WHEN DOES THE SHIT STOP?

Now Ahmad Chalabi is screwed, and might take Rummy down with him. How long, I keep asking myself, can this administration last? It’s unreal. Even Nixon would have been drinking heavy by now.

WE DON’T KNOW SHIT

This is real long, but I couldn’t resist it. The piece is by Jonathan Isbit and forwarded by our favorite southern belle.

The term "appendicitis" was coined in 1886 by a Harvard anatomy professor named Reginald Heber Fitz. Most people assume that the disease has always afflicted humanity. But actually, it's only been around for about 150 years - and only in the western world. Why did it suddenly appear? And why only in the West? And what causes appendicitis? Ask any gastroenterologist these questions and you'll get the same answer: "Nobody knows." A number of other colon and pelvic diseases also got their start toward the end of the nineteenth century - including diverticulosis, colon cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, and prostate and uterine disorders. The medical profession responded by devising ever more sophisticated surgical techniques to remove the diseased organs. Once again, having no inkling of the cause, they ruled out any means of prevention.In the 1970s, a British surgeon named Denis Burkitt, who had practiced medicine in Ugandafor twenty years, reported a remarkable absence of these ailments among the people of Africa. The same diseases that afflict African-Americans in large numbers were curiously absent in the land of their ancestors. Further research by epidemiologists showed a similar immunity in Asian countries, especially the rural areas. And once again, on moving to the West, these ethnic groups quickly became just as prone to western diseases as the rest of the population. Dr. Burkitt believed that two aspects of the Africans' lifestyle protected them from colon ailments. First, their diet contained higher levels of fiber. And second, they used the natural squatting posture for bowel movements. Western researchers immediately latched onto the first factor, preferring to ignore the second one...that the true culprit may actually be the modern commode. Diet may have little or nothing to do with these diseases.

Historically, human beings have always squatted for bodily functions. Every infant instinctively uses this method until he is forced to sit on a potty. Most of the adults in the world continue to use squat toilets all their lives. It was only about 150 years ago that the "porcelain throne" came into widespread use. It was basically a fad that started in England and quickly spread throughout the western world. No country wanted to appear backward and uncivilized, and no one at the time realized what the medical consequences might be. Even if they happened to be aware of the drawbacks of this new, contrived method of evacuation, they were unwilling or unable to break the Victorian taboo surrounding the subject. As the fad continued to spread, doctors noticed a mysterious upsurge in colon, bladder, and reproductive diseases. The medical profession was caught in a conflict of interest. Since treatment was becoming so lucrative, they had little motivation to explore the cause or to find means of prevention. How does the modern commode contribute to these diseases? There are two basic kinds of damage. The first comes from pressure on the pelvic floor from chronic straining in the sitting position. Over time, the pelvic floor "descends," stretching and injuring the nerves that supply the bladder, the prostate and the uterus. The result is that these organs become dysfunctional and prone to disease. The second type of damage is caused by fecal stagnation, from incomplete evacuation. A polluted colon is prone to cancer, diverticulosis, appendicitis, colitis and irritable bowel syndrome. The following explanation of appendicitis answers the questions with which this article began: The appendix is attached to the cecum, at the beginning of the colon. When fecal matter gets lodged in the appendix, it hardens, causing the appendix to suffocate and die. This only happens to users of the modern commode, for two reasons: The cecum cannot be fully evacuated in the sitting position. It needs to be squeezed empty by the right thigh while squatting. Pushing down with the diaphragm in the sitting position can force waste matter into the appendix. On a squat toilet, you don't hold your breath or push downwards. The posture itself effortlessly generates the required pressure for expulsion. The appendix was not "poorly designed" - contrary to what is taught in medical schools. Like the rest of the colon, it was designed with squatting in mind.
http://naturesplatform.com

And while we’re in the bathroom, the following comes from both some girl and Keith Oberman

A toilet to keep men in line. Or rather, a gadget that attaches to the toilet. The ghost-shaped device (why a ghost?) sits under the toilet rim and if the seat is lifted, chastises in a stern female voice. "Hello, what are you up to then? Put the seat back down right away, you are definitely not to pee standing up”... The device has sold 1.6 million units in Germany. (The land that gave us Zyklon B)

OUTSOURCING

I have a pleasant piece of fluff in this weeks LA CityBeat with a fab illustration.
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=933&IssueNum=50

CRYPTIQUE – U bend.

WATCH OUT FOR JIM BATH

Sometime around soon you’ll be getting a tad tired of the excuse that there ain’t much of a blog because I’ve had a large hard day tending the obscene science fiction or the paid diatribing, and my resources are depleted. Unfortunately that’s the story today. And the truth. It’s 2.30 in the LA AM and I’m going to do this, and then fall into the couch and watch The Hulk which I understand is crap, but haven’t seen it and I figure that’s all I’m fit for. I would complain how Belle de Jour seems to fix renounced her pornographic content since she got a book deal, but I think I’ll leave that until tomorrow.

For those of you to whom this is meaningless...
http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com

Fortunately kaymo has a major heads ups for us all on a new player from the toxic murk of our presidents past...

It seems that James R. Bath is coming back into the spotlight. Google his name for a refresher if you need. Try this url for some good pointers..

http://www.bulatlat.com

Jim Bath and Dubya were coke snorting, Texan drinking buddies back in their National Air Guard days, flying in that champagne unit... It seems that Bath's name was airbrushed out of the info Bush released to the 9/11 comish. Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 911 charges this was because Bath was Bush's connection to the Bin Laden family and their money. They invested in Arbusto etc.

Do you notice, though, how much time and effort is being expended on getting GW fucking B out of office, when we could be doing so many, much nicer things?

AND...

Oh yeah, and the new email address is – byron4d@msn.com. I kinda like MSN except for the damned butterfly that flaps when anything is going on. It’s starting to irritate me. Unfortunately MSN won’t let me garbage their corporate logo.

CRYTIQUE – Sanders the Chicken is dead.

GLIMPSE THE PROCESS

Okay, so here’s the truth. I don’t have a single thought in my mind except those that are essential to survival. (That’s for the benefit of my varied editors.) The reason is that, as I think I’ve already mentioned, I am totally submerged in Slide On The Run #11, and am attempting to create the best inter-galactic, inter-species, inter-entity, pirate rape and pillage orgy that has ever been committed to the page. Okay? And it is not as easy as it sounds, if I am to shun all porn cliches with the possible exception of fluid mess. Can I do for literature what S. Clay Wilson did for comics? Do I want to? And also I wonder about introducing mugwumps. And then I realize that I’ve stated all this publically, so now I’m under even more pressure to excel.

(Or is this all just a degenerate’s tease?)

FROM THE EMAIL

munz sends a link to the Top Ten Alternet Conspiracy Theories. (I must confess, though, I have given up all conspiracy theories for the 21st century. (Except of course my own,)
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18735

CRYPTIQUE – I do, however, like to pop packing bubbles until people get irritated and ask me to stop.

Please use the new email address -- byron4d@msn.com

MONDAY, MONDAY...

And really not a great deal to say since I'm working on the long overdue episode of Slide On The Run, and still trying to work out the ramifications of what went down with Colin Powell on TV yesterday. Are the bastards actually fighting among themselves to the knife?

(And if you haven't seen Slide On The Run, just slide over to Funtopia on the right and check it out.)

CRYPTIQUE -- Big T's dream?

WUSSUP WI’ FUCKING KERRY?

(Ask a science fiction writer.)

‘Tis the weekend and the Doc is tired, okay? But I’ll pose y’all a question, and damn the typos. Is the Kerry campaign stone blind to the parallel Dump Bush (LEB) movement, or just staying above any embarrassing agitprop? Either way it sucks. United we stand, even if the next guy is an asshole or Howard Stern. I like that Kerry is ex-VVAW. Why the soft pedal? It’s playing totally by the Republican rules. Kerry has to take over the poker game. Go ask the Duke of Wellington about defining the battle even though out-numbered and out-gunned. And ask the dead Duke now, while there’s still time to whistle up Bucher. (And if you don’t know the history, shame on you. Without Wellington, we’d all be eating soufles and fucking in the afternoon. Look it up.)

And while on a relevant history jag. Let’s not forget that, had Bobby Kennedy not been shot, the Yippies would almost certainly have been backing Bobby as the anti-War candidate. In the last month of his life, Bobby was down. He’d lost his tie and suit coat, and was doing soundbites in the fields with Caesar Chavez, quoting Bob Dylan, with poll numbers building to beat Nixon (and thus shot dead). In this parallel universe we would have seen Mayor Daley’s cops beating on Kennedy supporters, for chrissakes. I suspect the so-called pros around Kerry are Havard schmucks who failed to make it onto The Simpsons writing team, and they just don’t fucking get it.

And where is the Kerry cyber-kommando? Doc40 is on a million mailing lists. I get shit from Arriana and Nader and even Wes Clarke, but not a damn thing from Kerry. And don’t tell me there’s no money. There’s no money over here, either. Know what I mean? We depend on the kindness of strangers. It just requires work, ingenuity, elves, and hackers

Let’s not forget, if we can’t get Bush out of office this November, that’s democracy in the toilet, and the only other option will become riot and revolution. Bringing it all back home, so to speak.

PORNO-PROP

YOU GOTTA SEE THIS
http://usemycomputer.com/indeximages/2004/April/ashcroft.jpg
Sent by some girl. All I can say is that it takes a long time to load on dial up, but it’s so worth it. And be warned, it isn’t what you initially think. (Adult content.) The folks who labored so long don’t need lives. They’re already demented. You also probably need to save it to some place of graphic tools to reduced the whole thing in size. Or blow it up. And check out the Heinken bottle 4 squares down and 8,9, and 10, across (l-er)

HASTA LA VICTORIA CHARLIE
If you want fine-slick cultural cross-crafting about Che Guevara and Charlie Manson, try my piece in LA CityBeat...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=906&IssueNum=49

And our pal hipspinster blogs in horror after watching the Berg beheading...
http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

FLATTERING BUGGERS

We’ve been getting a lot of stuff from the Buggers. Now they shamelessly stroke my ego to the point that I groan aloud, “Fuck false modesty. I’ll post it.” (And yes, Phun City did look like VC free zone.)

BUGGER!

When in 1970 Mick Farren, Edward Barker and David Goodman named the festival
that they were organising Phun City, they condensed much of the commitment
of the Western counterculture of that time in just those two words. Phun
City: it reminds of a North-Vietnamese free zone in the middle of England. A
hotbed of revolt and dangerous fun.

The three-day Opeople's festival near Worthing brought together drug-fuelled rebels like The MC5, William Burroughs, The Pretty Things, The Pink Fairies, Farren himself, and combined music, radical politics, literature, graphic design, and visual arts. It was one of the last large multicultural events that successfully mixed politics, arts, and fun before the music industry commercialised these events and pulled their teeth. Musician, writer, editor, and anarchist Mick Farren, at that time the spearhead of the London underground, was one of the few Europeans who joined forces with the Detroit based White Panthers. The White Panther Party was infact an artists' collective founded by John and Leni Sinclair that modelled and named itself after the militant Black Panther Party. In 1968 this collective dedicated all their creativity to cultural revolution through a total assault on the culture which makes use of every tool, every energy and every media we can get our collective hands on. Because of their strategic
use of various art forms we regard Mick Farren and John & Leni Sinclair as
pivotal figures in Western revolutionary art.

When multi-disciplinarity serves no other purpose than crossing nominal barriers between art disciplines or between various fields of research, it is no more than tame artistic play. We, The Buggers, feel that multidisciplinarity is only vital when it leads to dangerous or genuinely
innovative mixes. In our view the drive to cross barriers in art should also be a drive to tear down conventions in thought. Farren and the Sinclairs demonstrated that multidisciplinarity is as much an artistic as a revolutionary tool and that it can be fun at the same time. Mick Farren and John Sinclair would probably have been rebels in any society. But much of their revolt resulted directly from moral rejection of the repressive and racist Anglo-Amercian societies of those days and the
American war against the people of Vietnam. Farren and Sinclair are romantic revolutionaries. They take as much inspiration from political revolutionaries as from literary heroes or musicians. Ho Chi Min plays drums with Bo Diddley. Music is revolution.

In the 60s and 70s Farren and Sinclair reclaimed public space through riotous multidisciplinary events but also through self-created media: records, magazines, writings, photographs, posters, pamphlets. Part of their program was taking fun  sex, drugs, music  out into the streets. Their assault on official culture consisted of vandalism of public space (in its broadest sense) and the creation of free zones, Phun Cities, strategies that evoked serious repression before they were adopted and used for commercial ends by capitalist industries.

The Buggers repeat their call to reclaim public space and to develop contemporary strategies against the occupation of public space by capitalist industries. In our previous pamphlets we already mentioned vandalistic strategies like self-destructive art, hostile modifications, desexualisation and sexualisation as circumstances or times require, and now we add to that the creation of free zones. Bugger the sham!

The Buggers.

http://www.sea-urchin.net/radiobaghdad/

And if you want to know more about all this, buy a book, dadnabit, buy two. Buy my own Give The Anarchist A Cigarette, or pick up a copy John’s Guitar Armies. Or both, and give them to friends. We elders of the tribe have bills to pay.

PETS CORNER

Vegetarian cat food? Who is kidding whom?

CRYPTIQUE – I‘m just a patsy.

LANDMARK

The Funtopia site (to the right) just logged its 20,000th hit. Which makes me irrationally happy. It almost happened once before, but then the counter malfunctioned and ran it back to 14,000. I know porno sites do the same traffic in a day, but what the hell?

NEW EMAIL
I have a new email address that is good for now and the future – byron4d@msn
Note it if you need it. The old on will die around Tuesday.

YOU WANT ICE 9 IN THAT?

Munz forwarded the lengthy thoughts of Kurt Vonnegut from In These Times. I ran a couple of chunks yesterday and here are two more tomorrow. http://www.inthesetimes.com/

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.
The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this:
Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:
As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?
How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. …
And so on.
Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.
For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.
Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

SCAREY
And here’s one fearsomely fucked up web-site courtesy if some girl.
http://www.blackwaterusa.com/

CRYPTIQUE – Smile when...

THEY’RE BACK!

I believe I’ve already mentioned my concern at how the aliens, grey or otherwise, seem to have been totally out of the picture since G. Bush took over. You can therefore imagine my delight when a whole formation of UFOs showed up over Mexico City as detailed in this report from Sky News...

Mexico's largest television network has broadcast film taken by air force pilots of what they claim are unidentified flying objects. The film shows bright lights with "movements and characteristics that do not have - up to now - a scientific explanation," according to the Televisa network. The air force pilots are heard expressing amazement on the tape. A frame-by-frame analysis shows 16 UFOs, according to the network. Televisa said the film was taken with an infra-red camera and there are no alterations. "It is one of the most important film documents we have been able to access, especially because it comes from an official source," said Jaime Mausan, a journalist who has been tracking the UFO phenomenon for more than 25 years.

Leaving aside dumb and racist comments like “who knew Mexico had an air force”, I’m damn pleased to see them, even if they’ve only arrived to retrieve the Chupacabra, the nasty-fanged goat-sucker frequently sighed in Mexico when The X-Files was still on the air. I always figured, the Chupacabra had to be some kind of grey alien pet that had somehow escaped it’s alien masters’ flying suacer. I mean, what species that can supposedly cross galaxies and circumnavigate the infinite wants to suck goat? (Don’t all answer at once.)

PETS CORNER
Since we already seem to be discussing pets, some girl forwards a link for The Infinite Cat Project that needs to be seen and not described. Suffice to say the Newton finds it silly and undignified.
http://www.privatehand.com/infinite/

Meanwhile HCBeck contributed a link to curly fries and heroine on Johnny Lehman’s Spot – http://blogs.indiewire.com/jonny/archives/000473.html

YOU WANT ICE 9 IN THAT?

Munz forwarded the lengthy thoughts of Kurt Vonnegut from In These Times. I present a couple of chunks (and maybe some more tomorrow.) http://www.inthesetimes.com/

Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace. But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal. One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddleypoo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.
Other drunks have seen pink elephants. And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals. We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.” How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF NICK BERG

On the comments board, agahastgrl wants to know what happened to Nick Berg’s head. I don’t have a clue. I’m still looking for the head of Ralphie Cifferetto. And, to be frank, I’m not that shocked. Okay, decapitation is a bummer. Jayne Mansfield taught us that. But the execution is being used yet another smokescreen to cover that systematic torture of suspects has been okayed from the top in the Iraq occupation. It’s sad the dude died, but he was hanging round in a war zone, in their country, trying to hire on as a low level merc.

And when is everyone going to listen to the low echelon spooks and Theorists of the Obvious like Doc40 and realise that Al Qe’ida is a get-America open franchise, not an octopus command structure?

CRYPTIQUE – Suck my goat, monkey boy!

SUBSERVIENT CHICKEN IN DECLINE

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a note on the Subservient Chicken, a disturbingly weird-ass promo from Burger King. Now some girl draws our attention to a Yahoo News report that tells how, after it’s fifteen minutes of cyber-fame, the chicken is officially in decline...

Between April 11 and April 18, the number of people who visited the site at least once from their home computers surged more than two-and-a-half times to 407,000, according to tracking firm Nielsen/NetRatings. Since then, traffic has trailed off, with just 186,000 people visiting the site from home in the week ended May 2. Miami-based Burger King has remained mum about the chicken's future but said consumers should not expect to see his image at one of its restaurants.
"That would be far too mainstream," Burger King spokesman Blake Lewis said. "The chicken doesn't do mainstream."
http://www.subservientchicken.com

FROM THE EMAIL

kaymo writes at length...

Who the hell are these people? wonders Doc 40. In Mother Jones this month I see that 61% of Americans now profess to believe that the Biblical story of the creation of the world/universe in 7 days is literally true. We already know that Americans have rejected the sciences of biology, geology, paleontology, astronomy, cosmology, genetics, etc. etc. since a huge majority of Americans reject "Evolution" in favor of one flavor or another of Creationism. The same rejection ultimately has to include Physics, Math and even Chemistry, since all scientific inquiry is tending to move along the same rails towards similar conclusions. (As long as the Higgs Boson really does exist! If not, oh boy....) What does this mean? One could say that these Americans have chosen a
kind of childish wilfulness, a deliberate refusal to see the world as it is. In doing so they have joined the Islamic fundamentalists, Hindu nationalists, Ultra orthodox Jews and sundry other groups that have deliberately closed their eyes and turned their faces away from the "enlightenment" and the process of scientific inquiry.

Being "enlightened" is hard for some people. It means having to give up notions of being "special", "chosen", and somehow "beloved" beyond others by the lord or lords, depending on your religion. It means having to accept that rationally there are no races, that the very idea of race is a misnomer, although there are slight genetic differences between ALL humans who originate outside of Africa and the various groups that originate on the mother continent. For some reason the idea that we're all pretty much the same and that we're also animals, horrifies a
certain (large) percentage ofAmericans as well as other peoples. This is an area deserving of some
determined work with MRI scanning, psychiatric observation and genetic cross referencing. It might even turn out to be an inheritable genetic trait. Maybe they could come up with a drug or two that would turn it off. One moment a raving religious racist, the next a rational human
being. Part of Bush's popularity is that he shares in the wilful childishness. Not much of a student at school, lacking much of a knowledge base of the world and not caring either, he presents himself as one of them, and they love this.

Other politicians have taken note. We will see more of this and for the possible end consequences I would suggest further reading of works like Ian Kershaw's two part biography of Adolf Hitler. Appealing to the irrational, the mischievous child, the wilful believer in his or her specialness and superiority is a potent political method. Combine it with tons of money from the ruling elite and you've got a successful strategy that no amount of rational good sense can overcome. Bush
doesn't have the personality to take advantage of the situation a la Adolf Hitler, but someone else, as yet unheard of, probably does.

And the Buggers respond to the last post...

Thanks for putting The Buggers positions #2 and #3 on the Funtopia site. I'm really honoured and appreciate your comments. The Buggers had already planned to dedicate a position to you and John Sinclair as seminal figures to revolutionary art in the West, probably the next position. They will make up for the omission of The Who in that same position as the mutual influences of American and British counterculture will be mentioned. I understood that Ron Asheton saw The Who perform when he was in London in the 60s and took the idea of destroying instruments home.
The Buggers would like to start that position with a brief analysis of the title PHUN CITY (the absurdist/anarchist combination of fun plus the association with Vietnam). Before they mention that I'd like to make sure it was you who invented it*. Let me know, if you can find the time. As to desexualisation and De Sade ... you're obviously right. But that will take some more time to work out. The Buggers have been going on about (de)sexualisation a bit too often now.

*The Phun City name and logo (see Funtopia?) was a joint effort by me and the late Edward Barker

CRYPTIQUE – I eat more chicken any man ever seen.

DOCTOR ZIMBARDO AND HIS EXPERIMENT

Seems like Doc40 stays about 48 hours ahead of the news media. Two days after Jett had reminded us all of the Stamford experiment with prisoners and guards, it was all over MSNBC and our local Fox News (and those were only the ones that I saw) neatly packaged, along with a up-to-the-minute sound bite of the good doctor himself, like some government spin control office had the whole thing ready to go in case the whole subject of torture became public, and the “aberration” case needed to be made. (See yesterday.)

BUT LET’S NOT FORGET...

Fox Butterfield writes in today's NY Times...

Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates...The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court imposed the decree after finding that guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex. The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time. The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system.

THE BUGGERS ARE AT IT AGAIN

Another position statement comes from the Netherlands-based Buggers, and is reproduced below. (Although I did cut a lengthy first paragraph about pulling down Saddam’s statue in Iraq, partly because I felt there’d been enough talk about Iraq this weekend, and also because it made the thing much too long.)

The use of vandalism to undermine the ideology behind official art or the media has been an effective strategy of revolutionary art in Western societies since the early 20th century. In fact, the vandalistic techniques developed by Duchamp, Picabia, Heartfield, Burroughs & Gysin, Guy Debord, the Dutch Provo movement, Destroy All Monsters, and many others, have proved
to be vital impulses to Western art, literature, music and thought. In its purest form vandalism is no more than the destruction of capital or property. But even this seemingly uncomplicated form of vandalism has led to vital and complex art, music and thought. We already mentioned Gustav Metzger's auto-destructive art in our position #1, but now also think of people as various as John Cage, Dick Raaijmakers, Iggy & The Stooges, and The MC5*. The controlled but real destruction of goods during performances refuses to represent anything else. It blows up all representation, and radically forces the spectators to face the void. Dangerous buggers! Seemingly more complex techniques of vandalism  adding something to objects, taking something from them, damaging them in various degrees, etc.  can be summarised as hostile modifications of objects, and range from the simplest drawings in school diaries to the attack on national monuments. Duchamp demonstrated in his modification of a reproduction of the Mona Lisa (using the schoolboy's technique of adding a moustache and an obscene subscript) that vandalism can give access to the unconscious, much like the Freudian joke or lapsus. Burroughs & Gysin's cut-up technique shows that hostile modification can induce paranoid lucidity and disclose covert
ideologies and connections. But the sheer impact of ridiculising, sexualising, desexualising, cursing, damaging, etc. can be effective too.

As long as its powerful and loud enough. Vandalism offers a wide range of possibilities to change the perception of reality, to expose the ideologies and mental constructions that define objects in public space (Space in its broadest sense, also including television, the internet, language and history). Anti-vandalism regulations and measures determine to a considerable extent the design, construction and choice of materials in public space. This, together with the increasing surveillance and control of public space, makes it fair to say that we live in an environment of suppressed vandalism. The suppression of vandalism is not synonymous with public order but is an important part of it. In Western capitalist societies public order mainly serves the protection of property, investments and the conservation of ideologically valuable goods. For that reason The Buggers believe that vandalism directly undermines the grip of Western capitalist industries on citizens, and that strategic use of vandalistic techniques is a powerful weapon in reclaiming public space. At present the Robert Johnson collective in Paris demonstrate that deconstructing advertisements and reclaiming public space through vandalism forces the capitalist industries to expose their repressive nature. Bugger on!

The Buggers are hosted by: Sea Urchin Editions, PO Box 25212, 3001 HE Rotterdam, The Netherlands, email: the.buggers@sea-urchin.net

* I was kinda surprised, however, at the omission of Pete Townshend, Keith Moon and The Who. I recall one of the first times I ever spoke to Pete was at a 1967 after-party for DIAS (Gustav Metzger's Destruction In Art Symposium) at which an upright piano was sacrificed.

CRYPTIQUE – M...m...m...my g...g...generation.

THAT WAS THE WEEK (WASN’T IT?)

I catch myself in repetition, describing over and over again how my mind whirls at current events as they stream from the TV, from the corporate online news and from newspapers and magazines, and how, after a week like the one through which we have all just passed, the emails to Doc40, Howard Stern, and alleged crazy people make more logical sense than those who are foisted on us as experts. When I hear a fool like David Brookes on PBS News Hour blandly claiming that the systematic torture of prisoners is just an “aberration” I start to want to scream. It’s in all the CIA torture manuals, goddamn it! Chapter and verse. Disorientation and degradation. All that’s missing is what has to be a new addendum on how to attack Moslem prisoners via their weird sexual mores. (A gift from Sharon/Mossad?) As in get girls to attach the electrodes. The outrage burns so intensely that it would take an major essay to organize, so instead, let me just huf and puff offer a shit-list of the unfocused impressions...

1) For once, the military-intelligence complex is doing its own dirty work. A history of torture extends from Saigon to El Salvador, but was usually conducted by local proxies. The CIA and Special Forces may have trained the torturers, but the deeds themselves were done, more often than not, by ARVN, the Arena Party death squads, or the local secret police hot out of the School of the Americas at Fort Benning. Plausible deniability? I guess the Bush boys were in too much of a hurry, or simply, in their arrogance, assumed that, after 9/11, they could get away with anything.

2) Why the fuck did we expect anything different. Neocoms like Ann Coulter have been shrieking for years how anything goes when smiting the evildoers.

3) Danger in all this talk of the Zimbardo experiment. (Thanx Jett – see the infamous comments board) It’s already been picked up by Bush media hacks as proof of the “aberration” defense. Like, you know, it was just stress-related weirdness. Yarbles, I say. Yarblockos. And refer everyone back to1).

4) And didn’t Harry Palmer long ago point out that torture was ultimately pointless, because torturers only get told what they want to hear.

5) Meanwhile the poor busted MP grunts cry, “I was only following orders” – the mantra of Nazi war criminals. Except, at Nuremberg, the brass was on trial. Again in their arrogance, the Bush crew seem to believe they can stem the destructive tide with the courts martial of a few rank and file military police. Blame it on Pvt. England, She Wolf of the US.

6) Bush and his handlers have not only started a war under the most inconceivable of pretexts, but are now managing to lose it. In a parliamentary democracy, Rumsfeld would have been forced to resign weeks ago, and Bush, were he prime minister, would be fighting off a Vote of No Confidence and removal from office. As it stands, almost half the country still thing he’s a great guy doing a grand job. Who the hell are these people? Are they so lumpen deluged by Friends, Jesus, snacks, and American Idol they believe any garbage that’s fed to them?

7) Okay, forget the plain benighted folks, what about Disney? Suppressing Michael Moore and the story of Bush and the Saudis until after the election, because of some short term business interests? Who do they imagine is going consume their damned movies and dopy theme parks when the economy is wrecked, a pointless war drags on, and the nation is in a state of Homeland siege?

8) Or what about John bloody Kerry. Where’s the towering condemnatory rhetoric? Where’s the wrath and the power? Yesterday I heard him mumble a sound bite phrase, something about “a huge historical miscalculation”, but delivered like a schoolboy buying condoms in an old fashioned drug store. Are his handlers telling him to stay out of the fray? Is this a tactic? Am I naive to expect more?

9) And at this point, I feel myself running out of steam. History is so tiring, my dears. But I can’t help wondering when some swine in the White House will start wondering if strapping electrodes to domestic enemies might be a workable idea? Or if, at the other end of the sado-fantasy, any Washington domination parlor has opened its very own Baghdad Room? *

10) Is there anyone out there who knows DC and its surrounds really well, and can suggest a fictitious address where a ultra high class, s&m bordello might be situated? *I feel prank fiction coming on. (Maybe I should offer stuff as a prize.)

Hey, it’s a Letterman Ten, how about that?

CRYPTIQUE – Boots and saddles.

THE OLD ONES ARE THE BEST

As in the old CND recruiting poster parody...

JOIN THE ARMY
VISIT EXOTIC LANDS
MEET INTERESTING PEOPLE
AND KILL THEM
(Except now we can add...and if any are left alive, strip them naked, put plastic bags on their heads, and attach electrodes to their genitals -- and then put a saddle on their grandmother and ride her around the cell.)

Or there was Simon de Montfort, who had it all going on with slaughtering infidels and heretics in the 12th century, and who operated according to the maxim...Kill 'em all and let God sort it out.

And was it Barry Goldwater or the Marquis de Sade who claimed that...A measure of excess in the defense of freedom is never a bad thing?

THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH

The story circulates that the real reason Disney are attempting to bury Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 -- that demonstrates the links between GWB and the Saudi royals -- is that Jeb Bush has leaned on them, threatening Disney World's Florida tax breaks if the film sees the light of day before the election.

I also understand that Homeland Defense has a truly lunatic plan to start fucking with the Muslims in the Federal Corrections gulag. I wish them luck. My money is on the jailhouse Muslims.

But don't despair, (and talking of prisoners) Charlie Manson will be on today's Entertainment Tonight.

CRYPTIQUE -- Leave the bottle.

I SEE YOUR HAIR IS BURNING

While well aware that no one outside the LA basin gives a rat’s ass that the city is going through it’s second cruel and unusual heatwave in eight days, and most are probably bored with my complaints like how yesterday’s 101F totally derailed your humble correspondent and the wonders he desires to perform. My theory is that the unseasonable temperatures are another symptom of global warming, and the waters of the Pacific are in entirely the wrong place (a idea possibly supported by yesterday’s TV panic about sharks – maybe great whites – in the bay.) Kaymo, on the other hand, emails what may be a different, but equally alarmist explanation...

Commiserations etc. but there may be something else going on... article in NY Times this Sunday indicated that scientists are finally coming around to accept what archaeologists and hydrologists have been saying for quite a while.. the 20th century was freakishly wet in the Western USA. Now in 6th year of drought the thought is occurring that maybe there will be a return to the real dry times, like those between 900 AD and 1300 when so little rain fell that even the Anaszazi abandoned their settlements in Arizona and New Mexico. The question that has to be asked is what will the millions of Americans now living in a desert do if – for instance – the Colorado River simply stops flowing? (and the cost of fetching water from Alaska or British Columbia remains prohibitive)

On a deeper level than the weather, however, or even the climatic fate of Los Angeles, the great problem of the 21st century is that exchanges like the above finish up blowing in the wind while communications are bowed down under the weight of Bush and his bloody war, the sadism of his minions, the short-attention-span unscrupulousness of his corporate backers, and the madness of his fundamentalist support. We don't even have the time to discuss whether the Anaszazi moved away or were kidnapped en masse by aliens any more. (Or how the aliens seemed to move out when Bush moved in.)

And talking of blowing in the wind, I hear that Bob Dylan wants to be a judge on American Idol. Senses taking leave? Jeez. But maybe more about Bob tomorrow.

Meanwhile, our pal hipspinster writes about Mustangs, heat, and Pixies at http://hipspinster.blogspot.com

CRYPTIQUE – Please notify my next of kin.

FROM THE EMAIL

In LA, the disturbing climate cycle is now in a repeat phase and the temps promise to climb into the Fahrenheit hundreds again. Mercifully stuff keeps coming down the ether and today (after taking yesterday off) I don’t have to write too much. The following comes from Ben, and although I’m pretty sure I don’t agree with the call for a new desexualization, it’s a fun piece of theorizing that I hope stimulates thought. I fear, however, that Ben and his crew make little distinction between (say) Britney Spears and the Maquis de Sade, when, on days of more intense cultural desperation, I’m prone to muse on the idea of how, in some timeless libertine dimension, the former might be handed to the latter for an education...

BUGGER!

Although the discoveries in the USA and Great-Britain of photographs ofAmerican and British soldiers torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners should make us wary and wonder if their simultaneous disclosures aren't a deliberate move in Anglo-American war propaganda to demoralise the enemy, they do reveal an aspect of the clash between Western capitalism and Islam hitherto less manifest. The most striking feature, the overall atmosphere of the photographs, is a sexual one. Sexually active champions of capitalism are opposed to sexually passive Muslims, or Muslims are forced to take part in sexual activities against their will. Sexual abuse of Muslims, especially by female soldiers, has also been reported by prisoners released from the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp. At the same time in several Western European countries the controversy about headscarves worn by muslim girls and women has grown to absurd proportions. Wearing a headscarf (an instrument to desexualise girls and women) by pupils and/or teachers has
already been forbidden at all schools in France, and at conservative schools in Germany and Holland. The fury that this traditional symbol of desexualisation evokes in capitalist countries and the perverse delight with which muslim girls and women are forced to expose themselves in public show similarities with the sexual harassment revealed in the recently published photographs. For that reason we, The Buggers, believe that sexualisation has become a capitalist strategy in the conquest of its opponents.

Based on the theories of Marx and on misinterpretations of Freud the sexual liberation of the masses used to be a revolutionary strategy to bring down a repressive capitalist system and its bourgeois values and social structures. Western revolutionary art in the 20th century embraced this strategy, from surrealism to Beat poetry to the counter-cultural art of the sixties and seventies. Although the pursuit of individual sexual freedom has brought about many positive changes in capitalist societies, it failed to undo the capitalist system itself. We now know that the strength of the capitalist system lies in its absolute lack of morals and its subsequent ability to absorb the moral force of its opponents, only to pervert it for commercial purposes. Now, instead of pursuing sexual freedom and changing society in the course of it, the masses find themselves chasing the sexual mirages produced by the capitalist industry - without ever finding gratification. The capitalist system deliberately keeps its sexually emancipated consumers in a prolonged sexual frenzy. Bugger it!

Since Lacan's interpretation of Freud we know that sexual desire centres around a void, a lost 'object', and that it can never be really satisfied. An endless string of ungratifying substitutes for the lost object marks the trail of individual sexual realisation. Capitalist industries consciously exploit this phenomenon; they promise sexual fulfillment, provide eroticised substitutes for the lost object, know how to sell them, and make huge profits in doing so. Desexualisation, the refusal to become part of a public sexualised circuit, poses a genuine threat to capitalism. Anti-capitalist cultures and religions, and particularly individuals or groups within capitalist societies that scorn sexualised consumerism, have come to symbolise the origin of the sexual desire that capitalism feeds on: the void, the nothingness. They shatter the illusion constructed to keep consumers prisoners of their own desires and must therefore be sexualised or destroyed.

The Buggers' second proposition is that modern revolutionary art can no longer employ sexual liberation as a weapon against the capitalist system. We believe that nowadays desexualisation, emphasis on the void behind the sexual drive, provides a more appropriate weapon. We invite you to explore the artistic possibilities of desexualisation, and to redefine the 'obscene'. Or to be more precise, to develop revolutionary strategies of public desexualisation (we wouldn't want you, or any other individual, muslim or non-muslim, to stop buggering in private).

The Buggers are hosted by Sea Urchin Editions
PO Box 25212
3001 HE Rotterdam

KING OF ALL MONSTERS

While Henry Cabot Beck brings us back to the more pleasant topic of the relativity of Godzilla and Elvis Presley. (And let’s not forget that Godzilla’s official birthday occures on November 3rd of this year, and it’s probably morally and culturally incumbent on all of us to party like it was 1999. (It will also be the day after the election, when we will know if we've dumped Bush, or at least if the elections being stolen in Florida all over again.)

I'm researching Godzilla for a Daily News piece, and I discover today that the day the Godzilla production was announced by Toho in Japan, July 5, 1954, is the day Elvis cut That's All Right. Don't know if that makes Elvis the Godzilla of America or Godzilla the Elvis of Japan, but it's fun to think about.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Hiding the faces of the war dead makes the motivation seem like saving face in an election year. Americans won't take casualties for the credibility of the Bush administration. That's not a good enough reason for people to die. – Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.

CRYPTIQUE – Mothra! Mothra!

THE HARDEST WORKING MAN IN POLITICS

Last night, Howard Stern second banana, Artie Lange, supplied us with the following fascinating statistic. In the last year (I guess figuring the war had been won) President George Bush had 98 days of vacation time, plus long weekends at camp David.

THE HARDEST WORKING MAN IN CHAOS

Earlier I was lying on the couch half-watching the movie Basquiat for about the nineteenth time, and I started idly wishing that I could get up one morning and string together a whole bunch of words that made absolutely no sense at all and get paid obscene amounts of money for so-doing. But, alas, it is not 1981, and may never be again. I do ask myself, however, what is the use of having the bloody Republicans in power if it can’t generate a totally spurious, bullshit art boom? I recall how Uncle Bill Burroughs and many others did very well for themselves in the Reagan era by doing very little. Today we simply wait for the roosting chickens, as in...

THE HARDEST LURKING ANXIETY FOR 2050

What did Jim Morrison tell us? “The old get older and the young get stronger”? When he said it, the young was my generation, but now Jim’s dead, and I don’t feel so great, and the young are doing the will of Allah. The point is made by Niall Ferguson in the London Sunday Times that the Muslim world has double the Western birthrate, which then causes him to make the following grim but all too plausible, not-so-longterm projection. “A youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonize a senescent Europe to the north and west.”

THE HAPPIEST LARGE ANIMAL

Meanwhile, Brother John is concentrating on the important stuff, and tells us more about the perc-a-pop (see yesterday)...
"Carfentanil (Wildnil®) is an analogue of fentanyl with an analgesic potency 10,000 times that of morphine and is used in veterinary practice to immobilize certain large animals" I hadda look up Fentanyl (and its analogs). In general I've always been rather against animal tranks -- not a gentlemanly indulgence -- but that's rooted in a natural bias against PCP. Not a prejudice that extends to opiates. I don't see how anybody could refuse something 10k the potency of morphine. I feel convinced that I could qualify as "a large animal"...

CRYPTIQUE – Time to wake the Mamalukes.

PERC-A-POP

Yesterday a wall o’climate fell on Southern California like the Wrath of the Molten Brain-Eater, as the temperature hit 102F in downtown. The eyes in the cars are bloodshot, and I feel as though I’ve been run over by a busload of the living dead on the way to a company picnic. For those of you with an interest in meteorology, the spring in LA is always something of a tussle between the cold of the ocean and the heat of the desert, but never conducted according to such brutally extreme parameters. Until the end of June, the sea usually wins, at least before lunch. It’s cooler today, but we are warned by the TV weathermen that the heat will return as another head of high pressure builds over the land. Meanwhile the battle for Fallujah rages with the US attempting to fight counter insurgency with gunships, like it’s 1969, but no one seems to be paying attention, more concerned that American Idol may be fixed in favor of a geeky, tone-deaf, ginger-haired, white kid*. Maybe drugs are the only answer to despair and the impulse to mass homicide with an accurate rifle from a tall building. Give the anarchist a perc-a-pop. (As in...)

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) -- A narcotic painkiller that looks like a lollipop - designed to speed relief to cancer patients - is starting to show up in illegal sales with the nickname "perc-a-pop." The drug's ease of use and sweet taste have law enforcement officials worried about the potential for abuse. Actiq, a berry-flavored lozenge on a stick, contains the synthetic opioid fentanyl. "We're starting to see it emerge as a drug that is, as we call it, 'diverted,' which is a legally prescribed drug being used illegally," said Kevin Harley, spokesman for state Attorney General Jerry Pappert. "It's a drug that is easily administered or taken by somebody who might be afraid to either take a pill, snort or inject a needle in their arm."

AND...

* More on the state of current media dementia in this weeks LA CityBeat.
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=876&IssueNum=47

CRYPTIQUE – Phew, Hellboy, wot a scorcher!

LOST IN TRANSMISSION

Ducking the war and all the rest of the dementia and turning to Pay for View for a chance to become prone in front of the TV but not totally mindless, I ceased to be one of the few inhabitants of the LA Basin who hadn’t seen Lost in Translation. My reactions?

1. Boy was I disappointed. Not that it was a bad movie, but it had been so over-sold to me that I was expecting considerably more than I got. And, folks, I love Bill Murray. I have seen Groundhog Day some 38 times, and this, Ms Coppola, was not Groundhog Day.

2. Boy would I like to back in Tokyo amid all that neon. I could have watched the teen-rituals in the video arcade for an hour. (And all the ennui of the characters seemed less than sympathetic in a city that so positively vibrates. If you’re fresh in Tokyo and bored, you got crisis energy problems, Bob and Charlotte. I recall being in my hotel room with jet lag, and watching inexplicable movies, but bouncing up and down with delight, even at the commercials.)

3. Boy was that some racist movie. The dumb-depicted Japanese were such stereo-parodies of the infinitely courteous and helpful people I encountered, I just found myself becoming irritated to the point that I didn’t give a rat’s ass what he whispered to her at the end.

4. Boy do I want one of those toy machine guns with the laser bullet-effects.

KILL THE WABBIT

Later, on Letterman, a resemblance between George W. Bush and Porky Pig was more than adequately demonstrated with film clips. Yes, kill the evil d-d-doers.

That’s all folks. It was 100F in LA today. The end is nigh, but distaff ire, if nothing else, seems to have brought the comments software back online. (Open now for "soft" jokes.)

CRYPTIQUE – B-b-b-banzai!

WEEKEND FEVER DREAMS

As what seems like another too-early heatwave hits LA, the sense inhabiting a very nasty, but highly realistic science fiction movie closes in on me, and the sense that I may be writing for my life, and but with knowledge that it is probably already too late. Global weather systems lurch out of whack. The planet is now so crowded that my favorite cities have grown, just in the last few years, to the point of standing-room only. An enlightened species would be galvanized by a sense of apocalyptic urgency. Population and environmental disaster loom, but instead of uniting in a common awareness of the threat, those in power, both secular and spiritual, allow the contagion of war to run lose yet again. The USA has been stumbling down the slippery slope of counter-insurgency for a year, and has now fallen into a dead run. The last time this benighted and evil game was played, it ran for twelve years, cost lives of 50,000 young Americans, a million Vietnamese, and don’t even mention the Kennedy Brothers. It split the country, polarized the world, and took a bite out of my youth, although I will freely admit that we had a lot of fun fighting the good fight to stop that wat. Who the hell knows where the mess in Iraq is going to take us, or how long it will be in the taking? But right now it causes menacing images to spin out at random from my memory.

Like who recalls the neutron bomb? The neutron bomb was a piece of nastiness from the Carter era. Small, low yield nuke that was designed to vaporize the Soviet tanks as they rolled across the West German Border without doing to much permanent damage to the friendly real estate and infrastructure. The fear at the time was of the Red tank superiority over NATO, and the joke was that the neutron bomb killed people, but left the buildings intact. The thought can only lurk in the back of my mind that at least someone in the Bush is wondering where we left them and how hard it would be to dust them off. Kill the insurgents but don’t irradiate the crude?

And then there’s John Kerry. He is now the repository of the world’s hope to oust Bush and restore some semblance of civilization to this country. We all knew he’d run into a barrage of flack, but he hardly seems to be coping with it. While the Republican’s drag out to old fabricated snitch-files of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO that absurdly claim the VVAW was seeking to overthrow the government, Kerry is still fumbling the smear about how he voted on the invasion of Iraq.

On this last topic, Andrew Christie, wrote the following and more for CommonDreams.org (sent by some girl)

There was Dick Cheney speaking to an NRA crowd last week, firming up the base, getting in the administration's favorite Kerry dig: Kerry could try to "explain or explain away all he wants" his vote to authorize the Iraq war, but such vacillation, was, to Mr. Cheney's way of thinking, unbecoming in a man who would be Commander in Chief. Incredibly, Kerry has allowed this issue to remain an issue, via his thread-the-needle, what-I-really-meant parsings ever since his former primary opponents started lobbing his war vote at him, now continuing to allow it after the GOP has taken it up, using it as the polishing cloth to burnish up their frame around Kerry's flip-flop image. Incredible because this was, and is, an issue easily dealt with. When Cheney demands to know how Kerry can justify his shameful, unmanly, indecisive, poll-driven equivocation on the war -- how it is that he now opposes what he once obviously supported -- he need only reply as
follows: "Because you lied to me, Dick. Remember? The White House sent its managers to Congress before the vote, and they briefed the House and Senate Intelligence committees on the dire threat of Saddam. The reconstituted nuclear program. The mushroom clouds that would be appearing over New York and Washington in a few years. The lie you were telling the American people in general terms, you told us with specific, impressive-sounding statistics and authoritative reports -- that legendary 'bad intelligence.' It was on that basis and that basis alone -- the basis of imminent threat to America from weapons of mass destruction -- that my colleagues and I voted to give your boss the authority to invade.

COMMENTS

After all last weeks discussion of the comments board, the bloody thing seems to be falling apart and I don’t really know enough html to either fix it or replace. Of course, once you declare a piece of web of software to have failed, it frequently reasserts itself. If anyone finds that it’s working perfectly for them, please email me. If anyone has a link to an alternate server, let me know about that too. (Byron4d@aol.com)

CRYPTIQUE – I can’t do that, Dave.

LAWRENCE OF BLOODY ARABIA

The US in Iraq looms large in my fevered dreams, like some chickenshit Roman Empire without the courage of its own brutality. At least Caligula was quite open about believing he was a god and therefore above the dictates of morality. Wes Clarke was just on TV, crucially pointing out how to retake Falluja with 2000 marines means big fire power, Blackhawks, air support, and beaucoup collateral wasted. The math of death is kicking in as we watch. Civilian dead create insurgent support, and the curve rapidly grows exponential. Without massive colonial-style suppression, and maybe a couple of nukes where they won’t fuck up the oil, this war can be conceded lost right now. Post McLuhan, brothers and sisters. The speed-up makes what took a year to happen in Vietnam flash past in a couple of months in Baghdad. It all starts to look like a high-tech rerun of Lawrence of Arabia – except we’re the Turks.

At least in ‘nam, Hanoi was a visible enemy with whom to negotiate. The Iraqi’s have nothing. About the only thing they agree on is that they don’t want a US puppet government of neo-con backed old crooks-back-from-exile, and the default scenario is one of endless theocratic civil war. Maybe Saddam’s defense at his upcoming trial should be that he was required to be a murdering shithead, because that’s what it took to keep so many lunatics under the slightest semblance of control, and that’s why the CIA gave him so much fucking support.

But don’t worry about the draft. It’ll take a year for all the exemptions for the children of the rich to be figured out, and in way that won’t reflect on future desires to run for office.

FROM THE EMAIL

People seemed very concerned with Doc40's design and function. These just in. (And I figure some girl will take a hit out on wrenchski.)

davinian writes...
Hi Mick, I agree with 'Some Girl'... comments on the individual post are a more logical way of doing things (or rather that is how the community known as bloggers are doing it). The comments at present can take a while to load and can be a bit confusing - especially if you want to leave a comment - where/how do I do it? oh, it's right down here at the bottom. Saying that I do enjoy sieving through them. Another off comment comment (Not influenced by your books at all :-) Do you think there is an alterative motive to all this doom and gloom terrorist/evil shit thats being brooded up around the world? I mean, by trying to stamp out terror - the likes of Bush and Blair have actually increased its profile to such an amount that it's having an effect on the whole world. Do they want to bring an ancient, evil god through from another dimension? But to do this they need such an evil/terror-state-of-mind that their willing to risk a full-blown 3rd world war (could potentially be WW4). Maybe its me, but I think there is a reason for all the nonsense in the world at the moment - and to tell you the truth it's starting to scare the crap out of me. Anyway, I suppose I had better get on with my work.

Doc replies...
Of course, according the Emanuel Goldstein, Joseph Goebbels, and probably Henry Kissinger too, a condition of continuous war is the perfect medium for the implementation of psycho-civilized mind control of the domestic population. War is really the gift that keeps on giving.

wrenchski writes...
So, some tit wrote you with "improvements" on your weblog...and the next thing you know, she'll be moving in and downsizing your stereo tearing the pictures of mao's bloody knutsack and other sports heros off the walls replacing them with flowerpots candles and collages of shampoo adverts... Fuck that, leve the damn thing alone and just write more...yer about the only limey writer who doesn't make me wanna change the channel three sentences in... Repeat after me... There is nothing wrong with my website...there is nothing wrong with my website...there is NOTHING WRONG WITH MY WEBSITE...

Doc replies...
Well, actually there’s plenty wrong with this site. The Animal House ambiance was not the intended effect, but, like so many things, it evolved by a cowboy momentum that, once in motion is very time consuming to divert. I have seen some fine Darth Vader weblogs out there, and found myself muttering “please can I have one of those for my birthday”. On the other hand, I do notice that many of the super sites often don’t have too much content because the game is all in the housekeeping. The choice is not easy. I can spend time improving the site. Or (as wrenchski notes) I can write. Which is why I came here in the first place. As it is, I spend too much time simply pulling hidden codes out of the email. As always, the enemy is inertia. When in doubt all things remain the same. Why the fuck do you think I still screw around with AOL?

In the best of all possible worlds, someone who likes doing that kind of thing could design a dream blog for us, with topics comments, and a running all-access sublog, multiple links, with the skin-finish of a high class Tombstone saloon, plus really easy for me to load and post. Then we can all move in an be happy ever after.

Any offers? (byron4d@aol.com)

CRYPTIQUE – No prisoners!

LONG DAYS JOURNEY

I was going to get down with Iraq and this new evangelical bullshit that it’s Armageddon warming its jets just like in the Left Behind doomsday saga, and the eyes of the unbelievers will agonizingly melt at the onslaught of Jesus, etc, etc,. But it’s been a long day and I’m going to lay down my weary tune for tonight. I will leave you, though, with this note from some girl that takes a new look at the Doc40 comments board.

COMMENTS?

Some girl writes...
as i was looking at the comments on your blog, where the number creeps ever higher, and wondering where the insanity will stop, a thought occurred to me. i think i have made this individual-comments-vs.-continuing-comments argument in the wrong manner (ie, some vague bullshit about web/blog aesthetics). but i noticed as i looked at the unwieldy comment board that, even before the crash and burn, there really weren't any new commenters. it's all the same people, give or take a random lunatic, and i think you should consider the possibility that the comments in their current form could prove daunting to any newcomer. it looks like a closed little cyber-community -- as opposed to an open one. i recommend giving doc40 visitors the ability to comment after every new post. and maybe you could explore the possibility of turning the existing comments board into an actual forum (a la the buffyguide boards and millions of other examples), so your in-crowd can still continue to play the way they want to.

So what does anyone else think? Chaos generates fear and elitism? Maoist rough & tumble or silliness? Comment by scrolling to the bottom of the chaos above, or write byron4d@aol.com.

The problem so far has been the technology of which I have had a basinful of late. This is a pop and nothing store, my friends. Rich tried installing a second version of enetation but it simply duplicated itself. I think what I would need to implement some girl’s suggestion might well be a second comments system provider, and very simply spelled out instructions on how to install it. I can only quote Groucho Marx. “A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five.”

BUT GOOD NEWS

Munz is first with the news that The Deviants “Let's Loot the Supermarket...” is #87 in the May Mojo's 100 Greatest Protest Songs. Fame at last, fame at last.

A PERSONAL NOTE

I still have a mess of unanswered email, but I’m getting to it. I swear. Also the next Slide On The Run episode is on the stove.

CRYPTIQUE – Civilization ends.

READING IRAQ

The feeling grows, watching the news out of Iraq, that we are entering the desperate stage of disinformation where even reading between the lines is hardly enough. Over the last few days, since last week’s computer malfunction, I’ve been pushing to catch up on my own life, and have not been reading and watching the news in the way that I normally do. Even so, the bits and pieces that I have gleaned seem to indicate a far more fucked up and dangerous situation than the optimistic, oh-this-uprising-is-just-a-glitch picture than the White House and Rumsfeld are trying to paint. As far as I can tell, the three main supply routes from Baghdad, north to Turkey, South to the sea, and west to Jordan are all cut and trucks are simply not getting through to the capital with essential supplies. Another disturbing piece of info comes from a Doc40 friend in the UK, who may or may not want to remain anonymous, giving a clear, grassroots indication that now mercs are being hired on to augment the US, and Brit regulars, and the troops of the other “allies”. And this does strike me as a little weird. Obviously most will be running convoys and logistical support, but the obvious other field has to be counter-insurgency dirty work. Face it neighbors, this is a mess. When the Pentagon is shopping for hired guns, it can only mean trouble.

Word from ex-squaddie chums: now, for at least the last 2 months, ANYONE who's ever spent even a month in the army is being offered "freelance" work in Iraq. Starting at £60k per annum tax-free. Poss. guarding static posts -- poss. working convoys. About 2 or 3 weeks before the News started telling us that the situation was running away, I heard from a pal (who now feels he's just too old & too married to accept such a gig ... half regretful/half grateful) that Baghdad airport was being mortared twice daily and 1 in 3 convoys was taking small arms fire.

CRYPTIQUE – Napalm in the morning?

PSYCHEDELIC UNCLE TOM

The fine guitarist and author John Perry has a book out titled Electric Ladyland, which is exactly what it is about; the Jimi Hendrix album of the same title. It’s part of a series of small format books from Continuum called 33 1/3, each dedicated to a single classic rock album, and, damn, but is it fine to read a really ace guitar player who also writes really well talking about music. He not only explains the true nature of feedback, but also provides some quite astonishing historical notes on US rock crits initial reaction to Jimi, especially that of Bob Christgau, with whom I worked with for years at the Village Voice etc., and whose word has become treated like holy writ. Today, Hendrix is totally canonized, but seemingly it was not always so...

When Jimi burst on them at Monterey, six months later, he was as unknown to most Americans as he’d been to English audiences. Yet it was as though they were reviewing a different performer. Critics wrote of an “undignified” “psychedelic Uncle Tom” whose “gimmick-laden” act was a “second-rate copy of The Who’s destruction”. Even his speech annoyed them with it’s “superspade jive”. The shrewd reader may feel a common theme underlies all those responses...

The liberal American press from Esquire to the Village Voice were perplexed by Hendrix in a way that the English never were. It seems extraordinary that the hippest American papers lined up with views found only in the English tabloids (“Wildman of Borneo” etc.). Nobody expected English papers like the Mirror to get anything right, least of all music, but one hoped for more from the American underground press. Filtering their reviews through a whole complex of self-consciously ‘radical’ Vietnam-era attitudes to race relations, they managed to miss the music almost entirely.

My purpose is not to flay the American press - they were quite busy enough flaying themselves. Behind a whole raft of complaints about Hendrix’s undignified performance and his irritating failure to fit existing critical categories for black performers, lay the essential point that his songs mysteriously failed to punish the audience for being white. Hendrix didn't play the wounded, angry black man, or the dignified bearer of oppression; he didn't provide white critics with a handy receptacle for their guilt. They didn't know quite what role he fulfilled. But they knew they didn’t like it.

Reviewing Monterey for Esquire, the 'Dean of American Rock Critics', R. Christgau, first distinguished himself by calling the Grateful Dead “the standout improvisers of the Festival” (actually the performance was so awful the Dead refused to allow even ten seconds to be used in the film or the soundtrack album). Garcia was very funny when he spoke about this, years later in London. He told me: “we blew Monterey and Woodstock. I dunno that big festivals ever really suited us. At Monterey we were sandwiched between The Who and Hendrix … first The Who - bang crash roar - smashed everything … then Hendrix - huge sound, set fire to everything … whooooosh … then we came out and played our little music…”

But as Christgau saw it:

"But [the Dead’s] performance was quickly obscured by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Hendrix is a Negro from Seattle who was brought from Greenwich Village to England by ex-Animal Chas Chandler in January. It was a smart move. England, like all of Europe, thirsts for the Real Thing, as performers from Howlin' Wolf to Muhammad Ali have discovered. Hendrix picked up two good English sidemen and crashed the scene. He came to Monterey recommended by the likes of Paul McCartney. He was terrible. Hendrix is a psychedelic Uncle Tom. Don't believe me, believe Sam Silver of The East Village Other: "Jimi did a beautiful Spade routine." ... He also played what everybody seems to call "heavy" guitar; in this case, that means he was loud. ... The destructiveness of The Who is consistent theater, deriving directly from the group's defiant, lower-class stance. I suppose Hendrix's act can be seen as a consistently vulgar parody of rock theatrics, but I don't feel I have to like it. Anyhow, he can't sing.”


It’s not my intention to single out Christgau. Clearly he represented one definite strain of US opinion (not necessarily restricted to white reviewers) and to his credit, he continues to stand by his original impression; a good polemicist should oppose the prevailing orthodoxy. But the disparity between UK and US opinion remains deeply puzzling. Hendrix's offences (apart from being, in Charlie Murray’s wonderful phrase, ‘unnecessarily black in an American context’) appear to be:

Coming on after the Grateful Dead. (A dirty job but someone’s got to do it)

Going to England. (Thereby reinforcing the deplorable European taste for Real Things).
Crashing the scene (!)
Being terrible (!!)
Seeming to be "heavy" (?)
Consistent vulgarity.
Inability to sing.

Phew. Add tone-deafness and poor microphone technique and you’ve got a pretty damning case.

SUBSERVIENT CHICKEN

And some girl sends us a real sicko-bizarre bit of corporate promo from – of all places – Burger King.

http://www.subservientchicken.com

CRYPTIQUE – Cluck, oh Mistress.

ONE BULLSHIT PLANET

Friday night in Hollywood, and the cars cruise past beyond the windows (yes, stuffed with eyes) and pulsing with hip-hop bass. I swear a new generation of the stone deaf are being created. And if that wasn’t enough, the LAPD choppers circle the building, like it was 1969 in Saigon, annoying the drunks in Plummer Park with their sunguns, and drowning out my TV with that recurrent Doppler bass boom. Whomp-whomp-whomp-whomp-whomp-whompity-whomp-whomp.

Meanwhile, hearing the news today (oh boy) I learn that an HIV vector and maybe actual test-positive infections have closed down the porn industry in the Valley, or is this just some Justice Department black-disinformation op that has stilled the cameras in Chatsworth? The next advance of oppression after Janet Jackson’s Reichstag tit?

Meanwhile, a GOP propaganda web site features a game where players can be President George Bush killing terrorists who have invaded the White House. (No, I ain’t giving you a link to that.) So are you of anything approaching sound mind – you out there in Middle America, where you all believe Monkey Boy is some kinda John Wayne and doing just great? As a good socialist, I have defended you to friends and acquaintances. You the People simply can’t be that stupid. But listen, now you’re making a monkey outta me, and I cannot tolerate that. I look bad. This shit has got to go, or I turn violently elitist, okay? As I recall, the last world leader to accompany his troops personally into battle was King George II (I think), who led a quick safe cavalry charge during the War of Austrian Succession (maybe) but then headed swiftly back to his tent, his mistress, and several nice bottles of vintage port.

Maybe it’s just that it’s the nominal end of a long week, but -- despite Patti Smith singing good, but looking like Willie Nelson’s sister on Letterman, and Lenny Kaye healthy with a green Fender -- this seems like one bullshit planet right now, and I want out. Intelligent life? Forget about it. Have the greased Scotsman beam me up. Like, with some urgency?

MAKE THE PIE HIGHER!

This is a short poem made up entirely of actual quotations from George W. Bush. These have been arranged, only for aesthetic purposes, by Washington Post writer, Richard Thompson. It’s come via Roger in Scotland, where GWB is held in low estimation, laddie.

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
And potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet
Become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?

They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being
And the fish can coexist.

Families is where our nation finds hope,
Were our wings take dream.
Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!
Make the pie higher!

CRYPTIQUE – In the sky with Elvis.

I’M BACK

The last few weeks have not been exactly halcyon days of technology. Indeed, they could well be described as Valium, Jack Daniels and wanting-to-throw-the-hardware-at-the-wall days, as the battlestar went into system collapse. But I loosed myself from the clutches of the 900-number technical support boiler-rooms of major corporations, and found a nice funky repair shop between Swing House rehearsal studio and the Formosa (venerable landmark to the alcoholics of Hollywood since something like 1931). It was run by a guy who looked like a retired roadie, and who was repairing a thirty year-old Mini-Moog for some strange low-fi keyboard player, and I knew it was where I wanted to be fixed. Now I have a new hard drive, and thus a new prosthetic memory, and all now works as it should again, although I am refusing to think about all the ideas, notes, outlines, synopses, hallucinations, dirty pictures, and correspondence that went the way of all electrons in the meltdown. But if I can’t remember them, what the hell? They never really happened, and if I can, they can be reconstructed. Thus I console myself that I also got rid of a fuck of a lot of garbage. Hell, I can work without notes. Unlike the President of the United States who can’t even work with notes, and can hardly claim English as a second language.

I must confess, though, a certain unreality lurks as I approach my cleanslated laptop. It’s all too quiet. All too normal. Ideas and even fantasies are a little tentative, like maybe they overloaded the old C-drive in the first place. There’s been too much frustration and desperately logical focus. I would like to take to my bed for the weekend, but I have a book of quotations to finish and several tons of email to answer. I swear I never worked so hard in the 20th century.

But Doc40 is tranquil and this will leave you with a short piece of harmonious inspiration sent during my times of trial by our favorite southern belle...

THE STREAM

Picture yourself near a stream.
Birds are softly chirping in the crisp cool mountain air.
Nothing can bother you here.
No one knows this secret place.
You are in total seclusion from that place called "The World."
The soothing sound of a gentle waterfall fills the air with a cascade of serenity.
The water is clear.
You can easily make the face of the person
Whose head you are holding under the water.
Look.
It's the person
Who caused you all this stress in the first place.
What a pleasant surprise.
You let them up...just for a quick breath...then ploop!...back under they go...
You allow yourself as many deep breaths as you want.
There now...feeling better?

CRYPTIQUE – Fuck you, Squiddly!

NORMAL SERVICE WILL BE RESUMED TOMORROW

The battlestar has a new hard drive, and is up and running. But after all the configuring I have no more mind or with which to post. But hang in there m'hearties. The fire and ire is building.

CRYPTIQUE -- Bleccch.

Postscript
(which in the blog world precedes the script because time runs backwards)

In this Hellmouse set-up, where Doc40 is pink on white, like a bloody wedding cake, I can't even access the comments board. Someone email me and tell me what's doing, or, better still, send me the actual comments URL and see if I can get to it that way.

I'M IN A 64K TIMEWARP
I'M IN A 64K TIMEWARP (and I don't wanna do the timewarp again!)
I'M IN A 64K TIMEWARP
I'M IN A 64K TIMEWARP
but it would seem that I can cut and paste. Hmmm.

Or should I just start to hallucinate and describe that? Maybe while watching Bush's press conference?

This may all cause me to lose my sanity. Don't all snigger at once.

Well friends, here's the story so far. Last Friday (yeah, Good Friday, that one) my computer crashed with signs of dangerous hard drive distress, and for the interim, as I seek to get it fixed, I'm working on a model T clunker without enough ram to scratch it's own ass, and that gets cranky when more than three screens are up at once, and in fear that, although the major works are saved to disk, all manner of notes, ideas and jottings are lost to the world, which as an artist kind of makes me sick to my stomach. Thus Doc40 will stagger as best he can, if it's only to be pissing and moaning about the ill fortune that has recently been besetting the technology. Like I just told Larry Wallis in an email, it's like trying to play Hendrix on a clapped out $20 mail order guitar. But, hey, thanks to all of you who have offered advice, help, possible loaners, and general sympathy. Email is late being answered, but tomorrow I see the fix-it guy and maybe all will be well.

Cryptique? Are you kidding? I can hardly read the blog itself on this machine.

THE DOCS COMPUTER HAS CRASHED. BADLY
More info when I'm not on a ten-year old machine.

BAD? AS OPPOSED TO WHAT?

History never looks like history when you’re are living through it. – John W. Gardner

I don’t want to alarm anyone but, this is all looking exceedingly unpleasant. Reading between the war-media bullshit, as we have trained ourselves to do, it would appear that, in Iraq, the US is losing control of the cities, and calling down airstrikes, while reluctant allies pull out of the hotspots. Both Sunni and Shi-ite insurgents move through the civilian population like Chairman Mao’s fish through water. Civilian casualties, and incidents like yesterday’s aerial blitz on a Falluja mosque strengthen Iraqi resolve, and move matters inexorably towards a full-scale popular uprising – something with which the US military is totally unequipped to cope. A mendacious and unnecessary war has gone beyond being illegitimately waged and is now being arrogantly lost, in classic ‘Nam fashion, and at mind-boggling speed. Meanwhile the poor fucking grunts, some already there a year, have their tours extended, and spring moves towards summer in one of the most environmentally unappealing places on the planet. In a parliamentary democracy, it would only be a matter of time before a vote of no confidence would be organized, and the current leadership removed from power. But that is not the American way, and so the gang in the White House fumblingly presides over what may well be the collapse of the First Crusade of the Third Millennium, and who knows what the hell will follow, as the whole of Islam, in all its infinite numbers, engages against us. I’d just love to be wrong, but I’m started to worry that these larcenous pygmies-in-power may have actually triggered an epic, if not an apocalypse.

MAYBE GREENLAND MELTING?

And as the war hots up, this story from Nature comes at me...

Greenland's huge ice sheet could melt within the next 1,000 years and swamp low-lying areas around the globe if emissions of carbon dioxide and global warming are not reduced, scientists said on Wednesday. A meltdown of the massive ice sheet, which is nearly two miles thick would raise sea levels by an average seven yards, threatening countries such as Bangladesh, islands in the Pacific and parts of Florida. ''Any area that is less than seven meters above sea level would be flooded,'' said Jonathan Gregory, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in southern England. Researchers have already calculated that an annual average temperature rise of more than three degrees Celsius would be sufficient to melt the ice sheet in the future.

LINK

I wrote the cover story in today’s LA CityBeat. It’s a profile of publishers-to-the-damned Adam Parfrey and Richard Metzger. http://lacitybeat.com/

CRYPTIQUE – Check with the Mamalukes. Bang or whimper?

ECCLES?

A while ago I started to collect found email poetry of the kind that’s used to beat spam blockers, but then I got bored and gave it up. But I decided to post the following because it included the world eccles and I wonder how many of you out there are old enough and English enough to recall the Famous Eccles.

compassion shoelace splint gracious mitigate degree fowl biaxial salaried alden munich sherbet adverbial calcify
bank lobule gczk jzdk
pistachiopocketful swag eccles numinous cecil who'd inaugurate was inequity rerouting artillery haiku october

But with Jungian synchronicity, Beck sends me this...

This is an authentic subject heading for a Viagra email ad I received today. Since I know what the ad is for, this phrase is evidently to be taken to mean something about virility and tumescence, or to paraphrase Neil Young, the wiener and the damage done. So while I'm disconcerted about the word shrink in the beginning, "tete bidirectional denial" clearly states that this product is designed to circumvent psychological problems within the marriage, and promises that taking this pill will result in a "transoceanic revolt muscle tsunami, " especially on intercontinental flights. I leave the Bulldog Drummond part and the rest to your imagination.

Subj: aberrate shrink vicar polarimeter bissau individualism tete bidirectional denial transoceanic revolt muscle tsunami ccny mistress drummond rhenish signboard

But I guess this is just one way to take some time out from the ugly fact of a full scale shi-ite uprising in Iraq, and avoid commenting that one of the most provocative things an Army of Occupation can do is this start shutting down newspapers. I guess Bush and his gang are too fucking stupid to learn any of the lessons taught to the Brits in Northern Ireland over the last 30 some years.

CRYPTIQUE – We don’t need no stinking cryptique.

I'LL LIVE

Thanks for all the cards and flowers, friends and neighbours. I'll be answering the email in dribs and drabs. The old bolshevik is recovering and now reflecting on how even staying indoors these days can give a boy combat fatigue. Talking it slow, but gotta give you a heads up for Thursday when Condee meets 9/11. After all the prima donna stalling, she better play like it like Joan Collins in Dynasty or she's the sacrificial toast.

More tomorrow, I hope.

CRYPTIQUE -- Fax more soup and bourbon.

FIRST THE TECHNOLOGY

First the technology crashes and then the humanity. Doc40 has to take a couple of sick days. (And no, I haven't been drinking.) With luck, I'll see you all in a day or so.

CRYPTIQUE -- Who needs it?

CAN THIS BE FATKIDGATE?

Monday night, the Letterman show aired a clip of GWB making yet another nebulous speech in Florida. Among the anonymous deer-in-the-limelight folk who stand beside and behind political speakers during sound bite speech snatches was a fat kid, age thirteen or so, who, in terminal boredom, yawned, stretched, and all but fell asleep. I didn’t think he picked his nose, but he might have done. The spectacle went on so long that I was moved to discuss with Newton the cat whether the kid was real or morphed. The cat wasn’t sure but I though probably morphed. Later CNN picked up on the clip, and ran with it, until the White House started complaining. CNN copped out by claiming it was a Late Show fabrication, but, Letterman's people denied it. They morphed no morph. Then the White House denied they’d ever called CNN. Then they admitted they had and CNN apologized to Dave. Complicated? Sure, but whatever the ultimate outcome, one thing is clear, there are people in the White House who watch more TV than the unemployed, and then attempt to put the frighteners broadcasters who do things they don’t like. The American Ministry of Virtue in the making? Or are the Bush thralls way less confident of the peerless leader’s reelection than some or our own comrades? The fat kid is on Letterman tonight and will be a cyber phenom like the dancing baby and fat Jedi kid by next Tuesday.

Press release...
So what's new with the CNN/White House flap? Monday we showed a clip of a speech given by the President from March 20 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. Directly behind the President stood a boy of 14 or so bored to tears. While the President spoke, the lad yawned, stretched, yawned some more, checked his watch, took a knee, yawned, and fell asleep standing up near the end. It was a very humorous actual clip we uncovered. Well, CNN played the clip the next day, Tuesday morning, stating that the White House had called and said the Late Show did some editing to the piece and it never happened. Two hours later, CNN showed the clip again and this anchor person said that the boy was at the speech, but was not standing behind the President as we had seen. Dave informs America that neither statement from CNN is true. The boy was at the rally and the boy was standing behind the President. Something strange is going on, and Dave smells a cover up. CNN is now saying the White House never called them. But why would CNN say the White House HAD called if the White House never did? Hmmm. And Dave reveals that our source, a very good source, confirms the White House DID call the CNN. Hoo boy, this is getting interesting. While Condoleeza Rice is testifying in front of the 9/11 Commission, perhaps she can shed some light on this as well.

And on the subject of weird broadcasting, who heard the Howard Stern April 1st parody Cross and Lopez, a perky “Fun Without Filth”, supposed replacement after Howard was pulled off the air? Had me for almost 45 minutes, and it was vx2 scary.

SOMETIMES MUST HAVE TO STAND NAKED

HC Beck writes...

Bob Dylan is the pitchman for the new Victoria's Secret commercial. Caught it on TV this evening. Bob sings ands looks menacing while girls cavort in their knickers. (No one will guide you, through Armagideon time)

CRYPTIQUE – An old bolshevik in search of a dentist meets the Buddha on the road. Who kills whom?

WHAT’S REAL AND WHAT ISN’T?

A couple of days ago, up on the comments board, Boarg asked the strange but obvious question. Are all the people who visit, comment, and generally contribute to Doc40 real, or did I make them up? For my part, I can truthfully say I didn’t make anyone up, and if I had, I would freely admit it, proud of the diversity of my creation. On the other hand, Billy Oblivion, on the comments board, comes up with the perfect answer. “Of course we’re real...I think.” Almost a paraphrase of Descartes’ Cogito Ergo Sum. "I think, therefore I am." Like “I think...(therefore)...I am”, with the final reduction to “I think I am.” And that’s the joy of the web. The surfer – behind the pseudonym or screen name – can be whoever or whatever he or she desires. It’s worth thinking about. But the night is late and today is a deadline day and have to leave you with more action on the aforementioned comments board, and with two other things...

There’s a piece fine by me on the 9/11 hearings (and also a highly weird April 1st cover story) in the new LA CityBeat – http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=793&IssueNum=43

And, from fidicen, an unpleasant tale from the Axis of Logic site...

THE CHRISTIAN TALIBAN By Stephen Pizzo

During the Taliban rule of Afghanistan the world got a good look at what happens when religious zealots gain control of a government. Television images of women being beaten forced to wear burkas and banned from schools and the workplace helped build strong public support for the President's decision to invade Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11.

But even as President George W. Bush denounced the brutal Islamic fundamentalist regime in Kabul, he was quietly laying the foundations for his own fundamentalist regime at home. For the first time far right Christian fundamentalists had one of their own in the White House and the opportunity to begin rolling back decades of health and family planning programs they saw as un-Christian, if not downright sinful.

Since 2001 dozens of far-right Christian fundamentalists have been quietly installed in key positions within the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Drug Administration and on commissions and advisory committees where they have made serious progress. Three years later this administration has established one of the most rigid sexual health agendas in the Western world.

It began immediately. One of George W. Bush's first acts as president was to issue an executive memorandum reinstating a global abortion "gag rule." The rule was first implemented under Ronald Reagan but revoked during the two Clinton administrations. The rule prohibited federally funded family planning providers from even discussing abortion with their clients.

For the rest, click – http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/printer_5981.shtml

CRYPTIQUE – I yam what I yam.