J. M. Verville

Today at about 7:30 I was standing on the corner of a street near my home. Tired, listening to Nargaroth on my iPod (really strong, dark black metal). I am waiting along with everyone else for the light to turn green for us to walk across. It does.

 I am in the second row of pedestrians and I slowly begin walking across when out of nowhere a blur of human chaos and a gigantic cracking sound goes up, immediately followed by dozens of shrieks and cries of pain.

The next thing I see there is people flying back; the scooters keep going forward a distance and a delivery boy goes flying off along with his bag of noodles. He lands on his face and doesn’t move for a while. A girl on the other scooter lays crumpled and pinned beneath it, not moving.

The girl who was right in front of me is now on her back and she slowly rises, blood trickling in a steady stream from the back of her head, staining her red & white checked shirt. I think it was vaguely ironic that the red matched the blood.

Suddenly my attention is turned to my immediate left. A woman is in shock and grabbing a bit at her foot; her entire shoe has been turn to bits and she is missing the end of one of her toes. I spot the end of the toe in the center of the street, sitting there like some morbid ornament.

I wait and observe. I do not need to offer assistance because the people who were narrowly not hit are already getting people to the side and dragging the wrecks away; I thought of calling the cops but literally every cell phone was out doing that exact thing.

Everyone by this time was conscious; the woman is not going to bled to death from her toe. A Catholic nun was already examining the back of the girl’s head. I did not bother approaching the other two people because what minimal training I had would be useless in the sense that I really do not know how to treat a head injury and the woman pinned under the scooter was not in a life/death situation; rather, she’d be fine until the ambulance got there.

I spent another 20-30 seconds staring at the partly severed toe and then I walked to the PC room.

There was a lot of blood. My bestial alarms were going off like crazy — the heart pounding, the adrenaline pumping, I was ready to do something but there was nothing to do.

When I first saw this article I originally mistread it as ‘California,’ because that would be a vaguely believable event. I found it quite shocking, though, that a region of Spain has banned bullfighting!

It’s been a long time coming, but on Wednesday, Catalonia took a historic step. With 68 votes in favor and 55 against, the Catalan parliament approved a measure that will make bullfighting illegal throughout the region.

The vote, which will make Catalonia the first region in mainland Spain to ban a tradition still referred to as the “national fiesta,” was the result of a popular initiative, launched by an association called Prou! (Catalan for Enough!) and first admitted to parliament in November 2008. In addition to banning the centuries-old sport (or art, depending on your perspective), it provides for the indemnification of those businesses — the bullring impresarios and seamstresses who specialize in capes — whose financial well-being will suffer from the ban.

Seoul in the summer is all about walking five minutes to the subway and becoming sweaty in the humid, impossible heat;  then you sit on a subway for 45 minutes and your sweat freezes, causing you to become cold. You unthaw within 3 minutes of going outside and search for a bathroom so you can apply your portable spray-on deodorant for the 2nd time.

The streets sometimes smell of rotting kimchi if you live in a nice area; if you live in a poor area, they always smell of rotting kimchi and you have to keep all your windows open and your fans on. Red, rusted iron algea spits up from your shower drain once or twice a day and makes your room smell like a sewer while you spend the day in your bath robe because you cannot cool your house down enough to wear clothes and your neighbors live with windows facing yours.

When you are poor the greatest thing is the cheap ice cream at corner stores and the cheapest way to pass a Saturday afternoon is in a park with some mates drinking beer and soju that becomes warm before you can properly enjoy it. Sometimes you go to soccer or baseball games or sit out by the river, awkwardly staring at it.

If you are lucky, you will become partially nocturnal to avoid the heat.

I find myself yearning, already, for the Fall. Korea is most beautiful in the Fall — the trees really light up and the mountains are beautiful to climb in. The scenery can be breathtaking and after the great, wet, hot summer there is nothing better than the cool breezes of October. Some might say Spring is more beautiful because of the cherry blossoms but, really, it is harder to find a cherry blossom tree just chilling in any, old neighborhood.

But it’s not so bad — Korean women have little modesty when it comes to their legs and we can see this in all of its glory each time we venture onto the streets.

But more than that, the most important thing is just the cold, cold beer on a summer afternoon and that really slow, dilapidated feeling you get when you are buzzing just right in a euphoric state while you can smell the pork cooking.

The summer heat is an extreme and there is something great about finding out ways to balance that extreme and to use that extreme to your advantage.

It isn’t so bad.

I just saw some pictures of Laos; I think that it would be nice to end your life there. In the tropical heat, a nice chair in a stinky, sweaty city to sit on and drink your morning coffee. Vodka in the evening, coffee in the morning; heat, heat, heat all day to make you sweat and lubricate your thoughts that slip in and out of your mind.

Or a nice beach in Vietnam or Thailand or maybe France or Norway or, hell, Vladivostok or Cote D’Ivoire or Mexico or South Carolina. Just beaches, waves crashing sometimes and waves gently lapping the sand sometimes. Just thoughts, thoughts, thoughts and morning coffee and evening vodka.

I am drunk all the time. There are three modes: Verv working to get money so he can get drunk, Verv getting drunk and drunken Verv. This is not a sin and this is not negative. This is just philosophy. This is the brain loosened and massaged into a state where everything slips out smoothly and falls out of my fingers onto the computer screen.  People do not understand this and perhaps I do not understand it, and perhaps I am wrong right now, but that is also irrelevent.

I’d like to be a writer. I get drunk every night so every morning my thoughts unfurl and unfold with little to no effort. Ave Maria on the computer (just like right now). (If a brain has juice, I bet it would be a lot like the juice that spills off of a steak and I bet a brain would be very delicious to eat if you didn’t know it was a brain but the texture would still not be that good, maybe, and nothing is as good as beef).

I want to plant my seed in a woman and watch it grow because I think coming full circle in life is reproduction. I also think my Dad was a pretty good philosopher, and I am a good philosopher, and dads should be philosophers. Philosophy, love of knowledge, isn’t that the greatest gift to give?

If you have philosophy then even when you suffer you can enjoy it and treat it as a lesson. If you have philosophy you can smile widely when you are in Hell. Hell is others. Philosophy is self.

The greatest gift, then, is knowledge. But maybe music is better. Maybe we can all agree: the greatest gift, then, is knowledgable music contained in a case with a really nice, aesthetically pleasing cover.

Now I drink morning coffee, evening soju. One day, I want to not work so I can drink liquor in my morning coffee. Perpetual state of buzzing and thinking.

Yesterday someone I really enjoy and admire told me I drink too much and was concerned that I would die young. It put some things in perspective. Perhaps I won’t live to have my reward.

But for now, we do not have to worry about that. We’ll worry about it later.

Now, we will just think about the Ocean, the morning coffee, the evening vodka, the music and the philosophy.

Everything else is irrelevent.

This article sums up the illegitimacy of this news network:

MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski admitted on air this morning that she was repeating White House talking points she had been advised to include in the channel’s news programming regarding the ongoing BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Morning Joe co-host was repeatedly seen looking down and carefully studying written notes as she engaged in a debate with former GE CEO Jack Welch, an outspoken critic of the government’s reaction to the disaster.

In response to each portion of Welch’s analysis, Brzezinski poured over the notes and read allowed from the script in front of her, defending the government’s response.

When it became blatantly obvious what Brzezinski was doing, Joe Scarborough jumped in:

“you keep reading these… you keep reading these… these…”

“White House talking points.” said Brzezinski, finishing his sentence.

“You keep reading these talking points,” Scarborough continued, “but there is no evidence whatsoever, from looking through all the evidence, that they had from the very beginning, that they had for the first 56 days a concerted plan and a war room to fix this.”

I am not surprised that this has happened and I think it is certainly progress in the region to do such. I look forward to the greater normalization of relations so that meaningful dialog at one point can be done.

It has been dangerous to further radicalize the Palestinians, potentially, with such an embargo.

JERUSALEM — Israel’s deputy defence minister claimed on Monday that the easing of the Gaza blockade the government has announced would end up strengthening Hamas, the Palestinian territory’s Islamist rulers.

“There is no doubt that the decision to allow the entry of more goods into the Gaza Strip will indirectly help Hamas strengthen its power,” Matan Vilnai told public radio.

“Everything that enters Gaza comes under the control of Hamas,” he added.

Israel has announced the easing of the blockade it first imposed in 2006 when Gaza militants kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, and tightened one year later when Hamas seized power in the coastal strip.

It said it would allow the import of strictly “civilian” goods, but will restrict “problematic dual-use” items — thought to include construction materials which Israel says can be used to build rockets and bunkers.

AFP

This merely illustrates a trend in Europe that has been going on for a decade or more — people are realizing the longterm problems with mass immigration. There are social and economic issues that effect every aspect of the lives of the people and now in countries everywhere from Britain to Austria we are seeing very conservative parties enjoy success.

This should act as a sort of wake up call:

In times of economic crisis where the domestic citizens are suffering it is inappropriate to not totally reform the system that is in place. t will only serve to to exacerbate the local populace.

For a long time, the far left has enjoyed plastering anything that is of the nature of ‘anti-immigration’ as racist; well, they are now failing in their efforts to poison the well as the voters are not falling for it.

Everyone has a right to their political opinions and not be demonized for them.

Geert Wilders’ PVV won the most in the election. Wilders, who is internationally known for his unequivocal criticism of Islam, went from 9 to 24 seats in parliament. While he ran a muted campaign and polls predicted he would barely double his seats, Wilders proved especially popular in the south-east of the country. His growing following there is part of the reason the Christian democratic party of incumbent prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende was halved at the polls. The CDA lost 20 of its 41 seats and will now be the fourth party in Dutch parliament.

NRC

This is when the absurdity of modern life comes full circle:

Two men who plotted to kill thousands of Britons in a terrorist atrocity cannot be deported because it would infringe their human rights, a court ruled yesterday.

Al Qaeda operative Abid Naseer and his accomplice Ahmad Faraz Khan were planning a ‘mass casualty attack’, probably against shoppers at the Arndale Centre in Manchester over the Easter holiday last year.

But judges said Naseer, 24, and 26-year-old Faraz Khan - who came to Britain as students - should not be sent back to Pakistan because of the risk they could be tortured.

Daily Mail

It is rather impressive… Naturally, I think these guys should serve a lengthy sentence in Britain and be sent home regardless of what awaits them.

When you plot to massacre civilians do you really deserve rights that were originally created for human beings? It is inhumane if you deport a person who would face torture and death in a foreign country for some offense like drug use, but this is completely another.

If I went to a foreign country and plotted to bomb their people I would consider myself quite fortunate to not be being tortured there.

Thought is a lifelong process and an on going project for each thinker. I am not sure how other people think so I can only analyze my own thought.

I have noticed three distinct stages that seem to rotate endlessly: Idealism, Skepticism & Reformed Idealism. This could theoretically correspond to ‘thesis, antithesis and synthesis’ but these phrases seem cold, scientific and alien. I do not want to go to bed with these words — they would not warm my bed.

Not only does the individual thought go through the idealism, skeptic analysis and then reformation, but even in our life we have stages where all of our thoughts on a topic for a few days, or a few years, or a few decades are idealistic or they are skeptical before we reach our reformation. One can point towards the fact that there are many youth who are very idealistic on some topics — many extremist movements are defined by their youthfulness.

Our thought process is dualistic not necessarily because we believe in the scientific method so strongly and must test our ideals (though this is part of it), but also because of our basic human emotions.

We fall in love with an idea, and then we use logic to justify it; we fall out of love with an idea, and then we use logic to bash it. And finally, when we are done bashing it, we sometimes float back to this simple ideal once again and realize what our errors were and we proceed to tweak it into something better once again.

This is good. This is human. This warms the bed.

I would like to point out something about Taoism.

The Chinese character for Tao is 道; the character for Tao indicates a path; the character itself is of a dude holding his chin while walking a path. The guy is thinking about something pretty hard… And why does such a character have that meaning? Well, this is not an empty character. We know exactly where he is walking from, where he is walking currently, and we know where he wants to go.

He started walking away from a point that is referred to as Ahn (安); ahn means comfort. Ahn represents civilization, society, family. In order for him to gain enlightenment.

The man is now walking in a place we refer to as Yaman ( 野蠻 ); yaman is the state of barbarism. It is man living in tribe like communities, illiterate and separated from all of civilization. It is necessary for man to walk through this place and to understand it in order for him to understand himself.

When man has learned what civilization is, and then has learned what barbarism and the ‘natural state’ is, he reaches his goal and has become more or less ‘enlightened.’ But we should not use the word enlightenment — it has a Buddhist connotation. The highly technical and pretentious word that the Taoists use for this place can be translated as ‘goal’ or ‘objective.’

This is quite similar to our thought process: we start out with something fake, idealized, not fully understood; something that is fundamentally alien to man because we cannot attain it. This pathetic excuse for a thought, this dreamworld, this Lord Of The Rings is our civilization, our society.

When we reach the ultimate goal we are no longer in idealism, and we are no longer in skepticism; we have a better idea.

We are no longer civilized, but neither are we completely barbarian. We are much like the Manchus or the Won dynasty: sure, we rule China, we rule civilization, but we do not mix with the civilization in the same way.

Did you know that after the Ming dynasty, when the Manchus took over, they used the Great Wall [i]in reverse?[/i] The wall was no longer there to [i]keep barbarians out of China. It was there to keep the civilized Chinese out of their barbarian lands.[/i]

The Manchus actually wanted to keep out civilization — they saw how the Chinese lived, and they decided they would rather be the various bad names that the Chinese called them than become Chinese themselves.

This is where we can look at the concept of the Noble Savage that J.-J. Rousseau gave us: there is a certain enlightened nature to the more primitive aspects of humanity. They are not corrupted by civilization. Even Christ once told us that we must [i]believe like little children.[/i] A child and a noble savage are not entirely unlike one another: neither have yet been corrupted by the forces of society. We must leav civilization to achieve this purity.

It is also worth drawing the parallel in Buddhism of Ibsan (入山) which literally means ‘to enter the mountains.’ This is synonymous with becoming a Buddhist monk. The mountains are the only lands around civilized places that allow one to be isolated — to be freed from the influences of the world.

There are of course practical considerations that we have to make, but I think we do need to learn a lesson from our thought process:

We become better, stronger, superior people if we put everything through a skeptic phase of destruction; we have to make an antithesis on our whole society and civilization itself.

When we build a newer, better building we do not build it on top of an older building; we tear down the old building and we start from scratch.

So now, we have to burn our Rome; we have to get in our Drakar ships and raid the coasts of Normandy. We have to get on our horses and find the weak point in the wall, and then we must kill every living thing that stands in our way, steal everything that we can carry and set fire to everything that we cannot.

After we’ve done this to our ideals, we will have set a fine layer of soot on the ground in which much can grow our reformed ideals.

And then we are neither civilized nor are we purely barbarians; we are Rulers. We have our civilization, and we have our society, but we are not fully part of it, nor do we want to be part of it. This is the goal.

We conquer our ideals and then we live above our ideals — our ideals are newly grown and changed, and they are better, but we are still not a part of them; we are like the Manchus trying to keep the ideals from coming over the wall so that we can keep ourselves pure. Our ideals are there merely because we personally can gain some insight from them, but we rule them, and we keep them separate from us.

This is the point at which we know we have achieved a good conclusion.

This is something that one would have certainly expected more from the Bush administration. What are the ramifications? Many.

Attorney General Eric Holder said for the first time today on ABC’s “This Week” that the Obama administration is open to modifying Miranda protections to deal with the “threats that we now face.”

“The [Miranda] system we have in place has proven to be effective,” Holder told host Jake Tapper. “I think we also want to look and determine whether we have the necessary flexibility — whether we have a system that deals with situations that agents now confront. … We’re now dealing with international terrorism. … I think we have to give serious consideration to at least modifying that public-safety exception [to the Miranda protections]. And that’s one of the things that I think we’re going to be reaching out to Congress, to come up with a proposal that is both constitutional, but that is also relevant to our times and the threats that we now face.”

America’s system of Miranda rights developed out of a 1966 Supreme Court ruling which found that the Fifth Amendment and Sixth Amendment rights of an alleged rapist and kidnapper, Ernesto Arturo Miranda, had been violated during his arrest and trial (Miranda was later retried and convicted).

Huffington Post

In a way, I could see how some on the Left would feel betrayed by this move as, naturally, the Democrats have claimed to be the protectors of these sorts of rights. It was the big, bad republicans trying to blow the house of cards down on their heads.

In the future they will be remembered for this controversy.