Wednesday Zeitgeist

Yeah, a post. Astounding. Nothing to report except working, looking for houses (which I hate) with Crush (ah, love ...) and many and varied hare-brained plans to escape the working.

This morning I received $10 in payment for an I-Ching Reading. This is part of a hare-brained plan I have actually put into motion - I've been studying the I-Ching for years, and have actually got a fair bit of knowledge of how it all hangs together, and to be honest, I seem to be actually able to wrangle meaning and perhaps insight from it. And if Jonathan Cainer can make a living from Astrology which has no actual theoretical foundation, then the I-Ching, which actually makes sense is surely viable.

So $20 in Google Adwords later and hours of readings I made $10.

But it's a start.

• You must read Howard's Heroes: Reagan, Thatcher, John Paul II. In Quadrant, of course. That bastion of fair and balanced commentary. And by fair we mean CIA-funded and balanced we mean right-wing.
• Fuck that asshole pisses me off.
• And before you rightists take me to task, I fucking hate the "stultifying orthodoxies and dangerous utopias of Western intelligentsia" as much as anyone, but I mean, Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul? In a century with such genuine luminaries as Ghandi? For fuck's.
• The whole thing makes me wish there was a viable political alternative.
  
• I am currently obsessed with Defcon. The game of Global Thermonuclear War. Apart from stunning aesthetic style, it's an awesome game. Even if you never loved the movie WarGames, you will be terribly disturbed by Defcon.
  
• Crush was slightly taken aback after one of my submarines launched an nuclear attack that took out Seoul - "That's where Bonnie is".
• Crush is also learning me not to say nuke-u-lar.
• And it makes the recent furore over an anti-US Game released in Iran look pretty sensational.
  
• Global Guerrillas: PROPAGANDA WARS
  Why propaganda doesn’t work anymore.
• Study: Human Hands Emit Light

  Human hands glow, but fingernails release the most light, according to a recent study that found all parts of the hand emit detectable levels of light: fingernails light up more: “It may be because of the optical window property of fingernails.”
• TV to show corpse on a cross
  CHANNEL 4 is to show a human corpse hanging on a cross in a documentary that has sparked outrage from Christian groups: a “90- minute film for More4 in which Gunther von Hagens plastinates (a conservation technique) `Jesus’”.
• World doesn’t end, sect upset
  A Kenyan sect that predicted the world would end Tuesday in a nuclear war ended the day in some confusion.
• Important reminder for all us apocalypticists - don't commit to a date.
  
• Topsy the Elephant
  
• Waterboarding: I can't believe it's not torture.
  

  The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt. According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last over two minutes before begging to confess.^[4]

That's it.