spinning iran

If you read just one article today, do just one thing to understand the world a little better, I recommend that it be to read Spinning Iran on Rafe Colburn's blog.

Bush's rhetoric about "War with Iran" is more neocon (read: pro-Israeli lobby) nonsense. The Newsweek "photo gallery" is like a page out of 1984. US diplomats are negotiating with Iranian diplomats now, brokered via Russia and Qatar. The results of those negotiations will be normalized relations, which are slated to become Bush's legacy (what's left of it).

The age of the "Great Superpower" is over, the Kissinger Doctrine failed, and with it goes the predominance of a whole other mess: Saudis, Tel-Aviv, etc. Welcome to a world where Asia becomes much, much more quintessential.

bateriophage

Couldn't resist making of note of "T4bateriophage" (image) by Wes Unruh from Key23, etc. He was the author of Metamagical Grafitti, which I enjoyed thoroughly. Thanks for the cites, Wu, from my Corporate Metabolism series. Excellent work on formulations applying sublation. I'm particularly fond of track 15, "Infected Nativity", on the related work DrOwning Street Memo by the Philip K Nixon Experience. Many thanks to Alobar and other friends who've helped bring some of those articles to light recently.

The essence of the bacteriophage idea being invoked here, a là Margulis, et al., is that an enormous inter-network encircles the planet, linking untold billions of members which live in the depths of volcanic shafts, throughout the intestines of most all higher animals, the roots of our forests, and reaching up into the clouds even... I think about that, every time a cold starts me sneezing, a little dysentery follows a hiking trip, or some restaurants slips in a minor case of food poisoning: how we become the transport for bacterial "messages". What verges beyond odd and well into the truly strange is just how fast those "messages" can transmit globally across these networks. Through us. Changing their DNA slightly through transmission. Altering the alien DNA which lives within us, on which our metabolisms depend. Methinks that McLuhan had it all rather inverted.