Sunday, September 30, 2012
From New York City: the Voice of the growlingwolf
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Human Animals Looking for Escape
We seem to think nothing of spending a billion dollars on putting a robot, Curiosity, on Mars. What is this fascination we human monkeys have for this planet? First we spent ultramillions to send the Mars Rover up there. Now this latest. I see no difference in the photos sent back by either robot rover. I read years ago speculation that these Mars expeditions are sponsored by the global mining cartels who are looking for precious metals up on that desolate planet. Of course that's a cynical approach to why we're spending these fortunes on these probes. In searching the Internet for answers to my question all I get are subjective ideals. One romantic woman says she's fascinated by Mars because she sees herself sitting on it admiring its vistas amidst silence. Most commentors on why they are fascinated with Mars say it's simply because we can see it with the naked eye; it's the closest planet to us; it appears to be (perhaps) inhabitable. Another more intellectual crowd say we are interested in Mars because curiosity is simply a part of being human. We are curious by nature. All those answers are too simplistic for such a cynical mind as mine.
Our government is spending billions on destroying this planet; therefore, I cynically ask, why are they spending billions on exploring Mars, something they've been doing since the 1970s? One cynical question I put to these Mars enthusiasts is: Could it be for military reasons we are so interested in Mars? One commentor on the Internet said it was stupid for us to be wasting so much money on exploring Mars since it was nothing but a planet of dust and rocks. This person was totally trashed by a plethora of Mars exploration true believers.
Something interesting I found out about Mars on the NASA Website...it's the only planet that NASA doesn't give a human monkey credit for discovering. NASA says Mars is a planet that has been known since ancient times.
The Romans named Mars after their God of War because of it appearing to be red to the human monkey eye (due to the iron oxide in its soil) and their associating red with blood. Even as far back as the Sumerians, Mars has been associated with war deities.
I have always associated Mars with the jazz man, Shorty Rogers (and his Giants), whose most famous composition was "Martians Go Home," which ends with drummer Shelly Manne spinning a 50-cent piece on his snare and letting it gradually spin itself out.
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Alaskan Wild Salmon
Every holistic doctor I know recommends eating a lot of salmon. "Salmon rather than red meats!," they holler on a daily basis. Yet, what do you do when you can't stand salmon? As a recovering heart patient, I'm advised to eat salmon and avoid high-sodium meats; yet, here again I'm in a fix, I love high-sodium meats, especially steak and pork chops. You put in front of me a lovely piece of grilled Alaskan wild salmon and a lower cut of steak (like a flank steak) grilled to perfection and covered with grilled onions and mushrooms and I go for the steak every time. Even the smell of salmon turns me off. The only two fish I can stand are rainbow trout and red snapper (in particular the one they prepare for me at my favorite Irish pub--grilled and covered with a mango salsa). And, yes, I can eat those two fish IF they are fresh. The holistic docs however warn against anything but Alaskan wild salmon because of the high content of mercury in fresh ocean or even now in fresh inland freshwater fish. They also denounce farm-raised fish as contaminated. And, as all us heart patients know, canned fish is out because of its high sodium content.
I never have had any ambitions at being a hunter or a fisherman. I have never hunted. Killing any kind of animal to me, except mice, is murder--and, yes, I am a murderer of mice, the nasty little bastards. I have twice tried to be a fisherman. The first time when I was 13 years old out in Washington state on the Hood Canal where using a deep-sea fishing rod and reel I caught a dog shark, a fish so disgusting to the true fishermen I was fishing with they condemned it to becoming fertilizer for the garden rather than prepared for the dining table. My second effort at fishing--and, yes, I consider killing fish, even though Kurt Cobain said they had no feelings, murder, too--was at a lovely gentle creek just south of my hometown with several of my boyhood friends and one of them's father who was a true fisherman, with the hat and lures and expensive rod and reel and the motorboat and all that jazz. I bought me a very cheap rod and reel from Sears-Roebuck (before it became simply Sears) and a River Runt lure and ended up standing on the bank of that creek for almost 48 hours (without sleep) and as a result I caught absolutely not one damn fish...nothing. Nor did anybody else on that trip including the true fisherman father catch one damn fish. We ended up going into San Angelo, Texas, to a famous seafood and fish restaurant there and ordering a whole mess of fried catfish, which we devoured with much glee.
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The USA Can Do Nothing Wrong
I find it very quaint how We the People of the USA are getting mixed gobbly-gook out of the District of Corruption about the storming of our consulate in Benghazi by Libyans pissed off over the movie that made Mohamed look like an idiot. Our corrupted officials are now blaming this incident on one of the greatest military organizations in the world, al-Queda. It was a planned al-Quedan plot, they are babbling. Wait a minute! Did al-Queda have knowledge of this movie in advance of the Egyptians and the Tunisians...I mean, those folks' attacks on the U.S. Embassies in their respective countries happened almost simultaneously with the Libyan attack; yet our corrupt government isn't blaming those assaults on al-Queda. Besides, where was our ambassador's protection?--where were our CIA operatives who are supposed to be keeping absolute track of al-Queda in terms of informing our ambassador? What do religion and oil have to do with all of this?---everything, because both our God of religion and oil is MONEY.
I've always been puzzled as to where al-Queda gets the vast sums of money it needs to do all the shenanigans blamed on it? (Of course, the BCCI scandal of many years back now proved they get most of their financing from Saudi-Arabia (and Saudi-Arabians brought down the World Trade Center buildings, or so we were told).) And where do they get all their weapons and ammunition? And where do they get the enormous amount of money it takes for them to be mobilized and present all around the Muslim world? And how come the death of bin Laden hasn't seemed to bother al-Queda one damn bit according to our corrupt government? We the People of the USA need a demon to justify our releasing our young people to perhaps die on all the many battlefields we are on all around the world. Battlefields that are Capitalistically oriented, as General Smedley Butler said about them back in the time We the People of the USA were sending our Marines into Central America and Haiti in order to protect the investments of United Fruit and Imperial Sugar and our huge banks like the Chase Bank.
"War is a racket....," Smedley Butler said back in 1933. You can read his whole speech here:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4377.htm
Life is a racket. I said that.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Existing in New York City--Relative to What?
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Sittin' Here Thinkin'
While eating a banana, needing the nutrition it promised me, I listened to T.S. Eliot reading his poetry. Eating a banana and listening to a poetry that sounded so distant to me, so from another era, read by a complicated man, a man who rejected his birthplace, St. Louis, Missouri, to go to England and become the literary hero he became. And yet in his reading I feel at home and as I eat the banana and listen to him I remember two times I was in St. Louis. The first time as a young child. The second time as a member of the U.S. Army on a weekend pass called a Liberty pass. The first time running away from my mother in the St. Louis bus station and discovering a room full of pinball machines. And I was fascinated by pinball machines, their many voices resounding around that room as young and old manipulated them, some cursing them, some shouting huzzahs as the little steel ball rolled up starlit numbers on their idolatry glass screens, some with half naked Wonder Womans lolled invitingly across them; some with fiery comets racing across them; some with great baseball players hitting home runs across their fences. And a St. Louis policeman found me for my worried mother. A St. Louis policeman found me standing on a little wooden box playing a pinball machine that was fed nickels by a strange man I didn't know, a man who looked like all men in those days, wearing a suit and tie and a hat, all men in those days wearing suits and ties and hats no matter what they were doing and this man looked like my father and my uncles and any of the men from back home wearing his suit and tie and hat. And my mother came up screaming at me and grabbed me away from that pinball machine and I cried and asked Why? She got me into that St. Louis bus station waiting room and she and the St. Louis policeman lectured me on trusting strange men who wore suits and ties and hats and had nickels for little boys like me, tempting to me to come with them into their pinball dream worlds.
And later as a private in the U.S. Army on my first Liberty since I'd been sent to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, six months back, I and my army pals went wild in St. Louis. We had just gotten our pay, $72.00, and we took a U.S. Army bus into St. Louis and were dropped off at that same St. Louis bus station. And instead of playing the pinball machines, we played the city of St. Louis, first going to the Jefferson Hotel and getting rooms and then heading to the Wonder Bar in the hotel and ordering drinks, me drinking my first ever rum..."You want that with Coca-Cola, trooper, or straight up?" the bartender asked me and I asked him how he knew I was a trooper since I had left my uniform behind and had bought me a pair of corduroy slacks and a long-sleeve shirt and a cheap jacket at the Fort Leonard Wood PX, and he said, "I can tell a trooper from a mile away" and that was that and after too many rums straight up I left the Wonder Bar by myself and walked the streets of St. Louis lost, alone, absorbing the city's night sensitivities, the dull spring dryness, the humid streets that were beneath the brim of the Mississippi River that flowed in its banks that rimmed that part of St. Louis.
My first time in St. Louis I had no idea who T.S. Eliot was. My second time in St. Louis I did know who he was but I wasn't aware of him being from St. Louis as I walked those dry bone and humid beneath the river streets alone and drunk that night of my first Liberty from Fort Leonard Wood in six months. I was walking in a waste land, lost, with, I'm sure, rats scurrying all about me, stumbling down the seemingly going downhill sidewalks, murmuring St. Louis songs, St. Louis blues I knew, that I also knew were being sung and played just across the MacArthur Bridge over the Mississippi River in East St. Louis...because I knew a lot of characters who were from St. Louis, Chuck Berry, Stan Musial, Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs Julius Hemphill...I knew Ike Turner was in East St. Louis...and I murmured St. Louis blues as I rolled and tumbled drunk down that St. Louis street ending up lost in an Edward Hopper-like coffee shop chugging down cups of black coffee provided me by a St. Louis policeman who had found me passed out on the curb like what seemed to be a million miles from the Jefferson Hotel and the Wonder Bar.
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time," T.S. Eliot wrote. And how true that was that night I was in St. Louis, his home town.
Relationships
I've currently embarked on attempting to write a biography of my brother and what I'm finding fascinating about the effort is how very little I know about him. He was 15 years older than I was and of those 15 years I'm having to guess at his life, trying to remember tales my parents and he told me about his life after I was old enough to jot them down in my developing brain. So much went on in those 15 years he lived before I came along. And since I don't remember much before I was 2 or 3 years old, those years would total 18, a time when he reached adulthood while I was still a mere child, a baby brother when he was 15; a little brother all his life.
One of his stern insistences in his later life was that he did not want anybody to write a biography of him. And in respecting those wishes, I don't consider my biography of him a true biography and much more really my own autobiography with him as my main subject. It's like a brother's respect for his brother and the influence that brother's life had on his life. If I were writing a serious biography of him I would transport myself down to Texas to Texas University at Arlington, Texas, where his archives are stored and read all the thousands of notes and papers and writings of his and thereby gather at least some facts that I have never known about his life. But, no, I'm an improvisationalist and I am writing his biography from my own memories of him. After my brother's death in 2002, I wrote a song about him in which I called him "a distant relative." In fact, that's a good title for my biography of him.
It amuses me to find out in writing about my brother how little I also know about my parents and their parents. And bringing it closer to home, how little I know about my closest friends, those when I was young and those I have today. How little I know about my closest male friends and especially how little I really know about the women I love and have loved.
Politics
I am suddenly so apolitical. The blundering idiocy of Mitt "the Mormon" Romney amuses me in a sarcastic way while the corporate correctness of President Obama leaves me feeling deceived. Mitt "the Mormon" Romney is not a phony. He is being real. Think of the privileged life this dumbass has had given him--yes, he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth--and, yes, his view of life is totally opposite that of most of us. While President Obama is a deceiver. He promotes himself as caring for the Middle Class when in reality there is no Middle Class anymore. Both men avoid talking about the Lower Class, the class living on the brink. Mitt because he grew up in the Upper Class and poor folks are an anathema to him. Obama because he knows life on the brink and now that he's been freed from it he doesn't care to go back to it even to confront it with kindness and care. Mitt "the Mormon" Romney is a dumbass, but Obama's not. Obama's a very smart man but he's trapped in this new glory he finds himself treated to; Obama is now a new millionaire and he ain't about to lose that status not now that he's set for life whether he wins or loses this November.
These are the same-ole same-ole choices we have every presidential election year. Mitt "the Mormon" Romney vs. President Obama is no different than G.W. "Baby" Bush vs. Al 'the Bore" Gore or John "the Phony Vietnam Vet" Kerry. Obama's only difference is he was born into conflict and these other characters grew up White, pampered, privileged, and rich.
I'm content to lose myself in my own world, like I'm listening to the music of Charles Mingus now, and allowing the presidential bullshit to pass me by. I will wake up after the election. Whoever's won it won't matter to me. If it's Mitt "the Mormon" Romney, yes, I'll be frightened and aim my escape toward Canada, but I've been that way many times before in the past. I survived Harry S. Truman, Ike "the Golfer" Eisenhower, JF "for Fucking Around"K, Lyndon Johnson, Richard "I Am Not a Crook" Nixon, Gerald "Unable to Chew Gum and Walk at the Same Time" Ford, Jimmy "the Peanut Farmer" Carter, Ronnie "Raygun" Reagan, Pappy Bush, Billy Jeff Clinton, G.W. "Baby" Bush...I mean, come on, do I have to remind you how scary all those political clowns were?
I would hope somehow Dr. Jill Stein would be our next president, but, of course, that's ridiculous hoping, though think about how great that would be.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Existing in New York City: Trying to Grow Old Gracefully
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Here Today...Gone Tomorrow
I hung out this past Friday night with a couple of my best friends. They're at least a decade younger than I am. We gathered to partake of Mexican cuisine and then to listen to music. I sat there feeling somewhat old-fashioned. I mean it had to do with the music they were into and the knowledge they had of THEIR music but also the knowledge they had of MY music.
Growing older means growing more obsolete or out of the box as we used to say. Like keeping up with the latest technologies. I'm still using my Power Mac G4 running on Panther OSX. I love it. I have two Mac Books running Snow Leopard, but they're not as easy to use as this old G4. Heck fire, my only PC still running is a Toshiba running on Windows 95. Blogspot.com is once again threatening to discontinue this old Blogger interface I'm still using. They've tried to discontinue it before but I think a lot of bloggers love this version better than the upgraded one that I do use when I use my Mac Books.
I despise growing old; and you'd never know how old I am in terms of the way I look or my reasoning and philosophizing and conceptual thinking. I've never been a fan of my elders and certainly not old folks in general. In fact, in my past, I've been quite rude to doddering old F-ers, like on the subway or those lumping and bumbling along on the crowded sidewalks of this metropolis.
I am endeavoring to grow old as gracefully as possible. I'm an inveterate reader. I read deep books, too; even the novels I read are deep. Deep in the sense they're not as visual and revealing as comic books or how to books but deep in the sense of much in them has to be read between the lines. Like I'm reading Hegel again and trust me, he's deep. Especially his explanation of being and nothingness being equal in terms of right halves or left halves, top views or bottom views, nonsensical-sounding cogs in the fundamentals of dialectical thinking. Or the poems of Ezra Pound can cause you to go deep with your thinking when reading them or even when listening to Old Ez read them, a sport I enjoy every now and then when I put on my two Caedmon LPs of Ez reading his poetry (deep listening is also good for the brain). Or MW's great Website wood s lot contains some wonderful deep reading.
Deep reading keeps my brain alert though I admit remembering names from my past is sometimes momentarily blank slating for me. Like while attempting to write a biography of my brother, I realized I have no idea what my Aunt Gertrude's middle name was. It's as though I've never known it, which could be the case. I am usually a deep rememberer but like I said on occasion my mind goes blank. Like there's a jazz musician whose name I cannot for the life of me remember. Of course, with Google it's easy to find out this guy's name or hell all I have to do is pull down any of my Cannonball Adderly CDs since this guy played with Cannonball during the late 5os and early 60s. (At this very moment, I can't remember this cat's name.)(His name is Victor Feldman. I can remember the "Victor" alright but the "Feldman" throws me every time.)
If my mind going blank on names as I tumble into the unpredictable future gets worse, then I have to worry about the Big A, Alzheimer's, a horrible disease that there is no cure for in spite of what the big pharma's spiel in their advertisements, like for a drug you don't hear much about anymore, Aricept, a drug on which I used to do advertising for, a drug all the information I had in front of me showed it didn't work.
I play a lot of games during the day, especially games that test my reactions. I'm pretty good at several of them. I play my computer chess games and I'm a lousy chess player, but I know a lot of openings and I know some tricks of the game but of course I'd not have a chance in Holy Hell against a true chess player like that Norwegian whiz kid who has a chessboard for a brain.
And now I'm writing on two books, one a biography of my brother and the other a novel. I'm currently on chapter 1 of the biography but chapter 25 and going over 35,000 words on the novel. I have to write. Writing is my metier, but as I'm writing on this novel, I'm also thinking, who the hell will publish it? In fact, I have no idea anymore how to go about even submitting a novel for publication. Of course, if I were more up to date with the technology I could publish it myself as an e-Book. BUT.... And there are so many BUTs in my way when I am approaching the Red Zone of life.
My brother, a successful writer, told me before he died that one day I would wake up to the fact I didn't have enough time left to accomplish all the projects I had in my head and that I would have to boil my projects down to the one I knew I could finish in the estimated time I had left to live. My brother, by the way, wrote right up to the Sunday before he died on the following Tuesday. He finished and submitted two of his newspaper columns that Sunday. All of that while suffering from a devastating brain cancer, the beast that finally devoured him whole.
And Then One Day
And then one day you return home from seeing your cardiologist, a young man without any sense of humor. You return home depressed. You were at the hospital for almost 3 hours waiting for him to see you. You had gone to the hospital totally happy and looking forward to being able to get out of his office in time to get to a deli on Fifth Avenue and order their very great beef terriyaki. You've been feeling so good and strong and void of chest pains and shortness of breath and able to walk several long New York City blocks without a problem and you can't wait to tell that to your doctor and then breeze out still sappy happy with plenty of time to get to the deli and that delightful beef terriyaki.
Then you find yourself sitting in waiting room B1 at Bellevue Hospital and it's 5:00 pm and doctors and nurses and finance people are leaving for home, tossing each other hearty "good nights" and "see ya tomorrows" and you sit there so tired waiting for your doctor. You've missed the beef terriyaki; they shut that portion of the deli down around 4 pm, but you still feel good and you can't wait to tell the doctor that you feel better every time he sees you and you can't wait to impress him with how mobile and frisky and freakin' strong you are.
And then there he is. You see him talking to another patient holding a red folder in his hand, facing you, and then he looks over at you and calls your name..."OK, Mr. Wolfe...." And you jump up and you do a little dance to show him how well you are and you follow him into his office, a very drab room that faces on First Avenue and all that air-polluting traffic. And he sits you down and tells you to relax while he goes over the records of his previous patient.
You can't wait to tell him that tomorrow will be 7 months exactly since you had the massive myocardial infarction that almost took you off the mortal coil.
He excuses himself and leaves the office. You watch that traffic flowing up First Avenue, those huge double-size buses, several of them in a row, and the flocks of yellow cabs flowing along with those buses like remoras following sharks.
"So how are you doing," the humorless doctor says on reentering his office and closing the door behind him. It's now your time to impress him.
"I feel great, doctor, absolutely perfectly great." You're trying to beam though you have trouble with your voice. Since the heart attack it has gone from tenor to almost soprano. Plus you have accumulations of saliva just suddenly well up into your mouth making it hard for you to talk.
"Do you feel better than you felt last time I saw you?" he asked finally looking at you.
"Yes," you passionately let fly, "I'm feeling, like I said, great...I mean, I'm walking several blocks now...."
"No chest pains?"
"No, sir, none at all...."
"No pain in your right hip?"
"No, sir, that's absolutely gone."
Then he mentions how he's going to reduce a couple of your meds and you notice he has the prescription sheets for the new dosages in front of him.
He asks you about your meds awhile. Then he says, "I've told you that I'm pretty sure you need a defibrillator implant haven't I?" And then he begins talking about the risks associated with these and then he starts emphasizing the risks you will take without one. And you ask, "But, doctor, I'm feeling so damn good; I seem to be improving so why do I need...." He cuts you short. "I'm concerned because you have a pretty bad scar on your heart, really bad, and your EKGs are not showing any improvement...your heart is still not squeezing the blood...."
By now you're quiet. You feel whipped. Your heart is not healing no matter how great you feel. No matter how you hoped that last EKG would prove it was healing.
"You run a great risk without the defibrillator implant...I mean, with it you could have two maybe three years...maybe even five years left...."
Now you are stunned into silence. It's the first time he's ever been so precise as to how many years you have left. Two. Three. Maybe FIVE!
But, doc, you want to say, I feel so great....
And you leave the hospital and exit out onto First Avenue and you get a cab and the cab driver is reluctant to take you over to your neighborhood because President Obama is in the city and the cops have traffic jammed from where the David Letterman Show is taped up on Broadway and 53rd all the way down to Chelsea where the President and a bunch of r and b celebs are holding forth at a swank club just a few blocks from your apartment with a $40,000-a-plate whingding and the cab driver says, "You can walk it...it's not that far" and you have to tell him, "No, I can't walk that far 'cause I've got a bad heart...and I may not have that many blocks left to live." And he says, "OK, but don't blame me if the President has all these streets blocked off."
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Existing in New York City: As the Religious Wars Continue
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Say Goodbye to: The Sugar Boy, James "Sugar Boy" Crawford: My old friend Robert Frances Guida turned me on to Sugar Boy Crawford back in the 80s and I put several of his songs in my repertoire, like "Watch Her," "Sing Out for Joy," and "I Bowed on My Knees." James "Sugar Boy" Crawford, 77, American rhythm and blues singer. Here's an old recording of Sugar Boy doing "I Bowed on My Knees": www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDWNsagS-B8
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Say Goodbye to: Pedro E. Guerrero (September 5, 1917 – September 13, 2012) was an American photographer.
Frank Lloyd Wright, photo by Pedro Guerrero
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Where in the World Is Hillary Clinton?
Believe it or not, according to the Washington Post, Hillary is in the District of Corruption:
“The U.S. government had absolutely nothing to do with this video,” Clinton said at a meeting in Washington with a delegation from Morocco. “We absolutely reject its content and messages. But there is no justification — none at all — for responding to this video with violence.”
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Say Goodbye to: Homer Joy --and watch the hit song he wrote, "The Streets of Bakersfield" by Dwight Yoakum and Buck Owens: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBaVUaHlZm8
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H.L. Mencken wrote:
"People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police."
"The curse of man, and cause of nearly all of his woes, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible."
"The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church, as an organization, has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings."
Jehovah vs. Allah
I'm just now reading about the attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Libya and the Embassy in Egypt over an anti-Islamic film put up on YouTube by a California Israeli (now rumors are denying he's an Israeli; it appears even his name is phony) fanatic and a pissed-off Copt dude that ridicules Mohamed and Allah. In Libya, Islamic fanatics stormed the U.S. Consulate in Bengahzi and killed our ambassador to Libya. In Egypt, Islamic fanatics climbed over the wall of our Embassy in Cairo and brought down the U.S. flag and put up an Islamic flag in its place.
Our God vs. their God, proving without a doubt that all of this bullshit waring going on is religious waring...our stupid War on Terrorism is actually a war on Islam (secularly a War for Islamic Oil). Stupid, stupid, stupid. To die in defense of fictional characters! With Israel and its God-given right to Jerusalem desiring to start World War III over Iran's building nuclear capabilities when Israel has nuclear capability second only to the USA.
Hillbilly Hillary, wherever she was, stuck her nose in the matter deploring, of course, the pissed-off Islamics in Libya and Egypt saying stupidly even though she was against attacks on the beliefs of people, she condemned a violent response to such attacks. This our Secretary of State who represents a country that has violently responded to attacks on its beliefs by raining down eleven years of terror and death on Afghanistan whose people had nothing to do with 9/11 and nine years of terror and death on Iraq whose people had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. Hypocrite Hillary has no diplomatic skills whatsoever that I can see as she wings her way around the world on a constant basis rather than staying in Washington, District of Corruption, and doing her job from there.
All of these fools ready to die for their fictional gods! Amazing! How dumb and backward are you if you put your faith not in yourself but in some man-made god? Yes, primitive people needed gods to explain the mysteries surrounding their jungle lives like lightning striking one of their grass shacks and setting it on fire. Holy shit, what the hell was that! And the shaman and the priest had the answer: "The wrath of God against our sinful tribe! We must sacrifice a couple of virgins to calm our God down."
Hey, it's easy as hell to ridicule Mohamed and Allah same as it is Jesus X. Christ and Jehovah. I mean these are fictional characters. They're not real, folks; yet look at the human lives that are sacrificed to these fictional deities year in and year out.
I have two very dear friends both of whom truly believe in this Jewish god we call Jehovah. I mean they govern their lives on believing in this Big Daddy in the Sky somewhere outside our vast Universe. Yet both of these persons are smart as whips in secular things like their careers, but when it comes to psychological problems and physical problems, they lose their reasoning and fall to their knees begging their Big Daddy to save them, to redeem them, to restore them to sanity and immunity.
And now the very stupidest of our stupid, including Mitt "the Mormon" Romney and that Flordia Black idiot, Allan West, are blaming President Barack "the Kenyan-born Muslim" Obama for especially the Libyan assault that killed our Ambassador. Hillary and the FBI are spouting their mouths off saying this Libyan assault was planned. One source I saw even said this assault was planned long before this weird-ass anti-Mohamed video was amateurishly produced and put up on YouTube.
Who the hell knows started this. All I know is, it started with a video made in the USA, this great Christian nation under God (a phrase put in our Pledge of Allegiance during Ike Eisenhower's administration and not like the Christians would lead you to believe put in there by our Christian forefathers (Thomas Paine was an Atheist; Thomas Jefferson was a Deist; Benjamin Franklin was a profligate)). Our God is bigger than your God, which means our God has the U.S. military and security forces behind him (the Big Daddy gods are always male). Calling Jesus X. Christ the Prince of Peace is like giving President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. Like our Strategic Air Command planes having on their sides the motto "Peace Is Our Profession."
And now, Israel's Benjamin Nut'nYahoo is over here campaigning against Obama because he won't back Israel in its attempt to start World War III by nuking Iran, that evil Islamic nation whose Islamic militants once stormed the U.S. Embassy there and held the staff there hostage until Ronnie "Raygun" Reagan made a deal with them to help him get elected after stupid-ass Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer and rocket scientist, fucked up a rescue mission.
To be continued
thehuffingandpuffinggrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power."
Benito MussoliniSunday, September 09, 2012
Existing in New York City: Solutions Are So Simple
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Where in the World Is Hillary Clinton?
Today the Hillbilly Gal is in Russia. Here's a lucky lady whose only political experience just 12 short years ago was being Bill Clinton's cheated-on wife and being on the board of Walmart of China! Remember, she was in East Timor during the Dumbocrat Convention. Think of what the airfare must cost We the People to fly Hillary from East Timor to Russia!!! Hillary seems to be flying around the world on a weekly basis now at a cost of millions per week!!! Nice work if you can get it.
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Solutions Are So Simple
I just watched Dr. Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala, the Green Party candidates for president and vice president, on Bill Moyers' PBS show Sunday and damn, come on, these two very sensible women, especially Jill Stein, have the solutions to all our problems in their vision of what the president and vice president should be standing up for in recreating the USA as a people-oriented republic and not a corporate plantation as it is now.
Jill Stein is a leveled-headed and very powerful woman in terms of ideas and her expression of them. The old plantation mentality politicians, those in power, have to keep her off the commercial pulp-pap airwaves (supposedly owned by We the People of the USA--and that's a big joke, folks) and out of the debates and certainly off the ballots. Her solutions are simple but brilliant. The most important of which are 1) breaking up these large banks and financial and insurance institutions (Teddy Roosevelt style), 2) forcing the 1% and our biggest corporations to pay the same rate of taxes as all of us pay and closing down their stashing huge sums of money in offshore banks and 3) to put a sales tax on all Wall Street transactions, including a stock transfer tax on the stock market.
Of course, these two women (Cheri Honsaka has experienced being homeless. She also ran for sheriff of Philadelphia on a platform of not honoring foreclosure notices) haven't got a snowball's chance in the upper reaches of Hell at even getting heard much less elected--being given voice on Bill Moyers' show about as prime time as they'll get. Too bad. Jill Stein is more a true Democrat (in the FDR sense) than any Democrat in Congress and that includes Bernie Sanders or Dennis Kucinich.
Check out Jill Stein's Website...it's pretty cool, like her: www.jillstein.org/
Nicholas Egon Jainschigg
Nick Jainschigg, a The Daily Growler Hall of Fame artist, has four new paintings, a bird's nest; a raccoon skull; a mango; and a coyote skull, up on his Blogsite: njainschigg.blogspot.com/. These are paintings he does on 8x10 boards where he limits himself to a certain period of time (30 minutes, I think) using a kitchen timer and which you can buy for $100 (the painting and not the kitchen timer, though I'm sure he'd sell you the kitchen timer for a hundred bucks if you so desired it--he might even sign it for you). I've known Nick for several decades now; he's one of the most brilliant and interesting of people I've become friends with over my years in NYC. I'm a lucky man to have so many brilliant and interesting friends. Nick, who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, is one of the nation's great illustrators who is currently into rather large landscape paintings, which he'll sell you, too, but for much more than $100.
Internet Love of The Big Dog
I expected Bartcop to go hog-raving mad for Slick Willie Clinton...he is totally in mad love with both Bill and Hillbilly Hillary...but other on-line pundits and movie stars, no, I expected them to be more analytical with the Slick One than they were. Chris Rock, for instance, expressed his outright love for Billy Jeff on his Twittering during the speech. The Daily Howler, another Clinton devotee, praised Bill's speech to the hilt. Only myself, Mark Ames on Exiled, and Glen Ford on the Black Agenda nailed old Bill to a cross for his many deceptions, hypoglycemic self-endorsements, and self-praising falsities during that speech. I have openly been critical of this Arkansas Traveler since the years he was in office. I grew up with all sorts of Billy Jeffs most of whom became Holy Roller preachers. As far as I'm concerned, Obama got elected after making a back-room deal with the Slick One and Hillary after he started whacking Hillary's presidential run (topping her in the primaries), otherwise why did he choose so many Clintonistas for major roles in his administration? And why did he pick Hillbilly Hill for his Secretary of State? But, hey, women love this guy; he shivers their timbers; of course, look at the semi-beauts he's cheated on Hillary with: Ginnifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, and the gods only know how many others. Remember when it was rumored old Babs Streisand used to call him and talk for hours?
To be continued
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
Friday, September 07, 2012
Existing in New York City: Coming Soon: Obama the Republican
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Where in the World Is Hillary RodHAM Clinton?
From USA Today:
We all saw Chelsea Clinton applauding her dad Wednesday night.
But where in the world was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while her hubby, Bill, was holding court for 48 minutes at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte?
Timor Leste. Or, as it's more commonly known: East Timor, in Southeast Asia.
From Mark Ames, a The Daily Growler Hall of Famer
Quote:
And yet as putrid goes, this [The Great Salt Lake and the awful smell it lays over Salt Lake City] is nothing compared to the decomposing Democratic Party politics and bullshit wafting out of Charlotte. Whether it was Clinton whinging for hours on end that he and Obama have done everything the Republicans said we should do — and by golly, not even a thank you kiss? And golly, the Republicans themselves never live up to their own vision for America, they just go all crazy ‘n’ stuff — but Barack and I, we’re the only ones carrying out the Republican right program! We killed welfare; I deregulated banking, while Barack upped the banking bailouts and completely screwed millions of homeowners after promising help; we both presided over massive increases in wealth inequality; I, not the Republicans, created NAFTA and destroyed American manufacturing, while Barack Obama has been working tirelessly to expand free trade agreements to ensure that Americans never work anywhere but as Wal-Mart store greeters ever again!
"You Republicans talk about busting unions — heck, Barack Obama has done more to bust teachers’ unions than any y’alls! How do we know that we’re more anti-union than you while pretending to be pro-union? Just look around you: Almost every union is boycotting this convention! [APPLAUSE, HIGH FIVES] While Republicans talk about cutting the deficit, I’m the one who slashed welfare and turned the deficits into surpluses [CHEERS] While President Obama’s deficit commission laid out the first real Republican rightwing blueprint to privatizing Medicare and Social Security, and you and I all know that when Barack Obama is re-elected, he will privatize every last fucking social program in existence [CHEERS ON THEIR FEET] Because We. Are. The. Real. Republicans [APPLAUSE, CHEERS!]. It’s that simple. Barack Obama created the framework for the Republican dismantling of every last program with the Simpson-Bowles Commission, and guess what? Paul Ryan voted it down. Really, who’s the Republican Right-winger here, huh guys? America, I ask you: What else can we do to prove how Republican we really are? For forty years, we’ve been trying to score a date with the Republicans, and they just keep spurning us and saying mean things about us, and treating us like we’re weird stalkers hanging outside their houses all the time. Well, guess what? The more you spurn us, the more Republican we’ll be. It’s almost like you want us to be this way or something, god you folks are really dumb! Like it or not, we’re gonna just keep trying to be Republican, America! And that’s why you oughtta vote for Barack Obama!”
To read this whole brilliant article: nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/bernie-bernbaum-does-americaAll Along the Watchtower
The above article by Mark Ames (a writer who you can keep up with on exiled (see our Blessed Blog List)) puts better than ever what I tried to write about in my last post. I just don't trust politicians and never have, no matter how glossy their reigns have been made by controlled history. And to me all history is controlled by the storytellers telling it. The only true history is the history of the moment. The history of the NOW. Reality is so in our faces we refuse to believe it and find solace in hiding behind the skirts of our philosophical gods (those creatures invented by our instincts).
Bill Clinton is a phony Southern philanderer who'd be a Fundamentalist Holy Roller preacher if he hadn't a lucked out and gotten to kiss the privileged ass of old Bill Fulbright back during Fulbright's glory days in the backward racist state of Arkansas. Barack Obama, I've said since his glorious victory in 2008 and when he showed his real self during his inauguration, is a trick-bagging Reaganite whose whole shuck and jive is similar to a hat-in-hand Uncle Tom so graciously thankful to the White man for allowing him to be the butler in the Big Plantation House.
We live in a Plantation Society. Our corporations are extensions of the Plantation system that made this country great, a system based on slavery, the cheapest form of labor there is. Even Goldman-Sachs' history in America can be traced back to pre-Civil War America. Even Aetna Life Insurance can be traced back to those days. Insurance scams have been going on since those early days when the White aristocrats who founded this country (all of 'em slaveholders) devised schemes to keep the common man in poverty so he could easily be ruled. Insurance a form of gambling...life insurance is gambling on your life; healthcare insurance is gambling on your life expectancy, according to Metropolitan Life's life expectancy tables.
This is the reality we've lived in since the White Man came ashore in this Red Man's land. Came ashore either as European (British) outcasts or European trading company executives and management people (the Dutch West Indies Corporation, for example). Most of our original rich dudes made their fortunes in slavetrading and rum (sugar cane).
As Gore Vidal always argued, this country has never been a democracy (one man-one vote, as William O. Douglas defined a democracy) it has always been a republic.
As I've written in the past, all our presidents have been natural-born scumbags from George "I Cannot Tell a Lie" Washington on down to Barack Obama. Most of them have been excessively rich scumbags. Even old humble Honest Abe Lincoln wasn't a poor man. Hell, his wife, Mary Todd, was rich as sin, her old daddy a big-time slave trader whose wealth was derived from that evil occupation made angelic by the White aristocrats' Supreme(ly dumb) Court and carefully worded aristocratic Constitution that declares Black people as only 1/5th humans, which means 4/5th animals (or savages).
President Obama, we tend to forget, is half-White. We tend to forget, too, that his White mother was a confused mixed-up White gal who was born in the backward racist state of Kansas (check out Kansas' racial history). I can imagine how guilty she felt growing up a woman with brains enough to figure out her Kansas clan were racist Christians who openly believed all Blacks and Redskins were savages. As a young hippy girl, she glided over into the arms of the Zen Buddhists through the influences of the Beatles and Herman Hesse's novels. Out of this guilt and against her family's beliefs, she hooked up with the brilliant student from Africa she met in college, a philanderer one of whose goals was to come to America and get himself a good education but also a White girl. This was pay back against the colonialism he'd suffered under growing up in multitribal Kenya.
Reading Mark Ames' above article brought all of this clearly back into my noggin'. That and that the American melting-pot folks are easily duped by the White man's skulduggery and shenanigans. Both candidates for the presidency are trick baggers. Mitt "the Mormon" Romney a spoiled little rich-boy brat and President Obama a half-breed under the White man's logic. And don't you think our President and his lady don't know this and talk about it all the time in private--Michelle growing up in racist Chicago, on that White man's city's delegrated "colored" South Side?
Sorry, folks, but this is just how I grew up seeing this country. All empirically obtained notions, an empiricism that led me in college into Sociology and reading the works of great empiricists like Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Charles Horton Cooley, Lester Frank Ward, Pitrium Sorokin, Thorstein Veblen, and my fellow Texan, C. Wright Mills.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
Tuesday, September 04, 2012
All Along the Watchtower: Will It Be Another Clown Show?
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President Obama's Speech
I'm sorry. It didn't inspire me. Yes, the man has poise and charm and he is proud of his woman and kids...but nothing in his speech gave any indication of any change from the same-ole same-ole and in mentioning energy, he seemed to imply that hydro-fracting was going to continue at an environmentally wrecking pace--as he put it, we have all of this natural gas right under our feet--he also mentioned "clean coal"--and he said he was going to open up public lands to drill-drill-drilling. Yes, he is more suave and sophisticated than Mitt "The Mormon" Romney, but economic-fixing-wise...I mean, come on, he kept boasting about saving General Motors and Chrysler from bankruptcy--yet General Motors was saved on the backs of its workers agreeing to take cuts in salary or working longer hours for less money than before--and Chrysler is now owned by Fiat of Italy, both bailouts costing We the People several billions of dollars. Besides, does General Motors still make most of its cars in Mexico? Yes, the Dumbocrats do look more US melting pot than the all-White Repugnicans, but the Dumbos still went to the same parties given by the same ole corporations that the Repugs partied to. Oh well (Orwell), I still maintain all politicians are deceivers, liars, and backward thinkers--and remember, whatever they say turn it around to the opposite and you'll be close to the truth about these birds of a feather.
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And There He Was: Slick Willie "Big Dog" Clinton Ridin' Again
Yep, there he was, old Slick Willie Clinton, the Dumbos trotting him out, the White side of Barack Obama. The great Liberal. The poor boy from the backward state of Arkansas. A poor old White boy from Hope, Arkansas, home of the watermelon and its famous pickaninny-eating-a-watermelon city limits sign; the White boy who lucked out and got the attention of old White codger William Fulbright of Fulbright Scholarship fame. The poor little White boy who rose from kissing old Bill Fulbright's ass to become $30,000-a-year governor of the Backward State of Racist Arkansas (i.e., Governor Faubus)(i.e., Governor Winthrop "the Drunk" Rockefeller) to become Democratic keynote speaker to become president of the USA to become now the richest ex-president in the history of our presidency by being worth over 200 million bucks. And there he was. Yes, he's lost a lot of weight--remember he had a bunch of heart attacks--remember, as president when he went jogging he stopped off at McDonald's for his coffee and egg-McMuffins--remember as president he deregulated the banks and financial institutions--remember as president he opened up Guantanamo Navy Base as a prison to hold Haitians who did everything they could to flee Haiti to get to the USA, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, to the point of risking drowning by coming here on anything that would float including innertube rafts, only to be rounded up by Bill Clinton's US Navy and pitched into prison at Guantanamo Navy Base--remember, too, old Sailor Bill put a circle of US Navy patrol boats around Haiti to keep those grimy Haitian N-worders from contaminating our precious White culture--remember old Big Dog Bill following in the footsteps of philandering JFK got a series of blowjobs in the Oval Office--did you notice that Monica Lewinsky wasn't at the Dumbocrat Convention to cheer old Big Dog on to another ejaculation? And what a speech--mostly praising himself--did you notice that? And oh how the Dumbocrat women were swooning over this "perfect" man--and all the Black women in the audience were swooning over this president who forced millions of American Blacks into abject poverty with his forcing millions of Americans on Welfare to either get a job or starve.... I apologize, folks, but I can't stand this phony profligate of a man--this two-faced Liberal who gave us the Patriot Act; who gave us NAFTA; who gave us GAAT and whole bunches of outsourced jobs under his Reaganistic Free Trade policies; this man who gave us Larry "Dump Nuclear Waste in Africa" Summers; who gave us Robert Rudin; who gave us David Axelrod and Emanuel Rahm; who gave us his wife, Hillbilly Hillary....
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The Dumbos Are Already Caving In to the GOP Nutjobs
Their platform hadn't mentioned GOD and they hadn't declared Jerusalem as the capital of Israel--but after the Christian nutjobs and Benjamin Nut'nYahoo started railing on them over this, the chicken Dumbos put God and Jerusalem into their platform--Whose God is this God, I ask? Is it OK for the Muslims at this convention to say it's Allah?
And as for Michelle Obama's speech: simply a commercial for her husband.
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The Solution-less Democrats (the Dumbocrats)
President Obama will compromise his ass off as is his usual way of being our duly-elected president. He should have an easy victory over Mitt "the Mormon" Romney; yet, he's facing a White backlash that could easily bring him down UNLESS he changes horses in midstream. As it stands right now, there's no difference whatsoever in these candidates except maybe their religious views. They both represent corporate America rather than We the People of the US. Obama will brag about his killing of Osama bin Laden and then dumping his body in the sea. Obama will brag about ending the Iraq War, though we still have a huge military and US corporate presence there--in other words, we're still running the show in Iraq, where currently an average of 20 to 40 people a day are being blown to bits by car bombers and suicide bombers, and Sunnis and Sufis are still killing each other right and left, and U.S. oil companies are raiding the Iraq oil reserves. Obama will brag about how he's reducing our dependence on foreign oil by his opening up our Alaska Wilderness to the drill-drill-drilling of BP and Shell (both foreign oil companies though most of their profits come from U.S. oil) and his allowing the criminal BP jokers to return to deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and by allowing unregulated hydro-fracting in all 50 states, and by continuing to allow the Keystone Pipeline to be built, and by defending what he calls "clean coal," and by continuing to promote nuclear power. There will be no mention of the word POVERTY at this convention; there will be no blame put on G.W. Bush at this convention--oh, yes, Obama will defend his own following-in-the-footsteps of this little criminal prick by saying he inherited all the problems he continues to bolster rather than reverse, like that insane Afghanistan War, the insanity of keeping on G.W. Bushites in his administration--General Betrayus, Ben Bernanke (that worthless piece of crap), Little Timmy Geithner, G.W. Bush's Pentagon creeps and Defense Department creeps, by continuing G.W. Bush's bailout of the most crooked financial and banking bandits in our history, by increasing G.W. Bush's executive privileges to now include Obama's being able to assassinate U.S. citizens and compile what is known in his circles as a "death list," and defending Obamacare (written by the Pharmaceutical industry, the Pay-or-Die health insurance industry, and the Pay-or-Deny for-profit hospital industry) as healthcare reform. Bullshit.
Many still have faith that Obama will turn us around and bring great prosperity back to this country. BUT, he won't; he's still in the back pocket of our corrupt corporate elites, our Power Elites, the Wall Street criminals who will be giving him upwards of one billion to run his campaign. The Wall Streeters don't give a shit which of these two men wins the election. Either one isn't going to rock their Power Elite power boat. The filthy rich power brokers are gonna reap huge harvests no matter which of these guys wins. The losers will still be We the People of the USA. We the Dumbass People of the USA. The losers will be those of us who still continue to have hopes that Obama will suddenly make good on his 2008 "Yes, We Can" promises (I'm reading where the Dumbos are bringing that limp slogan back as "Yes, We Plan"). The losers will be those of us who continue to keep our noses up the smelly ass of a nonexistent God. The losers will be all of us living off credit cards. The losers will be all of us losing our homes to the financial pirates like Goldman-Sachs, the crooked-as-a-snake-at-night Bank of America, the crooked Wells-Fargo Old West-style bandits, the boldly crooked J.P. Morgan-Chase pirates (Obama's favorite bank)--why do you think the Dumbocrats chose Charlotte, North Carolina, as their convention site?
The only way We the People of the USA could gain some control of our fate back would be to ignore these shammers and not vote at all. Another way would be on election day to go en masse and pull our money out of these Charlotte, North Carolina, headquartered banks. But, of course, citizen responses like that won't happen. The only hope for Obama winning against the Super-Pac-ed-backed White backlash is in the hands of Blacks and Latinos and all Seniors and Union members, the very voters the White backlashers are going after with Jim-Crow-type voting registration laws. Remember, G.W. "Stealing Votes" Bush only had to steal less than 50,000 votes to steal both his election wins--the first one given him by the rightwing nutjob Supreme(ly dumb) Court--after his brother pulled the voter denial trick in the great backward state of Florida--the second one given him by the people of the great backward state of Ohio. Remember, too, vote fixer Karl Rove is back with millions of bucks behind him; even that little crooked phony Christian hellion Ralph Reed is back with millions of Koch Brothers bucks behind him.
Another scary thing Obama should deal with is Benjamin Nutjob'nYahoo, the American-born Israeli leader, going on Christian-nutjob-television and saying that Israel is under a threat of nuclear attack from the new heathens in Iran and then adding that the U.S. is still under attack, too, from these same Muslim devil forces and the people of the USA should not vote for any one who is not pro-Israel and pro-separation of Palestine and Israel and pro-nuking of Iran.
Watch out, President Obama. The White Man is after you--he's gonna try every trick in the books to take back the White Man's House. Watch out, President Obama. The White Man is pure evil.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler