E's Surf Report

SLAYER

dude, it took me sooo long to find hammerhead when I was a kid.

thanks for the slayer call.. listening to "Show no Mercy" right now.

wow that shot is pretty damned relaxing. thanks for the shout out, e!

What up! Thanks for the Moab tips. Amazing part of the country. Good luck for tonights showcases!

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all."
- Helen Keller (entry @ the top of the Castle)

When we got there it was way overhead and walling up

The drop in was steep

High-Desert hang 5 (photo Mark K.)

Lewis in deep

i think lewis is goofyfoot.

awesome photos artifact! holy shit! that red rock is so badass looking.

sick spire artifact. that's no cheater five. what was that line rated?

yeah anon they reversed the negative to better fit on the mag cover ...happens all the time, recently saw a pic of the bay bridge with the tower cranes on the south side also

great album (Into the Outlands)

Tracks:
1. Voice Of Thunder
2. Speed Of Light Kim Duk-Soo
Lee Kwang-Soo
Choi Jong-Sil
Kang Min-Seok
Bill Laswell
Shankar
Ronald Shannon Jackson
Aiyb Dieng

http://www.animatedatlas.com/movie2.html

10 minute US history

nice shots artifact.

From Surfline:

Feel the burn...

LONGEST WAVE EVER
Local Surfer rides Brazilian River Bore for 10.1 KM, enters Guinness Book of World Records
On Friday, June 24th, Parana-born surfer Serginho Laus went to bed with very sore thighs. The longtime Brazilian bore aficionado achieved an unbelievable record of surfing non-stop for 10.1 km (6.3 miles) down Brazil's famous river bore wave, called the Pororoca. Until now, the longest wave ridden record belonged to Englishman David Lawson, who rode a wave for 9.1 km on the Severn River in England. Once they got to the mouth of the Araguari River in late June, Laus and crew saw the bore reach a place they'd never seen. "The mud banks along the riverside changed, and the only place for a potential record-breaking ride was on the mouth of the river, to the ocean side," says Laus, who spent 33 minutes and 15 seconds surfing the bore. Laus' "Surfing in the Jungle" team brought high tech GPS gear and a Guinness Book of Records representative to measure, map and make sure the record was broken. "It's a pleasure being able to register the breaking of a record in Amazonia, in such an impressive phenomenon as the bore," said Luiz Fernando Pedroso, director of Ediouro Publicacoes, that distributes and represents Guinness Book in Brazil. The state of Amapa has the largest number of bores in Brazil, and it was in the newest of these bores that Laus faced for the first time. In 2000, he was part of the second team to surf Araguari River reaching, at the time, 16 minutes of non-stop surfing -- until then an unimaginable limit. In 2003, the tidal wave specialist reached 25 minutes, but had a serious accident after being swept off by the wave, almost losing the movement of his legs after breaking the fifth lumbar vertebra. This successful attempt was the direct result of these years of experience -- and a very strong will. "It was very difficult, but on the third and last try I had to make a decision to forget all the pressure and the risks," Laus concludes. "I never thought I'd be able to surf so many kilometers."
Keep an eye out for the 2006 Guinness Book of World Records and a documentary about Laus' wild ride. Special thanks to www.adrenalimitz.com.br -- check 'em out for more bore-riding mayhem.

editor anon your both wrong

James Lewis Age:24
Nickname:Louie
Stance:Natural
Home Break:Mermaid
Career Level:Airshows, Free surfer
Specialised Event:Airshows
Sponsors:Cult, Stuart Surfboards
Main Shaper:Stuart Smith
Favorite Breaks:Burleigh, Straddy
Favourite Event:Airshows, any!
Respected Peers:Kelly Slater, Tom Curren, Ash the Champ, Powelly
Career Goals:be happy with my surfing, take it to a place it hasn't been before
Surfing Injuries:cracked skull, countless stitches & sea ulcers, fin thru my hand, dicki knees
Favourite Surfer to Travel With & Why?Steve Powell, cheap drunk but very inspiring
Likes:Burleigh boardriders
Dislikes:close-mindedness, ignorance, exams

Another nice drop...

I just heard about the London Bombings on BBC net radio. I take BART all the time and cant imagine somthing like that happening here.

go surfing.

Laus on Pororoca

Somewhere this morning the winds were off it, allowing the unadulterated purity of the windslop to shine its brightest. Two good-vibed ripsters paddled out soon after me, and we shared the zillions of zany lets-see-what-happens crossed-up sucking-out bumpy pulses that once in a while by the law of averages would line up into a straight flush, or, to be honest, maybe a three of a kind.

Surf sleezers. Thieves. Transplants. Beachdunefucking invaders. Ain't no way to control the throngs now; this mass invasion and the order is undone. The proliferation of wannabe surf culturalists. Shame on you all. Of coarse it’s all new to you... This is worse than what happend at Malibu, or at least close to the same thing...
‘Numbnuts 30-Nothing’ is trying on every single pair of surfguy-shades in the fucking store; must be a hundred pair in the pretty cases. Now he’s stepping outside; into the glare of the sunless million dollar abyss; tilting, handling, fondling, molding and bending the glasses to fit his fat head.
Meanwhile...back in the store, Boston Bitch girlfriend-or-wife, whatever she is, is parousing the place. I was listening closely and I swear I heard the sucking sound as the anguished void retracted in her misplaced presence. POW! And it hits her. I see it on her face like egg. As she fondles the padding in a bikini top she is also realizing that she too can become part of “this-here-surf-scene,” - WHY NOT? ! Her frizzed out curlywurly hair should be set free but is instead fused into place by the fat of animal by-products. You’ll see her out there soon; from behind legs flapping wildly. Again the void retracts... waiting to exahle out two more surf turds. As the new pair pull awayfrom the curb a hideuous conflageration of surf shit on an SUV Watermagazine Gone Wild is displayed before us. I spy the liscense plates: NEW YORK.

Thanks! Yeah had to nut up for that one. Imagine standing on your dinner plate 500 feet off the deck. Sweet drop Dano!
The lines are rated:
#1 Castleton N.C. an ass-kicking (for me) sustained 5.9
#2 Hells Revenge (off highway 4 of 5)
#3 Ancient Art 5.10d or 5.8+/ A0

awesome post INOKEA. great turd references.

The sun makes its first appearance at OB in recent memory

http://www.wunderground.com/satellite/vis/1k/US/CA/San_Francisco.html

ya, your a Genius INOKEA!

does bitching about newbies make them go away?

BVB is back?!

Bagel already knows this I am sure,
but anyone that is bored and likes to go to art openings, this site http://www.fecalface.com is great. Check out the calendar, you can entertain yourself and friends with art.

http://www.fecalface.com

couple more tasty tostee shots

yeah, fecalface is a great site. e & I both used to work with trippe. he posts here occasionally.

~~ When I started surfing the beach in 1990 I was a invader too, but from 32 blocks away, not from New York. Does that make me a thief too?

~~ I like surf shades too.

~~ Boston chicks in bikinis at OB are welcome. The more the merrier is my credo!

~~ Does this mean I can't drive to NEW YORK in my car with my CA license plate? Maybe the restaurants there won't serve me?

~~I'm jonsin' for good surf too, INOKEA. Maybe it's time for you to go on a surfari. But be sure not to invade anybody else's turf! Hey, I know! Why not try one of these spots below!!

INOKEA definately is a kook. Not BVB but a more educated cronie whos taken one to many creative writing classes, who lacks skill and is a jock. Unless BVB's got the joke on me. he would still be a kook crying for attention though. Nazi punks fuck off.

Aliens are coming! Aliens.....

Everyone stop surfing. I think the aliens also want a piece of the action....

viva latinas

Boobs, Lefts, Thruster

Thanks for the dose of reality Kaiser. I think you have found the antidote to the negative plunge of another surfless afternoon. Cheers. Sat next to Dale last night @ the Vic. Nice guy

Mi gusta!

what was the ob movie last night?

cool, fecal face, good job with the site!

and bbr finally saw battle royale..very awesome..thanks for the rec.

ps. funny thing;

http://www.big-boys.com/articles/baggyclothes.html

http://www.dannydoeschina.com/

e, I'm digging on that satellite site. Now I can see all the fog that I'll be trapped in until the fall.

I like aliens.

why all da nagative vibes dude?

Golly, my next wetsuit will have to be fierce lime green like that lady in the pic. With daisy decals. What say you, Steamwand?

Bagel - hope I make the show but if not, congrats in advance. Definitely want to see those paintings.

nice bagel... that movie ruled. the book is even better IMHO. i'm gonna try to cruise by your show tonight if i can.

just requested vacation for a 10-day trip to mainland in july, fingers crossed....

http://a-framemag.com/gallery/data/2/medium/Untitled-1_copychopoo.jpg
http://a-framemag.com/gallery/data/2/IMG_0607howperfectwasthisday.jpg

oops

p.s. yeah the satellite thing is rad thanks for the link

surfseeker 7.....why would you post that? i don't post ob, dead man's, ft. point, potatoe patch, kronkite,kelly's cove, 4 mile, pathetica, do i?

cool guys, thanks for the thoughts. should be fun.

id say that top left is glassy..

the end,

Uh, it was part of the fun I was poking at INOKEA. Besides, all I did was a google image search for "New York surf" and I got that jpg. Sorry if it offended. Well, gotta go! I'm off for my daily surf at potatoe patch. It's going off as usual!

holy smackers! Danny Way is a farking nut case! The wipeouts he takes in one of the videos on the site that j posted above are brutal. He gets ridiculous amounts of air.. i also read that he broke his neck surfing! D'oh.

ok.. back to work now.

haven't surfed in a LOOONNNGGG time.. kinda nice in a way.

sharky
go for the 4-3 silver wetsuit
may help reflect some of the intense sf sunshine

http://www.surfline.com/travel/surfmaps/us/new_york/index.cfm

Simple to find. Easy to follow. People come. People go.

Kaiser - I think you mean www.s**fl*ne.com. Ain't no namin' websites around here.

Yeah, exactly. Besides, I just copied and pasted that. So really, I didn't even type it.

Remember what Surfline was like back in the day? Like late '99 or even 2000, man, it used to be such a great site. Then the people came, it lost its soul and now look at what we have.... $69.95 a year my ass! Man, that shit used to be free. All these kooks on the internet. I bet half of them still double click on links and shit thinking they are using their mom's old '92 Mac. Fucking kooks. You only have to click ONCE KOOK! Streaming video, fuck that, I still dig the stills man. And that LOLA thing, fucking all blue and orange and red and moving around and shit, what happened to the days with it was just a normal chart? Fucking loved those charts man. Sean Collins sold out bro. E remembers that stuff, man, he was the dude. He CODED that stuff man. He was there. He charged it. Before anyone. Now look at it..... People dropping in and streaming like 4 locations at once, split screen with that LOLA bullshit, wind charts all up in your face.

I'm heading for the hills........This shit is going to hell quick!

$69!!!...did it really go up $20 in one year! I swear I paid $49 last year. They're gonna have one less subscriber when mine subscription runs out. f 'em.

you guys can go to archive.org and reminisce on what surfline use to be like.

nice one Kaiser!

i hate change. and progress too!

re Battle Royale: Watch it with your favorite "movie-ish" cd playing loud in the background ala pink floyd/wizard of oz. it is fucking great! I think we tried it with Electric Ladyland by Jimi. Cooool.

and JOC! nice offer. That would be sweet. I will definitely let you know.

Kelpy reefs and greeny leafs sound perfect in the fall.

flades - Rumor has it that if you signed up at $49 back in the day, you're grandfathered in at that price. Not positive but it's worth checking.

EIGHT SIDES OF REALITY IN MID-2005
By Paul Berman
(Paul Berman, a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University, is the author of Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer, and its Aftermath (2005) and Terror and Liberalism (2003).

Reality right now, I propose, is shaped like an octagon, with the following eight sides:

Side One: A Basic Fact of World History
Our current difficulties were created by the rise of liberalism during the last several centuries. By liberalism, I mean the set of ideas that began to assume a recognizable shape in the 17th century, and has been developing ever since. The liberal ideas insisted on a spirit of intellectual and practical modesty -- on a tolerant acceptance of incoherence and contradiction. Liberalism insisted that society can be broken down into separate spheres, and each of the spheres can be allowed to operate more or less independently of the others, with no detriment to anyone.
Liberalism insisted on separating the state from the church. But liberalism made other separations, too: between the state and the society; between the state and the individual person; between the society and the individual person.
Liberalism insisted that your own thinking can be broken down into separate spheres, so that in one part of your brain you can go on picturing the world in a strictly religious fashion, if you wish to do so; and, in another part of your brain, you can picture the world in a scientific or rational manner. In this way, liberalism allowed you to at least try to maintain the integrity of your own rationality, without having to submit your rational calculations to other modes of thought at every moment.
By the 19th century, the idea of liberalism had become reasonably well known in regions all over the world, not just in Western Europe and North America. And the belief arose that liberalism, in the broad sense that I have just described, contained within it the secret of human progress. There was a belief that, if only people would organize their societies and their own thinking according to liberal principles, they would unleash the powers of rationality and science. Their societies would become more efficient, inventive, and productive. And, all over the world, people would begin to live a much more human existence -- less animal-like, more secure, more satisfying, healthier and wealthier.
During the 19th century, events in many parts of the world seemed to suggest that progress of this kind was within reach of absolutely everyone, sooner or later.

Side Two: Liberalism's Unappealing Aspects
Liberalism in its modesty has always allowed for self-criticism. In that spirit, those of us who are liberals today ought to be able to acknowledge that something has always been dismaying, even revolting, in the liberal idea. A first dismaying aspect has been a massive capacity for hypocrisy. It is entirely possible to proclaim the most liberal of intentions, and then to draw a sword and march onward, committing murder and mayhem for reasons that finally have nothing to do with liberal intentions.
During the same 19th century when large publics all over the world were beginning to accept a notion of a smooth and liberal road to human progress, the very people who most loudly promoted this idea set about building gigantic empires on a basis of exploitation and the search for glory. Every single powerful country that embraced and profited from the liberal ideas ended up implicated in these efforts.
The British and French empires waded knee-deep in blood through large portions of the world, even while proclaiming the highest of motives. In the United States, the notion of liberal progress was indelibly linked with the most horrendous of actions against the American Indians. American slavery was promoted by some of the same people who promoted a Jeffersonian liberalism in other respects. At the very end of the 19th century, the United States acquired something of its own far-flung foreign empire, never on the scale of the big European empires, yet an imperial enterprise, even so. In the Philippines, the United States ended up committing massacres, too, precisely in the European style.
The Belgians proved to be probably bloodier than anyone else during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Germans never did command a very large empire, outside of Europe. And yet, having arrived late at their imperial acquisitions, the Germans in Africa ended up practicing the most modern methods of oppression. It was the Germans, at the beginning of the 20th century, who pioneered the technique of rounding up an entire ethnic group in a concentration camp and launching an extermination -- this, at precisely the moment when the belief in a simple path of worldwide liberal progress was at its height. And then, beginning in 1914, the mass killings rolled across Europe itself -- an event unforeseen by people who had upheld the idea of easy progress. In this terrible fashion, liberalism was revealed to be prone to a peculiar weakness: a catastrophic naivete on the topic of human suffering and irrationality.
Liberalism has always contained a second dismaying aspect, as well, which is not so much practical as metaphysical. There is something in man that craves a unity of thought and society, something in man that wants to reach out to a more than human force -- something that craves a god, or some other supreme power or guiding hand. Liberalism, in its modesty, does not deny this desire. Nor does liberalism satisfy the desire. Liberalism says, in effect, "Yes, you may feel this desire, and you are entitled to feel it and to elaborate any system of philosophical or religious thought that appeals to you. But you must allow these desires and systems of thought to remain in their own spheres, and not reduce every aspect of life and thought to a single desire or system of thought." The heart sinks, at hearing such a message. And so, liberalism has always left a great many people feeling unsatisfied.

Side Three: Ant-Liberalism
The dismaying qualities of liberalism have always generated movements of rebellion against liberal societies and liberal doctrines. These rebellious movements have tended to follow an identifiable two-step pattern. The rebellions begin as protests against the crimes that are committed hypocritically in liberalism's name. And then the rebellions evolve into a condemnation of the metaphysical nature of liberalism itself. That is, the rebellions begin as political protests, and end as metaphysical efforts to eliminate the notion of a separation of spheres.
The rebellions began in the 19th century as literary and philosophical movements, conforming to the principles of Romanticism. But, in the years that followed World War I, these Romantic impulses swelled into political movements, which took a very specific and original form. This was the totalitarian parties and mass organizations of post-World War I Europe. The totalitarian movements arose in virtually every country in Europe.
When we look back at Europe's totalitarian movements today, we may suppose that each of those movements was sui generis, and nothing tied them together. We resist the idea that a movement of the far left such as Bolshevism could have shared any important features with movements of the far right, such as Mussolini's fascism and Hitler's Nazism. And yet the far-right movements had their left-wing aspects -- which is why Hitler's movement claimed the word "socialism," and why Mussolini, with his own background on the extreme left, attracted followers from the left. More than fifty years ago Hannah Arendt already identified the fundamental similarities between the right-wing and left-wing versions of totalitarianism, and to her argument I would add only an emphasis on mythological structures -- on the shared mythology that underlies every one of the totalitarian ideologies and movements.
This is the mythology that I have described in Terror and Liberalism -- the mythology that begins by stipulating the existence of a people of good. The people of good are afflicted by a sinister conspiracy of internal corrupting forces and external diabolic forces. The people of good must rise up in apocalyptic battle against the internal corrupters and external diabolical forces. And, at the end of the terrible battle, a perfect society will be produced, in which liberalism's separation of spheres will be eliminated, and society will assume the form of a single, seamless whole, purified of all extraneous elements and corruptions.
Each of the totalitarian movements in post-World War I Europe postulated the terms of this mythology in a different fashion, such that the people of good were identified as the proletariat (for the Communists), or the sons of the Roman wolf (for the Italian fascists), or the Warriors of Christ the King (for the Spanish fascists), or the Aryan race (for the Nazis), and so forth. The internal polluting forces were the kulaks and the bourgeoisie, or the Masons, or (invariably) the Jews. The external conspiracy was the Anglo-American imperialists, or the pincer forces of the Soviet Union and the United States that were said to be attacking Europe, or the forces of Soviet and liberal atheism.
The apocalyptic battle was going to be the class war, the race war, or the Catholic Crusade of General Franco. And the perfect new society was going to be communism, or fascism, or the Third Reich, or the New Middle Ages of a perfect Catholic Spain.
A great many political movements postulate grand mythologies for themselves, but the totalitarian mythologies were distinguished by an unusual cult of death. The utopian perfection at the end of the mythology always turned out to require the slaughter of millions, and frequently turned out to require the self-sacrifice of the totalitarians themselves. Naturally, the cult of death varied from one movement to another. Franco's fascists chanted, "Long live death!", whereas Stalin's Communists chanted about Five Year plans. And yet, curiously enough, Soviet Communism inspired the most enthusiasm around the world in precisely those periods when the demands of the Five Year plan required the liquidation of mass numbers of people, including the party leadership. In 1956, when Soviet Communism veered in a less bloody and less oppressive direction, the Soviet Union lost much of its revolutionary prestige, in favor of Mao's China, where the Stalinist brutality continued.

Side Four: Liberal Blindness
Liberalism has always had difficulty in recognizing the existence and nature of these totalitarian rebellions. This is partly because liberalism presumes a world in which people behave according to a rational calculation of interests and desires. That is liberalism's ideal, and it is natural for liberals to assume that their ideal already exists.
The entire purpose of the totalitarian movements, however, is to rise up against these kinds of rational calculations. Totalitarians want to live out their apocalyptic fantasies, want to feel the thrill of intense hatred and the taboo-breaking thrill of mass murder. People with a liberal mentality want to believe that no such thrills and desires exist.
Because liberalism has always wanted to be self-critical, it is very easy for people with liberal ideas to end up looking at the totalitarian movements and, in a reflective mood, to wonder: Well, aren't we liberals just as bad, perhaps even worse? -- which has sometimes been the case, though not typically.
A liberal inability to recognize the existence and nature of totalitarian movements has been a main feature of the last century's history. Just as in the 19th century, when liberals were sometimes strangely blind to the crimes of their own empires and political systems, the liberals of the 20th century were sometimes blind to the crimes of their enemies. The totalitarians committed their genocides, and the genocides tended to be invisible, in liberal eyes -- at least for a while. Everybody by now knows all too well the story of the fellow travelers of Communism -- the liberal-minded people who, without being Communists themselves, tried to imagine that Communism was liberalism-in-a-rush, in a primitive Slavic version. The fellow-traveling liberals therefore failed to see or believe that, in the 1930s, Stalin was deliberately starving to death millions of Ukrainian farmers and committing other, equivalent crimes.
We ought to remind ourselves that a similar blindness used to afflict the liberals of the right, in regard to fascism and even to Nazism. Even some of the left-wing liberals were unable to understand the nature of fascism and Nazism. The majority faction of the French Socialist Party ended up voting in favor of Marshall Petain and a fascist France, and this was not unusual in the history of the democratic or liberal left.

Side Five: Muslim variations
Totalitarianism arose in Europe post-World War I, but it spread right away to the Muslim world, initially in the form of Communism, but, more importantly, in the form of Muslim variations on the original European concept. The two principle examples have been Baathism (which is the most radical version of pan-Arab nationalism) and radical Islamism, as it arose in Sunni Egypt and in the lands that eventually became Pakistan, and later on in Shiite Iran.
Baathism and radical Islamism are conventionally regarded as opposites because, while Baathism seeks a dictatorship by the leaders of Baath party, the radical Islamists seek a clerical dictatorship -- different goals. The Baath and the Islamists have fought terrible wars, not just in the 1980s between Iraq and Iran. Even so, Baathism and radical Islamism have also had a long history of alliance – an alliance, for instance, between the Syrian Baath and the Lebanese Hezbollah, which has remained solidly in place for more than twenty years. Right now, Baath-Islamist alliances are fighting tooth and nail against democratic forces in both Lebanon and Iraq. Nor should these alliances surprise us.
Baathism and radical Islamism entertain similar cosmologies -- a picture of the world in which the people of good are either the Arab nation (for the Baathists) or the community of Islam (for the Islamists), and are beset by corrupting internal forces (Jews, Masons, inauthentic Arabs and hypocritical Muslims) and by diabolical external forces (Zionists, Western imperialists), who wish to exterminate the people of good. Baathism and Islamism both call for an apocalyptic war (the Arab revolution, the jihad) to resist the cosmic evil and create the perfect society. Both Baathism and Islamism describe this perfect society as a modernized resurrection of the Muslim caliphate of the seventh century, though the Baath emphasize the caliphate's ethnic Arab imperial aspect, and the radical Islamists emphasize the sacred theocratic aspect.
Just now, in June 2005, a novel by Saddam Hussein called Get Out, You Damned One, has begun to sell briskly in Jordan, and the plot of this novel, as summarized by The New York Times, conforms precisely to the doctrines I have described.
Baathism and radical Islamism share some intellectual history, as well. Each of these movements arose in the classic period for all totalitarian movements, which was in the years after World War I; and each of the movements drew on European sources. Baathism drew on Nazism especially, though also on Stalinism. Saddam's mentor, Michel Aflaq, translated the Nazi theoretician Alfred Rosenberg into Arabic. Radical Islamism drew on some of the Vichy writers, as well as on Nazi ideas about Jews -- e.g., on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which long ago entered into Islamist commentaries on the Koran.
Baathism and radical Islamism also happened to prosper politically at roughly the same rate. Both movements reached an apogee of power in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini led his Islamist revolution in Iran, and Saddam Hussein radicalized the already-existing Baath dictatorship in Iraq. The two movements duly launched their apocalypses. And the consequences have turned out to be, from the point of view of the history of modern totalitarianism, entirely predictable and traditional. In their effort to withstand the cosmic forces of sinister evil and to resurrect the ancient caliphate, Baathism's "Arab revolution" and Islamism's jihad have, between them, killed more than two million people since 1979. This is the age of genocide.


Side Six: Liberal Blindness in the Middle East
The same liberal naivete that prevented good-hearted liberals from appreciating the scale of Stalin's and Hitler's crimes in the past has prevented the descendants of those people from noticing the slaughter in more recent times, too. Good-hearted liberals tell themselves today that massacres in the modern Muslim world are anthropological in origin, and reflect eternal traits of Muslim civilization -- therefore, should not be regarded as anything extraordinary or modern. This explanation is a slander. The history of Islam and of the Ottoman Empire has seen many golden centuries of peace and civilization, with benefits for the entire world. Islam over the centuries has tended to be more, not less, tolerant than Christianity.
Alternatively, good-hearted people like to imagine that massacres in the modern Muslim world derive from authentic grievances, and millions of Muslims have been slaughtered because the Israelis have oppressed the Palestinians. But this explanation cannot explain why the worst sufferings of the Arab and Muslim people in modern times do not come from Israel but, instead, from the Muslim totalitarian movements.
More typically, good-hearted people with liberal imaginations simply refuse to see the dimensions of the suffering in the Arab and Muslim world. That was why, when the wave of killings reached the United States on September 11, 2001, a great many people honestly pictured the terrorist attacks as freak incidents, or as a variation on the minor terrorism that has afflicted Western Europe in modern times. People with this interpretation simply could not recognize that a slaughter of a few thousand random people in the United States was merely one more link in a chain of far larger slaughters in the Arab and Muslim world.
People who imagined that the September 11 attacks were an isolated incident tended to picture the culprits as a handful of desperadoes -- villains who needed to be rounded up by the police, instead of as vanguard members of a mass movement. For the existence of mass totalitarian movements with genocidal intentions is just as difficult to see today as was the existence of such movements in the days of Stalin and Hitler.

Side Seven: the Anti-Fascism of Today.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are anti-totalitarian wars -- more narrowly, anti-fascist wars. This, too, has been hard to see.
Partly that is because the Bush administration has advanced incoherent explanations for the wars, and has sometimes lied to the public, and has committed crimes -- all of which draws attention away from the principle sources of suffering in the Muslim and Arab worlds. Still, if we peek beyond the Bush administration and its blunders and crimes, we ought to be able to detect something remarkable. In Afghanistan in the fall of 2004, millions of people participated in the most democratic election that has ever taken place in that country. The Afghanis elected a more-or-less liberal-minded government, which has been pursuing a war against the remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda -- against the partisans of radical Islamism. This war is essentially a civil war, and the difference between the two sides ought to be clear enough. It is a war between liberalism and totalitarianism -- a war in a recognizable form.
The war in Iraq displays the same characteristics. The election in Iraq in January 2005 brought out an astonishing number of voters, despite the terrifying threats against them. All of the leaders of the successful parties in that election loudly declared themselves in favor of a democratic Iraq with human rights. Some of those leaders made their democratic declarations fullly and clearly, others in a murkier and more ambiguous fashion, and this may hint at problems to come. Still, all of the principle leaders of the major parties seemed to agree on the fundamental objective of a democratic and free Iraq.
Each day’s headlines gives us reason for pessimism about both of those wars -- against the Taliban-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, and against the Baath-Qaeda forces in Iraq. And yet, one aspect of the present landscape allows for a few green shoots of hope. On September 10, 2001, if you had run your eye across the large region that is known as the Greater Middle East, looking for powerful movements struggling against the sundry totalitarianisms of the Muslim world, you would have seen the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and the Kurdish pesh merga in northern Iraq -- and both of those forces were without any realistic prospect of achieving a large victory. Today the battles against the totalitarian movements are being led by elected governments in those two countries, commanding at least rudimentary police forces and armies. On September 10, there were no significant Arab forces fighting openly for a democratic society. Today large numbers of Arabs are doing exactly that, in the ranks of the Iraqi government.
On September 10, virtually no one was speaking of a democratic revolution in the Arab world. Today that idea has been widely broached. The largest pro-democracy demonstrations in the history of the Arab world took place early in 2005 in Lebanon. Liberal protest movements have sprung up in Egypt and elsewhere. These movements might well fail. But there is no reason for us to accept a simple-minded determinism of failure in place of the old-fashioned simple-minded determinisms of success. Everything is in play, which means that people in the rest of the world may be able to influence the outcome.

Side Eight: A Struggle of Ideas
Regardless of how the military conflicts turn out, the struggle between liberalism and its totalitarian enemies has always been chiefly a struggle of ideas. If masses of Nazi supporters in all the countries of Europe had not been persuaded to abandon their totalitarian mythology and paranoid hatreds in favor of different and better ideas, the military victory over Nazism in 1945 would never have brought about a successful new liberal society. Communism in Europe was likewise defeated by a battle of ideas, without any military aspect at all.
Today many people with liberal ideas in the Western countries cannot imagine how to participate in a struggle of ideas in the Greater Middle East. The events seem to be taking place too far away. Liberal-minded people sometimes tell themselves that Muslim and Arab totalitarianism has nothing to do with the intellectual traditions of the Western world, which leaves no role for liberal arguments from the West. But none of this is true. Baathists and radical Islamists may declare themselves to be pure indigenous products of a civilization utterly foreign to the West. But then, totalitarians have always claimed pure and exotic origins for themselves. The Nazis claimed to be ancient Teutons. The Stalinists claimed to be masters of a mystical dialectic comprehensible only by the genius leaders of the Communist Party. There was no reason to accept any of these claims.
The Middle East is not Europe, but neither is it the moon. In some respects, the Middle East is, in any case, Europe. The entire Arab world has been crushed under dictatorships of one sort or another, mild or totalitarian, and the conditions for an open debate can be found only in the Arab diaspora in the great cities of Europe. The debate that needs to occur should take place in European newspapers, published in European languages as well as in Arabic.
It is true that, in order to engage in arguments with the most radical currents of pan-Arabism and Islamism, people with liberal ideas ought to proceed in a delicate fashion. Liberals should denounce the totalitarian currents of radical Islamism, yet not the noble traditions of ancient Islam. Liberals should affirm a sensitive appreciation of other cultures -- yet not allow their sensitivity to degenerate into an acceptance of political pathologies. Liberals should sympathize with legitimate grievances -- for instance, the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people. Yet liberals should not allow their recognition of grievances to degenerate into an acceptance of apocalyptic fantasies and the cult of death.
The struggle against totalitarianism has always required making these kinds of delicate distinctions. During the struggle against Communism, liberals had no difficult in supporting the rights of workers and condemning Communism in the same breath -- even though the Communists claimed to be the workers' truest leaders. Liberals pointed out that, far from defending the working class, Communism represented a new and terrible kind of exploitation. In just this fashion, liberals should point out that Baathism, far from defending the rights of Arabs, slaughters Arabs. Radical Islamism, far from defending Islam, corrupts and defames it.
How is this kind of debate proceeding, today -- the debate of liberalism against totalitarianism? We can answer by recalling the intellectual journalism of the 1970s and 80s. In those days, the most prestigious intellectual journals in the Western countries made a point of championing the liberal dissidents of the East Bloc -- even if those same journals frequently condemned the actions of the United States government. Today, the leading intellectual journals of the Western countries continue to condemn the actions of the United States government, and rightly so, often enough. But the championing of dissidents against totalitarianism is no longer in fashion today -- except here and there.
This kind of failure on the part of the liberal intellectuals of the Western countries is nothing unusual in modern history. Nor are the results hard to see. Millions of well-educated people marched in the streets of Europe and the United States in early 2003 to prevent the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But not a single mass march has ever been held in any of the Western countries to denounce terrorist attacks on the shaky new democratic governments of Iraq and Afghanistan. Thoughtful people ask, what are the factors that help create totalitarian movements? One of those factors is the treason of the intellectuals.

Those are my eight points. Glancing at them, a friend complains that I have not addressed the many errors and disasters of American policy. I say to him:
“You are right. I have described an octagonal reality. Pentagons cope poorly with octagons. Let us work to change things, and make up for the Pentagon’s errors, as best we can.”

shheeiiitttt surfline used to be a fax service. until Al Gore invented this here goddamn internet thing.

what the hell?

I still have a surfline subscription, and yes it is still $49.95 for us oldtimer subscribers. I don't get much out of it, though, and will probably let my subscription slide. I don't use the cams, and cdip has much more reliable bathymetry based surf height predictions.

Hi gang. Busy at work so I don't get to play in the sandbox. Is it true that Sharkbait got a job offer to illustrate for $500K/yr. at the NY Times? I also heard that Kaiser has a new gig with Reef interviewing potential models. And CK's girl still loves him? Big mistake! Someone said that E got a buzz cut and is thinking about writing marketing stuff for the Marines. And BVB is back? Life is good.

To name a spot and you all go crazy? How about this spot - GOOSES. Anyone know where Gooses is? It aint in Bank Wright's book! People go crazy over naming spots? You posture yourself and spot naming on the internet much higher than actual reality holds and the effect of naming the spot on a "local blog" in a "permanant searchable archive." LOL. It so lame. GOOSES, GOOSES, GOOSES!

Hey Whats Up Those are some awesome pic's Keep up the good work I'll be on those waves someday
C-ya brada kine

honestly, you f----d up big time ...i been surfing g------- every morning for the past two weeks while everybody been dissin' all the other breaks ,,,come tomorrow i'll be battlin' kooks on the shoulder thanks to you, mutha f---er

Any late night Stylemasters reviews?

Never write longer thAn you would ride. Do not name spots, and treat your new found friends with as much respe bros. Some Sac boyz know, all should! No spots, just north of and just south of..............- Good way!

Goodness is less than months away, I hate to see prime summer or fall spots WORKED.

Shaka!, Rick

bro gooses is a sick left i backdoored all las sumer only on a good south swell brah me and cabrillo..i mean carillo just pullin in all arvo sick!

I still don't get the whole name spotting thing. When did this ever come up? I've been surfing for 16 years, and only recently came across this idiotic non-sense. I can understand, if name spotting also came along with directions and maps, that people would get pissed, but, seriously, what's in a name?

just a bunch of letters