a shameful post

LI shouldn’t post on Rev. Ted Haggard, the ideal no sex man. LI should have some shame. On the other hand, the American knock-em-up spares no man, never has, puts six bullets in its six shooter and uses em all, breaks broncos and banks and babes, busted prairie ground for suckers, moves with a sublime unsense of its own ridiculousness to ever greener pastures through ever more trivial valleys of the shadow of death, recycles himself for the second, third, and 1+n acts, and is that meaty breadwinner, Rabbit and Proteus, Elmer Gantry and Coyote, met in one.

This is from the Denver Post:

Haggard, 50, resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals and was fired from the church he built from nothing into a 14,000-member congregation after a former male prostitute in Denver alleged a three-year cash-for-sex relationship.
Haggard admitted to "sexual immorality" and a long battle against feelings contrary to his beliefs. He admitted buying methamphetamine but said he never used it. Haggard did not respond to interview requests.

Among other things, the overseers urged Haggard to enter a 12-step program for sexual addiction, Ware [Rev. Mike Ware of Westminster, spokesman for the four minister board overseeing Haggard’s rebirth] said.

Ralph [another preacher overseer] said three weeks of counseling at an undisclosed Arizona treatment center helped Haggard immensely and left Haggard sure of one thing.

"He is completely heterosexual," Ralph said. "That is something he discovered. It was the acting- out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing."

And so it came to pass that the good reverend Haggard emerged from his desert sojourn. Unlike the Lord, who was merely tempted by Satan, Haggard was beset by the urge to buy drugs that he was never going to use and hire male prostitutes for the purpose of having no sex with them. Haggard, in short, had fallen prey to a temptation not listed in the Lord's prayer - the love of paradox. He is a peeping tom who keeps his eyes closed, an exhibitionist who exposes himself to himself in a dark closet in which he can't see himself. But LI is happy to see that all is not lost. For lo and behold, like the Gadarene swine doing the 12 step program, Haggard is coming out of Kristian Kamp with straight As in the straight department, leavin his devils behind him, and getting into online psychology! Let’s give him a big round of applause, and hope that he can find a cure for those woodies that may inflict themselves upon him and lure him, by their malefic throbbings, into non-sex, non-drug situations – they are so obviously symptoms of some rare tropical disease, as spots are to measles.

bremer and some media history

This lead graf to the story reporting on Proconsul Bremer’s upcoming testimony before a House committee contains some good material:

“The last time L. Paul Bremer testified before Congress, he was lauded as an American hero. Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.) congratulated Bremer, who was leading the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq, for a "tremendous success." Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) commended his "energy and focus." Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) praised his "brilliant analysis."”

Interesting what you can find going through the old quotes. This is from a Washington Post editorial (probably a Fred Hiatt editorial) from August 17, 2003, about Iraq:

The reality is more mixed. Certainly the U.S. effort is greater than some critics suggest, and the results are less gloomy than you might imagine from the inevitable daily attention to the latest problem. Some of the worst scenarios, widely foretold before the war, have not played out; there have been few revenge killings between Iraqis and little of the kind of communitarian violence that would threaten Iraq's unity. The majority Shiite community, though resentful of America's abandonment in 1991 and suspicious of the occupiers' motives, seems willing at least for the moment to tolerate a U.S. presence. Nor is the absence of negatives the only good news. As the fear of one of the 20th century's most vengeful rulers lifts, many Iraqis are reveling in new freedoms. There has been an explosion of political activity, of debate on campuses, of political parties and newspapers. In many cities, U.S. authorities have helped create local governing bodies that are ethnically mixed and broadly representative; an interim national council is also in place. U.S. service men and women are working heroically, tolerating stifling heat and difficult living conditions and often accomplishing with great patience and sensitivity tasks of municipal administration for which in many cases they had little training.
But that can-do spirit raises questions: Why are combat troops receiving so little help in these jobs? Why are there not more military police and civilian police trainers, more civil administrators, more democracy trainers? Why do the opportunities for communication between Iraqis and American authorities remain so limited? Why are troops stretched so thin in areas where they remain under threat? After an inexcusably hapless beginning, the occupation has gained some traction under the firmer guidance of L. Paul Bremer III. But is he really being given all the resources he could use? Could the United States really not be doing more to get Iraqis back to work, to turn the electricity and the air conditioners back on, to convince ordinary Iraqis that ordinary life will improve?”

Here’s WAPO’s opedist and conduit to Chalabi, Hoagland, September 21,2003 – months after the decision to disband the Iraqi army – giving Bremer the manly pat on the back:

“A man with $20 billion to spend is certain to accumulate a lot of things, including new troubles and determined rivals for control of that fortune. The hot seat that L. Paul Bremer occupies as America's proconsul in Iraq is about to get even hotter.
Bremer of Baghdad has exercised uncontested authority with a toughness and dogmatism needed to surmount the chaotic conditions he found when he arrived in Baghdad in May.
Those qualities won him support even from Iraqis and Americans he had to rebuff; in today's rapidly changing diplomatic and political environment, similar stubbornness could easily undermine Bremer's early successes.”

Those early successes – who can forget them? or, actually – who can remember them? What were they again? Ah, yes, they were all about dispelling the absurd idea that we were in for “revenge killings”, “communitarian violence” and all the other claptrap mouthed by the blame America first crowd.
Here is Krauthammer – a Churchill among columnists, a man whose eloquence has prodded us on in this long long long long war against the forces of evil and Mordred and all the grimy little hobbit killers out there who are out to get President Backbone before he puts Barney in the volcano… uh, I think. Isn’t that how this epic goes? Anyway, here he is, October 3, 2003:

“Garner was the right guy in the wrong place. There were other jobs to do, and Garner could not do them well. This error cost us a month, a crucial month.
His successor, L. Paul Bremer, has done remarkably well. Consider the task he faces. He has had to rule on privatization, the nature of the currency, the establishment of a central bank, the structure of the oil industry. And these are just the economic questions. Daily, he has had to make political, infrastructure, security, religious and ethnic decisions that will profoundly affect Iraq's future. In the United States, any one of these decisions would take months of deliberation, hearings and arguments. Bremer has to make them within hours or days. The re-emergence of life and structure in a country that six months ago had no civil society at all is testimony to his success.
His major mistake was disbanding the army. And even this judgment should be rendered with a bit of humility. At the time, it seemed the right thing to do. In the Middle East, a major obstacle to democracy has always been the military: military power, military autonomy, military coups. Keeping Hussein's army risked the worst possible outcome: a future return to power of a Baathist army. For the long-run health of the new Iraq, it made eminent sense to abolish the army and start over.”

Life was good back then. The privatizations were particularly dear to the Iraqi heart – for decades, the toiling, moiling masses had cried out in their hearts, if only we had deregulation in the agricultural sector! and as for the flat tax, make it at 15 percent, so that liberty and justice will be like dust in the desert wind!
What happened since we all know. The MSM made up a bunch of stories to disguise the outstanding successes that have made Iraq the envy of nations. We look forward to the Hiatt editorial explaining this at some later date.

the universe as the infinity of my inattention

In Jean Claude Beaune’s Philosophy of technique: matter, instrument, automat, he has an interesting passage on a conference talk given by Gaston Bachelard in 1939. The talk was called Universe and reality, and was sprinkled with odd remarks. For instance, Bachelard said” L’univers est l’infini de mon inattention… L’univers est mon repos, l’univers est ma paresse. Ce n’est jamais ma pensee.” “Bachelard posed as someone so naïve as to press on the limits of frivolity: “I have never reflected on the idea of the universe” (before the occasion furnished by the Lyon society of philosophy) and related cosmological preoccupations solely to the trivial inquietudes of a graduate student. He defined himself as a tetrological specimen – without any doubt, a unique one – “of a philosopher who has lost his world.” As Beaune says, we are a long way here from the Pascalian trembling before the infinite. Again, Bachelard says that “the idea of the universe presents itself as the antithesis of the object.” And: “to universalize is to hypnotize – oneself”.

Here’s a translation of the whole text. (I should say, I translated the quotes in the above paragraph myself). It is a remarkable piece – and short, too. It is pretty cool that it is up on the web for those who don’t read French.

Although Bachelard is a long way from Bruno, I don’t think my insertion of him in the chain of figures I'm going to use to talk about misfortunes of the infinite world does him any damage. On the contrary, although Bachelard doesn’t use the anima mundi terminology here, he never hesitated to reach for what some might consider scientifically ‘soft’ terms. His text does reference both older cosmologies and the relativistic image of the universe in physics.

So why do we hear the faint echoes here of Bruno’s anima mundi earth, which is not simply a compound, as Bruno said, of our trash? We’d identify the anima mundi world with that - and here we are making an unjustified leap – world the philosopher has lost. When Bachelard compares the universe of general relativity with the five year plan – a pretty witty comparison – we hear the faint overtones of the infinite world concept. The world whose loss is commoditized, whose atmosphere, oceans and soils have been made totally human over the last two hundred years. The totally human world, a goal shared by capitalist and communist alike, has turned out to be an incredibly successful project. The only non-human factor left in that world – the one factor not subject to the calculation of human use and value – is God. Animal, plant, element – they have all gone into the factory. As for God of the Gods, well, the non-humanity of God doesn’t really provide much of a stumbling block. Every effort is made to process God into the human, to create your nice adorable personal God. Otherwise, fuck him/her/them. The human God is tastier, with 90% less fat.

This weekend, LI liked two posts, one by Smokewriting and one by the friend and foil of this site, Paul Craddick, at Fragmenta Philosophica, that both had to do with the planetary question posed by the IPCC report – although Smokewriting’s post came before the official release of the report. Smokewriting's post welds together two different themes: one, the “risk society” thesis of Ulrich Becker (taken over by Anthony Giddens) that grounded the "third way" rhetoric of the nineties; and two, Hans Jonas’ thesis about the temporal dimension of the capitalist exploitation of nature, where natural resources stand for the future - human future. LI particularly liked this passage:

“Implicit in Beck’s thesis is the idea that the emptying and wholesale exploitation of the future is a structural feature of capital. It is this that generates the sense of having participated in an apocalypse which one failed to notice. Capital does not just extract surplus value from the ongoing present by subjecting it to the repetitive cycles of production, but also extracts it from the living futures of potential embodied in nature. Capitalist production pulls futures into the present and uses them up, but in order to do this it vampirises the past becomings from out of which the world has congealed.”

"The apocalype which one failed to notice" - we tend to see this as the universe that is the infinity of our inattention. It is the 'too big' of all the changes wrought on the biosphere during the twentieth century, the fertilizer dumped, the exhaust from each car, the oddity that transportation became both a major killer in the twentieth century and that the killings were absorbed into the background (while everybody is searching for a cure for malaria and aids, who is searching for a cure for the car accident?), etc.

Paul’s post is less about Capital than about Cost – and the framework in which to measure costs:

[C]onfronted with the reality of climate change and a human role therein, the central question for deliberation - What is to be done? - is an ethical-political one, not primarily a scientific one (not "primarily" because, while sober scientific judgment undoubtedly must inform deliberation, the answer eludes science's competence). In other words, to suppose that science simply "tells" us how to address [climate change] is a blatant category mistake."

Put another way ... even assuming that we could believe, to a reasonable level of certainty, that a certain course of action would ameliorate climate change significantly, it still doesn't follow that it ought to be undertaken. The costs of so doing may be unjustifiable.

I’ll have more to say about this – until you, gentle reader, are sick to death of it – in later posts.

on the fight

I’ve only been in one real barfight. That was back in New Orleans days, and it wasn’t as fun as the fight in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Unfortunately, it was faster, windows broke, my buddy made like a rabbit for the hills, which left me rather alone, and the cops came. The fight in HAI was started by the cry, ‘faggot’, which is the only similarity to that far off Plum Street brawl – apparently the bar I was in had strict rules on the display of male affection. Who knew?

Well, this week some blogs I go to and bloggers I like have been piling onto each other. It started with a thread at the Weblog, and ended, as usual, in tears, bannings, and complaints about personal threats. To me, the fun here is puzzling. It is sorta like a mosh pit without any music. Now, myself, when I am gray and crooked, I intend to bore grandnieces and nephews with the story of how old LI leaped into that mosh pit at the Nirvana concert (and, I should interject here before my friend D. leaps in here to make a comment, I did NOT break your nose, honey). So, I understand the mosh thrill. But not weblog shitstorms.

Maybe the problem is simply that blogs, so far, lack genius. The surrealists were always banning each other, but out of their fights came “The Use Value of D.A.F. De Sade” – and so far, blogorama has not produced a Bataille.

For me, recriminatory circle jerks don’t have any real attraction. It smacks too much of grad student days. There were many reasons I flunked outta grad school (I was becoming an asshole and a b.s. artist, and realized that, yikes! I didn’t want to be an asshole and a b.s. artist – I wanted to be a sage), but one of them was the odd sense that always, on the horizon, was a recriminatory circle jerk. Perhaps this was just my resistance to full American adulthood in an institution. In any case, it drove me emotionally crazy. I should say, though, that I am not offering this comment in that viscerally anti-academic way that comes to people who have flunked out of academia. Some of my best buds, people I love, are profs now, and I am happy for them and wish them much joy and tenure. I am not going to pretend my sour grapes are a mark of moral superiority. It is just an aftereffect of failure. But…

But, something should be done about the debased state of the academic weblog shitfight. Point a, if the Weblog, the Valve, Long Sunday and the rest of them want to host a brawl, cue the proper music. I’d recommend The Queen Bee’s romantic ballad, Suck my Dick (ah, one of the truly time wasting things about getting DSL - which I just did - is that I can watch Li’l Kim’s videos!) Thus transforming the mosh pit without music into one with, a big improvement. And point b is, please, don’t be a pussy about personal threats. Personal threats are lagniappe! It brightens the day. You venture out of your apartment, you scan the street for the big black pickup with the guy holding the two by four. Hollywood magic, man! Plus, how can one bitch about someone who cares enough about you to want to come over and sink a claw hammer into your skull? O...o....or am I just lookin for love in all the wrong places? … Naah. Take it from me: the early twentieth century figure who knew most about love was not Sigmund Freud, but Ignaz the Mouse. Throw the brick, honey! Suck my dick! – the immemorial song that goes all the way back to Eden.

Other points I will make up later, on some rainy day.

infinite earth vs anima mundi, round one

Robert Babe coined a phrase that LI is going to steal: infinite earth. My plan for this year’s posts is to sorta weave a pattern around the idea of anima mundi. The anima mundi idea emerges, in the early modern era, as the twin of infinity. Not of course that the anima mundi idea is new, since of course it occurs in one form or another as far back as we care to go. But something happens in the modern era, or rather a whole bunch of seemingly disconnected things happen. To quote again from Bruno’s Ash Wednesday’s colloquy:

“And he [Bruno] opened their eyes to see this deity this mother of ours, [earth]which on her back feeds them and nourishes them after she has produced them from her bosom into which she always gathers them again -- who is not to be considered a body without soul and life, let alone the trash of all bodily substances. In this way we know that, if we were on the moon or on other stars, we would not be in a place much unlike this, and perhaps on an even worse [place], just as there may be other bodies as good and even better for their own sakes and for the happiness of their own animals [inhabitants]. Thus we know as many planets, as many stars, as many deities, which are those hundreds of thousands that assist in the service and contemplation of the first, universal and eternal efficient [cause]. … We know that there is but one heaven, an eternal, immense region, where these magnificent lights keep their proper distances for a commodious sharing in a perpetual life. These blazing bodies are those ambassadors that announce the excellence of God's glory and majesty. Thus we shall advance to the discovery of the infinite effect of the infinite cause, the true and living evidence of the infinite vigor.”

Babe’s infinite earth phrase is found in his book, Culture of Ecology, and makes references to the usual arguments of the ecological economists, like Robert Goodland, whose The Case that the World has Reached Limits in 1991 is a little touchstone in the ecological economics movement. The usual arguments that are made back, by orthodox economists, are rather sweet. Poor people, who are basically flushed down the toilet by orthodox economists and certainly aren’t mingled with in their circles, unlike, say, bankers and CFOs, are suddenly hauled out of the toilet and marched front and center – economics, it turns out, is all for the poor. This critique of ecologism by Jay Mandle in the Boston Review is pretty much standard. When the ecological economist claims that economic activity unfairly enriches a grossly wealthy upper class, the Mandle’s of the world ignore pesky statistics about the distribution of wealth and go towards wealth effects, like the increase in life span, among the population as a whole. That is a useful statistic, but it is, of course, not a knock down argument: one can glance into any old folks’ home in these States and see increasing life span without an increase in the joy in life, so to speak. It certainly doesn’t address the issue, which is that transfers of wealth from the wealthiest would not decrease the wealth effect on the majority of the population, while at the same time taking out one of the drivers of growth that does the most ecological damage.

But this post – and in general the battle royale I am planning on staging between the Infinite Earth and Anima Mundi – is just going to graze these issues. I am more interested – in fact, passionately interested – in fact, head over pores immersed in, emotionally wired to, suicidally fixated on – the culture itself that is part and parcel of the infinite earth.

how do I love fertilizer? Let me count the ways

Were I an absolute legislator, I would therefore make it death for a man to be convicted of flying, the moment he could be caught; and to bring him down from his altitude by a bullet sent through his head or his carriage should be no murder. Philosophers would call me a Vandal; the scholar would say that, had it not been for me, the fable of Daedalus would have been realized; and historians would load my memory with reproaches of phlegmn, and stupidity, and oppression; but in the mean time the world would go on quietly, and, if it enjoyed less liberty, would at least be more secure. – William Cowper, letter upon hearing of Montgolfier’s ascent in a balloon.


The main reason that human population could quadruple while cropland only doubled in the twentieth century is that farming became more productive. Several elements combined in this, most notably chemical fertilizers and pesticides, irrigation, agricultural machinery and plant breeding. – William McNeil, Something New Under the Sun

To abbreviate horribly, Polanyi’s Great Transformation thesis states that the coming of capitalism to Europe was about reversing the relationship between the economic and the social, with the economic becoming the dominant, that into which the social is embedded. LI’s thesis, pursued with ardor and lunacy on this site, is that the twentieth century saw the meshing together of the treadmill of production and the war culture on a planetary scale. A couple of posts ago, we promised to say something more about Michael Pollan’s article in the NYTM, because we kept barking our shins, as we went through it, on brilliant hints of larger vistas. We have another excuse to say something about the planet today – the government equivalent of St. John on Patmos announced that it is the end of the world as we know it, and it does look like Exxon will be handing out its 10000 checks to Discovery Institute/Tech Station scientists in vain. Although, really, any changes that will be wrought in the near future will be purely rhetorical. We are the lemmings of the system, man.

Well, the atmosphere has been, in one way, the real last frontier: it is an airgrap, a stratograb, perhaps the logical conclusion of 1492. But LI has been collecting the flotsam and jetsam about the other biosphere transformation this week. The twentieth century saw the biochemical properties of the air, water and earth transformed by Man, that disconnected giant. However, a century has no eyes. There have been no eyes to see, and hence no memory to enshrine, the vast and sweeping changes we simply live in.

One of the greatest of those changes is one of the simplest.

Back in the days of the millennium – you remember the millennium, don’t you? – LI remarked to our friend, S., apropos of the Time Magazine article listing the hundred most influential people or scientists or whatever the fuck, that undoubtedly the most influential person who roamed the earth in the 20th century was Fritz Haber. S. thought this was wildly hilarious in a typical LI way. And in one way it is – Haber is one of those scientists who did something that seems, in retrospect, to have inevitably lain in the path of science. The spellbinding thing about science is how much of it seems systematically pre-ordained. Still, Fritz Haber was the first man – the first organism – to figure out a new way to synthesize nitrogen, and that was huge. Much huger than the invention of the atom bomb, or the invention of our minor knickknacks, like the computer.

Vaclav Smil, the geographer, gives some fascinating statistics in his book on Fritz Haber and the effects of the production of nitrogen fertilizer, Enriching the Earth, from which I take this:

-the reactive nitrogen in synthetic fertilizers is now perhaps equal to half of the total fixed by all bacteria in all natural terrestrial ecosystems.

-the twentieth century saw a roughly 125-fold increase in the average global rate of inorganic nitrogen applications per hectare of cropland. Half of all nitrogen fixed by the Haber-Bosch process between 1913 and 2000 was consumed only during the last two decades of the twentieth century.

- over forty percent of the human population depends on food fertilized by nitrogen fertilizers.

We are talking about a soil change that we can’t even begin to understand. Interestingly, that explosion in fertilizer use (and all the consequences – a monoculture that adapted to the fertilizers, an abundance of food that fed the exploding human population, etc.) came in tandem with the war system. This isn’t just a matter of poetic correspondences, such as Haber being one of the scientists to develop mustard gas. This is more a matter of policy patterns, common to both the east and the west, that resulted in massive population drains from the rural areas and the subjection of agriculture to efficiency – i.e., giant concentrated agricultural power, a process that was full integrated into the war culture as it played itself out in third world countries during the golden days of the green revolution.

That is enough about this for the moment. But I should end with one of Lorenz Oken’s golden sentences.

“The fourth science is the Art of War, the art of motion, histironism, music, poetic art of science, the light. As in the art of poetry all arts have been blended, so in the art of war have all sciences and all arts. The art of War is the hightest most exalted art; the art of freedom and of right, of the blessed condition of Man and humanity – the Principle of Peace.”

Hommage a Ayanna Khadijah

Ayanna Khadijah is not a celebrity face, is not running for president, and – having the system of surveillance on her neck for years – is not going to make as much money in her life as the CEO of Exxon makes in one day.

However, unlike the fucking celebrities, the fucking presidential candidates, and the fucking CEO of Exxon, Khadijah is a real human being. She was the victim of a ridiculous police raid to enforce the wholly monstrous laws against illicit substances in Norwalk, Connecticut. The police illegally entered her apartment and found drugs which, she contends, they actually planted – well, from the article Khadijah, an extraordinarily decent person, doesn’t say planted, but LI will, being an extraordinary son of a bitch. She won her case, but was still given a suspended 3 year felony conviction. Why?

…Ayanna Khadijah, 34, …. was convicted of the felony version of failure to appear after she failed to wake up from a nap and arrived 45 minutes late to court one day in August 2003. Her case is extraordinary because she fought back.
It was the only court date Ms. Khadijah missed among 45 sessions over three years defending herself against a set of drug charges that were eventually dismissed, in 2005. Ms. Khadijah, a single mother with a criminal history, received a suspended three-year sentence on the failure-to-appear charge.
She had spent the day before she was late for court at her job as a community organizer and then delivered newspapers from 1 to 8 a.m. Prosecutors argued that she should have known better than to work all night before a court appearance.

Khadijah had enough.

Connecticut’s appellate court overturned her conviction last fall after concluding that the inadvertent doze was not a willful shirking of responsibility. But the state is appealing to the State Supreme Court for fear the widely used tool could become harder to wield.
“We thought it set a bad example,” said John A. East III, a senior assistant state’s attorney, who argued in court papers that rather than rely on her boyfriend to rouse her, Ms. Khadijah should have set an alarm or perhaps brewed herself a strong cup of coffee.
But Gerald B. Lefcourt, a past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said the case “is really right out of Catch-22.” “There’s no way to win when you have a system that is so inflexible and so lacking in understanding,” he said.

There’s no way to win is the whole point of the system. It is a rule like, you can't beat the house. The system is all about mistreating people until they become laboring and docile cattle – although hopeful cattle, because who knows if the products they see advertised on tv might not bring them happiness. And that is the name of the system, otherwise known as pandaemonium, or L'infame. The people who change it for the better aren’t, God help us, named Hilary Clinton or Joe Biden or Barak Obama, and they certainly don’t bear the names of media personalities that I’m just not going to pollute this post with. They are named Ayanna Khadijah. In this world of the drowned and the saved, she decided not to drown.