London Beirut

According to a recent Rasmussen poll, “Forty-nine percent (49%) of U.S. voters believe pro-Palestinian activists on the Gaza-bound aid ships raided by Israeli forces are to blame for the deaths that resulted in the high-profile incident.”

• Despite numerous eye-witness reports to the contrary,
• Despite graphic footage showing Israeli commandos in full battle attire brandishing deadly weapons aboard the ship,
• Despite autopsy reports showing that several of the nine dead flotilla humanitarians were killed execution style,

myths in the United States persist that these brutal deaths were a response to actions taken by the flotilla participants.

Our side of the story is not being heard.

Here’s an eye-witness account published on Democracy Now: “The Images Israel Didn’t Want Seen: Video and Photographs from the Gaza-Bound Aid Flotilla.” Filmmaker and activist Iara Lee was one of the few Americans on-board the Mavi Marmara. Her equipment was confiscated but she managed to smuggle out an hour’s worth of footage. Here’s a torrent with the raw footage.

Legendary Israeli reporter Uri Avnery has at least 80 questions regarding the veracity of official Israeli versions of what actually happened aboard the Mara Marmara — and why it happened: “Who is Afraid of a Real Inquiry?”

Here’s an article regarding FPM co-founder Paul Larudee’s own experiences with Israeli commandos and prisons: “Captured and detained by Israel, an American tells his story.”

FPMer Joe Meadors speaks about his experiences on another ship during the flotilla seizure: “43 Years After Surviving Israeli Attack on USS Liberty, US Veteran Joe Meadors Seized by Israeli Forces on Gaza Aid Flotilla”.

-from a Free Palestine Movement newslist release

Atheistic existentialism, which I represent, states that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man . . .

If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing . . .

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself . . . man is responsible for what he is.

. . .when we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men. . . I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating an image of man of my own choosing. . .

The man who involves himself and realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but also a lawmaker who is, at the same time, choosing all mankind as well as himself, cannot escape the feeling of his total and deep responsibility. . .

For every man, everything happens as if all mankind had its eyes fixed on him and were guiding itself by what he does. . .

When a military leader takes upon himself the responsibility for an attack and sends a number of men to their death, he chooses to do it and at bottom he alone chooses. No doubt under a higher command, but its orders, which are more general, require interpretation by him and upon that interpretation depends the life of ten, fourteen or twenty men. In making the decision, he cannot but feel a certain anguish. All leaders know that anguish. It does not prevent their acting, on the contrary it is the very condition of their action, for the action presupposes that there is a plurality of possibilities, and in choosing one of these, they realize that it has value only because it is chosen. Now it is anguish of that kind which existentialism describes, and moreover, as we shall see, makes explicit through direct responsibility towards other men who are concerned. It is not a curtain separating us from action, but is part of action itself.

When we speak of “forlornness” – a term Heidegger was fond of – we mean only that God does not exist and that we have to face all of the consequences of this. The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain kind of secular ethics which would like to abolish God at the least possible expense . . .

The existentialist, on the contrary, thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. . . Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to. . .

There is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. . .

man is condemned to be free. . .

man, with no support and no aid, is condemned at every moment to invent man. . .

The moment the possibilities I am considering are not rigorously involved by my action, I ought to disengage myself from them, because no God, no scheme, can adapt the world and its possibilities to my will. . .

Quietism is the attitude of people who say, “let others do what I can’t do.” The doctrine I am presenting is the very opposite of quietism, since it declares, “There is no reality except in action.” Moreover, it goes further, since it adds, “Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.” . . .

The existentialist will never consider man as an end because he is always in the making. . .

There is no universe other than a human universe, the universe of human subjectivity. . .

That man is not closed in on himself but is always present in a human universe, is what we call “Existentialist humanism.” Humanism, because we remind man that there is no lawmaker other than himself, and that in his forlornness he will decide by himself.

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism”

This video is based on a video I made in the 7th grade with my VCR, that a friend accidently recorded over (Lauren Faith!). But here it is again! Way easier to make with a computer!

when I was an undergrad.

It was for an aesthetics class. My teacher didn’t like it.

Something Alisa said that Gertrude Stein said is that not-no isn’t the same as yes. It’s true. And not prose isn’t the same as poetry. The poetry-prose thing is a false binary. How can you say that William Carlos Willams and John Keats were doing the same kind of thing?

If you analyze fictional writing on a spectrum of anarchy to structure, this diagram is more accurate than the poetry-OR-prose thing:

I’ve never felt I write poetry. Just, all the people writing stuff that I want to write call it poetry. It gets dangerous when people are told they’re writing poetry: it puts their writing in a historical context, compares it to all the ‘poetry’ that came before.

One might feel obligated to get more serious, structured. Like if there wasn’t a specific category for comic books, and they were all called ‘illuminated manuscripts.’ Some artists would morph their styles to fit in more comfortably with the other manuscripts in the genre.

NO, dudes. Just call it something else.

Please suggest a caption for this image. Nothing dirty.

See Kyle from Kevin Knutson on Vimeo.

A boy I know named Kevin helped to make this video. It’s prroobably going to win the 48 hour film festival in Seattle.

[Numbers 1-26 are translated to letters (a=1), letters are added together according to order of operations except where punctuated ( :=multiplication, _=subtraction, ∅=x-variable), words have assumed parenthesis around them.

Every stanza is a derivative of the stanza before it.]

5.
(we naked) : ∅^your_point
is : ∅^we_cold
(wind and) : ∅^{diction_changed}
(to new) : ∅^time_zen
(night is) : ∅
our only chance to

4.
(grow new) : (buddha_cobra) : ∅^{mother_saying}
(rapidly we_love_cinder) : ∅^cobweb_time
(mistress to blue) : ∅^{flicker_puddle}
(is not seagull) : ∅
wing or

3.
[seashells : (peeling_night) is a spoonful of fractaling] : ∅^{glances_sung_at_me}
(glitter our military thought) : ∅^what_wind
(we thought we needed our motors rushed I) : ∅
_would be the observatory on

2.
{[(dilated threading) : (we_a)]_counterfeiter_butterflying} : ∅^{stretch_out_a_bone}
(motorcyclist covering pine covering country with no sweater and) : ∅
(we forgot it for him) : (thunder_her_boast)

1.
[(legs imprisoned for the dictionary) : of thought] : ∅
(your_death_is_growing_dying_still) : there

0.
lies : (love with fever)

Steve Salerno from Skeptic Magazine has written an article on “positive thinking” and how it makes people stupid. One section discusses the self-esteem-based education movement of the 1970’s, which celebrated mediocrity by lowering grade standards and ditching honor roles. Some students were given more recognition if they were below the standards, with the thinking that, “to make at-risk kids excel, you first had to make them feel optimistic and empowered.” Instead it’s created a culture of individuals that will be satisfied regardless of their failures. “If the school system failed to imbue students with genuine self-esteem, it was more successful at fomenting narcissism.”

Right. Anyone raised under this systems knows that. The idea that you can do it is only motivating when you think other people can’t do it. If anyone can be president, why would you want to be? That is hard work!

I was wondering if I’m Narcissistic (actually, I’ve always wondered that after being raised to go into theatre), but I took USA Today’s version of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and scored way lower than average. I win at low self-esteem!

(Question 27 is weird. You choose between:

A. I have a strong will to power.
B. Power for its own sake doesn’t interest me.

Is this an intentional reference to Nietzsche?)

The Skeptic article reminded me of an article on child prodigies that I read in the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Medical and Health Annual from 1989 (I was cutting out pictures in it). One thing surprised me:

It is difficult to imagine that such a gift could possibly founder, much less deliberately be set aside. Nevertheless, this, in fact, seems to be more the rule than the exception. . . as children, prodigies never produce works of genius and, as adults, they may or may not pursue their careers.

.
Of course!

If you attain easy success as a child for being mediocre-in-the-field–but a KID– what could drive you any further?

Praise at an early age is bad for everyone. Let’s start a pessimism-based education movement.

I just want this to go on record now, in case some physicist says this and solves that whole universe problem.

I have solved the universe!

There are 3 dimensions of time. (Some guy here says there are 2 dimensions which is supposed to be really controversial, but I’m saying he’s wrong and there are 3 dimensions.)

There could be some utility to this, because it could bring together Feynman’s multiple histories theorem in Quantum Mechanics and the 2nd dimension of “imaginary time” Stephen Hawking uses to calculate around black holes. The 2nd dimension is just real time that’s imperceptible, and the third dimension goes up into alternative histories.

We only see one dimension—the x-axis, eternity—but humans weren’t ‘created’ to understand the universe, and there’s no reason to assume we have the faculties to see everything that’s out there.

The y-axis could be made up of a continuum of perceivers, or subjects that can make quantum measurements and collapse a wave-function. What sorts of subjects can do that? People? Cats? Nebulae? I don’t think that’s been defined yet. But they can form an infinite continuum during any one instant along the x-axis. Anyone that could perceive this y-axis like we can perceive the x-axis would be omniscient at a given point.

(And how could there be a continuum of perceivers? We’re used to only thinking of one mind or perceiver at a time, but you can imagine a way to get over this like calculus was able to get over Xeno’s Paradox).

The z-axis could go off into Feynman’s multiple histories. This multiple histories model is a perfect way to explain the problem of superpositions in quantum mechanics, but I don’t like the way he has all histories except ours cancel each other out. (Too convenient, like Einstein’s cosmological constant which canceled out the gravitational effects of matter to allow for a static universe).

If you imagine every possible history as a different page in a book, stabbing through the book would be like stabbing along the z-axis.

Then, when you take all three dimensions of time together, it’s easier to imagine time having a beginning and end like a sphere, as Hawking argues it does. When there are zero observers and zero alternative histories you’ve made it to the north or south pole, and it doesn’t make sense to ask what time was like before or after that.

I don’t REALLY know if this would help with any deep calculations in finding the “theory of everything” but. The point is: trippy.

[This week I listened to an audiobook of Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell about 6 times, then a 13 hour lecture on the history of science, a 12 hour lecture on St. Augustine’s confessions, and a few hours on calculus. . . and an audio book of Slaughterhouse Five.

Spring Break = new model for the universe.]

I accidentally left the door to my apartment open today, and when I came back something like a large cat or a small bear ran out past me and jumped the fence. It was too dark to see. I don’t think there are any more bears in my apartment though.

I have been sleeping on a tabletop for a month with two mattress pads like this:

Real mattresses are for stupid.

“. . . a new theory suggests that SSRI antidepressants may also subtly alter the fundamental chemistry of love and romance, snuffing the first sparks between two people otherwise destined to become lovers, and preventing couples from bonding.”

RB of Orinda asks,

I don’t want advice from you.

Good point RB. Be sure to get that checked next time you go to the hospital.

No, guys. This is a great idea.

SEA KITTEN

this is my cousin:

RUSSIAN LIVEJOURNAL stole my poem. Summary: rats are stealing his sour cream and he hopes to scare them away with a message written in English. An old poem of mine is suggested.

post:
Begin one should from the fact that I eat sour cream … Recently, I explained that the office mice trampled to my sour cream… In order to remove mice from the sour cream, [my boss] deleted on the cover all original letters with the irreversible marker and wrote “Rat poison. Do not gorge!”

The raids of mice ceased. I was gladdened. … Today rats arrived into the office. Rats disemboweled the refrigerator and threw all that they calculated as not-food into the debris tank. My sour cream, as food did not descend.

…But somewhere scientists encounter the elementary particles in the wombs of their synchrophasotrons. Unclean czars of nature.
comment: Write in the Indian language … Not all mice in English understand.

reply: Write- that I can, but chances to fall into the language of mouse is small. Mice already have very much of the languages. In the previous refrigerator, by the way, visited mice. I even found them into my soybean milk.
comment:
“That man stole my sandwich.
I had it five minutes ago,
And I know
He’s always after my sandwiches.
So
He eyes me conspicuously
As I eye him back
Knowingly.
We make eye contact.
There’s a blatant connection.
Oh yes,
I’m on to him.
Oh wait, here it is.”

Lindsey Baggette
Eastlake High School
Grade 11
comment: Lesson to you: it is necessary to eat them hot, but not to place into some sweaty packet.

The company at London Bread have decided that this blog is now an advice column. Please send your lowly or heart-rendering questions to:

you.can.read@gmail.com

The theme for this column is existential angst or how to be as cool as dice.

Maybe Sylvia Plath would have been happier with a wife than a husband. Some things in that Bell Jar seem bored-with-boyish. She liked the same boy from a distance for six years, then went out with him and didn’t like him anymore. She lost her virginity from someone randomly just to get it over with, then didn’t want to see him again. And she was girly and pretty, and started to get popular writing fashion things for Seventeen. Don’t you think she could have been happy with a femme girlfriend?

I don’t mean that in a disinterested post-mortem diagnostic kind of way. See, this is me and Sylvia Plath: