New Normal

--It began with strange chemicals seething under a sky lacking in oxygen.

 Nothing in the world is usual today. The moon is certain to set at five, and the sun to rise at half past thirteen. The men are all imitating each other and on a small mould. There are reports of severed human genitalia and small boys being sacrificed to the sun god. Who can distinguish the real from the false?

 We have designed a starfish-shaped gel robot that can turn over by using spatially varying electric fields.

For a time, it seemed as if we were about to use the bright beam of science to illuminate the murky world of human action. The pie waiting to be divided up was enormous.

"When I see the men sharing the money, I feel envy," says 11-year-old Hassan Ali as he plays in the water near a hijacked Greek chemical tanker.

It is the great panorama of living things that enlists my central concern. So much has been written about the triumph of the fittest and so little about the survival of the failures who have changed, if not deranged, the world.

But we are dealing with a complex system--life on Earth--that is self-organizing, feeds off a flow of energy, and that exists at the edge of chaos.

Things change, we never know why, with the zigzag speed of a long-winged fly. I know it upsets me, but I can't understand why.

Somebody is playing games with the American public and I don't think it’s the Chinese this time.

Nothing in nature or human history points to the idea that we are moving anywhere. I see a war, and a victory after that one, and after the victory, a war again.

The fresh blood and the cries of the dying creatures are pleasing to the Goddess. Nobody on either side can say that this wasn't vetted properly over a long, long period of time.




In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a dead beluga whale, now classified as toxic waste, has to be handled with gloves and protective clothing because of the amount of toxins its body contains.


If you've got to be told by someone then it's got to be me. Our identity is a dream; we are a process, not a reality. Man is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up. If he exalts himself, I humble him. If he humbles himself, I exalt him; and I always contradict him, til he understands that he is an incomprehensible monster.

A meteoric iron weighing a pound fell in East Africa in 1853, was secured by the natives, anointed with oil, clothed and decorated, and finally installed in a temple especially prepared for it.

The human drama is exhausting. It is also a downer with no redeeming entertainment value outside of its hot sex scenes. None of the characters are likable in a conventional sense, and there's no telling when the once fascinating will become the most banal.

A young, drug-addicted supermodel struggles to get clean and make it in New York.
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Nothing can approach the devastating beauty of human beings.

Police in Australia's Northern Territory are on the lookout for a large male kangaroo that has been harassing human females.

In such a situation, there is no precipitation of qualities; no distinguishing of colors or forms. Nothing makes any nonsense or sense.

A geological group that that drilled a hole about 14.4 kilometers deep in the crust of the earth claims to have heard human screams.

Momentum and liquidity aren’t enough. There will always be something better just around the corner.

If this road goes there, it must be the right road, and if it doesn’t, it must be the right road to somewhere else, because there are no wrong roads to anywhere.

To be in any form. What is that? Breasts of unimpeachable heft and bounce? Bad waves of painful intensity followed by total confusion? Children who can only see that things are used up and that there's a certain pleasure in speeding up the decay? I was going to kill myself two years ago when my wife left me, but God sent me excellent doctors.

What can medicine do with something which floats on either side of illness, on either side of health, or with the reduplication of illness in a discourse that is no longer true or false?

The world of Nature is granular—discontinuous. All signs are things appearing through all things. I determine nothing; I do not comprehend things; I suspend judgment. The beauty of indisputable fact is all I can cling to, a cold wind that grows old.

A Brazilian jetliner with 155 people aboard was reported missing over the Amazon jungle Friday, September 29, 2006.

Now the eagle dominates my days, is jurist of the ambiguous cloud. But I believe a day will come when everything coheres, when the sun's blood will fill my head like dew, and each droplet of solar dew become an energy and an idea. The complete truth is out there. Somewhere. In pieces. It just can't be conveyed, either by words or by silence. I know it upsets me, but I can’t understand why.

Night is too late for you; come, while the twilight is closing the flowers.

Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Take a twilight tram ride through the zoo in the cool of the evening, then try a spin on the new Endangered Species Carousel. The admission is free, the human drama is all around, and the animals look happier than ever to be in their enclosures.  

 

Orangutans in zoos may enjoy watching us as much as we enjoy watching them.