Best Reason to Hope the Recall Vote Gets Back On Track in California

Robert Anton Wilson is a write-in candidate for Governor.

Here's his statement.

After refusing many pleas to run for governor, I have reconsidered and now enter the race as an unofficial write-in candidate. After all, why should I remain the ONLY nut in California who ain't running?  My party, the Guns and Dope Party, invites extremists of both right and left to unite behind the shared goals of...

1) Get those pointy-headed Washington bureaucrats off our backs and off our fronts too! 
2) Guns for everybody who wants them; no guns for those who don't want them.
3) Drugs for everybody who wants them; no drugs for those who don't want them. 
4) Freedom of choice, free love, free speech, free Internet and free beer. 
5) California secession - Keep the anti-gun and anti-dope fanatics on the Eastern side of the Rockies.
6) Lotsa wild parties every night by gun-toting dopers. 
7) Animal protection - Support your right to keep and arm bears. 

More position papers will follow; we know at least 69 good positions 

Robert Anton Wilson 
Guns and Dope Party

Scumbags of the Week

The RIAA settled a lawsuit against a 12-year-old girl who downloaded TV theme songs off the Internet instead of just recording them off the TV, making her pwomise never to do it again, and making her mommy pay $2,000. Luckily, a bunch of Internet music services and DJs have offered to pay the fine for her.

Oh Goody Goody

Democrats in Congress have abandoned their efforts to investigate the White House's use of questionable intelligence information about Iraq's alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, saying the issue has been "eclipsed" by President Bush's request for $87 billion from Congress to continue funding the war.

Insurgents in Afghanistan are using the same tactics against us that they used successfully against the Russians.

Jonathan Demme is remaking The Manchurian Candidate with Denzel Washington in the Sinatra role and Meryl Streep in the part created by Angela Lansbury, substituting Operation Desert Storm for the Korean War and Islamic fundamentalists for Chinese Communists. 

The Bush administration is ignoring 44 Million uninsured in the U.S while awarding a contract for Universal Health Care in Iraq.

A group of Egyptians is planning to file a lawsuit for compensation from all Jews due to the looting of Egyptian gold during the Exodus described in the Bible.

Scientists probing the paranormal said on Wednesday they hoped to set up a major experiment in Britain trying to find out once and for all whether the mind can step outside the body at the brink of death.

A black hole struck the deepest musical note ever heard.

In New Zealand, they're considering a fart tax.

Unexpected Consequences Department

People in the east preparing for the latest hurricane are finding that what they need the most, plywood, costs more than twice as much as normal because the supplies have been bought up by the Pentagon to send to Iraq. Each military camp requires at least 200,000 square feet just for flooring.

Fake News Story of the Week

Following the death of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, her estate, in conjunction with the Motion Picture Association of American are following the lead of the RIAA and suing Karl Rove for all the "file-sharing" he's done in stealing her work to glorify the Bush Administration.
- Robin Clauson -

So When is J.K. Rowling Going to Show Us Her Tits?

Madonna's written a new children's book called The English Roses.

In related news, other quasi-celebs have taken up the children's book craze. Titles to look for by Christmas time: Tom Cruise's upcoming "Billy the Mind-Sucked Scientologist Cultist Billygoat," Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Little Hans Shreds His Right Thoracolumbar Fascia," John Ashcroft's "Sammy the Really Pissy Angry Slug Who Hated Women And Icky Gay People and Sex," Lynne Cheney's "My Mommy The Itchy Thermonuclear Warhead," and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's "Betsy Bipdopper's Big Discovery That She's Addicted to Xanax and Diet Dr. Pepper and Premium Colombian Flake."
- Mark Morford -

Calling All Reporters Attending Bush's Next Press Conference

Here are some questions you might want to ask. Concerning the Bush administration's involvement in the events of 9/11, here are 22 more questions of interest.

 Robot from Hell

Never send a human to do a droid's job. Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, fly hundreds of dull, dirty, or dangerous missions for the U.S. military each year, including surveillance and bombing missions over Afghanistan and Iraq. They don't get tired or scared, and many can stay aloft longer than manned planes. Plus, if the bad guys shoot one down, you've lost a $3 million Predator instead of a $15 million F-16 and its pilots. Check out this amazing catalogue of air drones.

The War Against Plants

     "Our commission has come to document the impact of aerial glyphosate fumigation of the settlements lands to wipe out coca crops. The impacts are obvious as soon as we arrive. Marina Salguero, the official health promoter for Floresta and nearby settlements, who is licensed by the local municipal government of Cantagallo, maintains an extremely makeshift clinic in a little hilltop hut. A thin old man with big rash on his leg sits in the hut with a penicillin IV in his arm. His skin irritation, a result of being caught in his fields when the fumigation overflight swooped down, has become infected, Salguero says.
    "I get cases like this all the time," she says. "Children with head pain, vomiting, diarrhea, skin irritation. Every time the planes come." She points out a stretch of land on a nearby hill glaringly brown and dead in the green landscape-the result of the last fumigation, 15 days earlier. The brown stretch is right beside to a house. "Their home, their kitchen was fumigated. Their crops all destroyed--maize, platano, yucca."
- Bill Weinberg: Between Dynacorp and the A.U.C: Glyphosate and Paramilitary Terror in Colombia`s Cimitarra Valley -

Tommy Chong has been sentenced to nine months in Federal prison for selling bongs on the Internet.

Hello Michael:

I would like to get your opinion on what type of jobs are best outside of getting paid to write directly, for a screenwriter to have.  I have just completed my screenplay and have just been laid off from my full time sales job, (outside of the industry) and I am not ready to beg borrow and steal in order to stay in my basement and write the next one full time.  I live right outside of NYC and have contemplated going to work for either a studio, (in marketing and sales..hopefully) or some sort of film or TV related business.  What do you think??  My thinking on this is that I can continue to submit my present script to anyone who will read it..send it off to contests and agents and the like and increase my chances at getting to someone who knows someone, (I am a prodigious networker) who knows that someone who can help me.  Is this a helpful situation or a viable situation to aspire to??

Thanks,

Sean

Sean,

The best possible job for you is "reader," someone who reads scripts for a production company, a producer, an actor, anybody who's inundated and needs a screening process to weed out the garbage before committing themselves to actually reading something. That was my first professional job in Hollywood.

How did I get it? I worked in a book store in Beverly Hills. I got to know some of the customers, proving I was well-read and erudite. One of the customers turned out to be the president of Columbia Pictures, Gerald Ayres. (I had no idea) As president, he had the use of the Columbia Pictures reading department, a staff of professional readers who write reports on every single script submitted to the studio. When he left his position as president to become an independent producer, he no longer had the free use of the Columbia Pictures reading department. He needed to hire someone to read for him personally. He asked me. A brave choice. I had never read a script. He taught me how. He gave me the script for a film he had produced, The Last Detail, and said "This is what I'm looking for." The very first script I ever read was by Robert Towne, one of the greatest living screenwriters. That was my standard. I read a dozen scripts a week for Gerry for more than a year and nothing I read even came close.

Nothing on earth will prepare you for writing a script more than reading hundreds of others, and I don't mean those scripts at Drew's Script-o-rama or any other scripts that have actually been professionally produced. I mean wannabe scripts from people like you. Scripts people are TRYING to get produced. It was quite a lesson. You'd think that somebody submitting a script to the goddam ex-president of Columbia Pictures would learn to write first. Nope. 99% of what I read was not just un-producable, it was unreadable. Totally incompetent. Bad spelling, bad grammar, bad punctuation, incomprehensible plot, uninteresting characters. It was unbelievable. How could these people think for even one second that they'd get serious consideration?

They didn't. The whole time I worked for Gerry, I only recommended one script, an adaptation of Nathaniel West's The Dream Life of Balso Snell, a satire of the legend of Horatio Alger. You'll notice it's never been made.

This job turned out to be the perfect training for my next professional job in Hollywood, film critic for the L.A. Weekly. It also gave me the confidence to submit MY first script to Hal Ashby, the director of The Last Detail, knowing with absolute assurance that my script was better than 99% of the crap out there.

How do you get such a job? The same way I did. Luck. All the studio reading departments are unionized. Good luck getting in the union. All actors and producers hire based upon personal contact or recommendations. Good luck with it.

How do you increase your luck? In order to be at the right place at the right time, you've got to be in places where you'll run into people who are looking for what you can do. I happened to be working in a book store. Need I point out that Barbra Streisand's hairdresser became one of the biggest producers in Hollywood? Move to Hollywood. Get a job on Rodeo Drive. One day, when you're trying to fit Dawn Steel's size 7 into a size 6, you'll overhear her mutter "Gee, I wish I could find a competent reader."

MD

Don't Take My Word For It

"I immigrated to the United States in December 1998 from China. I began my working career as a seamstress in a garment factory because I did not speak English and the garment manufacturing industry was one of the few employment opportunities available to me. I typically worked 10 hours a day, six days a week, at a backbreaking pace. Most garment bosses know that new immigrants have few choices when it comes to work and so they take advantage by paying workers less than the minimum wage with no overtime pay. In my case, the boss refused to pay me until I had worked in the factory for two months, and when he did pay I only got one month's worth of wages."
- Feiyi Chen: Sweatshops On Our Shores -

"Four months after Bush declared an end to major combat, many Americans apparently remain misinformed on events in Iraq. Twenty percent in one poll said that Iraq used chemical and biological weapons in the war, 24 percent think the U.S. has found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and half believe that the United States has evidence that Saddam Hussein worked closely with al-Qaida. None is true."
- R.C. Longworth: Majority of Americans want U.N. to take control of Iraq effort -

"I asked Pentagon officials: 'How many Iraqis have been killed in this war?' The answers were given 'on background' -- meaning that the Pentagon spokesmen requested anonymity. The spokesmen were honest. They clearly were following orders from the policymakers when they replied that the Iraqi fatality toll was simply not our concern."
- Helen Thomas: Who's Counting the Dead in Iraq? -

"That this American government of bigots from the Low IQ states can run over our Bill of Rights, grabbing somebody with no warning in the dark hours, is a terrorist act by psalm-singers. The only way to defend yourself is to vote them out. Those who don't are fans of fascism."
- Jimmy Breslin: Fascism in the Name of Security -

"I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled. I'm sorry to say, but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did. It's not a question of couldn't do it, it's a question of tone. It's a question of being rigorous. It's really a question of really asking the questions. All of the entire body politic in my view, whether it's the administration, the intelligence, the journalists, whoever, did not ask enough questions, for instance, about weapons of mass destruction. I mean, it looks like this was disinformation at the highest levels."
- Christiane Amanpour -

"On Monday, seven anti-privatization activists were arrested in Soweto for blocking the installation of prepaid water meters. The meters are a privatized answer to the fact that millions of poor South Africans cannot pay their water bills. The new gadgets work like pay-as-you-go cell phones, only instead of having a dead phone when you run out of money, you have dead people, sickened by drinking cholera-infested water."
- Naomi Klein: Free Trade Is War -

"When you say you agree to a thing in principle you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice."
- Otto von Bismarck -

"The world managed without passports for thousands of years. Christopher Columbus did not have a passport or a visa. Those great waves of immigrants into the United States in the nineteenth century  those people did not show up at Ellis Island with passports and visas. They just came. Had visas been required, most of our grandparents would have been denied them, and denied entry. Great cities, countries, and cultures grew as people unrestricted by passports and visas headed to the new frontier. This has always been, and is, good for society."
- Jim Rogers: Freedom of Movement -

"If there's one influence that has shaped worldwide political events over the past year, it's the extent to which the Bush administration has exploited the events of Sept. 11, 2001, to solidify its military and economic control of the world at the expense of democracy, true justice, and the environment."
- Camille T. Taiara: Censored! Neocons' plans for global domination top the annual list of stories ignored or downplayed by the mainstream media -

"My vision of a New World Order foresees a U.N. with a revitalized peacekeeping function. It is the sacred principles enshrined in the U.N. Charter to which we henceforth pledge our allegiance."
- Ex-president George Bush, ex-CIA director, Knights of Malta, Skull & Bones, Trilateral Commission, addressing the General Assembly of the U.N.,February 1,1992 -

"Being an activist means always having to find something new to complain about."
- Declan McCullagh -

"What happened at 3:31 p.m. on election day in San Luis Obispo County California? A file from the Diebold stash examined by Jim March, of Alameda County California, turns out to be from a real election, and it contains real votes. And it also contains a real problem for Diebold, because it is illegal to count the votes before the polls close. Even more interesting: What mechanism was used to get votes to migrate from 57 polling places into a central tally in the middle of the afternoon?"
- Black Box Voting: Ballot-tampering in the 21st Century -

"Before the recent war, some of us argued that the Iraqi people, however much they despised Saddam Hussein, would not take kindly to being occupied by the United States and its British adjutant. Contrary to the cocooned Iraqis who had been on the US payroll for far too long and who told George Bush that US troops would be garlanded with flowers and given sweets, we warned that the occupation would lead to the harrying and killing of Western soldiers every day and would soon develop into a low-intensity guerrilla war. The fact that events have vindicated this analysis is no reason to celebrate. The entire country is now in a mess and the situation is much worse than it was before the conflict."
- Tariq Ali: Occupied Iraq Will Never Know Peace -

"Vindicating Palestinian warnings against the imminent Jewish terror threat that is embedded with the illegal Israeli settlers on occupied territories in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israeli authorities recently busted a Jewish terror cell suspected of killing nine Palestinians and of plotting and launching anti-Palestinian attacks capable of further inflaming the crisis with the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation since 1967."
- Israel Unveils Tip of Jewish Terror Iceberg, Embedded with Settlers -

"The deepest difference between optimists and pessimists is their position in the debate whether people are able to operate collectively from a basis of love. In a society that systematically develops in people their individualism, competitiveness and their cynicism, pessimists are in the vast majority."
- Donella Meadows: co-author of Limits to Growth (1972) and Beyond the Limits (1992) -

"She makes an incongruous figure, waiting in front of the central mosque in the northern Israeli town of Tamra. There is no danger I will miss her. She has short blonde hair, in contrast to the rest of the women who cover their dark hair with scarves, and is wearing a loose-fitting floral caftan, better suited to the streets of Wimbledon, her former home, than here in the Middle East. The difference runs much deeper than mere looks: Susan Nathan is the only Jew among 25,000 Muslims in Tamra, one of the country's dozens of Arab communities whose council is run by Islamic fundamentalists. She is one of only two Israeli Jews known to have crossed the ethnic divide: the other is the controversial academic Uri Davis, who lives in nearby Sakhnin."
- Jonathan Cook: A Jew among 25,000 Muslims -

"There are few things sadder than a dark and empty theater which, until a month ago, was full of life and the sounds of actors and theater people, who worked for starvation wages so that the show could go on. The only show that is still on these days is the one that is being performed at the garbage bins by the hungry of both peoples who are scavenging for food, and at the Israel Defense Forces roadblocks where the dignity of human beings is crushed."
- Ala Hlehel: It's natural that an Arab theater will close first -

"Professor Leif Salford, who headed the research at Sweden's prestigious Lund University, says 'the voluntary exposure of the brain to microwaves from hand-held mobile phones' is 'the largest human biological experiment ever.' And he is concerned that, as new wireless technology spreads, people may 'drown in a sea of microwaves.'"
- Geoffrey Lean: Mobiles make you senile -

"On Jan 24, 2002, my home was surrounded and raided by approximately 25 heavily armed FBI and Secret Service agents in one of the government's first attempts to exercise the new U.S. Patriot Act. I was interrogated for several hours while they ransacked my room and they seized a network of computers which I used to run my web site raisethefist.com. They also seized protest signs, and political literature. Their excuse was a protest guide (which I didn't author) that was posted to my site which a small portion contained information on explosives. The FBI had been monitoring the site long before this was ever posted, and long before Sept 11. The "explosives information" on my site (again which I didn't author) doesn't compare to what you an find on any other web sites such as howthingswork.com, Loompanics.com, Bombshock.com, Totse.com, Amazon.com, or the many neo nazi web sites which cover everything from assassinations, explosives, fraud and firearms. It's obvious a web surfer interested in making a bomb or taking part in other extra-illegal activities would not have to rely on Raisethefist.com. So how could the "bomb making information" on raisethefist.com be a concern to authorities? It wasn't a concern, it was simply used an excuse to exercise the new Patriot Act and take down the site."
- Sherman Austin -

"And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."
- Jesus Christ: the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:5, 6:6, King James version -

"At the time, Reagan's Middle East envoy was one Donald Rumsfeld, hard at work opening doors for Hussein's regime to purchase millions in aircraft, hardware and other potential weaponry."
- Heather Wokusch: Lawsuit for Gulf War Veterans Targets WMD Businesses -

"The state is never interested in the truth, but rather always only in that truth that is useful to it, or, more precisely, in everything that is useful to it, be it truth, half-truth, or error."
- Friedrich Nietzsche -

"In short, we deserve the government we allow, and none more than those of us who have experienced economic and personal privilege. In Iraq, I made no expert assertions and came to no absolute conclusions. Prior to, during, and since visiting Iraq, I have consulted over 100 experts in our Middle Eastern affairs, military and civilian, with a primary focus on U.N. weapons inspection capabilities. These consultations measurably increased my doubt at the factuality or the wisdom of the Administration's assertions and proposed remedies. I spoke at length with wary war correspondents whose repeated attempts to bring deeper understanding to the American public were consistently thwarted by editorial staffs, networks, and superiors, both Iraqi and American."
- Sean Penn -

"I'm a nobody, and nobody's perfect; therefore, I am perfect."
- Author Unknown -

"The most successful conspiracies are those that occur in front of our own eyes."
- Russell G. Brasel -

"[Johnny Cash] took the social consciousness of folk music, the gravity and humor of country music and the rebellion of rock 'n' roll and told all us young guys that not only was it all right to tear up all those lines and boundaries, but it was important."
- Bruce Springsteen -

"He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career."
- George Bernard Shaw -

"Politics, noun. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage."
- Ambrose Bierce -

"There are five ways of knowing who will win. Those who know when to fight and when not to fight are victorious. Those who discern when to use many or few troops are victorious. Those who upper and lower ranks have the same desire are victorious. Those who face the unprepared with preparation are victorious. Those whose generals are able and not constrained by their governments are victorious. These five are the ways to know who will win."
- Sun Tzu: The Art of War -

"None are so helplessly enslaved as those who mistakenly believe themselves to be free"
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -

"Don't be surprised if your banker, broker or insurance agent gets a bit chummier sometime soon. New federal rules, which must be implemented by Oct. 1, require financial firms to find out more about their customers. It's part of an effort to curb money-laundering activities that could be used to finance terrorism, following enactment of the USA Patriot Act two years ago. At a minimum, the new regulations will drive up costs for financial firms, slow the account-opening process and require customers to supply more personal information. At worst, you may find yourself the subject of a false alarm and even a government investigation, especially if you balk at providing certain information, make large-dollar transactions or come from a nation linked to heavy money laundering or terrorism."
- Russ Wiles: Patriot Act extends its reach -

"The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously."
- Jason Burke and Paul Harris: America's hidden battlefield toll - 

"I had a horse, it got shot, so I had to break its legs."
- Stephen Wright -

"I read the whole report instead of just the summary. By law, the budget office has to assume that existing laws expire as planned, and that no new programs are added or subtracted. But this report includes numbers that you can use to adjust for political reality. Which I did. First, I counted the $2.4 trillion Social Security surplus, which the Treasury uses to offset its cash shortfall. Then I figured that the last three years of tax cuts will become permanent; that Congress will pass a Medicare prescription-drug package and will also stop the dreaded alternative minimum tax from hitting 30 million taxpayers. These changes add $3.6 trillion to the deficit. So by the time you're done, the total projected deficit is more than five times the aforementioned $1.4 trillion. Call it $7.4 trillion. And I'm being generous, assuming we spend nothing in Iraq starting Oct. 1, 2005."
- Allan Sloan: The Brainteaser of Deficit Math -

"300 bigots and lunatics protesting around a carved rock, worthy of nonstop coverage. 100,000 people protesting a war, worthy of brief snide commentary."
- Atrios -

"The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it." 
- Dr. Joseph Mengele -

"All war prevents is peace."
- Harry S. Truman -

Belated Christmas Gift for Those Who Don't 
Feel Guilty Enough about the World Situation

WiFi-SM is an Internet connected wireless device that you can fix on any part of your body. It automatically detects the information from approximately 4,500 news sources worldwide updated continuously and analyses them looking for specific keywords such as death, kill, murder, torture, rape, war, virus etc.. Each time the text of the news contains one of these keywords, your WiFi-SM device is activated through the WiFi network and provides you with an electric impulse. This impulse is calibrated so that you can feel a certain amount of pain, but is completely safe.

Everything Else

An AP staffer fact-checked Colin Powell's UN Speech. Guess what? It didn't hold up.

Did conservative elements in the White House provoke an Exxon front group to sue EPA to suppress a report on climate change? That's the question that two State Attorney Generals have asked US Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate, after Greenpeace uncovered a routine email in a Freedom of Information Act request.

The fight isn't just in Washington or the courts. More than 160 communities across the country and three states have issued symbolic resolutions opposing the Patriot Act. A similar resolution is to be taken up by the City Council in Austin this month, and the ACLU could have one before San Antonio's City Council soon. The proposed resolution for San Antonio says the act and related executive orders and regulations threaten fundamental rights and liberties.

How rich are you? Type your annual income into this box, click on "show me the money," and see where you stand in graph of the world's incomes.

Remember photomosaics, those pictures made of thousands of pictures of something else? Here's one of Dubya made entired out of assholes.

Another big difference between Hitler and Bush? Unlike the Bushes, the Hitler family didn't invest any of its own money in the holocaust.