Undulating Ungulate

Watched Waco: Rules of Engagement last night.

Morbidly fascinating. At times hugely disturbing.

Many angles on it could be taken.

There’s the obvious disconnect between the media representation of the Branch Davidians as heavily armed “cultists” in a “compound” or “bunker”, as opposed to the quite nice people who happened to deal in weapons, had odd beliefs and lived together in a set of buildings they seem to be any time they appear on camera.

Briefly, though:
The ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) seemed to be setting up for a PR job ahead of a funding round by raiding Waco and finding guns. They lied extensively in justifying it in the first place and screwed up the raid unbelievably, leading to a several hour long gun battle fiasco which they lost when they ran out of ammo. Despite fatalities and wounded on both sides, the Davidians nicely didn’t slaughter the 70 or so armed men as they retreated because all they wanted was for them to go away anyway.

Then we get 51 days of siege and negotiation – complicated, but Koresh’s actions seemed to make sense on their own terms, which are a bit tricky to summarise. However, the day before the final assault, the Davidians all seemed really happy because God had told Koresh to write down his teaching (for the first time) and now they didn’t have to die anymore.

In terms of the final assault, the story that the Branch Davidians set fire to the compound in mass suicide seems to be absolute balls. The doco makes a quite compelling case that spraying in epic amounts of CS gas (which turns highly flammable when it dries), and the other flammables the tanks were dispersing and spilling as they rumbled about knocking lots of holes in the wall to create a “pot bellied stove”, and firing flash-bang grenades into the buildings combined to create massive fireballs (which survivors described) which caused a very fast and massive blaze which killed most everyone horribly. Incidentally, the CS gas, when burned, gives off cyanide. Cyanide, when inhaled, causes muscle contractions capable of breaking bones. (Apparently, when they execute people by gassing them, the reason they are strapped down is so that the people watching don’t have to see that.) Horribly burned and mutilated corpse footage aplenty.

Whether or not this was intentional or inept on the part of the FBI is another matter. That they blatantly lied and covered up lots about it is beyond doubt. The shocking bald-faced lie that “not one single shot was fired by the FBI” – repeated under oath by many FBI officials – has the lie put to it by the aerial thermal images showing repeated machine gun fire; and the twenty-odd Branch Davidians who got shot trying to exit the burning building. And in general, the mentality of the people conducting the siege seemed more important than that of the besieged to what eventually happened.

No fun, but interesting.

Filed by billy at 5:18 pm under culture
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One from the too fucking berserk for words files. Yet we find it strangely compelling. Maybe because the bit about buying New Zealand just brings it all home.

This claims to be a leaked image of a Google planning meeting whiteboard.

From the article:

To summarise: Google’s “Plan Nine” in outer space will deploy spy satellite technology to beam mind-altering corporate propaganda designed to convince even the most stubborn sceptic that dealing with the Chinese government really is a great step forward for Western Capitalism and, therefore, democracy.

If you can’t quite make out the full extent of their evil plan try these close-ups:

YOU BE THE JUDGE!

Filed by billy at 6:09 pm under Uncategorized
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RFID tags are an issue the moose has been following, what with the whole convergence of technology and privacy and being creeped out by smart cards et als potential for misuse by freaked out authorities who seek security through total control.

Which is why we are so delighted and amused to provide this link to instructions for making your own RFID blocking wallet.

And the key is a thin sheaf of aluminium foil, which is enough to block the signal. I use this in my novel, which may be why this is so funny to me.

Filed by billy at 2:19 pm under technology
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This is an excerpt from a Rumi poem, Each note, translated by Coleman Barks:

***

God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Each note is a need coming through one of us,
a passion, a longing-pain.
Remember the lips
where the wind-breath originated,
and let your note be clear.
Don’t try to end it.
Be your note.
I’ll show you how it’s enough.

Go up on the roof at night
in this city of the soul.

Let everyone climb on their roofs
and sing their notes!

Sing loud!

***

It seems a brilliant and beautiful metaphor for a spiritual way of seeing, and being in, the world. But then, Rumi was like that.

Filed by billy at 7:25 pm under quotes
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Did anyone hear about this in the mainstream media? Indymedia Ireland has excellent coverage

Anyway. It makes an interesting counterpoint to the Weather Underground post below about violent resistance and motivation.

So, if it wasn’t organised by political groups, how did it happen?

The people who took part in the rioting were largely drawn from the urban poor, mostly disenfranchised young men from impoverished estates around Dublin, people who normally have no political voice whatsoever, people who rarely vote, who are disorganised, who live in communities that have been ravaged by poverty and drug and alcohol abuse, people who many of those who live lives of privilege and relative comfort write off as ‘scumbags’ or whom the Marxists describe as ‘lumpen’.

Now, this occurs in the Loyalist/Republican context of Ireland, which is pretty extreme and not something I understand that well, but certainly a case where identity is a strong motivating factor. The offence to the Republican sense of identity of the Loyalist march seems to have set off the untapped anger of a segment of the community.

So, in the absence of massive anger and disenfranchisement – usually the lot of the oppressed rather than the white middle classes – would a shock to identity alone be enough to provoke violence against the state? Again, coming up against this notion that unless we are personally either suffering or threatened, we aren’t likely to act politically.

The crowd from the counter demonstration surged through the barriers into the road and the Gardai responded in the standard way that they do when a demonstration breaks through a barrier, they called up the riot squad who launched a baton charge into the crowd to clear the way for the loyalist march. However, they were not dealing with a normal political demonstration, they were dealing with the most disenfranchised sector of society, a group with very different characteristics from your normal political demonstrators, the anti-loyalist demonstration was immediately transformed into an anti-Garda riot that led to the forces of order completely losing control of central Dublin for the next few hours.

It’s an interesting point this: that those who have political goals tend to have a consciousness of longer term consequences of their actions, and so are less likely to go bugfuck in the short term. It also exposes the unreadiness of police to deal with actual uncontained expressions of violence. The myth of police/military invincibility is a massive factor in keeping populations quiescent.
It was also one of the reasons the Weather Underground was so surprised that it got away with it for years (that and the massive illegality of COINTELPRO style government efforts, which rendered prosecution impossible when they did turn themselves in).

Aside from all that, what is really interesting to the moose is this stuff about the use of communications technology in reporting the riots as they happened. Citizens on all sides of the conflict updating in real time, all thrown on the net for the world to see. The article linked just above is really worth a look in that regard (thanks, Ed!).

Filed by billy at 2:31 pm under politics,technology
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is a documentary about the Weathermen, a radical movement that grew out of theUS student protest movement in the 60′s. After the police started executing Black Panther leaders, they decided that the US goverment needed to be brought down, by violent means if necessary, reasoning that the world was in the process of worldwide revolution and white kids needed to choose to be on the side of the oppressors or the oppressed. The proceeded to carry out 25 non-fatal bombings against US targets in the USA, in retaliation for specific abuses of power over about five years before disbanding after the end of the Vietnam war.

In all it was really fascinating to hear these people. Their assessment of the decisions they made at the time, their naivete about the nature of power structures, their failings and their successes, and what any of it meant now. Taking the standpoint that while the government is murdering thousands upon thousands of foreigners, carrying on with a privileged middle class existence was complicity with that slaughter, they on the whole would do it all again.

It balances their story with critical voices and the (scarily familiar) mainstream position of the time. Really interesting piece.

One point that seems quite germane: the point at which they lost momentum was the end of the Vietnam war. On the one hand that was the focal point because it was the glaring atrocity of the day. On the other, it was the one where white kids were being drafted to go off and die. The removal of that threat to them seems to have really been what drained the protest movement of its sting, and unity with the oppressed of the world. Draft dodging and communes and living alternative lifestyles seen in this light as an adaptation to a threat to the middle class existence they knew – certainly not for all, but some. The movement then fractured into the multiplicity of causes of today’s world, which are slowly reforming under a vague anti-globalisation banner.

But this point seems vital when confronted with the overall apathy of the modern west. Our asses are not in the firing line. We are not the starving and diseased. We are not being invaded or violently oppressed. We’re just being lied to and intimidated, and have oh so many comforts to lose.

In the absence of a self-interested spur to action, such as the fear of conscription/death, what will it take to get the citizens of the modern west to act? (Sadly, imminent global catastrophe via climate change seems our best bet in the too little too late stakes – at the cost of millions of lives before we react.)

It is not simply a moral question: or rather, if it were, then our sense of morality is too weak to guide our action; and besides, with all the hand-wringing, we seem to understand the morality. It seems rather an emotional lack; a lack of empathy with the suffering of other humans. If it was happening in our street we would likely have a strong emotional reaction. Due to divisions existing only in our heads, we perceive others as different. These distinctions reduce our emotional reaction to their human suffering, and our wilful blindness to our complicity with the systemic forces that are its cause.

Which returns us, once again, to the nature of what is in our heads, how it is formed, influenced, and changed, as of primary importance. And why this moose should chug away on that wiki thing.

Filed by billy at 11:15 am under culture,politics
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A fascinating new column from Michael Ventura, a consistently honest and courageous writer trying to face reality and figure things out, quoted liberally:

Is God a “he” or “she”? Drive into the desert and gaze at the millions of stars and call that a he or she! The universe doesn’t have a gender. Nature, of course, is inclusive of the universe; and so, presumably, is God; both are too vast for gender.

Either Nature has a kind of consciousness, and therefore a purpose, or it does not. In our present state of development, there’s no way to know. It’s my experience that Nature – whether metallic (like my car) or organic (like a plant) or neither (like the wind) – behaves differently if one relates to it as though it is conscious; many have experienced consciousness in rocks, flora, fauna, and objects, but our subjective experiences are difficult to demonstrate and impossible to prove.

Certainly, one thing I have noticed is the definite and startling difference between perceiving the world around us as a miracle than perceiving it in our normal state of indifference.

Filed by billy at 12:56 pm under consciousness,quotes
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The following is a quote from Arnold Toynbee‘s remarkably stimulating set of lectures, The Present Day Experiment in Western Civilisation:

“The truth perhaps is that democracy, so far from having been one of the sources of the Western people’s power, has been one of the luxuries that their power has enabled them to afford. The source of their power has been their marriage of technology with science; the opportunity for their democracy has been the margin of strength, wealth, and security which their power, derived from applied science, has created for them. Democracy is an attractive regime for the majority – and this is a vast majority in any country – that is subject to the government without having a hand in the government. A democratic regime gives this majority a modicum of control over the government that is genuine, and it also gives them the comforting illusion of enjoying a great deal more control than they ever succeed in exercising in reality. This is a political luxury, but it is one that cannot be indulged in unless one possesses a margin of security, wealth, and power within which one can play the fool with impunity. Democratic parliamentary government is a less efficient, and therefore a more wasteful, regime than oligarchic parliamentary government, and even a parliamentary oligarchy is inefficient and extravagant by comparison with a well managed authoritarian regime. Parliamentary government and, a fortiori, parliamentary government with a wide franchise, is a political extravagance that is a political hall-mark of already achieved power, wealth and security. It is a tax on these assets; it is not one of their sources. Unlike the belief that science has been a source of Western power, the belief that democracy has been a source of Western power is a fallacy. Democracy has been a Western amenity that Western power has brought within the West’s reach.”

Toynbee couches his ideas in a very broad and deep understanding of history. Nonetheless, this insight strikes the moose as fascinating, and certainly appears to turn part of the conventional wisdom on its head.

What do you make of it?

Filed by billy at 12:30 pm under politics,quotes
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