CURRENT READINGS

“My favorite conspiracy theory is the one that says the world is being run by a handful of ultra-rich capitalists, and that our elected governments are mere puppets. I sure hope it’s true. Otherwise my survival depends on hordes of clueless goobers electing competent leaders. That’s about as likely as a dog pissing the Mona Lisa into a snow bank.” (Scott Adams, Author of Dilbert)
***
“Buddha had an analogy. Milk is milk. Then it gets churned into butter. Butter is butter. Then it gets processed into ghee. We reach points at where the way we have been for a while no longer fits, it becomes unstable and unable to continue. Then we reach out into the unknown and discover the next way we are to be.” (Thomas Ragland)

***
“[Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid] is offering Senator Hillary Clinton is his total, robust support to succeed him as Senate Majority Leader if she elects not to pursue the Democratic nomination for President.
Many are realizing that the electoral map is not something one can wave a magic wand over and reverse the views of 42% of Americans who believe that they know Hillary Clinton well and have strongly formed views of her and will not vote for her under any conditions -- according to recent polls. Reports are that Senator Clinton herself knows this and that her own enthusiasm for running actually trails that of her husband, her advisors, and her staff -- whose enthusiasm for the race is ranked in that order with Hillary the least enthusiastic.” (Steve Clemons at the Washington Note)

***

“Bill Nevins, a poet, journalist and teacher at Rio Rancho High School in Albuquerque, founded a student writing club for at-risk students and eventually formed them into a poetry team, encouraging students to perform at local open mike nights and over the high school's closed-circuit TV system. In February 2003, a Slam Poetry Team member read her poem "Revolution X" over the school's pubic address system, and shortly thereafter a formal complaint was registered by the school's "military liaison" (no idea), saying the poem was disrespectful to governmental authorities and that it was full of "profanity and incitement to violence" (although the text had neither element). A month later Nevins was suspended from teaching, prohibited from coaching his writing club or the poetry team, and all public readings of student poetry were banned by the school administration. A "multicultural poetry assembly" was cancelled. In May 2003, Nevins was informed that his contract would not be renewed for the coming school year, and on the same day the "military liaison" and the principal of the school, Gary Tripp, raised a flag on school grounds and read out their own poem, telling critics of Iraqi war policy to "shut your faces." Tripp later told the media that this was "a high point" in his career. This is what happens when you let the guy down at the gun shop run the high school.” (reported by Joe Bob Briggs/John Bloom)

***
“In countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, we exist in a wholly sexualized culture, where everything from cars to snack food are sold with a healthy slathering of sex to make them more commercially appealing. But if you're using sex to sell sneakers, then you're not just selling sneakers, you're selling sex as well, and you're contributing to the sexual temperature of society. You're going to get people who, unsurprisingly, become overheated in that kind of sexual environment, and if they attempt to assuage their desires by resorting to the widely available medium of pornography, they're going to have their moment of gratification, and then they're going to have a much longer period of self-loathing, disgust, shame and embarrassment. It's almost like a kind of a reverse Skinner-box experiment, where once the rat has pushed the lever and successfully received the food, then he gets the electric shock.” (Alan Moore)

***

“All I am is what I am. I lived seven lives at once. I was power and the ecstasy of death. I was god to a god. Now... I—I'm trapped... on a roof. Just one roof... in this time and this place. With an unstable human who drinks too much whiskey, and called me a Smurf.” (Illyria, in the television series “Angel”)

***
“The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction. A war that began at the president’s choosing has degenerated into a desperate, bloody mess that has turned much of the world against the United States. The administration’s contempt for international agreements, Congressional prerogatives and the authority of the courts has undermined the rule of law abroad and at home.

"Yet while all this has been happening, the political discussion in Washington has become a captive of the Bush agenda. Traditional beliefs like every person’s right to a day in court, or the conviction that America should not start wars it does not know how to win, wind up being portrayed as extreme. The middle becomes a place where senators struggle to get the president to volunteer to obey the law when the mood strikes him. Attempting to regain the real center becomes a radical alternative.

When Mr. Lieberman told The Washington Post, “I haven’t changed. Events around me have changed,” he actually put his finger on his political problem.” (New York Times editorial, morning after the primary)

***
“... to Guccione's credit, "Caligula" does make you reevaluate your umbrage yardstick. The sex is explicit, yes -- but it is just sex. "Caligula's" gratuitous decapitations and disembowelments -- presumably far less common in everyday life -- are now accepted in everyday cinema, and even then went largely unremarked upon.” (Daniel Kraus in Salon, on the 20th anniversary of ‘Caligula’)

***
“Sweetheart, trust me, this is way more ‘bad boy’ than you’re ever going to be able to handle. So do yourself a favor: go blow a drummer.”
(Dennis Leary’s character Tommy on “Rescue Me”)

***
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." (H.P. Lovecraft)

EDITORIAL NOTE: Never mind the snakes on a plane. Just how motherf*@#$%ing scary is it when H.P, motherf#%^%#ing LOVECRAFT is politically relevant and astute?