Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The Daily Growler "A Zen Master's Time's Up" Issue

In this issue: the latest from thegrowlingwolf + a tribute to Zen Master Sheng-yen + an article about what Artists are doing to rebuild Detroit as a People's city from WorldChanging.com
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"One second you're here; the next second you're not."

That's what I was thinking as I stood looking down into a casket at that good, good friend of mine who was not there, just a stone replica of him--he didn't feel as fleshy as he really was as I patted his stone replica on the shoulder and said a perfunctory "So long, pal." Then outside on the sidewalk after the wake and I saw my good, good friend's distraught best friend, and I walked over to him and hugged him, and while we were embraced, he said, "It's a second-to-second ballgame, man, a fucking second-to-second ballgame," and then I knew we were on those famous parallel lines and now I'm thinking about looking upon a dead friend and reminding myself how you really are here, and I'm speaking self-awareness, one second and off the coil the next second. Like the pregnant woman who was walking along East 37th with her friend after work on their way to the subway to go home and this big drunk horny dude driving a shaggy looking white van (there are tons of wrecked-looking vans racing and rattling about the streets of New York City driven by guys under some kind of rage, guarantee you) and this drunken self-proclaimed prince of men suddenly spotted this pregnant babe walking along with her friend, this mother of three children, this pregnant mother, and suddenly he went, "Hot damn," backward thinking in his superior male brain, "a pregnant mama...they say that's when their pussies are sweetest and they want it sooo fucking bad...that's why they call it an oven when there's a baby in there" and so he puts the van in slow cruise and he leans drunkenly over and opens the ride-side door and starts cat calling at the babes, but especially the pregnant babe, you know, a typical male seduction method, "Hey, baby, you, pregnant mama, yeah, like hey sweet baby, how'd you like to come take a ride with a real daddy?" The male superiority rap--it's called "machismo" in the street--it's a part of a male's drive--all male's have it--even I have it walking along Manhattan streets sometimes, I mean there are some wonderfully beautiful women sashaying along the streets of Manhattan almost 24/7--even the prostitutes are the best (ask Elliott Spitzer), and, yes, I, too, know about the male legend that says pregnant women are supposed to be the hottest and the wantonest at that time, you know, really "great" (a male sexual bragging term) in the sack! All us males have heard it first hand from our older male brothers or our friends who get married before us and have babies right off the bat; and we've all heard male stories about "gettin'" a pregger and how "great" it is. And suddenly, our drunken superior male macho man falls toward the open door and in an attempt to save his ass from falling out he grabs the steering wheel turning the van hard to the right at the same time he presses his foot brace like against the gas peddle--and zoom goes the rickety old van up over the curb ripping across the sidewalk to crash into the side of a building. In the process of saving his drunken ass, which he did, he came out of the crash unsoiled and uninjured and unbothered about the whole thing, the van hit the pregnant babe dead on, slamming her and her friend into the building, the friend badly injured was thrown away from the wall to allow the van to drive the pregnant babe straight slam-dead into that brick wall of that building. One man who ran to help these women said when he looked at what was once the pregnant woman, he began to upchuck. He said he couldn't bear to look at that bloody, pulpy, meaty, gutty mess. The pregnant mother of three was ground up like sausage meat by that killer van. All because males are animals like any male animals. They have drives that are sometimes uncontrollable; they are mentally scared already by who knows what kind of growing-up male experiences and legends he fell under. In the old societies a male accidentally killing a pregnant woman wouldn't have made much of a splash on the evening news, unless it was an inferior male accidentally killing a superior male's woman--then of course, the inferior male would be headed toward the noose or the chopping block.

I was with my feminist wife at one of the first meetings of the National Organization of Women here in New York City. My wife was a charter member of NOW. And one day she ask me to go with her to a meeting. At that time NOW was letting males, spouses and boyfriends and those into the cause, come to their meetings. The one I attended was the last meeting they allowed this to happen. The reason they banned men at NOW meetings after that? Because the men tried to interfere in their plans and TEACH them about what plans they had that were progressive and what plans they had that would hinder their progressness rather than aiding it. And this meeting discussed one such controversial stance NOW was taking: that of defender of a woman's right to decide what to do with her body, which meant, her right to decide whether to get an abortion or not, a right, the Fems said, should be hers alone and not the decision of some superior male moralist. Rowe vs. Wade was before the Supreme Court--and the Equal Rights Amendment was being offered for Constitutional status among the 50 states where it was looking for ratification (poor confused Rowe would years later become a fundie Christian and rebuke the sin she had committed against the Holy Jazzu, Jesus X. Christ, who, by the bye, was probably gay, all signs point to it: excessive love of his mother; never marrying; women hangin' with him; him hangin' with men, muy macho men. But Old Jesus the Essene Jew did support whores, and mothers, and women with blood-flow issues, and fallen women--as long as they ask him forgiveness for their sins and gave up their worldly possessions and became his possessions!).

"Thou shalt not KILL," the stupid Ten Commandments yells, and yet God Algoddamnmighty killed at will and over nothing and big-time when he killed; and the Jews killed--hell, the Jews according to the Holy Book of the Holier-Than-Us Christians killed their own Messiah, dumbasses! But, nope, not the just plain ole workingclass folk. They are forbidden to kill. Nor can they covet their neighbor's wife either, nor his land, nor his cattle (and isn't it ironic that the Ten Commandments are written as though guides for superior males?--not really aimed at any women--male rules written by the biggest male of all and handed down to Brother Moses, a macho male, who pitched the Big Stones down and broke 'em to smithereens when he came down off the Holy Mount and saw his bro Aaron with his Rod out whipping it at a bunch of naked Jewish babes dancing around a Golden Calf, GOLD being the true Messiah, fuck the Ten Commandments).

And these religious sons'a bitches, these backers of the coat-hanger back-alley abortionists (those approved by the AMA and the Supreme Court), said, based on the Ten Commandments, based on Holy Father Laws, based on Male-to-Male Power Elite rules and regulations, going under the ancient assumption that women are the possessions of men, same as cattle, same as land, they holier-than-we decided vacuuming out a fetus, an undeveloped human monkey (and a monkey fetus looks just like a human monkey fetus), not even in the tadpole stage yet, is murder in the first degree. Abortionists should DIE, some fundie Christ promoters screamed; and some fundie rads really did take their orders straight from the big male God and they went out and murdered abortion doctors in the name of the Father, Son, and Holier-Than-Thou Ghost, and they blew up Planned Parenthood offices and shot up abortion clinics and relentlessly harassed women coming to those clinics to save their lives and save having to have an unwanted baby, not necessarily an unloved baby, but an unwanted baby--a baby to be one day abandoned and left alone like the monkey tribes leave abandoned baby monkeys alone and on their own after their mothers are killed for bush meat or sport and their fathers are long gone up the trail of another female monkey coming into heat. Ironically, when these fetuses develop into hearty, rampantly horny 18 year olds, we round them up and send them off to wars to die in for the freedom of a bunch of senile old farts with invincible White Male ruling powers and the salvation of the next batch of fetuses that will produce another half-a-million or so more replacement troops for the wars our elders need to keep going into order for them to enjoy the many sports one gets to play in life when they are rich as sin, the 1% owners of 99% of our wealth; therefore the owners of all of us and all of our children; therefore the masters of us all; therefore....

"Here today, gone tomorrow"
http://www.yunchtime.net/misc/shengyen.jpg

Taiwan's Buddhist Master Sheng-yen dies

TAIPEI (AFP) — Venerable Master Sheng-yen, one of the most respected Buddhist monks in Taiwan, died Tuesday aged 80, his temple said.

Sheng-yen, who had kidney disease, died at around 4:00 pm (0800 GMT) at the Dharma Drum Mountain Buddhist complex in northern Taipei county, the temple said.

President Ma Ying-jeou said in a statement he was "saddened and shocked upon hearing the news" about the death of Sheng-yen, who the president said is "good at the use of language to touch people".

"The concept of spiritual conservation he advocated is not only religion but philosophy and attitude of living," Ma said, referring to the monk's relentless efforts to press for peace and a simple way of living.

In 1998 Sheng-yen was named by the popular CommonWealth Magazine among 50 people who have had the greatest influence on Taiwan over the past 400 years.

As a Buddhist Zen school master, he taught a number of celebrities, including Chinese martial arts actor Jet Li as well as Lin Hwai-min, founder and artistic director of Taiwan's Cloud Gate Dance Theatre.

The master was born in China's eastern Jiangsu province and became a Buddhist monk at the age of 14. He joined the Kuomtiang army in 1949 and fled to Taiwan with the Kuomintang troops after they were defeated by the Chinese communist forces at the end of a civil war.

He became a monk again in 1959 and trained in solitary retreat for six years in southern Taiwan. He completed a master's degree in 1971 and doctorate in Buddhist literature in Japan in 1975.

He became abbott of Nung Chan Monastery in suburban Taipei in 1979 and in 1989 founded the International Cultural and Educational Foundation of Dharma Drum Mountain.

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Dharma Master Sheng-yen has been on New York City cheap-channel, after-midnight teevee here for years. I liked watching him because each program he was introduced by a cute Chinese woman who before he lectured explained Master Sheng-yen's Zen philosophy (I had listened to Alan Watts lectures on Buddhism out in California and had read Alan's book on East-West psychology, plus who hadn't read Professor D.T. Zuzuki's Zen books? or Paul Rep's Zen Flesh! Zen Bones! (isn't that where the one-hand clapping comes from?--it's been a long time, folks)). Master Sheng-Yen then would lecture in Chinese with English translations crawling along at the bottom of the screen. I never read the translations--I hate trying to do that and watch the action at the same time--even at foreign films I watch the picture, fuck the translation--I can pretty much understand what the actors are saying by the screen images and actions--so I'd watch Master Sheng-yen spin out his bullshit in his native language. Master Sheng-yen had escaped with his mortal god, old sorry-ass, murdering asshole Chung Kai'shek, the Big Daddy of the Taiwan Chinese, who by the bye easily massacred the Formosans who once knew Taiwan as their sovereign nation: Formosa (beautiful island), their native land--but, oh no, Chunk-of-shit Kai'shek knew the Final Solution to this sort of human problem. But Master Sheng-yen, once he got set up in the keiko-muckity-muck ranks of the Taiwanian Buddhist World of Shenanigans, he became a Dharma Master, a Zen Master! And Master Sheng-yen was a master drummer, too. I've seen him drumming on his teevee show. And he lived on Drum Mountain in Northern Taiwan. Master Sheng-yen, by the way, is the source for the character Master Pi of Shangra-La on the PBS kiddie show Cyberchase--Master Pi's voice is that of Geoffrey Holder. That's a good kiddie show--about math--well written and produced, too.

A few days after the death of Master Sheng-yen (from kidney failure--teadrinker?), his rich patron in Hong Kong, the guy who paid for his cheap-channel teevee show here in NYC, up and died. Thus, I was sad to hear the nice-looking Chinese lady on the last Master Sheng-yen show I saw say it truly was the last Master Sheng-yen show now that Master Sheng-yen and his el patron were off the mortal coil. On top of Drum Mountain one day; 6-feet under the next; except I'm sure Master Sheng-yen was cremated! Aren't Buddhist monks cremated?--funeral pyred and set loose to sail off to Nirvana on the Yangtze or something?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Are Artists Maybe the 21st Century Messiahs? Check Out What They're D0ing in Detroit


Artists, Foreclosures and the Ruins of the Unsustainable

Klint Finley

Although it is small consolation in the face of overwhelming economic strife in Detroit and elsewhere as the foreclosure crisis continues, this story gave me a real feeling of hope and renewal. To me, this example and other corresponding cases – like the artist-driven re-imaginings of shopping malls and big box stores seems symbolic of an even larger cultural shift. The arts community isn’t just moving into one downtrodden urban neighborhood; rather, they’re taking on the ruins of the unsustainable. They’re taking on big box stores, shopping malls, and grid-connected homes in the car capitol of North America. And they’re not just creating new art. They’re seizing the opportunity to turn old shells of buildings into independent, renewable energy-powered, 21st century-ready spaces.

What I’m most eager to hear next is that creative pioneers are conquering McMansions in the suburban hintersprawl. As Bryan Walsh wrote recently for Time Magazine, “The Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech predicts that by 2025 there will be a surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (on one-sixth of an acre [675 sq m] or more) in the U.S.”

Will subdivisions be turned into workshops and performance spaces? Or possibly into small-scale agricultural communities, or enclaves for artisan food-production? At the very least, will they become denser, transit-connected and less car-dependent … and what will drive that?

Full Story: WorldChanging

Monday, March 30, 2009

Guide to Backward Thinking #3 w/thegrowlingwolf

In this issue: "We're Monkeys" from thegrowlingwolf and an article on JACK SPICER from wood s lot
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We're Monkeys!

I was listening to a woman discussing "childhood" problems this morning and while I was listening to her, I thought, this is what Philip Wylie meant by "Momism"--our notion that we must always do what "mother" wants us to do. Mom to boy: "Go comb your hair, you look a mess." Boy's response: "Aww, ma, I don't wanna comb my hair. None of the kids at school comb their hair." Mom's response: "You mind me, young man, or you're father will hear of this tonight when he gets home from work and he'll whup your hide tonight after I tell him how beligerent you were with me about this matter." Boy's response: "OK, mother, OK, I'll go comb my hair." Under the boy's breath: "I'll show that bitch. Maybe I'll get a Mohawk like Jimmy Brash has." Yep. That's how this "mother" was talking this morning in discussing "childhood" problems. She then began to praise young people, talking about how independently smart they were (Mom's are always pretending their children are smart), how innovative they are (Mom's, being subservient in this Male-controlled culture are constantly trying to prove they are just as smart and creative as Men)--and it end's up, a bunch of brighter-than-the-average-bear girls had started their own Indie magazine on "Teenage" problems and solutions to those problems. I was saying, "Yes, hot damn, that's the spirit; that's how you teach teenagers, you let them discover things for themselves." But Mom had some doubts about teenagers figuring out their own problems though she was still pleased as Punch with the fact these were girls, second they were smart, and third, they were taking matters in their own hands since the adults supposed to teach them were teaching them, yes, but were teaching them to be.... And into my mind popped "Circus Performers." And, yep, that's it, folks. We are teaching our kids to be circus acts--yep. You see, instinctually our Moms know we really are monkeys. Check out a Monkeytown--and there are plenty of Monkey shows on PBS television and the Nature and Discovery CABLE shows--Jack Hanna's always got a special-edition monkey show for you; or, hell, there's a little monkey cartoon character that runs on PBS children's programming (all sponsored mainly by the Helena Rubinstein Foundation--isn't that interesting?). In a Monkeytown, baby monks don't need a father. Fuck fathers. When fathers are around--usually when they're horny for mother--they're mean and rough and kick the shit out of the kids; so fuck fathers in the Monkey World. But moms! A little monkey is lost without a mother. The mother is salvation to a baby monkey, male or female, though both will grow up to become industrious females or Power Elite males or those who kowtow to Power Elite males. The big daddy. Every Monkeytown has a Big Daddy.

We consider ourselves above the definition of "animal." We consider ourselves not Natural-born beings but Supernaturally born beings. We weren't conceived in the trees of the jungle. Oh no. We were conceived in the mind of our Big Daddy, whose a big huge mountain silverback, I assume, backward-thinking monkey, and birthed in the wombs of our immaculate MOTHERS. Our fathers, too, have nothing to do with us, if you stop and think about it. Even in a gay marriage, the more feminine one becomes the industrious one, the child bearer and teacher, which is what "raising" children really means. We are in fact "taming" ("domesticating") our wild-born children and in the process, we are teaching them to be circus performers, to perform the proper tricks in order to succeed in this Male world--this world of subservience if you're a girl child; this world of constantly proving your manhood if you're a boy child. We are born under the curse of "Honor thy father and thy mother." First of all, what if you don't have a father or a mother? Or what if you do have a father but he's a wimp and wants nothing to do with you. "Get away, kid, you bother me." And that's the worst training children face in trying to justify their instinctual feelings with those of these strangers, these giants, these adults who either offer you love and affection and attention or deny you those needs. Or, what if you're born to half-tamed parents; in other words, parents who got trapped when they were half-trained, you know, with still a "wildness" in their "natures" (their characters), a wildness to control other child-like beings with beatings, pushing their disobedient children's heads under water until they're almost drowned, or chaining them to walls in closets or basements, or perhaps making them crawl around on linoleum floor covered with cracked corn. Obedience! Adults demand obedience! Same as prison guards! Parents expect teachers to be animal trainers first class. When I was a Social Worker in New Orleans back in Great Frontier days, I guarantee you every day a Mother would come to me saying, "Mr. Wolf, I can't do a thing with this child. He's, how do you guys say, incorrigible? I don't know what else to do with him, Mr. Wolf. So I've told him, I'll turn him over to you guys and let's see if you can handle him. I give up, Mr. Wolf." My advice was, "Get the hell out of here. Take that boy home and sit him down and asked him what his inspirations are. Like ask him what he's seen of life that impresses him! Like buy him books to read...or buy him a guitar...or a piano...throw your teevee out the window...." "But, Mr. Wolf, I'm so busy. I got six other children...blah, blah, blah."

Moms. But, you see, we need our Moms! Look at little monkeys left without moms. Their fathers leave them spinning in the middle of a dead-end road for all they care--their dads abandon them and chase on down the road horny for a female to replace the child's lost mother. Unless some outcast monkey mother adopts it, the little monkey is left behind to fend for itself or to simply drop out of the trees to lay limp on the floor of the jungle to be eaten by a predator. "Ah, tasty. I love fresh-killed baby monkey! Ah what a meal. Now for a little snooze," thus spaketh the predator. Yet, our moms are leading us down the wrong path. Our moms are trying to convince us we are children supernaturally conceived; fuck Darwin, they try and teach us, Darwin's this dude we call the Devil. Whoaaaa. Right there's when children start rebelling. We love the natural, the cool: like first of all snuggling up against our mother's warm chest to instinctually know where those breasts are and to instinctually know that those breasts both contain a thing called a nipple, and they know where those nipples are and what those nipples mean, and we don't have to be taught what to do with those nipples. Mom sticks one in our mouths and soon we're sucking away to beat sixty. Happy as a baby boy with a brand new choo-choo toy. And breasts become toys for us, objects of pleasure, salvation from starving to death--why those of us who don't get some titty end up sucking our thumbs. Or if we get a plastic pacifier, oooh, nasty plastic, we start sucking our thumbs--our thumbs are big nipples--aha.

Backward thinking begins at home. With the mother. That's what Philip Wylie was saying. It's our mothers who either turn us into schizo-psychopaths or behavioral perfections--little devils or little angels. Sometimes, abandoned children are more artistic that coddled kids.

I enjoyed reading Anais Nin's diaries back when Anais Nin was given her last respects by American women and her diaries and her sexual dream book became her accepted masterpieces. In the diaries, Anais struggles with her love for her handsome, profligate, classical pianist father, her deep sexual love for her father, even intimating in dream-like states that her father may have fucked her as a girl child, and her obedience to the laws of her mother. Henry Miller amused that though Anais was the best piece of pussy he'd ever had in his life getting involved with her sexually was like being gradually eaten by a black widow spider--you know, they eat the heads off their lovers as their lovers are ejaculating!

My mother, I now realize, was much smarter than my father, though she lacked his wit and his great sense of humor. My dad was a typical male of the day. He was allowed to grow up on his own, the youngest of 5 boys, with four older brothers to raise him. My mother was raised by a single mom--she lost her father when she was 12--for the rest of her life she pined for her father who she used to tell me was such a soothing father--he smoked a pipe and she would talk about how the smell of pipe tobacco always reminded her of her father (ironically, smelling pipe tobacco made my father deathly sick)--and she had a photograph of her sitting on his lap on the porch of her childhood home--and that photo represented perfect peace to her--and sure enough, in the photo her father's puffing on his pipe and looking very proud of his pretty little daughter as he performs his fatherhood as best he knew how--then right after that photo, he up and died on her; and she was there while he was dying--he was moved out on a back porch away from the family because he had what was called catarrh, which is now, I think, just simply known as tuberculosis or pneumonia. Cataarh was known as a "housepainter's disease"--and though my grandfather wasn't a housepainter, he was a sign painter--his beautiful signs stretched from Beaumont, Texas, over in East Texas, all the way along the highways west all the way over to Houston and Galveston. And as a hobby he raced automobiles--and my mother had a photo also of her father in his racing car, an EMF--and my mother had an older brother and he was named the same as the father but he was the opposite of the father; her brother was contemptuous of everyone except beautiful tragic women who he spent fortunes seducing and marrying--he wanted my mother and her sister to develop their sexual attractions to the hilt and end up marrying a rich dude and living like princesses for the rest of their lives. He taught his sisters rugged individualism as their substitute father. And why shouldn't he, he was raised by a single-parent woman, a hard-as-nails White pioneer woman who had lived in dugout houses off in the wilds of the Western prairies--prairies still swarming with Native Americans and ex-Confederate Soldiers who formed raiding parties and were called "Nightriders" by the prairie folk--and she lived with rattlesnakes, pumas, panthers, Gila Monsters, scorpions--and she was a female rugged individualist and naturally her son, who she allowed to develop in his own ways, became a rugged individualist, too!

My mother was not prepared to deal with children. She was prepared to deal with adults. And that's the kind of mothering I got. No titty. My mother couldn't conceive of a child sucking on her small breasts--yet, my father loved her "dinners," as he called them...and I've seen him just come up behind her and reach his hands around and squeeze her breasts and laugh his silly laugh and look at her with his silly grin. I knew what "Stop that!" meant. I knew "Stop that" meant "Ohhh, go right ahead and squeeze 'em silly." Was that backward thinking?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

From wood s lot


Jared White
Consider the name “Jack.” The poet Jack Spicer certainly did. His poetry, finally available after a long period of out-of-print obscurity, echoes through with references to his own name. A poem of admonition is wryly presented “To Jack;” in another poem the “Jack of Spades” materializes in a deck of tarot cards; in a third, an invocation of Shoeless Joe Jackson reshuffles the syllables into the boxer Jack Johnson, Jacks and Jacksons multiplying in an aural hall of mirrors. Even the poetry journal that Spicer briefly published in mimeograph went by the suggestive initial, J, a mere letter away from the autobiographical I. We may not all yet know Jack Spicer, but we all know Jack.(....)

At the heart of his work is a paradox: Spicer means to produce a “pure poetry” that is self-sufficient, magical and ecstatic, yet he freely draws from his own relationships, his obsessions and interests, his thoughts and fantasies and wishes and swoons. He published his work in his lifetime only in small editions barely distributed outside San Francisco (and even in the city he sometimes avoided major poetry bookstores like Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights). Yet his poetry seeks a conversation that is culturally wide-ranging and engaged with the publishing world, if in a conflicted, splenetic way. His last book, the posthumously published Book of Magazine Verse, proposes a series of poems dedicated to the major periodicals of the day, none of which would have been likely to publish his work. Most would probably have rejected his submissions, if he submitted at all. Thus, this title dramatizes Spicer’s ambivalence: how would parodic “magazine verse” differ from some other kind of poetry, and how can it remain “magazine verse” when published in a book? Ultimately, Spicer implies, this is a question of integrity, of whether poetry advances a poet’s professional, worldly agenda, or speaks for itself.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Guide to Backward Thinking #2

In this issue: the growlings of thegrowlingwolf/plus an article from Anti-Fascist Calling on Pakistan's involvement in Afghanistan/Taliban/Al-Queda mess Obama is marching us into.
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Red Eye Special

I've been listening to cassette tapes--then transferring them to a CD format and then squeezing them out into iTunes where I put them through an equalizer board and then burn them back onto a final CD. I've found these great blank CDs at a Staples in my neighborhood, French leftovers; yeah, French all over the packaging; but they're good, high-quality...

...and speaking of my neighborhood, here in New York City we have the wonderful opportunity to have a mayor who's worth more money than all the gods put together and he's suddenly decided he's so rich he must be a superman in terms of running the wicked city of New York so he's issued a Mayoral Bull that says he's free to run for an illegal third term as mayor whether anybody wants him to or not. He had his announcement party yesterday in Queens--in Queens because the head of the City Council, this Queens gal, has her nose big time up his gnarly old smelly ass--buried so deep in there she can't see the truth for all his bullshit. Plus, Bloomie represents the real estate industry and they own the City Council and the Mayor's office and this bunch of political parasites are sucking the people of the City of New York dry--the Metropolitan Transit Authority is broke again and they're raising fares and commuter tickets--this pool of political rich-boy flim-flammers have been claiming they're broke every year I've lived in New York City--and every year since I've lived here the public transportation fares have gone up. A subway token was 15 cents when I came to NYC and soon zoomed from 15 to 35 cents, then higher, then higher, up to $1, then higher, eventually getting the fares up to today's $2.oo, soon to be $2.50, and, of course, then soon to be $3.00. The Staten Island Ferry, a great NYC asset, what a great trip, was 5 cents when I came to NYC. Believe it or not, I've ridden the Staten Island Ferry when there were only a handful of people on the decks--it's great to ride the ferry hanging over a rail as she plows past the Statue of Liberty and noses towards the Staten Island terminal--then coming back you can sit and watch the goofy passengers until you're aimed right at the Manhattan skyline, then you head up front again as the ferry aims its sights toward the South Ferry terminal--a moment when you are out in the middle of the most beautiful harbor in the world looking toward the most magnificent skyline in the world--a marvelous occasion for a New York City person.

I've never stayed long on Staten Island, but my old friend the photographer used to go out to the southeastern end of Staten Island, out past the Verazano Narrows, looking out across the Atlantic or back onto the NY Harbor, and he would sometimes sit out there all night contemplating the universe of land, sea, and sky that lay before him. He and I loved contemplating scenes like that in those younger days, those poetic days, those highly romantic days. We used to stand on the walkway high up on the 59th Street Bridge and contemplate the world looking down the East River--that walkway's no longer open I think though I haven't been over around that bridge--I used to live under it--in at least 15 years--just like I haven't ridden the Staten Island Ferry in maybe 20 years--and I've never been out to the Statue of Liberty. I've always felt the Statue of Liberty has nothing to do with me--besides it's sotten with tourists and I can't stand tourists. But this little prick mayor we have loves tourists. He says that's the major industry now in NYC! Can you imagine! Tourism is the largest industry in NYC. All your fashions used to be thought up, designed, created, and then retailed out of NYC; all the big textile mills used to have their headquarters here in NYC--and the publishing industry was here--where is it now?--Berlin? And everything you bought anywhere carried a New York City headquarters address--I don't even think New York cheesecakes are made in New York anymore. I mean, the most powerful chefs in New York City now are British chefs--can you imagine! When I was in England, we joked long and hard about how bland and dull and just like the snobby Brits the food was! I was watching the latest Brit chef wunderkin on the Food Network the other day, and I was wondering, where the hell did this guy learn how to cook, and he was talking that stupid nonsense chefs talk about these days, like "carmelizing"--that's a big key word among these popping-up-like-mushrooms Brit chefs these days--and they put that awful raspberry sauce scrawled around their small portion main courses--a thumb-size piece of meat covered in a pesto of some kind, prissied up with mint leaves or sprigs of parsley--ah the presentation! What a presentation!..."But this tastes like shit." There's no where anymore for a home boy like me to get some stick-to-my-ribs American food cooked by somebody who grew up learning from his or her best family cooks how to cook food the American way--like how about bringing me out some ham hocks and red beans cooked with onions, tomatoes, and several big helpings of fat back, salt, pepper, garlic--hell yes, now that's cookin' to me. I don't like Brit music and I damn sure don't like Brit cooking! I want banana pudding and peach cobbler and chocolate meringue pies and sugar-cured hams and bacons--but now that's considered deadly food--though my elders were raised on that cooking and even the heavy drinkers and smokers in my old family lived into their seventies with no problems--most of the women living into their 80s and 90s; they lived on beans and fat back, hardtack, biscuits, hush puppies, tea cakes, cornmeal mush, farina, fresh garden vegetables, dandelion and wild onion salads, fresh ears of corn, busted-open-in-the-fields watermelons and cantaloupes--real red ripe tomatoes--now some Brit's lecturing me on what great cooking is! Julia Child, that snob, she brought that European cooking to the US. The French food I used to eat in New Orleans before Julia existed was ten times better than anything I ever ate cooked using Julia's "old" French cooking methods--she was a privileged housewife with a bureaucratic (spy) husband--and while hubby was doing his spying, Julia went to French cooking school.

And this asshole mayor of ours is adamantly opposite whatever the people of New York City need--everything under him is being gentrified, rezoned (he's turned traditionally low-rise NYC neighborhoods into hi-rise neighborhoods), and he's made it easy-as-pie for his real estate developer pals to steal land out from under us and he's giving them big tax breaks to develop mostly hotels and expensive places for rich people to own! Except there are a lot of new hi-rise luxury condo buildings with big "Now Renting" signs out in front of them these stock-market-diving days; one of them right up the street from me with "Now Renting" signs all over its front sidewalk area. There are six huge hi-riser condos (averaging 32 floors) behind me. All six show mostly empty apartments. You learn how to spot empty apartments in hi-rises when you've lived in the heart of NYC as long as I have. Think of living on say the 50th floor of one of these hi-rises and you're the only tenant living on the floor and there are no tenants on the floors above you and several floors below you. Empty apartments. And you never know when the building management is going to rent out its empty apartments as hotel rooms--to transitory tenants--they do it; my landlord does it; it's illegal, but they all do it. Running for a third term for Mayor of NYC is illegal, too, but our billionaire mayor is going ahead and doing it anyway. Here's how that's unfair. Bloomberg is willing to spend 3o million dollars out of his own pocket to run for mayor--plus he'll get real estate money and City Council approval and he'll be running ads 24/7 on teevee about all the great things his pompous little ass has done for NYC. I myself can't name one good thing he's done for this city. Before the Wall Street stealings began, this prick of a mayor was bragging about how big a surplus NYC had in its budget! A couple'a years later he's now saying we're 8 billion bucks in the hole. How we got that way, oh, we're too dumb and poor to understand such "big figures." These criminal assholes! You can't get rid of them. They are like weeds. Even if you shoot them up with Monsanto's Roundup (a toxic poison more dangerous to humans than weeds), they pop right back up the next election year.

How refreshing it would have been had Obama been a sincere voice and action figure for change; for a whole new way of doing business for We the People--an END to THOSE STUPID, BREAKING-OUR-ASSES WARS! US troops out of Iraq!--just get them the fuck out of there--leave that billion-dollar embassy to the Iraqi people--maybe they can make a mosque or a royal palace out of it! And get the fuck out of Afghanistan, too--and not like Obama's doing, putting more US troops in there!--first he said 25,000; now he's adding 12,000 more after adding 17,000 more--who the hell knows what's going on in that wretched and unecessary war over there? Russia warned us about how you couldn't win in Afghanistan. We the People through our crooked and drug-dealing assassinating CIA created Osama bin Laden--he was a fucking nobody until we brought him to Afghanistan to help us and the Mujaheddin kick the Taliban's Islamic asses out of there--while our poster boy Osama bin Laden was fabricating his Al-Queda terrorist organization--with US weapons and CIA approval. And how about this Karsai, We the People's puppet president of Afghanistan. I mean he's an oil thief and his brother is the leading heroin producer in the country. Keep it in the family, I say. What a life! The truth being: Afghanistan is necessary for us to control as we try and control all oil in that region--Afghanistan important not only because it borders Iran, but it's also a major oil transport state--moving the oil down from Central Asia to oil-poor Europe where it sells like hot cakes.

Yet, Obama, now that he's Commanader in Chief is letting that POWER go to his head. You don't know how powerful the legend of being President of the United States makes you feel. Remember, we live under the legend still that we are the richest and most powerful (militarywise) country in the world no matter our current state of bankruptcy and worn-out military. Hey, Obama gets saluted now! You know how powerful that makes you feel? Have you ever had the power to make underlings have to salute you? I was a second lieutenant in the horribly corrupt US Army and poor jerky kids had to salute my ass or I could order them to drop and give me "20"--push ups that is. I never did it. I treated my troops like brothers and as a result I got warnings all the time from The Old Man (the Company Commander) to not fraternize with the troops--the underlings--'cause you're gonna have to lead them into battles in which they might all be decimated. There were no women soldiers (what a misnomer) in my army days--when we saw a woman on base, we went howling wolf mad! Even an old general's old lady looked masturbationally hot to us horny base-bound soldiers. Remember, in the military, there are no Constitutional rights; there's only the Military Code of Conduct; otherwise, unless you're an officer you're a SLAVE!...though, guess what, even the officers are slaves to the US Military ideal--a legend as fictional as Jesus X. Christ.

I have splattered my brains all over this post--I'm angry--but I'm happy, too. I'm listening to cassette tapes I made starting back in 1984. Tapes I made at rehearsals and jam sessions a little clump of NYC blues & jazz musicians attended back in those days--all of them featuring myself and theryefarmerfromqueens--I already have 7 hour-long CDs and I'm still in September of '84. I'm making these CDs for theryefarmerfromqueens wife especially--I've left a lot of her husband jawin' away on various topics on these CDs--a lot of conversation--I want her to feel like her man is still alive--and he is on these tapes. I have five more hour-and-a-half cassette tapes to go in '84 and next there's a pile of 12 hour-and-a-half cassettes for 1985, forget 1986 and 1987. I'm estimating I'll get about ten hour-long CDs out of this mess of tapes now scattered all around my floor in front of my cassette deck, CD recorder, and sound board I'm pumping the cassette sounds through before they record on the CD before this is over--10, hell, I see at least 20 down there on that messy floor.

A work of love; and musicians love doing this kind of stuff. We love recording ourselves; most of us hate studio recording under the rulership of a stupid recording engineer who knows not one damn snittin' shit about music. Like when you record a vocal in a recording studio--oh how faked up it becomes--totally Pro-Tooled into something magnificent, though as opposite the passion of a live performance as one can get; that's why commercialized music sounds so boiled beef, as in British cooking.

Red Eye Special in my head refers to Rusty "Fire-eater" Bryant's great 60's tune of the same name.
http://www.concordmusicgroup.com/artists/images/Rusty_Bryant.jpg
Rusty "The Fire-Eater" Bryant--Rusty left the mortal coil in 1991.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

From The Anti-Fascist Calling: an article on this Afghanistan mess!! Good read; necessary Daily Growler reading

Sunday, March 29, 2009

As Washington Escalates Military Operations, American Officials "Discover" ISI-Taliban Nexus

Long considered the realm of "conspiracy buffs" The New York Times, citing anonymous "American government officials," have belatedly "discovered" that Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI) is aiding the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

That ISI operatives were reportedly involved in planning the 9/11 attacks, the ostensible reason for the 2001 U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan remains as they say, "off the table." Yet, as The History Commons reports, Operation Diamondback uncovered a 2001 plot jointly-run by ISI operatives and organized crime figures to illegally purchase weapons, including Stinger missiles and nuclear components, for the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

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Read the rest here:

antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2009/03/as-washington-escalates-military.html

Saturday, March 28, 2009

The Daily Growler Backward Thinking Issue--Tribute to Citizen Kafka

In this issue: thegrowlingwolf's latest growling/a Tribute to Citizen Kafka/and an article from Rolling Stone by Mike Taibbi, a The Daily Growler kind of writer!!!

Onward Christian Soldiers

Listen to the brilliant backward thinking of this little Canadian snit who right now is the hot item on the Christian flim-flam griddle. In talking about how he has been called to go into every country in the world to "preach the Gospel" and how he's just back from a big "miracle service" in Brazil--and, you know, I saw an argument t'other day on the Internet over whether we should spell Brazil with a "z" or an "s" and I'm thinking about how that's backwards thinking, too. Who the hell gives a damn how Brazil is spelled? That's like admitting Brazil is the indigenous name of Brazil (a Portuguese word meaning "ember" because of the Brazilwood tree's red ember-like wood and the red dye you can make from grinding the soft wood into a powder). Anyway, back to this little wanker from Toronto preaching his Gospel to the heathen of Braz(s)il: I decided to see for myself just who the hell the heathen Brazilians really are. The reason for Brazil is due to Christianity. Aha, you say! Yes, the reason for Brazil was not to discover India, as was Chris Colombo's wacky notion as he hit shore in what he thought was India, thus "Indians." On the other hand, Vasco de Gama had already been to India--and he came to South America from a different angle. He saw the Brazilians as savages, nonhuman jungle animals. He heard their many languages as animal gruntings. He spoke Portuguese, which when spoken rapidly probably sounded like monkey chatter to a Native American Brazilians (like on first hearing Vasco de Gama declare them nothing but jungle monkeys).

Portugal at that time thought they ruled the world. They also loved under the ruse of saving their souls enslaving savages. Portugal sits out on this western extension of Europe with Spain up their butt but the open Atlantic Ocean spread out in front of them, toward the west, their way of escape--the same as all migrations that started on the west coasts of Europe--"Go West, young man" even carried over into the White American's way of thinking (backwards thinking?). The sea became their way of possible national salvation, a chance to once and for all bring to reality the many fables, myths, poems, stories about what lay beyond that vast Western horizon, the exotic lands out there and the possessions those lands possibly contained, so they became great ship designers, builders, sailors, navigators, celestial device manufacturers, compass manufacturers and there developed out of all this seaworthy knowledge a profession of explorers, bold venturers who with backing from the Royal High-asses, set sail into the Western Sun! And these bold adventurers with their less-than trustworthy crews carried along with them, for luck and possible need of divine intervention beyond the power of the King's flag, Jesuit priests--aha! Here comes Christianity, Savages! The Jesuits, just like the little wanker from Toronto, were called by their God to spread the Gospel around the world, too! The Gospel to these nutjob backward thinkers was "civilization"--God would turn a savage (an animal really, not considered a human being) from a jungle bunny into a civilized human being, a Christian man, a truly civilized man. Christianity was linked with progress.

And, guess what, Christianity impressed these savages because they had the same legends and heroes in their instinctual thinkings and considerations, in their evolution from their beginning to their becoming nations and societies with languages and cultures and ceremonies and celebrations (feasts)--I mean, all Christianity is is another version of a universal that began with the first unions of monkeys who began calling themselves Hu-mans and setting up the instinctual patterns that have led to this monkey sitting here at this computer in New York City writing out his growlings at the stupidity of the still royal ones of us who have the power to ruin us or rebirth us. Yeah, our African ancestors had a belief in the eternal return--where do you think the Greeks got that idea? Don't you think our original brothers and sisters in Africa originated the idea of eternal life through great beings arising out of their toils and tribulations to lead them to great victories in tribal warfare or defending their territories or their explorers finding new and better territories (ancient explorers) for them to succeed better in--and all of these ancient ones looking for that one mighty one of them who when killed would rise right back up and fight some more or explore some more--human beings involved in evolution and the archetypes that develop as we gallop along, human beings rising to the status of real and imaginary at the same time--even to the point of having shape-shifters and eternal-returning saviors--brought to academic status by the gathering of these knowledges and discoveries in the great library at Timbuktu (there are still books preserved from that library in the now rather desolate city)--then passed on to the Egyptians as they migrated up both arms of the Nile to eventually end in the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Nile--Jesus is the Lily of the Valley! Aha! I'm on a roll now, just like a Christian preacher, I'm wild with a spirit within me I certainly called Holy.

I was just curious as to who this little tinhorn Christian magician from Toronto was miraculously SAVING during his triumphant 2-day "miracle service" in Brazil. Oh, he was so trembling with the Holy Spirit pounding him on the back, as he wide-eyed said, "Why, my people, there were literally hundreds of thousands of people who turned out for this miracle service and oh, my people, the thousands upon thousands who were saved, who found Jesus Christ as their personal savior...." Wait a minute, I'm thinking. Jesus Christ, the Brazilians have got to know who the hell Jesus Christ is. They've got a humongous statue of old Jesus towering over Rio de Janiero! There's a church on every corner of Brazil. Of course, the little wanker from Toronto is leading up to his end-of-service move when he opens up his trick bag and has these unsaved savages empty their rather meager purses into his big fat trick bag. "Come on, Jesus wants all your money!" Money! Money! Money!

Whew! I'm winded. I must now recover from a session trying to unravel the many knots backwards thinking leaves in lifelines we need to survive the Chaos we have now created for ourselves, whether through political shenanigans or our own stupidity, a Chaos that would have gladly rejected us if we'd had a true mathematical formula to go by instead of the jumbles of formulae based on ancient instinctively controlled Taos we habitually keep following.
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As an interesting aside to the death of The Daily Growler's ryefarmerfromqueens--the day after they laid the old Rye Farmer to earthly rest out in Queens, I'm sorry to say, Citizen Kafka departed the mortal coil--March 14. "Nothing ventured NOTHING gained," as Citizen Kafka often pointed out.

I first heard Sid Kafka (his real name was Richard Shulberg) on New York City's Pacifica station, WBAI, back in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, I met through the Rye Farmer, Pat Conte. Pat was the other Otis Bros.; Pat's also Major Contay of Canebreak Rattlers fame; but Pat's also the curator of the Secret Museum of Mankind--and I had heard of the Secret Museum of Mankind on Citizen Kafka's radio before I met Pat (on my first trip to the Secret Museum of Mankind, Pat's dog went for my throat--scared the hell out of me. Pat shrugged it off, "Must be the cologne you're wearing." I wasn't wearing cologne but it made sense to me, though the dog and I never saw eye to eye after that). Then later in the 1990s, Pat and the Citizen did a Secret Museum show on 'BAI and then even later on WFU or one of those college stations.

So raise one high to Citizen Kafka. He's either living well in the Castle or he's having to go to court again in that Kafkan High off somewhere in the great ethereal. The following is Citizen Kafka's Wikipedia entry:

Citizen Kafka (also known as Sid Kafka and The Citizen) was the stage name of New York-based radio personality and folk musician Richard Shulberg (b. November 20, 1947, Brooklyn, New York, d. March 14, 2009).

Beginning in the late 1970s and continuing through much of the 1990s, Citizen Kafka produced and hosted a number of radio programs on Pacifica Foundation's WBAI-FM in New York, presenting an eclectic range of live and recorded music, comedy and poetry. One such program was the monthly "Citizen Kafka Show", which Kafka co-created in 1979 with then-unknown actor John Goodman and musician Kenny Kosek. The Citizen Kafka Show, which ran during much of the 1980s, featured live improvisational sketch comedy by Goodman and Kosek along with music DJ'd by Kafka.

Kafka later co-hosted a program with Pat Conte called The Secret Museum of the Air, which ran on WBAI from 1990 to 1996. This show presented unusual music from various genres and cultures, most of it recorded before 1948. Kafka and Conte moved the show to WFMU, 91.1 FM in 1997. Archived shows, comprising hundred of hours from The Secret Museum, are available here: http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/SM

Parallel to his long radio career, Citizen Kafka also performed actively as a bluegrass musician. This included a stint as a leader of perennial New York bluegrass band the Wretched Refuse String Band.

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thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Addendum: Congratulations to Mike Taibbi of Rolling Stone
. He's obviously been reading The Daily Growler--we mean, he's talking about the Power Elite. He's caught on.

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.
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Read the rest of Mike's article here:

www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/print

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

The Daily Growler War Anniversary Issue

Hey Kids, It's the 10th Anniversary of Slick Willie Clinton Invading Yugoslavia
Yep, boys and girls, this is the 10th Anniversary of one of Billy Jeff Clinton's great warmongering efforts--his invading of Yugoslavia and especially the small nation of Kosovo. Let me explain it this way: after WWII, remember WWII is a righteous war, there was no longer any need for NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), and this was especially true with the founding of the UN and the business of the UN Security Council; yet the US Military Power Elite after WWII (old Ike Eisenhower was there) recognized what a powerful war tool NATO was, so they began justifying reasons for NATO to keep on existing. The US, Britain, and France began NATO with Russia not joining them and instead bitching against the idea. The Russians believed when they defended their lands against the same ol' neighboring botherers, the Teutons (the Germans), the Scandinavian hordes, the Finns, the hated Polish, the Slavs--I mean, Russia captured that territory from Hitler so by God it was their territory now, F the Big Boss US and its weak-ass allies, Britain and France. Thus Berlin was divided into 4 chunks, with East Berlin becoming the jewel of the Commie rebuilding brag--do you feel the Cold War already in motion? OK, said the US to Russia, you don't wanna be in NATO--OK. Russia added and made the US promise that they'd never use NATO forces to interfere with Soviet Union business, meaning NATO would never bring troops onto Soviet Union territories, including the new many occupied countries like the newly created Czechoslovakia, the Magyars, the Romans of Romania, the Serbs (who still think they are privileged Hapsburgs), the Croatians...but, whoaaaa--not the Yugoslavians! Yugoslavia was ruled by Marshall Tito, a controversial figure in both the US and the Soviet Union. And Yugoslavia was blooming after WWII under Tito's "liberal" communist dictatorship (remember the Yugo automobile?). And, Jesus X, how our State Department, under John Foster Dull-ass and his evil brother Alan Dull-ass, the man who started the CIA, hated Marshall Tito. They accused Tito of communizing Albania (wild ass weird Albania--read Byron's Childe Harold where the good Lord goes to Albania) and trying to communize Greece. But when the Soviets disciplined the upstarts Czechoslovakia and Hungary by moving the troops in, NATO respected the deal with the Soviets and stayed on their side of that long, long border that runs seemingly from the North Pole down to the Mediterranean.

NATO ruled militarily eventually over Europe--their attentions aimed mainly at Moscow as the Cold War began and the years and years of threats and counterthreats and big-talk bullshit, my dog's bigger than your dog, blah, blah, blah, began in scary earnest....

Did you ever ask yourself when watching these politician jerk offs authoritatively say things to the rest of the world about what We the People stand for, you know, our intentions, our beliefs, our respects, our attitudes, our politics, our fortitudes, our endeavors where they get their authority to say the things they say? Are these words written out for them and then officially stamped "A-OK to say" and then signed by the President or one of his flunkies, or what? Like when Hillary says something like, "We are in full agreement with the blessed nation of Israel that the Palestinian dogs...er-ah, I mean, the Palestinian A-rabs, are the cause of this Gaza, filthy place that it is, problem, and not blessed Israel. We pledge to the nation of Israel that We the People of the United Snakes will go to the very end of mankind defending Israel's right to steal as much land as they need and kill as many Palestinian men, women, and children (it takes a village remember) as it will take to stop Palestine from throwing tomato can missiles over into blessed Israel's Holy Land and KILLING precious Israelis, though, OK, small numbers compared to those suffered by the A-rabs, but then that's justified because the Palestinians must pay heavy for such death and destruction against blessed Israel." [You may accuse me of sarcastic exaggeration, but I am paraphrasing--OK, I'm slanging it up with real words--what Hillary said when she was globe-trotting and stopped off briefly in Israel--then peering over the fence into filthy Gaza from an Israeli military viewing box (I kid you not the Israeli army did set up a viewing stand and Israelis did gather down at that point and watch the Gaza invasion and masacre). Through whose lips is Hillary speaking when she says such bullshit? Who is she referring to with her using the introductory "We"--who the hell are "We"?

Meet Richard Holbrooke (from the Bosnia Website)

PROFESSOR FRANCIS A. BOYLE: RICHARD HOLBROOK SHOULD BE PROSECUTED FOR BEING AN ACCOMPLICE IN THE GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA

SARAJEVO, Bosnia (August 4th,2008) - According to a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law and an attorney for the Bosnian association of genocide survivors from the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica "the Mothers of Srebrenica" professor Francis A. Boyle, Richard Holbrook, who was Assistant U.S. Secretary of State in mid 90s, had a collusion with Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic, who has been charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) with genocide, extermination, murder, deportation, inhumane acts, and other crimes against Bosnian civilians,committed during the 1992-1995 Serbian aggression against Bosnia.

"All evidence and records at hand indicate that Holbrooke was an accomplice in the genocide," the lawyer told the Azerbaijani Trend News Agency.
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I got curious about these politicians going around the world spouting all this "We" shit around as though they are speaking for 300 million of us--only 30% of whom vote these people into their gold-lined office--while listening yesterday morning to a 1999 interview Richard Holbrooke, then in the Clinton State Department (see article above), had with good-ol'-boy Charlie Rose (a thornless rose by the way) explaining Clinton's reason for bombing the Holy Hell out of the small nation of Kosovo. I mean Holbrooke (and yes he's still around; President Obama has him in his administration) was lying like a dog, saying "We" didn't want to bomb Kosovo (he was actually speaking for Clinton)--in fact, the "We" weren't intending to invade the country (and he was lying here because yes We were intending to invade Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo) and start a war (and Dick was lying again because yes We were intending to start a war there) but "We" were there to use NATO.... And again, on the Anniversary of Willie Clinton getting us involved in overthrowing Communism in Yugoslavia, up comes NATO again. NATO. NATO. Most of We the People have no idea what the hell NATO is and why it's still in existence. Here's NATO's Website--check it out, it's pretty interesting--mostly US promotional bullshit: www.nato.int/

There ya go. NATO. A reason for NATO to continue to be 60 years after WWII was over and NATO was no longer needed. And my question is, Why is NATO still around? They are in Afghanistan now, too, remember. Bush gave that "nice little invasion and occupation" over to NATO. Bush washed his hands of that mess--and he even said he was no longer interested in Osama bin Laden--he said he hadn't even thought about him lately...

...and blah, blah, blah, the same old bullshit goes on and the same old characters are slinging the bullshit once again in our faces--at the same time they are robbing us blind through a consortium of Wall Street blood brothers, Robert Rubin, Larry "Really Dumbass" Summers, Tim Geithner (the head of the Kansas City Federal Reserve says Geithner's ruining our economy rather than saving it), Hank Paulson, the good ol' boys at Goldman-Sachs, J.P. Morgan-Chase (how insulting is that merge at We the People's expense?), AIG (oh yeah, Timmy and Hank and Bobby Rubin and Larry all know all the gangsta's involved with AIG--you bet the meet at their club everyday for lunch)--

Like this Timmy Geithner--he gives as his profession: "Civil Servant." He's a curious little asshole. Born in Brooklyn. Raised in Asia; finished his high schooling in Bangkok. His family came to Philadelphia from Germany in 1908. Timmy's father got connected with the Ford Foundation through Charles Moore, he headed Ford Motor Company, who's from Timmy's mother's family. Timmy's father worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia and one of his best organizers was Ann Dunham-Soetoro--guess who? President Obama's mother! Timmy and Obama are both 47. They actually met in Indonesia. Timmy went to Dartmouth (where all Civil Servants go--it's an Ivy League college a lot of White boy fops easily get into--especially if their father's head of the Ford Foundation--I'll bet Obama though couldn't have gotten into Dartmouth at that time). After Dartmouth and Timmy's deciding he wanted to be a Civil Servant, Timmy went to work for Henry Kissingassinger (considered a war criminal in Europe)...and then he SERVED in the Reagan Administration--faithfully--then, like Obama, Timmy had a meteoric rise in the criminal world of the District of Corruption--where they used to go into debt into the billions--and now they've gotten us into debt in the trillions! Oh boy what a sleigh ride being in politics is! The Masters of the World. That's who these foolish young men brought up and raised by their parents to be Civil Servants--living off We the People--and look at how many politicians We the People have made filthy rich. Our presidents go into office these days coming off of low-paying governor salaries, like Slick Willie, or coming off of several failed businesses, like Georgie Porgie Bush (who you notice the Repugnicans are not going to allow the N-word president to condemn Bush--you notice that? Obama tries to lay this national debt off onto Bush but they won't let him; even his own people won't let him blame Bush for anything. And little Timmy Geithner went on to serve Pappy Bush and then Slick Willie and then Georgie Porgie Bush. So you ask, why is Obama so intent on backing little Timmy Geithner (nephew of Charles Moore the Ford Motor Company anti-union asshole president who was a big reason the company went belly up last year) to the brink of disaster? Why they're asshole buddies. Of the same clothe. Little lanky kids who were too spastic to make it in professional basketball--Timmy is one of Obama's basketball buddies--too spastic to get a ground-level job--too privileged (in the case of Timmy) to do too much industrious work--remember, the Power Elite don't see work like you and I do--work to them should be nonindustrious--that's women's work--slaves's work--Timmy is too precious for that kind of labor. Nope, he's a professional Civil Servant. That means his work is so simple and so easy and so routine, he simply sits there and glories all day--waiting for that break time--he's finished by 3 in the afternoon--when he can join Obama in the Capitol gymnasium for some hot basketball! That's what "WE" are dealing with. This is the ilk that is speaking for you and me--this is the Power Elite, and now Obama's accepted into it, that continues to rule us whether we like what they're doing or not. Can we say Obama lied his way into the presidency? Well, what president hasn't lied his way into the presidency? Name one. And what president once he's been elected doesn't break every promise he made in his campaign promises--they all do it--Obama's simply just no exception. He had us fooled for awhile there--we really believed the dude--but now, he's in the catbird seat--and it's a whole different perspective up there, folks, than it is down here on the plebian ground. When you're on the ground--you only count in the Census--that's the only place you count.

I get to writing about this shit off the top of my head--I don't have the time, money, or resources to write a book about this shit--it's so evident--so obvious--it's so easily hauled in--that's what revolution is about and revolution doesn't mean you need a nuclear-weaponed army to start one--revolution means just turning something around one whole roll--like a wheel rolling--that's a revolution, that's a movement--and one turn of that god-damn stuck oxcart wheel is sometimes all it takes to get the son of a bitch out of the ditch and back on the right road, the agreed way, the Tao, whatever you wanna call it.

It's hard to be at peace with our planet. This is a boiling planet. Down under us at the core of our world is truly Holy Hell--a hell worse than any legendary soothsayer can picture in human words. Mount Redoubt up in Alaska, Sarah Palin can see it from her kitchen window, has blown its stack 5 times this week. Then there was a tremendous undersea earthquake out in the Pacific--and some enterprising Tongan was already taking tourists out face-to-face and up close to that earthquake--and you know he had a boatload of senior tourists with iPhones and iCameras and their blue-haired friends with them. Tourists. Tourists amaze me. While we're here in New York City struggling to save our jobs, our land, our homes, our dignity our billionaire mayor is still bragging about how the tourists are keeping New York City afloat--and this pompous asshole is still planning to run illegally for a third term--Guliani tried it saying in the 9/11 crisis we needed Rudi's bravery to help us through the ordeal--and yeah, Rudi helped himself to several millions of a 9/11 relief fund he started and then never gave a dime to any 9/11 victims's families--yet Rudi is still free as a bird living the good life beating his prostate cancer, getting a new wife, a new mistress, god knows, plus he was able to get millions from somewhere to start his crackpot security firm! He's in competition with Marvin Bush maybe! Oh, have we forgotten that Marvin Bush was head of World Trade Center Security the day the planes hit the towers and his dad was having breakfast with Prince Bandar Bush (remember him?) and they were laughing their asses off as the Prince's nationals blew down 5 or six buildings in that area. Sorry, we forgot, you can't blame Marvin for 9/11; he had resigned his security post just that morning!

All the above characters I've tried to slam with a growling wolf attitude are currently still around and doing well and living well and making millions and millions of bucks while you and I see our money being flushed down the District of Corruption toilet bowls called banks, financial institutions, toxic waste mortgage buyeruppers--BULLSHIT, and the BULLSHIT is overflowing the world's crappers--and the BULLSHIT, like lava flowing, is erupting over us--soon we'll be covered in BULLSHIT! Can you survive more bullshit? You'd better learn how. Listen to President Obama these days--you talk 'bout some BULLSHIT. I'm beginning, I'm sorry to say, to think the Prez has trickbagged us all--the power of the Power Elite has corrupted his brain, his rationale--I mean, the Prez and Mrs. Prez are on the verge of having the world for their oyster! Aren't you tired of being trick bagged! Where's We the People's Felix the Cat when you need him and his little bag of tricks?
http://bestuff.com/images/images_of_stuff/210x600/felix-the-cat-9348.jpg

thegrowling(felix the)wolf--RadiiiiiO
for The Daily Growler

Sunday, March 22, 2009

The Daily Growler Sunday Edition "Bashing Obama"

Squatting in the Aisle
with The Daily Growler's Venerable Old Cuss Reporter, Walter Crackpipe

Oh boy, oh boy, already this beautiful Sunday morning--our day to the Good Lord Sun, the true and only god to me; yep, I'm a sun worshipper--the commercial teevee millionaires are bashing President Obama already this beauty of a Sunday, blaming him for everything from the current economic crisis to being a mocker of handicapped children. The latter bashing for his silly kid-like comment on the stupid numbskull jackass joking Jay Leno teevee show where the Prez said he'd bowled a 129 in the White House bowling alley (can you imagine a kid suddenly moving into a mansion with its own bowling alley!) and when Jay asked him wasn't that a good score, Obama simply replied, "Yeah, maybe in the Special Olympics...." Ohhhhhh-oooooooh, a shudder went through Jay Leno's ultraLiberal-almost-Commie audience! Obama, Obama, thou of the cursed race of Ham, thou hast committed a faux pas worse than the cartoonist who drew you as a chimp wearing a diaper laying in a pool of your own blood with two bullet holes in your chest and a couple of cops off to the side, one of them holding a gun pointed at you that is the gun this cop's just shot and killed you with, and the cop is saying, "Now who's going to write the next stimulus bill?"--Obama, Obama, thou hast ridiculed poor little helpless Special Olympic kids--poor little helpless mindless beings! The Special Olympics, by the way, was founded by that old wrinkled Joe Kennedy daughter, Eunice, Maria Shriver's mother. One assumes, and I certainly assume this, Eunice founded the Special Olympics out of guilt for the horrible deed her father, Old Bootlegger Joe, as we call him around here, did to her sister Rosemary, like turning her into a vegetable by having her lobotomized. As Sweet Saintly Mama Rose said afterward, "Well, the lobotomy did stop her violent behavior though unfortunately it also left her incapacitated...." Oh, blessed Mama Rose--surely the Catholic Nazi Pope will make her a saint--three miracles, let's see, she gave birth to three divine sons, like a Holy Trinity of Kennedy divinities: first, Bootlegger Joe's favorite son, named him after himself, Joe Kennedy--a WWII hero according to the Kennedy revised history of the world; then the miraculously born and raised precious John Fitzgerald (for old Swizzlin' Honey Fitz, the old crooked-as-hell Boston Back Bay "fightin' potato famine Irish" politician--hell he was mayor of Boston--"Sure my son Joe's a bootlegger, so what the fuck you stupid shanty Irish gonna' be doin' about it?") Kennedy, who was also a WWII hero, remember PT-109? in spite of vicious rumors that that whole thing was a staged affair (I know you're aghast now! How dare I give sarcastic disrespect to JFK, the US's Little Perfect Prince?); and last but not least, the precious and all-clean-cut-all-American boy, Bobby Kennedy, the lawman in the family. All three boys died violent deaths--though their spirits have arisen--therefore, we give high praise to the possibility of one day seeing a plastic statue of Saint Mama Rose in all her soon-to-be churches or riding on the dashboards of all the Kennedy family limos and BMW sports cars--and certainly one or two around on the Kennedy Family fleet of tax-deductible yachts and sailboats--maybe in the tax-exempt Church of the Holy Mother Rose--down there in Boston's Back Bay--or over in Roxbury! Ah, the wonderfulness of fiction and how it can so easily become reality--like this, The Daily Growler, a work of fiction that is reporting through the fictional mouths of an aged, even if still wet behind their ears staff--like the wet-behind ears of the luscious Franny&Zoe, but I'm a nasty old man when it comes to her. What I'm saying is it's an empirical staff, a mixed-bag staff of generational goofs, all tagged atheists, scoundrels, Socialists, abominations to Jesus Christ's plans for the United Snakes of America--a staff that freely believes like Fundie Nutjob US Christians (read: Holy Rollers) that the US was founded by God through his faithful Catholic son, Saint Christopher Colombo, a Jew from Genoa--whoaaaaaaaaaaaaa, Chris Colombo a Jew, nooooooo, no, Chris was a Sicilian, dammit, a member of the Cosa Nostra of those dear old days!

I am an old fuck now, folks--check me out; have you caught a glimpse of me lately on PBS? I'm as old as newsprint and soon to be just as obsolete. I've been in the reporting business since I was a young rascal war correspondent from Texas in World War II, said to be the only JUST war the US has ever started or fought in--a war started back then in defense of Mother England who was so weak and vulnerable--the cost of the burden of Mother England keeping her Empire together and fighting her blood brothers and sisters the Prussians was breaking her ass.

And, yes, I was in WWII, as was old saggy-ass Andy Rooney. After WWII I got involved in the Greek conflict started by Harry "Ass" Truman, Mr. Citizen, when he sent our Marines to Greece to keep Greece from going Commie. Harry was bent on reestablishing a royal house there, giving the Greeks a fop Brit-ass-kissing king when the seat of Western Democracy (White Democracy) unanimously wanted a Statehood (in the national sense) and not a Monarchy--but we White Americans have always craved a king ever since gout-ridden old King George the Third drove us out of Merry Olde England--proudly, his royal highass was kicking the whackos out of his empire: the Puritans, Pilgrims, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and also the anarchists, pamphleteers, and Brit debtors (who became infamous in White history as the "indentured servants"--low-caste Whites in servitude to a White bossman/patron--passage to the Colonies in return for working off their debts to the royal crown.

While Merry Olde England was kicking its weirdo religious, political, and criminal elements across the Pond to the Redman's Land, the Euro Royals were also running out their whackos, the Huguenots, the Roman Catholics--especially out of England, Germany, and France (like good old Lord Baltimore and Lord Calvert who turned Maryland into a Roman Catholic state at one gay olde Colonial time--these two Lords had a couple of good old time rotgut US whiskeys named after them, too). Ironically, Lutherans and Scandinavian Christians (Christian Socialists) also came over here by the droves--Swedenborgs, etc., Moravians, Manicheans, barbarian pagans, all being driven out of their White homelands. And look out, soon here came these boatloads of White weirdos over here, tumbling onto shore here and immediately seeking all kinds of White Western freedoms of religion, politics, and crime, coming here and declaring this their new homeland. So what this country was already occupied by a very politically organized native people, who, by the way, are now still imprisoned for the sins they committed against those invading White Men and their pale women--the White Man who rampantly developed his Aryan superiority under the Manifest Destiny and then put into practice his Christian philosophy of the only good Injun being a dead Injun--How? How Chief Wahoo! How Washington, District of Corruption, Redskins (hell there's a redskin babe on top the Capitol dome isn't there?)? How Kansas City Chiefs? How Chicago Black Hawks? I did find it a little humorous to hear a young Black man talking about sports teams using insulting Native American images as their mascots the other morning on a talk show. He started mentioning teams like the Atlanta Braves (remember the tomahawk wave?) and the D.C. Redskins...but then he said, "...and the Cincinnati Reds...." "Whoaaaa," I hollered at him, "Dude, though the city's name is Native American their baseball team's identity as the Reds has nothing to do with Native Americans." You see how separated Whites and Blacks are in this country still, even after a Black American has been elected president (legally!!!)! Whites assume they know Blacks just like Blacks claim they know Whites. Unfortunately, the fact that Whites did enslave US Blacks and did have factions that claimed they had a right from the Christian God to own slaves because under that God Blacks were the Sons of Ham and were cursed by God the Vicious Father of the Jews to be servants unto the Jews and the Gentiles!! Whites are Gentiles, according to Whites; therefore, Blacks are cursed by the White Man's god to be their servants, except servants to White people mean slaves.

And my elongated thinking took me far afield of my intended finger pointing, back paragraphs of time ago, at our vaunted Mr. Citizen, Harry "Ass" Truman. My intention back then in time was to inform you what a dumbass ignorant man the old haberdasher and horse soldier was--Jesus, I mean, this little creep Harry Truman during his time in office ordered the deaths of 300,000 innocent Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two nuclear weapons he didn't know what the hell immediate damage they would do and certainly had no idea what future damage they would do. Harry said, "Fuck those slanty eyed bastards, drop a Fat Boy on 'em and watch 'em turn to yellow toast! Anything to save our precious troops so we can use them for cannon fodder in the next splendid little war or police action I have planned."

There were no teevee cameras there in those days. Harry didn't know how devastatingly "evil" those A-bombs were--we called them Atom Bombs in those days--and children born in that era weren't called Baby Boomers, they were called Atomic Bomb Babies--any kid born from around 1945-46-47--the era of the Atom Bomb. And Mickey Rooney played the "Atomic Kid" in the movies. And there was the Colossal Man, too, Glen was his given name--both men effected by atomic radiation, Little Mickey given superpowers and Glen given a massive body. The Atomic Bomb also gave us Godzilla, a radiated lizard.

And sure enough, after Greece, Harry came up with his Korean Police Action! Another fine little mess we got into. But Harry insisted the Korean affair was not a war. Remember, Harry said the Korean War wasn't a real war, it was simply a police action--a little mopping up of commies--a UN police action to boot--not the US's fault, hell no, the UN was in command of the Korean Police Action. Such bullshit and such a useless wasteful war--in defense of the wimp French's embarrassing defeat at the hands of Uncle Ho and his Korean Independence Forces at Dien Bien Phu. And Uncle Ho asked the US for aid after he'd kicked the French out of Indo Chine and were driving toward Saigon and of course the US turned him down and favored the illegal little dictator assholes of South Korea, like Premier Ky--who, by the way, is still living a charmed and good life running a restaurant--no, not in Asia, but in Los Angeles! By the way, also that silly no-good war divided up Korea into North and South Korea--a practice We the People of the US have been doing since we started seriously warring back in the days before the Civil War.

Since before WWII, the Repugnicans have consistently tried to wreck the New Deal and prove social welfare never works--laborers have to pick themselves up by their bootstraps--George Orwell wrote about that during WWII. This hatred of the New Deal started after the Privileged Power Elite East Coast New Yorker playboy Franklin Delano Roosevelt whipped young-whipper-snapper Power Elite California Mining and Land-grabbing expert Herbert Hoover and his Stanford-educated criminal elements in 1932, after once again the Repugnicans ruined our economy--and, folks, the Repugnicans had ruined US economies many times before 1929--to the point the Repugs had more of their presidents assassinated than the Dumbocrats--up until JFK got it in '63--though those who get so frustrated they assassinate did try to rub out Ronnie "Jelly Bean for Brains" Reagan! And the Pope, too, remember! Wow, aren't guns wonderful? Notice how the recent epidemic of assassinaters--gunmen randomly killing their families or ex-employers or just randomly knocking off dozens of innocent people-- is no longer cared much about with the commercial teevee channels or what newspapers are left--wild gunmen killing roomsful of people--I mean, come on, there's so much of it going on it's now being taken for granted--no more extensive coverage like was given the Columbine affair or the Virginia Tech killing spree. I mean, mass murdering is just one of our US legends now--in fact, we get terribly excited when we watch scary movies about serial murderers for instance. The stuff you can see vividly portrayed every night on commercial-pap television--tons of ways to murder--graphic details of ways to murder without getting caught even--the truly exciting murder shows are the ones where when they fade to black with Dick Wolf's creator credits running in somber white over that black you know the most vicious serial killer in the current world has escaped from prison and swears to start knocking off the criminal investigative teams that put him in prison--just at random--SURPRISE!--oh boy, a serial killer loose--how exciting is that? Don't worry, the male actors say, these guys only kill women--so we gotta be especially guarding of our hot-babe CSI women! Yes, women are brutally murdered on teevee every night and even on daytime soap operas these days--and you can't imagine the brutality these actresses are put through! I especially enjoyed one I saw last night--two girls were involved in a car wreck, one of the girls was DOA, but the other girl survived. Now listen to this; you talk about a bizarre writer's mind: The girl who survived the wreck was terribly messed up, you know, her face ripped off, with the surgeons having to glue her face back together going by her picture on her driver's license. The girl driving the car was said by the police to be the best friend of the other girl (they looked like twins they were so much alike) who'd been DOA. The mother of the DOA girl was infuriated by the death of her daughter at the hands of this friend who the mother said was a drug addict, a drunk, a whore, and she had killed her precious daughter, her lovely saintly daughter. Well, it turns out the girls had gone out partying together and they'd gone to this swinging club where they danced and drank all night. When they left the club and went to go home, the drunkest girl, the drug addict-whore, gave the other girl, the saintly girl, her carkeys telling her she was in no condition to drive because she was wasted as well as drunk and this saintly girl was not really drunk at all. This tale ends up with the mother sneaking into the hospital and suffocating the living girl with a plastic bag. As she suffocates the living girl, the living girl looks up and says, "Mamma!" to which the grieving mother of the dead girl says, "Your mother can't help you now, you bitch," then she proceeds to suffocate this girl. Later the cops arrest Mom and during the interrogation she admits to killing the drug addict-whore bitch who killed her precious loving saintly daughter--and, she bravely says, I'm ready to serve my time in good conscience. Then the cops spring on her the fact that they'd checked the mother's DNA against the DNA of the girl she had murdered who she thought was the evil girl. Turned out, the cops told her, that after the drunken-dopehead-whore girl got to the car and told the saintly girl she had to drive them home, the saintly girl said she didn't have a driver's license--so the drunken-dopey-whore girl gave the saintly girl her driver's license. Thus, when the cops got to the wreck, one girl was dead, with no driver's license, but the one girl who lived did have a driver's license, which was the driver's license of the drunk-dopey-whore--therefore, the mother of the saintly girl assumed the living girl was the evil bitch who'd killed her daughter! "Surprise, Mom," the cops said, "our DNA tests show you killed your own daughter! She was hollering 'Mamma' at you because you were her mother!" How's that for a fucking macabre script!

I'm very surprised the Repugnican nutjobs haven't blamed President Obama for all the serial murderers there are--even the ones born before Obama was born. Poor President Obama. He's in for a tough ride. How foolish was he looking backing up Tim Geitner today? In some ways, President Obama is as foolish as a young kid with a new toy. "One never knows, do one?" as Thomas Waller used to say.

waltercrackpipe
for The Daily Growler

Thursday, March 19, 2009

The Daily Growler: Jots and Tittles From Lake Flaccid, NY

From the Cold Faceless Overforecasted Lake Flaccid, New York, Comes Mr. Barabbas Munn-Dayne, thedailygrowlerjots&tittlesman

Real country folk you would figure live in Lake Flaccid in Upstate New York, and, yes, Lake Flaccid is "the country" and I am country as long as I'm living here; in fact, according to my urban-raised observation and experience living here, Lake Flaccid is "country" magnified by 4. However, you can think of Lake Flaccid as representing the reverse of what Johnny Otis said in his blues song, "Big Old Country Girl." In that song, there's a verse (it's a cliche by now in the Blues World) that says, "You can take Foxes out of the country/BUT/ You can't take the country out of Foxes." The same can be sang in reverse with respect to Lake Flaccid being country all right but from a different angle. Like here's my version of Johnny's song: "You can take people out of the city (my case: I'm born in New York City)/BUT/ You can't take the city out of people," which is the case up here in Lake Flaccid where there aren't many Lake Flaccid natives. Most of Lake Flaccid's citizens have immigrated to the Lake from some metropolitan area, the most from New York City, but there are also some Syracuseans and Buffalonians here; plus one Torontonian and a family of Montrealers up in North Lake Flaccid--though there's really no such thing as South or North Lake Flaccid, it's that isolated a town.

Up the road from my lake cabin is Abe Petrock from Flatbush, Brooklyn. He had a deli in Brooklyn, what else? The first time Abe ever came up here was 10 years ago when he and his wife, Elaine, were looking for fall colors--like New Yorkers drive up the NY State Thruway looking for colorful-leaved trees, groves of oaks or chestnuts or maples, mixed-bag rainbow forests. But when you get up to Lake Flaccid, suddenly you find most of the trees are green, pines, cedars, conebearers. Also, I must admit, Lake Flaccidites are mostly Whiteys--though we're mixed, too: there's Sally and Peter Loontongue--Native Americans from the Mohawk Tribe--Peter's always looking out over Lake Flaccid and saying, "Damn, I thought all of this belonged to me. Why can't I have my land and my lake back?" And, yeah, I forgot, over in South Lake Flaccid there's the huge Wang Family, Cedric and Saint Vivian Wang and their now grown children: their son Rex Wang (a Cornell grad) runs Rex's Diner on Route 73; their eldest daughter, Macadam Baby Wang, runs the Day School in Shuler Flats; and their youngest daughter, Samantha Ann Wang-Stooly, and her husband, Horace, raise chinchillas down in the far valley on the otherside of Tupper Lake. Their eldest son, Desmond Wang, was once the Lake Flaccid High School fishing team coach, and what a fishing team the Lake Flaccid Erectors were the years Desmond was their coach. They won the NY State High School Fishing Tournament three years in a row. Where Desmond is now, no one knows. During a happenstance meeting I had the other day with Cedric Wang, I bluntly asked him if he'd heard from Desmond and he started hawking up a loogy, then he turned his back on me, spat on the ground, and discourteously walked on down the sidewalk past me without a hey nonny-nonny or "fuck you." Nothing. I took that to mean he didn't know where Desmond was nor did he care where Desmond was. But mostly everybody up here is White (aren't Chinese considered Whites by Whites? Are Native Americans considered Whites by Whites?--and most of the winter in Lake Flaccid even the ground is white.

Since my last post, I've had two delightful dinners with Lake Flaccid's big celebrity, Cecil the Dog-faced Boy the Third. My interviews with him have gained bulk, so much so, that I've now decided to write a book about Cecil--Am I a Man or a Dog?--tentative title. I was going to call it A Fireplug or a Toilet, Which Do I Use? but my friend Ernie at the Lake Flaccid Publishing Company & Boat Dock Operations, Inc. said the first title would sell better, especially in the local drugstores and supermarkets and WalMarts--the last title, "the toilet title," as he called it, Ernie thought belonged in the crapper with the rest of the bullshit having to do with disruptive advertising. Ernie said he recognized the symbolic nature of the more anal title yet his devotion to publishing ethics caused him to put the kibosh on using it. "Maybe you could make it the subtitle--we'd print it on an early flyleaf maybe," was Ernie's end solution.

We shall see, but I do have a hundred pages of this book already typed up--I'm still using my old Olivetti portable--from my college days--remember how "mo-dern" Olivetti's were at one time? Like mine's fire engine red and has a lot of square (tailored) edges like Italians like. The problem is, it's hard to get typewriter ribbons for it these days. I buy them on eBay when I can find them. I have about 24 in my collection now. I know I promised Growlers my exclusive interview with Cecil, but, hey, publishing a book is more important than publishing these posts, so there ya go, folks. That's awfully "country" of me, isn't it?

So here we go with some jotting and tittling:

--Britney Spears is 28 years old now. Thought you might need that info now that Brit has faded from the news here lately, her popularity suddenly as dull as her singing.

--H.D. has a line in one of her poems: "She felt like a star invisible in daylight."

--Plato says in The Republic, Book VIII, "So long as extremes of wealth and poverty exist there can be no just society."

--The Bronx: Hip Hoppers now refer to it as the "boogie down Bronx." I never heard it called that before--and I was born just south of the Bronx in Manhattan but I knew a lot of kids from the Bronx, and I never heard any of them call it the "boogie down Bronx." Like I heard a native New Orleanian one time around the time of that movie The Big Easy saying that he'd never heard New Orleans referred to as "The Big Easy" and he was born and raised there. It's like people thinking of Cajun cooking when they think of New Orleans cuisine; yet true New Orleans cooking would be French and Caribbean-Creole (Creoles in New Orleans though never accepted as Whites in NOLA society, they were considered much higher in White society than Blacks because Creoles were a mixture of EuroFrench Whites and Haitian Blacks--I'm simplifying it, I know).

--Levi Weeks--ever heard of him?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Levi Weeks (1776-1819) was the accused in the infamous Manhattan Well Murder trial of 1800, the first recorded murder trial in the United States.[1] At the time of the murder, Weeks was a young carpenter in New York City. He was the brother of Ezra Weeks, one of New York's more successful builders of the time.

Weeks was accused of murdering Gulielma "Elma" Sands, a young woman who he had been courting.[2]. Elma disappeared on the evening of December 22, 1799. Some of her possessions were found two days later near the recently created Manhattan Well in Lispenard Meadows, located in today's SoHo near the intersection of Greene and Spring Streets. Her body was recovered from the well on January 2, 1800. Before leaving her boarding house on the 22nd, Elma told her sister, Hope, and friend Catherine Ring that Levi and her were to be secretly married that night.

The trial, which took place on March 31 and April 1, 1800, was sensational. Through his brother's connections and wealth, Weeks retained three of New York's most prominent attorneys, Henry Brockholst Livingston, Aaron Burr, and Alexander Hamilton. Several years later Burr would mortally wound Hamilton during the most famous duel in American history. Chief Justice John Lansing, Jr. presided on the bench, and future Mayor of New York, Cadwallader David Colden, was the prosecutor.

Although Elma was seen leaving with Weeks and a witness claimed to have seen Weeks making measurements at the well the Sunday before the murder[3], Weeks was acquitted after only 5 minutes of jury deliberation[4]. The public strongly disagreed with the verdict, and Weeks was ostracized by the citizens of the city, forcing him to leave New York. He eventually settled in Natchez, Mississippi, where he became a well-respected architect and builder.

Levi Weeks was born in 1776 in Greenwich, Massachusetts and died in Natchez, Mississippi in 1819 at the age of 43. He married Ann Greenleaf in Natchez and they had four children. [5]

--From The Daily Growler Guru, C. Wright Mills:

There is still one old American value that has not markedly declined: the value of money and of the things money can buy-these, even in inflated times, seem as solid and enduring as stainless steel. 'I've been rich and I've been poor,' Sophie Tucker has said, 'and believe me, rich is best.' As many other values are weakened, the question for Americans becomes not Is there anything that money, used with intelligence, will not buy?' but, 'How many of the things that money will not buy are valued and desired more than what money will buy?' Money is the one unambiguous criterion of success, and such success is still the sovereign American value.

Whenever the standards of the moneyed life prevail, the man with money, no matter how he got it, will eventually be respected. A million dollars, it is said, covers a multitude of sins. It is not only that men want money; it is that their very standards are pecuniary. In a society in which the money-maker has had no serious rival for repute and honor, the word 'practical' comes to mean useful for private gain, and 'common sense,' the sense to get ahead financially. The pursuit of the moneyed life is the commanding value, in relation to which the influence of other values has declined, so men easily become morally ruthless in the pursuit of easy money and fast estate-building.

A great deal of corruption is simply a part of the old effort to get rich and then to become richer. But today the context in which the old drive must operate has changed. When both economic and political institutions were small and scattered-as in the simpler models of classical economics and Jeffersonian democracy-no man had it in his power to bestow or to receive great favors. But when political institutions and economic opportunities are at once concentrated and linked, then public office can be used for private gain.

Governmental agencies contain no more of the higher immorality than do business corporations. Political men can grant financial favors only when there are economic men ready and willing to take them. And economic men can seek political favors only when there are political agents who can bestow such favors. The publicity spotlight, of course, shines brighter upon the transactions of the men in government, for which there is good reason. Expectations being higher, publics are more easily disappointed by public officials. Businessmen are supposed to be out for themselves, and if they successfully skate on legally thin ice, Americans generally honor them for having gotten away with it. But in a civilization so thoroughly business-penetrated as America, the rules of business are carried over into government-especially when so many businessmen have gone into government. How many executives would really fight for a law requiring a careful and public accounting of all executive contracts and 'expense accounts'? High income taxes have resulted in a network of collusion between big firm and higher employee. There are many ingenious ways to cheat the spirit of the tax laws, as we have seen, and the standards of consumption of many high-priced men are determined more by complicated expense accounts than by simple take-home pay. Like prohibition, the laws of income taxes and the regulations of wartime exist without the support of firm business convention. It is merely illegal to cheat them, but it is smart to get away with it. Laws without supporting moral conventions invite crime, but much more importantly, they spur the growth of an expedient, amoral attitude.

[From The Power Elite, Oxford Press, 1956.]

--Irony Among Criminals--did you know Phil Gramm, the guy who with Larry Summers decided banks and the financial investment and lending firms needed no regulations on them, is now on the board of the criminal Swiss bank USB. USB is being accused of helping its thousands of secret account holders to evade US taxes. As a result, USB was fined 750 million bucks. Here's the irony: USB got 8 billion dollars in We the People's giveaway of our money in the disguise of bailouts. What did USB do with 750 millions of that money? Can you put two and two together?

--Phil Gramm's Criminal Legacy--Gramm's most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry—friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career—came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead—even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. "Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it," says a congressional aide familiar with the bill's history. [From Mother Jones, 2008.]

--Ralph Nader says if this stupid bailout keeps going like it is we're doomed.

--Obama on Leno: Talking about his taking up bowling now that his new home has a bowling alley in its basement. When Jay Leno, a goofus trying to be a pro interviewer like Barbara Wah-Wah, asked him how he'd done bowling, Obama replied that he'd shot a 129. Jay said "That's pretty good, isn't it?" and Obama replied something like, "Yeah, in the Special Olympics maybe." So Obama bowls like a spaz! Is that any reason to impeach him now? That's how the commercial media is broadcasting this horrid faux pas by the President. It's OK the president before this guy was never legally elected president, lied us into a needless couple of wars, killed over 4,000 of our young people and over 65,000 admitted Iraqis (the Iraqis say the number is more like 300,000)--but at least Bush never said anything public making fun of the very serious and world-recognized US Special Olympics--the child of one of the Kennedy Power Elite who decided since her ole worthless bootlegging daddy had made a spaz of his daughter, her sister, the guilt was too much so she trotted out her Special Olympics idea. Obama's like a big kid, folks. Kids sometimes say the darnedest things. Fuck the Special Olympics, we've got more serious problems created by professional criminals who only care about the Special Olympics if they can get some great public relations and photo-op moments for their criminal company! Does Bud Light sponsor the Special Olympics? Such bullshit. The bullshit never ends. That's what our educational system should be doing, separating the bullshit from that which is edible and nutritious.

--TV Courtroom Antics: On the teevee "Court" show that's hosted by former Westchester County, New York, D.A., Jeanine Pirro (her husband is a big Mafia character, but that's OK if you're Westchester County D.A., implying that the Mafia has run Westchester County for years), a dude who "Judge" Jeanine refused to rule in favor of even though his woman had busted up his teevee, his mirrors, his CD player, broken some windows in his house...after the show the guy said to "Judge" Jeanine, "You won't see me again, Your Honor, I'm runnin' out of stuff to be broken."

--Is Fusion Possible?--"Energy and matter are incontrovertible" says Sun in a Bottle author Charles Siefe (the book's full title: Sun In a Bottle The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking). I think I heard Ed Moser sort of relating Fusion to Jesus Christ, saying Fusion is the Messiah of Nuclear Science.

barabbasmunn-dayne,thedailygrowlerjots&tittlesman

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