YAHWEH, WE HAVE A PROBLEM...

Photographed Balducci's meat counter. Sent by munz.

The secret word is Porcine

And, on the subject of pigs, how is it the Thought Police never thought of this. Also...

Karlheinz Stockhausen -- RIP

THIS BLOG IS STILL PROTECTED BY...

MORE ALIENS – AND HOW THE TIMES ARE CHANGING BACK

This, of course, is famous fuzzy photo of the Grey alien, possibly a Roswell crash survivor, supposedly in the custody of the US military. They presumably didn’t have an orange jumpsuit small enough.

For a while, after George Bush came to power, the attack on Manhattan, and the invasion in Iraq seemed to stop the odd, the seeking, and the disturbed in their tracks. Area 51 was put aside as Amercia feared their own shadows and Sikh cabdrivers. Mulder and Scully were out of a job. The Trench Coat Mafia went to ground. We had no aliens autopsies, and no demented kids or disgruntled employees going on a shooting sprees because they’d been fired from their demeaning minimum wage gig. But suddenly it seems like they’re back with a vengeance, one lighting up the sky and the other shooting up the mall. The following, about alien bacteria, comes from Scientific American, sent by Valerie…

"If, as many scientists believe, life can readily emerge under the right environmental conditions, it is possible that life arose on Earth more than once. Researchers are now seeking evidence of a second genesis by searching for exotic microbes that are bio-chemically different from all known organisms. Some of the best places to look for alternative life-forms are ecologically isolated niches such as ocean-bottom volcanic vents and the dry valleys of Antarctica. Alien microbes may also lurk right under our noses. Scientists can hunt for these organisms by looking for the markers of alternative biochemistry." (Click for more)

Then secret word might be Peyote

WHATEVER PLANET YOU’RE FROM, THERE’S A MESS OF NEW TUNES JUST POSTED ON DOCTUBE

WHY DO I FIND THIS ODDLY PLAUSIBLE?

I’ve been working all night and am square eyed and badly in need of sleep. Thus I have neither the time nor the energy to post anything more profound or provoking, but I do find this UFO clip filmed near Bakersfield, and the reaction of the two women behind the camera amazingly plausible. But give it time because it starts out kinda chaotic, quite as one might expect.

The secret words are Zeta Reticuli

But don't forget Doctube

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S # 32

Keeps the doctor away?

EXTREMOPHILES

(From Clive Thompson) "The Berkeley Pit is a copper mine that was abandoned in 1982; it's 1,780 feet deep and a mile and a half wide. In the last twenty-five years, it has filled with water, and as the water has soaked up the residual arsenic, aluminum, cadmium and zinc, the pond has turned as acidic as vinegar. In 1995, a couple hundred geese landed on the water and instantly died. Nice. Nonetheless, Don and Andrea Stierl -- two chemists who live nearby -- wondered if any lifeforms could endure such grim surroundings, so they pulled out some of the pond's goo and cultured it in Petri dishes. Whaddya know: They've found 142 organisms in the muck, and have isolated 80 chemical compounds that exist nowhere else. Better yet, it looks as though some of those compounds might be useful in killing tumors!" (for more)

The secret word is Adapt

SOMEBODY WROTE A BOOK ABOUT US

And I for one am very proud that Rich Deakin has written the whole disgraceful history of The Deviants and The Pink Fairies. I just wish I was going to the party, but I’m hoping we can arrange a hookup.

ON A HAPPIER NOTE

A bunch of new tunes have been posted on Doctube

WORLD DOMINATION BY THE NUMBERS (Or when do you Americans get over yourselves?)

AMERICA has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States. A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it. (Click for more)

The secret words are Enough and Already

TIRED

Tonight I'm beat from running around in the rain. I'll write more tomorrow and also add some new tunes to Doctube. The illustration has no real significance except for it's Ayn Rand, power of technology, muscular charm. And that power is something I presently lack.

The secret word is Couch

Evel Knieval -- RIP

MEDIA INUNDATION

In this week's LA CityBeat, I have a new media column about all the screens one, in theory, needs to handle all the stuff that's coming at you whether you like it or not.

I'M FUCKING BLACKWATER, YOU MAGGOT! AND NOW I'M HOMICIDAL AND BARKING MAD ON STEROIDS!

A lawsuit against government contractor Blackwater Worldwide accuses its bodyguards of ignoring a direct order and abandoning their post shortly before taking part in a shooting in Baghdad that killed 17 Iraqi civilians. Filed this week in U.S. District Court in Washington, the complaint also accuses North Carolina-based Blackwater of failing to give drug tests to its guards in Baghdad — even though an estimated one in four of them was using steroids or other "judgment altering substances." Click for more. (And also go back to October 13th.)

The secret word is Rage

WHEN IS ENOUGH ENOUGH?

Coming on top of the sentence imposed on the unfortunate Saudi gang-rape victim, Miss Templeton protests this latest excess of absolutist Islamic jurisprudence, and writes…
KHARTOUM, Sudan - Sudan charged a British teacher Wednesday with inciting religious hatred after she allowed her students to name a teddy bear Muhammad, an offense that could subject her to 40 lashes, the Justice Ministry said. The charge against Gillian Gibbons was sure to heighten tensions between Sudan and Britain. In London, Foreign Secretary David Miliband urgently summoned the Sudanese ambassador to discuss the case, the British government said. Gibbons, 54, was arrested Sunday after some of her pupils' parents complained, accusing her of naming the bear after Islam's prophet. Muhammad is a common name among Muslim men, but giving the prophet's name to an animal would be seen as insulting by many Muslims. Yes, it's just another 'click-me' Yahoo headline, but am I right in thinking "This global religious fundamentalism thing they've all got going on...maybe a bridge too far?" Paddington Bear asks you to spread the word...

I can only shake my head and agree as we attempt rapport with these horrible 12th century maniacs.

Now rocket over to Doctube.

And don't forget, LA readers, we're playing live tonight! Scroll back to Monday for details!

WHEN WATER WILL BE THE NEW OIL

"As droughts reach record levels from Atlanta to Australia, no one is asking the tough question: What happens when there is not enough water to go around?"

Thus read the subhead on the Alternet story forwarded by Iggymak, and after that the examples abounded, as in...

"Over the last decade, 15 to 20 percent decreases in precipitation have been recorded. These water losses have been accompanied by record temperatures and increasing wildfires in areas where populations have been growing rapidly. A fierce drought has settled in -- of the hundred-year variety. Lawns can be watered but just for a few hours a day (and only by bucket); four-minute showers are the max allowed. Car washes are gone, though you can clean absolutely essential car windows and mirrors by hand."

Click here for the whole story, but it always struck me that water crisis might even break up nations. A terrible future crunch could come in the US South West where two expanding cities – Los Angeles and Las Vegas – occupy approximately the same desert and depend on common water sources. I may not live to see a favorite paranoid fantasy -- nuclear war over water between California and Nevada -- but that's not to say it couldn’t happen around 2040.

The secret word is Evian

CRYPTIQUE – Fish fuck in it.

Visit Doctube, the Eldorado of music clip collections

CATHODE CREEPSHOW

This would appear to be a very disturbed website. Or maybe it’s art. Or electronic necrophilia. I dunno, but I find it disturbing. A guy in 1957 sitting in a room taking photographs of women on his flickering rabbit ear TV. Maybe he also drove a cab. And now those photos are preserved for posterity and what he probably though was a solitary -- well who the fuck really knew what he thought -- is now circulated by electronic systems the noctural photgrapher would hardly have dreamed of in his darkened room. I guess it’s only creepy in the context of imagination and the passage of time. Maybe.

The secret words are Are You Looking At Me?

NEW TOY

And I just can’t resist playing with it, and thusly have posted a whole bunch more music clips on Doctube (see Sunday for the full story)

WE'RE DOING IT AGAIN

“Of course I drop some acid when I see Mick and Andy. It makes them even more interesting.”

Mick Farren and Andy Colquhoun will once again pumping out their two-man psychedelic deviant future blues – with their new guitar buddy Tom Gardner – at Tequila Mockingbird’s Club Fluffer at the Hyperion Tavern at 1941 Hyperion (look for the red fairy lights) in Silver Lake this Thursday (November 29th) and you are cordially invited. Showing up around 9.00 would be about right.

The email is still Byron4d@msn.com
And since we have this brand new Doctube music annex in business, interesting video links are welcome. (But don’t send me one of your eager new band, hey. I probably won’t post it.)

A ROCKING NEW DEPARTURE

Every since Blogger made it possible, I have been including links to what I considered the best music videos I could find on YouTube and elsewhere, and they seem to keep you guys amused, and even simulate some positive feedback as in the recent case of The Monks that everyone seemed to like. But the blog moves on, and it can be hard to scroll back and watch something again, plus there’s also so much more out there than can be posted on Doc40 and still leave time and space for fighting the oppressor, exposing the idiocy, watching science fiction become reality, and all the other fun stuff we seem to enjoy. Accordingly, I sat down and constructed a new parallel page that goes by the name of Doctube that will act as a virtual video jukebox and is now up and running. The regularly updated content will simply be the very best stuff I can find, although some may find it the predictable taste of a antique boho, but what the fuck. It’s something to do in the long winter evenings and some of this stuff is truly amazing.

The secret word is Eclectic

CRYPTIQUE – This ain’t your daughter’s MTV

THE WOMAN WHO STOPS LIGHT IN ITS TRACKS

UK Steve sent us this quite mind boggling story from Wired. (And wouldn’t you just love to have that lab in which to play?

Lene Vestergaard Hau can stop a pulse of light in midflight, start it up again at 0.13 miles per hour, and then make it appear in a completely different location. "It's like a little magic trick," says Hau, a Harvard physicist. "Of course, in all magic tricks there's a secret." And her secret is a 0.1-mm lump of atoms called a Bose-Einstein condensate, cooled nearly to absolute zero (-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit) in a steel container with tiny windows. Normally — well, in a vacuum — light goes 186,282 miles per second. But things are different inside a BEC, a strange place where millions of atoms move — barely — in quantum lockstep. About a decade ago, Hau started playing with BECs — for a physicist, that means shooting lasers at them. She blew up a few. Eventually, she found that lasers of the right wavelengths could tune the optical properties of a BEC, giving Hau an almost supernatural command over any other light shined into it. Her first trick was slowing a pulse of light to a crawl — 15 mph as it traveled through the BEC. Since then, Hau has completely frozen a pulse and then released it. And recently she shot a pulse into one BEC and stopped it — turning the BEC into a hologram, a sort of matter version of the pulse. Then she transferred that matter waveform into an entirely different BEC nearby — which emitted the original light pulse. That's just freaky. Hey, Einstein may have set that initial speed limit of light, but he only theorized about BECs. "It's not breaking relativity," Hau says. "But I'm sure he would have been rather surprised."

And while in a science mode here is a funny but damning video on Windows Vista

THIS HAS TO BE THE LAST WORD ON THANKSGIVING

DAYS OF TRYPTOPHAN AND PIES

As the Turkey weekend laboriously grinds on, I do my best to write, sleep, and ignore it since, apart from having no need for any public displays of gratitude, it would seen that what was a dubious concept in the first place (pilgrims, Native Americans, dumb birds etc.) has now degenerated to drooping orgy of overeating, shopping, and football. I can only bring you this quote from Warren Ellis as conveyed by our pal Dr. Adder…
“Don't forget, my Yanqui readers, the true meaning of Thanksgiving: give your neighbors an infected blanket this Thursday and then move into their houses after they're dead.” – Warren Ellis
And, or course the above page from a fundamentalist comic that I stumbled across in my web travels. I find it hard to fathom what these people do with their time when they’re not complaining, praying, swaying to Christian rock, voting Republican, or mindfucking their children. Do I really have spell out the multilateral aberration this work of art.

I suppose they could play human Pacman.

The secret word is Butterball

SOMEHOW I CAN'T EVER FORGET WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

Pic from Gorightly

The secret words are Lone Gunman

THE WORLD COULD BE BEAUTIFUL

But we also have these unspeakable mechanisms, already the last thing seen (or not seen) by thousands of our fellow humans.

The secret word is Cranberry

THE MONKS...

Back in the day, The Monks somehow passed me by. I can only plead the “I can’t be clued in on everything” defense. Over the years, though, they became known to me because they were written up in the same kind of ‘zine that also featured me and The Deviants. I never so much as suspected that The Monks had videos, and then Doug the Bass put me straight with this gem that hints at all kinds of ideas that would later lay foundations for everything form krautrock to Devo.

…MOBIUS OR MANDELBROT

You wanna see some Möbius transformations? Me? I just smoked a joint and stared at the sequence like an unreconstructed hippie, but, if you wanna find out about the science, click here. On the other hand, you might just prefer a fractal sequence.

The secret words are Live and Learn

This blog does not respect authority.

THE AGONY AND THE FANTASY

“Please wash your hands after engaging in pain management.”

This theory that sexual fantasy may be a method to reduce pain is hardly new, dating as it does, from 1999, and although it's still entertained today, I have reservations. From my own experience, I would say that any major psychological motivation can function as a distraction from pain and sex angle is just a headline grabber. I recall from when I was a kid how the legendary Manchester City soccer star Bert Trautmann played out the 1956 FA Cup Final with a broken neck, and also all the damage Pete Townshend has done to himself, seemingly without noticing, while on stage with The Who. Me, I think I would prefer opiates to fantasy. I mean, fantasy takes one so far and no further. (And what if pain is part of the sexual fantasy, we wonder?)

"Bringing to mind a favorite sexual fantasy may be a good way to lessen pain, according to a recent study of college students by researchers at Johns Hopkins and the University of Wisconsin. The work, which tests the authors' theory about the relationship between pain and mood, could produce simple, cost-free ways to lessen pain in a variety of situations, says anesthesiologist Peter S. Staats, M.D., who led the study. "It also suggests changes in the way physicians should approach patients experiencing pain," Staats says. The new theory indicates that pain stimuli yield strong negative emotional responses. Operating on that premise, counterbalancing pain with a strong positive emotional response should decrease pain. Researchers set out to measure the effects of sexual fantasies a very strong positive emotional response on pain. "The biology underlying this theory relates to the idea that emotions are likely processed in the thalamus, a region of the brain also closely involved in processing pain responses," says Staats, director of the Division of Pain Medicine at Hopkins and an associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine." (For more) Thanks Valerie.

Nobody feels any pain? Let’s hear from Ol’ Bob, an expert on the subject.

(Photo by Gahbryel)

IF I GAVE HER THE WOOL COULD SHE KNIT ME ONE?

Or, I suppose, if the pain got too bad, one could try knitting a Dalek. Click here for the pattern.

The secret word is Exterminate

The following report comes from HCB – “Fox News was on the television with the sound off and in the close captioning, I noticed that when Bill O'Reilly said "No Spin Zone," it translated on the screen as "Nose Been Sown." I’m not making this up. Maybe they're outsourcing their subtitles, or the caption writers are in revolt.”

YOU DO THE MATH

“It says here that the global environment is totally fucked.”

"That's nice, dear."

Doug the Bass sent over this fascinating if highly disturbing AP report with some very nasty numbers on the condition of our planetary condition…

The following are some key findings in a report issued Saturday by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:
• Global warming is "unequivocal." Temperatures have risen 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years. Eleven of the last 12 years are among the warmest since 1850. Sea levels have gone up by an average seven-hundredths of an inch per year since 1961.
• About 20 percent to 30 percent of all plant and animal species face the risk of extinction if temperatures increase by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. If the thermometer rises by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit, between 40 to 70 percent of species could disappear.
• Human activity is largely responsible for warming. Global emissions of greenhouse gases grew 70 percent from 1970 to 2004. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is far higher than the natural range over the last 650,000 years.
• Climate change will affect poor countries most, but will be felt everywhere. By 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will suffer water shortages, residents of Asia's large cities will be at great risk of river and coastal flooding, Europeans can expect extensive species loss, and North Americans will experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater competition for water.
• Extreme weather conditions will be more common. Tropical storms will be more frequent and intense. Heat waves and heavy rains will affect some areas, raising the risk of wildfires and the spread of diseases. Elsewhere, drought will degrade cropland and spoil the quality of water sources. Rising sea levels will increase flooding and salination of fresh water and threaten coastal cities.
• Even if greenhouse gases are stabilized, the Earth will keep warming and sea levels rising. More pollution could bring "abrupt and irreversible" changes, such as the loss of ice sheets in the poles, and a corresponding rise in sea levels by several yards.
A wide array of tools exist, or will soon be available, to adapt to climate change and reduce its potential effects. One is to put a price on carbon emissions.
• By 2050, stabilizing emissions would slow the average annual global economic growth by less than 0.12 percent. The longer action is delayed, the more it will cost.
(This version CORRECTS seven-tenths to seven-hundredths of an inch.)

And here’s live concert clip from REM stating the obvious.

The secret word is Arithmetic

IT WAS SATURDAY NIGHT AND WE DIDN’T GET PAID

Since at least the 1970s we have watched the reduction and disempowerment of organized labor in the West, and with it the destruction of one of the most crucial sets of checks and balances on the natural inequality of capitalism, especially when it forgets its own essential need for consumers. In outsource-target, developing nations, labor unions are suppressed by any means necessary including the occasional death squad. The concept is hardly grasped by former communists, and China fails to rise above the Red sweatshop. We listen to the well financed, and professionally orchestrated sobbing of the obscenely wealthy at the horror of taxation – even to pay for their own wars – and their absolute conviction that management should be paid a 1000% or so more than labor. And when propaganda and corruption fails, violence is always the last resort. This brilliant photo essay by Martin Shakeshaft and David Bowmer actually covers the 1984 UK miners strike when Margaret Thatcher supposedly broke the mineworkers union, but it is a pattern repeated over and over by rightwing regimes. And yet this does have a surprise ending.

Music? How about Marilyn Manson doing “Working Class Hero”? Too decadent? Okay, so here’s Lennon.

Was Saturday night better when I stopped thinking and just got drunk I wonder?

“Will she ever stop haunting my dreams? And do I want her to?”

A LAUGHING MATTER?

Yes, it’s an old joke. But I’m seriously starting to wonder if there’s anything funny about George W. fucking Bush, and whether we should be taking him very much more seriously than we do. Especially now, with Blackwater, he would appear to be building his own private army.

KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES

Valerie reminds us the Leonid meteor shower hits tonight. (And who knows, we may all go blind and the triffids will eat us.) Sadly they are really only visible outside the big city bright lights and the exhaust of a million gas burners, which rather counts me out. (Click here for the sensible details.)

The secret word is Burnout

A COMET BIGGER THAN THE SUN

I was grounded in too much science fiction as a lad to seriously believe in signs in the sky or astronomical portents, (black dogs are more my speed) but when a comet named Holmes (maybe after Sherlock or perhaps Celeste?) blows up to something larger than the sun, and, instead of quietly hanging round in the Kuiper Belt, becomes, if only briefly, the biggest thing in the solar system, one can but wonder – especially as we coast towards the future mythology of 2012. (The insert of Saturn in the pic gives an idea of scale.) The comet did whoever do something similar in 1892, and we are still around so maybe we shouldn't worry. Here’s one report of the event from Reuters, and another from the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, both sent by our friend peromyscus.

And this is Interstellar Overdrive with Syd.

The secret word is Void

Hank Thompson -- RIP

“I think I’d like to be a space pirate when I grow up.”

STRIKE ONE (WEEK)

In today’s LA CityBeat, I expressed some of my doubts about the writer’s strike…

“While I won’t lower the red flag or hang-up my IWW T-shirt, I confess to mixed emotions about the strike by the Writers Guild of America. The problem might just be timing: Can the writers in TV and movies afford a walk-out over back-end money when a rapidly fragmenting mass culture is nose-diving into a bottomless abyss of Saw movies and American Idol? Or maybe it’s just old fashioned jealousy. When they’re working, writers for both TV and film are paid vastly more that novelists, poets, or journalists for work that is often so substandard it could cause an old time pulp hack to weep into his Smith Corona.” (Click for the rest)

But my mixed feelings have turned into a kind labor relations scrapbook. I mean, I wholly agree with this comment on Huffpo. Except just being a bloody writer doesn’t make you one of the good guys. (Hitler, Coulter, Hobbes)

“If the creative people of america won over the monstrously imperious corporations it would create an extra hour of daylight in this country (to paraphrase Spike Milligan, writing and performing genius) Keep them coming. Other Americans will get that this is bigger than the perceived bunch of lucky white guys making silly amounts of money. If the corporations, already in tune with the Neo-Con agenda, could eliminate writers, they could control content. Support your writers America.”

And who could argue with Howard Zinn and Woody Guthrie? On the other hand, I am not overly impressed by the street theatre of writers from The Daily Show. But sympathy then does an abrupt 180 while watching the media mogul fatcats smugly justifying their hideous greed. And after all this indecision I can only leave it to Billy Bragg.

Except I have another separate piece in CityBeat today on my own writing and why I do it. And, believe me, it ain’t for the digital backmoney.

AND ALL OF YOU IN LA, DON’T FORGET I’M PLAYING OUT TONIGHT WITH ANDY AND TOM, SCROLL BACK TO TUESDAY FOR DETAILS.

“My mission is far from accomplished. Assimilation is not yet complete. ”

BLACK DOG TURNROUND

This may strike newer readers as odd but it has a provenance.

I wrote the paragraph below when I was quite paranormally spooked on New Year’s Day, 2005, but I guess, since I’m still around, the dog clearly meant me no harm and now I further learn that according to the Hindu scripture, the Mahabharat, dogs accompanied Dharmaraj Yudhisthir on his journey to heaven. There is also a Hindu belief that dogs guard the underworld.

"Just over two hours ago it was 2004. At 11.58, I stepped out onto the balcony to listen the calendar change, noble in my new Yukata. The concrete was cold under my feet. Car horns were hooting, fireworks and perhaps guns were going off, echoing in the Hollywood Hills, and then, as precisely as I could judge, right on midnight, a silent dark dog – or maybe a coyote – raced up the street, running flat-out desperate, breakneck, and headlong north, into the darkness between streetlights. The omen potential was so overwhelming that it left me a little stunned. As far as I could tell, I was the only one who had seen it, and I hardly cared to make an analysis. The black dog looms large in my native folklore, and, for the most part, it isn’t at all good. But was this black dog – so real that I considered I was hallucinating – crossing my path or running on past me?"

The secret word is Possible

And this, more traditionally, is Robert Johnson – Hell Hound On My Trail

(Dogs from Valerie and Elizabeth)

LET'S ROCK AGAIN!

As part of the celebrations for Amy Wallace and Handsome Dick Manitoba’s The Official Punk Book of Lists, Mick Farren and Andy Colquhoun, with help of Tom Gardner, will be playing some bizarre cosmic blues this coming Thursday (November 15th) at Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont (90027) – 323 660 1175. it all starts at 7.30.

It’s rumored there’s free beer, pizza and patron Tequila.

I also suspect that since Handsome Dick couldn’t fly in from NYC, I was chosen as the nearest similar haircut

THE INVASION OF THE RHIZOMORPHS

Today, I took Veterans Day off (see Sunday 11/4) and spent it in bed. Even now I’ve risen I find myself falling asleep in front of a TV that is showing nothing of any substance except reruns of The X-Files. I believe this is one of those days when I have to admit I have been doing far too much and no longer have the stamina of Capt Marvel Jr. (or have forgotten the magic word.) Thus, feeling a lot like a lethargically insane fungus, I happened by synchronicity (thank you Dr. Jung) to come across another account of this famous entity and the invasion beneath our feet.

“The underground fungus [is] estimated to be between 2000 and 8500 years old . . . . [It] spreads mainly along tree roots, but also through the soil using shoestring-like structures called rhizomorphs . . . . Researchers thought that individual fungus organisms grew in distinct clusters in the forest, marked by the ring-shaped patches of dead trees that they spotted during overhead flights. No one expected to find that the well-separated clusters represented one contiguous organism." (For more)

And this is Captain Beefheart playing Big Eyed Beans From Venus

The secret word is Room

And I also forgot to post links to two pieces in last Thursdays LA CityBeat. One short take on the WGA strike, and another a rare (for me) piece of rock crit.

“I’m sorry Dorothy. Under no circumstances are you going back to Kansas.”

UP AGAINST THE WALL MOTHERFUCKER REVISITED

Is there such a thing as political nostalgia? Looking back over the century so far, I wonder about how much we have been forced to hold the line against the war, stupidity, and simplistic evil of the Bush/Cheney regime and the moronic culture and thought patterns it has engendered and nurtured in its fetid hothouse of torture and greed. Few speak any longer of utopian ideals and the revolutionary movement that might need to be created to achieve them. And then I happened across this comment on HuffPo and it started me thinking.

"Frank Little, member of the Executive Council of the IWW (formed 12 years before the Russian revolution) was lynched by Pinkertons both for union organizing and his stance against worker participation in WWI. I suggested the anti-war strike in memory of Mr. Little and I'm neither a democrat nor a red, as if I needed to apologize for either. This country needs a general strike because the class running the show presently is driving all of us to ruin. Fact is, the sub-prime scandal (according to Paul Volcker) has resulted in the biggest crisis for capitalism in the history of this country. We have a war-drunk and corrupt administration which, in concert with an under-regulated, over-leveraged and senile finance capitalism, is quickly driving this country headlong into bankruptcy."

And then, by what can only be total synchronicity I came across this article from the New Statesman about revolutionary youth movements in Eastern Europe. But why not in the West? I mean, goddamn it, we have so much more communication technology than we he had 30-40 years ago. The idea of creating instant flash mobs, for instance, has only been used for undergraduate pranks, and never employed by (say) the anti-war movement. Like good little lemmings we have been working within the system, and, I for one feel that my old time principles have have been compromised and betrayed in the process. Okay so we work for a Democratic win in 2008, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need to start now to create mechanisms with which to hold Hillary’s (or whomever’s) feet frirmly to the fire of actual change.

This is the Jefferson Airplane and I will shoot the first one who sniggers. Because here’s a snatch of lyric.

We are all outlaws in the eyes of America
In order to survive we steal, cheat, lie, forge, fuck, hide. and deal
We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent, and young*
But we should be together
Come on all you people standing around
Our life’s too fine to let it die and
We can be together
All your private property is
Target for your enemy
And your enemy is
We
We are forces of chaos and anarchy
Everything they say we are we are
And we are very
Proud of ourselves
Up against the wall
Up against the wall motherfucker
Tear down the walls

* Or am I just getting old?

Your humble host on TV during the previous revolution.

"The HAL 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error."