De Mockery

Like this is a big surprise?

It's hard to seem sincere when I urge the people who attend my downtown community college classes how important it is that they keep voting - despite the patent bs that has continuously manipulated "the democratic process" in US elections for the past thirty years. The US is the last battle in Big Banana's imperial War on Democracy in America.

The South and Central regions should be understood to have as valid a claim as the US does to the name America. And let's look at democracy at work in the US protectorates in the recent so-called elections in Mexico, possibly the US in 2008 (look at the still lingering policymakers), and now - again - Colombia:

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA --

"A former defense minister who would continue President Álvaro Uribe's tough anti-guerrilla policies handily defeated a former Bogota mayor Sunday in the first round of presidential elections. Juan Manuel Santos, 58, who oversaw the most decisive strikes against rebel forces, did not garner the simple majority needed to win outright. But his lead over the second-place finisher, Antanas Mockus, was so commanding that he is likely to win the presidency in a second round of voting on June 20."

Welcome to Plan Bananaland.

Another failure of free enterprise

Private industry is not only predatory; it is incompetent. We need a stronger government.

Mexico's Real President

Lest we forget:

Wall Street Journal

AMERICAS NEWS NOVEMBER 18, 2009
Mexico Has a President Who Runs Things and One Who Doesn't
Shadow Government of Mr. López Obrador Takes Pretense to New Heights
By NICHOLAS CASEY

MEXICO CITY -- Like a lot of countries, Mexico has a federal government. It meets in a number of imposing colonial and modern buildings around the country. But Mexico has another body, the so-called "Legitimate Government," which claims to be running the republic, too. It meets here in the capital every 15 days in a former garage at 64 San Luis Potosí St.

There, on a recent evening, sat Bernardo Bátiz Vázquez, the Legitimate Government's attorney general, shuffling papers on a foldout table. Not far away was Health Secretary Asa Cristina Laurell, a half dozen other ministers, representatives from various Mexican states, and handlers. At the head of the table sat Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

"You may call me the Legitimate President of Mexico," he said in an interview.

Some countries like the U.K. have shadow governments, complete with shadow cabinet members made up of the opposition. But these groups usually don't claim to be the actual government, as is the case with Mr. López Obrador and company.

It all began in 2006 when the former Mexico City mayor almost became Mexico's real president, losing the election by a hair. He cried fraud, launched street protests, and excoriated the winner, President Felipe Calderón, as a "presidential usurper." Then, as a culminating gesture of defiance, he held a mock inauguration in the country's main square, donning a replica of Mexico's red, white and green presidential sash and took a pretend oath of office.

With this, many assumed they had seen the last of Mr. López Obrador -- at least until the next election in 2012.

But while the leftist has faded from international headlines, he never really went away in Mexico. He went on to found a parallel executive branch of government that proposes new laws, issues statements, holds elections, officiates during Mexican Independence Day, and even circulates its own form of identification card for Mexicans (some 2.8 million Mexicans carry them, according to a Legitimate Government spokesman).

Nowadays, Mr. López Obrador tours the country giving presidential speeches where he is introduced as the real McCoy. After three years of this, he will soon have visited all of Mexico's 2,438 municipalities. That would make him, he says, the first politician -- indeed, maybe even the first man -- ever to have done that.

Mr. López Obrador's countryside gatherings are part populist rally, part earnest policy discussion. No one betrays any hint of not taking this completely seriously.

"We are in a land run by oligarchs," Mr. López Obrador began one recent morning in Nacajuca, a tiny Mayan village deep in Mexico's southeastern jungles. As the temperature rose, so did his voice as he railed against high prices for tamales, corporate tax loopholes and political corruption, all of which he vowed to fight off with new legislation and decrees.

The following Monday he was in the capital trying to deliver on his promise. Outside Congress -- Mexico's real Congress -- he stood before a crowd and introduced a pair of laws, one for the Senate that would reduce government salaries, the other in the Chamber of Deputies targeting tax loopholes for big businesses. He appeared to be in luck: Two friendly congressmen showed the bills to their colleagues shortly afterward. But as has often been the case, they were immediately shelved for "further study."

Some Mexican newspapers have journalists assigned to cover this imaginary government. "I've been doing this for years," says Heliodoro Cárdenas, a reporter from the Mexico City daily El Milenio. Did he volunteer for the beat? "No, I was sent." He adds: "It's difficult to cover, shall we say, Mexico's political ugly duckling."

While Mr. Cárdenas thinks there was a strong likelihood of fraud in 2006, he says Mr. López Obrador understands he's not actually running the republic. "It's a strategy to raise his political profile," he says. If so, it hasn't paid dividends. Support for the leftist hovers at around 16% of the population -- about half what he got in the 2006 election -- according to a June poll in the Mexican daily La Reforma.


'Legitimate Government' Seal

Members of the Legitimate Government spend hours discussing the direction of Mexico's future. Over a recent lunch in a bohemian Mexico City neighborhood, two cabinet ministers, Economy Secretary Luis Linares and Political Secretary José Agustín Ortiz Pinchetti, discussed ways to redistribute more money from state oil monopoly Pemex to the poor. But pressed on how the Legitimate Government might actually go about this, a different look spread across Mr. Linares's face. "We have no control over Pemex," he allowed. "There are some things we can do and others we can't."

Providing salaries for cabinet members qualifies as a no can do. Since the Legitimate Government can't tax Mexican citizens, it has no real source of revenue. It used to pay members a small salary by asking congressmen and senators from Mr. López Obrador's party to pay a tithe on their official salary. But eventually some of them complained. "Now we are all volunteers," Mr. Linares said.

Imaginary executive branches of the government have their problems, too. Héctor Vasconcelos, the secretary of international affairs of the Legitimate Government, has had trouble getting any country to recognize his title, despite his many trips abroad, including one to Ecuador to fete the presidential inauguration of leftist Rafael Correa.

When the professor, concert pianist and former Mexican ambassador to Norway joined Mr. López Obrador, he says requests from Mexican television shows to be a guest evaporated, along with dinner invitations and even a few childhood friends. "It's like you cease to exist," he said. But he says, "la lucha," or the struggle, is "the best I've had in my career."

Perhaps no event captures the Legitimate Government's audacious style better than Sept. 15, the night of an age-old Mexican Independence Day tradition known as "el grito," or "the cry (of independence)." A half million Mexicans flood the main square as the president waves a flag and yells out revolutionary slogans, re-enacting the call to arms that brought Mexicans to rebel against Spain 199 years ago.

This year, as President Calderón performed his "grito," Mr. López Obrador could be found with his cabinet a few miles away in another plaza, giving what was called the "alternative" grito. Flags were waved on stage. Men and women, some with faces painted in the country's tricolor yelled "Viva Mexico!" as the rain fell. Mr. López Obrador looked on in a suit and tie, a wide smile on his face. "Only the people can save the people!" he shouted to the crowd.

Days later, Mr. López Obrador was back on tour in his home state of Tabasco. He sat in the passenger seat of his white SUV as it hurtled through a banana plantation at 90 miles an hour. But it was getting dark, and Mexico's Legitimate President had two more speeches to give that night. The following day he would give five more rallies. The only day he rests is Mondays.

Is this harder than being president? "Perhaps," he says.

Write to Nicholas Casey at nicholas.casey@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A33
Copyright

Terrorism Information and Prevention System

Also known as TIPS.

See also

From Rick Moranis:

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Something Else

By RICK MORANIS

Published: May 14, 2010

Rick Moranis is a writer and actor.

Almost a decade ago

We didn't know the half of it.

Push Poll

Response to The Peacemakers' question "Has anyone here ever been polled about ANYTHING?"

Polled?
Well yeah -
In 2003 my phone rang between this and that (before caller ID), and when I got to the "Hello?" part, the caller asked if I had a couple of minutes to respond to a supposedly objective phone questionnaire. About nuclear "energy."
I said "Sure," thinking maybe my responses to a professional "objective" questionnaire might make a difference. And in late spring of 2003 - for some reason - I was Pretty Pissed Off about things.
Imagine that - late spring 2003 and pissed off. Go figure.
Anyway, when the caller eventually pressed me about why I was so against the "wonder-solution" of nukes, I said something or other which now I can only paraphrase: something like "That nuclear shit never completely flushes down, but it creeps out of the bowl at night and clings to every living thing in the house until everything suffocates or starves. Horribly."
The caller jumped quickly to the first half of one of those sell-to-the-skeptic TV detergent ads - in this instance for the Wonderful Yucca Potty as the alternative to worse value.
I demurred.
The caller's response? A collage of factoids forming a tableau of the blessings of mineral modernity, leading to something like "Would you - given the perils of our privation of a 'viable energy source' - still be against burying nuclear wast under a hill in some far-away Nevada people's back yard - even if that meant all the children would die?"
That's what a "push poll" looks like. And I guess I'm a baby-killer.
But I still don't trust polls - even the ones whose results I agree with - unless I've seen the questions and marked in my answers on a paper ballot in November.
How about you?

"I was of three minds" (a classic)

Late winter/early spring:

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
by Wallace Stevens

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

One Train May Hide Another

Kenneth Koch:

(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya)

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line—
Then it is safe to go on reading.
In a family one sister may conceal another,
So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view
Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.
One father or one brother may hide the man,
If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.
So always standing in front of something the other
As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.
One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide
The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another
On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe;
One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia
Antica one tomb
May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another,
One small complaint may hide a great one.
One injustice may hide another—one colonial may hide another,
One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath
may hide another bath
As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.
One idea may hide another: Life is simple
Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein
One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory
One invention may hide another invention,
One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.
One dark red, or one blue, or one purple—this is a painting
By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,
These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin
May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The obstetrician
Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but
One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.
A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides
Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in
A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag
Bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it.
In offering to pick up the daughter's bag one finds oneself confronted by
the mother's
And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker
May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee
Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love
or the same love
As when "I love you" suddenly rings false and one discovers
The better love lingering behind, as when "I'm full of doubts"
Hides "I'm certain about something and it is that"
And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the
Garden of Eden
Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.
Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.
When you come to something, stop to let it pass
So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,
Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory
Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,
The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading
A Sentimental Journey look around
When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see
If it is standing there, it should be, stronger
And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore
May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk
May hide another, as when you're asleep there, and
One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs
Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the
foot of a tree
With one and when you get up to leave there is another
Whom you'd have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,
One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man
May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.
You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It
can be important
To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

Equinox

Now the springtime zephyrs urge us to spread our wings and fly (sometimes in pairs) apart.

Remember the bonechilling autumnal gusts that made us clutch together and don garments?

The Great Scarf of Birds – John Updike

Playing golf on Cape Ann in October,

I saw something to remember.

Ripe apples were caught like red fish in nets

of their branches. The maples

were colored like apples,

part orange and red, part green.

The elms, already transparent trees,

seemed swaying vases full of sky. The sky

was dramatic with great straggling V’s

of geese streaming south, mare’s-tails above them.

Their trumpeting made us look up and around.

The course sloped into salt marshes,

and this seemed to cause the abundance of birds.

As if out of the Bible

or science fiction,

a cloud appeared, a cloud of dots

like iron fillings which a magnet

underneath the paper undulates.

It dartingly darkened in spots,

paled, pulsed, compressed, distended, yet

held an identity firm: a flock

of starlings, as much one thing as a rock.

One will moved above the tress

the liquid and hesitant drift.

Come nearer, it became less marvelous,

more legible, and merely huge.

“I never saw so many birds!” my friend exclaimed.

We returned our eyes to the game.

Later, as Lot’s wife must have done,

in a pause of walking, not thinking

of calling down a consequence,

I lazily looked around.

The rise of the fairway above was tinted,

so evenly tinted I might not have noticed

but that at the rim of the delicate shadow

the starlings were thicker and outlined the flock

as an inkstain in drying pronounces its edges.

The gradual rise of green was vastly covered;

I had thought nothing in nature could be so broad

but grass.

And as

I watched, one bird,

prompted by accident or will to lead,

ceased resting; and, lifting in a casual billow,

the flock ascended as a lady’s scarf,

transparent, of gray, might be twitched

by one corner, drawn upward an then,

decided against, negligently tossed toward a chair:

the southward cloud withdrew into the air.

Long had it been since my heart

Had been lifted as it was by the lifting of that great

scarf.

Dancing in the Streets

". . . Swinging, swaying, and records playing -"

Let's not forget, compadres.

" - Summer's here and the time is right . . . : There'll be dancing -

Everywhere."

Nothing to dance for just now though, is there?

So let's just dance for nothing.

Noam Chomsky Reflects

From an interview with Amy Goodman at the Harvard Memorial Church, Cambridge MA. (Rush transcript)

- Sponsored by Harvard U Extension International Relations Club. Democracy Now! Aired 15 March 2010.

The lesson that we ought to learn, there was a split in American public opinion, very sharp split, very visible, in the early ’70s, between elite opinion—you know, newspapers, Harvard faculty and so on—on the one hand, and the general population, on the other. Not the antiwar movement, the general population. In elite opinion, articulate opinion—and that you can read, so it’s easy to document—the most extreme condemnation of the war was that it was a mistake which proved to be too costly. OK, that’s about as far as you can go. Among the public, about 70 percent, in polls, said it’s not a mistake, it’s fundamentally wrong and immoral. OK? It’s a very sharp and significant split. And I think the lesson we ought to learn is, to bring it to today, that, say, when Obama is praised for opposing the war in Iraq because he thought it was a mistake, we should recognize that to be on a par with Nazi generals after Stalingrad who thought that the two-front war was a mistake. The issue isn’t was it a mistake; it’s whether it’s fundamentally wrong and immoral. Well, that’s the lesson that has to be drawn. That’s what the public probably already understands, but we have to do something with them and organize with them.

Thomas Jefferson - Retrieved from the Texas Memory Hole

Alert to all teachers lucky enough to choose your own textbooks and to school boards, administrators, and department heads: Eschew choosing textbooks from publishers that revise content to please the Texas Education Board. All textbooks - not just those that have been revised.

BANNED: A framer, but allegedly a dangerous radical:

The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. —Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

"Open Wider" music

See the post from Feb 20 2:51 am.
Grooveshark is up again, so - put on your headphones if you have to - now you can hear the tune.

Did the bamboo and baskets calm the beast? Or maybe pandanip?

Bummer - Grooveshark is down

I meant to link the previous post to the audio music. But when I went to retrieve it at this site, I got this message:

To those of you who were redirected here, we apologize.

In an attempt to befriend Asian investors and increase office morale, we here at Grooveshark established some connections with the Chinese black market and imported our very own black-and-white Giant Panda (hereby known as "Pickles"). Unfortunately, due to circumstances no one could have foreseen, Pickles became agitated at the fluorescent lights and near-constant belly rubs and began clawing at our computers.

Pickles is currently thrashing about in the server room, causing the technical difficulties and temporary outage you just experienced. As soon as our interns return from Pier 1 with synthetic bamboo, a picnic basket and an oversized net, we will be able to return the servers back to normal and, if we can, rescue the coder that Pickles has taken as a prize.

Thank you for your patience.

"Open Wider"

"Open Wider"
Music: Flannery and Bird York

Like a mantaray gliding serene through strange farmland,
Newly runaway, I got away clean in your car,
In your hands.
Sliding the warm black tongue highway,
Your hands there, so smooth, between between my legs
The cornfields sigh with freedom
Feel the world open wider
(turning me inside out)
See the trees, wild in the breeze, dancing insane
Quiet older guy
Driving us deep into nowhere
I'm soldered to your side
While stuttering stars, spit and strewn, wink and stare
The wind whips so wildly
From our speed,
Stirring such a frenzy deep in me
My heart becomes unbolted
Feel the world open wider
(turning me inside out)
See the trees, wild in the breeze, dancing insane
Fifteen year old, love hungry girl,
A flower, in the fist of the world
Flying in a fat blue car
Eyes wide, fresh heart
Feel the world open wider
(turning me inside out)
See the trees, wild in the breeze, dancing insane, dancing insane
- Bird York (John Flannery wrote the music I think) from The Velvet Hour

Spring will come: Long-awaited initiation ceremony ("turning me inside out") arrives ambiguous -- at once dark-scary and fresh-liberating - "The cornfields sigh with freedom."

May it ever be a little bit scary and a lot bit liberating - "dancing insane" - like a carnival ride for you.

Let's go again.

Lumpinprollie on the radio 2/19/10

Listen: "What if God Was One of Us?"

Corporate News

Not long ago I was debating someone on television. I thought the discussion was going well until the commercial break when a producer said into my earpiece "be angrier."

"Why should I be angrier?" I asked him, irritated that he hadn't appreciated the thoughtfulness of debate.

"That's how we get channel surfers to stop and watch the program," the producer explained. "Eyeballs are attracted to anger."

At this point I lost my temper.

- Robert Reich, "A Thought on Evan Bayh and Partisan America" Huffington Post 16 Feb 2010.

Paper Democracy

I am on your side 'til we win this fight:

- 'Til we get there.

Seen at a Teabag Rally

Here are some signs, but not all of them. There were some other signs that were just absurd.

Donna Lee

How fast can you think?