My dad lives on the island of Mindanao, the largest of the Philippine islands. Mindanao has been making headlines lately because of its Muslim separatist group, the MILF. MILF represents the militant faction of the large Muslim population on the island; recently a long-standing cease-fire with government forces deteriorated, and now there are big problems. Sporadic fighting has caused thousands of people to flee their homes and villages, and today a civilian was killed and several others wounded by a government airstrike that targeted MILF guerillas. Luckily, Dad is far away from that action, farming and eating grapes, but he says he can hear the planes overhead sometimes.
There’s a saying that goes something like, “You don’t find any atheists in a fox-hole,” meaning people get dumb when they’re scared. You could also say that you don’t find any free-market cheerleaders in a recession. Suddenly everyone feels that the financial markets need a “helping hand”, and congress approves of the 700 billion dollar bailout. All of the “self correcting principles of supply and demand”, “efficient market hypothesis”, Milton Friedman, my stepdad’s “even field of play” lecture, etc., all of that shit is out the window now, that was so 90’s. Now we need to get on board with the bailouts and realize how much trouble we’d be in if these numbers get any worse, we’re all in this together, blah, blah.
I call Shenanigans on that.
This list ↑(click to enlarge!)↑ of Federal Reserve bailouts from 1982-2007 is in the super-depressing book called “Bad Money” by Kevin Phillips. It basically shows that since Reagan, congress has been totally cool with rescuing these arrogant little venture capitalists and debt-wranglers whenever their ventures crash into something (like a housing bubble), and dumb folks like myself pay the bills (or lose our homes). As a result, “the financial sector” has gotten incredibly innovative, reckless and profitable. It’s way bigger than our manufacturing sector, and it makes a few people boatloads of money. It shouldn’t be a big surprise that the 700 billion isn’t being accounted for, isn’t going to new loans or to re-adjust the insane rates that people are now having to pay on their mortgages, but is being used by the banks to buy up smaller, weaker banks. Check out this article in Bloomberg.com.
Now the auto industry needs a bailout too, and you know they’re going to get it. An industry that has thumbed its nose at consumers for like 50 years now needs our help to continue operating, and we should just forget about the safety scandals, the relocation of manufacturing plants overseas, the stupid, stupid, stupid vehicles that they’ve been making, and the general redneck-conquistador culture of American cars. I would never, ever drive one and it seems insane to throw money at a plane that is crashing into the mountain. I say let it burn.
Two news stories lately caught my attention, not just because I find suicide fascinating, but because both suicides involved an act of “watch this you motherfuckers” publicity. One guy jumped off the Aurora bridge which is nothing new, but he did it during peak rush hour traffic, and threatened to go for two hours before he actually jumped. It just seems so strange to want everyone to watch, and to be watched during your last terrified moment of existence.
My ideal suicide would be as far away from everyone as possible; after all, isn’t it the obnoxious horror of other people that makes one suicidal anyway?
I can only think that this man must have been in some incredible existential turmoil to leave a final memory like that in the minds of hundreds of watchers, a memory of terrifying pain and misery. Something is definitely broken when your last wish is for a huge crowd of strangers to watch you go up like an eight-foot duraflame.
After riding my new work bike for a few days, I noticed a sloppy chattering coming from the front end when braking. It seemed like a poorly adjusted head bearing, and since I haven’t purchased a manual yet, I turned to the online forums for guidance and maybe to look at some old BMW stuff. To my disappointment, a google search returned almost nothing and I remembered that sport bike douches don’t work on their own bikes. Because of my endless gratitude to some anonymous knee dragger dot com forum poster that helped me through a difficult carburetor tune, I’m posting my repair in hopes that some other joker can figure out what that funny washer between the two castellated nuts does. This head bearing adjustment was performed on a 2005 Kawasaki Ninja ZX-6R.
1. Remove the steering dampener. Mine has an aftermarket dampener attached to the head and the frame at the tank bolts. The dampener has to be removed to get an accurate feel for the bearing adjustment.
2. Remove the top nut.
3. Remove the clamp bolts that clamp the top yoke to the fork tubes. The Ninja also has two bolts on the bottom of the yoke that had to be removed.
4. Remove the top yoke.
5. Here is where other bikes might vary, but the procedure is pretty much the same, I imagine. The bottom nut is the one that actually adjusts the bearing, and another nut will lock against it to prevent it from rotating on the threads of the steering tube. My bike has two castellated nuts with a funny washer between them. The washer has little tabs that bend into the castle-marks of the two nuts, to further prevent either of them from rotating. I had to bend all the little tabs flat in order to unscrew the upper castellated nut.
Then, remove the upper castellated nut.
6. Now it’s time for the actual bearing adjustment. Kawasaki makes a special adjustment tool, but I used a hook-type spanner that I had lying around and it worked OK. Bicycle shops sell a similar spanner. I only tightened the lower nut about a quarter of a turn, which turned out to be about just right. If your bike is way out of adjustment, you may need to repack or replace the head bearings.
Now put it all back together, except for the steering dampener. The dampener needs to be off to get a good feel for the bearing adjustment.
Checking your head bearing adjustment requires a lift that can get the front end of the bike off the ground and let the forks and turn freely. If you don’t have the lift, and you need to ride your bike for work the next day like I did, you can use this technique: have your buddy push the bike so that it pivots on the side stand, while you push up on the front, near the headlight. The bike will be on its rear tire and the side stand, and you will be able to awkwardly grab the fork legs and check for play in the bearing. If the bearing is too tight, the forks and wheel will have a hard time “falling” under the weight of the wheel when you let go of it (the wheel.) If you still feel any play in the bearing when you wiggle the fork legs, go back and re-tighten that lower nut a little. If the bearing feels bound up when the wheel falls to the side, back off the nut. Vroom!
I realize that pavement is wrong, but I still love it. I love the way it smells in the rain, and I love the way it disappears under the tires. Mostly I love the history that it reveals; it has a way of saying “we go here”. Recently I read a book called “Prelude to Revolution, France in May 1968″ by Daniel Singer, about the French student uprising and general strike. An interesting paragraph on page 127 has a wonderful homage to pavement stones:
“That evening St.-Germain-des-Pres was no place for tourists. The Flore, the Deux Magots, the Mabillon- these well-known coffeehouses were in the range of fire. That night St. -Germain was not Greenwich Villlage nor Chelsea; it was a battlefield. The police could neither cope nor understand. Their forces were impressive and armed to the teeth. There was a time when, faced with such a black armada, the sudents would have turned and run. Now fear was turned into passionate determination, and they tended to run forward. In daring hands the cobblestone was a match for the hand grenade. Le Pave- the new hero of May, the Parisian paving stone, small enough to fit the hand, heavy enough to hurt, provided munition for the fighter and a brick for his barricade. It was also the symbolic stone thrown against the edifice of the established disorder.”
It’s one of the more uplifting books I’ve read in a while, but also sad because it reaffirms my personal theory that today’s counterculture is flagging a little, and also journalists like Daniel Singer are in short supply. This is a newspaper man that used to write for the Nation, who is unabashedly Marxist and deeply critical of the douchebag political establishment of his day. He’d probably be reduced to writing for the International Socialist Worker these days, or hopefully the resplendent but marginal Real Change.
Another paragraph, after the student uprising has finally been crushed by the brutal gendarmes:
“Superior force had prevailed. By 5 a.m., most barricades in and around Rue Gay-Lussac had fallen. By 6, though there were still pockets of resistance, particularly near the hilly area around the Mouffetard Market, Daniel Cohn-Bendit broadcast an appeal to his friends to break off so as to avoid a slaughter. The battle was over, but not the mopping up. The cruel manhunt went on. The policemen, rifle or gun in hand, barged into private homes and dragged out refugees whom they clubbed into Black Marias. The image that sticks in the mind is of a young woman, dragged naked into the street and then into a distant van by representatives of law and order who were yelling ‘We’ll teach you, you whore.’ For many of the prisoners arrest was only the beginning of a ghastly ordeal.” p. 142.
Advertising is supposed to create brand recognition, not cool grammar, so the fact that this ridiculous double negative caught my attention actually means that the inane Sara Lee ad slogan is working. I don’t know why it bothers me. It’s like the commercial jingle that’s so irritating that years later you can still remember the phone number for that carpet place. Why not take this marketing concept to its logical extreme conclusion, and just go super over-the-top with shock value? Like “Sara Lee Eats Her Own Young,” or “Nobody Doesn’t Not Dislike …That Ass!!!”
I listened to the mediocre Saddleback Mountain church forum thing the other day; I want my two hours back. The most interesting feature of the discussion was the way that McCain was able to come off as this spry, lovable old Grandpa Twinkletooth with his war stories and crispy white hair. The guy’s got some charisma. Here is a link of Brian Unger making fun of some of the questions, it’s funny, you should listen to it.
I watched Godard’s “A Woman is a Woman” tonight, which is definitely his cutest, if not his most important movie. I read somewhere that this was the last movie in which Godard was having fun, and that seems like it could be true. There are plenty of gratuitous “look at how hot my wife is” sequences, but then again, he and star Anna Karina were pretty much on their honeymoon during this film. There are also many shout outs to American cultural icons, which is a stark contrast to the heavy american-hating of his later movies. As always, I am grateful for Godard’s insistence on keeping his characters in some kind of limbo between movie and reality, in which they constantly look at the camera and wink, or ask “is this a comedy, or a tragedy?” It’s a quality that reminds you that movies are not for escaping life, they’re for examining life. This film is also very light on the politics, even though the jock boyfriend reads “L’Humanite”, the Parisian communist newspaper at the time, and the stripper quotes Hegel. Mostly, it’s about relationships, sex, and Anna Karina’s hair.
After seeing Godard’s “Weekend” at the SIFF theater tonight, I’m now certain that Western civilization is definitely declining. “Weekend” is a movie about a square couple that murder their parents for money; it’s also about the spiritual chaos and emotional bankruptcy of post-capitalist society. Like most of Godard’s films, this one is full of surreal tricks and requires a lot of concentration to watch, and you never get “entertained” and drawn into the story line. When the main characters meet a couple of philosopher weirdos in the woods, the husband says “this film is rotten, all we meet are crazy people”, and after a violent car crash, the wife is pulling herself out of a burning vehicle- we see blood and flaming wreckage, and someone who is burning to death in agony in one of the cars. The wife screams “No! My Hermes handbag!”
In almost every scene, Godard packs in some potent Marxist or existentialist commentary, and even when it appears to be nonsense, he’s making profound statements about Gaullism, the war in Algeria, consumer culture, sex, and imperialism. It’s not just that no contemporary film maker would want to tackle this kind of stuff, it’s that they can’t, and we couldn’t handle it intellectually anyway. It’s as though we’re dumber now, and as a result of being dumber, we’re also more frightened and we can’t watch a movie that threatens to call us stupid. In one scene, after the husband has been murdered by a bunch of beautiful young revolutionary cannibals living in the woods, the wife says, “how horrible,” and one of the guerillas responds that “the horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome by more horror.”
It’s as true now as it was then, except worse.
I recently saw a documentary called “Commune”, that was about a group of people that inhabit a piece of land in a remote spot in California called Black Bear Ranch. The community was (and is) a radical collective of misfits, complete with activists on the run from the FBI, nudists, poets, farmers, and children. In part two of my conversation with my Dad about evading the Vietnam draft, I asked him if he had ever heard of Black Bear. It turns out that he had lived there in the 1960s for a while and knew a bunch of those people, including the actor Peter Coyote. The bravery and tenacity of a bunch of friends that tried to live without selling their labor, without the barriers of the nuclear family structure, and without the drudgery and meaninglessness of consumer society is inspiring, especially since they all mostly came from traditional American middle class value systems. Somehow, the grinding inertia of bourgeois mediocrity could not be stopped, and eventually sixties radicalism was co-opted, re-integrated, packaged and turned into an MP3 file, and all I have left are my Dad’s stories.
My dad lives on the island of Mindanao, the largest of the Philippine islands. Mindanao has been making headlines lately because of its Muslim separatist group, the MILF. MILF represents the militant faction of the large Muslim population on the island; recently a long-standing cease-fire with government forces deteriorated, and now there are big problems. Sporadic fighting has caused thousands of people to flee their homes and villages, and today a civilian was killed and several others wounded by a government airstrike that targeted MILF guerillas. Luckily, Dad is far away from that action, farming and eating grapes, but he says he can hear the planes overhead sometimes.
