Wisdom Dancer

Great quote from one of the greatest philosophers, in my opinion (via daily_zen):

The bait is the means to get the fish where you want it; catch the fish, and you discard the bait. Words are the means to get the idea where you want it; catch on to the idea, and you forget about the words.

- Zhuangzi

...with the knowledge of the US military, which classified it and may even have helped (especially considering MacArthur commanded the SK military). Mass graves and official secrecy covered up the genocide for decades, and even now obfuscate its true extent.

MUST READ: At least 100,000 said executed by US's Korean ally in 1950 summer of terror

The Stalinist North Koreans weren't the only deadly regime involved in slaughtering the innocent, but the US and SK falsely blamed them for all those murdered during the war.

You may have heard of Smedley Butler (author of War is a Racket) and the coup he foiled in 1934 by some power-elitists who believed Roosevelt wouldn't import enough corporatism into the American economy. However, one of the interesting details is that one of the too-powerful-to-prosecute industrialists was apparently Prescott Bush:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000651

I'm curious to know if anyone has seen more about this story.

For a number of years, I have had this intense allergic reaction to muddleheaded, dogmatic man-dog Thomas Friedman of the increasingly decrepit NYT. As Glenn Greenwald avers, he's the ultimate establishment (pseudo-)intellectual. Which practically requires him to be an imbecile stubborn to retain imbecility, who demonstrates he is aggressively anti-intellectual, and intolerant of dissent when exposed to actual intellectual exchanges. I recall for example the time he gathered European students for an open forum discussion on their views of US foreign policy in one of his TV specials, only to bark at one of them who politely disagreed, suddenly bellowing out of nowhere that without America they would all be speaking German. But my favorite Tom Friedman moment was when he (very earnestly indeed) pronounced "chasm" with a CH-sound. Not exactly a 25-cent word, chum. And remember, this is coming from a major New York Times reporter/commentator, who has written a number of seriously-received bestselling books propounding confused and half-baked theories and had multiple television specials on serious subjects financed.

So frankly I relish any criticisms of this court bumpkin. Here's Glenn Greenwald on Tom doing his best and most repugnant alpha-male act, the "suck on this" school of foreign policy:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/14/friedman/

Only once the deed was done did he magically realize that the real purpose of his war was not, after all, that "a more accountable, progressive and democratizing regime" in Iraq would "have a positive, transforming effect on the entire Arab world" -- as he continuously claimed while convincing Americans to support it.

No, instead, it turns out that the real purpose of invading Iraq, what made it "unquestionably worth doing," was that we needed to invade some Muslim country -- Iraq was just one of many that would have sufficed -- in order, using his words, to "take out a very big stick" and say: "Suck. On. This." That comes from one of the most revealing (and most repellent) three minutes of commentary one can find, illustrating the real face of the Friedman-led American foreign policy class (h/t Atrios):



And now Friedman has shifted his phallic, warmongering eyes from Iraq to Iran. While he denies in passing that he wants to wage actual war on Iran, he says we must find incentives "that the other side finds too tempting or frightening to ignore." In November, he argued that if Barack Obama becomes President, it was urgent that Dick Cheney be his Vice President because "when negotiating with murderous regimes like Iran's or Syria's, you want Tony Soprano by your side, not Big Bird," and thus, Obama needs "a Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm."

That's what passes for Serious Foreign Policy commentary in America -- the Most Serious commentary, actually. World War III has started! We need to be like Tony Soprano, threatening everyone with our big baseball bats. Those Muslims -- we can just pick the targets indiscriminately -- need 2-by-4s across their heads to get the message. And the message we need to convey with our baseball bats and 2-by-4s -- still -- is "Suck. On. This."

• Armed "radicals" attacked a US peace envoy in the Middle East, and the story shows up only two places I can find so far (notice the sources — neither American nor European):

http://www.imemc.org/article/54619
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/980193.html

So if these attackers were "Palestinian gunmen," or anyone else instead of Israeli "settlers" (i.e. armed colonizers) do you think we'd hear just a wee bit more about it?

• And moving on from one group of terrorists to another: Osama bin Laden hopes to stay relevant, by vowing once again to continue his fight against Israel. Hmm. Seems to me he never fought Israel, and never had anything whatsoever to do with fighting Israel, besides claiming solidarity with Palestinians because he knows half the world has sympathy for that fight, as opposed to his causes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, etc. I guess he's hoping everyone will forget he's taken credit for attacking New York businessmen who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time instead of Israeli soldiers occupying Palestinian land. Maybe if Al Qaeda were a Palestinian resistance group instead of a bunch of international-fundie latecomers to Iraq's motley civil war, this would be slightly less ridiculous. It's starting to seem that, much like many of those in power they'd like to overthrow, the Al Qaeda leadership is a bunch of politicians running out of ideas, reduced to publicity-seeking by saying "hey look over here! Remember us? Yes we're still fighting for YOU, Muslims" every once in while.

• Ran HaCohen's Letter from Israel column "Israel at Sixty" discussed empty nationalism:
http://antiwar.com/hacohen/?articleid=12826

• And again, I also recommend Forget the Two-State Solution by Saree Makdisi:
http://counterpunch.com/makdisi05132008.html

This, ladies and gentlemen, passes for one of the most substantive high-profile political exchanges of recent months (paraphrased for humor):

Bush in Israel: Talking to Iran and Syria = appeasing Hitler. [Otherwise known as "playing the Hitler card"]
Obama spokesman: How dare you turn a blatantly political occasion into a blatantly political occasion!
Bush spokesman: Oh, so the great Obama thinks that was about him, does he? No, W. would totally have said that anyway. (Even if Obama didn't have a thing for appeasing Hitler.)

So, my guess is the general election season will be about as evenhanded, substantive and mature as 1988's campaign...

From this article:

Discussing how he devoted his life to a project he would never see completed, Korczak once explained his amazing dedication in inspiring words: "The world asks you one question, only one… Did you do the job? And in my book there's only one answer: 'Yes!' You don't answer 'I would have done the job if I'd had the money. I would have done the job if people had been sympathetic, or understood what I was trying to do. I would have done the job if I hadn't gotten hurt, or crippled', and God knows I've been crippled. You don't even say 'I would have done the job if I hadn't died!' … I don't buy it! There's only one answer: 'Yes!'"

Goddamned right. Men like this show us how to live.

(PS If you haven't been there, to the Black Hills in SD... go. Skip Rushmore, see the Crazy Horse memorial designed by Korczak Ziolkowski which they're still blasting out on a budget of donations, and of course Devil's Tower/Great Bear Lodge, both amazing places which are still inspiring me.)

Today, I discovered that I am mentioned by name in some poorly-researched "progressive" anti-GM activist's book, which seems, upon a quick look, to be a who's who handbook for smearing everyone and their grandmother who ever had anything remotely to do with GM, written in the pretext of more evenhandedness. Even worse, I (and other proponents of the philosophy of Prometheanism) are mentioned alongside "fringe group" eugenicists, neo-Nazis and transhumanists. These are not the same thing, nor do they overlap necessarily, but apparently careful distinctions are almost irrelevant to this person, who manages to demonstrate in half a paragraph that a) they don't know what 'synthesize' means in a philosophical context, b) they do lazy research on the web and c) can't be troubled to read very well either.

They at least manage to distinguish us "Prometheans" from the Prometheists, who are a completely different group I will not link to (eugenic-transhumanists who call themselves a "secular religion" — while I would call them something saltier). Linguistically that comparison should utilize a term like "Prometheanist" really, to mean one who subscribes to Prometheanism, or at least "Promethean movement" since that's a term we actually use (for an involved Prometheanist), but never mind.

At least this author does correctly state that I oppose eugenics, but support voluntary genetic modification, although he does not state why. No doubt he equally opposes both, but I see a huge difference in that the former is racial-collectivist and has historically been involuntary, whereas the former could be individually-advantageous depending on how it is conceived and applied. For example, to eliminate rare genetic disease risks in one's children. (The author apparently wants to ban that, and all GM, including famine-averting foods as well, if I understand correctly. Which puts him firmly among the ignorant and dangerous zealots in this world, not that that's quite the subject here.)

Let me put aside the fact that both eugenicists, and those anti-GM activists who fear a GATTACA-type scenario seriously have no idea how genes work with phenotype. Deterministic trait genes are about as scientifically valid as microwaves somehow leaking out and nuking you. OK, so that said, transhumanism meaning technology-based human potential in some sense — I'm very critical of it. Now, I respect the differences of opinion I have with some of my friends and allies who are more optimistic about the promise of technology in assisting personal development and opening up human potential than I am. We've had some lively, and hopefully productive debates and discussions. (Here is one you can read online, which alludes to further offline arguments I've had in which I probably made similar points.) And I'm not anti-technology, of course! But I certainly don't think technology can really sort anything out by itself, I don't consider it an automatic boon or mistake it for teleological destiny. I see a lot of superficiality and category error there. In a nutshell, I think far too much effort has already gone into technological maturation compared to far too little maturation of other important means and understandings, so that people remain primitive in many ways, such as their habits, notions, philosophies, social- and self-understandings, but have very advanced STUFF. Even-more-advanced STUFF is hardly going to help sort all that out, is it? (Substitute "technical know-how" for "STUFF" and the same is still true.)

I definitely do NOT consider myself a transhumanist, merely because I am interested in human potential and committed to realizing it. It's not as though they even remotely invented that concept, which is old as the hills (old as the age of myths like Prometheus, anyway—which literalists and materialists think was about the fire!). Nor is Prometheanism basically a transhumanist philosophy; within the context of Prometheanism technology is a subject of strategy, utility and emphasis, really, rather than a defining concept. I am specifically VERY critical about today's high-profile "transhumanists," whom I have mocked rather mercilessly, because it is so easy, and they are so dangerous for anyone to take seriously, which oddly enough surprising numbers do. I see almost everything they are doing as either crazy, imbecilic, delusionary or all three, or 'just' counterproductive to real, reliable human progress, at the very least. I have FAR more respect for the previous generation of transhumanists (Leary, Wilson, Esfandiary) who weren't as stuck on articles of technology and drew from philosophy, psychology, mythology and various schools of humanism in the humanities (although they also suffered from the problem of not understanding evolution yet obsessing over it). They had surprisingly little in common with most self-appointed transhumanists today, who frequently substitute the liberation in the original formula for visions of their own social control—perhaps, predictably enough, for a bunch of reductionists who have far more in common with Marxists than conscientious scientists.

The role of technology in progress (or lack thereof), concepts of evolution and progress, and transhumanism specifically is something I discuss in "Rising in Walls," the major essay in my anthology Rising in Words and roughly a half of that book, and the most important single project I have completed thus far. Hopefully some more people will read it and become familiar with what I actually DO think. The author above clearly wouldn't bother with that kind of research while hunting for dirt on the internet, but hopefully open-minded people will.

Ultimately, that's the kind of mind I'm interested in, and the only sort of opinion I care about besides my own. Anti-intellectuals (especially anti-science, anti-humanist Luddites) who aren't interested in getting to know ideas aren't of much concern to me directly; however the influence they can have on other people whom I might otherwise reach, by giving me a bad name or misconstruing my work, does concern me. This is an ongoing problem which I can expect to continue. I once got a letter from someone who liked my website (Promethea) but also had some harsh words about eugenic transhumanism—as it turned out, based on confusing us with the Prometheists... and that was an unintentional mistake. It aggravates me to have a book commit analogous confusion to print, which people whose opinions I might actually care about could pick up... unfortunately, even intelligent people often forget the excellent advice that "you can't believe everything you read," because we tend to assume at least some of it is accurate. If I read what I saw today about my work and didn't know my work, I certainly wouldn't think, "maybe I should check that out."

After all these years of heaping subsidies and perks and hosannas upon the ethanol industry and distorting the food and fuel markets at the behest of the ethanol and environmental lobbies, politicians 'suddenly' discover that ethanol sucks in every possible way (except to those special interests who were collecting, and donating to political campaigns all along, of course):

What? Those Magic Beans Called ‘Ethanol’? Never Mind

The game here I think was to profit off the taxpayer until it became impossible to keep the game going. Critics have been exposing ethanol for many years, both for its environmental impact and its economic failure; it cannot compete in the market without huge subsidies from the taxpayer. Finally when too many people realize that food has a better use (as food), the jig is up. It's on to another game, at the expense of all the suckers who don't understand the system of factional government-industry collusion which is called corporatism or economic fascism by the useful kind of economist.

I, for one, am shocked as shocked can be.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article3889716.ece

Pretty decent article, if you're an Indy fan like me. (I always regretted that I can't pull off a fedora.)

When I was taking a class with neo-Marxist professor Saree Makdisi a decade or so ago, we debated a whole lot (the class: "capitalist culture," a portion of my humanities rotation at the University of Chicago), especially about economics. No doubt, these days I would call him on even more, since I know a lot more. However, I always thought he was a bright guy and admirably motivated, and despite his numerous errors and ravaging economic ignorance I wanted to get along with him. So, I really have to say this is a fine article he wrote, I'm pleased to have found it, and you should read it:

http://counterpunch.com/makdisi05132008.html

EDIT: Actually, it was spring of 1996, I believe. How time flies.

I'm reminded that no one does overwrought, effete pretentiousness better than Blixa Bargeld:

Einsturzende Neubauten
JEWELS

Initially, these miniatures , or JEWELS, were conceived only as downloads
for the supporters of Phase 3 of neubauten.org. Consequently, the time
that could be spent on jewel cutting was limited; two days had to suffice
to go from the first inspiration to a fin-ished song. As a result, the
Neubauten sought after a creation process, which would develop the
necessary dynamics.
Blixa Bargeld invented an unsystematic, Neubauten-specific deck of cards
(the first version contained 600!) that became a game, a divinatory
adviser and a navigation system. Every card made a cryptic reference to
elements of what the Neubauten have created over the last 28 years,
including the instruments, materials and structures, with references to
verse or chorus, intro and outro, middle section, social relationships and
alliances.
The band played DAVE (the name that was quickly established for this card
game) before every JEWELS recording session. Everyone drew a couple of
cards and attempted to interpret them. Afterward, the band went into the
vaulted cellar of the studio and came back with shopping carts full of
strange stuff, then spent a large part of the day converting all these
things, objects and materials into ideas. It was important not to tell the
others what card one had. Instructions could be given when required.
Otherwise, the name of the game was to surprise and be surprised.
The result of this "subversive interpretation game" is a concept album
with miniatures - small JEWELS, 2-3 minutes in length, about which the
Neubauten say: "At first we considered this process a gigantic digression,
but after a while we noticed that the excursions that led us away from the
normal album work were justified by the results, because they allowed us
to deliver some of our most ego-free compositions up to now."
Comes in special Ecolbook packaging with 40 pages booklet in full color,
Text by Blixa Bargeld and all Lyrics in German and English. 15 all new
tracks plus a 40 minute Quicktime movie.
Released early May 2008.

Currently trying to figure out publishing on Kindle. Conversion is pretty annoying, maybe too much to make converting my whole book worth it (it was laid out in InDesign for pdf, and Kindle uses a very primitive subset of html). I'm thinking of offering parts of my book for cheap or free instead which already are available online (as fancier html), to drum up business for the whole print book.

Does anyone have a Kindle? If you do, let me know how you like it.

EDIT: OK, so no freebies allowed on Kindle, price minimum=1 dollar. A couple bucks, then, for a short essay I guess.

Incidentally, for you chocolate fiends and dessert eaters, this week I made the same birthday cake I made up a year ago but this time with raspberry, and for the Grand Marnier I substituted good rum and limoncello.

For my next experiment, I try to get even more cocoa in it, and possibly, a butter cream frosting or some other coating I haven't thought of... dark chocolate glaze? Ganache? Hmm...

Give that recipe a try yourself, it works rather well.

New photos post Hiroshima:

http://faculty.ucmerced.edu/smalloy/atomic_tragedy/photos.html

This adds to the unfortunately-rare photos of the aftermath, which the US military attempted to censor and suppress... surely one thing which contributed to the unrealistic idea of fighting and surviving nuclear exchanges during the cold war:



EDIT: P.S., Truman told America in 1945 that "the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians." Lies and war go together like bread and butter.

Today, the first thing I ate was lunch at a churrascaria, Fogo de Chão. Meat—the eye-opener. I have to say they also have an amazing salad bar (full of meat and cheese, as well as other little delicacies).

Also, thanks to raaven for supplying further confirmations that indeed we are still living in a Dark Age, as I have previously mused. It's good to know where you stand. I await the return of witch-dunking ...

Quote sent to me recently:

"The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. There is probably a sizable segment in any population that believes scientists should be rounded up and killed."

This is for those interested in my book, or book production in general:

As it turns out, I finally heard back belatedly from someone with a brain at Lulu, and I did the right thing in already changing the gray text to black in my book Rising in Words because it turns out they only do halftone unless you're doing a (more expensive) color book. That's right—no gray, despite this being 2008 when grayscale printing is universal. They also failed to specify this in all their many FAQs, or the first 5 or so emails I received from clueless people who just seemed confused by the idea of grayscale. I thought some of you who might be considering print-on-demand in the future would want to know that unlike the rest of the world, Lulu considers gray to be color.

Incidentally, their other fine advice (for the way-too-dark proof of the cover) included "you might want to use a different cover" because "that's how it's likely to print in the future" (paraphrasing). No kidding? Or, here's an idea, maybe you could inform people that your color covers will look like they weathered 100 years of candle soot, or, really crazy idea, FIX IT. Fortunately, I had already decided to just brighten up Evi Numen's cover to correct for their peculiar darkening.

Oh well, hopefully you will agree the book doesn't really suffer from the lack of subtler bullets and such. I'm also hoping other printers in the worldwide distribution net won't err on the side of making the cover brighter, because that plus the new correction would end up looking rather hallucinatory.

EDIT: Should you end up with a misprinted copy, of course it is Lulu's responsibility to replace it. They did promise to do this with my proof copy, btw, so hopefully their customer service redeems itself from here on out, for the real customers.

Karl Rove accuses Obama of mudslinging, exploitation and other foibles

(Kettle laughs hysterically, explodes, spacetime continuum fractures from sheer irony)

I almost can't believe this exists:

http://www.sundancechannel.com/greenporno

If you remember Street Fighter II, like wacky Japanese songs and need a pick me up:

http://kotaku.com/387396/the-so+bad+its+good-street-fighter-ii-mash-up

Could potentially get in your head... you've been warned.

Hrm. Definitely in the throes of my typical in-between-projects self-questioning and soul-searching, if not depression. Also, the RSI pain seriously sucks right now, especially my hand. Damnit, this is like old times. And not in a good way.

OK. On a more interesting note, I have a whole new organizational strategy for attacking my troublesome novel, so I should get back to trying that. I think other writers might be interested, so if it works out, I may post about it.

Many don't realize what a corrupting effect militarism has on culture, over time. For instance, I would bet a surprising number of Americans consider this normal instead of sadistic. Some of them will hear about it, and instead of feeling revulsion, they will try to get a T-shirt, or even want to go on one of these Roman holidays. In fact, I guarantee some of them would prefer that the imprisonment theme were more front-and-center in these souvenir designs, or the 'resort' vacation itself. ("Hey, who wants to go see the terrorists? Kids, how 'bout it?")

Greetings from Guantanamo Bay ... and the sickest souvenir shop in the world

In the 1940s, the equivalent would have been selling Manzanar mugs in a gift shop, advertising Jap internment vacations. Obviously, that would not have seemed acceptable to anyone, then. American culture sure has come a long way — towards Roman tastelessness, empty vaunting and overall degeneration. The quest to adopt empire has been all-too successful — at home, that is.

Another article on Human Smoke:
http://mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=332

Orangutans are the second-smartest primate (and charming); they are seen here improvising very cleverly:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3828123.ece

Destroying the Bamyan buddhas revealed even greater importance of the site, the first oil paintings in history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamyan#Oil_painting_discovery

D. Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

Commenting on the claim that Plato thought our "necessary ideas" [or a priori knowledge] arise from the pre-existence of the soul, Darwin wrote: "read monkeys for preexistence"

After — what, two months? — I finally decided that I should give up on getting my printing fixed as it should be by dopes, and go around the service dunderheads at Lulu, who can't seem to get interested in tweaking any of the things their system won't handle automatically — including, believe it or not, printing in grey without pixellation (I know, I know, why not ask for the moon). I however have a certain commitment to quality though, where I don't want to put my name on anything I don't approve of. So, here's what I've done instead of waiting forever for what I will never get from them: I've gone around them, to replace grey text with plain black, and replace the cover artwork to be brighter so that even if they print it darker than it should be, Evi's artwork should still be visible attractively... which incidentally, looks approximately like this:



Anyway, the upshot is, you can order a copy of my book here at Lulu right now.

It should make it to Amazon and other online retailers within the next 6-8 weeks, as well.

You have to read this to believe it, on the un-coverage of the military analyst scandal by the TV networks. It's extraordinarily brazen deceit and arrogance, the kind any long-time Pentagon observer expects from the military, but from the networks it's a bit much, even for the MSM. (Actually, you will note that some of the MSM print press still retains enough integrity to know this totally crosses the line; I give some credit where it's due, there.)

As I recently wrote:

Lying succeeds routinely in modern democracies by means of co-opting the media (the chief information sources) into service as a semi-elite establishment class, like the bureaucracy or military, effectively bribed by attention and a profitable career, and cognizant of some instrumentality to imparting public opinion. The mainstream media has largely ceded any role of persuasive social criticism. In this context, lies are merely reported like facts, not exposed, or they are presented as incidental, not interpreted as part of a pattern — all important differences in the context of their presentation.

I must read this book. I love the approach of excerpts without commentary except that implicit in their selection. It puts critics in a very tough position of arguing facts don't matter, or charging that balancing facts were omitted tendentiously, which is tough again because there are SO many books giving more conventional views of WWII, this is a supplement to that literature. The "good war" thesis flounders as a result.

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (review)
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (Amazon interview)

These and other sensational revisionist quotes:

In 1918 Eleanor Roosevelt complained about being invited to a party by financier Bernard Baruch, saying "I’d rather be hung than be seen at" the party because the attendees were "mostly Jews." Her husband Franklin, noticing in 1922 that one-third of the freshman class at Harvard was Jewish, "went to the Harvard Board of Overseers, of which he was a member," leading to a change in admissions policy such that "over a period of years the number of Jews should be reduced one or two percent a year until it was down to 15%."
...
Baker also provides chapter and verse of the evidence that FDR knew how horrifically the European Jews were being persecuted in Germany and elsewhere, but steadfastly refused to lift a finger to help them. When a reporter asked him if there was any place in the world where the persecuted European Jews should be able to seek refuge, FDR answered "No, the time is not ripe for that." As far as allowing Jewish refugees into the United States, FDR said in 1938 that that would be impossible because "We have a [immigration] quota system."

Churchill also comes off as particularly unsympathetic in the light of the quotations in this book, I understand.

Although I am still having trouble with 'printing specialists' too ignorant or lazy to be of any help with manufacturing my book properly, there's still online publishing for getting my material out there... which at this point, I am very thankful for. So, I have published some other new material in my more traditional way:

A Concise Guide to Social Control
An Overview of the Fivefold Methodology Implicit in Social Hierarchy

An unauthorized guide to the naked reality of social control, for the skeptic and the rebel.

"every elite composed of those who attempt to control... have used five basic, artificial means to manage their relationship to the people they want to serve them: forms of compulsion, deceit, mythic moralism, bribery, and controlled empowerment..."


This article isn't just about politics and government, although it will be readily apparent how this applies to recent politics, such as the Bush administration. But this guide has further uses. I have included a few references to less familiar scenarios from the past, and unusual ways of looking at the present, to help kick loose some less obvious associations for readers than the usual half-baked concepts of "the controlling elite."

Massachusetts Police Get Black Uniforms to Instill Sense of 'Fear'

Some people in charge are so lacking in cleverness, they're actually honest like this.

I'm one of those people who used to love to make lists like this... for the heck of it, I made this quick approximation of favorite full albums, not necessarily favorite songs but the whole package overall.

Aghast View: Carcinopest
And One: Virgin Superstar
Autechre: Tri Repetae++
Banco de Gaia: Last Train To Lhasa
Covenant: Sequencer; United States of Mind
C-Tec: Darker
Das Ich: Cabaret; Egodram
Doubting Thomas: The Infidel
Download: The Eyes Of Stanley Pain
Einstürzende Neubauten: Tabula Rasa
Forma Tadre: Navigator
Front 242: Fuck Up Evil
The Future Sound Of London: Dead Cities
Gridlock: Further
Halogen: Halo_Gen
Haujobb: Freeze Frame Reality; Polarity; Solutions for a Small Planet
Index: Black Light, Twilight; Faith In Motion
Index AI: World Blade Center
Juno Reactor: Beyond the Infinite; Labyrinth; Shango
Klinik: Blanket Of Fog
Leæther Strip: The Pleasure of Reproduction; Solitary Confinement
Mentallo & The Fixer: Enlightenment Through A Chemical Catalyst [Limited Box]
mind.in.a.box: Dreamweb; Lost Alone
NCC: Seven Steps Of Nervousness
Numb: Blood Meridian, Language Of Silence, Wasted Sky
Project Pitchfork: Alpha Omega
Rotersand: Welcome To Goodbye
Severed Heads: Gigapus; Haul Ass (Special Edition 1.0); Rotund for Success
Skinny Puppy: Last Rights; Rabies; Remission; Too Dark Park
Suicide Commando: Bind, Torture, Kill
The Tear Garden: Tired Eyes Slowly Burning
Velvet Acid Christ: Fun With Knives
Winterkälte: Drum 'n' Noise
:Wumpscut: Boeses Junges Fleisch; Bunkertor 7; Embryodead
X Marks The Pedwalk: The Killing Had Begun; Meshwork
yelworC: Trinity

... aaaand back to work.