Tuesday, December 29, 2015
classic tax protest
During
the Vietnam War, one woman claimed seventy-nine dependents on her
United States income tax, all Vietnamese orphans, so she owed no tax.
They were not legal dependents, of course, so were disallowed. No,
she insisted, these children have been orphaned by the indiscriminate
United States bombing; we are responsible for their lives. She
forced the Internal Revue Service to take her to court. That gave
her a larger forum for making her case. She used the system against
itself to unmask the moral indefensibility of what the system was
doing. Of course she 'lost' the case, but she made her point.
Monday, December 28, 2015
The writing-pad in which Rilke drafted the Tenth Elegy includes this note: “Art cannot be helpful through our trying to help and specially concerning ourselves with the distresses of others, but in so far as we bear our own distresses more passionately, give, now and then, a perhaps clearer meaning to endurance, and develop for ourselves the means of expressing the suffering within us and its conquest more precisely and clearly than is possible to those who have to apply their powers to something else.”
“Nowadays we aren't allowed to use the word mad. What lunacy. The few psychiatrists I respect always talk about people being mad. Use the short, simple, true words. Dead, I say, and dying, and mad, and adultery. I don't say passed on, or slipping away, or terminal (oh, he's terminal? Which one? Euston, St Pancras, the Gare St Lazare?), or personality disorder, or fooling around, bit on the side, well she's away a lot visiting her sister. I say mad and adultery, that's what I say. Mad has the right sound to it. It's an ordinary word, a word which tells us how lunacy might come and call like a delivery van.
Terrible things are also ordinary. Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary? He said it was 'a most conventional way to rise above the conventional'.”
Julian Barnes. Flaubert's Parrot.
Flaubert, 1847: “You had hoped to find in me a fire which scorched and blazed and illuminated everything; which shed a cheerful light, dried out damp wainscoting, made the air healthier and rekindled life. Alas! I'm only a poor nightlight, whose red wick splutters in a lake of bad oil full of water and bits of dust.”
Flaubert: “I feel, against the stupidity of my time, floods of hatred which choke me. Shit rises to my mouth as in the case of a strangulated hernia. But I want to keep it, fix it, harden it; I want to concoct a paste with which I shall cover the nineteenth century, in the same way as they paint Indian pagodas with cow dung.”
Friday, December 18, 2015
Great 2CD Cincinnati Xmas comp for only $10!
Check out this Xmas comp. Full of Cincinnati weirdos past and present, including a rare recording by yrs truly under the monicker Her Wild Weasels Returning. Lovely handmade 2xCD-R set. $10. To order e-mail John Rich at beatpraxitiles@gmail.com
Greece: Anarchists from Rouviconas collective attacked on Wednesday and smashed the offices of “Teiresias”, that co-operates with banks to confiscate houses and apartments and throws poor people and families hit by the capitalist crisis out in the winter streets because they cannot pay their house loans in time, the same banks that the greek people are being forced by the government and the creditors to pay their debts for the last 6 years so that the banks can have profits.
Sunday, December 13, 2015
“No-one is forced to write books, or to spend years elaborating them or to claim to be doing this kind of work. There is no reason to make it obligatory to include footnotes, bibliographies and references. No reason not to choose free reflection on the work of others. It is sufficient to indicate well and clearly what relation one is establishing between one’s own work and the work of others.”
“Nul n’est forcé d’écrire des livres, ni de passer des années à les élaborer, ni de se réclamer de ce genre de travail. Il n’y a aucune raison d’obliger à mettre des notes, à faire des bibliographies, à poser des references. Aucune raison de ne pas choisir la libre réflexion sur le travail des autres. Il suffit de bien marquer, et clairement, quel rapport on établit entre son travail et le travail des autres.
Michel Foucault, (1994) [1983] ‘A propos des faiseurs d’histoire’. In Dits et Ecrits vol. IV.Paris: Gallimard, p. 413. This passage translated by Clare O’Farrell.
Saturday, December 12, 2015
Friday, December 11, 2015
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Increases in mortality rates of white, downwardly mobile men in the US
"Although the epidemic of pain, suicide, and drug overdoses preceded the financial crisis, ties to economic insecurity are possible. After the productivity slowdown in the early 1970s, and with widening income inequality, many of the baby-boom generation are the first to find, in midlife, that they will not be better off than were their parents. Growth in real median earnings has been slow for this group, especially those with only a high school education. However, the productivity slowdown is common to many rich countries, some of which have seen even slower growth in median earnings than the United States, yet none have had the same mortality experience."
(excerpt from the conclusion of Anne Case and Angus Deaton 's new study, Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century.)
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Palestinians challenge Israeli impunity in The Hague
Last week in The Hague Palestinian human rights organizations submitted to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court extensive documentation of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israeli military forces during the “Operation Protective Edge” assault on Gaza in 2014. The ICC was created precisely for the purpose of ensuring criminal accountability for crimes on the scale of those committed during the 51-day assault on occupied Gaza last year, in which more than 1,540 civilians – including 556 children – were killed. In a statement commenting on the significance of the submission, the first of its kind, CCR said, “the ICC, as the court of last resort, represents the only hope for justice for Palestinians” and called for “its judicial independence to be respected as it considers the evidence presented…. The United States must recognize that peace cannot come without justice.”
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