WOrd mAY 31, 2011

You know, when my time comes. I don’t want no open casket. I don’t trust no one to put on my makeup but me

Hey....

Cheez-o-peeza, that's right outside the window of my apartment on East Fifth Street in the East Village! I lived on the 5th floor at the time!
 performance by Stelarc, shot by Toya, NY 1984





more music from the East Village, 1992
this is sort of punk rock spoken word performance
Ray Sage:Drums, Billy Cote:Guitar, Microdot:Bass
A guy named Elmer:Vocals
Ladies and Gentlemen, Preserved Fish!

wORd mAy 30, 2011

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”Isaac Asimov

Fresh Berries!

gateau roule aux framboise

gateau yaourt aux creme marscapone fraise

Fresh fruit season in full swing at the La Sechere Dessert Research and Development Facility. The rolled cake is made from a sheet of merengue baked with sliced almonds. It was filled with a creme made of whipped creme and marscapone and raspberries. It was deocrated with more fresh raspberries and powdered sugar. The layered cake is a simple yoghurt cake, sliced in half, filled again with whipped cream and marscapone with fresh strawberries. It was glazed with raspberry cassis jelly and decorated with fresh gariguette strawberries and little wild ones....In spite of the heat and the drought, we are eating raspberries and strawberries everyday in every way we can think of. I am growing mara de bois, a variety called geant and gariguette.

The mara de bois variety is like a wild strawberry, but bigger and incredible....

 I don't know what the raspberry variety is. A friend gave me shoots about 10 years ago when he thinned his in the fall. I have two lines about 10 meters long. Though it isn't not going to be a good year because of the drought, I still expect to get 25 kilos.......

Are You A Replicant?

The Voight-Kampf questionaire

In 1968, Phillip K. Dick wrote a story called Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep.
In 1981, Ridley Scott adapted the story to make the classic Future Noir film,
Bladerunner.
The story was set in what seemed to be the far future, 2019. But it's 2011 already and the unruly disposable replicants are now the unruly, disposable working class.
The replicants had no rights, they had a pre-programmed life span and if they got out of hand, they were hunted down and destroyed.
Are you disposable? 
Are you a replicant without rights?
The future is already here.

New York Is Killing Me

Gil Scott-Heron, one of the greatest American poets of our era, died yesterday at 62. He recently released his first recording in years, I'm New Here. His piece, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, has been referred to as the birth of hip hop, rap from 1969. It may be one of the most referenced and parodied performance pieces in pop culture. Gil's tragic story is worth reading. You must read this heart wrenching portrait of a brilliant man who self destructed and resurrected, the story of being consumed by his own demons and gaining strength from them at the same time was published in the New Yorker in 2009. Stand back, you might get burned, but rather than condemn the man for his life, maybe one can gain some real insight into the soul of a great American poet.

Free The Rich

Another Post From 4am, from the corner of East 7th Street and Avenue A, the opening night of the A7 Club, July 1981. The band was Belle Starr. This is a piece called Free The Rich... a gentle kind of revolution that you can dance to.

Due to technical difficulties, you have to play the two parts...the second part is the end...the tape ran out and the person recording it flipped it as fast he could! Didier Poursain: Guitar and vocals, Janet Kerr: Electric keyboards and vocals, Timmy Chisholm: Extra terrestrial percussion, A guy named Microdot: Bass guitar and screaming.....

detachable autopen

I woke up this morning with a bad hangover

and my autopen was missing again

this happens all the time,

It's detachable...

This comes in handy a lot of the time.

I can leave it at home, when I think it's gonna get me in trouble

but now and then I go to a party, get drunk,

and the next morning, I can't for the life of me

remember what I did with it....

And then I read that I signed a 4 year extension to the Patriot Act...

And Our Next Contestant Is.....

Mr. Gingrich, Newt, sir, are you still in the competition? I'm sorry, sir, I wasn't sure...well are you ready? Because you are slated to do the next walk on....Yes, your speedo looks lovely, red white and blue sequins, very patriotic, sir, but shouldn't you be wearing a brassiere? Sorry, I didn't mean to offend, but look at what happened when when Mr. Cain did his walk on...I mean, I, well, feel sorry for him. Part of him was wiggling East and the other parts were heading for the hills...Well, perhaps, that's part of the appeal to your audience...they like a well fed, prosperous candidate, I guess. It must feed into their fantasies.
Speaking of fantasies, sir, I think you've got a bit of competition with Mr. Santorum. That was quite a dance routine he was doing in his star spangled mankini. I think he really has a handle of the repressed conservative homosexual vote thing...it must be a lot more prevalent than anyone suspected!
Did you get a load of Mitt? I didn't know you could get a crease like that in a bathing suit. It must be the starch in the legendary Mormon underwear he wears under that thing.
Thank God Mr. Trump went on first...the man wasn't wearing anything but his long wind tossed toupee and I don't think he was aware of it...He was raving about his new outfit and his fantastic new tailor and how much it cost...You saw it? Pretty scary, huh? I don't think that will make it to the final cut, if you know what I mean....
Wait a second, there's another contestant here that they are scheduling in front of you...it's, oh my gawd, I don't believe it! Sarah Palin! The reviews are coming in already, sir! Mr. Gingrich, maybe you'e better start working on your dance routine, because Sarah's one tough cookie and she's got buns of steel!
Just check out some of these Tweets twittering in:


1. This is a masterstroke. Everyone has been caught off guard. The Lefties are totally flummoxed. They expected to dominate the news with Bailey and the Caller story, now its SARAH IS COMING.
2. Washington will be in complete turmoil. They thought they might get Sarah to reconsider. and stay out. She’s not. She’s coming in. The Donor Class now knows that she will be in the game. This frustrates Mittens, TPaw, and most of all, the Bush Family.
3. This tells me something else: Palin has her TO&E almost ramped and ready. There is more behind the scenes than we know. State by state websites are probably ramped up, using O4P as the skeletal front. The fundraising machine is probably amped and ready. The FEC papers are filled out and ready to file.
4. Her position papers, some of them genuinely radical, are ready to go.
5. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, prepare for genuine, on the ground, protracted infantry warfare. This will be All Eastern Front, All The Time.
Expect this to be an extremely long and protracted effort that will take up the next 18 months of our lives. The Country is Worth It.
Remember, people gave their lives so we could bang away on a computers and vote our consciences. McCain spent five years in a box so we could do this stuff.
Do not forget who made the next 18 months possible. Men who laid down their lives at places like Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, Belleau Wood, Midway, Peleileu, the Chosin Resevoir, Khe Sanh, and Fallujah, made it possible for us to fight for the life of our country.
Oh, and don’t forget to seek God’s guidance and fortification in prayer. I intend to do that. Haven’t done much of it lately. That’s a part of my life that needs to change. Sarah’s example is a good one.
The road ahead for Palin, her family, her team, and for us, is a long and bitter one. But there have been tougher, blacker days. Mr. Churchill spoke to the King’s Subjects for the first time as Prime Minister on May 19, 1940 on the BBC. The British Expeditionary Force had just been unceremoniously expelled from the Continent, courtesy of the Panzertruppen. France was well on its way to becoming a German satrapy. And all of England would come under the ferocious assault of the Deutches Luftwaffe within a month.
Chruchill was stern in his address. He did not mince words. He told his fellow subjects of the enormity of the task at hand, and of the apparent imminence of invasion of the British Isles. Having made his speech, he finished with a peroration that has come down to the ages and I believe applies here:
“Today is Trinity Sunday. Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: ‘Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be.’
Cheez-o-Peeza I just came in my pants...
(these were verbatim posts from the extremely delusional Conservatives4Palin site, okay, the cumming in my pants part wasn't there, I just made that up...)

Actually, this is more like the trailer for The Stand by Stephen King  than a Beauty Contest....
Maybe you should put the brassiere on, Mr. Gingrich.....

Revenge Of The Deep, Revisited

In 2009, I wrote a post called Revenge Of The Deep. In it, I traced the connection of the Mafia controlled illegal dumping of hazardous waste off the coast of Somalia and the rise of the phenomena of piratage off the Somalian coast. When I published the piece, there was a lot of outraged comments finding fault with me for offering any defense of Somalian piracy. I did not defend it, I tried to show the real cause of the phenomena. If I opened the unimaginative minds of any of the outraged commenters with that piece, then, I did what I set out to do.  The waste dumping decimated the fishing industry and created a toxic nightmare for the Somalian fishermen who made their living from the sea. The documentation of the ravages of the pollution on the population is only now being revealed. The documentary, TOXIC SOMALIA from 2010 reveals the effects on children being born with congenital birth defects. The documentary also deals wit the Italian reporter, Illaria Alpi who was murdered in 1994 while doing a report on the Italian Mafia's involvement and complicity with the Somalian Government in the dumping.
I have read reports of the connection that leads through a small Caribbean Island off the coast of Haiti called Navassa. Navassa has a bizarre history and is legally claimed as a United States Territory. It is uninhabited and has an abandoned US Coast Guard Lighthouse. It had been used as a source for Guano, huge deposits of seabird droppings that were mined for fertilizer.

Navassa is located between Haiti and Jamaica

Haiti also claims Navassa as a territorial possession and there has been an on going legal proceeding between Haiti and the USA over this issue.

Navacense Coat of Arms

But, there is another player. Navassa was 
discovered by Columbus and through a tangled thread of claims dating back to Ferdinand of Spain, 
Navassa has been claimed by a Columbian group as a sovereign state. They claim they are a monarchy and the little uninhabited kingdom is known as the Principado De Navaza.  The "government" includes a number of Italian Mafiosi figures allegedly involved in the waste dumping scandal. They use their Navacense Government credentials to establish claims of diplomatic immunity. Through the tangled history of this uninhabited, disputed little island off of Haiti runs the thread that connects the destruction of the ocean environment and toxic pollution of the shore line of Somalia and the rise of Somalian Piracy. I want to know more, but frankly, I'm a little frightened of what I might find......

The Boiling Green Clouds....

Here in Europe, most people do not understand the real violence of a tornado. We have extreme weather here, but the conditions that create the meteorological weather amplifier that exist in North America are unique. A trumpet shaped land mass with mountain ranges on either coasts with extreme heat in the summer and cold in the winter creates conditions that shaped and defined the flora and the fauna on the continental mass. 
I lived in Michigan and Ohio and experienced a few pretty hairy tornado experiences. In August, you get used to the sirens going off around 4 pm a few times a week. I have tried to relate this to friends here, but until you have seen it or experienced it, it's unreal and beyond imagination.
The photo is from Oklahoma City yesterday. The boiling mamatmocumulus  clouds are a terrifying phenomena by themselves. The clouds form funnel like appendages which can develop into tornadoes.
These clouds occur occasionally in Europe and there are a few tornadoes in other parts of the world, but they never reach the size or the frequency of the storms in North America. Even after the massive storm related disasters this week, the Republicans are balking at government aid to the victims. On the other hand, an editorial in yesterday's Kansas City Star makes the case for rethinking the way we run our government if it cannot take care of disaster relief.
Here's a video of one of yesterdays tornadoes in Oklahoma.

The Bell Tolls

The bell sounds ominously, echoing across the roof tops of America. The Wisconsin Election Board has already approved of 3 recall elections against the wingnut Republican lunatic legislators that lied their way into office to push their corporate bloodsucking agenda upon an unwitting sedated and shell shocked public.
Today, in the special election to replace disgraced Republican Congressman, Chris Lee, the voters in Congressional district 26, which stretches from Buffalo to Rochester, Democrat Kathy Hochul was soundly elected.
This is a district which has always been Republican.
Voters crossed party lines and elected her because the Republicans have crossed the line and peed on the new more powerful fourth rail, so to speak. Social security was always the proverbial third rail, a sacrosanct line that the corporate, class war waging conservatives respected. The new more powerful line is Medicare!
This election was the first salvo in a rebuttal to the tea party and the corporate society gutting insanity they are foisting on America as what they term "Brave Choices".
Only a coward, a fiend would victimize the poor, the elderly, the disenfranchised to protect the social welfare of the wealthy. Only a scoundrel would try to destroy the fabric of society for greed, because that is the root of the conservative budget...greed. Fear Driven Greed. Little men who rush to their own doom as they line their pockets. The sooner their out of control wheel chairs roll off of the cliffs, the better for American society! The Republican Apocalypse is approaching ....

Birthday Boy

Bobby Zimmerman is 70!

worD maY 24, 2011

“A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what’s going on. A psychotic is someone who just found out what’s going on.”

William S. Burroughs

Media

Be In

Another echo from 1981. Belle Starr. live at the A7 Club, NYC.

Be In

7 Signs Of The Republican Apocalypse

Well, well, well, the world didn't end on Saturday after all, but while we all woke up disappointed to a beautiful new Sunday morning, there's still hope if you are a Republican Congressman in The USA.
Behold, the writing appears on the wall and one by one the mighty shaketh in their cordovans and findeth that verily, their deodorant doesn't seem to performing as advertised.
This week, the righteous Senators will vote on Paul Ryans apocalyptic budget forcing them to take a stand on destroying Medicare. Things are not looking good...
The shudda been easy win in New Yorks 26th District Special Election tomorrow doesn't look good for them at all and if Democrat Kathy Hochul wins this traditionally Republican bastion, it will be an epic disaster, a foreshadowing of how Republican Congressmen will be haunted by their vote to end Medicare.
There have been signs, portents and omens in the sky for weeks now, the polls are showing the Ryan budget as being as unpopular as Obama's Health Care Reform Bill at the nadir of it's unpopularity. The Congressional staffers are warning their bosses that "You might not want to go there" in a series of pre vote meetings.
Newt Gingrich was forced to demonstrate his amazing talent of spinning like a fat angel on the head of Rush Limbaughs pin...He liked it, then he didn't like it, now he didn't really mean to say that he didn't like in fact, he didn't say anything like that at all and if he did, well it's the liberal media's fault...whew!
That was some fancy dancin' Newt!
In Arizona, in a supposedly friendly meeting at the Fellowship Church in Anthem Arizona, the audience turned on Rep. Ben Quayle protesting the Ryan Medicare cuts.
In Las Vegas, last week, The Heck Town Hall Meeting turned ugly as his Rep. Joe Heck was confronted by his constituents shouting their protests and fighting with each other.
Paul Ryan, the author of the budget plan was confronted in Chicago by protesters carrying "Tax The Rich!"sign outside of his hotel when he was scheduled to give a speech on the plan.
Freshman Rep. Cravaack was forced to respond at a town meeting in Minneapolis and was called a liar and forced to admit that the information on the power point slides he was showing was inaccurate.
Meanwhile, MA Senator Scott Brown has completed his flip flop. He now has officially come out against the Ryan Plan. At first for it, now definitely agin' it...just bendin' with the polls, eh Senator? 


Even Mitch McConnell was forced to react to the attack ad showing a Ryan look alike pushing granny off the cliff in her wheelchair. "Let's just stipulate that nobody is trying to throw grandma off the cliff" he said on FOX News Sunday.
It's not that easy any more, Mr McConnell, if you really don't want to throw granny off the cliff, then you will have to come out and vote against the Ryan budget plan.


The wolf bays in the distance at the spinning moon. The stars are unfixed in the sky. The elephant crows like a rooster as a party now dominated by extreme, nutty ideologues finds it self in a lose-lose situation, in a wheel chair with out brakes, on a course of their own making as it heads over the cliff, into their apocalypse.....

My Next Vacation Destination!

This is truly awesome, sort of like an East Toledo with a much better climate and seismic activity to boot!

Rapture Tech Support Hotline

As a public service, thebrainpolice has set up a rapture tech support hotline. We are here to help you deal with any technical difficulties or questions you might have regarding todays scheduled "Rapture" event.
So far, the most commonly asked question has been: How do I deal with this pesky brimstone stuff and what exactly is it?
Our expert technical staff has this answer for you: Brimstone is the geological equivalent of the biological substance known as "Santorum". It solidifies in the atmosphere as it rains down in a burning maelstrom upon the damned. We have found it to be a rather good landscaping material once it cools down a bit.
Rapture hot line hot tip: Be sure to change your cat box before 7:30 pm this evening.

Videla's Last Tango

Another little snippet from 1981. The Band again was Belle Starr, live at the opening of the A7 Club in the east Village at around 3:30am. The song is Videla's Last Tango. Videla being the dictator of Argentina at that time. Electric Autoharp and vocals: Janet Kerr, Guitar and vocals: Didier Poursain

Drummer extraordinaire: Timmy Chisholm

Bass: Microdot

It's After The End Of The World

For all of you folks out there who are a wee bit upset about the predictions that the world is going to end this Sunday. Relax....

Su Ra officially declared that time had ended back in 1974 and it was already after the end of the world.

Don't you know that?

The Rationals "Respect" 1967

This was such a big regional hit in the midwest in 1966/67 by one of the best white punk soul bands ever.

I finally have forgiven Scott Morgan, the singer for walking off with my date in 1966. It was kind of traumatic for a 15 year old kid, but I got over it. Scott's still performing and as good as ever.

The Rationals, Respect, originally issued on Cameo Records in 1966.

I Have No Idea....

Jean Gabin as Inspector Maigret

In my last post regarding the DSK/Rape affair, I quoted Chief Inspector Maigret of the Flying Squad, the main character in many Georges Simenon mysteries. When asked by reporters or even associates if he had an opinion regarding a case he was involved in, he would invariably answer, "I have absolutely no idea."
One of the biggest headaches in his investigations was the attempt of The Judge of Instruction....a purely French legal personage, to direct the investigation to come up with the convenient conclusion that the Judge had already settles upon. Many times, the Judge would be acting under orders from "up above" to conclude the case with out embarrassment to notable figures. Maigret often found himself in hot water with his superiors and would drive them  nuts with his tight lipped, dogged methodology, but invariably he was right.
In France, the latest public opinion polls regarding the DSK affair show that almost 60% of the people polled believe that DSK is the victim of a plot. This reflects on the present sorry state of French political life. The present government is quite capable and amoral enough to believably have constructed such a plot in the eyes of most French people. That was my first reaction.
I am trying to keep an open mind, I have my ideas, but as of now, I have no idea.
I resent the frantic attempts of public figures to try to influence public opinion in this case. There is the "philosopher/media hound/best selling author, Bernard Henri-Levi writing of DSK as his friend. They are neighbors in Morocco, they share the same tastes for bling and loose women. He recently wrote a defense that found fault with the hotel worker for going into DSK's room alone. He found this "highly suspicious." He was shocked and outraged by the American justice process, which treated DSK as it would have treated any other man accused of the crime he was.  He claims that the affair is being exploited in France as an attempt to settle old scores by political rivals. Well, it is...that's a fact of life.
I resent Henri-Levi's attempt to justify the alleged behavior and blame the victim as he tries to defend DSK from the same accusations. He sullied his reputation in his defense of Roman Polanski, instead of logic, it became a defense of privilege. It was a class thing.
Frankly, if this incident had occurred at a great hotel in Paris, the hotels first concern would be to keep it out of the press and pay the victim off to protect its reputation.
Henri-Levi protests too much. It is as if he wants to quash this because it just might be a little too close to where he lives and he doesn't want his personal junk to be perused to closely. His agenda and ego are too big for him to be taken seriously on a philosophical level any more. It is the same aggressivity he uses to illogically defend Israeli violence against Palestinians. The guy needs to start buttoning his expensive shirts and get rid of the bizarre hair that seems to have propelled him into his own intellectual Trump World.
But the guy who took the cake, topped it with whipped cream and maraschino cherries before choking on it was fellow economist, the conservative Ben Stein, who tried to defend DSK by reasoning that there were no international economists who had ever been accused of sex crimes...
He said:
“In life, events tend to follow patterns. People who commit crimes tend to be criminals, for example. Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes? Can anyone tell me of any heads of nonprofit international economic entities who have ever been charged and convicted of violent sexual crimes? Is it likely that just by chance this hotel maid found the only one in this category? Maybe Mr. Strauss-Kahn is guilty but if so, he is one of a kind, and criminals are usually not one of a kind." -Ben Stein, 5/17/2011

Well, I did a little checking to help out Mr. Stein, here's a few links to clarify his statement:
Cobourg’s former economic director goes to jail for sexual assault.
Economist on governor’s staff charged with child sex abuse
Former Rockford College economics professor pleads guilty to sexual abuse
assistant [economics] professor charged with online sex crime
Colby [economics] professor resigns amid secret-camera flap
Economics professor caught in teen sex sting
CSUN economics professor Kenneth Ng runs Thai sex tourism website
Yeah, I know. They’re not all violent. POINT STEIN!


oops, just found another one and it's a doozy: 
 Guess who else holds an economics degree?

Paul Bernardo.

For those not familiar with the case, Bernardo is one of the nastiest serial killers in history. He and his wife drugged, raped, and tortured to death a number of schoolgirls in the late 80's and early 90's. The story is the stuff of nightmares.

I'll leave the debate over the rest of Mr. Stein's article to others. But as for his suggestion that studying economics precludes becoming a violent sex criminal, it seems history provides one hell of a counterexample.

Meanwhile, my inner Maigret has absolutely no idea.......

Wild Orchid Blogging...May 2011

himantoglossom hircinum

orchis apifera

Spring seems to have broken speed records this year. We had a spell of hot and dry weather and all the plants seemed to be blooming at the same time. Great for my vegetable garden, I am weeks ahead of where I was at this point last year. I have been trying to keep a visual record of the wild orchids of this region. Normally, the first orchids would just be ending now, but they have been over for about 2 weeks. I actually have some new orchi de boucs blooming on my property...they are called goat orchids or lizard orchids in English (himantoglossom hircinum). Pretty spectacular plants that can get about two and a half feet tall with spikes of wild flowers with long tongues. I also have some bee orchids (ophrys apifera) in bloom now next to the barn. This property was used as pasturage for cows for years and as the ground loses its cow produced over fertility, it becomes more and more orchid friendly.

anacamptis pyramialis

serapias vomercea

The forest and the fields around here are home to about 18 different species and hybrids. The pyramid orchids (anacamptis pyramidalis) are beginning to bloom. They have cone shaped clusters of hot pink flowers and can be very profuse. My friends across the valley have a lawn full of serapis (serapis vomeracea) which I have rarely seen any where else.

orchis purpurea

limadorum abortiva

  I have tried to carry my camera on bike trips and taken the dog for hikes to the valley bottom through the forest where there is a pretty untouched flood plain along the creek. That's where I have found some pretty impressive groups of Orchis purpurea. So far my most exciting find has been a limodore...(limodorum abortiva) which is a saphrophytic plant with no chlorophyll. The one I photographed had a 2 foot tall spike, no leaves, just a sturdy dark purple stem rising out of the damp ground topped with a spike of violet flowers. There were fields full of early purple orchids (orchis mascula) but with the heat, they came and went in a 
week! This won't be the last post in this series this year because there are a few varieties just beginning to appear. I have just discovered an entirely new area, almost right under my nose...well about a 2 kilometer hike. A series of man made ponds linked together by a system of canals at the bottom of the forest. I knew they were there, but I didn't know how to get access to the area.
I found the entrance to the trail on the local topographical map, then used google earth to scout it out before I took off with the dog.
Yesterday, I didn't have a camera, but I found hangman and frog orchids and I few others I had already photographed...
I am going back tomorrow with a camera!

woRd MAY 12, 2011

La Rue Vie

Again, another post from the past. La Rue Vie by Belle Starr, live from the A7 Club, NYC 1980.

The personell is the same, except Madame Kerr is playing electric piano....

Gulag Rock

another experiment to see if it works...this is a live performance from 1980 at the opening night of the A7 Club in The East Village in NYC. The band is Belle Starr, a French Rock Band that ended up in New York and became a hybrid of sorts...The guitarist and singer on this cut is Didier Poursain. Janet Kerr is the other singer and electric auto harpist. Timmy Chisholm is the fantastic drummer and I am the bass player. The cut was recorded on a little AIWA walkman stereo recorder about 3:30 in the morning....

Suicide Or Assassination?

So, Sunday morning, I woke up to a beautiful cool new day, full of positive energy. I finally was beginning to believe that Sarkozy was going down the tubes in flames. Sure, France was abuzz with the rumor that Carla was pregnant and possibly expecting twins, but that wasn't helping the dwarf climb out of his whirlpool of negative ratings.
Then I looked at the internet and saw the news bulletin that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or DSK as he is known here, had been arrested at JFK for sexual assault on an Air France plane about to depart. My immediate feeling was that this was a set up. DSK has quite a reputation. That's okay in France to a point. We like reputations. We like our politicians to be flawed, to a point...He was the most powerful and positively rated political figure in the country. He was posed to step from his term as President of the IMF and the success he has had as herd boss negotiating his way through the minefield of the worst economic crisis of recent times, to what looked like a shoe in for the Presidency of France.
But the ensuing media frenzy quickly turned into a maelstrom of rumors, charges, humiliating images of DSK doing the infamous perp walk in cuffs and being incarcerated in a jail in the Bronx. The details which began to emerge regarding the alleged assault were pretty sordid. Forcibly raping and sodomizing a maid at the Manhattan Sofitel in his 3000 buck a night suite, then hightailing it out of town.
I have a very hard time imagining the frame of mind required to commit such an act. If it were true, then DSK is a monster. I would not want to have a man like that as leader of a country.
But, the question in my mind is was this political suicide or was it a political assassination?
At this point in time, no matter what the outcome, DSK's political future is over. Suddenly every peccadillo of his past has been revisited and new details come forth hourly regarding incidents which allegedly took place many years earlier.
Oddly enough, a few weeks before the arrest, DSK was interviewed by the Liberal French Newspaper, Liberation. He outlined the three biggest personal hurdles in his yet undeclared presidential campaign:
"Money, women and being a Jew." There is an interesting article detailing the conversation and issues in The Guardian.
He started with women. "Yes I like women, so what?" he asked. "For years, there's been talk of photos of a giant orgy, but I've never seen them come out," he added, challenging his opponents to produce long-rumoured pictures of a night at a posh swingers' club dating back decades. He said he had warned President Nicolas Sarkozy (while they stood side by side at the urinals of the gents during a recent international summit) to stop smearing him over his private life. Strauss-Kahn then volunteered to the journalists a hypothetical example of something that could bring him down: "A woman raped in a parking lot who is promised half a million euros to make up her story."
Before Strauss-Kahn's opponents began throwing what one socialist described as "stink bombs" at him, he was keen to present himself as the victim of a potentially ruthless campaign.
Everyone in French political and media circles knew Strauss-Kahn's achilles heel was his attitude to women. Even his closest political allies admitted he was an inveterate seducer, an unashamed libertine. But what makes the scandal new and unprecedented in a presidential race is the crossing of the line to sexual violence, attempted rape and brutal assault.


Strauss-Kahn denies the charges, and his allies call him a seducer without the "profile of a rapist". But if, as the extreme-right Marine Le Pen affirms, all of Paris had long been abuzz with talk of his "rather pathological relationship" with women, why wasn't Strauss-Kahn pulled up on it before in France? He had already been chastised by the IMF over one affair with a junior in 2008.


It raises the uncomfortable question in the French media and politics of two parallel worlds: what is printed, and what is behind it, gossip, and what must officially remain "unsaid".


This makes the possibility of political assassination all the more likely as a scenario. I would like to play the part of Georges Simenon's, Inspector Jules Maigret, who when asked if he had an opinion about a case he was involved with, would invariably state, "I have absolutely no idea."
That is why, given the players, the statements by Claude Gueant, The Minister of The Interior a few weeks ago regarding DSK's presidential bid, I remain skeptical. Gueant said, "If DSK runs, the UMP would unleash a "nuclear firestorm."
It started two weeks ago with the publication of photos of DSK getting out of a very expensive Porsche, as if this would be personally damning to a Socialist Party candidate. It wasn't his car, but the Sarkozy friendly Paris-Match did not mention that....
As Jules Maigret would say, "I have absolutely no idea."

Zdob&Zdub - So Lucky - Moldova Eurovision 2011 (Semifinal 2)

I know this makes me officially demented, but as a popular culture junkie, I have to admit that I watched the entire Eurovision telecast last night. Perhaps there is a 12 step program I can join?

To my utter horror, but I am always horrified by the winner of Eurovision, it was some god awful song by a mis matched duet from the hell named Azerbaijan. The English as usual had to wake up this morning to their national shame and France? well the nicest thing I can say is the performance by the smarmy, egotistical tenor of the nondescript unhummable phony operatic aria demonstrated once again why France has no real allies in The European Union. Hungary was a nightmare of tacky harshness, a place where all costumes were made by hand by a mutant named Mr. Lazlo from the same bolt of bargain basement eleganza acrylic brand satinoid fabric and Romania combined so many elements of bad music, bad taste and bad attitude with just the extra special unfortunate mix of heavy metal rapping featuring english as a second language into one over the edge performance that  had to set some sort of record for just plain wrong. On the other hand, Ireland had a high energy punk techno twin group that was full of humor and Italy was the class act with a great Jazz pianist singer that was a credit to every sleazy Italian Lounge act on the ever to grace the stages of Las Vegas.

But, Moldava should have won. A band named Zdob&Zdub that incorporated humor, attitude with a stage presence that was like seeing The Beastie Boys dressed as cute little garden dwarves...they were surreal!

"Style War" by Cru the Dynamic

Steve Bryant, percussionist and composer. Long time friend.
Cru The Dynamic is a NYC based project.

This features a quote by Charles Bukowski.

Keep Repeating.....

That's right, just keep on repeating, NOT AS BAD AS CHERNOBYL...NOT AS BAD AS CHERNOBYL...NOT AS BAD AS CHERNOBYL....

 So those reports of very high radioactive leaks, the ones TEPCO denied, were accurate if the reactor core was exposed. There was indeed a nuclear meltdown :

"...the fuel rods have slipped downward..."

uhh, that's kind of what happens when they melt.

Tokyo Electric Power Company says the No.1 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is believed to be in a state of "meltdown".
The utility company said on Thursday that most of the fuel rods are likely to have melted and fallen to the bottom of the reactor. Earlier in the day, it found that the coolant water in the reactor is at a level which would completely expose nuclear fuel rods if they were in their normal position.
The company believes the melted fuel has cooled down, judging from the reactor's surface temperature.
But it suspects the meltdown created a hole or holes in the bottom of the reactor causing water to leak into the containment vessel.
It also suspects the water is leaking into the reactor building.

But don't worry - even thought it's reached Level 7, it's

 "still not as bad as Chernobyl"!

The Hard Way

 

It seems incredible to me that this item didn't make more waves yesterday in the international press. This is a major development in the struggle to wean the world from nuclear energy and step into a new alternative energy future. It is tragic that it takes an event on the scale of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and ensuing nuclear disaster to raise the level of awareness, to admit that long term survival is more important than short term corporate profits.

As Japan struggles to deal with the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the government is pulling back from plans to increase the nation’s reliance on nuclear power.

As the Associated Press reports, Prime Minister Naoto Kan announced on Tuesday that Japan will drop the plan it announced last year to boost, from 30 percent to 50 percent, the amount of the nation’s electricity that comes from nuclear power. Kan said his government will “start from scratch” in planning for the country’s energy future.

Kan also said that while the nation’s energy supply has previously has been based on the dual pillars of fossil fuels and nuclear power, now the nation must add both renewable power and conservation into the mix.

Around much of the world, support for nuclear power has waned following the crisis sparked by northeastern Japan’s March 11 earthquake and tsunami, which killed an estimated 27,000 people and crippled the Fukushima nuclear power, leading to mass evacuations.

As The New York Times reports, Kan’s announcement means the cancellation of plans to build 14 new nuclear plants. It also follows a call by Kan last week for Chubu Electric Power Company to temporarily close a plant that lies along a fault line about 120 miles southwest of Tokyo, by far the country’s most populous city. Chubu agreed to the order on Monday, and will install a series of earthquake and tsunami protections before reopening.

Germany also has declared a moratorium on new nuclear plants, but analysts say that the rising demand for energy in India and China will continue to give nuclear power a significant role in the world’s energy supply.

Kan also expressed remorse for his government’s role in the disaster, and said he would take a pay cut as a show of his sincerity.

“I believe the government bears a major responsibility for having promoted nuclear energy as national policy,” Kan said. “I apologize to the people for failing to prevent the nuclear accident.”

The first step, but a big one for a major nuclear energy player....I hope the rest of the world follows with out having to suffer the same way as the Japanese.