Marcel explains his 1916 Readymade "Comb"
Sunday, September 02, 2012
Saturday, September 01, 2012
The Idiot Bastard Son
44 years ago, Frank Zappa was able to see directly into the black heart of American political commercialism....well, the effects of corporate corruption that had forever destroyed and perverted our national...uhhh...soul and psyche...you could say, every body's doin it, but some folks do it so much better:
The Romney campaign staff w/ Paul Ryan & Mittens. Get ready for a nation run by frat boys & their little sorority sisters.
I believe I have been blinded by the WHITE!
I believe I have been blinded by the WHITE!
Your Daily Duchamp
Rotoreliefs”, 1966
Friday, August 31, 2012
Old Man Yells At Chair
Well, my immediate reaction to the Republican National Convention and the United Psychotic State of America is...well...there comes a time when the only appropriate and noble reaction is complete and utter anarchistic pointless and meaningless mayhem...RAMMING SPEED!

Politicians from both parties twist facts or spin policy, but Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has had a particularly strained relationship with the truth, repeating false claims with impunity — even after fact checkers, mainstream media organizations, and blogs have all debunked their assertions.
From claiming that “Obama gutted the welfare work requirement” to insisting that his own policies won’t deregulate Wall Street, Romney has led a post-truth campaign. A top adviser even admitted earlier this week, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”
ThinkProgress has compiled a Viewer’s Guide comparing what Romney says with the facts:
Romney On His Tax Plan || Romney On Wall Street || Romney On The Budget
Romney On Bain Capital || Romney On Obamacare || Romney On Medicare
Romney On Women’s Health || Romney On Energy || Romney On Global Warming
Romney On The Auto Bailout || Romney On Welfare Reform || Romney On Food Stamps
Romney On Security || Romney On LGBT rights

Politicians from both parties twist facts or spin policy, but Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has had a particularly strained relationship with the truth, repeating false claims with impunity — even after fact checkers, mainstream media organizations, and blogs have all debunked their assertions.
From claiming that “Obama gutted the welfare work requirement” to insisting that his own policies won’t deregulate Wall Street, Romney has led a post-truth campaign. A top adviser even admitted earlier this week, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”
ThinkProgress has compiled a Viewer’s Guide comparing what Romney says with the facts:
Romney On His Tax Plan || Romney On Wall Street || Romney On The Budget
Romney On Bain Capital || Romney On Obamacare || Romney On Medicare
Romney On Women’s Health || Romney On Energy || Romney On Global Warming
Romney On The Auto Bailout || Romney On Welfare Reform || Romney On Food Stamps
Romney On Security || Romney On LGBT rights
And what about Gramps Eastwood and his little performance? It was....kinda special:
Here's a recap if you missed it:
Frankly, I sincerely believe America is totally fucked, but don't ask me...Today. my only comment is
RAMMING SPEED!
Dixie Fried
I love this song...Carl Perkins, 1957, the master....
It's almost dawn, the cops are gone.
Let's all git Dixie Fried!
It's almost dawn, the cops are gone.
Let's all git Dixie Fried!
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Dusquene Whistle
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Thunder Road
I have been reading the great bio of Robert Mitchum, Baby, I Don't Care, by Lee Server.
I discovered a totally original self made artist, Mitchum was bigger than any of his roles...and among his other personas. he occasionally made records. By all accounts he was a pretty good saxophonist.
In the early 50's he was passionate about calypso and recorded a record and in the late 60's he reocrded some Country and Western and had a #1 C&W hit.....When I hear some of the stuff from this period, I think of a stylistic cross of Keith Richards and Dean Martin......
But in the late 50's he made the original bad boy moonshine car chase classic which set the standard for an entire genre. The film which he wrote, starred in and directed was Thunder Road and he wrote and sang the music as well...I'm going to watch Thunder Road this weekend!
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
The Sky Is Pink
This is the latest urgent piece by Josh Fox, who wrote and directed Gasland and was arrested for trying to document the congressional hearings on fracking earlier this year.
Below is the very eloquent editorial piece by Sean Ono Lennon from todays NY Times:
By SEAN LENNON
Published: August 27, 2012
ON the northern tip of Delaware County, N.Y., where the Catskill Mountains curl up into little kitten hills, and Ouleout Creek slithers north into the Susquehanna River, there is a farm my parents bought before I was born. My earliest memories there are of skipping stones with my father and drinking unpasteurized milk. There are bald eagles and majestic pines, honeybees and raspberries. My mother even planted a ring of white birch trees around the property for protection.
A few months ago I was asked by a neighbor near our farm to attend a town meeting at the local high school. Some gas companies at the meeting were trying very hard to sell us on a plan to tear through our wilderness and make room for a new pipeline: infrastructure for hydraulic fracturing. Most of the residents at the meeting, many of them organic farmers, were openly defiant. The gas companies didn’t seem to care. They gave us the feeling that whether we liked it or not, they were going to fracture our little town.
In the late ’70s, when Manhattanites like Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger were turning Montauk and East Hampton into an epicurean Shangri-La for the Studio 54 crowd, my parents, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, were looking to become amateur dairy farmers. My first introduction to a cow was being taught how to milk it by hand. I’ll never forget the realization that fresh milk could be so much sweeter than what we bought in grocery stores. Although I was rarely able to persuade my schoolmates to leave Long Island for what seemed to them an unreasonably rural escapade, I was lucky enough to experience trout fishing instead of tennis lessons, swimming holes instead of swimming pools and campfires instead of cable television.
Though my father died when I was 5, I have always felt lucky to live on land he loved dearly; land in an area that is now on the verge of being destroyed. When the gas companies showed up in our backyard, I felt I needed to do some research. I looked into Pennsylvania, where hundreds of families have been left with ruined drinking water, toxic fumes in the air, industrialized landscapes, thousands of trucks and new roads crosshatching the wilderness, and a devastating and irreversible decline in property value.
Natural gas has been sold as clean energy. But when the gas comes from fracturing bedrock with about five million gallons of toxic water per well, the word “clean” takes on a disturbingly Orwellian tone. Don’t be fooled. Fracking for shale gas is in truth dirty energy. It inevitably leaks toxic chemicals into the air and water. Industry studies show that 5 percent of wells can leak immediately, and 60 percent over 30 years. There is no such thing as pipes and concrete that won’t eventually break down. It releases a cocktail of chemicals from a menu of more than 600 toxic substances, climate-changing methane, radium and, of course, uranium.
New York is lucky enough to have some of the best drinking water in the world. The well water on my family’s farm comes from the same watersheds that supply all the reservoirs in New York State. That means if our tap water gets dirty, so does New York City’s.
Gas produced this way is not climate- friendly. Within the first 20 years, methane escaping from within and around the wells, pipelines and compressor stations is 105 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. With more than a tiny amount of methane leakage, this gas is as bad as coal is for the climate; and since over half the wells leak eventually, it is not a small amount. Even more important, shale gas contains one of the earth’s largest carbon reserves, many times more than our atmosphere can absorb. Burning more than a small fraction of it will render the climate unlivable, raise the price of food and make coastlines unstable for generations.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, when speaking for “the voices in the sensible center,” seems to think the New York State Association of County Health Officials, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the New York State Nurses Association and the Medical Society of the State of New York, not to mention Dr. Anthony R. Ingraffea’s studies at Cornell University, are “loud voices at the extremes.” The mayor’s plan to “make sure that the gas is extracted carefully and in the right places” is akin to a smoker telling you, “Smoking lighter cigarettes in the right place at the right time makes it safe to smoke.”
Few people are aware that America’s Natural Gas Alliance has spent $80 million in a publicity campaign that includes the services of Hill and Knowlton — the public relations firm that through most of the ’50s and ’60s told America that tobacco had no verifiable links to cancer. Natural gas is clean, and cigarettes are healthy — talk about disinformation. To try to counteract this, my mother and I have started a group called Artists Against Fracking.
My father could have chosen to live anywhere. I suspect he chose to live here because being a New Yorker is not about class, race or even nationality; it’s about loving New York. Even the United States Geological Survey has said New York’s draft plan fails to protect drinking water supplies, and has also acknowledged the likely link between hydraulic fracturing and recent earthquakes in the Midwest. Surely the voice of the “sensible center” would ask to stop all hydraulic fracturing so that our water, our lives and our planet could be protected and preserved for generations to come.
Sean Lennon is a musician.
Monday, August 27, 2012
Even Sicker
On August 14th 2012, I published a piece, Sick To My Stomach on the programmed closing of a profitable American business in Freeport Il, The Sensata Company which was acquired by Bain Capital, which in and of itself, stands as a shining example of the callousness of Republican vulture capitalism. I wrote of another company in Troy, Michigan which was acquired a few years back by Bain when Mittens was still officially at the helm. In both cases, highly profitable companies were acquired, and outsourced to China to save money on labor costs. The employees are being offered the "opportunity" to train their Chinese replacements. Romney recently extolled the virtues of Chinese "sweatshop" labor.
Now imagine how it would feel to someone reeling from the effects of Romney's business model?
Employees of the Bain-owned company Sensata, watched the video and were asked for their reactions.
Not surprisingly, they had some very harsh words for the Republican candidate.
If you want to know what the “Romney Economy” is, why don’t you look up Sensata in the book and see what Sensata’s doing for the people of Freeport, Illinois. If that’s what you want for your future….but I’m sorry to tell you that’s not what I want for my future. This is the disease and it is making the American economy even sicker.
Employees of the Bain-owned company Sensata, watched the video and were asked for their reactions.
Not surprisingly, they had some very harsh words for the Republican candidate.
If you want to know what the “Romney Economy” is, why don’t you look up Sensata in the book and see what Sensata’s doing for the people of Freeport, Illinois. If that’s what you want for your future….but I’m sorry to tell you that’s not what I want for my future. This is the disease and it is making the American economy even sicker.
Bonnie And Clyde
My wife and I were walking the streets of the village of Courgnac sur Lisle yesterday and found ourselves in front of a little house with these names on the mailbox:
BONNIE AND CLYDE
Here's the 1968 hit by Serge Gainsbourg and Bridgette Bardot.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Songs For Desert Refugees
This was a piece published on August 5, 2012 on the Les forums de Kidal.info blog which gives you a pretty good overview of what is happening:
Mali recently experienced a coup that emboldened rebels to seize the country's north. Islamist and other insurgent rebel factions have since been fighting each other as they try to keep ahold of northern Mali. The violence, and the imposition of harsh Islamic law in some areas, has forced many residents to flee their homes.
The officials warned that widespread hunger, displacement, insecurity, political unrest and other factors in Mali are putting countless lives at risk — and setting the stage for a global headache.
"There is a very serious threat for peace and security, not only for the whole region but, in my opinion, with global implications," U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told reporters at the U.N. in Geneva. "We are witnessing in the Sahel a dramatic humanitarian situation."
Guterres appeared a press conference beside U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Anne Richard, who oversees population, refugees and migration. They had just returned from a trip to visit Malian refugees in Burkina Faso.
Guterres said 260,000 Malian refugees have fled for neighboring Mauritania, Niger and Burkina Faso, which have kept their borders open and shared their food supplies despite the dire hunger crisis they face within their own nations. Some 200,000 people also have been displaced within Mali, facing dire conditions.
The U.N. humanitarian office says 18 million people already face severe hunger and malnutrition in the Sahel region. In Mali, many of those in need are beyond the reach of aid workers, the two officials said.
"The United States is very concerned about the crisis, and we're also concerned that's there not sufficient resources going to it," said Richard, adding the U.S. has contributed $355 million of aid and food to countries in the Sahel, including $34.5 million for refugees.
A group of middle-ranking soldiers toppled Mali's democratically elected president in March. After international pressure, they allowed an interim president to be named in April. But in May, that interim leader, Dioncounda Traore, was beaten up by a group of protesters, and left the country for medical treatment. He returned last week.
The initial coup gave insurgents in Mali an opening. Ethnic Tuareg rebels seeking secession took control of the country's north — an area larger than France — but were driven out in June by extremist Islamists with links to al-Qaida who vowed to introduce an ultra-strict interpretation of Islamic law.
Guterres said the threat goes "far beyond northern Mali" partly because many of the heavily armed fighters there have come from Libya, where they had been in the army and militias that supported the late Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, and others have come from Nigeria, Somalia and Afghanistan.
The crisis in Mali could become conflated with the unrest in Sudan-South Sudan, Somalia and even Yemen, he said.
"So if proper humanitarian assistance is not provided, and if a political solution is not found, the risk of this conflict to go far beyond Mali is, in my opinion, enormous," Guterres said. "And the implications are very serious for the whole region. Let's not forget that many of the states of this region are very fragile."
There is only so much that can even be spoken of on the internet about the crisis. Needless to say, this is not only a humanitarian but a cultural disaster.
The traditional residents of Mali are a number of desert tribes including the Tuaregs who have preserved the ancient heritage of what UNESCO has designated a cultural world heritage site, Timbuktu which is the place where some of the oldest actual libraries still exist in the unique timeless buildings made of mud and straw. The Tuareg among other groups have resisted the AQMI coup and jihad that is seizing control of their country. As a result, they are the victims, being slaughtered and driven from their traditional homeland. International NGO Groups such as Medicins Sans Frontiers are trying to do what they can to assist the refugees, It is extremely dangerous for a non Malian looking person to be involved in the area as being even suspected of being foreign is reason alone to be singled out and killed.
The result is a mass exodus of refugees coming into Mauritania and Burkina Faso and the inevitable human crisis that is occurring from too many people in hastily assembled refugee camps in a part of the world already strained to the max as far as available resources. There are a few groups working to provide assistance and logistics, but due to the difficult nature of working in Africa, the work is inefficient and much is wasted. There are a few small organizations who have to remain relatively anonymous to be directly involved in assistance. Medicins Sans Frontiers is there (Doctors Without Borders in America) and you can link to them through the Haitian Relief Button on the upper right hand corner of this blog page and learn about what they are doing and how to donate through them. You can be assured that any donations made to them will be used as efficiently as possible.
The result is a mass exodus of refugees coming into Mauritania and Burkina Faso and the inevitable human crisis that is occurring from too many people in hastily assembled refugee camps in a part of the world already strained to the max as far as available resources. There are a few groups working to provide assistance and logistics, but due to the difficult nature of working in Africa, the work is inefficient and much is wasted. There are a few small organizations who have to remain relatively anonymous to be directly involved in assistance. Medicins Sans Frontiers is there (Doctors Without Borders in America) and you can link to them through the Haitian Relief Button on the upper right hand corner of this blog page and learn about what they are doing and how to donate through them. You can be assured that any donations made to them will be used as efficiently as possible.
I will write more about this and have a direct link to provide aid in a following posts.
Here is a project already on the ground,. The music of Mali is world renown, Some of the greatest African music comes out of the Desert...and the English label, Glitterhouse Records released “Songs for Desert Refugees” a benefit compilation of unreleased Tuareg music from across Mali, Niger and Algeria including names such as Tinariwen, Tamikrest, Bombino, Faris and more. It also features sleeve notes from UK journalist (and former Tinariwen manager)Andy Morgan. All proceeds from the album will go to two NGOsTAMOURDRÉ and ETAR who are working directly with refugees from North Eastern Mali. You can order the recording directly here: Tamoudre or you can buy individual songs digitally and listen to samples here at emusic..
Here are a few samples of some of the great Tuareg artists featured on the recording:
Mali’s strife does not seem likely to end soon and while the international community decides what steps to take, regional African coalition ECOWAS is already readying military intervention in the north while experts have warned the country could become the “next Somalia”. If you love this music and are inspired to buy the recording, I humbly thank you. More information soon, I promise!
Here is a project already on the ground,. The music of Mali is world renown, Some of the greatest African music comes out of the Desert...and the English label, Glitterhouse Records released “Songs for Desert Refugees” a benefit compilation of unreleased Tuareg music from across Mali, Niger and Algeria including names such as Tinariwen, Tamikrest, Bombino, Faris and more. It also features sleeve notes from UK journalist (and former Tinariwen manager)Andy Morgan. All proceeds from the album will go to two NGOsTAMOURDRÉ and ETAR who are working directly with refugees from North Eastern Mali. You can order the recording directly here: Tamoudre or you can buy individual songs digitally and listen to samples here at emusic..
Here are a few samples of some of the great Tuareg artists featured on the recording:
Saturday, August 25, 2012
So 21st Century
Now, people are signing a petition so that the Ecce Homo is not restored to its former state, because in their opinion this version is much more XXIst century.
The result of the intervention cleverly combines primitive expressionism Francisco de Goya, with figures such as Ensor, Munch, Modigliani or Die Brücke group,belonging to the artistic movement of German Expressionism.
Friday, August 24, 2012
VOINA!
With the full media attention of the prosecution and sentencing of the Russian political punk performance artists, Pussy Riot, perhaps we should see it in the larger perspective of the ongoing persecution and prosecution of Anti Putin political artists. Most people who try to defend the Putin regimes prosecution of Pussy Riot try to frame it as legitimate outrage against the vandalistic desecration of a religious space. I think the stupidest comment I read on an American comment was "Wouldn't you be outraged if the American punk band, Green Day did this in a synagogue?" You really have to wonder who posts comments like this. I would ask you to read the truly eloquent and concise closing statement by Pussy Riot member Yekaterina Samutsevich at the Stalinistic show trial. The only time she was allowed to speak her own words in her defense:
How did he succeed in doing this? After all, we still have a secular state, and shouldn’t any intersection of the religious and political spheres be dealt with severely by our vigilant and critically minded society? Here, apparently, the authorities took advantage of a certain deficit of Orthodox aesthetics in Soviet times, when the Orthodox religion had the aura of a lost history, of something crushed and damaged by the Soviet totalitarian regime, and was thus an opposition culture. The authorities decided to appropriate this historical effect of loss and present their new political project to restore Russia’s lost spiritual values, a project which has little to do with a genuine concern for preservation of Russian Orthodoxy’s history and culture.
It was also fairly logical that the Russian Orthodox Church, which has long had a mystical connection with power, emerged as this project’s principal executor in the media. Moreover, it was also agreed that the Russian Orthodox Church, unlike the Soviet era, when the church opposed, above all, the crudeness of the authorities towards history itself, should also confront all baleful manifestations of contemporary mass culture, with its concept of diversity and tolerance."
If you are interested in lending your name to the petition by Amnesty International in America,
The video at the top of this post is the work of band of political artists in Russia called Voina, which means war. The giant penis was a piece of political art vandalism in St. Petersburg which was created one morning about a year ago. The bridge directly faces the headquarters of the one time KGB in St. Petersburg...If this outrages you, then you deserve to wallow in your misguided shame..If you think it is vandalism, well, then it magnificent vandalism, hooliganism on truly heroic scale. .Voina, is an art collective which has engaged in politicly provocative anti Putin regime actions for years. They have been arrested and the members are in prisons and suppressed in Russia. To learn more about VOINA, their work and how to support them,
Why is this important to you? America walks a thin line these days. Art is being suppressed and depending on the direction the country takes in the next year...You might have to be much more careful about what you say, who you say it to and letting people know how you truly feel....
It Can Happen Here!
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Oh, I Think You Should.....
My particularly predominate ethnic background is Irish. My wife is Irish and Scot...there are definitely traits that cannot be denied. We are both very proud of our heritage and amazed when we actually meet relatives who are so true to type, who by their natural passion and eloquence reaffirm our passion for our heritage. I ran across this last night, Michael Higgins, the present president of Ireland, has a"discussion" with the American Tea Brain radio dude named Michael Graham. This particular exchange took place in 2010, when Higgins was leader of the Irish Labor Party, he was elected president the next year. Higgins makes me so proud of my heritage! Here's the transcript:
HIGGINS: I've spoken of my time in the Midwest. I'm going to the Greyhound bus station and hearing for the first time "poor white trash." These people, who -- you know, I was there before the Civil Rights charter came in and frankly the idea that a person would not have one job, but would have two jobs, or three jobs and work all the light hours that are there and still not be entitled to the basic protection of fundamental care is so outrageous.
So whether you agree with Obama on what he is doing and aspects of his foreign policy -- I disagree with some things about Latin and South America --
[crosstalk]
But one of the things I do agree, the idea of being a social floor, below which people wouldn't fall, that's the future. I think even the poorest people in the great country that is the United States should be entitled to basic health care --
GRAHAM: Okay --
HIGGINS: -- And I don't think they'll thank the Sarah Palin lookalikes and followers for taking it off them.
You're about as late an arrival in Irish politics as Sarah Palin is in American politics and both of you have the same tactic. The tactic is to get a large crowd, whip them up, try and discover what is the greatest fear, work on that, and feed it right back in a frenzy. And that leads you in time then when you have in fact maybe one of the most gifted Presidents elected. I happen to not agree with all of his foreign policy but you know you regard for example someone who happens to have been a professor at Harvard as somehow now very handicapped.
You don't find anything wrong at all with this Tea Party ignorance that is being brought all around the United States, which is regularly insulting people who have been democratically elected.
(applause)
GRAHAM: Deputy Higgins, I'm not going to insult you by --
HIGGINS: -- oh I think you should.
GRAHAM: --by bringing up your lack of knowledge of the Tea Party movement other than to --
HIGGINS: I lived in the United States and you know one interesting thing, Mike? You know the big difference as I listened, I lived in the Midwest, in Willie Nelson country. I was a student there at the end of the 60s, I was a professor in Illinois when they entered the 70s.
The magnificent, decent, generous people of the United States, with whom I had supper. People who I sat and ate homemade ice cream with them. The difference between them and the tiny elite who are in charge of warmongering foreign policy in the United States is just enormous.
So therefore when you go on your picnic around the country you're really not representing the decent United States people who are very proud, correctly, of the person they've elected President which they're entitled to do.
But you have the neck to say that people like me who are willing to talk to people or at least are trying to build peace are somehow or another in favor of people who want to martyr Jewish people. That is an outrageous statement. I am not antiSemitic, I am not in favor of martyr, and unlike you, I make my profession in politics and I worked in human rights. And I condemned Hamas for sending rockets. Not that that will matter to you.
Because you know what you are, and I wish you well. Keep drinking Guinness and keep ranting away, but don't suggest that those of us who are working for peace in the heat of the day are somehow interested in martyring Jews.
There's a man in the United -- you know him. I think you may have interviewed him. Mark B. Klein. He represents fourteen Jewish organizations in New York. He organized forty-five members of the House of Representatives to sign a letter condemning Barack Obama for giving Mary Robinson the Medal of Honor. Yeah.
I was debating with him on a program rather like this and I said to him "How can you conclude that Mary Robinson is anti-Semitic?" And he said -- and I said "Or Bishop Tutu, for example?" "Bishop Tutu is anti-Semitic as well!" You're going down that road. And really, it is very dangerous stuff.
The fact of the matter is -- look. Young people from the United States are traveling all over the world again. They're welcome in Europe. They're backpackers and hostels. People are talking to them. Because the image of the United States, we've got away from this warmongering is getting better.
At least forty-seven million people that the likes of you condemn to no health care in a country that I was proud to work in -- these people are going to have some health care.
So this is the issue. So therefore be proud to be a decent American rather than just being a wanker whipping up fear.
[applause]
HIGGINS: I've spoken of my time in the Midwest. I'm going to the Greyhound bus station and hearing for the first time "poor white trash." These people, who -- you know, I was there before the Civil Rights charter came in and frankly the idea that a person would not have one job, but would have two jobs, or three jobs and work all the light hours that are there and still not be entitled to the basic protection of fundamental care is so outrageous.
So whether you agree with Obama on what he is doing and aspects of his foreign policy -- I disagree with some things about Latin and South America --
[crosstalk]
But one of the things I do agree, the idea of being a social floor, below which people wouldn't fall, that's the future. I think even the poorest people in the great country that is the United States should be entitled to basic health care --
GRAHAM: Okay --
HIGGINS: -- And I don't think they'll thank the Sarah Palin lookalikes and followers for taking it off them.
You're about as late an arrival in Irish politics as Sarah Palin is in American politics and both of you have the same tactic. The tactic is to get a large crowd, whip them up, try and discover what is the greatest fear, work on that, and feed it right back in a frenzy. And that leads you in time then when you have in fact maybe one of the most gifted Presidents elected. I happen to not agree with all of his foreign policy but you know you regard for example someone who happens to have been a professor at Harvard as somehow now very handicapped.
You don't find anything wrong at all with this Tea Party ignorance that is being brought all around the United States, which is regularly insulting people who have been democratically elected.
(applause)
GRAHAM: Deputy Higgins, I'm not going to insult you by --
HIGGINS: -- oh I think you should.
GRAHAM: --by bringing up your lack of knowledge of the Tea Party movement other than to --
HIGGINS: I lived in the United States and you know one interesting thing, Mike? You know the big difference as I listened, I lived in the Midwest, in Willie Nelson country. I was a student there at the end of the 60s, I was a professor in Illinois when they entered the 70s.
The magnificent, decent, generous people of the United States, with whom I had supper. People who I sat and ate homemade ice cream with them. The difference between them and the tiny elite who are in charge of warmongering foreign policy in the United States is just enormous.
So therefore when you go on your picnic around the country you're really not representing the decent United States people who are very proud, correctly, of the person they've elected President which they're entitled to do.
But you have the neck to say that people like me who are willing to talk to people or at least are trying to build peace are somehow or another in favor of people who want to martyr Jewish people. That is an outrageous statement. I am not antiSemitic, I am not in favor of martyr, and unlike you, I make my profession in politics and I worked in human rights. And I condemned Hamas for sending rockets. Not that that will matter to you.
Because you know what you are, and I wish you well. Keep drinking Guinness and keep ranting away, but don't suggest that those of us who are working for peace in the heat of the day are somehow interested in martyring Jews.
There's a man in the United -- you know him. I think you may have interviewed him. Mark B. Klein. He represents fourteen Jewish organizations in New York. He organized forty-five members of the House of Representatives to sign a letter condemning Barack Obama for giving Mary Robinson the Medal of Honor. Yeah.
I was debating with him on a program rather like this and I said to him "How can you conclude that Mary Robinson is anti-Semitic?" And he said -- and I said "Or Bishop Tutu, for example?" "Bishop Tutu is anti-Semitic as well!" You're going down that road. And really, it is very dangerous stuff.
The fact of the matter is -- look. Young people from the United States are traveling all over the world again. They're welcome in Europe. They're backpackers and hostels. People are talking to them. Because the image of the United States, we've got away from this warmongering is getting better.
At least forty-seven million people that the likes of you condemn to no health care in a country that I was proud to work in -- these people are going to have some health care.
So this is the issue. So therefore be proud to be a decent American rather than just being a wanker whipping up fear.
[applause]
Monday, August 20, 2012
To Mock A Killingbird....
Richard Pryors short lived controversial ABC television show from the 70's.
It was too damn good to be allowed to live. How many great comedic actors
do you recognize in his cast?
...okay, so it's a very young Robin Williams....that was the easy one....
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Macaron Madness
Okay, I love to eat great food and Love making it, but I have to bow down to my mistress...My wife is a genius. I say it all the time. She recently became obsessed with the process of making the perfect macaron. This is science...you really need an oven you can monitor, you have to be able to control the humidity of your kitchen...there are so many variables and it is easy to understand why the perfect macaron could cost a small fortune. She recently became friends with a culinary blogger from the Loire named Crystal. Crystal guided her through the process in which there were moments when she was considering suicide. After a number of spectacular successes, I took the liberty of suggesting macarons made with Dulce con leche as the filling (we made the duce con leche...or confiture de lait by taking a can of sweetened condensed milk and boiling it unopened in a pot of water for 4 hours...when it cools, open it and well...you have opened a gateway to heaven!). Crystal thought it was a fabulous idea and suggested using ground hazelnuts in the macaron batter. Can I say it was a massive success? They were and are the best macarons I have ever had and we are the only people on the planet Earth who have them!
So today, Crystal published Janet's photo of her macarons on her blog Voyage Culinaire, which if you are interested in reading and interested in food, I would highly recommend.
Here is Crystale's piece....
Bonjour, bonjour, aujourd'hui pas de recette mais une nouvelle mise à l'honneur. C'est à nouveau Janet, qui m'a fait parvenir son nouvel essai de macarons. Avant de vous mettre la photo, il faut que je vous explique comment ceux-ci ont vu le jour. En début de semaine, Janet me contacte pour me demander mon avis. Elle venait juste de faire de la confiture de lait et elle me demandait comment elle pourrait " aromatiser " ses coques. Je lui ai répondu, en lui disant qu'elle peut remplacer une partie de la poudre d'amande par du praliné comme ici, ou de la poudre de spéculoos comme là mais qu'à mon avis, avec de la poudre de noisettes ça devrait être comment dire ????? Hyper méga gourmand 8D Et ben figurez-vous qu'elle m'a écouté et voici ses
Macarons noisettes et Dulche con leche

Ils ne sont pas magnifiques !!! Encore une fois bravo Janet et comme je vous ai dit, dès que je rentre chez moi je les teste car ils m'ont donné trop envie 
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