7fatcow.com

For a while, i've preferred quietly bowing out to dramatic public announcements, not wanting to endlessly retire like an aging rock band. But now, a solid three years into the exciting creation and invitation of theis forum into being, i'm stepping down formally, from any inolvement with 7fatcow, unconvinced that it exists at all.

No bitterness. Dissapointment would imply expectations, and all my hopes and expectations for this blog where satisfied right away, constantly, along with all my concerns and suspicions, re: the inevitably difficult nature of True Expression and Engagement. That was understood from the beginning to be OK. Sometimes, when you talk with people, a lot of bullshit comes out as cushion for any insight and genuine heart-of-self that might be revealed, and that condition was understood from the beginning: along with the genius in our wider community of not-quite-ex/not-quite-ohs is a multitude of protective layer of ego and dogma; of noise and principle, of assumption and of flawed language, furious at the implication that it must be probed to be understood. That's OK, as much as any of the troublesome nature of our world is to be called OK, it's part of who we have been, and how we have expressed.

All that said, it's boring now, because maybe we've gone as far as any of us wanted to go. One of our founding members has moved beyond interest in the conversation here, as a funner life beckoned where the wit was expresseable and the company close enough that trying to blog in a noise filled room of cheesy links and ironically repressive vulgarity became uncompelling, especially once the Twitter and Facebook Status update was given unto us, to let the impulse sound more immediately, without need for context, or consensus. And so, the chance to say just a few things here was all he needed.

Another founding member has tried to give up so many times, and the clamor of each dramtic farewell, combined with the unelaborated links and occasional disavowels of entire identities for fear of Who May Be Listening, and Who May Be Judged along with him, often prevented the depth of his insight from being expressed. He erased all his posts, psuedonym after psudonym, and tried to convince somebody that he was somebody, and not actually somebody. And in that noise, his genius is silenced, and a certain unconfrontational decadence tried to grow around him; alas, woe unto those who think their sacrifices will provide security, money, or love.

And around that, behind that, so much genius was expressed.  Zoroastro/IslamoYid's and Atgate231's Scholarship, Class and Humor, Shitalpin's withering and ultimately humanist hot/cold sarcasm-masking-authenticity, Hashemsucksdick's marriage of post-religious concience and artistry, Mohammed's strange and shocking form of concience, Anivaho's Mercurial genius to let words permute into sublime association (even as any conceit towards divine synchronicty was despaired of) Yalhak's Majestic magnimamity and wholeness of vision/purity of impurity of perspective (along with the  lucid clarity of Yesod, Aisav, and the other maaminim he brought) and the writers we never even really identified, who bought so much class, genius, and perfect kvetchery to the conversation (who was Hiavrom anyway? he was brilliant! I hope he's OK.)

All the Neo-Nazis who stopped by to let us now what was going on, all the feminists and fetishists, all the excited Chabadskers, all the grieving relatives– so much got circulated, and maybe so little was heard, who knows? who knows. Who knows how much we ever hear from each other that we weren't ready to chap. But I feel like a lot of rare expression and relative taboo was aired here, and i'm really proud of that. As proud as one can be of something that one just let happen.

All the martyrs and all the victims; all the heroes and all the wimps. All the Faggotry and all the ugly, ugly Charedi shock-porn. All the piety and simple faith. Everything but the bullshit, and the noise, and the hiding of ourselves inside of our conceptions. It really has been a great ride, and I can only pray that some of this survivesinto the annals ofHistory, the story of how the Jewish Problem was, if only for a moment, touched upon, if not successfully adressed, from within, rather than just from without. God bless you all, to move on, and see how easy it is just to start up a crazy fucking conversation in this great, wide future of accessible interests, may we one day merit to see it to it's end.

Shana Tov, and i'll see you at the Jubilee

Yoseph Leib,

AKA Yhosephus,

AKA the guy that fucked your sister, back when she was still cute.

Things are not worth arguing over. But whether or not things are worth arguing over is certainly worth arguing over.

Any honest thinker has to admit the insecurity of all metaphysical positions, and in particular of all creeds. He has also to admit the unwarrantable nature of all metaphysical assertions and face the fact that there is no evidence whatever for the ability of the human mind to pull itself up by its own boot-strings, that is, to establish anything transcendental.  

Materialism is a metaphysical reaction against the sudden realization that cognition is a mental faculty and, if carried beyond the human plane, a projection. The reaction was ‘metaphysical’ in so far as the man of average philosophical education failed to see through the implied hypostasis, not realizing that ‘matter’ was just another name for the supreme principle. As against this, the attitude of faith shows how reluctant people were to accept philosophical criticism. It also demonstrates how great is the fear of letting go one’s hold on the securities of childhood and of dropping into a strange, unknown world ruled by forces unconcerned with man. Nothing really changes in either case; man and his surroundings remain the same. He has only to realize that he is shut up inside his mind and cannot step beyond it, even in insanity; and that the appearance of his world or of his gods very much depends upon his own mental condition.   

(C.G. Jung, Psychological Commentary to The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, xxxi-xxxii)

Oh frog in the unbound waters,

Struggle on, keep swimming.

Who knows? Perhaps…

(Fakhruddin Iraqi - Divine Flashes, 127)

The Aish.com website, arguably the world’s largest Jewish learning website, states that Aish HaTorah “is dedicated to revitalizing the Jewish people by providing opportunities for Jews of all backgrounds to discover their heritage in an atmosphere of open inquiry and mutual respect.” -Arutz7

What the Jew wants the most. What the Jew will never get.

Zil gemor…

-atgate231

So, Courtney Love is being interviewed by some low class rag whose name escapes me, when the question comes up: How do you feel about Nirvana's legacy. She responds:

"Every time you buy a Nirvana record, part of that money is not going to Kurt's child, or to me, it's going to a handful of Jew loan officers, Jew private banks, it's going to lawyers who are also bankers . . ." 

She's Jewish, at least her maternal grandmother is, and so is her and Kurt's daughter, and any children that she may have. So she's really kinda more of a Leah Kleim type figure, allowed to say things like this because she actually knows the lawyers and banks in question. maybe?

 Classic

Cracked magazine had a fun throwaway secret behind words that we use every day with racist origins,featuring this little tidbit:

Hip Hip Hooray!

How it's Used:

"We won the little league game! Hip hip hooray!"

What You're Actually Saying:

"We won the little league game! Let's go kill some Jews!"

Wait, What?

The first half of "hip hip hooray" is adapted from "hep hep," an old German shepherds' herding cry. That is, actual shepherds from Germany. Not the dogs.

Sounds pretty innocuous, right? Well, it was, up until around 1819, when the citizens of Germany and other neighboring countries began using it as their rallying cry while going Hebrew-hunting in the Jewish ghettos. So keep that in mind next time you're trying to come up with an appropriate cheer at your cousin's Bar Mitzvah.

Funny, right? For more details on the current state of Jew Evil, check out This historic video of Jewish British MP Gerald Kaufman accusing Israel of acting a shtikle Nazish in Gaza. Santa Klaus better reward him something nice!

I had a really great Kiddush Levana last night, coming off of a tormented existential weekend of frustrated ineloquent ambivalence about "Israel" and what terrible/misguided/ridiculous it demands. And it got me thinking, about grace, about feeling alone in a personal bubble of clarity, and feeling like no-one, or at least, not enough of everyone, cares or understands what we need them to. So it occured to me, sweetly:

Why are some people so troubled about the idea of suicide becoming perceived as a valid personal decision? Because we're afraid that someone we really like having around will give up on the world, and leave, either not realizing or not caring how much we appreciate them.  May we be blessed to realize how much people appreciate us, and if they don't, may inspiration fill us on how to live well enough that someone, if not everyone, we love can find reasons to be happy that we're alive.

–Yho

So, following a short trail of cutesy "Best of 2008″ links brought me to The Ridiculant, whereupon I noticed this charming little report about innovative computer trickery:

As with many recent major events (the Mumbai bombings, for example), plenty of people are following the Israeli military campaign in Gaza on Twitter - it's a good way to get breaking updates, and hear voices from the ground, on both sides of the conflict. One of the most common techniques to facilitate this is for Twitter users to tag their Gaza-related tweets with a 'hashtag' - simply including '#gaza' in any Gaza-related tweet. This allows other users to easily find Gaza-related content, and allows aggregation sites such as CrisisWire to pull together all the rolling updates from the site.

But if you search for #gaza right now, you'll see something odd: lots of #gaza updates that clearly have nothing to do with Gaza. For example, "I #gaza that brittany and I race each other to school every morning". Not only is it nothing to do with the ground war in Palestine, it doesn't even make sense. What's going on?

The answer is that somebody has recently set up a couple of automated Twitter feeds, which are simply searching Twitter for tweets containg the word 'love', and re-posting them with '#gaza' in place of 'love'. So, for example, when Twitterer katiesol mentions how much she loves the Randy Newman song 'You've Got A Friend In Me', it gets republished word-for-word by the Twitter bot Furttuna - except now she gazas the song, instead of loving it. The same for richardhiscutt, trying to tell British MP Tom Watson how cute his son looks in glasses (and the gazafied version). And so on.

Gaza is exchanged for love. Who does this kind of thing? how does it happen?

Why do this? Obviously, it's an attempt to drown out the natural conversation about the events in Gaza. Who might be behind it? It could be a supporter of either side (and while instinct might suggest that you'd lean towards someone with a pro-Israel stance, some on the Palestinian side have also shown a fondness for pranks),

So I followed that link to Electronic Intifada, where this prank call in response to Israeli leaflets of Gaza requesting information about terrorist activities is phoned in to the number on the leaflet:

EI: Hello

Israeli officer: Hello

EI: How are you?

Israeli officer: Praise be to God, who am I talking to?

EI: You are speaking to Ahmad.

Israeli officer: Welcome Ahmad.

EI: How are you, what is your name?

Israeli officer: I'm Abu Ibrahim, sir. Where are you from Ahmad?

EI: I'm from Gaza

Israeli officer: Where in Gaza, my brother?

EI: We'll talk about that in a minute, but I saw one of the flyers you dropped on Gaza.

Israeli officer: Oh yes that's right …

EI: I have some information for you on members of terrorist groups that are in Gaza.

Israeli officer: Oh I hope so……

EI: Ok, let's talk … let me give you some of the information and then we'll talk some more. Do you have a pen?

Israeli officer: Yes. I have a pen and I'm writing.

EI I want to give you names of the biggest terrorist organizations, not just in Gaza, but in all Palestine.

Israeli officer: Ok, let's see

EI: Ok, the first one …

Israeli officer: You mean to tell me they're all from Hamas?

EI: All of them are people … you'll see. The first one, his name is Ehud Barak [Israeli minister of defense].

Israeli officer: Ehud Barak? By God there's no one like you …

EI: Second, Gabi Ashkenazi [Israeli army chief of staff]

Israeli officer: Do you know him?

EI: Of course. The third one is…

Israeli officer: Wait a minute, one at a time …

EI: No write it down, I don't have time. The third one is called Ehud Olmert [Israeli prime minister].

Israeli officer: Look, just a minute …

Where can you breathe? That's where you can testify divinity. It's hard to breathe around shit, too much piss, too much detergent, too much civility.

Civility is a detergent, for the wildness of man. Too much makes him pale and lifeless, but alot of people feel like the danger of bugs is worth it to scare away.

I eat wild greens. I believe that God is in the wind, and is polluted and is polluting like the wind, and that the only salvation I have from the poison of the world is to eat the vegetables that have grown up in it and through it, wild.

Cars are not wild, no matter what the commercials used to swear. Cars are the essence of civil, that's why the ettiquette around them is so sacred. You better know what the traffic signals mean, and if you don't, you're not going to be welcomed back to the highway. They will pull you over and ask to see your proof of virtue, and everyone appreciates them for it.

In modern Cairo, one of the most polluted places in the world, there are no traffic laws. Just some folk customs, and alot of screwy innovation.

I pray to the God  that fills the sky with wind, who breathes life into history, to please give me the wisdom to live in the world.  Blame me  for the pollution? You put it there, waiting to be abused, so just tell me how to live with it without becoming ugly at all, won't you please? I hear wild greens, slow walks, deep breaths, and a little hard physical labor, done slowly enough, are good. What else did wind drag in this season? What new sickness is coming, can you innoculate me with you wild wonder life, oh holy father in the sky? Blow insight–