They O U

Bernie Mad-off-with-the-loot Ponzi Schemer was the Whole Thing in micro; We’ve been being ripped off for centuries, becoming even more enslaved, getting bled dry by these schemers -

as always, personal greed allows people to commit acts they know in their hearts to be evil, to be against niceness to others, to be screwing someone else over;

just look at their cruel faces,  coldhearted eyes,

-

of course you can’t always tell by externals,

but actions will steer you the way,

sooner or later.

and if they’re acting like heartless assholes,

they probably are

heartless assholes.

who’s writing this stuff?

“Catalonia was colonised by Ancient Greeks, who settled around the Roses area. Both Greeks and Carthaginians (who, in the course of the Second Punic War, briefly ruled the territory) interacted with the main Iberian substratum.” - wikipedia -




does that mean they were f*king the natives?

Riots in England

Calling these riots and potential riots a “crisis in European Democracy” is such a smoke screen to avoid admitting that it’s a crisis in Capitalism, which is not necessarily Democracy!

It also creates a gateway for something that isn’t Democracy to be brought through – something that perhaps doesn’t involve as much freedom as Democracy without control by the few wealthy might.

Been Awhile…

How many times have you read that on someone’s blog?

I have to admit: facebook did it.

I realized today that I’ve posted many things on my fb page that might have otherwise gone here, PLUS! I had to limit my word count!

Well, I’m about to change that, and share here what I share on fb.

Still, the discipline of having to write in short blurbs, a la twitter (which I do not do), is sometimes liberating, certainly challenging.  I also had to sum my self up for an americorps app. lately: Serious editing there, from 450 characters down to 200 – 200 characters to describe, for instance, my past experiences with and things I’ve learned from Writing!  in 200 characters???

and I didn’t do too badly, either.  I might have to use it on a resume.

But there’s the really annoying thing with filling out job applications: you spend a lot of time working on, perfecting your resume, but what happens?  All they want you to do is fill out, by hand, all over again, all the stuff that you so carefully parsed out for that nicely designed document that is now rendered redundant.  jeez.

and then there was the 25 minute fairly invasive questionnaire I had to fill out for a retail job at Macy’s!  the first three questions were about whether or not I obeyed rules, and my superiors, and authorities in general – I really wish I’d cut and pasted the whole thing.

Way more fun than that was filling out a personally designed set of questions for a music/video store.  I wasn’t even sure I wanted a job there, but I just loved answering their questions: 5 fave movies, fave cds, interests, and so on.

Meanwhile, been tinkering around with a blog site for the radio show I’m doing, for awhile at least.  And I’ve got an idea that instead of typing, I might try doing podcasts soon.

The world is really crazy right now, and I wake up to BBC  World Have Your Say every week day – my time live it’s 10 am (bbc time I believe it’s 6pm).

I’m still ranting, but I’m also dancing.

Hope you are too.

Reconsidering Drones:

14 May 2011 Last updated at 01:13 ET

Pakistan condemns Bin Laden raid and US drone attacks

Pakistan’s parliament has called for a review of the country’s relationship with the US over the American commando raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.

…

They unanimously passed a resolution urging a ban on Nato transit convoys unless the US ends drone attacks.




Okay? Surgical and all that: Obama doing the Bush a solid;

But: Shooting him in the head?  Dumping him in the sea?

And now what?




Okay…we will soon find out how much good this has done any of us ~




Henry Who????

Oh, Tom Ashbrook has Henry Kissinger on his show right now, interviewing him like a good ol’ boy – shite.  I had to post (on OnPoint site, and here) my poem about him, written in 2001, mostly in response to another lament about voices that might haunt Henry Kissinger (by Chris Brandt).




Here it is for all of you:




Response to “For Henry Kissinger” by Chris Brandt.

Victoria Larkin




Henry Kissinger couldn’t give a fuck…

He won’t be hearing voices in his dotage

His conscience is clean.

He’s quite happy with his long list of accomplishments,

And laughs at all of us sorry Poets

Crying over the long dead…




Henry Kissinger regrets nothing –

He only says that now and then;

It sounds good.




The Devil laps up the curses of the vanquished,

They are his morning’s fare.




Songs of love are sentimental hogwash

When The History of the World is at stake.




Henry Kissinger has made History;

We are merely the dust on his hem:




Shoo away little flies, I have Empires to build!




Henry Kissinger sleeps well tonight,

Despite our condemnations -

Hot air to the winds…




His mind dances over the bodies of those he’s felled,

Fertile and brown, in the dirt where they belong…




Henry Kissinger’s name is known to all,

Henry Kissinger rules in Hell.




Sing on, Poets, sing on,

But don’t think Henry Kissinger hears your song…




Monsanto Murderers

What more do we need to know???

“Far from being ‘magic seeds’, GM pest-proof ‘breeds’ of cotton have been devastated by bollworms, a voracious parasite.

Nor were the farmers told that these seeds require double the amount of water. This has proved a matter of life and death.

With rains failing for the past two years, many GM crops have simply withered and died, leaving the farmers with crippling debts and no means of paying them off.

Having taken loans from traditional money lenders at extortionate rates, hundreds of thousands of small farmers have faced losing their land as the expensive seeds fail, while those who could struggle on faced a fresh crisis.

When crops failed in the past, farmers could still save seeds and replant them the following year.

But with GM seeds they cannot do this. That’s because GM seeds contain so- called ‘terminator technology’, meaning that they have been genetically modified so that the resulting crops do not produce viable seeds of their own.

As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds each year at the same punitive prices. For some, that means the difference between life and death.”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1082559/The-GM-genocide-Thousands-Indian-farmers-committing-suicide-using-genetically-modified-crops.html#ixzz1Hjt4s8BQ

Red Red Wine….

There’s this phase, the one that I’m in, of being between sober and drunk;

the phase where you’re just feeling it, it feels good; it also feels slightly crappy; recklessness has awoken, and you want more.

This is the precipitous phase before too  much.

All the world’s beauty and all the world’s ills are pulling you into their undertow. Another drink and you won’t feel any of it anymore;

Another drink, and you’ll be staggering.

 

How to navigate this phase?

 

Sloooooooow down, even though you don’t want to.

Drink some water, even though you don’t want to.

 

The next drink with alcoholic content might be your last drink of the rollicking fun evening you’re having right now.

 

It’s hard to navigate these things when you’re in this phase, because as I already mentioned, you’re feeling reckless.

But if you don’t want to waste some good, and potentially expensive alcohol,

Slow Down Now.

 

Savor it, wallow in it, maintain…

What’s Up With That????

Okay, it’s 2011;

2011 People!

How the hell can we still be hatin’ on Black Folks???

Just because they’re BROWN!!!????  HELLLOOOOOO?????

And this business about not hiring people if they have a past misdemeanor? (which especially effects those of our citizens who get overwhelmingly picked on):

Damn, do you realize a person can get a misdemeanor for answering back under the wrong circumstances?  (well, don’t want no one answering back y’all!)  Or for smoking a joint on the wrong street?  A JOINT????

PLEASE!!!  What do you call a lying cheating white person who makes a fortune on Wall Street while ripping off all kinds of poor folks???

What do you call rich people who buy their ways out of misdemeanors because they can?

What do you call SLUMLORD BASTARDS who charge a Fortune to poor people in lousy neighborhoods and don’t do shit, but sit fat and pretty far far away????

What kind of fascist rightwing coldhearted greedy f’ing place is America turning into???  Are we trying to catch up with the rightwing fascist trend happening elsewhere? (and I DON’T mean in Egypt!)

Or are we just slipping back into our Puritan/Slave owning/Robber Barons past?

Facebook Debutante

So, I finally made a facebook page.

Over the past few months I’d become increasingly frustrated to hear about events only after the fact because they’d only been shared on facebook; events I would’ve been glad to know about: readings, shows, workshops, and gatherings.

This was after years of already feeling sheepish and mumbling ‘no’ when asked if I had a facebook page, this being the replacement for phone numbers and/or emails.

I still had my reservations, but I began to feel hemmed in.  How much longer could I hold out?

Meanwhile, many of my younger friends are already dropping out of facebook, sick of the impersonal, recognizing their own tendency to waste time, finding it invasive, etc.

But then, the biggie happened: Egypt, preceded by Tunisia, used facebook and other “social media” to facilitate a Revolution!

If you’ll forgive the analogy, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I mean, if Egypt can have a revolution on facebook, I guess I can have a facebook page.

Of course there’s that important flip side, not to be underestimated, that facebook was actually cut off by the powers that be, whoever they were/are – and we must remember that:

“they” are in charge of the grid, not us (not yet!).

(Can there be facebook/internet that belongs to “the people”, is run by the people, that we the people control?)

Nevertheless, the fires were stoked – Wael Ghonim, who was a major player in the online aspect of the protests, claimed he was not a hero; said that all he did was sit at a keyboard.

Well, there must be something to that social keyboarding thing, eh?

Time to join in.

Not knowing the territory, I began minimally.

First came the all important profile pic: I don’t have many photos of myself, so I chose a somewhat blurry picture I’d taken in my full length mirror while dressed as a witch last Halloween.  It was too long to fit in the allotted size, so I cropped myself from the waist up, wearing black with my pointy black witch’s hat.  Not bad, but okay for now.  At least it’s my face.

Within 24 hours I had an onslaught of friend requests, including some from people I don’t know, some really cute guys…How very tempting.  It made me wonder what I’d posted that got them there; was it ShahRukh Khan as someone who inspires me? or Jon Stewart?  Who knows what goes on in the geographical moonscape of facebook…

With my new facebook access, I got to see all these other profile photos, and quickly got discouraged with my own – too blurry, too black.  The full photo was more interesting: below my ruched black skirt, I’m wearing bright orange socks with black and white striped tights, and Dickensian lace-up boots.  I decided to post this lower half instead – essentially posting only my outfit.

This caused me to think about how much more the bottom half of my photo – that is, my outfit – represents me than the photo of my face does.

We can take far less credit – or blame – for our faces and bodies than we can for our clothes.  After all, what is my face but a turn of genetics? Something I cannot really alter without lots of cash and lots of surgery – and certainly not on a daily basis  Whereas my clothes really are more of an expression of me; they are my artistic statement, my daily moods on my sleeves, so to speak…

The boots and the tights would work for awhile.

Then, within days, I had what I would call my first true facebook experience.  Someone I am friends with in physical life, though not in regular contact with, posted on facebook that he was coming to town but had no idea where he was going to stay.  Having plenty of spare room in my house at the time, I emailed him to say he was welcome to stay at my place.  We proceeded to spend a lovely evening catching up and talking philosophy.

There was no denying: something had happened that would NOT have happened without facebook; A human connection had been made from a virtual one.

Another week went by and I began to desire a more purposefully designed profile photo.

I happen to be immersed in studies for a short story full of Persian carpets, so I took a pic of myself lying against a lovely russet rug of my own which is not Persian at all and is undoubtedly machine made, but felt just right, especially in my present state of mind.  I tweaked it a bit, and there it was, my new profile.

The next day while walking down the street I actually felt different, and I knew it was because of this picture.

I thought of something I’d heard recently, that spending even a short time as an avatar in a video game can enhance a person’s confidence for up to 24 hours (Jane McGonigal on Colbert).

When she said this, my mind traveled in a more menacing direction than she was heading in:

I thought of Jared Loughner (who now has his own wikipedia page – killing people publicly, always one way to get famous).

I also thought of the one time I’d seen Grand Theft Auto (the video game). It was over the shoulder of a man who was my housemate at the time, with whom I did not have good communication.  The clip I caught was of his ‘avatar’, armed with a high-powered rifle, running through a city landscape shooting people; a woman jumps up and screams, the avatar says “Shut up, Bitch”, shoots her and keeps on running…

How’s that for boosting a man’s confidence?

Still, after I’d posted that photo of myself, I really did feel like I was strutting differently. I’d framed something about myself, and now it was my public identity for everyone to see…There’s something intimate about it, and it marks this moment in my life, the story I’m working on, and even Egypt having a revolution before the eyes of the world, which is part of what I want to post about.

As for that, I also began to notice that I was almost the only one of my friends posting about world events.  The ratio of my concern with “what’s happening out there” to theirs was drastic, and I was confused. I’d expected to find myself deep in conversations on fire with the world, but…no.  Just daily doings around the house.

I began to infer from this that I have yet to find my ideal community.

I suppose one day I will start being in conversation with people I’ve only met in cyber space, people who are thinking and writing about what I’m thinking and writing about.  I’ve already run across blogs written by these kinds of people, people often from other countries, people I can exchange ideas with only because of the inter-net.

Will we one day be “friends”?  I hope so, though I worry about what will happen if the whole net goes down and our “friends” all live too far away for us to get to.  But in the meantime, simply connecting and finding others with like minds is a mighty thing.

With all its pitfalls and evils, I must say that so far my facebook experience has been illuminating and even exciting, especially as I’ve gotten connected to news pages that are important to me.  It allows me to continue being the one who brings up what’s happening even when others don’t want to know. It allows me to share new ideas, and whatever else I wish everyone knew about, even if they don’t take the time to look in depth.  And it allows me to be exposed to all kinds of things my friends share that I would know nothing about without my facebook page.

I guess I’m finally part of the social media mix.