Mine Mine Mine

I see that the Russians have discovered the power of the Flag:

'...A Russian expedition descended in a pair of submersible vessels more than two miles under the ice cap on Thursday and deposited a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole. The dive was a symbolic move to enhance the government’s disputed claim to nearly half of the floor of the Arctic Ocean and potential oil or other resources there...'

Scientists Say That By 1970 Over 10,000 People Will Be Living On The Moon!

(Above, the Earth, not the moon...)

So in the past week, the roads in front of Grand Central Station have exploded upwards and the bridges in Minneapolis have collapsed downward. The future doesn't look bold and beautiful like the cover of a 1950s Popular Mechanics magazine, but rather looks like a slow decline into senescence and irrelevance, a dull narrative for the ending of our culture. And to think that merely a generation or two ago, things looked so bright.

The crazy innocence of the atomic age 1950s didn't seem to last all that long. By the 1980s, that Popular Mechanics imagery had already become an ironic emblem of a naive age, and now it's even fading from our memories as a cultural touchstone.

But hope remains. On August 11th and 12th at the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station is the 2007 Rocketbelt convention. (h/t This Modern World).

So although a vacation on the moon doesn't seem on the horizon anytime soon, at least we can still get our damned jetpacks.

Talk to Jesus

Just shoot me...Seriously, I'm signing up as a beta tester for this.

If you go to the site, they have the following disclaimer at the bottom:

Disclaimer: TalkToJesus is intended for entertainment purposes only. It is not the actual Jesus.

H/T my brother, who if he has time to track down insanities such as this, has the time to post in his blog...

Christians United for Israel

Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour from huffpost and Vimeo.

This latest from Max Blumenthal is a must see to understand my motivation for studying Christianity. Watching the former speaker of the House of Representatives (and third in line to the Presidency) talk about how he looks forward to Armageddon, the senior senator from Connecticut wax poetic about one of the most corrupt televangelists, and dozens of people from around the country use the Bible to advocate messages of hate ('...the Antichrist will be a person of peace...') sends chills down my spine.

In the money

It looks like I will now never have to worry about money again, for I soon will be coming into billions, perhaps trillions of dollars. For some unknown reason, my yahoo email address has stopped spamblocking all of the Nigerian 419 scam emails, and for the past several days I have been getting flooded with them. I started keeping track of the amounts I was going to get yesterday morning, with the goal of posting this in a week, but after only 24 hours, it started getting too ridiculous. So here is a day's worth of loot that I'm going to receive:

$46 Million from Mikhail Khordokovsky, jailed head of Yukos Oil

$500,000 from Mr. James Morgan (deceased) who apparently knew me.

$25.5 Million from the Equitorial Trust Bank, PLC in Nigeria

$850,000 from the Global Company

$400,000 from Mr. Fred Clean in Nepal

15 Million Euros from the 'July Category 'A' draw'

An unspecified amount from the Central Bank of Nigeria

GBP 850 Million from the Microsoft email lottery promotion (this is close to $2 Billion dollars)

$950,000 from the Global Max Courier Company Benin

$3.2 Million from a woman in the Ivory Coast whose family was killed in Darfur, for me to use:

'...I have prayed and I told God to direct me to an honest Person whom God will use to handle this funds for the less privileged people ,offernage, displace and mother less baby home to receive this fund and utilize it for things that will glorify the name of God. After my prayers...'

$900,000 from John Basil in Benin

GBP1 Million from the Microsoft Lottery Corporation in England

$1.5 Million from Mr. Howard Ferraro who is a 'Spanish base business man.'

'$21,437,000.00 Million' (which if it's not a typo is over 21 trillion dollars) as the next of kin of the late Ronald Lake and his wife who used to work with Frank Howard Allen Realtors.

and my personal favorites:

$1 Million from the UN and Central bank of Nigeria 419 Scam Victims compensation fund, and

$35 Million from the Global Exchange Bank in Nigeria. I have been made aware of this through the 'Nigerian Investigation Department Ant-Fraud [sic] Unit':

'...BEWARE OF HOODLUMS...Based on the finding in this investigastion department we wish to warn you against some touts. We have been informed that some touts are contating you in respect to the collection of your fund in the total sum of $35 Million U.S.A Dollars that was long approved in your favour through the Global Exchange Bank of Nigeria. As a matter of fact we have been on this investigation assignments for some time codely known to no one but the Presidency and some top government official who are in support of this investigation team to help stop fraudalent activities in this country.

Although we have been able to come up with some good result about the people that have extorted money from you illegally and i wish to list them so that you will personally indicate them by writting back because we want to make your paymen to you without any delay but we must surely deal and bring this names to book if only you will indicate correctly any of them...'

So now I'm going to start up the spam blocking process again for these emails. After all, once you've got 21 trillion dollars, trying to acquire more is just plain greedy.

Why do you call Ganesh?

Ganesh is displeased.

You know my name (Look up the Number)

I just want to post briefly on this fun scandal du jour, currently engulfing Washington, and distracting us from things of lesser import, such as failing wars and health care. Normally I would follow this more closely, what with the people caught up in this being such perfect hypocrites up there with the scribes and Pharisees, but it really is shooting fish in a barrel.

More information is coming out, which means that Senator David Vittner (R. Louisiana) will likely be having to share the spotlight soon. Now it appears that Hustler Magazine (which first played the Senator into admitting his dalliances to the AP) is claiming to be investigating more than 20 congressman and Senators. And now another Republican consultant has been outed in all this.

It's been fun to read the defenders of these people. People on the right have been talking a good game of 'the temptations of immorality' etc. And the comparisons with the 'Clinton Blowjob' are flying fast. Of course what they are failing to take into account is one of the key differences between the Clinton Blowjob and the Good Senator (and others) visiting a hooker: The Clinton Blowjob was essentially plain vanilla sex.

You see, when a Senator visits a hooker, it's not going to be for some standard missionary position fun. Oh, no. A Senator visits a hooker because he wants to a) have someone ram a 12" dildo in the shape of Jesus up his ass, and b) make certain that she doesn't tell anyone about it. That's why. So the real fun is not going to be the naming of names. It's going to be the naming of kinks.

Update:

Looks like I was a bit off. Apparently the Good Senator is into Diapers.

Little Pink Guns for You and Me...

And I thought that the crap couldn’t get any crazier. But I would have been wrong. First of all we hear from Bill O’Reilly at Fox News that hundreds of roving gangs of lesbians carrying, I shit you not, pink guns, are rampaging across the country committing all sorts of heinous crimes. David Niewert at Orcinus has the story on this latest insanity from Fox News; the Southern Poverty Law Center has been following the idiocy as well.

This report also came out about the same time that the Vice President's favorable ratings have hit a whopping 13%, probably about the same percentage of people who favor getting repeatedly kicked in the nuts. Or more to the point, it's the exact same percentage of people who have never heard about global warming.

But the issue remains health care, of course, especially since Iraq is getting into the news more and more lately. Today The President appeared in Cleveland to give a speech on the topic:

'...The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room...'

Shit, why didn't I think of that. We should just build more emergency rooms. It's good to hear that the President has been on top of things like this for the past six years. From today's testimony by the President's last Surgeon General, Dr. Richard Carmona:

'...Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried,” Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as the nation’s top doctor from 2002 until 2006, told a House of Representatives committee.”The problem with this approach is that in public health, as in a democracy, there is nothing worse than ignoring science, or marginalizing the voice of science for reasons driven by changing political winds. The job of surgeon general is to be the doctor of the nation, not the doctor of a political party,” Carmona added.

Carmona said Bush administration political appointees censored his speeches and kept him from talking out publicly about certain issues, including the science on embryonic stem cell research, contraceptives and his misgivings about the administration’s embrace of “abstinence-only” sex education...'

Perhaps things have improved somewhat since Dr. Carmona left. Or not. From Kevin Drum:

'...the Bush administration is apparently in favor of loosening lead regulations in the United States, a transparent bit of industry pandering that makes the Iraq war look like a sober and prescient piece of public policy...'

Perhaps we could take the lead, paint it pink and make it into bullets. Then we could take on all those crazed lesbian gangs. We have plenty of Emergency Rooms, after all.

National Healthcare: Breeding Ground for Terror

TPM has been following the latest crap being hoisted up the flagpole. No word yet on how many people are saluting. YouTubes are at the links.

Apparently, because a number of the clueless idiots who didn't know how to make a bomb in England last week were doctors, this is a reason we shouldn't have universal health care in this country: it will lead to terrorism. You see, if we have universal health care, there will be an increased demand for doctors, and so we will have to import them from abroad. And of course, that means that we will be letting terrorists into our midst. Other options are discounted, as I gather from the impending nature of this crisis we no longer have any medical schools in this country.

So who exactly is hoisting this flag? One Jerry Bowyer from National Review Online. Who? Tbogg has the details from a post he did back in 2003. In short he's a PR schmuck for far, far right conservative causes bankrolled by the myriad of Scaife Foundations. Why he gets onto Fox news is therefore obvious. Why that drek then gets picked up by other news outlets is more outrageous.

Update:

As TPM notes, the meme is spreading - now it's in the New York Sun. Crooks and Liars is also on the track of all of this.

Torches and Pitchforks

They don't even try to hide the hypocrisy any more.

In a scramble to try to come up with some leg to stand on in the 2008 elections, the administration decided to trot out that old warhorse, Law and Order. If they can't take names and kick ass abroad, well then they could at least try to look tough at home. From the June 17th Boston Globe:

'...WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is trying to roll back a Supreme Court decision by pushing legislation that would require prison time for nearly all criminals.

The Justice Department is offering the plan as an opening salvo in a larger debate about whether sentences for crack cocaine are unfairly harsh and racially discriminatory.

Republicans are seizing the administration's crackdown, packaged in legislation to combat violent crime, as a campaign issue for 2008.

In a speech June 1 to announce the bill, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urged Congress to reimpose mandatory minimum prison sentences against federal convicts -- and not let judges consider such penalties "merely a suggestion."

Such an overhaul, in part, "will strengthen our hand in fighting criminals who threaten the safety and security of all Americans," Gonzales said in the speech, delivered three days before the FBI announced a slight national uptick in violent crime during 2006...

...Justice officials also point to a growing number of lighter sentences as possible proof that crime is rising because criminals are no longer cowed by strict penalties...'

Let's see how that new campaign theme's working out:

'...WASHINGTON, July 2 — President Bush said today that he had used his power of clemency to commute the 30-month sentence for I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, who was convicted of perjury in March and was due to begin serving his time within weeks...

...“I respect the jury’s verdict,” Mr. Bush said. “But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby’s sentence that required him to spend 30 months in prison.”...

...The president noted in his statement that the decision to commute “leaves in place a harsh punishment for Mr. Libby.[a 250,000 fine]”...

The president’s decision drew praise from Mr. Libby’s defenders. “That’s fantastic. It’s a great relief," said former Ambassador Richard Carlson, who helped raise millions for Libby’s defense fund. "Scooter Libby did not deserve to go to prison and I’m glad the president had the courage to do this."...'

I love the 'harsh punishment' of a cool quarter mil for a guy who's already ranked in dozens of times that amount for his legal defense fund. The media is already talking about this as some kind of compromise, like the President has the wisdom of friggin' Solomon or something: cut the sentence in half...

Americans put up with just about anything in politics, but they actually do start drawing the line at rank hypocrisy. The problem is that no one in the media points any of it out, at least with this administration. It's going to get a lot worse, too. Nobody in Washington is fearing crowds showing up at the White House bearing torches and pitchforks.

Strange Fruit

The analogy of a tree bearing fruit as an image of a man and his works is quite common in the Bible. Matthew 7:15-20 for instance:

'...Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits...'

As time passes on and the time left for the present administration fades away, I've had my mind wander over what lasting results will occur from the catastrophe of the last six years. It will take a generation to repair some of the damage done to government institutions and to our standing in the world. Other things could take far longer to fix, if they ever can be. But it is starting to feel that the President's choices for the Supreme Court will be among the worst problems we will have to deal with.

This morning I read of the latest Supreme Court Rulings, including the one that essentially overturns any possible enforcement of Brown. There are a lot of unpleasant undercurrents in our country that can be hard to pin down, but the memes tend to run along the lines of "Brown was useful once (like unions) but it isn't really relevant any more" and "Racism isn't the kind of problem that it used to be." They're the sort of things that you can chat about at parties and sound wonderfully moderate and even-tempered. So it can be hard to get worked up about a Supreme Court case that, in one way of looking at it, seems to indicate that we have solved these 1960's problems of racism and segregation, and so let's get on with solving the problems of the 21st century.

Except of course, one would be utterly full of shit to argue that.

In an odd timing, the Jena case in Louisiana got resolved today. No, I hadn't heard much about it either. The press coverage has been minimal, probably because it's not the kind of story to make us feel very good about ourselves. Some background here:

'...In September 2006, a group of African American high school students in Jena, Louisiana, asked the school for permission to sit beneath a "whites only" shade tree. There was an unwritten rule that blacks couldn't sit beneath the tree. The school said they didn't care where students sat. The next day, students arrived at school to see three nooses (in school colors) hanging from the tree....

The boys who hung the nooses were suspended from school for a few days. The school administration chalked it up as a harmless prank, but Jena's black population didn't take it so lightly. Fights and unrest started breaking out at school. The District Attorney, Reed Walters, was called in to directly address black students at the school and told them all he could "end their life with a stroke of the pen."

Black students were assaulted at white parties. A white man drew a loaded rifle on three black teens at a local convenience store. (They wrestled it from him and ran away.) Someone tried to burn down the school, and on December 4th, a fight broke out that led to six black students being charged with attempted murder. To his word, the D.A. pushed for maximum charges, which carry sentences of eighty years. Four of the six are being tried as adults (ages 17 & 18) and two are juveniles....'

Today the first verdict was handed out:

'...An all-White jury in a tiny central Louisiana town found a Black teen guilty of assault and conspiracy in a racially charged drama involving the beating of a White schoolmate....'

So we can thank the President for the Strange Fruit of his tree. Normally I would end with a quote from the famous song, but I think that the Rude Pundit nailed it our of the park today:

'...Fuck you, Sandra Day O'Connor. Fuck you, fuck you, and, uh, oh, fuck you. Fuck you for stepping down, yet still being able to do work like for the Iraq Study Group. Fuck you for putting yourself and your family above the good of the country. And fuck you because, even though you're a conservative who allowed George W. Bush to take office, we have to wish you were still on the court. Fuck you because you probably would have voted differently than Justice Alito on both desegregation and late-term abortion, maybe even on the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case. Fuck you, and, hey, by the way, fuck you, Senate Democrats, for not having the balls to filibuster John Roberts or Samuel Alito. Don't fuckin' crow about how you voted against them. You could have stopped them...'

Streetlight People

The story is that when you die, you relive your life episodically. Or at least right before you die. Like when you're hit by a bus, or having your skull crushed by an SUV filled with your grandchildren after being shot in the head.

In most of our cultural references, replaying your life involves a series of scenes, rather than a coherent narrative. And though its never, ever, mentioned or referred to, one living in our culture constantly judges his or her own life in reference to that - will that last experience I had make it to the 'top ten' that I relive in that moment of death? Or maybe not - I maybe just patterning. But, still, it's not a bad way to organize one's experiences.

Don't you agree?

Growing up in the twentieth century has also introduced another aspect to our lives that is almost never mentioned - the concept of soundtrack. Each one of those episodes has its own tune to go along with it. One struggles to imagine it otherwise. Sometimes the music makes one glad to be alive; sometimes the music is an embarrassment - a song that haunts you from the very beginning of its release, confounding you as to why it gnaws at you so. Dear God, please make it stop. But, no, it still plays on and on and on and on...And eventually marks an episode, usually one that will make the top ten for no damn good reason other than God foresaw it (or at least Augustine would have said so)

In the spring of 1984, it was time for me to visit colleges. I visited two. The second was the one I went to, the one that sang to me, Washington University. A good choice, looking back on it a generation later. But I did visit one other.

In the spring of 1984 I visited UC Berkeley. Just me and my dad. Pretty much just a day or two. And I only have two memories of the trip - the first was a visit with a faculty member in the administration. She went on and on and on and on about how the department was amazing, because the first project was to draw the absence of a chair. And I had no problem in getting in, as all I had to provide was my portfolio.

Not even knowing, yet alone giving a shit, about what the 'absence of a chair' was, I certainly wasn't going to put together a non existent portfolio to apply to the place. So I gave up on Berkeley about an hour after arriving.

The next day, I got up with my dad and we went to have breakfast at a place on one of the main streets of the city - I couldn't locate it today with a gun at my head. We walked in, and ordered...well I completely forget what we ordered, other than it included a massive glass of fresh squeezed orange juice. And that's when the memory began.

I'm sitting in this cafe with my dad, drinking a tall glass of the finest orange juice squeezed by mankind (which I can still taste to this day - nothing ever has compared) and suddeny this song comes on the juke box. Yes a juke box at nine fucking in the morning.

And it's by fucking Journey. 'Don't Stop Believing.'

And everything in my life slid into place at that moment. I have a few more months to live with my parents and then I'm on my own. I had just made my first real life decision, on my own, that the next step of my life, the first I would be taking without my parents, I had just made the afternoon before: that I wouldn't be going to Berkeley, that architecture school run by hippie idiots. My first big decision of my life and I had already made it without realizing it. But I realized it suddenly then, in the company of Journey, a crappy band, and my father, one of the most under appreciated people who ever lived on this planet.

And to the day I die, that moment will be one of the top ten of my life. And the soundtrack is a Journey song.

We can't pick the songs for our life - they just happen to us; although we get warning of it in advance. When we first hear a song that will leave a mark, we know it instinctively, even though the 'main event' hasn't happened yet. Often the song needs to build up first before it hammers itself in. Or at least, that's how it seems.

The memory triggers for all of this are rather obvious - the final episode of The Sopranos. The last scene's soundtrack is the same song - 'Don't Stop Believing'. And either Tony's Family sits down in that divey diner and has a lovely meal, or they get rubbed out by the guy heading into the bathroom. The show has always been a bit of a Rorschach test. What happens is up to the viewer - sort of like the ending to the Gospel of Mark. 'And they were afraid.'

I also remember the first time I saw an episode of the Sopranos. Season Two was about to start on HBO, and I was on my own for the first time in years - I had just moved into my own apartment. I had subscribed to HBO for the first time, and I needed to catch up before the show began anew. So I went to the video store on a Friday night to pick up the episodes of Season 1. Of course, it being a Friday night, the DVD copies were all checked out, so I had to settle for a VHS copy that had episodes 1 and 2 on them. I rented it out, took the tape home and plopped it in, cats on my lap, and a bowl of Mac and Cheese for dinner.

I pressed play.

After the opening credits (which, if there is any justice in the world, will become the official film of the state of New Jersey) Tony walks into his shrink's office and starts talking about his day. He's in waste management, you see, and he had a problem with some guy who owed him some money. They sat down to talk about it over coffee, like reasonable people. And then the show cuts to Tony trying to drive the guy down on a college campus, plowing up flowers with his SUV, with nary a care about the rest of the world. And I immediately ejected the tape, returned it to the store, and bought the entire first season on DVD; the first time I ever purchased a TV show.

Years have passed since then. And I have never missed an episode. I will miss them now. For I feel that it is the last show that will sing to me. HBO, in its marketing wisdom, followed the last episode of the Sopranos with the first episode of its new show, 'John from Cincinnati'. And what a show it was - amazing to watch, crazy shit going on. And I don't give a damn. Not a single damn.

TV has changed, for me at least. It's miles better than it was when I was growing up - the only aspect of our culture that has measurably improved over the past 30 years. But I think that we're done now. It's all just a matter of playing catch-up. Miltch gave up on Deadwood to produce 'John,' a show with a terrific cast and interesting things to see which is all just a bunch of sound and fury. But it reminds me of what a friend of mine, Heather, said to me in high school when 'Don't Stop Believing' hit the charts in 1981, two years before I went to Berkley.

'You'd think that musicians with that kind of money would know how to dress better.'