I Confess

I admit it, I'm breaking two new laws. They haven't exactly been enacted yet, but if they are, the Feds might as well prepare the warrants immediately in preparation for the inevitable day they cart me away. Consider the fact that "SECTION 102 of the new Patriot Act ll states clearly that any information gathering, regardless of whether or not those activities are illegal, can be considered to be clandestine intelligence activities for a foreign power." - Alex Jones: News Gathering Is Illegal Under New Patriot Act ll -

There is no doubt I gather "information" and reprint it, sometimes without permission, regardless of whether or not those "activities are illegal." I reprint things from anonymous e-mail without attribution, some of it "intelligent" and much of it "clandestine." Everything on my website is available to anyone living in any "foreign" country on earth with unfettered internet access. If I were to publish, say, a map of Los Angeles, and Los Angeles were to suffer some form of terrorist attack at a location on that map, I don't see how the Federal government can do anything but arrest me.

To add insult to injury, another bill has been introduced in the U.S. Senate to define what a criminal street gang is. S.2358 defines a criminal street gang as "an ongoing formal or informal group, club, organization, or association of 3 or more persons through or for which they individually, jointly, or in combination, have committed or attempted to commit, for the direct or indirect benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with the group, club, organization, or association, 3 or more unrelated predicate gang crimes." Also, having "membership, age or other qualifications, initiation rites, geographical or territorial sites, boundary, or location, or other unifying mark, manner, protocol, or method of expressing or indicating membership." - New Federal Bills Target Bikers -

Yep, with visions of Marlon Brando in leather, on a motorcycle, come to rape your daughter, congress is targeting motorcycle gangs with a net so wide that it includes just about everybody. Yahoo groups, Helenahandbasket, Darenet, NetWits, GovRant, and many others, contain "qualifications" (you have to know how to use a computer), "initiation rites" (you have to sign up), and a "location" (URL). These groups are "ongoing," "informal," and unquestionably a "group" comprised of "3 or more persons," who might consider "attempting to commit" an act of civil disobedience upon being tainted by a quote from Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks. If a group is a "gang" and three members commit the "crime" of taking ecstasy and fucking their brains out in a memorable three-way, the Feds could bust every single other member of the group who only dream of such lawbreaking. 

Add this to the modus operandi de jour, pre-emption, and I'm glad I live up a dirt road on the side of a hill where I can see 'em coming from miles away.

Film of the Week

 A Whole New You
by Michael Dare

LOG LINE: A man tries to solve his own murder. A cross between Groundhog Day and Memento.

Ralph buys an eternal life insurance policy where policy holders donate their DNA and do a memory dump onto a computer disk. If they die, the insurance company clones them and puts their memories into the clone. To the outside world, it's as though they never died.

Ralph wakes up to find he's been resurrected. He was murdered just the week before but he doesn't remember it because his last memory dump was a year ago. He meets the detective working on his murder and finds there are no clues. He gets on with his life until a week later, he wakes up to find he's been murdered and resurrected AGAIN. This time he remembers a little bit more because his last memory dump was a week ago, and the detective tells him a few new clues, but he still has no idea who killed him.

Ralph keeps getting killed and resurrected, each time remembering a little bit more, and picking up on more and more clues, getting closer and closer to his killer who turns out to be...

Answer at bottom. See if you can figure it out.

Belief and Technique for Modern Prose
by Jack Kerouac

LIST OF ESSENTIALS

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy.
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pitch middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Under-Reported Story of the Week

    "On Aug. 10, Indiana lost one of its finest, a loving father, husband, a person who loved his country, family, and his hometown.
   "Lt. Commander Scott Zellem was a great kid growing up here in Indiana, later a great student, a great athlete, a great U.S. Naval Academy graduate and then a great military pilot after receiving his wings in 1992 at Pensacola, Fla.    "He flew his plane from different aircraft carriers, including the USS Independence and the USS Abraham Lincoln.
   "He flew combat missions over Iraq during several deployments, including Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, for which he was awarded the Air Medal.
   "He was such an excellent pilot that he was chosen to fly President Bush onto the deck of the USS Lincoln, where the president gave his famous speech declaring the end of combat in Iraq."
- One Who Won't Be Returning -

Christmas Billboard from Hell

A Concise Summary of the 2004 Presidential Election

Democrats mistakenly thought that disastrous wars, jobs and national bankruptcy would be the main issues to most voters. 

Republicans correctly saw the chief concern of the electorate was to keep all gay married couples from having an abortion.

The Brain Monologues
by Michael Dare

Let's just say, hypothetically, that there is a land populated by a large group of people and 90% of them are idiots. One might hypothesize that democracy might not be the perfect political system for such a group. The idiots would always have their way and who knows what they might do. The 10% of the population who were non-idiots would probably want to hightail it out of there or organize an idiotic coup to save themselves from idiotic legislation. Only an idiot would want to be ruled by idiots. 

With such a population, the perfect ruler would be a dictator who wasn't an idiot, but since the population would be incapable of voting for a non-idiot, such a ruler would have to be imposed upon the idiots through an inside coup, or from the outside, presuming, of course, that the outside population doing the imposing weren't ruled by idiots themselves. The idiots ruled by a competent outside dictator would be better off than idiots ruled by an idiot of their own choosing, but since they're idiots, they wouldn't notice, and if they did, since they're idiots, they'd resent it.

One could argue that the very concept of allowing a population of idiots to choose their own rulers is inhumane. Competent administrators are necessary for any society to function. 10% of insane asylums are populated by supposedly competent administrators of 90% idiots who don't vote on who runs the place. Accepting the fact that food and clothing and cleanliness are necessary factors for life, if idiots ran the asylum they could end up killing themselves with fast food, thongs, and unbridled armpit hair. If idiots were in charge of the whole land, they could fuck up just about everything that allows society to function. In a land populated by idiots, democracy would be self-destructive.

Idiots in an asylum are not only there for their own good but to keep them out of society, which can always do with less idiots. Society makes the idiots in the asylum conform to THEIR wishes and not the potential democratic fiasco of an asylum run by the idiots themselves.

Society might pretend concern for the treatment of the idiots by the administrator of the asylum, but all society really cares about is that the administrator keeps the idiots IN the asylum, thus preventing society from having to deal with the inevitably disastrous results of idiocy run amok. As long as the idiots keep to themselves, applying their idiocy only to themselves, there's really no reason to be bothered. 

Idiotically yours,

MD

Moron this later.

 Dear MD:
     Greetings! My name is Gregory Dacted, and I'm writing to you in reference to the mentor program through the WGA.
     I'm mainly interested in feature writing, though I've dabbled in novels, poetry, short stories, etc. I'm not that big of a fan of television (both in watching and writing), though I would consider writing for an animated series. 
Regards, 
Gregory Dacted

Gregory, 

Thank you for braving time and space to contact me. 

You'd "consider" working for an animated series? That's like saying you'd "consider" fucking Angelina Jolie (or Brad Pitt if that's your bent). Animation is the toughest nut to crack in all of Hollywood, demanding years of razor sharp focus. There are literally thousands in line ahead of you, many with extensive credits. You'd be insanely lucky if the best job you ever have in your entire life is on an animated series, so you sure as hell better "consider" it because you never know what opportunities may come your way. 

Natalie Portman was picking up her dry cleaning when an agent gave her his card which led to an audition for The Professional. If she had picked up her dry cleaning the day before, somebody else would have starred in Star Wars, so you never know where that break is going to materialize. Following her lead, you could easily say that the road to success includes picking up your laundry more often. 

"Consider" this. At least ten thousand screenplays are registered at the Writer's Guild every month. Hollywood makes 400 movies a year.

MD, 
There is a chance I may have the opportunity to meet with some very good agents soon. A script of mine got a glowing coverage from a studio and somebody might be interested etc. (lots of ifs and mights). Here is my question: The feature script that has piqued some interest is my latest work. In addition to that script I have three or four TV specs and two other finished features. My problem is that I feel my latest work is definitely my strongest. The first feature script was a learning experience and is dated, and the second feature script is not bad at all, but a pretty simple-would-make-a-cute-TV-movie kind of thing. It was actually optioned by a tiny production company that never shopped it around. The rights reverted back to me. My question is: do I bother giving the old stuff to these agents when I go to meet them?
Best Regards,
Mike Daniels

Mike,

You are suffering under the delusion that all agents do is sell scripts. What they do 90 percent of the time is field offers. They're less interested in what you've done than what you're going to do. They are infinitely less likely to sell one of your scripts than they are to get you work rewriting something else or writing something new that someone needs written. They get regular updates concerning what people are looking for. They don't submit things cold. They only submit your Hasidic opera to Warner Brothers if they hear that Warner Brothers just signed Pavoratti who recently converted to Judaism. Everything you've got is a writing sample that is going to be rewritten anyway to expand the part of the waitress for the producer's hairdresser's girl friend. All you can do is pray that the guy doing the rewriting is you. TELL them about everything you've written and everything you intend to write. Successful writers are writers who can pitch. Have a minimum of 10 pitches ready at a moment's notice. If they like one of them, then, and only then, mention that it's already written. People only read things they ask for. If it's not written, get them to find someone to pitch it to who can hire you to write it. Use them to get appointments with people you want to pitch to.

Comedy Routine of the Week

Bill Martin and Phil Proctor perform the classic In the Beginning.

Stupid Answers of the Week

What will Dubya be doing on 06/06/06?

Go straight to hell . Do not pass go . Do not collect $200,000,000,000 000.00.
- Robert Falen - 

We will watch his assassination being televised on CNN... 
- Patricia B - 

Same thing he did on 6/5/06 - taking a wizz on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and in Condoleeza Rice's thirsty mouth. 
- Jeff Crook - 

Sittin' on the porch with Daddy and Uncle Rummy and Uncle Billy Graham sharin' a gallon of white lightnin' and lookin' up at that anti missile umbrella up there in the Texas sky. 
- Beaburt784 - 

The same thing he does every night, try and take over the world.
- Locke Milholland - 

He'll be watching The Omen trilogy to get tips. 
- Rita M. 

- Hopefully he will be going back to his real "father" as he calls it, Mr. 666 himself. 
- Meria Heller -

Stupid Question of the Week

If you haven't already skipped to the bottom, go ahead and guess. How does A Whole New You end?

Send your answers to stupidquestion@disinfotainmenttoday.com.

Suicide of the Week

Gary Webb, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who wrote a controversial series of stories linking the CIA to crack cocaine trafficking in Los Angeles, has died at age 49. Webb was found Friday morning at his home in Sacramento County, dead of an apparent suicide.

Quiz of the Week

Gary Webb was "suicided" by...

a) the CIA
b) coke dealers
c) there's a difference?

Gallery of the Week

Michael Paulus draws the understructure of 22 lovable cartoon characters.

Sophistimicated Doowacky of the Week

What if little people lived in a snow globe? How would they feel when you shook it?

People Who Don't Get the Concept

Okay, I admit that Loopy Cootiebiscuits and Murf Urfy Whurfy are funny names but they're not puns. Do I have to change the name of "The Ultimate List of Stupid Names" to "The Ultimate List of Stupid Names that Sound Like Something Else?" Stu Pidasso is funny because it sounds like something else, which is why it's on the list. Get a grip. Stop submitting names that don't fit the criteria. Maybe some day I'll create "The Ultimate List of Things that People Think are Funny but Aren't," but today's not that day.

Don't Take My Word For It

"I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality."
- Salvador Dali: Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and the Rights of Man to his own Madness -

    "On Friday, December 10, two certified volunteers for the Ohio Recount team assigned to Greene County were in the process of recording voting information from minority precincts in Greene County, and were stopped mid-count by a surprise order from Secretary of State Blackwell's office. The Director Board of Elections stated that all voter records for the state of Ohio were locked-down, and now they are not considered public records..."
    "Ohio Revised Code Title XXXV Elections, Sec. 3503.26 requires all election records to be made available for public inspection and copying. ORC Sec. 3599.161 makes it a crime for any employee of the Board of Elections to knowingly prevent or prohibit any person from inspecting the public records filed in the office of the Board of Elections. Finally, ORC Sec. 3599.42 clearly states: A violation of any provision of Title XXXV (35) of the Revised Code constitutes a prima facie case of election fraud within the purview of such Title."
- Blackwell Locks Down Ohio Voting Records - Ohio Election Investigation Thwarted by Surprise Blackwell Order -

"It is absolutely outrageous and irresponsible for the Ohio and New Mexico presidential electors to cast their votes when the outcome of recounts are still unknown. Just as in Florida in 2000, we have to question the integrity of our voting system and those partisan officials who are in charge of it. With allegations of voter intimidation and suppression looming, an impending Congressional investigation and the recounts just beginning, the presidential electors will cast their votes under a cloud of suspicion."
- David Cobb: Green Party presidential candidate -

    "Under the leadership of Ridge (and President Bush), tens of millions of paranoid minds learned to unquestioningly accept the squandering of a trillion dollar budget surplus on military and homeland security boondoggles.
    "In August, Ridge filed his financial disclosure report with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. The security chief, it turns out, discovered how to make a buck or two for himself during the fog of terror. The report showed that, during 2003, the secretary held private investments worth as much as $815,000 in 45 corporations, many of them defense contractors, several of them contracted with his Department of Homeland Security, which spends $47 billion per year."
- Peter Byrne: Failed Safe - 

 "You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too."
- John Kenneth Galbraith -

"Show me a man who resorts to violence and I'll show you a man who has run out of ideas."
- Nicholas Spilger -

    "The second Patriot Act is a mirror image of powers that Julius Caesar and Adolf Hitler gave themselves. Whereas the First Patriot Act only gutted the First, Third, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and seriously damaged the Seventh and the Tenth, the Second Patriot Act reorganizes the entire Federal government as well as many areas of state government under the dictatorial control of the Justice Department, the Office of Homeland Security and the FEMA NORTHCOM military command. The Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003, also known as the Second Patriot Act is by its very structure the definition of dictatorship."
- Alex Jones: News Gathering Is Illegal Under New Patriot Act ll -

"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents." 
- Nathaniel Borenstein -

"Were one to turn to the Bible for the Commandments, he would find them difficult to discover. They are not written on the first page of the Bible. They are hidden among its many pages and obscured by a multitudinous number of texts. If the reader thinks that the 'Ten Commandments' are as specific and as definite as the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States, he will be sadly disappointed. To find them is like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack."
- Joseph Lewis: The Ten Commandments -

"'Recruiters don't just lie about the money for college, their Military Occupational Specialty or tell them they won't go to combat. They tell the recruits to lie about their medical and drug histories and their criminal records. There's widespread deception and dishonesty,' said military lawyer Luke Hiken. 'Pretty much everybody I knew in the Marines had to lie about their medical history to get in,' said former assistant recruiter Chris White. 'One guy had previously attempted suicide; he went crazy, cut his neck, and had a big scar from it. I told him to say he fell off a truck into a barb-wired fence; he got in. Some guys would tell me they did coke or heroin; I'd tell them it was weed,' said the Army recruiter."
- Natasha Saulnier: Recruiting At Any Cost - How The Pentagon Keeps The New Recruits Coming -

"How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light."
- Barry Lopez: Arctic Dreams -

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."
- Henri Nouwen -

"The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers."
- M. Scott Peck -

"Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools."
- Marshall McLuhan - 

"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."
- Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet -

"I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting."
- Ronald Reagan -

    "Despite our best efforts to criminalize, restrict and otherwise hide it in every way we can... children learn about marijuana.
    "Whether in the schoolyard or the classroom, kids are inundated with information about it. Unfortunately, most 'drug facts' are more frightening than educational. Campaigns by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America blame pot, through startling leaps of logic, for homelessness, teen pregnancy and gunplay. Parents have few sources of scientific information about the plant that puts the safety of their children before politics. 
    "We believe a child's first awareness of drugs should come from a better source than the media, the government, or the drug manufacturers. Still, many parents are not comfortable discussing drug use beyond 'just say no.' Some parents use marijuana themselves. Others fear that any discussion of marijuana falling short of outright denouncement may be perceived by their kids as permission to try it on their own. 
    "It's Just a Plant is for them, and for all concerned parents who want to be involved in honestly educating their children about the effects, the dangers and the benefits of marijuana. - It's Just a Plant - A Children's Story of Marijuana -

"Always keep your anger bottled up. You might need a bottle of anger some day when friends come by and won't leave."
- Laura Kightlinger -

"It kind of stung, at first, to be singled out as a maker of movies that are considered 'so bad they're good,' but then you've got to realize the only bad recognition is no recognition."
- Larry Buchanan (RIP) -

    "This conference report has been reworked and redrafted over the course of two months in a closed door conference, and the Senate has only received a printed copy of the conference agreement less than 24 hours ago. As late as yesterday, the conferees were making changes. It is outrageous to expect Senators to read and understand a 600-page bill in less than 24 hours.
    "This conference agreement is very different from the legislation that was passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate two months ago. For example, a number of provisions related to the Patriot Act and law enforcement powers have been inserted into this bill, which, again, have never been considered on the Senate floor.
    "This legislation has encountered virulent opposition since the time of its conception, and while it may enjoy the support of a majority of members here today, nobody can say with any confidence or certainty as to how this new layer of bureaucracy will affect our intelligence agencies or the security of our country. We don't know if it will enable them to better guard against a terrorist attack or whether it will cause a host of unforeseen problems. And we are failing, in yet another misguided rush to judgment, to take the time and effort to find out."
- Senator Robert C. Byrd: Politics Surround Intelligence Reform - Hasty Action Leaves Too Many Gaps and Problems -

"A 10-year-old girl was placed in handcuffs and taken to a police station because she took a pair of scissors to her elementary school. School district officials said the fourth-grade student did not threaten anyone with the 8-inch shears, but violated a rule that considers scissors to be potential weapons."
- 10-year-old girl arrested for taking scissors to school -

    "After Alexandra called the Albany Department of Public Safety to complain about her personal property being towed by police from a private driveway, Chief Turley responded by telling her he was either going to arrest her or have her removed to the Capital District Psychiatric Center.     "Alexandra was snatched from the doorstep of her Second Avenue residence by two plainclothes police officers on Aug. 26, a day after she had filed a complaint with the Albany County district attorney's office against Police Chief Turley...    "Not only did he cause her arrest on three felony charges but caused her to be involuntarily committed with serial killers and rapists and subjected to the forced injection of anti-psychotic drugs.
    "Her alleged crime: exercising free speech on private property."
- Political Prisoner Or Criminally Insane? Woman Forcibly Injected With Drugs After Protesting DMV Regulations -

"If there was proof he was poisoned it would severely complicate matters. The new leadership would not be able to renew peace negotiations with a country that killed its president."
- Hani Masri in Speculation over cause of Arafat's death grows -

"If the murder of twelve innocent people can help save one human life, it will have been worth it."
- Dr. Necessiter (Steve Martin) from The Man with Two Brains - 

"Rumsfeld's obsession with machines and their efficiency has translated into his using one to replace his own John Hancock on KIA (killed in action) letters to parents and spouses. Two Pentagon-based colonels, who've both insisted on anonymity to protect their careers, have indignantly reported that the SecDef has relinquished this sacred duty to a signature device rather than signing the sad documents himself."
- dailykos: Impersonal 'your son is dead' letters - 

"The result of the 2004 presidential election was about fear. As a nation, we're still scared shitless by the events of Sept. 11, because virtually nothing has been done to prevent similar events from happening again. As any schoolteacher will tell you, fear renders intelligence null and void. Oh, the exit pollers may have heard the words 'moral' and 'family values' until they were blue in the face. But isn't that really just a case of attacking someone you can--gays, artists, liberals and various nefarious persons--because you can't get anywhere near the fear actually dominating your life? We see it in microcosm all the time: the white-trash cracker who hates blacks, the abused wife who beats her kids. Is it really so unreasonable to think it happens in macrocosm as well? Not only has this fear caused the deaths and maiming of more than 10,000 American soldiers and countless Iraqi non-combatants, but it's caused the United States of America to start feeding on itself as well. We don't trust each other. We don't like each other. Some of us are beginning to question our core beliefs about what this country is."
- Catherine O'Sullivan: Adventures in governance: Is George W. Bush a psychopath--literally? -

"The most important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one’s work seriously and taking one’s self seriously. The first is imperative and the second disastrous."
– Margaret Fontey -

"I see a better state to me belongs 
Than that which on thy humour doth depend"
- William Shakespeare: Sonnet XCII -

"Another Marxist-inspired theory tries to explain a market economy, claiming that everyone acting in his own self-interest (which should be the rational outcome of a free market) will inevitably make everybody worse off. If everyone is acting in his self-interest, the theory claims, the capitalists would like to cut their workers' wages, while other capitalists should not. But since all capitalists are alike, they all cut wages. The result is lower income for all workers, and thus marginalized profits for capitalists since nobody can afford to buy their products."
- Per Bylund: The Modern World-System -

"A casual stroll through a mental asylum shows that faith proves nothing."
- Friedrich Nietzche -

"I hold concession or compromise to be fatal. If we concede an inch, concession would follow compromise, until our ranks would be so broken that effectual resistance would be impossible."
- John C. Calhoun -"This case is about getting software developers out of the way, stifling innovation, so big entertainment companies can control this distribution channel the way they see fit."
- StreamCast Chief Executive Michael Weiss in Supreme Court to Hear File-Sharing Dispute -

"Michael Crichton is a man justly famous for doing his homework, typically leaving no fact un-remarked, so eager is he to establish the verisimilitude of the stories he is at pains to tell. Readers of State of Fear will learn many things: Did you know that the total weight of termites is a thousand times greater than the weight of all the people in the world? That the methane produced by termites is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide? That scientific studies show no increase in extreme weather events over the last 100 years and that, 'if anything, global warming theory predicts less extreme weather?' That banning DDT killed more people than Hitler?"
- Steve Wasserman: A techno-thriller, with a neo-con point of view -

"ORWELLIAN FORCES AWARD: Nic Robertson and others - U.S. military spokespersons now describe those who attack U.S. soldiers in Iraq as 'anti-Iraqi forces' even though, by all documented accounts, the vast majority of those forces are actually Iraqis. And some American journalists have begun to make that newspeak their own, among them CNN's senior international correspondent Robertson. On Nov. 25, Robertson reported from "Camp Freedom in Mosul, where the troops go out in their Striker vehicles into the city of Mosul." He continued: 'What they are doing has been conducting offensive operations to disrupt the anti-Iraqi forces.'"
- Norman Solomon: The P.U.-litzer Prizes For 2004 -

"Proverbs for Paranoids 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."
- Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow -

"Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can."
- John Wesley -

"The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death."
- Thomas Paine -

"Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men - go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers or families - re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body."
- Walt Whitman: Preface to Leaves of Grass -

"You can't shake hands with a clenched fist."
- Indira Gandhi -

"If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies."
- Moshe Dayan -

"In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep."
- Hunter S. Thompson: The Great Shark Hunt -

"A political victory, a rise in rents, the recovery of your sick, or return of your absent friend, or some other quite external event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: Self-Reliance -

"Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict - alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence."
- Dorothy Thompson -

"An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law."
- Martin Luther King, Jr. -

"Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Conservative -

"Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress."
- Thomas A. Edison -

"The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off."
- Gloria Steinem -

"Rape is no laughing matter - unless you're raping a clown."
- Xarvon, alien investigator -

"Opposition to tyrants is obedience to God."
- message inscribed on a rock outside a cave in 1660 in West Rock, New Haven, Connecticut, where sympathetic colonists hid judges that King Charles II was planning on executing -

"If at first you don't succeed, keep on sucking 'till you do succeed!" 
- Curly in The Three Stooges' Movie Maniacs - 

Everything Else

Someday, my son, all of this will be yours. No, not the curtains, the Broadway musical of Monty Python and the Holy Grail directed by Mike Nichols.

Porn star Harry Reems is writing an autobiography called He Came, He Shriveled, He Left.

Congress has slashed the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) budget for sewage treatment by 20 percent for a very good reason. They need an extra $2 million to buy a new presidential yacht.

Many thanks to Jeff Crook for pointing out that my website has been blocked by Postal Service computers for "Tasteless/Gross" content. Tasteless? Bad taste is taste.

IBM is getting out of the computer business.
Horizontal Lives contains the True Tales of the Infamous Courtesan Persephone N. Hades and her Horizontal Life underground, how she got there, her mis-adventures and her struggle to re-surface. Positive proof it's possible for a blog to be sexy and funny at the same time.

Hey, you know what's delayed the trial of Saddam Hussein? Setbacks. Whew, I thought it was something else.

17 out of 20 marijuana initiatives won on Election Day, so remember, if the fuzz beat down your door and find your pot plants, just tell them you're planning on getting cancer.
 
 

The End of A Whole New You

Ralph's killer turns out to be a flawed female resurrection of himself. He convinces her not to kill him, they discover they are each other's perfect lover, and they live happily ever after. Years later, they have a four-way with the Hilton sisters and I'm arrested.