woensdag, maart 31, 2004

Bush In Silicon Valley

The following is a review by P.J. Crowley -- senior fellow and director of national defense and homeland security -- and Robert O. Boorstin -- senior vice president of national security -- at the Center for American Progress. More than anything, the administration's war in Iraq resembles a software program that, at first, works brilliantly, but then catches the user in a cycle of "fatal error" messages.

SADDAM HUSSEIN POSES AN 'IMMINENT THREAT' TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

**Version 1.0 - Saddam Hussein is an imminent threat
**Version 1.01 - Saddam Hussein is a gathering threat
**Version 1.02 - Saddam Hussein poses a real and dangerous threat
**Version 1.1 - The smoking gun will be a mushroom cloud
**Version 1.2 - We can't afford to wait
**Version 1.3 - We never said imminent
**Version 1.3.1 - OK, maybe we did say it once or twice
**Version 1.4 - We should have been more precise

SADDAM HUSSEIN IS READY TO USE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.

**Version 2.1 - Saddam has weapons of mass destruction
**Version 2.2 - Saddam has nuclear weapons
**Version 2.3 - Saddam has biological agents he's never accounted for
**Version 2.3.1 - The trailers are mobile labs for producing chemical weapons
**Version 2.3.2 - Unmanned aircraft are ready to spread Saddam's biological weapons
**Version 2.4 - Saddam's going to make more of all these weapons
**Version 2.5 - We all know where the weapons are
**Version 2.5.1 - Well, Saddam has used weapons of mass destruction
**Version 2.5.2 - Iraq is a big country. We'll find the weapons eventually.
**Version 2.5.3 - Saddam had weapons of mass destruction programs
**Version 2.5.4 - Saddam had "weapons of mass destruction program-related activities"
**Version 2.5.5 - David Kay? Who's David Kay?
**Version 2.6 - It's not about misleading the American people. Saddam Hussein is gone and that's the most important thing

THE INTELLIGENCE IS CLEAR.

**Version 3.0 - We based our statements on our available intelligence
**Version 3.1 - Saddam tried to buy uranium ore in Niger
**Version 3.1.2 - Well, that was what the British told us
**Version 3.1.3 - Did we tell you about Joe Wilson's wife?
**Version 3.1.4 - Do you know a good lawyer?
**Version 3.2 - The intelligence is absolutely clear
**Version 3.2.1 - Intelligence is never 100 percent certain
**Version 3.2.2 - We didn't manipulate the intelligence
**Version 3.3 - There was no consensus within the intelligence community
**Version 3.3.1 - We saw the same intelligence the last administration did

SADDAM HUSSEIN HAS DEEP TIES TO AL QAEDA.

**Version 4.0 - Saddam has long-standing ties to Al Qaeda
**Version 4.0.1 - You can't distinguish between Saddam and Al Qaeda
**Version 4.0.2 - There is an Al Qaeda terrorist network in Iraq
**Version 4.0.3 - Saddam has provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.
**Version 4.0.4 - Saddam will give his weapons to Al Qaeda
**Version 4.0.5 - Colin Powell: I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection [between Al Qaeda and Iraq]
**Version 4.0.6 - Vice President Cheney: I still believe there's a connection.
**Version 4.0.7 - CIA Director George Tenet: I told Dick not to say that.

THE UNITED NATIONS JUST CAN'T HANDLE THIS.

**Version 5.0 - The UN had 12 years to deal with this
**Version 5.1 - We don't trust the UN to handle this
**Version 5.1.1 - We don't need the UN's help
**Version 5.1.2 - The UN should play a vital, but not central role
**Version 5.1.3 - You there, UN, tell Ayatollah Sistani that elections aren't possible
**Version 5.1.4 - UN, please oversee the election process
**Version 5.1.5 - Pretty please? We'll pay our dues

THE WAR IN IRAQ WON'T HURT OUR EFFORTS IN AFGHANISTAN OR THE HUNT FOR BIN LADEN.

**Version 6.0 - Iraq won't affect our hunt for bin Laden
**Version 6.1 - Assets have been moved from Afghanistan to Iraq
**Version 6.1.1 - Assets are being returned to Afghanistan
**Version 6.2 - We're mounting a spring offensive against bin Laden
**Version 6.2.1 - We'll catch bin Laden this year
**Version 6.2.2 - We hope to catch bin Laden this year
**Version 6.3 - Even if we catch bin Laden, the threat will still exist.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

**Version 7.0 - We won't need hundreds of thousands of troops -- that's wildly off the mark
**Version 7.1 - Mission accomplished
**Version 7.1.1 - We'll stay as long as needed and not one day more
**Version 7.1.2 - The troops will be home in six months
**Version 7.1.3 - The Iraqi Army will provide security
**Version 7.1.4 - Where's the Iraqi Army?
**Version 7.1.5 - We've disbanded the Iraqi Army
**Version 7.1.3 - The troops will stay a year and be replaced
**Version 7.2 - We're training the Iraqi armyIraqification will work
**Version 7.2.1 - We don't need any more American troops
**Version 7.2.2 - Well, maybe we do
**Version 7.2.3 - We're keeping 30,000 more troops on active duty than were authorized
**Version 7.2.4 - We don't know if this increase in troops is a spike or a plateau
**Version 7.2.5 - We're establishing stop loss so troops can't leave
**Version 7.2.6 - The Army is planning multi-year rotations

THE COST TO THE AMERICAN TAXPAYER.

**Version 8.0 - Economic advisor Larry Lindsey: The war will cost $200 billion
**Version 8.0.1 - President Bush: You're fired!
**Version 8.1 - The war will pay for itself very quickly
**Version 8.1.1 - Iraqi oil revenue will pay for reconstruction
**Version 8.2 - Our allies will help us
**Version 8.3 - We'll pay for the war through supplementals
**Version 8.3.1 - Congress wouldn't let us put it in the budget
**Version 8.3.2 - Can we please have $87 billion?
**Version 8.3.3 - Well, we really can't calculate what it will cost...
**Version 8.3.4 - Well, maybe we can -- $50 billion may be on the low side
**Version 8.3.5 - Ask us after November 2...

DEMOCRACY COMES TO IRAQ.

**Version 9.0 - We will be greeted as liberators
**Version 9.0.1 - We'll establish democracy in Iraq
**Version 9.1 - We'll turn this back to the Iraqis quickly
**Version 9.1.1 - President Chalabi will be welcomed with open arms
**Version 9.1.2 - Well, not so fast -- we're prohibiting political parties
**Version 9.2 - We have the November 15 agreement -- it's unchangeable
**Version 9.2.1 - We will appoint a small governing council
**Version 9.2.2 - Well, maybe a larger one
**Version 9.3 - We don't favor elections
**Version 9.3.1 - Caucuses work in Iowa, why not Iraq?
**Version 9.3.2 - OK fine, we'll have elections
**Version 9.4 - We can't return sovereignty until there is a constitution
**Version 9.4.1 - Never mind, we'll turn over sovereignty first
**Version 9.4.2 - We need to return this to the Iraqis -- How about June 30?
**Version 9.4.3 - We're still focused on elections -- the ones on November 2

THE BOTTOM LINE.

**Version 10.0 - Trust us. We know what we're doing

Note: This piece originally appeared on the Center For American Progress website on March 19, 2004.

zondag, maart 28, 2004

In The Bushiad and The Idyossey, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell and others in the Bush Court are the players in this modern epic, fostering conflict and warfare in concert with the corporate gods. Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Osama bin Laden, Kim Sung Il of North Korea, "Old" Europe, The United Nations, Canada and any that stand in their way or that can be used to further their ends are vulnerable. The Bushiad and The Idyossey demonstrate that when power-mad, testosterone-poisoned religious fanatics in league with greedy multinational corporations wield unlimited military might, all humanity is vulnerable.

Pessoa

23 March 1933

..."Life for most people is a tiresome chore they unwittingly perform, a sad affair with happy respites, as when those who watch over dead bodies tell anecdotes to pass the long quiet night and their obligation to keep watch. I've always thought it futile to see life as a valley of tears: yes, it is a valley of tears, but one in which we rarely weep. Heine said that after great tragedies we always merely blow our noses. As a Jew, and therefore universal, he lucidly perceived the universal natureof humanity.


Life would be intolerable if we were conscious of it. Fortunately we're not. We live as unconsciously as the animals, in the same futile and useless manner,and if we anticipate death, which presumably (though not certainly) they don't, we anticipate it through so much forgetfulness, so many distractions and digressions, that we can hardly say what we think about it.

Thus we live, and it's not much on which to consider ourselves superior to the animals. What distinguishes us from them is the purely external detail of speaking and writing, of having abstract intelligence to distract us from having concrete intelligence, and of imaginging impossible things.All this, however, is incidental to our fundamental organism. Speaking and writing have no effect on our primordial instinct of living without knowing how. Our abstract intelligence only serves to invent systems - or ideas purporting to be systems - for what the animals is lying in the sun. And to imagine the impossible may not be exclusive to us; I've seen cats look at the moon, and I don't know that they weren't wishing they
had it.

All the world, all life, is a vast system of unconscious entities operating through individual consciousnesses. Like two gases that form a liquid when a electric current passes through them, so two consciousnesses - that of our concrete being and that of our abstract being - form a superior unconsciousness when life and the world pass through
them.

Happy the man who doesn't think, for he accomplishes through instinct and organic destiny what the rest of us must accomplish through devious ways and through inorganic or social destiny. Happy the man who most resembles the animals, for he is effortlessly what the rest of us only are by arduous labour; for he knows the way home, which the rest of us can only reach through byways of fiction and return routes; for he is rooted like a tree, forming part of the landscape and therefore of beauty, whereas we are passing myths, actors of futility and oblivion dressed in fleshly costumes."


Fernando Pessoa-The Book of Disquietude, by Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon.Translated by Richard Zenith.Carcanet Press Limited.

vrijdag, maart 26, 2004

BUSH DEFENDS RESPONSE TO THREATS OF TERRORISM

NASHUA, N.H., March 25 -- President Jesus Bush sought Thursday to knock down allegations that the administration was inattentive to the threat posed by al Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, saying he would have "used every asset, every resource, every power of this government" to prevent the terrorist hijackings if it weren't for the "more pressing" concerns of Shadow Halliburton CEO Vice President Prick Cheney and his subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root.

"It bothers me that thousands of Americans died and billions of dollars were spent in the subsequent effort to hand over an Iraq which Mr Cheney and his subsidiaries would be able to exloit with minimum amount of investment and effort," the President explained with a shrug of his massive, terrorist-fighting shoulders.

Bush made his most extensive statements yet about the controversy that has swirled for several days, since his former chief counterterrorism adviser, Richard A. Clarke began selling his new book in earnest and portrayed the president as unfocused on the terrorist network and unduly preoccupied with Iraq. Clarke gave the critique in a new book and in testimony Wednesday before a federal commission that is examining the 2001 attacks.

*****
America's God, America's Pledge:
No Atheists Allowed in Government

Dr. Newdow, a nonpracticing lawyer who makes his living as an emergency room doctor engaged in repartee with Supreme Court Justices yesterday during his argument for why the daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in his daughter's public school classroom violates the Constitution as long as the pledge contains the words "under God."

When Dr. Newdow described "under God" as a divisive addition to the pledge, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist asked him what the vote in Congress had been 50 years ago when the phrase was inserted.

The vote was unanimous, Dr. Newdow said.

"Well, that doesn't sound divisive," the chief justice observed.

Dr. Newdow shot back, "That's only because no atheist can get elected to public office."

One justice, the infamously biased Antonin Scalia, who was seen leaving the court hand-in-hand with his lover, Vice President Prick Cheney, was sharply critical of the appeals court's ruling in a speech he gave before the case reached the Supreme Court.

As a result, Dr. Newdow asked Justice Scalia to recuse himself, and the justice complied. "President Jesus Bush is the only leader this country will ever need and we should all pledge allegiance to President Jesus Bush if we are true patriots!" he screamed, before being dragged out of the Supreme Court in leg irons and a leather corset.

*****

Songs in My Head Series:

Clint Eastwood
Gorillaz

I ain't happy, I'm feeling glad
I got sunshine, in a bag
I'm useless, but not for long
The future is coming on
I ain't happy, I'm feeling glad
I got sunshine, in a bag
I'm useless, but not for long
The future is coming on
It's coming on
It's coming on
It's coming on

Yeah... Ha Ha!
Finally someone let me out of my cage
Now, time for me is nothing cos I'm counting no age
Now I couldn't be there
Now you shouldn't be scared
I'm good at repairs
And I'm under each snare
Intangible
Bet you didn't think so I command you to
Panoramic view
Look I'll make it all manageable
Pick and choose
Sit and lose
All you different crews
Chicks and dudes
Who you think is really kickin' tunes?
Picture you gettin' down in a picture tube
Like you lit the fuse
You think it's fictional
Mystical? Maybe
Spiritual
Hearable
What appears in you is a clearer view cos you're too crazy
Lifeless
To know the definition for what life is
Priceless
For you because I put you on the hype shit
You like it?
Gunsmokin' righteous with one token
Psychic among those
Possess you with one go

I ain't happy, I'm feeling glad
I got sunshine, in a bag
I'm useless, but not for long
The future is coming on
I ain't happy, I'm feeling glad
I got sunshine, in a bag
I'm useless, but not for long
The future is coming on
It's coming on
It's coming on
It's coming on

The essence the basics
Without it you make it
Allow me to make this
Child, like in nature
Rhythm
You have it or you don't that's a fallacy
I'm in them
Every sprouting tree
Every child apiece
Every cloud you see
You see with your eyes
I see destruction and demise
Corruption in disguise
From this fuckin' enterprise
Now I'm sucking to your lies
Through Russ, though not his muscles but the percussion he provides
With me as a guide
But y'all can see me now cos you don't see with your eye
You perceive with your mind
That's the inner
So I'm gonna stick around with Russ and be a mentor
With a few rhymes so mother fuckers
Remember where the thought is
I brought all this
So you can survive when law is lawless
Feelings, sensations that you thought were dead
No squealing, remember
(that it's all in your head)

I ain't happy, I'm feeling glad
I got sunshine, in a bag
I'm useless, but not for long
The future is coming on
I ain't happy, I'm feeling glad
I got sunshine, in a bag
I'm useless, but not for long
My future is coming on
It's coming on
It's coming on
It's coming on
It's coming on
My future is coming on
It's coming on
It's coming on
It's coming on
It's coming on
My future is coming on
It's coming on
It's coming on
It's coming on
It's coming on
My future is coming on
It's coming on
It's coming on
My future is coming on
It's coming on
It's coming on
My future is coming on
It's coming on
It's coming on
My future

woensdag, maart 24, 2004

Kill The Messenger

"Nothing is more revolting than the majority; for it
consists of few vigorous predecessors, of knaves who
accomodate themselves, of weak people who assimilate
themselves, & the mass that toddles after them without
knowing the least what it wants."


Goethe


Ho hum. Another Jesus Bush critic, another quick character assasination. Kill the Messenger. Fuck the Good of the People in the name of the Almighty Power and Glory of President Jesus Bush and his Ass Monkeys guiding the growing debacle of the Invasion, the War on Terror, the Economy and jeeez, just about everything else there is to cock up out there.

Interesting allegations in Krugman's NYT piece, Lifting the Shroud which notes:

"Did the Bush administration ignore terrorism warnings before 9/11? Justice Department documents obtained by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, show that it did. Not only did John Ashcroft completely drop terrorism as a priority it wasn't even mentioned in his list of seven "strategic goals" just one day before 9/11 he proposed a reduction in counterterrorism funds."

Bush Admininstration, Tops in Character Assasinations: "On "60 Minutes" on Sunday, Mr. Clarke said the previously unsayable: that Mr. Bush, the self-proclaimed "war president," had "done a terrible job on the war against terrorism." After a few hours of shocked silence, the character assassination began. He "may have had a grudge to bear since he probably wanted a more prominent position," declared Dick Cheney, who also says that Mr. Clarke was "out of the loop." (What loop? Before 9/11, Mr. Clarke was the administration's top official on counterterrorism.) Guess that means the power troika of Prick Cheney, Paul Wolfashit and The Donald of Death, Scumsfeld is "in" the loop and the rest of the planet is "out" of the loop.

Further, you have other Democrats suddenly coming out of the woodwork after all these post-9/11 years cowering and pissing themselves every time President Jesus Bush uttered a thought on terrorism:

"We are seeing abuses of power that cannot be tolerated. The president needs to put a stop to it right now. We need to get to the truth and the president needs to help us do that," Hey! Look what coward suddenly found his voice! Why it's Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota. Is this the Tom Daschle, the same Spineless Daschle Pasty

Everyone's very brave now that there's a bandwagon to jump on. Had these cowardly little lions voiced this kind of abuse prior to the invasion, none of this mess would be upon us now. Had these quivering mouths of injustice raised their squeaking mouse voices when it mattered, weasels like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz would never have had the power to destroy the world as they now have.

*****

Hey, I know like the Democrats that Mewled, I'm a little late on this, but McSorley's, the lovely little pub just donw the road from my old haunts in NYC, has had a celebration. It's all good but just remember, you can't smoke in NYC so where's the fucking party?

*****

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, was in America last week, where he apparently made the rounds in the squawking world of the cable talk shows. On MSNBC's "Hardball" with Chris Matthews, a show that tries its damndest to say absolutely nothing but to say it very shrill, the Archbishop scored the trifecta of denouncing not only the liberation of Iraq but the liberation of Afghanistan, and he espoused a theory as to what motivates the terrorists of al Qaeda:

Tutu: "It is quite crucial for us to want to look at what are the root causes that enable or make people be ready to engage in desperate acts."

Matthews: What do you think they are?

Tutu: Well, I believe myself that there's no way in which we are likely to win the war against terrorism, as long as you've got conditions of poverty, of disease, of ignorance that can make people so desperate that they believe the only options they have are to engage in acts of that kind.

(Wow, imagine that. Someone applying logic to the War on Terrorism.)

Matthews: But the people who struck us on September 11 were people who were reasonably well educated. They were technical people. Maybe they didn't have Ph.D.s, but they had educations that would have allowed them to make a living quite well in the Western world.

Can't resist: idiotic reasoning that bin Laden is rich thus, having millions of people wallowing in their own filth and squalor leading hopeless lives with nothing to live for who are actually the sort of people blowing themselves up in the name of Jihad, has nothing to do with the war on terrorism? No WONDER the monkeys in America can't win the war...

Tutu: Now, the point is, if precisely people of that sort who look at the inequities of the international economic order--I mean, to think just now that you say to the developing world, in order for you to make it, produce more. So you sell. And they do produce more.

But then the developed world has massive, massive agricultural subsidies that ensure that farmers in those rich countries can produce their stuff cheaply. And there are high tariffs that prevent the developing country from being able to sell their goods. And so you say, these guys are playing a game and they make the rules for the game and they are the referees in this games. It is so lopsided that anyone seeking to be a normal person realizes that the odds are stacked against us so horrendously that people will say, I am ready to do anything to get out of this trap.


******

Shocking News:

VP Prick Cheney's secret energy task force, the one he'll fight the Supreme Court on to keep secret, and the one which raped the state of California for their own profits, has members who are coming under criminal indictment:

"But Cheney ?s denials that his friends in the energy sector weren?t to blame for the power crisis are sure to come back and haunt him and could hamper President Bush?s reelection campaign. Later this month, the United States Attorney?s office in the Northern District of California is expected to issue its first criminal indictment against an energy company for manipulating wholesale energy prices in California that could boost the state?s claims that it?s owed billions in refunds for overcharges. The company at the center of the probe is Houston-based Reliant Resources, Inc.

Reliant said in a news release March 8 that it was notified by the US Attorney?s office about the pending indictment, which stems from allegations that the company deliberately shut down its power plants in California for a few days in June 2000, creating an artificial shortage and causing wholesale prices to skyrocket.

A spokesman for the US Attorney?s office said he could not comment on pending cases, but he confirmed that his office is also seeking criminal indictments against several current and former Reliant employees whom he would not name. A Reliant spokesman said ?the actions that are the subject of the United States Attorney's investigation were not in violation of laws, tariffs or regulations in effect at the time and intends vigorously to contest any charges.?


*****

And because not everything should be about killing and lies and killing liars and lying about those who lied about killing, Ok, well, maybe it is:

Israel Vows To Kill All Hamas Leaders

(bully for them, someone actually FIGHTING the war on terror instead of killing for oil....)

lastly, no, something bloody well happy for a Wedesday, I did a Google news search for happy and came up with, ITEM NUMBER ONE USING THE WORD "HAPPY" IN THE NEWS:

Happy Birthday to Fucking Game Boy, which is not even fucking human --- so there you go, folks.

Whilst humans are off killing each other in bloody puddles every morning, the machines are having a good time.

dinsdag, maart 23, 2004

Songs in Me Head Series....

White Man In Hammersmith Palais

(Strummer/Jones)

Midnight to six man
For the first time from Jamaica
Dillinger and Leroy Smart
Delroy Wilson, your cool operator

Ken Boothe for UK pop reggae
With backing bands sound systems
And if they've got anything to say
There's many black ears here to listen

But it was Four Tops all night with encores from stage right
Charging from the bass knives to the treble
But onstage they ain't got no roots rock rebel
Onstage they ain't got no...roots rock rebel

Dress back jump back this is a bluebeat attack
'Cos it won't get you anywhere
Fooling with your guns
The British Army is waiting out there
An' it weighs fifteen hundred tons

White youth, black youth
Better find another solution
Why not phone up Robin Hood
And ask him for some wealth distribution

Punk rockers in the UK
They won't notice anyway
They're all too busy fighting
For a good place under the lighting

The new groups are not concerned
With what there is to be learned
They got Burton suits, ha you think it's funny
Turning rebellion into money

All over people changing their votes
Along with their overcoats
If Adolf Hitler flew in today
They'd send a limousine anyway

I'm the all night drug-prowling wolf
Who looks so sick in the sun
I'm the white man in the Palais
Just lookin' for fun

I'm only
Looking for fun

maandag, maart 22, 2004

"A TERRIBLE JOB IN THE WAR ON TERRORISM"
(Or, "Making Headlines to Sell a Book Whilst Keeping Your Mouth Shut During the Danger Period")

Richard Clarke, who retired as the White House counter-terrorism coordinator last year, is apparently selling a book and in an effort to sell MORE books, has finally come out and said what we all know, what a boob President Jesus Bush has been when it comes to fighting the "war on terrorism" -- ho hum. Where were you before the invasion Mr. Jack Ass?

"I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism," said Mr Clarke. (oh, NOW he tells us. Lovely, a little fecking LATE in the game now isn't it then?)

"Frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."

For those of you who have been following the fun and the war and the explosions, you will be happy to know that these very "sincere" sentiments by Mr Clarke come at the boot heels of the release of his own kiss and tell book: Against All Enemies : Inside the White House's War on Terror--What Really Happened --

Frankly, I don't need a book, or this dumb cunt to tell me something I already know. It might have been nice had this leech made these revelations at a time it would have fucking mattered instead of spreading gossip after the damage has already been done. Spineless, greedy coward. The face of the Bush Administration, really. Someday, President Jesus Bush will write his own memoirs and probably say the same thing: "Hey! Look at me! I Ran the War On Terrorism Into the Ground Because I'm a Muppet Controlled by Prick Cheney!"

(well, no one will say that out loud lest John Ashcunt come and cut out their tongues with his Jesus scissors and Holy Bible, but, really, this "revelation" to sell books isn't heartening. Frankly, I think Clark should be drawn and quartered for having kept his mouth shut this long. But hey, that's just me and hey, this is just the war on terrorism, brought to you by the War Pigs who bring you ever silver platter lie and blood spattered choking fit of deception.

*****

Hippy Hippy Sheik

Ooh, I can't keep still
With the Hippy Hippy Shake
I get my fill
With the Hippy Hippy Shape
Ooh, my babe
Ooh, the Hippy Hippy Shake


Sheik Ahmed Yassin, a quadriplegic preacher who founded the Islamic group Hamas and presided over its rise to a violent, radical alternative to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, was killed in an Israeli missile strike Monday.

*****

How about a nice plug for Bush Backlash -- just cain't get enough...via The Whole Wide World of Fat Buddha...

*****

To end the morning on a happy note, let's have a John Cornwall "poem", Alchoholic to cheer things up a bit:

You have not seen the sun for days,
it is always dark like unfortunate weather.
Your clothes are as dirty as the city
and the proud arch of your arm cradles
bottles and an occassional cigarette.

The home you left is miles away, your
collection of excuses worn so thin you could
not return to the destruction you have left.
Your bed now is where you fall from a day
in which many faces have seen

the terror inside of you, the terror you
cannot see. The mornings are worst.
For an hour your eyes are clear, capable
of sense and reproach; you would give anything
for the thoughts to go, to leave their questioning

until another time, perhaps until after death.
After the first drink you regain composure
and walk into the day without care.
You shout abuse at those who pass
but it does not matter, you will never

remember.
On a bench in the city centre
the world happens.
Everything goes, dismissed.
You sit and stare astounded.

Anger colours in each eye.

(This could be called The War on Terror as well. Really. Just reread it with that title in mind)

vrijdag, maart 19, 2004

I'm Female

I'm not tough
droll or stoical.

I droop
after wine, sex
or intense conversation.

The streets coil around me
when they are empty

I'm female
I get scared.


from: Dorothy Porter, "Chapter One - "The New Job"," The Monkey's Mask. South Melbourne: Hyland House, 1994.


*****

I'm President

I'm not scared
of terrorists, voters.

I stick out my chest,
after bombing and sex
or intense bouts of backtracking.

The streets are empty around me
my supporters are vaccuous.

I'm President Jesus Bush,
scared and almighty.

from: President Jesus Bush, "The Lies I Love to Live", no publisher, just propaganda, throughout the world.

donderdag, maart 18, 2004

BUSH'S CAMPAIGN EMPHASIZES THAT "HE HASN'T RUINED EVERYTHING YET"
"You won't need jobs if the terrorists kill you!" Bush warns.

WASHINGTON, March 16 — A year after ordering the invasion of Iraq so that Vice President Prick Cheney and his oil lackies at Haliburton could rake in more billions, after demanding enormous, budget-busting tax cuts for the top 1% of the richest tier of the population at the expense of the middle and lower class and virtually single-handedly destroying the most vibrant economy in the world, as well as eroding his own citizens' constitutional rights, one by one in the guise of fellow Jesus freak, General John Asshat, President Jesus Bush is moving his attempts to destroy America to the forefront of his re-election effort with a weeklong barrage of speeches, an orchestrated set of interviews with senior Pentagon officials and a new television advertisement which will compare his opponent, Senator Ketchup Kerry, to Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Satan, all in one week.

Mr. Bush's advisers said Tuesday that the president intended to press his case that the world was less safe with Saddam Hussein out of power, thereby making more targets to kill and be killed and creating daily headlines for the world media, and, to use the first anniversary, on Friday, of the war's start to draw sharp contrasts with Mr. Kerry over foreign policy and leadership.

"Mr Ketchup Kerry killed Gooks in Vietnam..." President Jesus Bush is prepared to emphasise. "I have killed no one. I have merely ordered the killing of thousands of innocent people. There's a big difference..."

The moves were part of what aides described as a new chapter in the political campaign against Mr. Ketchup Kerry. But they came as the bombings in Spain stirred more criticism of Mr. Bush's Iraq policy, underlining the extent to which the campaign had become subject to the unpredictability of overseas events, and pointing up the complications Mr. Bush faces in trying to balance the demands of the presidency with a re-election effort.

In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Mr. Bush showed a flash of how confrontational he planned to be on Mr. Kerry's foreign affairs record. With the Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, at his side, Mr. Bush demanded that Mr. Kerry show the skulls of the Vietnamese people he killed to support his suggestion last week that foreign leaders want to see Mr. Bush defeated.

"If you're going to make an accusation in the course of a presidential campaign, you've got to back it up with facts," Mr. Bush told reporters on Tuesday. "Facts, of course, which my Administration approves of and which appropriately diminish the severity of the crisis at hand allowing either or both of us to continue the destruction of both America and the World in record time..."

Mr. Bush then was asked if he and Mr. Balkenende had agreed on whether Dutch troops would remain in Iraq. Neither gave a firm answer.

The White House had long planned to use this week to focus attention on the war, terrorism and national security and the fact that President Jesus Bush has proven adept at fumbling the ball on all counts with equal dexterity. The White House is counting on those issues to build support for the president at a time when the other big subject of the campaign, the lack of jobs being created by the economy, is working against Mr. Bush.

"The terrorists are coming to kill you and only ME, President Jesus Bush, can save humanity from them!!! You won't need jobs if you're dead!!"

On Thursday, Mr. Bush will travel to Fort Campbell, Ky., for a speech before what the White House said would be 20,000 troops and their families. He plans to thank them for their sacrifices in Iraq and Afghanistan and to point to the progress being made in both nations.

President Jesus Bush is also expected to highlight his role as commander in chief when he delivers an address to his first full-scale campaign rally of the year, in Orlando, Fla., on Saturday because, as we all know, he can wear a pilot's vest and upturn a thumb in false confidence with the best of them.

At the same time, the administration is going after Mr. Kerry. Vice President Prick Cheney will begin a new attack on Mr. Kerry in California on Wednesday.

"The American people will have a clear choice in the election of 2004 — at least as clear as any since the beginning of time," Prick Cheney is expected to say, in a reference to the race between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have nots, the living and the dead, according to an advance excerpt of his speech.

The new Bush television commercial, which began running in the swing state of West Virginia on Tuesday, will show Mr Kerry's face superimposed over the bodies of Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, demonstrating that Mr Kerry is really an amalgamation of all the evil characters of mankind's history, in a word, Satan himself. It will also show Senator Kerry killing babies in abortion clinics, being sodomized by hippies and liberals as well as him pouring billions of dollars of hard earned tax payer dollars into his wife's ketchup fortune.

woensdag, maart 17, 2004

You Love Life, We Love Death

No, this isn't an offshoot of the popular you say tomato, I say tomahto jingle, rather it is the transcript of the al Qaeda videotape claiming that they carried out the Madrid bombings.

John Donne had a bit to say about this:

Death Be Not Proud
John Donne

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.


*****

Of course, if you are someone prideful of killing so long as it is for the right purpose, like President Jesus Bush, whose popularity exists solely in the mind of reactionary paranoids who believe every syllable of dyspeptic rubbish that dribbles from his lips, you might tend to believe that this is yet another example of the evil in others. In some ways, you might even say this logic goes hand in hand with Bush's New World Disorder, the theme song of Jesus and this followers in the White House.

President Jesus Bush knows that the Spaniards have made a grave mistake. He has even scolded them, noting that they'd probably get nothing but coal for Christmas in their stockings and further, that Americans, unlike the Spaniards weren't dumb enough to play right into terrorist's hands by letting democracy take it's course. Oh no. President Jesus Bush knows that if Democracy comes to America, they'll just fix the elections so that it comes out "right".

"What happened in Spain", he said, will never happen in the United States. "They'll never shake the will of the United States. We understand the stakes and we will work with our friends to bring justice to the terrorists."

Right on, President Jesus Bush. It's in the bible even, I'm sure. God and Jesus don't want no democrats fucking up democracy by giving in to terrorism like cowards! He wants us to stand up and be counted, kill indiscriminately like real lovers of the lord!

And of course, no bit of insane, if not convoluted and slightly off kilter logic would be complete without an utterance from the man himself, the Donald of Death, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who criticized the new Spanish government's position but said he doubted it would undermine the coalition in Iraq.

"If you think that by feeding the alligator you'll be the last thing it eats, you're going to be wrong. My guess is that other countries will step forward and add troops."

Indeed. Everyone knows that the it is the last person who EATS the alligator in a big pot of alligator gumbo who wins the war on terror.

Según (El presidente de la Comisión Europea) Prodi, Europa no tiene que entrar en "el miedo" y debe reaccionar de manera diferente a como han reaccionado los norteamericanos a la amenaza terrorista. "La sociedad estadounidense vive con miedo y desde hace dos días también Europa está entrando en el miedo pero Europa tiene sus medios para salir de esta situación, que son diferentes a los usados por Estados Unidos, que hasta ahora se han mostrado ineficaces", añadió el presidente europeo.

maandag, maart 15, 2004

Oh What A World Without Disaster...

"The war has been a disaster, the occupation continues to be a disaster. It
has only caused violence. There must be consequences. There has been one
already - the election result. The second will be that the Spanish troops
will come back. Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush must do some reflection and
self-criticism. You can't bomb a people, you can't organize a war with
lies."


- Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, head of the Spanish Socialists.

*****
The Arts and Death: A Fugue for Sidney Cox

I think always how we always miss it. Not
anything is ever entirely true.

Death dominates my mind. I
Do not stop thinking how time will stop.
How time has stopped, does stop. Those dead--
their done time. Time does us in.

Mark how we make music, images,
how we term words, name names,
how, having named, assume the named begins
here, stops there, add this attribute,
subtract this other: here the mold begins
to harden. This toy soldier has
edges, can be painted, picked up,
moved from place to place, used to mean
one or many. Within the game we play,
we understand. See his leaden gun
or saber, how deadly for aid or for
destruction as we aim him, and he is bold,
a game soldier. We play games
however serious we aim to be.
A true aim, a toy soldier, I think
always, how we always miss the aim.

Ponder the vast debris of the dead, the great
uncounted numbers, the long, the endless list
of only their names, if anyone knew their names.
Joined to the dead already, to those known
who have died already, are we not also joined
to many we would have known in their time--
to one in Ilium, say, who thought of the dead?
In the world's long continuum, it is not
the names of the dead, but the dead themselves who are like
names, like terms, toy soldiers, words.

I think always how we always miss it; how the dead
have not been final, and life has always required
to be stated again, which is not ever stated.
It is not art's statements only, not
what we try to say by music, not the way
this picture sculptures sight itself
to see this picture--not by art alone
the aim is missed, and even least of all
by art (which tries a whole world at once,
a composition). No, it is in our terms,
the terms themselves, which break apart, divide,
discriminate, set chasms in that wide,
unbroken experience of the senses which
goes on and on, that radiation inward and out,
that consciousness which we divide, compare,
compose, make things and persons of, make forms,
make I and you. World, world, I am scared
and waver in awe before the wilderness
of raw consciousness, because it is all
dark and formlessness: and it is real
this passion that we feel for forms. But the forms
are never real. Are not really there. Are not.

I think always how we always miss the real.

There still are wars though all the soldiers fall.

We live in a world we never understand.

Our lives end nothing. Oh there is never an end.

--William Bronk
>
>
> fr. *Origin* XIX / Summer 1956; ed. Cid Corman
>
> in *The Gist of Origin* ed. Cid Corman
> [New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975]
>

Los ESPANOLES CASTIGAN AL PP Y DAN PODER AL PSOE

You might say this was a referendum on the former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's lap doggish support of a certain President Jesus Bush's idiotic Middle East kill now, sort em out later policies. Or maybe the blasts and killings of last week just brought people to their senses.

Yesterday the ruling party was voted out of power. Reaction to yet another pig-headed and corrupt political leader who chose to ride the short and unraveling coattails of President Jesus Bush. The Spanish government, eerily mirroring what one could easily imagine the American leadership doing, had insisted that its prime suspect in the bombings was ETA, even as evidence mounted of an Islamic link. The government was accused of withholding information on the investigation to save the election. Sounds like 9/11, eh?

It was the first time in a long line of governments that backed the Iraq war being voted out of office. Incoming prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has pledged to bring home the 1,300 troops Spain has stationed in Iraq when their tour of duty ends in July.

American Presidential candidate John F Kerry, as they've taken to calling him now as though to invoke Instamatic memories of President John F Kennedy (John F) Kerry-Kennedy, has...well, what has he called for? Well, he has blasted the Iraq policy but frankly, given that he comes from the same background as Bush and voted to give Bush all sorts of powers to invade Iraq to begin with, what difference does it really make? A slight change in the timbre of the sound bite?

Spain has shown the rest of the civilised world how to take down the lackies and conspiracists who have taken the events of 9/11, twisted them like the bodies and corpses that followed, and have used the lame excuse of "terrrorism" to indoctrinate their own somnambulists. It's a pity that in places like the UK and the USA, there isn't an alternative party of any consequence who might have the vision and popular vote to do the same.

In fairness, for those who loved taking the events of 9/11 and turning them into a senseless invasion of Iraq at the expense of actually fighting the terrorism everyone alleges to abhore, for the knee-jerk reaction and the predictable palaver of the RIGHTeous, have a look at Iberian Notes and just sense the injustice!

"A victory for appeasement. A victory for cowardice. The Spanish people demonstrated today that they have no courage."

Quite enlightening. I guess the victory for senseless destruction and the victory for turning 9/11 into a platform for corporate greed and neoconservative cock-pulling wasn't as long lived as some idiots would have hoped.

vrijdag, maart 12, 2004

"Frente a la sinrazón y la barbarie, sólo cabe la unidad, la firmeza y la serenidad"

La barbarie terrorista ha sumido hoy a España en el más profundo dolor, repulsa e indignación.

Hombres, mujeres y niños, ciudadanos libres de todas las edades y ocupaciones, incluso de otros países, que se acercaban a sus destinos, escuelas y trabajos, se han encontrado brutalmente confrontados con la muerte y el sufrimiento.

*****

Chelsea fans may find the silver lining of this barbarism in The Return of Beckham...he might join the Leicester Three in returning to England from Spain although Becks won't be returning from prison, you've got to figure any time spent with the "talentless pig faced council parasite", Victoria Beckham must be some sort of imprisoned hell....

*****

Here's some shocking news about the Holy Deliverers of Democracy: Guantanamo Bay Torturers.

One of the released detainees says conditions were so inhuman that animals in the prison camp were given better treatment than the detainees. Held in captivity for two years, Jamal al Harith also said he was assaulted with fists, feet, knees and batons after refusing a mystery injection.

also worth a look, "Welcome to Camp X-Ray

*****

Don't look now, but the Cotswald Olimpicks is alive and kicking.

"Greasy poles, girl guides and a Greek who forgot his underwear have all played their part in England's 392-year old version of the Olympic Games."

*****
If it's the weekend, it must be time for some Binge Drinking!

donderdag, maart 11, 2004

J'irai cracher sur vos tombes

Extrait de J'irai cracher sur vos tombes de B.Vian

Je me suis tout de m?me rendu compte, au bout d'une heure que les autres allaient trouver la bizarre, et j'ai reussi ? me degager de ces deux filles. Je ne sais plus tres bien ? quel endroit de la salle nous ?tions. J'avais la t?te qui me tournait un peu et le dos me faisait mal. J'?tais lac?r? sur les hanches o? les ongles de Jean Asquith m'avaient griff? sans m?nagement. J'ai ramp? jusqu'au mur et je me suis orient?, et puis j'ai trouv? le commutateur. Judy remuait pendant ce temps-l?. J'ai allum? et je l'ai vue assise par terre et se frottant les yeux. Jean Asquith ?tait ? plat ventre sur le tapis en caoutchouc, la t?te sur le sbras, elle avait l'air de dormir. Seigneur, les reins de cette fille ! J'ai remis en vitesse ma chemise et mon pantalon. Judy se refaisait une beaut? devant le lavabo. Et puis, j'ai pris une serviette de bain et je l'ai tremp?e dans l'eau. J'ai soulev? la t?te de Jean Asquith pour la r?veiller - elle avait les yeux grands ouverts - et, ma parole, elle riait. Je l'ai attrap?e par le milieu du corps, et je l'ai assise sur le rebord de la baignoire.
- Une bonne douche vous ferait du bien.
- Je suis trop fatigu?e, dit-elle. Je crois que j'ai un peu bu.
- Je crois aussi, dit Judy.
- Oh ! Pas tellement ! assurai-je. Vous aviez surtout besoin d'un petit somme.
Alors, elle se leva et s'accrocha ? mon cou, et elle savait embrasser aussi. Je me suis d?gag? en douceur et je l'ai coll?e dans la baignoire.
- Fermez les yeux et levez la t?te..
Je tournai les robinets du m?langeur et elle re?ut la douche. Sous l'eau ti?de, son corps se tendait et je voyais les pointes de ses seins se faire plus fonc?es et saillir doucement.
- Ca fait du bien...
Judy remontait ses bas.
- Grouillez-vous, vous deux. Si on descend tout de suite, on aura peut-?tre encore un peu ? boire...


via Le Caf? Litt?raire

*****

Common Dreams commenting from The Risks of Waging Culture War

"The phrase "culture war" comes from "Kulturkampf." That word was coined in the 1870s when Germany's George W. Bush, Otto von Bismarck, launched a "values" campaign as a way of shoring up his political power. Distracting from issues of war and economic stress, the "Kulturkampf" ran from 1871 to about 1887. Bismarck's strategy was to unite his base by inciting hatred of those who were not part of it.

His first target was the sizable Catholic minority in the new, mostly Protestant German state, but soon enough, especially after an economic depression in 1873, Jews were defined as the main threat to social order. This was a surprising turn because Jewish emancipation had been a feature of German culture as recently as the 1860s. By 1879, the anti-Jewish campaign was in full swing: It was in that year that the word "anti-Semitism" was coined, defining not a prejudice but a public virtue. The Kulturkampf was explicitly understood as a struggle against decadence, of which the liberal emancipated Jew became a symbol. What that culture war's self-anointed defenders of a moral order could not anticipate was what would happen when the new "virtue" of anti-Semitism was reinforced by the then burgeoning pseudo-science of the eugenics movement. Bismarck's defense of expressly German values was a precondition of Hitler's anti-Jewish genocide.
"

*****

Burgers, Fries and Lawyers

"A scene: The overweight baseball fan jumps to his feet in the bleachers of Wrigley Field, screaming for the Chicago Cubs to hold onto their 3-2 lead in the bottom of the ninth inning. He squeezes a Cubs pennant in his left hand while shoving a mustard-smeared hot dog into his mouth with the right. The Dodgers have a runner on first, who is sneaking a big lead off the base. The Cubs? pitcher has thrown three balls and two strikes to the batter, a notorious power hitter. The obese fan holds his breath while the pitcher winds up and fires a blazing fastball. ?Crack!? The ball flies over the fan?s head into the bleachers for a game-winning home run. The fan slumps to his bleacher seat and has a heart attack.

Whom should the fan sue? (a) The Cubs for breaking his heart? (b) The hot dog company for making a fatty food? (c) The hot dog vendor for selling him a fatty food? (d) All of the above"

dinsdag, maart 09, 2004

No News Is Good News!

It couldn't be helped: more of the patriotic posters brought to you by White House dot Org:

"Unions? Fuck 'Em! Get Back To Work You Lazy Democrat Dock Monkies

Quiet Faggot: you're kind belong on the back of the bus.

etc., etc.

maandag, maart 08, 2004

Battle of the Mites
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), Letter to Mrs Foote, Dec. 2, 1887

Mite Hopeful, Senator Ketchup Kerry: Mr. Kerry, of Massachusetts, campaigned this weekend in Southern states that will hold Democratic primary voting on Tuesday, including Texas and Mississippi. Before leaving Mississippi, Mr. Kerry charged that Mr. Bush was resisting federal investigations into the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the intelligence leading up the invasion of Iraq.

"Why is this administration stonewalling and resisting the investigation into what happened and why we had the greatest security failure in the history of our country?" Mr. Kerry said about the 9/11 inquiry. "And why did I, hedging my political bets, vote to give President Jesus Bush the authority to invade Iraq in the first place when now in hindsight, because I'm a second-guessing political opportunist with the whore of the Ketchup Empire for a wife, I carp on and on about how wrong the invasion was to begin with? Because President Jesus Bush exaggerated the threat and made me soil myself in fear? Certainly! Had I known then what I know now, boy. Whew. I'd have never voted to give President Jesus Bush all that power. Certainly not! Vote for me now because I was hip enough to kill gooks in Vietnam. I'm a big war hero in another idiotic adventure in failed American foreign policy!"

Encumbant Mite, President Jesus Bush :

President Bush on Saturday brushed aside calls to pull political ads that use images of the devastated World Trade Center, and sought to cast himself as the best candidate to grow the economy despite job losses under his watch.

"The economy is getting stronger," Bush said one day after a government report showed the labor market mustered only 21,000 new jobs last month -- as compared to a White House forecast for more than 300,000 new jobs a month this year.

"You are getting very sleepy," Bush said one day after a government report showed the labor market mustered only 21,000 new jobs last month -- as compared to a White House forecast for more than 300,000 new jobs a month this year. "You do not care about jobs. You do not care about all your money going to us. You only care about being saved from those terrible terrorists....only President Jesus Bush can protect you from death...."

Bush hoped to shore up his public standing this week on national security and the economy with his first election campaign ads after John Kerry locked up the Democratic nomination.

But the ads, drawing on images from Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, sparked a backlash from families who lost relatives in the World Trade Center.

The small gain in jobs also disappointed White House officials, who had hoped for stronger evidence of a recovering labor market, and fueled Democratic attacks that Bush should be thrown out of office in the Nov. 2 general election.

Bush rejected criticism on both counts during a joint news conference with Mexican President Vicente Fox at his Crawford, Texas, ranch.

"We've been through a recession, we've been through an attack, we've been through corporate scandals, we've been through war, and yet our economy is getting stronger," Bush told reporters. "If you don't vote for me, the terrorists will kill you! All your little families, DEAD! All your babies will be blown to tiny little pieces if I'm not reelected. So just remember that when you think about voting for Ketchup Kerry. A vote for him is like a vote to slaughter your own babies."

zondag, maart 07, 2004

Clash of the Titans

"...So you have one party, the Republican Party, the so-called party of the heartland, which won't nominate a guy unless he has a ranch the size of Oklahoma. Republicans don't think you're fit to govern unless you're on the north 40 every summer clearing brush. And then you have the Democrats, the so-called party of the people, who won't nominate a guy unless his family had an upper-deck berth on the Mayflower.

This year's nominee, John Kerry, is almost a parody of the East Coast establishment. He's descended from John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his mother is a member of the famously haughty Forbes clan. He spent part of his childhood at a boarding school in Switzerland before his aunt, whose estate included a bowling alley inside the barn, sent him to then-snooty St. Paul's..."


Whose Side is God On?
"If our life lacks a constant magic
it is because we choose to
observe our acts & lose ourselves
in consideration of their imagined
form instead of being impelled by
their force."


Antonin Artaud

The two remaining Democratic presidential candidates, with Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich along for comic relief, showed up for a debate in New York yesterday morning, and the most revealing moment came toward the end, when the New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller posed a question to John Kerry:

Bumiller: "President Bush has said that freedom and fear have always been at war, and God is not neutral between them. He's made quite clear in his speeches that he feels God is on America's side. Really quick, is God on America's side?"

Kerry: "Well, God will--look, I think--I believe in God, but I don't believe, the way President Bush does, in invoking it all the time in that way. I think it is--we pray that God is on our side, and we pray hard. And God has been on our side through most of our existence."

The answer, of course, is that God and Jesus are both on the side of President Jesus Bush because he invokes them so much in his great speeches justifying the killing of other human beings. As far as President Jesus Bush, Jesus himself and God are concerned, there will never be enough killing in their names to suit their purposes.

So, the answer to the headline, whose side is God on, is why, whomever is willing to kill them most people in his name, of course!

That's the sermon for Sunday, folks. Go out there and kill in the name of God and Jesus and Democracy!

*****

Springsteen Used For Torture

"First I spent a month in a cell 2 metres by 2 metres that had a roof of sheet iron, with unbearable heat," the Spaniard, Hamed Abderrahman Ahmad reportedly told the Cadena Ser radio network upon his release after a two year stay in America's favourite prison at Guantanamo Bay.

"All day they blared patriotic American music. It was Born in the USA by Bruce Springsteen. I remember we had to put wet towels on our heads to be able to bear the heat and not hear the music . . . Later they put us in even smaller cells."

I have to admit, Born in the USA is a pretty obnoxious song but this proves, YET AGAIN, that the Jesus Monkey Brigade simply doesn't know what it's doing.

First of all, unbeknownst to most of the single-brain cell Patriots who love to chant it with patriotic gusto, Born in the USA is hardly a paen to American interventionism. It is about idiots who got stuck killing in Vietnam and unlike the current Murder Inc. Administration, this particular idiot didn't seem to particularly relish it.

"Got in a little hometown jam

So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man"


Were the parrots of the Administration not such automotons and were the jailors at Guantanamo a little more intelligent, they might have realised that if they'd really wanted to torture these "terrorists", they would have blared Celine Dion croaking away at "That's The Way It Is" or any maybe just a looped tape of Celine warbling over breakfast, lunch, dinner and prayer. In fact, to make the torture even worse, they could have played Celine Dion songs virtually nonstop only to be interrupted by interviews with Celine Dion and that inhuman accent of hers twittering away about what a find her fat, bald husband is.

If the prisoners ever got immune to Celine over time, they could introduce intervals of oh, let's say The Maria Carey Christmas Album. I imagine all the prisoners at Gitmo would have committed suicide within a month or would have divulged every al Qaeda secret known just to get the music to stop. Idiots run this war, I tell you.

*****

Come to Sweden, Where the Homeless Have Sex in the Streets!

A homeless couple protesting a lack of housing in Stockholm placed a bed in the middle of a downtown square and had sex in front of numerous spectators, police said today...but WHERE is the video???

*****

Responding to the criticism that his poetry lacks
meter, H. G. Wells declares:

"Meters are used for gas,
not the outpourings
of the human heart."


*****

So much for the human heart.

vrijdag, maart 05, 2004

No Levity

...they tell jokes all fucking day.
The rain is funny because now
they don't have to take a shower.

They poke each other with sticks
and laugh until they puke.
They radiate and all around them dies.

At this hour, they fuck. The elaborations are mathematical. When you
say Ten Times Peace, you're just talking about inflation.

When you add up the letters of the warriors and they are still skillets
without grease, banging away at us under fire beneath the tube and
those slithery things that leak out of truths when they perspire we are
knowing, pie charts, disillusion multiplication tables, the enemy of
cocktail parties and debriefings...

Save us, screecher in the back corner with a porno mag and an unloaded
revolver. Threats grow like unwanted hairs on moles, compounding the
problem.

And then over the cartoon is that balloon above their heads where the
text is supposed to tell us why and when. We'll settle instead for
homecoming. Our dicks won't stay hard for long and no one's incubator
is going to last the distance.

We jack in the box and pop the heads out when it's time for redemption:
Sanctions.
Eliminations.
some 43 percent of Americans
are in a poll. Every second.
Wasted.

There are plenty of Carthaginians to kick around. We don't need these
headaches. We bought the most television time. We are the mothers and
the fathers and the misdirections so get in line and we will promise
YOU
and all the others
all the other things they wanted.
And then we will be Ovid's best stories never published, never
pondered,
and we will gaze into a vast economy
until we lose our refrigerated skyline sight,
and they come to dump out the ashtrays
at night, always at night...


*****

Frank was excited about his new rifle, and decided to try bear
hunting. He spotted a small brown bear and shot it. There was
then a tap on his shoulder, and he turned around to see a big
black bear.

The black bear said, "That was my cousin, and you have got
two choices. Either I maul you to death or we have sex." After
considering briefly Frank decided to accede to the latter alternative.

Even though he felt sore for two weeks, Frank soon recovered
and vowed revenge. He headed out on another trip where he
found the black bear and shot it. There was another tap on his
shoulder. This time a huge grizzly bear stood right next to him. The
grizzly said, "That was a huge mistake, Frank. That was my
cousin and you have got two choices. Either I maul you to death
or we have rough sex." Again, Frank thought it was better to
cooperate.

Although he survived it would take several months before Frank
finally recovered. Outraged he headed back to the woods and he
managed to track down the grizzly and shoot it. He felt sweet revenge,
but then there was a tap on his shoulder. He turned around to find a
giant polar bear standing there.

The polar bear said, "Admit it Frank, you don't come here for the
hunting, do you?"



donderdag, maart 04, 2004

So you see, the headache is only a slow road to the migraine.



woensdag, maart 03, 2004

America
by Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good
looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial
for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I'm not sorry.
i smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came
over from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious.
Movie producers are serious.
Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of
genitals an unpublishable private
literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twenty-five-thousand
mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who
live in my flowerpots under the
light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next ot go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all
different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old
strophe
Merica free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a
handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were
free everybody was angelic and
sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea
what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw
Israel Ameter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.
America you don't really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.

The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to
take our cars from out our
garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers' Digest. Her Wants
our auto plants in Siberia.
Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black
niggers. Hah. Her make us all
work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and
psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.


Berkeley, January 17, 1956


Sonnet Two
Edna St. Vincent Millay from "Renascence and Other Poems.", 1917

TIME does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

Edna St. Vincent Millay from "Renascence and Other Poems.", 1917


THE LOVE OF HANDWRITTEN
Puddle Style

When I'm low, I take out old notes;
she said this, she said that.

I won't hold it against her.

Her cursive can't be laminated
by memories alone;

you need the voice.

And if you don't have the voice
you have the memory of the voice
and the memory of the memory
and that too, is a voice,
at times.

Rilke is the Kerouac of German poetry
Disruptive Stijl

Rilke is the Kerouac of German poetry.
Angels, indeed!
Good grief.

With cosmogeny in the eyes,
the great aspirations of youth, blahblahblah.
In this tired world of sad reality and killing it might be nice to grasp
that sort of faith, get a foot-hold, like, angels are everywhere, hidden,
etc., but it's a tired lot, fed up with humanity to believe in the
Rilke's prescient Euro-Disney, the angels, the Mickey Mice, the smiling
faces and certainly, even behind Rilke, there was the greedy, beady-eyed
huckster attempting to elude the masses?

You've got to have a real tunnel vision to stomach that sort of syrup and
tart. A real illusionist's pride.



Rainy Day Stijl

Having something to drive you to keep collecting paychecks is always
good. I'm sorting out translating work but since it's only been two
weeks into this move, I still haven't bothered looking for anything
concrete yet. Another few weeks of the toothpick in one corner of the
mouth, a nice bitter in the left hand and alot of hours sleeping off
western civilization.


America, My America

Thanks for the geographical belaborment by the way. No matter how many
tiny lobotomies I endeavor to experience, that damned America is always
in the rear-view mirror. Like a kid sister you can't shake.

Of the whole bi-posting carp, the pyrotechnic
spectacle of whining and then on to the sardonic replies,
I realised
how uncool I must be
not to double dutch and worse so,
to be so unimaginative What genius,
implied with this double-dutching!
Mass-mail self-indulgence, Bumper stickers!
Sound
bites! All the important forms of communication in one tasty slurp...

*****

There really is a "blood bin" in rugby. Saw one player sent to it three
times in yesterday's brilliant Pommie victory over the Aussies. Sent to
the blood bin. Such a manly sport. Of course, compared to calling for
terrorists to "bring it on" against your own troops and then hiding, like
a coward, behind millions of £££ worth of security wherever you go and
being too scared of terrorists to even step out in public, well, the
blood bin and rugby pales in comparison when it comes to the manliness of

*****

THE RICH POET

The lonely, as a commodity,
fail. The exchange rate:
£ of Love= 30 pence per second.

The downtrodden mean
they won't take any more business
and nothing is serious
anymore.

When the poet is inspired
it creates a crowd.
Give free wine, toss up
a few paintings, feel the
transluscence.

When I pity a big crowd,
when I walk existential, big rocks
in my hands, I'm looking for solititude.
Get out of this poem.

This poem is for rich poets.

When the MFAs have consumed
all the wine and coffee
they have consumed a nomenclature
and they have named themselves
the poets.

When weekend open-mikes
display the plummage of amateurs,
the diaries and confessionals,
all you eat is poverty.

Because this poem is for the rich.

What does an MFA drive?
What colour hair does it prefer?
Will it eat vegetables or flesh?
Will it show up at the front door?

And when it does, how will you treat it?
Drumsticks collapsed across the knees,
salads tossed violently?

This poem is for rich poets.

Because great fun cannot be measured in metre
nor in rhyme.
It must be measured by the time
spent rich and alone
to be a poet and to
live on subsidies,
two years on fifty grand,
and down further as the currency
is ground to dust
the great, rich poet
must
seal his own fate
without asphixiation.

And the rich poet can choose.

Daily rations, love.

So we get it, on all channels,
a soap opera kiss, the pretty girl
around the corner.
And in between, tampons, soda
and miscommunications.

How great the rich poet for
how rich he is.
How pretty the coffin and the chemicals
to make him real
in death
for conversations in hallways
the rich poet:
The exchange rate of blood fluxuates
until the lifeless left,
to man the doors and create
interference.


world "leaders".
Busy Night

In _The Culture Of Fear_ author Barry Glassner argues that it is our
*perception* of danger that has increased, not the actual level of risk.
It is an interesting read of how organizations that manipulate our
perceptions profit from our fears. The profit in the instant case is
public opinion. It might be submitted that so long as we can be made to
fear an "imminent threat", terrors of the imagination will remain united
with the terrors of truth, indecipherable to the public, producing the
desired efficacy of minimalizing public examination of the organization
itself.

Compound this manipulation of American fear of terror post-9/11 with war
and you've got the ingredients for shaping public opinion in a way that
most benefits the Administration. As Walter Lippman noted in 1922,
public opinion tends to solidify during times of war and the media,
becoming more patriotic, aids in this solidification.

The real question for the American people should be whether or not, in
the face of the radical transformation of their privacy rights and their
acceptance of the general war on terror as justification for their
support of unilateral invasions conducted under the guise of rather
nefarious rationales, the Administration has created an environment for
them that is realistically safer from terror now than it was prior to
9/11.



The Traveled Man

SOMETIMES I wish the railroads all were torn out,
The ships all sunk among the coral strands.
I am so very weary, yea, so worn out,
With tales of those who visit foreign lands.

When asked to dine, to meet these traveled people,
My soup seems brewed from cemetery bones.
The fish grows cold on some cathedral steeple,
I miss two courses while I stare at thrones.

I'm forced to leave my salad quite untasted,
Some musty, moldy temple to explore.
The ices, fruit and coffee all are wasted
While into realms of ancient art I soar.

I'd rather take my chance of life and reason,
If in a den of roaring lions hurled
Than for a single year, ay, for one season,
To dwell with folks who'd traveled round the world.

So patronizing are they, so oppressive,
With pity for the ones who stay at home,
So mighty is their knowledge, so aggressive,
I ofttimes wish they had not ceased to roam.

They loathe the new, they quite detest the present;
They revel in a pre-Columbian morn;
Just dare to say America is pleasant,
And die beneath the glances of their scorn.

They are increasing at a rate alarming,
Go where I will, the traveled man is there.
And now I think that rustic wholly charming
Who has not strayed beyond his meadows fair.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox
"...Another [American] soldier was unimpressed with the ruins of the
ancient city of Ur, the birthplace of Abraham. "I've been all the way
through this desert from Basra to here and I ain't seen one shopping mall
or fast food restaurant," he told a British reporter. "These people got
nothing. Even in a little town like ours of 2,500 people you got a
McDonald's at one end and a Hardee's at the other."


- from _Harper's Magazine_ news review, 4th april week

Range Life
Pavement

after the glow, the scene, the stage, the set
talk becomes slow but there's one thing i'll never forget:
hey, you gotta pay your dues before you pay the rent.
over the turnstile turn out in the traffic
there's ways of living it's the way i'm living
right or wrong, it's all that i can do,
and i wouldn't want to let you be

i want a range life, if i could settle down,
if i could settle down, then i would settle down
[x2]

run from the pigs, the fuzz, the cops, the heat
pass me your gloves, there's crime and it's never complete
until you snort it up or shoot it down
you're never gonna feel free
out on my skateboard the night is just hummin'
and the gum smacks are the pulse i'll follow if my walkman fades
but i've got absolutely no one, no one but myself to blame

don't worry- we're in no hurry
school's out, what did you expect?

i want a range life, if i could settle down,
if i could settle down, then i would settle down
[x2]

out on tour with the smashing pumpkins
nature kids, i/they don't have no function
i don't understand what they mean
and i could really give a fuck.
the stone temple pilots,
they're elegant bachelors
they're foxy to me are they foxy to you?
i will agree theY DESERVE absolutely nothing
nothing more than me

dreamin' dream dream dream....

maandag, maart 01, 2004

You say Haiti, I say Hottie

I say kill em all
The American way
dirty but clean fingernails
and lots of money.

Somebody has a say.
Kill em all anyway.