Insomniac Notes

I drove to Wheeling, West Virginia yesterday to meet with Howard L. Feinstein. He’s a Foxhead author, lawyer, memoirist, former Justice Department official, musician, performer, activist, teacher, lay historian, and public speaker. My manifest said I was en route to deliver four crates of his new book, Fire on the Bayou, so he’d have enough to sate his rowdy fans at the January 12th book launch.

In return, Howard promised to deliver to me all extant physical evidence of the book’s disastrous initial short-run, botched when I managed to surpass every moron-proof error-safeguard in Adobe CS6, moot Dropbox’s usefulness, and present our bulk printer with an overwritten InD book-file that, once produced, looked as if copy-edited by an LSD-crazed peahen.

We planned to sketch marketing ideas for a title that doesn’t need marketing. Howard is a force of nature, and comes by his nickname, “Hurricane,” honestly. I reserve a thimbleful of pity for the domestic terrorists who deserved and received Howard’s prosecutorial wrath. Once resolved, he sees a thing to the end, and if you bet he’s not going to come out on top, you’re a damn fool. Just sayin’. Tomorrow, the 12th, he embarks—I shit you not—on an east coast tour he organized on his own, to promote the memoir.

What’s even more remarkable is he’s promised his share of net proceeds from the memoir to Empowered Women International, a nationally recognized non-profit that has created jobs, businesses and leadership opportunities for more than 3,000 immigrant, refugee and low-income women and continues to transform women’s lives. Here’s a lecture the founder, Marga Fripp, gave TED:

Okay, so on to my diversions:

Former student of mine (she’s a super-sharp cookie, and was never a “student” in the traditional sense; I should say, “she took my class…”) posts this essay on poverty, aimed at the audience of bougie haters who have more in common with the poor than they do the rich, but think by dissing their inferiors they’ll bait the gods of good fortune to elevate them to affluence.
Notes from Lessig & Chomsky, two of the best minds of the 20th/21st centuries, both of which were affected and influenced by a wunderkind, who’d have joined their company, had the US Justice Department not driven him to suicide. May those prosecutors burn in Hell. I Thank you.
If the Feds didn’t cook the books, you’d all notice the economy, as endured by the 99%, never recovered; unemployment is the worst it’s been since the 1930′s.
Biggest problem with media coverage of scientific papers?—many headline writers don’t know the difference between correlation and causation.
No! You cannot posess the moon. Such is Mango.
Egyptologists accidentally find awesome important grave.
I was on about consciousness a couple days ago. So, more.
I have heard this before. Prolly nonsense, but I love the idea.
Wonder if these sort of smug pronouncements will justify the purge, bloodbath, beheadings, and firing squads they’re bound to inspire? Of course, they got away with pimping Hitler, incinerating customers, and selling the Fiesta, so who knows?
Someday, your descendants will wonder why you did not demand your leaders nuke the Saudis. But, so obvious an answer probably obviates need for the question.
The conflation of certification and education paves the way for corprofascist system to subsume the entire concept of developing a whole, thinking, integrated person capable of sophisticated abstract thought.
So, if Graham Hancock is such a nut, then why doesn’t someone address is his evidence and arguments on the merits when he makes thorough, disruptive claims?
You know, it struck me the other day that by labeling and categorizing, we think we’ve neutered mystery and magic. For instance, this. We call something instinct, then pretend that naming the phenomenon conceals the fact that memory itself is passed to offspring, just like physical traits. Only the good live Jung.
Sign of the times when I root for an obviously unbalanced, though endearing, accused murderer over my own “democratically” managed government: