Living in New York City: Free as a Bird

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2010
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Man Talking to Himself
It's like traveling through a haunted house. It's like being in a Jack Kerouac dream. One of his beermares! It could be like the Bird playing on stage chorus after chorus while inside his body was eating him alive raw. It could be like trying to run and you have no legs. Pulling the legs off live frogs and ordering them to hop. Ploughing fields of rocks.

Rocks for my pillow, too.

Inside the haunted house you are not scared. Why? Inside the haunted house all seems false. Aha! All seems fabricated, designed, sketched then produced. And some of the hauntings in the haunted house are virtually there, yes. But the giant-tall one-eyed skinhead raising his executioner's ax as if to cut off your head doesn't bother you one bit. The mechanized are not prepared for a duck. Or for a man with a blowtorch.

You hear no music from machines. Even choirs of machines leave you begging for at least a hint of harmony or melody.

Living through a Jack Kerouac dream is a much tougher trial to endure. You may need to take Henry Miller along with you as you belch along with Jack's wanderings drunk among the fallen roses of Saint Teresa of Avila--on second thought, maybe Gertrude Stein not Henry Miller should go with you into a Jack Kerouac dream--unless it were one of Jack's beermares. That would be no place for a woman like Gertrude Stein. Carolyn Cassidy would be a better woman to take into a beermare, but then she's in most of Jack's beermares, so you see the dilemma? Which brings us back to Henry Miller. Take old Henry into especially one of Jack's beermares.

We worship machines because we are the gods of machines. The highest achievement so far of the human monkey is in his technology. In his entanglements of complicated things he has figured out the simplicity of binary mathematics, how easy it is to realize virtually anything you care to realize. It's so easy, all you do is invent a machine language, then write a program of commands to the machine you're intending to create and VOILA! There in virtual reality is the machine. From there, a machine will follow either megacommands or nanocommands. Our machine gods are so far ahead of the most of us--especially us who write poetry and novels and tell tales and are given to empirical criticism based on the same logic used in computers.

Nothing is complicated. Not a haunted house and not even a Jack Kerouac dream (or beermare). Not even ploughing a field of rocks. The natural gas treasure hunters have figured out a way hydraulically (using water under huge pressure and laced with rock-cracking particles) to plough fields of rocks, to blast through layers of shale or limestone down into depths where there are ancient pockets of natural gas that probably are under all the Appalachian chain and the minor chains shooting off the Appalachians, like the Poconos, the Adirondacks, the Catskills--the old mountain ranges--especially over around parts of eastern Pennsylvania where the first oil in the US was discovered back at the height of the Industrial Revolution in this country--the Revolution that has really meant more to the founding of this nation than did the Revolution against the British Crown.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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Spammers
The old The Daily Growler has finally become the nesting site of now a large host of spammers. It started with our Chinese friend peddling photos of underage Thai girls getting banged big time. He was then joined by a hillbilly masturbater peddling "nekkid photos of Miley Cyrus" (isn't she already a has-been?). Within recent weeks the list has become a gallop through of all kinds of sneaky comments--"Great post. I really gained some valuable information from this article..." We immediately drop down to the bottom of these comments and see the http: address line and see it goes to some Webpage that is usually either a porn site; a get rich quick scheme introduced by the infamous "a system I discovered that I didn't believe at first but after trying it one time, I'll tell you, pal, I was surprised to receive a large sum of money from out of nowhere...."; or lately they been just openly wanting to get their product on the post--"Hi, great post. I'm Judy Lovejoy and I run the All Girl National Book Supply Store and Jam Regatta and I know you'd love to get certain bestselling books at ridiculous prices...."

I assume Google is allowing these spammers free access to their blogs now. Google is now so rich I saw where they are joining several California companies in developing a solar energy project in the Mojave or somewhere like that. Google is maybe, and we're not kidding, the most powerful corporation in the world right now. How did Google get so rich?, you may ask. How did Yahoo get so rich?; and now that Microsoft has taken over Yahoo, how the hell richer are they going to get? Yahoo--started by some young college students. Yahoo, Google, eBay, PayPal. All started by young dot commers who made it. And who are now too big to fail. Will We the People soon be bailing them out? Don't We the People own the Internet? Doesn't it belong to the Department of Defense? But then the Internet is now worldwide. WWW. Wow. Do We the People of the USA own the world through the Internet? Not according to the spammers.

We here at The Daily Growler resent being a part of the Google Information Collection Agency--probably a branch of the Department of Defense for all we know. We are certain that The Daily Growler's every word whether total fantasy or actuality has been absorbed and crunched and referenced and categorized along with every bit of information whether alias or not--that's the frustrating part of being a part of this Google machine that has now entered the realm of the lower floors of the Power Elite, the US ruling class--our royalty.

Blogging is a great idea--but Google's brain-drainers will eventually find a way to Capitalize on it--already by scraping up information including email addresses and we suppose Google is selling those blog addresses to spammers! Is it possible?

As the spam guards begin to fail all over the world, soon blogging will be spoiled. But then Websites suffer from spammers worse than bloggers.

Another thing bothers us--how the hell do spammers survive?--they must meet their goals, there are so many of them. Like I wonder who in the hell, unless it's a horny teenage boy, goes onto a site coming out of China or Russia to look at child pornography, though maybe in China and Russia and Thailand sex with underage girls is legal and photos of 12-year-old girls going round the world is not considered pornography, just a part of the local customs.

austinhighchew,managingeditor
for The Daily Growler

From Wikipedia:

Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social networking spam, and file sharing network spam.

Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is universally reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.^[1]

People who create electronic spam are called spammers.

For an Up-to-Date List of the Top Ten Spammers (they seem to be mostly Russians, Ukraines, Chinese--there's an Estonian), here ya go:

www.spamhaus.org/statistics/spammers.lasso

Living in New York City--al-Queda Alive and Well in the USA

TOTALLY REVISED AND RE-EDITED

"Los dioses de la noche" Osvaldo Romberg (1938), original color woodcut, 1966
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Military Experience
I was the last of the "fortunate" boys who when they reached 18 had to by law go down to what was called "the draft board" and obtain what was called "a draft card." This card had a draft number on it. On a certain future date, this draft board, under orders from a man named General Hershey in the District of Corruption, would have a drawing where the head of the local draft board (the head of my draft board was an old high-school pal of my dad's) would reach into a box and pull out numbers that they would then announce in the newspaper. If the number on your draft card was picked in one of those drawings then you were on your way to WAR whether you liked it or not. There were exceptions. One was where at the age of 18 you could get a college deferment as long as you signed up with the National Guard--to go to Guard meetings once a month and to go with your Guard unit to summer camp, blah, blah, blah. The minute, though, you graduated college, you became a member of the US Army and had to report to whatever US Army base your eventual orders (you got them from the National Guard) ordered you to for basic training and then into actual specialty training, in my case, at an artillery base since I had signed up for this plan at my hometown's National Guard armory and that unit was a highly decorated-in-WWII artillery division--a US 4th Army Division headquartered at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas.

And as I said as I started off on this recollection journey, I was fortunate to be in this age of the military draft--and I would expect people to ask me WHY, for God's sake? and I answer because I got to experience the military first hand, which is something I would have never volunteered for. And my military experience, as brief in actuality as it was (though in all it lasted 6 years out of which I was in actual military service for about a year and a half off and on), did one thing for me: it awakened me to the fact that there are so many different societies within our collective society (the USA) and that each of these societies has its own constitution and rules and laws and bylaws and dictatorship. Like when you are inside a place of religious worship, according to the constitution of that institution's umbrella affiliation you become a subject to the rules and orders of that religious place passed down from a heirarchy that has no one above it but the God. The military is on a parallel line with that religious place of worship. In the military you are subject to laws and rules and orders against your will all sent down from a hierarchy whose head dog is the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief, which I can say is equivalent to a religion's certain God.

Once you set foot on a military base as a recruit, you are no longer a citizen of the United States. You see where I'm headed with this?

My first post and tour of duty was held at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. I spent 3 months at Leonard Wood as what the army referred to as "a raw recruit"--a no striper. Not even a Buck Private yet--a Recruit. And when I had to give my army service number, I had to say, "Recruit 94078556387, SIR!" As a US citizen, fuck it, I had no god-damn civil rights at all in the US Army--like screw the Bill of Rights and screw Constitutional protections. They were meaningless to the US Armed Forces. The US justice system was not available to me either in the US Army.

I met, while at Leonard Wood, two lawyers, one a graduate of Roosevelt U.-Loyola U. in Chicago and the other a graduate of the Yale Law School. I hung with these two dudes a lot. I loved 'em like brothers. Both from Chicago. Both Jewish. One from Hyde Park and the other from up in the Wilmette suburb area of the Windy City. Both sharp as tacks and both totally dedicated to rebuking the military's justice system by spending a lot of time in the post library reading military law books. Both figured they would eventually end in the military judicial branch since they were both lawyers--though I have no idea how either one of them ended up--dead or alive--nor do I want to know, like I tell people.

One Saturday morning after inspection after we were released by "the Old Man" on our own, though we had to remain on base, all of my gang dragged our soldier asses over the the PX for a steak dinner in the PX steak house--pretty damn good steaks for an army base. As we were downing our steaks and beginning to gulp down cold 3.2% alcohol Carling's Black Label beers ("Hey, Mabel! Black Label!"), the lawyer from Yale said, "You know, guys, the only rights we have in this man's Army are religious rites. Like me and Rosey. The only rights we have in the Army is the right to observe the Jewish Sabbath, which is Saturday; therefore they can't force us to participate in Saturday morning inspections due to those rights. And these bastards hate Jews, let me tell you how they hate us, but we've got them by their military dongs with this religious right." "But, how the hell can you guys get away with missing inspections?...how are you ever gonna get a Liberty pass if you don't go to inspections?" "That's part of the sacrifice--we give up military freedoms just to gain our religious right. So, no, we won't get Liberty passes probably not until we finish basic training. I don't think this action will affect our records after this shit. You'll see, we'll have to do shit work the rest of the week, too, if we decide to observe the Sabbath and miss inspections--like we'll be doing all the shit work down in the boiler room every fucking night--and we'll probably be doing permanent KP, too, but hey, it's the only right we have in the Army so like the confirmed Jewish cats we are, we're going for it--so we'll being doing the shit work five days a week, when you guys fall out for inspection Saturday morning, we'll be watching from our bunks." "Plus, you guys get Sunday off, too?" They both grinned like possums eating you know what at that question. And just as they predicted, that's exactly what happened to them, they got the Sabbath off but the rest of the week they were harassed cruelly--like being awakened in the middle of the night and told to report to the PM and then getting there and sitting and waiting maybe an hour for the PM who would then come in and say, "What the hell are you two Hebes doing in here--shouldn't you be gettin' some sleep? You're gonna be cleaning shit houses tomorrow. Now get the fuck out of here and don't bother me again." There Jewish sense of humor under harassment got them the support of the whole company and especially their buddies, of whom I was their best--a cotton-haired, Aryan-looking, curious kid from far West Texas--a place of spread-open horizons and verizons--a place of either bitter hidden hatreds or openly exposed tolerances. Strange bedfellows? Naw. Nothing strange about just human beings being human beings. I judged those guys not on their Jewishness, that was their religion to me, but rather on their imaginations and their use of wit to get them through even a torturous time, a device I have used ever since learning it from them. There is nothing your torturer hates worse than you're cracking a joke about your situation with a smile on your face. God-damn torturers hate that. It brings out the KILLING DESIRES in them. That's why the Army doesn't allow a sense of humor to mess with it necessarily having God-like dictatorial powers over its recruits.

Like I said, I have no idea what happened to those two dudes. I suppose I could find them in the White Pages, though their names are pretty common Jewish names--Rosenberg and Goldberg--and common first names, too. How many lawyers do you think there are in this country (or even in Chicago) with those names!

I have never had a desire to go down to the Vietnam Memorial, to The Wall, to see if I can find any of my army buddies's names there. I still have somewhere in my possession a list of all my pals I met in the army with their hometown addresses--I can still clearly see them all as they were then, so alive, so hopeful, so not knowing what they had gotten themselves into. They are still frozen alive at that time in my memories--what great guys--so innocent of what lay ahead of them in this place called Viet Nam--when I first went into the army it was Laos we were going over to "kill or be killed" in though the stage quickly changed to Viet Nam soon after my basic training and my orders on that bulletin board up at Fort Sill when I was mustered out of Artillery School said "Next stop Fort Ord, California" and all us cannoneers knew that Fort Ord was where they shipped you out of after assigning you to a Nam artillery unit--next stop from Fort Ord for an artilleryman was Camron Bay, Republic of South Vietnam and from there he knew he would either "kill or be killed"--that is the Biggest Order given in the military and they give it to you the first day you are at a post as a raw recruit with no rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's bullshit to the Army. You either live or you die according to the Army Bill of Rights--"You have the right to kill them because they have the right to kill you, so there ya go."

And that little brief military experience was enough to show me how separate and unequal the world of the US military--or any country's military--really is from the civilian world. How obligated today's soldiers are to the military hierarchy--currently that includes Generals from Commander in Chief G.W. Bush's New World Order Army, Admiral Mullins, General McChrystal, General Petraus (Obama's hero), and good ole Bushite Henchman, Bob Gates--sorry, General Bob Gates. Soldiers in the US Army or any army are slaves. Slobs. They are the military's lumpenproletariat! I mean, these poor young dupes are subject to be ordered to either KILL or be KILLED--and if you are KILLED, you better have KILLED a bunch of towelheads before they got you, or you are worthless to the Army--better crippled than DEAD. Of course, the DEAD have to be treated as HEROES, otherwise, the lumpenprolitariat might catch on all they are is cannon fodder, pawns under the commands of big fat always perfectly safe brass, the command, the Generals, the Colonels, the Admirals--the boys who party hearty during these invasions and occupations--just think, they're being WARLORDS, they're being military tactitioners, they're getting to practice all the moves of WAR that they learned at West Point or Annapolis or Colorado Springs--HOT DAMN are they having the time of their lives. Their lives are not in any danger.

One thousand poor slob US soldiers have now died in Afghanistan [they corrected it to 960--40 deaths happened outside Afghanistan proper], a war now entering its ninth year! Nine years and all we've accomplished is NOTHING near peace, freedom, and democracy. Hell no. That means in both of these stupid wars over 5,000 dumbass boys and girls have died now in revenge for the 2,900 not-all-Americans who died in the 9-11 attack.... And let's stop right here and analyze the situation: just how more effective was 9-11 at bringing down the USA than this current Surge we're imposing on the Afghanistan people in Marjah is in bringing down the Taliban? The Taliban as Afghanistanis had absolutely nothing to do with 9-11--and we are imposing death on all Taliban who the US Army PR releases call insurgents but who actually are Afghanistanis, a lot of them citizens of Marjah and Helmond Province. Our big pompous asshole General Stanley McChrystal had to go on Afghanistani television this morning to apologize for the US Army having wiped out 29 Afghanistani civilians who were in a small bus convoy escaping the area. Our dumbass soldier boys and girls were ordered to fire on it, so they followed orders and fired on it--SUCCESS, they killed 29 of those insurgent bastards. General Bob Gates came on after McChrystal had apologized and set us straight about the incident. "This is WAR," Bob said, "and WAR causes these kind of unfortunate things. Besides," General Bob continued, "the Taliban, those dirty bastards, are using civilian Afghanistanis as human shields so how do we really know those people weren't insurgents?...."

KILL OR BE KILLED is the Army's ultimate order. The fact that the Taliban are the civilians they are using as shields means they are using themselves as shields. The Army is puzzled how every time they start to raise the Afghan flag over the Marjah battlefield the Taliban appear out of nowhere and pull it down and take the city back over. The Taliban are Afghanistan citizens--you are invading their homes, their farms, their businesses--of course they are going to fight back. Of course since they know the country and the people and the customs and the culture they are able to appear and disappear at will--it's their fucking home town or their home province.

You see how utterly stupid and illogical the US Military is? Look at the fact that these terrorists we keep capturing and imprisoning without trials because we see them as enemy combatants are under the jurisdiction of the US Military courts.

The only way to end the War in Afghanistan, and I'm sorry I disagree with Phyllis Bennis, who obviously has no military experience, and her idealistic way to end this war--BUT, the only way to end that WAR is to just stop it. President Obama could go to Kabul and become the antiChrist for real and just say, "Look, you poor bastards, we made a bigger mistake than the Soviet Union did in thinking we could invade your homeland and occupy it and make Democrats and Republicans and Christians out of you. I want to personally apologize for my predecessor and myself for bringing this chaos to your never-really-free country. I want to help you become FREE. Not by military force but by altruism, my fellow Afghanistanis, altruism, an offer of freedom. I am withdrawing all US and NATO forces from Afghanistan immediately. I will be meeting with the puppet president my predecessor laid on you and instead of military threats we're gonna simply offer you whatever services in the way of humanitarian help and rebuilding help you may need--otherwise, we're getting the hell out of here. Your fate is now up to you guys--and don't worry, we'll pay reparations--we have to to clear our collective conscience. Case closed, Long Live Afghanistan!"

By the bye, the military general still bossing folks around in Iraq says we ain't leavin' Iraq until they stop bombing and killing each other (remember when people were saying we had turned Iraq into a Civil War Zone--same thing in Afghanistan?

Baghdad is home of our largest-ever Embassy, the Green Zone --you don't think we're giving that up, do you?--the Green Zone was once one of Saddam's gaudy palaces--no sir, we ain't giving up the Green Zone. And oh by the way, this Head Iraq General said, we ain't leavin' Iraq unless they straighten up--you see, everyday over there as long as we keep our troops and Blackwater troops there are civilians getting killed by car bombs and suicide bombers or shot by a Blackwater trooper (he may be from Chile) at a guard post--posts being so important to the US Army, like the posts that hold up that fence We the People built around certain neighborhoods in Baghdad.

HAS ANYBODY THOUGHT YET about why we are in Iraq and Afghanistan?

L Hat (www.languagehat.com) in one of his past posts said he had holy hell trouble finding a detailed map of the City of Baghdad. He was looking for a certain park and certain streets and neighborhoods he had read about in an Iraqi author's novel--a terrible novel L Hat revealed though interesting in terms of the novelist's descriptions of Baghdad itself. The only halfway detailed maps he found of Baghdad were some older German maps--but on them he couldn't find certain streets mentioned in the novel, though he did locate the park he'd been looking for. Either L Hat or one of his commenters said that since Baghdad was considered a WAR Zone maybe detailed maps of the town weren't allowed by the US Military. That made sense to me. There are probably not even any military maps of Baghdad. Maybe even Saddam Hussein didn't allow maps of Baghdad--who knows? Though surely Baghdad has been mapped thousands of times over in history. Also, surely We the People have satellites spying on Baghdad right now that can map that city down to the livingrooms and bedrooms of private homes.

I just read where moving the 30,000 troops from Iraq and the US to Afghanistan cost us 1 million dollars per soldier. You heard me right, 1 million dollars per soldier to transport these poor dopes to Afghanistan. We now have 120,000 US shuck and jive soldiers there plus over 100,000 soldiers of fortune (Blackwater, Dimecorp, contractors, etc.) for a total of 220,000 invaders in that country. Doesn't that sound chaotic to you?

5,000 US troops have now died in these two insane WARS of revenge for some unknown military genius killing 2,900 people, innocent people yes, most of them, some of them who knows--the CIA had a big database in the WTC--as did the Treasury Dept. have some old gold stored there, too--and oh yes have I mentioned who was in charge of World Trade Center security right up until the morning of 9-11 when he retired from the job--Marvin Bush--have you ever heard that name before?

But you see, folks, here's the problem I see through my empirical eyes, this country is now a MILITARY-Controlled Nation. Obama's only power as President is in his role as Commander in Chief of the US Army. The President of the United States is more powerful than Congress or We the People because as G.W. Bush figured out in his little boy head, being the Commander in Chief of the US Army means he has these sons of bitches under his command and our military leaders being loyal to him who provides them with wars to fulfill their WARRIOR dreams of playing a game of WAR Chess using human beings for the pieces.

Male human monkeys have an instinct for becoming WARRIORS and proving themselves in WAR. I think it's an unquenchable instinct--unless you are the beaten--beaten so far down that you find yourself in slavery--THEN and seemingly only then do our instinct for FREEDOM and JUSTICE take over--so only through a REVOLUTION will We the People ever pull ourselves out of this mess--and we can because what Marx forgot in his faulty dialetical materialism approach to change was human invention. Human invention when used for the good of mankind can cause a REVOLUTION in this country, emphasis on the evolution part of the word.

One way to start would be for our government to confiscate all the holdings of Toyota America--and to maybe put old Brother Toyota, Jr., in a fucking jail cell where he and the ex-Presidents of Chrysler and General Motors belong....

But of course I don't see any change on the horizon. WAR seems to be inevitable. PEACE seems to be impossible. So what do you do?

I'm writing a detective novel--a Dick Stump Mystery--you can't stump Dick Stump. I'm losing myself in my inner self's playpen, that self that is so crammed with things to write about. I'm getting some of my old art out of hiding and digging it again--like Osvaldo Romberg's Los dioses de la noche that leads off this post. Look at those gods. They are gods of WAR nights. There is no light at the end of the tunnel in Osvaldo's view of WAR. (Osvaldo is an Argentine-born now American artist--who is still with us. See www.osvaldoromberg.com/)

I'm going to lose myself among the stars over some beers and a steak down at my fav Irish pub.

Gártha agus síocháin ar domhan

privatethegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

There Is Big Joy Tonight in New York City at the Policeman's Ball
The mad bombing al-Queda-trained Afghanistan native from Denver, Colorado, has amazingly confessed his intent of blowing up the New York City subway system. The cops and the FBI and the CIA are patting themselves on the back with all of 'em saying how devastating this would have been had this twentyish al-Quedan managed to have pulled off his plot. Seems he's pissed at the way the US Army is killing Afghanistan civilians (estimates are that 100,000 Afghanistan civilians have been killed in this futile war since it began in 2001). Of course, they never found any explosives on the dude or at his Denver home. Nor did they find any explosives at his father's house or the home of the al-Queda Iman from Queens nor at the homes of his two high school friends also accused of being al-Quedan enemy combatants along with the father and the evil Iman. I mean these people have lived here all this time and suddenly now they want to blow up the NY City subway system--an impossible feat--more than likely the guy confessed under an extreme urging for his to do so by his accusers.

By the way, as an aside, a judge here in NYC acquitted the 3 cops who a male victim claimed sodomized him with a billy club in a late-night subway arrest. The message sent to We the People of New York City: the cops now have the right to jam a billy club up your ass while arresting you. Who knows, you could be an al-Queda agent.

So this al-Quedan from Denver confessed to everything. They say he made a deal with the Feds and the local cops--in exchange for reduced waterboarding torture he's going to squeal on all his al-Queda cell members here in the USA. Looks like he's gonna rat on his own father.

Oh the fun we New York Citians have while al-Quedan plot after plot is foiled by our brilliant CIA and FBI--and, by the way, a detailed map of New York City--even a map of the complete subway system--is readily available to anyone who needs one, al-Quedan or White Separatist.

In the meantime, devastation is still a comin' the Feds and the local cops keep saying to keep all of us scared shitless--they pompously with very straight-faces tell us to expect more al-Queda attacks any day now. I mean come on, folks, one of them's going to get through and actually set off a fucking bomb one day the way these bastards blab all the details of their mighty investigative and preventive powers. The test bombing will probably happen right under my apartment building which sits directly over one of the largest subway stations on the whole system.

I'm'a scared...MOMMY! MOMMY!

austinhighchew,managingeditor
for The Daily Growler

New York City: No Longer "American"

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2010
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Broken English in a Broken Neighborhood in a Broken City in a Broken State
When I first moved into this neighborhood the only English speakers around were in the Irish pub just up the street from my building. And trust me, a true Irishman or woman doesn't speak the same English we Americans do so they can be pretty hard to understand for an American-English-speaking ear (even for an American-Irish-English-speaking ear), an ear taught to hear only American-English replies clearly--without having to bend forward and say, "Beg pardon, what did you say?" I put my hand up to my ear and make out like I'm hard of hearing when I don't understand my neighbors or people in the street who come up to me and ask directions. Once a woman who only spoke Greek--I flailed my hands madly trying through sign language to understand where she wanted to go--finally giving up and pointing westwardly towards New Jersey and saying my best pseudo-Greek, "That way" and off she obediently headed that way--west toward New Jersey. I felt really bad about that for a few blocks on up Fifth Avenue when soon it was pushed off into a dusty area of my mind's attic (I learned that from Sherlock Holmes) and I haven't thought it out and dusted it off until today.

For some strange reason, Latinos and Latinas who can only speak Spanish seek me out on the street--go out of their way to confront me with something like ¿Cómo en nombre de la Virgen encuentro la Embajada mejicana? or something similar. One time this Latina came up to me while I was standing with a Spanish dude and started asking me questions in Spanish. I just pointed towards that Spanish guy and said "Buenas dias" and turned to walk on my way when I heard the Spanish guy holler, "Hey, why me, man, I don't speak no Spanish, man; why the hell you think I speak Spanish, motherfucker?"

I probably know more Spanish than any other language tossed around on these streets--at least I know enough Spanish to maybe point someone in the right direction.

I see a lot of Germans in the streets around my neighborhood because my neighborhood has two $150-a-night (with a 14% city hotel tax added on) hotels (both used to be whorehouses and crack dens) so the Germans flock to these hotels. Germans, however, never approach anyone for directions. They try and figure out things for themselves. Like they always carry maps of New York City with them. Asians never get lost enough to ask a White American for a direction--besides the sidewalks all over this neighborhood are filled with Asians--the White folks haven't driven all the Asians out yet--though they will one day--they will. Like this used to be a big Lebanese neighborhood--the famous-at-one-time Beirut Restaurant used to be over in the Martinique Hotel.

I recently tested my Spanish out at my fav Irish pub when I tried to have a conversation with a couple from Madrid. I got enough conversation in to discover the man was a Sociology professor at the U of Madrid. I failed miserably trying to talk Sociology with him and spent the rest of the effort mostly nodding and saying "Si" once maybe hollering in their faces "¿Qué demonios dice usted?" No, of course, I wasn't that rude to them. I left out the demonios--I mean, they were very nice folks--he was probably a brilliant man. Years ago I met another Sociologist from Madrid, a woman professor--but I won't comment on her--language wasn't the problem with her.

My building at the time I moved into it was dominated by Asians: Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese. The neighborhood was Korean in terms of culture, restaurants, festivals, and language. The Asians who dominated my building, though, were Chinese. New immigrant Chinese. Illegal immigrant Chinese. None of them spoke English and all of them didn't trust any White person--and why should they? They were fresh from China and didn't understand the American English language, the customs, the culture, except the materialistic part of it all; they knew that just fine. Their only salvation when here--and it's the reason they were here anyway--was to be with their own people, either actual relatives or at least people from their hometown or province. The illegal Chinese immigrants worked for the legal Chinese Americans, especially the Chinese-American restaurant owners. I'm talking about a time when Chinese restaurants, both the fast-food kind and the regular kind, were thick on every block of Manhattan for sure and also thick in the other boroughs, too, I'm sure. I mean there were Cantonese joints, Sechuan joints, Hunan joints, Asian-Cuban joints. There were enough Chinese restaurants and joints around to provide plenty of jobs for immigrant Chinese--the men in the kitchens cooking, the women sitting around peeling vegetables and the illegal immigrant boys with their bicycles ran the numerous delivery orders out all across Manhattan.

The recent real-estate-developer attacks on New York City have found this neighborhood and have begun a process of driving out the Asians and replacing them with upper-end Whites, though well-to-do Chinese are welcomed--especially the hip upwardly mobile Chinese no matter their legal status. This is true even in my building where my landlord hates the unhip old-fashioned shit-in-the-stairwell Chinese and risks multiple lawsuits in wild efforts to kick them out of the building. These real-estate building-and-site gobblers have attacked this neighborhood big time especially back about 5 years ago during the wild derivatives trading times when the real estate industry was flourishing and wallowing in record sales; when homeowners were selling their formerly $75,000 houses for $700,000 to these new-home-buyers who couldn't afford to pay $700,000 for a $75,000 house but who did with the encouragement of the friendly easy-to-deal-with newly formed and unregulated mortgage dealers (brokers) and loan sharking bankers--the unregulated financial system--the playboys of the speculation world. Thanks to Bill Clinton's deregulating squad, banks were soon allowed to move away from depending on checking and savings accounts for their capital and move into the field of peddling insurances and credit cards and making all kinds of E-Z loan deals--except to poor blacks who the banks and loan sharks red lined as DANGER ZONES. And banks were also allowed to buy and sell mortgages--to become derivative traders--or vice versa, mortgage and bond brokers allowed to become banks--and even insurance companies also allowed to become banks (check out Met-Life Bank) and not only could these insurance companies still peddle all kinds of insurance but as banks they could also finance hedge funds and private equity groups and finance real-estate developments with monies they reaped extorting the dumbass masses out of their hard-earned bucks by scaring the shit out of them--"What if daddy drops dead suddenly?...what are mommy and the kids to do?" "Daddy's a son of a bitch, mommy says, because he died and left us broke." So look at all the fear they peddled along with their assurances in the form of insurance policies--policies on your life; policies on your death; policies on your chances of dying of a horrible disease; policies on your chances of living beyond 72 years of age; policies on something happening to your house--policies on your wife's or your new false tits--all insurance then broken down into fear divisions: fire, casualty, thefts (break in, burglary, home invasion), wind damage, water damage, storm damage, Act of God damage, lightning striking twice in the same place damage--I mean insurance schemes going every which way to scam people our of their dwindling hard-earned bucks--OR TO FORCE THEM DEEPER INTO DEBT. Why, hell, while they were at it, how about insurance on your cars--aha, and what if you have a wreck in your insured car--aha--you need accident insurance--and, oh yeah, you need break in and burglary insurance on your car. And then there's the taxes on your wages: city tax, state tax, federal tax; then there are the taxes on your sins, the taxes on your groceries, the taxes on your property, the taxes you pay to drive on your own highways--your thruways, your toll roads--some now owned by foreign companies--like those in Indiana--and we all pay restaurant taxes, hotel taxes, taxes on food, taxes on taxes, taxes on phone bills, taxes on utilities bills, taxes on if you win a lottery prize, taxes on capital gains, taxes on marriage licenses, taxes on your healthcare!

Remember when G.W. Bush tried to sell our ports to his pals in Dubai? Let Muslims run our ports. Oh, man, and these asshole Repugnicans are bitching about Obama being soft on terrorists. Muslims running our ports. Makes sense to me. Made sense to the Saudis and the Dubaians and the Arab Emiratese--why not Muslim nations running our ports? Damn splendid Yale Business College Degree thinking.

And credit cards. Hey, I fell for it when the minute I graduated from college a barage of credit cards hit my mailbox. I got eight "gasoline" credit cards on graduating college. I got one from Fina (a long-gone company--made famous by the "Pink Air" advertising campaign back in the 60s using the Pink Panther (of movie fame) cartoon image as their spokesperson). I got one from Mobil (at that time just recently renamed after being the Magnolia Oil and Refining Co (a Socony-Vacuum Oil Co. (Socony standing for: Standard Oil Co. of New York)) for most of my growing-up time in Texas). I got one from Humble (the Humble Oil and Refining Co. out of Houston--also known over in other states as Esso (read as: S--O, as in Standard Oil), both combining to become Exxon in the 60s--and now these many years later, those two Texas Standard Oil companies that started off Magnolia and Humble have alas been reunited into Exxon-Mobil, the biggest and greatest money-making Standard Oil company of all time--and old John D. Rockefeller is smiling in his luxurious grave and his heirs are all so thankful, too, folks, thankful that our kind and considerate politicians allowed Standard Oil to gusher back to Oligarchy status once again. Praise the Lord for deregulating fools like Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton, gnarly old Allen "Fountainhead" Greenspan, and now Barack Obama!

Why not an excess-profits tax on giants like Exxon--and AIG, and Goldman-Sachs, those bastards?

Here ya go, L Hat turned me on to this Mike Taibbi article in the latest issue of Rolling Stone--Mike has done an unbelievably thorough job of relating our financial crooks's way of skinning us alive of all our money to the ways of the grifters and the flim-flammers. A brilliant article--Mike being a The-Daily-Growler-Writing-School-Graduate-type of writer:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32255149/wall_streets_bailout_hustle/print

And I also got a credit card from The Texas Company--yep, folks, that's good ole Texaco Fire Chief gasoline--"Trust your car to the man who wears the star" was their brand tag. The star representing authority to dumbass Americans--our sheriffs wear star badges; our generals wear stars; our police chiefs wear stars; our celebrities are called "stars." The North Star the guiding star. A star showed the Wise Men where the baby Jesus was. The Red Star the guiding Communist symbol. Our Sun a star. We wish on stars. The Jews see themselves as symbolized by a 6-pointed star. The Devil, yes, he has his on star, a pentagon. Some of us see our future and our past in the stars. We are lost among the stars. We may be overpopulating so we'll outnumber the stars in the universe some day--maybe we already do.

Texaco has now comboed up with Chevron and guess what Chevron originally was: Standard Oil of California or SoCal for short!

I also got a credit card from the Sinclair Oil and Refining Co. whose mascot was Dino the Dinosaur (this when geologists thought oil came from decayed dinosaur corpses from when the big meteor hit the earth way back in an impossible time for humans to remember).

I also got a card from the Phillips Petroleum Co. of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, purveyors of Phillips 66 gasolines.

And lastly, I got a card from the Gulf Oil and Refining Co. makers of Good Gulf gasoline. Gulf Oil goes back to the Spindletop discovery field near Beaumont, Texas, in the early 1900s (1910, I think) their first refinery coming on line in Port Arthur, Texas. The principle investor in Gulf Oil was good ole Bill Mellon of the Pittsburgh, P.A., banking family. Up until the 70s, the Gulf Tower was the tallest building on the Pittsburgh skyline. In 1984, a cool date for a merger, Gulf Oil merged with Chevron (Standard Oil of California (SoCal)), though now Gulf is owned by a consortium headquartered in, guess where? If you guessed the Cayman Islands, you were right. There is still here in New York City a couple of Gulf filling stations, one a big one down on the Lower East Side near the Williamsburg Bridge.

Then on top of all those gasoline cards (you could buy like a set of tires for $120 on these cards and if you knew the filling station guy he'd make the tab out for $150 and give you $30 cash back out of the deal. That's one way you could get cash off your gasoline cards). Then motels and hotels along highways started taking gasoline cards, too, and Stuckies and places like that. And then I got the real deals, first a Diner's Club Card, then second a Master Card, and third an American Express card.

Gradually, I had to cut all my gasoline cards in half and send 'em back to the oil companies accounting divisions (credit divisions). I owed several hundred dollars on all 8 of them and I was wiped out and it got so bad, their dunning me, that I married and moved to New Orleans to escape their dunning ways. After I married, we were loaded with plastic--both of us had American Express cards--her's was one of the first gold cards--and we partied heartily around Manhattan and the world on those cards--even after our divorce, I traveled and lived on my American Express card until the early 80s when I finally had to cut it in half and send it to their Miami dunning office.

After I freed myself from this plastic debt--I paid it off later after I sold my first Pope book for a healthy sum--I haven't had any credit cards since. Fuck credit. Credit is for the taildragger. I'm a fast-cash-only type--and that's a rough way to live--the credit people hate people like me.

All of this to say in a passing note that the new Credit Card regulations went into effect this week. Oh boo-hoo-hoo; hear those credit card crooks crying those big crocodile tears. I'm sure they'll come up with tons of schemes to keep bilking their customers out of as much of any money they have left or points they still have on their credit reports. Did you know a landlord in New York City charges you $75 to check your credit before he or she will rent you an apartment--and certainly before they'll sell you an apartment. Fuck 'em all, I holler. Here's a damn good explanatory article by the AP's finance reporter on the new Credit Card reform--HAH:

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100222/ap_on_bi_ge/us_credit_cards_new_law

I just got a cut-off notice from Verizon. I've had the same telephone number for 31 years now and it has never been cut off. When Verizon was New York Telephone, I was told I had an A1 rating with them and would never be harassed with a cut-off notice. At that time these crooks couldn't charge a late charge either--nor could they charge you for long distance if you didn't use it (they can now). Same thing when New York Telephone merged with New England Telephone and became NYNEX--then that nest of crooks merged with Bell Atlantic to become--suddenly out of nowhere: Verizon, meaning I suppose they own your phone lines both coming and going. Verizon shows no mercy should you get over 100 bucks behind in your payments. They'll shut your phone off quicker than ConEd will turn off your heat and lights if you get that far in debt to them. Verizon is like the Mafia when it comes to owing them over a hundred bucks. They must send out millions of cut-off notices a month, don't you think? Think of the money these crooked bastards make of cutting people's phones off--they charge you all kinds of fees to get your phone back on, too--plus they may demand a large deposit--what a bunch of rip-off bastards. As I've said before, $22 of my phone bill is taxes, fees, wire fees, and surcharges. Plus now late fees have risen to above $5. Plus, if you don't use your long distance service now at all, they still charge you like $4.00 for the service--yeah, they have a spin phrase for what they call it--like they call it something like a "nonuse" fee. I'm not kidding.
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I go out in the morning to get coffee. My young coffee dude is an Afghanistan-American. My fruit man, Ibrahim, is also an Afghanistan-American. The great Rafiki gyro cart next to the Arab fellow running the news kiosk is managed by a Bangladeshi and a Moroccan, both who speak perfect American English--so I assume they are both born and raised here. The bank I use for my ATM withdrawals is a Korean bank, Bank Woori. The people in the bank are very friendly, but their American English is atrocious. My fav deli I go to is run by a Bangladeshi gentleman and his partner an Indian Sikh. Their sandwich dude is a young Mexican fellow who calls me El Gringo. The woman who runs the laundry I go to is from the West Indies--her accent (patois) is so thick its only by habit I know what she's saying. The main big deli I go to on Fifth Avenue is run by a Chinese gentleman who is a really nice fellow though he's tighter than Dick's hatband when it comes to deals and speaking American English. The woman I like best who waits on me in this deli is Chilean. My new next-door neighbors on my West are from the Balkans--my doorman tells me they are Gypsies. I do hear them singing heartily songs that do have a Gypsy flavor to them in their apartment occasionally. My landlord is a Persian Jew whose American English is very broken--though if I'm very still when he's speaking I can understand him. The office manager in my building is a Georgian-Russian who speaks with a thick Russian-Jewish accent. He once sat and talked to me and a friend for about 30 minutes telling us his life story. When we finally shook him off and left him spinning in the road, my friend said, "I didn't understand one word that man said. What the hell was he talking about? I did, I think, understand him saying 'daughter' a lot so I assume he was talking about his daughter." "Who knows?" I replied; I hadn't understood what the hell he was saying either and still avoid talking to him to this day.

Norman Mailer back in the fifties said New York City wasn't really a New York City but a New York State unto itself. Mailer championed New York City as the 51st state. But in fact New York City truly isn't really American anymore. It's global. It is very hard to say who is a native New Yorker--if there are any left--though the hospitals are birthing little New Yorkers by the thousands every day. It makes for a crazy city, I'll tell you that. It once was the epitome of American cities--but since the World's Fair of 1964, it has become a Global City State--Mayor Billionaire Bloomberg selling the old American New York City off to the highest Old World (the new trend in New York City restaurants and bars) bidders--to attract Euro Trash to town since, as our Billionaire Mayor tells us over and over, TOURISM is now New York City's number one industry. Wow. Once the place where the American Dream came true. Now it's better if you go to L.A. or Chicago or someplace like that if you're looking for any piece of the American Dream still realizable. It's impossible to dream in New York City anymore.

But hell, once you're embedded in this city--it's hard to leave it--it's hard to give up on it and move to someplace else! When I leave New York City--even to go to a big city like L.A. or London or even Paris--I feel terribly uneasy and anxious to get back to Gotham--though in a few years when all of this International crowd buys us all up and evicts our asses--you may find me living in Podunk--if there's still a Podunk left in this country by then?

I've heard Bangkok, Thailand, is the cheapest big city in the world to live in. Of course AIDS is big there as is child prostitution...oh well, you've got to live where you can afford to live if you're gonna be a Global Citizen.

thenewyorkforlifegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler (still very Amurican in its accent)

Living in New York City With Planes Flying Into Buildings Elsewhere Now

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2010
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What If War Came to the USA?
We pompously forget that Europe has suffered WAR. We pompously forget that Asia has suffered war after war after war. The Middle East, again war after war after war.

Just think, Berlin was leveled to the ground in WWII. So was Hamburg. So was Dresden. Leveled to the ground, folks. That would be like New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., being leveled to the ground. How many times have European cities had to rebuild due to being leveled to the ground by WAR? Large areas of London were flattened by Hitler's bombs and V rockets in WWII. Look what Russian cities have suffered over the years, but especially during WWII. Small towns in France were blown totally away during WWII. Small towns in Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland were flattened by war. In Iraq, for centuries Babylon (Baghdad) suffered being flattened from innumerable wars--cities all over the Old World leveled down through the centuries by war. The Greeks worshipped WAR and brought destruction every where their armies under Philip of Macedonia and his son Alexander went. Then the Golden Horde hit that area led by Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Timur, ruthless armies that conquered towns and villages by going in and flattening them to the ground--then rebuilding them as Golden Horde cities--then the Islamic forces hit that part of the world using the same conquering tactics, leveling cities and towns and slaughtering human beings to annihilate them and other animals by the thousands--all in the name of WAR! all in the name of Conquering.

We are territorial animals. That should be all that needs to be said about human monkeys and their love of WAR, WAR, and more WAR.

The United States of America has certainly flattened many a city in its WARRING history. In WWII the American Air Force leveled cities around the world--the big ones of course: Berlin, Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden, Cologne, Nagasaki, Hiroshima.

Then on that morning of September 11, 2001, the United States gets attacked not by bombers but by US-based airliners--no bombs, just planes--planes taken over by 21 hungover Saudi-Arabians and one Jordanian using only lowly boxcutters as threatening weapons of individual destruction--planes these 21 hungover Saudis and that one Jordanian didn't really know how to fly and yet they managed to fly these US airliners into the very exact places in the World Trade Center twin towers that would bring them crashing straight down--straight down into the ground as if they'd been imploded. An amazing military attack--a sort of an ancient Trojan Horse method of invading a country thereby making it a classic military attack.

This one attack on the US by US airliners flown by hungover Saudis and one Jordanian that leveled not only the twin towers but Building 5, too (and Building 7, too, right? I'm confused about what went on that day)--and several other buildings in the area--like I said, an amazing result for so crudely a pulled off military attack.

And look at how we reacted to this attack! We started two wars as revenge for that miraculous attack. We started two wars of devastation on nations whose people had nothing to do with 9-11. Absolutely nothing to do with it; yet, look how they've been made to suffer for it. (Of course, we know our forces are actually fighting for oil rights--for oil territories--the actual probable reason behind 9-11--the oil cartels needing a reason to use the US troops to take back control of all Middle Eastern oil, our buddies in Saudi Arabia not strong enough militarily to really defend all that oil--certainly not stronger than Saddam would have been after he beat Iran in their 10-year war of military sport; and today Saudi-Arabia is certainly not stronger than the Iranian army, especially if that army has nuclear weapons in its arsenal, though I'm sure the Good Ole USA (that's We the People) have secreted some nuclear weapons into Saudi-Arabia, don't you figure?

You see, folks, Sociological thinking is all about "figuring." To Sociologically think, and I doubt if many "sociologists," and there are millions of them around the world, understand what I'm saying, though maybe intrinsically they do. Serious Sociologists can be very clever observers, though how they "figure" what they observe is where I debate with them--"Problematics of Sociology," the constant drivers in Sociological thinking--have we eliminated all the biases?--is what we're doing "purely" scientific? I, going kinda arm-in-arm with Dr. Max Weber, say Sociological thinking is an art, a gift. It's inherent in the wide-eyed curious at birth. It's especially inherent in those wide-eyed curious who become nonconformists or at the farthest end of that continuum, anarchists. It's like reading the Yahoo News headlines and seeing something in them (like the phrase "Obama Says We Are Out of the Recession Earlier Than Predicted") that triggers an interest in your oval of vision's range of expertise in terms of your"training" (meaning, I was trained by PhD. Sociologists) to interpret Sociological Theories, to use them as principles and guides and to embed them within your intelligence so you know how to use those principles and sociometric guides to give measurement to the field in which you are noting your empirical observations and what you note when you note down in a notebook and from your notes you calculate the impressions of what you've noticed and you sketch dimensions and planes and tiers and parameters and embarkations--a sketch of the field of conclusions from which you'll eventually develop your percentage-based premises, which you then collect and arrange into rational points of view--all artists have notebooks, sketchbooks, preliminary drawings, jots and tittles--the art is in "figuring" (reckoning) out what is going on in what you're observing--what aspect of the SOCIAL Gestalt you are making predictions on--it could do with ethnicity, the tribal, a community, a neighborhood, the other side of the tracks; or to do with isolationists, aggressors, murderers, criminals in general (all criminals have a profound effect upon society just as do all richer-than-rich individuals), or maybe even the so-called "good" people, too (the Humanitarians, for instance. "Humanism" is a word out of the Christian Satan's Dictionary of the Satanic Language. To US Fundie Christian freaks "humanism" as a philosophy demands that even the Christian God adhere to the world principle of equality and respect and by doing that (it's like giving an order to the Christian Creator God) it actually denies that this Christian God is the One and Only Almighty God the Creator; therefore, all humanitarians are heretics, atheists, children of the Devil--therefore, the Crucified-with-Christ Christians are then naturally led to believe that so-called "pure" science ("unbiased science" in Sociological terms) is the science of the Devil--Christian Fundie backwards logic. Wow, Elijah Mohamed may have been right, we were all created by a Mad White Scientist!

Don't you see, I'm justifying all of my Soothsaying opinions, like the one I fixin' to lay on you all.

At the moment about 30 innocent Afghan men, women, and children have been accidentally killed (one can't say "murdered" in this case--"All's fair in love and war" don't forget--HEY, I'll bet you a hundred bucks that if you go into a social setting and say "All's fair in love and war" most people there will agree with you heartily--with an "Ain't it the truth!" tailing that off with a Lordy-Lord guffaw)--and just now on the radio news I hear one our "oops" off-course missile attacks just killed 9 Afghan policemen up in a Northern Afghanistan province--up where war has destroyed the ruins of a previously unknown large city from the times of the Kushan in Afghanistan. By the bye, I know two Afghanistan people here in New York City, one a young fiercely proud Afghani-American, the other an older native of Afghanistan who is now an American citizen, and these guys are wizards at "figuring" out what's going on in their country--I mean they know exactly what the US is up to there--and yet, Obama will listen to a fucking US Army general telling him what's going on over there before he'd even let my two friends in the back door of the White Man's House to maybe get to talk to the gardener or maybe if they're lucky, the President's personal chef.

Like the warlords of old did, why don't We the People make President Obama lead our troops in these two continuous wars?

[Mr. Ed: Old Soldier Robert Gates has just announced a name change for our "police action" in Iraq. It will from now on be called "Operation New Dawn"--the same name they gave the ruthless killing mission into Fallujah under this same General Bob Gates's command and his loose-wig buddy the author of "the Surge," General Petraus, who Obama said was one of his heroes--this on one of our president's quickie sneak-in-sneak-out visits to our troops in Iraq back when he was still popular--so it looks like several more years of US military occupation for the Iraqis. I mean, it's just now Dawn to the US Army--when's the sunset ever going to come, the Iraqis are now asking.]

Like that little prick G.W. Bush and his phony "Mission Accomplished" 15 minutes of fame--we should have suited that little asshole up and forced him into a jet fighter and told him to get the hell up into the wild blue yonder and leave us on terra firma the fuck alone--how many feet on that runway before that silly bastard would have crashed?-- or if he'd maybe miraculously, like those Saudi-Arabian and one Jordanian dudes, got the plane in the air, it might of been him crashing into the Austin, Texas, IRS office building--or that Houston building that kid pilot flew a plane into in an anarchic act in which he was trying to impress his filthy rich Texas parents--remember when the Texas kid flew the light plane into the office building?

And now we get to the crux of my sermon today: Here goes a passage from my Sociological Notebook on Afghanistan: We the People of the USA are not there fighting to save the people of Afghanistan from the Taliban and al-Queda. In fact, al-Queda are almost totally out of the big Afghan picture now--it seems we've shifted all the al-Queda forces out to kill Americans from Afghanistan and Pakistan over to the Arab Peninsula now (Yemen especially)--WHY that's right across the way from Iran! How 'bout that?

Nope, it looks to me like, and here goes the Sociological soothsaying: first, I am looking at a map of southern Afghanistan focused on where the latest intense NATO (read "US") fighting is taking place: the city of Marjeh. Why, lookie there, it's in Helmand Province. You remember what the major crop production is in Helmand Province? The juice of the poppy, folks, Afghanistan's oil--though also, don't forget Afghanistan is the site of the almost-built-all-along-proposed oil pipeline that will run down from our Oil Barons's oil leases and wheeler-dealer deals in Kazakhstan (a ruthless dictatorship--but that doesn't bother us in the least bit) down through Afghanistan and into European ports--oil for Europe. Europe has no oil, folks--they've just about squeezed every drop out of the North Sea. Though we now see why the Brits reacted militarily to the Argentinians trying to invade and occupy the Falkland Islands way back there when they had their little WAR, which has now started back up. Why? you ask: BECAUSE THE BRITS JUST DISCOVERED OFFSHORE OIL THERE!!! So now here comes Argentina claiming it's theirs again. I assume President Obama will come to the defense of the Brits and we'll send a couple of destroyers against Argentina in defense of our White Motherland England's Imperial right to the wealth of their colonies--remember, the Monroe Doctrine covers that part of the World, too. This is all hearsay, but a Sociologist has a good notating ear as well as a good notating eye.

What if there really had been an Al-Queda drone air force carrying Weapons of Mass Destruction from Saddam Hussein's huge nuclear weapons cache buried in the desert sand somewhere?--and what if this air force of supersonic drones (ask yourself here what air force is actually using drones carrying weapons of mass destruction in this world today?)(how hypocritical are We the People?) had leveled New York City?--left it in bombed-out ruin?

The American air force pilots and crews who flew those missions over Hamburg and Dresden and Cologne are either gone already or there are only a handful of them left, especially the bombardiers and tailgunners and fuselage gunners who looked down and saw face-to-face, the bombardiers watching out the open bomb doors through binocular devices, as the showers of bombs landed in spectacular glory in a spewing of destruction across the width of those several large German cities. Imagine enduring what the people in those cities suffered during those fire bombings--incendiary bombs. Imagine something like that happening to New York City.

Our Ivy League-trained corporate lawyer President is trying to bring his corporate-backed (the source of his Chicago community service efforts) brand of community organizing to the whole world now that he's the world's most powerful leader, which US legend tells him he is whether he is or not. Dr. Jack Van Impe, my man in the world of Christian Fundie prophecy, says that President Obama is the antiChrist! I'm thinkin', wow, Brother Jack, like Elijah Mohamed was right in his way of sociological figuring about a Mad White Scientist creating Mankind, maybe you're right about President Obama being the anti-Christ. Brother Jack sees society totally different than I do; yet we can almost meet (through our parallel lines) in terms of prophesying that WAR seems to be the one instinct we can't control--we totally believe our legends of war and warriors--that they are HEROES and that it's an HONOR for our WARRIOR HEROES TO DIE for their country--and that it is BETTER TO DIE IN WAR than to come home crippled and damaged--the sign of a loser. The true WARRIOR HERO if he survives comes back a a decorated HERO, a TRUE CHAMPION--the one who did not surrender--the one who kept fighting even though maybe he lost a limb--BETTER MILITARY HONOR than saving a silly limb. Going one up on Brother Jack the Accordion-playing prophet, I'll predict, as long as We the People continue to follow our animal instincts and keep on choosing males to be our LEADERS we will have WAR upon WAR upon WAR until our technology becomes so nanofied it leads to our destruction. As soon as human monkeys annihilate themselves through their imagined righteousness and mirrored divinities, then the old Earth can relax and let whatever seed slime is left beneath what's left of its polar ice caps crawl once again out of the slime and onto land and the evolution of the super monkey will begin once again.

As an aside, let me tell you what We the People of New York City are having to put up with from our little-guy, billionaire, lover boy, billionaire mayor within this past week or so. Let me emphasize again that this Mayor is now serving an illegal third term he spent 100 million dollars to get himself finally elected to at the last minute by the narrow margin of 50,000 lousy votes over a Black man whose name (Bill Thompson) nobody today even remembers--I exaggerate, of course). Back in power, Billionaire Mike ain't wasting time getting that 100 million back in political rakeoffs. Lately his PR people have been promoting the little prick around town through photo ops and press releases as the most charitable man in the USA--trumpeting like little asskissing swans how much of his riches the Good Mall-Mad Mike contributes to...well, here they suddenly aren't too specific. My question is how do you praise him as a charitable rich man when at the same time he's allowing his real estate developer buddies (and, yes, folks, Bloomberg has investments in real estate--all Power Elitists buy all the real estate they can get their hands on, i.e., Ted Turner owning 1/4 of Montana ranch lands) to tear down blocks of affordable housing, throwing the tenants, some of whom have lived their whole lives in these apartments, out into the streets with a "Fuck You" eviction notice from a developer with a note that Michael Mall-Mad Bloomberg approves of your eviction. You get rid of poor people and you increase your tax base--which, of course, is a big fat Leisure Class (Power Elite) LIE. Nobody pays more out-of-proportional taxes than your Middle Class down to your workingclass down to even your poorest of poor.

So here lately, this little prick has just pulled another Plutocratic move on us dumbass New York City taxpayers. Last week he closed 19 New York City public schools because they weren't performing like our brilliant not-native-New-York-City-born mayor had ordered them to perform--in terms of promotions based on test scores that have no measurements for a student's learning abilities only what he has supposedly learned--and of course most of these closed schools are in poor and mainly Black neighborhoods.

This week this lousy little egoistic pecker of a mayor announced he was giving 75 million dollars to help build three new privatized charter schools: one in Brooklyn where the principal makes, listen to this, $700,000 a year; one in Harlem that is the project of Malcolm Smith, an old-school Albany state politician; and the Peninsula School in Queens whose founder and owner is, by golly, one of Mayor Bloomberg's old asshole buddies from a long time back. Yep, this sorry son of a bitch mayor, Mr. Charity, closes 19 schools--and instead of keeping them open, upgrading them in terms of repairs, equipment, new teachers (new jobs), etc., he gives taxpayer money (property taxes) to three private charter schools to which only ORDAINED students can attend.

Mayor Bloomberg being a Capitalist pig is attempting to privatize the New York City school system. He has been given power over the school system by New York State. The reason: New York State is broke--so they don't want the responsibility of the New York City school system on their hands.

The fucking rich are taking over New York City, folks. They are protected by the NYPD. They are given huge tax breaks by the City Council and the Mayor. Foreigners (Foreign hedge funds and private equity groups) that include Middle-Eastern potentates and royalty, Chinese commie real estate buyers, Brits, Israelis, Indian private equity gangs are being encouraged by Mall-Mad Mike to come into the city and buy our buildings and buy our affordable housing and upgrade it into unaffordable housing, to buy up our foreclosed-on businesses and condos and houses, and to buy up our land, and our factories (what factories? you ask)--AND NOW TO BUY UP OUR SCHOOLS--and they're already buying up our hospitals. [St Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village (where Dylan Thomas died) announced last week it was bankrupt and unless it was privatized it would have to close. Imagine that; with health insurance companies making billions in new profits and HMOs raking in the cash by the barrelsful; yet a hospital that is so viable to that neighborhood--I myself have been to St. Vincent's on a couple of occasions--the best emergency room in NYC--I can't imagine letting that hospital close or go private. Instead of spending 100 million dollars to win an illegal third term our billionaire mayor could have spent that money since he's Mr. Charity, don't forget, to save hospitals--that would have gotten him votes--more votes than his 100 million bucks spent on bullshit ads got him] And none of these silent-terrorist-invasive bums are paying their fair share of taxes, the burden of taxation falling on the backs of the already broke poor--higher property taxes, higher small business property taxes, higher taxes on the ungodly products like beer and cigarettes, higher tolls on bridges and thruways, higher fares on public transportation, allowing slot-machine gambling at the city racetracks, which are losing money out the ass because the gambling poor don't have bucks enough to gamble on the ponies so the pony boys are installing slot machines by the thousands in their race tracks. Yonkers Raceway in Westchester has slot machines already. Aquaduct Raceway out in Queens has just gotten state permission to install them. In this case, it's interesting that the company that got the contract to install the machines and run the casino at Aquaduct is headed by the Reverend Floyd Flake, a Black preacher on the order of the self-ordained Al Sharpton (and I like old Al's wit), who is always in trouble in terms of being in the LIGHT while he's in the pulpit but being in the SHADOWS when he's dealing with the Devil in a secular way, Praise the Hypocritical Lawdy Lawd!!

Plus, I just noticed, the state has put a deposit charge on plastic bottles--especially bottled water bottles, 5 cents on my bottle of Poland Springs--plus we are dealing with higher food prices, added taxes on our utility bills and phone bills, added taxes all over the place, plus our health insurance premiums are going up, 39% in some cases--plus supplemental Medicare healthcare insurance premiums are going up---GLORY, GLORY, GLORY the Power Elite pirates are dancing on the grave of Lady Liberty.

Think of this: because of our broke governments and bankrupt governmental agencies we are all surviving on BORROWED MONEY! Our dollars are now imaginary dollars. Every individual in the USA according to the national debt clock is in the hole thousands upon thousands of dollars, an amount increasing every day at such a rate we'll never ever again have our heads above water in our lifetimes--that is what's left of the lives of those of us over the age of 40. With dollars actually worthless, that means people who are working today are actually not making any real money, only imaginary money. Like if they went down to the bank and wanted to withdraw everything from their checking and savings accounts and IRAs and such, the banks would be boarding up faster than you could drive through the front doors--even if like Actor Rip Torn, one of my favorite actors by the way, and I hate most actors, you drive your god-damn pick up right straight through the god-damn bank's front door.

You see that's what caused the Great Depression--that's why Obama and his Clintonista and Bush Baby advisers are bailing out the crooks who took advantage of deregulations that Clinton and his gang foisted on us to go hog wild in deriviative speculation with OUR money--WHERE DO BANKS GET THERE BASE MONIES? If everybody made a run on the banks today, we'd end up like Argentina was not that many years ago, where you had to go to the bank every fucking fifteen minutes and check to see if you could get any money out--the value of the Argentine dollar falling faster than the people could keep up with it. A wheelbarrow full of money one day made you rich and the next day the wheelbarrow was worth more than the money it was holding. So that's why G.W. and Obama had to bailout the banks.

Oh how weary politics makes me. It drains me--though I do manage to work late at night on a couple of novels and some essays and dammit if I haven't been mentally charmed into trying my hand at a detective novel. I've invented a character: Dick Stump. Catch on yet? Yet, I can't take my Sociological eyes and ears off of the political scene--it's too crucial for me to know what these cheesy bastards are up to.... I mean one unexpected debt forced on my ass right this minute would send me out to buy a pistol and like Dr. Hunter S. Thompson blow my fucking brains out leaving behind a short note saying the world was going to hell in a handbasket and I was too tired and worn out physically and mentally to even consider continuing on the ride.

We (speaking the King's English) got a compliment from L Hat (proprietor of www.languagehat.com) t'other day saying my posts reminded him of Maxim Gorky, whose life and writings, L said, we're on parallel lines with OURS (speaking the Queen's English this time)--he'd just been reading a book on Maxim (in Russian, of course). I (speaking American English) did take it as a compliment as I have read in my youth one of Gorky's novels and liked it very much--when I was in my Rooshun-reading period brought on by my reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast in which Ezra Pound tells Hemingway he should "read the Rooshuns" if he wanted to learn how to write the best.

I'll leave you with a Maxim Gorky quote, which at one time I surely would have agreed with--myself included:

Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.

I gotta have a drink,

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Living in New York City: in the Navel of Chaos

Foto by tgw, New York City, 2010
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First of all, doff your hats, put your hands over your hearts and let's say goodbye to:

• Jake Hanna, 78, American jazz drummer, blood disease. [27]
• Dale Hawkins, 73, American rockabilly musician, colorectal cancer.

And say good-bye to this dude--I read one of his books one time; not bad; kind'a fun.
Dick Francis, 89, British novelist and jockey.

And yet another jazz cat died: Art Van Damme, 89, American jazz musician and accordionist
And we baseball fans lost one, too--I remember this guy: Jim Bibby, 65, American baseball player.
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And Now About LIFE
President Obama is asking for more money for WAR (KILL POWER)--his military budget if this increase is given (and it will be; Congress makes a lot of its "dirty" bucks from the Military Industrial Complex) will be upwards of 800 billion dollars (that's for 1 year, folks). Think about that. How long would you have to work and pay taxes on your earnings to afford 800 billion bucks? It's unfathomable to the average yokel in this ignorant nation. How long collectively will We the People all have to work and pay taxes on our earnings to cover this debt? That is another unfathomable number to crunch. Remember, this military hooey budget is even at 800 billion a drop in the bucket compared with the overall debt we've now backed ourselves into one of those really scary dark corners of Chaos over.

Want a bigger scare? Our overall debt is, listen to this, you talk about the unfathomable, 3 trillion bucks and rising--probably more like 4 trillion and rising when you compute it right. Think of how long collectively We the People of the USA will have to work and pay (higher and higher) taxes on our earnings to pay off this debt. In the meantime our clown representatives are living wonderful high-style District of Corruption lives--in their We-the-People-provided mansions in Georgetown or their sprawling horse farms across the Potomac in Virginia--with their getaway places over in the Shenandoah maybe--you know--as luxurious a comforting lifestyle as We the People can provide them while they're in the District of Corruption (where they then rob us blind)--and then, of course, the big new homes back in their home territories--plus the old family homestead and the little acreage back just outside their old hometowns...and, oh, I forgot the lake cabin. I noticed Bill Clinton visited his and Hill's mansion We the People bought for them up in Westchester County, New York, while he was in town getting the best of care with his heart problem. I didn't see a for sale sign on the estate's front lawn so I assume Bill and Hill's mansion isn't being foreclosed upon (the bills for upkeeping their mansion must be out of our sight--Westchester County has the highest property taxes and utilities in the USA). I'll betcha Bill and Hill's investment fund has made money off its stocks in this up-and-down market. Don't you think the Power Elite tip each other off to how the stock market is going to perform? Don't you think these little jerky criminals, these little Ivy League business majors, spoiled brat sons (and daughters) of rich fathers, don't tell each other when and how they're are fixing to manipulate the price of a certain "issue," as they call them, so that the market suddenly jerks up 200 points in one fell swoop--you got the right stocks in your portfolio that day at a certain time and you're gonna clean up, partner. Bill doesn't have to worry about losing his guaranteed-for-life presidential salary, plus office expenses, plus rent on his Harlem office, and salaries for his staff--free postage--free security--and then when Obama chooses him to represent We the People, that must cost us a pretty penny. Like Obama's chosen Slick Willie and Georgie Porgie Bush Baby to represent us in the Haiti Earthquake reconstruction bonanza and takeover of Haiti we are now pulling off in that country--"Fuck the homeless and hungry Haitians--let 'em eat cake--they're worthless to us--we need to get some big developers like Halliburton in here fast so we can gradually take this place over. Jes' look at the reconstruction bucks looming over the Haitian horizon!" So don't you think while the Slick One (with his ever-faithful defenders in BartCop and the Daily Howler) and Baby Bush are acting on behalf of We the People they are on an expense account? Plus these birds are hustling us for money with something called the Bush-Clinton Haitian Relief Fund. What the hell is that all about? Why can't we send our money to the Haitian Red Cross?--or is there one? Why can't we send our money directly the to Haitian people?--why's it gotta go through Slick Willie and Georgie Porgie Bush's hands first? Those guys are terrible with money! Yeah, Bill had better and slicker creative accountants than G.W.--by using a certain creative accounting principle (it projects moneys into futures based on current continuously selling things like stamps, bonds, the Treasury, Treasury bills, duck stamps, National Park grazing-right permits--you see where I'm going?) Slick Willie left office, his bunch said, with a surplus budget of billions, whether it was voodoo economics or not. G.W.'s first year in office, he managed to blow that budget surplus down the toilets of his rich pals--really the rich pals of his father--G.W. Bush had no idea what he was doing while he was Governor of Texas or faux president of the USA--he's too damn dumb to have not had his old Pappy's and his old Pappy's friends hands up his ass running his brain while he was president (and some of these hands also include Unka Dick's, Prince Bandar Bush's, the family friend's hand who started the Carlyle Group with Pappy on the board, the board members's hands from Halliburton, KRB, the Bradley Co., etc., etc., blah-blah-blah--on and on for hours! so many hands up that poor boy's ass) in order for him to take us into the worst debt ever--double worse than the budget mess his old Pappy left us with. Plus Baby Bush, under instructions from those hands up his ass, managed to just up and lose 40 billion or trillion dollars after that--then he managed to bullshit us by starting two wars that immediately started costing us millions of dollars a day.

[Isn't it amazing how these army bastards can move 30,000 soldiers and all the equipment that goes along with them into Afghanistan in a matter of days and yet they still can't get the food distributed fairly in Haiti because of the US Army and the US Navy interfering in how it would be naturally done claiming We the People are there to secure the place first--fuck the buried alive, fuck the starving wretches left in the street to survive as best they can, some with missing legs and arms or some are left to die because they can't be moved to triage areas, or because in the case of some old ladies, they were left to die because they were just too old to waste precious time and care on.

[Wherever We the People go now, we go wearing military uniforms--think of that. President Obama has made an executive order recently that says all future disasters in this country will be under the immediate control of the US Military (it is on this order that our troops are in Haiti). The US Army is now by executive order going to be the first ones into a disaster area to go in and secure it--and from there, they will be in charge of all matters until stability and normalcy is restored. And then Blackwater and Dimecorp move in and take our military troops's place so they can move on to our next invasion and occupation. The executive order means disasters that happen on American soil--so one would think then that since our troops are in Haiti under this executive order, We the People's leaders must consider Haiti American soil. We've occupied Haiti before, folks, so don't start calling me a conspiracy nut. It's all a conspiracy if you want to know the truth about everything. We are a people of multiconspiracies all going on at once.]

Did you hear like I did that Slick Willie was seen running around hobnobbing over in Davos, Switzerland, seems like right after his big emergency heart surgery?--that almost instant healthcare coverage that We the People paid for to keep old Bill hustling yet another day--nothing but the best for our ex-Presidents--with the exception of Jimmy Cahter who is chopped liver these days among the Dumbocrats. [You have to remember why everybody hates Jimmy Carter--not because he called the way the Sweet Jews treat the Arab-dog Palestinians (they aren't humans according to Judaic history) Apartheid--no, not for that, but because of his involvement with Iran and the American embassy hostages who came on line during his time in office and who were held for a damn long time by the Ayatollah Khomeini's forces who overthrew the Pahlavi Shah--ran him and his wife out of Iraq. The Shah, by the way, died of cancer in the USA but not after We the People had tried to save his ass by giving him the best of healthcare in a Boston hospital (maybe the same one that tried to save old Unka Teddy Kennedy from brain cancer). It was Jimmy Carter who like a dumbass ex-Naval Academy graduate tried the military rescue of these hostages, an effort that ended in a big pile of rubble outside Tehran--a total-failure military mission--a joke failure--and this mismangagement ended with Jimmy Carter being laughed off the political stage--a stage taken over from Jimm-ee by Ronnie Raygun Reagan. Remember, it was said Reagan made a deal with the Iranians that if they held the hostages until after he used this mess to get elected, the hostages would be released and Raygun would get credit for getting the hostages released--which is exactly what happened. Remember, too, that the Shah was a hated man in Iran who back in 1953 under a Republican administration (Ike Eisenhower, the golfing president) our CIA with the help of Israel's Mossad put the Shah into power by leading a coup against the duly elected premier of Iran, Mohamed Mossadeq, who had come to power via a democratic election that We the People's representatives claimed was rigged in Mossadeq's favor, same as President Obama and Hillbilly Hillary were harping on back during the latest Iranian elections that reelected Ahmadinejad. It's all the same-old-same-old story with We the People's elected representatives--their mission seems to be the invasion and occupation of Iran--making it and its oil ours at last!]

You know about this big yearly meeting in Davos, Switzerland, don't you? Its where all the global robber barons get together to decide the fates of the rest of us--you know, how to get more production out of us for a lower and lower pay out by making us work interminable hours for our yearly salaries--no overtime payment--no common laborer bonuses. Yes, that's all decided over in Davos once a year. I once worked at Pfizer Pharmaceuticals for their person who decided what to charge both retail and wholesale for the drugs their field reps peddled around the world--I helped her put together a presentation piece for her coming trip to that year's Davos Conference. She was an Economist. I being a Sociologist revealed myself to her as such and we immediately hit it off. Oh the deviltry that goes on at Davos once a year. And fucking Bill Clinton was over there prancing around among those ultrarich bastards, like Little Billy Boy Gates and the lovely Melinda Gates and their old buddy-buddy Warren "No Bluffin'" Buffett to name drop just a few of these birds who go to Davos once a year. But what was Bill Clinton doing there?

I find it appalling that We the People just sit on our hands and allow these creepy motherf-ers to continue to trickbag us out of our ways of making a living; stealing our homes and land from us through foreclosures--foreclosures due to our financial people--the same gang that's--I MEAN YOU KNOW WHAT I'M GONNA SAY, DON'T YOU? Foreclosures due to the trickbagging ploys of our crooked criminal Wall Street jerk-offs--like Goldman-Sachs--those bastards! How dare Obama and Congress bail those sons a'bitches out and hire their god-damn CEOs and junior jerk offs as advisers. Look what those Goldman-Sachs criminals pulled on the nation of Greece. They hoodwinked the whole god-damn Greek government. Bled the whole nation of Greece dry. (Remember, Greece is a Kingdom thanks to We the People back when Harry Ass Truman was our president--Greece wanted to be a democracy, except the Marxists (read in US English "Commies") were gaining daily ground as the favorites to win a majority in the approaching national election--so Good Old Freedom-Loving Divine Nuking Harry Truman sent the US Marines over there and forced some pompous asshole king on the Greeks's commie-leaning asses.)

What got us this far in debt? How about the Military Industrial Complex? How about these series of invasive and occupational tactics we are forcing the World to face from us? Check out what these 3 trillion wasted bucks have gotten us so far: In Iraq: we have brought modern Chaos to them; not freedom and democracy. We think we have at least secured those Iraq oilfields and we've got our Oil Barons over there already stealing as much of that oil as they can get away with--and trust me, folks, we're going to keep US troops in Iraq as long as that oil isn't flowing out of there and into our Oil Barons's already overflowing wallets and offshore bank accounts without many hitches. Remember, truth be known, and it will be one day, we are in Iraq because they have a huge oil reserve. (Guess what Iran has, too.)

And, let's see, yep, for 3 trillion, we brought our brand of Chaos to Afghanistan in 2001 on the grounds that Afghanistan was giving protection to the instigators of the great military tactical move of 9-11 pulled off by those wild men who were halfass trained in whatever they did, 21 transfixed assholes (high on hash maybe) drunk-from-the-night-before armed only with boxcutters al-Queda Army veterans (most of whom were from Saudi Arabia and not Afghanistan) that brought down not only the twin towers of the World Trade Center but also several other buildings that weren't really connected to the twin towers and should not have fallen due to the twin towers falling (remember, those two buildings fell straight down into the ground as if directed to do that. Not even much debris from the planes hitting into those buildings spewed out into the far reaches--not like a building explosion would do--I mean think about this attack in military terms! I mean it not only caught our pompous ethnocentric asses off guard, but it showed our faux president to be a total fop, a momma's boy, a shittin'-in-his-pants fool, a spoiled little crybaby rich boy, a tool of his old New World Order Pappy and Pappy's Neo-Con rascal buddies from the Oil Industry and the Reagan Administration. The military in cahoots with the CIA suddenly served us up on a silver platter the LATEST eviliest man on earth (not really as evil however as Saddam Hussein, it turned out), a character they invented along with his band of renegade RIGHTWING Muslim sect fanatics who our usually very unreliable CIA said were highly organized and called themselves "al-Queda," though there's really no such organization--the name being an ordinary Arabic word with a very general meaning. For these reasons, G.W. Bush half-ass went into Afghanistan and he half-ass went after Osama bin Laden (remember, this guy's a friend of the Bush Family)--and now here's a dude we were told who was on a dialysis machine, living in mountain caves, and yet he miraculously managed to escape the US Army and make it safely over into Pakistan--where I read later he had a posh mansion rented in Peshawar--and he even had his own private tiger hunting camp somewhere in that wild area of Pakistan--a tiger hunting camp the Kingdom of Dubai knew all about--why, hell. some of them had been over to Osama's camp for a hunt and a little barbecued tiger cub.

Let me cut short this diatribe and say that We the People of the USA have become wracked with fear of attacks from forces of EVIL. Human animals naturally fear what they don't understand--and we damn sure don't understand anything at all about these peoples and cultures (we don't even understand their languages) we are currently demonizing using White European principles of purification as our excuse for bringing chaos on these hapless people. Again today as I was working on this the US Army announced they had accidentally killed another 9 Afghan civilians in a rocket attack--it hit a house full of children by mistake--and oh, we were so apologetic! [Early this morning it was announced we'd had wiped out another Afghan family--we killed like 12, all in one family. However, this time we said it wasn't a mistake--this family was hiding some Taliban terrorists--so, they had to be blown to bits, assuming We the People's armed forces got their Taliban terrorists as well. So a family has to die in order for America to bring them freedom and democracy--and another religion, too, We the People being a Christian nation under the bootheel master we call Jehovah, a mean mother fucker when he's crossed--especially by Arabs, who Jehovah considers less than human dogs. Freedom is on the march. Bring 'em on, Obama says in his crisp Ivy League-lawyer-trained speaking voice.

Through the government propaganda fed us daily by our national commercial teevee networks and what's left of our newspapers we are told we must remain AFRAID--we mustn't trust anybody who isn't WHITE!--STOP HERE and think about this: the largest advertiser on television is the US government! Add 1+1 and what do you get? Is television going to trash its number one advertiser? That's a rhetorical question surely. Think further: General Electric, for instance, owns NBC. What would you imagine was the area of production in which General Electric made its most money? Electric fans? Vacuum cleaners? Try GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS! GE is a big nuclear energy producer; they also build missiles and rockets; they are a part of the Military Industrial Complex, THINK: MILITARY CONTRACTS.

Next, our 3 trillion dollar debt is gradually taking our sacred Afghanistan chaos into Pakistan. Let's do some more thinking--think along these lines: Why are we so messing around in Pakistan's business? Think this way: who is our greatest ally in this area? Think this: INDIA! General Electric, remember them?: they own NBC. But they don't make money off NBC so they're selling it to Comcast; no, General Electric makes big bucks currently in India fulfilling a government contract G.W. Bush made with India: Remember "We are trading India our nuclear secrets for their mangoes!"--that unfathomable statement made by our faux president when he and Pickles were flying constantly around the world popping in on countries and making stupid deals like trading nuclear secrets for mangoes! Yep, General Electric got the contract to supply India with some nuclear advancements they need to stay ahead of PAKISTAN in the nuclear arms race, which is still hot and profitable within the Military Industrial Complex.

WE ARE DESPERATE FOR FUEL! Don't you get it? WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF ENERGY! Why do you think our corporations are turning GLOBAL? Why did Halliburton move its headquarters from Ardmore, Oklahoma, to Dubai? Why does Exxon-Mobil not have to declare profits they've banked in offshore and USB bank accounts? Why was USB being used to hide US accounts so they wouldn't have to pay taxes on billions of dollars worth of US assets? WE ARE DESPERATE FOR ENERGY.

Do you recall that Pakistan used to be a part of India?--and it would still be a part of India today if Gandhi and Nehru hadn't have been so anti-Muslim and righteously Hindu. You see the split up of Pakistan and India was religious! These are religiously opiated nutjobs! India, don't you see, is becoming more and more secular every day--India is becoming our shield against China! India has nuclear weapons. If we could get Pakistan and India back together, shit, we'd rule Southeast Asia--why we originally were in Vietnam. Check out the true reason we were in Vietnam. Check out the geological reports from off the Indo-China reef that runs around what was then known as Indo-China and is now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Michael Rockefeller, a geologist (the one eventually eaten by cannibals in Papua New Guinea, where he was looking for oil--come on, folks, this guy was a Rockefeller--HOW DID THE ROCKEFELLERS MAKE THEIR FORTUNE? Come on, folks, THINK!), wrote his old pappy, Nelson Rockefeller (the art collector who for lack of anything to do got into politics--THINK ATTICA PRISON when you think of Nelson Rockefeller), that there was OIL in them thar reefs. Big oil. Thus really why we managed to stick our dumbass noses in the Vietnamese rebellion against the colonizing French (Napoleon's France) who Uncle Ho Chi Min put to shame at Dien Bin Phu. It's all so connected, folks. It's a stream running through our collective instincts--our legends. We are faithful to our legends.

Our 3 trillion bucks is now getting us a building up of defense forces--including two naval vessels--around Iran, another country which really hasn't threatened the US, though we are so desperate for oil (the main source of all our power--think about it--when you're drinking your morning coffee out of that Styrofoam cup--it's made out of oil; or that plastic bag the deli guy put your bagel in--yep, it's made out of oil; how do you think our power plants keep their dynamos churning--you bet: Oil) we must keep generating mock threats against Iran in hopes that Iran's paranoid-schizophrenic leaders are running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to rebuff our attempts at branding them possessors of Weapons of Mass Destruction--REMEMBER, that was the LIE that got us involved in Iraq. LIEs, are you reading me?--LIES are what has gotten us involved in most wars we've been involved in since the White Men who colonized this country formed a MILITIA meant supposedly to defend our sacred shores. Always keep in mind, that besides Pancho Villa's Army of the North attacking Columbus, New Mexico, and whoever those 21 Saudi-Arabians and that one Jordanian were working for who attacked NYC on 9-11, the only other country to invade us and try to occupy us was Great Britain.

I refer you to my Sociology guru C Wright Mills, from his book The Power Elite (written in 1956):

In the twentieth century, among the industrialized nations of the world, the great, brief, precarious fact of civilian dominance [of the military] began to falter and now - after the long peace from the Napoleonic era to World War I - the old march of world history once more asserts itself. All over the world, the warlord is returning. All over the world, reality is defined in his terms. And in America, too, into the political vacuum the warlords have marched. Alongside the corporate executives and the politicians, the generals and admirals-those uneasy cousins within the American elite- have gained and have been given increased power to make and to influence decisions of the gravest consequence.

Check out how many military dudes are on Obama's advisory staff. Check out how many military dudes are on the boards of our corporations. Check out how many military dudes are in our think tanks. Military cats dig WAR. That's how they prove their worth. Recall from your elementary school days through high school what happened to incorrigible and sociopath boys who civilian teachers were unable to discipline--a lot of them were sent to military academies that were all over the USA--they used to advertise in the back sections of the NYTimes Educational section or the NYTimes Review of Books or the New Yorker. The public school I attended in Dallas, Texas, had formerly been the Peacock Military Academy (Texas military schools run by a military man named Peacock out of San Antonio). One of my best friends in grade school couldn't pass a course even if you gave him all the answers he needed to pass it. It wasn't that Lancelot was dumb, he wasn't, he was smart as a whip, but he was antiauthoritarian. His parents were wealthy and had no control over him--so what did they do, they sent Lancelot to a military school in Tennessee.
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A The Daily Growler Advertisement: Over in our blog links we've added a book--Laughing Billy Hyde and Other Stories, by the now-mostly-forgotten writer Rex Beach. I knew about Rex Beach as a writer of good fiction before I'd ever read one of his popular detective novels. I discovered Rex through my grandmother who was my hometown's head librarian. My grandmother's library was a major one between Dallas and El Paso and it was within walking distance of the train station, the bus stations, and the biggest hotels in town, and it sat just 4 blocks off the Bankhead Highway, US Highway 80, which ran from New York City across country down through the South and then on out West through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, then right on into L.A.--following the Texas & Pacific Railroad from Dallas into my hometown and then on out to El Paso, where the highway picked up the Southern Pacific Railroad and followed it on out to Los Angeles. As a result of its locations, my grandmother was constantly spotting famous writers or celebrities she thought she recognized from photographs of them she'd seen in their books: Thornton Wilder once; Ernie Pyle the WWII journalist--killed in action while covering troops in their foxholes--whom she met when he was with the press corps out at the US Army Air Force base just west of my hometown; William Randolph Hearst once came in the library demanding to see her latest Wall Street Journal, which she had a copy of in her reading room; and it was in that reading room that one day my grandmother said she met Rex Beach. He gave her his address on the West Coast and she swore she'd correspond with him, but whether she ever did I don't know. She did however champion a little book of short stories of his after that, Laughing Billy Hyde and Other Stories. I just read the "Laughing Billy Hyde" story again for the first time in maybe 40 years and I was charmed by Beach's writing skills--it's a damn good story. In it he mentions Reindeer Mary, who was a real person who at one time in Alaska herded reindeer--the larger her reindeer herd became the richer and more powerful Mary got--yet she lived a very humble raw life.

I can close my eyes and easily remember that reading room in my grandmother's library. I remember especially it had a huge wooden rack at one end that was full of these wooden rods that were slitted--or slotted--so that you could put a whole newspaper into them and then hang them back on the rack. That old rack held at least 20 newspapers--from the locals to the major Texas cities papers, the NY Times, the LA Times, and the Chicago Sun Times. There was a companion wooden rack next to the newspaper rack that housed a host of magazines--like Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Fortune, PM, Colliers, Look, Life, Holiday, Arizona Highways, et al. I remember as a little kid being jealous of the young man my grandmother hired to go to the train station every morning and collect all the out-of-town papers. It was a sad day the day my hometown tore down my grandmother's beautiful old Carnegie Library and replaced it with a tacky stucco and plate glass 50s bland architectural style--the same style as 50s post offices, schools, city halls, etc.

That's it: My grandmother's Carnegie Library--an old postcard--I found it in Google images. That's a marble door frame on the main entrance there--with that beautiful red tile roof. The window on the right on the second floor was where the Children's Reading Room was. It was a big round table sitting in the corner--piled high with the latest children's books--and also the cabinet containing the library's stereopticon (first use of "stereo" you think?) and boxes of stereopticon slides showing all the strange places around the world. I've spent many a childhood hours in that old library. My brother wrote a whole book about his relationship to that library. I wouldn't know how to live without books. I grew up being babysat in a public library--my brother then owned a bookstore--and soon in life I managed to accumulate quite a little library of my own--growing it up to 2,500 volumes in its final state of collection here in New York City, finally busted up and relocated after my divorce from that wife. I remember a cold winter's day back the year after I got my divorce and was trying to live on my own down on Spring Street in Downtown Manhattan when I was so broke and hungry and I went over to what books I had left and I pulled out all my first editions--including two Hemingways--Green Hills of Africa and Death in the Afternoon--some very rare private-printed Henry Miller pamphlets and short books--one signed by Henry and Alfred Perles--and one signed by Henry and his first US publisher Bern Porter (a really weird guy from Vermont whose performance art (I heard him one night at the Ear Inn) was he read in a sing-song voice (like Carl Sandburg used to read his poetry) from a Vermont seed company's catalog--I went to admire him and ended up ridiculing him)--anyway, I remember clearly that day I took those books to a little book shop on Hudson Street owned and run by one of those Sylvia Beach-type bookstore women from those old days of American literature. She gave me $100 for all those first editions--today probably, I figure, worth at least 10,000 smackers at least. Hemingway first editions--real ones--"A" ones--sell upwards of a 1000 a piece now. It's a sad day for a book lover when he or she has to sell their books, though there do come times when if they're the only thing you got you can sell to keep on keepin' on you sell 'em. Like many a good writer in the old days always came upon that day when the only thing of worth they had to hock to keep on goin' was their typewriter. I never had a typewriter worth hocking--but I have sold prized books before.
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Here's the end of Ike's "Military Industrial Complex" speech, in case you've forgotten it:

V.

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

VI.

Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war -- as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years -- I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.

Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.

VII.

So -- in this my last good night to you as your President -- I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.

You and I -- my fellow citizens -- need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation's great goals.

To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration:

We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.

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And I'm sad to report: President Obama has given 8 billion dollars to an Atlanta firm--yeah Gawjah gets Obama's support--Gawjah--did they vote for him? It's Newtie Gingrich's home state, too--that asshole--that backward-thinking profligate in Christian clothing--We the People are paying 80% of the cost for this Atlanta firm, Southern Nuke You All, or some name like that, to build a nuclear power plant in the Atlanta G.A. area. Now the energy boys are getting their bailout from We the People. We need nuclear power plants like we need a nuclear war--though it looks like whatever we need we're getting those two sources of Mass Destruction whether we want them or not.

The President says this is good for reducing green-house gases! Amazing. This son of a bitch just up and gave the nuclear power industry 8 billion dollars and giving HIS permission to build nuclear power plants at will now in our backyards! This piece of Gawjah shit nuke plant the first new nuclear power plant in this country since they were banned back in the 70s. Doesn't that amaze you like it amazes me? I mean, don't all of us with our heads out of our asses know that nuclear power is the most dangerous power in the world? How dare this president just up and suddenly say we need nuclear power plants to aid in reducing green-house gases, a program we don't even agree to--not signing any worthwhile agreement in Copenhagen for instance. Oh yeah, Obama gave 'em a nice speech but then turned around and said fuck what 3rd World Nations want--fuck those peasant Global marketplace-draggers-downers--The G20 nations rule the world and they want NUCLEAR BOMBS and NUCLEAR POWER--and we're building a nuclear power plant and at the same time we are calling Iran "the world's leading supporter of terrorism"--I quote from Hillbilly Hillary's speech last night she gave to some group--a nice banquet first, some steak and potatoes, and then Hillary got up and tried to coax Iran into starting World War 3. You don't believe there isn't going to be a WW III? Even one of my hero nutjob Christian fundies, Dr. Jack Van Impe, knows that there is going to inevitably be a World War III. According to Dr. Jack, it's mentioned in old Oddball Saint Johnny's book he wrote while exiled on the Isle of Patmos off the Greek territorial coast. World War III is coming. It's called Armageddon in the Holy Books of our three desert religions (those who teach that the salvation of man is coming from the sky and not terra firma.

Happy trails to you--watch out, there's a checkpoint guarded by Blackwater coming up.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler