- When E asked if I've seen an uptick in hits on this blog from Utah and I said yes, just in the past six months, she then smiled, I must have blanched, then I said, but none have been dot govs, then E laughed, said they're friends of ours, A turned them on to your blog, they like the music, then I laughed. A pleasure meeting E, a joy seeing A.
- E told stories of her surveillance and harassment, her treatment by OPD during Occupy. Yoinks.
- To the right of Reagan.
- The lamentable sigh of the depressed progressive.
- Joan Walsh considers today's most important story the return of Sarah Palin to Fox News.
- Opt out of PRISM.
- Finnegan's Wake, Gerald Manley Hopkins, and the NSA.
- The five uncontrollable urges of the surveillance state.
- Insubordination and the surveillance state.
- Swarming state power.
- Don't worry about the government.
- Killing the American University in five easy steps. There was much discussion at BBQ about how fucked the old University model has become, how much more fucked the new model will be.
- He saw a stranger crying in public.
- New Inquiry's Sunday links.
- A brief history of DC United's, with two exceptions, lame-ass foreign signings.
- New sites added to Newest Gag the Second, yo.
- Silliman's always generous lit-links.
- Ambiguously arthrous band names. There are time when I'm glad I'm not a linguist.
WELTENDE VARIATION #1
Bill Knott
The CIA and the KGB exchange Christmas cards
A blade snaps in two during an autopsy
The bouquet Bluebeard gave his first date reblooms
Many protest the public stoning of a guitar pick
Railroad trains drop off the bourgeois’ pointy head
A martyr sticks a coffeecup out under a firehose
Moviestars make hyenas lick their spaceship
God’s hand descends into a glove held steady by the police
At their reunion The New Faces recognize each other
A spoiled child sleeps inside a thermometer
A single misprint in a survival manual kills everyone
The peace night makes according to the world comes
Xtina's thoughts on the university post: yes, universities are awful corporatized institutions designed to create docile service-sector workers via standardized curricula and enforced debt. "Everything is the worst," she said, which is a sentence that gets bandied around the house quite often.
ReplyDeleteGod’s hand descends into a glove held steady by the police
ReplyDeletereminds me of the song "Wind of Change" by the Scorpions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohOtDA3dTAA
Our friends at Wikipedia tell us, in the article about the song: "In 2005, viewers of the German television network ZDF chose this song as the song of the century. It is the highest selling song ever in Germany, reputedly selling over 6 million copies in that country alone, and is frequently played on television shows presenting video footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Germany, it is remembered as the song of German reunification and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe."
In the article about the band, Wikipedia tells us of a controversial occasion when this song was performed: "On December 20, 2007, Scorpions played at a concert for the elite of Russia’s security forces in the Kremlin. The concert was a celebration of the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Cheka—predecessor of the KGB. The band has claimed that they thought they were performing a Christmas concert. They have said that their concert was by no means a tribute to the Cheka, communism, or Russia's brutal past. Members of the audience included Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev."
When I heard of this concert, I tried to imagine how a group of proud, loyal secret policemen might feel listening to this song, identifying with their role in helping their Leaders guide the exciting, but dangerous, transition into a New World - one world is ending (Weltende), but another one is beginning
I'm sure the folks at the NSA know the feeling