TUCK YOU, TUCKER
Tucker Carlson is an annoying neo-yuppie TV-boy and professional right-winger who believes that wearing a red polka-dot bow-tie is cool. He used to be irritating in CNN’s Crossfire, but now he’s irritating on his own show on MSNBC, The Situation. He is, however, even more irritating in a promo for The Situation in which he pretends to pretend that he’s some 1970's-style private eye on some imaginary Quinn Martin detective show like Cannon. And – as if this wasn’t incongruous enough for someone who is essentially a male Ann Coulter – during the course of the spot he slams a bad guy with a white boy ‘fro and Zapata mustache into the hood of a car. My problem is that this character looks a lot like me circa 1970. I mean he’s not quite a dead ringer, being kinda skanky, and without my artist’s smouldering passion, but the resemblance is enough to annoy. I’m not so narcissistic to believe that Carlson had ever heard of me – even though I have previously abused him both on net and newsprint – but the vision on my screen was enough to give me pause. (And The Situation is so damned lame that it’s always possible that I may have more total readers that Tuck has viewers.)
And while we’re on the subject of white boy afros, I also find that "dorkwad" commercial for movietickets.com quite offensive. So be warned, mocking we of the long and curly can be ill advised. We tend to mutate into Bob Dylan and write poisonously venomous and vitriolic songs about you that cut to the bone.
JAMES DOOHAN – RIP
I DIDN’T HEAR ABOUT IT, BUT I SURE WOULD HAVE LIKED TO HAVE SEEN IT
http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68242,00.html
PLUG
Ellen, a good friend of Doc40, had her own crafts store on ebay. Check it out...
http://stores.ebay.com/MooCat-Arts_W0QQssPageNameZviQ3asibQ3astoreviewQQtZkm
The secret word is Coiffure
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
CALIENTE FUCKING LOCO
We might as well give up arguing about global warming. The way it feels tonight, we’re in the terminal stage. It’s 2.15AM and it’s 175F in the LA Basin, (I swear) and I hear the rest of the continent is in much the same condition. Too hot to think, too hot to breathe, and my laptop may soon become malleable. Too hot even to complain although, by tomorrow, I’ll probably be pissing and moaning. Too hot, in fact, to go into the hideous ramifications of how Bush’s nomination of John Roberts for the Supreme Court is the sanctioned dawning of an era of intensified ignorance and brutality unseen since Custer blundered across the Little Big Horn.
The secret word can only be Inferno
CRYPTIQUE – Whose right is it anyway?
We might as well give up arguing about global warming. The way it feels tonight, we’re in the terminal stage. It’s 2.15AM and it’s 175F in the LA Basin, (I swear) and I hear the rest of the continent is in much the same condition. Too hot to think, too hot to breathe, and my laptop may soon become malleable. Too hot even to complain although, by tomorrow, I’ll probably be pissing and moaning. Too hot, in fact, to go into the hideous ramifications of how Bush’s nomination of John Roberts for the Supreme Court is the sanctioned dawning of an era of intensified ignorance and brutality unseen since Custer blundered across the Little Big Horn.
The secret word can only be Inferno
CRYPTIQUE – Whose right is it anyway?
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
AS THE WORLD TURNS
And the day rushes by a dizzying speed (and I seem to be achieving nothing) I pluck this item from this morning’s NY Times as a reminder that the criminal War on Drugs still rages and people still rot away their lives because of minimum mandatory sentencing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/19/opinion/19tierney.html?th&emc=th
And talking of wars without end, Sunday was the 69th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War.
Ted Heath RIP (if only because he was only Prime Minister mentioned in a Beatles song.)
The secret word is Later
And the day rushes by a dizzying speed (and I seem to be achieving nothing) I pluck this item from this morning’s NY Times as a reminder that the criminal War on Drugs still rages and people still rot away their lives because of minimum mandatory sentencing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/19/opinion/19tierney.html?th&emc=th
And talking of wars without end, Sunday was the 69th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War.
Ted Heath RIP (if only because he was only Prime Minister mentioned in a Beatles song.)
The secret word is Later
Sunday, July 17, 2005
MAKING QUITE HORRIBLE SENSE
The link below was sent by kaymo and I would humbly recommend taking a look at it and becoming very, very paranoid. Although grandiose in the extreme, and even though one (and one’s mental health) does not want to spend a whole lot of time contemplating scenarios that end either in enslavement, nuclear annihilation, or both, some of the parts do have very sound and supported pedigrees in the world of conspiracy theorizing. Remember, though, that Whitley Strieber scripted Wolfen and The Hunger and has made a further name for himself -- and a few bucks -- after claiming he was abducted by aliens. (But then again, my own resume is a little odd, and I expect to be taken seriously.)
http://www.unknowncountry.com/journal/?id=188
The secret word is Junta
The link below was sent by kaymo and I would humbly recommend taking a look at it and becoming very, very paranoid. Although grandiose in the extreme, and even though one (and one’s mental health) does not want to spend a whole lot of time contemplating scenarios that end either in enslavement, nuclear annihilation, or both, some of the parts do have very sound and supported pedigrees in the world of conspiracy theorizing. Remember, though, that Whitley Strieber scripted Wolfen and The Hunger and has made a further name for himself -- and a few bucks -- after claiming he was abducted by aliens. (But then again, my own resume is a little odd, and I expect to be taken seriously.)
http://www.unknowncountry.com/journal/?id=188
The secret word is Junta
Friday, July 15, 2005
Thursday, July 14, 2005
LA CITYBEAT
Two quite lengthy gems o’mine in this week's issue...
...on celebrity...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2340&IssueNum=110
...and the bombings...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2338&IssueNum=110
Two quite lengthy gems o’mine in this week's issue...
...on celebrity...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2340&IssueNum=110
...and the bombings...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2338&IssueNum=110
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
TOADWATCH
(Maybe best to read yesterday first.)
Today Karl Rove – described last night by Jon Stewart as "the only man in Washington with flesh-colored hair" – mounted his counterattack....
As told by MSNBC...
The GOP continues to believe that the best defense is offense, and true to form, Republican talkers are starting to try to change the subject and/or once again question Joe Wilson's veracity. Among those who have come to Rove's offense: President Bush, via Scott McClellan, who said yesterday that Rove has Bush's confidence; Laura Bush, who called Rove a very good friend; Newt Gingrich, via TODAY; Tom DeLay, via The Hill newspaper; and RNC chair Ken Mehlman, who has offered the staunchest backing of Rove by far. But Mehlman leaves Washington for Iowa today, which may cut into his media availability. Add to the list the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which today praises Rove for "turning out to be the real 'whistleblower' in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal," and notes that "there's no evidence that [he] broke any laws."
Before Mehlman lammed it out of town he left the following Rove-style "talkingpoint" that will be repeated by all the TV shrieking heads...
WASHINGTON, July 12 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is a statement by Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Ken Mehlman on the partisan attack on Karl Rove:
"It's disappointing that once again, so many Democrat leaders are taking their political cues from the far-left, Moveon wing of the party. The bottom line is Karl Rove was discouraging a reporter from writing a false story based on a false premise and the Democrats are engaging in blatant partisan political attacks."
Meanwhile in other news...
"President Bush called Tuesday for the release of an Iranian journalist jailed for writing articles linking government officials to murder."
Meanwhile Wonkette has a suggestion...
Okay, we admit it, we were overthinking the whole Rove-Plame thing. In speculating that this wouldn't destroy him or the White House, we had been hung up on how he didn't break the law. What we realize now is that liberals finally have an issue where the headline hurts Republicans more than it hurts them: "White House Aide Identified Undercover CIA Agent." Now, shut up. Shhh. Zip it. ZZZip. No, really, quiet. Repress natural urge to pedantry. For once, allow Americans' short attention span work for you. And whatever happens, do not let Michael Moore make a movie about it. Let the Republicans shoulder the responsibility of having to explain how Karl didn't do anything illegal, or how when he identified the agent it was in a context that wasn't so bad, or that it's Matt Cooper's fault, or why this is all just a massive smear campaign. Soon, they'll be debating the definition of "is" and you can start rumors about Laura being a lesbian. Fun! http://www.wonkette.com/
MEANWHILE (again)...
Over at the NY Times, you can find a fascinating story on audio hallucination.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/health/psychology/12musi.html?incamp=article_popular
AND FINALLY SOMETHING WEIRD...
Two nights ago when the insomnia was bad, I scoured the cable grid for something to watch. By default, I clicked on one of the Encore Channels for Meryl Streep in Postcards From The Edge, but found to by surprise that John Walters' Pink Flamingos was being aired. Okay, so errors do happen on the cable schedule, but Pink Flamingos is pretty sturdy stuff even for premium cable what with its cock-sucking, shit-eating, talking-asshole, cop-eating cannibalism, and general overall theme of a drag-queen Manson Family, not to mention the dead chicken and all those eggs. I have heard nothing since, but, then again, it was the time of day when only Travis Bickel and I are watching TV. I do wonder, however, if some subversive out there is deliberate slipping in such raunch in very wee hours.
BUT LET’S LEAVE THE LAST WORD TO TRAVIS...
You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin' to? You talkin' to me? Well, I'm the only one here. Who do the fuck do you think you're talking to? Oh, yeah? Ok.
(Maybe best to read yesterday first.)
Today Karl Rove – described last night by Jon Stewart as "the only man in Washington with flesh-colored hair" – mounted his counterattack....
As told by MSNBC...
The GOP continues to believe that the best defense is offense, and true to form, Republican talkers are starting to try to change the subject and/or once again question Joe Wilson's veracity. Among those who have come to Rove's offense: President Bush, via Scott McClellan, who said yesterday that Rove has Bush's confidence; Laura Bush, who called Rove a very good friend; Newt Gingrich, via TODAY; Tom DeLay, via The Hill newspaper; and RNC chair Ken Mehlman, who has offered the staunchest backing of Rove by far. But Mehlman leaves Washington for Iowa today, which may cut into his media availability. Add to the list the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which today praises Rove for "turning out to be the real 'whistleblower' in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal," and notes that "there's no evidence that [he] broke any laws."
Before Mehlman lammed it out of town he left the following Rove-style "talkingpoint" that will be repeated by all the TV shrieking heads...
WASHINGTON, July 12 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is a statement by Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Ken Mehlman on the partisan attack on Karl Rove:
"It's disappointing that once again, so many Democrat leaders are taking their political cues from the far-left, Moveon wing of the party. The bottom line is Karl Rove was discouraging a reporter from writing a false story based on a false premise and the Democrats are engaging in blatant partisan political attacks."
Meanwhile in other news...
"President Bush called Tuesday for the release of an Iranian journalist jailed for writing articles linking government officials to murder."
Meanwhile Wonkette has a suggestion...
Okay, we admit it, we were overthinking the whole Rove-Plame thing. In speculating that this wouldn't destroy him or the White House, we had been hung up on how he didn't break the law. What we realize now is that liberals finally have an issue where the headline hurts Republicans more than it hurts them: "White House Aide Identified Undercover CIA Agent." Now, shut up. Shhh. Zip it. ZZZip. No, really, quiet. Repress natural urge to pedantry. For once, allow Americans' short attention span work for you. And whatever happens, do not let Michael Moore make a movie about it. Let the Republicans shoulder the responsibility of having to explain how Karl didn't do anything illegal, or how when he identified the agent it was in a context that wasn't so bad, or that it's Matt Cooper's fault, or why this is all just a massive smear campaign. Soon, they'll be debating the definition of "is" and you can start rumors about Laura being a lesbian. Fun! http://www.wonkette.com/
MEANWHILE (again)...
Over at the NY Times, you can find a fascinating story on audio hallucination.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/health/psychology/12musi.html?incamp=article_popular
AND FINALLY SOMETHING WEIRD...
Two nights ago when the insomnia was bad, I scoured the cable grid for something to watch. By default, I clicked on one of the Encore Channels for Meryl Streep in Postcards From The Edge, but found to by surprise that John Walters' Pink Flamingos was being aired. Okay, so errors do happen on the cable schedule, but Pink Flamingos is pretty sturdy stuff even for premium cable what with its cock-sucking, shit-eating, talking-asshole, cop-eating cannibalism, and general overall theme of a drag-queen Manson Family, not to mention the dead chicken and all those eggs. I have heard nothing since, but, then again, it was the time of day when only Travis Bickel and I are watching TV. I do wonder, however, if some subversive out there is deliberate slipping in such raunch in very wee hours.
BUT LET’S LEAVE THE LAST WORD TO TRAVIS...
You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin' to? You talkin' to me? Well, I'm the only one here. Who do the fuck do you think you're talking to? Oh, yeah? Ok.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
THE FALL OF THE DARK TOWER – SHALL WE GET THE PARTY STARTED?
Gather round friends and neighbors, this might just be the best vertical fun we have all year. Just the possibility that we might be at the start of the Karl Rove Deathwatch Of Toad fills me with a highly Machiavellian glee, and I just hope that this Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald turns out to be a relentless pitbull, similar to Ken Starr. Okay, Pat J. is probably Bush’s boy right now, busy throwing Judith Miller in jail, but you never know with Special Prosecutors. They come in like lackey’s, but once they realize that they’re driving the plane, megalomania sets in and they start wanting blood and fame. And wouldn’t it be such big fun to see the Bush gang all turning on each other at once.
Already Mr MR has sent over a conjecture about how the first fall back of the White House would be to try have their Karl and eat him too. How they move him from the too-visible Dark Tower to the Cave of Shelob, where the evil brain can still function but the porcine face would be hidden.
"It is impossible to know whether any closed-door conversations have begun in the White House about whether to find a graceful way for Mr. Rove to exit partially, or as one former official said, to "get the benefit of the brain without the proximity of the body."
Hoo-wee, I’m certain this is just the start of the swamp fest. All observations are welcome. The email is byron4d@msn.com
And if anyone has any doubts after last week just how urgent the departure of Bush is becoming, check this NY Times op ed on North Korea...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/opinion/12kristof.html?th&emc=th
The secret word is Comeuppance.
CRYPTIQUE – The chickens are flying business class, and the destination is spelled "roost."
Gather round friends and neighbors, this might just be the best vertical fun we have all year. Just the possibility that we might be at the start of the Karl Rove Deathwatch Of Toad fills me with a highly Machiavellian glee, and I just hope that this Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald turns out to be a relentless pitbull, similar to Ken Starr. Okay, Pat J. is probably Bush’s boy right now, busy throwing Judith Miller in jail, but you never know with Special Prosecutors. They come in like lackey’s, but once they realize that they’re driving the plane, megalomania sets in and they start wanting blood and fame. And wouldn’t it be such big fun to see the Bush gang all turning on each other at once.
Already Mr MR has sent over a conjecture about how the first fall back of the White House would be to try have their Karl and eat him too. How they move him from the too-visible Dark Tower to the Cave of Shelob, where the evil brain can still function but the porcine face would be hidden.
"It is impossible to know whether any closed-door conversations have begun in the White House about whether to find a graceful way for Mr. Rove to exit partially, or as one former official said, to "get the benefit of the brain without the proximity of the body."
Hoo-wee, I’m certain this is just the start of the swamp fest. All observations are welcome. The email is byron4d@msn.com
And if anyone has any doubts after last week just how urgent the departure of Bush is becoming, check this NY Times op ed on North Korea...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/opinion/12kristof.html?th&emc=th
The secret word is Comeuppance.
CRYPTIQUE – The chickens are flying business class, and the destination is spelled "roost."
MORE ACID DISCOVERIES
Spent the weekend writing about last week’s Jihadist nastiness and also the horrors of contemporary celebrity. The products will be ready for perusal in LA CityBeat on Thursday, but, in the meantime, after all that fury, I feel a little beat, although I’m gleefully anticipating the possible downfall of Karl Rove, and how the smug fat fuck may soon be toast, evicted from his Dark Tower, and perhaps even wind up doing time. (You think Georgie will stand by him if it’s a case of Rove’s ass or his?) While we wait, though, the following came through from kaymo...
Saw the thing on Crick and acid... have you seen "What the Dormouse Said" by John Markoff? Turns out the early pioneers of the personal computer revolution were mostly acid heads in the period 1955-75. Combination of trips and experiments that produced the breakthroughs that lead to the revolution in computer usage in the late 70s, and thus to the pcs and Macs on our desks today.
With all this good stuff being discovered on acid, I have to wonder what would have happened if someone had dosed Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. We might have had a very different bomb.
The secret word is Microgram
Spent the weekend writing about last week’s Jihadist nastiness and also the horrors of contemporary celebrity. The products will be ready for perusal in LA CityBeat on Thursday, but, in the meantime, after all that fury, I feel a little beat, although I’m gleefully anticipating the possible downfall of Karl Rove, and how the smug fat fuck may soon be toast, evicted from his Dark Tower, and perhaps even wind up doing time. (You think Georgie will stand by him if it’s a case of Rove’s ass or his?) While we wait, though, the following came through from kaymo...
Saw the thing on Crick and acid... have you seen "What the Dormouse Said" by John Markoff? Turns out the early pioneers of the personal computer revolution were mostly acid heads in the period 1955-75. Combination of trips and experiments that produced the breakthroughs that lead to the revolution in computer usage in the late 70s, and thus to the pcs and Macs on our desks today.
With all this good stuff being discovered on acid, I have to wonder what would have happened if someone had dosed Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. We might have had a very different bomb.
The secret word is Microgram
Friday, July 08, 2005
Thursday, July 07, 2005
"WE WERE PACKED IN LIKE SARDINES WAITING TO DIE..."
Right now I find myself at a loss to think, let alone analyze, and simply watch, sad and mindless, all the TV images of familiar places packed with emergency vehicles and the walking wounded. The odds are that no personal friends or loved ones were hurt or killed, but one never knows. And then disgust creeps in with the appearance of the smug, moronic face of the loathsome Bush, with the hint of a "told you so" smirk, and the indecent speed at which the fucking news commentators turn to self interest with no decent interval to grieve for London. Oh gosh, is America safe? Of course America isn’t safe, you schmucks. A pointless and disgustingly irrelevant war cannot be waged from a position of total safety. And finally there are the intelligence and Homeland Security officials and consultants, most of whom seemingly couldn’t find their own ass with a map, with their color-coded stable-door mentality, and the failure to realize that, while they’re expanding the police state and blathering about rapid transit, the next attack could just as easily by on a movie house, a sporting event, a rock show, a container port, or a nuclear power station.
Right now I find myself at a loss to think, let alone analyze, and simply watch, sad and mindless, all the TV images of familiar places packed with emergency vehicles and the walking wounded. The odds are that no personal friends or loved ones were hurt or killed, but one never knows. And then disgust creeps in with the appearance of the smug, moronic face of the loathsome Bush, with the hint of a "told you so" smirk, and the indecent speed at which the fucking news commentators turn to self interest with no decent interval to grieve for London. Oh gosh, is America safe? Of course America isn’t safe, you schmucks. A pointless and disgustingly irrelevant war cannot be waged from a position of total safety. And finally there are the intelligence and Homeland Security officials and consultants, most of whom seemingly couldn’t find their own ass with a map, with their color-coded stable-door mentality, and the failure to realize that, while they’re expanding the police state and blathering about rapid transit, the next attack could just as easily by on a movie house, a sporting event, a rock show, a container port, or a nuclear power station.
IN THE MATTER OF NY TIMES REPORTER JUDITH MILLER GOING TO THE SLAM
This would be my impression, open of course to comment.
Bush’s Dark Lord Karl Rove – out of pure WMD spite – outs CIA Agent Valerie Plame via TV pundit and columnist Robert Novak
Judith Miller is tipped off, but doesn’t publish.
Miller is jailed for refusing to name her unpublished source to a Grand Jury.
Judge gratuitously mentions anarchy and abortion while committing Miller to jail.
The right-wing toad-greasy, three-lunch-eating Novak is hardly talked about.
Fear eats the already mendaciously spineless MSM, and Karl Rove plainly demonstrates that he is the Lizard King and he can do anything.
Fascism marches on.
(And you don’t know what I’m talking about, read a newspaper.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/07/politics/07leak.html?th&emc=th )
But on a more amusing note...
IT’S AMAZING WHAT YOU CAN FIND...
As I wandered the web researching something about The Deviants, I stumbled into a site devoted to the late-model, Jack-Kirby, Marvel Universe of The Immortals, and I found the following crucial data, which reads so nicely and also reminds me that I have to write the final episode of Slide On The Run for Funtopia. (I especially like the Shroud Gun, the Slicer, Belts of Bemusement, Brain-Mines, the Coagulation Chamber, and the ever-popular Electric Whip.)
Deviants – Sub-race of humanity which on earth, dwell in the city of Lemuria. Deviants on other worlds include the Skrulls, who killed their original race. The Deviants of earth have been ruled by a monarchy, with the House of Toads ruling them for several centuries. Since the death of Brother Tode, Brother Kro, Brother Brutus and Brother Visara have all ruled them, but it is Priestlord Ghaur who currently rules the Deviants, though Kro is kept in power as a figurehead leader. The Deviants' religious system places the Dreaming Celestial as their creator. For centuries, the Deviants believed that the most grotesque of their kind must submit to the Fire Pits of "Purity Time", not knowing that victims of Purity Time ("Rejects") were actually put into suspended animation to one day serve as the "Fifth Host". Purity Time has since been dis-continued. Deviants have little love for one another, and little hope for their future. One of the few pleasures they enjoy is the domination over humanity. At one time, Lemuria existed above the waves, and was capital of the earth. But after an unwise attack on the Celestials, Lemuria was sunk, and the Deviants have never reclaimed their full power. Modern plots have included the use of Mutates to spread disorder among humans. They were also responsible for the many subterranean races, including Gortokians, Moloids, Tyrannoids, and the Lava Men, all originally bred as slaves. For a brief time, the Deviants were mutated further by Apocalypse, and were nearly mindless creatures which rampaged indiscriminately, but they have since been restored to normalcy.Prominent Deviants include: Ahqlau, Argos the Hunter, Bandrhude, Blackwulf, Blackwulf II, Blackwulf III, Bristle, Broop, Brutus, Cataphrax, Chudar, Coal, Darg, General Dasrax, Dragona, Ulysses Dragonblood, Dromedan, Dulpus, Enigmo II, Erishkigel, Fascit, Finn, Frathag, Ghaur, Giganto, Gigantus, Glomm, Gort, Gorgilla, Grottu, Haag, Hept-Supht, Id, Ignatz, Odysseus Indigo, Jorro, Karkas, Karygmax, Khult, Nuncio Klarheit, Kro, Kulkulk, Lady Trident, Lugner, Mammoth, Marcelus, Medula, Megataur, Metabo, Minotaur, Molten Man-Thing, Morga, Nirvana, Pandara, Plokohrel, Phraug, Pyre, Ragar, Brother Ranar, Ransak, Schizo, Shelmar, Sledge, Sluice, Spike, Spore, Stranglehold, String, Talon, Tantalus, Taras Vol, Thunder, Tobias, El Toro Rojo, Touchstone, Toxin, Tricephalous, Tutinax, Brother Tode, Veeg, Queen Vira, Brother Visara, Randy Lee Watson, Weller, World-Devouring Worm, Wraath, Yrdisis, Zakka, and Zona. -Other Deviants appear in Eternals (v.1)#1-6, 8-10, 13, Thor Annual#7, Thor#285-286, What If (v.1)#23, Iron Man Annual#6, Eternals (v.2)#1-12, Avengers Annual#17, Amazing Spider-Man Annual#23, Avengers West Coast Annual#4, Fantastic Four Annual#22, Alpha Flight (v.1)#83, Fantastic Four#339-340, Quasar#12, Eternals: The Herod Factor, Warlock and the Infinity Watch#7, Avengers#370-371, Thunderstrike#6, Blackwulf#2, 6, 8-10, Heroes For Hire#5-7, Marvel Universe#4-7, New Eternals#1, X-Force#94, Marvel: The Lost Generation#10, Black Panther (v.3)#26-29, Avengers (v.3)#42-44, Cable#96, Avengers (v.3)#49, 52
Deviant Technology – The Deviants have developed technology in all areas save artificial intelligence. Among the many weapons and vehicles the have designed are: Air Shuttle, Atom-Displacer, Belts of Bemusement, Bloodhound Missile, Brain-Mines, Coagulation Chamber, Death-Wagons, Diggers, Dimension-Transit, Dispersatron, Disruptor, Dreadnoughts, Electric Whip, Energy Bomb, Energy Screen, Flame of Life, Flamers, Flotillas, Gouger, Gracelet, Ice-Gun, Implosion Device, Infra-Sonic Cannon, Kro's Flagship, Molecular Decoder, Molecular Disruptor, Molecular Disunifier, Packet Rocket, Power-Rod, Raiding Craft, Rail-Jet, Rat, Shadowlance, Shock Howitzer, Shock-Pistol, Shroud Gun, Slicer, Time Projector, Torment Machine, Transjector, Transponder Portal, Wall Screen and Z-Ray.
Deviatron Device Zuras gave to Thena which can locate Deviants within its vicinity. -Eternals Annual#1, Thor#285
The secret word is Kro
This would be my impression, open of course to comment.
Bush’s Dark Lord Karl Rove – out of pure WMD spite – outs CIA Agent Valerie Plame via TV pundit and columnist Robert Novak
Judith Miller is tipped off, but doesn’t publish.
Miller is jailed for refusing to name her unpublished source to a Grand Jury.
Judge gratuitously mentions anarchy and abortion while committing Miller to jail.
The right-wing toad-greasy, three-lunch-eating Novak is hardly talked about.
Fear eats the already mendaciously spineless MSM, and Karl Rove plainly demonstrates that he is the Lizard King and he can do anything.
Fascism marches on.
(And you don’t know what I’m talking about, read a newspaper.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/07/politics/07leak.html?th&emc=th )
But on a more amusing note...
IT’S AMAZING WHAT YOU CAN FIND...
As I wandered the web researching something about The Deviants, I stumbled into a site devoted to the late-model, Jack-Kirby, Marvel Universe of The Immortals, and I found the following crucial data, which reads so nicely and also reminds me that I have to write the final episode of Slide On The Run for Funtopia. (I especially like the Shroud Gun, the Slicer, Belts of Bemusement, Brain-Mines, the Coagulation Chamber, and the ever-popular Electric Whip.)
Deviants – Sub-race of humanity which on earth, dwell in the city of Lemuria. Deviants on other worlds include the Skrulls, who killed their original race. The Deviants of earth have been ruled by a monarchy, with the House of Toads ruling them for several centuries. Since the death of Brother Tode, Brother Kro, Brother Brutus and Brother Visara have all ruled them, but it is Priestlord Ghaur who currently rules the Deviants, though Kro is kept in power as a figurehead leader. The Deviants' religious system places the Dreaming Celestial as their creator. For centuries, the Deviants believed that the most grotesque of their kind must submit to the Fire Pits of "Purity Time", not knowing that victims of Purity Time ("Rejects") were actually put into suspended animation to one day serve as the "Fifth Host". Purity Time has since been dis-continued. Deviants have little love for one another, and little hope for their future. One of the few pleasures they enjoy is the domination over humanity. At one time, Lemuria existed above the waves, and was capital of the earth. But after an unwise attack on the Celestials, Lemuria was sunk, and the Deviants have never reclaimed their full power. Modern plots have included the use of Mutates to spread disorder among humans. They were also responsible for the many subterranean races, including Gortokians, Moloids, Tyrannoids, and the Lava Men, all originally bred as slaves. For a brief time, the Deviants were mutated further by Apocalypse, and were nearly mindless creatures which rampaged indiscriminately, but they have since been restored to normalcy.Prominent Deviants include: Ahqlau, Argos the Hunter, Bandrhude, Blackwulf, Blackwulf II, Blackwulf III, Bristle, Broop, Brutus, Cataphrax, Chudar, Coal, Darg, General Dasrax, Dragona, Ulysses Dragonblood, Dromedan, Dulpus, Enigmo II, Erishkigel, Fascit, Finn, Frathag, Ghaur, Giganto, Gigantus, Glomm, Gort, Gorgilla, Grottu, Haag, Hept-Supht, Id, Ignatz, Odysseus Indigo, Jorro, Karkas, Karygmax, Khult, Nuncio Klarheit, Kro, Kulkulk, Lady Trident, Lugner, Mammoth, Marcelus, Medula, Megataur, Metabo, Minotaur, Molten Man-Thing, Morga, Nirvana, Pandara, Plokohrel, Phraug, Pyre, Ragar, Brother Ranar, Ransak, Schizo, Shelmar, Sledge, Sluice, Spike, Spore, Stranglehold, String, Talon, Tantalus, Taras Vol, Thunder, Tobias, El Toro Rojo, Touchstone, Toxin, Tricephalous, Tutinax, Brother Tode, Veeg, Queen Vira, Brother Visara, Randy Lee Watson, Weller, World-Devouring Worm, Wraath, Yrdisis, Zakka, and Zona. -Other Deviants appear in Eternals (v.1)#1-6, 8-10, 13, Thor Annual#7, Thor#285-286, What If (v.1)#23, Iron Man Annual#6, Eternals (v.2)#1-12, Avengers Annual#17, Amazing Spider-Man Annual#23, Avengers West Coast Annual#4, Fantastic Four Annual#22, Alpha Flight (v.1)#83, Fantastic Four#339-340, Quasar#12, Eternals: The Herod Factor, Warlock and the Infinity Watch#7, Avengers#370-371, Thunderstrike#6, Blackwulf#2, 6, 8-10, Heroes For Hire#5-7, Marvel Universe#4-7, New Eternals#1, X-Force#94, Marvel: The Lost Generation#10, Black Panther (v.3)#26-29, Avengers (v.3)#42-44, Cable#96, Avengers (v.3)#49, 52
Deviant Technology – The Deviants have developed technology in all areas save artificial intelligence. Among the many weapons and vehicles the have designed are: Air Shuttle, Atom-Displacer, Belts of Bemusement, Bloodhound Missile, Brain-Mines, Coagulation Chamber, Death-Wagons, Diggers, Dimension-Transit, Dispersatron, Disruptor, Dreadnoughts, Electric Whip, Energy Bomb, Energy Screen, Flame of Life, Flamers, Flotillas, Gouger, Gracelet, Ice-Gun, Implosion Device, Infra-Sonic Cannon, Kro's Flagship, Molecular Decoder, Molecular Disruptor, Molecular Disunifier, Packet Rocket, Power-Rod, Raiding Craft, Rail-Jet, Rat, Shadowlance, Shock Howitzer, Shock-Pistol, Shroud Gun, Slicer, Time Projector, Torment Machine, Transjector, Transponder Portal, Wall Screen and Z-Ray.
Deviatron Device Zuras gave to Thena which can locate Deviants within its vicinity. -Eternals Annual#1, Thor#285
The secret word is Kro
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
MORE NARCO-TRIVIA
Munz just sent me the following and I couldn’t resist simply posting it. I hesitate to say more than, back in the day, that was where the London counter culture got it’s acid. I wonder, though, about the "LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool", since back in the the 1960s the calibration of doses was real hit and miss, and never really came together until the 1970s. It only took a little for the full fear, loathing, and Yellow Submarine. Also I must add an odd footnote in that, since the Welsh acid factory survived until 1977, the Operation Julie bust, coming as it did when the Sex Pistols were peaking, became a very bizarre big deal with cops discovered this James Bond acid plant in rural Wales (as they told it). At the height of punk, boring old hippies were suddenly the SPECTOR of psychedelic warfare, which confused Joe Strummer no end until Lemmy explained it to him.
But I digress...
NOBEL PRIZE GENIUS CRICK WAS HIGH ON LSD WHEN HE DISCOVERED THE SECRET OF LIFE
Copyright 2004 Associated Newspapers Ltd. Mail on Sunday (London)August 8, 2004by Alun Rees
Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago. The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life. Crick, who died ten days ago, aged 88, later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.
Despite his Establishment image, Crick was a devotee of novelist Aldous Huxley, whose accounts of his experiments with LSD and another hallucinogen, mescaline, in the short stories The Doors Of Perception and Heaven And Hell became cult texts for the hippies of the Sixties and Seventies. In the late Sixties, Crick was a founder member of Soma, a legalise-cannabis group named after the drug in Huxley's novel Brave New World. He even put his name to a famous letter to The Times in 1967 calling for a reform in the drugs laws. It was through his membership of Soma that Crick inadvertently became the inspiration for the biggest LSD manufacturing conspiracy-the world has ever seen the multimillion-pound drug factory in a remote farmhouse in Wales that was smashed by the Operation Julie raids of the late Seventies.
Crick's involvement with the gang was fleeting but crucial. The revered scientist had been invited to the Cambridge home of freewheeling American writer David Solomon a friend of hippie LSD guru Timothy Leary who had come to Britain in 1967 on a quest to discover a method for manufacturing pure THC, the active ingredient of cannabis.
It was Crick's presence in Solomon's social circle that attracted a brilliant young biochemist, Richard Kemp, who soon became a convert to the attractions of both cannabis and LSD. Kemp was recruited to the THC project in 1968, but soon afterwards devised the world's first foolproof method of producing cheap, pure LSD. Solomon and Kemp went into business, manufacturing acid in a succession of rented houses before setting up their laboratory in a cottage on a hillside near Tregaron, Carmarthenshire, in 1973. It is estimated that Kemp manufactured drugs worth Pounds 2.5 million an astonishing amount in the Seventies before police stormed the building in 1977 and seized enough pure LSD and its constituent chemicals to make two million LSD 'tabs'.
The arrest and conviction of Solomon, Kemp and a string of co-conspirators dominated the headlines for months. I was covering the case as a reporter at the time and it was then that I met Kemp's close friend, Garrod Harker, whose home had been raided by police but who had not been arrest ed. Harker told me that Kemp and his girlfriend Christine Bott by then in jail were hippie idealists who were completely uninterested in the money they were making.
They gave away thousands to pet causes such as the Glastonbury pop festival and the drugs charity Release.'
They have a philosophy,' Harker told me at the time. 'They believe industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people's mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves.
'Dick Kemp told me he met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told him that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD. 'It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and probably bowled over by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man like Crick, who had gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD, then it was worth using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp's inspiration.' Shortly afterwards I visited Crick at his home, Golden Helix, in Cambridge.He listened with rapt, amused attention to what I told him about the role of LSD in his Nobel Prize-winning discovery. He gave no intimation of surprise. When I had finished, he said: 'Print a word of it and I'll sue.'
The secret word is What?
CRYPTIQUE – Lucy in the Sky with Dramamine.
Munz just sent me the following and I couldn’t resist simply posting it. I hesitate to say more than, back in the day, that was where the London counter culture got it’s acid. I wonder, though, about the "LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool", since back in the the 1960s the calibration of doses was real hit and miss, and never really came together until the 1970s. It only took a little for the full fear, loathing, and Yellow Submarine. Also I must add an odd footnote in that, since the Welsh acid factory survived until 1977, the Operation Julie bust, coming as it did when the Sex Pistols were peaking, became a very bizarre big deal with cops discovered this James Bond acid plant in rural Wales (as they told it). At the height of punk, boring old hippies were suddenly the SPECTOR of psychedelic warfare, which confused Joe Strummer no end until Lemmy explained it to him.
But I digress...
NOBEL PRIZE GENIUS CRICK WAS HIGH ON LSD WHEN HE DISCOVERED THE SECRET OF LIFE
Copyright 2004 Associated Newspapers Ltd. Mail on Sunday (London)August 8, 2004by Alun Rees
Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago. The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life. Crick, who died ten days ago, aged 88, later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.
Despite his Establishment image, Crick was a devotee of novelist Aldous Huxley, whose accounts of his experiments with LSD and another hallucinogen, mescaline, in the short stories The Doors Of Perception and Heaven And Hell became cult texts for the hippies of the Sixties and Seventies. In the late Sixties, Crick was a founder member of Soma, a legalise-cannabis group named after the drug in Huxley's novel Brave New World. He even put his name to a famous letter to The Times in 1967 calling for a reform in the drugs laws. It was through his membership of Soma that Crick inadvertently became the inspiration for the biggest LSD manufacturing conspiracy-the world has ever seen the multimillion-pound drug factory in a remote farmhouse in Wales that was smashed by the Operation Julie raids of the late Seventies.
Crick's involvement with the gang was fleeting but crucial. The revered scientist had been invited to the Cambridge home of freewheeling American writer David Solomon a friend of hippie LSD guru Timothy Leary who had come to Britain in 1967 on a quest to discover a method for manufacturing pure THC, the active ingredient of cannabis.
It was Crick's presence in Solomon's social circle that attracted a brilliant young biochemist, Richard Kemp, who soon became a convert to the attractions of both cannabis and LSD. Kemp was recruited to the THC project in 1968, but soon afterwards devised the world's first foolproof method of producing cheap, pure LSD. Solomon and Kemp went into business, manufacturing acid in a succession of rented houses before setting up their laboratory in a cottage on a hillside near Tregaron, Carmarthenshire, in 1973. It is estimated that Kemp manufactured drugs worth Pounds 2.5 million an astonishing amount in the Seventies before police stormed the building in 1977 and seized enough pure LSD and its constituent chemicals to make two million LSD 'tabs'.
The arrest and conviction of Solomon, Kemp and a string of co-conspirators dominated the headlines for months. I was covering the case as a reporter at the time and it was then that I met Kemp's close friend, Garrod Harker, whose home had been raided by police but who had not been arrest ed. Harker told me that Kemp and his girlfriend Christine Bott by then in jail were hippie idealists who were completely uninterested in the money they were making.
They gave away thousands to pet causes such as the Glastonbury pop festival and the drugs charity Release.'
They have a philosophy,' Harker told me at the time. 'They believe industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people's mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves.
'Dick Kemp told me he met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told him that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD. 'It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and probably bowled over by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man like Crick, who had gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD, then it was worth using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp's inspiration.' Shortly afterwards I visited Crick at his home, Golden Helix, in Cambridge.He listened with rapt, amused attention to what I told him about the role of LSD in his Nobel Prize-winning discovery. He gave no intimation of surprise. When I had finished, he said: 'Print a word of it and I'll sue.'
The secret word is What?
CRYPTIQUE – Lucy in the Sky with Dramamine.
Sunday, July 03, 2005
INDEPENDENCE DAY
As an Englishman, it’s a little hard to get worked up over July 4th. As a pyromaniac, I’m inordinately fond of fireworks, burnt meat is always good, and I kinda like the Constitution, but it’s hard to jump up and down and wave the flag about the British being run out of the lower forty-eight, even when my American friends explain how, if the Founding Fathers hadn’t done what they did, we’d not only all be speaking English, but living in some post-facto colony with all that Canadian-style oppression like social stability, low crime, and evil commie healthcare.
But talking about freedom and healthcare, it’s kinda ironic that this should be the weekend when JD forwards me the following, that would seem to kick away any possible rationale for keeping marijuana outlawed. If herb not only doesn’t give me cancer, and may actually protect me from it, why the fuck should I be jailed for smoking the stuff? The answer becomes increasing clear that – beyond some Alice-In-Wonderland logic that dope is bad because it’s illegal, and thus it’s illegal because it’s bad – the only possible reasons are that prohibition supports the drug enforcement industry, maintains some bizarre notions of social control, and panders to the fucked-up who just can’t stand seeing anyone having a good time.
I’m kinda in a good mood because I’m high, but, really, I've had enough of this shit. For almost a century, happy-go-lucky vipers have been hunted, jailed, killed, brutalized, denied public office, and deprived of their civil rights, and it's high fucking time it simply stopped!
The secret words for the holiday are Rockets, Red, and Glare
Now read on...
Smoking Marijuana Does Not Cause Lung Cancer By Fred Gardner
Marijuana smoking -"even heavy longterm use"- does not cause cancer of the lung, upper airwaves, or esophagus, Donald Tashkin reported at this year's meeting of the International Cannabinoid Research Society. Coming from Tashkin, this conclusion had extra significance for the assembled drug-company and university-based scientists (most of whom get funding from the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse). Over the years, Tashkin's lab at UCLA has produced irrefutable evidence of the damage that marijuana smoke wreaks on bronchial tissue. With NIDA's support, Tashkin and colleagues have identified the potent carcinogens in marijuana smoke, biopsied and made photomicrographs of pre-malignant cells, and studied the molecular changes occurring within them. It is Tashkin's research that the Drug Czar's office cites in ads linking marijuana to lung cancer. Tashkin himself has long believed in a causal relationship, despite a study in which Stephen Sidney examined the files of 64,000 Kaiser patients and found that marijuana users didn't develop lung cancer at a higher rate or die earlier than non-users. Of five smaller studies on the question, only two -involving a total of about 300 patients- concluded that marijuana smoking causes lung cancer. Tashkin decided to settle the question by conducting a large, prospectively designed, population-based, case-controlled study. "Our major hypothesis," he told the ICRS, "was that heavy, longterm use of marijuana will increase the risk of lung and upper-airwaves cancers."
The Los Angeles County Cancer Surveillance program provided Tashkin's team with the names of 1,209 L.A. residents aged 59 or younger with cancer (611 lung, 403 oral/pharyngeal, 90 laryngeal, 108 esophageal). Interviewers collected extensive lifetime histories of marijuana, tobacco, alcohol and other drug use, and data on diet, occupational exposures, family history of cancer, and various "socio-demographic factors." Exposure to marijuana was measured in joint years (joints per day x 365). Controls were found based on age, gender and neighborhood. Among them, 46% had never used marijuana, 31% had used less than one joint year, 12% had used 10-30 j-yrs, 2% had used 30-60 j-yrs, and 3% had used for more than 60 j-yrs. Tashkin controlled for tobacco use and calculated the relative risk of marijuana use resulting in lung and upper airwaves cancers. All the odds ratios turned out to be less than one (one being equal to the control group's chances)! Compared with subjects who had used less than one joint year, the estimated odds ratios for lung cancer were .78; for 1-10 j-yrs, .74; for 10-30 j-yrs, .85 for 30-60 j-yrs; and 0.81 for more than 60 j-yrs. The estimated odds ratios for oral/pharyngeal cancers were 0.92 for 1-10 j-yrs; 0.89 for 10-30 j-yrs; 0.81 for 30-60 j-yrs; and 1.0 for more than 60 j-yrs. "Similar, though less precise results were obtained for the other cancer sites," Tashkin reported. "We found absolutely no suggestion of a dose response." The data on tobacco use, as expected, revealed "a very potent effect and a clear dose-response relationship -a 21-fold greater risk of developing lung cancer if you smoke more than two packs a day." Similarly high odds obtained for oral/pharyngeal cancer, laryngeal cancer and esophageal cancer. "So, in summary" Tashkin concluded, "we failed to observe a positive association of marijuana use and other potential confounders."
There was time for only one question, said the moderator, and San Francisco oncologist Donald Abrams, M.D., was already at the microphone: "You don't see any positive correlation, but in at least one category [marijuana-only smokers and lung cancer], it almost looked like there was a negative correlation, i.e., a protective effect. Could you comment on that?"
"Yes," said Tashkin. "The odds ratios are less than one almost consistently, and in one category that relationship was significant, but I think that it would be difficult to extract from these data the conclusion that marijuana is protective against lung cancer. But that is not an unreasonable hypothesis."
Abrams had results of his own to report at the ICRS meeting. He and his colleagues at San Francisco General Hospital had conducted a randomized, placebo-controlled study involving 50 patients with HIV-related peripheral neuropathy. Over the course of five days, patients recorded their pain levels in a diary after smoking either NIDA-supplied marijuana cigarettes or cigarettes from which the THC had been extracted. About 25% didn't know or guessed wrong as to whether they were smoking the placebos, which suggests that the blinding worked. Abrams requested that his results not be described in detail prior to publication in a peer-reviewed medical journal, but we can generalize: they exceeded expectations, and show marijuana providing pain relief comparable to Gabapentin, the most widely used treatment for a condition that afflicts some 30% of patients with HIV.
To a questioner who bemoaned the difficulty of "separating the high from the clinical benefits," Abrams replied: "I'm an oncologist as well as an AIDS doctor and I don't think that a drug that creates euphoria in patients with terminal diseases is having an adverse effect." His study was funded by the University of California's Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research.
AND OH YEAH
Check this week’s LA CityBeat column...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2282&IssueNum=108
As an Englishman, it’s a little hard to get worked up over July 4th. As a pyromaniac, I’m inordinately fond of fireworks, burnt meat is always good, and I kinda like the Constitution, but it’s hard to jump up and down and wave the flag about the British being run out of the lower forty-eight, even when my American friends explain how, if the Founding Fathers hadn’t done what they did, we’d not only all be speaking English, but living in some post-facto colony with all that Canadian-style oppression like social stability, low crime, and evil commie healthcare.
But talking about freedom and healthcare, it’s kinda ironic that this should be the weekend when JD forwards me the following, that would seem to kick away any possible rationale for keeping marijuana outlawed. If herb not only doesn’t give me cancer, and may actually protect me from it, why the fuck should I be jailed for smoking the stuff? The answer becomes increasing clear that – beyond some Alice-In-Wonderland logic that dope is bad because it’s illegal, and thus it’s illegal because it’s bad – the only possible reasons are that prohibition supports the drug enforcement industry, maintains some bizarre notions of social control, and panders to the fucked-up who just can’t stand seeing anyone having a good time.
I’m kinda in a good mood because I’m high, but, really, I've had enough of this shit. For almost a century, happy-go-lucky vipers have been hunted, jailed, killed, brutalized, denied public office, and deprived of their civil rights, and it's high fucking time it simply stopped!
The secret words for the holiday are Rockets, Red, and Glare
Now read on...
Smoking Marijuana Does Not Cause Lung Cancer By Fred Gardner
Marijuana smoking -"even heavy longterm use"- does not cause cancer of the lung, upper airwaves, or esophagus, Donald Tashkin reported at this year's meeting of the International Cannabinoid Research Society. Coming from Tashkin, this conclusion had extra significance for the assembled drug-company and university-based scientists (most of whom get funding from the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse). Over the years, Tashkin's lab at UCLA has produced irrefutable evidence of the damage that marijuana smoke wreaks on bronchial tissue. With NIDA's support, Tashkin and colleagues have identified the potent carcinogens in marijuana smoke, biopsied and made photomicrographs of pre-malignant cells, and studied the molecular changes occurring within them. It is Tashkin's research that the Drug Czar's office cites in ads linking marijuana to lung cancer. Tashkin himself has long believed in a causal relationship, despite a study in which Stephen Sidney examined the files of 64,000 Kaiser patients and found that marijuana users didn't develop lung cancer at a higher rate or die earlier than non-users. Of five smaller studies on the question, only two -involving a total of about 300 patients- concluded that marijuana smoking causes lung cancer. Tashkin decided to settle the question by conducting a large, prospectively designed, population-based, case-controlled study. "Our major hypothesis," he told the ICRS, "was that heavy, longterm use of marijuana will increase the risk of lung and upper-airwaves cancers."
The Los Angeles County Cancer Surveillance program provided Tashkin's team with the names of 1,209 L.A. residents aged 59 or younger with cancer (611 lung, 403 oral/pharyngeal, 90 laryngeal, 108 esophageal). Interviewers collected extensive lifetime histories of marijuana, tobacco, alcohol and other drug use, and data on diet, occupational exposures, family history of cancer, and various "socio-demographic factors." Exposure to marijuana was measured in joint years (joints per day x 365). Controls were found based on age, gender and neighborhood. Among them, 46% had never used marijuana, 31% had used less than one joint year, 12% had used 10-30 j-yrs, 2% had used 30-60 j-yrs, and 3% had used for more than 60 j-yrs. Tashkin controlled for tobacco use and calculated the relative risk of marijuana use resulting in lung and upper airwaves cancers. All the odds ratios turned out to be less than one (one being equal to the control group's chances)! Compared with subjects who had used less than one joint year, the estimated odds ratios for lung cancer were .78; for 1-10 j-yrs, .74; for 10-30 j-yrs, .85 for 30-60 j-yrs; and 0.81 for more than 60 j-yrs. The estimated odds ratios for oral/pharyngeal cancers were 0.92 for 1-10 j-yrs; 0.89 for 10-30 j-yrs; 0.81 for 30-60 j-yrs; and 1.0 for more than 60 j-yrs. "Similar, though less precise results were obtained for the other cancer sites," Tashkin reported. "We found absolutely no suggestion of a dose response." The data on tobacco use, as expected, revealed "a very potent effect and a clear dose-response relationship -a 21-fold greater risk of developing lung cancer if you smoke more than two packs a day." Similarly high odds obtained for oral/pharyngeal cancer, laryngeal cancer and esophageal cancer. "So, in summary" Tashkin concluded, "we failed to observe a positive association of marijuana use and other potential confounders."
There was time for only one question, said the moderator, and San Francisco oncologist Donald Abrams, M.D., was already at the microphone: "You don't see any positive correlation, but in at least one category [marijuana-only smokers and lung cancer], it almost looked like there was a negative correlation, i.e., a protective effect. Could you comment on that?"
"Yes," said Tashkin. "The odds ratios are less than one almost consistently, and in one category that relationship was significant, but I think that it would be difficult to extract from these data the conclusion that marijuana is protective against lung cancer. But that is not an unreasonable hypothesis."
Abrams had results of his own to report at the ICRS meeting. He and his colleagues at San Francisco General Hospital had conducted a randomized, placebo-controlled study involving 50 patients with HIV-related peripheral neuropathy. Over the course of five days, patients recorded their pain levels in a diary after smoking either NIDA-supplied marijuana cigarettes or cigarettes from which the THC had been extracted. About 25% didn't know or guessed wrong as to whether they were smoking the placebos, which suggests that the blinding worked. Abrams requested that his results not be described in detail prior to publication in a peer-reviewed medical journal, but we can generalize: they exceeded expectations, and show marijuana providing pain relief comparable to Gabapentin, the most widely used treatment for a condition that afflicts some 30% of patients with HIV.
To a questioner who bemoaned the difficulty of "separating the high from the clinical benefits," Abrams replied: "I'm an oncologist as well as an AIDS doctor and I don't think that a drug that creates euphoria in patients with terminal diseases is having an adverse effect." His study was funded by the University of California's Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research.
AND OH YEAH
Check this week’s LA CityBeat column...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2282&IssueNum=108
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
HAVE THIS SHOW CANCELLED!
I returned from some external local wanderings around the pharmacy and the hardware store and found George Bush monopolizing my fucking TV, trying re-sell me that bloody war of his that I never wanted in the first place. And there was that dumb belligerence as he tried to reconcile the statements of Dick Cheney on one hand that it’s all over in Iraq bar the shouting with Rumsfeld’s equally dumb insistence that whole thing is going to drag on for decades so we better get used to it. Meanwhile, the mainstream media still find it impossible to join the dots, conclude how the Downing Street memos essentially identify the whole pack of them as lying toe-rags, or, more recently, how the somewhat amazing statement by Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss that the CIA totally know where Osama is but can’t grab him because it would infringe another nation’s sovereignty, is kinda confounded by the Langley spooks who’ve been running all over Italy kidnaping Moslem clerics and shipping them off to Egypt in private jets to be tortured. Indeed, this whole bullshit administration has reached levels of absurdity that I find myself no longer raging, but simply dazed and amazed that it is, on any level, able to continue, and that’s when I’m not wondering, with the shock of hard-won deja vu, if Bush is in fact simply recycling old Vietnam speeches of Lyndon Johnson’s from 1967, when The Doors were playing "The End" and revolution actually seemed quite possible.
OCTOBER 14TH 1978
(See comments 719 over there >>>>)
I do remember MF and the Good Guys playing Camden Palace, so vividly, in fact, that I know we all went to the cinema between sound-check and show-time to see Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy, (big 10-4 good buddy) instead of sitting in a pub so Larry and I wouldn’t get shamelessly drunk and total live-on-stage spectacles of ourselves, a ruse that was doomed when we took a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black with us to the film. But I still don’t recall seeing Chas and Dave.
(How’s the punctuation, Fiona?)
The secret word is Sufficient
CRYPTIQUE -- Did Tom just screw the pooch on a major Scientology power play?
I returned from some external local wanderings around the pharmacy and the hardware store and found George Bush monopolizing my fucking TV, trying re-sell me that bloody war of his that I never wanted in the first place. And there was that dumb belligerence as he tried to reconcile the statements of Dick Cheney on one hand that it’s all over in Iraq bar the shouting with Rumsfeld’s equally dumb insistence that whole thing is going to drag on for decades so we better get used to it. Meanwhile, the mainstream media still find it impossible to join the dots, conclude how the Downing Street memos essentially identify the whole pack of them as lying toe-rags, or, more recently, how the somewhat amazing statement by Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss that the CIA totally know where Osama is but can’t grab him because it would infringe another nation’s sovereignty, is kinda confounded by the Langley spooks who’ve been running all over Italy kidnaping Moslem clerics and shipping them off to Egypt in private jets to be tortured. Indeed, this whole bullshit administration has reached levels of absurdity that I find myself no longer raging, but simply dazed and amazed that it is, on any level, able to continue, and that’s when I’m not wondering, with the shock of hard-won deja vu, if Bush is in fact simply recycling old Vietnam speeches of Lyndon Johnson’s from 1967, when The Doors were playing "The End" and revolution actually seemed quite possible.
OCTOBER 14TH 1978
(See comments 719 over there >>>>)
I do remember MF and the Good Guys playing Camden Palace, so vividly, in fact, that I know we all went to the cinema between sound-check and show-time to see Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy, (big 10-4 good buddy) instead of sitting in a pub so Larry and I wouldn’t get shamelessly drunk and total live-on-stage spectacles of ourselves, a ruse that was doomed when we took a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black with us to the film. But I still don’t recall seeing Chas and Dave.
(How’s the punctuation, Fiona?)
The secret word is Sufficient
CRYPTIQUE -- Did Tom just screw the pooch on a major Scientology power play?
Monday, June 27, 2005
IF YOU GO DOWN IN THE WOODS TODAY*...
Although I’m well aware that there are many more crucial things going on around the planet, I've more than once caught myself thinking about that 11-year-old who was lost for four days last week in the Utah mountains, and couldn’t be found because his parents had taught him too damn well that he should never talk to strangers, and he kept hiding from the search parties of potential rescuers. The timorous brat really doesn’t have a prayer if he’s ever shipped off to higher education in a major city. The kind of victim body language that alerts every urban predator for blocks around must be totally ingrained. Okay, maybe times have changed since I was raised in the woods so I knew every tree, but this strikes me as the same dangerous psychological overkill that has idiots in suburban Idaho so coweringly convinced that Al Qeada are going to attack the local mall by next Tuesday that they’ll reelect George bloody Bush as many times as Fox News tells them and the voting machine will let them. What the fuck happened to Home of the Brave, Land of the Free, or the realization that we’re born, we die and, between the two, we play odds to survive just like the gazelles in the TV nature show? There are no other guarantees, and not to accept this reality is another version of living on one’s knees, and (to paraphrase Big Nose Katie Elder in the movie Doc) when I get on my knees it ain’t in fear (although maybe trembling.)
BUT ON A BRIGHTER NOTE...
Here’s a piece of truly inspired biblical craziness sent over by some girl...
www.hoax-buster.org
The secret word is Reckless
(* How many of you, dear readers, recall "The Teddy Bears Picnic"?)
Although I’m well aware that there are many more crucial things going on around the planet, I've more than once caught myself thinking about that 11-year-old who was lost for four days last week in the Utah mountains, and couldn’t be found because his parents had taught him too damn well that he should never talk to strangers, and he kept hiding from the search parties of potential rescuers. The timorous brat really doesn’t have a prayer if he’s ever shipped off to higher education in a major city. The kind of victim body language that alerts every urban predator for blocks around must be totally ingrained. Okay, maybe times have changed since I was raised in the woods so I knew every tree, but this strikes me as the same dangerous psychological overkill that has idiots in suburban Idaho so coweringly convinced that Al Qeada are going to attack the local mall by next Tuesday that they’ll reelect George bloody Bush as many times as Fox News tells them and the voting machine will let them. What the fuck happened to Home of the Brave, Land of the Free, or the realization that we’re born, we die and, between the two, we play odds to survive just like the gazelles in the TV nature show? There are no other guarantees, and not to accept this reality is another version of living on one’s knees, and (to paraphrase Big Nose Katie Elder in the movie Doc) when I get on my knees it ain’t in fear (although maybe trembling.)
BUT ON A BRIGHTER NOTE...
Here’s a piece of truly inspired biblical craziness sent over by some girl...
www.hoax-buster.org
The secret word is Reckless
(* How many of you, dear readers, recall "The Teddy Bears Picnic"?)
Friday, June 24, 2005
IN RESPONSE TO THE COMMENTS (712) BOARD (just over there>>>)...
I really don’t recall ever being on a bill with Chas and Dave, but, then again there’s a lot late of the seventies/early eighties I don’t remember. The other day I accidently came across the following quote by poet and old lag Pete Brown in some book about Pink Floyd. "All Saints Hall was also routinely rocked by incredible mad jam sessions - one of which ended up with Alexis Korner, Arthur Brown, Mick Farren, Nick Mason, and me all singing `Lucille.' Which was really frightening to a lot of people – including us!" This is something of which I have absolutely no memory even though it sounds like fun.
I really don’t recall ever being on a bill with Chas and Dave, but, then again there’s a lot late of the seventies/early eighties I don’t remember. The other day I accidently came across the following quote by poet and old lag Pete Brown in some book about Pink Floyd. "All Saints Hall was also routinely rocked by incredible mad jam sessions - one of which ended up with Alexis Korner, Arthur Brown, Mick Farren, Nick Mason, and me all singing `Lucille.' Which was really frightening to a lot of people – including us!" This is something of which I have absolutely no memory even though it sounds like fun.
IT’S 2008, OKAY? (ALL ACROSS THE USA)
Seems like the 2008 Presidential Election is underway already. I’m no great Hillary Clinton admirer, but I figure that she may well be the card we’re dealt, and right now I’d support Cal Worthington and his dog Spot if I thought there was a chance of halting a Bush dynasty. (I mean, I’d have Old Bill back in an NY minute, but Hill is getting kinda charmless of late.) What really fascinates me, however, is how the artillery is already being positioned to rain down forty kinds of like-never-before hell on the poor woman. She needs dig in because the Rove Ratfuckers are already busy. Check the following bit of anonymous disinformation making the rounds of fax and internet...
Gold Star Mothers is an organization made up of women whose sons were killed in military combat during service in the United States Armed Forces. Recently a delegation of New York State Gold Star Mothers made a trip to Washington, DC to discuss various concerns with their elected representatives. According to NewsMax.com there was only one politician in DC who refused to meet with these ladies. Can you guess which politician that might be? Was it New York Senator Charles Schumer? Nope, he met with them. Try again. Do you know anyone serving in the Senate who has never showed anything but contempt for our military? Do you happen to know the name of any politician in Washington whose husband once wrote of his loathing of the military? Now you're getting warm! None other than the Queen herself - the Hildebeast, Hillary Clinton. She refused repeated requests to meet with the Gold Star Mothers. Now - please don't tell me you're surprised. This woman wants to be president of the United States - and there is a huge percentage of the voters who are anxious to help her achieve that.
Gold Star Mothers have refuted the story, but once its out it become instant legend.
ON THE OTHER HAND...
Click below for plausibly paranoid chapter and verse on how Homeland Security is putting the fix in on your new laptop. The story and pics have been declared a hoax, but there’s no reason not to pass it along as the absolute gospel truth. You just didn’t hear it from me, okay?
http://c0x2.de/lol/lol.html
The secret word is Attrition
Seems like the 2008 Presidential Election is underway already. I’m no great Hillary Clinton admirer, but I figure that she may well be the card we’re dealt, and right now I’d support Cal Worthington and his dog Spot if I thought there was a chance of halting a Bush dynasty. (I mean, I’d have Old Bill back in an NY minute, but Hill is getting kinda charmless of late.) What really fascinates me, however, is how the artillery is already being positioned to rain down forty kinds of like-never-before hell on the poor woman. She needs dig in because the Rove Ratfuckers are already busy. Check the following bit of anonymous disinformation making the rounds of fax and internet...
Gold Star Mothers is an organization made up of women whose sons were killed in military combat during service in the United States Armed Forces. Recently a delegation of New York State Gold Star Mothers made a trip to Washington, DC to discuss various concerns with their elected representatives. According to NewsMax.com there was only one politician in DC who refused to meet with these ladies. Can you guess which politician that might be? Was it New York Senator Charles Schumer? Nope, he met with them. Try again. Do you know anyone serving in the Senate who has never showed anything but contempt for our military? Do you happen to know the name of any politician in Washington whose husband once wrote of his loathing of the military? Now you're getting warm! None other than the Queen herself - the Hildebeast, Hillary Clinton. She refused repeated requests to meet with the Gold Star Mothers. Now - please don't tell me you're surprised. This woman wants to be president of the United States - and there is a huge percentage of the voters who are anxious to help her achieve that.
Gold Star Mothers have refuted the story, but once its out it become instant legend.
ON THE OTHER HAND...
Click below for plausibly paranoid chapter and verse on how Homeland Security is putting the fix in on your new laptop. The story and pics have been declared a hoax, but there’s no reason not to pass it along as the absolute gospel truth. You just didn’t hear it from me, okay?
http://c0x2.de/lol/lol.html
The secret word is Attrition
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
BEFORE EVEN THERE WAS EDDIE COCHRAN...
Mercifully the English are obsessive about preserving cultural minutiae otherwise we would have missed this little delight from 1955 that has to be a prototype for a whole lot that came later.
http://www.teddygirl.co.uk/
CRYPTIQUE – "When I take the medication my evil uncle stays in Yonkers."
Mercifully the English are obsessive about preserving cultural minutiae otherwise we would have missed this little delight from 1955 that has to be a prototype for a whole lot that came later.
http://www.teddygirl.co.uk/
CRYPTIQUE – "When I take the medication my evil uncle stays in Yonkers."
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
I MEANT TO POST THIS ON SUNDAY
But the weekend grew hectic and the world again turned into one giant movie promotion with live ammunition, and the Martians land next week, and so the most important thing on my TV is Tom fucking Cruise being squirted with water. (Although this constant real-world exposure of Cruise is starting to reveal him as a three foot demented munchkin, just not tall enough for the blazing-eyed Scientologist Messiah to which he seems to aspire. Which brings us neatly around to religion, and the following from The Independent Online sent over by Mr MR, which kinda shows very clearly why humanity really has to get over this whole God thing, and quickly...
PRIEST UNREPENTENT AFTER CRUCIFYING OF NUN
By Laura Chiriac
Tanacu, Romania - A Romanian Orthodox priest who ordered the crucifixion of a young nun because she was "possessed by the devil" and now faces murder charges was unrepentant on Saturday as he celebrated a funeral mass for his alleged victim. "God has performed a miracle for her, finally Irina is delivered from evil," Father Daniel, 29, the superior of the Holy Trinity monastery in north-eastern Romania, said before celebrating a short mass "for the soul of the deceased", in the presence of 13 nuns who showed no visible emotion. He insisted that from the religious point of view, the crucifixion of Maricica Irina Cornici, 23, was "entirely justified", but admitted that he faced excommunication as well as prosecution, and was seeking a "good lawyer". Cornici was found dead on Wednesday, gagged and chained to a cross, after fellow nuns called an ambulance, according to police. Mihaela Straub, spokesperson for the police in the province of Vaslui, said Daniel and four other nuns had claimed Cornici was possessed and should be exorcised. Before being crucified she had been kept shut up for several days, her hands and feet tied and without food or drink, he said. Cornici had entered the monastery just three months before, after visiting a friend who was a nun there, police said. As her coffin entered the church of the monastery Saturday no church bells were sounded while nuns cast distrustful glances at the strangers, including two AFP reporters, present at the ceremony. Claps of thunder from an approaching storm were sometimes the only sounds to break the silence. "This storm is proof that the will of God has been done," Daniel said.
"You see it?" said the priest, gesturing at the body, lying in an annexe and still showing the marks of the gag. One of the nuns, Sister Martha, added, "She can't be laid in the church because she was possesed."
Daniel has lived for the past four years in the isolated monastery located in the hills of one of the poorest regions of Romania, without running water or electricity. "Over there, in your world, the people must know that the devil exists. Personally I can find his work in the gestures and speech of possessed people, because man is often weak and lets himself be easily manipulated by the forces of evil," said the bearded young priest. "I don't understand why journalists are making such a fuss about this. Exorcism is a common practise in the heart of the Romanian Orthodox church and my methods are not at all unknown to other priests," he said.
A 34-year-old parishioner who had come to defend Daniel and gave her name as Dora, said Sister Irina " had to be punished, she had an argument with the Father during a Sunday mass and insulted him in front of the congregation."
Sociologist Alred Bulai said that corporal punishment was still commonly used in certain Romanian monasteries. "It's happening particularly in the isolated monasteries, where the superiors have difficulty understanding the current realities and adapting themselves to modern life," Bulai said. Since the fall of the communist regime in December 1989, the Orthodox Church, which represents 85 percent of Romania's 22 million inhabitants, is rated in many opinion polls as the most trusted institution in the country. Vitalie Danciu, the superior of a nearby monastery at Golia, called the crucifixion "inexcusable", but a spokesperson for the Orthodox patriarchate in Bucharest refused to condemn it. "I don't know what this young woman did," Bogdan Teleanu said. - Sapa-AFP
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER
The new Mick’s Media column from LA CityBeat has been around since last Thursday, but, like I said, it’s been hectic.
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2221&IssueNum=106
The secret word is Gluegun
KEITH MORRIS -- RIP
But the weekend grew hectic and the world again turned into one giant movie promotion with live ammunition, and the Martians land next week, and so the most important thing on my TV is Tom fucking Cruise being squirted with water. (Although this constant real-world exposure of Cruise is starting to reveal him as a three foot demented munchkin, just not tall enough for the blazing-eyed Scientologist Messiah to which he seems to aspire. Which brings us neatly around to religion, and the following from The Independent Online sent over by Mr MR, which kinda shows very clearly why humanity really has to get over this whole God thing, and quickly...
PRIEST UNREPENTENT AFTER CRUCIFYING OF NUN
By Laura Chiriac
Tanacu, Romania - A Romanian Orthodox priest who ordered the crucifixion of a young nun because she was "possessed by the devil" and now faces murder charges was unrepentant on Saturday as he celebrated a funeral mass for his alleged victim. "God has performed a miracle for her, finally Irina is delivered from evil," Father Daniel, 29, the superior of the Holy Trinity monastery in north-eastern Romania, said before celebrating a short mass "for the soul of the deceased", in the presence of 13 nuns who showed no visible emotion. He insisted that from the religious point of view, the crucifixion of Maricica Irina Cornici, 23, was "entirely justified", but admitted that he faced excommunication as well as prosecution, and was seeking a "good lawyer". Cornici was found dead on Wednesday, gagged and chained to a cross, after fellow nuns called an ambulance, according to police. Mihaela Straub, spokesperson for the police in the province of Vaslui, said Daniel and four other nuns had claimed Cornici was possessed and should be exorcised. Before being crucified she had been kept shut up for several days, her hands and feet tied and without food or drink, he said. Cornici had entered the monastery just three months before, after visiting a friend who was a nun there, police said. As her coffin entered the church of the monastery Saturday no church bells were sounded while nuns cast distrustful glances at the strangers, including two AFP reporters, present at the ceremony. Claps of thunder from an approaching storm were sometimes the only sounds to break the silence. "This storm is proof that the will of God has been done," Daniel said.
"You see it?" said the priest, gesturing at the body, lying in an annexe and still showing the marks of the gag. One of the nuns, Sister Martha, added, "She can't be laid in the church because she was possesed."
Daniel has lived for the past four years in the isolated monastery located in the hills of one of the poorest regions of Romania, without running water or electricity. "Over there, in your world, the people must know that the devil exists. Personally I can find his work in the gestures and speech of possessed people, because man is often weak and lets himself be easily manipulated by the forces of evil," said the bearded young priest. "I don't understand why journalists are making such a fuss about this. Exorcism is a common practise in the heart of the Romanian Orthodox church and my methods are not at all unknown to other priests," he said.
A 34-year-old parishioner who had come to defend Daniel and gave her name as Dora, said Sister Irina " had to be punished, she had an argument with the Father during a Sunday mass and insulted him in front of the congregation."
Sociologist Alred Bulai said that corporal punishment was still commonly used in certain Romanian monasteries. "It's happening particularly in the isolated monasteries, where the superiors have difficulty understanding the current realities and adapting themselves to modern life," Bulai said. Since the fall of the communist regime in December 1989, the Orthodox Church, which represents 85 percent of Romania's 22 million inhabitants, is rated in many opinion polls as the most trusted institution in the country. Vitalie Danciu, the superior of a nearby monastery at Golia, called the crucifixion "inexcusable", but a spokesperson for the Orthodox patriarchate in Bucharest refused to condemn it. "I don't know what this young woman did," Bogdan Teleanu said. - Sapa-AFP
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER
The new Mick’s Media column from LA CityBeat has been around since last Thursday, but, like I said, it’s been hectic.
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2221&IssueNum=106
The secret word is Gluegun
KEITH MORRIS -- RIP
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
WARNING, MICK FARREN, WARNING!
So there I am, it’s 8.40 and I’m watching back-to-back reruns of Law & Order, scratching my feet and reflecting what a thrill-packed 36 hours it’s been, what with MJ not guilty; Katie Holmes turning out to be a total idiot, 4-year-old Daudi Bamuwamye dying on the Mission: Space ride at Walt Disney World after pulling 2G, and Gov Arnold’s sneaky special election, (and how come the cops figure they have the right to confiscate protester’s banners?) and then – Pow! – the Emergency Broadcast System cuts in with a tsunami warning!
"Say what?" I cry. But the EBS warning is so fucked up, and the audio so garbled, it offers no information except that the warning is timed from 8.30 to 8.45, and it then cuts back to that cheese commercial with the black and white talking bovines before it’s even complete. I look at the cat and we both sit there. I know that a hundred foot wall of water bearing down on one is nothing to fuck with, but I’m at something of a loss. I had been wondering about a possible shake after hearing about the big weekend jolt in Chile. I believe these thing are all highly interconnected, but (like the Spanish Inquisition) no one expects a tsunani. Do I call a cab and drive the pair of us to Mulholland? The cat suggests I switch channels. Channel 9 is running news, but the weather woman with the large breasts seems to know nothing about any imminent inundation.
By 9.05, I’m starting to wonder if I imagined the whole thing, and it isn’t until the 11.00 news that I learn the tsunami warning was indeed issued, as a safety measure after a seven point something off the coast up by the CA/OR stateline. Full marks for the seismic alert, but the EBS really doesn’t fucking work, despite all those irritating tests. Americans have this fetish for being kept safe from everything known to man, but the warning was nothing short of a cluster fuck tailored to create either panic or disbelief, and if the wall of water had materialized through the French windows the cat and I would have been fucked to Bakersfield. Being drowned and turned to flotsam is not what I call homeland security.
CRYPTIQUE – Failure is no success at all.
The secret word is Tectonic
So there I am, it’s 8.40 and I’m watching back-to-back reruns of Law & Order, scratching my feet and reflecting what a thrill-packed 36 hours it’s been, what with MJ not guilty; Katie Holmes turning out to be a total idiot, 4-year-old Daudi Bamuwamye dying on the Mission: Space ride at Walt Disney World after pulling 2G, and Gov Arnold’s sneaky special election, (and how come the cops figure they have the right to confiscate protester’s banners?) and then – Pow! – the Emergency Broadcast System cuts in with a tsunami warning!
"Say what?" I cry. But the EBS warning is so fucked up, and the audio so garbled, it offers no information except that the warning is timed from 8.30 to 8.45, and it then cuts back to that cheese commercial with the black and white talking bovines before it’s even complete. I look at the cat and we both sit there. I know that a hundred foot wall of water bearing down on one is nothing to fuck with, but I’m at something of a loss. I had been wondering about a possible shake after hearing about the big weekend jolt in Chile. I believe these thing are all highly interconnected, but (like the Spanish Inquisition) no one expects a tsunani. Do I call a cab and drive the pair of us to Mulholland? The cat suggests I switch channels. Channel 9 is running news, but the weather woman with the large breasts seems to know nothing about any imminent inundation.
By 9.05, I’m starting to wonder if I imagined the whole thing, and it isn’t until the 11.00 news that I learn the tsunami warning was indeed issued, as a safety measure after a seven point something off the coast up by the CA/OR stateline. Full marks for the seismic alert, but the EBS really doesn’t fucking work, despite all those irritating tests. Americans have this fetish for being kept safe from everything known to man, but the warning was nothing short of a cluster fuck tailored to create either panic or disbelief, and if the wall of water had materialized through the French windows the cat and I would have been fucked to Bakersfield. Being drowned and turned to flotsam is not what I call homeland security.
CRYPTIQUE – Failure is no success at all.
The secret word is Tectonic
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
WHAT ME WORRY?
Michael Jackson walks, and do I worry? Actually I’m kinda glad. I spent too much of my youth listening for the ominous bellow "get the weirdo", so I could take to my heels to avoid a beating from the more conventional youth of my village. (Although much of my time, I had a dog with me large enough to deter the neighborhood Nazis.) Certainly the joy of persecuting the freak seemed to ooze from prosecutor Tom Sneddon each time he showed up on my TV, so, all in all, I’m kinda relieved that such sentiments didn’t apparently factor into the verdict.
Over the weekend I read the NY Times and once again realized it’s a tad scarey that, in all the mainstream media, one has to wait for Frank Rich to write what ought to be fundamentally obvious, viz, viz and viz... (on Deep Throat)
"The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before" was how the former Nixon speech writer William Safire put it on this page almost nine months ago. The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon's in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them to find what Carl Bernstein calls "the best obtainable version of the truth."
"The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon.
"Though Nixon aspired to punish public broadcasting by cutting its funding, he never imagined that his apparatchiks could seize the top executive positions at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Nor did he come up with the brilliant ideas of putting journalists covertly on the administration payroll and of hiring an outside P.R. firm (Ketchum) to codify an enemies list by ranking news organizations and individual reporters on the basis of how favorably they cover a specific administration policy (No Child Left Behind). President Bush has even succeeded in emasculating the post-Watergate reform that was supposed to help curb Nixonian secrecy, the Presidential Records Act of 1978."
For the whole story...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/opinion/12rich.html?th&emc=th
My eye was also drawn to the following...
"And in Tennessee, Dr. Daniel D. Roberts gave up his ordinary practice not long ago to handle a growing workload at 10 jails across the state, nearly a third of whose prisoners, he estimates, have ravaged teeth owing to methamphetamine."
Which kinda means that one in three people doing time in Tennessee are speedfreaks. A sobering thought and a noisy jailhouse.
The secret word is Lemmy
Michael Jackson walks, and do I worry? Actually I’m kinda glad. I spent too much of my youth listening for the ominous bellow "get the weirdo", so I could take to my heels to avoid a beating from the more conventional youth of my village. (Although much of my time, I had a dog with me large enough to deter the neighborhood Nazis.) Certainly the joy of persecuting the freak seemed to ooze from prosecutor Tom Sneddon each time he showed up on my TV, so, all in all, I’m kinda relieved that such sentiments didn’t apparently factor into the verdict.
Over the weekend I read the NY Times and once again realized it’s a tad scarey that, in all the mainstream media, one has to wait for Frank Rich to write what ought to be fundamentally obvious, viz, viz and viz... (on Deep Throat)
"The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before" was how the former Nixon speech writer William Safire put it on this page almost nine months ago. The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon's in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them to find what Carl Bernstein calls "the best obtainable version of the truth."
"The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon.
"Though Nixon aspired to punish public broadcasting by cutting its funding, he never imagined that his apparatchiks could seize the top executive positions at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Nor did he come up with the brilliant ideas of putting journalists covertly on the administration payroll and of hiring an outside P.R. firm (Ketchum) to codify an enemies list by ranking news organizations and individual reporters on the basis of how favorably they cover a specific administration policy (No Child Left Behind). President Bush has even succeeded in emasculating the post-Watergate reform that was supposed to help curb Nixonian secrecy, the Presidential Records Act of 1978."
For the whole story...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/opinion/12rich.html?th&emc=th
My eye was also drawn to the following...
"And in Tennessee, Dr. Daniel D. Roberts gave up his ordinary practice not long ago to handle a growing workload at 10 jails across the state, nearly a third of whose prisoners, he estimates, have ravaged teeth owing to methamphetamine."
Which kinda means that one in three people doing time in Tennessee are speedfreaks. A sobering thought and a noisy jailhouse.
The secret word is Lemmy
Sunday, June 12, 2005
ONE CANNOT HELP BUT THINKING
Smoking marijuana rather than ranting about it, one I cannot help thinking. I just watched Kevin Spacey in Beyond The Sea, the Bobby Darin story, and enjoyed it immensely, especially as Spacey was having since a good time wearing the tuxedos and doing his own singing, but there were moments when, in his Bobby Darin makeup, Spacey’s face morphed into that of an older Lee Harvey Oswald, which was cause for pause – especially as I may have the only one seeing it.. It does, however, give me a fine segue into some thoughts about what exactly our President is up to.
I’m a reasonably well known paranoid in paranoid circles, – see previous paragraph – and all my antennae are up and quivering. I seriously don’t like all the promotion of Patriot Act II, that’s going on, and how little is being said about how it one dangerous movie to play. This is the sucker with all the Gestapo clauses, and everyone should be very afraid of it because, once the Feds get these powers, it’s a hell of thing to pry them back again, and everyone, from Act Up to the Aryan Nation needs to be nervous of zealous overloaded, armed-for-bear law enforcement. Have the fundamentalists forgotten Waco so quickly? While Bush is out selling the deal on TV, we get all of these weird-ass news reports about rounding up Al Qeada "sleeper cells"and "sympathizers", plus "what-if" horror scenarios about terrorists poisoning school dinners (although I thought McDonalds had that well in hand), and a whole bunch of other demented War On Terror shit, that sounds a fuck of lot like round-up-the-usual Ay-rabs, and maybe we’ll have ourselves a lot of little Reichstags and a lot of little Rosenbergs while Bush attempts to once again ride his approval ratings from the depth of the crapper on amorphous fear.
And, on the subject of the antics of the current administration, kaymo sends us the following...
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believe you can do these things. Among them are... a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." – President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954
He includes a provenance for when Ann Coulter calls it a phoney...
Citation for those who believe that this quote is too perfect to be true: Eisenhower, Dwight D. Personal and confidential To Edgar Newton Eisenhower, 8 November 1954. In The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, ed. L. Galambos and D. van Ee, doc. 1147. World Wide Web facsimile by The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission of the print edition; Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press,1996
http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/first-term/documents/1
He also sends an H.P. Lovecraft link for those who like that sort of thing.
http://www.hplovecraft.com/
The secret word is Arkham
Smoking marijuana rather than ranting about it, one I cannot help thinking. I just watched Kevin Spacey in Beyond The Sea, the Bobby Darin story, and enjoyed it immensely, especially as Spacey was having since a good time wearing the tuxedos and doing his own singing, but there were moments when, in his Bobby Darin makeup, Spacey’s face morphed into that of an older Lee Harvey Oswald, which was cause for pause – especially as I may have the only one seeing it.. It does, however, give me a fine segue into some thoughts about what exactly our President is up to.
I’m a reasonably well known paranoid in paranoid circles, – see previous paragraph – and all my antennae are up and quivering. I seriously don’t like all the promotion of Patriot Act II, that’s going on, and how little is being said about how it one dangerous movie to play. This is the sucker with all the Gestapo clauses, and everyone should be very afraid of it because, once the Feds get these powers, it’s a hell of thing to pry them back again, and everyone, from Act Up to the Aryan Nation needs to be nervous of zealous overloaded, armed-for-bear law enforcement. Have the fundamentalists forgotten Waco so quickly? While Bush is out selling the deal on TV, we get all of these weird-ass news reports about rounding up Al Qeada "sleeper cells"and "sympathizers", plus "what-if" horror scenarios about terrorists poisoning school dinners (although I thought McDonalds had that well in hand), and a whole bunch of other demented War On Terror shit, that sounds a fuck of lot like round-up-the-usual Ay-rabs, and maybe we’ll have ourselves a lot of little Reichstags and a lot of little Rosenbergs while Bush attempts to once again ride his approval ratings from the depth of the crapper on amorphous fear.
And, on the subject of the antics of the current administration, kaymo sends us the following...
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believe you can do these things. Among them are... a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." – President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954
He includes a provenance for when Ann Coulter calls it a phoney...
Citation for those who believe that this quote is too perfect to be true: Eisenhower, Dwight D. Personal and confidential To Edgar Newton Eisenhower, 8 November 1954. In The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, ed. L. Galambos and D. van Ee, doc. 1147. World Wide Web facsimile by The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission of the print edition; Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press,1996
http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/first-term/documents/1
He also sends an H.P. Lovecraft link for those who like that sort of thing.
http://www.hplovecraft.com/
The secret word is Arkham
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
SOME OPTIMISM FROM MUNZ (HA-HA)
I received the following from Munz regarding yesterday’s post...
Mick: Obviously I share your half-century frustration with the flat-earth war on (some) drugs. I once wrote of the drug warriors that they are "wind-up monkeys who continue to slap the cymbals of stupidity." But yesterday’s decision is not as definitive as it seems. Dig below from Dale Gieringer of California NORML. The Supremes, while denying Raich/Monson's commerce clause argument (which was a shaky legal argument to begin with), also validated medical marijuana. Justice Stevens, who wrote the majority opinion, says a medical necessity defense is 'strong'. People need to read this. It's not the end of the world. In fact, it gives all legit patients who use med-mar a considerable legal leg-up. Unfortunately, in the interim, the 6-3 naysay may embolden those in local and state law enforcement who abhor med-mar laws. Expect more raids and arrests. Raich/Monson should have pursued a medical necessity defense which is based on English common law. The example often given is "you can steal a boat to save a drowning man." Best, Munz (One of your hard-drinking, cab-riding LA friends)
In its majority opinion against Raich and Monson (p. 6), the Supreme Court issued a significant word of warning about the wisdom of current federal laws: The case is made difficult by respondents' strong arguments that hey will suffer irreparable harm because, despite a congressional finding to the contrary, marijuana does have valid therapeutic purposes. The question before us, however, is not whether it is wise to enforce the statute in these circumstances; rather, it is whether Congress' power to regulate interstate markets for medicinal substances encompasses the portions of those markets that are supplied with drugs produced and consumed locally." The DEA and federal law enforcement officials would be well advised to heed this caution before rushing to enforce their bankrupt federal law.
For full text of the Supreme Court decision, see
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/04slipopinion.html
ALSO More on another medmar case from Wired... http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,67780,00.html
And an NY Times editorial
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/opinion/08wed2.html?th&emc=th
CRYPTIQUE – Baby got barcode
The secret word is Myoclonic
I received the following from Munz regarding yesterday’s post...
Mick: Obviously I share your half-century frustration with the flat-earth war on (some) drugs. I once wrote of the drug warriors that they are "wind-up monkeys who continue to slap the cymbals of stupidity." But yesterday’s decision is not as definitive as it seems. Dig below from Dale Gieringer of California NORML. The Supremes, while denying Raich/Monson's commerce clause argument (which was a shaky legal argument to begin with), also validated medical marijuana. Justice Stevens, who wrote the majority opinion, says a medical necessity defense is 'strong'. People need to read this. It's not the end of the world. In fact, it gives all legit patients who use med-mar a considerable legal leg-up. Unfortunately, in the interim, the 6-3 naysay may embolden those in local and state law enforcement who abhor med-mar laws. Expect more raids and arrests. Raich/Monson should have pursued a medical necessity defense which is based on English common law. The example often given is "you can steal a boat to save a drowning man." Best, Munz (One of your hard-drinking, cab-riding LA friends)
In its majority opinion against Raich and Monson (p. 6), the Supreme Court issued a significant word of warning about the wisdom of current federal laws: The case is made difficult by respondents' strong arguments that hey will suffer irreparable harm because, despite a congressional finding to the contrary, marijuana does have valid therapeutic purposes. The question before us, however, is not whether it is wise to enforce the statute in these circumstances; rather, it is whether Congress' power to regulate interstate markets for medicinal substances encompasses the portions of those markets that are supplied with drugs produced and consumed locally." The DEA and federal law enforcement officials would be well advised to heed this caution before rushing to enforce their bankrupt federal law.
For full text of the Supreme Court decision, see
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/04slipopinion.html
ALSO More on another medmar case from Wired... http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,67780,00.html
And an NY Times editorial
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/opinion/08wed2.html?th&emc=th
CRYPTIQUE – Baby got barcode
The secret word is Myoclonic
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, BUT I’VE HAD MORE THAN ENOUGH OF THIS CRAP
Yesterday the Supreme Court handed the Federal Government and the DEA overlord powers to nationally control and continue to criminalize all use of marijuana in the USA, despite the fact that ten states have voted in legislation legalizing to some extent the medicinal use of the drug.
An AP report follows that comes courtesy of Mr MR.
Federal authorities may prosecute sick people who smoke pot on doctors' orders, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, concluding that state medical marijuana laws don't protect users from a federal ban on the drug. The decision is a stinging defeat for marijuana advocates who had successfully pushed 10 states to allow the drug's use to treat various illnesses. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing the 6-3 decision, said that Congress could change the law to allow medical use of marijuana. The closely watched case was an appeal by the Bush administration in a case that it lost in late 2003. At issue was whether the prosecution of medical marijuana users under the federal Controlled Substances Act was constitutional. Under the Constitution, Congress may pass laws regulating a state's economic activity so long as it involves "interstate commerce" that crosses state borders. The California marijuana in question was homegrown, distributed to patients without charge and without crossing state lines. Stevens said there are other legal options for patients, "but perhaps even more important than these legal avenues is the democratic process, in which the voices of voters allied with these respondents may one day be heard in the halls of Congress." California's medical marijuana law, passed by voters in 1996, allows people to grow, smoke or obtain marijuana for medical needs with a doctor's recommendation. Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington state have laws similar to California. In those states, doctors generally can give written or oral recommendations on marijuana to patients with cancer, HIV and other serious illnesses. In a dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said that states should be allowed to set their own rules. "The states' core police powers have always included authority to define criminal law and to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens," said O'Connor, who was joined by other states' rights advocates. The legal question presented a dilemma for the court's conservatives, who have pushed to broaden states' rights in recent years, invalidating federal laws dealing with gun possession near schools and violence against women on the grounds the activity was too local to justify federal intrusion. O'Connor said she would have opposed California's medical marijuana law if she was a voter or a legislator. But she said the court was overreaching to endorse "making it a federal crime to grow small amounts of marijuana in one's own home for one's own medicinal use." The case concerned two seriously ill California women, Angel Raich and Diane Monson. The two had sued then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, asking for a court order letting them smoke, grow or obtain marijuana without fear of arrest, home raids or other intrusion by federal authorities.
The War on Drugs has been raging for all my quite extended lifetime, and, in a nutshell, I am heartily fucking sick of the whole feeble-minded fiasco. Billions have spent, and billions upon billions more channeled into global crime syndicates and cartels; hundreds of thousands (if not millions) have been incarcerated, lives have been ruined, a massively corrupt drug enforcement industry has been created, and absolutely nothing positive has been achieved in seventy-some years. Recreational drugs are readily available just about any place, and the current system does nothing to provide regulation or protection where it is needed – as in protecting the young. I personally feel that kids should probably not be getting fucked up on anything until they can read, write, handle basic arithmetic, and have a nodding acquaintance with art, science, history, geography, and literature. The current regulation of alcohol seems to work reasonably well. I don’t want to see any nine year-olds sprawled on my doorstep sucking on a gin bottle, but that’s no reason why I should be prevented from having a martini or a shot of Jack after a hard day. I even advise my hard drinking LA friends to take a cab to the bar. I could go disgustedly on about this for pages, but I won’t. I satisfy myself with just a couple of points.
1) This latest Supreme Court idiocy pushes deep into the vexed question of states rights. For the overseas readers, the question of Fed v local control is a core issue in the USA. The Civil War was fought as much over states right as its over freeing the slaves. (That’s what they tell you in the South, at least.) In this instance, it imposes a uniform legal conformity on an increasing plural culture.
2) The reasons for marijuana being illegal at all are becoming more and more shakily Dadaist with the passage of time. We have gone from Harry Anslinger’s poisonous 1930's disinformation that dope was The Weed of Satan and led to rape, murder, madness, and jazz, to the "gateway drug" theory of the 1960s that reefer was fairly benign in itself but led directly to the horrors of heroin. When it was statistically proved that real gateway drug was actually beer, the story switched to "this ain’t your mom’s pot" – the 1990's contention that modern dope was genetically tailored to be so much more powerful that it had to remain outlawed. Now it seems that those in authority don’t even bother. After the Supreme Court decision, Drug Czar John Walters appeared on TV welcoming the ruling and claiming that it would stop the insidious movement for full legalization, and "save lives." No part of the media questioned what lives might be saved when we still await a single authenticated marijuana death, and it would seem that Waters requires dope to remain illegal simply because he says so. I guess I could get violently angry, but I think I’ll just fire up a blunt.
Here’s a bit more background...
http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/pressroom/pressrelease/pr050405.cfm
http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/21922/
LINK
Our pal hipspinster blogs about treason.
http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/
The secret word is High
Yesterday the Supreme Court handed the Federal Government and the DEA overlord powers to nationally control and continue to criminalize all use of marijuana in the USA, despite the fact that ten states have voted in legislation legalizing to some extent the medicinal use of the drug.
An AP report follows that comes courtesy of Mr MR.
Federal authorities may prosecute sick people who smoke pot on doctors' orders, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, concluding that state medical marijuana laws don't protect users from a federal ban on the drug. The decision is a stinging defeat for marijuana advocates who had successfully pushed 10 states to allow the drug's use to treat various illnesses. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing the 6-3 decision, said that Congress could change the law to allow medical use of marijuana. The closely watched case was an appeal by the Bush administration in a case that it lost in late 2003. At issue was whether the prosecution of medical marijuana users under the federal Controlled Substances Act was constitutional. Under the Constitution, Congress may pass laws regulating a state's economic activity so long as it involves "interstate commerce" that crosses state borders. The California marijuana in question was homegrown, distributed to patients without charge and without crossing state lines. Stevens said there are other legal options for patients, "but perhaps even more important than these legal avenues is the democratic process, in which the voices of voters allied with these respondents may one day be heard in the halls of Congress." California's medical marijuana law, passed by voters in 1996, allows people to grow, smoke or obtain marijuana for medical needs with a doctor's recommendation. Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington state have laws similar to California. In those states, doctors generally can give written or oral recommendations on marijuana to patients with cancer, HIV and other serious illnesses. In a dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said that states should be allowed to set their own rules. "The states' core police powers have always included authority to define criminal law and to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens," said O'Connor, who was joined by other states' rights advocates. The legal question presented a dilemma for the court's conservatives, who have pushed to broaden states' rights in recent years, invalidating federal laws dealing with gun possession near schools and violence against women on the grounds the activity was too local to justify federal intrusion. O'Connor said she would have opposed California's medical marijuana law if she was a voter or a legislator. But she said the court was overreaching to endorse "making it a federal crime to grow small amounts of marijuana in one's own home for one's own medicinal use." The case concerned two seriously ill California women, Angel Raich and Diane Monson. The two had sued then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, asking for a court order letting them smoke, grow or obtain marijuana without fear of arrest, home raids or other intrusion by federal authorities.
The War on Drugs has been raging for all my quite extended lifetime, and, in a nutshell, I am heartily fucking sick of the whole feeble-minded fiasco. Billions have spent, and billions upon billions more channeled into global crime syndicates and cartels; hundreds of thousands (if not millions) have been incarcerated, lives have been ruined, a massively corrupt drug enforcement industry has been created, and absolutely nothing positive has been achieved in seventy-some years. Recreational drugs are readily available just about any place, and the current system does nothing to provide regulation or protection where it is needed – as in protecting the young. I personally feel that kids should probably not be getting fucked up on anything until they can read, write, handle basic arithmetic, and have a nodding acquaintance with art, science, history, geography, and literature. The current regulation of alcohol seems to work reasonably well. I don’t want to see any nine year-olds sprawled on my doorstep sucking on a gin bottle, but that’s no reason why I should be prevented from having a martini or a shot of Jack after a hard day. I even advise my hard drinking LA friends to take a cab to the bar. I could go disgustedly on about this for pages, but I won’t. I satisfy myself with just a couple of points.
1) This latest Supreme Court idiocy pushes deep into the vexed question of states rights. For the overseas readers, the question of Fed v local control is a core issue in the USA. The Civil War was fought as much over states right as its over freeing the slaves. (That’s what they tell you in the South, at least.) In this instance, it imposes a uniform legal conformity on an increasing plural culture.
2) The reasons for marijuana being illegal at all are becoming more and more shakily Dadaist with the passage of time. We have gone from Harry Anslinger’s poisonous 1930's disinformation that dope was The Weed of Satan and led to rape, murder, madness, and jazz, to the "gateway drug" theory of the 1960s that reefer was fairly benign in itself but led directly to the horrors of heroin. When it was statistically proved that real gateway drug was actually beer, the story switched to "this ain’t your mom’s pot" – the 1990's contention that modern dope was genetically tailored to be so much more powerful that it had to remain outlawed. Now it seems that those in authority don’t even bother. After the Supreme Court decision, Drug Czar John Walters appeared on TV welcoming the ruling and claiming that it would stop the insidious movement for full legalization, and "save lives." No part of the media questioned what lives might be saved when we still await a single authenticated marijuana death, and it would seem that Waters requires dope to remain illegal simply because he says so. I guess I could get violently angry, but I think I’ll just fire up a blunt.
Here’s a bit more background...
http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/pressroom/pressrelease/pr050405.cfm
http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/21922/
LINK
Our pal hipspinster blogs about treason.
http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/
The secret word is High
Monday, June 06, 2005
A SUITABLE CASE FOR TREATMENT
After a plate of Chinese hors d’oeuvres, and inhaling too many paint fumes (don’t ask), I found myself in the grip of a nightmare in which all the humans had vanished, and I was desperately freeing all of the incarcerated, and, in some cases, mutilated animals from confinement in cages, and boxes, and a lot of railroad cars. They were mainly horses and elephants, and the first part of the first phase of the dream was very unpleasant, frantic, and bloody, but later, up on the roof, I was surrounded by a mighty population of the inevitable cats who all wanted to be fed, but I was able to handle that because I had an almost unlimited supply of cat food, brands that my own cat Newton refuses to eat, and all the cats liked and thanked me. Then I woke up, and had to get up and smoke a cigarette, drink a glass of Alker Seltzer, and ask myself what the fuck that was all about.
Later I watched a segment on 60 Minutes about these assholes in Wyoming who want to kill the grizzly bears because they believe they threaten their rural real-estate, neglecting to realize that they built their ranch-style retreats in the middle of bear country, and they’re whining that the bears will eat their wretched children, although it’s a matter of record that grizzlies have not killed a single human in Wyoming in the last hundred years.
I am very tired of belonging to this species.
The secret word is Disgusted
QUOTES
"Between the sensory and intellectual world, sages always have experienced an intermediate realm, one akin to what we call the imaginings of poets. If you are a religious believer, whether normative or heterodox, this middle world is experienced as the presence of the divine in our everyday world. If you are more skeptical, such presence is primarily aesthetic or perhaps a kind of perspectivism." - Harold Bloom, Omens of the Millennium
"There may be some kind of phenomenon - maybe something as materialistic as fluctuations in the earth's gravitational and magnetic fields, as was suggested by Persinger, a behavioral scientist from Canada, who suggested that energy fluctuations cause wave changes which cause hallucinatory or psychedelic states."-Robert Anton Wilson
CRYPTIQUE – I may be planning something.
After a plate of Chinese hors d’oeuvres, and inhaling too many paint fumes (don’t ask), I found myself in the grip of a nightmare in which all the humans had vanished, and I was desperately freeing all of the incarcerated, and, in some cases, mutilated animals from confinement in cages, and boxes, and a lot of railroad cars. They were mainly horses and elephants, and the first part of the first phase of the dream was very unpleasant, frantic, and bloody, but later, up on the roof, I was surrounded by a mighty population of the inevitable cats who all wanted to be fed, but I was able to handle that because I had an almost unlimited supply of cat food, brands that my own cat Newton refuses to eat, and all the cats liked and thanked me. Then I woke up, and had to get up and smoke a cigarette, drink a glass of Alker Seltzer, and ask myself what the fuck that was all about.
Later I watched a segment on 60 Minutes about these assholes in Wyoming who want to kill the grizzly bears because they believe they threaten their rural real-estate, neglecting to realize that they built their ranch-style retreats in the middle of bear country, and they’re whining that the bears will eat their wretched children, although it’s a matter of record that grizzlies have not killed a single human in Wyoming in the last hundred years.
I am very tired of belonging to this species.
The secret word is Disgusted
QUOTES
"Between the sensory and intellectual world, sages always have experienced an intermediate realm, one akin to what we call the imaginings of poets. If you are a religious believer, whether normative or heterodox, this middle world is experienced as the presence of the divine in our everyday world. If you are more skeptical, such presence is primarily aesthetic or perhaps a kind of perspectivism." - Harold Bloom, Omens of the Millennium
"There may be some kind of phenomenon - maybe something as materialistic as fluctuations in the earth's gravitational and magnetic fields, as was suggested by Persinger, a behavioral scientist from Canada, who suggested that energy fluctuations cause wave changes which cause hallucinatory or psychedelic states."-Robert Anton Wilson
CRYPTIQUE – I may be planning something.
Friday, June 03, 2005
Thursday, June 02, 2005
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
COMMUNICATIONS
From some girl...
it's "felt." mark felt. not feld. so we would not confuse the two, i don't think. but, wow. one mystery of our times, solved. yet still i can't help feeling it's just another distraction. i was just thinking about your comments board and wondering if it will ever come back. i like to think of it as the blogworld equivalent of the TARDIS -- a bit unpredictable in where it lands.
And semi-enlightenment from Funtopia Rich
I've just been into the template for Doc40 to check the comments code and checked it against the codegenerated for this account by the comments board provider and it all looks fine. I'm baffled. Maybeit's as you say, it's doing it's "wandering feline" routine again and will reappear as mysteriously as it disappeared. Failing that I'll e-mail the "support" section on Enetation!
From some girl...
it's "felt." mark felt. not feld. so we would not confuse the two, i don't think. but, wow. one mystery of our times, solved. yet still i can't help feeling it's just another distraction. i was just thinking about your comments board and wondering if it will ever come back. i like to think of it as the blogworld equivalent of the TARDIS -- a bit unpredictable in where it lands.
And semi-enlightenment from Funtopia Rich
I've just been into the template for Doc40 to check the comments code and checked it against the codegenerated for this account by the comments board provider and it all looks fine. I'm baffled. Maybeit's as you say, it's doing it's "wandering feline" routine again and will reappear as mysteriously as it disappeared. Failing that I'll e-mail the "support" section on Enetation!
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
HA!
So Deep Throat finally came out of the closet and into Vanity Fair, revealing himself to be Mark Feld (not to be confused with the real name of Marc Bolan) who was second banana at the FBI at the time of Watergate. And on my TV the same old weasels are weaseling and blaming Nixon’s downfall on the media. Don’t these fucking Republicans ever learn the phrase "it’s a fair cop, copper"?
But can I now hope that there will be a deathbed confession from one of the shooters from the Dealey Plaza Triangulation? (And if that makes no sense, you are either very sheltered or very young.)
FROM OUT OF A CLEAR SKY
The following fell on me out of a clear cyber-sky...
THE PROMISED DAY HAS COME
Friends and fellow-heirs of the Kingdom of Bahá'u'lláh:
A tempest, unprecedented in its violence, unpredictable in its course, catastrophic in its immediate effects, unimaginably glorious in its ultimate consequences, is at present sweeping the face of the earth. Its driving power is remorselessly gaining in range and momentum. Its cleansing force, however much undetected, is increasing with every passing day. Humanity, gripped in the clutches of its devastating power, is smitten by the evidences of its resistless fury. It can neither perceive its origin, nor probe its significance, nor discern its outcome. Bewildered, agonized and helpless, it watches this great and mighty wind of God invading the remotest and fairest regions of the earth, rocking its foundations, deranging its equilibrium, sundering its nations, disrupting the homes of its peoples, wasting its cities, driving into exile its kings, pulling down its bulwarks, uprooting its institutions, dimming its light, and harrowing up the souls of its inhabitants.
For more...
http://darrenhiebert.com/eBahai/html/pdc.html
Although post secret is probably a lot more fun...
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/
WHILE I WAS AWAY
The big old comments board vanished, and, in answer to a number of concerned emails, I did not take it down, and I have no idea where it went, and neither does Rich. It has, of course, mysteriously vanished before, and then just a mysteriously returned like some wandering street feline, but, if it doesn’t, I know it will be missed, and the annoying little comments links at the bottom of each post are not the same thing. I’m wondering if it is possible to rig a parallel blog that is open to all. Is there anyone out there with the skill and expertise to create the Doc40 Annex?
The email is byron4d@msn.com
The secret word is Assist
CRYPTIQUE – His brain is squirming like a toad.
So Deep Throat finally came out of the closet and into Vanity Fair, revealing himself to be Mark Feld (not to be confused with the real name of Marc Bolan) who was second banana at the FBI at the time of Watergate. And on my TV the same old weasels are weaseling and blaming Nixon’s downfall on the media. Don’t these fucking Republicans ever learn the phrase "it’s a fair cop, copper"?
But can I now hope that there will be a deathbed confession from one of the shooters from the Dealey Plaza Triangulation? (And if that makes no sense, you are either very sheltered or very young.)
FROM OUT OF A CLEAR SKY
The following fell on me out of a clear cyber-sky...
THE PROMISED DAY HAS COME
Friends and fellow-heirs of the Kingdom of Bahá'u'lláh:
A tempest, unprecedented in its violence, unpredictable in its course, catastrophic in its immediate effects, unimaginably glorious in its ultimate consequences, is at present sweeping the face of the earth. Its driving power is remorselessly gaining in range and momentum. Its cleansing force, however much undetected, is increasing with every passing day. Humanity, gripped in the clutches of its devastating power, is smitten by the evidences of its resistless fury. It can neither perceive its origin, nor probe its significance, nor discern its outcome. Bewildered, agonized and helpless, it watches this great and mighty wind of God invading the remotest and fairest regions of the earth, rocking its foundations, deranging its equilibrium, sundering its nations, disrupting the homes of its peoples, wasting its cities, driving into exile its kings, pulling down its bulwarks, uprooting its institutions, dimming its light, and harrowing up the souls of its inhabitants.
For more...
http://darrenhiebert.com/eBahai/html/pdc.html
Although post secret is probably a lot more fun...
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/
WHILE I WAS AWAY
The big old comments board vanished, and, in answer to a number of concerned emails, I did not take it down, and I have no idea where it went, and neither does Rich. It has, of course, mysteriously vanished before, and then just a mysteriously returned like some wandering street feline, but, if it doesn’t, I know it will be missed, and the annoying little comments links at the bottom of each post are not the same thing. I’m wondering if it is possible to rig a parallel blog that is open to all. Is there anyone out there with the skill and expertise to create the Doc40 Annex?
The email is byron4d@msn.com
The secret word is Assist
CRYPTIQUE – His brain is squirming like a toad.
Sunday, May 29, 2005
D-BRANE THE HARD WAY
To explain the process of protracted fiction to anyone who has never so engaged is not easy, and I’ve always considered it infinitely preferable to simply offer the result and make no comment on how it came to be, but, since I’ve been missing from the blogworld for a few weeks, I felt a brief justification might be in order. To deliberately set one’s brain loose in a whole imaginary and completely fantastic construct for long hours of each day can has to be, with very little qualification, an exercise in controlled insanity that is not a hundred miles from those individuals who put on the tinfoil hats to prevent the CIA or the aliens from reading their thoughts. Except the author eschews the tinfoil. No hat and no exit, except abject failure of the most extreme and terminal kind. He walks his mind naked like a dog, and often with only a very flimsy leash, at the mercy of a legion of multiple personalities, and an entire cast of characters, operating in a mental state that might, I guess, be called, for want of a better word, polyphrenia. (As in schizophrenia, only with a whole lot more options.) The only real control is in how well you have pre-planned the landscape of imagination, and the environment of fantasy, because all protect must be installed in advance. Before one lets slip Superman it is good to have invented kryptonite, so to speak. The only lifeline to the real world is the process itself, the physical fingers on the noisy keys, punch-drunk with illusion of arthritis, the desperate vocabulary, and the highwire deception of the crafted sentence. One becomes one’s own pimp as, hour after hour, one turns phrases as if they were tricks, to the galley slave drummer of internal quality-control...
"Make it better!"
"Make it better!"
At 120,000 words, the novel Conflagration is long by the popular standards of every one except maybe Stephen King, and in the last 20,000 the author’s mind snaps entirely. Unless it is an exceedingly dull story, the characters, by then, in a high state of excitation with epic psycho-sexual hell breaking out around them. As in old fashioned amphetamine psychosis, time and sleep are the first to go, working against the dawn, leaf-blowers, waste-management, the annexation of crows, the demands of felines, and fear that the marijuana may run out. No one understands you. In the moments that you flag and fall in front the comforting formalism of TV Law & Order re-runs is about all you can handle. Even The Simpsons are too bright and random. One even begins to speak in the third persons and as if the present was already past.
The final collapse is best not described at all. Mercifully the memory is highly selective about both pain and dementia, but the decompression has to be handled with care – like a diver with the bends – and not mutilated or spindled because those tiny, champagne nitro-bubbles of vacant creativity will appear in the bloodstream of the aftermath and wreak havoc in what is left of the brain.
But I survive, all the way to the terrible post-depression when, as usual, I wonder – like the old actor – if I will ever work again. But it the same time, I ravenously need write on regardless.
MARK BOYLE -- RIP
JEFF NUTALL -- RIP
LINK
A awesome piece of animation from Russia that says something about mortality...
http://fcmx.net/vec/v.php?i=003702
CRYPTIQUE – Fill in the next line yourself.
The secret word is Tangled.
To explain the process of protracted fiction to anyone who has never so engaged is not easy, and I’ve always considered it infinitely preferable to simply offer the result and make no comment on how it came to be, but, since I’ve been missing from the blogworld for a few weeks, I felt a brief justification might be in order. To deliberately set one’s brain loose in a whole imaginary and completely fantastic construct for long hours of each day can has to be, with very little qualification, an exercise in controlled insanity that is not a hundred miles from those individuals who put on the tinfoil hats to prevent the CIA or the aliens from reading their thoughts. Except the author eschews the tinfoil. No hat and no exit, except abject failure of the most extreme and terminal kind. He walks his mind naked like a dog, and often with only a very flimsy leash, at the mercy of a legion of multiple personalities, and an entire cast of characters, operating in a mental state that might, I guess, be called, for want of a better word, polyphrenia. (As in schizophrenia, only with a whole lot more options.) The only real control is in how well you have pre-planned the landscape of imagination, and the environment of fantasy, because all protect must be installed in advance. Before one lets slip Superman it is good to have invented kryptonite, so to speak. The only lifeline to the real world is the process itself, the physical fingers on the noisy keys, punch-drunk with illusion of arthritis, the desperate vocabulary, and the highwire deception of the crafted sentence. One becomes one’s own pimp as, hour after hour, one turns phrases as if they were tricks, to the galley slave drummer of internal quality-control...
"Make it better!"
"Make it better!"
At 120,000 words, the novel Conflagration is long by the popular standards of every one except maybe Stephen King, and in the last 20,000 the author’s mind snaps entirely. Unless it is an exceedingly dull story, the characters, by then, in a high state of excitation with epic psycho-sexual hell breaking out around them. As in old fashioned amphetamine psychosis, time and sleep are the first to go, working against the dawn, leaf-blowers, waste-management, the annexation of crows, the demands of felines, and fear that the marijuana may run out. No one understands you. In the moments that you flag and fall in front the comforting formalism of TV Law & Order re-runs is about all you can handle. Even The Simpsons are too bright and random. One even begins to speak in the third persons and as if the present was already past.
The final collapse is best not described at all. Mercifully the memory is highly selective about both pain and dementia, but the decompression has to be handled with care – like a diver with the bends – and not mutilated or spindled because those tiny, champagne nitro-bubbles of vacant creativity will appear in the bloodstream of the aftermath and wreak havoc in what is left of the brain.
But I survive, all the way to the terrible post-depression when, as usual, I wonder – like the old actor – if I will ever work again. But it the same time, I ravenously need write on regardless.
MARK BOYLE -- RIP
JEFF NUTALL -- RIP
LINK
A awesome piece of animation from Russia that says something about mortality...
http://fcmx.net/vec/v.php?i=003702
CRYPTIQUE – Fill in the next line yourself.
The secret word is Tangled.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
READ WHILE I WRITE
As I steam, majestic and half mad, to end of this novel that has taken over my life – no, I’m writing it, not reading it – the Doc40 entries have become a bit skimpy, but here’s a bit of an ink-fest from 100th issue of LA CityBeat. The first link is to my part in the cover story which basically attempts to chart events since a 2003 cover in which I interviewed Ann Coulter...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2027&IssueNum=100#
The second is a long-form version of my media column that concerns itself with The Pope, God, and Elvis...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2028&IssueNum=100
The secret word is Nearly
As I steam, majestic and half mad, to end of this novel that has taken over my life – no, I’m writing it, not reading it – the Doc40 entries have become a bit skimpy, but here’s a bit of an ink-fest from 100th issue of LA CityBeat. The first link is to my part in the cover story which basically attempts to chart events since a 2003 cover in which I interviewed Ann Coulter...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2027&IssueNum=100#
The second is a long-form version of my media column that concerns itself with The Pope, God, and Elvis...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2028&IssueNum=100
The secret word is Nearly
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
A GEOGRAPHY LESSON (OR MAYBE GEO-POLITICAL)
Every one paying attention? Okay, so click on this map take a look and then come back...
http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~sara/html/mapping/election/election04/election.html
Now run through this set of maps...
http://www.topalli.com/blue/lynching.html
I could comment, but a visual aid is worth a thousand words, and I’ll let you all draw your own conclusions. (Maps kindly sent by logicgrl)
The secret word is Cartography
Every one paying attention? Okay, so click on this map take a look and then come back...
http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~sara/html/mapping/election/election04/election.html
Now run through this set of maps...
http://www.topalli.com/blue/lynching.html
I could comment, but a visual aid is worth a thousand words, and I’ll let you all draw your own conclusions. (Maps kindly sent by logicgrl)
The secret word is Cartography
Sunday, May 01, 2005
SO WHERE WAS DOC LAST WEEK?
A moment of calm comes in the production of a work of fiction when (the author hopes) it becomes clear that it is all going to make sense. The plot will resolve itself as one has always hoped and all of the characters will be in place and where they’re supposed to be to do their respective parts. The moment of calm is usually preceded a sometimes prolonged bout of screaming anxiety, (sometimes verging on insanity, and, on occasion, necessitating Jack Daniels by the tumbler-full) that the whole fucking thing is completely off the rails, and you will never write again. It’s only when the crisis is behind you, and the calm has come, that the writer is able to settle down for the final grind of internal trench warfare, and the push to The End. (And if you think this is just the cry of the whining artist, try it for yourselves, goddamn it.)
The good news is that the push The End of Conflagration is almost over. 120, 000 words in and only a mile or so to go until I sleep. Last week saw massive strides, and next week will almost certainly see the culmination.
I might actually be finishing right now, except LA CityBeat is celebrating it’s 100th issue, and I was asked to write not only a de luxe edition of my regular Mick’s Media column – about God, The Pope, and Elvis – but also part of the celebratory lead story. All this will be out next Thursday, and the links will be right here.
So keep on clicking to Doc40, I need the validation.
IN THE MEANTIME, HERE’S SOME OF THE STUFF THAT WAS SO VITAL IT NEVER GOT POSTED...
I neglected to post a link to the last Mick’s Media...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=1960&IssueNum=98
This (from the NY Times) should not go unnoticed...
Last week President Bush signed a Family Entertainment and Copyright Act that allows "family-friendly" companies to sell filter technology that cleans up DVD's of Hollywood movies without permission or input from the films' own authors and copyright holders. That sounds innocuous enough until you learn that even "Schindler's List" isn't immune from the right's rigid P.C. code. As the owner of CleanFlicks, the American Fork, Utah, company that goes further and sells pre-sanitized DVD's, once explained to The New York Times: "Every teenager in America should see that film. But I don't think my daughters should see naked old men running around in circles." And so Big Brother can intervene to protect our kids from all that geriatric Holocaust porn.
See what happens when the Christians get hold of one of my columns...
http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=91481
And who could get by without the Opus Dei Awareness Network?
http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=91481
CRYPTIQUE – The thousand yard stare is bloodshot.
The secret word is Cordelia
A moment of calm comes in the production of a work of fiction when (the author hopes) it becomes clear that it is all going to make sense. The plot will resolve itself as one has always hoped and all of the characters will be in place and where they’re supposed to be to do their respective parts. The moment of calm is usually preceded a sometimes prolonged bout of screaming anxiety, (sometimes verging on insanity, and, on occasion, necessitating Jack Daniels by the tumbler-full) that the whole fucking thing is completely off the rails, and you will never write again. It’s only when the crisis is behind you, and the calm has come, that the writer is able to settle down for the final grind of internal trench warfare, and the push to The End. (And if you think this is just the cry of the whining artist, try it for yourselves, goddamn it.)
The good news is that the push The End of Conflagration is almost over. 120, 000 words in and only a mile or so to go until I sleep. Last week saw massive strides, and next week will almost certainly see the culmination.
I might actually be finishing right now, except LA CityBeat is celebrating it’s 100th issue, and I was asked to write not only a de luxe edition of my regular Mick’s Media column – about God, The Pope, and Elvis – but also part of the celebratory lead story. All this will be out next Thursday, and the links will be right here.
So keep on clicking to Doc40, I need the validation.
IN THE MEANTIME, HERE’S SOME OF THE STUFF THAT WAS SO VITAL IT NEVER GOT POSTED...
I neglected to post a link to the last Mick’s Media...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=1960&IssueNum=98
This (from the NY Times) should not go unnoticed...
Last week President Bush signed a Family Entertainment and Copyright Act that allows "family-friendly" companies to sell filter technology that cleans up DVD's of Hollywood movies without permission or input from the films' own authors and copyright holders. That sounds innocuous enough until you learn that even "Schindler's List" isn't immune from the right's rigid P.C. code. As the owner of CleanFlicks, the American Fork, Utah, company that goes further and sells pre-sanitized DVD's, once explained to The New York Times: "Every teenager in America should see that film. But I don't think my daughters should see naked old men running around in circles." And so Big Brother can intervene to protect our kids from all that geriatric Holocaust porn.
See what happens when the Christians get hold of one of my columns...
http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=91481
And who could get by without the Opus Dei Awareness Network?
http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=91481
CRYPTIQUE – The thousand yard stare is bloodshot.
The secret word is Cordelia
Friday, April 29, 2005
Saturday, April 23, 2005
HOW THEY BROUGHT THE REAL BAD NEWS
If this is true, and the oil has peaked, THEY know it, and are preparing for the next phase. Which is the wealthy enclaves and the Global Police State. The moves are being made from Homeland Security to God. And if you disagree I’d be real happy to hear it, because this is really the bad Bladerunner shit. Of course, the story is from Al Jeezera so treat as your prejudices feel fit.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/08B97BCF-7BE6-4F1D-A846-7ACB9B0F8894.htm
kaymo comments...
Think what this means...no Saudi super-production to rescue the global economy. No wonder Blair & Co. are waiting until after the election to present a huge ramp up of Nuclear Power in the UK.
The secret word is Fucked
If this is true, and the oil has peaked, THEY know it, and are preparing for the next phase. Which is the wealthy enclaves and the Global Police State. The moves are being made from Homeland Security to God. And if you disagree I’d be real happy to hear it, because this is really the bad Bladerunner shit. Of course, the story is from Al Jeezera so treat as your prejudices feel fit.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/08B97BCF-7BE6-4F1D-A846-7ACB9B0F8894.htm
kaymo comments...
Think what this means...no Saudi super-production to rescue the global economy. No wonder Blair & Co. are waiting until after the election to present a huge ramp up of Nuclear Power in the UK.
The secret word is Fucked
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
STILL REACTING TO RATZINGER
Looking at first responses to Pope Ratzinger, I still haven’t formulated my reaction except a quaint old-fashioned prejudice against anyone with Nazi affiliations, no matter how briefly they partied for the Fuhrer. For now I’m happy to leave it to Maureen Dowd in this mornings NYT, one of the only in print to not be lauding the former Hitler Youth...
"The white smoke yesterday signaled that the Vatican thinks what it needs to bring it into modernity is the oldest pope since the 18th century: Joseph Ratzinger, a 78-year-old hidebound archconservative who ran the office that used to be called the Inquisition and who once belonged to Hitler Youth. For American Catholics - especially women and Democratic pro-choice Catholic pols - the cafeteria is officially closed. After all, Cardinal Ratzinger, nicknamed "God's Rottweiler" and "the Enforcer," helped deny Communion rights to John Kerry and other Catholic politicians in the 2004 election. "
The only consolations I can find right now is that Pope Ratzinger will not be in any holy circle jerk with the fascist evangelicals, and the No-Popery Wing of the Fundamentalist Right will be praising the Lord for passing them a shitload of ammunition.
The secret word is Heil!
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"Think I’ll take some pills and go to bed/Might get lucky and wind up dead." – Mick Farren
1976.
Looking at first responses to Pope Ratzinger, I still haven’t formulated my reaction except a quaint old-fashioned prejudice against anyone with Nazi affiliations, no matter how briefly they partied for the Fuhrer. For now I’m happy to leave it to Maureen Dowd in this mornings NYT, one of the only in print to not be lauding the former Hitler Youth...
"The white smoke yesterday signaled that the Vatican thinks what it needs to bring it into modernity is the oldest pope since the 18th century: Joseph Ratzinger, a 78-year-old hidebound archconservative who ran the office that used to be called the Inquisition and who once belonged to Hitler Youth. For American Catholics - especially women and Democratic pro-choice Catholic pols - the cafeteria is officially closed. After all, Cardinal Ratzinger, nicknamed "God's Rottweiler" and "the Enforcer," helped deny Communion rights to John Kerry and other Catholic politicians in the 2004 election. "
The only consolations I can find right now is that Pope Ratzinger will not be in any holy circle jerk with the fascist evangelicals, and the No-Popery Wing of the Fundamentalist Right will be praising the Lord for passing them a shitload of ammunition.
The secret word is Heil!
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"Think I’ll take some pills and go to bed/Might get lucky and wind up dead." – Mick Farren
1976.
JUST IN TIME FOR ADOLF’S BIRTHDAY
Hey, not only do we have a Pope, but one whose formative philosophies were formed in the Hitler Youth. This bastard will really fit with the current trends in the Global Power Structure. As my mind boggles on this planet of AIDS and overpopulation, my first reaction is that the College of Cardinals must be out of their fucking minds. Fuck ‘em and the white smoke they went up in.
The secret word is Inquisition
Hey, not only do we have a Pope, but one whose formative philosophies were formed in the Hitler Youth. This bastard will really fit with the current trends in the Global Power Structure. As my mind boggles on this planet of AIDS and overpopulation, my first reaction is that the College of Cardinals must be out of their fucking minds. Fuck ‘em and the white smoke they went up in.
The secret word is Inquisition
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
DAN DARE NEVER HAD THESE PROBLEMS
I can only reflect that this modern wonderworld of high technology seems to be higher maintenance than having a former lap dancer for a mistress. (Something I have mercifully managed to avoid.) None of this was ever predicted in Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future.
And for those of you who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about Dan Dare POTF was a strip in a comic called The Eagle, set in the first decade of the 21st century, and, as a very small child who had just learned to read, (yes, there were printing presses back then) I was totally obsessed by it and wanted to be The Mekon. In that future now the Earth was happy, war was outlawed, the UN was in charge, everything was clean and ran on safe nuclear energy, and all humanity had to worry about was invasion by the evil Treens from Venus – led of course by The Mekon. (Start to get my drift?) Of course, rock & roll had never been invented so I couldn’t win ‘em all.
For more on D. Dare – http://www.dan-dare.org/
SWITCHING THE TOPIC JUST SLIGHTLY
The April 2005 edition of the Scientific American had an editorial that kinda says it all.
Okay, We Give Up
There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong. In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence. Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details. Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions. Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security, you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either, so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools' Day.
Okay, We Give Up – Matt Collins the Editors editors@sciam.com
OR, FROM ANOTHER ANGLE
"According to legend Odin hung from the tree of life for 3 days and nights to wrest the secrets of the runes from the Norns - losing an eye in the process. He must have been really pissed to discover you can buy them in Borders for $19.99 complete with a velveteen carrying bag."
MACUSERS
I know you all mean well when you tell me "Mick get a Mac", but if I hear it one more time, I will make like the sexblog ladies and suggest you all send me five bucks. (But I’d only keep the PC and spend the money on drugs.)
The secret word is Embattled
I can only reflect that this modern wonderworld of high technology seems to be higher maintenance than having a former lap dancer for a mistress. (Something I have mercifully managed to avoid.) None of this was ever predicted in Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future.
And for those of you who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about Dan Dare POTF was a strip in a comic called The Eagle, set in the first decade of the 21st century, and, as a very small child who had just learned to read, (yes, there were printing presses back then) I was totally obsessed by it and wanted to be The Mekon. In that future now the Earth was happy, war was outlawed, the UN was in charge, everything was clean and ran on safe nuclear energy, and all humanity had to worry about was invasion by the evil Treens from Venus – led of course by The Mekon. (Start to get my drift?) Of course, rock & roll had never been invented so I couldn’t win ‘em all.
For more on D. Dare – http://www.dan-dare.org/
SWITCHING THE TOPIC JUST SLIGHTLY
The April 2005 edition of the Scientific American had an editorial that kinda says it all.
Okay, We Give Up
There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong. In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence. Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details. Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions. Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security, you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either, so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools' Day.
Okay, We Give Up – Matt Collins the Editors editors@sciam.com
OR, FROM ANOTHER ANGLE
"According to legend Odin hung from the tree of life for 3 days and nights to wrest the secrets of the runes from the Norns - losing an eye in the process. He must have been really pissed to discover you can buy them in Borders for $19.99 complete with a velveteen carrying bag."
MACUSERS
I know you all mean well when you tell me "Mick get a Mac", but if I hear it one more time, I will make like the sexblog ladies and suggest you all send me five bucks. (But I’d only keep the PC and spend the money on drugs.)
The secret word is Embattled
Sunday, April 17, 2005
I MUST HAVE MORE POWER TO THE SHIELDS, MR SCOTT!
I have failed to achieve much this weekend because my computer has been under intense and constant attack by viruses for the last 72 hours. My paranoia is as famous as I am, but when – mentored by a immensely patient and determined lady cyber-sensei at Microsoft – I have slaughtered more than 50 trojans on my hard drive since Friday, plus many hundreds of related items, and when detective logic tentatively suggests the first assault inflitrated through Blogger, I have to wonder. I do rather go out of my way to offend people, and many have more than enough advanced tech to fuck with me. Random or deliberate, I’m kinda fried, and my computer feels like the Millennium Falcon after a bad brush with Imperial cruisers. Fun will resume once I’ve written Mick’s Media for next week and conducted damage control. In the meantime, if you haven’t read this killer bit by Frank Rich from the NY Times, do so...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/opinion/17rich.html?pagewanted=2&th&emc=th
The secret word is Countermeasures
I have failed to achieve much this weekend because my computer has been under intense and constant attack by viruses for the last 72 hours. My paranoia is as famous as I am, but when – mentored by a immensely patient and determined lady cyber-sensei at Microsoft – I have slaughtered more than 50 trojans on my hard drive since Friday, plus many hundreds of related items, and when detective logic tentatively suggests the first assault inflitrated through Blogger, I have to wonder. I do rather go out of my way to offend people, and many have more than enough advanced tech to fuck with me. Random or deliberate, I’m kinda fried, and my computer feels like the Millennium Falcon after a bad brush with Imperial cruisers. Fun will resume once I’ve written Mick’s Media for next week and conducted damage control. In the meantime, if you haven’t read this killer bit by Frank Rich from the NY Times, do so...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/opinion/17rich.html?pagewanted=2&th&emc=th
The secret word is Countermeasures
Friday, April 15, 2005
WEEKENDEST LINKS
APOCALYPSE NOW...OOOPS...CHRISTIANITY TODAY
This is all getting a tad absurd. I mean, I don’t mind my stuff being reprinted for free on lefty, goth, or generally surreal or subversive blogs and websites, but when I find myself linked on Christianity Today, well, neighbors, I start to fucking wonder what the fuck I’m doing. I’d complain except the Code of Literary Pillage prevents me.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/115/11.0.html
ELVIS SAVES
I really had thought that Elvis worship had faded with the 20th century despite all the remixed hits, but this piece of special weirdness from Capt. Chaos seems not only to indicate that it’s alive and well, and also turned shamanistic, but some denominations are big on retribution and Hound Dogs from Hell. To be honest, I could happily take on the gig of High Shaman. What I need is fund raisers and a sharp advisory council. There’s some confusion in the piece, though, as to whether all this is for real, or a role-playing game, but I’m ignoring that part, since I have rather dedicated my life to refusing to distinguish between role and reality. Such niceties never bothered Charlie Manson or Thomas De Quincy. Any offers?
http://bull.dumpshock.com/sr/fcoe.html
ANDREA DWORKIN
While hardly mourning the women, I recently linked hipspinster’s thoughts on her passing and now here’s another view from Susie Bright.
http://susiebright.blogs.com/
LIZARD KINGS
Underland*, the final book of the Renquist Quartet, ends with Victor Renquist confronting the Dhrakuh, or lizard men, in the Hollow Earth. That, of course, is fiction. Some folks, however, take the stuff very seriously (and not just the loathsome David Icke). Cathy O'Brien , a supposed victim of CIA MKULTRA mind-control, claims to have seen George Bush shapeshift into a Reptilian being. (Okay!) And Credo Mutwa, a Zulu shaman, claims that the Zulu people have known of a reptilian species called the Chitauli for centuries. Here is the real obsessive chapter and verse, folks, in super-handy form. My only complaint is that, since I’ve been getting so much attention lately, I’m kinda miffed and pouting I wasn’t cited as a reference along with Tim Leary and Philip K. Dick. Ah well. Fame is slow, they are dead, and I’m not.
http://dinosauroid.biography.ms/
FUZZY BACTERIA
Finally, some girl has sent a link to a vendor of fuzzy, soft-toy germs and viruses from HIV to the Black Death. And also a Martian Lifeform (like they found on that meteorite, dig?)
http://www.giantmicrobes.com
The secret word is Cobalt
CRYPTIQUE -- The Red Death is no mask.
* BUY A BOOK THIS WEEKEND
APOCALYPSE NOW...OOOPS...CHRISTIANITY TODAY
This is all getting a tad absurd. I mean, I don’t mind my stuff being reprinted for free on lefty, goth, or generally surreal or subversive blogs and websites, but when I find myself linked on Christianity Today, well, neighbors, I start to fucking wonder what the fuck I’m doing. I’d complain except the Code of Literary Pillage prevents me.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/115/11.0.html
ELVIS SAVES
I really had thought that Elvis worship had faded with the 20th century despite all the remixed hits, but this piece of special weirdness from Capt. Chaos seems not only to indicate that it’s alive and well, and also turned shamanistic, but some denominations are big on retribution and Hound Dogs from Hell. To be honest, I could happily take on the gig of High Shaman. What I need is fund raisers and a sharp advisory council. There’s some confusion in the piece, though, as to whether all this is for real, or a role-playing game, but I’m ignoring that part, since I have rather dedicated my life to refusing to distinguish between role and reality. Such niceties never bothered Charlie Manson or Thomas De Quincy. Any offers?
http://bull.dumpshock.com/sr/fcoe.html
ANDREA DWORKIN
While hardly mourning the women, I recently linked hipspinster’s thoughts on her passing and now here’s another view from Susie Bright.
http://susiebright.blogs.com/
LIZARD KINGS
Underland*, the final book of the Renquist Quartet, ends with Victor Renquist confronting the Dhrakuh, or lizard men, in the Hollow Earth. That, of course, is fiction. Some folks, however, take the stuff very seriously (and not just the loathsome David Icke). Cathy O'Brien , a supposed victim of CIA MKULTRA mind-control, claims to have seen George Bush shapeshift into a Reptilian being. (Okay!) And Credo Mutwa, a Zulu shaman, claims that the Zulu people have known of a reptilian species called the Chitauli for centuries. Here is the real obsessive chapter and verse, folks, in super-handy form. My only complaint is that, since I’ve been getting so much attention lately, I’m kinda miffed and pouting I wasn’t cited as a reference along with Tim Leary and Philip K. Dick. Ah well. Fame is slow, they are dead, and I’m not.
http://dinosauroid.biography.ms/
FUZZY BACTERIA
Finally, some girl has sent a link to a vendor of fuzzy, soft-toy germs and viruses from HIV to the Black Death. And also a Martian Lifeform (like they found on that meteorite, dig?)
http://www.giantmicrobes.com
The secret word is Cobalt
CRYPTIQUE -- The Red Death is no mask.
* BUY A BOOK THIS WEEKEND
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
CYBER-EGO
An ego can be a terrible burden. It demands to be supported by unreasonable and near-obsessional courage, an impossible workload, and often a lifetime and wide variety of both mundane and exotic booze and drugs, just to keep the damned thing from pitching the rest of you into the drainage ditch of despair because it irrationally feels slighted. In all fairness, however, the ego can be very easily pumped by the most trivial occurrence, as it was this morning when I discover how, in a Smirking Chimp cyberforum, my fiction is being referenced, just like it meant something, in a discussion of Abramic religion, the Book of Enoch, the Nephilim, alien selective breeding, how science fiction writers may be unconsciously passing on psychically imparted knowledge. If nothing else, it has to demonsrate how the progressive left can become a tad confused at times. Check out the fun...
http://smirkingchimp.com/viewtopic.php?topic=54576&forum=3
The secret word is Inflated
CRYPTIQUE -- A squid-based belief system?
An ego can be a terrible burden. It demands to be supported by unreasonable and near-obsessional courage, an impossible workload, and often a lifetime and wide variety of both mundane and exotic booze and drugs, just to keep the damned thing from pitching the rest of you into the drainage ditch of despair because it irrationally feels slighted. In all fairness, however, the ego can be very easily pumped by the most trivial occurrence, as it was this morning when I discover how, in a Smirking Chimp cyberforum, my fiction is being referenced, just like it meant something, in a discussion of Abramic religion, the Book of Enoch, the Nephilim, alien selective breeding, how science fiction writers may be unconsciously passing on psychically imparted knowledge. If nothing else, it has to demonsrate how the progressive left can become a tad confused at times. Check out the fun...
http://smirkingchimp.com/viewtopic.php?topic=54576&forum=3
The secret word is Inflated
CRYPTIQUE -- A squid-based belief system?
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
TWO QUOTES AND A LINK
"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic." – John F. Kennedy
"A couple nights ago I was out in the kitchen doing the dishes – not even thinking about any particular thing, just feeling overwhelmed by it all – and this suddenly coalesced in Brane (not as a smart-off, but as a serious question!): "Did somebody actually already drop The Big One, I'm dead, and this is Hell?" – Thel (clearly a devotee of string theory) who posts on Smirking Chimp (see yesterday) and the quote also kinda relates to what Billy Oblivion has to say over on the mass comments board.
Also our pal hipspinster blogs on the death of Andrea Dworkin (who I’d be a hypocrite to say I ever had any time for) and also The Story of O.
http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/
"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic." – John F. Kennedy
"A couple nights ago I was out in the kitchen doing the dishes – not even thinking about any particular thing, just feeling overwhelmed by it all – and this suddenly coalesced in Brane (not as a smart-off, but as a serious question!): "Did somebody actually already drop The Big One, I'm dead, and this is Hell?" – Thel (clearly a devotee of string theory) who posts on Smirking Chimp (see yesterday) and the quote also kinda relates to what Billy Oblivion has to say over on the mass comments board.
Also our pal hipspinster blogs on the death of Andrea Dworkin (who I’d be a hypocrite to say I ever had any time for) and also The Story of O.
http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/
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