Thursday, April 25, 2013

Existing in New York City: Oh, Come All Ye White Hypocrites

Foto by tgw, New York City, April 2013
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Say Goodbye to: Deanna Durbin, a great singer and movie star.  In the late 1940s, Deanna Durbin was the highest salaried woman in the USA.  She started appearing in movies as a teenager; one of her first movies was with Judy Garland.  Deanna Durbin, 91, Canadian singer and actress.[3] (death announced on this date).  Check her singing out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inV3RlOTOXM
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Say Goodbye to: Janos Starker, one of the great cellists I had the privilege of digging a lot of as a young man when Janos was the principle cellist with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra under Antal Dorati.  One season as a kid, I attended the children's music appreciation concerts under Mr. Dorati and during one of those concerts Janos Starker played a Bach and a Kodaly cello sonata. I was totally impressed and for several weeks after that decided I wanted to be a cellist.  János Starker, 88, Hungarian-born American cellist.
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Say Goodbye to: Maria Tall Chief (she changed it to Tallchief later): I just found out that Betty Marie Tall Chief died back on April 11 from complications of a broken hip suffered in 2012.  Maria Tallchief, born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, on the Osage Reservation, was the first Native American to become a diva in the ballet world becoming first a star with the Ballet Russe and later with the New York City Ballet.  in 1946 she married old George Ballachine, but the marriage was annulled when George threw Maria over for another dancer.  Maria was a beautiful woman and became one of the world's greatest-ever classical ballet dancers.  Watch Maria dance with Rudi Nureyev:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-qy2Z_j58A
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Say Goodbye to: George Jones, the good ole boy from right near Beaumont, Texas, whose first hit was "Why, Baby, Why?" and who at times in his life was better known for his extreme alcoholism and missing gigs than he was for his recordings.  I found George Jones a fine songwriter and sang a couple of his songs in my heyday as a New York City cult-band singer.  I can't imagine anyone ever imagined George would live to be 81 years old.  George Jones, 81, American country music singer ("He Stopped Loving Her Today", "The Race Is On").
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Oh, Come All Ye White Hypocrites
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I’ve already had my say about the Boston Marathon bombers, The Tsarnaev brothers, and their pressure-cooker bombs that killed 3 and wounded (maimed) 170.  The younger brother ironically had become an American citizen on September 11, 2012.  And the older brother, again ironically to me, was married to a Christian woman and was the father of a 3-year-old kid.  I wonder, will one of Obama’s death drones kill that kid for the sins of her father the way one killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, in Yemen?  That’s how Obama’s spokesperson, Robert Gibbs, at the time justified that kid’s murder.  This American kid who at the time was living with his grandparents in Yemen, grandparents who disagreed with the politics of their son.  Gibbs said glibly that Abdulrahman should have picked a better father, the father another American citizen murdered by one of those wonderful drones.  [I’m just reading in Counterpunch that there is now a drone base in Philadelphia.  Look out Philadelphians who aren’t Christians but look like Muslims…but wait a damn minute, did those American-Chechen brothers look like Muslims?]

Can you see why I see White Americans as hypocrites?  Hey, I’m White; I know my people.  I grew up in the Southwest among all-White neighborhoods, going to all-White school systems, finally getting a form of relief from Southern White hypocrisy when I attended the first college in the Southern Collegiate Association to integrate in 1956.  Integration meant Blacks could now attend my college.  Ironically, Middle-Eastern Muslim students, I had an Iranian friend in college, were considered Whites in those days.  You see what I mean about White Americans being hypocrites?

Later I lived in New Orleans, Louisiana, where prominent White people (politicians, newspapermen, lawyers, judges, etc.) pronounced Blacks not humans but rather “coons” and “gator bait” and “jungle bunnies” and the worst pronunciation of all, “niggers.”

And when finally, I left the South for good and moved to New York City, due to my accent, a New York City White cab driver said, my first day riding in a New York City cab, “I can tell from your accent you’re from the South so I know you understand me when I tell you what’s wrong with New York City…it’s the niggers and the Por-toe Reekin’s who are our [meaning New York City’s White people] biggest problem.”  You see what I mean about White Americans being hypocrites?

While three people died in the Boston bombings (and, yes, 170 people were injured badly), that same day 50 people died in Baghdad from a car bomb.  Nearly every day in Iraq innocent people die from being blown to bits by bombers.  Check out the followingt:
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Documented civilian deaths from violence in Iraq
112,114 – 122,644
Further analysis of the WikiLeaks' Iraq War Logs
may add 12,000 civilian deaths.
Deaths over time

This data is based on 31,804 database entries from the beginning of the war to 17 Mar 2013. The most recent weeks are always in the process of compilation and will rise further. The current range contains 10,302–10,666 deaths (9.2%–8.7%, a portion which may rise or fall over time) based on single-sourced reports. Graphs are based on the higher number in our totals. Gaps in recording and reporting suggest that even our highest totals to date may be missing many civilian deaths from violence. See Recent Events for as yet unpublished incidents, and read About IBC for a better description of the project's scope and limitations. 
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Now do you see why White Americans  are hypocrites? (I could say “the majority” of all Americans are hypocrites, though I don't see Blacks, Muslim-Americans, and Native Americans as participating in the hypocrisy of which I'm writing.)  Think about if the United States suffered 10,000 deaths a year from “terrorist” bombs.

Look at the devastation and destruction and death the White Political and Military Leaders of America brought to the people of Afghanistan…the innocent people of Afghanistan who had nothing to do with 9/11…who had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden (a Saudi-Arabian) being in their country…he was invited to Afghanistan by our CIA who took over reigning militarily over Afghanistan from the then Soviet Union who warned us not to get involved in Afghanistan because it was impossible to win a war there.

And look at the innocent victims of our drone strikes in Pakistan.

As irony would have it, today (April 25th) in Dallas, Texas, the weasels and rats and corrupted ones dedicated the George W. Bush Presidential Library.  I was shocked to see Jimmy Carter there and speaking highly warmly about Georgie Porgie’s benevolence toward Africa.  I never thought much of Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer/rocket scientist who fucked up tragically in trying to rescue the Iran Embassy hostages, a foolish endeavor that left the gate open for Ronnie “Raygun” Reagan's invasion into the White House during the next election.  All of our White Presidents have been hypocrites.  And now our first Black (half White) President is a hypocrite, too.  Maybe it’s just natural for White (or half-White) Americans to be hypocrites. 

And speaking of hypocrites, wouldn’t you know New York City’s billionaire mayor who can’t stand being out of the spotlite for one minute, came on NYC television today (April 25th) with his shanty Irish police commish to take the spotlite away from Boston (ironically his hometown) by declaring that the Tsarnaev brothers next stop was Times Square where they intended on doing some serious bombing having one pressure cooker bomb left and some smaller hand-grenade bombs left in their arsenal…no one has explained yet how the brothers were carrying this sack of bombs around Boston as they tried to escape the long arm of what seemed like every Boston policeman and Sheriff’s department goon and FBI agent in the whole damn town.  It seems the young Tsarnaev, handcuffed to his bed in a Boston hospital, is taking advantage of the attention he’s finally getting to trumpet himself and his brother as master planners of bombing away the USA with their three pressure cooker bombs.  [Please, I’m not making light of the death and injury these two nutjobs brought to the couple of hundred watchers of the final yards of the Boston Marathon.  I’m merely showing how hypocritical we Americans are when it comes to someone hurting us while we’re hurting so many more around the world with our war economy and stupid War on Terrorism and our stupid drone strikes and our stupid selling and giving away weapons of mass destruction to whichever ally we deem needing them or, in the case of Saudi-Arabia, those able to purchase them.]

We the American people, especially those of us who elected that little criminal privileged prick, G.W. Bush, to two terms as president (whether he stole the elections or not, We the People of the US allowed him to do so without any challenges) and then reelected President “Two Face” Obama again after he had reneged on every “Yes We Can” promise he made in 2008 (he was the lesser of two evils, you argue…so what, he was still evil…and look at the messes he’s continuing to get us into while at home he seems intent to force Republican austerity on our asses) (in today’s (April 25th) hearing on the murderous effect of drone strikes, President Obama refused to send a representative from his administration to explain his drone-strike policies to the shindig).

I’m sorry, but I just can’t believe how We the People of the USA, no matter how fucking neurotic, frightened, bamboozled we are, are continuing to be led down the path to Chaos by our damn noses by our corrupted politicians and global corporations without so much as a weak call for help, a call for stopping this vulgar shit, a call for the arrest of George W. Bush, a call for the recall of these fucking backwards low-populated state representatives and senators who ignore the needs of their people in favor of the pockets full of cash offered them by our true rulers, the global corporations who have no allegiance to our national needs anymore and whose main vision (as used by corporations) is to go about confiscating the wealth of the world for their own powerful positionings and rankings on the Forbes 500 and their own hoarding of trillions upon trillions of dollars and stashing it away in offshore banks and financial ventures and not paying any taxes on the enormous profits they are making off this war economy.  We are such hypocrites...and by now I'm saying all of us Americans are hypocrites.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

 

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Existing in New York City: Celebrating Our Seventh Year of Blogging

How to Spot a Chechen (from The EXiled)
 http://exiledonline.com/spot-the-chechen/
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Say Goodbye to: Richie Havens. I once lived next door to Richie up in Greene County, New York...the man loved to party. Richie Havens, 72, American folk singer and guitarist, heart attack
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Say Goodbye to: Artie White, blues singer...who I knew from his recordings on the Jewel label.
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The Boston Massacre
Do you think the three who died and the nearly two hundred who were injured (losing limbs, some with brain damage) in the Boston bombing would have suffered this foolish bit of trauma had we not been killing Muslims wildly around the world and placed in such a fear society, fear of Muslims attacking us, fear of losing our means of income, fear of intruders, fear of the police?  What if Obama when he took office in 2008 had brought peace to the world...brought our troops home and disbanded Homeland Security (what terror has Homeland Security stopped?) and the CIA goon squads and grounded all the drones and sent out tons of diplomatic corps with open arms of peace, love, and tie dye? In the meantime, look at the next item in this post about the George W. Bush Library being built at the expense of millions of dollars of our tax money (and probably our Social Security pool money) and think about how that little lying prick is living the good life down in Dallas, Texas, both he and his pothead wife getting the best of free health care and being protected to the hilt by Secret Service goons.  That low-life weasel of a spoiled brat boy who never grew up...a weasel of a man who went AWOL and cried behind his mammy's dress when his time to SERVE his country came up; yet, this same little prick sent thousands of military personnel to their deaths and millions of Iraqis and Afghanistans to their deaths.  Too bad this year's Boston Marathon wasn't held down that nice Dallas street on which this criminal bastard lives.

In the meantime, what did I tell ya, Congress didn't pass one god-damn new gun law.  Obama continues to show his Republican side is his true side.
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Look What Your Tax Dollars Are Building: The George W. Bush Presidential Library: This building will not contain any books but will be filled with shit.



Solar Flare (CME) to Hit Helpless Mercury
"Earth was not in the line of fire. Instead, the CME is heading for Mercury: ETA April 20th. NASA's MESSENGER probe in orbit around Mercury will be monitoring the effects of the impact. If the CME overwhelms Mercury's relatively weak magnetic field, it could scour material off the planet's surface creating a temporary atmosphere and adding material to Mercury's comet-like tail." (From spaceweather.com)
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Irony
Ironically this West, Texas, fertilizer plant explosion happened close to the anniversary of Timothy McVeigh (our homegrown terrorist and ex-US Army-trained killer) blowing up the federal building in Okie City using this same kind of fertilizer.  Ironically, also, West, Texas, is only a few miles from David Koresh's compound that Janet Reno ordered burnt to the ground, fuck the people inside.  Ironically also, the ATF is involved in this investigation, too.  This chemical plant (that's what this ammonia-based fertilizer is, a chemical) hadn't been inspected in 5 years (it is also a non-union plant); chemical plants blow: Bopol in India; one in France a few years back; and down in Texas City, Texas, when I was a kid, a boat loaded with sulphur-fertilizer blew sky high killing over 1,000.  But we are hooked on chemicals...we love them and we love our fertilizers and we love our chemical weapons...but the plant executives and officials who allowed this to happen, they're not terrorists...oh no, they'll get bonuses and be excused for their carelessness and mediocrity in concern for their workers and neighbors...hey, it's all about profits, folks!  It's Capitalism at its best and most dangerous.

By the way: President Obama's oil-executive-packed Keystone Pipeline investigative thugs released their report on the Keystone Pipeline (one of the members of this committee was a Trans-Canada executive) and guess what?  Why, of course, they said it was perfectly safe and blah, blah, blah...and now Trans-Canada is flooding the press and internet sites with ads telling how many jobs and how much money this "safe" pipeline is going to mean for our economy (and Canada's).  Plus, check out who owns the Texas refineries where this dirty crude is going to be refined and sold to European markets.  Would you believe the Koch BrothersLet's give those two sorry bastards a big round of tax breaks for their giving not one shit about anybody's lives but their own.
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Interesting Statement About Social Security (from tompaine.com):
"...when it comes to Social Security, there is no division between 'old' and 'young.' There’s only 'old' and 'not yet old.'"
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 OH BOY, Here We Go Again: Remember How Vietnam War Started?  WE LOVE WAR!

US to deploy 200 troops to Jordan over Syria war: minister
AMMAN — The United States plans to deploy 200 troops in Jordan because of "the deteriorating situation" in war-torn Syria, Information Minister Mohammad Momani said on Wednesday.
"The deployment of the troops is part of US-Jordanian military cooperation to boost the Jordanian armed forces in light of the deteriorating situation in Syria," Momani told AFP.
He did not say when the troops were scheduled to arrive in Jordan.
"US and Jordanian officials have been in touch for the past two days. It is still unclear if military equipment and weapons will arrive with the group, who will come to the kingdom in the coming stage."
Jordan, a key US ally in the region, says it is hosting around 500,000 Syrian refugees.
Prime Minister Abdullah Nsur told parliament on Sunday that the impact of Syria's war posed a threat to the kingdom's security and Jordan would seek the UN Security Council's help to tackle the fallout.
Copyright © 2013 AFP. All rights reserved 
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Say Goodbye to: Frank Bank: Lumpy on "Leave It to Beaver." Frank Bank, 71, American actor (Leave It to Beaver).
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In Celebrating Our Seventh Year of Posting The Daily Growler, Here's a Post From Nov. 2006

Thursday, November 30, 2006


An I for an I

Me, Myself, and I
Since my transcendental elevation from cynical bottoms to the existential plane of universal mazda—the light bulb, symbol of the Idea, I am seeing clearly NOW almost to forever. Only NOW, because about the past I am confused and about the future I know as much NOTHING as the most vaunted soothsayer or scientist. With NOTHING visible in front of me and NOTHING truly remembered in back of me, I am left with the NOW.
In the NOW, what matters?
For many years I was a professional editor in New York City working in several areas of editing, first as a copyeditor, then as an editor, then a senior editor, then an editorial director, and finally as a pharmaceutical ad editor. I started in editing as a freelancer peddling my wares in whatever back-office temp job I could land—and I temped at some of the hottest publishing houses, magazines, ad agencies in NYC—and I worked so hard and was so easily accessible night or day I impressed directors and senior editors and soon I began to get more work than I could handle. I was on my own. I loved freelancing. And during the seventies, one could freelance one’s way into steady enough workloads, most of which you worked on at home (I had a brand-new downtown loft I worked out of, though most of the time my official office was a special table in a window they had set up for me around the corner at a local watering hole). I edited everything from cookbooks to horribly bad poetry manuscripts to the pompous asinine trumpetings of an old upstate New York rich man and ex-U.S. senator and WWII general rambling out his memoirs before the approaching Alzheimer’s took him under and left him more goony bird than important homo sapien. In my best freelancing years, I made easily $500 a week, always getting a check every Friday, taking it right to the check cashing place where I had an account, cashing it, and heading straight back to my watering hole office for a little successful celebration that lasted until Sunday afternoon when I once again had to come to my senses and start editing on the pile of another week’s worth of work, buckling down until the eagle flew on the next Friday. I swore I would never again work for anybody except ME, MYSELF, and I. Do I hear a drumroll and a salute?
It was all me. My being the important being; my individuality my freedom. And I believed in NOTHING then. I had learned in college as a student of sociology that all was darkness and that only in light did we progress—nights were given over to shivering in fear and alarm and days were given over to being creative, to thinking, to getting ideas, light bulbs over heads symbolizing a light for the coming darkness. Bringing light to darkness is God’s first creation in all the holy books of the world. The more light bulbs you have, the more light you have. Eventually, the light bulb eliminates DARKNESS—and or NOTHINGNESS. Our individual space is our place in the sun. We protect ourselves from the darkness; in the light we are so aggressively idealistic we have to be controlled. “Stiffled,” as Archie Bunker used to put it.
When I was finally tossed out of my profession on my ear, a part of my dismissal had to do with me being out of the modern mode, the new work world that insists we're all members of TEAMS, which, of course, is bullshit, except TEAMS keep workers in line--TEAMS following the B.S. adage that two heads are better than one. What, though, if there's only one light bulb over just one of those heads? That's usually the case when it comes to TEAMS in the corporate structure. They are there to take the individuality out of the worker. I don't like that. I'm an individual; I work better left alone. My line of work demands separation. TEAMS handicap a guy like me.

The irony here is that as a man I love being alone but as a wolf I need my fellow wolves for certain advantages in hunting, which is the main occupation of a wolf.

This is becoming a nice writer's puzzle for me. I've got a lone-wolf-contrarian versus a member of a tribe or wolfpack; one the shepherd the other the lamb. Besides, I haven't really gotten deep in this existential atheism yet; I love the sound of that. It means a believer in NOTHING doesn't believe in any SUPERNOTHING either, only the darkness of pure NOTHING. So when I turn on all my light bulbs what I see is me and all my shadows, the "I's" that behold me through my self--the Id, the Ego, the Superego; those that are NOW.

I said I am writing poetry again.

Coming: the Great I AM.

To be continued as everything is continued until it is discontinued.

the growlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Word From Baghdad--The Idiots Were Meeting in Jordan While in Iraq

From the Washington Post:

But Iraqis on both sides of their nation's sectarian divide report worrisome signs that the conflict will soon evolve into pitched battles between large armed groups.
One secular Shi'ite speaking on the telephone from Baghdad said Shi'ite militias were massing in preparation for a large offensive against Sunnis in the capital.
"They had a big militarylike ceremony today for the Mahdi militia, to show their force. They are making themselves ready for something big -- protests, fighting, killing," said the Shi'ite.
A secular Sunni in close contact with one insurgent faction, said rebel Sunnis were also trying to form alliances among militias for a big push in the city against the Shi'ites, including more raids on government buildings.

Our truly dumbass, phony "president" says we're staying the course in Iraq until "the mission is accomplished," his words in Jordan where today the phony "president" of Iraq got pissed at his master and tried to bite him back. In the meantime, Unka Dick was summoned to Saudi Arabia where the Bin Ladens are getting pissed off at Bush Baby is letting the filthy dog Shi'ites take over the country and the only Shi'ites close by are the Iranians--the Saudis are Sunnis--oh boy, what fun we have created overthere. Unka Dick's nose is deep up the asshole of the ruling Saud. We are owned by Saudi Arabia, if perhaps you didn't already know that.

Pappy Bush is now stepping in to solve the Iraq situation with his own study group paid for by, guess who? We the People. Pappy's picking up a staff and a few million bucks to help on his retirement--how old that old F anyway?

Be Glad You Don't Live in Baghdad, Unless You Do...
thestaff

for The Daily Growler

Tuesday, April 09, 2013

Existing in New York City: We Are a Nation of Killers

Foto by tgw, "Radiating Cell Phone Panels Aimed at New Yorkers," New York City, 2013
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GIVE THREE CHEERS TO THE DAILY GROWLER--as we celebrate our 7th year of blogging...we started back in April of 2006.  Go to the end of this post for a 2006 post!!!
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Say Goodbye to: Grady Hatton, another great old baseball player from the 8-team days of Major League Baseball, an infielder with the Cincinnati Reds back in my early days when I followed MLB and collected baseball cards; passed on at 90; like I say, old baseball players (some of 'em) seem to live forever. Grady Hatton, 90, American baseball player (Cincinnati Reds) and manager (Houston Astros), natural causes.
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Say Goodbye to: Annette Funicello, at one time every young boy's fantasy sex symbol when she was a well-developed member of the Mickey Mouse Club.  Walt Disney later insisted that Annette not show her marvelous cleavage in all those stupid beach blanket bingo movies, though he did allow her to wear one-piece bathing suits.  Annette Funicello, 70, American actress (The Mickey Mouse Club, Beach party films) and singer ("Tall Paul"), complications from multiple sclerosis.
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We Are All Killers
War, war, war.  Hot damn!  Don’t you just love war?  Now we’re beating the war drums for a possible nuclear war with North Korea!  Double hot damn!  Finally a nuclear war.  You know our military goons have been praying to the God of War for it seems like forever for a nuclear war with some heathen society; so why not North Korea?  Those lousy dirty commie assholes; we need to teach those sorry bastards a lesson.  Only problem is, these heathen, commie, bastards do have nuclear weapons.  Of course, don’t dig too deeply into where they got their nuclear capabilities.  They supposedly got their nuclear missile capabilities from Pakistan and Egypt, though I seem to recall a connection between a Swedish nuclear power company and either Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld having something to do with selling North Korea nuclear power capabilities.

God, we love war.  We love killing heathen.  We love defending our allies to the death.  Even to the possible end to all mankind.  You see, these lousy commie North Koreans have missiles with nuclear war heads capable of perhaps reaching the California coast.  Remember last year sometime when North Korea tested a missile and we pooh-poohed it as going up a few feet in the air and then slamming back down to earth a dud?  Why do I remember all these incidents and nobody else seems to?  Is it because I’m an armchair objectivist sociologist? (I like the fact that the objectivist poets (Wm. Carlos Wms, Oppen, Zukofsky) considered poems machines built out of words.)

And President Obama.  What is with this guy?  He continues to compromise with these nutjob Republicans.  Why?  He doesn’t have to.  He’s got the people behind him, though, yes, the American people are fools.  Why fools?  For one reason they keep electing these arrogant, hayseed, backwards-thinking boobs who don’t give one flying shit about the people they’re supposed to represent.  I mean can you imagine these beanheads allowed this bullshit sequester crap to prevail, a bullshit political move that in cutting Medicare has put in jeopardy cancer patients, Medicare once paying for cancer patients to get their chemo therapies at local clinics but with this sequester bullshit now forcing these poor boobs to go to HMO for-profit hospitals where Medicare only covers partial chemo expenses leaving these poor folk to have to come up with upwards of $650-a-month out of pocket.  These Washington, District of Corruption, jerks living the good life with the world’s best paid-for health care gouging poor folks to pay for the economic mess these lying-dog jerks shoved us into with their ass-kissing of non-tax-paying corporations who are hoarding billions of dollars in offshore banks (mostly British banks) so they don’t have to pay taxes on these hoards of money, these corporations who aren’t paying taxes anyway given all the loopholes these Washington, District of Corruption, creeps keep voting their way.  These same creeps who after 21 little kids were gunned down by a antipsychotic drug-taking nutjob kid in Newtown, Connecticut, still can’t come up with any gun-control legislation that might perhaps save some future lives.  Fuck no.  Instead, they hem-haw about as they kiss deep into the ass cracks of the nutjob National Rifle Association and the weapons manufacturing lobbyists who want to arm the fucking world so we can go back to having shoot outs and multiple drive bys and cops mowing down innocent people and antipsychotic drug-taking psychopaths to continue blowing us away on a whim with assault rifles that can fire 100 rounds in a matter of seconds.  But of course the USA is the weapons capital of the world.  We are the world’s largest makers and sellers of weapons of mass destruction.  We are the world’s cruelest people.  We love murder.  We love serial killers.  We love mobs and the Mafia.  We love outlaws.  We love fear.  We love the thought of being given a license to kill.  And we love killing.  Life means nothing to us, not even our own lives.  Look at all the fat slobs waddling around boogie-ing into McDonald’s to carb up on green-slime-beef hamburgers or butt-shaking into Burger King for some abscessed cow meat or maybe glue-factory slaughtered horse meat for all we know.

I just watched a whole slew of George Carlin live on YouTube and oh what a right-on man of wit and wisdom he was.  And speaking of old bitch Maggie Thatcher's death, in one of his bits called "Things You'll Never See," he said one thing you'll never see is Maggie Thatcher strapping on a dildo.  This pinhead of a Brit corruption who thought Nelson Mandella a terrorist and who was palsy-walsy with some of the corruptest assholes in the world, including Pinochet and Saddam Hussein.  This warmongering bitch who was hand-in-hand with old Pappy Bush in starting the Persian Gulf War and who bombed the bejesus out of the poor Falkland Islanders because Argentina wanted to take back what was their sovereign territory.  In Merry Ole England as I write on this they are having parties celebrating Maggie's death.  From our friend Nick Jainschigg comes this link

http://metro.co.uk/2013/04/09/margaret-thatcher-dead-10-songs-about-her-3589285/

And we sing "Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead" along with the Brits.  But then we must remember, Maggie didn't rise to power without the full support of a majority of Limeys, did she?

The Syrian Conflict
I just watched a very awesome PBS "Frontline" program this evening (April 9th) of some brave filmmakers in Syria with both the regime forces and the rebels and Jesus X. Christ what a telling program.  It shows the futility of war; how stupid it is; how dividing it is.  People who once were neighbors are now enemies.  The rebels blame the regime and the regime blames the rebels.  The official word in Damascus is that the rebels are foreigners, terrorists from England, France, Turkey, Libya, while the rebels seem ragtag at best, with weapons they managed to grab from overtaking regime outposts, weapons most of the rebels shown in this program don't even know how to fire.  One weapon they knew how to fire it but they didn't know how to aim it.  Trying to aim it, they were using Google Earth coordinates they were downloading off cell phones.  They had rocket launchers, for instance, but they didn't even know how to fire them.  At one point the rebel commander says they only have 80 bullets left in their arsenal.  There is a sad moral to this bullshit conflict, at the end of this program, one of the defeated rebel soldiers says he is going over and join al-Queda.  Most of the civilians I saw were women and children.
 
Just as I heard on an interview with an Iraqi civilian who said he wished they could go back to the days of Hussein, a Syrian woman on this program was saying Syria used to be so peaceful under Assad.  "We used to could walk around at night without any fear."  "WAR...what's it good for?  ABSOUTELY NOTHIN'"

In the meantime, President Obama is being advised by the same ole dumbass military goons who advised Little Georgie Porgie Puddin' Pie Bush, that little prick who got us into this whole war economy mess we're in, spending trillions of dollars on these stupid conflicts around the world, in war-ravaged and now absolutely divided Iraq; in war-ravaged and innocent-of-having-anything-to-do-9/11 Afghanistan, while We the Dumbass American People suffer, while we lose our homes, our jobs, our manufacturing, our pensions, our public lands, our minerals, our water supplies to President Obama's Reagan/Thatcher-like austerity measures and the privatization of our lives as he allows corporate criminals to do as they please, to go about robbing us blind, to go about making billions off these useless wars, to go about making billions off polluting our air, to go about making billions off chemically and genetically ruining our food supplies [we are letting Monsanto and DuPont destroy our honey bee populations through the use of their pesticides that are 1000-times more powerful than DDT...without bees to pollinate most of our food supply, we'll produce no crops in a few generations.  Yet, President Obama continues to promote Monsanto goons to high-level decision-making jobs in our FDA.  And he continues to promote fossil-fuel fools to high positions in our energy and interior departments.  And he continues to let his White side rule over his Black side brain in order to kiss the criminal asses of the Wall Street gangsters, gangsters who get free rides though their policies (of gambling with our money) that are bringing ruination and more war to this collapsing (heading toward Chaos) world.  Are we doomed?

thebittergrowlingwolf  
for The Daily Growler

Happy Birthday The Daily Growler...Here's a post from 2006

Sunday, December 31, 2006


Old Father Time Is Hanged By His Neck

Here Goes Yet Another Year
I am all alone this New Year's Eve, a situation I have purposely placed myself into. I have no gig again this year. It's now been 6 years since I fronted a New Year's Eve band at a NYC club, a band I fronted for 7 years before one of the star bartender's galfriends, a violin player who had been around NYC for a long sagging bunch of years, a star follower...but I'm growling about a personal disappointment and I'm sure the violinist is no longer the NY's Eve band down there--but that was a wonderful time for me--I was a star then, and, boy, I gotta admit, I love the power of being a lead band singer and the miniscule stardom but still stardom that that brings--and, yes, the babes, ah the sweet women who love musicians, the best women in the world, that I guarantee, to put up with the emotions of a musicians, the depressions, the drinking, the associating, the drugs, the "always" disappointing hopes--it's a hell of an emotional trip for a musician's babe and god help 'em if they marry their musician--I don't give a shit if the musician is a successful musician--they're the worst husbands.

I have the draft of a novel I wrote on another laptop that's still up here above my head on a shelf gathering age, which is told by the layers of dust that have like tree rings collected on it. I fire it up occasionally just to keep it alive to me, but, anyway, in that novel I discussed what it was like being a musician and the problems a musician had with his woman--a horror story, a real horror story, too, a story that only a musician could tell, though most musicians aren't good writers. I must have written 500 songs about my particular horror story with women. [In that novel I talk about a young Viet Namese immigrant who lives directly across the hall from me and who still lives directly across the hall from me and who is into what I call "house" music, meaning it's a kind of mixing--which is stealing the riffs, beats, and actual recordings of real musicians to make a synthetic music that is called house music because it's the kind of shit you hear when you go in a Mafia-run or an Israeli-run dance club or "house" out in the distant boroughs of New York City. Young people dance straight up and down now and that's what this crappy music sounds like, just straight up and down boring, boring rhythms--their tempos never changing--boring, GOD-DAMN BORING. But anyway, he's just fired up--he's really a good neighbor, kept up by a really nice Viet Namese woman who's a strong, hard-working babe, the kind a real musician really needs and not this poor little amateur kid who truly thinks he's Amurican hip by playing his mixes--he told me one time he had over 2000 albums stored over in Brooklyn he made his mixes from--he tried to take advantage of me when he first moved in over there, hearing me practicing and shit he told me, "Hey, man, could you teach me to play a keyboard, I just bought this Yamaha...." Musicians are funny. We don't like to pass out tricks on to kids, especially kids who...oh hell, there I go again, growling due to my own frustrations with being a musician who used to work every New Year's Eve not having a gig this New Year's Eve.]

And that's why I'm purposely alone this New Year's Eve.

And what has been the worth of 2006 to me? I don't know. It was just another year to me. Let's see if I can recap what this past year was...

1) the 2006 baseball season was one of the best I've ever lived through, though as a New York City baseball fan I was terribly disappointed that the two best teams in baseball were eliminated by two rather second-rate teams who went on to perform in a truly boring and who-gave-a-shit World Series won by the Saint Louis Cardinals, the least worst of these two undeserving teams. That was bad; but the season itself was a winner, both for the asshole owners--they made billions, trust me--and the fans. The fans got their money's worth and the owners got much more than their money's worth.

Hey, here's another irony, it was the best year in the Yankees's long history in terms of attendance and earnings, and, yet, the greedy son of a bitch who owns the Yankees had the nerve as punishment for his all-star millionaire Yankees letting him down to announce he was raising Yankees ticket prices by up to 25%. Baseball ain't a kids's game anymore. What kid has $30 in his jeans to afford even a bleacher seat at Yankee Stadium? That means only people with good paying jobs are keeping baseball alive and well--it's no longer a poor people's sport and that's a shame. The only hope for poor people is that they still broadcast all Yankee games over the free radio--I mean, you have to subject yourself to what seem like eternal commercials, everything, even a ground ball to shortstop is sponsored by some sponsor--"Wow, here's hot ground ball to Jeter at short, brought to you by Toyota, the throw to first, brought to you by ConEdison, is, in time, brought to you by Budweiser, for the out, brought to you by the good people at Kay Jewelers." But, hell, it's free and you can be at every damn game, road or home. Of course, if you can afford a $100-a-month and can get ESPN, you can watch the games on television--but for Yankees games that means it's Bobby Mercer as the announcer. [Poor Bobby just underwent brain surgery down in Texas to remove a tumor from up there. Hey, Bobby is an old Okie hillbilly just like the Mick--in fact, Bobby was supposed to become the next Mick but he never could cut that mustard. As an announcer, he's kind'a boring, though the boy does know baseball in a hillbilly sort of way.]

2) In music. I discovered that Charles Edward Ives is the greatest classical composer ever produced in America, and to me, in the world; the most original composer ever. I raise a glass of Moet to Charles Ives--especially his Concord Sonata and his great 4th Symphony and all the stuff, man, all the Ives you can eat in one meal. Damn right, he's worth gorging on.

And then, I came back to pianist Jaki Byard, his playing and his leading and composing, and thanks to thedailygrowlerhousepianist I got my hands back on what I think is one of the greatest live recordings ever recorded, in jazz or whatever, improvised perfection, Jaki Byard's album from the 1960s, Live From Lennie's on the Turnpike, a dump of a club that used to sit outside of Brookline, Massachusetts, on the Mass Turnpike. It contains a Jaki tune called "Twelve"--it's written in 12/4 time, that's 3 triplets of eighth notes played 4 times in one measure, like a Delta blues, like Lightnin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscombe played, and it is massive, wide-open, free-as-a-bird, soul-stealing, giving wings to those same feelings that give us energy to rise from a nothingness into a 12-minute-long period of ecstasy, the highest pleasure man can enjoy, the pleasure of being entranced by a music as it arises and explodes--or ejaculates, though I'm reading it from a male point of view.

And as always, I've found Charles Mingus continuing to be fascinating, unbelievably fascinating right up to the time when his body told him he was through and he refused and kept on writing from his wheelchair--humming it out into a tape recorder. I got a DVD of Mingus at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1975 doing a rendition of "Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat" that just knocks your F-ing sox off, with Benny Bailey and Gerry Mulligan and Mingus taking over your totally aural intake and bringing it straight into your solar plexus where it turns to feelings, man, deep expressive feelings, feelings that soar you and cause you to memorialize Lester Young, man, that is if you know Lester Young like we jazz afficianados have to know Lester Young and we know it takes two to tango, two to rango.

Which brings me to another fun musical thing that happened to me in '06--re-getting-into Lester Young, the one master I tended to overlook coming alive when I did in the middle of the happening careers of Charles Parker, Jr., Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Bud Powell, Oscar Peterson, Clifford Brown, Max Roach, Thelonious Monk, the innovators--my teachers, the masters, but then, thanks to John Coltrane whose life I followed step-for-step till he died, I began listening tighter to Lester Young, especially a Columbia LP issued back in the earliest 1950s, called Lester Leaps In, and featuring the earliest Lester Young recordings mostly with Count Basie and the Kansas City gang from back in the late 1930s, Jo Jones, Freddie Green, Walter Page, and that band, that old Benny Moten band kicking Lester on and on note velvety perfect note after velvety perfect note, playing the tenor sax as though it were an extention of his body, which it was. Hail, Lester Young!

3) Politics in 2006. Politics broke my F-ing heart in 2006. Scary politics. Fascism blooming faster than crab grass on a southern front lawn right before our eyes and our leaders seem dumbstruck in their efforts to stop it in its tracks, its huge tracks, its overwhelming tracks, its big feet slamming down on us as it goosesteps over our necks with its bootheel-enforced philosophy of demand. Politics may be beneath me in 2007. I'll do it dog-style if it is--up the rump, if you don't mind my crassness. Bush. Hooey on that gone-astray monkey. He's a crushed wimp. Killing is getting boring to him. Killing Hussein should have been one of his thousand points of light, but it seems old George had rather be down in Crawford, Texas, on his faux ranch entertaining his advisors--"Here, boys, have a couple'a swigs of this Ezra Brooks here. My old pappy, that old sagging wimp, sent it to me congratulatin' me on stretching old Sad-dam's neck till it snapped. Gawd, there was a day when I'd like to have been there, like when I used to enjoy those executions I ordered down there in my adopted State of Texas. Yeee-haw those were good times. I don't know, boys, maybe I'm gettin' tired'a killing folks--though hell, I expected a lot more of our doughboys to have been killed by now--I used to think the more of my boys killed overthere the more peppy the populus would get behind me--you know, get behind in a good sense and not the sense they all seem to be expressing--they're gettin' behind me all right but I think they're fixin' to dog F me, boys--I don't think there's any luv in their motives. I may have to bail on you boys. I'm rich as hell; I don't have to take this; Prince Bandar Bush sez he has a room at his Pakistani Tiger Camp I could come live in with my old half-brother, Osama."

4) I started reading books voraciously this year. I love reading books like that. 14 at once presently--and looking to start reading another one as soon as possible. I've never read Finnegan's Wake. I think I'd like to give it a try. Here's a link that will lead you into that Joycean World, a fascinating man, Joyce; a man who wrote in many languages at once, Finnegan's Wake having that great long sentence--it has a name, but I've forgotten it--like there's one word mentioned over and over in it. Hell, go with me to this link:

www.fweet.org/

You can even find out what "fweet" means.

Ulysses is the funniest book I've ever read; second is Lolita; and wouldn't you know Nabokov got to sit at Joyce's feet in Paris and idolized the guy; and James was an interesting sweet singing drunkard of a man, becoming eccentrically blind as a bat in his latter years, yet able to see amazingly through walls of words.

Happy New Year from

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler