Book Armor Because the Empire never Ended

What Jason Kennedy thinks is of no consequence

Should there be a 'whatsoever' tacked on there, and the image of an Identikit MP, framed against the green leather benches, somebody such as Nicholas Winterton, in his pomp, speaking to an empty House, but intent on having that statement on the record.

What Jason Kennedy thinks is of no consequence, whatsoever...

And then a 'furthermore'??? Or. Is this statement perhaps wrong? Utterly wrong? Or simply wrong? And each of my thoughts, having arisen, presumably, from necessity, are quite as consequential as those passing through other heads... Or are there fashionable thoughts, that possess a modish sense of being consequential, and I am excluded, again by necessity, from being privy to these, so that my thoughts lack that ooomph, that certain something that nobody can quite describe, but everybody is familiar with.

It could be that. Or perhaps the thoughts are fine, but the presentation is wrong. I am using the wrong words, in the wrong order, and these wrong words, in the wrong order, continually emit an undertow of unwelcome vibration, and perhaps, at times, this unwelcome vibration becomes all that is perceived, by onlookers, witnesses, readers, etc.

“Look, Jason Kennedy is vibrating in an unwelcome way... again!”

Again. Repetition. We fear it, don't we? (There's that journalistic “We” - as in, “Why we're all buying holiday villas in Tuscany” or “Why we all killed Jade Goody” or “Why we all carry pickaxe handles and sniff glue”) And people are criticised for their repetitions, but why? Isn't this an Age of Repetition? Could we ever repeat things quite as much as the things around us repeat? Repeating movies, repeating commercials, repeating pop songs, repeating politicians (when there is a co-ordinated roll-out of a single phrase, so it emerges from fifty heads, the same formulation, and how disconcerting this is, a kind of public display of omerta, certainly of contempt). And words, written words, and the order of written words, these repeat, too, so the net effect is to produce the sense that everything has already been said and everything has already been done, and that a few permutations exist, and these are disgorged in the newspapers - “Man puts boy in sack and sends FedEx to Zambia...” or “Boy puts man in sack and sends DHL to Paraguay” or “Boy and man put each other in sacks and man sends boy by Royal Mail to Iceland and boy sends man by UPS to Iran” or “Boy and man put each other in sacks and man sends boy by Royal Mail to Iceland and boy is misdelivered to Iran and boy sends man by UPS to Iran and man is misdelivered to Iceland” or “Boy and man put each other in sacks and man sends boy by Royal Mail to Iceland and boy sends man by UPS to Iran and boy and man are misdelivered to Canada” Sub-heading - “Mystified man and boy found laughing hysterically in Toronto”

As if to prove this point, The Sun today carries this story:

A GRANDAD aged 89 has broken the record for the oldest man to cross the Channel, flying at 1000ft, at more than 100mph AND strapped to the wings of a plane.

It's worth reading that a few times, to extract the full flavour, to become steeped in its unique aroma.

And what is a basic fear in this Age of Repetition? That all of these repeating things will disappear, and we (that “We” again) will be left (to rot), repeating in the most basic formulation of all, day, night, day, night, day, night, without cellphones, internet and television.... Yet... it is this repeating nature of things, that produces the sense that a day and a night and a day and a night are a repeat, too. No two days are the same, no two nights are the same. They come, and then they depart, forever. If people are foolish enough to engage in the same activities, regardless of what that particular day offers, regardless of what that particular night might be better used for... Instead, people will say, “Great, it's Friday, Friends is on...” “A new episode of Friends” and so on. When, it's clear, that in a world of repeating things, that it matters not at all when an episode of Friends is broadcast, and it also matters not at all that it is a new episode of Friends, because there is nothing new... Or, if there is anything new, this does not include episodes of Friends, which is an incredibly tightly structured 24 minutes of audio-visual entertainment, that could not possibly contain anything new. By the very nature of the process of its construction, anything new, anything radical, would have disappeared, by necessity, long before reaching the endpoint of transmission to the gaping millions, distributed across the sofas of the world.

New has come to mean – previously unbroadcast, previously unreleased

Newness is defined by 'the point at which something that was previously unbroadcast, previously unreleased, is seen'... sounds more like Now than New.

The new and now of my own life is possibly described as:

The point from which I make something new of what was.

Generally, this process takes a long time, months, years, even a whole decade. But, in effect, it is my life that is constantly undergoing revision, not in light of new experience, experience here meaning 'things happening outside, in the world' but due to things happening inside, in my thoughts, thoughts that are unrelated to what I am doing now. For example, I am thinking again and again about certain aspects of life in the UK, particular events, and so on, but this happens here in Guatemala City, where I am sat in a bedroom, half-dressed, listening to Fugi, Marvin Gaye, Fela Kuti, Jackie Mittoo, Idris Muhammad, and so on, a situation that has nothing in it that would remind a person of life in the UK. Other than myself. I am the thing, the thing that remembers, and wherever I am, there is always a mixture of engagement, with things that are taking place at that time, externals, and this other engagement, that is a continual entering into what was, who I was, who others were, where others might be, what might they be doing (and this is not “What might they be doing now?” but “Given what I know of them, what might they be doing now?” and subjecting them, in my mind, to a necessity that their life flows explicitly from what I experienced of them. And this can be ludicrous, so if I only saw a man once, waiting for a bus, then, the thought is, “Is he still waiting for that bus?” and there he is, looking at his watch, and when the bus finally arrives, saying, incredulously, “Feels like twelve years I've been stood here...” And the bus driver, “Sorry, heavy traffic around Torquay...” So that is one aspect of these memories, that they end, but rarely in a natural place, unless the most natural place for a story to end is in the middle, and it is a condition of the times, perhaps, to consider being able to follow a story to its end as natural. Perhaps in times past, this only happened with such things as weddings, funerals, recitals of epic poetry, magic ceremonies, etc, and the power that emerges from this beginning to end has been taken over by those things that, hollowed out, are now the enemies of significance, commercials, TV news, Hollywood films, pop videos... Pop videos! I always recoil in a horrified amazement when I realise that a pop video has 'a story', it seems as nonsensical and over the top as dressing an ant in the livery of a medieval yeoman.

I don't have many dead people in my head, because they died before I was born, before I was. But this year, somebody I know died, and this person kept returning to my thoughts, just the few things they had said to me, such as “You've got great legs” and another time when they let fireworks off the top of their restaurant on my birthday, and another time when they yelled, “Did she give you the herpes, Ben??!! Or maybe you already had them...” in a crowded bar. And then smashed an ashtray and ran home, and how somebody said, “He's going for his pistol...” And later, I learned, he did have a pistol, though at the time, my thoughts were divided between thinking, “Has he really gone for his pistol?” and “Wow! That's a cool line to say, that whenever somebody leaves the room, you just say, 'He's gone for his pistol'”... and wondering if the person said that line a lot, and not knowing, as it was the first thing this person had said that I had heard. And then, later on, his dog having a seizure and dying horribly, and how I ran away 'to find Brenda' (a source of help) and how I ran away to just spare myself seeing anymore of a dog having a seizure and dying horribly, and knowing that this constituted weakness on my part, but that it didn't matter. And then, later, realising I had not paid my bill, and thinking, “That dying dog just saved me six dollars...” And then thinking, “That is a way to look at things that would be widely condemned...” and feeling myself being condemned, by that part of myself that mirrors the public, and that perhaps is known as conscience, and is the source of many grand claims, but to me, is just the public in the head, and not something eternal and fixed, but something cultivated and fixed (but capable of bending, or, through extremely hard work, being revised). And how the dog died and he was sad, and him saying that “Everybody is dying” and finding myself looking at the photo behind the bar of him and his dad (dead a year before) standing in the same spot where the photo was now pinned (photo pinned aroud shoulder-height) and thinking of how touching that was, and of how sad, the presence/absence of the photograph in the same spot, and how rarely photos are placed where they are taken, and how the Taj Mahal and the Great Pyramids and Karl Marx's grave and the Grand Canyon and the Empire State Building would simply all be covered, in photographs, to the point where people would stop photographing them, complaining that “there was nothing to see but other photographs”, but then, there would be other people who simply waded into the photographs and “took” one, so they would say, “I took this at the Taj Mahal” and the question would be, “Took it with your own camera? Or took it out the enormous pile of photographs?” And even this question, it might not need formulating, because, perhaps there would be no photographs lying around in the photograph, and so it was obvious (painfully, like all obvious things are painful) that the photo was taken from the floor. Or, the photo would contain millions of other photographs, and then the question would not matter. And, around these questions, asked or not asked, another thought, of how “pure images” of the Taj Mahal would become prized, that is, a pristine shot of the Taj Mahal with no other photos laying around on the floor, etc, would be in possession only of private collectors and public museums, and instead of flocking to the Taj Mahal, people would flock to see a “pure image” of the Taj Mahal in London (no photography allowed)... The real Taj Mahal would sink into obscurity beneath millions of photographs, and when the photographs were cleared, there would be either: no Taj Mahal at all, and its disappearance would baffle the world, or, the Taj Mahal would sweep the world with excitement, and the process would repeat itself. Or, lastly, the Taj Mahal would be kept “pure” and armed guards would shoot dead anybody with a camera, and a team of janitors with golden brooms would sweep away the slightest pieces of debris, in rolling shifts, and this would all be done to protect the private collections and public museums, from suffering a collapse in the value of their “pure images” of the Taj Mahal, now that the real Taj Mahal was once more waiting, a dangerous intrusion on art market values, on insurance values, and how, as a climax, a cabal of wealthy art collectors would hatch a plot to “safeguard our investments” meaning “works of art” and this plot would require the total destruction of the Taj Mahal, and this would not happen at once, the plots would be foiled and revealed to the public, and those caught would snort that the allegations were “fanciful” and “like something from a bad movie” until, finally, a breakthrough was made, and a low-flying aircraft, piloted by a raffish billionaire swigging Cointreau, descended from a blue sky and delivered a handsome 1000lb bomb, scoring a direct hit and sending the value of the “pure images” soaring. And of how, a year later, when I was in Taiwan, I heard the news that this man had died – that he had travelled across the lake to another town and taken an overdose of sleeping pills in a hotel room. And I learned this in Taiwan, and this is inseparable from his death, for me, to think of his death is to be reminded that I was in Taiwan. And after hearing of his death, again and again, these apparently random memories of him, that have a structure, but perhaps do not have a significance, or, they have individual significances, that are lost in the structure, or distorted by the structure, because, for example, the image of the father in the bar, and the pain of that loss, it has significance, but it does not mean that it was the reason for his death, and more, because everybody's father will die, but not everybody will travel across a lake and take an overdose of sleeping pills. And he used cocaine, too, and this cocaine may, for him, have also distorted the significance of things, and I remember now, that he had cut and laid out six lines on a small mirror in my room, one night, and that there were four of us, and him and the other two snorted a line, and I did not, and then the night ended. Until, two days later, he came, frantic, and I gave him the mirror, and he was so happy, and said, “You're the only extranjero in this town who wouldn't have used this...” I watched him do a line and scoop up the rest, saying, “You can take the mirror...” and him thinking about it, and perhaps thinking about all the use(s) I might have for a mirror, constructing a list from his own set of uses for the mirrors that he owned (or had access to), and crossing “snorting cocaine” off the list, as he knew now that I was not a cocaine user, so that just left 'shaving, looking at yourself, combing hair' and whatever else, signalling to ships while stranded on a desert island, who knows, but also, now I think back, he was likely thinking of if he would have to walk back and return this mirror, and so he was not really thinking of the mirror, but of the work that taking the mirror might create, and I lived at the top of a steep hill, and he lived at the bottom of the same steep hill, and the season was hot, and then he gave me the mirror back and said something friendly that I forget, and so, there is no way to say that one thing was the reason for another thing, and I am not of the mind that because of X, and X is the death of his dad, and because of Y, and Y is the death of his dog, and because of Z, and Z is using cocaine a lot, that this means he had to, finally, travel across a lake and take an overdose of sleeping pills, though, equally, it could be that this is absolutely why. I prefer to regard it as inexplicable, and not as the end of a story, but that this death is still the middle, and there is no way on to the end, and I find, thinking of this man, of these memories of this man, that I can still have him go on, inside my mind, that his suicide means nothing at all, to this process, and so, I can see him still running for his pistol, or eating some potato soup, or using cocaine, or playing poker somewhere, though, when I think of him, doing these things, I never put him back in the town where we lived, because otherwise, the conversation would have to keep being people asking, “But I thought you were dead?” the same way there is a running joke in Escape from New York, with Snake Pliscin, “I thought you were dead...” and perhaps people would say this to him, “Pliscin, I thought you were dead...” and feel terribly witty, and him saying, “I am!” or, “What do you think? Do I look dead?” And he probably would look dead, if you knew he had died, he would look like a ghost, and a person of this mind would stick out a hand and pass a hand right through him, it would feel exactly as if you had passed your hand right through him, because, in that situation, within that sequence of events, it would make more sense for him to be a ghost than a man returned from the dead, and it is for this reason alone that a hand would pass right through him. A person would just feel air.

Health Destroyer retuns as Benefactor

Mcdonalds has just opened its second Casa Mcdonalds here in the public Roosevelt Hospital, Guatemala City. The project will provide an area for the use of families of patients with cancer and heart disease.

The Mcdonalds project represents the transformation of appearance (of the Mcdonalds corporation), rather than reality (of the Mcdonalds corporation) through the completion of a genuine transformation (the construction of Casa Mcdonalds).

Here we have the following:

Helping people is good.
Mcdonalds is helping people.
Therefore, Mcdonalds is good.

The invitation is to identify the actor as possessing an attribute of the action.

The problem with the above is that, there is this:

Selling unhealthy food to children is bad.
Mcdonalds sells unhealthy food to millions of children.
Therefore Mcdonalds is bad.

Both can not be the case.

Sometimes Mcdonalds does good things, sometimes Mcdonalds does bad things.

Something that Mcdonalds will attempt to deny. Or, the bad things will be classed as unavoidable, as arising from necessity. This leads back in a regression to a primary question:

"What makes Mcdonalds corporation in any way a necessity?"

***

How about, instead:

Helping people is perceived as good.
Mcdonalds wishes to be perceived as good.
Therefore, Mcdonalds is helping people.

or:

Corporations perceived as good are more profitable.
Mcdonalds wants to be more profitable.
Therefore, Mcdonalds wishes to be perceived as good.
One form of action that is perceived as good is helping people...

And, further, what about choosing who to help?

One form of action that is perceived as good is helping people.
When people react emotionally, they do not consider the whole situation when forming a judgment.
Therefore, a form of help that will produce a strong emotional reaction, will be perceived as the most good.

This leads straight on to the marketing value of the sick child to corporations, something that a treatise has no doubt been produced on.

Does it matter why X helps Y? (leaving aside the fact that 'help' is a debatable concept)

Person receiving help - "No. Without this help, the situation would be worse..."

This may be the case. The fault is to go from here to attributing the idea of goodness to the agent who is providing help.

"X did not have to help."

X not having an obligation to help means the fact that X helps is a sign of goodness.

Counter-argument

X is only helping Y. There are many others that X is not helping.

X is only helping Y to achieve Z (improved perception of Mcdonalds).

One might still say, "So?" to this, as a recognition of 'the reality of business' or some such. This line of argument suggests that what motivates an action does not matter, so long as somebody who would not benefit receives a benefit. The "if it helps just one child..." approach to determining the worth of things.

Equally, here - "Mcdonalds is helping these sick people, who have you helped?"

I would here offer in my defence the fact that while I have not helped that many sick people, I am also not personally in control of a corporation that produces millions of tonnes of waste and sells unhealthy food products to millions of children around the world powered by aggressive marketing techniques that border on brainwashing.

The accuser here is also not helping any sick people, either, but are taking a moral position where they shield from criticism what they deem an undeserving target. Somehow, by taking the part of the actor, the accuser feels themselves to also be engaging in a good, even if it is only to engage in argument. Similarly, the accuser may feel that anything is justified in the pursuit of this defence, so abuse, denunciations, etc, may be employed here.

Judging actions without following them from a beginning to an end

X mowed the lawn of his neighbour, Y, who is too old to do this, for free.
Mowing the lawn of a neighbour, for free, when there is no obligation to do so, is good.
Therefore, X is good.

NO! Therefore, the action, X is good. What if the purpose of helping was to win the trust of Y, or to place Y in the debt of X. X might then ask for money, or attempt to insinuate themselves into the will of Y, etc, etc. Persons may be judged by their actions, but, the actions must be pursued from a beginning to an end, otherwise the judgment is wholly open to being founded upon a wrong inference, and therefore leading to error.

X is helping a man who has fallen down - good
Wait, X is going through his pockets - bad!
Oh, he's got his cellphone - bad!
Wait, X is calling a number in the cellphone and explaining the situation - good!

and so on.

Literary aside - In the courtroom scene in The Trial, those observing (presumed to be somehow instrumental in the judicial process) exhibit no ability (or will) to consider the proceedings from a beginning to an end, but instead are subject to immediate vicissitudes of emotion on the basis of what was just said. This is, in many ways, the court of public opinion transcribed into literature, a court that is many things, but is undoubtedly never just, even if it may content itself with how events finally unfold, that "it was right". Instead of hearing a case, the process is more of a hunt for signs and clues that suggest inconsistency, and therefore, guilt. It is quite possible, however, that even truthful accounts are inconsistent, that it is the nature of the human organism to produce inconsistent accounts, particularly when an event is revisited. Further to this, it is precisely accounts of events that possess no such inconsistencies that are considered highly suspect, fabricated.

In Beckett's Watt, the character of Watt is unfathomably engaged by an event of watching a piano being tuned, but with each subsequent mental recreation of the event, the event becomes more and more complicated, until it no longer appears to have had its original meaning (of tuning a piano) but is now instead something quite different. Here we have a truthful representation of how the dynamic process of memory occludes the facts with each effort to remember. (End of literary aside)

What about the source of the power that permits X to assist?

Does it matter where the money comes from?

"No. So long as somebody is helped."

This is to fall into the trap of judging actions by not following them from the beginning to the end.

Here, a Mexican drug cartel is depending on this flaw in logic:

"Handing out toys to children and money to build schools, the cartel tries to promote a mystique unique among Mexican gangs by claiming openly to protect the local population."

This cartel is even setting up drug treatment centres!

Mcdonalds core business is the aggressive targeting of children to consume its unhealthy food products via inducements (toys).

Therefore, it does matter that the money for building Casa Mcdonalds, that will help a small number of people, comes from an enterprise that dispenses millions of unhealthy meals to children, while attempting to place them in a lifelong relationship with the corporation, to ensure its own profitability.

On this basis, I object...

This part will remain obscured.

[This was just an experiment. A further conclusion could be that "What Jason Kennedy thinks is of no consequence" etc, and I think that may be a useful thing to consider the possibility of, in the next post!]

Creative destruction – a personal testimony

The previous post was [and remains] an explosion. This ongoing war has frustrated my will, hour by hour, day by day, in a very real sense. This ongoing war has invaded, damaged, and occupied the creative centre of my mind. No longer do I feel any urge to write anything at all, anything that might be seen as somehow being wholly unrelated to global events, that might lead attention away from the designation of all sea, land, air, and space, as battlespace, and of the dissenting citizen as vulnerable, no matter the location, to kidnap, detention without charge, transfer to black sites outside the remit of international law, and torture at the hands of the US or its proxies.

How do I return to writing about a sandwich factory, or a candle factory, or, as was planned, the now demolished Unigate Dairies site at Totnes, Devon, England...? I see no way forward creatively. It is noteworthy, perhaps, or perhaps it's not noteworthy at all, but after 9/11 there was a thorough artistic discussion in the newspapers, online, about the question of “How is literature to have meaning in a post-9/11 world?” and whether there was an obligation to engage with this seismic event, or whether it was somehow “too big” or “too raw” to be approached, and so on. And alongside this, the question of just what role literature has, period, in relation to the age, and has it lost all meaning, drained firstly from within, now from without, and should the very idea of literature be dispensed with... I followed these tortured missives with interest, and looked to see any difference in what followed, but it appears that apart from a rash of 9/11-related fictions, things are now very much as they were, and that this show of concern had no lasting consequences for any of the protagonists, no major literary figures put down their pen, unable to go on.

And yet, for myself, as time has gone on, this question has remained alive, has grown more urgent, and while I have tried various strategies to find my way back to what I was doing, none of them have been successful, they all have smacked of denial, and indeed, the methods have required denial – not reading the newspapers, not engaging with the internet, avoiding contact with Americans. Yes, avoiding contact with Americans, and even, to avoid looking at American faces on TV or billboards, to avoid hearing that grating American voice, the tone of empire, arrogant and complacent in equal measure, that tone has regularly incensed me, as all the frustrations of the will rise up; of the world being colonised under a total pretext of a “War against Terror”, of the paid-for talking heads populating the airwaves, disseminating rationales for the irrational, of the army of mutants baying for more blood, calmly discussing which remote controlled drones to deploy, with the aim of blowing up X% less women and children, and so on, it's all their inside that American tone of voice, all the ambivalence to the suffering, to the Global Death Machine otherwise known as the United States of America.

And then there is my own country, well, the country I was born in, that already had a history that would take some topping, in terms of body count, and much of it glossed over, or worse, taking place behind a facade that emphasised the 'great values' of the staunch nature of the British people, a pack of good souls, welcoming to outsiders, jealous of their freedoms, and so on. And all while a ruling class rapes and kills and steals, then changes into their flannels for a game of doubles, and then a few bottles of Pimms. The ongoing war has reassured me on the level of most British people not being dupes in the same way the average American is [and shall doubtless remain], but the flipside is that all of the outrage, all of the protests, and, lastly, all of the trips to engage in the democratic process, have reaped nothing. No true investigation of Tony Blair and his government's taking of the UK into two illegal wars, and now, even worse, the media offensive that appears destined to provide three main parties, all committed to 'staying the course' in Iraq and Afghanistan, at the next general election. And this will be an election where Labour's ideas will be charged with ensuring defeat, or the leadership of Gordon Brown, or even, in some lunatic right-wing quarters, that Labour's defeat is the sign of “socialism being dead” (have to love the opportunism of that one). Not that the single greatest issue, the prosecution of illegal wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the designation of “terrorist” being applied to everybody brave enough to confront the space-age weaponry of the Coalition forces, when historically, it is clear, that a people have the right to defend both themselves and their territory, from an invading force. To me, the morality is clear, and my principles don't yield on the basis of who is doing the invading.

If geopolitically, the lifestyles of the Western consumer are unsustainable without these wars, then let the leaders come out and say as much, and let's decide how much people need to drive enormous pick-ups, live in such fancy houses, slap a plasma screen on every patch of wall, and so on. If the price of that is the open-ended occupation of sovereign nations, and damn those who stand in the way, I would be happy to hear it. But the most dire aspect of all this, is that instead, we continue to hear of good vs evil, of liberation and of freedom (women and children blown to smithereens by remote-controlled drones, well, they have certainly been liberated, from life itself, and they certainly now enjoy a greater freedom, to drift as dustclouds), of terrorists and insurgents, and lastly, of how brave our heroic boys and girls are, to be out there, with bleeding-edge technology, wiping out rag-tag bands of shephereds, calling in airstrikes that kill civilians, or, even better, that we have some war-nerd, programming a remote controlled drone to descend from a Pakistani sky and obliterate a bunch of people, be it wedding party, fruit market, or a bunch of schoolchildren, etc. Heroes, sure, maybe Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog can present these last guys with their medals.

My last hope for some affirmation has become pegged to a desire to renew the psychedelic experience. That may sound... crazy... but those original experiences around the age of 24, that entrance into another world, it is those moments that sustained me for so long, not just as sources of inspiration and of personal truths, but as an enormous contribution to my well-being – just the simple idea that nothing is boring – that there are only boring ways of looking at things, of thinking of them, this has acted as a constant challenge over the years, pushing me out of a comfort zone [that was actually a discomfort zone] and towards the personal challenges I have undergone. There was never any need to travel to Ireland, to go to the US, to get married, divorced, decamp to Guatemala, submerge myself in the culture, find a girlfriend, move to Taiwan, return, and now prepare to start another life close to the jungle, on the shores of Lake Itza, where I will stand outside and watch the sunrise to the sounds of parrots and monkeys. None of it was necessary, but all of it was valuable, and the saddening thing is that this great shadow (that may seem laughable, or incomprehensible, or both, to some) has come across things and, as I have explained, deadened my imagination and finally had me determine that there is nothing of worth that I can produce any more, in the realm of fiction, but that there is also no easy substitute [the camera was/is a sop to this idea] and yet, writing fiction was the one thing I valued above all others, for the purest form of mental pleasure it delivers, and for all the jokes and silly memories and strange speculations it has given rise to.

I no longer feel that I am at liberty to be that person. This is why I say that the last hope for me is that the renewal of the psychedelic experience may prove a revelation, and that some other routes will offer themselves. Until then, I am so sorry, and sick in my heart, for the spite and the bile, the frustration and the futility, the repetitions leading nowhere, and the unfolding testimony to my impotency that BookArmor has become.

Peace be upon you,

Jason Kennedy, Guatemala City

Apologies

BookArmor keeps being hacked, twice in three days. A total pain.

Inexplicable

An inexplicable bad mood has been replaced by an inexplicable good mood. This is inexplicable.