Yeah...check this site out at your own risk...

"Drawing from a database of all the scores given by city health inspectors. Type in any spot in SF and you'll get its hygiene inspection score and descriptions of any violations, e.g.: cockroaches (1pt deduction), "dirty utensils" (1pt), "hazardous materials improperly stored" (4pts), and the 12-point bonanza “severe cockroaches" (judgmental bugs who are unwilling to forgive mistakes). You’ll also see a graph plotting each restaurant’s scores over the past three years; one spot actually dropped from a 95 to a 43, suggesting an epically incompetent manager, or an unreasonable increase in bribery rates."

Hopefully none of your favorites are hiding in the "Worst Locations" section.

www.CleanScores.com

Bon Appetit, Bitches!

C

Possibly my favorite description ever of the IRAQ fiasco...

"This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit­eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole."

Matt Taibbi from www.rollingstone.com/politic..._swindle

Doesn't get much more to the point than that....

C

Money = Debt

So, I have a business degree. Crazy story how I ended up going that route...
Even though I was generally bored to tears by the curriculum, I did pretty well. Considering that I almost flunked out of High School, I got all A's and B's in college, except for one class....Financial Management. Economics was pretty tough as well (Statistics was pretty fuckin' awesome, though). For some reason, I could not wrap my mind around how money works. They would teach us how the monetary system works and about stocks and bonds and what not, but it always seemed like it was a shell game. I would sit there in total confusion, my mind flummoxed about how all this was logically possible. I'd ask the professor, "wait, how is all this decided...who decides this?" And he'd say, "the FED... that's just how it is." Everyone around me seemed to get it, they just listened to what he said and memorized it, but my mind would just crack in there. I know now that what my mind was doing was reacting to the complete absurdity of the whole thing. It's a hard thing to recognize that the whole system is a made up game that is by no means interested in the public good....that really, the whole thing is pretty much the grandest scam ever perpetuated. In business school, I'd get little glimpses at it, cuz I was on my way to being an "insider." All you have to do is drink the kool aid and not ask too many questions, just learn the rules and maybe you can get a cut out of the heist. My entire person was recoiling at the prospect, but at the time, I just figured I didn't "get it". Subconciously I did get it....and it all pretty much boils down to "What the fuck?" Even in 4 years of business school, they never really told us about what follows. This was just never mentioned, it was the man behind the curtain...it was just referred to as "The Fed". Anyway, I truly hope you all will take some time to review the following videos...it's an excellent description of an incredibly complex subject, and it's done with cartoons :) But beware, if you didn't know all this already, it's pretty disconcerting....but more truly informative than 4 years of business school....

Part 1:
www.youtube.com/watch

Part 2:
www.youtube.com/watch

Part 3:
www.youtube.com/watch

Part 4:
www.youtube.com/watch

Part 5:
www.youtube.com/watch

I CHING, YOU CHING, WE ALL CHING FOR ICE CREAM!!!

"In the time of internal gathering together, make no arbitrary choice of your associates. There are secret internal forces at work, leading together those who belong together."

~~~I Ching Wisdom

Wrap your mind around this....

www.tenthdimension.com/flash2.php

or better yet, dip your BALLS in it!

Fear of Death...or...Duhism

So Fallwell being raptured up to the big pearly gates in the sky has me reflecting on something...

Many of you know I was brought up Baptist. I never really got any farther than the hell-fire fear part of it. I absolutely did go through a bit of a spiritual dilemma in college freeing myself from that framework, and still find dusty corners of my life that haven't been cleared of the extreme duality of that model. What can I say...it's got some strong archetypes goin' on.

But anyway, I've pondered alot on it out of the necessity of determining my own beliefs. And slowly, I've been becoming ever more comfortable with some form of reincarnation. I've started realizing that in general, many of my spiritual beliefs rely on some form of an evolutionary process that requires reincarnation in some sense.

And as I've gone down that road, I've come to a realization...

I used to believe fundamentalists were scared of Death,
...now I believe they are scared of Eternity.

The fundy's believe in a very simplistic sense that if you "get it right" you go to heaven and if you "get it wrong" you go to hell. In either case, it's for "eternity."

Now the whole issue I've always had with heaven and hell is that either one is just one side of the coin.. they don't seem like they could exist without one another. But let's just consider that you could. Either way you go, if you go in one direction for eternity, then you have ceased to change. The dance has stopped. You have arrived, the game is over and you "won" or you "lost". Pretty unambigous and finite.

However, if you start screwing around with the cosmic, reincarnated, metaphysical worldview... you seriously got an existential problem on your hands. The shit NEVER ENDS!! It's eternal!! It's the ABYSS! And it's tortoises aaaaaaallll the way down. (pardon me while I go YAK!)

That is some seriously scary stuff, man. There is no resolution. This is it. This is all there is and all there ever will be. The journey is the destination. And yet it's infinite.

Now like many of you, I feel like something is going down right now. I know about all the talk about the consciousness leaps and the new dimensions and what not. But even if that goes down, I don't think it's over. It's just maybe a moment where the game is revealed and the board is changed. Sweet! But the point is that it still goes on. Even if God wakes up and remembers who he is, I doubt she'd go back to nonexistence. They'd just big bang again!!

So anyway, I'm not so sure that the fundy's really want eternal life, I think they just want to get off the fucking ride.... which is why there's no "fun" in fundamentalism.

Come to think of it, not a lot of "mental" either.

Just alot of "duh" and "ism."

Camtastic

Happy Birthday Sweet Cassalicious...

Presenting...

The Queen of Cartoons :)

Checkin it....

web.mac.com/seanfranzen/...20Cinema.html

Something I've been struggling with...

I was reading an excellent interview of Arundhati Roy and it really hit home on something I struggle with. This world getting absurd beyond belief. We're definitely in a very new time of human evolution, as I guess we've always been. Some would say that we've been here before, and I agree to a large extent, in as much as our human nature tends to continuously flavor our environment and and vice versa,. However, with the amount of technology, noise, doublespeak (tower of babel), globalization, neo-liberalism, and subjegation of all things to the demands of some idea of this thing we've created called "The Market"....for instance... things have gotten really weird. Weird in a way I'm not actually sure human beings are capable in their current state of dealing with. It's almost as something has taken on a life of its own that has actually disconnected itself from our own human needs. And I even mean the "bad" stuff like greed, fear, violence....it's as if "IT's" feeding on these things, but there's not really any human meaning to it...

"IT's" got it's own agenda...

Here's a quote from Arundhati that kinda gets at what I'm saying....

"It makes you wonder – is the last stop of every revolution advanced capitalism? Think about it - the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Anti- Apartheid struggle, the supposedly Gandhian Freedom struggle in India…what’s the last station they all pull in at? Is this the end of imagination?"

That's a good question. Is this the end of Imagination? Or are we in a prison of Imagination? Because I tell you this much.. most everything that controls our life is total imagination...imagination that's been crystalized in to things like law and tradition and culture from a collective perspective, not to mention whatever personal prisons we've concocted for ourselves.

If there's one thing that seems to not be part of this whole spectacle, it's actual, REAL human needs and a sincere way to provide that to ourselves and others.

What has taken place of the actual food for the human soul is a hologram. In our desire to consume this hologram, lot's of us are doing all types of shit to buy, hustle, or downright steal it...but the hole just gets emptier and emptier...it's like the Hell of the Hungry Ghosts the Buddhists wax about. Meanwhile, those of us who are lucky enough to manufacture, market, and sell these holograms (a miniscule percentage of people) enrich themselves on the real thing. Oops...did I say us and them? Forgive me.

In the process of following all this to it's logical conclusion, you start to see patterns. You start to see similarities amongst things that shouldn't go together. Paradoxes begin to resolve...conundrums start to dissolve. And once you get to some ground that seems as real as it's gonna get, you have to ask yourself a few questions....

Am I ok with this?
If not, is there anything I can do about it?
If so, what should I do?
If I do it, will it actually make the situation "better?"
OR
....and here's the kicker....

despite my best intentions, does my struggle just entangle me in the web... and worse, enable that which I am not ok with? Am I just pulling at the knot and making it harder to untangle?

A good example is protesting. Let's say you're a well educated progressive activist and you don't like what the fuck's goin' on 'round here. So you decide to put together a protest. You get your permits, your permission from the appropriate authorities, and you promote this thing to other progressives. Everybody shows up at the spot at the agreed upon time, and damnit you start marching. Next thing you know, a few crazy lookin' anarchists decide to kick it up a notch and begin to act in "unsavory" ways. TV cameras are on them...their creative protestations are blasted on the mainstream news, and all of a sudden, the medium is the message. Everyone can now dismiss you, because, "hey, you're all a bunch of crazy lookin' anarchists", and all the protest did was crystallize that idea into even more people's heads.
At the same time, those same people can feel great that we have a country where those crazy anarchists can speak their minds...we're free after all. And my fine progressive friends can feel good about the fact that they "did something."

San Francisco is even a more interesting situation when it comes to protesting...it reminds me of that western koan....if a tree falls in the woods and noone (who's not a tree) is there to hear it, did the tree really make a sound?

Again, Arundhati puts it waaaaay better....

"We’ve entered the era of NGOs – or should I say the era of palthu shers - in which mass action can be a treacherous business. We have demonstrations which are funded, we have sponsored dharnas and social forums which posture militantly but never follow up on what they preach. We have all kinds of ‘virtual’ resistance. Meetings against SEZs sponsored by the biggest promoters of SEZs. Awards and grants for environmental activism and community action given by corporations responsible for devastating whole ecosystems."

"How do we make sense of all this? The place is crawling with professional diffusers of real political action. ‘Virtual resistance’ has become something of a liability."

"We are living in times, when to be ineffective is to support the status quo (which no doubt suits some of us). And being effective comes at a terrible price. I find it hard to condemn people who are prepared to pay that price."

And so my struggle is this...

Is it possible that doing nothing is better than doing something if you're not totally sure that your proposed action wouldn't just make things worse?
Is the act of doing something better than doing nothing as long as your intentions are clear because at least you're taking a stand and making an effort?
Is it all truly just theater? Whether you do nothing or something....it's something...as long as you do it with style, flair, and self-assurance (I have a feeling my friends on tribe will vote for this one :)

I guess the true struggle within me is this need to do something, but the paralysis that comes from understanding how easy it is to contribute to the status quo through my actions. I want to find the weak spots and hit them there. But I see all these beautiful people around me just kicking at shit and that makes them happy. Results aren't the point. In some ways, it's as if they really want the status quo because they derive their identity from it by being "different" from it. And here I am, caught up using all my energy to figure out what all this shit is predicated upon.... where the cracks in the foundation are.

I guess I'm just a conlficted Ninja surrounded by Pirates...

but I do notice that Pirates always give me their knots to untangle...


Here's the whole interview...good reading...

www.countercurrents.org/roy260307.htm

Camtastic

What's Valuable?

“All human beings have this burden in life to constantly figure out what’s true, what’s authentic, what’s meaningful, what’s dross, what’s a hallucination, what’s a figment, what’s madness. We all need to figure out what is valuable, constantly."

-Maxine Hong Kingston

Ahh, how true Maxine, but it's no burden for me, it's my passion...