FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

I wonder how many of you recall an old Paul Newman film titled WUSA, in which Newman, a alcoholic DJ, who carries his martinis with him in a sharp aluminum Thermos, goes to work for a fascist radio network dedicated to an American dictatorship. Clear Channel seems determined to make the movie all reality. I keep coming back to the phrase corporate totalitarianism, and some may think I’m overstating, but I would suggest the that right now the communication conglomerate, with its Zero Tolerance Broadcasting Decency Campaign does seem to the be setting itself up as Bush administration’s own Ministry of Truth. Although I’m not sure going after Howard Stern, no matter what you might think of him, is a terribly smart idea. It’s a move that might just shift working stiffs back to the left where they ought to be, and properly make “blue-collar conservative” an oxymoron. They also seem to have forgotten that some of Howard’s biggest fans are rank and file law enforcement.

For chapter and verse on Clear Channel, (courtsey some girl) go to...
http://www.takebackthemedia.com/radiogaga.html (And do scroll down to the visual aide to the whole unholy relationship between Clear Channel and the White House.)

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

And over at the Office of Vice & Virtue, Mel Gibson, while making the crucifixions run on time and bloody, is not neglecting the merch. Henry Cabot Beck sends the following clip...

You can buy "witnessing tools," including lapel pins labeled in indecipherable Aramaic (yay Aramaic! What a comeback! Who knew?) and lapel pins with crucifixes, and packs of "witnessing cards" to swap with your Jesus-happy friends, just like the Disciples did when they sat around the holy campfire, swapping tales of sad lost goddesses and making s'mores with communion wafers and pink Easter marshmallow peeps. But nothing says "slightly masochistic Jesus fanatic" like adorning your fine self with a two-inch silver pewter crucifixion-nail pendant, hanging 'round your neck from a nice 24-inch leather cord. Oh my yes. It's an actual product, available right now for about ten bucks from Mel Gibson's official "Passion of the Christ" movie Web site, while supplies last, which they will forever and ever because they're doubtlessly made in bulk by Malaysian sweatshop workers wearing faded "Lethal Weapon IV" T-shirts who all believe in a very unhappy Allah. Irony, it knoweth no boundaries.

For full story...
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/02/25/notes022504.DTL


LOVE IS HATE

But what could be more decent and wholesome than a televised execution? Isn’t Mel helping prove that? After the recent Doc40 post on the subject, kaymo seems to have the bit between his teeth...

We should do more on this. I have lots of qs. Like why Houston, Tex? What is it with the culture there that makes that town so fond of executions? And why the opposition to having them on TV? When, who, what etc... It seems so mewling, puking, sickly and weak of this stern visaged, balls of steel, minds of adamant, hearts of stone right wing rulership that they should want to hide the moment of death from those designated as the enemy to all things wise and wonderful (and usually white). if I can grab some time I will dig into this in coming days.
(Comment above or email byron4d@aol.com, especially from you guys from Texas.)

NADER IS RALPH

My considered, and I hope final thoughts on the Ralph Nader bit for the presidency came out this week in LA CityBeat – http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=693&IssueNum=38

CRYPTIQUE – Mind crossing your feet?

THE ELEPHANT ANALOGY

In response to yesterday's half-assed missive from A. Huffington, kaymo explains all we know about global warming (which may not be that much.)

Global Warming is still a very tricky thing...the models for mapping it are still soooo crude. Analogies include: Imagine an elephant in a sealed off room. There is no video, no audio, no smell sensor, all we have to examine it with are some mechanical arms. We know that it's pretty big and it may be dangerous. The elephant is getting angry about something, but we don't know what, exactly. It may break out of the room and if it does we're in trouble, in fact it does seem to be getting restless. It may be upset by our bad breath, or it just may be going into Musth, in which case all bets are off and let's get the hell out of here.

Google: Greenland Pump.
The G-Pump is an area of the North Atlantic where water from warmer parts that has drifted across the Atlantic and way north, cools off enough to sink down through the fresher-- therefore lighter-- water already there. This water is "heavier" ie saltier, because it's been on the surface a long time and it started out in warmer climes where evaporation removed a certain amount of the water and left the salts behind. This "North Atlantic Drift" begins with the good ol' Gulf Stream and it basically keeps Europe from looking like Labrador though they're on the same Latitude. If you've flown from Europe to the US in a window seat you may have noticed just how stark the difference is. Once the heavier Drift water sinks it drops all the way to the bottom of the ocean and flows back south in a huge bottom current that after about 4,000 years or so surfaces again in the Indian Ocean. Now, it is estimated that the Greenland Pump has weakened by between 20 to 30% in the past fifteen years or so. Reasons for this weakening include a sharp increase in the fresher water melting off Greenland's ice cap. Should it stop functioning then the "pull" on the warm North Atlantic Drift water will be much reduced and the Drift will be reduced in turn. Which will mean a very chilly period for Europe's 500 million inhabitants. It's happened before-- during the Little Ice Age (1450-1650)the Thames regularly froze over and England's viniculture gave up the ghost. But, the effect will be (maybe already is) felt all around the Northern Hemisphere. The result could be a quite abrupt shift to a rather more extreme climate, with hot dry summers and colder winters. Needless to say this will be great for the British Air Conditioning and Central Heating industries, both of which have struggled to find customers in a land where the ambient temp tends to be in the mid 50s F. It may also be tough for the US corn and wheat belts, especially if the interior of North America experiences a strong drying trend. The potential losses to world food stocks of having the climate of Iowa-Ohio become more like that of Saskatchewan-Manitoba are huge. Winter wheat is great, but American fattens its meat animals on corn and the difference in productivity between a field of Manitoban wheat and one of Ohio Corn is pretty damn huge. This may be the answer to America's problem with waistlines. As to the big question-- are we causing this change? Answer: maybe. The fact that the warmest years on record are clustered in the post 1980 era does point that way. But we're working with pitifully frail data. The elephant may just be in a frisky mood, ready for a change, or it may be that our CO2 emissions have maddened it. Either way, when push comes to shove it's going to blow our house down, big time.

BUT OH THAT THE ELEPHANT WOULD SIT ON SIMON

The joke has always been that Simon Cowell would reject Bob Dylan out of hand if he was ever a contestant on American Idol (I think that’s Pop Idol to you UK homeboys). And now here is the loathsome abomination actually saying it for himself. (Culled from the current TV Guide)...
Bob Dylan? Too ugly, too boring, too whiny, and too serious.
Yeah, well Simon, you’re an idiot babe, it’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

AND A SHAGGY ORGAN STORY (but true)

From MSNBC
A drug suspect trying to pick up 119 pounds of marijuana at Buffalo Niagara International Airport instead got two boxes of human organs, one box containing a heart intended for a transplant. The Canadian woman was arrested 12 hours later when she attempted to exchange the organ boxes for the packages full of pot, which was wrapped in plastic and smeared with mustard. Her accomplice, a New York man, was also arrested. The heart was delivered to the transplant recipient in time for the emergency surgery. What is unclear is why it took the culprits so long to realize the airport's mistake -- the boxes were labeled "PLEASE RUSH, HUMAN TISSUE FOR TRANSPLANT."

CRYPTIQUE – Blood on your saddle.

THE END OF THE WORLD IS CONFUSING

The following is an excerpt from a newsletter from Arianna Huffington...

If he’s smart enough to use it, the Democratic nominee may have just been handed the perfect cudgel with which to pummel President Bush — and cripple Karl Rove’s attempts to position his man as America’s go-to guy on national security. The weapon in question is a new report on the grave and gathering threat posed by global climate change — and the potentially cataclysmic consequences of the Bush administration’s obstinately ignorant approach to global warming. And the thing that makes the report so frightening — and the prospective bludgeon so crushing — is that it wasn’t authored by some crunchy granola think tank or a band of tree-hugging Earth Firsters, but by the U.S. Department of Defense. That’s right, the Pentagon — Rummy’s playpen. In fact, the report, which was slipped to the press earlier this month after being kept under wraps by the White House for four months, was commissioned by Andrew Marshall, a legendary DOD figure, nicknamed “Yoda” for his sagacity. As head of the Pentagon’s secretive Office of Net Assessment, Marshall has offered national security assessments to every president since Richard Nixon. And this latest assessment pegs climate change as a far greater danger than even the scourge of international terrorism. Dryly entitled “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,” the report reads like the plot summary of the upcoming Dennis Quaid doomsday flick, The Day After Tomorrow in which global warming pushes the planet to the edge of anarchy and annihilation.

But this scenario is not science fiction. According to the Pentagon study, the question is not if abrupt climate change will happen, but when. It could be, according to the report’s authors, as soon as the next three years, with the most devastating fallout potentially occurring between 2010 and 2020. At that point, we could find ourselves in the midst of a new ice age in which mega-droughts devastate the world’s food supply, drinkable water becomes a luxury worth going nuclear over, 400 million people are forced to migrate from uninhabitable areas, and riots and wars for survival become commonplace. But the Bush White House remains unwilling to address — or even acknowledge — this looming peril. Instead, the oiligarchs in the administration continue to fiddle while the atmosphere starts to burn, routinely ignoring scientific evidence and international consensus, and casting a questioning eye on the very idea, let alone the fact, of global warming. It’s a stance that has warmed the hearts —globally, no doubt — of the Bush Pioneers and Rangers in the oil and energy industry, making them feel very generous indeed. As last week’s release of a scathing letter signed by 60 prominent scientists — including 20 Nobel laureates and former science advisers to both Republican and Democratic administrations — makes clear, the Bush administration has made an art out of ignoring science. Particularly whenit comes to the issue of global warming.

Unfortunately Arianna, a recent convert from right wing Republicanism, is not so well versed in the techniques of doom-saying as those of us who have been at for decades, like (say) kaymo, Doc40's own grim prophet of destruction. She gives no references, no chapter and verse, and even mistakes it as a party political issue and not another indication that this planet is just sooo fucked that we might as well stay loaded until The End. Fortunately, here at Doc40, we can at least manage to run a Google search, which revealed that the source of her alarming information is a month old issue of Fortune (apt, AH?), from which we lifted the following excerpt...

Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade—like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies—thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power. Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe. Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's California wildfires as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia—it's easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change. Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned about it a decade ago, after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient layers of Arctic ice. The data show that a number of dramatic shifts in average temperature took place in the past with shocking speed—in some cases, just a few years.
For the full story – http://www.fortune.com/fortune/subs/print/0,15935,582584,00.html

BUT CHEER UP

Here, courtesy of Henry CB (who’s name I misspelled yesterday) is a new animation from the great Joel Veitch, that is quite as good as Viking Kittens or Gay Bar. – http://www.rathergood.com/moon_song/

MEANWHILE...

The FCC seems to be rolling hard in it’s clean up of the airwaves, and also providing Bush with another fatuous smokecreen. Bubba the Love Sponge is history and Clear Channel jerked Howard Stern from its stations just as Stern joined the League of Extraordinary Bushwhackers (LEB) by furiously turning on GWB and backing Kerry. But more of this later as the news comes in.

CRYPTIQUE – Jesus H. Christ, Mel...

COME WITH ME TO THE CASBAH

The following small wonder came in today from Henry Cabot Back...

DEAR Citibank Members,

This E-mail was _sent_ _by the Citibank server_ to
veerify your_ E_MAIL addres.
You musst clmoetpe this prsecos by clicking on_the link
below and enttering in the smal winddow your CITI-bank
ATM Card number and Pin that you use in the local ATM Machine.
This_is done - for-your pcertotion -G- because some of_our
members no logner have accses to their email adrssedes
and we must verify it.

Aside from qualifying as the most inept webscam of all time – or at least to date – the looney clip from Henry also started me thinking. I’m well aware that my imagination tends towards overcook a lot of the time, but that’s how I earn a living (distant laughter), and also how I keep myself sane (more distance laughter), but it serves as yet another reinforcement of my fantasy picture of the internet. Al Gore dubbed it the Information Super Highway, conjuring, for me at least some rolling, big-deal perspective that had elements of Heinlein’s Roads Must Roll, the world of the clone-makers in Star Wars II, the Venusian city of Mekonta, and Osaka International Airport, all clean and chrome, plexiglass, and airstream tubular, with order and efficiency, a precision of integrated and organized traffic. And maybe that’s why Old Al found himself incapable of defeating chump-chimp George W. because at least Bush, probably courtesy of Dick Cheney, and with rich-boy contempt, could see a little, if iniquitous, vision of the true unkempt nature of reality.

For me, the internet has always seemed far more like a some middle eastern bizarre, a souk or casbah, part futurist, part medieval, a space-floating Interzone, unplanned, asymmetrical and labyrinthine, although easily negotiable by those who know, with narrow accessways between gimcrack structures, who’s flaws are hidden by hypnoswirls of niteglo color, and all the whores, hustlers, cutpurses, deadrabbits, footpads, swackdogs and gutter jumpers at which an adventurer could ever hope to shake his swordstick. Quack croakers with dirty instruments want to enlarge your penis, brothel-shills do it with domestic beasts, and that’s only the promise of better things inside, swarthy bunco artists whisper of fortunes in Nigeria, and politicians with corrosive blood want your money even more than they want your vote. Sexualized cartoon hentai-children retail their tears in darker alleyways, dancing in come-to-me display for dangerously scarred and mind-numbed teenage gunpersons on r&r from the carnage of their X-cubes, while dealers in long coats of a million pockets whisper transactionally of every dubious pill know to man and crustacean, to calm your mind, roll up your eyes, or keep you fucking to Sunday. Pop-ups like dirty grey beggars need beating, while mules look for their 40 acres, and the gambling games tell you there’s ninety minutes in every hour and a hundred seconds in a minute and the odds are in your favor. And you should believe that when pigs eat your brother.

And in the middle of it all, there’s Doc 40's Own Cozy, Leather-Jacket Gin-Joint, 24 Hour Global House Party, and Medicine Show, offering sharp conversation, bad ideas, honest politics, cheap stimulation, dirty concepts, and links to revolution, right out on the stairs. The girls are smart, the women wicked, the men at least reasonable, poets cut up, the aliens behave themselves, the cats help themselves, the fire escapes work, and there’s never a cop around – even if you need one. And that, my friends is why I attempt to keep it all going. Even if it is only a bunch of freaks on a stream of electrons. Come on back now, y’hear.

MEANWHILE
London’s blogging callgirl Belle de Jour seems to have acquired a stalker...
http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com

AND A LAST WORD ON DEATH

I'm not quite sure how many Americans want to see executions live on TV, but according to a recent poll, it’s a hefty and bloodthirsty majority. I’ve been against capital punishment since I first saw Susan Hayward in I Want To Live, essentially figuring that a society should act according to a higher moral standard than its killers. (And if you’ve got a problem with that, the comments board is up on the right.) On the other hand , I do think, if we’re going to put people to death, it should be televised, just so we see exactly what is being done in our name. And if we’re not sickened by it, we are hardly worth the designation civilized.

CRYPTIQUE – Embiggen the girl.

HARD DAY AT THE KEYBOARD

Not so much to relate today, except the desire to maintain continuity and keep you all coming back. The entire day was taken up by finishing a story on the new season of The Sopranos and resolving yesterday's fury at Ralph Nader into something more manageably literate, (plus deftly and insouciantly linking the two) and following that, I find myself flagging and in that void-like moment when I really wonder if it’s all making any difference at all, or if it’s just creating the illusion of doing something to camouflage basic political impotence. Or maybe I wonder if I can still write at all. Both pieces are destined for LA CityBeat and will – editor’s willing – appear in print and online -- Nader Thursday next and The Sopranos the week after.

But hell, I can’t really believe it’s a waste of time. If I did, or began to, it really would be the cue to blow my brains out. The idea can be quite attractive in these grim days when very little seems to work as it should, but mercifully two things mitigate the self-destructive urge. One is a Hamlet-like fear of the void and the other is the quasi-logic that, since nothing remains the same, it might actually get better.

Meanwhile, there’s enough in the email in the box to make the log-on worth the effort. Plus our lovely Doc40 pal hipspinster has a new blog posted.

That’s – http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

FROM THE EMAIL

Jamie-in-Canada sends this unique perspective on the 21st century world...

Went to funeral for wife's cousin. He was Sergeant at Arms for oldest bike club in Toronto, The Last Chance. All wearing Hell Angels patches now. Province of Ontario has biggest HA group in world. Dozen or so at the funeral were all 5'10" looking like 400lbs of pork on kebab. You'd think with chemical business they'd be a little thinner. And what's with this new clothing empire they're building. T-shirts, jewelry, pants, hats, all from the RedWhite company. Nike should be so well represented.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

Kenshim proffers a shaggy president story...

SLEEPLESS IN THE WHITE HOUSE

One night, George W. Bush is tossing restlessly in his White House bed. He awakens to see George Washington standing by him. Bush asks him, "George, what's the best thing I can do to help the country?" "Set an honest and honorable example, just as I did," Washington advises, then fades away. The next night, Bush is astir again, and sees the ghost of Thomas Jefferson moving through the darkened bedroom. Bush calls out, "Tom, please! What is the best thing I could do to help the country?" "Respect the Constitution, like I did," Jefferson advises, and dims from sight. Bush isn't sleeping well the third night when he sees another figure moving in the shadows. It is Abraham Lincoln's ghost. "Abe, what is the best thing I can do right now, to help the country?" Bush pleads. Abe replies, "Go see a play."

And Dick 13 passes on a chance for direct action...

Subject: Censure President Bush

Dear friend, In an attempt to escape responsibility for the misleading statements that led the nation to war, President Bush has announced plans to form an independent inquiry to look into what went wrong. An inquiry would serve the Bush administration well: it would envelop the issue in a fog of uncertainty, deflect blame onto the intelligence services, and push any political damage into 2005, after the upcoming election. But the facts need no clarification. Despite repeated warnings from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, President Bush and his administration hyped and distorted the threat that Iraq posed. And now that reality is setting in, the President seeks to pin the blame on someone else. We can't let him. Congress has the power to censure the President -- to formally reprimand him for his betrayal of the nation's trust. If ever there was a time to use this function, it is now. Join the call for Congress to censure President Bush now at: http://www.moveon.org

And fidicen feels differently about Ralph Nader...

Really think vilifying Nader does more harm than good to the Democrats and the cause of defeating the fascists. We must take the inclusive high road (a la Roosevelt vs. 3rd party man Thomas in 1932--look it up if you don't know) and cannot allow ourselves to be defined and hemmed in bypotential Bush rhetoric and dirty tricks, a core mistake of Gore. A true blue message, stated presidentially, cannot lose this time and most of Nader can be safely co-opted. First and foremost, Nader, and the very few in the handful of swing states who might NOT vote Dem because of him (as opposed to any Green, Lib, or not voting at all people) can be neutralized by respect for their inarguable positions, their right to seek office and vote their conscience, and for their chutzpah to do so at this time. Include them in the discussion and show respect and my guess is they leave in October.

CRYPTIQUE – The sound of one foot walking on eggs.

RAGING AT NADER

I stayed up all night and watched Ralph bloody Nader announce his run for the White House on Meet the Press this morning. Refraining from screaming “Egomaniac weasel shithead!” more than four or five times – I contained my thoughts into three basic points.

1) Nader is attempting to take the progressive, anti-corporate high ground. This means that, if Kerry (or whoever) attempts any bold or radical initiatives on health care, prescription drugs, oil dependancy etc., the door will be wide open for accusations by the Bush campaign that the Dems are merely caving in to pressure from the Nader left, and cry "how can you elect a president who can be pushed around by Ralph Nader."

2) Where will Nader get his money? He says from web appeals, but it would be all too easily possible for Bush to keep him in the race as a spoiler and energy drain, by covertly channeling funds, with or without Nader even knowing it.

3) Nader gives the impression that he believes he can pick up many of the young and idealist Dean supporters to be his campaign grunts, almost as if he had some divine right to their support. As one who is not so young but still shamelessly idealistic, I'm disgusted, because, bottom line, what he betrays by this is nothing more than a cynical contempt for their idealism.

Right now I’m lobbying for print space to expand this analysis.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

The matter of Bush’s monstrous heap of cash money is pointed up by a webclip from some girl...

Specifically, while the president attacks Senator John Kerry (D-MA) for accepting money from lobbyists, a new study shows "the president accepted more in direct contributions from lobbyists in one year than Kerry did in the past 15 years." All told, Bush collected at least $6.5 million in "bundled" contributions from lobbyists last year alone.
Full story – http://www.misleader.org

And some girl also spotlights Bush’s under-the-radar attacks on women’s rights...

Thumbing his nose at the Senate for the second time in recent weeks, President Bush today appointed one of the most virulently anti-choice and anti-privacy judicial activists, Bill Pryor, to the Eleventh Circuit federal bench. Just a month after his surprise appointment of anti-choice Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit bench, Bush proved today that he'll go to any length, violate any rule, and upset any precedent to pack the courts with anti-choice extremists. Mr. Pryor has called Roe v. Wade an "abominable decision." The truly abominable decision is to give this hardened anti-choice crusader a seat on the federal bench. This outrageous appointment puts a judge who opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest in a frightening position of power over women's lives in Alabama, Florida and Georgia.
Full story – http://prochoiceaction.org

Which brings us back to Nader and his totally cavalier attitude to abortion rights in the 2000 campaign, retold on the Headblast website – http://davidcogswell.com/

In that campaign his response to a question about whether the Republican Supreme Court would endanger the right to abortion, Nader said if the Supreme Court struck down Roe vs Wade it would just go back to the states, as if the lives of women in Bible belt states were not a concern to him.

BLIMP LIKE AN EAGLE

Kaymo sends another of his military-industrial horror tales, which fits quite neatly with the revelations on last night’s edition of 60 Minutes that the Patriot Missile System (PMS???), so touted by Bush Sr, as a Scud-buster in the first Gulf War, is in fact better at shooting down US planes that enemy missiles. In Pentagon-speak it has “high fratricide levels”.

You heard about this one?
USAF is working on the Evolutionary Air and Space Global Laser Engagement, or EAGLE, a gigantic blimp about twenty to thirty times as big as a Goodyear blimp. Slung underneath it would be an array of huge mirrors designed to reflect high power laser beams that would be directed from either ground based transmitters or from orbiting power satellites. The reflected laser beams would be used to destroy enemy missiles, planes, limousines, you name it. This monstrosity is being created at the Air Force Research Lab's Directed Energy Division. At first glance this looks like just another Pentagon mega-turkey. A way of spending lots of taxpayer dollars and allowing young, right thinking science types to have rewarding careers. But apart from the grotesque mismatch between acronym and gas bag there's also the Pandora effect to consider. If the US can do this, so can others and do we really want colossal airships patrolling the stratosphere ready at a moments notice to fry just about anything chosen as a target to a crisp?

CRYPTIQUE – It beats working.

– AND IF YOU FIND DOC40 QUAINTLY AMUSING, FOR FUCK’S SAKE SEND A LINK TO A FRIEND!

SUNDAY POETRY – A NEW TWIST (and it goes like this)

Uncle Bill Burroughs should have lived to see this. He would have loved it – online porno sites masking their content from the latest generation of spam blockers, parental controls, government surveillance, and god knows what other manifestations of online moral enforcement, by using unintelligible scrambled and cutup text around the crucial hotlink to the site being promoted.

Even I thought the porn vendors were getting a little bold when, one afternoon (as is my habit) I rose and opened my email to find a clear and graphic sample image of a rather depressed-looking young woman felating a carthorse. There is little that shocks the Doc, but after coughing into my first Coke and cigarette of the day, I decided those responsible were sailing a tad close the contemporary winds of censorship, but that is really beside the point. John Ashcroft and worried webservers had unwittingly turned cyberpanderers into post-Beatnik techno-poets.

In the course of their subterfuge, the porn spammers were busily, but, I assumed, unknowingly, creating a form of found poetry, hugely resembling the works created by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, first with paper and scissors, and then with their various models of cutup engine, a technique later "borrowed" by David Bowie in his Thin White Duke incarnation, or so David boasted at the time.

Most of this kind of spam seems effectively random, although some spammers betray a self-awareness and creativity over and above their basic mission of smut-camouflage, by arranging the text into fanciful and maybe symbolic typographic structures – unless of course some HAL 9000 artificial intelligence is at work and playing long with the game. Unfortunately these line and column formations are destroyed by the act of removing the codes prior to posting. Which is a pity but inevitable. Unless someone had a smart idea.

As evidence that nothing is ever wasted in the constantly expanding culture, I have started to collect these items. More are always welcome, and I will post them until they stop coming or we all get bored with the exercise. (Send to byron4d@aol.com.) Here is the first example. The title is imposed, but I don’t think that’s breaking the rules...

LUCRETIUS CONCEDES.

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On sit, a exciting there overcooked I shabby also f x, is forked
he .soup, Their she child and and comedy g g a early.
dull,
Is I'll or British pastry bar n u,
it becoming he stabbing a doctor.
&&&&
There wanna,
She dusty, their pie she generic object web site a hill on geeky
The could? I high,
On right are vibrator a k or slow their dirty their against it
don't gonna.
The text,
A buying the creamy a five dollar bill I because leaf,
a before it of he .

Is suit,
found there four n p is deep
or biscuit also run
h a there until and tender she atom f e is silky.

It brothers y p, I about v o I shiny the brain throughout
j q and trailer q l a are king on does also she frosty. 318
Or bat b b, ours u o he train
I lonely there dropping u s he smacking h o on home
I great gun. Or store y p, She ;)
The coloring book, I bed and n v she mail. n f

adjectival deflate

delirious happy aunt bernice prissy
delirious happy aunt bernice prissy

I'd love to perform for you. manicuring Lucretius concedes.

COMMENTS BOARD

Funtopia Rich, the Doc, and I are wondering what to do about the comments board. Suggestions? Maybe a second one?

CRYPTIQUE – See Spot die.

NADER, I’M MAD AT’ YA!

Okay, so now I’m good and pissed off. You, me, even David Letterman, we’ve all spend months hammering away at George (smirking) Bush, and finally, in the last few weeks, we’ve seen some cracks appear. But just as we were started really to wonder if the light at the end of the tunnel was actually hope, and not the on-rushing train of neo-Con dictatorship, Ralph Nader lurches in this weekend, demanding everyone's attention like an ignorant drunken whore at an otherwise perfectly pleasant party. Fuck you, Ralph, you opportunistic, egomaniacal, shithead. Your vote syphoning got is into this mess. You’ve already had quite enough of our attention this year when millions of us sent you emails telling you, quite politely, to stay the fuck out of the race. But you didn’t, and now we hear you will announce whether you’re going to run for president on Meet the Press tomorrow, and I have to get up at fucking 8AM on a Sunday to see what you think you’re doing. I swear, if you run, I’m coming after you with pliers and a length of old Harley Davidson timing chain, because, pal, if you fuck up the 2004 election and put Bush back in the White House, you deserved the hurt being put on you -- with extreme prejudice. If for no other reason than, in the current political climate, no one in their right mind is going to hand you the cash to run EXCEPT THE FUCKING BUSH CAMPAIGN ITSELF!

Which makes nothing more than a treacherous bought-and-paid-for creature of the Bush White House, with less ethics than a 10th street crackhead rentboy. Go away Ralph, before we do something you’ll regret. This isn’t finished by a long shot, but I’ll wait until you announce before getting any more serious. You are enough, right now, to drive me to drink, and you wouldn’t like me after I’ve been drinking.

AND TALKING OF DRINK

In last year's LA CityBeat Xmas gift guide I wrote.

For the bohemian who has tried everything, what better than genuine Czechoslovakian absinthe? The forbidden green goddess of demimonde decadence is a legendary aphrodisiac, a subtle and colorful hallucinogen, and only quasi-legal. Plus the romantic imbibing ritual – involving sugar, ice, and a naked flame – is super-seasonal. Better hurry, though. Online absinthe suppliers, La Boheme, promise a ten-business day delivery to the US, but the stuff does have to be ordered in the UK and the shipped from the Czech Republic. (We tested an order, though, and all worked as advertized.) Compared to other exotic liquor, absinthe isn’t cheap, but measured by hallucinogen prices, it’s a steal. A sample starter of 140 ml., in a highly keepable stainless steel flask, is $34.99, while the 70 cl. Absinthe King Gold could fuel an orgy at $199.99. But before you dim the lights and break out the satin and lace, also order one of the decorative absinthe preparation spoons that start at $12.99, and find some elegant, goth-green, tumbler-sized glasses for real belle epoch class. (All orders come with history and full instructions.)

Go to www.laboheme.uk.com

Well, Fidicen took my advice and here’s his report...

A large cylindrical package arrived at the office yesterday and despite an angel on my shoulder loudly advising I wait until nigh on the weekend, by 9:15 p.m. I was dimming the lights, chilling filtered water, and pulling out the sugar cubes. At approximately 9:25 I toasted my cat as well as the visage of Arthur Rimbaud gazing down at us from a lovely French import edition of original manuscript facsimiles perched above the poetry section of my library. I'd read about the first taste being difficult and had to laugh knowingly as the beclouded green fluid met my palate like a sweet and dear friend. Admittedly, subsequent tastes were occasionally odd, but my mostly empty stomache can assume the blame there. I took to it like a doctor to medicine. I felt light effects quickly, knew something was afoot, and noted a desire for only upbeat and happy music and thoughts. A couple more rounds in and a rising exuberance began to take hold, I upped the volume on the stereo and gleefully took a call from a journalist friend and found my thoughts lucid and animated and being received as such.
After quaffing another, the confines of my apartment would not suffice. With but little concern for my obligations on the morrow, I put on my coat and dashed up to Sunset in search of after midnight adventure. Definitely a social drink; I don't expect to drink alone on this one again. Of course there was a special breed gulping down alcohol on a Tuesday night nearing closing time following a three day weekend in quaint old Hollywood. I made fast friends and promptly got myself in a heck of a condition, overflowing with lust and verging on drunken madness. Easy to understand why those old poet and painter bastards got themselves in a knot. Jesus Z Christ, what's cutting off an ear when you're on a jag with this lady?? Of course I saw no indication that it would provide creativity, or even augment it--assumed that was mostly the mythmaking of spastic hack writers with a hard on for fin de siecle Europa. Then again, perhaps more mysteries await me. Mostly I noted a cocainesque thing of nasty confidence building, quickening of thoughts, and bodily unabashedness. Quite the devilish dash to add to an 140 proof concoction.

Bartender, another.

More carousing, they generously offered me a free Newcastle Brown, and finally forced me out around 2:20 upon which I happily bounced homeward and jumped into the building's jacuzzi. For good or for ill, not a soul seemed to be around. God knows when I went to sleep but I do know about waking. Talk about a world class hangover. That's got to be the true danger with this stuff. Interestingly, the effects were clearly still upon me, a lucidity and positivity, gentler under the duress of my newer condition. Somehow I got to work, even though my brain really is preferring not to function. I found myself not wanting to hassle with bothers like other cars and rules of the road. Outdoor oxygen seemed very necessary, and continues to beckon as I report to you from the confines of a dreadful, stuffy location near LAX. Not sure what else will help but the lunch truck is due any minute and I will be customizing a burrito with a hefty compliment of the hottest chilis they have. Purge we must. Usually the world's intrigues find me, but the Green Goddess has been fickle despite my heavy acquaintance since the age of 15 with the likes of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Hemingway, and those wacky impressionists and cubists. Naturally I've never even seen Moulin Rouge, but perhaps I might now.

Obviously more research is necessary.

CRYPTIQUE – It’s not easy being green.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

COMMERCIAL
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IT’S THE DOC40 HISTORY CLASS (for Dysfunctional History Month)

DEPT. OF MONKEY AND MONOLITH

Fifty years ago today -- on Feb. 20th, 1954 -- President Dwight Eisenhower interrupted his vacation in Palm Springs, Calif., to make a secret nocturnal trip to nearby Edwards Air Force base to meet two extraterrestrial aliens. And that, according to some theories, is when it all went really wrong. For just the facts (ma’am)...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4306380/

DEPT. OF ROCK AND HARD PLACE

I wrote this cautionary tale from the elder days of rock & roll, on how psychedelic music was corrupted into progressive rock, for Mojo. It ran in December ‘03 issue, but I figured, now the mag’s well off the stands, I’d post it for those among you who like this kind of esoteric musicological trainspotting...

PSYCH TO PROG

The Who were at the Marquee. The place was packed with rabid mods blocked on fine SKF Dexedrine. I think the tune was Smokestack Lightning, their early auto-destruct finale. Townshend had pulled round his two stacks of sixteen 4x12s so they faced each other leaving a nine inch gap. Holding his shell-shocked Rickenbaker by the neck, like a garroted vulture, he thrust the guitar into the space to create an electric alien banshee. Moon killed his kit in primitive anger management, Entwhistle made a noise like a nuclear submarine stripping it’s gears. We’d obviously come a long way from Be-Bop-A-Lula or Apache. It this wasn’t the future it was quantum progress.

More progress a couple of years later at the UFO Club, Pink Floyd played Interstellar Overdrive; similar psychosis, but far less rage. The piece commenced with a repeating four chord theme, little more than Green Onions in reverse and descending. The crowd was now stoned on Moroccan or Manfred’s acid. The paisley tide swayed and waved, submarine and languid. The theme cleared the gravity well, and meandered with whirling Binson echo boxes, out past John Cage and Albert Ayler to somewhere near moons of Saturn, straight from a Dan Dare hallucination, courtesy of Syd Barrett. Here again was rock & roll shaping its future, and making clear it was boldly going where none but Sun Ra had ever gone. Sadly, Barrett would soon be mistaking the dawn for a supernova, and being advised to take a rest from piping at the gates, but no matter, Sgt, Pepper was upon us and all manner of weird floodgates were bursting.

In the beginning, psychedelic meant novelty records; My Friend Jack Eats Sugar Lumps by the Smoke, Granny Takes A Trip by the Purple Gang, but, very quickly, the Rolling Stones went Marakesh/Owsley/Satan, while Steve Marriot and Pete Townshend were hard at work on a psychedelic pop idiom for Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, and Pete’s underappreciated pop masterpiece, I Can See For Miles. Strawberry Fields were taking us down. Nights grew so neuron-hammered that we listened to Sister Ray by the Velvet Underground over and over, and very loud, and breakfast with Boss Goodman meant Paki black, bacon sandwiches, and all four sides of Live Dead. The MC5 were actually playing Sun Ra songs along with the more predicable rama-lama, while Jimi Hendrix blazed a trail all of his own to places where few humans could completely follow. The air was day-glo electric for those who Jim Morrison called the “stoned immaculate.” The only fly in the ointment was an insistent voice from the other side of the dressing room demanding we hold on a minute.

“Hold on a minute? Why?”
To engage in what seemed to be a very pointless argument turned out to be the answer. Was psychedelic music nothing but a drug groove? The slogan was bandied about; “what can be achieved by drugs can be achieved by other means.” To we Star Fleet dopefiends, the concept was plainly nonsense, but a number of bands, led by a Syd-less Pink Floyd, were backing off from public association with the drug culture. On one level this was an understandably pragmatic. In 1967/8/9, the official heat was on, from the high profile busts of Jagger, Richards and Brian Jones, down to the constant stop-and-search street harassment of the velvet and hairy. To blatantly promote oneself as “psychedelic”, or as a “drug band” was a red flag to the drug squad. In our neck of the woods, the Deviants, Sam Gopal, later Hawkwind, and all the stoner combos to follow, acted nonchalant, bollocks to pragmatism, and went our merry way flattering ourselves that we lived outside the law, and at least tried to be honest. Others, though, with their eyes on the prize, the contract, and dreams of shipping platinum, became circumspect. At the same time that CBS was developing their fatuous marketing campaign “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music”, house hippies working for major labels brainstormed for a generic term not so overtly druggie as “psyche”. The term Progressive Music floated from some hellspawned corporate meeting. A decade later, punk would be sanitized to suits and narrow ties by the sobriquet New Wave, and so it went when Psyche became Prog.

The house hippies had correctly noticed the all-night idiot dancers in what Zappa dubbed psychedelic dungeons went even more bananas than they were already were over America by the Nice, and this was absorbed as a template for Progressive. The greatest template of all, of course, was Whiter Shade of Pale – one of the most beautiful and deliberately witless pieces of pop music of all time. The major-label house hippies failed to grok, however, how, by embracing this approach, they were opening a Pandora’s box of pretensions and ugly trousers. Bad lyricist wrote screeds of illiterate Pre-Raphaelite poetry, but worse than that, keyboard players were encouraged. Led, as far as I could tell, by John Lord, Rick Wakeman, and Keith Emerson, these were a breed who had gone to Guildhall or some lesser college, and needed to get fancy with G-sharp diminished ninths, while making portentous judgements about Good Music. Unfortunately, rather than pillaging Bartok or even Richard Straus, and totally leaving Carl Orf for metal to discover years later, they leaned to the pop classics, Ravel, even Elgar. Sometimes it worked, as in Roy Wood’s early shoe-horning of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 into the bad-trip, proto-punk classic, Night Of Fear, or, on a more grandiose scale, Townshend’s orthodox operatic design for Tommy. Too often, though, grandiose became the dumb bombast of (say) Robert Plant’s Band of Joy. Progressive Music had to be de-capitalized, and some u/g press wag, maybe Charlie Murray, shortened it to “prog”, making it sound like a Saxon mining implement.

My real problem with prog was that I sensed totally different and more valid progress being made well away from its beaten tracks. Capt Beefheart represented progress in spades. With Trout Mask Replica, he had established rock’s own Mars Colony. The Stooges braved the metaphor of napalm in the morning and prepared for Search and Destroy. David Bowie sang Lou Reed like Anthony Newley dressed as Veronica Lake, while Bob Dylan was taking us down home for another look at country music. In such circumstances, it became very hard take the pomp and circumstance of King Crimson (even with the wit of Bob Fripp) as significant musical progress. Strange fusions were coming, but, for me, the strangest would be tragically denied us. Two great Kubrick monoliths, Jimi, post-Experience, and Miles, in Bitches’ Brew mood, appeared to be drifting into each other’s orbit. But then Jimi was a sunbeam, and that was the end of that. But damn, if nothing else, that would that have been progressive.

Of course, the psyche/prod conflict is now only in the minds of collectors. Those of us from back in the day have pissed over a lot of bridges in the intervening years. For the most part, we have kissed, made up, and even worked together, learning the lesson that method and madness are by no means antithetical, but are in fact two symbiotic halves of the same creative process. But remember, all of the above is highly subjective and shamelessly biased.

CRYPTIQUE – Smoke if you got some.

UTOPIA – SCHMUTOPIA

Yeah, well, it was nice to consider thinking outside the box for a moment, but sinboy was right. If you’re sick and ain’t got medical care, metaphysics can get a trifle luxurious, and thinking outside the box becomes academic in the face of the truly absurd shit the other side keep throwing at us as they strive for dictatorship. The following comes from Arianna Huffington, in her email newsletter. I have my reservations about Arianna. Never been too trusting of the pitstops, honky tonks, and the Highway Patrol parked behind the Exxon sign out on the Damascus Road, but in this case, she’s close to the money...

Remember that divisive pre-9/11 campaign staple? Well, it’s flared up again — with a vengeance and a rash of new administration actions clearly aimed at shoring up the president’s Christian conservative base. In the last month, the president has traded in his too-tight flight suit for a revival tent, backing a new anti-obscenity crusade, anti-condom sex-ed programs, a renewed commitment to fighting the drug war, and his attorney general’s efforts to poke around the private medical records of women who’ve had abortions. He even hinted in his State of the Union that he’d be willing to endorse a constitutional ban on gay marriage. But that’s not even the worst of it. The Justice Department has recently assigned a team of FBI agents to focus exclusively on adult obscenity cases. That’s right, with the war on terror in full swing, our war president is going to have a group of G-men doing nothing but working the porn beat when they could be tracking down — oh, I don’t know — terrorist sleeper cells. Talk about your misguided allocation of manpower. I don’t know about you, but I certainly feel safer knowing the feds are going to be keeping close tabs on Jenna Jameson.

Except Arianna doesn’t take it far enough. The old Duke of Wellington taught me that it’s half the battle to chose the battlefield and be the first to arrive. (Of course, it didn’t work for Robert E. Lee, but that’s another story.) The bloody fundamentalists are making the running, comrades. We are under heavy bombardment by the cultural trivia of oppression and it is wasting a great deal of our time. And it will get more intense and viciously witless as this election year progresses. Witness the following nonsense relayed by Jay Babcock

Can American cultural life get any more absurd? I'm laughing to keep from crying...

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla., Sunday, Feb. 15, 2004 – Bobby Labonte overcame early problems in the Daytona 500 and fought back to finish 11th in the 46th Daytona 500 Feb... The hood of Labonte's car is both a shameless movie plug -- The Passion of the Christ, coming soon to a theater near you -- and some new-style proselytizing for the Gospel. Yes, witnessing has moved from the revival tent to the fast lane. "It's a chance to get the word out," Labonte, who grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, said about the ad on his car. "Someone who is curious about Jesus and has never been saved sees the race and says, 'Hmmm, I'd like to see what that's about.' ... Maybe we can change their minds." NASCAR racing and the Christian faith have often worked hand-in-hand, from infield services for drivers, crewmen and officials to the pre-race invocation to the annual break in the schedule for the Easter holiday. Now comes a car promoting The Passion of the Christ, a soon-to-be-released movie that already has drawn lavish praise from conservative clergy -- including the Rev. Billy Graham -- but angry denouncements from Jewish groups fearing it will stir up anti-Semitism. For Labonte, it was a no-brainer to plug Mel Gibson's film on the No. 18 car, especially since the movie focuses on the seminal event in the Christian faith -- the crucifixion of Jesus."I know how much it has impacted my life and my family's life," said Labonte, a former NASCAR Nextel Cup champion.

http://www.bobbylabonte.com/news/04_news/040215_race.shtml

AND IN RESPONSE TO SINBOY OF YESTERDAY

some girl writes...

sinboy is cute, but...????
Quoting him: "I figure the seeds were there in other places for shit like the Manson cult to come about, but they just grew the way they did because of a serious disrespect for human life, and a leader who decided to use that for his own glorification. That's not uncommon, it's just that they looked really fucked up and unique when the media found them." Oh, that media. always trolling for freaks. or maybe they were kind of hard to miss, what with the slaughtering of the pigs and all. i mean, i see what he sorta means, but...i dunno. i would a more cynical point about it being natural for leaders to abuse their power, human nature, blah blah ... but then i'd feel bad for raining on his hard-work utopian parade. hee. anyway, i love reading about his little commune or whatever, but does he really think it's never been done before? adorable. hmmm....a true libertine? and a boy, no less. kewl.

AND FINALLY MORE FARREN

For a more reasoned and erudite analysis of the current Democratic primaries try the cover story I seem to have written for this week's LA Citybeat.

http://lacitybeat.com

CRYPTIQUE – Rome wasn’t burned in a day.

UTOPIA REDUX – First Response To Yesterday’s Post

Sinboy writes...

Polymorphous yes. Utopianism? Are you effing kidding? This shit takes work. One of my tribe (*) just broke her leg on the way to thecourthouse to help with the same sex marriages in San Francisco. She's a massage therapist, has no health insurance, and is going to need near
24 hr care for a while. The really shitty thing is that she's a marathon runner, and was just recovering from some pain from her last try at training for an AIDS marathon. That Heinlein guy never mentioned this in Stranger In A Strange Land. But somehow I don't feel cheated. If you're still worried about the whole "Manson cult" thing, you should see the scar one of my other family members just got. A lamp fell on him. He's this intense biker tech guy with a superman fixation. I figure the seeds were there in other places for shit like the Manson cult to come about, but they just grew the way they did because of a serious disrespect for human life, and a leader who decided to use that for his own glorification. That's not uncommon, it's just that they looked really fucked up and unique when the media found them.
(*)there's no word for what we do as a family. It's not common enough to get a definition. Some call it polyamory, others call it open marriages, and some would call it communalism. The words aren't what's important.

While some girl corrects a couple of Star Trek details I screwed up.

Star Trek: TNG is set in the 24th century. That would make it THREE hundred years in the future. Not two hundred. And you didn't key in a code to get what you wanted from the replicator on the Enterprise-D. You just told it what you wanted. You know, like, "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." And there you had it.

GAY WEDDINGS

Again I stand corrected. There were 2500 gay weddings in the Bay Area over the long weekend, to which I can only paraphrase Col. Kilgore in one of my favorite movies. -- "I love the news of gay weddings in the morning. It's news of...chaos."

WHAT US WORRY?

But this clip from the New York Times may indicate that all this discussion of a better world may be totally academic...

Recent astronomical measurements, scientists say, cannot rule out the possibility that in a few billion years a mysterious force permeating space-time will be strong enough to blow everything apart, shred rocks, animals, molecules and finally even atoms in a last seemingly mad instant of cosmic self-abnegation. “In some ways it sounds more like science fiction than fact," said Dr. Robert Caldwell, a Dartmouth physicist who described this apocalyptic possibility in a paper with Dr. Marc Kamionkowski and Dr. Nevin Weinberg, from the California Institute of Technology, last year. The Big Rip is only one of a constellation of doomsday possibilities resulting from the discovery by two teams of astronomers six years ago that a mysterious force called dark energy seems to be wrenching the universe apart. Instead of slowing down from cosmic gravity, as cosmologists had presumed for a century, the galaxies started speeding up about five billion years ago, like a driver hitting the gas pedal after passing a tollbooth. Dark energy sounded crazy at the time, but in the intervening years a cascade of observations have strengthened the case that something truly weird is going on in the sky. It has a name, but that belies the fact that nobody really knows what dark energy is. In six years it has become one of the central and apparently unavoidable features of the cosmos, the surprise question mark at the top of everybody's list, undermining what physicists presumed they understood about space, time, gravity and the future of the universe.

CRYPTIQUE – Surf or fight!

ANYONE FOR UTOPIA?

How many of you remember Star Trek: The Next Generation? That was the second version of the show that boldly went where no TV show had gone before, the one with the Patrick Stewart and his shaved head as captain of the slick, new-model Starship Enterprise, with the bar and the “holodeck” where all fantasies were made virtual reality. The Mk 2 Enterprise also came with a neat device that looked like a microwave and could supply anything from a dry martini to clean underwear just by keying in the appropriate code. In a small backstory aside, viewers were informed that, when this marvelous stuff simulator was invented, money was abolished on Earth, and a whole new social order introduced.

This was supposedly two hundred years in the future, but it would seem that from MP3s to weblogs, the situation is already with us in the contemporary arts, and the obsolescence of money becomes technically possible. Okay so the record companies sue downloaders, and techies work on encryption devices so we still have to pay to watch movies, but these are only holding patterns. Writers wonder where it will all end. Some turn tricks, others pose as Nazis. Agents cop attitudes, and don’t return calls. Drummers move to Montana where bars still pay the band to play blues for drunks. Web and print scuffle for the same advertising dollars. Chaos is virtually upon us. And yet we can hardly have a culture that is entirely driven by elves, amateurs, and the unemployable.

You may have noticed that I’ve taken a day off from Bush bashing. This doesn’t mean that I have given up on evicting the weasel from the White House, but today I started reflecting on the shape of things just a few miles further down this road. The battle is not merely to get John Kerry into the White House for nothing more than a Dem course correction. Fear of the future is rapidly becoming the 21st century malady, and when the ignorant get scared they run to daddy. Daddy, of course, in political terms, is, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff, (I don’t have a link to hand, look him up!) points out, the totalitarianism of dictatorship. That is why I am so bent on bashing Bush. I recognize, with, I hope, some accuracy that the Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft/Rumsfeld quartet and the voice of PNAC are the thin end of an Imperial American dictatorship.

Maybe with Bush currently polling five points behind Kerry, he is not so invincible as he looked at the end of last year, but what’s ahead? Can the kind of democracy formulated by 18th century gentleman farmers cope with a techno-driven social upheaval that promises to be as radical and disruptive as the Industrial Revolution and the Italian Renaissance combined? Right now half my cable channels are down, but Comcast, while trying to buy Disney, have instituted a policy of charging me $1.99 to complain to a human being. They have a monopoly on my TV service, unless I re-tech to satellite, or go back to eight channels and rabbit ears with bits of tinfoil on them. I’m not only screwed but left prostrate for further uninvited penetration. That is how corporate capitalism copes with change.

So, brothers and sisters, what are your thoughts on all this? I am not preaching doom and gloom, and ain't that a change? A golden road could be paved for our tried feet, but it will require a massive creativity. But the very survival of creativity is being choked off. I’d really like to hear from all who read this. Short comments on the absurd comments board, but longer reflections to byron4D@aol.com. They will be posted.

NOTE

How many gay weddings were there today in San Francisco? A hundred?

RESPONSE TO YESTERDAYS BECK/FARREN

from mfc
Henri LeBeque...how dare you mention mendacity and not Burl...and I think there's room for The Rifleman in there somewhere

CRYPTIQUE – Somebody say amen.

DID YOU MISS ME?

Yeah well, it was a weekend not so much lost as spent running behind the metaphoric bus, and not managing quite to get on it, mainly because of Mixmaster Eric and his using me and the CityBeat crew as guinea pigs for his glow in the dark cocktails, although the golden-orange ones were very nice – Carmen Miranda’s Tropical Pussy or something. I really have to compose the names of Eric’s drinks for him. I did create a moment of drama, though, when the TV in the bar was running by default, tuned to some History Channel-type show about famous executions, it being the anniversary of the hanging of alleged Lindburg baby kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann, and everyone was suddenly watching with such rapt and grisly attention that I felt I had to remonstrate with full Shakespearian projection that this was not appropriate bar-viewing on a Friday night – even the 13th – and then storm out for a smoke. When I came back, Jimi Hendrix was on the jukebox and the lights had been dimmed and all was much more as I felt it should be. So I guess I prevailed, but maybe I am turning into an irascible old geezer. Who knows?

DIALOGUE

The following exchange occurred on Sunday afternoon with Henry Cabot Beck, although you do need an extensive knowledge of old movies and Tennessee Williams to follow it.

Re “Richard Cohen describes far more vividly than GWB what it was like avoiding Vietnam combat in the US National Guard.”

Beck – We're going to find that like Orson Welles' Mr Arkadin AKA Confidential Report, guys who could actually come forward and talk about bending elbows, snorting blow, chasing West Texas hookers, tipping cattle, and evading the war with GWB will have disappeared, one at a time, in the vast indifference of the Texas outback. Other movie references: Cliff Robertson in Picnic, Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) in Written On The Wind, Anthony Franciosa as Jody Varner sucking up to Will Varner (Orson Welles again) in The Long Hot Summer. All stories about bad sons with too much money, mean and miserable, trying to make daddy happy or stand in his shoes. If this were the film Giant, GWB would be seen as a child playing in the dirt with an toy oil derrick, a tin soldier and an empty whisky bottle. Chill Wills would play Dick Cheney.

Farren – But where is Jett Rink?

Beck – He's Phil Spector.

Farren – Oh, I though he might be Ted Turner. More important though, in the Giant analogue, where is Liz?

Beck – To my mind, the tragedy of GWB is that he never had a great, big-titted fag hag Liz Taylor dominatrix drama queen to pick him up by the scruff of the neck like Roy Horn and drag him away from Big Daddy like Maggie The Cat did for Brick. Of course GB had Barbara, but Laura Bush is neither Big Mama nor Maggie nor even Hillary. Come to think of it, Bill would have made a good Brick. And worst of all, Big Daddy Bush (Bradford Dillman?) never gave GW the much needed speech about mendacity. Of course the crux of the play is that nearly everybody in it is a lying liar. The world may be ready for Cat On A Hot Tin White House.

OBITUARY

Munz sends the following clip...

Feb. 13, 2004 – The Wisc.Post-Crescent

His daughter remembers him as a man with a pad of paper and pen, always writing articles or jotting down memos. For the man who first used the term "psychedelic," the end came in Appleton. Psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, 86, died at home Feb. 6. Osmond and his wife, Jane, had been living with their daughter in her Appleton home for the past four years. He moved to Appleton from Alabama. Euphemia Blackburn, 45, said her father had been an invalid for about 13 years. "He went quietly at home," Blackburn said Thursday. Osmond, born in England in 1917, is said to have coined "psychedelic" in a letter to British author Aldous Huxley to describe manifestations of the mind. Osmond, researcher of such mind-altering substances as LSD and mescaline, gave Huxley mescaline in the 1950s. Huxley related his experience in "The
Doors of Perception." Osmond was interested in researching the way LSD altered perceptions of
time and space and whether it could help could help alcoholics kick their addiction.

CRYPTQUE – I might as well live.

###################
A SHORT INTERUPTION OF SERVICE
###################

Due to a bout of Friday 13th drunkeness -- and the resulting hangover -- brought on by Mixmaster Eric and his glow in the dark cocktails, Doc40 for St. Valentine's Day was massacred. And the Sunday post is kind of pathetic. A full account of the incident, or at least some lame excuses, will follow on Monday. The following poem sets the mood...

A LONG WALK WITH THE DEMON

All his life he'd walked with the demon
From the Radium Room to the Palace of Mirrors
From the Canadian border to the Place of Skulls
All his life he'd walked with the demon
At regular intervals, his friends had come to him
And pleaded that he cast it from him

The demon drove him to the madness
The craving for the adoration of the mob
The reason that all but one of his women had left him
The demon might mature and modify
Making him more comfortable with the passage of the nightmare
But he would never be free

The demon would never let him be free
Never allow itself to be cast out or put aside
Symbiosis, home boy, it told him
A twin singularity

Written in 1993. Recorded in the same year with Tijuana Bible for the CD Gringo Madness, released by Big Beat, London 1993.

CRYPTIQUE -- Give me a fucking break!

INSPIRATIONAL PARABLES

I’ve always hated that story about the guy with no shoes who meets a guy with no legs and doesn’t feel so bad. You know why? Because the guy with no shoes was a wino with prostate cancer, and the guy with no legs was a billionaire Columbian drug lord with one of these ultra-tech wheelchairs like Stephen Hawking. (And while we’re on the subject, how did Stephen Hawking cheat on his wife?)

THE RED OCTOBER TRACTOR FACTORY

Whenever I hit one of the sloughs of depression and despondency that make artists such a pain in the ass to be around, I remind myself of the two Russian soldiers who, during the World War II siege of Stalingrad, manned a machine gun nest in the Red October Tractor Factory for 52 straight days, frequently starving and always freezing. I mean, how can that determination and suffering be compared to, say, the fear of creative failure or the pangs of unrequited love? And yet maybe one or both of them, in another time and another place, ached for a lost love to the point of suicidal contemplation. Which, of course, begs the question can pain, or joy for that matter, ever be quantified?

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

(WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR MR. PRESIDENT? #1)

Richard Cohen describes far more vividly than GWB what it was like avoiding Vietnam combat in the US National Guard. Clip courtesy of Billy via natalien...

During the Vietnam War, I was what filmmaker Michael Moore would call a "deserter." Along with President Bush and countless other young men, I joined the National Guard, did my six months of active duty (basic training, etc.) and then returned to my home unit, where I eventually dropped from sight. In the end, just like President Bush, I got an honorable discharge. But unlike President Bush, I have just told the truth about my service. He hasn't. At least I don't think so. Nothing about Bush during that period -- not his drinking, not his partying -- suggests that he was a consistently conscientious member of the Texas or Alabama Air National Guard. As it happens, there are no records to show that Bush reported for duty during the summer and fall of 1972. Nonetheless, Bush insists he was where he was supposed to be -- "Otherwise I wouldn't have been honorably discharged," Bush told Tim Russert. Please, sir, don't make me laugh. It is sort of amazing that every four or eight years, Vietnam -- that long-ago war -- rears up from seemingly nowhere and comes to figure in the national political debate. In 1988 Dan Quayle had to answer for his National Guard service. In 1992 Bill Clinton had to grapple with the question of how he avoided the Vietnam-era draft. Now George Bush, who faced this question the last time out, has to face it again. The reason is that this time he is likely to compete against a genuine war hero. John Kerry did not duck the war. But George Bush did. He did so by joining the National Guard. Bush now wants to drape the Vietnam-era Guard with the bloodied flag of today's Iraq-serving Guard -- "I wouldn't denigrate service to the Guard," Bush warned during his interview with Russert -- but the fact remained that back then the Guard was where you went if you did not want to fight. That was the case with me. I opposed the war in Vietnam and had no desire to fight it. Bush, on the other hand, says he supported the war -- as long, it seems, as someone else fought it.
It hardly matters what Bush did or did not do back in 1972. He is not the man now he was then -- that by his own admission. In the same way, it did not matter that Clinton ducked the draft, because, really, just about everyone I knew at the time was doing something similar. All that really matters is how one accounts for what one did. Do you tell the truth (which Clinton did not)? Or do you do what I think Bush has been doing, which is making his National Guard service into something it was not? In his case, it was a rich kid's way around the draft. In my case, it was something similar -- although (darn!) I was not rich. I was, though, lucky enough to get into a National Guard unit in the nick of time, about a day before I was drafted. I did my basic and advanced training (combat engineer) and returned to my unit. I was supposed to attend weekly drills and summer camp, but I found them inconvenient. I "moved" to California and then "moved" back to New York, establishing a confusing paper trail that led, really, nowhere. For two years or so, I played a perfectly legal form of hooky.
To show you what a mess the Guard was at the time, I even got paid for all the meetings I missed. In the end, I wound up in the Army Reserve. I was assigned to units for which I had no training -- tank repairman, for instance. In some units we sat around with nothing to do, and in one we took turns delivering antiwar
lectures. The National Guard and the Reserves were something of a joke. Everyone knew it. Books have been written about it. Maybe things changed dramatically by 1972, two years after I got my discharge, but I kind of doubt it. I have no shame about my service, but I know it for what it was -- hardly the Charge of the Light Brigade.
When Bush attempts to drape the flag of today's Guard over the one he was in so long ago, when he warns his critics to remember that "there are a lot of really fine people who have served in the National Guard and who are serving in the National Guard today in Iraq," then he is doing now what he was doing then: hiding behind the ones who were really doing the fighting. It's about time he grew up.

(See tomorrow for #2)

A MUSICIAN JOKE I NEVER HEARD BEFORE

A young child says to his mother, "Mom, when I grow up I think I'd like to be a musician." She replies, "Well honey, you know you can't do both."

CRYPTIQUE – Friday 12A

************************************************
ANNOUNCEMENT

For those of you in and around Los Angeles, Mick Farren will be signing the paperback of his novel UNDERLAND tomorrow, Saturday, Feb 14th, 2.00PM – 4.00PM at ...
Dark Delicacies
4213 W. Burbank Blvd.
Burbank, 818-556-6660 / 888-darkdel

************************************************

TIME IS NOT ON MY SIDE THIS WEEK

Still putting the “dead” in deadline, and in the grip of other, more proximate horrors, I again cop out, although, today, I offer up (below) a fabulous golden oldie for you nostalgic consideration. This was written back in the days when the aliens were still around, Bill Clinton ruled over a pleasant and golden land, and all the religious right had to worry about were blowjobs and Satanic conspiracy...

BIG TROUBLE ON THE MONKEY PLANET

The last time that I was abducted by aliens, I returned with the distinct impression that they were close to the end of their extra-terrestrial rope with the Third Stone from the Sun and, in particular, its overdeveloped, tool using, simian inhabitants. Namely us -- the human race. When one of those lipless little grey suckers with the bald heads and huge guppy eyes came up to me, right there in the main abductee reception area, a charmless place not unlike Ontario airport with an added dimension, and wanted to know "when the hell are you Earth monkeys going to stop breeding yourselves into extinction", I had to accept the fact that we may not be the most admired lifeform in this neck of the quadrant.
I rarely admit my abduction experiences. Not so much because I'm embarrassed by them. It's more that I've never really felt that my encounters had been significantly productive. I tended to talk about them rather more when I lived in New York. I discovered that, on 14th Street, if you told the guy on the next bar stool that you were an UFO abductee, he would more than likely dismiss you as crazy, but mercifully harmless. Try the same thing at a party in Venice and they'll not only totally believe you but proceed to recount their own adventures in space, usually centering on intrusive alien surgical procedures, often of a gynecological nature. Some will even give you the number of a therapeutic support group.
It was during the initial medical examination that the ETs started to discover that I was hardly the experimental subject of their collective dreams. I was first abducted at a time when I was drinking even more heavily than usual. It solved the missing time problem, but my blood alcohol level spiked out and created chaos butterflies in their nano-stats. Even worse, my chromosomes had been so customized by the quantities of LSD 25 that I'd consumed during an earlier bout of destructive self exploration, that I was pretty much useless as a source of genetic material, unless, of course, someone or something wanted to breed a race of nappy haired tadpoles with nasty imaginations. Rumors also circulated that, when particularly fucked up, I would show a less than appropriate affection for the rectal probe.
In terms of the normal conventions of Earth/alien interaction, I pretty much proved myself a social incompetent, and I would never have been abducted again had the implant not already been in the small of my back, just to the left of my spine. This means I'm solidly on the tracking computer, and can be hauled up for a bogus 20 thousand light year service at any time, and there isn't a damn thing that I or any other bio-entity can do about it. I don't want to see them, they don't want to see me, but, like junk mail and unwanted relatives, they just keep coming around.
This was surely the reason that, after the third routine beam up, I was shuffled aside to hold gentlemanly if sometimes oblique conversations with Qua/D/Thrrof, the discursive focus of a being, essentially a form of highly intelligent yeast, about nine thousand miles long and one molecule thick, that makes its home in a loose orbit around Jupiter. Qua/D/Thrrof was the first alien to make crystal clear what I'd already suspected. As far as the rest of the inhabitants of the viable cluster are concerned, here on the Monkey Planet, (as Earth is commonly known) we are in big trouble. That's why, even after twenty thousand years, we still haven't emerged from the quarantine phase as laid down in the Prime Directive. (He also confirmed how Tom Tomorrow's theory about the Republican Party and Rush Limbaugh being a secret alien test of human stupidity is uncannily on the money.)
Like most foreigners, Qua/D/Thrrof blames a considerable proportion of Monkey Planet woes to the affluent of the United States. (Or, as they call them, The Resource Gobblers.) In our most recent conversation, he expressed trepidation over how 2000 AD is a Presidential election year, and the escalating horror of the phenomenon might, this time round, actually push us over into a collective, species-wide, greed-barking psychosis.
"I don't know why you don't just get rid of democracy." Qua/D/Thrrof has a certain problem gasping concepts like the rights of the individual, coming as he does from a collective consciousness of over two billion component facets. He's good, however, at accepting nuances like how election finance reform is fundamentally impossible because the television stations end up with the lion's share of the bucks, and around election time, politics yields more ad revenue than headache remedies, phone sex and psychic hotlines combined.
"Just get rid of television." Even other passing aliens realized that Qua/D/Thrrof was elaborately out of touch with this remark. A small green person with tentacles and huge ears sadly shook what approximated for a head. "It's only television that keeps them from killing each other more than they already do. If television hadn't been introduced in the fifties, they'd be into mechanized erotic cannibalism by now. You know what the monkeys are like when you leave them to their own devices."
Another received snippet of intergalactic gossip is that our Earth, despite its quarantine, is getting the reputation as a clandestine hangout of vermin and lowlife. High on the list are the crew of retard hot rodders and nova scum from Zeta Reticuli who've been putting on the lightshows out at Area 51, just north of Las Vegas, and sending the conspiracy paranoids into uproar. It would seem that these alien Hells Angels have managed to have convinced the US military that they are the Supreme Authority in the Universe, rather than the malicious honky tonk sweepings of a hundred parasecs, and now have total run of the Pentagon.
What really worries Qua/D/Thrrof, however, is our galloping overpopulation. "Surest way to foul up a perfectly good planet. You either got to stop breeding or start dying." Qua/D/Thrrof is especially pissed at the Catholic Church and their attitudes to population control. As he puts it "Jesus was one of ours in the first place. It's kinda embarrassing."
Another serious consideration would seem to be that many aliens feel that our Earthling stupidity is playing directly into the hands of some galactic political hard liners. Apparently the stampede to the bellicose right is not confined to only this solar system. An entire multi-species mindset would be just as happy to fire up the Great Planet Fryer and turn this whole messy sphere that we call home into one vast, fused, green glass Christmas Tree ornament. Seemingly they view Earth as something akin to a planetary welfare case.
Like they say on the X-Files. "The truth is out there." Or at least some approximation of it.

Written in 1996. First published in 1996 in The Los Angeles Reader as a column in the "Panic In The Year Zero" series.

BUT...

Maybe the aliens have not gone away, and/or the Satanic conspiracy is still lurking. This comes from MSNBC...

A small town in Sicily may be due for an exorcism. The villagers of Canneto di Caronia are struggling to explain why dozens of household items are suddenly bursting into flame. When electrical goods began combusting, they assumed a strange power surge, so the local utility cut power temporarily. But even unplugged appliances combusted, and pieces of furniture began lighting up without notice. Some fires have spread so rapidly that residents have been evacuated from their homes. "Demons occupy a house and appear in electrical goods... Let's not forget that Satan and his followers have immense powers."

CRYPTIQUE – Keep your hair-dryer close, but your toaster closer.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

And what fun for us pinko saddle-tramps to watch the fascist pundits turn on their former golden boy. As in this snippet from AOL news on the formerly rabid Robert Novak...

Mr. Novak pointed out the most Republicans are not likely to vote for the Democratic nominee. But, he said: "The problem is not whether they vote for Kerry. The problem is whether they stay at home."

Then, hey, let’s have some real nice TV on election day, tailored for Republicans. Like a Touched By An Angel marathon hosted by Rush Limbaugh. Or an nice new happy-happy miniseries on the Reagans.

************************************************
ANNOUNCEMENT

For those of you in and around Los Angeles, Mick Farren will be signing the new paperback edition of his novel UNDERLAND next Saturday, Feb 14th, 2.00PM – 4.00PM at ...
Dark Delicacies
4213 W. Burbank Blvd.
Burbank, 818-556-6660 / 888-darkdel

************************************************

STOP PRESS

According to the site tracker, Doc40 just got a hit from Iran! Fuck! Now what lists am I on? Another surprise was one from Croatia.

THE CURSE OF THE DRINKING CLASSES

Work. That’s right friends and neighbors, today I have to work – as in write to earn a living -- so things are going to be kinda short. But mother said there’d be days like this, and I’ll see you all tomorrow.

Also, in my incarnation as TV critic of LA CityBeat, HBO sent me the first four episodes of the next Sopranos series, and I have to watch them. I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I tell you there’s a cool New Jersey black bear in the season premiere, and Anthony Jr gets a drum kit. (NB. David Chase was once a rock drummer.)

In the meantime, nobody gets totally left without anything to do at Doc40's fun house. Our homegirl hipspinster has updated her blog with observations on Jimi Hendrix, the Grammies and the Super Bowl, plus, if you scroll her back a couple of posts you will find yourself filled in on Eric the bartender at Canters who mixes glow-in-the-dark, demon-raising cocktails. (See comments board). She’s at...

http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

And if that wasn’t enough...

TRUE LAWYER JOKES 3 & 4

More courtroom absurdities from the book Disorder in the American Courts, courtesy of Jessica. (See Fri Feb 6 & Sat Feb 7)

Q: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning?
A: Did you actually pass the bar exam?

Q: What was the first thing your husband said to you when he woke up that morning?
A: He said, "Where am I, Cathy?"
Q: And why did that upset you?
A: My name is Dorothy.

And, of course, LEB marches on...

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

Having seen George screw up on TV, with the details of his so-called military service now spilling all over the media, and rightwing pundits like Bill O’Reilly start to shy away from him, our pal Patrick stays one jump ahead by directing our attention to the growing scandal over Republican dirty tricks, in this instance, the hacking of Democrat computer files, and then turning then over to Robert Novak, who, having aided in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, seems willing to make public anything the GOP or the White House feeds to him no matter whether it’s in the national interest or not. The following snippet is from the Boston Globe...

Democrats now claim their private memos formed the basis for a February 2003 column by conservative pundit Robert Novak that revealed plans pushed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to filibuster certain judicial nominees. Novak is also at the center of an investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA agent whose husband contradicted a Bush administration claim about Iraqi nuclear programs. Citing "internal Senate sources," Novak's column described closed-door Democratic meetings about how to handle nominees. Its details and direct quotes from Democrats -- characterizing former nominee Miguel Estrada as a "stealth right-wing zealot" and describing the GOP agenda as an "assembly line" for right-wing nominees -- are contained in talking points and meeting accounts from the Democratic files now known to have been compromised.

And Marjorie forwards a call to direct action...

Dear friend,
In an attempt to escape responsibility for the misleading statements that led the nation to war, President Bush has announced plans to form an independent inquiry to look into what went wrong. An inquiry would serve the Bush administration well: it would envelop the issue in a fog of uncertainty, deflect blame onto the intelligence services, and push any political damage into 2005, after the upcoming election. But the facts need no clarification. Despite repeated warnings from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, President Bush and his administration hyped and distorted the threat that Iraq posed. And now that reality is setting in, the President seeks to pin the blame on someone else. We can't let him. Congress has the power to censure the President -- to formally reprimand him for his betrayal of the nation's trust. If ever there was a time to use this function, it is now. Join the call for Congress to censure President Bush now at:

http://www.moveon.org/censure/?id=-539027-24Vd7Yn86Y9kb1kp3dto2A

CRYPTIQUE – The butterfly can’t be blamed.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY BUSHWHACKERS (LEB)

Whether it’s the constant onslaught of Doc40 at the tainted edifice of G.W. Bush, or that Toad-Boy deigned to show up on TV yesterday, but my laptop memory is groaning under a ton of 100% anti-George email. In a way it’s kind irksome that we have gird up and take the fight to the simian fool, when we could be laughing, joking, and debating the important topics of the day like how Diana Ross is going to survive 48 hours in the joint, why Marla Maples is selling some weird package of religious devotional software called The 72(?) Names of God on late-night television, or listening to me whine about all the help I’ll need to win the H. P. Lovecraft Necronomicon Competition. (I mean, how do you pastiche a 17th century Satanist translating 9th century Arabic?) But, as Chairman Mao once remarked, “the revolution is not a dinner party”, so it’s back into the breach, dear friends, once more.

MORAL DILEMMA – Open with a joke
A beau jest from Billy via natalien...
This test only has one question, but it's a very important one. Please don't answer it without giving it some serious thought. By giving an honest answer you will be able to ascertain where you stand morally and politically. The test features an unlikely, completely fictional situation, where you will have to make one decision. Remember that your answer should to be honest, yet spontaneous. You're in Florida. In Miami, to be exact. There is great chaos going on around you, caused by a hurricane and severe floods. There are huge masses of water all around you. You are an Associated Press photographer and you are in the middle of this great disaster. The situation is nearly hopeless. You're trying to shoot very impressive photos. There are houses afloat around, people floating, disappearing into the water. Nature is showing all its awesome power. Suddenly you see a man in the water - he is fighting for his life, trying not to be taken away by the masses of water and mud. You move closer. Somehow the man looks familiar. Suddenly you know who it is - it's George W. Bush! At the same time you notice that the raging waters are about to take him away, forever. you have two options. You can try to save him or you can take the best photo of your life. You can't do both. You can either heroically save the life of George W. Bush, or you can shoot a Pulitzer Prize winning photo, a unique photo chronicling one of the world's most powerful men in a battle against the power of nature itself.
Here's the question (please give an honest answer): Would you select color film, or instead go for the simplicity of Classic black and white?

322?
From fidicen
Ahoy Doc – Point of Information
"#322" was uttered by Russert, not the smirking chimp. I 've looked into that girl's book on Skull and B but cannot recall the significance of that number, though surely that is Bush's membership number. Bush only said "it's so secret I can't even talk about it." Curious how Russert quoted Kerry's knowing of Bush then and Bush utterly denied knowing Kerry, which would be impossible if they were there together, as they were. Another nice factoid is that that they give you a new name when you join. They couldn't think of one for Chimpy so they named him "Temporary." Lo and behold, he never got another name so his name in the group is "Temporary!" One of the very first events at the WH following the coup was an S&B bash. Fine opportunity this summer to discredit anti-conspiracists as two boners have a cock fight. Should be a rash of good outings, esp. for that good woman's tome. Two links – Brother Corn with a fine deconstruction: http://thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=1245
and here: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0209-02.htm

HISTORY AND LIES

A handy lies-in-timeline from Marjorie,
Oct. 7, 2002: "The Iraqi regime... possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."
March 17, 2003: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
January 20, 2004: "Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day."
January 27, 2004: "First of all I think it's very important for us to let the Iraq Survey Group do its work so we can find out the facts, compare the facts to what was thought."
February 8, 2004: "Saddam Hussein was a danger to America... because he had the capacity to have a weapon, make a weapon. We thought he had weapons. The international community thought he had weapons."
February 8, 2004: "There is no such thing necessarily in a dictatorial regime of ironclad absolutely solid evidence. The evidence I had was the best possible evidence that he had a weapon."
Sources: Reuters, The Associated Press

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SADDAM

Just the facts (ma’am) from kaymo
1958 Iraqi military men inspired by Nasser's nationalist revolt in 52 against the British backed Egyptian monarchy, seized power in Baghdad. Their leader General Abdel-Karim Kassem turned to the USSR for aid. He legalized the Communist party. He decreed wide ranging land reform and granted autonomy to the Kurds in the north. Iraq also announced its claim to Kuwait, which had once been joined to what is now southern Iraq in a province of the Ottoman turkish empire. This alarmed both the US and the UK. The British reinforced their presence in the Persian Gulf to head off any moves by Kassem. CIA Director Allen Dulles deemed Iraq "the most dangerous place in the world." The CIA began fishing in Iraqi waters. (At the time the Shah was firmly in control of neighboring Iran after the CIA backed coup there.)
1963 the anti-Communist Ba'ath Party-- Sunni controlled-- seized power in a coup. Kassem and a long list of leftists provided by the CIA were shot. Among the young Ba'athists was one Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti. The Ba'athists were as yet unable to completely dominate the country and had to govern as part of a coalition. This did not sit well with the CIA which wanted a tighter, right wing government in place.
1968 The CIA helped the Ba'athists pull off a coup d'etat in which they eliminated their lefist and centrist coalition partners and set up full Ba'athist regime (think Francoist, Phalange Spain for a comparison.)"It was a regime that was unquestionably midwived by the United States and the CIA's involvement there was really primary." Roger Morris, staffer of the NSC during the late sixties under both Johnson and Nixon.
1979 Saddam Hussein came to the fore in another coup and replaced his mentor Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr. A massive purge of the Ba'athist elite took place at once. Saddam Hussein was a known CIA intelligence asset. The same year saw the fall of the Shah of Iran and the rise of Khomeini and the Islamist state in Teheran. This event had enormous repercussions for American policy in the region.
1980 Saddam invaded Iran with the idea of striking while his bigger neighbor was in chaos and seizing the Iranian oil fields along the Persian Gulf. This would have crippled the Shiite government in Teheran and also help to cow the Shiite majority in Iraq. Saddam and his generals bungled the war and by 1982 they were thrust back on the defensive. It began to look as if Iran might actually defeat Iraq. This was unacceptable to the US and the Reagan Administration launched a covert operation to arm and assist Ba'athist Iraq. (Note: the NSDD No.114 of Nov 26 1983 is still classified top secret. The US promised to do whatever was necessary to stop Iraq losing the war.) The Reagan Admin began to secretly funnel arms and supplies to Baghdad. As much as $5.5 billion in loans were arranged to help Iraq buy arms, under the cover of promoting American farm exports. Weapons were sent via CIA fronts in Saudi Arabia and Chile. Between 1986 and 89 seventy three transactions took place including weapons grade Anthrax cultures, computers and aircraft repair equipment.
In December 2002 when Iraq was forced to deliver to the UN Security Council an 11,800 page dossier on the history of its weapons programs, officials of the Bush Admin seized it and took out 8,000 pages before any other member of the Security Council was allowed to see it.
In Dec 1983 Donald Rumsfeld acting as Reagan's personal envoy, met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. He returned in March 84. At the time Iraq was employing chemical weapons against Iranian troops. Rumsfeld declared that "the defeat of Iraq in the three year old war with Iran would be contrary to US interests."
November 1984 Reagan restored full diplomatic relations with Baghdad – which had been severed since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Thereafter Reagan stepped up sales to Saddam of items such as the helicopters that would be used in the gas attacks on the Kurds in 1988.Indeed, the US maintained friendly relations with Baghdad until the moment when Saddam revived Iraq's claims to Kuwait and then invaded Kuwait in August 1990.
Question: What's in those 8,000 pages?(Prepared from "The Sorrows of Empire" by Chalmers Johnson Henry Holt Pub.2004)

(The Doc40 email is byron4d@aol.com)

CRYPTIQUE – The railroad runs through the middle of the house.