Of the many shocking stories to emerge from the Orange diocese’s recently released personnel files, one is likely to resonate worldwide: the pope knew that Catholic priests were accused of molesting Orange County children as early as 1987 -- and apparently did nothing to stop the scandal.

He wasn't the only one who knew. Remember Sinead O'Connor on SNL? She was one of the few people who had the guts to renounce the man for his complicity in such matters, and it pretty much ended her career. And guess what, the new one is no better; in fact, he's probably even worse. But because he's given the title of "holiness" by a building full of similarly corrupt old men, the public will overlook it.

They cover a lot of ground in this one.

On the notion of time:

JZ: Among the North American Pawnee it was said that life has a rhythm but not a progression. Primitive peoples generally have no interest in birthdays or measuring their ages. As for the future, they have little desire to control what does not yet exist, just as they have little desire to control nature. That moment-by-moment joining with the flux and flow of the natural world of course doesn’t preclude an awareness of the seasons, but this in no way constitutes an alienated time consciousness that robs them of the present. What I’m talking about is really hard for us to wrap our minds around, because the notion of time has been so deeply inculcated that it’s sometimes hard to imagine it not existing.

DJ: You’re not talking about just not measuring seconds. . . .

JZ: I’m talking about time not existing. Time, as an abstract continuing "thread" that unravels in an endless progression that links all events together while remaining independent of them. That doesn’t exist. Sequence exists. Rhythm exists. But not time. Part of this has to do with the notion of mass production and division of labor. Tick, tick, tick, as you said. Identical seconds. Identical people. Identical chores repeated endlessly. Well, no two occurrences are identical, and if you are living in a stream of inner and outer experience that constantly brings clusters of new events, each moment is quantitatively and qualitatively different than the moment before. The notion of time simply disappears.

On technology:

DJ: Let’s talk more about technology. Isn’t technology just driven by curiosity?

JZ: You hear people say this all the time: "You can’t put the genie back in the bottle"; "You’re asking people to forget." Stuff like that. But that’s just another attempt to naturalize the craziness. And it’s a variant of that same old racist intelligence argument. Because the Hopi didn’t invent backhoes, they must not be curious. Sure, people are naturally curious. But about what? Did you or I aspire to create the neutron bomb? Of course not. That’s crazy. Why would people want to do that in the first place? They don’t. But the fact that I don’t want to create a neutron bomb doesn’t mean I’m not curious. Curiosity is not value free. Certain types of curiosity arise from certain types of mindsets, and our own "curiosity" follows the logic of alienation, not simple wonder, not learning something to become a better person. Our "curiosity," taken as a whole, leads us in the direction of further domination.

DJ: We may try to make better mousetraps -- more efficient ways to kill small rodents -- but I don’t see us working real hard to stop rape, child abuse, or global warming. Strange, the things we apply this much-vaunted curiosity to. Also, I think about friends. I want to learn about them so we can be better friends, not so I can utilize them more efficiently.

On tactics:

DJ: when is violence appropriate? My belief also is that this isn’t the most basic question. The question I would ask is: to what depth do we feel the destruction in our bodies? I have on my wall a news clipping headlined "Mother bear charges trains." I keep it because if we’re able to perceive the situation deeply enough in our bodies -- like the mother grizzly who charges the train that killed her cubs -- we will know precisely what to do. She didn’t go into theoretical discussions of right and wrong; her response was embodied.

JZ: And it’s the same for people who hate their jobs. If they would just reenter their bodies, they would know what they need to do.

With all the people in this house that have been playing Everquest lately, this story seemed somehow relevant. It's crazy, man!

A well-known company, running a massive multi-player virtual world, was considering adding a new space to their world. Due to the nature of the space, characters there would probably want to make music. So the programmers created a set of virtual musical instruments, and tools for players to create their own instruments. The plan was that players would get virtual instruments and make music, for all of the reasons people make music in the real world.

But management nixed the idea, on advice from lawyers, because of concerns about copyright infringement. The problem was that players might use their virtual instruments to play copyrighted songs, and the game company might be sued for contributory or vicarious copyright infringement, for failing to prevent this.

Tonight, I made experimental pasta and cheese sauce for supper, which Yanthor and Anya both thought was really good. Yanthor requested that I post the recipe for the sauce.

The megafest commenced on Wednesday night. I arrived on the scene at 22:30 CDT to find that I was the first guest, and proceeded to setup Argo. Jaeger, Kiesa, Humblik, and Linknoid arrived a few minutes later. We watched the premiere of Jaeger's video of the previous megafest, and went to bed.

I still have no idea. What an insanely bizarre movie. Everybody has a theory. Mine is that the whole thing is a farce. But I could be wrong. It's absolutely nutso.

Well, as that crackhead on the radio would say, now we know the rest of the story. An enjoyable conclusion to the fall of Anakin Skywalker.

A moment out of life. That is what this film is.

I've been rather lax in posting updates about what's going on lately, but here's a brief summary.

A great little torrent site featuring Noam Chomsky, plus a whole lot more! Speeches, documentaries, interviews. They even have all 3 parts of The Power of Nightmares, a highly recommended BBC documentary about the "War on Terror". It's well seeded too! Good stuff. Check it out.

Earlier this week, I recieved a notice in the mail from Household Bank, with whom I had a credit card account. It served as a perfect motivation to reduce my number of cards by one, so today, I called them up.

Two hilarious recorded phone conversations between sales people trying to sell service from an anti-gay phone company and one VERY enthusiastic customer. A good dose of laughs for your evening. The second one is the best.

These latest eloquent words from the Anthropik Network have me thinking.

The fact of the matter is that there are many societies where murder, theft, deceit and treachery are virtually unknown, where sharing is not just a virtue but simply expected, and where compassion is as fundamental to daily existence as the pursuit of profit is in our own capitalist society. [...]

Consider the issue of theft. In our own culture, there is no incentive to refrain from stealing. So, we invent such incentives in the form of laws and police. But, if you can evade those, then there is no reprecussion whatsoever, and much to gain. Laws exist in our society for precisely this reason, because the society itself suffers from such deep, systemic flaws that such rudimentary stopgaps are required to keep the entire system from falling apart in great chaos and violence.

Yet, there are other societies that have no such laws, and yet are much more peaceful than our own. In our society, sharing is considered abnormal. We thank people for sharing, and teach our children that it is good to share -- which also sends a message that sharing is above and beyond the norm, something out of the ordinary, something that should not be expected. In actual point of fact, we penalize sharing. [...]

Where technology has allowed for a pure form of sharing [Internet P2P], laws must step in to curb such behavior. For if sharing ever became commonplace, expected, then our very society would be at risk.

There are societies where sharing is just such an expectation. People do not share because it is "good," but because there's simply no other way to live. For them, not sharing would be as absurd as to ask one of us to go about the streets naked. It's simply not done. No one thinks of it, no one lauds the person who shares. It's simply the way things are.

Most people in our society generally assume that if a centralized form of authority (i.e. the government) were to one day disappear, everybody would automatically start going around stealing from one another and killing. I'm even inclined to agree that a scenario such as Yanthor described in a recent post about the outcome of a Big Crash is quite likely, not because such violent properties are inherent to human nature, but because we've all been conditioned from birth to think of our fellow humans as adversaries. If the threat of government force were suddenly removed, a signficant number of people raised in the present sociological climate probably would go around being ruthless bullies. (This, of course, assumes that such bullies aren't already in charge of the government anyway, but I digress.)

So here's my question: How can we evolve our society from what we have now toward one where generosity is genuinely encouraged? I'm hesitant to even use the word "generosity" because that connotes sharing as an exceptional behavior, as noted in the article. Is there a way to peacefully dismantle the chains of capitalism (a system which abhors sharing of every form, not just music) without unleashing something even more repressive, or will a dog that has been trained to bite and attack people be forever set in its ways?

Here's a good little read. The first couple paragraphs:

A long time ago -- centuries, it has been -- the poor, the wretched, the hopeless one day came to the end of their fear. As a lazy, opportunistic philosopher many hundreds of years later would describe it, they came to that place where they chose not to live any longer on their knees, the cattle of wealth, the chained labor of users. Many were the children of enclosures, whereby the landed aristocracy put an end to the centuries-old practice of allowing the workers to live on the land of the lords. With such acts of selfish, greedy cruelty, the free and unfree alike, who had come even to have claim of their own to land, were sent on their way, welcome only for the plantings and the harvests.

Between the devastation of the Plague and the evictions from the manors, perhaps a quarter of England's people would be on the road, without a place of permanence, without a place of belonging. The civil courts of England had long before, in the early part of the century, decided that those who were not noblemen had no standing to plead their cases. In so doing, the crown had left the peasants with the full understanding that they were beneath the protection of law.

Perhaps the angry mob that day knew ownership was for the wealthy, while rage is forever the last comfort of the masses.

I've been reading Joseph Campbell's Myths to Live By. Actually, that's a lie. It was one of the books I checked out from the library a couple weeks ago, but haven't even read past the introduction yet. However, I do have a few thoughts about myths, which may or may not come out in a cohesive manner right now. None of the ideas I'm about to relate are terribly original; I understand that a lot of these general concepts were pioneered by Campbell, but I've sort of picked them up through osmosis from various others who were influenced by his work. (Thus my desire to seek out the original source and read what Campbell himself wrote. But I may or may not actually even get around that, and I want to cover this topic now anyway.)

Another addition to the Pop Culture Tarot deck. Purity.

How important is it to survive, really? This is something I have been contemplating for myself personally for the past few months. Ran's latest landblog post, entitled The Burden of Survival, puts the question rather succinctly...

Earlier, I posted a message to yanthor.net saying that I will be staying after the fest, and possibly looking for a job in Lincoln during that time.

The recent spate of speculation about pop stars as instruments/victims of mind control has me thinking back to something that happened the other day. I was thinking I might write about it then, but never quite got around to it. Now I will.

Pop Culture Tarot now has an official permanent page. (Also known as Celebrity Tarot, but it's not limited only to celebrities.) And I just made a new card! The Psychonaut.

This is starting to become quite a deck! My latest one is entitled FemiKnight.

My second foray into Celebrity Tarot. The Conspiracist.