randomWalks

dead @ 32 is hosting lots of photos and video of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

Huge smoke cloud visible on NYC radar. (MeFi)

originally posted by xowie

What good is spilling blood?
It will not grow a thing
“TASTE ETERNITY”
the sword sings Blues for ALLAH
In’sh’ALLAH
They lie where they fall
There’s nothing more to say

• Robt. Hunter

  look at water and fire
  earth and wind
  enemies and friends all at once
  the wolf and the lamb
  the lion and the deer
  far away yet together
  look at the unity of this
  spring and winter
  manifested in the equinox
  you too must mingle my friends
  since the earth and the sky
  are mingled just for you and me
  - Rumi

  ‘An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.'
  

• Mahatma Gandhi (via Noise Between Stations)

originally posted by xowie

If you're in Manhattan, think about something seriously for me -- there was already a major blood shortage, and there will be an immense need for blood. Most hospitals have set up ways for you to walk in and donate blood today; please, if you're OK, and your family is OK, and you are just glued to your television, think about ungluing yourself, walking to your nearest hospital, and donating blood.

I cannot stress how important this is right now.

PFLP denying responsibility. DFLP too.

originally posted by xowie

CIA fact sheet and Muslim student database on Osama bin Laden.

originally posted by xowie

Astrological software for Apple Macintosh.

Sec. 101: Prohibition of Certain Devices.
(a) In General -- It is unlawful to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies that adhere to the security system standards adopted under section 104.

originally posted by xowie

Buddy Holly’s 65th birthday. Rave on!

originally posted by xowie

Transform Columbus Day.

originally posted by xowie

My unseen opponent began with some highly irregular, if not totally absurd, opening moves - shifting all his pawns forward by one square. These were moves that no Grandmaster would ever play. From this deliberately unpromising position emerged moves of extraordinary power. In the first game I was totally crushed.

I am Seymour Skinner. Who are you?

Of course if you're Einstein, you want everything that you want your way and then you want to be left alone. So you want love, and you want affection, you want a good meal, but then you don't want any interference outside of that, so you don't want any obligations interfering with your life, with your work. Which is a difficult stance to maintain in an adult relationship; it doesn't work. Everything has to be a give and take. Einstein always felt Paradise was just around the corner, but as soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby and something better appeared.

SF Gate: Sketches of the Game of Ultimate.

originally posted by xowie

"John and George had already had a dose, but then called me and asked if I wanted to come over, and I thought 'yeah, cool, why not -- it's the Beatles after all','' he recalled, describing how they had gone on to get high.

originally posted by xowie

Fortunately the world didn't split in two as one of the children surveyed before the event believed would happen, nor did the Earth leave the Sun's orbit as feared by another.

The Adult Industry Medical (AIM) HealthCare Foundation was started by porn legend Sharon Mitchell to provide HIV testing and health care for performers in the adult entertainment industry. They are providing a vital service to exploited workers and are terribly under-funded. If you watch porn, you should support this organization.

originally posted by xowie

George Washington University, located in the DC neighborhood expected to see some state violence at the end of this month, is closing its dorms for five days surrounding the IMF/World Bank meetings. An interesting aspect of the shutdown which somehow didn’t make it into the Washington Post article is that the DC police will be using GWU as a base of operations.

The U.S. runs but can’t hide.

originally posted by xowie

Who’s got the beats in hip-hop these days? Where is the song that gets you snapping your neck before you even realize the stereo’s on, and then keeps you nodding after it ends, like the next day?

When I first did the Lawrence story, the biggest problem was for the very small papers in the United States. The editors may have agreed with it, but they couldn't run it. One editor told me someone broke windows at his paper, and another said his kids got beaten up at school and someone spray-painted his dog.

The Jiffy Lube sex art hurt no one and bothered only bigots. Its censorship bodes ill for the future of Black Rock City, which is rapidly deteriorating into an RV park/fun fair with really lousy weather. My favorite sign on the entrance road read, ‘If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.’ Maybe it’s time for someone to move over.

originally posted by xowie

That kind of stuff, familiar to us all, kept piling up in my mind and got me started trying to figure out how white supremacy had come about in the u.s. working class. So for years after this I read labor history and asked older trade union radicals questions whenever I could.Finally, an anarchist veteran of the autoworkers' historic 1937 Flint Sit-Down strike told me that the strike had been Jim Crow, that one of the unpublicized demands had been to keep Black workers down as only janitors....or out of the plants altogether. This blew my mind. That's when it hit me that the wonderful working class history that the movement had taught us was a lie.

It was hard research work, but no conceptual leap at all to see that in general in u.s. history the colonized peoples have been the proletariat, while the white working class has been a labor aristocracy. This has been camouflaged in capitalist history by retroactively assigning white racial membership to various european immigrant peoples who weren't "white" at the time. For instance, when leading u.s. capitalists started the "Interracial Council" to promote patriotic nationalist integration during World War I, the "races" they wanted to bring together were the Irish race, the Welsh race, the Polish race, the Lithuanian race, the Hungarian race, the Sicilian race, the Rumanian race, and other Europeans that we now think of as only nationalities within the white race. Shows you how race is another capitalist manufactured product.

Racism as we experience it today didn't exist before capitalism, which is why many revolutionaries see rooting out the one as requiring rooting out the other. To Europeans before modern capitalism the most important "races" were what we would call nations. Indeed, until well into the 20th century it was widely assumed by Europeans that even different European nationalities were biologically different, and had different mental abilities and propensities. Slavs were thought to be biologically different from Nordics, and Jews were thought to be an exotic race all by themselves.

There's a certain trend of fashionable white thought that claims that race is nothing more than a trick, an imaginary construct that folks are fooled into believing in. So we even find some middle-class white men claiming that they've "given up being white" (i can hear my grandmother saying, "More white foolishness!" with a dismissing headshake). Needless to say, they haven't given up anything.

Race as a form of class is very tangible, solid, material, as real as a tank division running over you ... tank divisions, after all, are also socially constructed! About another form of this same white racist game -- white New Age women deciding to play at "becoming Indian" -- Women of All Red Nations activist Andy Smith used to wearily suggest that if they really really wanted to "become Indian" they should live on the rez -- the u.s. colony -- without running water or jobs, without heat in the winter or education for their children, with real poverty, alcoholism, and violent oppression.

Secret neo-Nazi dances have been held for two years at the Shack, a rock club near Disneyland.

originally posted by xowie

There is a belief among some black comics that audiences find it funny when they launch extended insults against white people (see also Chris Rock's embarrassing outburst in the forthcoming "Jay and Silent Bob"). My feeling is that audiences of any race find such scenes awkward and unwelcome; I've never heard laughter during them, but have sensed an uncomfortable alertness in the theater. Accusing complete strangers of being racist is aggressive, hostile, and not funny, something Tucker demonstrates to a painful degree in this movie--where the filmmakers apparently lacked the nerve to request him to dial down.