Excellent article on the attempts of superhero comics to deal to critique American politics, and how they fail:
The Superhero Registration Act is a straightforward analogue of the USA PATRIOT Act; the rhetoric of its opponents could have been cribbed from an ACLU brief. But under scrutiny, their civil libertarian arguments turn out to hold very little water in the fictional context. The “liberty” the act infringes is the right of well-meaning masked vigilantes, many wielding incredible destructive power, to operate unaccountably, outside the law — a right no sane society recognizes. In one uneasy scene, an anti-registration hero points out that the law would subject heroes to lawsuits filed by those they apprehend. In another, registered hero Wonder Man is forced to wait several whole minutes for approval before barging into a warehouse full of armed spies from Atlantis. Protests about the law’s threat to privacy ring a bit hollow coming from heroes accustomed to breaking into buildings, reading minds, or peering through walls without bothering to obtain search warrants. Captain America bristles at the thought of “Washington … telling us who the supervillains are,” but his insistence that heroes must be “above” politics amounts to the claim that messy democratic deliberation can only hamper the good guys’ efforts to protect America. The putative dissident suddenly sounds suspiciously like Director of National Intelligence Mitch McConnell defending warrantless spying.
I haven’t read Ellis’s Black Summer yet (I have issue 0, just need to find the time), but I suspect it falls into the same trap: Horus’s murder of the president is little different from the US’s invasion of Iraq.
Full Story: American Prospect).
(via American Samizdat).
Read Part 1 of The US as Police State.
In part 1, I took a very brief look at the history of the United States from 1787 to around 1980 and found a history of government repression of citizens at varying levels of government: restrictions on voting, vote fraud, and slavery. Not to mention the genocide of the Native Americans at the hands of the US military.
So now I turn my attention to Ronald Reagan and the point where the “War on Drugs” actually became a war, and not mere prohibition. The drug war is meant to stamp out the “drug problem” in America. A problem that the government helped engineer in t he first place. As detailed in Gary Webb’s series of “Dark Alliance” articles for the San Jose Mercury News, and later a book by the same name, the C.I.A, with the explicit knowledge of the Reagan administration, supported Nicaraguan contras in their sale of cocaine to drug dealers in Los Angles starting around 1981. For more information, see Webb’s 1998 article for the Orange County Weekly, The Crack-Up.”
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Today was the 9/11 Truthers general strike for a new 9/11 investigation (and immediate impeachment of President Bush). Since I didn’t have to work or go to school, I did not have to make a decision as to whether I would participate. Generally, I find the Truth Movement to be too certain, too religious in their positions to take completely seriously. At this point, I make no speculation about who was behind the attacks, or what precisely happened that day. That approximately 3,000 people died that day is enough.
But I believe there are enough unanswered questions to justify an extensive, independent investigation into 9/11. And regardless of whether Bush had a role in planning or executing 9/11 (or just let it happen, or whatever), he deserves to be impeached.
So while today was just another day for me, I do want to register in some way my support for a new investigation. I think it is the best way to honor those who lost their lives. We should know what happened, who was responsible, and, most importantly, what we can do to prevent something like this from happening again.
Then, yesterday evening, I spoke with the owner and manager of a bar in Manassas Park, Virginia. In 2004, their business was raided by 90 — yes ninety — police in paramilitary gear. The police raided under the guise of — are you ready for this? — an Alcohol Beverage Control inspection. The advantage of raiding under an ABC warrant is that its a regualtory inspection not a criminal investigation, which means that the police didn’t need to get a warrant before going in. The owners have video of the raid captured by their security cameras. I’ll be posting it here once they condense it and send it to me.
For the last three hours, I sat with the two men while they went over detail after excruciating detail of the Manassas Park police departments endless efforts to entrap them, bait them, and run them out of business. The manager has no criminal record. Neither does the owner, his father, who’s a business owner and a practicing lawyer for 40 years. The manager’s brother is the income president of the Fairfax Bar Association.
Before 2004, the bar had a spotless ABC record. Not a single violation.
That’s just the beginning… what follows is a stranger-than-fiction story about local police and city counsel corruption complete with cocaine, strippers, child pornography, gambling, and shady redevelopment schemes.
Full Story: The Agitator.
Start at the bottom and work your way up.
See also:
Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. (There’s a link to download the PDF towards the bottom of the page).
Found this article yesterday while reading the print edition of The New York Times Magazine (link to article). Fortunately, it’s online (for the time being), but I’ll copy n paste it in its entirety for your reading pleasure:-
By TED WIDMER
Published: July 22, 2007
None of us can control our ancestors. Like our children, they have minds of their own and invariably refuse to do our bidding. Presidential ancestors are especially unruly – they are numerous and easily discovered, and they often act in ways unbecoming to the high station of their descendants.
Take George Bush. By whom I mean George Bush (1796-1859), first cousin of the president’s great-great-great-grandfather. It would be hard to find a more unlikely forebear. G.B. No. 1 was not exactly the black sheep of the family, to use a phrase the president likes to apply to himself. In fact, he was extremely distinguished, just not in ways that you might expect. Prof. George Bush was a bona fide New York intellectual: a dabbler in esoteric religions whose opinions were described as, yes, ‘liberal’; a journalist and an academic who was deeply conversant with the traditions of the Middle East. Read the rest of this entry »
In 15 square miles of abandoned land, about 400 misfits-aging hippies, disillusioned veterans, teenage runaways-have built a community where no one cares if you smoke pot, fire your rifle all day, let your kids drive your car, or walk around naked in the desert heat. It’s a landscape of beat-up old trailers, shacks jerry-rigged from recycled materials, solar panels, little farms, greenhouses, and at least one tipi. “Where I live is the last remaining land of America that is left,” says Dreadie Jeff, another Mesa resident. “You can do what you fucking want there.”
The local culture defies easy stereotypes. “Going into this community with this traditional mainstream liberal ideology,” Jeremy says, “we realized all our preconceived notions were bullshit. These people were extremely into their Second Amendment rights, and they were also into marijuana legalization. They don’t fit into these molds.” There’s a touch of madness to the place as well. Mama Phyllis, a Mesa woman who used to be a psychiatric nurse (“I couldn’t do that anymore,” she says, and leaves it at that), calls it “the largest outdoor insane asylum.” The governing philosophy is a mix of anarchism, patriotism, New Age stoner wisdom, and a militia-style distrust of the state. Early in the film Dreadie Jeff, a veteran of the first Gulf War, exclaims that his military oath was not “to defend this land, it’s not to defend the people, it’s not to defend the motherfucking asshole president of the United States. My military oath goes, ‘I solemnly swear to defend the Constitution of the United States of America from all enemies, foreign and domestic.’” The Constitution’s “biggest enemy,” he adds, is “this fucking government that is in place right now.”
Full Story: Reason Magazine.
Arthur Magazine has posted their now classic interview with Grant Morrison on their web site:
And The Filth came out of that, trying to understand that every cherished thought and belief had an equally valid counterpoint. Once I realized I had to think about this stuff and I had to deal with it, I decided to treat it as an Abyss experience, based on the ideas of kabbalistic magic. Because that at least gave me a context to deal with the experience. According to Kabbalah, or to Enochian magic, the Abyss is a kind of Ring-Pass-Not for consciousness, which means that beyond that, the typical self-aware 11-bit consciousness you use to get through the day, doesn’t operate. The kabbalistic idea of the Abyss is manifold. There’s a kind of crack in Being and the crack is the moment of the Breath before the Big Bang. It’s also the crack of dead time where we do nothing when we’d like to do something, the crack between the thought of doing and actually doing. That gulf can become immense and daunting. We might decide to be President and do nothing, leading to a life of reproach and regret. [chuckle] Then you’re in the Abyss. So I felt this confrontation with difficult material coming, and I chose to frame it as a trip into the Abyss, I took the Oath of the Abyss, from the Thelemic version of Kabbalah, the Aleister Crowley version, and…again all this stuff really is to me ways of contextualizing states of consciousness. Crowley also talks about the demon Choronzon who’s the guardian of the Abyss, and Choronzon is a demon who takes any thought and amplifies until it becomes a completely disorienting storm of disconnected gibberish.
Full Story: Arthur Magazine.
Get yer hate on! See AlterNet article for complete details:
Scariest Presidential Candidate: Sam Brownback / Senator (R-Kansas)
Scariest Judge: Edith Hollan Jones / Chief Justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
Scariest Opportunity Killer: Richard Berman / President, Berman and Company
Scariest Proselytizer:: Rev. Rick Warren / Author of The Purpose Driven Life
Scariest Snoop: Derek V. Smith / CEO, ChoicePoint
Scariest Polluter: Don Blankenship / CEO of Massey Energy Co.
Scariest Scientist: Leon Kass / Member of The President’s Council on Bioethics
Scariest Cop: Joe Arpaio / Sheriff, Maricopa County, AZ
Scariest Drug Dealer: Billy Tauzin / CEO, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America
Scariest Academic: Kevin MacDonald / Professor of Psychology, California State University at Long Beach
Scariest Hidden Persuader: Michael J. Petruzzello / Managing Partner, Qorvis Communications
Scariest Billionaire: Richard Mellon Scaife/Oil and Banking Heir
Worst Insurer: Edward M. Liddy / CEO, Allstate
“The second part of our conversation with Natasha-Vita More, President of the Extropy Institute and Founder and Director of Transhumanist Arts & Culture.”
MP3 on NeoFiles.
“Natasha Vita-More, President of the Extropy Institute and Founder and Director of Transhumanist Arts & Culture joins us for the first of this two part interview. We discuss extropy, the rate of change, and Vita-More announces a big transition?”
MP3 on NeoFiles.
“2012,” he shrilled, and then fell to cackling grotesquely. “That was the year Morgan the Fifth was appointed President of the United States by the Board of Magnates. It must have been one of the last coins minted, for the Scarlet Death came in 2013. Lord! Lord!?think of it! Sixty years ago, and I am the only person alive to-day that lived in those times. Where did you find it, Edwin?” The boy, who had been regarding him with the tolerant curiousness one accords to the prattlings of the feeble-minded, answered promptly.
Full Story: The Scarlet Plague by Jack London.
(via Robot Wisdom)
Dick Cheney, then [assistant] White House Chief of Staff to President Ford…was the reason my family had travelled to Wyoming where I endured yet another form of brutality – his version of “A Most Dangerous Game,” or human hunting…. Dick Cheney had an apparent addiction to the “thrill of the sport.” He appeared obsessed with playing A Most Dangerous Game as a means of traumatizing mind control victims, as well as to satisfy his own perverse sexual kinks.
Full Story: Rigorous Intuition.
(via Robot Wisdom)
Is April Fool’s an officially recognized Discordian holiday? Anyway, Hoax Musuem has a top 100 April Fool’s hoaxes of all time.
In 1995 the Irish Times reported that the Disney Corporation was negotiating with the Russian government to purchase the embalmed body of communist leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The body has been kept on display in Red Square since the leader’s death. Disney proposed moving the body and the mausoleum to the new Euro Disney, where it would be given the “full Disney treatment.” This would include displaying the body “under stroboscopic lights which will tone up the pallid face while excerpts from President Reagan’s ‘evil empire’ speech will be played in quadrophonic sound.” Lenin t-shirts would also be sold. Disney anticipated that this attraction would attract more visitors to the theme park, significantly boosting profits which had been weak since the park’s opening. The Russians were said to be agreeable to the sale of Lenin’s body. But a controversy had erupted about the sale of the mausoleum. Liberal groups wanted to keep the mausoleum empty “to symbolize the ‘emptiness of the Communist system,’” while Russian nationalists wanted to transform it into a memorial to Tsar Nicholas II.
Link (via Capital of Nasty).
They didn’t include the time that The Joker forced Batman into a boner.
Thompson proves he’s still the hardest writer out there:
This year’s first presidential debate was such a disaster for George Bush that his handlers had to be crazy to let him get in the ring with John Kerry again. Yet Karl Rove let it happen, and we can only wonder why. But there is no doubt that the president has lost his nerve, and his career in the White House is finished. NO MAS.
[...]
Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous “trickle-down” theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow “trickle down” to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white male property owners could vote.
Things haven’t changed all that much where George W. Bush comes from. Houston is a cruel and crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It’s a shabby sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West — which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.
[...]
The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more and more like the head of a fascist government but if the American people want it that way. That is what this election is all about. We are down to nut-cutting time, and millions of people are angry. They want a Regime Change.
[...]
Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a good man with a brave heart — which is more than even the president’s friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him.
From the story: “CNN spiked Connie Chung’s widely-publicized “expose” on Yale University’s Order of Skull & Bones, chapter 322, which counts among its membership President George W. Bush and his father and grandfather before him, and influential aide and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, and Connie Chung ain’t talking.”
Link (via New World Disorder).
Charlton Heston has announced that he may have Alzheimer’s. I’ve always wanted to hang-out with Cheston, and it now looks like I may never get the chance. Well, not while he’s sane anyway. Further, it looks like the president of the NRA may loose his guns.
Link.
Counter-culture legend Robert Anton Wilson’s new book, TSOG: The Thing That Ate the Constitution will be released sometime soon. From the blurb: “Will the ‘war on terrorism’ put the last nail in the coffin of YOUR rights? Would Hannibal Lecter make a better president than George W. Bush?”
Link (via the Barbelith Underground).
It seems that back in 1969 former US president Jimmy Carter sighted an unidentified flying object. “The object stood still in the sky for a period of ten or twelve minutes, slowly changing its color, size, and brightness, and then gradually retreated into the distance, disappearing from view. Carter estimated that the object, at its closest, was some 300 to 1,000 yards away.” But it turns out that it was probably the planet Venus.
Link.
For those who don’t know, I.G. Farben produced Zyklon-B cyanide gas, which was used in Nazi death camps to aid the extermination of the Jews. The Final Solution was in full swing but far away, some say on the moon, some say in Antarctica, some say both, a far different program was taking place.
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