Recently many people who are not too familar with Libyan history started asking quations about the sanity of Gadaffi. Is this man clinically insane? To answer the question one only has to read the ‘Green Book’ Gadaffi wrote as some sort of political bible Libyans had to live up to. Let me quote from chapter three:

“According to gynaecologists, women menstruate every month or so, while men, being male, do not menstruate or suffer during the monthly period.” Colonel Gadaffi, Green Book, Part III, The Social Basis of The Third Universal Theory

Men do not menstruate or suffer during their monthly periods, says Colonel Gadaffi. Why thank you Mr Gadaffi, that was some very useful knowledge from the supreme high leader, the Chose revolutionary of the people!

Now can you please stop hiring mercenaries to shoot your own people?

Before I made it clear that I believe at this point NATO or the UN face a final test to their credibility: do they really care about human rights they should act now. But the same is true about the Arab nations: they should help out and intervene. Tunesia and Egypt, come on, help your neighbours out and stop the slaughter.

After a day of horrible, rash violence in the Libya uprising we get to see Mr Gadaffi, whom some said had already fled to Venezuela, but in a very strange and unsettling setting: holding an umbrella in an old lorry, wearing Russian ear-warmers. What a surreal image. It must have been done on purpose. But what does it mean and why these propagandistic choices?

The obvious explanation is that Gadaffi fears for his life and does the ‘Look, I’m a nut, please don’t kill me’ routine.

But a nut would speak about strange stuff. And he doesn’t. He just says I refuse to speak to you because it started to rain. And he is holding his grey umbrella while sitting in a 1960 style lorry van. Completely unnecessary since he’s already inside the van. What’s he holding the umbrella for? Is he scared that the lorry will get wet? Why the weird grey coloured sober umbrella? Russian ear-warmers? It a scene so weird even David Lynch would probably scrap it.

Now of course Gadaffi always was a colourful tyrant known for his posturing qualities. The war crimes he committed last days stand in stark contrast with his public image, because he is purposely playing the ‘sweet lunatic’ here. There is only one other possibility. That is the possibility that he is genuinely insane. Which is quite likely, for one must be insane to use ones air-force on ones own people.

Let’s hope the Libyans will succeed quickly in getting rid of this tyrant. I think this is the one case where NATO actually could make an impression as something not entirely irrelevant when it comes to freedom and democracy. So I say: intervene, and do it know. This is a place that needs a UN peace force. Libya consists of several tribes and there is a huge potential for civil war there. Institutionalize Gadaffi, get a peace keeping force in and let the Libyans for legitimate political parties and hold elections.

These have been two interesting months, to say the least. Whatever the real causes are, fact is that the current chain of revolutions is unprecedented in history. I cant recall any other period in history where such a chain of revolutions took place. Now Libya looks like its going to fall, lets hope all other tyrants are next. We need to make sure that humans rights and civil liberties are a global and not just a local phenomenon.

As to Gadaffi, here’s a song for you, old man:

Obviously not, they are just there because they fell into his habit. I feel the same way about most people who claim to be into poetry: they don’t actually care about the substance, its just something that fell into their ritualized personality. Its just a piece of furniture of their soul.

The above observation is the actual cause of much frustration. Replace poetry with ‘love’ or ‘me’ and you see what I mean: most people cannot by nature be truly interested in any substance. The fact that they protray themselves as such doesn’t mean a thing. Its just social baggage. They learned to behave that way in order to be safe in this world. They pretend they love poetry because this identity protects them from the void.

A lot of people will be scared of the above idea, because in reality it means that most people are ritualized fakes. Well this is true. I dare you to go out to any bar or cafe and watch the environment attentively: there is hardly anyone who notices anything in their environment. They are some sort of ritualized fakes that do not live in reality. You have to force your presence upon them before they notice anything.

The military have a technique that consists of trying to remember and observe as many elements of your environment as you can. I often try practise this technique and I think its also vital when it comes to writing poetry. Think of it in this way: if you cant observe the world then how could you possibly observe your own thoughts? The observational skills are the same. Learn to be a brilliant observer and you are very close to being a briliant poet, or a brillinat artist, or a brilliant whatever.

What was special about the Huffington post? It was that it filled up a true gap: it proved there actually is a leftist American movement.

I have been watching Slavoj Zizek on Al Jazeera interviewed about Egypt. In the interview he analyses the actual lack of a left wing as the exact cause of the ‘radicalisms’ going on around the globe. That interview can be seen here:

So, I feel the exact same way as Zizek: what an utterly depressing message is this, to – all of a sudden, our of the blue – sell the most important leftist news-source to an incredibly conservative and irrelevant dinosaur as AOL. Very, very depressing. Except for the person who made 300 million with the deal, who is laughing all the way to the bank. If she ever gets the money, that is. Because my guess is that the Huffington will deflate like a balloon and soon there will be little left of it. And then she might not be so happy with AOLs Arabian owners who paid for 25 million users and their posts.

But philosophically, what a perfect moment to snuff the left media out – one year before the enxt elections, with the Teanutters warming up to take America over.

That’s a scary development. And as in all horror-films, such scares depend on their instant appearance.

Another philosophical angle: it seems a repeating pattern: a broad base of users builds a content network (and I think everyone would agree the reason the Huffington is popular is because people love to read critical comments of other users), its sold out for lots of money and deflates immediately. Isn’t this rather a modern variant of piracy? Is Arrianna Huffington a modern day pirate, or did she completely sell out her own principles?

What struck me as REALLY WEIRD is the news that she ‘will be the head of this-or-that department’ after she just earned 300 milllion bucks.

Think about it. You just earned 300 million bucks by selling your weblog to a corporate giant.
Are you inclined to sign a job contract with the firm? Of course not.

Any clever person would sell, and start an alternative.

So my guess is: the job positioin was either part of the deal, that, or Arrianna Huffington really does believe that AOL will give the Huffington Post ‘The speed of light’.

At any rate, it all stinks like a limburgian cheese. Then again, there must be at least SOMETHING wrong with you if this strikes you as the image of a ‘leftist person’:

You have found a stone.
But it is not your stone.
So you keep polishing and polishing.
The craft, you say, is to create a flawless stone
one indistinguishably remarkable.

But it’s not your craft, is it?
It is the found beast of an old tradition.
True, there are worse things in this world
than a couple of polished stones.

One day you will stretch out your hand
and offer us your perfect stone.
It will glow, in the middle of your palm
like a star only dreamed of by puppets.

You will stand in front of the mob,
expect nothing less than a crucifixion
or, at least, to meet the original stone
receiving its autograph on your corpse.

But no one moves. The crowds stare
only reminds you of the desert of birth.
You, who owns an invisible star, are
now at mercy of a nursing wasteland.

Square one, home of the creator.
But it’s not your square, is it?

It’s been around. In all its hidden glory.
In all its hidden glory. It’s been around.

Martijn 18-01-2011

Girls. I thought it was a great way of impressing girls. Of course
later I found out that having an expensive mobile phone works much
better. The girl I wrote my first poem to just looked at me like I was
crazy. So I got the natural idea that I was probably not good enough
at it yet and started with the vain idea that i could improve these
skills. Of course later on I realized that having a crisp hundred
dollar bill sticking out of your breast pocket is much more effective
if you want to get interactive.

Are all of your poems kind of constructed around a main theme?

No. In fact if you investigate this idea closely you will see that
‘themes’ actually do not exist in the entire corpus of poetry. This is
because of the nature of poetry, which primarily is a tool that tries
to name the unnameable. You could, for example, claim lots of poems
have ‘death’ as a theme. But do they really? The theme itself is often
just a metaphor for something else. And death is an abstract concept,
in this case operating in the abstract environment of a poem. So what
exactly does it mean to call ‘death’ a theme? Nothing much on closer
investigation. A poet could really be talking about anything
imaginable and make it look like a poem about death. Don’t be fooled.
Poets are tricksters.

How do you feel poetry is beneficial to the world of literature, and
the world itself?

The world of literature kind of stinks. It’s full of fools who have
invested a lot of time in ‘cultural capital’ and are very hungry to
get returns on those investments in the form of recognition. Frankly,
only a complete moron would waste his precious time on this planet
with such insane people. In my opinion poetry wants to have little to
do with those people. The stuff they praise always seems pretty random
to me. They praise good stuff and they praise bad stuff, all is the
same to them. If you wanna write poems just keep out of the world
of literature that’s what I say.

As to ‘what beneficial effect does poetry have on the world’ I am not
at liberty to answer that question since this is one of our trade
secrets.

When you pull together a piece of poetry, is it all at once, or do you
begin a piece and return to it later?

In my opinion the most effective way of writing poetry is to get up at
0600 in the morning every day and write, write the poem until the
draft is finished. I have heard this from several great poets – early
in the morning the mind is the cleanest and its most easy to produce
poetry without the mind interfering with itself. Just do that every
day for a few years, then you have like a few hundred drafts. Then
reserve a month or two to rewrite about 50 or 60 good poems from those
hundreds of drafts. And there you go.

Do you have any big inspirations for your poetry?

How exactly does one measure the size of inspirations? How am i
supposed to know if an inspiration is big or not? Sometimes you feel
something, a little tickle in the back of your head. Sometimes you
feel an incredible urge. Is the last ‘bigger’ than the first? Better?
Hell if I know. Big inspirations, little inspirations, I do them all,
dude. I’m an omni-inspirationalist. In my opinion the whole world is
fabricated by inspirations. But now I am getting dangerously close to
those trade secrets again.

Thanks a ton once again, I know you’re likely very busy and It’s very
much appreciated.

Welcome, Lee. I wish you the best of luck with your project. Let me
close this interview with one of my favourite poems from Milosz, which
concerns some of the topics we touched in this interview:

A Confession (1985)

My God, I loved strawberry jam.
And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body.
Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the waitress’s neck.
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,
Able to recognise greatness wherever it is,
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,
I knew what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud,
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

Czeslaw Milosz

On what basis does Frank Fenner think humanity will be extinct so soon? What’s his line of logic, what’s the evidence? He claims that humanity as a whole will suffer the same faith as the inhabitants of Easter Island. When that island was discovered back in 1772 the explorers found a small population of people at constant war with each other over a limited number of resources. The island had once been a true civilisation, but had degraded into an eternal war-zone once the resources proved to be insufficient to support everyone.

As humanity keeps on growing and growing and its resources shrink fast its not hard to see where Professor Fenner gets his idea from. He joins a long line of intelligent doomsday thinkers, some of whom I am suspecting of having popularity motives for being such (as is the case with Zizek and his pseudo hip end time phenomenon book) – I don’t think any reasonable person could refuse to admit the chance of this development is high, but let’s for one moment look at the only thing that CAN save us: science. For the last 10000 years we should have learned at least one thing: it is never politics that progresses humanity, it is science, art and culture that do.

Now, we do have a giant resource problem that will quickly worsen. The biggest problem is metals. All those mobile phones, all those laptops, they are all impossible without the use of rare metals and those metals are running out. Forget about the Oil crisis. Don’t even believe all those websites that claim some giant oil crisis is coming for more than 1 nanosecond: the solution to the oil problem has been found. Giant bio-farms with bacteria that produce oil constantly. Its possible and they are working on it. But you cant do that with metals. Those run out. And the ecological system does too. There is one very strange and hopeful development that, if implemented, would save humanity from its bleak future.

Its photosynthesis combined with microbiology. I have seen an interview with a eminent Dutch microbiologist who at this moment is creating fish that can live from sunlight. Yes, its possible and he did succeed in doing so. He claims that within 8 years he will be able to make humans that do not need to eat any more but can simply live from sunlight. The implications of such a development are enormous. Think about it: what resources would we need if no one needs to eat any more?

As to the scientific side, its a question of making the skin of even just the hair have photosynthetic qualities by mingling it with the right plant DNA.

So, ironically, in the future we might all be LITERALLY green. If we want to survive. These are strange times, aren’t they? The risks are enormous, but hopefully with some right decisions we will actually be able to overcome this rather infantile stage of self destruction.

A ‘tweet’ or a ‘status update’ is not an official publication. It is a quick thought you pen down to a network of supposed ‘friends’. We have learned now that such ‘quick thoughts’ are enough reason to lose your job. I can think of circumstances where such would even be somewhat justified, but in this case the expressing of condolences seems to me perfectly legal.

But what are the real ramifications here? Isn’t it that companies through these media now have large control over our thoughts? How much time will it take before companies can fire employees not because of what they express but because of what they think? If you think that idea is far away, you are not very up to date about the developments in human-computer interfaces.

It is very well possible to create an interface that directly links the brain to the computer. Such interfaces have already been build. Think about the enormous implications of that, especially if the computer learns to execute commands of the brain. You could simply think of a book and the computer would write it at the speed of your thoughts. You could visualise a website and the computer builds in in 3 nanoseconds.

Think also of the enormous dangers: viruses now do not only destroy your computer but can also directly effect your brain. You could be remotely controlled without even knowing it. And: in a company where everyone is hooked up to such a brain-computer device the employer could simply fire you for thinking something.

We are not far from that point at all if we fire people for a quick thought via a tweet or status update. I am all for responsibility and I don’t think an employee can make official publications that would seriously downgrade his company, but that is not what we are discussing here. We are talking here about giant corporations that think they have the right to determine what you can and cant say in your private life, not about the company but about a political matter. Think about it. That is very serious and very wrong.

The lesson, for now, seems to be mostly not to add your employer to your list of ‘friends’, but unfortunately it isn’t as simple as that. There’s always people who will rat you out, and show your tweet to your employer anyway. No, the solution here, especially in sight of the enormous risks of interface developments, is new legislation about what governments, companies and other institutions can do with our personal lives. There are too many unguarded and unthoughtful and very very risky scientific developments going on at the moment, and without some serious monitoring we will all live to see the day that we regret not having acted now against the dangers these developments imply.

Martijn Benders

Martijn Benders is a philosopher and a member of Novo Universalis, a centralist Think-tank that aims to help humanity evolve.

Click here for the larger picture

But there are some huge obstacles to the idea. One is the immense effort of the digging and support of the city. Another is water management. A third one is earthquakes, which are even far more dangerous to underground cities than to normal cities. No one wants to be squeezed between two earth platters.

Then there is the problem of fresh air, and the problem of lack of sunlight and thus lack of Vitamin D. To live ones life only in artificial light is not healthy. There’s a challenge: could it be somehow possible to invent a light source that is not artificial but completely mimics the qualities of real sunlight?

I am doubtful about the entire news item now, since I was unable to trace any architecture agency in Russia named ‘Alice’. So it probably a hogwash story. Nice stuff to think about though and nice imagery, wherever it came from!

Or could the Russians really plan to go underground, perhaps as a counter-move to the illustrious ‘rocket shield plan’ of the US which got even more ridiculous by now because they now claim to only install short and middle range rockets – check the fly-path of a missile from Iran to Europe and see if it somehow crosses Poland…

Now, two of those spies lived together as a happy couple for years, doing the stuff spies do: normalising. Being as normal as possible. Being as American as possible. Their names? Richard and Cynthia Murphy.

Richard and Cynthia Murphy. That sounds almost like my neighbours. Will they still fit into the court seats after Americanizing for years? And as taking a whole range of psychiatric drugs is considered ‘normal’ nowadays we can safely assume they have been swallowing pills like crazy, just to appear normal. They must have been cheating on each other too, just to prevent standing out from the crowd.

Maybe they are not spies but the real Americans, while all the other ones are the spies. Are they on facebook? Hell yes! You cant normalise without having a facebook profile. Let’s see. Here’s Richard Murphy:

Richard Murphy

He’s kind of handsome, so Cynthia should better watch out. He looks like a young sturdy de Niro.
We also read that Richard Murphy has been renovating homes in the exclusive neighborhoods of Los Angeles for years.

Now where’s Cynthia? Well, here:

Cynthia Murphy

Hmmm. Who is the Cynthia? The left one seems rather ‘Americanized’. Or the right one, who is pretending to have studied and pretends to have an American mom?

This is definitely book material. The long romance between the girl who pretends to have an all american mom and the guy who pretends to be renovating homes in the rich areas of Los Angeles. As if we all dont know people do not renovate their homes there, they simply throw it away and buy a new one. We dont buy it, Russian Richard!

See what I mean? Facebook is the perfect tool for would-be-spies and cheap romantic novel writers.

‘Are you also secretly waiting for the moment a black Saab crashes itself into some sort of monument? Not that I wish for it to happen, but at least something would happen then!’

The OM, the ‘National Prosecutors Office’ (website) the next day said Paul the Leeuw would not be sued for making this tweet on Twitter. Would not be sued? Can you be sued for just saying something, an innocent joke? What the hell has the National Prosecutors Office to do with an innocent tweet? Don’t these people have anything better to do? Are we supposed to feel better now that we know they actually investigate tweets, to see if they can be legally sued? The guy made a joke, for christ sake.

Then, simultanously, this item appears in the dutch news. Dutch Broadcasting Network ‘TROS’ fires Cornald Maas for putting the following tweet online:

‘What nice export products we Dutch have, Sieneke, Joran van der Sloot and the PVV’

Cornald Maas was working for the TROS as a commentator and he also commentated the Eurovision songfestival for the Netherlands. So this guy is FIRED for making a joke on twitter? What is wrong with these people?

Isn’t it obvious that social media are becoming increasingly more dangerous and narrow minded. Yesterday I took a peek at a fake facebook account i created after not having looked there for about two months. Now every post you make there says ‘flag’ under it, so you could be nicely reported for anything you could possibly say.

I am actually glad they threw me out of facebook. It is becoming a very narrow minded instrument of moralistic social control and twitter doesnt seem any better judging by these news items. Think about it, I am a well known dutch author, and they simply deleted all my work ‘because someone complained’ and they wouldnt even tell me what the reason was for deleting my profile!

I dont want weird government agencies to gloat over my family pictures, thank you very much. I dont want ‘prosecutor agencies’ weighing every joke and remark I make on the scale of their legal apparatus. Having such agencies controlling everything you say in your own home is RIDICULOUS and UNACCEPTABLE. Yes, I articulate that, because people somehow seem to start to think this is all normal.

My book was one of the bestly reviewed books of 2008. I was nominated for the Buddingh price and won two other poetry awards. It means nothing to facebook: it simply deletes all my work, all my poems, all my thoughts, because some monkey had some moralistic issue with something I wrote. And they wouldnt even tell me what it was. There was no chance of appeal, nothing. Justice doesn’t exist in their world, just low-brow moralism.

That seems exactly the road we are on: a road that leads to a world where low-brow moralism of the most stupid sort rules and justice is simply a thing of the past. Too complicated, too nuanced, to much maintenance costs.

Facebook and Twitter increasinly are becoming control instruments. I actually started to develop a new social environment, called ‘Soulsat’, because I do like the technology, I just dont like the morons who happen to control it. I will try to get it online in the coming months.

The article (dutch) about Cornald Maas

The article about Paul de Leeuw

He is by no means the only tibetan writer or artist that has got arrested recently. Reports indicate that the last three months the chinese government has arrested more than 50 writers, poets and musicians. People who were arrested in the middle of the night and taken away, because they wrote poems, songs or made artworks the autorities disapprove of.

China has become the dark underbelly of our capitalist system. They produce almost anything we use in the western world. That makes us responsible for its policies, in a sense, because we have at many levels been economically and politically merged with their system. Slavoj Zizek once said that China proves Capitalism can very well function without democracy and that this is the biggest danger that lies ahead of us. He may very well be right: except that I believe this is already kind of ‘old news’, in the sense that most democracies in the west have become like show trials. The ‘double standards’ people complain about are actually preconditions without which the system wouldnt work.

What can we do to free Tashi Dhondup? I am afraid not a whole lot. We could send mails to the Chinese Embassy or just spread this story around. I have great symphaty for the Tibetan people, who have been the most spirited and warm people I have ever met in my travels. So yes, I am amongst those that keeps saying ‘Free Tibet Now’.

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