The Occupation

continues.  I held a sign for three hours today, at this corner.

The vast majority of drivers honked, waved, raised a fist or flashed a peace sign.  A pretty woman in a black truck dropped off a tureen of soup and hugged the sign holders before the light changed.  She pulled away, closing the door behind her and blowing kisses.  One of her bumper stickers read: Should You Trust the Government?  Ask a Native American. 

There was the occasional stony faced driver, staring straight ahead, afraid to look, of what they might see, and of course a few middle fingers flying high, and one loon who kept circling 'round and calling us "Obama's useful idiots."  

Then, out of nowhere, Terry Sherven plugged in a guitar and sang Can You Hear? (video from YouTube as I can't get blogger to upload the video I shot on the street in Quicktime):

He's hitting Western state Occupy movements, and the tune could well become a rallying cry.

If you haven't dropped in on your local gathering, I encourage you to do so.  If you can't stay long (most of the occupiers are the long term un-and-under-employed like me) then stay just a little while, bring some cookies,  tarps,  medical supplies--you get the picture.

We're staying out there.  We'll eventually get busted, but we--and occupiers across the world--will keep coming back, in ever increasing waves, until the corporations and their servile politicians are swept out to the Fukushima sea...

Peace.

Frame This

George Lakoff, a distinguished professor at UCal Berkeley, claims in an article published today that some protestors at OWS had asked for his advice, and he waxes eloquent about properly framing the issue--with the purported goal of prevailing in the 2012 elections.

Lakoff clearly cannot see very well from the parapet of his ivory tower.

The OWS protest has exactly jack to do with any election anywhere--except as a wholesale rejection of that system.

See, George, we've tried elections, and regardless of whether "we" control both houses and the white house, or whether "they" do--illegal war, looting of the treasury, torture, rendition, assassination, wiretapping--all of it, not only continues unabated, but has only gotten worse under the current regime.

But I do see your point about framing the issue.  So I suggest that you, Professor George Lakoff of the University of California at Berkeley, immediately resign unless torture-memo author Professor John Yoo--(your esteemed colleague, paid and protected by tenure by the same organization) is fired immediately. (More on Yoo's allowable torture--it includes children's genitalia!--can be found here and here.)

Your trite "advice" in the article aside, the fact you have remained utterly silent on this abomination exposes you as ignorant and foolish at best--

Or complicit at worst.

Either way, your credibility takes a fatal hit.

Until you resign or Yoo does, then, shut the fuck up, eh?

In the meantime, I suggest you go down to the local #occupy gathering, and LISTEN.


I'll have more from our own Occupy Eugene later today.


Update 1:

To the critics who've written protesting my pillorying of Prof. Lakoff, saying, more or less, butbutbut Noam Chomsky works for MIT:

It is true that Lakoff and Chomsky have written extensively in what is generally a progressive vein. But Chomsky went out in the street and was bloodied alongside Howard Zinn. Chomsky had the fortitude to stand up and defend free speech when it was a holocaust denier speaking, because, as he eloquently noted: "If we don't believe in free speech for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."

Chomsky acknowledges the futility of elections and the usurpation of the political process by corporations.

Lakoff just sucks off Democrats, wipes his mouth, and tells us the 2012 elections are important, after Obama proved unequivocally that Corporations rule.

As for what I've done, I don't think you want to get into a pissing match over who is "more authentic," which seems counter-productive, but for establishing cred purposes, I have spent twenty hours since Saturday as a legal observer for the local occupy movement, and I'm about to head back down there.

In any event, I don't think you can argue that Lakoff has written a syllable criticizing torture or his employer's overt support of it. Show me where, and I'll concede the argument.

My point is that Lakoff--and a whole host of nominally progressive writers, journalists, and teachers today--are stuck in the "Democrats are better than Republicans" paradigm.

I also humbly submit there are times when silence equals complicity; when your coworker takes the position that, should the president deem it necessary, he could have the testicles of a child crushed, it is, I think pretty goddamned obviously, one of those times.
Noam Chomsky never remained silent, knowing full well the damage he was doing to himself professionally. Watch "Manufacturing Consent"--it's free on the innertubes--and it'll clarify the distinction I make between Lakoff, who hasn't the courage of his alleged convictions, and Chomsky, who got his head busted and sucked Mace, and never went easy on MIT or the MIC...

I hope you are helping your local Occupy movement, cause electoral politics is the show they want us to watch.

We disempower them by making them irrelevant.

Photos from occupy Eugene.

This was reportedly the largest protest in the city's history...

and this is fucking hippietown.

Maybe there's hope, after all.

Squealing Swine

Goddamn.

That didn't take long.

Not even a month into the OWS protest, politicians smell blood in the water--

But this time, it's their OWN--

Most self-designated nominally progressive groups in the U.S. are no more committed to the true change needed--the utter dismantling of corporate power and a massive redistribution of wealth, both in the form of control of natural resources essential to sustain all life AND THE MONEY SUPPLY--than they are to, say, slowly pulling out their own eyes.

That is, when politicians are attempting to co-opt a movement, you can be certain they're worried.

Right now, they appear to only fear for their pensions, their salaries, the boatloads of campaign cash and a plethora of perks, and of course, mistresses and boytoys that won't be putting out after the sugar stops flowing--

But they also sense the possibility the system itself could be brought down, which causes them to fear the mob in the night.

Sure they do.

Their greed knows no bounds, and they provably, tangibly behave in a manner that can't but destroy us.

They have polluted our lands, our waters, our air, and our very bodies. They've polluted our souls.

Enough. It is time.

Join in, any way you can, and Take It Back. It has always been ours. It will always be ours--

Unless we fail to act.

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming...

I know few of you have the time, but rather than the latest Hollywood BS/Redbox/Netflix/Hulu tripe, take a gander at this.

Spread the word, eh?

Hedges Don't Hedge

Chris Hedges, as usual, nails it

The only way the rule of law will be restored, if it is restored, is piece by piece, extradition by extradition, trial by trial. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA Director George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice and John Ashcroft will, if we return to the rule of law, face trial. The lawyers who made legal what under international and domestic law is illegal, including not only Rizzo but Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee, David Addington, William J. Haynes and John Yoo, will, if we are to dig our way out of this morass, be disbarred and prosecuted. Our senior military leaders, including Gen. David Petraeus, who oversaw death squads in Iraq and widespread torture in clandestine prisons, will be lined up in a courtroom, as were the generals in Argentina, and made to answer for these crimes. This is the only route back. If it happens it will happen because a few courageous souls such as the attorney and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner, are trying to make it happen. It will take time—a lot of time; the crimes committed by Bianco and the two former officers sent to prison this month are nearly four decades old. If it does not happen, then we will continue to descend into a terrifying, dystopian police state where our guards will, on a whim, haul us out of our cells to an amusement park and make us ride, numb and bewildered, on the kiddie train, before the next round of torture.

If you've not run across Hedges before, he is one of too few voices that refuse to be tempered by the mainstream media onslaught that we are in danger from terrorists and government spending on social programs.

Where are the voices in media decrying shrink-wrapped pallets of cash, the multi-trillion dollar bailouts to capitalists who are all free-market-don't-regulate-you'll-kill-the-economy, that is until they destroy the economy, the $2.3 Trillion Rumsfeld admitted was missing from the Pentagon budget (announced, conveniently enough, on September 10, 2001?

Any person who tells you our financial problems--any of them, including government debt--is due to social program expenditures or teacher pensions is simply and gloriously wrong.

Maybe they're lying, maybe they're merely stupid--

But. They. Are. Wrong.

If you need a little more convincing that we do indeed need to watch the little man behind the curtain, check Glenn Greenwald's brilliant speech here.

Cry, if you must.

I did.

Yes. Well.

Apparently all it takes to shift one's mood from apocalyptic despair to grinning mirth and optimism is a week deep in the happy confines of the Oregon Country Fair.

If you hail from the Midwest as I do, "Country Fair" conjures up images of massive produce and livestock displays, and butter sculptures, sure. Cotton candy, carnival rides (manned by suspiciously maimed personnel missing digits or hands or entire lower arms, one presumes from working with machinery with many moving parts designed solely to hurl humans about in ways only the young or mad can enjoy without puking)...squealing pigs, corn on the cob steamed and dipped in vats of melted butter, quilting demonstrations--your basic agricultural fair.

The Oregon Country Fair, is, um, nothing like that.

Like Burning Man, trying to explain it poses many problems, not the least of which is the fact that the "Real Fair" is an invitation-only private party for the 4000 or so volunteers who remain in the camps through the night. Burning Man is huge, fiery, public, MadMax. The OCF is sedate, private, hippie-hobbits in the Shire with plenty of Pipeweed and the odd mushroom bon-bon.

Point is, it pulled me back from the brink, and I remember why I love humanity, even as I plumb the depths of misanthropy.

Lament # 10

I can feel it creeping up on me, soft and slow, like a slug or stunned cephalopod, and it knows my weaknesses and where to hit me and it’s oh so subtle but one minute you’re striding brightly through the world and all worries are manageable and then the weather drops or serotonin fucks off to the amygdyla or likely altogether, and bam you can’t think, can’t concentrate, can’t string two coherent sentences together in any way that makes you happy and the women are scornful except the weird, the damaged, and especially the damned, a sexy smile simply won't drop your way or you were oblivious or worse, like a Lou Gherig’s victim, aware, but unable to move and do anything about it.

The Nuclear Porcupine

A note on the origins and title of this blog--

As a simple Google search demonstrates, there are several genuine Gern Blanstons out there--
I plucked the name from an obscure Steve Martin routine off the vinyl issue of Comedy is Not Pretty. Despite my apparent misspelling and a possibly fictitious controversy over Martin's use of the name, I used it simply to send a veiled signal that I hail from a sarcastic segment of what was once termed "the Nowhere Generation".

We are too old to be Xers and too young to have participated in the sixties unless our parents dragged us. We grew up in the 70s and watched the hippies turn a genuine revolution into a coke-addled polyester nightmare of disco and yuppies and the me generation, resulting in Reagan's election in 1980...and we've seen how that worked out.

Of course, that is a lot of detail that matters not at all, so long as the writing holds up.

But I originally planned to call this Blog The Nuclear Porcupine, because that's how my hypertrophied misanthropy frequently makes me feel...completely toxic and unhuggable.

Just sayin'.

If I Disappear...

...it could be because I went Mad for the Gale and Refused to Come In, and now I can't whine as my body slams against the cliffs in the towering Big Sur surf that drove Kerouac over, bits of brain and kelp and bone matter roiling about me in pinkish sea-foam...

Or maybe I got a little too close to The Man this time, right before they blew him to flaming bits, DMT or Salvinorin A or maybe the multiple concussions I sustained as a lad cutting off all access to any decent pre-frontal lobe sense of self-preservation--

Or perhaps I was stabbed and robbed whilst in an opium/hashish stupor in a thatched hut deep in a misty Myanmar jungle, strange animal and human cries falling dead and muffled as if on snow--

Or maybe--and this is my favorite, I think-- I was ripped to death by bear, by just being stupid, camping yet again in an off-limits section of Cascadia, getting stoned while I tossed out a pad and my bag and another pad for the dog, careful to stay above the incoming tide and build a small fire downwind, then just forgetting and sleeping next to nearly a pound of smoked salmon...

The point is, the scenarios above describe arguably unsavory and untimely ways to die.

But I'll take any of them over being tortured to death or hunted for sport on another human's say-so.

Just a Farmer in the Empire

Shit. Recently returned from a four-month gig that involved serious winter wilderness. I sit here hunched over the keyboard, hair down to my shoulders (with serious tow-head from high-altitude UV) and a full beard, neck and all, that I had to keep trimming away from my mouth. I feel like Jeremiah Johnson and shit.

The beard is gone; the hair goes today. I'm pretty sure I've experienced what the antihero of Camper Van Beethoven's "The Lottery" describes: People see me comin'/And they move to the other side of the road.

I used to wear suits all the time, and I hated it, but I will say this: People, particularly women, aren't spooked by the guy in the suit and tie.

Yeah. Another life. Funny, though, how I stopped grinding my teeth away as I slept, and I could ditch the SSRIs and my health has improved to where I'm running up goddamn mountains as I press in on 50.

On the downside, all of the early crops except peas and raspberries have basically failed. The weather took a nasty turn in March. So there's a lot of replanting to do. Living off the land is great, but you must be willing to accept a lot of factors out of your control.

Somehow, lack of control is much easier to handle when it's just the weather, even if humans are warming the planet.

A government that claims the right to detain anyone, anywhere, forever, and torture them to death, is a far more pressing danger. A government that spends trillions in a few weeks to save corrupt financiers, then bellyaches like a little bitch about Social Security, unemployment benefits, jobs programs, healthcare, or any other crumb, is a government that Does Not Serve Its People. Nomi Prins has an excellent bit that shows just how fucking much we could have done with the bailout cash. And that doesn't include the 3-6 illegal wars we are currently waging, nor the over 700 military bases scattered about the U.S.'s quickly fading empire.

From Nancy "no impeachment" Pelosi to the Prez and his filthy, corrupt swine-appointees, to the soon-to-be-fascist-majority Supreme Court. Oh, yeah, and the Republicans.

Anyone still believe that there's a dime's worth of difference between the parties?

There isn't. Nearly everyone not in the political class or among their corporate owners, from the students to the retirees, all races and creeds, are having the same corporate dildo rammed right up our ass.

The sooner we realize it and come together, the better.

But I'm not counting on it. I've more faith in the weather.

The Roof

problem has been solved, I think, but as always, in the short term, and this time the roof is mobile.

In other news, Eric Holder and our humble president continue to shield War Criminals, which has a surprising effect--surprising only because it is a well-drafted law, quite crystalline in its clarity, and may be translated as, essentially, IF YOU TORTURE, MOTHERFUCKER, YOU'RE A WAR CRIMINAL, AND IF YOUR VICTIM DIES, YOU DIE, AND SO DOES ANY CUNT WHO TRIES TO GET YOUR BACK, NO EXCEPTIONS.

Here, W., et al would be the "torturin' motherfuckers" referred to in this vernacular version of the statutory language, and "any cunt" would be, well, Eric Holder and Barak Obama, among others.

WTF else can be said? 'Cept bring them down. All of them. Now.
=================================================
Internet access will be limited soon. Will post again, though I know at this point it's just screaming into the void...

The Brink

Hmmm.

This doesn't look good.

I can sympathize on a real level with these people now.

As of August, I don't know where I'm going to live.

Not in the "where will my job/adventure take me?"-sense, but in actual fact, I don't know how I will be able to keep a roof over my head.

As of August, no roof.

Ready access to the 'Net will cease long before that, like June 7th-ish.

Maybe I'll be able to post after that, maybe not. But, let's face it, after taking much time off of blogging, no one reads, 'cept maybe the tapper crowd.

I'll try to stay positive, of course, but I think I know for the first time what is meant by staring into the Abyss, and having it stare back.

Why I Sulked

It started, I suppose, before my time, when firearms and motorcycles were banned in 1996, and reached its peak in 2004, the last time I went. That year, the preliminary literature, suddenly—astonishingly--promoted Burning Man as “kid friendly” despite the ever-present back of the ticket promise that YOU RISK SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH BY ATTENDING BURNING MAN.[1] When we pulled in at midnight on Sunday, we endured a van-search—for stowaways—that’d make a narc wet his pants from envy. As the 2004 week ground on, I felt besieged by the so-called default world, the very thing we seek to escape.

For example, on Thursday, a woman woke me up at 9 am, not to share sex, food or drugs, but by talking on her satellite phone. I crawled out of my tent, eyebrows dusty, a little bleary, and beheld her there, wearing a terrycloth robe and slippers, sitting calmly in a cushioned Adirondack chair outside an impossibly shiny behemoth RV, a scene so suburban and blasé that for a moment I thought it was satiric performance art. But this woman kept chatting away like any oblivious tool with a cell phone in a strip mall café about how Neat It Is To Be Here. I was amused, then incredulous. After twenty minutes, I bailed, biking in to Center Camp to get ice before the heat really hit, where some massively uninformed kid offered me $20 for my place in line.[2] Later that night, the police made Jiffy Lube (a recurring Playa fixture renowned for supplying literally buckets of condoms and lubricant-packs to anyone—just grab a handful—as well as for the casual gay hook-up: Get In, Get Off, Get Out) tear down from its roof a giant wicker rendition of male-on-male sodomy. A mother-with-young-child had complained the sculpture was obscene. This is peculiar, because “community standards” govern these issues. By Black Rock City standards, sodomy--straight, gay, or otherwise--is barely a beige fiber in the tapestry.[3]

Had I witnessed the event, I no doubt would have suggested to Mommy, with deadpan concern, that she gather Jr. and juice boxes and flee back to suburbia, preferably before a roving Death Guild patrol kidnapped her and her child for a slow, Satanic sacrifice, under the kliegs in Thunderdome.

Sure, these are trifles, and I certainly had better options than sulking. I should’ve made a joke about the sat-phone to the woman then cooked her breakfast. I should’ve gifted my place in line to the uninformed kid. I should’ve simply ignored the fact that Jiffy Lube and/or Burning Man, LLC, didn’t tell the police to stick it, pun intended, regarding the wicker sodomy sculpture.

I concede the’04 festival had its moments. Like smoking salvia divinorum in a geodesic dome with carpets and pillows and candles and my friends Jens and Shalom watching out for me…(I’ll try to get to that later, but don’t fuck around with this stuff, not before talking to me or someone else who has been there...I’m still processing that trip, three years hence, truly terrifying, shamanic-level experience) and making ice cream at 2 pm on the Esplanade with Ben and Anita (who met at Burning Man in 2002 and are getting married this year--Congrats, kids!) and serving it up to every parched (and amazed and delighted) Playa person who emerged from the dust; finding Eli, a kindred spirit I only see at the Burn, who wasn’t apparent when I first turned up in his camp. Upon inquiry, a tripped-out dude in dusty black leather and dreads smiled and pointed to the van at the end of the shade structure. He spoke with a Brixton accent: “He’s in there—pop your head in and say hi.” The grin should have warned me. I slid back the door, and there was Eli, kneeling with a tiny video-camera, filming a guy shaving (what I assume was) his girlfriend’s pussy. Engrossed, neither of them even looked up. Eli, however, without missing a second of filming, glanced over from behind the viewfinder with one smiling eye: “Hey! Great to see you Gurn. I’ll be right out,” and he was, with a hug, a joint, an offer of DMT (which I declined, because of the salvia the night before)--and a copy of the video on a flash chip.

But despite the obvious link, to me Burning Man could be neither the purifying flame seen by the yoga-tarot chick nor the one I sought for myself. Indeed, I’d stayed away for over a thousand days, and intended to keep staying away, because even in Black Rock City, I could no longer see the edge of the envelope--my favorite place to be.

Next: Despite everything, a Return to the Burn.

---

[1] Thank the lawyers, most of whom know such a disclaimer is actually pretty worthless. There have been several deaths and many more injuries at Burning Man over the years, but earlier attendees understood that the Black Rock Desert is dangerous just to hang around in, all by yourself, before you add several thousand libertines toting firearms, explosives, motorcycles, flamethrowers, ultra-light aircraft, and an equally impressive arsenal of drugs and alcohol. It’s ostensibly an arts festival, sure, but that label never came close to covering it.

In any event, lawsuits are no longer unthinkable, and now Burning Man exists as a relatively new (about 15 years in most states) type of entity dreamt up by the corporate lawyers, the Limited Liability Company. I can create one for you, too, if you ask nice.

[2] Burning Man, recall, is a gift economy, so offering money for anything is not only verboten, it’s rube-level ignorant and crass. These writings assume you know the basics. If you need a primer on the event, go here, and for my own first impression, here.

[3] In other words, in a community where public nakedness, sex, bondage, etc., are commonplace, U.S. Supreme Court cases ensure the sculpture could not possibly be deemed “obscene”— thus it’s protected under the free expression clause of the First Amendment. Jiffy Lube had every right to tell those cops to fuck off, like they did in 2001.

I'm Not Going

I left her house in the shaggy hills of Eugene, Oregon, and flew on my bike downtown, sated by opium, hashish, and sex, but I vaguely recalled I had a meet set up--

And then I was in the W.O.W. Hall, watching Les Claypool for the “gee, I think I’ll throw it in the street” sum of $5. In retrospect, the reason it was $5 was probably because Les wasn’t playing bass. The box office guys sure didn’t let on, and I’m assuming they knew. Indeed, unless you already knew Claypool was making a movie spoofing the post-Dead/Phish jam-band scene, you were pissed off like me ‘cause Les wasn’t even apparently on stage. You know, the skinny, big-hat weird-beard bastard thumping away on the Thunderbroom in the look most known from his animated rendition in the opening credits to South Park.

Naw, I learned later instead he was there, in a convincing fat suit and overalls, with long hippie hair, gold-rim glasses, a Trey-on-heroin beard and playing drums for chrissakes. It was a little different from what I expected, but these expectations were formed mostly slamming about a deep-mud mosh-pit as Primus headlined Lollapalooza, maybe 1992, at Riverport in a driving rain-

But I think of Les today, partly because I feel he still owes me a fin (okay, $10--I had a date) but mostly, because as part of his ripping on the whole jam band scene, he sang a little tune entitled Are You Goin’ to Burning Man?

As the fat drummer sang on, I caught him smirking at the three generations of hippie-freakers-by-the-speakers, whirling away with no apparent sense of irony. But I stood stock still, like Entwistle amidst the chaos of The Who, and finally understood the whole show was a put-on.

Burning Man, to me—and apparently, to Claypool—had become a joke.

Next: Why.

A Logical Response to Despair

I've finally faced up to it. Political blogging is a wank. Hell, activism in general is sheer unadulterated wankery. I’ve blogged. I’ve called and written Congress, repeatedly, not only my “own representatives,” but most of them, including the morally bankrupt-jellyfish Nancy Pelosi, war-mongering Hillary Clinton, and habeus corpus-hatin' Gordon Smith. I protested the Iraq war, before it began, in Hyde Park in February, 2003, with a million-plus pissed off Brits. I protested in the states, multiple times. I’ve functioned as videographer and Legal Observer at protests on federal land and was meticulously filmed, from three feet away, by our “justice” department, you know, the one that can imprison you for no reason whatsoever and torture you to death without telling a soul, not even your mother (read the article; the WaPo headline is quite misleading)--

Needless to add, I filmed the DOJ guy filming me.

Not a fucking thing has changed. The occupations and torture and new wars and fixed elections and propaganda media and gutting of the middle class and the inexorable economic extermination of the lower classes continues at increasingly breakneck speed.

Trust me kids, though I’ve passed the Bar Exam in three states and drafted amici briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, and billed thousands of hours at one to three hundred dollars for each--I’ve worked alongside ex-cons in ditches, legal and illegal aliens in the vineyards, and plain ol’ poor folk framing houses on a non-union job. I’ve seen it up close. The nonrich, that is, both the poor and the middle class, have been purposefully dealt a brutal series of blows in recent years.

They’re trying to kill us off, using some sort of Darwinian-eugenic phantasmagoria of twisted logic. The uber-wealthy have decided that the 7 -soon-to-be- 9 billion humans on the planet are simply too many, and the gears are being placed to grind that down to 2 billion or so, and probably by the end of the century. 

Abbie Hoffmann, before his final overdose, wrote simply: "It's too late. We can't win, they've gotten too powerful." But I was 26 when he committed suicide, kicking ass in law school and preparing to Dominate my Profession like some kool-aid drinking freak-yuppie protégé of the bond-trader/masters of the universe from The Bonfire of the Vanities. I thought Abbie was just ill, misguided and tired. But now I’m forced to consider that maybe the old Yippie was right at the end. Or even, all along.

Heh. Aren’t I just a little bundle of dew-washed joy? I could be wrong about the lot of this, of course, but that’s my call after taking a good look around these last few years.

So the burning question should be obvious:

How long before the hammer really comes down?

Time to live for the moment, folks. You can fight, you can flee, or you can continue to do fuck-all until the cuffs cinch ‘round your wrists and the noose about your neck. Time to wax orgiastic or at least philosophic on the meaning of life and celebrate, hard, in these last moments before Death, capital “D” Death, the Death of what makes us human. Time to Get It On, in every sense of the word, with the Man, with each other, and absolutely with the Lunatics in the Asylum. Time to reconnect with that vital essence that is everywhere at once, time and distance irrelevant, constant, alive, and reassuring. Time to heed my mystic, who threw two tarot arrangements, both of which indicated The Tower as the primary card.

The Tower, yeah. At the time, I had no idea what she was really getting at, but I was distracted. She sat on her bedroom floor and lay cards from the Aleister Crowley deck in a Celtic Cross between her spread bare legs, translucent lycra Danskin still damp from 90 minutes of hot yoga, glancing up as she turned each card, almost gasping when she ended a second time with what she called “the motherfucker of all cards”, The Tower. She lay back on a pillow, lips pouting over a fat spliff. She told me I had a Dresden-sized conflagration of change in my immediate future. She fired up, held the smoke, and extended it to me. "I sprinkled a bit of opium in this" she said, exhaling. "I hope you don't mind."

She was trying to seduce me, of course. And it was about bloody time.

That encounter aside, I don’t buy into mysticism, specifically. But I do believe some people have access, and tarot opens the window for some of them. This chick was plugged in. Somehow, her words rang true.

What the fuck am I babbling about? I’m not sure, exactly. But I am certain I seek a conflagration, one of apocalyptic proportion. Time to Burn It Up. Time to Burn It Down.

And from the ashes the Phoenix arises, or some such shit, right?

Perhaps I've made it too obvious where I'm headed with this. More, soon.

Well, shucks.

Out of curiosity, I just googled this blog and it turned up on a list of recommendations.

In 2005.

On New Year's Eve.

We don't know what this may imply about her state of mind, but still, someone named aIMEE linked to me in a comment at Americablog, and had a nice summation. If you really want to see the text, click on Comments and scroll down about halfway in the Haloscan window, where she says I write "[a]cerbic, profane rants with great stories and links."

It's obscure, sure, but what the hell. We take what we can get, eh?

I don't know who aIMEE is, but I bow to thee, nearly two years late. It was enough to get me to write again.

A'ight, then.
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WARNING/GUARANTEE

To borrow from the late Frank Zappa, these writings contain material that a truly free society would neither fear nor repress. Furthermore, reading this stuff is guaranteed not to condemn you to eternal fire and torment with pointy sticks and whatnot in Hell.

For reasons explained below, I’m axing the political commentary for now, but you can still find it in the archives.

It turns out that after two years of trying to ignore it, the fever is still on me and I still have things to say. So I’m firing up the computers again, and I intend to produce at least a few good bits before fall.

And, as always, these are works of fiction, full of lies and made up facts. But then, anything conveyed by mere language is fiction, innit?

Letter to Senator Harkin

Dear Senator Harkin--

Thank you for your email updating me on your "anti-surge" bill and asking for a contribution.

I have been a long-time supporter of yours, particularly when you were running for president and flouting "trickle down" economics and touting "percolate up" instead--

And I fully support the legislation you have proposed to clarify that additional troops require specific congressional authorization--

But let's be frank, Senator. For whatever reason, your party, the party for which I vote overwhelmingly in every election, has simply acted in the worst interests of the country since Bush 43 was installed in 2000. You permitted private corporations to control 85% of the votes cast in the United States via the Help America Vote (sic) Act, you ceded our Bill of Rights, all of them, via the Patriot Acts I and II, the Military Commissions Act, the retroactive granting of immunity for War Crimes, domestic warrantless spying, opening of citizen's mail, torture, the suspension of habeus corpus...and the appointment of justices to the Supreme Court (Alito and Roberts) that will permit these abominable and perverse subversions of the Constitution to become/remain the law of the land.

In short, it will take a little more hefty an action than opposing the admittedly ill-advised troop surge on your part--and the whole of the Congress, for that matter-- to convince me that the lot of you are anything other than complicit in the destruction of U.S. democracy.

You have one hell of a lot of work to do Senator, before you ever come knockin' on my door for money. The list above doesn't even begin to address the tortuously long list of damage that must be reversed JUST TO STOP THE DECLINE, never mind return us to where we were, oh, say, when Clinton left office.

The people, sure, they oppose the troop surge, but I think I've made my point that your support of this measure, while laudable, simply won't be enough to convince most people that anything meaningful has changed. Indeed, your assertion that the troops already in harms' way will always be supported ignores the very obvious fact that funding their withdrawal removes them from danger altogether, which is the type of "support" the voters indicated in November.

All of this should be, to me, blazingly obvious to you. Perhaps you need a policy analyst to point these things out. Contact me immediately should you wish my assistance.

I'm not kidding. The system appears broken from here, sir, but I'm willing to be disabused of this notion.

In any event, I'll be watching the Congressional agenda to address all of the items I listed above in the near future--

And legislation to bring our troops safely home,

And one helluva lot more.

Peace and Democracy,

Gurn Blanston

JUST CALL ME SCHLEPROCK

Or whatever the name of that Flintstones character was who had a literal cloud following him around, usually raining, occasionally making with the odd gigavolt lightning strike--

Okay, I'm just moaning because I happen to live in a particular part of the Northwest where we suffer from "air stagnation alerts"--which means the fog rolls in, thick and fluffy, and those of us (and call us Legion, for we are many, as a demonically possessed man identified himself to Jesus one fine Biblical day) who burn wood for heat add to the problem by pumping smoke into the mix. The net effect is a sort of prehistoric smog, pinned to the valley by a temperature inversion. It's like being inside a box of smoldering cotton...hell, even the tops of the trees (and the trees are Ent fucking humungous here) are obscured.

The psychological effect of this particular brand of gloom cannot be understated. It simply fucks your head, first by vigorously pumping out all optimism and mirth, then slowly replacing it, like a Thermarest inflating at 12,000 feet, with woe, grief and despair--

So fuck. What can I say? I'm just copping to the filter that I'm working through now--to give you the state of mind I've been in to reflect upon the recent events in Washington. I cop to it because I sense the populace believes the "tide is turning" against the neocons (sic--they are neo-fascists) because the mainstream media is reporting a bit (and I emphasize bit, as in tiny, miniscule, itty, bitty iota of a scintilla) of reality, and because a handful of democrat governors were elected, and because Schwarzenegger lost all four (gasp, choke) of his nefarious ballot initiatives.

It's hard to attain a phrase profane enough to capture my true feelings here, but let me try this one, fraught with incest, blasphemy, and no small measure of political incorrectness:

Sweet Jesus Motherfuck, what are we wetting our collective panties about, hmmm? A couple of governorships for the dems, and Ahnuld dealt a minor setback, and some think this indicates the tide is turning?

Mark my words: you heard it here first. The neo-fascists who currently run this country (and that is the Bush folks, and the military/pharmaceutical/oil/banking people they have promoted and coddled above all else, including our Constitution, our soldiers, and our freaking children) will never lose another election that matters. While it is "good", in the absolute sense, to have those governorships, defeated der Gropenfuhrer's anti-working class ballot initiatives, and, as the cherry on top, tossed the inbred microcephelatic "intelli-design" fundies off a school board in Pennsylvania--these are tiny little battles the opposition is only too happy to concede.

Why do I say that?

Because California and other states continue to work furiously to certify the demonstrably untraceable and easily altered voting machines--which will be used in the next elections, the midterm elections, the one where Congress could change hands and expose Bush et al to impeachment and prosecution for war crimes (torture is a war crime, eh?)...which carries the Death Penalty.

I say it because this month in Ohio (where Kenneth Blackwell, who was somehow permitted to serve as both Secretary of State and W's campaign manager, presided over an election where exit polls showed Kerry winning handily, the suddenly Kerry lost...in a near syndicated repeat of Katherine Harris' role in 2000), polls showed a voting reform measure stripping the Secretary of State of that power winning by at least 60/40--

But when the ballots were "counted" by that same Kenneth Blackwell, strangely, the measure was defeated by that same ratio.

This is the second time (or third, if you count the '02 Georgia and Nebraska U.S. Senate elections) results defied the polls in a statistical anomally at least as rare as hitting the Powerball twice...on consecutive weeks. In other words, even in 2005, a piddly "off-year" election--the lowest tier, below even midterm elections--the real battles were lost. Untraceable electronic voting is alive and well, shepherded to this point by key corrupt officials like Blackwell, Harris, the Governator-- all of it still owned by private corporations dedicated to this administration.

Understand this clearly, in case I somehow didn't punch through: THE VOTE IS STILL RIGGED.

The stakes in '06 are huge. Because Bush et al have authorized torture, have used chemical weapons on civilians, have jeapordized U.S. security by outing a CIA operative specializing in counter-terrorism and weapons of mass destruction--our own federal laws (follow the link above) provide they should be executed. They can't take that risk. They won't take that risk. They will rig the vote to ensure a Congress that will not impeach. They will install a Supreme Court Justice who has guaranteed Cheney/Bush in private that everyone can be pardoned, even the President himself, even for treason. If any significant resistance threatens, the avian flu, a "terrorist" attack, or some convenient natural disaster will be used as an excuse to impose martial law, perhaps suspending elections altogether.

--------

Recall at the outset I warned I've been wallowing for several days in a smoky, foggy valley, without even the frigid rain to wash the air clean. So I suppose I could fairly be accused of being jaded, unreasonably reluctant to claim momentum for "our side"--because there are indeed other signs of life in the gangrenous, syphilitic corpse that was U.S. democracy:

Patrick Fitzgerald has reignited (reinstated seems a bit mild, eh?) the grand jury to probe the treason committed by the White House; Rep. Murtha from Ohio threw down the gauntlet and demanded, as a decorated, seasoned war veteran, that U.S. troops be returned home--immediately and wholly, from their utterly failed and now impossible mission in Iraq; Randy Cunningham plead guilty to bribery and resigned from the house; Bush fled to the only country that likes him--Mongolia--after Central and South America essentially rolled CAFTA up into a fat papyrus cylinder and told W to go fuck himself--preferably sheathing it first in a wire-bristle punishment condom--

Sure. that's all great, lovely stuff. And I mean that from the bottom of my prematurely curmudgeonly heart.

But let's see the troops home, let's see medical and psychological care for them and all Americans, let's see affordable housing and healthy food for everyone; let's see schools that do not indoctrinate the young for a life of wage-slavery and obeidience, let's close the torture gulags, then let's see Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Libby, etc., and their corporate cronies at Enron, Halliburton, Kellog, Brown and Root, Baker & McKenzie, Conoco, Exxon, Eli Lilly--ALL of them, just let me indulge in a bit of just-desserts fantasy here--tossed into Gitmo with stoned serial sodomist cannibals that have the munchies--and no food, no lube-- and definitely no utensils.

When all of that happens (except maybe the sodomy, but only for Karl Rove, because I think he would enjoy it) then you can squawk at me about turning tides, because right now, right the fuck now, as I type and as you read, PEOPLE ARE BEING IMPRISONED, RAPED , TORTURED AND KILLED IN OUR NAMES.

From here, deep within the fog and smoke (and let's face it, steeped in the harsh green liquor of my own bile) I predict that in '06 we will still be at war in Iraq--and Iran and Syria. We will have a fascist Supreme Court, Congress will be unchanged, Libby will remain untried, Bush will not be impeached, Schwarzenegger will be re-elected--

And the torture gulags will remain in operation, funded by our tax dollars.

It will take buckets of blood, metaphorically, for certain--and most likely, literally--to make it right again.

So don't go to sleep, goddamnit. Pay attention. We are in more danger than ever, now that we have flashed a feeble light on the Beast. When the flu strikes, or a "terrorist attack" or some other crisis occurs at a convenient moment to distract us and/or promote the granting of ever-more executive power, you have to sit down and ask yourself:

Why is this happening?

More importantly, Why in Sweet Jesus Motherfuck does it keep happening?

Peace out,

GB

Feel free to comment, or if you want more private correspondence: blanstonshrieks@yahoo.com

The First Step

In yesterday's post, I pointed out that the First Step to realizing those in power can now fuck us with impunity and remain in power, is to know AND UNDERTSTAND that elections in this country are now wholly fictitious.

I acknowledged that this First Step is a doozy.

I challenge you to read this and this, for starters. If you still think, as some of my dearest friends do, that election fraud isn't occurring or hasn't affected recent elections, then I'm more terrified than ever.

GB

Occam's Razor and Why I May Slit My Own Throat With It

As W's approval ratings hover near lows matched only by Nixon;

--as he vacationed on his faux ranch and ignored Cindy Sheehan and rode bikes with Lance (at an arthritic sub-8 m.p.h.; the news reports simply told you "17-mile trail" and "just over two hours);

--as he says he "must get on with his life", then ignores the worst natural disaster in memory to give a speech ludicrously comparing post-WW II Japan to 2005 Iraq,, then grudgingly perused the post-Katrina devestation from a couch on Air Force One;

As Veep Cheney scowls away vacation in Wyoming and Condi Rice drops a few grand on fancy shoes in Manhattan and a Broadway comedy despite clear catastrophe at hand...

one has to wonder--what dipshit political adviser is letting this happen?

Of course, W. doesn't have to worry about re-election...setting aside for the moment the fact he was never justly elected in the first place.

But I'm not talking about the conventional, lame-duck presidency wisdom--that is, I don't think for a nanosecond that W. is permitted to act like an idiot because of the constitutional two-term limit.

No, I'm afraid it's much more sinister than that.

Only a fool could believe that Karl Rove and the rest of the real brains behind W. would allow him to act this way if it was not Part of The Plan, or at least if they thought The Plan would be negatively impacted.

Midterm elections are coming soon, and the smart money of conventional wisdom is betting that any Congressperson who brayed the pro-war line too early or too often (or too long, by braying "stay the course" today)--and those who by association and simpering sycophancy Look as Bad As Bush--may well have hopped the conveyer to the kill line of election 2006--and the Republican stranglehold on the legislature will finally be broken. Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead, and all of that.

Yes, that's the smart, conventional money. However, a mountain of evidence, as putrid as a post-Katrina sewage plant, suggests these are hardly conventional times.


Face it...W's actions and those of Halliburton and KB&R ad infinitum, ad nauseum,, with the blessing of way too many members of Congress, are so massive and reprehensible and clearly illegal we are forced to the conclusion that they believe they can do anything while in power, AND STAY IN POWER.

Occam's Razor dictates the simplest explanation is best--and I grant you I strive mightily to not leap up to exclaim bygod that's simple, they behave like idiots, because, well, they ARE idiots.

Except they aren't idiots at all. That W. is a post-coke, dry-drunk refugee who was none too bright to begin with belies the fact of the towering evil geniuses around him, like Cheney, Rove, Rice, George H.W., the new Saudi King, The Carlyle Group,to name a few--

The Bush Admisnistration and its corporate and political cronies are, to me, acting like they know they will get away with it. They know the game is rigged, because the private corporations who somehow now control proprietary (that is NOT PUBLIC, nor accountable to anyone but the, um, private company) voting software Right Here in America are owned by--you guessed it, powerful Republicans.

And sure as shit, elections are now nearly complete fictions. Anyone who denies that the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections suffered from widespread abuse at various levels, including tampering with electronic vote totals and ensuring many liberal voting districts were understaffed, under-supplied with functioning machines, and full of GOP operatives to "challenge" potential voters, not to mention the soul-sucking chutzpah of Katherine Harris in 2000 or her counterpart Kenneth Blackwell in Ohio 2004...is simply denying reality--

And of course, now that Rehnquist has died, his soul oozing slowly to Hell, the Judiciary won't be able to help us, either--

That still isn't what scares me. OK, it scares me, it scares me shitless, because absolute control of the process has already been used to enthrone Bush et al and stack Congress and the Courts. What true American (or any reasonable folks who twigged freedom) wouldn't be terrified of this scenario?

Yeah. That first step, as they say, is a doozy. But the second step, well--

Beyond the gut-wrenching, terrifying realization that elections are wholly fictitious lies a deeper, even more sinister reality, dictated by Occam's Razor. This reality makes me go, like the rabbits of Watership Down, tharn.

As strange as it may sound at first, absolute control of the elections is not enough. It was enough to get "them" (the neocons) into power, jus' like the ol' unsmilin'goose-steppin' swastika-and-limburgher-lovin' Germans after the Reichstag. The Nazis had already assumed power through "legitimate", existing channels--then used the Reichstag fire and the Commie boogeyman to justify dismantling the very system which had empowered Hitler, to establish dictatorial control.

The U.S. elections of '00, 02, and '04 went largely unchallenged because far and away the critical mass of the population was willing to go along, willing to heal, to look forward and unite behind the leader, assuming that if the election gave us a president we didn't like we could toss him out.

That's what they always told us, eh? Heck, we tossed GHWB out like a tub of rancid milk--

Nobody wants to think their government seized power illegally, then used that power to declare perpetual war and remove all obstacles to maintaining power.

But now Katrina comes, the Morley's chain of petroleum drags hard on the U.S. economy, and the direct relationship between Iraq and the awesome, awful degradation of tens of thousands of U.S. citizens, is outlined in red neon for all to see.

The critical mass is finally calling bullshit on BushCo's tax cuts for the rich, deficits for the war, eliminating civil rights (how's that for unalienable?) cutting/denying funding for flood control in New Orleans, (not to mention the attempt to raid Social Security and the secret arrest and incarceration of U.S. citizens)...and the gloriously encapsulating, callous and indifferent Air Force One flyover--nothing has ever been more clearly stated:

We Don't Care About You, the People.

We Don't Even Care If You Realize It.

What I'm driving at here, albeit a bit circuitously, is that the display of Total Indifference, Ignorance and Even Contempt would ordinarily have consequences at the ballot box. Occam's Razor tells me first that Bushco's behavior indicates that they intend to stay in power, no matter what it takes, even if it means fixing elections-- or declaring martial law. All it will take is another "terrorist attack," like I predicted before the London bombings, but this time Stateside, where martial law will be imposed.

We are seeing the beginnings of it in the martial law imposed in Louisiana. Don't believe me? Why then is our own military, sent in to New Orleans because the Louisiana National Guard is deployed to Iraq, calling the victims of Katrina "the insurgency?" What would you call a shoot-to-kill order against looters, who loot only because the government that now shoots at them, failed them in the first place?




--------------------------

Clarification

Didn't mean to dis the sisters out there in the post below. The reference to "Oh my brothers and only friends" is a line repeated by Alex, the antihero of A Clockwork Orange, as he descends into complete economic, physical, and ultimately mental control by the government--

So forgive the line, those of you who bristled. 'Twas merely intended to call up the spectre of too much gov't power. And the "motherfuckers" referenced at the end, those who might need to look up metaphor, well, that was aimed at NSA/DHS types.

Heck.

Sorry.

The Real War

I've come off the so-called "lost-coast" of northern Humboldt County, oozing poison oak from every pore, to find out we just invaded Canada.

The significance of the United States' raid on Marc Emery and the British Columbia Marijuana Party Headquarters in Vancouver cannot be undertstated.

As noted before,
the "Vansterdam" enclave on Hastings street has had its share of problems, arson just the penultimate in a long line of setbacks.

This time, it's different. The U.S. has basically gone nuclear in its War on Drugs. But that "war"--well, it is not the Real War, either.

Sad as it is, arresting the quintessentially peaceful "Prince of Pot" whose sole goal in life is to legalize the stuff once and for fucking all (and perhaps not coincidentally, make a boatload o' cash in the process) is merely a symptom, an operational definition of The Real War.

The Real War, oh my brothers and only friends, is on each one of us.

Since 9-11, George Bush and his administration have responded to an alleged radical Islamic group that "hates our freedoms" by, paradoxically, taking those freedoms away. I've already waxed hysterical on this topic, so there's no need to belabor the obvious.

The nut is this--the terrorists, whoever they are, have won.

They've WON, goddammit. We torture innocent people and rape children. We have probably tortured some guilty folks too, but we TORTURE. We have an Attorney General who sanctions torture. We have the grandson of one of Hitler's primary financial backers in the white house.

[Sure we do. Never mind the fact that scads of Nazi officers--particularly those well-versed in anti-Soviet espionage--were given the choice to defect to Stalin, who'd just wasted 13 million of his own fucking people fighting that war and could reasonably be expected to show somewhat less mercy to his, um, prisoners--

Or, hey, the U.S. said, come with us, and we'll protect you from Stalin, so long as you have some information we can use against him.

That's correct--the precursor to the CIA was started by Prescott Bush, using former Nazi intelligence ofiiers....]

But I seriously digress, eh? Best head down that plank on another post.

The point is, even if the allegedly paranoid rants of connections of Bush to the Nazi party, the deaths of JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X...supposing it may be easily, laughably dismissed to the tinfoil trash bin of the loonier corners of the internet.

Even so, the bloody--literally bloody--point remains.

We torture.

We rape children.

Whatever differences that may exist between that and the precise definition of Nazism are, I suspect, academic.

And, like the Germans of the day, we are oblivious.

It is time to follow Jefferson's instructions. If you don't know what those instructions are, perhaps you should refer to this. He put it right in the second paragraph...

So I'll head back out to the Lost Coast to leech the poison out of my system, to suck up the fog and mist, avoid bears and elk, and sharpen the blades of my weapons*

Be back soon.

* It's a metaphor, motherfuckers. Look it up if you need to.

HolyfuckingpurplejesusSHIT

If the rumors be true, tomorrow Chief Justice Rehnquist will throw in the towel, and limp off to the woods to die--whereupon he will likeky Go To Directly to Hell, without passing GO, and definitely without collecting $200.

There are many well-known and infinitely discussed reasons why W's appointment of two Supreme Court justices have long-reaching consequences, primarily stemming from the life-long nature of Federal judgeships. They stay on the court as long as they want--or until the other judges or justices can no longer tolerate their encroaching senility or frailty--and kick them out by consensus.

Indeed.

Becker has related that despite the maddening lesser-of-two-evils choices presented by Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton and Kerry (especially Kerry, who would have escalated the war in Iraq and done LBJ proud) in the last several presidential elections, he was compelled to hold his nose and mouth to preclude puking and vote for them all--for the simple reason that they would have the power to appoint judges who affect our lives for multiple generations. Reagan and the Bush father/son team have now appointed over 75% of the curent fed judges. Despite what the hopelessly corrupt mainstream media would have you believe, a whole heckuva lot of Clinton's proposed appointments were filibustered by the Senate.

Now, the idiot-child president gets to appoint two, and a hamstrung, emasculated, ineffective set of Senate Democratic weenies have effectively bartered away the filibuster, by essentially agreeing not to use it.

This alone is bad enough. Bush's choices will be unspeakably bad, whether they include torture-lovin'-but-hey-I'm-Hispanic-so-it's-ok-amigo Alberto Gonzales or not.

Yeah, Bush's nominees will undoubtedly fuck us long and hard, sans lubrication, for decades.

But another, more immediate problem looms.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Gonzales, Rice, and Feith, among others, have certainly committed high crimes and misdemeanors warranting impeachment, removal from office, and prosecution under the U.S.'s own War Crimes Act. The drumbeat has been growing for months--

But now, like the Bombs in London, the battle over the appointments will draw the nation's attention, and we will let those fuckers walk away, heinously wealthy--and we'll still be stuck with a fascist majority on the court.

Of course, I hope I'm wrong, but every previously paranoid notion I had about these criminals has come true.

Please, please let me be wrong.

Peace out.