Monday, February 25, 2013

The Notebooks of Barack Hussein Obama II

My best years are behind me, or rather my capacity to have had best years...

I was young once, but I fucked it up.

Comfort rots the brain like sugar rots teeth.

Do not ask yourself, "Am I a good person?" Ask yourself, "Am I the person I want to be?"

To be is not to be: that is not a question. Self-annihilation is redundant.

If only I could recapture the hatred of my youth, my puritanical intolerance for anything that was not on the bleeding edge. If only there were a real, visionary Evil, something I could believe in...

Life is always worse than you want, but never as bad as you dream.


I dreamt I was a coyote ripping open a jackrabbit's throat... I dreamt of velvet and hissing and hard thrusts... something roiling in the night...


Sleep deprivation is the new black.


Is it shameful to laugh at these lines, which are, afterall, but the echo of oppression?
We don’t have any other choice.

The only Beatles records I can listen to anymore are The White Album and Let It Be.
What the hell is wrong with me?

If you haven't seen Ecstasy of the Angels, you have no reason to live, or rather to die.

To what extent is my infatuation with sexually explicit art films responsible for my real life sexlessness? What, for that matter, of my love for political art?

I wish there were a third or fourth gender. Life would be richer...

...or at least more complexly impoverished...


...thoughts form like mist and dissipate... but through the fog... the muffled roar of bombs...


Just because you live in a country where nothing ever changes doesn't mean that's the way it's supposed to be.

Nowhere in this world are any two peoples at war with one another: There are people living their lives, and then there are people trying to rule them.

The thing about Americans is their zeal for letting others kill on their behalves.

...the preciousness with which imperial nations treat (most of) their own citizens lives, equaled only by the vindictiveness with which they persecute their enemies...

We are all J. Christopher Stevens. We are all Sean Smith. We are all Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. We are all Gilad Shalit.


Only a King can enslave. Therefore, only a King can make free.


One can help society by helping individuals and vice versa. And can help individuals without helping society and versa vice. Yet the idea that rules the age is to help society by not helping individuals and to help individuals by not helping society.

"Society" and "individuals": two lips that never kiss.

All that Modernity has accomplished, it has done by treating human beings as matter.


...the urge to say something, to have something to say...


...my mind searches for a salve, yet all is poison...




We owe it to ourselves to speak the truth, and we owe it to truth to remain silent.




I'm comfortable with the regrets I'll have.

- from the Tablet of Barack Hussein Obama II

Sunday, February 24, 2013

The Phantom Menace

"Okay, okay, I admit it: the Internet is a hoax!" - Al Gore
  
"Life is a struggle to accept defeat." - Al Gore

"I've never understood: Why do the poor have children?" - Al Gore 

“You don't care about these people. You don't have any relationship with them at all other than the one you inherited. Get the fuck out of here.” - a mildly drunk Al Gore chases College Democrats out of a soup kitchen

"It's not that I don't want to give you money. I'll give you the money, whatever you want. I just don't want to acknowledge that we exist in the same universe." - Al Gore to a homeless person or Tipper

"Help me. Help my body.” - Al Gore

"At worst, love makes people who shouldn't feel good about themselves at all feel great about themselves for no reason. At best, it is a way for two people to reassure themselves that they are not crazy, that there is some one else who understands just how bad things really are." - Al Gore

“Anyone who denies their own same sex attractions is a hypocrite and a hick.” – a mildly drunk Al Gore delivers the 2006 Maryville College commencement speech before trying to kiss the provost

"You know, I'm not sure I'll ever get laid again. Or want to. Handsome as I am (and I am too vain not to regard myself as handsome), I fear that my corporeal decrepitude has taken me out of the game for good. No matter how interesting and charming some one is, if their body is repulsive, they will be alone forever, sexually at least. I know this is true because it's true for me: I cannot desire anyone with a body like mine, and so I do not expect anyone to desire me. I could change my life in an effort to become desirable, but why? I've been lucky enough to experience reciprocated romantic love once, and that will have to do. If I'm unlucky in love, I am lucky in friendship. Thank God I have you all to help me through it." - Al Gore to his dollhouse

"Girls have it more often!" - George W. Bush, soft but loud in Al Gore's ear

"Make love, goddamnit,  real love!" - Al Gore yelling at the television during the Super Bowl XLVII blackout

“Why did you do it?”
“I’m a gambling addict.”
- Michael Jordan and Al Gore, watching their children scavenge garbage off Space Jam Highway

"I spend most my life wishing I were dead." - Al Gore

"Every time I trim my beard, no matter how little I take off, I am immediately overcome with regret, and what's worse is that no one else seems to notice the change, it's just a horrible, existential stain that only I can see, and it gets the point where, lacking the ratification of my self-perception by others, I hardly even know what's real any more." - Al Gore to Ted Nugent

"If you just structure your life around having regular, tidy bowel movements, everything else locks into place." - Al Gore, in fluent Japanese, in an onsen at the base of Mt. Fuji, December 29, 1989

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Scream of Stone

"I have often thought about the theory of panpsychism, what the coltan thinks, whether it can scream..." - former Cabot Corporation CEO and US Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman

"It just works!" - Steve Jobs on the internet/slave labor

"This rock. Beautiful, isn't it?"
"How do you know if it's quality?"
"Your nose starts to bleed just looking at it."
- Chuck Hagel and Charlie Rose on a motorcycle tour of Africa

"Giant boulders in the sky..." - Tim Cook passes out in the sun after too much overseeing

"There's no such thing as humane mining." - Frederick Engels

"And when the last Foxconn worker committed suicide there was silence on heaven and earth for half an hour." - John of Patmos

"I put on the Google Goggles, it was just like They Live!" - Gavin Newsom

"And worst of all, there were no day care services at the mine." - Nicholas Kristof

"With our new app, you can tell what part of the mine your children are working in!" - Mark Zuckerberg, Facelessbook Inc. HQ

"Any doubts that the world was my oyster were quickly dispelled by my trip to Kinshasa." - Priscilla Zuckerberg

"Leave your heart in San Francisco. You won't need it here." - Sergey Brin

"I hate to say it, but Leopold was way ahead of his time." - SFchaz415, Yelp user review of the La Trappe Gastropub on Russian Hill in San Francisco, California, USA

"You know, Beethoven may have been of African descent." - Paul Kagame shouting over the cacophony

"When will this war end?"
"Whenever we pick the winner."
"HAW HAW HAW!"
- the G20 share a hardy laugh about the Permanent Congo War
 
"I have a suspicion that boycotts are not really about fighting anything but about beautiful souls wanting to stay stain-free, a desire that dovetails neatly with a, I won't say prejudice but distaste for certain kinds of people. For the movement to boycott conflict minerals, the stain is black flesh." - Judith Butler

"Read your shrill anti-mining post on my iPhone, way to go!" - #billclinton

"Would I do it all over again? Yes." - Steve Jobs

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Like Tears in Rain

"I believe that one day a double-amputee athlete will be able to bash his fucking woman's brains in even more ferociously than his able-bodied peers." - Oscar Pistorius

"Is there no happiness in this life?" - Manti Te'o

"This is going to sound insensitive, but I can't help but admire it." - Lance Armstrong

"Good athletes are all fucking jacked up atavist rapists." - O. J. Simpson

"Better to be Jodi Arias than Reeva Steenkamp." - Nicole Brown Simpson

"Nothing turns me on more than pictures of dead girls." - The New York Post 

"Every new detail that emerges about this grisly crime is more erotic than the last." - Jacob Zuma

"Entitlement, paranoia, and barbarism: a perfect distillation of white South Africa." - Jack Abramoff

"Just look at South Africa: there is an enlightened place, where every man has the right to protect his trophies from his trophy." - Wayne LaPierre

"I did not think I was shooting at my girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. I thought I was firing blindly at the black man in my bathroom." - the Confession

"It's legally impossible for a paraplegic to commit murder. Every man of science knows that the black humors accumulate around the knees." - the Defence 

"Why'd you do it!"
"It wasn't me, judge! It was the performance enhancing drugs I intentionally took to excel at largely symbolic events!"
- the Exoneration

"O, my country, you have no heroes." -  Nelson Mandela, awaking from a dream about a snail crawling across the edge of a razor unscathed

"No amount of gates and guns and armored guards can protect you from love." - Chris Brown

"Hate will find a way." - Desmond Tutu

Monday, February 18, 2013

The Way We Kill Today

 “We are the conflagration we’re looking for.” - Christopher Dorner

"He was a kind of public intellectual of the deed." - Charlie Rose

"He died consumed by light, a light that must never go out, that must be guarded, generation after generation, to show us the way to freedom." - Ted Nugent, Hate of the Union Address

"It was not on purpose. We didn't intentionally burn down that cabin to get Mr. Dorner out. We merely shot things that cause fires into the cabin." - San Bernardino Sheriff John McMahon

"It's like a bad dream from which we cannot Wacop." - Janet Reno

"What's really disturbing is truther types who insist he's innocent. That is an insult to the dead, to the criminal, and to the crime." - Mike Davis

"God, I hope he gets away with it." - Al Gore, on first hearing of Chris Dorner

"Real criminals always get away with it." - Dick Cheney

"One does not try to 'get away with' a true crime." - Rahm Emmanuel

“It’s not worth getting away with.” – Lawrence Summers sipping blood from a skull on a white sand beach in Hawaii

Fields of dust and ash
Wild horses wearing gas masks
Perpetual dusk

Heavenly structures
A black sun that never sets
Ashfall on rare earth

Something on the horizon
It’s coming this way
There is no escape

- Kim Jung-on, "Three Haikus for Post-Mongolia, 2078"

"In the Coming Technocracy, there will be no Founding Crimes, only Founding Solutions." - Cyborg Deity Barack Obama Rex

"It will never work, Charlie, because robots cannot hate. This is war, not Facebook." - Gen. Stanley DarkChrystal on Charlie Rose

"Just imagine you're clicking 'Like.'" - Mark Zuckerberg trains new recruits

The police set us free
By enforcing love of Country
Of God and Family
One’s place in Society

Their violence is God’s love
Their violence sets us free
It is a gift to our children
May they be worthy of it

So here’s to the paratroopers
Here’s to the national guard
Here’s to the secret police
To the bodies that pave the road to freedom
And the boots that tread upon them

The hand that throttles can also caress
An iron hand, a velvet hand
An invisible hand in a white glove

The virtuous have nothing to fear
But fear of virtue itself
For the enemies of security
There can be no security

Fallen heroes are not forgotten
A uniform can never die
They live on in the cry of our voices
In every swing of our clubs

So here’s to los Federales
Here’s to i Carabinieri
Here’s to o Esquadrão da Morte
To the bodies that pave the road to peace
And the boots that tread upon them

- Scott Walker (both)

"See you in hell, hick pope!" - Christopher Dorner

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Confirmations and Condemnations

"Look, I'm not bigoted, I just want to kill again." - Chuck Hagel, Defense Secretary Nomination Hearing

"If giant spiders came out of the ground, are a bunch of fairies and women going to stop them?" - Lindsey Graham looks beyond the headlines

"Listen, I'll kill all those motherfuckers, whatever, trust me." - John Brennan

"Don't worry, they're bad guys." - the President on literally whomever he wants

"Haw haw haw, son boy, CUT HIM DOWN!" - Secretary of Homeland Security Pa

"Cybergenocide!" - Barack Obama joins with the Algorithm

"I may be, at times, an unethical human being, but never an unethical employee." - Predator Drone UV-987X

"Self-incrimination is the only possible kind, for a man's deeds are only criminal if he regards them as such." - Eric Holder

"If a man is sufficiently boring, he can overtake morality as the tortoise does the hare." - Al Gore

"A country not founded on genocide is no country at all." - Alan Dershowitz

"Being occupied is like dating a rich, handsome older man who always orders for your when you go out to eat." - Judith Butler explaining American foreign policy to Lena Dunham in terms she can understand

"If we allow open homosexuals into the Scouts, then all of our years of sublimation will be for naught, and the practice of Greek love among our ranks, drained of its delectation." - Hector A. "Tico" Perez

"I'm not unlucky in love: I'm a conscientious objector." - Gilberto Valle
Lady prosecutor,
My love for you's a crime,
Wrap your laws around me,
Make me do my time

Coz I'm guilty, guilty,
Guilty as charged,
Yeah, I'm guilty, guilty,
Guilty as charged!
- John Yoo, War Crimes of the Heart
"Cops all over America are watching Zero Dark Thirty, and they're seeing those scenes with the CIA guy so calm, so cool, so utterly in control, torturing Muslims as he calls them 'bro,' and they're thinking, 'If only they'd let me do that, our troubles here would be over very quickly.' They are right." - Wang Lijun

"Better to deal drugs, kill pigs, and die in the streets than join up, kill Muslims, and die in the sand." - Christopher Dorner

"I look at our prisons, and I don't see jailed blacks. I see safe Jews." - Ed Koch

"Sure, I eat muff, but in my heart of hearts, I'm an evil Irish cop." - Christine Quinn

"When I watch two lesbians going at it, it reminds me of nothing so much as pigs feeding at trough, only pigs do not lower themselves with gratitude to the trough." - Michael Bloomberg

"Much more important to me than being gay is being a conventionally powerful man." - Ed Koch

"Ray Kelly's asshole tastes like pecans." - Jon Stewart

"That ol' blog a yourn just don't fuck like she used ter." - Kevin Spacey

"You boys have perfected the art of regression!" - 43