Lately, I have begun to realize the the character, Otto, played by Kevin Kline, from the John Cleese Classic film, A Fish Called Wanda has everything and more to be the Perfect Teabrained Congressman. In fact, he just might be too perfect. I think Jamie Lee Curtis was a little off the mark in calling Otto stupid...It's something else, something way else...In so many ways, Louis Gomert seems to emulate the qualities of Otto, but Otto could have done it so much better.
Here's Otto's take on Vietnam in the scene with John Cleese who plays Archie:
Otto: You know your problem? You don't like winners.
Otto: Shut up. We didn't lose Vietnam. It was a tie!
Archie: [going into a cowboy-like drawl] I'm tellin' ya baby, they kicked your little ass there. Boy, they whooped yer hide REAL GOOD.
Remember, Gomert was just another chicken hawk who was of draft age during Vietnam, but of course, just another privileged pussy boy who could get deferred by his rich daddy. And. of course, if Gomert really was half the the man that Otto thought he was, the next scene would be:
Okay, here's the real first pope Frank...the new guy is just a poseur. Pope Frank is played by Frank Zappa and it's just too bad about Muddy Mudskipper, but Powdered Toast Man does save the day
and the presidents penis, well sort of...
This is an actual poster still on a post on a foot bridge over the railroad lines approaching the Gare de Limoges-Benedictins in Limoges, France. Soyez Prudent!
Oh, it all started out innocently enough, the boys were gonna party, but then, you know, weird shit always just seem to happen.....
Confusing signals from the holy Vatican chimney yesterday...what color is that smoke? Pink, blue, green...Hmmm...get a whiff of that shit, I think it's some Panamanian Maroon Bud!
As the cardinals slowly drifted back into painful consciousness, the reality of what happened the night before became inescapably apparent. I think Cardinal Sylvester got a new tattoo. "Whooa, whadda fug? whaa happen? Oh shit...I think we elected Franky!'
Yes, boys, you elected Franky the first...and in the cruel light of the harsh morning, maybe it wasn't such a good idea. Franky, a relatively youthful 76 year old pudgy Argentinian was a "dark horse' so to speak. He was never considered a player by the bookies and the Vatican gossip columnists. Franky is Jorge Mario Bergolio and perhaps it was an attempt to some how change the church's image? The first non European elected to the papacy 1,272 years from a part of the world that is hemorrhaging membership, but still Latin America is full of cultures that are much more tolerant of homosexuals and Bergoglio is on record affirming church teaching on homosexuality, contraception and abortion and is considered to be among the most conservative in Latin America. In 2010, for instance, Bergoglio stated that same-sex adoption is a form of discrimination against children and has said that same-sex marriage is “a scheme to destroy God’s plan” and “a real and dire anthropological throwback.” He strongly opposed legislation introduced in 2010 by the Argentine Government to allow for marriage equality, writing a letter warning that it would “gravely harm the family.”
He publicly advocates alleviating poverty and the conditions of the poor in Argentina, which is recovering slowly from being one of the first real casualties of the World Economic Crisis
However, Bergoglio has been criticized by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) for his behavior during the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina, with some journalists claiming that he prevented human rights groups from finding political prisoners by imprisoning them in his vacation home. During the period of the dictatorship, the Catholic Church failed to confront the regime, even as it was kidnapping and killing thousands. The church eventually issued a blanket apology for its actions in October of 2012, though Bergoglio “invoked his right under Argentine law to refuse to appear in open court” to address two cases in which he was directly involved. When he did testify in 2010, his “answers were evasive,” human rights activists claim. Even more dirt on Franky: An Argentine human rights lawyer had accused Archbishop Bergoglio, aka Pope Francis, of working with the murderous Argentine military junta in abducting two priests in the 1970s. A human rights lawyer has filed a criminal complaint against an Argentine cardinal mentioned as a possible contender to become pope, accusing him of involvement in the 1976 kidnappings of two priests. Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s spokesman Saturday called the allegation “old slander.” The 1970 abductions by the junta, called “the dirty war,” were a horrible business in which people were “disappeared” and murdered simply for disagreeing with the government. It’s rather disgusting that they’d pick a Pope in any associated with a cloud surrounding that period. Then again, Ratzinger was Hitler Youth and was implicated in the cover up fo the pedophilia scandal, and it didn’t stop him.
It looks like it's business as usual for this medieval mind control money driven institution. Another highly conservative, fascist enforcer who will continue to promote the regressive outdated policies that have been totally destroyed any real relevance or moral authority that they ever claimed to have. I say,
SPLENDID BOYS! JUST KEEP DOING WHAT YOU'VE BEEN DOING AND PERHAPS YOU'LL FIND OUT WHAT IT IS REALLY LIKE WHEN YOU HAVE A RELIGION AND NO ONE WANTS TO PLAY ANYMORE!
(the clips are from the last nights emission of the classic long running news parody prime time program,
More music, this time from somewhere else in space and time...actually about 3 am on a August night in 1980 at the A7 Club on Avenue A and East 7th Street in The East Village across from Tompkins Square Park. It was recorded on my little stereo Aiwa walkman type cassette player. The band was Belle Star and it was a brave little unit. French/American, folk, funk and punk rock...this is kind of French punk rap dance music...the guitarist and vocalist is Didier Poursain, the Keyboard player is my wife, Janet Kerr, I play bass and the drummer is the best drummer I ever worked with, Timmy Chisholm. The song is called La Rue Vie...or Street Life....
Last night I watched a riveting German produced documentary on the French/German ARTE Television Network on Aluminum. If you wish to watch it, it is about 70 minutes long and in French, but here is the link.Even without speaking French, you might find it extremely informative. If you speak German, there is a link to the German ARTE website. Obviously, we live in a modern world where aluminum is the omni present miracle metal used in almost everything we touch. As a metal, it's malleable, lightweight and strong. Every product we use in our every day modern world could be a big name corporate brand using a by product of the Multi national Aluminum Industry. Your over the counter pharmaceutical remedies for heartburn, your toothpaste, sun screen and what is the most common ingredient in most deodorants? Aluminum, not to mention the packaging. It's hard to think of a product that can't be associated somehow with Aluminum. But, real studies have turned up incontrovertible and damning evidence that the widespread use of aluminum by products is a major cause of cancer, autoimmune infections, allergies and every day there is more real evidence linking aluminum to the ever increasing occurrence of Alzheimer'a disease. It's insidious and the corporate marketing of Aluminum is so persuasive because the very cost of refining this, perhaps the most common metal on the planet is so expensive. To release it from it's unusable, raw state, contained in bauxite deposits, massive amounts of energy and water are required. The Red Bauxite Earth is treated with caustic soda. The poisonous caustic water has to be contained because it is deadly stuff. Just look at the disaster in 2010 that occurred in Hungary when a dam containing Bauxite from a Bayer operated mining operation mud collapsed in Kolontar, Hungary. The caustic poisonous sludge which poisoned and devasted this farming community still is being cleaned away today. The earth has to be scrapped and detoxified before it can be used again.
The best deposits of Bauxite are in West Africa, Australia, India, Jamaica and Southeast Asia, but the most profitable operation today is in Trombetas Porto in Northern Brazil, in the hands of one company, the Brazilian giant,Mineracio Rio do Norte.It is a corporate police state unto itself and you cannot enter without corporate permission. The devastation of the disaster in Hungary got the worlds attention because it occurred in Europe and affected the lives of thousands of Europeans and polluted the Danube river. What goes on in Trombetas is epic devastation. They destroy the equivalent of 250 football fields of biodiverse rainforest every year. The ARTE documentary showed ecological disasters in England and across Europe that occurred because of industrial incidents involving Aluminum production. Perhaps, though, the most tragic aspect was establishing the link between aluminum by products and Alzheimers. The research into the health threats caused by the marketing and use of aluminum by products has been sabotaged and hindered by the industry lobbyists in Europe and the the United States, but the reality cannot be denied. This is potentially a much bigger economic and health threat than the asbestos scandal of the 1970's. Aluminum is the most common metal in the environment, but in it's natural form, it is not absorbed by or used by most living organisms. In it's refined state, it becomes a new and poisonous substance that we are not biologically ready to deal with. One other little issue the documentary dealt with was the chemical reaction that occurs when aluminum melts and comes into contact with water. Beyond the obvious energy released when a superhot substance comes into contact with a cool substance, there is a violent explosive reaction. Just a few years ago, scientists, studying videos of the World Trade Center disaster identified a river of molten aluminum pouring out of the first tower. It was the aluminum of the fuselage of the plane melting.
The molten aluminum came into contact with water as it flowed down stair wells and into crevices when the sprinklers of the tower were still operational. The results were the massive chain reaction explosion that collapsed the towers. Of course this was picked up by conspiracy theorists to try to prove their theories that the Towers were deliberately destroyed by thermite charges...Well,some of us are not equipped to make the choice of living in the world of fantasy or facing reality. Here's a video made recently by a scientist who wanted to demonstrate the power of aluminum reacting with water. Here's a pretty good PDF which explains the problem from an industrial insider Point of view....
The final comments from the English Researcher who has been a prime mover in exposing the dangers of Industrial Aluminum and its by products in our present environment could be summed up by the statement that perhaps one day, if we don't address this problem, life will have evolve on earth to deal with the aluminum pollution we have created, but, unfortunately it won't be humans.
Astor Piazzolla (March 11, 1921/July 4, 1992) was born in the old Italian neighborhood along First Avenue, below 14th Street in NewYork City. When he was very young, his parents emigrated to Buenos Aires. He had started playing bandoneon, the button accordion when he was still a child in NYC, but in Argentina, he became a classicist and a great musician. He revolutionized Argentinian music and created something called Los Tango Nuevo. It incorporated elements from jazz and classical music. A virtuoso bandoneónist, he regularly performed his own compositions with a variety of ensembles... He became Argentinas greatest contemporary musician. I saw him many times in New York. In this video, he performs a concert of his work and explains the origins of Tango Nuevo.....
For the total leaked version of Bradley Manning's opening Court Room Statement please go here. In spite of everything he has gone through, Manning seems totally focused, unbroken and committed to his mission. This guy, if anyone ever deserved it, should get the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize! Update: Here are Daniel Ellsbergs comments made just a few hours ago on the leaked Manning testimony and his support for Mannings proposed candidature for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize!
Here's something that is really GOOD! Another really great idea which allows a little to do a lot. This is an off shoot of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.Rolling Jubileeis aStrike Debtproject that buys debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, abolishes it. Together we can liberate debtors at random through a campaign of mutual support, good will, and collective refusal. Debt resistance is just the beginning. Join them as we imagine and create a new world based on the common good, not Wall Street profits. Called a “bailout of the people by the people,” jubilee comes from many faith traditions including Judaism, Christianity and Islam. A jubilee is an event in which all debts are cancelled and all those in bondage are set free. Banks sell debt for pennies on the dollar on a shadowy speculative market of debt buyers who then turn around and try to collect the full amount from debtors. The Rolling Jubilee intervenes by buying debt, keeping it out of the hands of collectors, and then abolishing it. The objective being not to make a profit, but to help each other out and highlight how the predatory debt system affects all our families and communities. Since they launched their effort, they have raised $566,890 which will purchase and abolish $11,238,000 of personal debt.
Check out theirwebsiteto learn more, or to get involved.
Now here's something pretty bad....
At the request of rule-breaking bankers, a top U.S. regulator has for years settled bank cases in secret, raising the bar on just how far regulators are willing to go to help the industry they regulate. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which insures bank deposits in the U.S. and shuts down failing banks, has since 2007 repeatedly settled charges of banker wrongdoing by agreeing to"no press release" clauses that keep the settlements a secret, the Los Angeles Times reports. In one particularly glaring example, Deutsche Bank agreed to pay $54 million to quietly settle charges that its New York mortgage-banking subsidiary, MortgageIT, sold bad loans to another mortgage bank, Independent National Mortgage Corporation, a/k/a "IndyMac." IndyMac collapsed under the weight of bad mortgage loans in July 2008, a notable milestone in the financial crisis. In exchange for the settlement, the FDIC agreed not to announce the deal unless it was asked about it, the LAT writes. That was just one of "scores" of such settlements the LAT discovered through a Freedom of Information Act request that turned up 1,600 pages of documents. The FDIC would not comment to the LAT about the no-press-release clauses, but a spokesman did say that it announces settlements "when damage payments are large and media interest intense." And many of the settlements turned up by the FOIA request were indeed fairly small. That does not explain the non-announcement of the Deutsche Bank settlement, which was relatively large and would probably have attracted some media interest. The no-disclosure clauses might have helped the FDIC settle cases more easily, saving it the expense of going to trial. But so far the agency has been able to recover only $787 million of the $92.5 billion lost to bank collapses between 2007 and 2012, according to the LAT. Those bank failures were often helped along by the banker misbehavior flagged in the FOIA documents, which the LAT calls "a catalog of fraud and negligence: reckless loans to homeowners and builders; falsified documents; inflated appraisals; lender refusals to buy back bad loans." The revelation comes just days after U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder admitted publicly that some banks are simply too big to prosecute without hurting the broader economy. Instead, U.S. regulators have repeatedly doled out wrist slaps to major banks over allegations such as money laundering, mortgage fraud and foreclosure fraud, while declining to file criminal charges against either banks or individual bankers. I wonder what Elizabeth Warren will have to say about this!
And now, unfortunately, the really very UGLY.....
Angelo Carusone, the VP of Media Matters is behind the DUMP TRUMP campaign to convince Macy's that using The Donald is detrimental to their image and is hurting their "brand". It must be working because Trump sent his enforcer, attorney Allen Garlen, to debate Angelo on this broadcast live debate. It's a little long, but worth it. Garlen tries to accuse Carusone of "mob like, bullying tactics" in his cruel treatment of The Donald...Garlen even tries to use Carusone's Italian name to insinuate that he is a scary, mean Mafia Bully. It's about the 6:30 mark in the video where Garlen loses it and from there, Carusone zooms in on the real issue:
What I would say is that it's quite consistent with what Mr. Trump's brand has become. I'm not making a characterization of Trump's brand ten years ago or five years ago. That's really irrelevant and not part of the discussion here.
The discussion is what Donald Trump's brand has become and in some ways he needs to keep upping the ante to get his free media fix.
And that's why it has become consistently more odious and contemptible. My point is not that Donald Trump should be sanctioned or silenced by the government, which is what you threatened to do to me, is to actually tell the government to stop me and silence me and punish me.
My point was simply that a company that I and 690 other thousand people support and like should not be investing in and as the CEO said, further developing that brand because Trump's brand is not worth pouring more money into.
And if he's as successful as you pointed out before, then I don't see what the problem is. He could easily go someplace else unless of course there are concerns that his brand has become something so toxic that nobody's really interested in it, at least at a fashion level.
Angelo has nearly700,000 signatures on his petition at signon.comwhich I have proudly signed promoted on this blog and facebook and Garten did nothing in this interview to de-toxify or otherwise rehabilitate Trump.
Today in Japan, thousands of people turn out to remember the 2 year anniversary of the catastrophic tsunami and the continuing real time disaster of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. I find it pretty incredible that it is hardly talked about in the news, but then again, not surprising in light of the concerted and militant campaign by the nuclear power industry to rehabilitate it's image after the world wide reaction against immediate threat of nuclear accidents and the long term reality of dealing with this technology, even when nothing seems to be going wrong. I am not a Luddite. I believe in science. I believe in the future of our planet and the human species. I do believe that nuclear power is a dead end in many ways. The immediate greed driven profits generated for the companies and the governments which enable them blind us to real progress. Real progress is being made incrementally every day. We are closer to a world of passive, free, safe energy and we did it with out a Manhattan project. Where would we be now if there had been a "Manhattan Project" to develop passive safe energy? I have always been opposed to and I will always be anti nuclear energy. Will you stand with me?
I have written quite a bit about Fukushima and the accident here on this blog. If you are interested in learning more about Japan, the culture and the mind set which allowed this to happen and is now trying to reverse the obvious reality of the disaster for corporate greed, you could check out my nephew, Alex Kerr's book,Dogs and Demons. Alex is truly embedded into Japanese culture and is the only non Japanese writer to have ever won their version of the Pulitzer Prize. This was not the book that won him a prize, though. He got in a lot of hot water for daring to speak the truth! I grew up in Detroit in the 50's and the 60's. My uncle was an engineer for Detroit Edison and worked on the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Plant in Luna Pier, Michigan. Luna Pier is a spit of land on the marshy shore of Lake Erie South of Monroe. It was supposed to be a showcase of new technology. The first commercial liquid sodium cooled commercial reactor in the world. The engineers were inventing the technology and solving problems as they built it. It went on line ahead of schedule and in 1962, my school went on a field trip to visit the reactor complex. I got this great propaganda comic book! One month later, the operators of the reactor were making panicked phone calls to the Monroe County Sheriff Department to tell them that they had to evacuate Monroe and they might only have 20 minutes...It took almost 30 years to figure out what had happened in Luna Pier. It was after the designer of the system died and there was access to his personal papers that they even realized he had designed, in dealing with a technical problem, a solution that was never even incorporated into the final plans: To regulate the flow of the liquid sodium, he designed titanium flutter valves. After the system went on line, one of the little butterfly wing valves broke and clogged the system. The Sodium stopped flowing and the reactor began to melt down. The Fermi plant was so contaminated that it took years before any real diagnostic attempt could be made. The cameras showed a little metal chip in the line and the immediate verdict was to blame the workers for dropping a beer can pop top accidentally into the system. It wasn't the workers though, it was a little piece of titanium and perhaps, Gil Scott Heron is more eloquent and passionate than I am capable of being...here is one of Americas greatest modern poets telling us about How We Almost Lost Detroit:
Well, I have had over 2,200 hits on this blog in about 4 days. I have no idea what I am doing right or wrong....so here's a little bit of Mr. Wrong....My old Friend Elmer Lang who I worked with years ago in the early 1990's in NYC and his little dittie, Elmer's Got A Girlfiend...Elmer composed the music and I sort of arranged it. This was probably one of the most ambitious recording projects I ever took on. A great guy named Ray Sage is the drummer, but I layered all the guitars and bass parts...I really was trying to channel Ernie Isely who I was obsessed with at the time...this started as an acoustic piece with Mr. Lang. I was the plant in the audience and would start to insult him when he tried to play guitar...Then he'd insult me, I\d come on stage and we do an acoustic set with me as the instrumental back up. It was a joke that turned into a pretty cool band in the early 90's in the East Village.
We have the great honour of nominating Private First Class Bradley Manning for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize. Manning is a soldier in the United States army who stands accused of releasing hundreds of thousands of documents to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. The leaked documents pointed to a long history of corruption, war crimes, and a lack of respect for the sovereignty of other democratic nations by the United States government in international dealings.
These revelations have fueled democratic uprisings around the world, including a democratic revolution in Tunisia. According to journalists, his alleged actions helped motivate the democratic Arab Spring movements, shed light on secret corporate influence on the foreign and domestic policies of European nations, and most recently contributed to the Obama Administration agreeing to withdraw all U.S.troops from the occupation in Iraq. Bradley Manning has been incarcerated for more then 1000 days by the U.S. Government. He spent over ten months of that time period in solitary confinement, conditions which expert worldwide have criticized as torturous. Juan Mendez, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, has repeatedly requested and been denied a private meeting with Manning to assess his conditions. The documents made public by WikiLeaks should never have been kept from public scrutiny. The revelations – including video documentation of an incident in which American soldiers gunned down Reuters journalists in Iraq – have helped to fuel a worldwide discussion about the overseas engagements of the United States, civilian casualties of war and rules of engagement. Citizens worldwide owe a great debt to the WikiLeaks whistleblower for shedding light on these issues, and so we urge the Committee to award this prestigious prize to accused whistleblower Bradley Manning. We can already be reasonably certain that Bradley Manning will not have a fair trial as the head of State, the USA President Mr. Barack Obama, stated over a year ago on record that Manning is guilty.
