dailyrevolution.net

Today’s links are, most of them, drawn from my inbox. While I realize we’re all busy, placing yourself on the mailing list of a few of the following humanitarian and activist organizations would really help to keep you informed of all that below-the-radar stuff that the MSM misses or purposefully ignores.

Anyway, one of Hagee’s stooges mesmerizes the campers one evening with a ghost story about two children stricken with acute respiratory failure and saved when their father is advised to throw a Harry Potter book out of the house.

Rowling, as I’ve pointed out before, is a very progressive author; and I am sure that’s one big reason why people respond to her work as they do. She constantly lambastes institutions and government of every kind. Lord Voldemort is basically a fundamentalist preacher — Jerry Falwell with a snake’s face and a magic wand. Naturally, then, the fundamentalist camp attacks Rowling and equates Harry Potter with Satan — because they recognize themselves in Lord Voldemort. If you wish to write great and enduring satire, this is precisely the kind of reaction you want to incite as an author — the enmity of those whose falsehood you expose. For a writer, it can’t get any better than that.

Filed under: art, bizarre, fundamentalism, politics, power, state | Add Comment →

And now, a word from our blog’s mascot, Night the Cat:

Yesterday, this blog had 43 page views. It’s anybody’s guess as to whether we’ll be able to afford the hosting costs this year; and overall, our supplies of energy, money, and talent are dwindling.

But I remain eager to get away from Blogway buzzards circling my candidacy and feeding off fresh tidbits like the revelation that I had lent my blog money to keep it afloat. I will fight on in the swingiest states in the galaxy, West Virginia and Kentucky, confident that the dynamic blogospheric environment in those key states will raise me above Truthdig and HuffPo at last.

In short, I’m staying in this race until there is a blog-king, and will not relent even if it tears the entire lefty blogosphere into tiny little pieces and makes people start taking Drudge seriously.

I’m a fighter, a doer, the one with the power, the rhetoric, and the will to obliterate all my enemies. That’s why everybody loves me, and many even worship me (thank you, Rush). And when that phone call from Reality comes at 3:00 AM, I’ll be there to tell it: “No thank you, I have my own, better Reality already.”
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Source for the above para-quotations, here.

Filed under: politics, power | Add Comment →

While the MSM amuses and aggrandizes itself by parsing Hillary’s body language and otherwise displays its unique grasp of the obvious, I’d like to give some attention to the most disturbing news story of the week.

The following is from Der Spiegel’s report on the cyclone in Burma:

Cyclone Nargis has killed tens of thousands in Burma and the death toll keeps rising. Hundreds of thousands of people are without food, water or shelter. But the only thing the military junta appears to care about is keeping its hold on power.

The details bear out the point, which we have seen demonstrated here in America: a disaster like Katrina or Nargis will lay waste to more than people, cities, and villages. It exposes the curious symbiosis of oppression and incompetence that defines the despot and his administration. Here’s an illustration from the Spiegel piece:

Once again, many deaths could have been prevented in Burma if the government had warned its people about the impending disaster. But nothing of the kind happened. “The only thing that was broadcast over the radio on Friday was the propaganda for the bogus referendum next Saturday,” said Aung Zaw, editor of the Thailand-based opposition magazine Irrawaddy.

The same themes resound as those we heard on our own Gulf Coast: a total lack of preparation because of a ruling military junta’s obsession with power and its ignorance of scientific leadership — in fact, of any leadership other than its own oppressive machinery.

Thus, this principle may be said to apply to individual life, family, and running a company or a nation: when oppression is your sole guide; murder your primary means; and mute obedience your only goal, then incompetence and ruin will inevitably be your legacy.
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Many global aid and relief organizations are trying to penetrate the borders of both geography and ignorance in Burma. UNICEF is among those; if you have some money to spare (your Bush rebate, perhaps), it would be well spent on helping to deliver aid to the victims of this predominantly human disaster. Katrina and Nargis and virtually every other event like them reveal less a flaw in Nature than the malignancy of the human faith in, and lust for, power.

Filed under: corruption, power, state | Add Comment →

Just sitting around waiting for the polls in IN and NC to close, so you can start seeing results? How about a quick tour of some real winners — the Webby Awards recipients for 2008? You’re likely to find some sites you’ve never even seen, but may want to bookmark once you have.

In case you’re not a web-aholic like me, the Webby Awards are sort of the Oscars or Emmys of the Intertubes. I’ve been a reviewer for them these past 3 years — it’s fun and it pays. I’m not allowed to say which of my faves won (and, of course, I didn’t see but a fraction of the entrants); but the following are worth noting — the full list is here.

There, now off you go to check those primary results. If you really feel like it.

Filed under: art, bizarre, blogging | Add Comment →

Juan Cole, who writes what is arguably the most important blog of our time*, offers this comment on the appalling remarks from Hillary Cheney:

…it is surreal to have Democrats discussing whether it is appropriate for the US to “totally obliterate” another country. It would be one thing if she had threatened the Iranian military. Targeting civilians, who would be included in the “total” obliteration, is a war crime.

The rest of Cole’s comments on this are here; and I would merely add this pragmatic observation: in this era of genocide, when political and corporate leaders are vying for prominence in accelerating the extinction of the human species, “progressive” genocidal talk like Clinton’s is also an act of political suicide on behalf of herself and her party. Every time a Democrat voices such horrific idiocy, John McCain smiles.

Anyone who needs a historical reminder of where this sort of bellicose jargon leads can take a look at these pictures and then read Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke.
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*My one-two picks, as daily reads for anyone who wishes to know the truth about what’s happening in Iraq and Iran (and what it all means), would be Cole’s blog and TomDispatch.

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This is pretty good stuff: a short video on the Pentagon pundits scandal (which, if you get your news solely from the Big 3 Networks, you haven’t heard a word about). The action link on this is at freepress.net.

Filed under: corruption, power, state | Add Comment →

Set them together, said Panurge, then blow in their arses, it will be a bagpipe. We saw, after that, a diminutive humpbacked gallant, pretty near us, taking leave of a she-relation of his, thus: Fare thee well, friend hole…(Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel).

In the projectile-vomit realm of mega-corporate finance, in which bulimic trolls eat one another and then regurgitate workers and propaganda across the barren wastes of Oligopoly, there is a piquant hilarity that reminds one of toddlers on an ant-hill, playing Giant-on-the-Mountain. We are often constrained to wish that we could step off our own treadmills (otherwise known as jobs), in order to better view and enjoy this entertainment.

Thus, like two monsters doing rough sex for a peepshow act in old Times Square, Microsoft and Yahoo come to the end of their brutish and bawdy tape, while we, with equal parts fascination and disgust, reach for another bill to stuff into the machine, that we may watch some more. But sad to say, there will be no more:

Mr Ballmer also told Yahoo’s boss that he would not pursue his original plan B of launching a hostile takeover battle, because Mr Yang would “take steps that would make Yahoo undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft”.

Where is the Rabelais, the Swift, the Cervantes, or the Erasmus, who could do this scene justice in the public press? A whoreson, priapic beast, whose fecal software might be found within the “golden bottle” at the end of Pantagruel’s quest, attempts to subdue a dominatrix whose chief amusement consists in consigning pro-democracy Chinese bloggers to decades of imprisonment and torture — has Trump anything to compare with such sport?

No, but it is over. And thus we, the still-gaping audience, turn reluctantly away from the show and return to our own paler and pettier, Monday morning arcs of acquisition and lust; confident in the knowledge that, ere long, there will surely be another such lubricious and awful panorama of savage corporate perversion, upon which we may fawn, feast, and fantasize.
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Footnote: If you happen to be from Iran, don’t even think about doing business with M$ or Yahoo, because you do not exist. There: now you don’t have to wait for Hillary to “obliterate” you — M$ and Yahoo have done it already.

Filed under: bizarre, corpo-corruption | Add Comment →

17,600: Number of people killed in alcohol-related car accidents in a year.

0: Number of people killed annually while giving or receiving fellatio.

We report, you decide: whose crime is worse — Bill Clinton’s or Vito Fossella’s?

Filed under: corruption, politics | 2 Comments →

Take the Bush-McCain challenge (courtesy of MoveOn.org).

Filed under: bizarre, politics | Add Comment →

Sure beats American Idol. There are a lot of good musicians here in New York, and I wouldn’t mind seeing this sort of thing extended to include poets, visual artists, and hell, even bloggers (well, it would be a nice break from that underground legion of amateur Christian evangelists who currently disrupt the relative silence of the morning commute).

In ancient times, this sort of thing was universal — people got their news and entertainment from wandering street criers, poets, and minstrels. It is reasonable to assume that the two most influential poems of Western culture were a product, at least in part, of this tradition.

Perhaps the Intertubes and the blogosphere are a modern continuation of this practice. However that may be, it’s fairly important that artists be given the widest reach we can offer them — a living and popular artistic presence is one defining mark of every civilization worthy of the name.

The trouble comes, of course, when artists get trapped in the trail of slime left by the Great Corporate Slug. A sci-fi/fantasy writer named Orson Scott Card has recently reprised a complaint that we’ve voiced here with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

Artists are not supposed to deal in the great billion-dollar grab; that’s the province of hedge fund managers and corporate behemoths. Once an artist does jump into this slime-pit, creativity is terminated. This is probably something that Rowling, in a twisted way, recognizes herself: she claims that she can’t write anymore, and, with an arrogance worthy of a neocon pundit, displaces the blame for that onto an imagined enemy.

As I mentioned in a different context earlier this week, the reach for excess — what psychologist Karen Horney called “neurotic claim” — is as piano wire to the throat of the creative spirit. For as long as Ms. Rowling holds her grip on her own neurotic claim, her creative gift will also be strangled.

Yet she still has her fans — witness this report on Bush’s “wand envy”:

– “I wish I could simply wave a magic wand and lower gas prices tomorrow; I’d do that.” — Bush, 4/20/05

– “I wish I could just wave a magic wand and lower the price at the pump; I’d do that.” — Bush, 5/16/05

– “[L]et me assure you that if the President had a magic wand that could lower prices, he would do it!” — Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, 8/08/05

– “I wish there was a magic wand that I could wave that would lower gas prices. But I can’t.” — Bodman, 4/25/06

As Mr. Ollivander might say: “the wand chooses the president, Mr. Bush, not the other way around.”

But when you’re controlled by the Death Eaters, your wand, not to mention your policy, inevitably fails.

Filed under: art, money, state | 2 Comments →