The Pathetic Lead Us Into Chaos

Apathy's Children: the Pathetic
I was just reviewing a recording session I did alone in a studio. I meant well. It started after I just was fooling around at the piano--I'm reading Gunther Schuller again--Musings, from the Oxford Press, 1986--so I'm getting into music elementals and technical shit again--so I was fooling around at the piano and moving chords around--and I came upon--B-flat seventh to G with flatted 3rd--from G to F ninth, then back to G, then to the G V (I-IV-V progression), to the IV, and back to the...AHA, not the G, but the B-flat! Then while looking over the r&b classic, "Good Rockin'," and going over the intro verse--"Have you heard the word/There's good rockin' tonight...."--I started putting words to the B-flat configurational tune I had doodled out on the piano. I took it into my studio and recorded it--it came out "Have you heard the word/Father Blues is sad tonight/Have you heard the word/Father Blues ain't rockin' tonight/Why? [at the V (the D)]..."'Cause tonight's the night Bob Guida died...." I went on and recorded 8 tunes, including this head-one that came out of my piano doodling. I did Muddy's "Streamline Woman" (I think Willie Dixon actually penned it), "Workin' on a high line/'Fore daylight." I just started following the parallel lines railing through the vast relationships to myself and Brother Bob the Apostle of the Way-Back Blues in the attic of my cerebellum (my cerebellum plantation) in the musical sense and in a matter of two days I had the eight offerings down what I thought was pretty pat. But on reviewing the recording today, after wading in its flowing-keys-and-cataracting-notes waters, I came out of the experience wondering if it had turned out too pathetic. That hit me. Pathetic? Is that the right word? Why did I feel the word "pathetic" after listening to my recording, my eight-tune tribute to my old blues traveler brother, Bob Guida (theryefarmerfromqueens)? It is pathetic. I picked the right word, but that doesn't mean it's not any good. It's morbid; maybe that better explains it; a tearjerker! And I'm not a tearjerker type of person; I'm usually good for a cackle and not a tear! I'm actually in quite good form both vocally and pianistically on the recording. The tunes are classic blues and a couple of my originals Bob knew well and appreciated like they were his own and he had played them with me many times. The pathetic part came out of nowhere. It's just the way the satchel of tunes leaves you feeling after it's emptied out it's tunes and sits lonely in the back of a forgotten closet. God-damn! I almost threw the recording in the trash. I am a perfectionist whether people think I am or not. I'm a wordy magician of sorts. I've always said I'm a soothsayer, too. Being pathetic's just not my style. Bob's death hit me hard. Death usually doesn't bother me at all--since I was a very young kid I heard of local kids getting their asses whacked every day in the evil World War II and as a bouncing baby boy and later a little dumbass kiddy kid I attended many a military funeral of so many fallen and now-forgotten heroes. Because I attended so many military funerals as a kid, I've had a feeling all my life just instinctually that WWII was "fixed"--a trick-bag job pulled off by old Brit Bowler-Hat-Snob-Snit-Wanker Neville Chamberlain's snobbery approach to with the street-hustler Hitler and Hitler trick bagging that old fool right back by, the minute his Brit high-ass left town, immediately going off to rape and plunder Poland and Czechoslovakia--the Germans have hated the Poles for centuries--same with the Russians--poor old crushed Poland! And the Germans hated the Scandinavians and so did the Russians. Then Pearl Harbor! Oh yeah, there were several questions about Pearl Harbor that were never answered!).

Keep us in fear and right now in this degenerating world, the Power Elite is wishing Swine flu on us all. Remember, I've, like a good soothsayer, warned my readers that Lord Chaos is a tough motherfucker to live under. To understand Lord Chaos's chaotic mind you must abandon all logic--logic doesn't work in the Chaotic World. I was hoping Barack Obama would pull out his ancient wisdom--his aboriginal wisdom--his special mixed-blood wisdom--and battle old Lord Chaos maybe back into some kind of semi-"natural" order, at the least, but, nope, it looks like Obama isn't even a Don Quixote when it comes to wisdom. Obama's like a kid finding himself suddenly in toy and candy heaven; Obama's thrilled-happy living like a king and getting the best for himself and his family, fuck the worries and woes of most of the citizens of the world. You see, when you're amongst the Power Elite, outside suffering and bungling and fucking up aren't seen and certainly not cared about--like when Bush flew over New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina in Air Force One (yep, same one Obama loves flying around in) saying, "Wow, it must really be bad down there if it looks as bad as it does from up here. Ah, pilot, dude, get me back to Crawford, quick!"--Obama is now flying over the World's mess in Air Force One, a mess left in the aftermath of two massive illegal invasions and occupations of two sovereign nations and justifying those invasions and occupations with a phony World War on Terror--a phony and unworkable warmonger phony coalition that was destined to wipe out terrorism with a burlap bag full of wonder "Mission Accomplished"-type tricks--in a matter of days. Instead, in Lord Chaos's world, we're stuck with two killing fields that are continually flooded with blood now for 8 years and whose cost is rising upwards of umpzilliongagglingbazilliongooseyganders of dollars--wrecking our economy--bringing down our corporations--8 years of illegally disrupting civilized life in Afghanistan and now 6 years of disrupting civilized life in Iraq. Just last night I heard Hillbilly Hill (our pathetic Sec'y of State) say, after she had made one of those famous "unexpected" drop-in visits to Iraq all our politicians seem to love to do and do multiple times a year it seems (Joe Biden, the Veep, made a surprise visit to Iraq recently)--as if dropping unexpectedly into Iraq is like taking a little drive in the country for these pampered princes and princesses as they fly madly around the four corners of our rolling-round earth ignoring the fact it's being flattened back to a mythological state by the global economy and global warming--global doom. So, due to the sudden increase in violence in Iraq, Madame Secretary Hillary RodHAM Clinton said, by golly, even though Obama promised to pull us totally out of Iraq if We the Voters of America (notice I didn't say We the People of the USA--because only 30% of We the People vote these fools into lordship/knighthood/royalty/the Power Elite)--so Obama promised if We the Voters of the USA would elect him Prez, he'd pull out of Iraq IMMEDIATELY--and that immediately soon became nine months--and then that nine months was stretched out to eleven months--and then maybe a couple of years--but now Hillbilly Hill (where's Bill while Hill's traveling all over the world in her Air Force One?--what a life we give these dumbasses!) is saying, this increase in violence in Iraq (Islam-mad bombers have killed hundreds in the last week in Baghdad and Mosul--they even lobbed a few rockets into the precious democratic Green Zone last week) means, Jesus X, we can't pull out of Iraq afterall--Hell, Hill said, we're staying in Iraq with no end in sight now. We'll show them who's boss. Bring 'em on. Yep. We ain't leaving Iraq afterall! And the Iraqi president said, "The hell you aren't leaving!"

And now we've suddenly got a Swine flu epidemic upon us. And it's being blamed on our gosh-awful neighbors to the south, those sleazy drug-dealing, sorry-ass, US-controlled (aren't they? Larry Summers saved the peso back when he was stooging for Slick Willie and his billionaire buddies) Mexicans--and now fearless Obama is giving his approval to order the Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California National Guards into doing Mexican border service --we are militarizing our border with Mexico--we are turning Mexico into a terrorist state!

Disorder on the border--and then out of nowhere sneaking (wetbacking/fence-climbing) over that border comes Swine flu. Is it an epidemic? Is it pandemic? At first announcement, the Mexican reports said 120 people in Mexico had died of this strange-new resistant strain of Swine flu--then that number was reduced to 86--then at one time today I heard that maybe only 26 had really died of Swine flu in Mexico. I also read in the same report that some Mexican healthcare experts were saying wearing masks doesn't really protect you from this strain of Swine flu. US reports are saying this epidemic was started at a Mexican pig farm owned and operated by the Smithfield Ham folks of Yahoo US Virginia--why, heckfire, you see, we do own Mexico. On the other hand, mad scientists are coming out of the woodwork up here with doomsday promises--a pandemic is developing!!!!! While the politicians, as usual, and Obama say, no sweat, no problem, Obama saying, hell, he himself just came back from Mexico and he's healthier than a horse--why Obama's even playing golf at the used-to-be EXCLUSIVE Congressional Country Club. Fuck basketball, he's so athletic now that he's President gamesmanshippy now--yep, he was out playing golf over the weekend--the commercial teevee heads saying he dared to take time off to play golf while the world was going to hell.

I just returned from my favorite Irish pub where I had the cracked-pepper-glazed pork chops, stamped with a big Mexico guaranteed "meat" stamp irredescently shining through the varnishy glaze of my chops, cooked by a Mexican chef, and served by two young Mexican waiters. Why a Mexican looking woman came up to me as I gobbled down my Swine chops and sneezed in my face. "You swine," she hollered at me. "You've got the wrong male chavinist pig, lady--I'm the piano-playing pig who built a brick--ehhhhh--HOUSE--'She's mighty, mighty, lettin' it all hang out'--you know, lady, the 'three little pigs'? I'm the pig whose Brick--ehhhhh--HOUSE that god-damn Wolf Man couldn't blow down...you know, in the believable nursery rhyme?"

theswinishgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Gunther Schuller

marvelousmarvbackbiter
A Quicky, Disgruntled Look at New York City Baseball This Year
How embarrassing are the New York Yankees this year. Joe Gerardi's second year as manager of the most expensive and considered best ball team in baseball. Yet, they just got badly swept by the fucking Red Sox and last night the bumble-stumbling Detroit Tigers clawed the Yanks into the ground for their 4th straight loss and a dive into the under .500 class. And all the fol-de-rol about the new "house that George built"--this 2 billion dollar boonswaggle and pink elephant We the Citizens and Taxpayers of New York City Sales Taxes built for the pompous now Alzheimered Georgie Boy. George is letting his stupid son Hank ruin the team now--he along with Brian Cashman, the worst general manager in baseball--a waster of talent. They have a minor-league pitching staff coached by a minor-league pitching coach so don't expect much major league pitching out of the Yanks this year. C.C. Sabathia fucked the game away last night. Chin-up Winged Wong is on the injury list. Then their high-hope big timer A.J. Burnett gave up 8 hits in a couple of innings against the Boston bullies--they clobbered A.J. And this Swisher goof they've put in right field! Why--he was a .218 hitter last year. And Billy Gardner in center! Why that? And benching Melky Cabrera? What's that all about? OK, the Yankees can hit like Titans--though Posada's only hitting .235--and, of course, A-Fraud is still basking in the Florida moonlight as he parties his way heartily around the Tampa hot spots with a new babe on his arm every night. He's recuperating from his arm having to have been rebuilt down in the Yankees up-t0-the-minute operating room in the Yankees big hospital complex down in Tampa. I predict the Yanks will stay in contention all year but will end up under .500 and out of the playoffs for the second year in a row. Good pick, there, Hank and Brian. Getting rid of that awful Joe Torre was one of the big baseball goof moves of all time. In the meantime, Joe is basking in the glowing flaming fame he's currently enjoying managing the first-place Los Angeles Dodgers being led by a ferociously hitting Manny Ramirez and a hyped-up all-star-looking Orlando Hudson! Yes, Hank, you and Brian were so right. I honestly feel sorry for Joe Gerardi. Like I said, if Hank hadn't of fired Joe Torre, Joe Gerardi would be peddling Budweiser in some Northern New Jersey beer market.

And the second worst general manager in baseball is the Mets glorious, El Senor, Omar My-My-yam. Hey, Omar, what a stroke of luck getting Gary Sheffield! And keeping Jerry Manuel. Looks like Jerry will take the Mets lower than he did last year. Great move firing Willie Randolph!

Not a good baseball year for me so far. I just can't be a Dodger fan; though if I loved L.A., and I don't, I'm sure I'd be out at Chavez Ravine every night this year!

American League East
Team	W	L	Pct.	GB	Home	Road	East	Cent.	West	L10	Strk
Boston	13	6	.684	-	10-2	3-4	8-2	3-0	2-4	10-0	W 11
Toronto	14	7	.667	-	7-3	7-4	0-0	10-5	4-2	6-4	L 1
N.Y. Yankees	9	10	.474	4	4-2	5-8	3-6	4-4	2-0	4-6	L 4
Baltimore	9	11	.450	4½	7-6	2-5	4-6	2-1	3-4	3-7	L 1
Tampa Bay	8	12	.400	5½	2-5	6-7	4-5	2-3	2-4	4-6	W

National League East
Team	W	L	Pct.	GB	Home	Road	East	Cent.	West	L10	Strk
Florida	11	8	.579	-	5-4	6-4	11-5	0-3	0-0	3-7	L 7
Philadelphia	10	8	.556	½	4-6	6-2	6-3	1-2	3-3	6-4	W 4
Atlanta	9	10	.474	2	3-4	6-6	6-6	3-4	0-0	4-6	L 2
N.Y. Mets	9	10	.474	2	6-4	3-6	4-3	4-5	1-2	5-5	W 1
Washington	4	14	.222	6½	3-5	1-9	4-14	0-0	0-0	3-7	L

National League West
Team	W	L	Pct.	GB	Home	Road	East	Cent.	West	L10	Strk
L.A. Dodgers	13	7	.650	-	6-0	7-7	0-0	1-2	12-5	6-4	L 2
San Diego	10	9	.526	2½	6-4	4-5	4-2	1-2	5-5	4-6	L 3
San Francisco	9	9	.500	3	7-2	2-7	0-0	2-1	7-8	7-3	W 1
Arizona	8	11	.421	4½	7-9	1-2	0-0	2-2	6-9	5-5	W 2
Colorado	7	11	.389	5	3-4	4-7	1-2	1-1	5-8	3-7	W 2

Standings thanks to CBSSports.com

marvelousmarvbackbiter
for The Daily Growler

The Daily Growler: Our Man in the New York Times

It's Strunk & White's Birthday and Our Man in the New York Times Gives 'Em a Deserved Kick in the Ass for a "Happy Birthday" Present!

Taken from NYTimes On-Line ed. 4/25/09:

Stephen Dodson, an editor, blogs at languagehat.com.

I have been attacking Strunk and White for many years. On my blog, I have called it “that mangiest of stuffed owls,” “the bible of those who want to sneer at other people’s use of language without bothering to actually learn something about it themselves” and a “malign little compendium of bad advice.”

But in the comment thread to my latest Strunk-bashing post, a reader said he had “close to zero knowledge of linguistics” but was “fascinated by the arguments” for and against the book,” and he quite admirably followed up by acquiring a copy and reading it. He then came back to review it, saying:

The rules are short on explanation, background, detail and useful context. So, the book is not the elegant historic relic I hoped for; nor is it an evil, nasty little mindrotter. Either would have been worth the price. I suppose you would have to live with the constant praise of the thing (like Tolstoy with Shakespeare) to get decently angry about it. There are better things to be angry about: like an education system that has college kids unable to write a decent essay, and that turns for a remedy to this inadequate work.

I found that I agreed with him. As I said in my reply, “it’s not evil (though Geoffrey K. Pullum, a co-author of “The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language,” likes to talk as if it were), just undercooked and overpraised.” I told him that the reason some of us express what may seem excessive anger about it is precisely that we “have to live with the constant praise of the thing.”

If people would stop touting it as the Indispensable Book and using it as a weapon, we wouldn’t have to annoy them with our attacks.

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All Along the Watchtower
I just watched the London marathon. I don't see any lack of monies and shit overthere. Nobody jumping out of windows or off the bridges. London looks great, even charming. Even the usually extra-filthy Thames looks clean and refreshing; and, I'd forgotten how right out on the main street the Tower of London is--and Big Ben hanging bangingly high over an otherwise shabby flat swarming trafficky asphalty cluttered wide street leading over to the Old Virgin Queen's royal digs--Buckingham(fat) Palace--looks like a huge park bathhouse--you know, those palaces where the poor and down-and-outers went to bath and take leaks and shits and stuff. Like one I was once in in San Francisco, out in Expo Park, a great old stony Gothic bathroom--and beings it was San Francisco, of course it served as a gathering place...oh well, on with the show. So, yes, London looked nice--great in fact, green and deeply European, great, too, in that their hundreds-of-years-old structures are mingling with brand-spanking new (neo-glasshouse era) glassy, reflecto buildings of all rounded rims or pancake-stacked squares like a children's blocks turned into an architectural enterprise. The only thing about London I don't like is that tacky Millennium Wheel. Looks like a high wind could come along and blow the damn thing flat off down the Thames toward Southampton and the opening-out-toward-the-New-World Atlantic. Like the guy in the Raymond Chandler story, The Goldfish, who was named Sunset. Why? "Because I'm always heading west," was his reply. And in London, you naturally want to head west to get out of town. When I was there in ancient times, I couldn't wait to get back to NYC. But then that's the way I felt in Guatemala City; the way I felt in Dallas, Texas; the way I felt in St. John, Newfoundland; the way I feel even in Brooklyn, New York. And when you're in Brooklyn, you follow the sun west to get out of it and back to the civilization of Manhattan Island. And I'm calling myself Sunset these days. I'll be heading west again when I'm dead and gone and in my pine box being shipped back out to the city of my nativity, that high-and-dry city on the lone prairie, that bald-prairie city from whence came the lyrics to the cowboy's lament, "Don't bury me, on the lone prairie...." Sunset Wolf. Howling at the setting Sun, the wolf's god! and man's god, too.

I was watching the story of the telescope on PBS (Pro-British System) t'other eve and how amazing was it to see how once man looked through the telescope and saw right before his eyes how wrong the religious scammers were in their belief that a great human who looks just like us so craftily designed our boiling universe! Looking through those early crude but surprisingly revealing telescopes those old skeptic scientists saw so clearly that, NO, the Christian God got it wrong, the Sun did not travel around the earth--and NO, sorry Jehovah (Allah), the earth is not flat. With a telescope you can clearly see the curvature of the earth! And by tracking the position of the earth to other planets--Galileo could see Jupiter and its moons moving slowly around it--every night, taking precise measurements, these guys could plainly see the earth was actually moving around the Sun along with Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter--I think they considered our moon (Luna, from which comes lunatic; another religious-based myth based on missed facts) a planet--until some other skeptic scientist came along and saw the moon was simply reflecting Sun light back to earth.

Heading west from London, I arrived back in New York City in time for the thermometer to be heading gaily as hell, up into the 90s today. The record for today is 84. We're gonna smash that by 11 ticks of the thermometer the hot weather girls are babbling about--95 the high today in Central Park. Right now, at 11:36 in the morning, it's a pleasant 75--my windows are open and the air is fresh and scintillating, though you can feel some tongues of fire licking at you from within it. It's a southern breeze, so it's coming off that Atlantic Ocean you head west into to escape the royal-asskissing streets of old Viking-built London.

I once made love to an Irish girl and during the height of our togetherness she suddenly turned wildly and wonderfully ferocious on me--bucking me up wildly into some deep Celtic mythological state of ecstasy. Afterwards, while we were cooling out and refreshing each other's egos with glorious praise for our procreational Olympian efforts I babbled out, "You fuck like a Viking, my little Irish wonder." "I am a Viking," she snorted back, attacking the shores of my loins with an intruding force that suddenly had me running me flag up the old flagpole once again--going for Old Glory against this Viking attack. Remember, Eric the Red was really the White man who discovered the Red Men (the Red Stick people) of the tribal nation Eric and his Boyz called Vineland, because the land was covered in wild grapes. So I suppose, since my old daddy's way-back family was from London, I'm part Viking, too. As well as originally African. Ain't that ironic?
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Hot As Hades
So, I'm readying myself for a day in the oven New York City becomes (we're below sea level, you know) when the temp hits anywhere over 90. I mean the heat is suffocating around 2 pm. Relief comes with nightfall they're saying....

And New York City teevee, I'll say this, has some of the hottest weather girls of any city I've ever watched teevee in. Channel 11 has the best, a woman named Linda. Channel 11 years ago came up with the concept of having hot women as their news half-hour anchors and weather girls, etc. So at one time they called themselves the three-Linda channel because of Linda Church, the weather babe (I worked in the same building with her for 9 years and she's a beautiful friendly very tall voluptuous woman), Lynne White the absolutely gorgeous anchor babe, and J-Lo's teevee-star sister, Linda Lopez, in a way, much more suitable in terms of teevee beauty than sister J-Lo, who by the way, I just heard a Black woman on the radio say, is considered a White chick by Hollywood society--which she means the whole White society. That's like I recently said about Piri Thomas, a New Yorican-Puerto-Rican writer, who was black as the Ace of Spades, as Whites put it, and was treated like a black man in Texas until they found out he was Puerto Rican and then he was treated like a White man. I consider J-Lo simply a Mickey Mouse Club creation--wasn't she? Her and Britney and Christina Aguilera and Jason Timberlake and Ricky "Oooooo La-La" Martin (ex-Menudo, wasn't he; the guy who founded Menudo ending up doing time for making the Menudo boyz pay him respects by kneeling in a prayer-like position just in front of his open fly--but then, I'd better watch my step here. I got in a lot of trouble calling old Al Capp a pedophile. Turned out he was simply an adulterer--and which of us hasn't at one time been an adulterer or adulteress?).

I turn to the west. The weather babe is saying a cold front is moving in from the northwest. Go west....

A westwardly aimed,

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

In 7 Years, Christians Will Depart the Earth

Praise de Lawd and Pass Me Some of Those Biscuits and Jelly
Christians will be departing the mortal coil in 7 years according to nutjob and a The Daily Growler Hall of Fame Idiot, my White brother, Jack Van Impe--come on, you don't watch Brother Jack and Sister Rexella? Get out'a here. But anyway, I watch Jack faithfully every early Monday morning here in New York City, on one of the has-been channels (nothing daily but reruns and infomercials except when they have Brother Jack on at 3 am in the ho-hum). But, anyway, Jack was hot this morning. He was boiling with predictions that he calls "prophecies." Jack can rattle off scripture and verse so fast you haven't got time to double check him. Jack's hot because he's figured out in his head that Christians will be departing the earth and headin' for Hebbin' in 2012--EXCEPT--whooaa, I just realized, Jack has said his Nostradamus-like calculations told him Christians are vaporizing in 2012, but this morning, Brother Jack was yelping "in 7 years" Christians will depart the earth. That's 4 years after 2012. Oh no, another Christian miscalculation, but anyway, here's the best of Brother Jack's prophecy this morning--first of all, Jack definitely says a nuclear war is eminent. It will take place when China and Russia join up (Wow, that's going to be interesting) and form a huge military force to go against...WHO? You have one guess. If you said Israel--well, you win the bottle of the best and a chance to ruffle up the feathers of the Cuckoo's nest. Yes, according to Brother Jack (and he babbles off about 15 scriptures and verses--his nuclear war thing comes from Psalms of all places) Russia and China will unite to annihilate the Jews. Brother Jack in sort of the same breath says North Korea will one day fire atomic (Jack still uses the word "atomic" to mean nuclear) missiles at the United States. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, Rexella mentions Barack Obama! Aha. Jack's face lights up! You know he's going to mention the AntiChrist! Obama's the AntiChrist! But, no, Jack is cooler than that. He doesn't say Obama is the AntiChrist but that Obama is, dig this, Henry Kissingassinger's choice to head The New World Order! Wait a minute, I always thought Pappy Bush, old wobbly Pappy, created the New World Order in his "1000 Points of Light" speech, which we ran in a past The Daily Growler, but, nope, Brother Jack informs me that the Bilderberg Society down in Virginia are conspirators in the Devil's Workshop. The Bilderbergs started in Holland--Brother Jack is a Calvinist--he's headquartered in Michigan, the US home of Calvinism (Calvin College is in Grand Rapids), and it's also the home of Libertarianism in this country (Holland, Michigan) that promotes the works of two Austrian sociologists/economists, Frederick Von Hayek (a statistician and cousin of Ludwig Wittgenstein) and Leopold Von Mises, whose Libertarianism was based on Calvinism, in fiduciary terms and in the morals they stressed in their masterpieces.
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from Wikipedia:

The economic calculation problem

Hayek was one of the leading academic critics of collectivism in the 20th century. Hayek believed that all forms of collectivism (even those theoretically based on voluntary cooperation) could only be maintained by a central authority of some kind. In his popular book, The Road to Serfdom (1944) and in subsequent works, Hayek claimed that socialism required central economic planning and that such planning in turn had a risk of leading towards totalitarianism, because the central authority would have to be endowed with powers that would have an impact on social life as well, and because the knowledge required for central planning is inherently decentralized.

Building on the earlier work of Mises and others, Hayek also argued that while, in centrally planned economies, an individual or a select group of individuals must determine the distribution of resources, these planners will never have enough information to carry out this allocation reliably. The efficient exchange and use of resources, Hayek claimed, can be maintained only through the price mechanism in free markets (see economic calculation problem). In The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945), Hayek argued that the price mechanism serves to share and synchronize local and personal knowledge, allowing society's members to achieve diverse, complicated ends through a principle of spontaneous self-organization. He used the term catallaxy to describe a "self-organizing system of voluntary co-operation."

In Hayek's view, the central role of the state should be to maintain the rule of law, with as little arbitrary intervention as possible.

Spontaneous order

Hayek viewed the free price system, not as a conscious invention (that which is intentionally designed by man), but as spontaneous order, or what is referred to as "that which is the result of human action but not of human design". Thus, Hayek put the price mechanism on the same level as, for example, language. Such thinking led him to speculate on how the human brain could accommodate this evolved behavior. In The Sensory Order (1952), he proposed, independently of Donald Hebb, the connectionist hypothesis that forms the basis of the technology of neural networks and of much of modern neurophysiology¹.

Hayek attributed the birth of civilization to private property in his book The Fatal Conceit (1988). He explained that price signals are the only means of enabling each economic decision maker to communicate tacit knowledge or dispersed knowledge to each other, in order to solve the economic calculation problem.

Hayek and conservatism

Hayek attracted new attention in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of conservative governments in the United States and the United Kingdom. Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative British prime minister from 1979 to 1990, was an outspoken devotee of Hayek's writings. Shortly after Thatcher became Leader of the party, she “reached into her briefcase and took out a book. It was Friedrich von Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. Interrupting [the speaker], she held the book up for all of us to see. ‘This’, she said sternly, ‘is what we believe’, and banged Hayek down on the table.”^[23] After winning the 1979 election, Thatcher appointed Keith Joseph, the director of the Hayekian Centre for Policy Studies, as her secretary of state for industry in an effort to redirect parliament’s economic strategies. Likewise, David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s most influential financial official in 1981 was an acknowledged follower of Hayek. ^[24]

Hayek wrote an essay titled Why I Am Not a Conservative^[25] (included as an appendix to The Constitution of Liberty), in which he disparaged conservatism for its inability to adapt to changing human realities or to offer a positive political program. Although he noted that modern day conservatism shares many opinions on economics with classic liberals, particularly a belief in the free market, he believed it's because conservatism wants to "stand still", whereas liberalism embraces the free market because it "wants to go somewhere". Hayek identified himself as a classical liberal, but noted that in the United States it had become almost impossible to use "liberal" in its original definition, and the term "libertarian" has been used instead. However, for his part Hayek found this term "singularly unattractive" and offered the term “Old Whig” (a phrase borrowed from Edmund Burke) instead. In his later life he said: "I am becoming a Burkean Whig".
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So Brother Jack doesn't call Obama the AntiChrist but rather, and this is great, "Dictator of the World." Wow. I wonder if Obama has heard Brother Jack? Yep. Obama is so popular in Europe, Brother Jack said, that it was reported he could easily be elected President of the European Union--and Brother Jack believes the Anti-Christ will come from the European Union. Brother Jack says Obama will be chosen World Dictator by the Bilderbergs, called the Bilderbergs because their first get together was at a fancy hotel in Bilderberg, Netherlands--they are meeting this year at a 5-star hotel in Athens, Greece. The Bilderbergs were the invention of the Eisenhower Administration's CIA chief, a Nederlander rich asshole, and a Nederlander prince--Bilderberg members are specially picked from the World Power Elite, though their membership is kept quiet secret. Their original intention was to counteract a growing hatred of the United States in Europe in the early 1950s. Henry Kissingassinger is, according to Brother Jack, head of the US Bilderbergs, and, again according to Jack, Henry's already written an article declaring Obama the future Dictator of the United States--a BENIGN dictator perhaps--as we were warned of by Noam Chomsky just recently. Hitler, according to Chomsky, was a benign dictator. Meaning he was thought of as "good" for Germany at the time.

Ah, how evil this Power Elite that rule us are. A mighty evil. Evil spelt backwards is Live. You use backward thinking in this case and, yes, being alive is evil. Being born in the first place is evil. From evil comes life. Of course, I'm being facetious. I can't reason in my head the difference between "good" or "evil." I can't define either term in any sensible sense.

Ain't Sociology great! And old Jack Van Impe is part of the Gestalt of the United Snakes of America. As von Hayek said, everything "liberal" is so complicated, but I say it simply means "liberty." The original meaning of "Libertarian"--a lover of liberty. I'm lambasted by my enemies (of which I have none, only friends) for my love of liberty saying all I'm promoting is rugged individualism and a society can't progress with a complicated mess of individuals lording over us. What about a collective of rugged individualists forming a society based on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Wait a minute, that's what old Tom Jefferson was saying when he wrote the US Bill of Rights, that document that introduced us to ourselves as We the People of the United States. [That Columbus discovered America (meaning Santo Domingo...or the Dominican Republic) in 1492 didn't enter our history until when? when Winifred Sackville Stoner, Jr., wrote the poem?--"Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 14 hundred and 92...." I prefer my Colombo to come from the Bawdy Song and Backroom Ballad entitled, "Colombo" "He knew the world was round-O; his balls hung to the ground-O; that navigatin', calculatin', son of a bitch, Colombo!" "Columbus had a one-eyed mate; he loved him like a brother; every night at half-past-eight; they buggered one another." Ah, my scripture and verses! Go to this link to see how a young New York City school teacher teaches Columbus to her little kiddies--it's kind of interesting: www.everythingesl.net/lessons/columbusday_celebration.php]

And, speaking of Columbus and Native Americans, I came across a very interesting Native American Website--check it out: www.turtletrack.org/Issues09/CO020109/CO_020109_Favorites.htm

Why, it's Brother Jack (off on the left there) and Sister Rexella. Brother Jack used to play the accordion while he preached.

C. Wright Mills on Corporate Executives (remember this was written in 1956) From The Power Elite
The corporations are the organized centers of the private property system: the chief executives are the organizers of that system. As economic men, they are at once creatures and creators of the corporate revolution, which, in brief, has transformed property from a tool of the workman into an elaborate instrument by which his work is controlled and a profit extracted from it. The small entrepreneur is no longer the key to the economic life of America; and in many economic sectors where small producers and distributors do still exist they strive mightily-as indeed they must if they are not to be extinguished-to have trade associations or governments act for them as corporations act for big industry and finance.
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My brain now tires from trying reason through all the bullshit I've been drenched with today.

marvelousmarvbackbiter and I were beaming ear-to-ear the other night as the NY Yankees--minus the greatest manager in baseball, Joe Torre, were beaten by the last-place Chief Wahoo Injuns 22-4. Their superstar Chinese pitcher, Chen Ming Wong (sic), pardon my Mandarin, went to pieces--gave up 8 runs in 1st inning; it was 14-2 in the second inning. And you know why Yankee pitching is so fucked up? Because they've got a minor league pitching coach; as minor league as Jabo Chamberlain is still minor league (Double A ball). Joe Torre warned Brian Cashman not to demand they make Jabo a starting pitcher, but, oh no, Hank Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman know much more about baseball than Joe Torre. By the way, the Dodgers are tied with hot San Diego for 1st place in their division, having won 7 in a row as of Sunday eve--with Manny Ramirez going hogwild as a Dodger. My California nephew who used to be a rabid Yankees fan when he lived here now says he's following the Dodgers like a little boy just seeing the game for the first time. The poor old Yankees. They're a .500 team at best since Joe Torre left.

The Mets, too, are stupidly sticking with Jerry Manuel--and again this year they've started off flip-floppy as hell, hot one night, then losing the next--like they lost to Willie Randolph (the bench coach) and the Milwaukee Brewers in a close one yesterday. I'm puzzled, too, by why the new Mets Stadium (insultingly called CitiField--and oh they are so proud of that name--the commercial teevee boobs are sanctifying "CitiField" every 5 minutes on regular newscasts and sportscasts) has a Jackie Robinson Rotunda? Jackie Robinson never played for the Mets. Why wouldn't the Mets have a Tommy Agee Rotunda or a Mookie Wilson Rotunda or maybe a Gil Hodges Rotunda or maybe a Tom Seaver Rotunda or a Doc Gooden Rotunda or a Joe Torre Rotunda or a Casey Stengel Rotunda?--that's what I'd a put in it if I'd'a been designing it--a Casey Stengel "Amazin', Amazin', Amazin'" Rotunda or how about a 1962 Mets Team Rotunda?--as ancient old creakity Ralph Kiner says, "You gotta admit, they were the worst ballteam ever"--hey, that's something to be proud of--in Queens especially--but why a Jackie Robinson Rotunda? Maybe Jackie lived in Flushing, Queens, though I rather doubt it.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The Daily Growler on Sales Pitching

Quantitative Thinking vs. Qualitative Thinking
In a way, quantitative thinking is Backward Thinking. It's a good old Capitalist tool. More production via the cheapest means of energy, whether by human energy or mechanical energy. More consumer products produced the fastest and therefore the least expensive way possible. Quality?

Qualitative thinking is Forward Thinking. Why? Because cars used to last 10 years at least or they weren't considered very well-made automobiles. Quality, by the way, didn't mean leather seats, 4-speaker stereo systems, air-conditioning, stuff like that; nope, those "extras," you see, under Qualitative Thinking, are considered "luxuries." You want luxuries, you pay for them. The quality is in the functionality and endurance of the just-plain automobile you are building and you are buying. Now, of course, that's not to say everybody who owned a car kept them for ten years. That's not a part of the concept. What is a part of the concept is that though not everybody drove the same car for ten years, the standard cars were of the quality that they could if they had to. Nor is this concept saying all cars lasted "without problems" for ten years. No, not at all. Not every quality-made car had quality everything-about-it. If you took quality care of a car back then, you could keep running the damn thing for ten years before you needed to buy another car. You could have your whole car rebuilt at one time in this country--your motor overhauled--or you could replace it with a rebuilt motor and run it another 100,000 miles. In Quantitative Thinking, the effort is to get you to buy a new car every 6 months--and they have to do that because in Quantitative Thinking you overproduce--stockpile cars--now we buy cars from huge dealer stockpile car lots. The ultimate goal in the quantitative world, the perfection in that world, is a car (or appliances, or clothes, or shoes, or medicines, etc.) that wears out every 6 months--or gets obsolete every 6 months. In the record business they call it "the obsolescence factor."

Back in my young, youthful, Utopian-minded, very early, and dumbest days, I lucked into becoming a staff member of a division of Time-Life Inc. here in Gotham City. [While I worked at Time-Life, Life magazine folded and Time-Life became Time Inc., even though it was always Time Inc., though when I first went to work there, they had only been in their new 6th Avenue Rockefeller Center building for a few years, having moved from the Time Building that originally had been at #1 Rockefeller Plaza, the private street in Rockefeller Center--the only private street in NYC. That 6th Avenue building was called The Time & Life Building when I went to work there. Today, by the bye, I reside across the street from the original Life magazine building in NYC--this Life magazine from the late 1800s and not the Time Inc. one started in the 1930s. The building is still the "Life Magazine Building" and its original facade has been restored by its current owners, a romantic facade with gold-leafed cupids blowing trumpets and heralding out scrolls of LIFE, with upspiraling Spanish ironwork crawling up its 11-story Italian Renaissance brick-styled front. It is actually a former whore and crack house (when I moved into the neighborhood) that has since turned into a "respectable" cheap-ass ($125-per-room-per-night) tourist hotel run by moneyed Indians-from-India "hotel keepers" (they learned servant work and hotel management when they were little "woggies" (Gunga Dins) under the bootheels of the British Empire, Indians being taught how to properly wait hand and foot on the Proper, the Brit military fops and snobs, the Brit governors and vice governors, the wealthy Brit fops there to steal India's natural resources and use its untouchables as slave labor, or they're favorite Rajahs and their Rannis, or any body the British Royal Family and wigheaded government deemed worthy of asskissing respect].

My Time-Life division's offices were in the high 20s, one floor below the Life magazine subscription offices, along with the Life photographers and some reporters and feature writers up there, too, along with the whole Time-Life sales representative force shoved back in one dingy corner of that huge officespace. One of my division's sales reps was a guy named Zack, a little menacing-looking Jewish guy, one of those constantly "concerned" Jewish guys, who was irritatingly and repeatedly darting back and forth between that floor and our floor, twiddling his thumbs and whining in his high-pitched bitch-voice about this and that and this other shit and that, too, and all of that, too. I was the chief copyeditor of this division. All the ads our copywriters and artists created came through me as dummies and then proofs and stuff--my division had the US rights to all British (BBC) television shows--we dealt mostly with PBS stations and got most of our monies from Time Inc. and Mobil Oil, the corporate "sponsor" of the BBC's very popular Masterpiece Theatre--at first under the pompous introduction of transplated Brit, now-American, Alastair Cooke (remember Alastair Cookie Monster on Sesame Street's version of Masterpiece Theatre?), and those shows were our mainstay product. My job involved going over these ads with my fine-toothed editorial/creative comb. I checked the wording, what facts were available, any figures mentioned, the allure, the continuity, trying to keep a smidgen of truth and reference in them to keep them in line with our legal department's flimsy rules and regulations while electrifying the many lies that made the ads successful or not. Our ads ran daily, weekly, monthly, in local newspapers, in TV Guide, in Time Magazine, in Fortune, in the NY Times, et al. My job had to do with the way these ads were "pitching" our teevee shows and big-screen documentaries. Our directors liked action verbs in their ads--and I gave them action verbs galore. "RUN, don't walk, to your teevee and suddenly become aware of one of the greatest, most shocking, thrilling, running-away-with-your-nerves gothic dramas ever adapted for your television screens from one of the runaway all-time classic literary masterpieces ever written by a Brit snob!"

Like I said, our big hit in those days was Masterpiece Theatre. Mobil Oil was MT's corporate sponsor--they paid the bills for the ads (all the ads for Masterpiece Theatre prominently mentioned Mobil and displayed the Mobil logo) and for the show's expenses in exchange for huge tax breaks and, like I said, prominent mention on the show and on the ads. So we had access to big bucks, millions of dollars--and it was up to us to get stations to contract them for broadcast but we also had to market the show--sell it, pitch it (and, yes, I was an Anglophobe in those days same as I am today! and, yes, I met Alastair Cooke and thought him a fop first-class--who William F. Buckley learned his nose-up snobbery from, I swear--though he was very nice to me the couple of times we met, especially one time when he found out I was from West Texas, a part of the world he claimed he knew very well and had visited many times and loved, especially the sunsets). And this guy Zack, the salesman, would constantly call me and tell me he thought I should query blah, blah this or blah, blah that...like, "Wolfie, Wolfie, my boy, my boy, it's hard enough to sell this high-brow shit using my salesman skills, but then Rah-jah (the art director) comes up with this! What the hell's a hot-air balloon got to do with Henry the Eighth? And what's that crap on this Elizabeth R layout about 'the wiles of hell in a heavenly body'--what the hell does that mean in terms of what?--I mean, we're selling adult entertainment here...these are like movies--I need star promotion--like make me some celebrities out of these actors to promote!" "But, Zack, these are episodic dramas on a higher plane than 'I Love Lucy' or 'Gunsmoke'...." "Oh God, I wish I worked for CBS and had Lucy and Gunsmoke instead of this BBC shit...." "Zackie, baby, it's called 'Masterpiece Theatre' because it's premise is the dramatization of great classic novels--and that's the crowd we're aiming for--not the Mertzes or Ricky Ricardo and Lucille McGillicuddy. Like people who like Gilbert and Sullivan like this shit." "Is that Gilbert that now works at Fortune?" "Yeah, Zack, and Sullivan, you know, he has the coffee wagon on the 13th floor."

Later word came back to us that Zack in a performance meeting with the directors of my division and the systems analysts boys from the "in the clouds" floor (the Executive Suite) at the top of the building was demanding more say in how we promoted our shows.

The Time & Life Building was 40 floors high--Teddy White, a Time writer I saw nearly every day when I worked there and who I identified with since Teddy had started as a stringer for Time magazine just like I had done when I lived in Mexico City, and Theodore White wrote a book about working at Time & Life, and it became a big bestseller: The View From the Fortieth Floor. It was a smashing success, atop the NYTimes Bestseller List for a great many moons. It was promoted for its sexual innuendoes first and its understanding of the world of magazine publishing second. In this novel, old prissy Teddy, he wore bowties, intimated that some of the perks one got from being a big shot at Time Inc. was maybe getting to bang your hot secretary (maybe a recent-college-graduate from Bryn Mawr or Smith) or any of the tons of hot secretaries and typing pool girls, even the cleaning ladies, on a desk late after work; or getting to take celebrity chicks (like a movie star you might be interviewing) out to 21 on a Time-Life credit card--or men and women reporters shacked up like Hemingway and Mary Welch and Martha Gellhorn in hotels while on foreign assignments. That's what sold the book. That's why every young English major or Fine Arts major out of Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools scrambled into Time Inc. looking for entry-level jobs--like assistant to the assistant art director or assistant picture researcher or assistant to the assistant copyeditor, which my secretary was called--and speaking of secretaries and banging them on desks, sorry, Teddy, but my View From the Fortieth Floor would make your View read like you petered out in the 20th-floor stairwell--oh the stories I could tell about working at Time-Life back in those days when Life magazine was shut-down for good and my division was losing millions of bucks a year and Zack the sales rep was revolting. Zack one day announced that if he couldn't sell what we considered great television then maybe it was time he taught us what great television was and what kind of ads he thought would help him sell the shows! The Sales Force wanted more say in the marketing of our products, plus they wanted more to do with the sponsors than our creative people--our idea people.

At about this same time, chain bookstores began popping up all over NYC and all other major cities in the US--Doubleday's, Walden Books, Marlboro--and suddenly book salesmen began revolting, too, against acquisition editors and managing editors and editor-editors, saying they knew better what books sold than did the "literary" or "nonfiction" book selectors. Like the record industry spinners came up with the obsolescence factor in making record albums, the books salesmen came up with what they called "shelf life," meaning if a book stayed on a shelf say a month and didn't sell a copy, then pull it from the shelf and put it in a discount bin, and replace it with a genre or niche or whatever that will sell multiple copies per month, keeping those books jumping off the shelves like wildfire--reorders! And there's the key to successful salesmanship, REORDERS! Books that don't stay on the shelf long have to be reordered! Keep those reorders coming! Soon, first novels and books of poetry and shit like that disappeared from the shelves of the oligarchic bookstore chains. Soon Danielle Steele and Steven King became our bestselling authors, or Judy Bloom types, or books on murder written by tough-guys writers with tattoos and who ride Harleys and all their books start out, "Detective Bob 'the Manic Mechanic' Carter, 20-year vet with the NYPD, looked at the piece of shit pervert sitting across from him at the interrogation table, a steel table bolted to the floor of a regular jail cell in the deep dark back of New York City's grungiest prison, the Tombs. Carter looked this bastard right square-dab mean in his crossed-eyes and shouted, 'You rotten scumbag. I could beat your bloody fucking ass to death with my bare hands....' Carter belted the perpetrator with a strong backhand across his sagging-drug-puffy-sweet-lipped face. 'I've got daughters the age of this sweet, innocent, apple of her mother's eye young lady you pig-fucked and then throttled, you sick piece of shit.' Carter threw a bolo punch to the accused's palpitating gut. The culprit let out a coughing upchucking sigh and began calling for his 'mommy' while crying like a fucking baby. 'Go ahead and call for your mommy, you motherfucking coward.' With that Carter produced a large wool sock filled with sand. 'Here's a lesson, punk, you ain't gonna forget for a long time.' Carter closed the steel door to the cell so the screams wouldn't be heard...too much that is. He chuckled to himself as he prepared to beat the living shit out of this child-abusing, doper, scumbag, sorry piece of human feces...POW, the first blow broke the sorry bastard perp's nose...."

The great old homey, comfy, pipe-smoke filled "literary" bookstores, like the Gotham Book Mart that was still on 47th Street while I worked in Rockefeller Center, are now things of the past. The Strand is still here, but mostly there's only these overdone, too fabby, Barnes & Noble joints now that seem more like shopping malls than bookstores.

You think books and magazines are going the way of newspapers in this country? The Boston Globe (because its owner the NYTimes is losing millions a year) is going under. Amazing. The Chicago Sun-Times is going under. The L.A. Times, now trimmed down to nothing but an overblown advertising flyer, is going under. Journalists are being fired right and left all over the country. This dude David Simon who wrote and produced the HBO series called Wired is a Baltimore journalist who took an early retirement and got into television with this series that is about being a journalist in Baltimore a few years back when that city was going through political corruption scandal after political corruption scandal. Simon says as more and more newspapers go under, local investigative reporting will be no more--thus, he says, crooked politicians will have a field day in which to practice their corruption skulduggeries without worry of getting caught. Corruption at the local political level will become catastrophic. Simon's a pretty smart dude. He talks as though he has read The Daily Growler, though I'm sure he'd never admit to such a thing.
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Here's an interview with David Simon from Salon.com:

www.salon.com/ent/tv/feature/2008/03/10/simon/
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They call it "sales pitching," but I call it flim-flamming. Hustling. Huckstering. Duping. Hawking. Scheming. Scamming. Oh, let me name the many ways one can sell a product. And television is now one continuous series of sales pitches. Every show is touting some bunches of products--like game shows that give away cars, and cash, and trips, and exercise machines, and grandfather clocks and stainless steel refrigerators--mentioning sponsoring products names over and over. Or teevee is selling the latest movies constantly and trotting out the latest actors to "arrive" from the latest movies, no matter if the star of that movie is a dumb-ass little hick girl from Tennessee whose daddy was a one-hit-wonder hick-hillbilly star who was contracted as an actor, and what a horrible actor he was, who at 15 and with the breast-implant mentality of Walt Disney Productions is now a multimillionaire, much richer and more successful as her pappy, though, watching her act is like watching her father act--it hurts.

You can tell the economy's tanking by the number of sales pitches we must endure in daily life.

I come from the world of advertising. I can honestly say, all ads are lies. All ads think backwards. They attack you through your fears, mainly your fear of dying!

Fundie Christian Silent Majority Preachers these days are desperately hawking Jesus Christ as the solution to all mankind's problems but especially it's financial problems. Some fundie preachers are trying to mesmerize, with Jim Jones-like tones, their audiences into sending them a minimum "offering" of $1000. The sales pitch? Somewhere in the Christian Holy Book it says if you give unto Jesus Cristo your last cent, he'll reward you 100-fold. Old Okie-the-dokey Oral Roberts started this "seed planting" bullshit back when he was still admitting he was a member of the Assemblies of God Church--before he changed denominations and declared himself a Methodist. Oral based his "seed" bullshit on the story of the mustard seed in the Christian Book of Fables--if you have the faith of a mustard seed (a very small seed--I mean really small--therefore the parable's meaning in terms of the size of your faith) you will reap treasures in Heaven--you know, old Jesus is preparing mansions for all the true believers on the gold-paved boulevards of Christendom. Such bullshit. But the Christian babbling idiot preachers are desperate for money now--desperate.

And how corny and stupid was the "great Wall Street" news today (Friday) that CitiGroup lost less money than was expected therefore the stock market shot up 200 points back to over 8000 again for the thirtieth or fortieth time over the past year--still the silly meaningless Dow-Jones is 3000 points below what it was until G.W. Bush invaded and tried to occupy (unsuccessfully) Afghanistan and Iraq using the Neo-Con Manifesto of the New World Order as his Executive-Power-Elite Word of the True and Living White Gods who rule us--that Backward Thinking document that wants to take us back to the 19th Century and those glorious days of monopolies and oligarchies and plutocracies!

Obama is showing signs of sanity with his making gestures of wanting to have a little sit-down talk with Cuba's President Castro. He also buddy-buddied with old Hugo Chavez down in Port of Spain, Trinidad, today. Good for him. I mean, folks, you talk about helping the economy! He was also fairly cool in releasing the "torture justifying" documents of G.W. "Pantywaist" Bush's never-elected-honestly presidency's corrupt advisory staff, under instructions from Unka Dick "I Shot the Judge" Cheney--that old washed-up primate reject--out there now pumping up that White Aryan rumor that Obama is out to eliminate the White Race! Oh my God! And what if he actually did that? Wouldn't he wipe out half his own family? He did have a White mother, dammit! How come White mothers don't count in the race game? Naw, naw, I'm not saying Obama's not Black, he's Black alright, but I can see the Whiteness in him, too--like he's my bro, too, you dig? I'm being facetious, but in a way I'm not either. Piri Thomas, a very black Puerto Rican writer from years ago, Mean Streets was his bestseller, said when he went to Texas for the first time, he went in to this place and this White Texan looked at him and said, "Sorry, boy, I can't allow you to come in here." Piri said he told the guy he was Puerto Rican and the Texan said, "Well, why the hell didn't you say so, boy, come on in, what kin I do you for you?...er-ah, hah, hah, hah...." As long as he told the White Texans he was a Puerto Rican, he was OK; but if he said he was a Black man from New York City, then it was "exit out of town before sunset or look out for a rope being slung over your head."

The White Man. Remember, the White Man believes he's perfect! He's made in the image of his handsome, Aryan, Big Daddy, muscleman god, Jehovah (or Allah for short)--therefore, he's divine. Other races, except for the Jews, who Christians do consider a race and not a religion, are heathen--especially Black men and women who were turned Black by Jehovah (Allah) getting pissed off at Noah's dark-complected son Ham (as in Ham Fat) for looking on his old drunk pappy while he was laying back naked as a jay bird and with a rampant hard on. And Big Daddy Jehovah cursed Ham, turned him Black, to be a servant of the White Man for all his natural-born days. Then he exiled Ham to Darkest Most-Heathen Africa, to Kush, which actually was a dynasty already more civilized than any of Jehovah's Holy Desert peoples were at the time.

Do you realize that Jerusalem during the time of the Roman occupation was not a Jewish city. After Christ, the Roman hierarchy ran all but a few Jewish families out of Jerusalem--out to the Judean hinterlands. After the Romans lost the city, it became an Arab city inhabited by mostly Muslims. After the Muslims lost it, the Crusaders, White Gentiles from Germany mainly following the orders of the peasant Barbaric priest Martin Luther, formed a White Man's Christian Army of over 150,000 troops and attacked Jerusalem--and the White Crusaders slaughtered every man, dick, chick, boy, girl, granny, mother, uncle and aunt Muslim in Jerusalem, a vicious bloodbath, and these Crusaders (and Christian preachers still hold "crusades" even to this day) took over Jerusalem and it became a White Man's city because the Crusaders, too, didn't let Jews back in Jerusalem. Then one day the Crusaders got homesick for Europe and gradually they abandoned Jerusalem--and Jerusalem became a burg on a goat trail in terms of importance until the Ottoman Turks took it over and it became a Muslim Holy City--it had always been a Muslim Holy City according to Mohamed.

Has Jerusalem ever been a totally Jewish city? Not really....

Do you realize if Obama would legalize all drugs how much wasted and corrupted monies would be saved; how many lives would be saved? Legalize drugs and the drug wars will be unnecessary. The phony War on Drugs that is a billions of dollars a year boondoggle to some Power Elite military fops and armament dealers and police departments and South American dictators. What a waste of human life and hard-earned money. The DEA is said to be the only government agency that makes a huge profit every year.

Cigarettes and whiskey kill tons more humans every year than any illegal drug ever! I remember back during the crack and cocaine freaking out going on among our do-gooders and ultrapious assholes Harper's magazine on that page where they give you factual information about stuff like this ran a statistic that stated "How many people OD'd on crack or cocaine (the year before)?" The answer was like 5 or 6. That same year, over 150,000 people were killed in automobile accidents.

Ah, LIES, what sweet truths they bring to bear.

thetrulyhonestgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

The High Definition of Everything

"From the Navel of New York City" tgw

Please Note: The Daily Growler "Reported" in Our Post of Nov. 5th, 2008, on Larry Summers's Plan for Dumping Toxic Wastes in Third World (Read: Africa, Especially Somalia) Nations Long Before The Huffing&Puffing Post and Those Guys--Dammit!!! (See Below for That Post)

By the bye, The Daily Growler Was 3 Years Old (Over 900 Posts) on April 6th. Serving You (Our Reader(s)) More Truth Than Gods, Kings, or Politicians Ever Spate...Read On, Lone Readers....
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The Generation of the Low Definition
by thegrowlingwolf

My generation is dying off. Headed for the lower levels of Hell. All my friends are dead or dying--especially my good friends--but then the good die young in this country while the corrupt live on and on and on. My parents bailed out at 59 for my mother; 62 for my old man. Most of my inspirational heroes, those I emulated as a wide-eyed kid are dead and long gone. Most of what once inspired me to a fervid pitch is long gone--some lost having long gone over the hill of remembrance; the long forgotten. OK, I still hear some mentions of them in some contemporary thinking and creative stuff though not much, and when mentioned, it's usually at a very high and lonely intellectual level.

At one time Igor Stravinsky filled my solar plexus with great musical hope and appreciation. Le sacre du printemps sent me into several ecstasies at once when I listened to it leisurely or when I listened to it following it intensely with a score. Today, I can't remember the last time I heard that great work of the little cocky-gentleman of a dude from Saint Petersburg before it became Leningrad. In fact, in looking for a CD of it now to play, I can't find my copy of it anywhere--even after a dusty effort of going through the twin-towers pile of classical CDs that seem coldly abandoned to a surreal corner of my bare floors. Nor can I find a score of it in my shelf of classical scores. There was a time I would have freaked out if I couldn't have laid my hands on one of my several LPs of that great-music-changing work of art. I even had a 12" 78 rpm 4-record--8-side Columbia Blue Label album of Stravinsky conducting it himself with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra (ah, when the networks had their own record labels and symphony orchestras!).

And Hemingway.... My God, I used to faithfully read The Sun Also Rises at least once a year (and to read his collected short stories over and over again, too, especially "The Big Two-Hearted River"). I started reading The Sun Also Rises in high school and by the time I was thirty I had not only read everything Hemingway ever wrote but I was trying to collect everything he ever wrote: Hemingway first editions and magazine articles and anything "Papa" I could get my collecting mitts on. Now, glancing over at my book shelf, I see not one Hemingway book--though, yes, Peter Buckley's photo essay called Ernest is laying flat on one of the upper shelves, laying atop a biography of Henry Miller.

And the first time I heard Charles Parker, Jr., I was a kid sleeping in the same room with my 15-year-older big brother just back from 4 years of foreign-war duty in the South Pacific and China. And my brother brought back from San Diego with him, he'd bought it with his mustering-out money, an Emerson table-model radio--with an art-deco front that glowed in the dark when the radio was on at night. And that radio was on every night my brother and I were sharing that room--for nearly a year. And that radio would be on until deep into the night, before he could finally fall asleep and get some "sack time," as he put it in U.S. Navy lingo. I had no idea at that time in my life about how guys who'd been in war and close to or in combat and around massive killings of their buddies and constantly having to kill or be killed by the bloody enemy--how it was hard for them to get to sleep once they were "discharged" and back home in the peaceful quietness of a working-class/middle-class lifestyle. And my brother would listen to that radio every night to get to sleep, fine-tuning it until he got live music broadcasts from Chicago and New York City, from the hotel ballrooms but especially from the Chi-town or the New York City jazz clubs--and he really dug the broadcasts from New York City best, the broadcasts from Birdland, the Roundtable, the Royal Roost (where The Bird nested!)--and one night on one of these broadcasts I first heard this guy they called Bird. With this cat they called Dizzy. Live from New York City. And on hearing Bird, I sat up in bed. I wasn't old enough to surely appreciate what I was hearing! No, maybe not, but something about it attracted me. I slammed into that "Bird" music like a piece of lead slamming into the head of a magnet! Bird. Charlie Parker. Charles Parker, Jr. And by then I was playing boogie-woogie on our home piano, a Mason & Hamlin upright, and boogie-woogie was a part of what Parker was playing on a brass instrument. And the piano player I heard on that radio broadcast that night--it could have been Bud Powell though it was probably Al Haig or Dodo Marmarosa--though like I say, it could have been Bud Powell, too. And that piano player was tinkling right along merrily with the Bird's seemingly perpetual flowing of hydromatic ideas coming in his voice out the bell of that smaller saxophone, that alto saxophone, while that piano player flowed along steadily underneath Bird's cataracts of tumbling beautifully and rainbowlike fallings of notes and phrases out into the aural ethereal--that immediate melding of the outside real with your solar plexus's computer, your brain. Oh what a time then in New York City for me as a kid listening to those distant--a million miles away to me--broadcasts, whether in reality it was or not. And I heard New York City calling me through those late-night radio broadcasts from those New York City 52nd Street clubs. And my brother worked for the Coca-Cola Company, delivering Cokes on Dallas's Black neighborhood mainstreet, Second Avenue, a street that was so tough everybody in Dallas called it Deuce Alley. And one day my brother took me with him to the Coca-Cola plant (up at the Fair Grounds end of Deuce Alley) to get his check and in the plant he bought me a Coke in an "automatic" Coca-Cola vending machine, a 6-oz 5-cent bottle, which I turned up and guzzled down in a typical kid-on-a-hot-summer-day way. After I finished it, I turned it upside down to see where it had originally come from, they put the city names on the bottoms of Coke bottles in those days, and lo and behold it was from New York City. I kept that Coke bottle far on up into my coming-forth life--except, ironically, one day my brother's house in Dallas caught fire. I had just gotten out of the army and had just moved to Dallas to look for my first real job so I had stored all my belongings in my brother's garage, most in my old army foot locker, like all my army uniforms. boots, shoes, and a cardboard box that held all my stuff from growing up in my hometown, books, photos of long discarded girlfriends, my high school yearbook, and my 78 rpm blues records, a stack of 25 or so--and I lost all those possessions in that fire--along with that Coke bottle--melted back to an indistinguishable blob of glass--like my 78 rpm records became an indistinguishable blob of black shellack. Though I lost that semiotic Coke bottle in that fire, that didn't stop me from eventually getting to New York City by God!

And Be-bop became the rhythm of my poetry--be-bop, be-bop, be-bop, be-bop--hard hit (accent) on the "be"--counted off in the rhyming of lyrics and rhythms and notes and measures--iambic pentameter or 4/4!

Be-bop/be-bop/be-bop/be-bop. Fitting my heartbeat. My be-bop heartbeat.

I sit and wonder now what happened to it all--yes, I know, the Bird Word is still around and idolized and shit, but the knowledge of the music he imparted to my bunch, I don't see it being used anymore. I see his virtuosity being studied and imitated but reduced to practice scales--showing no direction. No definition to it. No high definition, I suppose I could say now, to it.

And, I consider how stereo affected my early monaural ears and the emotions of hearing the beats of life turned into multiphasical songs, instrumental songs, the human "soul" voice needing a tough intricately constructed amplifying instrument to blare that voice out or bring it down to subtle graciousness.

I went up on New York City's Upper West Side Saturday eve. I went up to the Whitest bunch of blocks of it where a more-intellectual crowd has considered it as a safe-haven for NYC liberals and old commies and the caring rich and professor types and such. This ilk has found it THE place to live since back before WWII--and they live on a big wide-street like West End Avenue, with its rows of great, strong, preWWII-constructed same-height brick buildings (all of them around 15 to 18 stories)--a big wide tree-lined street, and each apartment entrance has a long extended awning with the address or the trendy name of the apartment building on it, the great fancy brassy/glassy doors guarded by a military-uniformed doorman, and the sidewalks are full of sinewy White dudes wearing shorts jogging and Latin-and-Haitian-looking women pushing little blonde White kids in Rolls-Royce baby buggies--some of them need license plates they are so big and automobile like--and Mexican boys wearing delivery-boy uniforms hustling the same-tasting, same-looking, same-old foods to these stay-at-home-hard-working people's overpriced apartments.

I went up to the Upper West Side at the invite of my Upper West Side relatives, my late brother's daughter and her husband and brood. "Oh, Unka Wolfie, blah, blah, blah, blah...you've got to come...so and so'll be here and so and so and Big So and So...around 5, catered dinner, plenty of beer and Wild Turkey...." So I took the Broadway Local to West 104th then over to the apartment of my relatives. My artist relative (my late brother's eldest son) from California was in town. He hadn't been in town since way back in the early 2000s when he dropped in briefly from hang-gliding in Brazil and chasing teenaged Brazilian girls all over Bahian beaches--or hang-gliding over Rio's big Jesus. That was just before he ran off to Hollywood intending stardom though ending up in Studio City and finally ending up in Bakersfield, what I call Texas in California--the Buck Owens-type-cowboy capital of the world--Western Nashville. So this relative was back, the last of my California relatives--remember one Californian relative died on the operating table in L.A. General--"Oops, sorry," the doctors said, "but he was gonna die anyway...." And my other California relative blew his fucking head off in a California State Park surrounded by handmade signs telling people to obey the roped off area and to be quiet as they observed his final rites. So this prodigal relative had come back to New York City, a town he entered when he was still underage, a town in which he grew up--became a man--though he advertises himself as being Texan through and through in terms of himself and his art, and he did study art in Texas under the personal tutelage of the great Texas illustrator and painter Ancell Nunn.

And soon I was immersed in the occasion, drinking Sierra Nevada beers, jawing with my nephew, looking at a catalog-style art book he published through the Internet--a damn good job, by the way, folks--I was quite impressed with the printing, the color process results, even with the binding and production, a damn good job, a fine looking book featuring my nephew's over-reality reality art--some of his canvasses are big as highway sign boards--and soon guests started arriving and I had two or three more Sierra Nevada beers. And then an ex-relative arrives, a woman who's been included in my family and my family's relationships since she was 22 years old--since she was once my niece-in-law--and carried the family name long after she divorced my family member and remarried again. And her new husband was there, an Aussie, with her and I like the bloke and he likes me and we started drinking heavily and jawing and bullshitting heavier than Oprah's current weight.

These people, by the way, are totally opposite sides of the coin from me, though, several of us are the spitting images of each other. I don't think when I'm around them. I drink. I tell bullshit stories, especially about my brother and my family and especially the very distant Wolves these relatives have no idea who they were, etc. As far as interests! Their outlook of reality is from a whole 'nother Pompeii's Head. The participants in this joyous occasion soon included a woman real-estate dealer who immediately trotted out photo books containing pictures of her "grandkids" by her Lesbian daughter and her Lezzie lover, a Lipstick queen, damn good looking and young-looking, too. I was concerned about her age, you know, this woman's daughter maybe committing "child abuse" and was told the Lipstick lover was a famous attorney in blah-blah-blah...." A my grandkids are the greatest grandkids ever born in the history of birth, the greatest, the prettiest and handsomest, with the greatest mother and "father" in the whole god-damn fucked up world.

After her grandkids were overadmired and phonily glowed over, she turned to my former female relative that still carries the Wolf name and congratulated her on her latest real estate deal--"I hear you're breaking the record...(then turning to the crowd)...she's on the verge of finalizing a record-breaking deal on a high-floor condo...oooooh, that's all I can say." Then I realized, everyone of these people was floating in dough, with the exception of my artist nephew from California--though his wife is a successful "restaurant" owner--who admitted this Depressed economy was having its effects on his art sales--he leases pieces of his art to Hollywood studios for use in movies and shit, so if you're a movie buff, you may have caught a glimpse of his art on the big screen--though he's certainly better off than I am. I mean, folks, I'm dirt poor, a failed arteest, a has-been vocalist and blues pianist, a writer of millions upon millions of unpublished words, a man with a reckless desire to live to the hilt with the least hurdles and hindrances--I had $40 in my jeans, my raggedy GAP jeans, with my vintage Texas State Railroad teeshirt on--though I was sporting my gold Hamilton wristwatch, a late 1950s phenom watch, an automatic winder, 18K gold, too, with an 18K gold watchband. There, too, I was out classed as the Aussie bloke was sporting a very new looking gold Rolex and had steered the conversation around to skiing and how he was at one time an Olympic-ready skiier. "Where the hell do you ski in Australia?" I cynically asked. "Or are you talking about sand skiing?" Yuk, yuk, yuk, that gotta laugh out of the crowd, then he started talking seriously about skiing again--and then my nephew started talking about how sissies skiied and he-men hang-glided--and then this teevee reporter chick showed up and started talking about her assignments--the Congo, Darfur, "Yes, I've been to Iraq and Afghanistan," blah, blah, blah. Everybody around me is RICH! Still flying first class. Still planning on vacationing about three months out of every year--skiing in Switzerland coming up--going out to Napa Valley for a few weeks leisure--MY GOD, I was screaming inside, all these people are on the reverse side of my world--the economy sliding into the gutter doesn't worry them. They spent nearly $400 (on one of their tons of credit cards) on the Italian food that suddenly streamed in, white jacketed Mexican kids trucking it in--chicken Marsala...antipasto...pastas galore. Do you tip $40 on such a spread? Suddenly, I know, I as distant a relative to my close family as old Uncle Blue used to be to me when I was a teenager listening to Charles Parker, Jr. and Uncle Blue was shitkicking away listening to Roy Acuff and the Smokey Mountain Boys. "Now, boy, them's some damn fine muu-zis-shuns, by dern, damn fine, I say."

In the meantime, high definition television (YES, I bought one, dammit) is creating a new bunch of pretty people to toss amongst us--as high definition teevee makes the old pretty UGLY--like Oprah's true fatness blossoms forth big time in HD. HD makes Ellen Degenerate pretty however. However, one actress who used to come off as a sexpot, breathtaking, pure-skinned beauty has a couple of huge wens on her face--and makeup--holy shit, you can see the makeup lines--rushed on makeup we assume--I mean, it makes this babe look like Carol Channing warmed over. I'm gonna stay Low Definition--high definition is just too fucking defining.

LDTVthegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

HERE'S BELOW--The Daily Growler Post of November 5th, 2008

Also Obama is thick buddy-buddy with Larry Summers (a Harvard snob), Clinton's former Sec'y of the Treasury who replaced Robert Rubin, called "Mr. Wall Street" when he was in Clinton's crooked administration, and who was a big advisor for Obama during his 20-month-long campaign in which he spent 600 million dollars--and Robert Rubin is a true snob asshole, too, don't forget. Larry Summers is the fop who proposed we dump all nuclear and polluting waste in Africa. Here's the famous memo Lawrence Summers wrote:

DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP

"'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be
encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed
Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the
foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of
view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the
country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages.
I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest
wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial
increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always though that
under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air
quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico
City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-
tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit
transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing
trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is
likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that
causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously
going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate
cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is is 200 per thousand. Also,
much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility
impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health
impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could
be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air
is a non-tradable."

"The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more
pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social
concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more
or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization."

Monday: Stormy Monday/Blue Monday--Another Beginning

"Sittin' Here Thinkin'" ("And my thoughts make me feel so sad....")
I've been sittin' here listening to my old pal Bob Guida sing what seems like at least a dozen versions of blues star Herman Parker's old blues standard on tapes recorded 25 years ago. It's been one month since Brother Bob walked up the steps of that library where he was scheduled to play and dropped down, Mama, flat dead...face down...dead on the spot...that quick, like he'd counted off the tune in his head, a one, two, three, four...then on the one, BOOM. DEAD. GONE in life. But still alive in my life...tune after tune of Bob singing and playing with such big-man depth and booming presence, rockin' my brain on the dancefloor of my medulla oblongato.

And thinking of Bob and Bob's being gone--"So long, I've got to be goin'"--made me consider myself in the role of fundie wacko preachers. Like they yell it out from their Bible, I preach mine out in the blues idiom, all my thinkings being backed up by a blues lyric from an old blues etched in memory within my mind's multivolumed lyrics library--the old blues lyrics becoming verses out of my Blues Bible--"Turn with me now to the second verse of Herman Parker's 'Sittin' Here Thinkin' where we sing and shout...'Like the old folks say, "All that shines is not gold."'" Doesn't that sound like a "Bible" verse? a blues sermon, with choir accompanyment and a swinging pianist at a 10-foot grand comping behind my verses and scriptures as I emote and declare the blues gospel. "All that shines is not gold...." and "....You've got to reap just what you sow...." Come on, you live by those two principles right there and you're gonna be ahead of the game.

And thinking like this is my calling, a calling today inflamed by the eternal light that glows off old Bob Guida's final resting place out in Queens, New York, right nearby Louis Armstrong's, John Coltrane's, and Dizzy Gillespie's graves I hope. Bob had been to all three of those gravesites and paid homage and knew their locations in terms of meridians and Mecca and all that kind of shit as though cosmic blues-idiom energies flowed up from their final blues-idiom states of rest--their persons gone but their left-behind creations still flowing forth--flowing forth from life's stereo speakers...continuing on in spite of the neglect of this "natural" music that flows from within us to the without now taking a far backseat on the music bus in favor of the instant music that is now sitting in the front seats--instant music with instant lyrics (in a can); and instant songs written by computer music programs; musicians whose instruments are their techno toys who make robotic musics OR musicians who know their instruments inside and out and are fingering wizards when it comes to virtuosity; yet, when they play "jazz" or try their hand at improvisation all they can do is run the scales they've gotten virtuosic on--in their "jazz," I don't hear IT! I don't hear any individuality; any style; or if I hear a style, I recognize it as a copycat style a la "Miles" or a la "Trane" or a la "Dizzy".... I hear these young people "living" as stars from birth, with no Sittin' Here Thinkin' involved in what they're learning; no hearing original things in their heads as they learn with superb perfection the rudiments of their instruments--no individual style developing, only the textbook style. Everything old jazz has evolved into "orchestrational" jazz. Taught jazz. Ensemble jazz. Solos becoming filler for the continuing orchestrated score. Example: Wynton Marsalas's Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. An orchestra of who Wynton (a very smart man, don't get me wrong--and a brilliant musician) picks as his favorite "readers," their writings complicated scores, except these complicated scores usually lead to very boring and uninspiring solos within the drapes of the surrounding orchestra's wings--whereas, in the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band, yes, you had complicated scores, but those scores whipped each player up to what would be an original wild solo--amidst a choir of brass and wood and skins and strings banging up behind them driving them on to solo glory; not the orchestra itself the focus but the soloists it creates from among its being a living unit. Basie's 1938 band without Lester Young? Forget it.
_____________________________________________________________
Backward Thinking, part 4 (continued as is continually continued in a continuing stream of continuence that is continually constant in our continuing to exist)
See how confusing "forward" thinking can be? Like put one stanza of an Ezra Pound poem in front of a common old ordinary member of the species and you're going to get a unanimous "DUH?" The I-don't-get-it-crowd is who you're dealing with when it comes to forward reasoning, or the expectations of forward reasoning. Those who don't get it are a wacky bunch. They are diverse except in one area: FEAR. They are afraid of their own shadows. They look to soothsayers for answers to the most imposing questions they face, like, "How in the fucking hell am I gonna pay these fucking bills?...look at that phone bill, Jesus Christ...." Or "Why can't I have a baby?" Or "Why am I being laid off and these illegal immigrants are being given free food, free education, and they're taking away my job, god-dammit?"

You must approach these "backward thinkers" as a common denominator--they are afraid to death of change (change means readjusting--it's like making a dog give up his favorite place to sleep: the middle of a four-lane highway or in the middle of your bed! That's where they feel the safest and most protected)--or put another way, they are scared to death of forward thinking and what changes it might ask of them. Remember, this is the I-don't-get-it crowd.

I have been listening to Noam Chomsky talking about the Obama administration and how, yep, Noam, too, says Obama is not really a very forward-thinking president, though he doesn't go as far as I do in saying Obama has tricked bagged our expectational asses just to get into the outer limits (maybe) of the Power Elite, the political Power Elite, that body of wealthy White men who govern We the People, manipulators of our Congress that passes laws every session that are mostly against We the People in favor of our adversaries who are their nest-egg suppliers; a Power Elite that handles our money with flamboyant flagrance in spending it, in wasting it, in stealing it from us, and in handing it out among themselves.

Noam Chomsky says we still have a ONE party system in this country. He calls it the Business Party. Noam says the Dumbocrats and the Repugnicans are simply diverse branches of this Business Party. Noam says Barack Obama is a Dumbocrat Centrist and is going to continue most of G.W. Bush's policies, which Chomsky said were to these birds too far-right-of-the-established-center and failed not because they were "wrong" but because they were handled much more arrogantly than previous presidents, though our previous presidents bucked for the same policies, going back to Jimmah Cahter, the peanut farmer rocket scientist, whose economic policies weren't so much different from those of Ronnie Raygun Reagan's that followed Jimmah's (Jimmy "Now Peacemaker" Carter fucked up an attempt to rescue the famous Iranian hostages--those that Iran released after Raygun had made a deal with them through who, was it Pappy Bush maybe?)--politics as usual.

Chomsky said Obama didn't lie to us during the campaign but that he's always said he was a Centrist Dumbo and that his intentions weren't to repair the past but leave the past behind to focus on a new future, a future using insider (Beltway talk) ways of "correcting" Bush's "wrongs"--the same as Lincoln's so-called "freeing of the slaves," rich-boy Roosevelt's New Deal, Ronnie Reagan's "free-market Capitalism," and G.W. Bush's powerful extension of executive privileges, a lot of which Obama is not giving up, like the protecting of AT&T against "invasion of privacy" charges being brought against them by mainly the ACLU--Obama's Justice Department under his corporate-designed-buddy Eric Holder (a very rich man) has just decided to keep in place not only G.W.'s saying the media giants who spied on American citizens for him and Unka Dickless Cheney could not be sued but also keeping extraordinary rendition flights and the torture that awaits these poor buggers after they get to Syria or Egypt or Morocco--where beatings and waterboarding and beheading are tolerated by Islamic law--Egypt said to now be the most brutal government in the Middle East--where torture is professionally practiced--and where at any moment Mubarak and his ilk could be blown away by their own guards! Obama has condoned these CIA-sponsored flights. His Justice Department has also just decided that prisoners held in foreign prisons, like the prison in Afghanistan at Bagrum Air Base, have no rights under U.S. Constitutional law--EVEN if they are US CITIZENS. Obama is also refusing to lift the "enemy combatant" status off the poor, by now a nutjob, shoe bomber, a US citizen who's been held without charges and legal defense for 7 years--5 of those years in solitary confinement, with no windows, with no mattress, no covers, with the lights in his cell on 24 hours a day, with loud rock 'n roll (horrible punk rock shit) boomed from speakers directed at his cell 24/7, and when he would pass out, they would come in and wake him up, throw water on him, punch him, and kick him awake.... Obama says that's OK. Obama, I sadly noticed, too, is continuing the G.W. Bush practice of using an Air Force cargo plane to carry the big specially built for Obama "Ironsides" Caddie limo along with him on his globe trekking at a cost of millions a flight. Plus, notice how Obama is just as much a globe-trekking fool as G.W. Bush became, like popping in unexpected in Iraq--and then not leaving the Green Zone--staying behind several walls that separates the keiko-muckity-muck, God-blessed precious US assholes from the scumbag smelly Iraqis, or what's left of them. Walls protecting all the USA political junket junkies, and professional gunrunners and black-market manipulators, and the big starched-stiff generals like this fool Petraus that Obama thinks is a great American soldier--Obama's already said he admired the guy and respected his military decisions--when in fact, Petraus is a big dumbass ox who was really taking orders from death-squad-designer and instigating culprit John Negroponte--who G.W. Bush at the last minute made Death-Squad John (son of a hugely rich Greek shipping magnate, born in London, not born an American citizen) step down as National Security boss and go forthwith to Iraq, right after which, "the surge" military strategy of the great Commander and Thief G.W. "Bunnywagon" Bush was put into action under General Betrayus--and soon after that, just like his "Mission Accomplished" declaration on the deck of the Abe Lincoln, General Bush announced that his "surge" strategy had been such a success that, hell, he was sure enough to announce that though the War in Iraq would go on another 20 years or so, the occupation was at last a success--Bush eventually saying he thought his use of "the surge" in Iraq was his greatest achievement he had as president, though he really never was "honestly" elected president--and isn't it amazing how we know all this shit on this little weasel bastard who got us in every mess we're in now, all of this caused by this bastard's two illegal invasions and occupations that are still costing us billions a month and which have led to not only death and destruction in both Iraq and Afghanistan but whose squandering of money has led us into the a Depression (and Obama insists it's a recession) that looks like it's gonna be greater than the Great Depression, and this little Bush jackoff is allowed to roam free as a bird, live a great life, well protected, with the best healthcare taxpayer money can buy--isn't it amazing how he's not seen as such a bad guy by the Power Elite?--and even Obama said that about him when they met so Bush could turn over the White (Man's) House keys--"Why heckfire," Obama (sort of) said, "he's a really nice easy-t0-get-along-with fellow, quite jovial"--and Obama doesn't want to talk about charging this sorry bastard with any crimes--that's because Obama plans on continuing those crimes! How 'bout that, folks?

Why is Obama following such backward logic? According to Noam, it's because Obama is politically controlled by the financial industry--he's in "politics" now and Politics is controlled by the Power Elite that controls the wealth, which are bankers, financial institutions, insurance companies, pharmaceutical drug companies, Exxon-Mobil, those companies and institutions that are so-called "too big to fail," a political term meaning, "Go ahead, boys, invest wildly and foolishly without worry, because, hell, if you fail, We the People of the USA will bail your worthless asses out...they'll bail you out every time. Remember, Jimmy Carter bailed out CitiBank when it wasn't CitiGroup back in the late 70s."

Chomsky when asked why did Obama pick the very people who caused the financial problem: Larry Summers and Robert Ruben and Tim Geithner and Paul Voulker for his financial advisers--for his Sec'y of the Treasury--and also why did he keep on Bush's head of the Federal Reserve? Chomsky's answer was because Obama had no choice because these guys are the guys that got him elected! These are the guys he admires and trusts. These are Harvard boys, Skull and Bones Yalies, Dartmouth boys, boys trained to be politicians of the most finagling kind! Money rules these birds! And it was their monies and the monies of their asshole buddies who put Obama in the White (Man's) House and not the money he raised off the Internet and from his populist backers. Remember, Obama spent the most money ever in the history of a presidential campaign--G.W. Bush before him had the record--Obama outspent Bush! After final count, and they haven't ever issued what he really spent yet--some say it'll be around 1 billion dollars when it's all added up--and most of that money came from the very people he's currently bailing out--excusing himself by saying these institutions are "too big to fail." Such bullshit! But it's pure-dee old Backwards Thinking.

So when you hear Obama say, "It looks like our bail-out package is having some results," after the Stock Market has, say, surged up over 8,000 again, turn it around backwards and read "Looks like we need to give these guys more bail-out money...why look what our stimulus package did for Wells-Fargo." This right after old Warren "Junk Bond" Buffett's Wells-Fargo Highway Robbers said they made record profits just recently! But when Obama should be saying, "OK, boys, I'll take those profits in the name of We the People of the USA and boy howdy that will really actually stimulate the economy," he will be saying "Give them more money; they're too big to fail." What you can say, using Backward Thinking, is that Wells-Fargo not only probably didn't make any real profits at all but phony profits like Warren Buffett made off his phony junk bonds and Wells-Fargo will soon be back at the trough looking for some more bailout scraps to feast on.

What a shame. But that's life, folks.

The scary thing is, what Obama's doing is in-line with National State Socialism, what was called Nazism back in its heyday under Adolph Hitler. As Chomsky says, at one moment after WWI, Germany was the most advanced state in terms of art and science and democracy. However, in a matter of 10 years, Germany was suddenly taken back to a Barbaric state...brought on by what? FEAR! The White Man's fearing his own demise--having to blame it on someone--blaming it on the Jews and the Bolsheviks in the case of the very White Germans!

The recent G20 meeting! Declared a success! Read it really as saying, there was no unity at that meeting at all. However, they had to show unity and they did so by agreeing to shore up the IMF--the International Monetary Fund (a branch of the US Government headed up by a European dude) with billions of dollars. And, of course, using Forward Thinking, the IMF is the very last institution that should be shored up, but using Backwards Thinking the worst is the best. Hell, it's the rules the IMF sets on its forced loans that have caused Third World countries to find themselves in debts so deep they must follow the orders of the IMF and privatize everything and sell off all their wealth and put their populations into poverty in order to pay back the IMF. It was the IMF that allowed toxic waste to be dumped off Somalia's coastline that put Somalian fishermen out of business and turned them to piracy! One of the pirates the US Navy froggies captured instead of killing was a teenager.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Here's a great photo I found of Dizzy Gillespie blowing his trumpet over the grave of Tom Wiggins, better known as the famous black pianist and composer Blind Tom