Existing in New York City: Our Stupid President and Congress

Foto by tgw, New York City, November 2012
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Say Goodbye to: Dave Brubeck, who goes way back in my musical life; he was one of the first successful jazzmen in the biz, a success that got him branded as "commercial," a bad stamp back in the early days of progressive jazz.  But Dave was an original.  Dave Brubeck, 91, American jazz pianist ("Take Five", "Blue Rondo à la Turk", "Unsquare Dance"), heart failure.
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One Weird-ass Story by Mark Ames at Salon: What the CIA does with We the People's money:
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/02/better_than_bourne_who_really_killed_nick_deak/
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A Simple Explanation of Coronal Mass Ejections, Those Which May Bring on the End of Mankind:
http://earthsky.org/space/what-are-coronal-mass-ejections
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Our Stupid President and Congress 
I just don't read or listen to the news anymore.  What a bunch of dumbasses we have handed over our lives to.  And especially this president.  What is wrong with this guy?  This election he just won didn't change his mind one damn bit.  He's still acting more like a Reaganite Republican than he is a true Democrat, the party of Roosevelt and the New Deal.  He's still letting this god-damn idiot John Bonehead call the god-damn shots.  He's still kowtowing to the Wall Street crooks, still kissing their asses, this after the American people tried to show him they are sick and tired of these clowns trying to buy our votes; by reelecting Obama, We the People tried to let Obama understand that we think Mitt "the Mormon" Romney and the Ayn Rand crowd are full of shit and we don't want their brand of Paul "the Catholic" Ryan's austerity methods, clown methods, the rich buying elections, these jokers continuing to cut the taxes of rich assholes who don't pay any taxes anyway; to continue to cut corporate taxes on corporations that don't pay any taxes anyway.  FOOLS!


We're in an economic crisis not because the richest assholes and the richest corporations in the world don't pay taxes and not because of Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare and not because of public education and not because of these religious institutions not paying any taxes at all and not because...We're in an economic crisis because of WAR and warmongers and hawks and the Military Industrial Complex and all the military aid in the billions of dollars we are giving to Israel and Egypt and Saudi-Arabia and now Libya and the money we are wasting on drones and the money we are wasting on the CIA, Homeland Security, the NIS, the money we are wasting on this stupid and insane WAR on TERROR and this stupid and insane WAR on DRUGS and the money we are wasting on our dependency on OIL and this stupid hydrofracting and this stupid TransCanada Keystone pipeline, and the money this god-damn stupid Federal Reserve is printing up and secretly still handing over to the most crooked banks and financial institutions in the world, and money we are wasting on all this free trade bullshit that doesn't benefit We the People of the USA; in fact, all the free trade stupid Milton Friedman economic deals benefit only the Global Market Place and the greedy gluttonous corporations who are continuing to be left unregulated and left to jeopardize We the People of the USA's manufacturing and our jobs, our futures, sending our jobs and manufacturing over to countries like China (a Communist country that is now ironically the world's most successful Capitalist country), Indonesia, South Korea, Vietnam (also a Communist country), Taiwan (the country that the loser Chinese stole from the Formosans after Mao ran Chiang Kai-Shek, that despot, out of China), Thailand...God-damn, I could go on and on.

In the meantime, the little worthless dumbass who got us into all of this is still highly respected and living like a prince down in Dallas while the other asshole who before Georgie Porgie started all this mess, Slick Willie "I  Did Not Have Sex With That Woman" Clinton becomes richer and richer and more idolized, this the dumbass who deregulated the banks and the insurance companies and the financial scumbags, this the dumbass who gave us NAFTA and GATT and who gave us Osama bin Ladin (via the CIA) and who gave us wars in Somalia and Kosovo and Serbia.  And these millionaire pricks we keep electing continue to force this austerity on us...continue to jive ass us with this stupid "over the cliff" crap and kiss the asses of true dumbasses like John Bonehead and Mitch McConnell and John "Failed Mission" McCain and the seemingly dumbest of them all, President Obama, who is still compromising with these neanderthal-thinking clowns, these idiots who even the American electorate just showed Obama by reelecting him that We don't want Paul Ryan's austerity measures forced on us; We don't want to keep giving free rides to idiot men who have so much god-damn money they don't know what to do with it, jerks like Warren Buffett, Little Billy and Melinda Gates, and New York City's Billionaire Mayor, Mike "Mall Mad" Bloomberg.  And in order to solve our economic crisis President Obama keeps going back to the assholes who got us into it in the first place, holding on to jerks like Little Timmy Geithner and Ben "Bailout" Bernanke and Obama keeps gathering all these crooked CEOs like Little Jamie Dimond (and some superrich are suggesting that that crooked little job outsourcing jerk replace Little Timmy as Treasury Secretary) into secret meetings in the White Man's House and he keeps on promoting that old crank Alan Simpson (from the backward low-populated state of Wyoming) and that prissy Clinton asshole Erskine Bowles (from the backward state of North Carolina) wanting to gut Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare, old geezers who have made their livings at the public slop trough...I'm exhausted from this.  You see why I no longer read any news, all lies, all bullshit?

My critics awash me in finger pointing because I have no faith in President Obama pulling progressive rabbits out of his hat.  I refer them to Ex-first lady Hillbilly Hilary's rebuke of the UN recognizing in a sort of way Palestine's legitimacy as a sovereign nation and the truck-driver-voiced Susan Rice's blatant Israeli-ass-kissing as she, too, condemned the UN vote as blocking the two-state head-on negotiations between the continuously Palestian-land-stealing Israelis and the unelected leaders of the Palestinian subjects.  Remember, a true Israeli like Old Ben Net'nyahoo! considers the Palestinians less than human beings...dogs being the designation the true Zionist gives these former Chaldeans...these brothers under the same God of Water for desert survival.

Pundits are now promoting Hillbilly Hilary as the next Dumbocratic candidate for the presidency after Obama runs out of rabbits from his top hat.  I'm still amazed at this former wife of a president having so much clout now as a politician.  You know how I feel about her Ozark-hillbilly husband, this sleazebag philanderer who kissed the asses of the Milton Friedman free trade hustlers and deregulated the insurance industry, the banks, and the financial industry crooks...this pretty boy who took the advice of Wall Street princes like Robert Rubin and second-rate economists like Larry Summers, this schemer who at the end of his disastrous presidency pulled the wool over the eyes of We the Dumb People of the USA into believing he left us with a surplus economy, a surplus based on futures and a robbing of the Social Security pool that little Georgie Porgie Bush, that little freak, stole...  God-almighty-damn, here I go again, getting my dander up over these openly crooked politicians....  I've just finished reading Gore Vidal's great revisionist history novel, Burr.  As Gore points out, though his novel is fiction, since Day 1 in this Republic, our politicians have been asshole aristocrats whose Constitution never intended for We the Common People in the USA to have any say in what these privileged assholes do in terms of taxing us, getting us into wars, and trick bagging us in favor of their aristocratic pals.  Remember under the original Constitution, the Constitution we still chop to bits via amendments, only landholders could vote, women were reduced to babymakers and silent crybabies, several of our early presidents being bachelors, and Blacks were not even considered human beings...oh, yeah, 1/5 humans and the rest monkeys, jungle bunnies.  Our early forefathers being floorflushers, many of them with mistresses, and all of them with slaves and servants and all of them living high-lives surrounded by gaudy extravagances that left most of them stone broke by the time of their deaths.  The joke is still on We the People of the USA.

I await to see just how many rabbits President Obama magic like pulls out of his top hat.

By the bye, I highly recommend you all read Burr.  To me, Gore Vidal is one of the more brilliant thinkers to come out of the aristocratic class...and yes he was out of that class, too...born at West Point and raised in the District of Corruption, with Burr as an ancestor and the old Senator Gore as his grandfather.  I'm now reading his revisionist novel 1876 about politics after the Civil War during the Grant administration.  Next I'm tackling Gore's tome, Lincoln, my intentions to go on through this series of revisionist history novels that ends with Hollywood and the connection with our politicians and the film industry.  Great reading for a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian like myself.

thegrowlingwolf 
for The Daily Growler

Existing in New York City: Poor as Job's Turkey

Foto by tgw, New York City, November 2012
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Say Goodbye to: Mickey Baker of Mickey & Sylvia (Robinson) fame. "Oh, Sylvia, how do you call your lover boy?"  And, yes, Love Is Strange...and so is Life. Mickey Baker, 87, American guitarist (Mickey & Sylvia) and songwriter ("Love Is Strange")
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Thanksgiving With the Pilgrims
I really was poor as Job's turkey come the approach of this year's Thanksgiving Day.  I was so poor, I was planning on perhaps experimenting with some cat food on Turkey Day, like maybe what some of the reservation-bound Native Americans up north were feasting on this fine great U.S.A. White Man's Holy Day.  Business had been lousy for the past month.  My income was suddenly pushing me off a cliff into a subbasement of what President Obama insists on calling the Middle Class when in fact it's the Lower Class, the on-the-brink-of-poverty class.  I think to President Obama, now a rich man, the Middle Class consists of anybody making less than $250,000 a year; otherwise, "Hey, Prez, there ain't no Middle Class no more."

I was so damn broke this Thanksgiving, that I went in my closet and started going through all my coats and trousers looking for perhaps money I stashed away in those myriad pockets and forgot about...with luck, maybe I had cached a twenty in some long ago unworn-in-a-while summer pants after stumbling home a little inebriated from a night out on the town.  No such luck.  I did find thirty-five cents in an old coat that was pushed way back in that corner of my closet where I keep my out-of-style or worn-out apparels just before I toss them out or Hefty bag them up and leave 'em on the street for the bums to find.

I was on the verge of getting out the coin wrappers and wrapping up some pennies out of the Pacifico beer bucket I bought on my last trip to Mazatlan, Mexico, yeah now decades ago, a six-pack-size bucket into which I now toss these worthless pennies I collect from change on a daily basis.  There are an estimated thousand pennies in that beer bucket, which comes to, what?  Ten dollars?  Even wrapping that many pennies besides being time consuming also involves putting my bank account number on each roll of 50 and then trucking them down to my bank on 14th, which means I'd need to scrounge up $5.00 for a round trip on the N Train.  Was it worth spending $5.00 to cash in $10.00 worth of pennies?  Even broke, I thought not.

As I was at my lowest, building up the courage to call an ex-lover and trying to borrow some money off her, up pops a "You've Got Mail" and I open it to find an email from an old drummer friend of mine.  "What the hell does he want?" I thought.  I hadn't heard from him since we did a gig together back in August.  So I clicked on his email and opened it up not expecting anything but perhaps a brag mail inviting me to come hear him play somewhere. And, sure 'nuff, it started off with the normal perfunctory greeting, "Hey, what the hell are you up to?  If you're not doing anything...."  I was writing it off to blah-blah-blah and was on the verge of closing it and keeping it to read later when I noticed in the next line the phrase "Thanksgiving dinner."  I read the whole damn email and lo and behold, this old friend was inviting me to join him at a woman's apartment on the Upper West Side where she would be feasting us to a Thanksgiving turkey dinner complete with all the proper trimmings.  All I had to bring was myself, everything else was being provided by this woman whose name I didn't recognize.   Turns out I knew this woman very well from back in the days when the drummer and I were in the annual New Year's Eve band at a restaurant in downtown Manhattan.

So it turned out I got a splendid Thanksgiving dinner with turkey, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, kasha, and desserts galore: a chocolate hazelnut cake, some pumpkin walnut chocolate chip bread, a sweet potato pie, an apple crumb pie, and several pints of various good ice creams, all washed down with Stella beers and a fine red wine.

And the company was right up my alley, too: the hostess a literary agent originally from Detroit; a native New York City Ukrainian lady and her retired Detroit fireman boyfriend (we discovered we had similar army experiences); a Frenchman bon vivant; a medical technician; my friend the drummer; and a successful writer who happened to be a transplanted Texan like myself (he's the author of a biography of Thomas Paine).  The drummer brought along a CD I made with his band 9 years ago on which I sing several tunes and he played me very loudly as he commented on my being the best vocalist he ever recorded with.  Bullshit, but the good kind of bullshit an old bullshitter like myself thoroughly enjoys.

After it was all over, the hostess packed me up three containers of leftover turkey, sweet potatoes, and cranberry sauce and the Ukrainian lady slipped me a paper sack containing one of her pumpkin-walnut-chocolate-chip breads.  And as I was going to bum $2.50 for the subway from my drummer friend, he said, "Hey, since I have a bum knee and don't feel like trudging down into the subway, let's take a cab...I'll pay for it."

After I got home, I didn't know which brace of gods to praise for bailing my poor ass out with such a splendid result.

So on Thanksgiving I was poor as Job's turkey but rich with the best friends a man can have...or should I say blessed with the best friends a man can have.

The wonderful thing about being a New Yorker...everybody you know has a bit of salvation of some kind in them.

thestuffedgrowlingwolf 
for The Daily (Gobbler) Growler

Existing in New York City: Israel Uber Alles!

Foto by tgw, New York City, November 2012
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Say Goodbye to: Pete LaRoca (Sims): I first heard Pete on one of my very fav of all time albums: Little Johnny C, a Blue Note album featuring trumpeter Little Johnny Coles. Pete La Roca, 74, American jazz drummer, cancer.
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"All Palestinians Are Dogs!" 
Way back when I was young and dumber I fell in love with this Jewish woman.  I mean it was good mutual love except in one area and that was the justification of Israelis hating and mistreating Palestinians with the same barbaric bitterness Jews had been subjected to by the Europeans before and during World War II.  One evening when I referred to all Israelis as fatalistic, she went off on me ending her defense of Israel's rather Gestapo-like tactics used to take land from the Palestinians by saying, "All Palestinians are dogs and don't deserve to even be servitude to Israelis."


Palestine when I was a kid, according to the Christians that surrounded me, was the Holy Land.  This remained the case even after the 1947 UN resolution that created Israel.  Israel wasn't considered the Holy Land until much later.

In reviewing Palestinian history, it reveals that this area of the world has been fought over, conquered, lost, reconquered, ruled over, and dictated over by seldom its own people, whether Palestinians (originally the Canaanites) or the Jews (originally the Judeans, but who some modernist historians are now saying were actually Canaanites).  In terms of Palestine, it has seldom been allowed to exist as a sovereign independent nation, except after World War I when it came under British and Jordanian domination when as a colony it was referred to as Palestine.

The Israelis (Zionists) claim they are the rightful possessors of all of Palestine under the right to the area given them by their God, Yahweh, the same God the Christians, who once ruled the area for 200 years or so as Crusaders (and by the way, the Crusaders kicked the Jews out of Jerusalem), call Jehovah and whom the Arabs call Allah, all of God's names derivatives of the same God, the God of the Levant, the God of the desert lands, the God of Water.

The underlying problem in all of this Israeli belittling Palestinians to me is not really religious bullshit but rather simply a part of the Power Elite and Corporate world takeover--the Global Marketplace forces using privileged Elitists to CONTROL those deemed unprofitable.  Both Arabs and Jews are full of too much God shit, yes, but that is secondary to what's really going on.  There are too many god-damn gods in the world to keep track of.  The Jewish sacred texts give 17 different versions of Yahweh.  The ancient Sumerian gods from which all these Levant gods come had so many gods you needed a scorecard to keep track of them.  Too many gods is simply a way to keep large masses of the underprivileged confused.  What's going on in the Middle East even today you can trace back to the British Empire, like you can trace back most problems in the world (after all, Capitalism is a product of the British Empire, an imperialist device taken up by all the European colonialists as they went about the world stealing the uncivilized (savage) nations' natural resources that they did not possess--Great Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Italy--natural resources that these countries had little if any of yet needed to keep their own Capitalist schemes going).

According to Oliver Stone's latest revisionist history, old Winnie Churchill, that pompous privileged elitist ass, was trying to hold the British Empire together in World War II.  Stone also gives a large chunk of credit in the Allies winning World War II to the Soviet forces who gave Hitler his truly greatest defeats and who also in threatening to invade Japan actually forced Japan to surrender and therefore the stupid atomic bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were totally unnecessary--Japan had already surrendered, but that little pompous prick, Harry S. Truman, thought of himself as a great warrior president (Harry had been a horse captain in World War I) and was talked into trying out those cruel and criminal weapons on what Harry called the Japs by his elitist military advisers.  One could say dropping those atomic bombs on Japan was payback for embarrassing us at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese Air Force almost completely decimated our South Pacific fleet.

So as I write this post, the Israeli Army is making mincemeat of hundreds of filthy dirty Palestinian pariah dogs (men, women, and children) in the Gaza Strip, really an Israeli-controlled concentration camp, in retaliation for Palestine sending 200 missiles into certain areas of Israel, missiles most of which were shot down by Israel's missile defense system (given them by We the Christian People of the Imperialist USA) though some did get through and killed 3 Israelis.  Palestine's firing these missiles into Israel is in crude retaliation for an Israeli Air Force guided missile hitting and killing the Hamas military leader, Ahmad Jabari (and also, Israeli forces had shot and killed a 13-year-old Gaza boy a few weeks back).

The Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, and it's a million and a half of them, are war refugees, left over from the 1967 War in which Israel conquered from what was termed the United Arab Republic (an Arab union formed by Gamil Nasar, the former President of Egypt) armies the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank from Jordan.  These Palestinians were penned in this former Egyptian land by that war, which Israel won thanks to the massive military supplies and air force provided to them by We the Christian White People of the Imperial USA.  Israel could not continue to exist without our giving them both economic and military aid.

And our jiveass President, Barry Obama, the Indonesian and Kenyan royalist, before he left on his trip to Thailand and Burma (what the hell is that all about?), proudly boasted that We the People of the USA stand behind the Israelis as they begin their planned massacre of Palestinians by saying foolishly that what country who is experiencing missiles being lobbed into their state and killing their people (3 so far) wouldn't retaliate against these Palestinian TERRORISTS?

The Corporate-Elitist USA Imperial forces now cover the world going about killing some of the most impoverished people in the world in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, the Sudan, not really wanting to WIN any of these so-called wars on TERRORISM.  Don't you get it?  Look at the messes out-of-control Capitalism is causing in Europe right now where the most powerful and richest of the Capital-Global-Marketplace countries (mainly Germany) are coming down hard on the poorest of the European Union countries, like Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Italy.  The Corporate Elites hate poor people, unproductive people, people who do nothing to add to what they call economic growth, which is nothing more than these Corporate Elitists confiscating all the wealth of nations same as the European colonialists did when they needed the natural resources of the impoverished countries in order to fuel their extravagant lifestyles...put in these insufferable situations, of course there eventually will be rebellions just as there always have been when these imperialist civilizations get TOO BIG to FAIL.  The Egyptian (Pharaoh) Empire failed; the Greek Empire failed; the Roman Empire failed; the French Imperialist effort (under Napoleon) failed; the Japanese Empire failed; the Empires of China all failed...and, yes, this US Empire is bound to fail as our Power Elitists rob We the People of our monies, our land, our means of employment, our means of transportation, our homes, our public school system, our Social Security--not by the way as our lying sons of bitches politicians are saying an entitlement program---now calling Social Security payments Federal Benefit payments---God-dammit, We the People of the USA worked our asses off paying into Social Security and the companies we worked for paid into it, too, with EARNED INCOME.  According to anyone's grade-school math, if the Feds hadn't of stole the Social Security surpluses to use to pay off foolish boondoggle schemes and those Social Security monies had have been invested in interest-bearing actuaries, all of us should retire on incomes of over $3,000 a month; instead, these crooked bastards have stolen so much money from this EARNED INCOME system the average return now is $1200-a-month, which leaves folks on Social Security under the poverty level.

One hundred million Americans are currently living below the poverty level ($26,000-a-year for a family of 4!).  Forty million Americans would starve to death were it not for food stamps, which, if you notice, our Power Elites (the 1%) are trying to take away from us.  These Corporate Global Economy Elitists want us all in poverty.  If you read Paul Wolfowitz's Neo-Con Manifesto, what that old phony fop G.W.H. "Pappy" Bush called the New World Order, its whole intention is to sink our standard of living, to drive the dollar down to worthless paper, to force us all into poverty and that way we will work for slave wages---the whole idea behind this scheme is CHEAP LABOR, the cheapest of which is SLAVERY.

What's going on in Palestine is simply what went on in South Africa when the minority Whites ruled that country's indigenous majority with an iron fist.  This method of getting CHEAP LABOR is called Apartheid.  I mean under these corporate-elite schemes if you are too poor and weak to work, FUCK YOU, you're better dead than receiving welfare---just like the Nazis did in World War II---only those who were strong enough to work survived---that is until they were worked to almost death and then they were slaughtered.

Rebellion is the poor of the world's only hope whether in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Greece, Spain, or right here in the good ole USA where I reside in New York City where affordable housing is not being built but hi-rise luxury apartment buildings are literally on the rise, to the point where BILLIONAIRES are flocking into Manhattan to turn it into a Billionaires' Playground where they eat meals costing thousands of dollars a whack and then pay another $1000 on desserts with real gold-flake toppings (it was called by Thorstein Veblin "Conspicuous Consumption"), while the underdogs of the city are dining on rancid cheeses, cinch bug flour, and cat and dog food.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily (Worker) Growler

Chris Hedges Saying About the Same Thing The Daily Growler Is Saying:

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12821-elites-will-make-gazans-of-us-all

Check This Out, From the Washington Post (thanks, L Hat): 

Of the many facts that have come to light in the scandal involving former CIA director David H. Petraeus, among the most curious was that during his days as a four-star general, he was once escorted by 28 police motorcycles as he traveled from his Central Command headquarters in Tampa to socialite Jill Kelley’s mansion. Although most of his trips did not involve a presidential-size convoy, the scandal has prompted new scrutiny of the imperial trappings that come with a senior general’s lifestyle.
The commanders who lead the nation’s military services and those who oversee troops around the world enjoy an array of perquisites befitting a billionaire, including executive jets, palatial homes, drivers, security guards and aides to carry their bags, press their uniforms and track their schedules in 10-minute increments. Their food is prepared by gourmet chefs. If they want music with their dinner parties, their staff can summon a string quartet or a choir.
The elite regional commanders who preside over large swaths of the planet don’t have to settle for Gulfstream V jets. They each have a C-40, the military equivalent of a Boeing 737, some of which are configured with beds.

From C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite (Oxford Press, 1956):

The fact that they have succeeded in climbing the military hierarchy, which they honor more than any other, lends self-assurance to the successful warlords. The protections that surround their top positions make them even more assured and confident. If they should lose confidence in themselves what else would there be for them to lose? Within a limited area of life, they are often quite competent, but to them, in their disciplined loyalty, this area is often the only area of life that is truly worthwhile. They are inside an apparatus of prerogative and graded privilege in which they have been economically secure and unworried. Although not usually rich, they have never faced the perils of earning a living in the same way that lower and middle-class persons have. The orderly ranks of their chain of command, as we have seen, are carried over into their social life: such striving for status as they have known has been within an unambiguous and well-organized hierarchy of status, in which each knows his place and remains within it.

In this military world, debate is no more at a premium than persuasion: one obeys and one commands, and matters, even unimportant matters, are not to be decided by voting. Life in the military world accordingly influences the military mind's outlook on other institutions as well as on its own. The warlord often sees economic institutions as means for military production and the huge corporation as a sort of ill-run military establishment. In his world, wages are fixed, unions impossible to conceive. He sees political institutions as often corrupt and usually inefficient obstacles, full of undisciplined and cantankerous creatures. And is he very unhappy to hear of civilians and politicians making fools of themselves?

It is men with minds and outlooks formed by such conditions who in postwar America have come to occupy positions of great decision. It cannot be said that they have necessarily sought these new positions; much of their increased stature has come to them by virtue of a default on the part of civilian political men. But perhaps it can be said, as C. S. Forester has remarked in a similar connection, that men without lively imagination are needed to execute policies without imagination devised by an elite without imagination.

From Mark Ames's Article "When Congress Busted Milton Friedman" in eXileD:

Like everything involving modern economics and libertarianism, it was a kind of giant meta-sham, shams celebrating a sham [the Milton Friedman Celebration held at U of Chicago recently]. Even the Nobel Prizes in economics awarded to people like Milton Friedman, George Stigler, or Friedman’s contemporary fans Heckman and Lucas, are fake Nobel Prizes — in fact, there is no such thing as a Nobel Prize in economics; its real name is the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” and it was first launched in 1969 by the Swedish Central Bank and has since been denounced by Alfred Nobel’s heirs.
And yet — in the words of Larry Summers, "Any honest Democrat will admit we are all Friedmanites now." Of course, there are no honest Democrats. And there are no honest economists. And these are the people who are framing our politics, the people who have told Greece and Spain they have no choice, and the people who today are making sure that the number one item on Obama’s and Congress’s agenda is cutting Social Security and cutting Medicare and cutting "entitlements" — and the only thing that divides the elites in charge of this mess is “how much of these moochers’ lifelines can we cut?”

 

Existing in New York City: Ah, the Hypocrisy Hooplah

Foto by tgw, New York City, November 2012
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Say Goodbye to: Will Barnet,  whether you liked Will's paintings or not, you had to like old Will.  He was quite a colorful character. Will Barnet, 101, American painter.
  Animals & Art, Will Barnet
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Waving the Bloody Shirt 
The hypocrisy spewed out on Veteran's Day here in New York City was enough to make a true hero puke.  But not just here in NYC but all across the nation, the trumpets blared and the cowards (meaning newscasters and pundits and politicians who've never served one lousy day in the military or who've never taken a stand against this nation's leaders who get us involved in these unwinable and in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan unnecessary wars) filled the air with blowhard B.S. as We the People of the BS US honored our heroes, our poor stupid desperate poor boys and girls who coming out of high schools without a chance in hell of going on with their education or getting a good job are hoaxed by a bunch of recruiting dudes suckering them into the military with lies about how they're going to BE PREPARED for their futures with travel and pay and training and these poor boobs are sent off to basic training bases to be taught to KILL or BE KILLED, to be taught that these towelheads, sand N-worders, al Queda terrorists, Muslim creeps are enemies of the glorious and totally innocent USA and have to be KILLED or they're gonna come KILL US like is shown in the Hollywood hypocrisy remake of a propaganda film like Red Dawn, this time the enemy is not the Soviet Union but rather a bunch slant-eyed gooks from North Korea.  And these poor young boobs, these 18, 19, and 20-year olds, are sent to fight in these illegal wars started by true cowards like Unka Dick Cheney and that little privileged prick G.W. Bush, one a big scared turkey who got 5 deferments from the Vietnam fiasco and the other a little spoiled brat prick who went AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard to hide behind the skirts of his wimpy old father, Pappy Bush, whose WWII war record was marred by his plane crashing on his final mission and him bailing his ass out before all his men were out of the plane, and kept in war by new-to-power cowards like President Barry Obama...I mean even writing about this shivers me timbers and ruffles the hairs on the back of my neck and makes me want to duck into the nearest alley and puke my brains out.  Hypocrisy.  "The greatest nation on earth!"  "These heroic men and women who are sacrificing their lives to keep this country great!" "USA, USA, USA!"

And all the PR clowns around the country trotted out these smiling perfect little angel soldier boys and girls though they didn't go into the Veterans hospitals and show all the invalid soldiers in there, soldiers with their limbs blown off, soldiers ruined for the rest of their lives, soldiers with the shakes, soldiers with heavy-duty mental problems, soldiers having to constantly be watched so they don't take their own lives, or ex-soldiers like Lyndie Englund or Jessica Lynch, or the soldiers who went on a killing rampage in Afghanistan and then pissed on the bodies of the trophy kills, or good ole Charlie Bates who in the name of Old Glory, the bald eagle, and his mother murdered in cold blood 16 some-odd men, women, and children...no, they didn't trot them out.  Did you know there are 18 suicides a day in the US military?  Also, did you know there are 60,000 homeless veterans living in our streets?  You see, after these poor boobs have served their country and are discharged, we throw them on the old soldiers garbage pile.

And the praise heaped on this stupid war-minded general, this man I call General Betrayus.  What the hell so great did he come up with?  The surge?  Hey, we lost the illegal war in Iraq.  We didn't win a god-damn thing over there in spite of General Betrayus, a G.W. Bush pick, and his stupid surge.  Under the Neo-Con rule-the-world policy (an imperial scheme that old Pappy Bush called the New World Order), G.W. Bush was informed by the clowns surrounding him, that hellfire, now that the Soviet Union was out of business, the US was the toughest god-damn nation of military killers in the world and as such, why we could just fly in helter-skelter into any god-damn little wimpy country in the world we wanted to conquer for their natural resources (read: OIL) and batter the bastards down in a matter of 3 or 4 days (Mission Accompished!).  Now, remember, our Commander in Chief, that little coward prick, was reading My Pet Goat to 5th graders in Florida (his intellectual equals) when the most fabulous military unit in war history (20-plus Saudi-Arabians whose weapons were box cutters) attacked this country...and remember, when Georgie Porgie was informed about the US being under attack, when he finally got it in his 5th-grade head that it was serious, he ran like a coward dog out to Omaha, Nebraska, to hide his AWOL ass under the protection of that Strategic Air Command (the creation of General Curtis "Bomb 'em back to the stone age" LeMay) fortress base while that sissy coward Unka Dick Cheney fled to his private bunker in a mountain somewhere in Virginia.  Where was General Betrayus then?  Banging his biographer on his Pentagon desk?  You see how god-damn silly and stupid this whole scenario is?

General Betrayus's surge didn't work in Iraq.  We were there for 8 years.  Little did we know that the Iraqis would fight back against us.  Rather than cheering and throwing rose petals at our armies...you know, letting us make them a part of our new British-type empire (a Neo-Con idea), they fought against us tooth and nail with suicide bombers and car bombs and roadside bombs.

And then, after another G.W. Bush general, that McCrystal fool, fucked up by drinking too much beer while he was partying it up in Europe while his troops in Afghanistan were getting their asses kicked and making N-word comments about Barry Obama and President Obama fired his ass, what did Obama do?  He put good ole General Betrayus and his surge tactics into Afghanistan, the longest war in our war-mongering history.  Did the surge work over there?  Hell no.  Betrayus's idea was to pick out certain villages and go in and massacre the Taliban elements in them and then bring in his boxed leaders from Kabul to take over these villages and rehabilitate them to respect US invasion and occupation forces as the good guys and their Taliban cousins and brothers as the bad guys.  That was soon brushed under the carpet because it was a total failure.  So much for the strategic brilliance of good ole General Betrayus.  Then President Obama saves the good general's ass by bringing him home and putting him atop the CIA!  And what does Betrayus do at the CIA?  Why he turns it into a military outfit and talks President Obama into giving it a drone force and before he got caught banging his biographer, he had asked President Obama for more drones and it was this same asshole general who infiltrated Libya with his CIA special forces and one day we'll learn that he did the same thing in Syria, all a part of the Neo-Con idea for world dominance.

Again, I quote my Sociology guru and mentor, C. Wright Mills from his book The Power Elite:

In the twentieth century, among the industrialized nations of the world, the great, brief, precarious fact of civilian dominance 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.

I feel sorry for kids who have to join the military to make ends meet.  I feel sorry even for poor dopes or traditional military sons and daughters like John "Failed Mission" McCain who make careers out of the military.

President Obama is tackling this week what the pundits and moron politicians are calling "falling over the brink," which means we've got to solve our economic dilemma or else we're going over the brink of disaster like's happening in Europe right now.  One way to solve it would be to bring home all our troops from the 150+ bases we have on foreign soils and to end that worthless war in Afghanistan, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11; a country we've been infiltrating for many decades now; our CIA responsible for Osama bin Laden being in Afghanistan in the first place.  Also, what the hell, we could do away with the CIA, Homeland Security, the NIS, and all the billions of dollars we waste on supporting security forces and supporting the Military Industrial Complex.  Another way to save the economy would be to reinstate tariffs on imported goods--this free-market Reaganomics-Milton Friedman-Austrian Economics doesn't work, folks.  By taxing imports we would force US-chartered companies like Apple and Nike to come back to the USA to manufacture their products.  Another way to solve our economic crisis would be to stick a stock transfer tax on Wall Street and put the Federal Reserve out of business and turn its business over to the Treasury.

But, of course, that ain't gonna happen, folks.  Instead, yours and my taxes are going up and big corporations' taxes and Warren Buffett's taxes and Little Billy Gates' taxes and Billionaire Mayor Bloomberg's taxes are coming down and the pirate banks and crooked financial businesses will continue to speculate with our tax money and foreclose on us with impunity...I mean can you imagine if you were declared too big to fail?


thegrowlingwolfformerusarmy2ndlt
for The Patriotic Daily Growler  

  

Living and Dying in Billionaires' Heaven: New York City

Foto by tgw, New York City, November 2012
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Say Goodbye to: Valerie Eliot, T.S. Eliot's widow, his second wife after the crazy Vivien; Valerie, a major stockholder and editor at Faber and Faber, Eliot's publisher, was 38 years younger than T.S. when they married.  It was said she gave him the happiest years of his life.  That's why old men dig young girls. Valerie Eliot, 86, British editor, widow of T.S. Eliot.

Say Goodbye to General Betrayus (I'm sorry, that's my name for him)--here's a great piece on the B.S. general by Glenn Greenwald brought to my attention by L Hat on this day of so much ass-kissing of our loser (remember they are salaried) military volunteers: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/10/petraeus-scandal-media-military
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Stoop Buddies
There was a time not too long ago in New York City, when people who lived in brownstones or row apartments or the older apartment buildings congregated on the stoop, the steps in front of these apartments.  This was especially true before the advent of air-conditioners or condos or high-rise luxury buildings, or Baby Boomers buying up the brownstones and converting them into million-dollar properties.  Though, yes, it is still true in certain neighborhoods like up in the high 100s where the Dominican Republicans live or in some of the Puerto Rican neighborhoods in the South Bronx or in certain parts of Queens.  But here in Manhattan there are not so many buildings with active stoops on them left or if there are stoops, they've been gentrified and gated and locked up tight and camera secure.

My building, the oldest building left standing on old Broad Way, does have a stoop, and when I moved into this building 30 years ago, that stoop was every morning and afternoon filled with tenants of all types: those with jobs, those out of work, those retired, who gathered on the stoop to bullshit, or talk sports, or bitch about how expensive things were getting, or dishing out rumors about certain tenants in the building, but mostly bullshitting, particularly when it came to politics and landlords and oddball personalities.

One of the first people I met on our stoop was a gentleman who I called Jake.  He and I took right off to each other since he like me was a transplanted Texan.  Though Texans are miles apart in a Texas geographical sense, like Jake was from Pasadena, a suburb of Houston, maybe 400 miles south of my native West Texas, still all Texans feel related and are sensitive to being related and this was the case with Jake and me even though, too, he was Black and I am White.

Jake had lived in this building since 1969.  When I moved in the building in 1982, Jake was 49 years old.  That next year, Jake bought a pair of roller blades and you could often see him roller blading down Fifth Avenue from Central Park where he used to do his serious roller blading.  That year of 1983, he turned 50 and started wearing a tee shirt, a bright red tee shirt, with bold white lettering that read: "I'm 50 years old, but I can still kick your ass."

It was around this same time that one day I'm out on the stoop talking trash and I asked Jake a question, to which he replied, "Why do you call me Jake?" I was stunned.  "'Cause that's your name, isn't it?" "No, my name's Jay," he answered calmly.  I stood corrected.  This after calling him Jake for at least over a year.

Ironically, there was a Jake in the building, a guy most of us usually called Clem.  One day this Jake came out on the stoop to brag about the Pittsburgh Steelers beating the Chicago Bears and I called him Jake.  Jay suddenly said, "Hey, Wolfie, how come you don't call him Jay?" We had a good long laugh over that.  That was Jay's wit.  From then on I knew him as Jay.

Around a year and a half ago, Jay woke up one morning and couldn't walk.  He had been a strong union man, he had worked over 20 years as a short-order cook at a cafe on 8th Avenue just below 34th Street called Squires before he retired, so he carried good health insurance.  He checked into New York Hospital and when he returned he was on a cane.  He said they diagnosed him with arthritis in his hip.  He was on the cane for a month or so and one day he showed up without the cane, but the ordeal had taken a lot out of him.  He just didn't look like his old self.  He looked haggard.  Also his voice had changed.  His voice had been cynically strong but now it was weak and raspy.  Now that he was retired, he was on that stoop every day.  He became the fixture on the stoop; in fact, it became Jay's stoop since he spent most of his daylight hours on the stoop.  The rest of us stoopers were on it every now and then, but Jay was always out there.

One morning I came out to do a little stoopin' and there was no Jay.  Curious, I asked Bobby the all-night doorman if he'd seen him that morning.  "You didn't hear?" Bobby said.  "Jay collapsed on the steps last night.  He's back in New York Hospital."

Jay was in the hospital a week and a half before he was back on the stoop, except this time he really did look totally changed.  And everybody else out there noticed it and commented on it behind his back. He was older looking, really older looking.  He was also, and this is the only way I know to describe it, shriveled up...he was shorter, like he had collapsed a little bit.  I asked Jay what had been wrong with him and he dodged answering the question.  Bobby the doorman told me he'd heard the reason Jay had passed out, and he said he'd heard this when he had visited Jay in the hospital, was because he was dehydrated.

I thought no more about it.  Jay was back on the stoop and back to his regular routines, complaining about how the nurses had taken most of his blood while he was in the hospital and how the doctor had put him on a diet that demanded he eat a lot of salads, which he said he hated.  But then one morning there was Jay with a travel bag by him.  He told me he wouldn't be there the next day because he was waiting for Pablo the cab driver to take him back over to New York Hospital because his doctor said he needed to do some tests on him.

When Jay came back this time, lord'a mercy he had really changed.  He was poorly looking, as our Texas relatives would have described him.  It was quite obvious that something was seriously wrong with my old friend Jay.

A little before this happened I had had my heart attack so I wasn't very concerned about Jay's problems, figuring he couldn't have a problem worse than I had.

About three weeks ago, I came down to get my breakfast and Bobby the doorman told me that Jay had blacked out again, this time in the street, up the block aways, and that the police had found him and he was back in New York Hospital.  Several days passed and one morning, one of the stoop guys who had gone to see Jay in the hospital stopped me and said, "You know, man, Jay has cancer...kidney cancer...he's undergoing treatment now."  "Chemotherapy...what?"  "Yeah, chemo."

Just before Sandy hit us, the weekend before Sandy hit us in fact, the doorman said Jay had returned home but his niece from Texas was coming to New York to get him and take him back home to Texas, a place Jay told me he had not been back to for 40 years; in fact, he often said he had no desire to ever go back to Texas.  I asked if anybody had seen Jay...like could I go to his apartment and see him, and I was told he was in bed and probably couldn't come to the door.  Next time I checked on Jay, I was told he was in Texas, he had flown out the night before with his niece.  Good, I said, it'll do him good to get back in that Texas heat; besides they had great hospitals in Houston, blah, blah, blah.

I came down to go to breakfast three days ago, right after Sandy had passed and left behind the massive problems, many of which still have not been resolved.  Bobby the doorman stopped me.  "You heard about Jay?"  "No, what?"  "He's no longer with us."  "What?"  "Yeah, he passed yesterday afternoon down in Texas."

Jay was dead.  He was 78 years old.

And now our stoop is empty.  There's no one out there any more.  None of the old regulars...not a soul.  As if Jay was the tribal leader of the stoop.  And I suppose he was.  We've got no reason to gang out there anymore.  We've got no conversation leader, no bullshit leader, no philosopher, no instigator of rumors, no josher, the source of witty teasings.  It's a sad place now.  And it'll probably remain a sad empty place since the stoop regulars have no reason to gang up out there anymore, which is fine with the landlord who didn't like us stoopin' out there anyway, our bullshitting sometimes getting loud with laughter and jocularity, with all of us trying to outtalk the others and Jay urging us on to greater heights of jokin' and jivin'.  No, it just ain't the same on our stoop anymore.  Our leader's gone and it's too damn sad out there without him.

thegrowlingwolf,anoldstooper  
 for The Daily Growler 

Existing in Stormy New York City: Well Shut My Mouth

Foto by tgw, "The Penn Terminal Building...one of my fav NYC buildings," NYC, Nov. 2012
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Say Goodbye to: Panbanisha, an American bonobo, one of our (homo sapiens) close relatives, one of our distant cousins. Just look how fascinated we are with our close relatives: Panbanisha, 26, American bonobo involved in language studies (Great Ape Trust), common cold.


Say Goodbye to: Darrell Royal, most famous as the University of Texas football coach, but as a kid I remember him as a quarterback on the Oklahoma Sooners under coach Bud Wilkenson, the football team that won 49 straight games without a loss. Darrell Royal, 88, American football coach (University of Texas), Alzheimer's disease.
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Whew!
The worst of two evils lost.  On the other hand, I'm disappointed.  I was anxious to see a Mormon in power...I mean, what if the Mormons are right?  What if there really is a God from the planet KooKoo, and what if the Mormons are the lost tribe of Israel (the children of Benjamin)...and what if there really is an angel called Moroni looking over us?  And what if Salt Lake City is the New Jerusalem, the place God led the polygamist Brigham Young to in order to establish his kingdom there one day?  Come on, it's just as possible as what the Protestants and Catholics (really old chips off the same block) truly believe.  I mean, old Mitt could have brought us back to God.  It looks like the majority of We the People will put our trust in Barry Obama for another 4 years of the same old-same old, Barry Obama the man of royalty, even though in the eyes of Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney and Michelle Bachmann, Dr. Jack Van Impe (the The Daily Growler Christian Minister to our Faithlessness), and that ilk he may truly be the anti-Christ.

Does one understand my mockery?

In order to rule us with their iron fists, we must be kept in constant worry and fear.  This is because these creepy politicians need us afraid, these blessed human monkeys who never miss a paycheck, who have their Georgetown mansions paid for by We the People, who have the best god-damn free healthcare in the world, who have enormous expense accounts thanks to We the People, who have chances due to their political positions to reel in millions of extra bucks from the corporate gods who rule their lives.  In this stupid election, these two fops spent 2 billion dollars!   Think of that!  Consider that!  Two billion dollars!  You think these human frailties aren't obligated to the fat cats who gave them that much money?  By reelecting Barry Obama, We the People feebly at least gave the shaft to the Repugnican downsizers, but they still rule the House and, or am I wrong, they even gained in the Senate, so it's gonna be the same-old same-old all over again: Compromising Barry Obama vs. the Uncompromising Backwards Thinking Repugnicans.

Check out the red states that gave the Mitt Man as many votes as he got...I mean, ironically, he won more states than Obama...but look at those states.  Those are the most backward states in the union.  We could do without them.  In fact, we'd come off even safer were they all to secede from the union.  Mississippi-God-Damn, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Gawjah (what a revolting state Gawjah is), old Kaintuck, the top half of Florida, North Carolina...let 'em secede and form a Rightwing/Teabagger/Ayn Rand Nation and just see how long before they'd be begging to come back into the union.  Check out those Romney strongholds and see that the majority of those states make up an area that has been referred to forever as the Bible Belt.  Backward Thinking anti-progressive states.  Hellfire, that idiot Paul Ryan didn't even carry his own state, which surprised me since I think Wisconsin has slipped more backwards lately that forward.

Did anyone notice that the commercial-pap television did not mention how many votes Dr. Jill Stein or Rocky Anderson got?  Sure, they hadn't a chance in Hades of winning, but at least it would have been interesting to see how many left-leaning wingdingers there are left in this country.

So here we go onward into continuing wars and continuing with withering rights and homeland spying and drones flying over us all and continuing to kill millions of men, women, and children all around the world, and supporting 150 military bases all around the world, and continuing to send US jobs and manufacturing to those nations where there's cheap (in most instances child labor) labor, and continuing to allow the Federal Reserve to pass out money by the bales to our gloriously crooked too-big-to-fail financial institutions and pirate banks--did you notice that Obama almost won in North Carolina where the headquarters for our biggest and most crooked banks are?  The Mitt Man pulled it out at the last minute.  So there goes Bishop Romney and Nutjob Paul Ryan off into history, to be on the same junk pile now as John "Failed Mission" McCain and Sarah "Pale Face" Palin...but don't worry, the Teabaggers and the Repugnicans will still be able to bring us more and more misery and our economy will continue to tank and we'll continue to lose jobs and we'll continue to lose our homes, our lands, our chances at "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."  And watch out!  Guys with arsenals of weapons will continue to surprise us with killing sprees, the latest out in California...especially now after Barry "the Black anti-Christ" Obama was reelected by We the Heathen People of the USA.

thegrowlingdoomsayerwolf
for The Daily (Downhill) Growler

Existing in Chaotic New York City: With the Power Off

Foto by tgw, New York City, November 2012
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PLEASE NOTE, A COMMENTER HAS SAID THE FOLLOWING SCARE ABOUT THE EARTH PASSING THROUGH THE MILKY WAY'S "DARK RIFT" IS A HOAX...HOWEVER, IT'S A CLEVER HOAX THAT WE HERE AT THE DAILY GROWLER LIKE VERY MUCH (WE LOVE DOOMSAYERS)...WE MEAN IT'S CRUDELY WRITTEN, LIKE IT'S WRITTEN BY A NON-ENGLISH-SPEAKING PERSON...HOWEVER, THE PART ABOUT THE SOLAR STORMS COMING IS NOT A HOAX, ACC. TO NASA. See: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/06/solar-storms/ferris-text 

We consider Mitt "the Mormon" Romney and Paul Ryan a HOAX; yet, hey those two phonies are getting millions of Yahoo votes, winning in most of the racist/backward states!
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Some Scary Shit From http://www.solarstormwarning.com/
We have a very alarming update and are still working to have more details ASAP. News that even has the full attention of the National Academy of Sciences along with NASA and other world scientist are quite concerned as they are not sure just what to expect, if they do, they are not talking.  Simply said... the earth will soon start to cross through the absolute center of the dark rift of the Milky Way "plane" which is (not to be confused with the center of the Milky Galaxy Way itself) around 12.21.12. The rift is dark because it's littered with lots of space debris that consists of stationary rocks and boulders, even asteroids, and some objects which are planet size. This "dark rift" is the galactic gravitational plane of the Milky Way which traps all of this space debris. As the Earth passes through this plane, we may very well see a meteorite storm producing thousands of rocks that come raining out of the sky with hundreds, possibly thousands of meteorites making it all the way to the ground. We will just have to see what really happens. Keep in mind that countries around the world have long since built massive deep underground survival bunkers for 2012 and beyond. See Milky Way photo above.

   Additionally, solar scientist are concerned that this gravitational plane (that is the backbone to the Milky Way's dark rift) may send the sun on a rampage which sets off powerful x-class solar storms and CMEs. (coronal mass ejections)  It's these x-class storms that have the ability to generate an EMP event (electromagnetic pulse) like the one that hit the Earth in 1859. Once that happens again with today's technological world of electronics, the United States will go dark in about three minutes or less, along with the rest of the world.

   Food trucks will no longer be able to supply stores with food, cell phones and computers will no longer work, and without power from the grid most factories will no longer work. Within three days or so, what food that's in your local store will be gone. Since most cars and trucks today require electronic ignition to work, most likely most vehicles will not work, however non-electric trains most likely would continue to work.

   It's estimated that it will take at least six months to repair the grid. But the National Academy of Sciences estimates it will be closer to five years to repair it all. However populations in third world countries are use to growing their own food and should survive such an event much easier.
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Say Goodbye to: Elliott Carter.  I had the pleasure of attending, with thedailygrowlerhousepianist, Mr. Carter's 95th birthday party, where we sat up front with the old maestro right down the row and listened to a concert of his latest compositions...I did like his Cello Concerto and some of his earlier works, but he got a little too minimalist for me in his later years...besides he was an early admirer and "friend" of my hero Charles Ives but later turned on Charles writing some very critical articles against him and that turned me off Elliott, though I think he later rescinded a lot of his vindictive criticism...anyway, he lived 103 years...think of that!  Elliott Carter, 103, American composer, natural causes.

Say Goodbye to: Ted Curson, jazz trumpeter, a mild-mannered cat who I first heard playing with Archie Shepp over at the Tin Palace on the Bowery in NYC way back when.  Ted was also composer of "Tears for Dolphy," a tribute to the great Eric Dolphy. Ted Curson, 77, American jazz trumpeter, heart attack.
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Lies 
Those who know me know I'm neither a big fan of either major candidate running for the presidency.  But today, Sunday, Nov. 4th, on NYC teevee I saw two anti-Obama ads put out by the American Cross Roads and a bunch of goons who call themselves Return Our Future (sic)...I think these are ads who have behind them two of the most despicable characters in our crooked politics, Karl Rove and Ralph Reed, both lyin' sons of bitches whose shenanigans should have landed them both in jail years ago.  Both of these ads blamed our current economic situation on President Obama.  Unka Dick Cheney and that worthless piece of Bush shit, G.W. Bush, must be laughing their asses off when they see these ads.  And old Mitt "The Mormon Bishop" Romney must call both Karl and Ralph up and tell them he's gonna give them important jobs in his presidency.  Like I said, I'm not a fan of Obama's, but to blame this economic crisis on him is a big fat lie.  Now, if you blamed Obama for continuing G.W. Bush's ruinous policies, you've got him there, but then you'd have to blame Reaganomics and G.W. Bush's ass-kissing of the Neo-Cons and their purposely bringing the economy down and tanking the dollar and neither Karl or the Cocksucking (Koch) Brothers or Ralphie Boy "Mr. Christian" Reed would dare do that.  Remember the whole idea of successful Capitalism is CHEAP LABOR...and the cheapest labor there is is SLAVERY.
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Sittin' Here Thinkin'  
Right down Broadway from me, people of all ilks are trapped in their high-priced apartments and condos with no electricity, no water, no food, no nothing.  Some are having to go up and down 20 to 30 stories in order to get out and do business and then get back home.  Con-Ed, New York City's high-priced deliverer of electricity is taking its merry time about restoring power to the parts of New York City that have been without power now for 6 days...and tempers are flaring and all of these powerless people just don't understand...what the hell's going on? [Power is finally back on in the Lower East Side and the Village as of Nov. 4.]


We are so god-damn dependent of electricity.  We rely on electricity for survival.  When it is taken away from us, we are like fish out of water.  We forget that historically speaking it wasn't that many years ago that nobody had electricity.

Besides electricity, those of us who can afford cars are totally dependent on gasoline.  And when the gasoline runs out, we wait in long lines at those filling stations we find open, desperate for whatever amount the now all-powerful filling station owner will allow us to buy...at pumped up prices, too, that I guarantee you.  Again, it hasn't been that historically long ago when there were no automobiles.  There was no oil or gasoline.  It was so little time ago that we still rank our cars by horsepower.

I was lucky (though of course there's no such thing as luck), Sandy didn't put a curse on my neighborhood.  My neighborhood didn't even get any rain.  My neighborhood experienced no high winds.  My neighborhood had no power outages.  Even the subway lines in my neighborhood weren't flooded and their power cut.  And yet, right up the street from me on the East Side, Bellevue Hospital was put out of business via a loss of power and by flooding from the East River, on which Bellevue has sat since the 1700s.  Bellevue had to evacuate over 500 patients to other hospitals due to their power being cut and then their back-up generators failing and the first floor and all the basement floors flooding.

Way up in the Bronx, far from the surging sea levels, my relatives lost their electricity for 5 days.  And above them in out-of-the-way Westchester County, several hundred thousand people suffered power outages.  These are all in Con-Ed (for Consolidated Edison, the power company founded by old Tom Edison himself) territory, to which customers pay the highest electrical and gas rates in the USA.

According to the doomsayers, events like Sandy are now a part of our everyday lives.  According to these seers, New York City better get used to these yearly hurricane events.  Plus, we've got to now start worrying about the effects the coming solar storms are going to have on us.  The doomsayers say these solar storms will wreak more havoc that 1000 Sandys.  One thousand Sandys since these solar storms will wipe out all of our electrical grids and leave millions of us without power, without water, without food, without hope.

Ain't Chaos grand?  I love these Chaotic times; I mean they're fodder for my grist mill.  I thrive on ironies.  Ironies make me happy.  All during Sandy I sat pompously gulping down the many ironies going on around my safe ass.  EXCEPT, and I love exceptions, too, since I'm a Bellevue Hospital outpatient, a heart patient, and Bellevue is still out of business, I may be fucked big time.  Like already two of my most important meds have run out leaving me vulnerable to another heart attack and a stroke, good stuff like that.  Besides, worse than anything, I'm a procrastinator.  "I'll take me chances" is my motto during grave times.  And isn't it ironic that we use the word grave in such a grave-bound sense?

Tuesday is election day and I'm wondering how many people are actually going to traipse out to vote around here?  The choice is ironic: do we want Mitt "the Mormon Bishop" Romney to lead us into the Mormon Empire--will he move the capitol to Salt Lake City?  Of course it might be kind of interesting if he legalizes polygamy to have five wives and 31 children like Mitt's old Mormon grandpappy  The Mormons do believe that their God (from the planet KooKoo) took this land away from the savages in order to set up his kingdom here--old inebriated Joe Smith even put the American Constitution in the Book of the Mormon.  Our White forefathers were Mormons.  Did you know that?

Or we can vote for the International American, President Barack Obama, once known as Barry Obama, the poor little half White boy who explained to his Hawaiian schoolmates that he was royalty in Indonesia and Kenya.  And perhaps Obama is just that, a royalist.

Whichever one of these inept men We the People elect, they will continue on the policies of the Bushes, especially the chaotic path hacked out by Unka Dick Cheney who had the long arm of his law up Georgie Porgie Bush's ass working that dumbass's mouth.   That little spoiled brat prick who got us into two unnecessary wars that sunk us into this economic crisis and yet he goes about life now having a grand old time, a true dumbass American who went AWOL from the U.S. Army and got away with it 'cause his old worthless daddy...oh, God-damn, how my blood pressure soars when I think of G.W. Bush walking about free as a god-damn privileged bird...the bastard!  Yet, President Obama said G.W. was not a bad guy, very personable...hell, he was so impressed with him that he made G.W. and the man who has his hand up Obama's ass, Slick Willie "I Like to Cheat on Hillary With Ugly Broads" Clinton co-administrators of Haiti...and look what a splendid job those two jokers did with Haiti--by the way, whatever happened to all those billions We the People gave to rebuild Haiti?  Last I saw, Haitians were still living in makeshift tent cities, starving to death, in need of medical aid...shit, it's all so god-damn wrong.

While watching the Oklahoma State-Kansas State football game Saturday, I thought it quiet interesting how Oklahoma State was bragging big time about how it had played a significant role in the development of unmanned aircraft, i.e., drones.

By the bye, I've just started reading the first novel, Burr, in the series of Gore Vidal's revisionist history novels (Burr, Lincoln, 1876, The Golden Age, and Hollywood) and I'm enjoying the Holy Hell out of it.  Vidal is my kind of writer; brilliant; revealing...quite a writer...I miss the crusty old dude.

thegrowlingwolf 
for The Daily Growler

The Daily Growler recommends you vote for Dr. Jill Stein for President--OK, so she hasn't got a snowball-in-hell's chance of winning, she's still the best candidate--I mean she's been arrested for trying to get into the phony presidential debates and she just recently got arrested again down in Texas for protesting with the Texans against the Keystone oil pipeline that Obama has approved to rip through the pristine forest lands of Texas in order to get that dirty oil down to the big Texas oil refineries.