MAYDAY MAYDAY

"The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue." OSCAR LEVANT

aloha,
DRILL BABY DRILL?
i see NO UPSIDE in the Deepwater Horizon (sic) oil spill. are we so stupid it takes another MONSTER OIL SPILL ACROSS 4 STATES to remind us that OFF SHORE DRILLING IS A BAD IDEA? i thot O BOMBER was supposed to be THE SMART ONE (despite AFGHANISTAN).

SINK BABY SINKING
my state rep. BILL MONNING gave a talk to the grassroots recently....if you neglect to feed and water a garden it withers and soon dies, ditto with the public welfare and safety nets.so despite the smiles, bells & whistles and GOV. SCWARTXZENPOUTER embracing OBAMACARE KALIpornia is still in deep deep doo doo.we are worse than broke we are bleeding cash reserves and drowning in debt and the GOP grins like Chesire cats belonging to GROVER NORQUIST.

SPEAKING OF THE GOP

STEVE POIZNER is running against MEG "MONEYBAGS" WHITMAN for the GOP nomination for Governor, this is fascinating as the two attempt to paint each other and Scwartzenpouter as the dread LIBERAL .huge huge sigh
apparently there is NOTHING THAT CAN'T BE SOLVED WITH MORE TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH ( and corresponding cuts for lifelines to the poor...
DEPRESSIONS? tax cuts.
RECESSIONS? tax cuts
BANK BAILOUTS? tax cuts
FORECLOSURE CRISIS? tax cuts
10+MILLION JOBLESS? tax cuts
KALIpornia WILDFIRES? tax cuts
KATRINA FLOODING? tax cuts
END TIMES? tax cuts
ASTEROIDS? tax cuts
ANAL LEAKAGE? tax cuts

you get the idea.
THE FACT THIS HAS NEVER WORKED AND THAT THE "FREE MARKET" AIN'T FREE...irrelevant????
the GOP is Not a Political Party IT IS A FAITH BASED BELIEF SYSTEM OF THE RICH & SUPER RICH...next time Rep.John TAN MAN Boner or Sen.Mitch McChinless gobble gobbles in response to some reasonable action, say like curbing Wall Street excesses which nearly took our country down, think of them as lunatic heretics.

BTW
you may have noticed the brevity of recent blogs, the knee buckling lassitude and weakness of my January ANEMIA has returned in full force,stil awaiting a daignosis, who said WE HAVE THE BEST MEDICAL SYSTEM IN THE WORLD? oh right, the GOP despite overwhelming evidnecE elsewhere. SIGH...

MINISTRY OF ODDITIES
namaste y'all
mega

RATS 4 LIFE

To an obnoxious acquaintace
"I'm going to memorize your name and throw my head away." OSCAR LEVANT

aloha,
i am a pessimist, this is a given.
saw TERMINATOR*SALVATION on cable last night.
i am NOT A FAN of a future where humans live like rats, maybe because i fear it will ultimately come true, THE ROAD WARRIOR,SOYLENT GREEN, RESIDENT EVIL* EXTINCTION (which i actually liked,BIG MILLA JAVOVICH FAN).
my FAVE SCI FI MOVIES-BLADE RUNNER & THE FIFTH ELEMENT, the original russian version of SOLARIS.. a grungy chaotic but survivable future.BLADE RUNNER seems esp. prophetic now with Climate Change and CORPORATE PERSONHOOD.

BTW rats,spiders and cockroaches can survive almost any nuclear radiation.THE ROAD ROACH? RAT RUNNER??

coming from nyc i see a future a lot like nyc or tokyo only more crowded and futile, this is based on 62 years of an emotionally scarred lifetime.the promises of a clean tidy RATIONAL FUTURE have not come true, instead we have Enron,Lehmman Bros and THE GREAT RECESSION huge huge sigh..

i remember a button from the 60s WE ARE ALL DOOMED, THE WORLD WILL NOT END TOMORROW!
amen to that.

MINISTRY OF TRUTH
namaste y'all
mega

GOT ANGRY?

warning...BAD LANGUAGE & IDEAS AHEAD...

The Middle Class Game Is Up: We're Heading to a Slave Labor Planet
Thanks to globalization, the American, Australian and European promises of middle-class prosperity are on their way to extinction.

April 22, 2010 |


Class solidarity was such a good idea. It really was. Obviously, most of the people who need solidarity are in the world's laboring classes. After all, the rich have more than enough solidarity already, as was recently demonstrated by their successful execution of the greatest global financial heist in history. Oh sure, we'll see some state sponsored mock show trials of a few of them -- they always throw a few of their own out of the sleigh to the wolves during their escapes. The big heist was big news. Working Americans will be applying Preparation H to their keisters for a long time to come.
But the ultimate accomplishment of the already rich, the newly rich and the corporate rich, has been their global solidarity on the corporate/financial front. It's been a long run up to globalism, but the rich have great patience. As an American, all my life I've heard their chief mouthpiece, the president of the United States, beginning with Eisenhower, right on up through Kennedy, Reagan, Ford, Carter and Bush, and now Obama, sing the same song. Which goes moreover like this:

"Trade is the road to peace. Commerce and business know no national boundaries. They link nations together on productivity, creating jobs and peace across the world."

It sounded good at the time. Who would have thought that the people enjoying all this harmony and peace brought about through globalization would be enjoying it in a one big happy planetary work gulag? And if they are not doing so at the moment, they will be as soon global capitalism, under the watchful solidarity of the rich, bears full fruit.

Thanks to globalization, the American, Australian and European working classes are on their way to extinction, in terms of their traditional rights, and quality of life. Just like the workers being poisoned to death by circuit board toxins in Guiyu, China, their fates will be determined by global capital, either by default or by bitter struggle against it. We are not seeing much of the latter and are not likely to, until it is too late, which it may already be. After all, you cannot put up much of a struggle against global capital when you worship it a creed and are addicted to commodities too.

Oh yeah, I forgot. We're gonna "develop" and "stimulus" our way out of what is happening now -- which is that we are fast becoming a slave labor workhouse planet. Now let me see here -- hmmm -- who is in charge of development? Oh yeah, the global financiers.

There is no way the world's working people can win in the long run, which is getting pretty damned short, or even survive, except by joining the worker struggles, of China, Asia and Africa and India. The idea that American workers are the same as the Asian and Latin American and African working people goes down hard in American gullets.

But for Americans, it does not go down at all. As a people, they'll never ever accept that fact, because they'll never know it for at least two reasons. (1) They are too over worked and undereducated to find out for themselves, and (2) American corporate media machinery will never let them hear of it. Americans are screwed, blued and tattooed.

And for that I blame Anderson Cooper. That's right, CNN's boyishly good looking, sincere faced, Emmy Award winning Anderson Cooper. Let me explain.

Between the corporate and financial elites and the slobbering masses stands the American Information Class -- the reporters, talking heads, news anchors and pundits. In short, the entire gaggle of meat puppets and journalism hacks who have been cultivated and bred to be clueless by the university industry and others serving our corporate empire. In other words, serving global capitalism, and the national fictions it maintains, including that sizable piece of corporate feudal turf known as America. And that fiction is maintained through la danse des marionnettes de viande.

Not that these meat puppets are to be pitied for their cluelessness. Lordy no! When your employer is throwing celebrity and money at you faster than you can suck up the adulation or blow the bucks, why would anybody pause long enough to get a clue. I sure as hell wouldn't. I'd pull a Bill Clinton, buy me some Cuban cigars and tell the secretary, "Under the desk, baby! And crack open a bottle of Jack Daniels for me on your way down."

It's certainly an easy gig. Move your lips like a reporter, wear a black shirt and a $600 bush jacket in disaster and war porn spots as Anderson Cooper does, and make at least 4 million a year base salary (plus a few hundred thousand more a year in speakers fees for canned talks. Cooper's agency will provide the list). Anderson's basic message is that the world is a horrific place filled with miserable inferior lives, ridden by want, African machete amputations and the like. The guy in front of the flat screen in Cedar Rapids, Iowa doesn't even have to stop and think to draw the corpo-state approved conclusion Anderson delivers. It's instantaneous into his deep reptilian brain: "Hatians fucked. Iraqis fucked. Greeks fucked. Me live in best place of all."

Attractive, serious and sincere looking, and presented as calm and rational against the backdrop of world terror and misery, Anderson is the perfect robotic mouthpiece, easy on the eyes, poised in the "Anderson Cooper suit," (actually, it's Ralph Lauren, the gay aesthetic goes a long way in his business). And most importantly, despite what he's seen first hand, he remains clueless about the world. Bullet proof to reality. Robot. Then again, that's a job qualification in the entertainment business. American news is first and foremost entertainment. If you happen to stumble onto some accidental truth, be assured there will be a correction in the name of Republican sponsored "fairness and balance in media."

Now this may be a stretch for some more open minded readers, but to my mind, anyone such as Cooper, who actually believes he is worth 4 million, and can put it in the bank without dying of shame, has no idea what's going on in this world -- no matter how much he or she is paid to look like they do. In fact, anyone doing so for over $50,000 is in the same category. Which includes everyone you see on your television screen. It's all just self-absorbed celebrity preening. At the local level the rubes watch you on Keokuk Cable. At the national level, an indoctrinated people read Vanity Fair's writers going down on you, telling you what a brave and saintly journalist you are. And the internet dedicating hundreds of thousands of words to your choice in suits.

There is no way out of our culture manufacturing machinery. We're not in charge. It would be bigger than any one of us because it consists of all of us. It tells us all we are individuals supremely worthy of our silliest notions and desires, thereby making us soft and lazy, infantilized an incapable of truly effective solidarity as a people. Instead, we are fed Tea Party drivel. Even if CNN decided to send Coop to Guiyu to cover the blood poisoned worker women with the deformed children, the result would be the same. The guy in Cedar Rapids would see further proof that "Me live in best place in world. Got Cheetos." Or perhaps a nice Cotes du Rhône if you are a member of the commodity drugged educated faux middle class.

And I wanna say to them: "Not for much longer, buddy. Not much longer. And you can thank Anderson Cooper and a helluva lot of other people like him who do not have a clue, but nevertheless inhabit your very mind, for that."

Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), about working class America. A complete archive of his on-line work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his website .


------ End of Forwarded Message

ON MADNESS

"The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man." NIETZSCHE, agreed.

aloha,
cnn reports that BLACK PEOPLE ARE TWICE AS LIKELY TO GET ALZHEIMERS (sp?)
huge huge sigh.hope you guys will keep me posted when i fall off the edge?
put up a link to my FACEBOOK page yesterday, maybe all these weird peeps trying to FRIEND ME will stop and read something.naw,probably not...

SOUL MATE reports that SHE WAS THE ORIGINAL TEA BAGGER! being arrested at SF STATE for ASSUALT WITH A TEA BAG (no lie) at a demonstration there back in the 60s.

i was going to talk about NERVOUS BREAKDOWNS TODAY, maybe not.
now they call them MAJOR DEPRESSIVE EPISODES (sic) it means your whole world turns to sh*t and you want to kill yourself.hmm, maybe the suicide part is optional...unlike MY EX-THE MIRAGE & youngest son M... i am NOT BIPOLAR, i tend to be on a spectrum of Depression like my eldest Z Man. had my first Nervous Breakdown at 16 when i was prematurely (& IMHO immaturely) graduated from high school (DeWitt Clinton nyc in 1964) and my last in 1991 after being released from the Kaiser ICU with a diabetes diagnosis.
what was my point in writing this? MY EX-THE MIRAGE has several books linking mania and artistry whereas i am more on the darker Ambrose Bierce- Edgar Allen Poe variety.

this does not mean i am incapable of happiness..i just tend to see the glass as half empty,dirty and cracked. think of me as one of THE ADDAMS FAMILY'S darker relations.
speaking of which, one of my fave movie moment is when Wednesday (Christina Ricci) hooks up Pugsley to an electric chair and he asks WHAT GAME ARE WE PLAYING? and she deadpans IS THERE A GOD?

i have wrestled with the concept of God(s) my entire Life, oddly enough it was LSD and ZEN BUDDHISM which gave me the answers i had been seeking ( find your own, i am not a priest. scratch that, legally I AM A PRIEST WITH THE UNIVERSAL LIFE CHURCH and have been since the 70s,damn.) so FIND YOUR OWN PATH thru the Madness which is our society.TRY NOT TO LOSE YOUR HEART OR THE INTEGRITY OF YOUR SOUL and if you can find a SOUL MATE to walk the Path with you, so much the better.

BTW
probably not a good time to bring this up with EDUCATION being gutted like an overripe fish but WHY DO THEY NOT TEACH US ABOUT LOVE??? Sex Education ( if still taught) teaches how to screw but not who, or why. one of the most important things in our existence (besides DEATH) and we left to TRAIL & ERROR..heartbreaking and wasteful i think.if you are an ADA- ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS and your home life sucked ,blossoming with violence,boozing,stunted emotions and terror how exactly are we supposed to grow up to be "productive consumers"?
i sit here in comfy middle class lifestyle in a nice locale but i could just as well be somebody's "bitch" in some cramped KALIpornia prison cell.some of it was luck but most of it was realizing there was a PATH and finding my way onto it.

MADNESS IS A MIRROR TO/ON REALITY? who is to say their interpretation is not wiser than ours? looking at schizophrenia (Wolf Girl et al) i have often wondered if we stigmatize some different drummer peeps who make us uncomfortable, uneasy or feel too different or vulnerable.
DON'T TELL ANYBODY THIS OK? with the whole parallel ( mirror) universe theory (see FRINGE or Vedic mythos first concepts)..when you return from an extended LSD TRIP there is always the nagging suspicion that the universe you return to is NOT EXACTLY LIKE the one you left behind. maybe cups or colors are slightly askew or the rules of physics bent ...IS THIS MADNESS OR SOMETHING ELSE???? SIGHS

this is not the blog i set out to write, maybe it is better?
it looks like i have bleeding ulcers and one of the fx is unusual weakness & fatigue. i have to wait until my med appt in late May to get a ribbon tied around this possible diagnosis.

BTW 2 hope to see GHOST WRITER soon, a friend recommends.will tell you what i think.

MINISTRY OF TRUTH
namaste y'all
semper gumby
mega
megalith
stonehenge

MADNESS

Patriotism is as fierce as a fever,
pitiless as the grave,blind as a stone,
and irrational as a headless man.
--Ambrose Bierce

aloha,
yes G MAN i am also weaning myself off KEITH O. & RACHEL M. i look around at the DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE and it's like watching a slo mo car crash where your loved ones are involved. i feel both helpless and totally exhausted.O BOMBER alone can't solve this irrevocably broken government..sigh& cry.
making flippant fun of the dry rot in the system does not seem like enough, even here in "PARADISE" the local pols accept the death of many as the cost of doing business & systemic budget cuts. we are indeed worth-less than others...

K PAX
one of the best performances Kevin Spacey has ever done, which is high priase indeed.not your typical mental health movie...it is quietly wonderful.

GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
speaking of atypical.on Charlie Rose the director was joking that people should see the Original before the american remake, why would he say that?

all thru the movie i kept thinking what would be deleted,edited out or blunted for the american market HUGE HUGE SIGH. this is a stunning & fierce movie and the female star NOOMI RAPACE is magnetic.this is a movie to savor, full of unexpected depths and treasures. please get the DVD if it is not playing in your market, okay? BTW ROGER EBERT has hinted the main character has ASPERGERS, which i saw esp. when she turns off the car radio without asking, a favorite of my son who did not fully understand the concept of rudeness.

it's SOUL MATE'S turn to have her back go out so we are awaiting the chiropractors call...

MINISTRY OF TRUTH
namaste y'all
mega

KICK ASS V. VANNA WHITE

"If you can't say anything good about someone,sit right here by me." ALICE ROOSEVELT LONGWORTH, they said terribile things about FDR too...

aloha,
apparently one cannot be NEUTRAL about the movie KICK ASS.CNN/HLN was trying to gin up controversy over HIT GIRL and her tween profanity while teasing about NEO NAZI VIOLENCE IN L.A. yesterday. hypocrisy much?
unlike most of these dweebs i have seen the movie and i have seen real violence and been in real fights, i am not some squishy couch potato pacifist. i thot of getting a small PEACE SYMBOL tattoo on my forearm once and SOUL MATE commented that i was the least peaceful man she knew, a comment echoed by an ex wife of the fx series JUSTIFIED,which i love!

one of the feminist pundits declared that Hit Girl is OUT OF THE FEMALE BOX, which means she is NOT DECORATIVE like Vanna White (now 53) or Megan Fox or anybody else whose screen time is directly proportional to her cup size (exc. Jennifer Connelly and a few others with real talent). blax, gimps,gays and women have a common interest in TRUE EQUALITY and it breaks my heart to see a BBC series on beauty contests for female crips, we should demand more than that sigh.... AN INNER BEAUTY CONTEST?

HIT GIRL IS MOVIE VIOLENCE whereas the much touted tv friendly TEA BAG MOVEMENT (oooh, that sounds SO dirty) is threatening much greater ACTUAL VIOLENCE using much the same obscenities as the tiny vigilante.no where in the movie are congressmen threatened,spit on, call fag and niggah while the cops stands around debating their FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS...huge sigh. i am 62 years old and have seen and eaten a load of sh*t in my life but this modern world is offal (pun).

and another thing, NYT polls show these TEA BAG PARTYERS to be better educated and more well off then most os america, so what have they got to be mad about? they claim O BOMBER is doing "too much for poor people" . OMFG, really? since when? the BANK BAILOUTS, the castration of all CONSUMER PROTECTION LEGISLATION? PANDERING TO GOP SCUMBAGS? financing NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS? givng a HUGE gift of mandatory HEALTH INSURANCE to the corporations? fighting two very expensive and unwinnable wars?
fascist/socialist/communist yeah right?

BTW most POOR PEOPLE IN THE US ARE WHITE...so far.and yes i know its a CODE WORD for breeding like bunnys brown people.

'WE WANT OUR COUNTRY BACK!" wtf does that really mean? THE ELITES have owned and run this country since Day One. you cannot decry WALL STREET bailouts while demanding the status quo, IT IS CRAZY & ILLOGICAL....MAIN STREET is Vanna White to Wall Street's Pat Sejak- except Sejak does not make the rules, determine the prizes or rig the WHEEL OF FORTUNE.(nice segue eh?)

JOBS HAVE NOT COME BACK AND THERE ARE 10,000 LOOMING FORECLOSURES IN SANTA CRUZ ALONE, i think 6 million nationwide and O BOMBER'S PLEAS for "voluntary bank negotiations" have fallen on deaf ears, cnn had some appalling graphic earlier this week which i forgot to write down.
i gotta go see GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.'bye

MINISTRY OF TRUTH
namaste y'all
mega

WORDS B SALAD

1. SARAH PALIN HAS MADE OVER $12 MILLION SINCE RESIGNING HER GOVERNESS-SHIP...
"I'm gonna vomit." Lindsay Lohan (poly addictive miscreant& starlet)- yeah, me too.

aloha,
went to see "KICK ASS" this morning, I LOVED THIS MOVIE.
if you are not a fan of graphic violence, dark dark humor and foul mouthed tweens you should avoid this movie.DADDY'S LIL GIRL is a butt kicking crime fighter and THE LOVE INTEREST volunteers at a Needle Exchange, is not homophobic and can take care of herself physically ( plus has a healthy sex appetite).gets me in the Mood for IRON MAN 2 and whatever else looms.

BTW GOOD NEWS?
NEVER MIX LIDOCAINE,VERSED AND FENTANYL it's like a MEDICAL ROOFIE.i have HUGE GAPS in my memory for over 20 hours after the proccedure..ysterday SOUL MATE reminded me of a coinveration i am totally BLANK on.
1. no surgery needed
2.no sign of CANCER huge huge sigh.
3. meds should ease my symptoms -possible bleeding ulcer tho, bland foods forever?
4.i should be more relieved but i am still a medical mess with weakness and fatigue shackling any efforts. luckily my fingers still sorta work with enuff bee pollen.

i am bogarting my stockpile of half priced Easter chocolates YUM!

namaste y'all
yours from beneath
MINISTRY OF TRUTH
mega