Juan Cole more than ever

Nice dissection of Black Ops/propaganda preview show on Iran.

The New New Mexico and its Fence

The only thing keeping us from achieving our dreams is reality. And the fence between the two.

The REAL Steroids

Alcohol.

LIBloggers with good taste and bad taste

It really isn't possible to have more time on my hands than I do presently, but even so, I don't think I would have time to do what I think somebody should do, and that is compile a list of the political bloggers that have good taste and those with just awful taste.

But that would be a pointless, tasteless endeavor.

I would like to elaborate on my ideas about taste. I know my ideas and musings upon the nature of reality have stonecold knocked the blogosphere on its collective ass. Thhhhhop! There are a few things that I know deep inside of me, even though I mask most of it with perpetually spewing hose of horse and bullshit. But even if I can't exactly articulate it, I know about good and bad taste as much as reality. As anyone. Some may deem these areas either subjective, or only the areas that the great philosophers (and those who study them) may delve into. I disagree. But I don't want to speak too soon. You'll just have to wait.

In the meantime, I give you an inspiring Lisa Simpson quote:
"Come on Bart: In your pre-Fascist days you knew the giddy thrill of futile revolution."

The Seamier side of Star Wars

My favorite is the bit about his girlfriend.

Up"date": Worlds within worlds.

A question I pose to The Ununified Cosmos

When can I see THIS.

Stolen Elections: Past, Present and Future

Greg Palast was on Democracy Now last night and said that the infamous NSA database is going to be used to steal the next election a la Florida 2000 et Ohio and Florida 2004. It's all outlined in his latest book. I don't understand how it can be in Palast's book because the USA Today article only came out a few weeks ago. But I guess Palast is that good of a reporter.

The Al Gore movie, An Inconvienent Truth is coming out soon. I don't know if it will be coming to Denver.

Speaking of which, if you read this blog and don't know it already, I'll be in New York from May 20th to May 30th. I'll be at the Beer Garden in Queens (As reviewed in this week's New Yorker) Saturday night the 20th and Friday afternoon/evening the 26th. If you read this blog and already knew that, well, good. If you don't read this blog and already knew that, double good. If you don't read this blog and you don't know that, well, I don't know how to help you.

I just spell checked this post, and the spell checker does not know the word blog.

And we expect computers to tabulate our votes.

The Vandalized Constitution

As I commented on Attaturk's blog, I made my own version of the Vandalized Constitution. Although it was rejected by my 8th grade teacher for its egregiousness, it could not compare to Cheney's.

Dick Cheney's Dream Objects

Maybe reality is all just a dream.

Tuesday is Joke Day at Angry and Sloppy

1st. HI-larious EU jokes.

(a TASTE: In Heaven: the cooks are French,
the policemen are English,
the mechanics are German,
the lovers are Italian,
and the bankers are Swiss.

In Hell: the cooks are English,
the policemen are German,
the mechanics are French,
the lovers are Swiss
and the bankers are Italian. )

2nd. Commie jokes.

3rd. A copy of the letter from Iran!

Funny funny funny!!! I love my yuks!

Fuck'd

Ha ha Hamas!

Signed,
The IMF, the American Israeli Lobby, Neo-cons, liberal commies, etc.

Deconstructing the Hitler Paradigm

Starts with Churchill.

what's all the hullaballoo?

I point my legions of readers to this site--it's just that good. I like the fish post from Tristero, ee-specially.

BTW, I am a big fan of the films of WERNER HERZOG.

CIA RESIGNATION: just for "poker," heh heh

Prostitutilicious!

More at cursor, course.

What DOES Liberal mean? What DOES conservative mean?

Only IDIOT, GENERALIZING NAME-CALLERS care.

The Cult of Sherlock

This is kinda cool:

One of the more wonderful ideas is found in a science fiction story by H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire entitled "The Return," about an isolated community which had maintained a thriving society for two centuries after an atomic war. The heart of the community was the Sacred Books, which told of the eternal conflict between Holmes and Moriarty and tutored them in the use of deductive reasoning.

Lyndon LaRouche was almost right

Hacker discovers the UFO cover-up.

Generic Blog Post

I'm gonna try and cover all the bases with this. I am going to try and cover all the bases with this post. I'm going to try to hit the targets that I see, and bring into focus the ones that are blurry right now. There's an article about a Picasso painting of Dora that is the second highest bid of all time. It's a pretty painting. Last night I read an Ann Beattie story called Taking Ucello home. I didn't know which renaissance painter Ucello was. Made me depressed, after spending a month in Italy, he didn't ring a bell. But I was glad to see that, after a little bit of research, I've seen his work before. He did a famous St George and the Dragon that I have known for a long time.


Art people make me feel stupid. Mainly because I know so much about music, and really, so little about the visual arts. Except for the fact that I've been to a lot of art museums. And love art. Maybe I should write about art because of that fact. But they shouldn't make me feel stupid. Art is as much a game of the gut as a game of the head. Sometimes somebody who isn't really into abstract painting will ask me how they are supposed to enjoy a blank or splotchy canvas. You look at it and you see if it makes you feel something. Same as when you are sitting and listening to music. Or with a piece of literature. Sometimes you'll get hit by it immediately. Sometimes it will hit you days later. I think it is not so important IF it affects you, or how INTENSELY; rather, it is the quality of the effect. I think it is like wine. Any wine will affect you. But some has a natural sweetness or bitterness that transcend the ordinary. I really like the idea of natural sweetness. Even crude oil comes in a prized "sweet" variety. (An Iraqi or Venezuelan vintage, say.) But, really, good coffee or good wine has a natural sweetness that is not the same as having a cane-sugar taste. But this sweetness is just one facet of art. There's also "depth." I am tiptoeing around the idea of "heart," and "soul," because I have always hated these terms. I prefer depth.

(Last night I listened to a lot of music. I mean, I just sat and listened to a billion mp3s. Not a billion, but more than a thousand. I was looking for music that would go well with imagery. It makes you hear music differently. It's weird how a piece of music will sound different to you if you associate it with a images, moving or otherwise.)

I said one day I'd write a post about reality. Well, no time is better than the present. Is life a dream or a reality? Is there no distinction between dream and realitiy? I would say that, morally, we must distinguish between dream and reality. It is very easy to abstract oneself away from reality, labeling perception as subjective and therefore one's experience as a dream; but this does an injustice to all that we hold dear. What do I mean? I mean that there is, undeniably, a REALity. And the phenomenon of dreams and unreliable senses are inextricably a part of this reality. But calling reality a dream is sloppy and dangerous. Especially when you are in a privelaged educational and cultural status. Free citizens of the most powerful country in the planet do not have the luxury of labeling their existance as dream-like. The paper I print things on come from real trees, the computer I type on comes from a real factory in China, the factory emits real toxins, and workers who die on the job in the factory get taken by a real German scientist and get injected with real plastic and are displayed in real museums in the US. This is not very Buddhist of me. But I think that it is this view of life as a dream that leads to atrocity.

If you don't buy that, well, I have another angle. Real life is absolutely mundane compared to dreamlife. Dreams are amazing. They are scary. They hold potential, they are idea generators, they are mysterious, and maybe the only genuine organic mystical experience. Calling life a dream does a disservice to dreams. Life really is nothing like dreams. Sometimes we have lifelike dreams, but dreams are rarely like life. Merrily merrily, dream is but a life. And let its life be discrete from reality.


Where to now? Well, let's inorganically step back to politics. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was reading this book called The New Rulers of the World, by an Australian auther John Pilger. I thought I'd quote the most astounding passage from this great book:

Like Wally MacArthur, Eddie Gilbert is another forgotten name. In the 1930s, Eddie, a fast bowler, was given special permission to play outside the Queensland reserve, in a white team. He took five wickets for sixty-five runs against the West Indies. In 1931, he faced Donald Bradman, the world's greatest batsman, and bowled him for a duck. (P. 190)

AMAZING, huh?! Five wickets for sixty-five runs? Seriously, it was the only incoherant passage in the whole book. I suppose if Pilger was talking about any sport, I'd have no idea what he was talking about, considering my willful ignorance on the subject. Super-seriously, though, Pilger is talking about the extreme marginalization of Aborigines in Australia. The Aborigines have faced prejudice and exclusion to a degree even more extreme than native Americans and Blacks in the US. It is very disturbing.

This leads to the idea of Genocide. There was a PBS show last week about the genocide of Armenians by the Turks. And basically how the Turkish government completely denies everything and anything connected to it. And it seems that the Turkish government wants to distance itself as much from the G-word, than wholesale slaughter of innocent people. I guess because killing isn't necessarily political, just day-to-day business; but if its genocidally motivated, all the sudden the Turks are Evil. I guess because the recognition of the evilness of killing is unavoidable, and, apparently, the act of killing is unavoidable, we have to call certain kinds of killing more evil than others; therefore a relative evil dynamic is established and it follows logically that the more evil parts should therefore be truncated from the body of mankind lest the disease spread. That seems to be the general humanitarian argument about starting wars and executing criminals. I always thought that Return of the Jedi was a great movie, if flawed, for the great drama between the Emperor and Luke at the end: Should Luke use the darkside to kill his evil father? DID Luke use the darkside to kill his father? Or is their understanding of the force limited by their moral paradigm? Perhaps it is much more complex.

I covered some of the ground I wanted to. I feel better even though the world still sucks.

Angry and Sloppy's take on United 93

Been there, done that.

(People: you forget the visceral thrill of a Zucker brother movie on the big screen. Geesh.)

The Incredible Race!

And they say irony is dead.

Tom Waits is AWFUL

There. I said it.

Easy for him to say

I suppose next week he's going to write an article about how it's also not very hard to be a really good singer.

That's Incredible! (Incredible Fascism!)

Okay, so my new year's resolution was to stop calling people fascists. I haven't entirely succeeded yet. But I was watching the Neo-National Socialist Propaganda film The Incredibles and it just sputtered out on me. Probably because the machine that made it was impure, and would have ended up in the scrapheap if it wasn't for our communistic welfare state that propped its shoddy ass up.

Okay, seriously. I was enjoying The Incredibles but then it stopped working. The sounds in the movie were really cool. Right before the digital impurities started encroaching upon the entertainment that I was feeding on I was actually NOT thinking that God I wish I was watching a Werner Herzog or Kurosawa film instead. For a few seconds. And that says a lot. Especially for Neo-National Socialist Propaganda.

Please note that I say Neo-National Socialist, not Fascist! Is there a difference? Only to the fascists!

(Sorry! I swear I'll cut the habit by 2007. But seriously. I don't know how the movie ends, but it kept on saying "If everybody is special, then nobody is special." I liked the part where the big perfect blonde guy kicks the ass of the short dark-haired anemic type--only because. Also, the perfect skin reminded me of no less than the flayed factory workers so elegantly presented at The Body Worlds exhibit.)

The British Tea Party

Was listening to NPR, and according to the Rand Corporation, white Brits are about twice as healthy white United Statesians, ie., heart disease, diabetes, cancer rates etc. The researcher, with a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine, I believe, said there was nothing conclusive. He said he liked that--too often papers have conclusions. It was kind of a strange statement. But what I think he was trying to say was that the descrepancy was an astounding, mysterious find. According to the researcher our obesity levels are much higher, and their drinking levels are much higher. Hmmm. Why do you think the Brits are so much healthier?

Maybe it's because they have real, fresh beer?

And they drinks lots of really good tea?


Oh yeah...maybe that obesity thing has something to do with it too. But what do I look like, a genius?

Pacified by a bagel

But I still feel really bad about the tea kettle. And this is why. Okay, so I'm living with my mother right now. It's not easy for either of us. It's not hard, either. But let's say our sense of aesthetics cross paths here and there. I have this problem with ruining pots. What happens is I put something on for boil and I forget about it because I'm on the internet or playing a video game or watching a movie and the all the liquid boils away and marks up the pot in question. I did this last week a sauce pan. It wasn't much of a burn stain, but it was irreversible. Mom gets home and she's upset about it. Why? Well, the sauce pan in question was something that her grandpa had given her; the namesake of my brand spankin' new nephew, incidentally. I told her, well, you know there's such a thing called entropy. But that didn't fly with her. And now I've ruined her teapot and she's gonna come home. See this is bad, because she wasn't REALLY upset about the saucepan, even though it was one of the last remaining noumenal objects from her long gone grandfather, but she did tell me that I need to be more mindful about things. It's true. I live in my head and I treat a lot of my stuff like crap. And here I am, treating all of her stuff like crap too. So a few days later I set the tea kettle out and I don't put much water in it because I don't want to drink a huge cup of tea and then I forget about it and the whole kettle turns brown and stained. It's kind of beautiful. That will be my spin when she gets home. Look how beautiful your boring old tea kettle looks, mom.

See, this isn't working. I did need to write about this. But the blog format isn't clicking with me.

Hm. Well, once I find my camera I'll post some pictures up of the tea kettle.

History, tragedy, farce, armageddon...

Atrios goes over the basics again.

Also, I hope you got to see Colbert spit on the press corps and the president at the same time. It was awesome. A more recent Crooks and Liars post quotes Billmon: "Colbert's routine was designed to draw blood -- as good political satire should."

And, once again, ma, sorry about the tea kettle. I'll buy you a new one as soon as I have some dough. Which might be months from now. But it'll happen. You'll see a tea kettle the likes of which you've never seen before in your life.

History, tragedy, farce, armageddon...

Atrios goes over the basics again.

Also, I hope you got to see Colbert spit on the press corps and the president at the same time. It was awesome. A more recent Crooks and Liars post quotes Billmon: "Colbert's routine was designed to draw blood -- as good political satire should."

And, once again, ma, sorry about the tea kettle. I'll buy you a new one as soon as I have some dough. Which might be months from now. But it'll happen. You'll see a tea kettle the likes of which you've never seen before in your life.

Big Changes for Angry and Sloppy

I might be changing some things up in the future for A&S. I haven't been feeling very ranty lately, but I feel like I need to get some real writing done. I might start just doing writing on the blog because I can't seem to get it done anywhere else anyways. I don't know. We'll see. I'm sort of just thinking out loud, which is what this blog was basically intended for when I first started it.

Goddamn it. I just burned my mom's tea kettle. She's gonna kill me.