DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S # 37

SHOOT DOWN THAT SATELLITE

As the US prepares to shoot down the 10-ton spy satellite that was launched in December 2006 but didn’t properly deploy and has been slowly falling back to Earth ever since, totally out of human control, the official story is the shoot-down (no Dick Cheney jokes) is needed because it choc fill o’ highly toxic hydrazine rocket fuel. Suggestions have also been made that the military want to blow up the system to avoid the possibility of sensitive equipment landing on enemy soil. (Enemy?) While the even more cynical have suggested that it’s demonstration to China, who recently used a surface-to-space missile to shoot down a satellite in orbit, that the US also has orbital warfare capabilities. When questioned about this the Pentagon responded with all the injured innocence of a ten year-old caught with a BB gun and a broken window. “Who? What? Us? How could you think such a thing? That would be the militarisation of space, and we’d never do that.

The secret words are Doom Beam

Freddie Bell -- RIP

FROM THE TRENCHES

Fucking hell, Doctor T, why did you have to go and blow yourself away. It's getting weirder enough for most of us and we in the Old Guard could really use your voice in the chorus. But...


The secret word is Veterans

CLASS WAR? WHAT CLASS? WHAT WAR?

Jon sent me this long and righteously angry piece by Chris Floyd from his excellent blog Empire Burlesque, essentially saying the, although Mitt Romney has mercifully left the building, his power-elitist distortion still haunts the land…

“Romney makes the sexual and racial subtext abundantly clear in his remarks about Europe's loss of religious faith, eroded morality, etc. The Euros are plainly too busy having abortions and watching porn to do their duty by the race and breed bigger families kept under strict religious discipline. And thus the shabby denizens of an alien faith are breeding like rats in the cellarage of Western Civilization, gnawing away at the foundations and conquering it from within. The fact that "Muslims" are substituted for "Jews" in these formulations and implications of Hitchens, Amis, Romney, et al, does not lessen the precision with which their diatribes mirror those that saturated Germany (and many other nations) in the first four decades of the 20th century. For the elites, there is always a dark, sexually potent "other" out there, whose overwhelming threat to white supremacy can only be overcome by….giving the elites more and more power.”

(Click to read)

The secret word is Loathing

SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES

I have been working on my new book (on the subject of drugs as it happens) all the livelong damned day, so I don’t have to much to say except, even loathing award shows as I do, I was delighted that Amy Winehouse picked up five Grammy awards, providing proof that, counter to all the fashionable hypocrisy and propaganda, one can still actually be psychotic, stoned, drunk, self destructive, and an all round mess (plus being ratted out by a tabloid newspaper and tossed into dubious rehab) and still produce, if not great art, at least some of the best music around. Needless to say, the sobriety gestapo, led in this instance by the miserable Natalie Cole, is moaning that an alleged and incarcerated drug addict should not be so honored. Nice one, Natalie, let's lower the poor girl's self-esteem a bunch more notches when she's trying to save her own life. Ah, fuck ‘em. I've had more than enough of the self righteous dictating what is acceptable behavior for the artist and what’s not, and degrading and diminishing all who disagree.(But get well Amy, we need you.)

The secret words are Charlie Parker

REVELATIONS OF ROCK

“Would Woody Guthrie have tolerated this shit?”

HCB has just sent over this scathing commentary on the music business by Simon Napier-Bell -- who, managed, at one time, The Yardbirds, and, in another era (and at another extreme) worked with Wham! --which contains some stunning anecdotes like…

“Nevertheless, I was totally in their hands. Here there were 6,000 radio stations. Four thousand were said to have playlists under Mafia control. To promote my record would require cocaine and sex and suitcases full of cash. I hadn't chosen to be with this company: that had been done by EMI. In America I had just one job - to persuade CBS the Yardbirds were worth promoting. But since that was already decided there wasn't much left to do. So I went and had tea with Ahmet Ertegun.”
Or
“Dick was about to have a conversation he didn't want. Eighteen months previously there had been publicity about Jewish-born Dylan becoming a born-again Christian. He'd made a couple of albums full of evangelical zeal but they'd bombed. Now his contract had come up for renewal. Dick especially didn't want to have this conversation in front of me. He took the call anyway. To begin with, it wasn't too interesting but then Dick yelled, 'I've told you, Bob - no fucking religion! If you can't agree to that, the deal's off...' Bob was arguing the point but Dick was having none of it. 'Look, I'm telling you. There'll be no fucking religion - not Christian, not Jewish, not Muslim. Nothing. For God's sake, man - you were born Jewish, which makes your religion money, doesn't it? So stick with it, for Christ's sake. I'm giving you 20 million bucks - it's like baptising you, like sending you to heaven. So what are you fucking moaning about? You want 20 million bucks from us? Well, you gotta do what we tell you. And what we're telling you is... No Torah! No Bible! No Koran! No Jesus! No God! No Allah! No fucking religion. It's going in the contract.'
Click for the full story

The secret word is Larceny

(Thanks Tim)

A MESS OF BLUES

You hear no lonesome train whistles round midnight here in Hollywood. The closest thing is the howl of an LAPD siren. Doesn’t mean, though, that a man can’t get the blues so bad, he feels the need to post a mess of them over on DOCTUBE. (And that’s Blaze Starr on the picture, who was the mistress of Louisiana Governor Earl Long, who was the brother of Huey Long, the Kingfish. He was rumored to be a psychotic drunk, but he was also rumored to know all the inside details of Clay Shaw and the New Orleans connections to the JFK assassination, but he never said a word because he couldn’t figure how it would be to his advantage.)

The secret word is Seventh