I found I didn't have enough money to bid on a Bumblebee Slim "original" 78 rpm record I found on eBay. I really wanted it. Bumblebee at one time was the biggest blues star, in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. His name was Amos Easton. He was from Gawjah. He joined the Ringling Bros. Circus to get out of Gawjah and from that experience hit the road and went to Indianapolis where he became friends with blues greats pianist and songwriter Leroy Carr and guitarist Scrapper Blackwell. Bumblebee was popular because he sang streetwise blues in a lighthearted easy-going way. He sang them with high humor in his delivery. He blended Gawjah country style with Indianapolis and Chicago urban styles; he sang blues with a sweet honey voice--he was the Bumblebee, "...always buzzin' 'round your hive...." He made a ton of records in the 30s, was the top blues singer of that era; yet the business end of the blues was where the deep, down, dirty, motherfuckin' blues were--and Slim though a big star wasn't a rich star because his record labels, Paramount, Vocalion, etc., shafted Black artists, paying them nothing for any of their original songs, most times giving themselves writing credits, and paying them chickenfeed in terms of royalties.
The Bee in 1940 gave up on the blues and went to L.A. hoping to get into the movies as a comedian and songwriter. Nope. It wasn't to be. The blues idiom was the only idiom the Bee knew and understood. So he tried once again to "buzz around some hives" in L.A., but it wasn't to be. By then the slick electric blues dudes and the new white fasthand-showoff blues dudes had taken over the blues scene and young blues original cats, like Chuck Berry, were inventing rock 'n roll, a new form of blues, or they were inventing r and b out of jump and swing and blues, and White wannabe Black dudes were taking over rock 'n roll and rock'a'billy--and Bumblebee Slim sang the blues in the back-alley bars of South L.A., making some albums, but they didn't sell. As a last ditch effort at a comeback, Bee tried to become a jazz singer and recorded his last album for the Pacific Jazz label. And then one day somebody in L.A. asked, "Whatever happened to old Bumblebee Slim? I used to catch him over on Figaroa but I haven't seen him playing anywhere in what seems like over a year or more." "I heard he's dead, man." "Yeah, when did he die? I don't remember reading about it." "I think he died a couple a'years back, 19 and 68 I think, but I don't know for sure." For sure it was April of 1968 in Los Angeles. He was 63...and totally lost and forgotten in the music world. Of course today there's tons of Bumblebee's stuff available--I think one of those "complete works" labels (Document CDs?) has done Bumblebee's complete works. I was trying for a Paramount copy of "The B&O Blues," said to be one of the first "railroad" blues. But, sadly, I couldn't bid on it because at the time I was slip-slidin' towards the rock bottom of my bank account--well, I did bid $20 on it, ready to pay my bank a $50 hot-check charge should my balance not even have $20 in it, but it sold for way over $60, so that was that.
While I was listening to Bumblebee sing "No More Fattening Frogs for Snakes" on YouTube (a guy plays a 78 rpm record on his Caliphone all-purpose "record player" (phonograph)--I have one of these Caliphone record players and love it--it plays 16, 33 1/3, 45, and 78 rpms in mono and stereo with an auxiliary jack where you can record off of it onto CDs--marvelous for us old record-collecting geeks who used to holler when CDs were taking over the music-storage business that nothing stored sound like vinyl--and we kept our vinyl albums and we bought new vinyl pressings of old vinyl albums, reprocessed and repressed by these studio engineer loonies who are into reengineering things having to do with sound)--so you see, that could have been me playing my Bumblebee Slim 78 on YouTube. I did once produce a "Rare Record Review" teevee show where I filmed myself playing my 78s while a slide show showed the featured artists in flash-bys. I would occasionally step in on the record to give out some vital information at a certain point in the record that needed the viewer/listener's attention, then replay it again so they'd note exactly what I wanted them to hear and delite over--like in a Sir Charles Thompson Apollo 78 ("20th Century Blues"/"The Street Beat" (the Street is 52nd St. in New York City and the Beat is Bop)) I have where out of nowhere comes an alto sax solo that blows your mind..."That sounds like fuckin' Bird, man"...and, yes, it is Bird, with the Sir Charles Thompson All-Stars on the Apollo label...or it could be I introduced the fact that on the Chu Berry 78 on the Commodore label I was about to spin, you could actually hear old Chu Berry talkin' everybody into a jam--which may be the only time his voice was ever recorded.
Then in yesterday's mail came a 78 rpm record I did have enough money to buy from my favorite 78 record dealer up in Massachusetts. I opened it up and to my surprise it was even better than I expected. It was a 1941 RCA Victor recording of the Metronome (magazine) All-Stars (the magazine's jazz poll winners) that included the White King of Swing, Benny Goodman; Count Basie; Mr. Cootie Williams; Gene "Boom-Bang" Krupa; Alvino Rey (the band leader and steel-guitar player); Tex Beneke (a Goodman band tenor man who made "Pardon me, Boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo-choo?" a Hit Parade hit for several years [Hey, now, come on, yes, Tex was a Texan, but hey, back in those days, that's what you said in Penn Station when you were White and leaving New York City for points wherever because all the "red caps" in Penn Station back then were Black men who White men and women and children could call "Boy" with social impunity]--Tex milked that little "racy" diddy for all it was worth up until his death just a few years ago); Harry James (Harry was born in Gawjah but grew up in Beaumont, Texas, playing in his father's circus band when he was 10. His second wife was Betty Grable who was noted as having the "finest ass" of all the WWII Hollywood starlets [my brother, a gyrene, thought Barbara Stanwyck had a better ass]--Betty Grable did a pin-up poster in which she is facing a wall wearing a tight one-piece bathing suit, looking back over her shoulder, smiling, to see if you are checking out her fine bottom that she has conveniently allowed to protrude out double roundly enticingly invitingly toward you. It's a poster US soldiers, sailors, and marines kept on their barracks walls or their quarters walls or in their action rooms, anywhere, any place where they could as they passed it by give a little pat on Betty's ass for good luck. That good luck didn't apply to either Betty or Harry James--both were big cigarette smokers and were in cigarette commercials all the time. Betty died of lung cancer at age 56; Harry died of lymphatic cancer in the 1980s when he was 67], etc., etc. (too many all-stars to name right now). The Metronome All-Stars are doing a fiery "Bugle Call Rag" on the A side of this record and on the backside is a faithful rendition of the Count's "One O'Clock Jump." I already had two of this same record, one of which had a crack running clear through it--you could play it, but that's hard on your diamond needles-- and the other one had arrived with a large chip out of it. This one yesterday arrived unscathed and to my surprise was in Excellent condition, which to an old record buff means it hasn't been played that--not factory mint but still showing shellac lustre, probably used as a demo record in an old record shop. You used to could go in a record shop and take a demo record of the record you were interested in into a glass soundproof booth where there was a record player and a speaker and you could listen to the demo record and see if you wanted to buy it or not. People in those days didn't just buy a record because one of their favs put out a new record. You judged it on whether you liked it or not; whether it was any good musically or not. We knew the best talent in our world made hokey records occasionally--like "Chattanooga Choo-Choo," for instance.
Betty Grable on the left; Barbara Stanwyck on the right.
Yes, I Heard President Obama's Afghan War Speech
I'm ignoring it. I heard it. It was trick-baggy as hell, but then I've already given my opinion on the matter. I've said over and over this country's only hope of salvation from this spiraling out of control economy according to Dumbocrats going way back to Frankie Roosevelt's first term is WAR. The Repugnicans ruin the economy--the Dumbocrats try first to bring the economy back with National Welfare--and then when that doesn't work, they look for WARS. Check it out.
After WWII we suffered what was called a "recession." Harry Truman was president. He immediately started looking for a WAR. First he sent the Marines to Greece to force a King on the Greek people who really wanted self-control, though the way they were getting it was through the Communist Party in Greece. "NO WAY," said Commander in Chief Harry. That was a skirmish and didn't do much to pump the economy up, so Harry decided it was time he stopped Communism in Korea! Remember, this little prick of a common man, had just dropped two Fat Boy Atomic Bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima killing close to 300,000 innocent of war men, women, children (unborn and just born), pets, anything living--zilching them alive; leaving them like photo negatives on the crumbled walls of both cities, scarring survivors for life--Harry saying defiantly he did it to save the lives of brave American boys--yassuh, Harry cared for his canon fodder, so he was hot to trot with power. A simpleton of a man from Missouri, a state that worships mules, suddenly told us that this WAR on Communism he was gonna get us into was not a WAR, but simply a bully of a little "police action," a United Nations-sponsored police action. Oh yeah. That little police action is best dramatized if you watch the very well-done old teevee series called "M-A-S-H" (it came out first as a movie), a series that used actually doctors and nurses who had served in MASH units in the Korean War as advisers. The Korean War (that's its official title now) was devastating to the Korean people. It split their nation in half and they've stayed split in half for 59 years now and the North Koreans, still a Communist government, is still a thorn in the side of the US's world-dominance efforts.
After the Korean War and because Harry Truman had desegregated the US Armed Forces, the Southern Racist Dumbocrats who had split off from the Dumbos in 1948 and went first to being Dixiecrats, running Strom Thurmond for president (remember good ole boy Trent Lott saying it would have been better for us had Strom won the presidency back then?--remember Trent's house's porch was one of the first FEMA repair jobs after Katrina blew it off his We-the-People-paid-for Mississippi mansion?--and remember G.W. "Stolen Elections" Bush joking about how he hoped old Trent's porch was fixed so he could sip some bourbon with him on that porch when he came down a few days too late to overview (fly over) New Orleans and the Gulf Coast and do his photo-ops and phony care shit?) So thanks to this revolt of the Southern Racists Dumbocrats in 1948 (the year Truman desegregated the armed forces), in 1952, these turncoat Southern racist Dumbocrats swung their allegiance to the Repugnican Party and got behind sweet old lovable dumbass military-trained Dwight David Eisenhower. [DDE was so out of it that when he was told they were thinking about him as president he thought they wanted him to be president of Columbia University when Columbia really wanted his brother Milton as their president, an educator who was then president of the U of Penn. The Repugnicans at first tried to get Douglas "Old Soldiers Never Die" MacArthur to run as their candidate, but he turned it down saying he was "just going to fade away," so the Repugs turned to Eisenhower, who at the time, was either a registered Dumbocrat or an Independent--I don't think he was a Repug--in fact, he may not have voted for a bunch of war years, who the hell knows? Eisenhower easily beat egghead Dumbocrat candidate from the crooked state of Illinois, Adlai "Till Hell Freezes Over" Stevenson, especially after Strom Thurmond and the renegade Southern racist Dumbocrats started calling themselves "Dem-Ike-Crats" and began voting Repugnican exclusively at that time. Pappy Bush rode into Texas politics on the backs of these Southern racist turncoats.
Eisenhower got us out of Korea but soon he announced we were in a recession and his career diplomat Sec'y of State, John Foster Dulles (his brother Allan founded the CIA--and Allan had the Washington National Airport named after him until the rightwingers changed it to Ronnie Reagan Airport (from whence those 3-hour flights to Tokyo take off daily)) started talking about his "Domino Theory" of Communist takeover of Asia and how the US Police Force had to stop them and arrest them all or like a string of dominos standing on end side by side sequentially when the first one is tapped over so go the 140 rest of them or however many of them there are. Dulles said that's the way the Commies were take over the Asian world, knocking over countries like you knocked over those dominoes. And then rumor started talking about us getting involved in yet another WAR--which is when Ike warned us about the Military Industrial Complex and how under its bootheel we were becoming a War-dependent economy. The MIC was hungry for another WAR, but Eisenhower who'd lived through both WWI (the WAR to end all WARS) and WWII (our only truly righteous WAR, according to WAR apologists) was afraid of us getting into another WAR because he knew the cost of WAR in terms of flesh and materials. Still his old French buddy Charles DeGaulle was getting his French ass kicked in a place called Indo-China; in fact, his French forces had been humiliated by Ho Chi Min and his pajama-- and underwear-wearing Vietcong freedom fighters (considered Commies by our military experts) at Dien Bin Phu. The French were begging the US to interfere and bail them out and save their colony from these independence seekers, the bastards, which Vietnam was, a French colony, with Saigon the Paris of the Orient.
Eisenhower left office--he got two terms--and at the end of his second term there were scandals in his party. One of his cabinet guys (Sherman Minton) was getting mink coats as "special booty" in return for "special favors" in the White (Man's) House (built by slaves). Then Richard Nixon had to go on teevee and say for the first time, "I am not a crook," regarding, he said, a puppy named Checkers that had been given to his daughters. Plus, the country was sinking deeper into a recession when John Fitzgerald "New Frontier" Kennedy became Commander in Chief by whipping "I Am Not a Crook" Nixon's old evil ass in the 1960 Presidential election, carrying into the White (Man's) House with him the last of the old-timey Texas "liberal" Dumbocrats, Lyndon Baines Johnson. The New Frontier depended on a strong economy if it was to work--and even JFK knew a strong economy needed a WAR for stimulus.
Well, at first, JFK said we were in Vietnam solely as advisers. At the same time, that sneaky bastard started duking it out with his Soviet Union counterpart, the shoe-pounding Russian peasant with power to kill off millions of his people with a purge a la Joe Stalin, Khrushchev, who threw JFK a right cross to his glass jaw by sending some Soviet ships to Cuba. Ships which a US spy plane supposedly showed through its aerial photography were loaded with ICBMs (missiles) that would be aimed at the USA from 90 miles away--though these things they called missiles were long unidentifiable objects covered up by tarpaulins out in plain view on the decks of these Soviet ships. These photos reminded me of the evidence drawings Colon's Pal showed to the United Nations General Assembly when he had to stand there and lie his ass off about Al-Queda and Saddam Hussein being asshole buddies and ready to fly drones over here to our sacred shores carrying nuclear weapons (Weapons of Mass Destruction) and defend the US's obligation to invade and occupy that nation on a preemptive strike basis! These photos didn't really show any missiles. Then later when another spy plane's photos showed what the CIA said were missile silos being built in Cuba, again, those photos were so grainy and iffy they were no proof of those being missile silos at all. Besides, even as a kid I knew there was a US Army missile silo being built just north of my hometown--I wondered if that missile silos's ICBMs were aimed at Cuba or maybe Moscow?
The Cuban Missile Crisis diverted our attention from what was building up in Vietnam as out-and-out WAR! It also covered up JFK's involvement with the Mafia and his part in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. And soon, JFK was waving the WAR flag while he was fornicating with the Chicago mob boss's mistress (Judith Exeter) and a bunch of Hollywood starlets his brother-in-law Peter Lawford was obtaining for him and his brother Bobby--party time nightly out at Peter's fabby Malibu mansion.
Thus came about the Vietnam War. Oh not to worry, we were arming the South Vietnam Army and they would do most of the fighting (sound familiar?). NOT SO. The South Vietnamese Army was worthless--they were ill-trained, some of them unwilling to fight against their brothers and sisters from up north, some of them arrogantly cocky and fuck you about it so that soon Colon Pal was giving out rigged casualty figures so his boss General Westmoreland could keep asking for more and more troops. And then Robert McNamara kept seeing "a light at the end of the tunnel" and 50,000 dead US troops and maybe as many as 4 million dead South and North Vietnamese (men, women, children, grandmas, grandpas, babies--all were Cong to our troops) later, and after we'd dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we had dropped in all of WWII, and after we had drenched their forests and crops with Agent Orange (made by the good people at Du Pont (an Amurican corporation highly praised and defended by our vice president and corporate owners of the great state of Delaware--our vice-president's adopted state) (check out how much We the People of the US have had to pay out to our own troops who developed cancer from their exposure to Agent Orange in Nam; then compare that with how much money Du Pont has had to give up for being the creators of Agent Orange, a true Weapon of Mass Destruction).
And we ended up leaving Vietnam with our tails tucked between our legs and by then President Richard Milhouse Nixon had gotten himself elected in spite of his being a crooked son of a bitch and began illegally bombing the bejesus out of Cambodia and wanting to drop a nuke on Hanoi along with his asslicking dickboy Henry "Heil Henry" Kissingassinger warmongering like crazy until the Cong kicked our asses in the Tet Offensive and we had to turn real tail and run (I saw that old fool (Hank Kissingassinger) still being pampered and seriously listened to the other day on a teevee talk show--amazing how people take that old geek seriously)--then finally caving in and creating the Paris Peace Treaty Convention where at first they argued over the tables, whether they should be square or round--no kidding...in the end, the Peace Treaty was a JOKE.
WE lost the Vietnam War--same as we lost the Persian Gulf War after Ronnie "Raygun" Reagan had wrecked our economy and put us into a huge national debt and we were in a bad RECESSION again and under Pappy Bush's New World Order Army we launched an attack on a Muslim nation from another Muslim nation, which is the real reason Osama Bin Ladin took a dislike to his employers--yes, Osama worked for us (hired by the CIA) in our taking up where Russia failed in trying to "control and own the wealth of" poor old constantly invaded and occupied for centuries Afghanistan--so check out Britain's experience in trying to invade and occupy Afghanistan back in the late 19 Century--one time invading and then being driven back out in a huge loss of Brit life--you know, it is my cynical belief that Britain (and the other colonialist nations--France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Spain) is responsible for all the current world WAR problems--the WAR between Palestine and Israel; the Iraqi situation; the Iranian situation; the Afghanistan situation; the Pakistan situation; the Indian situation; the problems in Indonesia; the problems in Kenya; the problems in Nigeria; the problems in the Sudan; the problems in Zimbabwe; the problems in Egypt; the problems in Bangladesh; the problems in South Africa; the problems in Burma, etc. Am I too harsh?
Pappy Bush's using Saudi-Arabia, where Mecca is, as a take-off point to invade Iraq set off a lot whacky Muslims inside Saudi-Arabia, where Osama's from, and where most of the 9/11 invaders and Al-Queda-said members were from--none from Afghanistan; not one a member of the Taliban, who aren't Al-Queda in case you've been trick-bagged by our government's huge big lying machine into believing they are. This shit was once called "propaganda," and the US always accused its enemies of using "propaganda" (read: enemy lies) against the good ole "Honest Abe" USA.
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prop·a·gan·da (pr
p
-g
n
d)n.
1. The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.
2. Material disseminated by the advocates or opponents of a doctrine or cause: wartime propaganda.
3. Propaganda Roman Catholic Church A division of the Roman Curia that has authority in the matter of preaching the gospel, of establishing the Church in non-Christian countries, and of administering Church missions in territories where there is no properly organized hierarchy.
[Short for New Latin Sacra Congreg
ti
d
Prpagand Fid, Sacred Congregation for Propagating the Faith (established 1622), from ablative feminine gerundive of Latin prpgre, to propagate; see propagate.]
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.ti d Prpagand Fid, Sacred Congregation for Propagating the Faith (established 1622), from ablative feminine gerundive of Latin prpgre, to propagate; see propagate.]---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So I'm not surprised to hear President Obama taking over his role as Commander in Chief, keeping in place all the "executive privileges" that Commander in Chief G.W. "Georgie Porgie" Bush forced on us, and leading us deeper into WAR--on the advice of Slick Willie Clinton and his wife now our Sec'y of State, who, I believe, is now running for president in 2012. She'll be dishin' out the dirt on Obama come 2010 when they all start running for President again (hey, that's next year already).
It's a cryin' shame, as old Bumblebee Slim would have sung about it. We are fattening frogs for snakes and President Obama is proving himself just as backward thinking as Junior Jumpshot Bush was--as backward thinking as Unka Dick Cheney--as backward thinking as Slick Willie, and Hillary, and Johnny Boy ("Wife Cheater") Edwards, and John (ex-DA/Vietnam Nutjob) Kerry, and John (Cap'n Fly Boy of the Failed Mission) McCain, and Sweet Sarah Paleface.
Notice the Dumbocrat Party bigwigs, Nancy Pelosi and Dr. Howard Dean, are trying to say public option healthcare is still an open subject--though We the People know that's bullshit. Howard Dean and his wife are successful doctors--you don't get to be successful doctors without hooking up with an HMO and learning how to turn in phony Medicare bills for a little extra income. These doctors rip off Medicare both Plan B and Plan D every year and still Medicare is the most economical way to give "beneficial" healthcare to every citizen.
My question to these Dumbocrat Town Hall Meetings on Healthcare? Why do you keep holding these stupid things? Or why, if you're gonna hold them, don't you throw out idiots who get up and try and distort the whole matter with backward thinking (Yahoo reasoning) that is 360 degrees away from the "truth" of the whole lie-entangled mess. Why don't the cops arrest these nutjobs like they used to protect goofball spoiled rich kid G.W. Bush when he spoke at a Repug party functions and We the People who hated him tried to protest his deadly nonsense? Like if you wore a teeshirt with Georgie Porgie's picture on it showing him wearing a Hitler moustache and a Nazi uniform (as Repugnican nutjob babe brought to a Vermont Town Hall Meeting and actually asked old Bernie Sanders a stupid Yahoo question) to a AntiBush Rally, you'd'a been arrested by the cops, beaten pretty badly, detained without charges for four or five days before finally being released, except on release you did have to make a court appearance where you were subject to jail time or having to pay a fine.
Give us the fuckin' National Healthcare, dammit. You've been promising it to us since the 1960s and the days of the New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society! And then I remember, this is not a democracy! This is a Republic. This is a republic ruled by aristocrats and a Power Elite comprising 1% of us yet owning 99% of our wealth (our land, our waters, our skies, our capital, our Capitol); thereby controlling the USA while We the People get poorer and more Third World every day.
Here's my point. The whole cause of our current trip down Chaos Lane are the two WARs that were started by an idiot man, a spoiled rich brat son of a crooked oil man, himself the son of a Connecticut politician who actually did business with Hitler while WWII was going on and was later investigated by Congress for that reason, both men business failures, G.W., the worthless son a failure at everything in life in everything he did except drinking bourbon and beer and snortin' cocaine with his marijuana-toking wife and going AWOL like the coward he is to avoid having to go to a WAR the Dumbocrats had started--and who became President when his brother Jeb (named after a Confederate general) threw out thousands upon thousands of Dumbocrat votes, thousands upon thousands of Black votes that went to the Dumbos, and forced over onto folks voting machines that were so crooked people were hollering, "Hey, I voted for Gore but this stupid machine said I voted for Bush Baby." And then it went to the rebel-yelling Supreme (Dunce) Court where those political-picked numbskulls decided, unConstitutionally, that G.W. had won, fuck whatever else was proven. Shortly thereafter, right after the Neo-Con Manifesto was shown to have the Neo-Cons saying we needed another "Pearl Harbor" to get we peacenik (Beatniks, Hippies, Yippies, Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, Black Muslims, Commies, Unifiers) Amuricans beaten back so they could foment another World War, we were attacked by 21 or so box-cutter-toting, still hungover from a night of drinking and whoring, Saudi-Arabians. Military geniuses evidently--goofball Saudis (yes, one Jordanian and another same-area dude) who didn't know how to fly 747s managed to like clockwork precisely fly two of these jumbo jets exactly directly at the right spots into the two World Trade Towers of over 110 stories--the right spots that brought these giant buildings straight down flat as a pancakes into the ground, amazingly straight down as if imploded--even the huge teevee tower on top of the one building coming straight down like an arrow with the falling building--an amazing military feat--a successful attack on the continental US, the first such since the Brits preemptively invaded us in 1812 and burned down the White (Man's) House! Actually, the third such since Pancho Villa successfully preemptively struck the USA by shooting up and burning down a bit of the burg of Columbus, New Mexico, back during the days of the Mexican Revolution and the days of the US Army under the command of a prig of a dude they called Black Jack Pershing. [New York City has a square named after Black Jack, but I doubt if many New Yorkers even know where it is--millions of them passing through it every morning and afternoon.] We were hoodwinked then and we're still being hoodwinked now.
I'm amazed to see old-fart (chicken-fart) Republican seniors at these Town Hall meetings shouting about how old people are going to be left to die by Obama's Socialized Medicine scheme--old farts who I guarantee you are on Medicare and couldn't afford any other healthcare without going back to work at Wal-Mart--I'm sorry, Wal-Mart now spells its name Wallmart (it should be named The Chinese Junk Shop).
So I'm trying to ignore President Obama saying that the Taliban and Al Queda were still out to kill Americans, to attack our cities, and do us harm. This man is supposedly highly intelligent--why he was editor of the Harvard Law Review or Journal or something or whatever--Hah-vard! Harv-vard! Where Southern racistsplantation families sent there sons--Hah-vard--no Jews or Niggers allowed until, hell, not that many years ago. Hah-vard. Yay-ell. The Eli. Dahrt-muth. Prince-maker-ton. Penn snobs. Aren't you sick of these schools training us! That's what Mark Twain said was wrong with us Americans. We were all trained monkeys. We were trained from birth--by our trained parents, by our "training" teachers in our training schools. Training us to be proper monkeys. Ready to jump through the hoop of flames at the trainer's command!
Yes, I heard Obama say we were seriously warring against the Taliban and Al-Queda and Pakistan and Afghanistan and ironically I read today where in the upcoming Afghan elections (Thursday), there is a proposition they'll be voting on which if passed will ask the US to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan's soil immediately. Isn't that a reason for the US to declare we're staying there for another decade. And each of those two WARS, listen to this, are costing us 220-million smackers A DAY! Amazing isn't it? It's a WAR economy, folks. And we have a President who approves both these phony WARS imposed on us by the WORST President in the history of this country; worse than Martin Van Buren and U.S. Grant or Warren G. Harding or Hoobert Heever--putting us the deepest ever in debt--deeper in debt than Reagan left us--DEEPER IN DEBT THAN HIS OWN FATHER GOT US--old jitterbug-shuffling Pappy Bush, still scootin' along at 89 along with his upperclass wife who just got the best damn healthcare We the People's money could buy with her little heart problem--the very best of healthcare thanks to We the People's generous healthcare plan we give our politicians whether we want to or not.
Sociology and Chaos
I recently sneaked a peek at the progress my Sociology intellectual pals have made over the past 40 years in deducing through natural science what the hell is going on in our society currently. I came across a book on Google entitled Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences. I jumped for joy.
By a pair of empiricists named Kiel and Elliott, the book starts off saying that new discoveries in natural science have led Sociologists to reconsider the Newtonian Paradigm (that things are predictable because there is a measurable (mathematically formulated) discipline to natural matter) through the emerging field of chaos theory. This field of chaos theory, Sociologically questions apparent certainty [I've never believed in certainty], linearity, and predictability that were previously seen as essential elements of a Newtonian universe. [I am paraphrasing Kiel and Elliott, two pretty brilliant dudes.] "The chaos theory is a means for understanding and examining many of the uncertainties, nonlinearities, and unpredictable aspects of social systems behavior" [from Krassner, 1990].
This is really old thinking as far as Sociologists go. Talk of the chaos theory started back in the 1960s when even economists like Von Hayek were writing about the unreliability of random sampling and certain measurements that before we'd thought were fairly correct, off by only say an .03 differentiation. In the chaos theory, i.e., through the butterfly effect, measurements can be off less than a millionth of a degree and still throw the whole of probability (estimation; prediction) in the garbage.
It's fascinating shit, but difficult shit, too; but then Sociologists have to be deep thinkers--they look backwards, yes, but only by going through past records and recordings and statistics and histories and piles of measured information including history and literature and language and perception and behavior and body motions to gain insight on the coming problematics wrought by this maze-like web we have woven ourselves into! Sociology is advancing (or evolving as Sociologists like to say) boldly into a very dark unknown--this chaos--and we better hope they can shed some light on what's going on in there--in that world of Mandelblot fractals, which are very chaotic--so there, Chaos can be beautiful as well as catastrophic.
Then these Sociologists, Kiel and Elliott, get deeply serious about their subject and start talking about "Cellular Automata," and I've got to put this damn book down--it's getting too deep for me. They are using statistical methods I've never heard of, though I can still read their formulae in terms of time and space and frequency distribution and plus-or-minus this or that or either more or less--little sigma and Big Sigma, the summation--and it's a'gettin' to be'a all'a Greek'a to me. That's from an old comedy record by Ernest and Billy Hare--"Hey, Nick'a, you gotta any German mustard?" "No gotta." "Well, have you got any English mustard?" "No gotta." "Well then what kind of mustard do you have?" "It's'a all'a Greek'a to me," Nick replied.
Get ready for perpetual WAR...no healthcare of any kind...and wonderful, wonderful Chaos! It'll give us all something to think about.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
The book is: Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences: Foundations and Applications
By L. Douglas Kiel, Euel W. Elliott
A The Daily Growler Sports Extra With Our Own marvelousmarvbackbiter
I feel like a god-damn fool. The Yankees are going hogwild--kicking American League ass all over the place--hitting like maniacs--getting 14 wins out of big fat C.C. Sabathia--finally putting Jabo Chamberlain in the 8th inning relief roll he should have been in all along--and son of a bitch, the Yankees are right now the best team by far in the majors.
The Mets. Forget 'em. They're finished. They're wrecked. They're 12 1/2 games out of first--though all serious Mets fans should remember them coming from many games back to overtake Atlanta years ago.
And another thing that's maybe making me look like a fool is that Joe Torre and the Dodgers are slipping badly lately--only 4 1/2 games up on the Colorado Rockies who are currently coming on like firecrackers--the division heating up--even though the Dodgers stopped the Cardinals win streak last night.
The Yankees aren't home free yet, they're now just 7 games up on Boston, with Boston coming into town this weekend for a series--and also, believe it or not, the Tampa Bay Exorcised Rays are showing a little streak-intent right now--Toronto and Baltimore--forget 'em; they'll be up for sale soon.
I still love baseball--like it's still the greatest game there is, but I'm still reeling from the bullshit that happened two years ago--with both the Mets and the Yankees--it's too bad such a great baseball city has to endure the amateurish actions of their teams's owners, both filthy rich spoiled brat sons of fathers who built successful businesses, which their sons then inherited and don't really give a shit about except it keeps 'em socializing in the realms of the Power Elite (sitting like Caesars in their luxury boxes, drinking that fine champagne and brandy with chippies on their laps while smoking those big thick illegal Cuban cigars which kill the ordinary workingman but not the pompous rich fools).
Oh well, my only hope this year is a Yankees-Dodgers World Series--though like the Wolf Man said just before my column began: nothing's predictable anymore.
marvelousmarvbackbiter
for The Daily Growler
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