Isabella Nicolette Brady January 23, 2010 5:03pm. Welcome Monkey!!
This is a couple of hours after she was born. It was a beautiful moment even though we hadn’t slept in almost two days and she was about to be moved to a different hospital in preparation for her heart surgery.
With mommy at the next hospital
Sophia holding Bella for the first time since giving birth two days before.
Me holding her (and trying not to weep!) for the first time ever.
The whole family (minus Eugene the kitten with Melissa the kitty sitter) together the night before surgery.
Bella had her surgery this morning and it went great! We’re not quite through this yet but right now we are both being guided by a (difficult to articulate) profound, glorious and almost aching love.
But fuck, we’re tired! (Exhibit A: see my face above.)
Now, before anyone gets the idea that I’m going soft, I would like to mention our daughters middle name: Nicolette. While it is lovely to the eye and the ear it’s translation in Greek is:
People’s Victory
Since we’ve got the whole family here, we might as well bring in Mr. Eugene:
The new website could be up this week. Comments are closed due to a spam/hacking situation, but I can be reached at the usual email options.
The people in power will not disappear voluntarily; giving flowers to the cops just isn’t going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.
- William S. Burroughs
Greetings Earthlings, check out my favorite internet writer of the moment, Frank Smecker:
The Politics of Awareness, part 2 on Dissident Voice. This article kicked me directly in my ass this morning. Please read it. Read the living shit out of it! (I’ll comment on it later.)
Have I mentioned that me and Soph’s daughter is going to be born, like any day?! More tomorrow.
BREAKING FUCKING NEWS: Mickey Z joins modern civilization (wait..oh no!) and creates a Facebook profile! (I’ve actually had one for a while but it has been managed by Sophia. I’ve now made the transition from MySpace to Facebook if anyone wants to say hola.)
So, tomorrow I want to discuss Mr. Smecker, Bringing Down Civilization, Our beloved daughter, social networking sites and my (late) hatred of the bourgeois yearly fraud “celebration” of MLK. Here is what I said last time.
Reacting to the stories of Tahiti, and troubled that the crew of HMS Bounty could have found life among the Tahitians preferable to life among Christians, the religious orthodoxy of England founded the London Missionary Society in 1795 (which included their own armed police force). The sole purpose of the society was to bring Tahiti under Christian rule, in effect to remove a more pleasant alternative lifestyle that threatened Christian power (my emphasis.) Two years later the first missionaries arrived in Tahiti and were as warmly treated by the Tahitians as had been earlier visitors. But after 7 years of missionary work (children were required to recite, “For what is Jehova angry with thee? Because I am evil and do evil.” in Tahitian) there were few willing converts to Christianity.
What happened next is documented in a letter to home by one of the brethren, J.M.Orsmond. All the missionaries were at that time salting pork and distilling spirits. Pomare (the local chief) was introduced to the bottle by the missionaries. Orsmond describes the compact by which Pomare, reduced to an alcoholic, would be backed in a war against the other island chiefs on the understanding that his victory would be followed by enforced conversion (This is the same deal that Papal Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli made with Hitler, trading the Vatican’s support for Hitler’s promise to declare Catholocism Nazi Germany’s state religion).
Since Pomare was supplied with firearms to be used against his opponents’ clubs, victory was certain. “The whole nation”, Orsmond wrote, “was converted in a day.”
There followed a reign of terror. Persistent unbelievers were put to death and a penal code was drawn up by the missionaries and enforced by the mission police. It was declared illegal to adorn oneself with flowers, to sing (other than hymns), to surf or to dance. A moral code of such strictness was then enforced that a man walking with his arm round a woman at night was compelled to carry a lantern in his free hand. On the island of Raiatea a man who forecast the weather was treated as a witchdoctor and put to death.
Within a quarter of a century the process by which the native culture of Tahiti had been extinguished was exported to every corner of the Pacific, reducing the islanders to the level of the working class of Victorian England.
After their mass conversion it was hoped that the Tahitians might be induced to accept the benefits of civilization by putting them to [servile] work growing sugar cane… The enterprise failed, and Mr. Orsmond, believing that “a too bountiful nature diminishes men’s natural desire to work”, ordered all the breadfruit trees to be cut down so that the lack of a natural food supply would force the Tahitians to seek employment in the mission plantations.
Captain James Cook estimated that 200,000 people were living on Tahiti. After thirty years of missionary rule, only 6,000 remained.
Their power base firmly established in Tahiti, the missionaries moved swiftly to other islands. The methods employed were the same as before. A local chieftain would be baptized, crowned king, presented with a portrait of Queen Victoria, introduced to the bottle, and left to the work of conversion.
By 1850 the Christian conquest of the Pacific was complete.
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In Related News: the only image of civilization that our new all knowing GOD–Google–has to offer is that of a computer game. Perfect.
In Even More Related News: Are you familiar with what went down in Diego Garcia? No? Here is John Pilger. For those of you who are familiar, here is an image of the end result of the great and glorious march of civilization there.
I should probably mention Haiti here. Well as the co-creator of this website can attest, it’s difficult for me to talk about that subject publicly without risking trouble with The Department of Homeland (uber alles!) Security [sic]!
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So long story short: the “civilized” have spent centuries conquering the world. Now there’s no space left. It’s time for the world to conquer civilization.
But Then It Was Too Late
“What no one seemed to notice,” said a colleague of mine, a philologist, “was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all Read the rest of this entry »
Blog title borrowed from this...half-ass documentary.
I’m just returning from this site being hacked and around nine months of pregnancy with my poop. John should (should!) have the new and updated site up this week. Back Tuesday (for real.)
Before we get back into business, and while we’re waiting for this guy to remake this beautiful and inspiring website; here is my favorite and most inspiring song of Summer 2009.
A quick goodbye to my beloved grandfather (Pop Pop) a loyal worker for NASA (which poisoned his lungs with Asbestosis) a lifelong farmer, an all around good ‘ole boy, a recovered alcoholic and my only real father: Raphael S. Lowe.
And hello to the thousands of you still checking in from Google images. I left that last post up as a kind of welcome and hello. Say hello in more detail at amovingtrain@gmail.com
Since my unexpected return to the suburbs I have been reminded of how seductive this insane culture is.
I was talking to my best friend a few years ago on the phone; we were talking about the stress of daily life. Something I often say when thinking about the stress of working jobs we hate, sitting in traffic and so on is, “I’m just going to run away and join the Indians.”
Which he responded within one second with, “Yeah, if you want to freeze to death in the winter or starve.” As if indigenous people were just rolling around in near freezing mud eating their own finger nails before the glorious liberators of Europe came to “Civilize” them!
Another moment with my buddy was when we mutually witnessed the sight of automated check-outs at his local grocery store for the first time. I sighed and said, “Another job and life down the drain.” To which he said, “No. It’s progress. Things are getting easier everyday.”
And he’s right. Ish. It is more convenient…if you can afford to shop there. I’ll have to finish this train of thought tomorrow night.
Back to my slide back to the suburbs:
No matter how horrific the obvious reality of the world is, suburban, “middle class” culture spins it all as an undeniable, positive march towards a dreamland. Where, “WHAT APPEARS IS GOOD; WHAT IS GOOD APPEARS.”–Guy Debord
So back while I was daily driving to work through Bethesda Maryland, I heard this song almost everyday and thought of my friend’s response to our moments together. Here is the song and after my response:
Oh the irony! You go and create a website to declare war on this culture and you end up representing it on the internet. Yes, now that we’re on hit number 6000 I might as well acknowledge our new group of comrades here: people who searched for Jesus on google images found this site as their first choice. I’m not sure how this happened but through some confluence of google magic about half of the images I’ve used here have gone straight to the top of the google hierarchy. A close second place is freaking ice cream of all things! I can only imagine what someone searching for an image of goddamn jesus or ice cream must be experiencing while clicking through this madness: but it’s still pretty cool! So welcome mainstream America (and Central America, Africa, Middle East, Korea, Indonesia, Australia, that one person in Hong Kong, Western Europe and mother fucking Canada!)
I saw that a few thousand stayed around for a little bit and a few of you stayed on for a long time and even started coming back. Good. I found the above image on the same search engine that led you here. I think that it sums up what this whole website is about.
I think I should also introduce the writing here. A lot of the stuff in more recent months basically sucks. However, if you poke around in the archives there are plenty of little gems. Also there are a shitload of outstanding videos archived. But here is a list of my best work:
Being that indoctrinated people obviously are not usually aware of their state of enslavement in the “west” (it’s a sphere!) I try to point out the horrors of daily life that are often just overlooked as “normal” and “the way things naturally are.” So, if you are new here and have enjoyed yourself, email me at rejection08@gmail.com.
If you’ve been here before I’m also at the top of the google heap with David Gilbert, Arundhati Roy, Sleater Kinney, Atari Teenage Riot, Chomsky, Noam Chomsky, Huey P. Newton, Mickey Z and Derrick Jensen. Fucking cool! However–sadly–I’m getting more hits off of the above mentioned stuff and “turntable” and “arrow up.” Whatever. With google it could change tomorrow, so let’s just play with it!
But back to the newbies here. If you didn’t know already, there are thriving subcultures here subverting the DOMINANT culture we were all born UNDER. And as a welcome gift I would like you to see what the news looks like within our culture: ENJOY!
My Morning in 