This blog is still affiliated with The White Panther Party

SIMULATION OR REALITY REVISITED

You may recall that, eight days ago (Wednesday August 15th ) Doc40 engaged the idea that we might all be imaginary entities running round in a computer simulation, construct, or nightmare created by some vast, possibly malignant, or maybe just bored third party being. (And if you don’t remember, it’s easy to go back and look.) The matter came up when our pal Dr. Adder complained how Oxford Ph. D philosopher, Nick Bostrom was pushing the concept of a Matrix-like unreality to the media as his own original thought when all he was doing was catching up to “up to where Philip K. Dick was 40 years ago”. I also pointed out that the suggestion our universe was nothing more than a micro-point in some unimaginably huge macro-reality had been "well known to paranoids, acid heads, schizophrenics, and comic book writers for at least a half century." The illustration above, probably from a 1950s Astounding Science Fiction (although I’m not wholly certain), would seem to be yet another confirmation of just how venerable the idea really is, as the lady in the headset seems remotely to manipulate the brutality of the human male.

Moreover we have clips from the notorious, but unseen by me at least, Cameron Diaz soft core BDSM movie* she made before she was famous, and also The Ramones Name Generator, the combination of which, in itself, would seem to be a little too weirdly complicated -- not to say convoluted -- for us all to be mere players in a sim game.

The secret word is Misapprehension

* Unsuitable for children. Piss off if you're under 18.

IS THIS THE FACE OF GLOBAL WARMING?

Hurricane Dean (for James Dean, Dean Stockwell, Dean Moriarty?*)didn’t hit any major population centers or wreck a city, and blew out leaving comparatively few deaths and less than total devastation. It was, though, at one point in its evolution, a monster Category Five, more powerful that Katrina, and also a week earlier in the season. For facts and figures check Chris Mooney in yesterday’s HuffPo, who makes the case that Dean may not be a symptom of a disintegrating global weather system, but it sure as hell could be.
*Original joke from HCB.

The secret word is Rising

PLUS
In this week’s edition of LA CityBeat, I make a stunningly plausible case for how another fourteen some months of this no-limit, no-quarter, no-prisoners presidential electioneering may reduce us all to drooling mental cases

AND HAS THE PEOPLE'S TEMPLE MOVED EAST...

...and is the ghost of Jim Jones stalking the desert sands? (They always did say he really fronted for the CIA.)

THE BOUND NAKED LADIES OF DUBLIN

Good lord, it sounds like something out of James Joyce, except this would appear to be an exercise in guerrilla art, which, if nothing else should piss off the still powerful Catholic church. Although the report in the Dublin Evening Herald does not record the number, a whole bunch of these identical images, by an artist known only as Pi, appeared on walls, bridges, and streets of Dublin in the course of a single night last week, slowing traffic, intriguing or disconcerting the populace, and sending more than one fleeing for a pint of Guinness and a shot of Jamieson’s.
A similar art performance occurred back in the 1980s when I lived in lower Manhattan where some unknown artist painted dozens of sinister life-size black silhouettes that were vaguely the shape of a young Elvis Costello, and consistently positioned them on shadowed walls and the entrances to alleyways for the maximum, corner-of-the-eye, double-take shock

The secret word is Samo

AND TALKING OF NAKED

BEES (NOT BY WARHOL)

I fear even we at Doc 40 suffer from the same deplorable short attention span as our brethren in TV and print. One day a story is red hot, but the next it is lining the proverbial canary cage, as was pointed out on the credits of Lou Grant. (Who among you remember Lou Grant?) A few months ago we were beside ourselves about the bees, citing Einstein, expecting Gotterdammerung, pretty much every panic response short of quoting Latin. Now all is silence. The bee story is on hiatus. But has anyone any new information, observation or rumor? If so, let’s hear it.

The secret word is Buzz

In the meantime, here is some Latin, call it a CRYPTIQUE SPECIAL…
Dies irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla (The day of wrath, that day which will reduce the world to ashes.)

(Pic and motivation from Valerie)

I NEVER THOUGHT RONALD REAGAN WOULD SHOW UP ON DOC40

But then Tim B sent this quote from the just published REAGAN DIARIES. The entry is dated May 17, 1986, and records Reagan’s opinion of George W. Bush, the son of his Vice President.

"A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne're-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work."

The secret word is Trash

(Oh, and by the way, I’m still not smoking cigarettes no matter how many dead presidents might want me to.)

Oh yeah, and if you though Reagan had a low opinion of Bush, check out what Hugo Chavez has to say -- and also the cows behind him.

I KNEW THERE WAS A REASON I AVOIDED VEGETABLES

Artist Till Novak constructed this produce masterpiece, the Alien made entirely out of vegetables as his tribute to H. R. Giger and Giuseppe Arcimboldo. (lifted from boing boing)

DOES THIS MEAN THE WARP DRIVE IS COMING?

The mainstream media seem to have totally ignored this story (sent by Sky) of particles moving at more than the speed of light, but if it’s true, surely it’s incredibly important.

"Scientists claim to have broken the ultimate speed record - by making photons travel faster than light. Exceeding the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, is supposed to be completely impossible. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object through the light barrier. Travelling faster than light also turns back time with bizarre consequences. An astronaut moving beyond light speed would theoretically arrive at his destination before leaving. But two German physicists now claim to have forced light to overcome its own speed limit using the strange phenomenon known as quantum tunnelling." (For more.)

"I can't do that, Dave"

THE BUGGERS ARE BACK (and fast)

For a while, our Dutch pals the Buggers seemed to be laying low, but then, back at the end of July the came through with new position, and now, suddenly, here’s another one about money and banking.

BUGGER POSITION #18

Normally speaking we would not give a rat's arse about the current bank crisis. Let banks sort out their own mess. We don't care for their dog-eat-dog world. But there are a couple of aspects of the current bank crisis which make it even more unsavoury than usual. In the first place, of course, the fact that the crisis has its origin in rip-offs of people whohave next to nothing. The subprime mortgages given out by American banks, which lie at the root of the crisis, cheat people without means out of what income and possessions they have. First the banks take their money through high interest rates and then, when the money has gone, they take possession of their homes. As long as the prices of houses are on the rise, there is no risk involved for the mortgager: the lender ends up with the borrower's money and house, which by then is worth more than the value it has beenmortgaged for. That is why subprime mortgages have always been lucrative deals for lenders. And that is how unscrupulous businessmen like Roland Arnall have made a fortune. A fortune that enabled him to buy himself the position of US ambassador of The Netherlands on the one hand and to buy off criminal prosecution on the other. A rat like that ought to have a price put on his head, or arse, if you think that part of the body will make a better investment.
A consequence of the subprime mortgages is that people are either forced to sell their homes at relatively low prices or that banks take possession of them and auction them. This rising amount of relatively cheap houses unsettled the already inflated housing market in the USA. When a couple of years ago the US housing market collapsed and the value of houses dropped, a crisis began to take shape. Subprime mortgages no longer guaranteed profit for the mortgagers, debts turned bad. Big banks and wholesale lenders had bought the debts from mortgagers when they were still considered profitable, repackaged them and sold them to Wall Street firms. These Wall Street banks and investment companies had further repackaged these debts and sold them to pension funds, hedge funds and institutions all over the world. So, once the debts of people with low incomes in the US had turned bad, the system was infected on a global scale. Some banks and funds suddenly faced huge financial losses, others became distrustful of making investments or granting loans to fellow-banks and funds. What is called a "credit crunch" is actually a flare of paranoia all around the dog-eat-dog world. Paranoia is inherent to this world. But it is ironical that failed rip-offs of the poor should kindle it. There is a sense of justice in this backfire. It is a cliché but in this case an appropriate one: "Dog" spelled backwards reads "God". The past few weeks central banks all around the world have injected huge sums of money into the financial world to ease the paranoia. With private banks distrustful of one another and unwilling to make investments or give out loans - except against high interest rates - the financial crisis was beginning to spread to other areas of the economy: the shares of companies that do business with borrowed money dropped in value and stock marketsaround the world plunged. Today the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the USA, announced that it has lowered its interest rate with 0,5 percent. No doubt, other central banks will soon follow. Now when central banks start to intervene, the public should be wary. Central banks, the monetary institutes of our governments, can only produce money and grant loans at low interest rates at the cost of inflation. Thus, the trick by which the financial losses of mortgage banks and investors are being compensated by their big brothers, the central banks, is called INFLATION: they simply decrease thevalue of our money. In the end the bugger in the street will pay the bill. Fuck a duck! There is no god after all. There are only dogs and rats.

The secret word is Loot (as in the profit of theft)

THIS BLOG IS STILL PROTECTED BY...

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

Valerie send the above suggestion for staying cool in the August furnace.

THE SUMMER OF LOVE REVISITED (and revisited and revisited and...)

When Munz sent over this piece from The Guardian in London, I kinda groaned. Another fucking dissection of 1967? But this one seems to be fairly balanced, and attempts to place the counter-culture in a much broader social context. And the writer quotes me, so it can’t all be bad. For those unfamiliar with the history, Tom McGrath was the first editor of the UK underground paper IT. After IT’s first obscenity bust, Tom took it on the lam, and the paper was taken over by an ad hoc collective of which I was the most vocal and loaded. (I’m posting the story in full because the link has run out.)

SUMMER OF LOVE: The hippies were the most extreme example of a much broader movement transforming Britain into a relatively permissive society.

by Marcus Collins August 9, 2007

In March 1967 Tom McGrath, the editor of the leading countercultural newspaper, IT, sought to describe "the revolution [that] has taken place within the minds of the young" on the eve of the Summer of Love.
He identified its core as permissiveness: the notion that "the individual should be free from hindrances by external law or internal guilt in his pursuit of pleasure so long as he does not impinge on others". He was right, for "doing your own thing" became an articleof faith among his fellow hippies in the 1960s and beyond. Yet, for all their attempts to distance themselves from "squares" and The System, hippies were simply the most extreme example of a much broader movement transforming Britain into a relatively permissive society.
The legal restraints to which McGrath referred had been undergoing wholesale reform during the previous decade, transforming the relationship between state, society and individual. Print censorship was relaxed in 1959 and that of drama in 1968. Citizens won the right to take their own lives in 1961 and murderers got to keep theirs after 1965. Off-course betting became legal in 1960, as did abortion and male homosexuality in limited fashion in 1967. The National Health Service (Family Planning) Act of the same year extended access to contraception regardless of marital status, while the Divorce Reform Act passed two years later dissolved marriages that had undergone "irretrievable breakdown" after two years in consensual cases and five years in contested ones.
The liberalisation of the law was only one facet of permissiveness in 1960s Britain. McGrath's disavowal of "internal guilt" shows how those affected by legal change were no passive recipients of civil liberties. The radical theologian, Douglas Rhymes, duly urged his readers in 1964 to overcome both their guilt and any deference to "priest, Church, politician or parent" when making moral choices. Advocates of permissiveness equated individualism with iconoclasm, described by McGrath as a rejection of leaders and by George Melly (who died last month) as a "cool refusal to pay homage to traditiona bogeymen and shibboleths". Disdain for convention sat uneasily with the pluralistic dimensions of permissiveness. McGrath commended the "international, inter-racial, equisexual" dimensions of the "alternative society", while the anarchist hippie Mick Farren stated that "each and every individual has unique needs and desires that areentirely his own".Permissiveness encouraged people to express and satisfy these desires. McGrath urged everyone to follow their "inner voice in the most honest way possible", gays "came out" and the future politician and perjurer Jonathan Aitken incongruously applauded his generation's "remarkable frankness" in 1967. Self-expression often took creative forms such as the "wild new clothes" and "strange new music sounds" that caught McGrath's attention. The past decade or so had witnessed a cultural efflorescence that rid Britain of its frumpy image. A country producing the Beatles and the Stones, Mary Quant and VidalSassoon, Biba and Habitat soon lost its inferiority complex. Equally significant was the manner in which British culture challenged existing aesthetic standards. It was no longer self-evident that high culture was superior to popular culture or, indeed, how each termshould be defined. British icons likewise redefined female beauty (Twiggy), male beauty (Mick Jagger), artistry (Lennon and McCartney) and heroism (James Bond). Tom McGrath's championing of "the individual's right to pleasure (orgasm)" points to the bond between permissiveness and the sexual revolution. Britain overcame its reputation for prudery by conducting a carnivalesque breaking of taboos in the 1960s. The first C-word in a paperback (1960), the first F-word on air (1965), the first drug reference in a Beatles song (1965) and the first full-frontal centrefold in a soft-core magazine (1971) could be taken to signify liberation or merely titillation, but either way they indicated a weakening of controls. While this process was furthered by the relaxation of censorship, contrary attempts to restore public decency often achieved the same effect. The prosecution of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 made it a bestseller; Christine Keeler's nude bodybecame the defining image of the Profumo Affair of 1963 and Marianne Faithfull served the same role in the 1967 Redlands drugs trial.
The primacy given to freedom, pleasure and sexuality necessitated a rethink of morality and religion, leading McGrath to write of a "new spiritual movement". Some defined the "New Morality" in terms of the abolition of prohibitions; others toyed with moral relativism. The famously liberal Bishop of Woolwich preferred to restructure Christianity around a situational ethics in which "nothing can of itself always be labelled as 'wrong'." But for humanists, permissiveness was inseparable from a process of secularisation thattook off in the 1960s and continues to this day.
McGrath's utopianism became painfully unfashionable once the 1960s gave way to the 1970s and the Summer of Love to the Winter of Discontent. But 40 years later, his vision of a Britain embracing freedom, individualism, iconoclasm, pluralism, openness, pleasure, creativity and a post-Christian morality seems almost prophetic. Britain is now a more permissive society than it has ever been, and hippies deserve their due for assisting in its creation.

The secret words are Oh Wow

THE TESLA COIL ATE MY BRAIN

Which is actually a lame excuse for being, with LA in the nineties, too burned to even think let alone come up with a witty, thought provoking, revolutionary blog entry.

The secret word is Fried

Max Roach -- RIP

ELVIS IS A LONG TIME GONE FROM THE BUILDING

Elvis with Little Junior Parker and Bobby Bland

Elvis Presley died thirty years ago today. I think we can all accept by now that he’s not hiding out in Hawaii under the name John Burroughs. I have written so much about Elvis down the years I have little left to say. Why don’t we just let the performances be the tribute? Here are three tunes from three essential peaks in the man’s career – “Heartbreak Hotel”, “Jailhouse Rock”, and “In The Ghetto.”

We can, however, mark the occasion by laying to rest an unpleasant rumor that been circulating for a half century that claims Elvis once remarked “The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.” The evidence seems to have finally been amassed that this was an early piece of anti-Presley, anti-rock disinformation.

The secret word is Left

WAR FOOTNOTE

In the last year 99 military personnel serving in Iraq have committed suicide.

IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE DOC40 RAN A PICTURE OF ELIZABETH TAYLOR

It’s hot here at the night computer, and the wee hours could grow depressing, so why not a picture of Liz when she was hot and not in the least depressing? (Also I think the time is right.)

This is another theft from Tom Sutpen. I just can’t help myself.

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S # 24

And while I post this cover, Dr. Adder writes, “some Ph. D at Oxford catches up to where Philip K. Dick was 40 years ago, and somehow it's a major revelation to the New York Times.” And Dr. Adder is right. The idea that we all might just be part of some third party’s computer simulation, construct, or nightmare has been well known to paranoids, acid heads, schizophrenics, and comic book writers for at least a half century, and the concept is even employed in a Daffy Duck cartoon. How do these fools get tenure while I have to work for a living and call it fiction?

"Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims. But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation. This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits. You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford." (For more of this nonsense)

The secret words are Red Pill

THE DEAD ZONE

Meanwhile Sky passes along this frightening report that, if this is some asshole’s computer simulation, it is managed worse than the real world.

"The oxygen-poor "dead zone" off the Louisiana and Texas coasts isn't quite as big as predicted this year, but it is still the third-largest ever mapped, a scientist said Saturday. Crabs, eels and other creatures usually found on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico are swimming in crowds on the surface because there is too little oxygen in their usual habitat, said Nancy Rabalais, chief scientist for northern Gulf hypoxia studies. "We very often see swarms of crabs, mostly blue crabs and their close relatives, swimming at the surface when the oxygen is low," she wrote in an e-mail from a research ship as it returned to Cocodrie from its annual measurement trip. Eels, which live in sediments 60 to 70 feet below the water surface, are an even less common sight, she said. The 7,900-square-mile area with almost no oxygen, a condition called hypoxia, is about the size of Connecticut and Delaware together. The Louisiana-Texas dead zone is the world's second-largest hypoxic area, she said." (For more)

'TWAS BRILLIG AND THE SLITHY ROVE

Discussion of the possible plans of the hideous Karl Rove continued today like one of his own demon talking points. The theory I liked best and made the most sense was that, instead of attaching himself a single candidate like a strategizing incubus, Rove will actually rove free (pun accidental) as the non-aligned Destroyer of Hillary. Assuming of course that Hillary is nominated. Orca also suggested in an email that Rove is a victim of the Roy Cohn syndrome. (Cohn-- the gay homophobe and anti-Semitic Jew.) “You are well aware, I assume, of the long standing rumors of Turd Blossom's gayness (gives the nickname whole new meanings I'd rather not even go into). Believe he understands that trigger in the American psyche that gets set off by gays because he so fears his own deep-closeted Richard Simmons. Who was Jeff Gannon with during those overnight visits to the West Wing?” And Noudela send another video that certainly demonstrates Rove dancing to be, to say the least, strange.

LINKED WITHOUT COMMENT
Except I wonder when the mine owners will allow the US coal industry at least to make it into the 20th century

WHAT THE FUCK IS KARL ROVE UP TO?

"It was a dirty job, but Rove liked to do it."

When I read news (oh boy) I flatly didn’t believe it. “Karl Rove, President Bush's close friend and chief political strategist, announced Monday he will leave the White House at the end of August. On board with Bush since the beginning of his political career in Texas, Rove was nicknamed "the architect" and "boy genius" by the president for designing the strategy that twice won him the White House. Critics call Rove "Bush's brain." Yeah right, that sonofabitch, known to his boss as Turd Blossom, is about as likely to ride quietly off into the sunset as Sauron would be to trade the Dark Tower for a Florida timeshare. So what’s the deal here? Is he bailing ahead of subpoenas and even indictments? R. J. Eskow in HuffPo today seemed to be of that opinion…
“Rove is facing a Congressional subpoena. And let's not forget his role in the Libby scandal. In what was probably a public threat/negotiating ploy, Libby's lawyers threatened to submit evidence that Scooter's actions were part of a broader criminal plot to protect Rove. It apparently worked, since they suddenly reversed themselves and offered only a token defense. Then, in what was an extraordinary exception even for cases of Presidential pardons, Scooter never served even a single day in jail. Funny, that. So Rove is either leaving now because a) he wants to write that book, b) he wants to spend more time with his family, c) he thinks this will lower the pressure to have him testify before Congress, d) somebody said "we'll fix it with Scooter but when the heat dies down you have to leave town," e) all of the above, or f) there's something else going on we may never know.”
But then again I wonder. I could easily see him trolling the slime trails of the Republican primaries whoring out as a kingmaker-for-hire figuring which wannabe might have a prayer in this shambles of America that Rove helped create. This evil motherfucker is about the most wholly amoral political manipulator since Joseph Goebbels. This is the bastard who ran the Bush 2004 election on insinuation and homophobia, and I’m telling you, citizens, we do not, for a moment, want to turn our collective back on this very dangerous, slithering scumsucker.

The secret word is Wormtongue

(But check this video clip Noudela just sent in which Rove jokes about being president.)

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S # 23

And talking of Karl Rove’s deft use of homophobia as a tool in the political power game, we should not forget it when we congratulate ourselves on the supposed progress we have made towards tolerance and enlightenment since the 1960s, when books like this were on the racks in the drugstore. If the hate and bigotry wasn’t so deeply ingrained in too much of the collective psyche, it could not be exploited by the likes of Rove and they would find themselves out of ammunition. And unemployed.

MORDOR INCORPORATED

The article was about a proposed new skyscraper in San Francisco, taller than the Trans America Pyramid, but the illustration jumped out at me so hard I had to steal and post it. A symbolic landscape I know from my nightmares, and, for all of my days, have been doing my damnedest to fight. And yet it still encroaches, like the bumper sticker “Frodo Failed – Dick Cheney Got The Ring”. But my sword is still dully gleams, my staff is not broken although I may lean a little more heavily upon it, and sometimes in the night, I long for the Grey Havens, and some rest and respite, and yet we have to go on. No choice in the matter.

The secret word is Nazgûl

But, neighbor , what better antidote, short of pharmaceuticals, for this pre-dawn desperation than Buddy Holly!

EVEN GETTING OUT WON'T BE EASY

“Troops Out Now” is an easy slogan, but actually to extricate the US military from Iraq and George Bush’s asinine and foully fucked-up war is not that easy in the context of any kind of geopolitical reality. (Not to mention what would appear to be US enthrallment to the Saudi Royal Family.) To get out of Vietnam, once Nixon’s place in history was history, was comparatively easy. Most of us remember, or have at least seen the films, of the choppers taking off from the US Embassy roof in Saigon. Iraq will be a lot more complex. I don’t always agree with John Gray of the Guardian but in this instance, he has a point…

“Forget all the talk about Iraq being as bad as Vietnam. Today's conflict is far worse. The US was able to walk away from Vietnam with relative impunity because Vietnam was essentially a peripheral country. Iraq, by contrast, is a key factor in global oil supplies, so an American withdrawal would be a devastating blow to US power. In Vietnam, US withdrawal was feasible because there was an effective government in the north ready to take over in the south. Nothing like that exists in Iraq where almost a third of the population, according to Oxfam is in need of emergency relief. And whereas the feared domino effect never materialized in Southeast Asia after the US left Vietnam, the consequences of the Iraqi debacle are already apparent. Surrounding states such as Iran and Turkey are being irresistibly drawn into the conflict, threatening to unleash regional war.”

A REALLY BAD IDEA

This story headed “Eight-million-year-old bug is alive and growing” culled by HCB from the New Scientist strikes me as a really bad idea. So bad in fact, that the H. P. Lovecraft, Yog-Sothoth crowd are waiting for something really nasty to happen should it happen to get loose.

An 8-million-year-old bacterium that was extracted from the oldest known ice on Earth is now growing in a laboratory, claim researchers. If confirmed, this means ancient bacteria and viruses will come back to life as ice melts due to global warming. This is nothing to worry about, say experts, because the process has been going on for billions of years and the bugs are unlikely to cause human disease. Kay Bidle of Rutgers University in New Jersey, US, and his colleagues extracted DNA and bacteria from ice found between 3 and 5 metres beneath the surface of a glacier in the Beacon and Mullins valleys of Antarctica. The ice gets older as it flows down the valleys and the researchers took five samples that were between 100,000 and 8 million years old. (For more…)

The secret word is Telluric

But after all this grim shit, here are a whole bunch of optical illusions to mess with when stoned.

REQUIEM FOR BAT BOY

In this week’s LA CityBeat, I mark the passing of the Weekly World News and fifteen years of the inimitable and irreplaceable Bat Boy, and report on the less than happy condition of the other supermarket tabloids.

A BUSY DAY IN HISTORY

“Happy anniversary, folks.”

In 378 at the battle of Adrianople, Gothic horsemen destroyed the attacking Roman forces led by Emperor Valens. The Goths killed an estimated 20,000 of the 30,000 Romans. In 1945 the U.S. bomber Bock's Car dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, destroying a third of the city and killing 40,000 people, according to U.S. estimates. Japan's government surrendered 5 days later. In 1968, the Manson Family conducted their slayfest at the home of Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, and, in 1974, President Richard Nixon, facing impeachment by Congress for his role in Watergate, resigned.

Of the above, only Charlie Manson has a music blog about him.

The secret words are Helter and Skelter

EVANGELISM IN (VIDEO) ACTION

This is a still from Left Behind: Eternal Forces as devout Christians gun down the unbelievers. The Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game is a real-time strategy game that makes players commanders of a virtual evangelical army in a post-apocalyptic landscape that looks strikingly like New York City after 9/11. The game is inspired by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' ultra-violent novels about a blood-soaked Battle of Armageddon pitting born-again Christians against anybody who does not adhere to their particular theology. In LaHaye and Jenkins' books, the non-believers are ultimately condemned to "everlasting punishment" while the evangelicals are "raptured" up to heaven. With tanks, helicopters and fearsome firepower from automatic weapons, Left Behind players wage a violent war against United Nations-like peacekeepers who, according to LaHaye's interpretation of Revelation, represent the armies of the Antichrist. Each time a Left Behind player kills a UN soldier, their virtual character hollers "Praise the Lord!" To win the game, players must kill or convert all the non-believers left behind after the rapture. They also have the option of reversing roles and commanding the forces of the Antichrist. But that’s not the truly weird part, an evangelical organization called Operation Straight Up is mailing care packages containing the Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game to soldiers serving in Iraq. (Thanks to Ilene Proctor.)

The secret word is Hallelujah

BRIEF AND SILLY

This has to be by far the most foolishly pretentious guitar in the history of rock & roll. (Shared with us by HCB)

Gotta sleep now, and write more later.

The secret word is ZZZZZZZZZZ

Lee Hazlewood -- RIP

THE BADGERS OF BASRA

"Hi, I’m a badger but I’m also a nocturnal bio-weapon.”

This strange tale of the Iraqi War sent by UK Steve, has been somewhat overlooked for a couple of weeks. I don’t know how many of you have heard it, but I wouldn’t put it past the Brits to turn ravening badgers on the natives. The British Empire was run on that kind of thing. Just ask the Irish.
Word spread among the populace that UK troops had introduced strange man-eating, bear-like beasts into the area to sow panic. But several of the creatures, caught and killed by local farmers, have been identified by experts as honey badgers. The rumours spread because the animals had appeared near the British base at Basra airport. "We have been told these are indigenous nocturnal carnivores that don't attack humans unless cornered." The director of Basra's veterinary hospital, Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, has inspected several of the animals' corpses. He told the AFP news agency: "These appeared before the fall of the regime in 1986. They are known locally as Al-Girta. "Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific."Dr Ghazi Yaqub Azzam, deputy dean of Basra's veterinary college, speculated that the badgers were being driven towards the city because of flooding in marshland north of Basra. But the assurances did little to convince some members of the public. One housewife, Suad Hassan, 30, claimed she had been attacked by one of the badgers as she slept. "My husband hurried to shoot it but it was as swift as a deer," she said. "It is the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey," she told AFP.

The secret word is Set (Puzzled? Look it up.)

FREE SAMPLES

I keep finding all these sites where you can download bits and pieces of The Deviants and like stuff. Human Garbage, is the live recording of the 1984 show at Dingwalls Dancehall in London with Wayne Kramer and Larry Wallis dueling on guitars and a rhythm section of Sandy and George Butler. I, of course, am the one in front sweating and bellowing.
And there’s also a Stiff collection on which you can not only hear The Deviants doing Let’s Loot The Supermarket (Like We Did Last Summer) but also the Pink Fairies “Between The Lines” and Larry Wallis’ original “Police Car.”

NEVER TOO YOUNG

Since The Simpsons Movie seems to be exploited all over, let’s put Bart to our own nefarious use. What did the Jesuits say? “Give us the child until he’s seven and he’s ours for life”? Maybe the same applies to freeform anarchy.

(Graphic from Nuzz)

ALTHOUGH, IN CARTOON LAND, THERE CAN BE CONSEQUENCES

SWINE

I have never had anything specific against Starbucks. I’ve never been in one, I didn’t like the ambiance, and thought they were just part of the corporate profitmass. It was only a day or so ago that I heard – and then had confirmed – the story of how the scum-sucking swine, in the immediately aftermath of 9/11, actually insisted on charging rescue workers at Ground Zero for water. For the full story….

The secret word is Porcine

AND TALKING OF PROFITS...

Here is a piece by Allen Ginsberg from two wars ago, demonstrating that nothing changes. (Thanks Valerie)

These are the names of the companies that have mademoney from this warnineteenhundredsixtyeight Annodominifourthousand eighty Hebraic

These are the Corporations who have profited by merchan-dising skinburning phosphorous or shells fragmentedto thousands of fleshpiercing needlesand here listed money millions gained by each combine formanufacture and here are gains numbered, index'd swelling a decade, setin order, here named the Fathers in office in these industries, tele-phones directing finance,names of directors, makers of fates, and the names of thestockholders of these destined

Aggregates,and here are the names of their ambassadors to the Capital,representatives to legislature, those who sit drinkingin hotel lobbies to persuade,and separate listed, those who drop Amphetamine with

military, gossip, argue, and persuadesuggesting policy naming language proposing strategy, thisdone for fee as ambassadors to Pentagon,consultants to military, paid by their industry:and these are the names of the generals & captains mili-tary, who know thus work for war goods manufacturers;and above these, listed, the names of the banks, combines,

investment trusts that control these industries:and these are the names of the newspapers owned by thesebanks and these are the names of the airstations owned by thesecombines; and these are the numbers of thousands of citizensemployed by these businesses named;and the beginning of this accounting is 1958 and the end1968, that static be contained in orderly mind,coherent and definite,and the first form of this litany begun first day December1967 furthers this poem of these States.

Allen Ginsberg

PLEASE DON'T LET GEORGE BUSH KILL US

The White House – ever a friend of the earth – recently issued a “wolf management proposal” – the 10J rule – that would give states a license to kill grey wolves, possibly leading to the extermination of up to 700 wolves in Wyoming and Idaho combined. This would reverse the welcome gains in recovery of this magnificent species in the Greater Yellowstone and central Idaho regions. To help, click here. (Pic stolen from The People’s Daily Brief.)

SATURDAY MORNING PICTURES (how does it feel?)

Napoleon in rags and the language that he used? As regular visitors to Doc40 may have gleaned, it’s been a long hard week during which I have done one hell of a lot of writing – some of great interest and some the was the literary equivalent of hanging sheet-rock – but I will let you into a small secret. In pauses while I wait for the words to come, I’ve been sniffing around YouTube seeing what goodies a poor boy could find. Last Wednesday, I posted a clip of The Who doing “My Generation” at the Marquee in 1967, and now my friends (try this for size) we present eight fucking minutes of Bob Dylan and the Hawks doing “Like A Rolling Stone” at Newcastle City Hall in 1966. This was a manner of music that at the time, like The Who, made you feel you could tear the world apart with you bare hands. (And I guess I still have the metaphoric bleeding fingernails.) And guess what? If all that wasn’t enough, I was actually there. I was at that show! I even remember what I was wearing. All decked out very Chelsea Girl style in a white denim suit, a black and white paisley shirt, and white Victorian lace-up boots with Cuban heels that were extremely Brian Jones, and later, after the show, the ensemble almost got me beaten to death by blind drunk homophobic Geordies who decided that, despite my matching girlfriend, I qualified as queer.

How did it feel? It felt like the power structure would fall like a house of cards. That’s how it felt.

The secret word is Then

AND just to show the other side of the coin, here’s a demonstration film of the Johnny 7 One Man Army from approximately the same period.

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S # 22

Unfortunately the concept of revolution was apt to become a little confused at times. It was probably the acid in the water supply.

I THINK I WANT ALL MY FOOD SERVED LIKE THIS FROM NOW ON

Does that seem an unreasonable demand? (Or maybe I just need some sleep and should post something more logical later.)

Oh yeah, I keep forgetting, over among the permanent links, near the top, is the World Super Clock . Check it out. It counts everything.

The secret word is Infantile

WE BID YOU ALL A LAST DUBAI

This is real, not a Spielberg set for his next Philip K. Dick movie. This is Dubai. This is what the mega-rich demand from their architects. Halliburton is moving there. It will be the capital city of Cheney the Merciless when he ascends to Evil Dictator of the Planet. Hitler wanted to level Berlin to build his insane Germania. (Rhymes with megalomania.) The oil barons have done it in Dubai, and on imported near-slave labor who’s pay, and working and living conditions are described by Human Rights Watch as “inhuman”. And why, as Valerie noted when she sent the pic, does it all resemble the tentacles of Cthulhu?
.
Meanwhile, in Japan, Godzilla hates cats.

The secret word is Wrong

IS ANY EXPLANATION REQUIRED?

Whiskey river take my mind.*

(Don't let her memory torture me.)

I have written myself into the ground. My hands hurt, my arms ache, my brain is mush. I feel like I don’t have another word left in me tonight. And I’m wracked with guilt over all the calls I haven’t returned and all the emails I have yet to send. If there was ever a time to hide in a quiet Tennessee hollow, this is it. Because it’s fucking August, and I attempt to create while cities turn into overheated ghost towns. Even the fucking Iraqi government is on vacation. The only thing that refuses to cease is the lying propagandist bullshit that flows relentlessly from the leadership machine of the Loathsome Decider. But I’m sure you didn’t click on here to listen to me bitch and moan deep into the night. So, my friends, in return for all the nanoseconds you have wasted stopping by to visit here (in addition to Willie*) is a clip of The Who, doing My Generation live at the Marquee, back when the world was young and 100% of us were still alive and kicking. (And it's loud and marvellous!)

The secret word is Tomorrow (when the sun will doubtless come out.)

CLONES, I TELL YOU! CLONES!

They are coming for us! More and more of them! There may be pods in the laundry room! Will no one help us?

The secret word is Idiopathic

PENGUINS NO LONGER MARCHING

Remember how, a couple of years ago, we all got all misty about the movie March of the Penguins? Well, it seems like the penguins’ marching is being made more and more difficult. Recent temperature increases in the Antarctic are impacting some penguins' abilities to feed and breed, creating population dips in a species that can't handle the heat. Here’s a new and much more depressing film.

CRYPTIQUE – The doctor dies of the disease. Will the patient survive the remedy?

Ingmar Bergman -- RIP

Tom Snyder -- RIP

THE REVOLUTION MUST BE FABULOUS

Our pals in Holland, the Buggers are back. Which is a damned good thing because I always relish their stuff, and I’m also working my ass off and haven’t have any time to work up a post. Except to announce that The People's Daily Brief is now a blog.

THE BUGGERS POSITION #17

True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time - true art is unable NOT to be revolutionary, NOT to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains which bind it, and to allow all mankind to raise itself to those heights which only isolated geniuses have achieved in the past. We recognize that only the social revolution can sweep clean the path for a new culture.With his thousand technicians, Trotsky seized the viaducts and the bridges and the telephone exchanges and the power stations. The police, victims of convention, contributed to his brilliant enterprise by guarding the old men in the Kremlin. The latter hadn't the elasticity of mind to grasp that their own presence there at the traditional seat of government was irrelevant. History outflanked them. Trotsky had the railway stations and the powerhouses, and the "government" was effectively locked out of history byits own guards.So the cultural revolt must seize the grids of expression and the powerhouses of the mind. Intelligence must become self-conscious, realize its own power, and, on a global scale, transcending functions that are no longer appropriate, dare to exercise it. History will not overthrow national governments; it will outflank them. The cultural revolt is the necessary underpinning, the passionate substructure of a new order of things. We have already rejected any idea of a frontal attack. Mind cannot withstand matter (brute force) in open battle. It is rather a question of perceiving clearly and without prejudice what are the forces that are at work in the world and out of whose interaction tomorrow MUST come to be; and then, calmly, without indignation, by a kind of mental ju-jitsu that is ours by virtue of intelligence, of modifying, correcting, polluting, deflecting, corrupting, eroding, outflanking inspiring what we might call THE INVISIBLE INSURRECTION. It will come on the mass of men, if it comes at all, not as something they have voted for, fought for, but like the changing season; they will find themselves in and stimulated by the SITUATION consciously at last to recreate it within and without as their own.(Fragments of the manifesto Towards a free revolutionary art by André Breton, Leon Trotsky, and Diego Riviera from 1938, and A revolutionary proposal: invisible insurrection of a million minds by Alexander Trocchi from 1963.)

The picture is Marilyn Monroe, of course, and equally important. Any revolution that fails to recognize Marilyn as an icon will have trouble holding my interest.

The secret words are By Any Means

UK UNDER WATER continued

Our pal Rich sends this email from the middle of it all…

“It seems whilst you swelter in LA, here in Blighty, or at least in Gloucestershire, Hereford and Worcestershire we have been deluged with rain and floods, the likes of which have never been seen before. Irony being that because the flooding was so bad it knocked out the main filtration plant that serves Gloucester city, Cheltenham and Tewkesbury as well as all areas in between. This means we've had no mains water for days, and are having to rely on water bowsers and bottled water distribution outlets. Basically about 150,000 households and 350,000 people without fresh water!

At first it was a bit of a novelty - sent home from work; some of the pubs still had water and were still open etc. but after nearly a week of no fresh water I think I've had enough. People are now vandalsing the water bowsers e.g. pissing in them, putting bleach in them etc. I'm surprised someone hasn't dosed any with LSD yet hahhahaha!

At the risk of appearing a bit crass, although this isn't on the same scale, even in our current situation, you do start to appreciate what the poor fuckers in a drought zone, or any war blighted area that's lost it's water supply must be going through. At least I can get the hell out of dodge today and drive twenty miles down the road to a friends and have a shower, and top up with fresh water!”

And in waters of a whole different kind…

ATTACK OF THE GIANT SQUID

“Ferocious, pack-feeding jumbo squid have invaded waters off California's central coast and are devouring local fish populations. Researchers say global warming and overfishing are likely to blame. Humboldt or jumbo squid (Dosidicus gigas) first appeared off Monterey, California during an El Niño event which warmed waters in 1997. Since 2002 they have taken up permanent residence.”

Which also would appear to conform to an emerging pattern of how when a part of the ocean become too damaged to support life as before – ie fish and aquatic mammals – the squid, jellyfish, and other invertibrates move in, in what seems to be the end of this sea as we knew it. (For more of the story and squid vid. via Valerie)

The secret word is Suckers

THIS BLOG IS STILL PROTECTED BY...