protoplasmic inanimate structure, to be manipulated by whatever creative design the human can foist on that critter, will probably view individuals within its community, and other cultures in the community of nations, with the same type of disdain and disrespect and controlling type mentalities.

- Joel Salatin in Food, Inc.

Interchangeable parts keep things running smoothly down on the farm.

Just finished watching Food, Inc. at the recommendation of TYWKIWDBI and it left me with a few things I hadn’t seen before (it’s well worth watching if you’re hungry for more than run-of-the-mill slaughterhouse footage and McDemagoguery of Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation) which bear repeating for those who aren’t interested in sitting through an hour and a half-long guilt trip:

[via CHRISTOPHER DOMBRES]

• Food Libel Laws – One can be sued or even imprisoned for “disparaging” food items (i.e. “beef” – not necessarily a specific company’s product) in 13 US states. This legislation enables food conglomerates and interest groups to sue when a TV personality like Oprah “slanders” the good name of feedlot beef.
• Food Industry Lobbyists & Government – The Rumsfeld-Searle-Aspartame connection has been mentioned in past diatribes, however, it’s worth noting that Monsanto (which figures heavily into the Food, Inc. picture) went on to purchase Searle and has gone on to purchase … plenty of influence throughout the Clinton, Bush, and Obama cabinets and the FDA.
• Food Cabal Conspiracy – Apparently there is a lot of work being done to gag video footage, pictures, and testimony because some of the horror stories (remember that peanut plant and its stifled, underpaid workforce? What about this canned rat from Con Agra?).

… so if any of that piqued your interest and you’re not presently engorged with the kind of USDA Grade Z circus monkey meat you’ve come to expect from your friendly neighborhood fast food dealer, give the movie a try at YouTube:

* If you answered “yes, I am hungry for change and in fact I would like some now” perhaps it is time to wake up to the fact that the problems of the food industry are hardly unique.

Related: It’s really encouraging that the filmmakers chose to dedicate the last 5 minutes of the film to “things you can do” – but we’re really not going to save the world from ourselves, now, are we?

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.

- Stephen Hawking

Had a neighbor who stole my mail – unknown frequency, but the bastard stole both incoming and outgoing letters.

First month’s rent check never made it to the landlord.

One day he left a card – addressed to him, opened – in the mailbox.

Apparently he felt guilty about his felonious ways…

… me, I felt guilty returning a piece of opened mail. How the hell is that supposed to look? … and what was going to happen if I didn’t return it?

Of course, up to then I had no idea he had been stealing mail. I walked over to his home down the street and delivered the letter after returning home from work one day (just after sunset).

He didn’t open the door at the first knock, however, I knocked again because the lights were on (a sure sign that someone is home if it’s just after sunset – don’t know of anyone who leaves their lights on all day).

He came to the door but left the chain in the latch and pretended to be “holding the dog back” (his words, not mine).

I passed the letter through the four inch aperture.

He said something about “putting the dog away”, closed the door, and re-opened the door twenty seconds later to let me in.

He had a small stack of mail. “Postman has been delivering it to the wrong address…”

Right.

The oldest piece was postmarked a year prior.

I could almost swear he was the same man I’d met two years prior in another city, the man with the respirator tank who watched people walking down the street from the surveillance cameras in his bunker and had scurried out, tank in tow, to say hello when he saw me walking down the street – but somehow he was frailer, now.

Afraid but unwilling to be afraid alone – maybe pent-up and shy – with no place to mount his cameras.

The mind tends toward lumping the irrelevant things together – a series of similarly-coiffed leading men from bygone eras’ film become a single Übermensch actor, disagreeable odors and flavors churn together indistinguishably in some singular back-alley cesspot, and hoary shut-ins become The Archetypal Shut-in where one has the unfortunate occasion to make contact.

The mail thief and the bunker-dweller are doubtless different people, not that it would matter much – the common threads of their solipsistic stories must patch together some sorry, worn-out quilt of loneliness, TV dinners, and misery for each to cry himself to sleep with when the weather’s cold.

Here’s to hoping you die a certain kind of death, creepy old bastard – you interfered, got the postal service involved when all you had to do was knock, ask for a cup of sugar and acknowledgment of your pathetic existence.

I enjoy Don Peck’s attempt at capturing the zeitgeist of the American empire’s decline – the article over at The Atlantic Online includes more than a few choice observations and anecdotal truisms for a generation losing its grasp on the American Dream and its alternately apathetic and unprepared antecedents:

Some neighbors were at the Walmart a couple of weeks ago, he said, and he rang up their purchase. “Maybe they were used to seeing me in a different setting,” he said—in a suit as he left for work in the morning, or walking the dog in the neighborhood. Or “maybe they were daydreaming.” But they didn’t greet him, and he didn’t say anything. He looked down at his soup, pushing it around the bowl with his spoon for a few seconds before looking back up at me. “I know they knew me,” he said. “I’ve been in their home.”

- How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
by Don Peck for The Atlantic Online
March 2010

Economic Recession as Vampiric Entity

How does one invite such malaise? The boom years, the lives unexamined, the wrong prescription, and complacency.

Will the ignorance and susceptibility to manipulation cultivated in the US population finish sucking the value out of the dollar and lead the country to the relative wasteland of a developing nation?

Had a couple requests for features which were conspicuously absent on this site (and even a few requests to be removed from the diabolical tar pit whose administration page remains partially incomplete) – here’s what’s new:

Search – Now available from the navigation panel at the left, or you can always run my favorite search.

Recent Comments – Will display in a panel at the left on the blog homepage.

Comment E-mail Follow-up – Still working on this one (thinking of using Subscribe to Comments 2.1 but I need to vet it first – suggestions welcome).

… and thus concludes another insomniac site update session. (Please feel free to let me know what’s broken, too)

In a candle-lighted chapel, each climbs into one of the austere wooden caskets laid side by side on the floor. Lying face up, their arms crossed over their chests, they close their eyes. And there they rest, for 10 excruciating minutes.

“It’s a way to let go of certain things,” says Jung, a former insurance company lecturer. “Afterward, you feel refreshed. You’re ready to start your life all over again, this time with a clean slate.”

- South Koreans experience what it’s like to die – and live again
by John M. Glionna for the LA Times
2010-01-04

via Dangerous Minds

Perhaps this is what I was talking about… the radio hits a patch of silence and the chatter becomes appreciable; the gears grind to a halt and the stark beauty of chaos on the assembly line momentarily appears; time enough to catch a breath before the mad dash through the forest resumes.

I’ve yet to take a real break from the incessant blogging – whether here and at the new outlet dedicated to “case files” (hopefully there is a noticeable lack of organization there … the goal is to reserve coherent thoughts for this outlet) – there is simply too much new information to overlook.

Warning: Bricolage.

via FuKung.net

“… and, whether it began as an investigation into the bicameral mind or merely a creative outlet, (perhaps an escapist refuge or fugue limbo the individual entered upon encountering stressor which he was not prepared for?) it has clearly devolved into something less cogent. It has become a spectacle so ugly as to suggest that it has taken on a life of its own and will proceed without intervention to its logical conclusion: reality.”

We’ll get there. Hold on just a little longer…

Psychiatric Evidence – Schizophrenia: Auditory hallucinations of a critical nature. A large percentage of patients with schizophrenia experience “command hallucinations.”

Relevance to Bicameral Mind – Patients suffering from schizophrenia experience a partial relapse to the bicameral mind. In the absence of consciousness, bicameral man hallucinated a commanding voice that instructed him in times of stress or decision-making.

- Summary of Evidence
Julian Jaynes Society

No. Too far. Step back slowly.

Over the course of reading The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde I’ve decided to create a Read-along category for posts wherein I will share passages from texts available at Project Gutenberg.

What’s the point? Final summation? None. Just looking to provide a few tie-ins with whatever mind I have left (as I exsanguinate a dead man’s stash of aqua vitae) and classic literature… consider it a backlash to the problem of “unwrapping the author’s meaning” which (no offense, past English literature professors) is naught but a paramasturbatory exercise in circumlocution.

Interpretative criticism is the pass-time of the hack and the bane of creativity itself – it’s a paint-by-numbers way of digesting literature and, for all the evils of the Five Paragraph Essay, this critical bent’s just another way of diluting the author’s meaning without registering or creating any meaning of one’s own… and if one should manage to really express what some author’s work means to oneself, who cares?

Parasitism is all well and good, but I’ve got to draw the line when to comes to fan fiction.

I hope to have the motivation left to provide a summary analysis which draws on the pragmatic / empirical / utilitarian lessons of a given novel / story at its conclusion (arguably more useful than some tripe about the symbolism of the color red – seriously, we all have better things to do).

FUCK ART. LET’S KILL!

It just occurred to me that it might be an entirely too-hilarious idea to get some of the resident crackheads from the neighborhood together for some Live-Action Role Play.

Here’s how it might go:

Nevermind. Insomnia #1788 (continued) EXEUNT

I think it’s safe to say that our culture isn’t going to help us to make changes. Ultimately, our culture doesn’t care about us, only about making money and accumulating power. Instead, it is up to each of us individually to decide that a different road is necessary if we wish to find what we seek.

- Popular Culture: Too Much Time On Our Hands
by Jim Taylor, Ph.D. for Psychology Today
2009-09-09

Culture is a virus with roots in every mind…

Terraforming prospects looked fruitless until the Systemic Terraform Procedure was developed. Rather than expend our resources by shuttling equipment and supplies to other planetary bodies, we crafted spore delivery systems which required a minuscule amount of energy to project into space across every conceivable vector.

The delivery system contained the nanotech devices which, when combined with their power source by the force of impact on a planetary body, composite indigenous materials into heterogeneous Systemic Terraform Operands. With minor intervention from the delivery system’s devices, the Systemic Terraform Operands will interact with the extant environ to extract resources and alter the atmospheric composition of the planetary body.

Systemic Terraform Operands will diversely mutate and compete as they apply Genetic Algorithms to the problems of resource extraction and alteration of atmospheric composition.

Yes, there remains the possibility that Systemic Terraform Operands will eventually develop self-awareness. This potentiality has been addressed by the inclusion of a Uniform Destruct Operator – they will never be like us.