mellifluous flow

Posted on April 7, 2003 by joe
The official spelling is Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight SavingS Time.
Saving is used here as a verbal adjective (a participle). It modifies time and tells us more about its nature; namely, that it is characterized by the activity of saving daylight. It is a saving daylight kind of time. Similar examples would be dog walking time or book reading time. Since saving is a verb describing a single type of activity, the form is singular.

Nevertheless, many people feel the word savings (with an ‘s’) flows more mellifluously off the tongue, and Daylight Savings Time is also in common usage, and can be found in dictionaries.

I think my preference regarding things which flow mellifluously is for them to flow onto, not off of my tongue.

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brave innocence

Posted on April 6, 2003 by joe

Thanks to the criminal behavior of the US government, brutal regimes have escalated their killing and have gained confidence that they will not be held accountable.  On Saturday April 5, 2003 a 24 year old American peace activist, Brian Avery, wearing clear markings identifying him as a non-combatant, and with his arms in the air, was shot in the face by an Israeli tank.  The tank then slowly lumbered past without stopping or offering assistance.  This is the new world order which the Bush administration has inaugurated.  Read it.

Two weeks ago, Rachel Corrie, 23, was run down and killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Palestinian town of Rafah.  It appears the bulldozer drove over her deliberately.  She too was a clearly marked, passive non-combatant.  Read it.

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strange embed-fellows

Posted on April 6, 2003 by joe

A little bit of truth slipped out recently, despite Donald Rumsfeld’s omnipotent micro-management.  The whitewashing effort, well underway for days, helps identify for us those few news outlets which still hold the truth in high regard, and reveals the rest as cowardly apologists for thugs. 

“‘Fire a warning shot,’ he [U.S. Army Capt. Ronny Johnson] ordered as the vehicle kept coming. Then, with increasing urgency, he told the platoon to shoot a 7.62mm machine-gun round into its radiator. ‘Stop [messing] around!’ Johnson yelled into the company radio network when he still saw no action being taken. Finally, he shouted at the top of his voice, ‘Stop him, Red 1, stop him!’

“That order was immediately followed by the loud reports of 25mm cannon fire from one or more of the platoon’s Bradleys. About half a dozen shots were heard in all.

“‘Cease fire!’ Johnson yelled over the radio. Then, as he peered into his binoculars from the intersection on Highway 9, he roared at the platoon leader, ‘You just [expletive] killed a family because you didn’t fire a warning shot soon enough!'”

?from an article at commondreams.org, quoting Washington Post correspondent William Branigin’s eyewitness account.
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children

Posted on April 4, 2003 by joe

‘Ana, ana’ \(me,me\) as he tapped his chest.  Take just one picture of me.  I never got his name, but he lives in the Saddam City district of northern Baghdad.  Photo credit: Farah Laith

Click to visit more images of the enemy at IraqJournal.org.

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A coworker said to me the other day, “Yeah, well, I’m behind Bush one hundred percent.  I saw the pictures on the news of the kids that got killed, and that’s not nice, but you know, they’re just going to grow up and be just like their parents.”

“And.  What’s.  Wrong.  With.  That?” I asked, incredulous.  “What have they done to us?”  She responded with some vague blither about 911.  “You don’t even know,” I said.  “The fact is that they haven’t done anything to us.  You don’t even know the lies, much less believe them, yet you are willing to let children die.”

Her voice can be a scraping irritating noise even when her words have negligible meaning.  But her cavalier disregard of the slaughter of children, and her use of racism to justify it was revolting.  I nearly struck her.  I had to walk away. 

She is just an overwhelmed child herself, what with all the considerable trauma and stress she has endured in her own life.  Which makes it worse.  She doesn’t have the time or the inclination to be bothered with the esoterica of injustice ten timezones away. Indeed, for anyone, accusing one’s own country of criminal behavior requires an uncommon discernment both incisive and fearless.  And so her opinion is not the result of a rigorous and objective examination of the facts, but is simply a regurgitation of the recieved propaganda, passed on essentially unchanged.  I’d like to think no one else thinks this way.  I’d like to think the propaganda did not have this effect on one as typical as she.  She is in her twenties—starting a family, starting a career, starting an American life.  She is a mother.  And she is studying to be a nurse.  I dread to think how many other young people in america?children really?think as she does. 

I want to throw-up.

There is no question in my mind why the world hates us. 

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sweet reason

Posted on April 3, 2003 by joe
“Stop the war now. As Baghdad will be encircled, this is the time to get the UN back in to inspect Baghdad and the rest of Iraq for biological and chemical weapons. Our troops should not have to be the ones who will find out, in combat, whether Iraq has such weapons. Why put our troops at greater risk? We could get the United Nations inspectors back in.

“Stop the war now. Before we send our troops into house-to-house combat in Baghdad, a city of five million people. Before we ask our troops to take up the burden of shooting innocent civilians in the fog of war.

“Stop the war now. This war has been advanced on lie upon lie. Iraq was not responsible for 9/11. Iraq was not responsible for any role al-Qaeda may have had in 9/11. Iraq was not responsible for the anthrax attacks on this country. Iraq did not try to acquire nuclear weapons technology from Niger. This war is built on falsehood.

“Stop the war now. We are not defending America in Iraq. Iraq did not attack this nation. Iraq has no ability to attack this nation. Each innocent civilian casualty represents a threat to America for years to come and will end up making our nation less safe. The seventy-five billion dollar supplemental needs to be challenged because each dime we spend on this war makes America less safe. Only international cooperation will help us meet the challenge of terrorism. After 9/11 all Americans remember we had the support and the sympathy of the world. Every nation was ready to be of assistance to the United States in meeting the challenge of terrorism. And yet, with this war, we have squandered the sympathy of the world. We have brought upon this nation the anger of the world. We need the cooperation of the world, to find the terrorists before they come to our shores.

“Stop this war now. Seventy-five billion dollars more for war. Three-quarters of a trillion dollars for tax cuts, but no money for veterans ‘ benefits. Money for war. No money for health care in America, but money for war. No money for social security, but money for war. We have money to blow up bridges over the Tigris and the Euphrates, but no money to build bridges in our own cities. We have money to ruin the health of the Iraqi children, but no money to repair the health of our own children and our educational programs.

“Stop this war now. It is wrong. It is illegal. It is unjust and it will come to no good for this country.

“Stop this war now. Show our wisdom and our humanity, to be able to stop it, to bring back the United Nations into the process. Rescue this moment. Rescue this nation from a war that is wrong, that is unjust, that is immoral.

“Stop this war now”.

Sorry, but I just can’t bring myself to leave out even just one word of this statement. 

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pox americana

Posted on April 3, 2003 by joe
In our name, the government has brought down a pall of repression over society.  The President’s spokesperson warns people to “watch what they say.”  Dissident artists, intellectuals, and professors find their views distorted, attacked, and suppressed.  The so-called Patriot Act — along with a host of similar measures on the state level — gives police sweeping new powers of search and seizure, supervised if at all by secret proceedings before secret courts. 

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Posted on April 3, 2003 by joe

The “Shock and Awe” Photo Gallery

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make war

Posted on April 2, 2003 by joe
One man’s body was still in flames.  It gave out a hissing sound.  Tucked away in his breast pocket, thick wads of banknotes were turning to ashes.  His savings, perhaps.

Down the road, a little girl, no older than five and dressed in a pretty orange and gold dress, lay dead in a ditch next to the body of a man who may have been her father.  Half his head was missing. 

One cannot help but gasp when confronted by such trauma and agony, unlimited in both its gore and its senselessness.  The wet sound of living body parts splattering…  the snap and pop of limbs dismembered…  and the sight of someone’s animated face at the moment of their decapitation…  all happening under the shrieking, bellowing, screaming roar of the lethal machines of war.  It lifts one–both body and soul–out of the monotonous daily repitition of dull and threatless lives into an experience of the sublime.  For those who come through it conscious and in one piece, such an experience transcends ethical judgement, it transports one beyond such petty distinctions as friend or foe, panic or peace, alive or dead, and it plants one firmly in the center of an unvarnished, undiluted, unmitigated, unadulterated experience of being terribly alive.

Until humankind learns to experience life with the same degree of intensity, clarity, and desperate cruciality as when in the throes of mortal combat, until then humans will continue to make war.  It really has nothing to do with ideology or politics or even justice; those are merely the pretenses upon which we build our horrific stage of war, and where we exorcize the demons of our unsatisfying lives.

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just lie to me, so I won’t know

Posted on March 27, 2003 by joe

(Found it here.)

I promise I will stop dwelling on the political in a minute, because I am in need of dipping the ladel into the truly deep well–it is very overdue.  Until then, here’s a fairly decent article about a few of the indecencies of the Bush administration.  This is just the tip of the iceberg, but nobody really wants to know that. 

The brazenness of this approach would be hard to believe if it weren’t entirely in line with how the administration has pursued so many of its other policy goals. Its preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration’s broader agenda almost impossible not to pursue. During and after the 2000 campaign, the president called for major education and prescription drug programs plus a huge tax cut, saying America could easily afford them all because of large budget surpluses. Critics said it wasn’t true, and the growing budget deficits have proven them right. But the administration now uses the existence of big budget deficits as a way to put the squeeze on social programs–part of its plan all along. Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it’s just a straight-up con.

– from “Practice to Deceive”
by Joshua Micah Marshall
at WashingtonMonthly.com

This country is great.  The people of this country are great.  The young men and women in this country’s military are great.  Help me know, then, how it is these things have happened.  Are we not responsible for the things these warmongers do with the authority they have derived from us? 

But nobody really wants to know that. 

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painful poetry

Posted on March 25, 2003 by joe

Just stole this link from ex-lion tamer, and I’m just passing the word, like a bucket at a fire. 

Go to March of Death and listen.  Read and listen.

…

Lies, sanctions, and cruise missles have never created a free and just society.  Only everyday people can do that.  Which is why I’m joining the millions worldwide who have stood up to oppose the Bush administration’s attempt to expand the U.S. empire at the expense of human rights at home and abroad.  In this spirit, I’m releasing this song for anyone who is willing to listen.  I hope it not only makes us think, but also inspires us to act and raise our voices.

– Zack de la Rocha
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telling

Posted on March 22, 2003 by joe

A quote posted at Mary’s site:

free speech is what America is about

“Of course the people don’t want war…  That is understood.  But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.  Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.  That is easy.  All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.  It works the same in any country.” 

— Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler’s Deputy Chief and Luftwaffe Commander, at the Nuremberg trials, 1946 from “Nuremberg Diary” by G M Gilbert (Signet, New York, 1947).

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tear drops

Posted on March 20, 2003 by joe

Why do I always convince myself that the world is not as bad as it seems–and then it proves it is.  Why do I hope, over and over again, that brutality and hatred will subside, and that peace will find a home in my lifetime?  Why don’t I just give up?  It’s so simple to do.  And it hurts so much to keep trying to rebuild my tissue paper dreams under all these tear drops. 

You can see the summit but you can’t reach it

It’s the last piece of the puzzle but you just can’t make it fit

Doctor says you’re cured but you still feel the pain

Aspirations in the clouds but your hopes go down the drain…

Why don’t I just give up? 

Why ever did I think it could be different?

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relief

Posted on March 19, 2003 by joe

I heard a rumor at work that Aziz was shot.  Of those at the top in Iraq, Aziz is the most capable politician, and certainly more moderate than Saddam.  Aziz wants Iraq to survive as a sovereign nation and has arguably accomplished a political miracle within Iraq to subdue the petulant Saddam and allow inspectors unconditional access.

from the article:
Aziz (said) a U.S. request that Iraqi soldiers and citizens allow coalition forces into Iraq uncontested is “unjust” and gives “an example of the mentality of such an administration.  They have power but no brains.”

My first thought was cynical; that we had him killed to reduce what sanity and reason there may be in the Iraqi leadership.  Then, likely, our opponent would be an irrational mad bomber Saddam–that is if he returned to his erratic scud-launching of a decade ago.  When I finally read this article, I was relieved.  It means my country has not yet sunken to the monstrosities which I fear it eventually will.

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no pics

Posted on March 12, 2003 by joe b

I don’t feel like writing, so try this old journal entry.  I’ll be rearranging the site soon.

If you get screwed up in the frames (these are old pages, coded when I knew less than not much) then try this link to the old journal entry. 

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pair

Posted on March 11, 2003 by joe

pic

A couple days ago I threw out all the junkmail and outdated catalogs which had accumulated on my kitchen table.  I tidied what was left, a few books and some old journals and sketchbooks, with plans to put it all away somewhere eventually.  This morning, as I opened the blinds to let in some light, I glanced sleepy-eyed at the titles revealed there on the table.  I hadn’t noticed them before, together.  Postcards from the Edge, by actress Carrie Fischer and The Immense Journey, by anthropologist Loren Eisley.  Cute. 

Are you sick of my pictures yet? 

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