by Chris Barrus
Why suffer through the coming Dark Times? Join in on the profit just like your congresscritters. No Skull And Bones membership required!
An evenly weighted basket of five stocks poised to succeed in the age of perpetual war. The stocks were selected on the basis of popular product lines, strong political connections and lobbying efforts, and paid-for access to key Congressional decision makers.
Most students entering college this fall were born in 1984, which means…
The full list is up on their site.
Phil Ackley lives in Anchorage, Alaska…
“Its December 2nd, and its raining. The grass is green. This is just sick and wrong…
Well, after the shortest winter in Anchorage’s history, a winter with an astounding 4.57 minutes of total snowfall, it’s breakup again in Anchorage. The higest temperture I saw today? 56 degrees. Summer (in December) here we come!”
The TiVo sucked down Frontline’s The Merchants Of Cool a couple of days ago and only just now had a chance to watch it. The show surveys the current state of teen culture marketing and co-optation using the current suspects/demons of the moment (MTV, Britney, Fred Durst, etc.) with appropriate scenes of disapproval from culture critics.
Of course this is all nothing new, as folks who’ve read The Conquest Of Cool already know. The only thing that’s changed in the past forty years since is the number of zeros in the dollar amounts and the marketer’s desperation in keeping the modern hyper-conglomerate corporate beast fed.
Host Douglas Rushkoff‘s Utne Reader-level sanctimoniousness wears thin though. The show doesn’t address any race or class issues or consequences (the image/brand archetypes are all affluent and white) and doesn’t once consider that a teen culture could exist outside of corporate media. If I was a teenager, I guess I’d be pretty offended by the whole show, but then again I wasn’t cool (though I suppose anti-cool is now cool these days)
Anyway, the most interesting commentary can be found in the Frontline message boards for the show, and in case you missed it, you can watch the whole show online.
Halle-freaking-luah! I avoided buying anything from them no matter how close the store was because I was tired of providing a name and address every time I bought a battery.
For the record, if you ever get asked for a resident address and don’t want to give out your real one, use 1313 S. Harbor Blvd., Anaheim, CA 92802. It’s the address for Disneyland.
So good, it needs to be posted…
The ground war in Afghanistan hotted up yesterday when the Allies revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist philosophers into the country to destroy the morale of Taleban zealots by proving the non-existence of God.
Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or ‘Black Berets’, will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy. Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long occupation of Paris’s Left Bank, their first action will be to establish a number of pavement cafes at strategic points near the front lines. There they will drink coffee and talk animatedly about the absurd nature of life and man’s lonely isolation in the universe. They will be accompanied by a number of heartbreakingly beautiful girlfriends who will further spread dismay by sticking their tongues in the philosophers’ ears every five minutes and looking remote and unattainable to everyone else.
Their leader, Colonel Marc-Ange Belmondo, spoke yesterday of his confidence in the success of their mission. Sorbonne graduate Belmondo, a very intense and unshaven young man in a black pullover, gesticulated wildly and said, “The Taleban are caught in a logical fallacy of the most ridiculous. There is no God and I can prove it. Take your tongue out of my ear, Juliet, I am talking.”
Marc-Ange plans to deliver an impassioned thesis on man’s nauseating freedom of action with special reference to the work of Foucault and the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
However, humanitarian agencies have been quick to condemn the operation as inhumane, pointing out that the effects of passive smoking from the Frenchmens’ endless Gitanes could wreak a terrible toll on civilians in the area.
A new Mike Davis book, a new completely over-the-top lengthy histrionic attack on Davis from the establishment.
Until recently, the sperm of UC Irvine professors was not among the many subjects covered in the pages of The Guardian, one of England’s leading daily newspapers. But there it was in John Sutherland’s Sept. 30 column: “Tell Me Lies About Iraq: Politicians, generals and authors are all fighting the fiercest battle of all-to make us believe their side of the story.”
Despite the column’s title, no politician’s statements are scrutinized. No general is mentioned. And the examination of authors is limited to one: UC Irvine history professor Mike Davis.
Sutherland accuses Davis of aligning himself with the forces of darkness by using his new book, Dead Cities: And Other Tales, to poison the public debate in the U.K. over a “preemptive” war against Iraq. “The Iraqi lie factories are in full production,” Sutherland writes. “Davis has his product out early.”
This is strange because Dead Cities isn’t about Iraq. But then Sutherland isn’t actually attacking Davis for anything he has written about Iraq. Instead, he’s infuriated by something Dead Cities reveals in passing about the late, great Winston Churchill in a chapter on the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Sutherland is so upset he uses 14 of the column’s 15 paragraphs to attack Davis as a scholar and a person, in a way that is remarkable for its sneering disregard for the truth and for its incompetence.
Davis says Dead Cities is a study of “‘the radical contingency of cities,’ as well as the Urban West.” One of the book’s “dead cities” is the German Village, whose remains still stand at the Dugway Proving Ground. The U.S. Army Air Corps constructed the German Village during World War II to determine the best way to bomb Germany. “Best” in this context means “most destructive,” and “Germany” means “German civilians.”
And this is where Churchill enters the story.
Winston Churchill was an enthusiastic proponent of bombing civilians, as Davis amply documents. Specifically, Churchill was a proponent of bombing poor and working-class neighborhoods. The “mansions of the Nazi political and industrial elites” were off-limits because, as Davis neatly puts it, “this risked retaliation against Burke’s peerage”-that is, the British aristocracy and landed gentry, including Churchill’s own family. Middle-class neighborhoods were considered poor targets because the space between the homes made it harder for bombs to produce maximum damage. But the crowded conditions of working-class neighborhoods were perfect.
Everyone is linking to William Safire’s column today. And yes, it’s that important:
If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:
Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend – all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as “a virtual, centralized grand database.”
To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you – passport application, driver’s license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance – and you have the supersnoop’s dream: a “Total Information Awareness” about every U.S. citizen.
This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.
Make it this one. And decide whether you want to switch… to Canada.
I don’t know which is scarier. Bill Moyers’ warning or the ferocity of the attacks against him in PBS’ discussion forums.
Way back in the 1950’s when I first tasted politics and journalism, Republicans briefly controlled the White House and Congress. With the exception of Joseph McCarthy and his vicious ilk, they were a reasonable lot, presided over by that giant war hero, Dwight Eisenhower, who was conservative by temperament and moderate in the use of power.
That brand of Republican is gone. And for the first time in the memory of anyone alive, the entire federal governmen – the Congress, the Executive, the Judiciary – is united behind a right-wing agenda for which George W. Bush believes he now has a mandate.
That mandate includes the power of the state to force pregnant women to give up control over their own lives.
It includes using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich.
It includes giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment and control the regulatory agencies meant to hold them accountable.
And it includes secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine. Above all, it means judges with a political agenda appointed for life. If you liked the Supreme Court that put George W. Bush in the White House, you will swoon over what’s coming.
And if you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture. These folks don’t even mind you referring to the GOP as the party of God. Why else would the new House Majority Leader say that the Almighty is using him to promote ‘a Biblical worldview’ in American politics?
So it is a heady time in Washington – a heady time for piety, profits, and military power, all joined at the hip by ideology and money.
Don’t forget the money. It came pouring into this election, to both parties, from corporate America and others who expect the payback. Republicans outraised democrats by $184 million dollars. And came up with the big prize – monopoly control of the American government, and the power of the state to turn their ideology into the law of the land. Quite a bargain at any price.