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

ANNE BANCROFT -- RIP

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

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.

THE BIG OLD COMMENTS BOARD IS BACK, AND MANY THANKS TO, AND A BIG HAND FOR FUNTOPIA RICH FOR ALL HIS HELP AND INVESTIGATION.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Again I have the feeling of living in a damaged starship.

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!

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.

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.

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

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

UP THE WORKERS!

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

YES, I'VE BEEN WORKING LIKE A MANIAC, BUT THE BOOK CONFLAGRATION IS ALMOST FINISHED AND THERE WILL BE A MASSIVE POSTING OF ALL THAT IS BACKED UP OVER THE COMING WEEKEND. I PROMISE.

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

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.

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

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 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

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

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?

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/

AT A GUESS, I FIGURE THUS PRETTY MUCH MEANS IT’S ALL OVER...
First the story, (in the chaos of concluding Conflagration The Novel, I have forgotten if someone sent this or if I found it at random.)

LONDON — Sony has patented an idea for transmitting data directly into the brain, with the goal of enabling a person to see movies and play video games in which they smell, taste and perhaps even feel things, New Scientist reports. The patent — based only on a theory, not on any invention — marks the first step towards a "real-life Matrix," the British science weekly says.
In the sci-fi film of that name, cyber-reality is projected into the brains of people via an electrode feed at the back of their necks. In Sony's patent, the technique would be entirely non-invasive. It would not use brain implants or other surgery to manipulate the brain. The patent has few details, describing only a device that would fire pulses of ultrasound at the head to modify the firing patterns of neurons in targeted parts of the brain. The aim, it says, is to create "sensory experiences" ranging from moving images to tastes and sounds. New Scientist said the inventor is based at a Sony office in San Diego, California. Sony Electronics spokeswoman Elizabeth Boukis said the work was a "prophetic invention" and no experiments at all had been done on it.
"It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us," she told New Scientist. Independent experts said they did not dismiss the idea out of hand, although they also cautioned about the proposed method's long-term safety. So far, the only non-invasive way for manipulating the brain is crude. A technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation uses magnetic fields to induce currents in brain tissue, thus stimulating brain cells.
But magnetic fields cannot be finely focused on small groups of brain cells, whereas ultrasound pulses could be.

Could we be looking at an artificially induced Rapture, maybe?

The idea of total sensory entertainment has, of course, abounded in science fiction, and how
Sony gets to patent a theory without an invention seems dubious, but what can you do? I even threw up a short novel called The Feelies, first publish in 1977, and then revised in the late eighties. The basic idea was that you climb into this coffin/CAT scan bit of hardware and be the Marquis de Sade, Erwin Rommel, Caligula, James Bond, or Elvis. The idiot rich signed up for "duration of lifespan" contracts. The dirty secret, know only to the fascist corporate brass and an alcoholic janitor, was that they were fed on cheap nutrients and allowed to deteriorate and die after a few months. Darwinism reasserted. This being a product of punk neo-nihilism, the janitor did absolutely nothing about what he knew.

(I really do have to organize the republication of some of my back fiction catalogue. Any input to
byron4d@msn.com)

The secret word is Enfeebled

The column Get The Faith Out Of Here had been republished on smirking chimp. Which means it comes with comments from strangers.
http://smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=20612&mode=nested&order=0

GET THE FAITH OUTTA HERE!
...is the title of my piece on religion and media in this weeks LA CityBeat, and, I hope, it may be of some passing significance, and worth the read...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=1899&IssueNum=96

And in the same issue, Chris Morris has a sweet piece on Gene Vincent and even gives me a name check on my book Gene Vincent – There’s One In Every Town. (So buy the book, damnit! It’d be so nice to be solvent.)
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=1897&IssueNum=96

And our pal hipspinster has a new blog which is a paean to the character Starbuck in Battlestar Gallactica.
http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

The secret word is Synergy

OH POPE
While the Papacy continues to inundate my TV, making me grateful for the reruns of Law & Order, and not even History Channel is providing any hot Vatican back stories like all of those infinitely corrupt and decadent Borgias and Medici, not to mention the really murderous papal bastards like Gregory V, who had the English mercenary Sir John Hawkwood massacre the entire population of Cesena, or Clement V who burned as many of the Knights Templar as he could get his hands on because he owed them money, or the amazing Innocent III who, while slaughtering the Cathars coined the phrase – "Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius" – roughly translated, "Kill ‘em all and let God sort it out." (You learn a lot if this kind of stuff while researching four Victor Renquist vampire novels.) Thus all I can do is follow the betting. Irish bookies’ favorites to succeed Pope John Paul II are Dionigi Tettamanzi of Italy and Francis Arinze of Nigeria, both listed on 11-4 by by Paddy Power PLC, Ireland's largest betting shop chain. I am, however, again totally convinced that Opus Dei already has the fix in.

AND TALKING OF CORRUPTION AND MURDEROUS BASTARDS...
Master Bass Guitar Doug sends the following from Celia Hirschman on KCRW about the music industry in general and Warner in particular...
Last month, the UK newspaper Financial Times outlined the salary and bonus packages for five of the Warner Music Groups' top executives, totaling over $21 million. What did these executives do to earn such extraordinary compensation,during one of the most difficult periods of the music business? Warner executives delivered to its investors, an expected savings of $250 million, achieved primarily by firing or laying off 1600 employees and dropping 93 musical acts. There's nothing wrong with adjusting one's business model, to reflect a more contemporary economicclimate. But to be compensated so lavishly for the misfortunes of so many, is just another example of the highly imbalanced world of the major label business. Even more astonishing, is that according to documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, last year's total executive compensation was more than 3 times higher than Warner Music's $7 million operating income for the 10 months prior. In other words, Warner Bros paid their 5 highest executives more than 3 times the annual operation budget to make the cuts. And, we should call it an advance on services to be rendered. Warner Music was privatized just last year, so this is compensation based on the promise of a far bigger future, not results garnered to date. Up until five years ago, the music business was a great business to be in. The benefits made most young adults drool with excitement. Business was carried out in luxurious boardrooms, in nightclubs, on cell phones, and at recording studios. Everyone affiliated wore a mantle of being hip and cool. Meals and entertainment easily fell into business expense accounts. Most executives in the music business found that their social life revolved around the business and its associates. There was little time for family life or balance. But about five years ago, the record business changed dramatically. The shift was caused by a number of factors, including limited play lists on commercial radio airwaves, rising marketing and promotion costs, consumers demand for lower prices, fear of illegal downloading and piracy, and so on and so on. Did the record business adjust to these new financial paradigms? Certainly not proactively. Since most major label contracts run for 6 or 7 album cycles, a contract may stay in enforcements for well over a decade. Therefore, what labels promised in a signed contract in say, 1997 might lock them into delivering on services for many years to come. Consider the point that major labels often sign young bands for a fraction of their potential worth, to see if the first couple of records might deliver a financial upside. With each subsequent release, the contract calls for higher and higher escalations of compensation. If the artist cannot meet a profit and loss statement by the end of the marketing cycle for album two, the label rarely has the passion to insure an investment for album number three. More and more, the answer is drop the artist, hold onto the catalog and hope some other label is more fortunate marketing them. In this highly volatile world of the music business, where luck, persistence and talent meet on the road to success, it's discouraging to see that executive cost cutting is valued far more than spotting and nurturing talent. Somewhere we've forgotten what business we're really in.

Or maybe the sons-of-bitches never knew what business they were in, in the first place, except the "more-obscene-money-for-me" business.

The secret word is Swine

NEIL YOUNG -- GET WELL SOON!

SUBLIMINAL COMMUNIST CHUCKIE
I found this tale from Canada while wandering the web. (Not quite as lonely as a cloud, but definitely floating on high.)

A Christmas toy intended to spread the peace and love of the holiday apparently spews hatred. As first reported by The Columbian, a Vancouver, Wash., family discovered that the toy they unsuspectingly attached to their son's crib utters the words "I hate you" amid the rhythmic ocean sounds designed to lull the baby asleep. Blanche Skelton told WorldNetDaily she was giving her 6-month-old, Alex, his medicine the other night when she heard the soft voice of a woman or little kid repeating the nasty message over and over. "The voice has a softness to it. It sounds hypnotizing. ... I think it's creepy," Skelton said. "My husband thought I was crazy until he heard it." Skelton's in-laws and everyone who has visited the house since have heard it. Skelton describes the toy as being shaped like a boat, blue and white with a big red anchor on the side where you push a button to make it play either music or the ocean sounds. The front has pictures of fish and water. Blanche does not remember the name of the toy, but said the box bears the Wal-Mart brand label Kid Connection. She said the toy appears to be a Wal-Mart version of a similar "Ocean Wonders Aquarium" toy made by Fisher-Price and sold by Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart's website ranks the Fisher-Price toy as its third best-selling product among toys for infants age 0 to 6 months. The box indicates Wal-Mart's Kid Connection toy was made in China. "You know China is not friends with us," Skelton said, speculating about the explanation for what she fears is a subliminal message hidden in the toy. "They're trying to get back at us. What's the best way? Teach kids when they're young to hate. It's scary." "How many kids are lying in their crib listening to that?" Skelton's father-in-law, Gary Skelton, posed to The Columbian. Blanche Skelton said she and her husband went to the local Wal-Mart in Hazel Dell the next day to report the bizarre phenomenon. Finding four or five identical toys on a clearance shelf, Blanche said she played the toy for an assistant manager who, she says, "could hear something," but wasn't sure the phrase was "I hate you." Still, he pledged the toys would be removed from the shelf and said if the couple would bring in their toy, they could receive a full refund. The store manager declined to comment for WorldNetDaily. The Columbian reports the toys were gone from the shelves the next day, but Wal-Mart spokeswoman Karen Burk said no toys were pulled from the shelves in Hazel Dell. Burk said this was the first time she'd heard complaints about the toy and said she was having difficulty investigating the Skeltons' claim due to lack of information.
"I have relayed this information to our merchandise team," Burk told WorldNetDaily. "We're looking into it to the best of our ability. This is an important situation. Any product that is not performing properly is important." "We are always sorry that a customer is not happy with a product they purchased at our stores, and we encourage the customer to come back for a full refund," she added. The Skeltons don't plan on taking Wal-Mart up on the refund offer.
"It still plays music," said Blanche, "and if we take it back we lose our proof."

THIS SHIT IS FUNNY
http://www.despair.com/indem.html

RE: POPE
I really thought the Pope would hang on the feeding tube a while longer, which makes some of yesterday’s post a little redundant. On the other hand, I never did like the guy and the ceremonial mourning will still drag on and on, I’ve already head him credited for "winning the cold war" and how he’s a sure thing for canonization. And I don’t see the C of C electing anything but an arch-conservative, which puts the tin hat on any mitigation of the population disaster.

The secret word is Huh

CRYPTIQUE – Onward Christian soldiers.

ON POPE TO CROAK
(And here’s where all the lapsed Catholics take guilty offence.)
The death of the Pope is going to be yet another massive media mortality binge, moving at the speed of the 16th century, and will have us screaming before the smoke comes out of the chimney from the College of Cardinals. Like the death of Ronald Reagan writ even larger. We haven’t had a pope death in quite a while, and the last one, poor old John Paul I, left us with a big fat conspiracy theory and Godfather III. The jokes and rumors will abound soon enough – as in the tale that there’s not only a Papal Dead Pool inside the Vatican in which participants can bet on the exact hour of the pontiff’s death, but also that Opus Dei already has it fixed.

GOOD NEWS FOR PERVERTS...
From no less than Pravda online...
http://english.pravda.ru/main/18/90/360/15176_whipping.html

AND THIS IS JUST PLAIN FASCINATING (I could watch it for hours)
http://www.lares.dti.ne.jp/~yugo/storage/monocrafts_ver3/03/index.html

The secret word is Infallible

Frank Perdue, the chicken king, is dead. He didn’t like unions and killed a fuck of a lot of chickens. Did his own commercials, too. Looked just like Ed Koch.

STRING HAS SPRUNG
Still working on finishing the damned novel. (Or maybe novel of the damned – what else is new?) But last night found me sprawled on the couch in front of a three hour PBS special on String Theory. (And I’m so fried I’ve forgotten the title, but it’s 3 hours long and the only one currently around.) I’d be a liar if I said I actually understood String Theory, but the graphics were exactly what I want on my TV screen when it’s considered as part of the furniture, and, or course, for many years, I have moved and manipulated characters around multidimensional space-time (the most notable being Yancey Slide and the DNA Cowboys), and so, while hardly comprehending the math, I felt wholly at home and comfortable with concept of string closing up the holes in the warp and of infinitely vast cosmic branes colliding and producing constantly repeated Big Bangs. This wasn’t all of it, though, I was also mightily impressed with the mathematicians who have spent the last 20 years and a million donuts on the elegant equations that led to the M-Theory, and who now wait for the great Fermi Lab atom smasher to come up with a single graviton to either prove their theory or the lack of it which will mean they have magnificently wasted their time. What courage, and how much more valiant and intrepid than these vicious Christians with their absurd creationism, and their atrophied imaginations that leave them unable to conceive of any God-Creator who is not as miserable, stupid and vindictive as they are. (But the creationism rant will be in next week’s LA CityBeat, and you’ll have to wait until next Thursday.)

The secret word is Awesome

HELL
The current bookslut has an hysterical interview with our old Lower East Side homie Richard Hell in which he attempts to explain (I think) to an idiot that poetry is not a career and it might be an idea if fucking poets had some life experience to poet about. (Or maybe I’m projecting my own beef.)
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005_03_004703.php

ANTEATERS OF THE GODS
In keeping with the Doc40 policy of bringing you all the best in cute but extinct critters, kaymo sends the following...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Just as dinosaurs started getting really big 150 million years ago, a little rat-sized mammal scurried around eating termites, U.S. scientists reported on Thursday. They found the fossil of a completely new type of animal in Colorado, and said it apparently resembled an armadillo and would have eaten bugs. But the fossil animal, named Fruitafossor windscheffelia, is not related to anything alive today and shows that anteaters, armadillos and other creatures that dig up insects evolved their specialized abilities several times during the history of the world. This is known as convergent evolution. Zhe-Xi Luo and John Wible of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh said the mammal's limbs and hollow teeth resembled those of some of today's specialized termite-eaters, including aardvarks, anteaters and armadillos."The dental convergence of Fruitafossor to modern armadillos suggests its diet may include termites, other insects, invertebrates, and even plants," they wrote in Friday's issue of the journal Science. Termites and their close relatives -- cockroaches -- had evolved millions of years before Fruitafossor lived, they said. Like anteaters, the Fruitafossor had tube-like teeth because it would have sucked in and swallowed its prey virtually whole, Luo and Wible found. Its four-toed limbs suggested it scratched in the dirt. Dated to the late Jurassic period, it would have lived alongside huge dinosaurs such as the brachiosaurus, stegosaurus and allosaurus. The name comes from the town of Fruita, Colorado, where the fossil was found, with "fossor" for the fossorial, or digging, specialization of the forelimbs. "Windscheffeli is in honor of Wally Windscheffel, who discovered the holotype specimen," the researchers added.
Plus a kaymo comment...
Of course, dinos were already huge 150 mill ya, which is late Jurassic, but this is a very old "mammal", and a neat example of convergent evolution. I say "mammal" but I bet it looked more like a fat lizard crossed with a possum, in other words a hairy kind of lizard. Not that it was a lizard, or even closely related to them, just looked like one.

CRYPTIQUE – You don’t have to be a retired buccaneer to write poetry but it sure improves the poems, Jim lad.

DAYS AND DOLLARS
The last couple of days have been unrelenting work. A column for LA CityBeat on the religious revolution, a retrospective on Robert Johnson’s King Of The Delta Blues singers for Mojo, and off course on with the novel. Too burned to say much except today is Christopher Walkin’s birthday, so maybe we should go around all day spontaneously tap dancing, talking without punctuation, and playing Russian roulette.

The secret word is Polymath

CRYPTIQUE – Johnnie Cochran is dead.

(NB The ancient communal comments board has, like Lassie, come home. See top right.)

(NEW COMMENTS SYSTEM – SEE YESTERDAY)

FRIDAY? GOOD? THANK GOD IT’S SATURDAY

Good Friday, and first I read a note from kaymo –

Been down in Virginia for a bit. They're mad down there, completely taken over by the right wing looniness. It's a wee bit frightening, mate.

And then I turn to the NY Times and find two Op Ed pieces, one by Bob Herbert and the other by some Princeton oil academic who’s name I don’t recognize. All a bit depressing, what with all the fucking crosses on TV.

First Bob Herbert
While the press and the public are distracted by one sensational news story after another - Terri Schiavo, Michael Jackson, steroids in baseball, etc. - the president and his party have continued their extraordinary campaign to undermine the programs that were designed to fend off destitution and provide a reasonable foundation of economic security for those not blessed with great wealth. Figures in the budget show that child-care assistance would be ended for 300,000 low-income children by 2009. The food stamp cut would terminate food stamp aid for approximately 300,000 low-income people, most of whom are low-income working families with children. Reduced Medicaid funding most certainly would cause many states to cut their Medicaid programs, increasing the ranks of the uninsured. Education funding would be cut beginning next year, and the cuts would grow larger in succeeding years. Food assistance for pregnant women, infants and children would be cut. Funding for H.I.V. and AIDS treatment would be cut by more than half a billion dollars over five years. Support for environmental protection programs would be sharply curtailed. And so on. Conservatives insist the cuts are necessary to get the roaring federal budget deficit under control. But they have trouble keeping a straight face when they tell that story. Laden with tax cuts, the president's proposal will result in an increase, not a decrease, in the deficit. Shared sacrifice is anathema to the big-money crowd.

Now the oil prof...
I used to work with Mr. Hubbert at Shell Oil, and my own independent research places the peak of world oil production late this year or early in 2006. Even a prompt and successful drilling operation in the Arctic refuge would not start pumping oil into the pipeline before 2008 or 2009.A permanent drop in world oil production will have serious consequences. In addition to the economic blow, there will be the psychological effect of accepting that there are limits to an important energy resource.

Which I guess brings me to my own...
EASTER MESSAGE

I’ve never been a great supporter of B.F. Skinner and behaviorism, but I feel a rat-cage instinct taking over. Even without figures and projections, humanity starts senses that it’s overcrowded and stuff will shortly be in very short supply. The neo-con response is to put a wall around the remaining stuff and hold it for themselves at any price. The real problem is who gets to be inside the wall and who is locked out. It’s the Capitalist Rapture. Those with stuff with are in an uneasy material paradise, those without get a John Shirley/Soylent Green, increasing-scarcity dystopia. No shit, shamus. Unfortunately too many Bush-supporting Americans believe that the simple act of voting in the current gang of fools, psychotics and grifters guarantees them a divine laminate that reads Access All Areas. They think, when the wall turns overt, and the gates quickly close, they will be safe on the inside with their SUV, their Bible, and their riding-mower. Bad fucking error, neighbours. Compounded by the fact that, in your fear, you are turning on all of those who should be your logical allies in the only concerted action that will save us – the concerted tearing down of these walls before they are fully built and manned with armed guards.

Fascism, my dears, has never been, and never will be, the friend of human beings. So why not take this weird ass spring weekend, while you’re celebrating executions, eggs, and rabbits, to wise up and join the human race? It is damned nearly too late.

The secret word is Joshua

QUOTE – "I have had my fun if I never get well no more." – Howling Wolf

IT WOULD SEEM THAT, TO POST A COMMENT, CLICK THE TINY "COMMENT" AT THE BOTTOM OF EACH POST, AND THEN "POST A COMMENT" ON THE NEW SCREEN THAT COMES UP. TO READ COMMENTS, YOU ALSO HAVE TO CLOCK "POST A COMMENT". SEEMS UNWEILDY, BUT MAYBE I WILL TINKER.

ANY COMMENTS?

(AND NO, I DIDN'T TAKE DOWN THE OLD BOARD. IT JUST MYSTERIOUSLY VANISHED. I WAS FOND OF THE OLD BOARD. IT HAD A LIFE OF IT'S OWN. WHY DO I FEEL LIKE I'M LIVING IN A VERY OLD USED SPACESHIP.)

COMMENTS NOW SEEM TO HAVE CHANGED. (THE OLD BEAT UP BOARD HAS VANISHED). YOU NOW HAVE A KIND OF DOUBLE ACTION THING AT THE END OF EACH POST. I GUESS ALL WE CAN DO IS PLAY AROUND AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS.

DID I MENTION ALREADY THAT THE WORD SEEMS TO BE GOING INSANE?
Over on the comments board Billy Oblivion has clued us in on how the Brits are cleaving to the Bush madness and now TPGLA sends this piece from The Guardian that indicates the Greeks, despite two and a half years of civilization are going just as nuts...

He meant it as a piece of religious satire, a playful look at the life of Jesus. But Gerhard Haderer's depiction of Christ as a binge-drinking friend of Jimi Hendrix and naked surfer high on cannabis has caused a furore that could potentially land the cartoonist in jail. Haderer did not even know that his book, The Life of Jesus, had been published in Greece until he received a summons to appear in court in Athens in January charged with blasphemy. He was given a six-month suspended sentence in absentia, but if he loses his appeal next month his sentence could be increased to two years. Haderer's book is the first to be banned in Greece for more than 20 years, and he is the first artist to fall prey of the European arrest warrant system since it was introduced in June 2002. Yesterday in Vienna, a group of prominent writers and poets called a press conference to draw attention to the plight of Haderer, an Austrian, whose case they claim is crucial to the freedom of international artists. "It is unbelievable that a person can write a book in his home country and be condemned and threatened with imprisonment by another," said Nikki Conrad, a human rights expert who organised yesterday's press conference. "But he is not going to just sit back and accept this injustice. He is prepared to take this to the European court of human rights. When Gerhard first got the summons he thought it was a joke. But now he is starting to get a bit nervous." Mr Conrad added that a 1,000-signature petition of international artists, signed by people including the Nobel prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, would be delivered to the EU within the next two weeks. "This campaign is crucial for the future freedom of international artists. Haderer is unique and situations like this will inhibit his artistic style," said the poet Gerhard Ruiss. The Austrian comedian Hubert Kramar, who is next week due to star in a new satirical play about Christ, turned up to the press conference dressed as Jesus. "We are supposed to be living in a democratic society. Greece is in Europe and the whole idea of the European Union is that everything is supposed to be more open. But what happened to Haderer is scaring artists like me," he said. Haderer's 40-page book has been already published in seven countries, including Germany, where 100,000 copies have been sold. Well known in Germany for his weekly illustrations in the news magazine Stern, he is to appeal against his six-month sentence in Athens on April 13.

AND TALKING OF CRAZY...
This week’s LA CityBeat finds me going on about the state of US jurisprudence...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=1843&IssueNum=94

SAVE OUR SCIENCE
And kaymo sends a link to 13 really fascinating things to wonder about...
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/space/mg18524911.600

The secret word is Dementia

REPRINTS, REPRINTS, REPRINTS
I keep finding stuff of mine reprinted on the web. Lately it’s been the things I do for LA CityBeat. I know writers who throw a shitfit at things like this, whining about how they’re not getting paid (waaah, poor baby, go work for Conde Naste) but just see it as a wider audience and that maybe some good will come of it. God knows I was never in this life for the money. (Although the striven for changes in the world didn’t come about as planned, either.) And even on the days when I feel wholly and totally used up, I’m not about blame anything but my own overwhelming ego. The most fun of this reprinted stuff is that it comes with comments (like proper orderly comments not like the Doc40 free-for-all that must be getting close to some record overload.*

This week, the Smirking Chip ran my CityBeat piece on censorship and though crime.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=20250

And something called Free Republic ran my thoughts on the cultural implications of Battlestar Gallactica, which seemed to garner over a hundred shots, mainly of right wing savagery, and only reinforced just how pig ignorant the fascist classes are when it comes to any kind of popular culture, even the kind they like.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1351052/posts

There was also, however, a cute question from Tom Galloway...
What would happen in a battle between an Enterprise security team, who always get killed soon after appearing, and a squad of Imperial Stormtroopers, who can't hit the broad side of a planet?

* An impassioned comment has recently been posted over there Billy Oblivion on how the brutality of the Bush mindset had spread to the UK. Check it out.

ELVIS MEETS BODY PIERCING
You gotta see this...
http://www.bodycandy.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?item=4484&source=froogle

RAINBOW WARRIOR
HCB sent this over as an example of just how weirdly unfettered Brit pre-school kiddie shows were in the 1970s. What he didn’t know was that, back around 1975 when I was writing the DNA Cowboys and songs for Motorhead, the Rainbow – and ultra-low budget puppet show was the only thing on TV when I rolled out of bed into a Ladbroke Grove one channel noontime, hungover from a nights drinking at Dingwalls, the Speakeasy or both. Also I seem to recall that the only overt human in the cast was a suvivor or some one-hit pop band getting what he so richly deserved.
http://rainbow.arch.scriptmania.com/rainbow_tv_episode.html

The secret word is Zippy

A GOREY GIFT
I have always love this and having found it on the web, I couldn’t resist reproducing it. Alas I don’t have the drawing to go with it...

A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears. C is for Clair who wasted away, D is for Desmond thrown out of the sleigh. E is for Ernest who choked on a peach, F is for Fanny, sucked dry by a leech. G is for George, smothered under a rug, H is for Hector, done in by a thug. I is for Ida who drowned in the lake, J is for James who took lye, by mistake. K is for Kate who was struck with an axe, L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks. M is for Maud who was swept out to sea, N is for Nevil who died of enui. O is for Olive, run through with an awl, P is for Prue, trampled flat in a brawl Q is for Quinton who sank in a mire, R is for Rhoda, consumed by a fire. S is for Susan who parished of fits, T is for Titas who flew into bits. U is for Una who slipped down a drain, V is for Victor, squashed under a train. W is for Winie, embedded in ice, X is for Xercies, devoured by mice. Y is for Yoric whose head was bashed in, Z is for Zilla who drank too much gin. -- Edward Gorey "The Gastly Crumb Tines"

CRYPTIQUE – Elvis didn’t live long enough to feel the tongue stud.

Yup

MAD ON THE EQUINOX
I have been attempting not to get violent, disgusted, or sick over this whole Schiavo keep-the-brain-dead-alive bullshit down in Florida, and screaming at everyone who will listen that real objective here is the will of the Fundamentalist SS to usurp total control over our very bodies – be they alive, dead, pregnant, or stoned. At risk of sounding like Uncle Bill Burroughs, it's the rise of the psycho-civilized slave state. In that context the anti-abortion/pro-death penalty mindset ceases to be a contradiction. THEY will decide how you live, when you die, what you believe, what you ingest, and how and why you fuck.

The secret word is Patriarchy

One attempt at distraction was to do yet another of those cyber-quizzes. This outfit seems more fun than Quizilla that had now fallen to total "My Little Pony" pre-teen whimsy.


Which Horrible Affliction are you?
A Rum and Monkey disease.

And here’s another that turned out cunningly deceptive or maybe Dadaist...

What kind of pirate am I? You decide!
You can also view a breakdown of results or put one of these on your own page!
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey

CRYPTIQUE – Holy shit. I’m reviewing online quiz sites.

ABSINTHE, DOMINATION AND A CORSET CATALOGUE
Having decided that all was lost (see below – "Maybe we simply have to accept that we’re an aberrant species of sociopath and the only sane strategy is one of high-speed hedonism and fast demise.") a whole clutch of decadence came down the cyber-pike. Most of it had a decidedly Victorian tone but that may be a synchronic, near-miss, side effect of my work on the steam punk novels Kindling and the sequel Conflagration, that is nearly finished.

The first was an entire website devoted to recipes for cocktails involving absinthe.
http://www.feeverte.net/cocktails.html

The second came from the magnificent Wikipedia – The Free Encyclopedia – that seemed to indicate that the 19th century was way more perverse in its perversions that the 21st, and also that Al Swearengen had nothing on Mrs Berkley...

The 19th century British dominatrix Mrs Theresa Berkley (died September 1836) ran a brothel in at 28 Charlotte Street, just to the north of Soho, specializing in flagellation. She is notable as the inventor of the Berkley Horse, a piece of BDSM apparatus. According to an un-named source quoted by Henry Spencer Ashbee,
"Her instruments of torture were more numerous than those of any other governess. Her supply of birch was extensive, and kept in water, so that it was always green and pliant: she had shafts with a dozen whip thongs on each of them; a dozen different sizes of cat-o'-nine-tails, some with needle points worked into them; various kinds of thin bending canes; leather straps like coach traces; battledoors, made of thick sole-leather, with inch nails run through to docket, and currycomb tough hides rendered callous by many years flagellation. Holly brushes, furze brushes; a prickly evergreen, called butcher's bush; and during the summer, a glass and China vases, filled with a constant supply of green nettles, with which she often restored the dead to life. Thus, at her shop, whoever went with plenty of money, could be birched, whipped, fustigated, scourged, needle-pricked, half-hung, holly-brushed, furze-brushed, butcher-brushed, stinging-nettled, curry-combed, phletbotomized, and tortured till he had a belly full. For those whose lech it was to flog a woman, she would herself submit to a certain extent; but if they were gluttons at it, she had women in attendance who would take any number of lashes the flogger pleased, provided he forked out an ad valorem duty. Among these were Miss Ring, Hannah Jones, Sally Taylor, One-eyed Peg, Bauld-cunted Poll, and a black girl, called Ebony Bet."

The Wikipedia home page is at...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

But as a gauge of the vastness of its database, it even, to my eternal delight, has an entry on my fictional vampire Victor Renquist...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Renquist

And finally, for all who dream of saloon girls and Lola Montez, this on-line corset catalogue is worth a visit for the glamor art alone...
http://www.corsetconnection.com/index.htm

The secret word is Oyster

CRYPTIQUE – Does life hold more than rage and lewd proposals?

TWO BITS OF REALLY, REALLY BAD NEWS
(As in "we’re probably fucked")

That Bush wants to make Donald Wolfowitz the head of the World Bank may well be a global catastrophe on a par with a largish asteroid impact. Watching Wolfie on TV has always left me feeling that here was a paranoid and very unpleasant little man seeking deep psychological payback for real or imagined childhood slights. Of all the swamp-draining, neocon weasels, his philosophic mindset always seemed closest to that of a stunted Ming the Merciless, and to give him such power over the global economy is nothing less than arming a weapon of mass inequality. With Wolfowitz holding the purse-strings, or, at least, the lines of credit, ideological blackmail will be the order of the day, and the fucking of poorer nations will, in the future, be conducted with all the finesse of a San Quentin gang rape.

Meanwhile, down at the South Pole, the South Antarctic ice sheet is going to collapse. About the only thing that can prevent it – along with a diversion of the Gulf Stream that would disastrously impact the climate in Northern Europe – is a 60% cut in carbon dioxide levels. Which is a dream. The Kyoto treaty calls for only a 5% CO2 cut and that’s being largely ignored. Humanity is simply too locked into its immediate greedy moment of gratification to do what’s needed. Middle America will only give up its SUVs when they’re pried its cold dead fingers. Europe and Japan might adjust but only minimally and avoiding any radical change of the lifestyle. Military industrial China is burning metaphoric aviation fuel, and the developing nations are going to go through some approximation of 19th century smokestack culture before they ever reach the modern world. Maybe we simply have to accept that we’re an aberrant species of sociopaths and the only sane strategy is one of high-speed hedonism and fast demise.

The secret word is Damned

Our lovely hipspinster has a thought provoking blog on the Haidel rape trial.
http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

CRYPTIQUE – You stepped on the dog.

DID YOU MISS ME? (Part 9)
A medical epic in the family has slowed things down some. (No, not me.) I hope I’ll be putting more out on the morrow. In the meantime play with this link. Just type in anything. Like Doc40. It’s totally amazing, wonderfully pointless, and comes courtesy of some girl who assures us "this shit is crunk, yo." http://www.gizoogle.com

The secret word is Insurance

CRYPTIQUE – Y2K was a psych test.

HISTORY, BLOODY HISTORY

Dan sends in the following culled from Reuters...

New York's legendary rock club CBGB, which helped launch everybody from Blondie to the Ramones, faces closure if it does not resolve a dispute over unpaid rent with the homeless charity that owns the building. Club owner Hilly Kristal said the dispute dated from 2001, when the landlord presented a $300,000 bill for unpaid rent. Though most of that has now been repaid, the club was handed another bill earlier this year for $76,000 which CBGB has not paid. The club's lease comes to an end in August and talks on renewal are stalled.
"The real thing is they don't want me back," Kristal said, adding that there had been a series of disagreements over renovations and building certificates in recent years.
CBGB, which stands for "country, bluegrass and blues" even though it is most famous for punk music, rents its downtown space from the Bowery Residents' Committee -- a non-profit organization that runs a homeless shelter above the premises.
"I am not going to subsidize CBGB at the expense of homeless people," Muzzy Rosenblatt, executive director for the organization, was quoted as saying in The New York Times.
MTV's Web site quoted him as saying CBGB had not met its obligations on safety.
The Committee wants to double the rent and negotiations over a new lease have ground to a halt amid legal wrangling that will result in a court hearing later this month.
Kristal, who founded the club in 1973, converting what had been a Hell's Angels hangout into one of the most famous venues for live music in the city, said he would fight closure of what he called a New York City institution.
"We've established something here. ... This is a kind of symbol of helping young musicians and new artists," he said, recalling early gigs by the likes of Pearl Jam.
"I think we do a nice thing for a lot of people; maybe it's not quite as wonderful as helping the homeless but it has its benefits," Kristal said.
Rosenblatt could be immediately reached for comment

I don’t really know what I think about all this. I played CB’s a bunch of times, mainly with Tijuana Bible, but entropy inevitably sets in, and everything ages and everything changes, (so do what you think you should do.) Out here in LA, the legendary Barney’s Beanery went the preservation route and now we have something that looks like a theme park concept of a biker bar and has nothing to do with the saloon where everyone from Errol Flynn to Jim Morrison used to behave badly. Hilly does, however, need a joint over which to preside.

SMILE WHEN YOU SAY THAT, DAKOTA KID

Over on the comments board, the Dakota Kid is all of aflutter about the Walking Eagle joke sent in by johnette. To cut a tirade short, I’ve just enumerated a few points which put me at odds with the Kid, and can only echo some girl’s comment “thank god for borg’s brain”. You better read the actual comments first, though, or you won’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.

1: “Just because someone thinks she or he is being funny does not mean it is entirely advisable to say and write anything you want anytime you want.” Well, as a matter of fact, I would strongly advise it. “To say and write (and post and publish) anything you want anytime you want” is my profession. Of course, it can get you beaten, stoned, jailed, burnt at the stake, and denied employment. A number of the above have happened or almost happened to me down the years, but that goes with the territory.

2: The function of Doc40 is never ever to “convince mainstream voters to change horses”. I gave that a half-hearted try last year. Hell, I was even civil to Ann Coulter. But no more, Kid. Fuck ‘em, and the horse they rode in on. The “less discerning minds and innocent victims” have had decades, if not centuries, to figure it out, as have the brutal, the transcendently greedy and willfully ignorant. They still refuse to get it.

3: “If you knew anything about out "red brothers"...”– Which “brothers” are those, Dakota? The guys from AIM I knew back in the day? The mad BC bud runners? My friend Gayle? The Manhattan high steel construction workers who used to hang out in a bar near Bloomingdales in the 1980s?. The windwalkers just over the psychedelic horizon? Shall we dispense with patronizing Victorian missionary-speak?

4: “...you'd know that, although they have a truly superb sense of humor, they would never use an obscenity like 'shit'.” Give me a break. Excremental humor is common to all known cultures. It’s the very first infantile comedy topic. And some of those guys in the bar by Bloomies had no sense of humor at all.

5: “Indigenous people have suffered tremendously for a long, long time.” Fucking A right we have! Take my Anglo-Irish ancestors. (Please.) They spent 700 years oppressing and slaughtering each other. And when weren’t doing that, they enlisted in the bloody British army and were shipped off to oppress Indians in India, Africans in Africa, and sell opium to the Chinese. Was it Brecht who said “war is a bayonet with a worker at each end?”

6: Some of my best friends are the “intelligentsia of Hollywood screenwriters.” So watch it.

7: “Currently Wyoming is attempting to drill on public, sacred land. I trust you have already contacted the Bureau of Mines?” Fuck the Bureau of Mines. We asked the North Koreans for a ten megaton airburst.

8: While being aware that James Stewart was politically to the right of Strom Thurmond, that still does not prevent me from enjoying Harvey. Movies are our modern folklore, goddamn it. Indeed, I even recorded a version of the theme to “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” as a homage to Lee Marvin. It’s on the recently released Japanese version of The Deviants Dr. Crow.
(Two more and we’d have a 10 point program.)

The secret word is Misguided

AND
And I have a bit on censorship in this week’s LA Citybeat...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=1783&IssueNum=92

WALKING EAGLE
Send by johnette
Invited to address a major gathering of the American Indian Nation last weekend in Arizona, President Bush spoke for almost an hour of his future plans for increasing every Native American's present standard of living.
Though vague on the details of his plan, he appeared enthusiastic about his ideas for helping his "red brothers."
At the conclusion of his speech, the Tribes presented the President with a plaque inscribed with his new Indian name -- 'Walking Eagle'.
As the President departed waving to the crowd in his motorcade, a news reporter asked the group of chiefs how they came to select the new name given to the President.
They explained that Walking Eagle is the name given to a bird so full of shit it can no longer fly.

The secret word is Forked

TOMMY VANCE RIP (see comments)

SPONGEBOB, SPONGBIB

I make errors, I freely admit it. I put it down to a racing mind and a tendency to read what I intended to write and not what’s on the page. My slips, however, are nothing compared to those who spring to the defense of that idiot James Dobson of the morality website Focus On Family, and his theory that Spongebob Squarepants is a fifth column for the Homosexual Agenda. These lines are from mail sent to MSNBC after Keith Olbermann had ridiculed the theory...

"I think Jesus said it best when he said, Get behind the Satan."

"Your prejudism is definately showing."

"I am writing to express my opposition to the SPONGE BOB ’TYPE VALUES THAT ARE TRYING TO BE TAUGHT in education today."

"It came up a long time ago that Spongebob was gay. It is a theory not a fact. It is a general belief among society that Spongebob is gay."

"Our family is deeply concerned by your callous remarks about Dr. Dobson. I believe him to be correct in his assumption of homosexual references in the show. We have watched this cartoon for years and recently, it has appeared to us to be more homosexual in nature. There’s several episodes where I just sat there and thought, this is really, really weird. I couldn’t get over the gay undertones."

"I knew when I herd your reports about Spong Bob… I needed to ivestigate further… and sure enough you not only left out the most important part of the story, but that misrepresented Dr. J. Dobson. I feel that we need to protect the inocence of children. And I feel that right as a parent is being taken away by Homosexuals who slip there docterin in on the sly…"

But best of all, the truly presidential... Stupid Intellegenece."

And, while we ask ourselves if the illiterate should be permitted opinions (or would they just keep coal in them?) kaymo sends a link to a neat compendium of really advanced paranoia, kinda like Lyndon LaRouche meets the Rapture or, as the ever-splendid kaymo puts it. "Do you ever find yourself singing "The madman draws circles, up and down the block,....." etc. when you're reading one of these rants?
http://www.redmoonrising.com/AmericanBabylon/ABindex.htm

And, from HCB, is another angle on the fatal inanity that may yet kill us all...
http://thewvsr.com/gargoyle.htm

The secret word is Palsy

A typo on Feb 20th had the wrong email address. The correct one is...byron4d@msn.com

STRINBERG AND HELIUM
Before you read through all the grim data that follows, here’s some fun donated by HCB....
http://www.strindbergandhelium.com/

(I also find myself recalling the ice-blonde, beautiful, and sadly deceased Ingrid von Essen with whom I shared a top floor Ladbroke Grove apartment for most of the 1970s, and who was quietly proud that one of her relatives – a great aunt, or something – had an affair with August Strinberg. I would have said a torrid affair, but I don’t think they do torrid, up in those Norse countries.)

The secret word is Fjord

DEADWOOD
There’s also my squib on Deadwood, plus a nice picture of Ian McShane in this week's LACityBeat...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=1768&IssueNum=91

SOME WEEKEND FACTS ‘N’ FIGURES
Sent by Nelson 7, compiled by our old pal Michael Ventura for the Austin Chronicle.

The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (the New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004).

The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).

Twenty percent of Americans think the sun orbits the earth. Seventeen percent believe the earth revolves around the sun once a day (The Week, Jan. 7, 2005).

"The International Adult Literacy Survey...found that Americans with less than nine years of education 'score worse than virtually all of the other countries'" (Jeremy Rifkin's superbly documented book The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, p.78).

Our workers are so ignorant and lack so many basic skills that American businesses spend $30 billion a year on remedial training (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004). No wonder they relocate elsewhere!

"The European Union leads the U.S. in...the number of science and engineering graduates; public research and development (R&D) expenditures; and new capital raised" (The European Dream, p.70).

"Europe surpassed the United States in the mid-1990s as the largest producer of scientific literature" (The European Dream, p.70).

Nevertheless, Congress cut funds to the National Science Foundation. The agency will issue 1,000 fewer research grants this year (NYT, Dec. 21, 2004).

Foreign applications to U.S. grad schools declined 28 percent last year. Foreign student enrollment on all levels fell for the first time in three decades, but increased greatly in Europe and China. Last year Chinese grad-school graduates in the U.S. dropped 56 percent, Indians 51 percent, South Koreans 28 percent (NYT, Dec. 21, 2004). We're not the place to be anymore.
The World Health Organization "ranked the countries of the world in terms of overall health performance, and the U.S. [was]...37th." In the fairness of health care, we're 54th. "The irony is that the United States spends more per capita for health care than any other nation in the world" (The European Dream, pp.79-80). Pay more, get lots, lots less.

"The U.S. and South Africa are the only two developed countries in the world that do not provide health care for all their citizens" (The European Dream, p.80). Excuse me, but since when is South Africa a "developed" country? Anyway, that's the company we're keeping.

Lack of health insurance coverage causes 18,000 unnecessary American deaths a year. (That's six times the number of people killed on 9/11.) (NYT, Jan. 12, 2005.)

"U.S. childhood poverty now ranks 22nd, or second to last, among the developed nations. Only Mexico scores lower" (The European Dream, p.81). Been to Mexico lately? Does it look "developed" to you? Yet it's the only "developed" country to score lower in childhood poverty.

Twelve million American families--more than 10 percent of all U.S. households--"continue to struggle, and not always successfully, to feed themselves." Families that "had members who actually went hungry at some point last year" numbered 3.9 million (NYT, Nov. 22, 2004).
The United States is 41st in the world in infant mortality. Cuba scores higher (NYT, Jan. 12, 2005).

Women are 70 percent more likely to die in childbirth in America than in Europe (NYT, Jan. 12, 2005). The leading cause of death of pregnant women in this country is murder (CNN, Dec. 14, 2004).

"Of the 20 most developed countries in the world, the U.S. was dead last in the growth rate of total compensation to its workforce in the 1980s.... In the 1990s, the U.S. average compensation growth rate grew only slightly, at an annual rate of about 0.1 percent" (The European Dream, p.39). Yet Americans work longer hours per year than any other industrialized country, and get less vacation time.

"Sixty-one of the 140 biggest companies on the Global Fortune 500 rankings are European, while only 50 are U.S. companies" (The European Dream, p.66). "In a recent survey of the world's 50 best companies, conducted by Global Finance, all but one were European" (The European Dream, p.69).

"Fourteen of the 20 largest commercial banks in the world today are European.... In the chemical industry, the European company BASF is the world's leader, and three of the top six players are European. In engineering and construction, three of the top five companies are European.... The two others are Japanese. Not a single American engineering and construction company is included among the world's top nine competitors. In food and consumer products, Nestlé and Unilever, two European giants, rank first and second, respectively, in the world. In the food and drugstore retail trade, two European companies...are first and second, and European companies make up five of the top ten. Only four U.S. companies are on the list" (The European Dream, p.68).

The United States has lost 1.3 million jobs to China in the last decade (CNN, Jan. 12, 2005).
U.S. employers eliminated 1 million jobs in 2004 (The Week, Jan. 14, 2005).
Three million six hundred thousand Americans ran out of unemployment insurance last year; 1.8 million--one in five--unemployed workers are jobless for more than six months (NYT, Jan. 9, 2005).

Japan, China, Taiwan, and South Korea hold 40 percent of our government debt. (That's why we talk nice to them.) "By helping keep mortgage rates from rising, China has come to play an enormous and little-noticed role in sustaining the American housing boom" (NYT, Dec. 4, 2004). Read that twice. We owe our housing boom to China, because they want us to keep buying all that stuff they manufacture.

Sometime in the next 10 years Brazil will probably pass the U.S. as the world's largest agricultural producer. Brazil is now the world's largest exporter of chickens, orange juice, sugar, coffee, and tobacco. Last year, Brazil passed the U.S. as the world's largest beef producer. (Hear that, you poor deluded cowboys?) As a result, while we bear record trade deficits, Brazil boasts a $30 billion trade surplus (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).

As of last June, the U.S. imported more food than it exported (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004). Bush: 62,027,582 votes. Kerry: 59,026,003 votes. Number of eligible voters who didn't show up: 79,279,000 (NYT, Dec. 26, 2004). That's more than a third. Way more. If more than a third of Iraqis don't show for their election, no country in the world will think that election legitimate.
One-third of all U.S. children are born out of wedlock. One-half of all U.S. children will live in a one-parent house (CNN, Dec. 10, 2004).

"Americans are now spending more money on gambling than on movies, videos, DVDs, music, and books combined" (The European Dream, p.28).

"Nearly one out of four Americans [believe] that using violence to get what they want is acceptable" (The European Dream, p.32).

Forty-three percent of Americans think torture is sometimes justified, according to a PEW Poll (Associated Press, Aug. 19, 2004).

"Nearly 900,000 children were abused or neglected in 2002, the last year for which such data are available" (USA Today, Dec. 21, 2004).

"The International Association of Chiefs of Police said that cuts by the [Bush] administration in federal aid to local police agencies have left the nation more vulnerable than ever" (USA Today, Nov. 17, 2004).

The USA is "No. 1" in nothing but weaponry, consumer spending, debt, and delusion.

The secret word is Dire