Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Bush in a Bottle"

John Chuckman

There have been rumors of Bush taking to the bottle again. Since alcoholics are never cured, this is possible. The stress of having his ineptitude so publicly displayed as it was in New Orleans and of having his every major policy collapsing before his eyes would certainly tend to push him in this direction.

There are also rumors of very ugly behavior towards associates and especially anyone bringing unwelcome news.

These rumors have sparked stories of the dangers of a drunken President, but I think these stories are misguided. If true, Bush's drinking is a development we should welcome. There is, in fact, less danger from a drunken Bush, and his return to drinking would provide one of the most fitting possible outcomes for his destructive, miserable time in office, a political version, if you will, of time wounds all heels.

His handlers will not allow him to do anything truly dangerous. Neo-cons are moral ciphers, but they are not suicidal. Remember the precautions taken during Nixon's last days in office when he was gulping whiskey by the tumbler? Not only will a Bush back on the bottle effectively be side-lined, but all his ghastly entourage will be forced to spend their remaining time trying to hide the facts.

In the meantime, I think it would be helpful, as well as a fitting political statement, for all concerned Americans who can afford the cost to send a gift bottle of Bourbon to the White House. Who knows, it might just speed things along?

"Goodbye Joe"

Jamal Mecklai

me gotta go, me oh my oh

me gotta go pole the pirogue

down the bayou…

The heartbreaking scenes out of New Orleans these past two weeks brought to mind the lyrics of "Jambalaya," one of thousands of great songs that sprung out of the bayou mud of Southern Louisiana over the past few hundred years.

I know – I guess, "knew" would be a better word today – New Orleans, the Cajun country stretching across South Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf Coast extremely well, having been taken to New Orleans on my first fall break in college – a wide-eyed 21-year old graduate student (relatively) fresh off the boat from India.

It was – to use a contemporary phrase – awesome. Not only did we drink all night and whatever part of the day we were up – I particularly remember sitting on the sidewalk swigging Boone’s Farm Apple wine (99 cents a bottle, I kid you not) – but we danced on the streets, heard the finest music and I almost ended up married to a girl who was dancing naked on my table at a bar just off Bourbon Street one night.

"Object a As Inherent Limit to Capitalism:

On Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri"

Slavoj Zizek

What makes Empire and Multitude such a refreshing reading (clearly the definitive exercises in Deleuzian politics) is that we are dealing with books which refer to and function as the moment of theoretical reflection of — one is almost tempted to say: are embedded in — an actual global movement of anti-capitalist resistance: one can sense, behind the written lines, the smells and sounds of Seattle, Genoa and Zapatistas. So their theoretical limitation is simultaneously the limitation of the actual movement.

Hardt's and Negri's basic move, an act which is by no means ideologically neutral (and, incidentally, which is totally foreign to their philosophical paradigm, Deleuze!), is to identify (to name) "democracy" as the common denominator of all today's emancipatory movements: "The common currency that runs throughout so many struggles and movements for liberation across the world today — at local, regional, and global levels — is the desire for democracy."1 Far from standing for a utopian dream, democracy is "the only answer to the vexing questions of our day, /.../ the only way out of our state of perpetual conflict and war."2 Not only is democracy inscribed into the present antagonisms as an immanent telos of their resolution; even more, today, the rise of the multitude in the heart of capitalism "makes democracy possible for the first time"3 Till now, democracy was constrained by the form of the One, of the sovereign state power; "absolute democracy" ("the rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without qualifiers, without ifs or buts,"4 only becomes possible when "the multitude is finally able to rule itself."5

Bill Templer writes:

"The Uses of an Earthquake:

Rereading Harry Cleaver"

Bill Templer

Harry Cleaver's extraordinary piece "The Uses of an Earthquake" (Midnight Notes 1988) on the response by Tepito (a barrio in Mexico City) to the 1985 earthquake and its aftermath — and the building of grassroots autonomous self-organization and militancy by the Tepitenos — is especially relevant in the wake of Katrina.

As Cleaver reminds us:

"In dozens of the poorer barrios of Mexico City, the movement of the earth sparked movements of people using the devastation in property and the cracks opened in the structures of political power to break through oppressive social relations and to improve their lives. […] For those of us outside of Mexico, the people of Tepito have an important lesson to teach, not only about the uses of an earthquake, but about the use of crisis more generally. […] We should always be ready to take advantage of any crack or rupture in the structures of power which confine us."

Have a look:

http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/earthqu ake.html

Rarely has the chasm between people and Power in America opened so wide. We need fresh left-green and libertarian argument about the whys and hows of people’s autonomy, far beyond what Naomi Klein sketches in "Needed: A People’s Reconstruction." Many eyes and ears have been opened, however momentarily.

"Towards a Third Cinema:


Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema ot Liberation the Third World"

Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino

"...we must discuss, we must invent..." — Frantz Fanon

just a short time ago it would have seemed like a
Quixotic adventure in the colonised, neocolonised, or
even the imperialist nations themselves to make any
attempt to create films of decolonisation that turned their
back on or actively opposed the System. Until recently,
film had been synonymous with spectacle or entertainment: in a word, it was one more consumer good. At best,
films succeeded in bearing witness to the decay of
bourgeois values and testifying to social injustice. As a
rule, films only dealt with effect, never with cause; it
was cinema of mystification or anti-historicism. It was
surplus value cinema. Caught up in these conditions,
films, the most valuable tool of communication of our
times, were destined to satisfy only the ideological and
economic interests of the owners of the film industry, the
lords of the world film market, the great majority of
whom were from the United States.

nolympics writes:

"Back Inside New Orleans"
Jordan Flaherty

What actually happened in New Orleans these past two weeks? We need to sort through the rumors and distortions. Perhaps we need our version of South Africa’s Truth And Reconciliation Commission. Some way to sort through the many narratives and find a truth, and to find justice.

First Responders Urged Not to Respond

Here's an interesting list that paints a very curious overall picture of government ineptitude, or worse...

FEMA won't accept Amtrak's help in evacuations

FEMA turns away experienced firefighters

FEMA turns back Wal-Mart supply trucks

FEMA prevents Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel

FEMA won't let Red Cross deliver food

FEMA bars morticians from entering New Orleans

FEMA blocks 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid

FEMA fails to utilize Navy ship with 600-bed hospital on board

FEMA to Chicago: Send just one truck

FEMA turns away generators

FEMA: "First Responders Urged Not To Respond"

That last one is also real — not satire, but straight from FEMA's website.

"Dhalgren in New Orleans"

Bidisha Banerjee,
Reason

September 13, 2005 —

As Americans struggled to grasp what was unfolding in New Orleans, the
word "unimaginable" recurred frequently — even though the catastrophe had
been imagined, and envisioned, many times. Thirty years ago, science
fiction writer Samuel Delany wrote, in high detail, about the unfolding
of racially-charged violence, rape, and looting in "Bellona," a major
American city struck by an unspecified catastrophe and ignored by the
National Guard.

Delany's Dhalgren focuses on a group of people who choose to remain in
Bellona despite — and partly, because of — its dystopian qualities
(including lack of water and sanitation). This surreal work of science
fiction seemed especially apt last week, as fires raged and stories of
racism, rape, looting, and murder proliferated, and then-FEMA head Mike
Brown continued to blame the victims who had not evacuated the city. New
Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco
publicly disagreed over whether residents would be forcibly evicted from
their homes during the cleanup, while thousands of the city's
approximately 10,000 remaining residents remained adamant in their
resolve to stay. Dhalgren suggests what the holdouts might find if they
succeed.

Phil Rockstroh writes:

"Levees Made of Lies:
Rage, Grief, and the Chimera of the American Dream"
Phil Rockstroh

An entire American city has become an uninhabitable mire of fetid water, sodden ruins, and toxic sludge. Moreover, the destruction will not end there: the financial, political, and psychological spill-off, incurred by the deluge, will cause our nation to sink further into a morass of debt, denial, and despair.

How did it come to this? How did we come to buy this worthless plot of swampland known as George Bush's America?

"Endless, Multilayered, Super-Fast and Infinitely Complex Boredom: Hooray"

Matthew Fuller

What makes software jump? What words, what
styles of thought do we need to understand
running code and the multi-layered compositions
it is part of, and how, if at all, does software
establish relations with what might termed
freedom? Such questions, of how to act in and
understand complex technologies and live
situations are not unique to technology, and for
a figure by which to understand them, it is often
useful to start from the wrong place, not with
software, but with a frog. In his book Lifelines
the biologist Steven Rose describes the way in
which a number of his workmates might, whilst
sitting at the edge of a pond, compete to
describe the leap of a frog. By trade, they are a
physiologist, an ethologist, a developmentalist,
an evolutionist and a molecular biologist. Each
sets their particular disciplinary scale of
perception against those of the others. The
frog, responding not to the nattering of the
knowledge workers but to a snake spotted on a
nearby tree splashes elegantly into the safety of
a pond. The representatives of their disciplines
each in turn ascribe the 'jump event' to: the
interaction of nerves, muscles and bones
containing and releasing structured patterns of
energy and movement; learned or grown behavioural
responses; the result of the particular pattern
of growth of the organism; the action of an
inherited genetic imperative; or the biochemical
properties of its muscles.

As the ripples in the pond spread and interact
with other movements in the water, Rose's
argument is to encourage equally multivalent ways
of thinking a non-reductive biology of
life-patterns. Whilst, in his experiments on the
physiology of memory, there can be few people in
the world who have scissored as many heads off
hatchling chicks, Rose's appetite for a wet,
complex, living biology is something from which,
with all necessary irony, our understanding of
software can learn. The trick for biology as a
whole, he suggests, is to find a way of engaging
both the volition to detail entrained by
disciplinary approaches, which are in turn geared
to particular constituent scales of reality,
those of the gene, the molecule, the organism and
so on, whilst at the same time recognizing the
radical interweaving of such scales.