My Virtual Reality
OK, I haven't been writing much. Or reading, unless you count musical engineering forums, magazines, and books.
I have had my reality so focused on music recording as of late that my writing and research has come to a virtual standstill. I haven't updated my notebook in almost two months. This blog has only seen 5 entries since around then, too.
My laptop is having a power supply problem. I need a new power cord (which is ridiculously expensive), and my OS install is over a year old. I'm running Firefox 1.0.7 (2.0 just came out).
I can see a shift in my Virtual Reality coming. Fix the laptop, install a new OS. Switch this site over the really amazing WordPress software.
In my abundant free time, of course.
Dental surgery, or, the difference between Democrats and Republicans
Well, I had some minor dental surgery today. And as I told a friend, a day including dental surgery is not likely to be included in your best days. Everything went fine, thanks for asking.
Last night, I told another friend that "I can't wait to laugh sardonically at the euphoria that will sweep (sleep?) the land when the Dems regain Congress...." Turns out to be true. The Democrats regained the house, have a majority of Governorships, and are presently up 50-49 in the Senate, with only the outcome in Virginia left to decide the balance.
And to top it off, Donald Rumsfeld "resigned."
Whee. Cue the chorus of midgets singing "Ding, Dong, The Witch Is Dead!"
The most interesting statistic on cnn.com's front page, when counting the number of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents in Congress, was that there are ZERO independents on the list. This reminds me of when Nader ran in 2000, and I was convinced that there wasn't a difference between Democrats and Republicans.
Turns out that's not the case. My view back then was not nuanced enough.
I am now convinced that my mistake was in terms of how each party serves the power structure, which generally I prefer to call Empire. I saw clearly that both parties serve Empire as their prime function, and mistook this fact for a complete equivalency among the two parties. That's what my mistake was.
But the difference between them is in how they serve Empire. And in general, I know believe that the function of the Republican is to push the bar of Empire, to seize, consolidate, and concentrate as much power as possible while they are in power. Then, the function of the Democrats is to maintain those newly-drawn lines of power for Empire, helping to normalize them and assimilate them into popular consciousness.
So time will tell. In the coming months, we're going to hear a lot about "partisanism" and "party politics"... and while in general I prefer a government doing nothing because it is in a state of gridlock to the behavior of the BuShites over the past 60 years, I seriously doubt that all of a sudden the US government will become committed to ending its global waging of low-intensity warfare, its commitment to torture, its blatant servitude to corporatism, and its general disregard for the poor of the world.
I need to stop typing, I can feel the novocaine starting to wear off....
cool multimedia psychedelic lectures
BoingBoing pointed to
Media on 'Second Attention' today, a place where there are lots of audio/video files from people like Tim Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, etc.
Their server is being hammered right now because of the link from BoingBoing, so I wanted to mark this for the future. Definitely want to check some of these out....
Bad Magic
OK, this is what I would call
bad magic:
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A Dutch woman, who had meticulously planned her own funeral after the death of her husband last year, died next to the grave in Amsterdam where she wanted to be buried, a newspaper reported.
The 65-year-old widow probably died of a heart attack while she was visiting the family grave where her name, but no date, was already inscribed, De Telegraaf daily reported Wednesday.
The woman was carrying a bag with her containing her will when she died and had already organized details of her funeral including the music she wanted played, the paper said.
Lately, I've been thinking about the notion of "bad magic" as an extension of Sartre's existentialist notion of "
bad faith," as applied to a modern pagan.
Bad faith, in short, is "a philosophical concept first coined by existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to describe the phenomenon wherein one denies one's total freedom, instead choosing to behave as an inert object."
Similarly, bad magic is where one denies one's ability to create one's reality, and acts as if one's actions have no bearing on what happens.
So for this woman, to have obsessed over the details of her death arrangements, brought about (on a metaphysical level... I'm not talking about scientific cause/effect here) her own death under those circumstances.
Another way to put it: be careful what you wish for. You might get it.
