"All the Stones the Builders Rejected" 
(And some days it takes more Stones than others...) Where Mythical Bestiary meets Contemporary Culture and Chews On Its Leg Until Covered with Slobber.
Showing posts with label Michigan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michigan. Show all posts
Thumbs Up, Michigan! And Whadda YOO Lookin' At?
Upstate New York exists to make Michigan feel better about its status as the Texas of the North. Sure, we wolverines gave America its mad bombers, Nixon's pardon, the Amway-Blackwater dynasty, breeding enclaves for Calvinists the Netherlands didn't want, and city planning worthy of a post apocalyptic zombie film, but at least we don't shop at Forever Leather in Utica.
Monkey Fucks Football in Michigan Primary, Brings Winter to My Soul
Welcome to the most cynical blog in the wintry state of Michigan, where wickedness goes masked as virtue. Home to a Russian style ballot in the Democratic primary, where Hillary Clinton, the candidate of the party establishment, is still on the ballot even though the party establishment ordered Obama and Edwards to take their names off the Michigan ballot because Michigan democrats dared to move their primary to an earlier date. (Kucinich is still on the ballot because his people didn't get the paper work in before the ballots were printed.)
None of the candidates are campaigning in Michigan, though our Governor, a Hillary supporter, is not displeased by this turn of events, and senator Carl Levin is asking Obama and Edwards supporters to vote Uncommitted. And CNN is reporting this clusterfuck with a banner reading CLINTON WINS MICHIGAN PRIMARY. She's owed, Goddamnit!PBS Frontline is opening its season with Cheney's Law a comprehensive look at precisely how the Constitution was subverted by the agita of this determined bully and his followers. The Red Wings lost to the Thrashers, five to one, for Bog's sake-- with a hat trick against us, and 46 saves by the other goalie?
The bear didn't just eat us this day, it ate us and shat us out. Work is soul-killing, the weather is dreadful, but not dreadful enough to close work tomorrow. A fitful nap, and even more depressed. I ask the silent universe, why is virtue thwarted? Against stupidity, do the gods indeed contend in vain?
The cats and Sophie the Wonder Rabbit try to comfort but cannot cheer me. They haven't the words. Then my friend Wayne, a professional writer of horror who ponders with the Problem of Evil on a daily basis, answers the mystery by explaining why Gilligan sabotaged every attempt to leave the island. I will not elaborate, except to say that the explanation involves Ginger the glamorous movie star and to complain that the picture was shot from the wrong angle-- who wants to look at Bob Denver with that expression on his face? This atrocity made me laugh out loud in disgust and wonder as well as amusement, and my courage returns as from a shot of whiskey. Cheers, mate.
My Time Has Come
"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world", muttered Shelley, probably while peering through an absinthe fog and wearing Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin's teenaged thighs for earmuffs. Such things may fill a man with hubris and make him think he can go sailing in a thunderstorm or walk on water.
Until today, I have avoided the call to the dusty arena of politics. My hat was never in the ring. If nominated, I would not serve, if elected, I would move and change my name to Osbert Fleadick. Anyone who wants power over other human beings probably shouldn't be trusted with power.
An unfeeling public would almost certainly reject my plan to bring back the buffalo west of the Mississippi and restore the forests east of the Mississipi to pre-1850 numbers. They say a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic to the Mississippi in the trees without ever touching the ground. Swimming the river, he could travel on the backs of the buffalo herds to the Rocky Mountains, again without touching the ground.
I admit there were provisions in my platform that some found troubling. The call to re-establish grizzly bears to their former range "because Americans need a large dangerous animal in their environment to knock the snot-nose out of them" could probably have been phrased differently. The red states aren't ready to vote for a candidate who's come out in FAVOR of pornography, and the blue states don't see the need to purge all advertising agencies with a guillotine set up on Madison Avenue.
But now my time has come!
Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology Michael Wynne wants to test "nonlethal" microwave devices on American citizens, to see if they really ARE non-lethal. "If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," says Wynne. "... if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press."
Never mind the world press, Wynne. The first concern will be my foot up your ass, as soon as the tremors wear off.
Candidate for governor Richard "Dick" DeVos ("Dick DeVos before he dicks you") wants Creationism-- excuse me, "intelligent design" taught in science class to "expose our students to more ideas, not less."
Ideas that once would have been derided as stark raving batshit are now in the mainstream. A once skeptical media, afraid of being "partisan" (that's what happens when you whore after advertisers or sell out to a conglomerate) now reports this stuff with a straight face.
America! I have heard your call!
America! I'm putting my loony shoulder to the wheel!
Until today, I have avoided the call to the dusty arena of politics. My hat was never in the ring. If nominated, I would not serve, if elected, I would move and change my name to Osbert Fleadick. Anyone who wants power over other human beings probably shouldn't be trusted with power.
An unfeeling public would almost certainly reject my plan to bring back the buffalo west of the Mississippi and restore the forests east of the Mississipi to pre-1850 numbers. They say a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic to the Mississippi in the trees without ever touching the ground. Swimming the river, he could travel on the backs of the buffalo herds to the Rocky Mountains, again without touching the ground.
I admit there were provisions in my platform that some found troubling. The call to re-establish grizzly bears to their former range "because Americans need a large dangerous animal in their environment to knock the snot-nose out of them" could probably have been phrased differently. The red states aren't ready to vote for a candidate who's come out in FAVOR of pornography, and the blue states don't see the need to purge all advertising agencies with a guillotine set up on Madison Avenue.
But now my time has come!
Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology Michael Wynne wants to test "nonlethal" microwave devices on American citizens, to see if they really ARE non-lethal. "If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," says Wynne. "... if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press."
Never mind the world press, Wynne. The first concern will be my foot up your ass, as soon as the tremors wear off.
Candidate for governor Richard "Dick" DeVos ("Dick DeVos before he dicks you") wants Creationism-- excuse me, "intelligent design" taught in science class to "expose our students to more ideas, not less."
Ideas that once would have been derided as stark raving batshit are now in the mainstream. A once skeptical media, afraid of being "partisan" (that's what happens when you whore after advertisers or sell out to a conglomerate) now reports this stuff with a straight face.
America! I have heard your call!
America! I'm putting my loony shoulder to the wheel!
COMMONPLACE QUOTATIONS for AUGUST, 2006
"Public interest is clear in this matter. It is the upholding of the Constitution. . . . It was never the intent of the framers to give the president such unfettered control. (U.S. District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of Michigan)
***
“One judge in Michigan has done what 535 members of Congress have so abysmally failed to do.” (NYT editorial)
***
“Socrates asked: what do a beautiful woman, a beautiful vase and a beautiful bed have in common? His answer: the idea of beauty. My question is: what do extremist ideologies like the communism or Nazism of yesteryear and the Islamism of today have in common? After all, they support ostensibly very different ideals – the superior race, mankind united in socialism, the community of Muslim believers, the Umma. Tomorrow, it could be altogether different ideals: some theological, some scientific, others racist. But the common characteristic is nihilism.
“The root element is the attitude that anything goes, particularly when with regard to ordinary people: I can do whatever I want, without scruples. Goehring put it like this: my consciousness is Adolf Hitler. Bolsheviks said: man is made of iron. And the Islamists whom I visited in Algeria said that you have the right to kill little Muslim children, in order to save them.
“....Religion is only the cloth, the excuse and the justification. What is essential is the practice. For there is a direct connection between the Islamic suicide bomber and the general serving under Franco who shouted out in front of the University of Salamanca: “Long live death!” This is the connection that I was trying to grasp.”
(André Glucksmann, in a terrific interview considering Bin Laden in the light of Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed”)
***
“Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep doing it. ... You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network. Israel focused on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.” (John Arquilla, defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, quoted by Seymour Hersch in The New Yorker August 21, 2006)
***
The Geek Heirarchy
***
“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” (Charles Bukowski in “Factotum)
***
“[During the Cuban Missile Crisis] Kennedy was deeply influenced by Barbara Tuchman's classic, "The Guns of August," which recounted how a seemingly isolated event 92 summers ago -- an assassination in Sarajevo by a Serb terrorist -- set off a chain reaction that led in just a few weeks to World War I. There are vast differences between that August and this one. But Tuchman ended her book with a sentence that resonates in this summer of crisis: "The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit."
Preventing just such a trap must be the highest priority of American policy. Unfortunately, there is little public sign that the president and his top advisers recognize how close we are to a chain reaction, or that they have any larger strategy beyond tactical actions. (Richard Holbrooke, The Washington Post
***
“Ralph Giordano, a German writer and, by the way, a Jew, has noted that Mr. Grass was only 6 when Adolf Hitler was invited to become Germany’s chancellor. (The overused phrase “seizure of power” badly distorts what happened around Jan. 30, 1933, the date of the Führer’s accession. A coup d’ état would have been bad enough; that Hitler’s appointment was perfectly legal only makes it worse for German history.) And Mr. Giordano has asked, reasonably enough, “What else could he have done during that time in the face of the Nazis’ all-powerful propaganda apparatus?” And answers his own question: “Nothing.”.... It is not that a public personality should get a free ride simply for being famous, let alone popular. Herbert von Karajan may have been an outstanding conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, but this would not erase the fact that he joined the Nazi party twice — these were the acts of an adult, after all. The uncomfortable question that remains for Mr. Grass is this: Why did he keep this interlude as a servant of the regime so tight a secret? .... I am not Mr. Grass’s analyst, nor have I ever met him. But it seems to me that he failed to come forward all these years simply because he was too ashamed.” (op-ed by Peter Gay in the New York Times
***
(Ward Sutton in The Village Voice)
***
"All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency.
“They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.
“....Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests."
(George Washington)
***
".... The snakes will reveal themselves to be not a counter-Phallus, but rather an expression of the rage of the Medusa, the radical queer postcolonial feminine. What is at stake here is not a battle between "snakes" and the "plane," but rather the contest between transgressive Oedipalized subjectivity (memorably described by Jackson's line, "there's motherf---- snakes on the motherf---- plane") and the anti-Oedipal, serpentine, body-machine complex...."
(A Pre-Reading of "Snakes on a Plane" by Amardeep Singh)
***
“... And I’ve been killing my way to the truth ever since.”
(Marv, in Frank Miller’s “Sin City”)
***
“One judge in Michigan has done what 535 members of Congress have so abysmally failed to do.” (NYT editorial)
***
“Socrates asked: what do a beautiful woman, a beautiful vase and a beautiful bed have in common? His answer: the idea of beauty. My question is: what do extremist ideologies like the communism or Nazism of yesteryear and the Islamism of today have in common? After all, they support ostensibly very different ideals – the superior race, mankind united in socialism, the community of Muslim believers, the Umma. Tomorrow, it could be altogether different ideals: some theological, some scientific, others racist. But the common characteristic is nihilism.
“The root element is the attitude that anything goes, particularly when with regard to ordinary people: I can do whatever I want, without scruples. Goehring put it like this: my consciousness is Adolf Hitler. Bolsheviks said: man is made of iron. And the Islamists whom I visited in Algeria said that you have the right to kill little Muslim children, in order to save them.
“....Religion is only the cloth, the excuse and the justification. What is essential is the practice. For there is a direct connection between the Islamic suicide bomber and the general serving under Franco who shouted out in front of the University of Salamanca: “Long live death!” This is the connection that I was trying to grasp.”
(André Glucksmann, in a terrific interview considering Bin Laden in the light of Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed”)
***
“Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep doing it. ... You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network. Israel focused on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.” (John Arquilla, defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, quoted by Seymour Hersch in The New Yorker August 21, 2006)
***
The Geek Heirarchy
***
“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” (Charles Bukowski in “Factotum)
***
“[During the Cuban Missile Crisis] Kennedy was deeply influenced by Barbara Tuchman's classic, "The Guns of August," which recounted how a seemingly isolated event 92 summers ago -- an assassination in Sarajevo by a Serb terrorist -- set off a chain reaction that led in just a few weeks to World War I. There are vast differences between that August and this one. But Tuchman ended her book with a sentence that resonates in this summer of crisis: "The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit."
Preventing just such a trap must be the highest priority of American policy. Unfortunately, there is little public sign that the president and his top advisers recognize how close we are to a chain reaction, or that they have any larger strategy beyond tactical actions. (Richard Holbrooke, The Washington Post
***
“Ralph Giordano, a German writer and, by the way, a Jew, has noted that Mr. Grass was only 6 when Adolf Hitler was invited to become Germany’s chancellor. (The overused phrase “seizure of power” badly distorts what happened around Jan. 30, 1933, the date of the Führer’s accession. A coup d’ état would have been bad enough; that Hitler’s appointment was perfectly legal only makes it worse for German history.) And Mr. Giordano has asked, reasonably enough, “What else could he have done during that time in the face of the Nazis’ all-powerful propaganda apparatus?” And answers his own question: “Nothing.”.... It is not that a public personality should get a free ride simply for being famous, let alone popular. Herbert von Karajan may have been an outstanding conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, but this would not erase the fact that he joined the Nazi party twice — these were the acts of an adult, after all. The uncomfortable question that remains for Mr. Grass is this: Why did he keep this interlude as a servant of the regime so tight a secret? .... I am not Mr. Grass’s analyst, nor have I ever met him. But it seems to me that he failed to come forward all these years simply because he was too ashamed.” (op-ed by Peter Gay in the New York Times
***
(Ward Sutton in The Village Voice)***
"All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency.
“They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.
“....Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests."
(George Washington)
***
".... The snakes will reveal themselves to be not a counter-Phallus, but rather an expression of the rage of the Medusa, the radical queer postcolonial feminine. What is at stake here is not a battle between "snakes" and the "plane," but rather the contest between transgressive Oedipalized subjectivity (memorably described by Jackson's line, "there's motherf---- snakes on the motherf---- plane") and the anti-Oedipal, serpentine, body-machine complex...."
(A Pre-Reading of "Snakes on a Plane" by Amardeep Singh)
***
“... And I’ve been killing my way to the truth ever since.”
(Marv, in Frank Miller’s “Sin City”)
BUSH and the NSA: DON'T QUESTON ME.
Sad to say, our only overseas communications this year involved the wedding of Maureen and Michel, bridesmaid dresses and the wrenching loss of our house rabbit Fanny. No enemies list for pipsqueaks like me this year. The bloggers at The Washington Note sure were eager to know who was on the list, but that was December 16, and by now the list is about as exclusive as toilet paper.
The New York Times, under the stewardship of Arthur Pinch "Rich and Powerful People are Nice to Me, Therefore We Trust Them" Sulzberger, waited until Christmas weekend to reveal that Bush's spying without a warrant was NOT limited to people who might have stood next to a terrorist once. It seems the National Security Agency has without court-approved warrants, been plugged right into tapping directly "the American telecommunication system's main arteries".
And John Conyers-- a Michigan boy, I'm pleased to say-- was first on the board to utter the "I" word, impeachment, in public. Too bad fellatio wasn't involved, or Henry Hyde could jump on there with him. Does anyone else think it odd that a drunken woman picked this week of all weeks to start a public bar fight with Mrs. Conyers?
Of course, the American telecommunications corporations rolled over like micturating daschunds to help the NSA get in the electronic back door. And lots of "concern" has been expressed by judges and agents, but not enough concern for more than one of them to resign.
"Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda." Is there anyone who believed that? Well, the lickspittle Attorney General, of course.
And Idaho. Cheney doesn't believe in anything, he just bulliies you into this week's party line. He's kind of like a short, balding Patsy Stone-- "Don't question me!" 
And Rumsfeld, the very avatar of arrogance, thinks EVERYONE'S stupid and can't even brook the mildest line of questioning from an NPR reporter without insulting the interviewer. Sadly, this tells us more about Rumsfeld's insecurities than he wants us to know.
The Bush administration says it wants "to detect terrorist plots before they can be carried out". The consensus of the people-who-know-better-than-me seems to be put us at a 70% chance of a terrorist attack with a weapon of mass detruction on US soil within the next 10 years. Nothing in Bush's efforts is likely to better those odds; indeed, this adminstration seems determined to increase the terrorist population. See Also: Jekyll & Hyde President, , St. George vs, the Pagan Knight, ,Missing Link, ,NeoCon Blogging, , Hating the French, The Worms Turn
The New York Times, under the stewardship of Arthur Pinch "Rich and Powerful People are Nice to Me, Therefore We Trust Them" Sulzberger, waited until Christmas weekend to reveal that Bush's spying without a warrant was NOT limited to people who might have stood next to a terrorist once. It seems the National Security Agency has without court-approved warrants, been plugged right into tapping directly "the American telecommunication system's main arteries".
And John Conyers-- a Michigan boy, I'm pleased to say-- was first on the board to utter the "I" word, impeachment, in public. Too bad fellatio wasn't involved, or Henry Hyde could jump on there with him. Does anyone else think it odd that a drunken woman picked this week of all weeks to start a public bar fight with Mrs. Conyers?
Of course, the American telecommunications corporations rolled over like micturating daschunds to help the NSA get in the electronic back door. And lots of "concern" has been expressed by judges and agents, but not enough concern for more than one of them to resign.
"Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda." Is there anyone who believed that? Well, the lickspittle Attorney General, of course.
And Idaho. Cheney doesn't believe in anything, he just bulliies you into this week's party line. He's kind of like a short, balding Patsy Stone-- "Don't question me!" 
And Rumsfeld, the very avatar of arrogance, thinks EVERYONE'S stupid and can't even brook the mildest line of questioning from an NPR reporter without insulting the interviewer. Sadly, this tells us more about Rumsfeld's insecurities than he wants us to know.The Bush administration says it wants "to detect terrorist plots before they can be carried out". The consensus of the people-who-know-better-than-me seems to be put us at a 70% chance of a terrorist attack with a weapon of mass detruction on US soil within the next 10 years. Nothing in Bush's efforts is likely to better those odds; indeed, this adminstration seems determined to increase the terrorist population. See Also: Jekyll & Hyde President, , St. George vs, the Pagan Knight, ,Missing Link, ,NeoCon Blogging, , Hating the French, The Worms Turn
Novelist Jim Harrison's Cure-All
"Rare is the man or woman so sullied they cannot be revived by a shower, a few beers, and a pizza." (sloppy misquote)
Though for more serious cases he recommends a personal bottle of tabasco sauce or a bowl of menudo. I can recommend the menudo served in the back room restaurant of the carneceria in Fennville after canoeing on New Year's Day (I just added that last detail to shore up my Hemingway/Harrison Michigan rustic street cred-- though what kind of cred is it if it didn't involve streets?)
Actually this is just a test post to try out the template for the Ormondroyd's Encyclopedia Esoterica weblog.
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