THE BANKER

There’s really nothing to say about this little gem from Bill Nighy except its hilarious and subversively on the money. Click here.

The secret word is Ruin

MARILYN SEZ…

“And for bankers who refuse to compromise, we have plenty of lampposts and lots of rope.”  

PURE EGO

A glowing review by the excellent Ben Graham of last Friday’s poetry show here in Brighton was posted on Facebook. One section, however, gave me cause for a certain old guard pause and posed three possible questions.

1) Have I been doing this for too long?

2) Have my visions become archaic?

3) Do I give a fuck?

“Farren links back to an era when outlaw giants like Burroughs, Thompson and Morrison still strode the earth, and rock n’ roll and outsider poetry were linked, along with wider and more amorphous notions of youth-as-rebel-culture and drugs-as-shamanic-tools, standing firm against the rapacious advances of the military-industrial greedheads and all who served them. Such an era may seem quaint and discredited now from our lonely 21st Century beachhead. And yet we at the Midsummer Poetry Ball still broadly advocate and stand behind such principles.” (Click here for the whole thing.)

So while I’m basking in the wonder of me, KUSF in San Francisco devoted an hpur show to the works of the Deviants plus side project like Tijuana Bible. (Click here for a listen)

And if all that wasn’t enough, here’s a clip of the Deviants’ D-Day show in Wolverhampton.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

POSTED WITHOUT COMMENT

GRATUITOUS CORNER

FULL SPEED TO THE DARK AGES

This essay by John Atcheson provides one more well considered confirmation that arrant and vicious stupidity has to be halted if any of us are to survive.


“We are witnessing an epochal shift in our socio-political world.  We are de-evolving, hurtling headlong into a past that was defined by serfs and lords; by necromancy and superstition; by policies based on fiat, not facts. Much of what has made the modern world in general, and the United States in particular, a free and prosperous society comes directly from insights that arose during the Enlightenment. Too bad we’re chucking it all out and returning to the Dark Ages. Literally. Two main things distinguished the post Enlightenment world from the pre Enlightenment Dark Ages. First, Francis Bacon’s Novo Organum Scientiarum (The New Instrument of Science)introduced a new way of  understanding the world, in which empiricism, facts and … well … reality … defined what was real. It essentially outlined the scientific method:  observation and data collection, formulation of hypotheses, experiments designed to test hypotheses and elevation of these hypotheses to theories when data consistently supported them.  It was and is a system based on skepticism, and a relentless and methodical search for truth. 

It brought us advances and untold wealth and health.  From one-horse carts to automobiles to airplanes. From leaches and phrenology to penicillin and monoclonal antibodies.

Until recently. 

Now, we seek to operate by revealed truths, not reality.  Decrees from on high – often issued by an unholy alliance of religious fundamentalists, self-interested corporations, and greedy fat cats – are offered up as reality by rightwing politicians. For example, North Carolina law-makers recently passed legislation against sea level rise. A day later, the Virginia legislature required that references to global warming, climate change and sea level rise be excised from a proposed study on sea level rise. Last year, the Texas Department of Environmental Quality, which had commissioned a study on Galveston Bay, cut all references to sea level rise – the main point of the study. As Stephen Colbert so aptly put it: “If your science gives you results you don’t like, pass a law saying that the result is illegal Problem solved.”Click here for more

  

Click here for the Doctor

The secret word is Dementia

YES COMRADES IT’S THE KARL MARX CREDIT CARD (for real)

From each according to his credit score!

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

It took Lars Frozdick some time to talk the other three guys into taking part in the experiment but eventually they came on board.

GRATUITOUS PIG RACING

THE AUM NUKE

Here at Doc40 we love a good conspiracy theory, especially when it involves DIY nuclear weapons. Although I cultivated a morbid interest the Aum Shinrikyo death cult through the 1990s – they were the characters who, in 1995, loosed Sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway – I hadn’t heard this quite amazing story until I read about it in Bill Bryson’s book In a Sunburned Country…

“In January 1997, according to a report written in America by a Times re­porter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic dis­turbance in the remote Australian outback al­most four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo.

"It happens that at 11:03 p.m. local time on May 28, 1993, seismograph needles all over the Pacific region twitched and scribbled in response to a very large-scale disturbance near a place called Banjawarn Station in the Great Victoria Desert of Western Australia. Some long-distance truckers and prospec­tors, virtually the only people out in that lonely expanse, reported seeing a sudden flash in the sky and hearing or feeling the boom of a mighty but far-off explosion. One reported that a can of beer had danced off the table in his tent.

"The problem was that there was no obvi­ous explanation. The seismograph traces didn't fit the profile for an earthquake or mining explosion, and anyway the blast was 170 times more powerful than the most powerful mining explosion ever recorded in Western Australia. The shock was consistent with a large meteorite strike, but the impact would have blown a crater hundreds of feet in circumference, and no such crater could be found. The upshot is that scientists puz­zled over the incident for a day or two, then filed it away as an unexplained curiosity-- the sort of thing that presumably happens from time to time.

"Then in 1995 Aum Shinrikyo gained sud­den notoriety when it released extravagant quantities of the nerve gas sarin into the Tokyo subway system, killing twelve people. In the investigations that followed, it emerged that Aum's substantial holdings in­cluded a 500,000-acre desert property in Western Australia very near the site of the mystery event. There, authorities found a laboratory of unusual sophistication and focus, and evidence that cult members had been mining uranium. It separately emerged that Aum had recruited into its ranks two nuclear engineers from the for­mer Soviet Union. The group's avowed aim was the destruction of the world, and it ap­pears that the event in the desert may have been a dry run for blowing up Tokyo.”

Click here for Bob

The secret word is Roentgen

AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR...

GRATUITOUS PALLENBERG

(Image from HCB)