THE NEW IMPROVED RED SKULL

This would appear to be a teaser of Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull in the upcoming Captain America movie, and I must, as a life long Red Skull aficionado (who has actually preserved a Capt. America v The Red Skull coffee mug intact since the 1970s) I give it my seal of approval. If you don’t count the Mekon, the Red Skull may well be my favorite comic book super villain, I mean, damn, he was personally constructed by no less than Adolf Hitler and pisses on Lex Luthor or The Joker.

“The Red Skull, Johann Schmidt (sometimes spelled Shmidt), was a former Nazi general officer and confidant of Adolf Hitler. He has been closely affiliated with HYDRA and is an enemy of S.H.I.E.L.D., the Avengers, and the interests of the United States and the free world in general. He was physically augmented by having his mind placed into the body of a clone of Captain America, the pinnacle of human perfection. He has been seemingly killed in the past, only to return time and time again to plague the world with schemes of world domination and genocide.” (Click here for more)

The secret word is Evil

BUT DO WE GET A NEW CAPTAIN AMERICA?

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MOBY SEZ…

"I truly believe, as an institution, most major labels should just die. There was a time when the music business was incredibly monolithic and there were only two ways to get your music heard: sign to a major label, get your music played on MTV and get it played by big radio stations. "Thank God, that period has come to an end... Signing to a major, for 99.9% of the musicians on the planet, is the worst thing they could do... They've treated musicians badly. They've treated fans badly. They've treated the music badly, most importantly. For that reason, they either need to reinvent themselves or die quietly." (Click here for more)

THIS BACON THING IS GETTING OUT OF HAND

FRIDAY? GOOD? WELL, ACTUALLY THE NEWS IS FUCKING TERRIBLE

“Oh shit.”

Each time I look at the news of the environment, it seems to be quantum degrees worse. (And to think we have to put ourselves through so much of this grief because super-rich bastards don’t want to pay tax and oil barons maximise profits.)

“Life on Earth is hurtling towards extinction levels comparable to those following the dinosaur-erasing asteroid impact of 65 million years ago, propelled forward by human activities, say scientists. This week, scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, announced that if current extinction rates continue unabated, and vulnerable species disappear, Earth could lose three-quarters of its species as soon as three centuries from now. "That's a geological eyeblink," said Nicholas Matzke, a graduate student at UC Berkeley and author of a paper describing the doom-and-gloom scenario. "Once you lose species, you don't get them back. It takes millions of years to rebound from a mass extinction event." This means that not, too far in the future, backyards might not be buzzing with bees, bombarded by seagulls or shaded by redwood trees. And while that might seem far off, species are already disappearing on a global scale. In recent history, we've lost the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon, the Javan tiger and the Japanese sea lion, and now, maybe the eastern cougar - declared extinct by the US Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday.” Click here for more

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The secret word is Gaia

BUT, IF THIS IS SURVIVAL, MAYBE EXTINCTION ISN’T SUCH A BAD IDEA

We humans do seem to be a terrible waste of space.

“The 3,500 square foot house in Malibu was designed by “Happy Chic” interior designer Jonathan Adler and features a chandelier made of Barbie hair, a closet filled with thousands of shoes and a sunburst mirror made from 65 Barbie dolls.”

UNCUT

There’s a feature on the 1960’s counterculture/underground press in the April issue of Uncut magazine in which old timers like Pete Townshend, Robert Wyatt, Marianne Faithfull and your truly give recall of back in the day. I’d provide a link but Uncut is an actual paper magazine.

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WE ARE THE ALIENS?

More evidence emerges that life on Earth was perhaps nudged into being by intervention from elsewhere. The popular report comes from Io9…

“Meteors may have seeded the planet with life-giving ammonia. New research adds more weight to the claim that the lifeless Earth may have been helped in the right direction by a stray asteroid. Carbon-containing meteorites found in the Antarctic have nitrogen locked away inside them. And when these meteorites are treated with heat, pressure and water, they emit ammonium — which the researchers argue was the precursor to complex biomolecules that formed the first single-celled creatures. The exciting part? The nitrogen found in the meteorites is measurably different from any found on the Earth. If this hunk of rock isn't our ancient parent, it shows that one like it could very well have been.”

The scientific details come from PNAS…

“Carbonaceous chondrites are asteroidal meteorites that contain abundant organic materials. Given that meteorites and comets have reached the Earth since it formed, it has been proposed that the exogenous influx from these bodies provided the organic inventories necessary for the emergence of life. The carbonaceous meteorites of the Renazzo-type family (CR) have recently revealed a composition that is particularly enriched in small soluble organic molecules, such as the amino acids glycine and alanine, which could support this possibility. We have now analyzed the insoluble and the largest organic component of the CR2 Grave Nunataks (GRA) 95229 meteorite and found it to be of more primitive composition than in other meteorites and to release abundant free ammonia upon hydrothermal treatment. The findings appear to trace CR2 meteorites’ origin to cosmochemical regimes where ammonia was pervasive, and we speculate that their delivery to the early Earth could have fostered prebiotic molecular evolution.”

I have, of course, a vested interest in all this since I now find myself working on a fiction epic in which all life here is supposedly a result of nephilim genetic mess-around. Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, dubbed the whole business “directed panspermia”. Click here for more.

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The secret word is Exobiology

THIS IS JANET FOLGER PORTER

She and her kind are on the menu of reasons I left the USA. But before you dismiss the woman as nasty fundamentalist crazy, remember the operations like Faith2Action are great fundraisers among the benightedly stupid.

“A fetus has been scheduled as a legislative witness in Ohio on a unique bill that proposes outlawing abortions after the first heartbeat can be medically detected. Faith2Action, the anti-abortion group that has targeted Ohio to pilot the measure, called the in-utero witness the youngest to ever come before the House Health Committee at 9 weeks old. Faith2Action president Janet Folger Porter said the intent is to show lawmakers who will be affected by the bill, which abortion rights groups oppose. Ohio Right to Life has not endorsed the measure. An aide to committee Chairman Lynn Wachtmann said a pregnant woman will be brought before the committee and an ultrasound image of her uterus will be projected onto a screen. The heartbeat of the fetus will be visible in color.”

WHAT? CHE? GOLF?

Or am I simply betraying deep seated class prejudice by being surprised that a revolutionary should play golf? The image is from UK Steve.

OR SHALL WE ALL JUST CHILL?

THE MORDOR SPIN

Taking, for a moment, leave from grim reality we learn that Lord of the Rings has been rewritten with Sauron as the good guy…

“In Salon, Laura Miller writes about a novel by Yisroel Markov which tells the LOTR story from Mordor’s point of view. Here’s a summary of The Last Ringbearer: In Yeskov’s retelling, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science “destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!” He’s in cahoots with the elves, who aim to become “masters of the world,” and turn Middle-earth into a “bad copy” of their magical homeland across the sea. Barad-dur, also known as the Dark Tower and Sauron’s citadel, is, by contrast, described as “that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic.”

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The secret word is Nazgûl

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Zeus Frozdick called his concept “Auto-therapy” but it failed to catch on.

YES! A BARKING ROBOT CAT

Shake the head! Light the eyes! Yet another product the world cannot live without.

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DON'T YOU MISS THE 20TH CENTURY?

(Image from Lazer LaZero)

PROBLEM OR SOLUTION?

Once again Chris Hedges has given voice to what many of us are only reluctantly considering.

“I have watched mothers and fathers keening in grief over the frail corpses of their children in hospitals in Gaza and rural villages in El Salvador, Bosnia and Kosovo. The faces of these dead children, their bodies ripped apart by iron fragments or bullets tumbling end over end through their small, delicate frames, appear to me almost daily like faint and sadly familiar ghosts. The frailty and innocence of my own children make these images difficult to bear. A child a day dies in war-related violence in Afghanistan. Children die in roadside explosions. They die in airstrikes. They die after militants lure them to carry suicide bombs, usually without their knowledge. They die in firefights. They are executed by the Taliban after being accused, sometimes correctly, of spying for the Afghan National Army. They are tiny pawns in a futile and endless war. They are robbed of their childhood. They live in fear and surrounded by the terror of indiscriminate violence. The United Nations, whose most recent report on children in Afghanistan covered a two-year period from Sept. 1, 2008, to Aug. 30, 2010, estimates that in the first half of last year at least 176 children were killed and 389 more wounded. But the real number is probably much, much higher. There are big parts of the country where research can no longer be carried out. We will not stop the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we will not end this slaughter of innocents, unless we are willing to rise up as have state workers in Wisconsin and citizens on the streets of Arab capitals. Repeated and sustained acts of civil disobedience are the only weapons that remain to us. Our political system is as broken and dysfunctional as that once presided over in Egypt by Hosni Mubarak. We must be willing to accept personal discomfort, to put our bodies in the way of the machine, if we hope to expose the lies of war and blunt the abuse by corporate profiteers. To do nothing, to refuse to act, to be passive, is to be an agent of injustice and to be complicit in murder.” (Click here for more.)

Click here for The Clash (supplied by UK Joe)

The secret word is Desperate

Suze Rotolo – RIP
Jane Russell – RIP

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

“A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, ‘Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.’ “

JUST SO YOU KNOW

Between 2002 and 2007 average incomes in the U.S. grew by $8,358. The richest 10% got 87% of that growth. The bottom 90% shared 13%.

KITTENS ON COKE

Actually the words are those of Charlie Sheen

GRATUITOUS JULIE NEWMAR

FEBRUARY ON THE SUN

As the weather on the sun rapidly becomes cause for concern, millions upon manipulated millions of the human race retreat into a fundamental, anti-science, superstitious ignorance in the name of some nebulous deity. At the same time, though, these same tortuous bigots make themselves wholly dependant on advanced technology while denying the entire scientific underpinnings on which their very survival depends. At times it all seems so ludicrous that I can only shake my head and wait for the lights to go out. Pray your way out of that one, sucker.

“Havoc wreaked by a solar storm – such as the one that occurred last week – could be equivalent to a "global hurricane Katrina" that would cost up to $2 trillion dollars in damage to communications satellites, electric power grids and GPS navigation systems, scientists said yesterday. Thursday's solar flare was the biggest for four years and ejected billions of tons of matter travelling at a million miles per hour towards Earth. When it hit our magnetic field it generated magnetic storms and power surges which disrupted communications and grounded flights. Senior government advisers have warned that the world has never been more vulnerable to the effects of such an events, which buffets the complex and delicate electronic technology that now controls almost all aspects of modern society. An increasing reliance on electronic equipment, such as GPS satellite navigation and the computers controlling smart grids for electricity distribution, has meant that solar storms can now produce unprecedented damage on a global scale, they said. Professor Sir John Beddington, the government's chief scientific adviser, said that the growth in the use of complex electronic machinery over the past 10 years has made society far more susceptible to catastrophic disruption than a decade ago when the last solar activity cycle reached its peak."Space weather has to be taken seriously. We've had a relatively quiet period of space weather and we expect that quiet period to end," Sir John told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.” Click here for more.

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The secret word is Mithras

THE PENGUIN SEZ…

“When are you humans going to wise up?”

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Arianna Frozdick did not bother to conceal her weapon.
(Image provided by HCB)

SPACE OPERA (Tika Masala)

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SUNDAY BREAKFAST

I rise in a poet’s quest for something that maybe involves vodka. The bed lays rumpled, but only from a book and the Sunday newspapers, and a long night of free associating ideas with a chopped and channeled Chevrolet mind and a Sony voice recorder. Later I will ordain the ramblings by writing them down – then maybe wait for the Spring to raise the ante on excitement. Finn the cat watches seagulls and pretends he’s Chekov. We remain calm.

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The secret word is Weekend

MARILYN SEZ...

“Stop being Sunday surreal, darling. Everything is going according to plan.”

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DON'T YOU MISS THE 20TH CENTURY?