iWaste and MyCorp: The Corporate Cult of Anti-Sustainability

We have a new banner quote up, and I offered a clue on it in Tuesday's post. The only other hint I'll add is that it's from a book published 40 years ago. Amazing, isn't it? Doesn't it seem like it might have been something from a recent bio-piece on Bush, Cheney, or Rumsfeld? We'll have more about it on Friday.

Amnesty International is having a membership drive this month. I'm a member, and I encourage anyone who longs for some greater measure of peace and justice on this planet to join now. Why now? Here's AI's explanation, from Larry Cox, the Exec. Director of AIUSA:

It's astonishing how dramatically and quickly things have changed. Our America - once a beacon to the world and the standard bearer for human rights - is now a major perpetrator of human rights abuses.

Take a moment to read that sentence again - and let it sink in.

Ten years ago, if you had told me what was down the road, I would have shrugged in disbelief. But today, Amnesty needs committed human rights defenders like you more than ever.

Next, a follow up to our Geek Wednesday piece yesterday, in which I bashed Apple again over the iPod, which I think is in the same class of dysfunctionality as MS Windows. In an article in Mother Jones, Giles Slade details the cult of disposability that has grown around the iPod and its product ilk, and the threat this poses to our planet.

Yes, the secret is out. After 13 months of heavy use, the lithium-ion battery of the iPod can lose more than half of its functionality. You'll find that even though you recharge more often, your iPod can fade out by the end of a long day. Simply put, even though an iPod can cost you $350, these digital music players are designed to be disposable.

Perhaps even more simply put, we are a culture that has forgotten how to make music; we only know how to consume it. In the piece that follows, I've tried to indicate some of the forces behind that mistake, so that we can the more easily and quickly clear them out of ourselves.
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MyCorp: Corporate America and the Pandering of Ambivalence

Healing is, by definition, transformation: something new, fresh, and regenerative grows to replace death, malignant division, and corruption. What is true of bodily cells is also true of institutions like government and corporations.

Immediately after 9/11, corporate America (like the government) had a golden opportunity to make some internal changes that would naturally become manifest in a global transformation of its values and behavior. These changes could have moved our society forward in a quantum leap of growth and well-being for all. In other words, they could have helped us all to heal, by beginning the work of healing themselves.

But instead, the cry went out—from politicians, corporate leaders, and an answering chorus of media pundits—for a return to "normalcy." By this was meant, "let's all hit the switch of our treadmill and get back to the round of accumulation and denial." The politicians brazenly ordered us to go shopping; the investors cried for an ideologically contrived bull market; the corporate kingpins and the media cheerleaders urged us to get back to work, just as we had done before.

It was, in short, a return to the same old grind. No changes were made to the structure of the workday; the sardine commute in big cities; the herd mentality of indentured servitude and consumption (conspicuous or otherwise); or the general cult of conformity. The only clear changes visible were an increased militarization of the corporate workplace, again particularly in urban areas. We saw several obvious signs of purely outer change, viz:

◆ There was ramped-up security: barriers, guards, cameras, fences, dogs, and other marks of institutional vigilance sprang up around our workplaces.
◆ There were "forced troop movements" among the workforce in America. Many workers were made to relocate or transfer to new offices, often in more remote areas that provided significant financial savings for the corporation. Needless to say, none of this money was ever shared with the inconvenienced workers.
◆ Also in the name of security, more invasive protocols for worker identification were speedily executed (it was almost as if they had been on the drawing board for some time already). Fingerprinting, face recognition technology, and vigilantly granular background checks, complete with urine drug testing, were forced upon both current and new workers in corporate America.

Lots of changes: a re-ordering of the furniture, the cubicles, of our working nation; but not the slightest evidence of a transformation of principle, a fundamental change of attitude. Everything that was done was a superficial, defensive response that, far from bringing anyone a feeling of protection, actually elevated the anxiety level of all. This, after all, was not a "return to normalcy"; it was the introduction of a police state, with a focus on the American workplace.

Meanwhile, the marketing division of corporate America realized that, in the midst of this iron descent of rigid uniformity and hypervigilance, there must be some positive reinforcement offered to a confused and alarmed populace. So they brought us an ingenious advertising campaign devoted to the person in the context of his place within the group. This was necessary to make us feel better about ourselves, and to give us some superficial sense of our individuality even amid the oppressive lockstep march of forced conformity. They invented a new consumer cult of "My": My Points, My Bank, My Card, My News, My Team, and, of course, myspace.

This, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with the individual; it does not speak to each person's true self, but rather to a group self: the pebble in the concrete block. The campaign is the corporate marketing department's grudging nod to individuality, even as it promotes and enriches the Corporate Person. Thus, the various financial incentives offered as "my" rewards/points/cards/etc. are in truth created to further a culture of consumption beyond both need and means. The information that is delivered as "my" news/weather/sports/sites/etc. is really a spin-washed veneer of pabulum.

It should come as no surprise, then, that we remain trapped inside thickening cages of accumulation, beneath a revolving, gleaming white monument of debt. Nor should it shock us that, years after 9/11 and the beginning of the Iraq War, significant percentages of Americans still believed that Iraqis had committed the atrocities of 9/11 and that Osama bin Laden was an intimate ally of Saddam Hussein's: this is what the cult of "my news" had fed them. This vein of the info-advertising culture has seeped into the very buildings of corporate America, in the form of the news screens visible in many elevators—the muzak of the information age.

Meanwhile, myspace.com is an artificially personalized web portal that beckons to youth at its main entrance, even as it opens its back door wide to sexual predators, pornographers, and the other corporately-approved agents of consumption and titillation. Believe me, if there were a true will on the part of myspace to stop this infection of our teens, the technology is there; it could have been easily done. But where would be the profit in that?

So is it time to resort to further government regulation of such sites? Will that solve the problem, or simply redirect the energies of the poison-pushers into other avenues of infestation? Before we answer, we should be clear about the dilemma that our corporate culture has forced upon our children.

Most kids are taught principles of frugality and thrift from an early age: a penny saved...waste not...and the like. As they grow, however, they are welcomed into the culture of consumption: more is better, bigger is better, the more you get, the more you save. To have a "mycard" or "mypoints" is to have a "mylife." And who would want to miss out on life?

Or again: kids are taught principles of moderation, restraint, and even some measure of contempt for their bodies and bodily functions; and then they are fed into the cult of the extreme, the self-indulgent, even the perverse, by our advertising-rich media. If your sports and games aren't "extreme" (as in extremely dangerous), then you're a wimp; if you aren't covered with the chemical body-washes, toxic makeup, tattoos, and garish, faux-ghetto clothing that is all over the TV and myspace, then you just don't get it, you're lame.

If you are sensing a forced ambivalence here, a conflict-by-design, then you have arrived at the black heart that beats within the corporate troll; the fuel that runs the massive machinery of corporate America. This is the heart we have to cut out of ourselves; the force we must reject; this is what we have to deprogram from within ourselves, as true individuals. In a future piece, I will offer some suggestions on how this may be done; but the real answer lies, already formed and waiting, within yourself.

Geek Wednesday: Geeks 1, McCain 0

I thought this was an April Fool's gag when I first saw it, but it was for real. John McCain was hitting Newsvine founder Mike Davidson's myspace page for bandwidth and content. So Mike let the Senator have it by making a slight alteration on the image that McCain's geeks were stealing (click graphic to enlarge). The whole story is well told in this DK post, and in Mike's own words.

Senator, I hope you've learned something: when you steal a geek's bandwidth, you're hitting below the belt. And believe me, geeks know how to get back, good and sharp. Don't mess.

Speaking of April Fool's Day, Google's this year was not quite up to its usual sophistication. The toilet WiFi thing just didn't do it for me—not like the interplanetary search station job posting of a couple years back. But those clever astro-geeks at APOD had me fooled for a second: imagine, Quidditch in outer space!


So, what's big in geekdom this week? Yeah, yeah, Steve's made a deal with EMI on DRM-free music. I wish I could get as wet in the panties as the mass media are becoming over this, but I just can't, I'm sorry.

Now the rumors of a June Leopard release date, I can get interested in. The WWDC is the week of 6/11, so if TS is on target with its info (which isn't always so), then there's the time you can figure on seeing the Leopard stalk Vista.


By the way, can you guess where the graphic above came from? All those white guys staring up at something as if it were God (kind of like the drones in the famous Apple 1984 ad, recently (in)famous for its transformation into anti-Hillary propaganda)? It's from the WWDC website banner. It reinforces something I've talked to my daughter about: the world needs more girl geeks, desperately (and more Black, Hispanic, and Native American geeks). That's why projects like Ubuntu Linux and the MIT $100 laptop are so critical: we can't have this monochromatic, one-gender melody to our technology song. There has got to be real diversity brought to geekdom, within the next generation, or we'll just wind up with more overpriced garbage like Windows and the iPod. And that's no April Fool's.

Until then, however, the Mac is still the best hardware platform for your geek needs, if you want great graphics delivered on a beautiful display with crisp performance. Now that CS3 is out, Photoshop is Mactel-compliant at last, which leaves one more big animal left to bring into the universal binary zoo. Apparently, MS is in beta with Office for Mac 2008, which will be fully UB and ready for release by the end of this year.


I found another OS that's worth a close look in MEPIS Linux. This is Ubuntu with a touch of Windows-style interface in the GUI and some additional sophistication. If you're used to Win2k or XP as your OS of choice but want to try Linux, you may be pleased with what you see in MEPIS. Note the Start menu-style look and feel in the screen capture at left (click to enlarge). I ordered the MEPIS 32-bit disc (it cost all of $17) and installed it onto the Wintel machine here, an older Gateway P4 with a 1.3 GHz processor, 640MB of RAMBUS RAM, and an nVidia 128MB video card. MEPIS ran G-Part, the Linux partition manager, and let me set up a Linux partition without harming the existing XP partition. Then it installed effortlessly and without incident. It actually configured the video card better than Ubuntu had, perhaps by finding a better driver for my nVidia card. I haven't gotten to try Red Hat yet, but I've seen Suse a little and used Ubuntu a lot; and I have to say that MEPIS is the most efficient and versatile flavor of Linux I've seen yet.

GW Site of the Week

This one's a beauty: Fecalface.com is a truly creative site, resplendent with such a diversity of art and life that you could easily spend an hour there and not have enough. I found this photo at their photo-of-the-day section (click to enlarge). Great design, marvelous use of Flash media, strange and inspiring stuff all the time. Bookmark it and check it out regularly. This is the web at its very finest—John Trippe and company, take a long bow.

And now for your punishment: I was throwing out some old notebooks the other day and found a piece I'd written for my Life Lessons in a Time of War book, which never made it in there. It was meant to be a prose poem for geeks. Well, it would be a waste to just toss it in the garbage, so I'll do the next best thing. You can stop reading now.

Whoever told you that your work is about nothing more than zeroes and ones—a binary treadmill—throw him out the window of your mind.

Hear the voice that tells you that technology is about the manipulation of machines and data—and then silence it.

What is the purpose of 0 without 1? What need have you of hardware without software? Can your heart beat with just one ventricle?

Thus, these things are not opposites. Opposition is a delusion, the fable of drunken old men who rape little boys and write sawdust pages about their priestly sanctity. Turn within and kill them, shut them up for good.

The cult of opposition is a lie. Complementarity is real, because it is alive. Truth is only fleeting, never fixed or eternal. Truth and untruth; zero and one; these are the lungs that absorb and process the air of love, squeezing its nourishing essence and sending it outward to the world.

So whether you write poetry or javascript, you must love the medium you do it in. Tell the computer that you love it, and it will no longer be a machine.

Chocolate Balls of Jesus

I'm working a block away from the Roger Smith Hotel, where a new exhibit was to open today at their well-known art gallery. You may have heard or read some of the buzz about the Chocolate Jesus and the Church's successful efforts to kill the exhibit. It appears the Catholic hierarchy has more important things to do than investigate its own cadre of child molesters and rapists. Nope: they've got to start a campaign against anyone showing Jesus' dick.

So here's some news for the bloviating Catholics: Jesus had balls, and so did lots of other gods throughout religious history. If I believed that god was a human, I'd want to get to know every inch of Him, wouldn't you? Damn, I'd want to know what God's asshole looked and felt like, too.

But god doesn't have an asshole, nor any genitalia that we'd recognize as such. Pan (above left) did, and so did Bes (right). They, too, were the work of imagination and visual metaphor, just like Jesus. But the cultures that spawned these gods had no FOX News commentators or hypocritical Cardinals to suppress artistic imagery.

By the way, guess what else—I found this page, which is loaded with pics from Christian iconography featuring some pretty well hung guys, including "Saint Priapus."

That this sort of oppressive censorship is happening in the cultural capital of the world, under the guiding hand of Cardinal Egan, is mildly sickening.

But the true believers are getting a little uncomfortable these days, with bestselling authors like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris around. Pastor Rick Warren recently challenged the latter to a debate, which had some amusing highlights. Here's one:

RICK WARREN: I see the fingerprints of God everywhere. I see them in culture. I see them in law. I see them in literature. I see them in nature. I see them in my own life. Trying to understand where God came from is like an ant trying to understand the Internet. Even the most brilliant scientist would agree that we only know a fraction of a percent of the knowledge of the universe.

Yep, Pastor Rick, yer right. Religion is a lot like the Internet. The Bible is the original proto-blog; televangelism is like really loud spam; and the Torah is kind of like Internet Explorer, what with all those rules and the potential for malware attacks at every turn. When I consider the world's religions, I often feel like my spiritual IP address keeps changing; and who can deny an insidious connection between the Old Testament and myspace.com?
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Now here's a story that doesn't mind being dirty. For while MC Rove sanitizes everything he touches, spinning deceit and corruption into pristeen, germ-free truth; and while those Catholics raise their kids to be Easter-Sunday perfect (cleanliness is next to godliness); science is pointing us in another direction: it's good for you to get dirty.

Exposure to dirt may be a way to lift mood as well as boost the immune system, UK scientists say.

Lung cancer patients treated with "friendly" bacteria normally found in the soil have anecdotally reported improvements in their quality of life.

Mice exposed to the same bacteria made more of the brain's "happy" chemical serotonin, the Bristol University authors told the journal Neuroscience.

Common antidepressants work by boosting this brain chemical.

I am reminded of a comment I heard from an old RN with whom I worked many years ago: "Bacteria aren't evil, Brian, they're just doing their jobs."
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Finally today, a tribute to a man who is arguably the world's greatest living writer. I remember getting chills on reading the first few pages of 100 Years of Solitude, and again for Love in the Time of Cholera. Happy 80th, Senor Marquez.

Monday with McKenna: The NeoCon Threat to Good Government

It's been a couple of weeks since we last heard from Mr. Terry McKenna, and I'm sure you've had more than your fill of my New Age nonsense. Therefore, without further prologue, Monday with McKenna:


This week my topic is the Bush Administration’s attack on America’s history of open and honest government. But first, and by way of introduction, a couple of brief comments.

George Bush continues to trumpet alternative fuel vehicles as an answer to our over-consumption of oil.

Comment: NO, asshole, we need to mandate fuel economy, not a switch to a different carbon based fuel source.*

George Bush, John McCain, Joe Lieberman and the rest of the war mongers believe that setting a date for withdrawal is announcing the date of our defeat.

Comment: We have already lost this one. Neither are we surrendering to Iraq – they didn’t conquer us: if we leave, we are just LEAVING.

BushCo and the Assault on Good Government

America at its heart has been a very successful experiment in self-government. There are lots of reasons for this, one being the entry of millions of energetic Europeans and Asians to a vast and under populated** land full of rich soil and mineral wealth. Another is the absence of a ruling class of petty nobles and landlords who in other societies have been empowered to exact rents and other restrictions upon commerce. Thus, citizens have been able to engage in commercial activity with much less interference than almost anywhere else. We expect our public officials to behave fairly, and for the most part - except when it involves contracts to provide goods or services to the government itself – they do. Building permits, licenses and all manner of government activities are carried out for the genuine public interest. Town engineers practice engineering in a professional manner; geological surveys are genuine; and our national weather service provides solid and sound weather information. By and large, American civil servants have no agenda but to provide service. (To Chomsky-ites, followers of Howard Zinn and old leftists who dote on America’s failures, you are right as far as it goes, but so what—in the scheme of things, America is as good as many and better than most. Fairer as a whole than nations like Russia, China or Zimbabwe, and not quite as fair as places like Sweden and Norway.)

Oh yes, to those who say we are a nation of laws and not men – hogwash! Just think of Iraq and its constitution. Or of the UN and its numerous covenants and protocols. Suffice it to say that it takes a lot more than a signed document to generate a civil society or to inspire good behavior.

Starting with the New Deal, Congress created agencies that took on various roles that conservatives claimed were properly left to the states or to the people. The Supreme Court also took on a more activist role to re-make America into the free land implied by our founding documents. When a conservative president was finally elected after a space of five decades (with the election of Ronald Reagan), conservatives decided to use the executive branch to destroy programs that they were unable to attack directly.

Thus, Reagan appointed James G Watt – an avowed opponent of federal conservation programs, to manage the Department of the Interior. Reaganites especially hated environmental laws, housing programs, the Department of Education and the enforcement of civil rights laws. But Reagan operated before the flowering of modern Right Wing think tanks, so his efforts were not as focused as those today.

Enter Bush II (Really Ronald Reagan II) and cadres of trained right wing professionals, each ready to speak the newspeak of corporate evasion and to hide their mission, which was to bend federal programs into supporting the right wing policy arm - actually, anti-policy arm, since the right wing has no real policy, just newspeak meant to build a consensus against policy. Gail Norton at the Department of the Interior was one example. She was a protégé of James G. Watt and built her career setting up what are known as astro turf groups*** with a fake environmental agenda. And think of the FDA. This formerly proud servant of public health was shaped into an instrument of conservative Christianity when it stalled the approval of the morning after pill.

In almost all spheres of activity, officials have switched from serving the American people to serving the president. Thus Treasury lied to the nation about the cost of the Bush tax cuts; and the Defense Department lied about the cost of the Iraq folly. And when they are not lying to us, the feds are simple nincompoops like Brownie.

So Alberto Gonzalez’s lies are not surprising. The entire executive is bathed in deceit.

But are we ready to conclude that the future is lost too? I don’t think so. At the local level, our civil servants still serve us honestly. And Democrats by and large believe in the government that they serve, but we won’t know how they will act until they win back the White House, which they surely will do in 2008.

And before I go, an expression of thanks to the hospitality of San Francisco and the surrounding towns within northern California. I just returned from a seven day trip to California, my first ever. Now I understand what led many of my generation to extend their stays in this strange but attractive land.

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*If you think ethanol is a solution, then please read up about the cost of raising the corn necessary to produce it. The net energy yield is close to zero. And for those interested in sugar instead (especially as produced in Brazil) the yield and costs are better, but the bad news is, the Brazilians use slave indigenous labor to clear the Amazon jungle in order to get open land for sugar can.

**Yes, I know that North America was populated by millions of what used to be called Indians, but after the European settlements had been established, disease and warfare (especially disease) so shrunk the existing population that the later immigrants felt they were entering a virgin land.

***Astro Turf groups are funded by industry, or sometimes by wealthy right wing zealots (for example, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Move America Forward, and Focus on the Family). They are named to sound friendly, but beware, they have a mission and are to be feared.

—T. McKenna

A Word (with Music) From the Cat

Yeah, yeah, look at the video of the cute kitty playing the piano (and probably making her people some serious cash). Well, this is Night the Cat again, back at the blog with you. I'm not much of a musician; I'm a blogging cat.

I've got one reminder today for you humans: you can poison yourselves all you want with your mass-produced, factory-farmed, environmentally-destructive, genetically-modified food. Go ahead: drive yourselves to extinction with that crap. BUT LEAVE US OUT OF IT.

You know what I'm talking about by now: you people have made poisoned garbage and are killing us with it. Enough, Bast damn it!

You're on a highway to hell, people—you know that, don't you? Wherever it is you think you're going—to the Rapture, or Nirvana, or 72 Virgin Lane, or Yahweh's Big House—just remember, we animals don't want to be there with you. And anyway, I hear they don't allow pets in Heaven. So keep your poisons to yourselves, and leave us animals alone.


Now I've got some napping to do. The guy will be back again on Monday. Meanwhile, you people think about what I told you—go sit on a windowsill and see if some answers start to form in your dim human minds. What d'ya wanna die for? Craziest species I've ever encountered—you make the dogs seem like sages by comparison. I'm only telling you this because, by and large, we animals like you guys. Maybe we ought to have our heads examined for it, but that's the truth. Wake up, people.