[Synthesis blog once again brings you the philosophy of Synthesis Weekly columnist Mad Bob. With no further adieu, we present to you Immaculate Infection.]

In My Hour of Darkness

I am suffering through a crisis of confidence.

More after the jump. (more…)

[Once again Synthesis Blog brings you the rambling wisdom and sagacious meditations of our Synthesis Weekly columnist, Mad Bob Howard. The reclusive and gun-toting Mad Bob can be reached at madbob@madbob.com, but attempts at correspondence will most likely be met with a computer virus and several death threats.]

No Tolerance

Girl-O-Rama! Hurray!: Well, apparently I can’t drink alcohol anymore — at least not in the vast quantities I used to imbibe. For the last couple of months or so, I have been cutting way back on my consumption. That being said, on Saturday night the girlie show was in town and I decided it would be a good night to go ahead and tie one on. That decision turned out to be erroneous. As of this writing it is Tuesday morning, and I am still not 100 percent.
The evening was pure entertainment. 2 Drink and I rolled into Nick’s around 10:30 and caught the last song-and-a-half of the Baghdad Batteries set. Is it just me or are shows starting a helluva lot earlier than they ever used to? The Shankers did what they do so well, and in between the bands and afterward, wonderfully glamorous women performed classic burlesque numbers. There was nothing wrong with the evening that a couple of purposefully placed, brightly sequined tassels spinning in opposite directions couldn’t take care of.
Anyway — after getting my fill of ear and eye candy, I just didn’t want the evening to end and so I followed a small entourage across the street to a lively after party. In retrospect, I would have been better off just going home. I recall talking to some very nice people, but I don’t remember a word of what was said. I recall meeting several very nice dogs as well. I recall drinking at least a couple of beers, but I don’t recall how I got home. It isn’t more than four blocks to my house so I am assuming I walked but you never know.

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[Once again Synthesis Blog brings you the rambling wisdom and sagacious meditations of our Synthesis Weekly columnist, Mad Bob Howard. The reclusive and gun-toting Mad Bob can be reached at madbob@madbob.com]

Crumbling Faith

“I’m an anarchist – I don’t make rules for other people. I make rules for myself.”
-Utah Phillips

Utah Phillips, legendary songwriter and labor activist, passed away last week at the age of 73. Phillips was born in 1935 and as a young man he served in the army. The gore and human waste he witnessed during combat duty in the Korean War left him angry and deeply disturbed, and when he returned to America, Phillips fell into a life of destitution and alcoholism. He hopped freight trains and moved from state to state and shelter to shelter; then, in his later career as a folk singer and songwriter, Phillips wove the characters he met along the way with the anarchist philosophy he’d adopted to create meaningful music that shone a light on injustice and hinted at a better method of structuring society.

Fingers in the Dyke: All around us we are seeing an erosion of this particular “capitalist” system. Similarly as to how I feel about communism or socialism, I don’t believe there is anything innately wrong with capitalism. All three systems work fine on paper because they are essentially theoretical. The problem is with people and the inevitability of corruption. That’s what we’re seeing today. It’s taken longer than it did to rot out communism, but corruption is devouring our own political and economic system from within.
Consumer capitalism is an economic belief system built primarily on faith. If we all believe things will get better, and keep on spending accordingly, then the system will persist into perpetuity. The economy has been floating on credit cards for the last 20 years. I used to have a problem with the credit cards, and I am telling you it’s the same thing as gambling. You are spending money you don’t have assuming that eventually your personal financial situation will catch up with your spending lifestyle.
But once we lose our faith and decide to hold onto our money instead of sacrificing it on the altar of consumerism, then the system breaks down. This “economic downturn” is ultimately a monster of our own creation — we’ve allowed our faith to crumble.

[More stuff to get the blood boiling after the jump.] (more…)

[Synthesis blog once again brings you the philosophy of Synthesis Weekly columnist Mad Bob. With no further adieu, we present to you Immaculate Infection.]

Beauty, Paranoia and Black Holes

J. Edgar Hoover: J. Edgar Hoover was the former head of the FBI and a severely sinister and creepy individual. He was twisted and power-hungry and would stop at nothing to increase his own influence and prestige. He built the FBI into a potent law enforcement tool but he also used that potency to achieve his own selfish and strange gains.
One of the suspect activities the FBI indulged in under Hoover’s watch was to secretly wiretap figures within the Civil Rights movement. As a result, the FBI accumulated hours upon hours of clandestine footage of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. While the practice is dubious and illegal, historians today are absolutely ecstatic to have this treasure trove of information that shines a light into the personality of such a dynamic public figure.

It turns out that what Martin Luther King Jr. revealed in those tapes is even more selfless and righteous than his public personae. He was not an attention-seeker; in fact he consistently bemoaned the public role that was thrust upon him. King spoke often of being tired, of just wanting to go back to being a preacher, which he felt was what God had called upon him to do. But, with the encouragement of the people with whom he had surrounded himself, he pushed on until the fateful day he was assassinated in April of 1968. Incidentally, there is more than a little suspicion that Hoover’s FBI was involved in that incident.

Listening through these tapes, Hoover did not take away the beauty and selflessness of the man in question. Instead, he focused his attention on King’s imperfections. The tapes revealed that King was an adulterer and Hoover quickly labeled him a sexual deviant and a hypocrite. He found every avenue he could to dehumanize and tear down a great man.
It is difficult for me to explain this, but I feel badly for J. Edgar Hoover. How could a man have so much hatred in his heart that they fail to see the brilliance of a once-in-a-lifetime figure like Martin Luther King Jr.?


Withdrawing the Benefit of the Doubt: It is jading, but helpful, to understand that there are people out there very much like this — people whose hearts are so hardened and filled with cynicism that they would miss the beauty that surrounds them. The truth of the matter is that the establishment is fundamentally afraid of change. It makes sense; if one has power, they will do whatever they have to do in order to hold onto it. This is why you will never see the Federal Government choosing to decentralize its power and shift it to states and local government. This is why the establishment was afraid to let blacks and women vote. This is why the Chinese army drove tanks into Tiananmen Square, and this is why more recently the Burmese Government slaughtered monks. This is why the establishment crucified a man for speaking a new philosophy and causing agitation amongst the populace.
So anyway — I have a tendency to give people the benefit of the doubt. For years I have, in my head, reconciled George W. Bush’s actions with the unique pressures and situations he finds himself in. I have said to myself, “Well, I’m sure that his intentions are good.” I formally withdraw that benefit of the doubt. I have come to the conclusion that people like Bush and Cheney simply don’t see the beauty in this world. Bush may see beauty in some perceived afterlife, and as for Cheney, I am not convinced he sees beyond dollars and cents and beyond the limitations of his own lifetime. My conclusion is that these guys are in it for their lifespans and then they’ll leave the mess for generations after them to deal with. It’s a sinister world view, but actions don’t lie. You don’t break laws, establish a secretive cabal-like government, drop bombs, consistently increase military spending and wage preemptive warfare because you’re trying to create a peaceful and tolerant future. It is pure and simple retention of power.

Black Holes and Cosmic Lessons: It goes on and on. But we can find pertinent patterns in nature. A black hole sucks everything into it until, as the theory goes, it reaches critical mass. Then all the accumulated centralized energy and power bursts forth and is once again disseminated to the universe.
Power centers will crumble, establishments will fall.
Come on people — send me your thoughts and ideas. Madbob@madbob.com.