Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy (American) Thanksgiving all!

I’m having some connection issues, which will hopefully be resolved soon. In the meantime, enjoy this holiday themed video

Funkyzeit Mit Kürt!

“Ach, Ja!” oder “Nicht, nicht!”? Definitely “Ach, Ja!”

I hadn’t planned on seeing the Borat movie. I find that kind of “in your face” schtick a little uncomfortable to watch, even though Steven Collbert pulls it off pretty well with his own faux-conservative thing. But I may have to go see it. I hadn’t watched Da Ali G Show either, primarily because it was on HBO and I don’t have that on my cable. So imagine my chagrin, when I find out that the Bruno pictured above is none other than Sacha Baron Cohen! I had seen this particular Bruno clip a while ago, all the time thinking it was really a clip from some weird Austrian tv show hehe. What can I say, I’m the guy who was ignorant of Numa Numa for a few years too I am sufficiently convinced of Cohen’s comedic genius, after seeing some of Ali G over the weekend. This guy fooled people into thinking he was really a Kazakh journalist. He fooled me into thinking he was a gay Austrian fashionista. And for god’s sake, he got Pat fricken Buchanan to rap, of all things!

Ali G discusses the merits of the BLT, with and without mustard, and other things with Pat Buchanan

Love Bruno? Take heart! A movie has been announced! You can take a walk on the brown side mit Bruno sometime in 2007 or early 2008.

In the Land of Rape and Honey

One of the things that really has amazed me over the last year, is just how surreal the US has become politically. Years ago, I was content to leave politics to the politicians and the chattering class, assuming that they knew what they were doing, and preferring to stay focused on things closer to my heart, like languages, computers, tacky 80s music, etc. I suspect many Americans are in the same boat. And then to my surprise, I find that not only are the people running things completely inept, but they are almost certainly certifiably insane.

At one time, there were two major approaches to politics; one Democratic, and one Republican. Which one you preferred was pretty much a matter of how much you made, with a quite a bit of wiggle room for personal preference, social aspirations, etc. Both had their problems, both had their benefits, what I’m getting at here is that both approaches were valid political stances. And then everything changed. And not terribly gradually…this is due primarily to the end of the third American major economic cycle. I go into nauseating detail about this on the old blog for those interested…and the political links here in the blogroll also cover this kind of thing. At this point, we have Democrats who are still in the process of coming to terms that theirs is the only valid political stance currently on the market, so to speak. The Republicans have been taken over by Authoritarian Cultists, and religious nuts. Raving, lunatic, evangelical nuts. Raving Jewish nuts. Raving fundamentalist nuts. If they’re at all religious and still in the GOP, they’re batshit insane. The more moderate religious have quietly left the party…heck most of them are now Democrats. The Neocons are still nominally in charge of the Bush Administration, but their implosion continues apace. While the next two years could continue to be troubling, it is unlikely that the neocon movement will survive. And if they do somehow manage to hang onto control of the Republican Party, they could throw it into a permanent minority status, essentially wiping it out. You won’t know this from the media of course, because they are too busy chattering about faux-Centrism…as if such a thing as Centrism is possible between liberals, and the radical Constitution-destructionists. Centrism is gone, it’s dead, and it’s unlikely to come back any time soon. When the punditocracy blathers on about Centrism, what they really mean is whatever they themselves happen to believe. Which seeing as how they all take Republican paychecks, is so far from real centrism in any conventional sense, as to be unrecognizable. So they remain silent on Bush’s dismantling of habeas corpus, turning the clock back to pre-Magna Carta days, and instead drone on about the color of Nancy Pelosi’s outfit. They ignore Bush’s illegal torture, Geneva Convention violations, etc….and instead zoom in on the fact that 2 people applied for the Majority Leader post, and that somehow (wrongly) means the Dems are divided. Conservatism is also dead, which the chatterati are also blissfully ignorant of…while they declare newly elected Democrats to be, in fact, closet Conservatives. They aren’t of course. Why do people listen to these pundits again?

As mentioned elsewhere, what Bush, Rove, and company tried to do with their unholy alliance of Neocon, Theocon, and economic conservatives was to usher in a new economic cycle similar to the Robber Baron Age of Railroads, where wealth was concentrated into the hands of a very few, extremely wealthy and powerful individuals. They attempted to do this by attempting to destroy the Democratic Party, trample on the US Constitution, and create a permanent state of war in the Middle East. The Republican owned non-liberal media simply stopped reporting anything that even remotely made Republicans look bad, which is why we’ve had little if any reporting on the unconstitutional behavior of the President, and hours and hours of Missing White Woman stories. They failed, miserably. And as this whole thing unravels, the poo flinging is really starting to get off the ground, so to speak hehe. We had a radical rightwing blogger associated with the Free Republic arrested for sending fake anthrax to the Democratic leadership, and the few liberal journalists still out there. This would shine a bright light into the whole nest of vipers that passes for political discourse on the radical right nowadays…if the radical right-owned media would actually report about it. Instead, we have CNN continuing to shill for the goopers, with Glenn Beck asking the newly elected Muslim Congressman to prove he’s not a terrorist. Funny, I’d like to see some proof that Coulter and Malkin aren’t terrorists, seeing as how they REGULARLY ADVOCATE TERROR. And can we all just admit that James Carville is really a Republican operative, and just move on? Why on earth does anyone take him even remotely seriously anymore? His wife is most likely about to become the next head of the RNC, there’s no way in hell anything he is bloviating about is going to harm her efforts. Atlas Juggs is even more unhinged than ever, if that is even possible …her BFF John Bolton is about to be permanently kicked out of the UN, I guess it’s really rough for her. The other doughy pantloads are even doughier, and are still avoiding military service, while pushing for even more troops in the Iraq Quagmire. Lieberman is an even bigger whore than before, but then, that is his only major job skill, and I guess you gotta do what you’re good at.

Older video of Pam @ Atlas. This is her during her “sane” period…sane being used in it’s most broad meaning.

There is a ton of work to do now, to reverse all of the damage done since 2000. And if you are an American citizen, you owe it to your country to get involved. Because we are all to blame for allowing things to get this bad. We were too busy, wrapped up in our little lives, to do something about the creeping fascism. We were too wrapped up in our stupid tv shows, and our stupid video games, and our stupid sporting events. We don’t have to change careers and become political consultants hehe…but we do need to be more involved. I challenge every (American) reader to set aside 30 minutes of your time every week. and stay informed about the political situation. The major news sites are useless for the most part, as they stopped reporting any real news long ago. There are plenty of blogs though that report on things in a timely fashion. I highly recommend Huffington Post and Rawstory for this, linked to the right. I challenge every American to take some time, and write your Congresscritters an email. It’s important! Because if people like us don’t take the time to do these things, the only people doing them are Little Green Fascists. And look where that’s gotten us. We are not to blame alone. A horde of legislators, mostly Republican, but many of them Democrats, joined the Bush Admin and enabled their disgusting behavior. Hundreds of corporations, large and small, were completely on board too. There must be repercussions. These people must be held accountable. That’s our job…to make sure that they are.

#60 : Demons

When you use the Way to conquer the world,
Your demons will lose their power to harm.
It is not that they lose their power as such,
But that they will not harm others;
Because they will not harm others,
You will not harm others:
When neither you nor your demons can do harm,
You will be at peace with them.

This is from the Tao Te Ching, a book that infuriates many due to the way that it is written, but that provides interesting little things to meditate on for those who don’t mind stepping outside of themselves for a bit. It’s an infuriating book for those people…mostly Republicans I would imagine hehe…for whom everything in the world is either black or white, with nary a shade of grey in between. (Certainly Republicans have gotten into trouble lately with their own inner demons erupting onto the public stage!) I however see the world as mostly shades of grey, with very little black and white, and so perhaps this is why I find the Tao Te Ching so interesting. As mentioned earlier here and on the old blog, I’ve spent much of my life studying language, and inevitably this led me into such areas of speculation as the nature of consciousness, the nature of Mind, the nature of reality, and perhaps into the nature of morality. There are whole schools of Philosophy out there that attempt to reduce reality to a discussion of the nature of language, which to me is bass ackwards, as my grandma would have said. It’s even more infuriating when the linguist in question is someone who hasn’t even bothered learning any languages other than English…they just memorize the usual textbook examples from their linguistics courses, and then pontificate on the nature of reality as if they were some sort of expert now, with that college degree under their belts.

Language, the Universe, and Everything

But that’s a debate for another day. Back to the demons. As mentioned earlier, I went through a Wiccan period. Pagans have much more varied beliefs on pretty much every subject relating to religion and spirituality, than say, for example, Christians. In Christianity there’s a creed you are supposed to accept and “believe in”, whereas with paganism there is more of a laundry list of approaches to issues of spirituality, and you are left to figure it out on your own. The beliefs are secondary; the approach is what is important. So with Christians you will get pretty standard answers to questions about the nature of reality, nature of good and evil, etc. within the same denomination, but with Pagans it’s pretty much a different answer for each person you talk to, though many of the differences are nuanced. So with Christians the concept of the supernatural is usually a given. That’s how God and Jesus work their miracles or whatever. And that’s what demons are, supernatural beings of some sort. Pagans on the other hand tend to view the entire universe as a natural thing, with by definition an impossiblity of anything being supernatural. If it’s here, it’s natural, and that’s the end of it. And then there is how both groups tend to approach the “occult”; Christians tend to view it as a study of the supernatural, using means that are probably unwise at best and heretical and evil at worst. Pagans however would approach the occult as a rather dated attempt to understand human psychology and the universe generally.

Ministry - Stigmata

Since for pagans there is no supernatural, there is nothing supernatural behind the occult, and it’s just some rather curious writings by people from another era. Many pagans have recast the entire occult/magick discussion completely into psychological terms, and spend more time studying the writings of Jung than some weird grimoire from the 1500s that advises you how to curse your neighbor’s farm animals, by wrapping a piece of fur around your leg and chanting something in Latin hehe. In other words, modern pagans are not medievalists. Once you reject the supernatural as a motive force, demons are relegated to being creatures of Consciousness of some sort instead. Which means they are in the Mind somewhere. (Or they are just natural creatures out there in the universe somewhere. Since there is no evidence of them being natural creatures, like dogs or cats, the Mind it is!) We are immediately confronted by a problem however. Cognitive Studies is a relatively young discipline, and it is remarkable how little we know about how the Mind works. Earlier philosophers suggested that physical reality was somehow “less real” than spiritual reality, whatever that might mean. Plato had his famous Cave analogy, where we were like people in a cave, doomed to only experience life as shadows of the real reality that was better and more real. Berkeley went so far as to say that all of us and the universe around us are just dreams in the mind of God. This is a little too close to the Great Green Arkleseizure Theory for my tastes, so let’s go back to the Mind :). The fact is there doesn’t seem to be a “mind” at all. There appears to be no such thing. There does however, appear to be a brain, and when it functions normally, a process which we can call Mind functions. And to make matters even more complicated, there appear to be many brains in our heads, not just one! We call it “a brain”, but in fact a number of different brains have accumulated in our heads over the millennia, via evolution. Depending on how detailed and picky you want to be, there could be literally dozens of discrete parts in there functioning in tandem to create Mind. Clearly the earliest developing parts were only intended to control parts of the body, and regulate various systems. The so-called “lizard” brain handles such simple things as telling us when to eat, when to run away, etc. Higher brain functions relate to more abstract things, such as processing language and problem-solving.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

Something odd happened though when enough “computing power” ended up bundled together inside our heads. Namely, we became self-aware. Verbal language developed at some point in the mists of time, and can only be tracked with certainty once it began to be written down a few thousand years ago. But linguists have reconstructed “proto-languages” using common sense and educated guessing by examining how languages have diverged over time. This is how they pinpointed the birthplace of Indo-European to Central Asia, by comparing common words in its descendant languages and working backwards. Language and self-awareness go hand-in-hand. And so we get to the nature of consciousness. What does it mean to be conscious? What is the difference between being conscious and unconscious? Where and what is the sub-conscious? What about that collective unconscious thing of Jung’s? What about that Cosmic Unconsciousness thing from Repo Man?! It’s all pretty mind-boggling isn’t it. I leave it to the reader to meditate on such things.

Cosmic Unconsciousness illustrated

I see I’ve already blathered on too long, and wandered all over the map, and I apologize hehe…but again back to the demons. The most logical place for them to exist is internally. Yep, in one of the many of those brains inside our heads. A psychologist might call them complexes instead of demons, but there they are. They are a part of us…collective or no…that is mostly forgotten, buried, hidden, literally “occult”…and that is not evil per se, but not overtly working productively or for our own good. These are ancient and primal parts of ourselves, and if we don’t come to terms with them, they can create all kinds of trouble for us in our lives. Getting these demons into line is the whole point of some of the old grimoires…though admittedly back then any practioner would have viewed them as supernatural entities, rather then as complexes. The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, and the Goetia both go into elaborate detail as to how to deal with these things…from the perspective of a medievalist…and both books have been reinterpreted for use by more modern people as psychological journeys. And a dangerous journey it is. You’re not in danger of being possessed by something supernatural though; you’re in danger of losing your mind. As such the instructions contained in those books are usually only attempted by people who have studied them for years, and remain the province of specialists in the field. I wouldn’t recommend that people dally with them.

Coming to terms with your inner demons however, and causing them to stop doing harm to you and to your own life, is an important part of the spiritual journey, in my humble opinion. You can never banish them, or destroy them, since they are a part of you. You can just come to understand them, and live with them, and hopefully be at peace with them.

Tiam Dat Beep!

As I’ve said before, the US is a little insulated from European trends…cough…ok a lot insulated from European trends hehe. And as I’ve also mentioned before, I tend to avoid the radio and am a bit of a music snob, so I ended up missing that whole Numa Numa thing. In fact it was only a bit of chance that I stumbled upon the song, Dragostea Din Tei, at all. I had recently discovered YouTube, and ended up seeing some cute young guy’s video, which just happened to have the song in it as the background music. The tune was quite catchy, and in a foreign language (Romanian), and so naturally I was hooked. It took a few days but I finally found out what song was playing in the background. And so I discovered the Numa Numa meme.

The original video, that started it all!

What is a meme anyway? Let’s ask Merriam Webster.

Main Entry: meme
Pronunciation: ‘mEm
Function: noun
Etymology: alteration of mimeme, from mim- (as in mimesis) + -eme
: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

OK, but a little dull. I prefer this definition: meme - bigger than an idea, more contagious than the flu!

The story behind Numa Numa is actually pretty interesting…way more interesting than the song perhaps. A Japanese internet user heard the song, and made a flash “music video” for it. Part of it can be seen here. And then there was Gary Brolsma whose, erm, energetic lip-synching the song in front of his webcam that started the whole Ï’m going to look like an idiot in front of my webcam to Numa Numa thing There have since been literally thousands of similar videos, many of them viewable on YouTube. Warning…these are all pretty bad, and not worth watching unless you know the person in the video.

Gary Brolsma gets his numa numa on.

Wikipedia has the details about how the meme spread, but I’m just going to link some of the more notable user-made videos here. I love how exuberantly gay everyone looks in these videos, even when everyone involved is straight!

Japanese Numa Numa. Yes, it’s a guy as the head-cheerleader.

Hebrew Numa Numa. I love the plays on words here.

UBC Numa Numa. They keep with the airplane theme of the original video, and add in a new dance move, the Sprinkler!

Spanish Numa Numa. The meaningless chorus has been changed to Marica tú! (you’re gay!)

Navy Numa Numa. This one is probably my favorite.

Haiducci’s version.

And finally, New Numa! Gary Brolsma returns.

I hope you have enjoyed this trip through Eurotrash hehe.