How it is that Occidental Civilization, from the End of the 4th Century A.D., until just these first couple of Decades of the Third Millennium,

Has held to a vicious, perverse, cruel, soul-destroying, wrong and plainly stupid conception of Sexuality in General, and of human Sexuality in particular, is only partially explained by the political necessities of the military and sectarian governance of the late Roman Empire, as it devolved into the Dark Ages and came under the dominance of Germanic and Slavic barbarians, in whose interests it lay to consolidate and formalize the "Natural Psychology" and the World-view--too fragmented and too incoherent quite to call itself a philosophy--of the State Religion of "Christianity."  Like Topsy, it "just growed."  And, like all barbarian belief-systems, it consisted almost entirely of what everybody, already, "knew"--or thought they did: "assumed to be so, without examination, or inquiry," would be a more accurate description of the fundamental tenets of Christianity.

And so it passed, even into the era of the 17th and 18th centuries of Enlightenment, particularly in the broad geographical designation of "Germany," that philosophy and philosophical inquiry were stretched upon the Procrustean bed of the a priori "truths" of what philosophers already believed, either as revealed to them by the "One True" Christian religion, or which they pulled straight from their asses, without need of further analysis, and proclaimed to have been derived from "Categorical Imperatives."  Such, for example, as the comprehensive (mis-)treatment of Sexuality in Emmanuel Kant's Lectures on Ethics delivered in 1785--as ugly, implausible, pernicious, perverse, stupid and entirely worthless a disquisition on this subject as has ever been written (and, apparently, read aloud), but which we are forced, in the modern world, to consider, because it is fundamental to the ugly, implausible, pernicious, perverse, stupid and entirely worthless philosophy of Feminism, as espoused particularly by the utterly negligible, very ugly, quite hysterical, preposterous--and astoundingly influential--Catharine

MacKinnon.  Whose word (God help us all) is law in Canada.

Paul Craig Roberts - Official Homepage

Counter-intuitive it may seem, that a co-founder of Reaganomics and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts, is the clearest, loudest and most eloquent Voice of Reason and Spokesman of Truth in the world today.  His opinions, published in political essays of  Caesarian  polish, pith and gravity, on current affairs, economics and civil liberties are, as our First President would have said, inarguable.  Explanation for the apparent paradox  that such wisdom might grow from so narrow a base is to be found in Roberts' upright, honest and candid humility--which is that of a man not afraid to admit that he has been wrong, when he has been wrong:  [Roberts] has voiced regret that he ever worked for [the Republican Party], avowing that, had he known what it would become, he would never have contributed to the 'Reagan Revolution.'

 Paul Craig Roberts - Official Homepage


Post Scriptum (I've been wondering where I was going to stick this):

Talking to my friend Richard on the phone last fortnight, he earnestly recommended the writings of one Peter Matthiessen, recently deceased, a celebrated author, Zen Roshi, etc., about whom I knew (as is my wont with celebrated, prolific authors who are virtually popes of the Buddhist sect [Zen] that I personally adhere to) zilch.  So, while still talking with Richard on the phone, I got online and Googled Peter Matthiessen Roshi--"Uh, Richard.  Matthiessen was CIA.  He set up the Paris Review as a cover for his CIA activities in Paris during the 1950's."

Then (It was like the wire was going dead)--there was either too much or too little to tell Richard, and besides, he really wasn't interested in talking about Matthiessen any more...He just mumbled something about how I had to read The Snow Leopard...and silence.

So I dug out a few more facts about Matthiessen's CIA involvement; specifically, what he said about it later--enough to convince me that he was not an innocent, that he did get dirty, that he might very well have murdered the people whom he later said he had just been "keeping tabs" on.  And, of course, that he lied about it.  So, armed, I checked a couple of volumes of Matthiessen's award-winning short stories out of the library--and found them essentially unreadable, morally insane, disgusting.  Do I still have to read the goddamned Snow Leopard?

So yesterday afternoon I scraped together the last July's pittance and went shopping in Honolulu's real-deal of a Chinatown for absolutely necessary provisions for the last days of the month:

Coffee (with chicory), 40 oz. of firm tofu, dried mushrooms and wood fungus, basil, onions, vegetarian stir-fry sauce, two pounds of plain rice noodles, and a large clump of nutritious-looking, nameless potherb for only a dollar and a half, which, according to the couple of Chinese ladies who observed my selecting it with skeptically, more than usually narrowed, eyes, "Can be chopped up and put in soup."  Plainly, they doubted that my cooking skills would be equal to doing that.  Clearly, les dames Chinoises would be astounded to see the fragrant and nummy Pho that I am concocting this afternoon.

But to the point of this today's blog: Just as I left the Chinese market place yesterday, hurrying to catch the next bus home, I was hailed by an unknown, beggarly sort of Chinaman, who thrust into my hand a small, shiny pamphlet which said, "Jesus Loves You!"  Which, when I had looked for half a second to see what it was, I firmly thrust back into the beggarly Chinaman's hand, saying, "No! I don't want this.  Take it back," and he took it back, looking somewhat confounded.  And I felt good, as tough, gruff Mr. Hemingway used to say--wonderful even--at having at last told Christians that they may not bestow their unwelcome gift of presumptuous love and the insulting superfluity of salvation upon me.

So how is it then that I get on so well with St. Francis of Assisi--whose Little Flowers I am all the time re-reading in the original 14th century Umbrian dialect?  Well, frankly, I just bleep over the parts about Jesus and Mary and 'Iddio,' and Hell and Satan and damnation, and skip right to the sermons to birds and animals, and to the lovely, lovely disquisitions on Holy Poverty, which nothing even in Buddhism or Vedanta surpasses.  And of course, like a child at bedtime, I have my favorites--San Francesco ed il Lupo di Gubbio, for example--that having read hundreds of times before diminisheth not a whit the Aesopian charm of.  And withal, finally, I must confess that any of the stories about Santa Chiara I find, somehow, infinitely appealing and persuasive--She is such a dainty, genteel, angelic lady-saint.  Fierce and growly atheist/epicurean that I am, I am not so stiff-necked with pride nor so obdurate in sin that I could resist Santa Chiara.  If Santa Chiara were to offer me the Holy Eucharist, I very much fear that I would accept it.

When I say "Lizards," referring generally to members of the government and of the military-industrial complex of the United States and its NATO allies,

I am thinking specifically, of course, and primarily,  as a most visible representative thereof, of Donald Rumsfeld--the Donald Rumsfeld being asked, point blank, by Louis C.K. if he is a "flesh-eating lizard from outer space." Noting that, while being openly confronted, Rumsfeld can neither acknowledge nor deny that he is, in fact, a flesh-eating lizard from outer space, nor in any way deal with the suggestion that he likes particularly to eat tiny, toothsome, Mexican children.  

CNN Interview with RT Anchor Explodes: (FULL) Chris Cuomo vs Peter Lavelle.

There is much to say about this exploding interview, which, for those with eyes to see, ears to hear, and wits to perceive, lays bare (1) the clumsy stupidity, bias and bad faith of Western media, and (2) the clumsy stupidity, bias, dishonesty and malice of United States' foreign policy.  Afterwards, in another interview, acknowledging the "failure" of this interview, the moronic CNN mouthpiece/shill (in the Blogosphere widely referred to as a Twat) Chris Cuomo, said that he had been "killed" by the satellite-delay, which, in all fairness, is at least partly true; but which doesn't explain how the responsible journalist for Russia Today, Peter Lavelle, wasn't killed by it (at least not to the same degree), nor why Mr. Lavelle talks cogent sense, while pretty, young Mr. Cuomo (son of the former Governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, and younger brother of the current Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo) spews nothing but twattle. 

And that said, there is a larger issue that this interview summons up--one with which I am much concerned, even obsessed, in my life, and in this my blog:  Truth will out, even against great odds. When you look at the massive machinery of lies that the most powerful nation in the world has devoted all its resources to, in its attempt to intrude NATO into Ukraine, and to drive a wedge between Russia and its natural European allies--enormously though the frog-skin was inflated, a tiny little prick, from far to the side, of mere intransigeant honesty and ready wit, has blown frog guts all over the World Wide Web.  It must be tough being a toady to lizards these days.

It is not just the Vermin that infest the Judicial, Legislative and Executive Branches of the United States' Federal Government,

It is that many-headed Hydra, the American People, whose wildly erroneous opinion, enflamed and envenomed by the constant sewage-trickle of lies fed to them by their corporate-controlled media, which gives cover and excuse to the abominable iniquities perpetrated by their own government, and lends credence to the vile aspersions cast by their government upon the character and motivations of others. Thus:  Obama and his Creatures in the State Department and the Congress opine (astonishingly, as if it mattered even if it were true, which it isn't) that American citizens do not like or trust Putin, and believe that Putin is somehow responsible for "creating the climate for shooting-down Malaysia Flight MH147."  I, for one, and in fact provably more an American citizen than Obama is, very much do like and admire Vladimir Putin, and trust him to behave honorably in foreign affairs in a manner far beyond the ability of the sadistic, gay Kenyan Lizard even to understand the meaning of those words--"trust" or "behave honorably" or "foreign affairs."  And of course I know that soldiers of Ukraine--of the régime in Kiev--shot down Malayasia Flight MH147 . Not that it fuckin' matters--given that Putin's popularity rating, at latest polling, stands at 83% among Russian citizens.  And tell me not that the poll was "biased."  It wasn't.  And it's stupid of you to think that it was biased.

And now there's evidence, hard, photographic, that the soldiers who shot down Malaysian Flight MH147 were wearing Ukrainean Army Uniforms

But do you think that this for a minute deters the thugs, imbeciles and con-men in the federal government of the United States who have been saying all along that Putin did it?  You little credit their talent for thuggery, imbecility and impudent fraudulence:  "Oh well," they boldly squeak, "They may be wearing the uniforms of the Ukrainean army, but they're defectors--We can tell because we have secret information that we can't share with you which trumps any hard evidence you have." Uh huh.  But, still,  war with Russia, and making Poroshenko a full-fledged NATO ally have been somewhat delayed.

And Now the 674 Tonne Question: What happened to Germany's Gold Reserves?

The short, simple, direct answer is that the U.S. Federal Reserve, acting on behalf of the thugs, crooks and shysters who constitute the federal government of the United States,  and who were supposedly keeping Germany's gold reserves safe for her in a bank in Manhattan, have stolen it--sold and resold it (almost certainly to China)--or, as they are entirely too fond of saying, "rehypothecated" it--in order to finance their endless piratical, genocidal wars abroad and their prison/police-state at home.  What's amazing about these our own thugs, crooks and shysters is that they seem almost to have believed, like psychotic children, that they wouldn't get caught at it--or that, if they were caught, they could just say, "Yeah, so what if we stole it?  What are you going to do about it?"--and expect to suffer no ill consequences from such villainous and faithless treatment of their friends and allies.  And, of course, the Deutschebundesbank and Merkel's top financial advisor, being enemies of the German people and co-conspirators de Nature with their fellow thugs, crooks and shysters at the U.S. Federal Reserve--once they had got over their first, panicked astonishment enough that they could speak, said, "Oh, yes, the audit's over.  Our friends at the U.S. Federal Rerserve bank in Manhattan are keeping all of Germany's gold safe for Germany.  Let's talk about something else!"  What, of course, the media in the United States did not report is that there ensued demonstrations, little short of riots, all over Germany of German people shouting, "Give us our goddamned money back!" and "Get Germany the hell out of NATO!"


But to characterize the thugs, crooks and shysters who constitute our federal government as "psychotic children"--while it does account for their unblinking stupidity, unreason and utter immorality--is rather wide of the mark in presupposing that they are human, of the same species as ourselves, though of a lesser growth; whereas the nature of such an act as the theft--filching as it was really--of an ally's gold reserves, and surprise, not shame, at being caught at it, is in fact several notches lower on the evolutionary scale of ethics than homo sapiens sapiens ordinarily sink to:  Toads, maybe, snakes or flatworms, have such ruthless, conscienceless, short-term self-centeredness, that they are unable to resist simply, as the opportunity presents itself, snatching whatever they want, without a thought for whomever besides themselves it might belong to.

Hah! Richard Dawkins, noted Apologist of Atheism, says, "Mild pedophilia does not cause lasting Harm."

He said this, apparently, in a recent interview in Time magazine.  I know about it from Katie McDonough's piece in today's Salon, in which Dawkins' remarks are immediately followed by a handkerchief-twisting rebuttal from Peter Watt, director of child protection at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, who called Dawkins' "defense of sexual assault [my italics--Note the perverse, deliberate prevarication of Dawkins' "pedophilia"] a terrible slight to victims of such abuse," and who said further that, "Mr. Dawkins seems to think that because a crime was committed a long time ago we should judge it in a different way--but we know that the victims of abuse suffer the same effects whether it was 50 years ago or today."

Let us herewith immediately acknowledge that the last quoted statement, anent what we "know" about what "victims suffer," is merest, purest, made-up-of-whole-cloth horse-shit. We know nothing of the goddamned sort.  Dawkins did rather let his guard down by saying (which is not germane to his argument that mild pedophilia neither hurts nor harms, and therefore creates no "victims") that it's useless to judge the past by the present (Even I don't believe that); and he vitiates his case by equating the fearsome, horribly painful physical abuse of caning with presumably friendly and pleasurable non-abuse of fondling:  Any child could've told him that the former is abuse (It hurts!), and that the latter isn't (unless it hurts--in which case it's hardly "fondling").   But ah! in referring to a "child"--and not to a "boy"--I've lost my footing, slipped a bit, in the solemn pig-shit of "Depth Psychology" that still lies fathoms deep on the fictive science of Child Psychology and Development, and which, with the blind, unconscious brutality of Received Wisdom, perceives no real, essential difference between boys and girls.  It may, for all I know, or care, be abusive of girls to fondle them (I certainly wouldn't do it myself, and it quite sickens me to think of anybody else's doing it); but, speaking like Mr. Dawkins who was fondled as a boy and liked it, and never afterward regretted it, I can say that fondling boys is a wholly positive experience for them, especially if they are allowed to reciprocate it.

That said, note that the Official Refutation of Richard Dawkins' case for pleasurable, not harmful or painful, "mild pedophilia," comes from the director of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which in effect, by definition, makes pedophilia a form of cruelty (in the minds of women and the pussy-men who cater to them).  And perhaps, for all we know or care, for girls it is.  But ask any boy whether he would rather be flogged or fucked.  And, that aside, if you will but descend for a moment to the mundane realm of actual statistics derived from the records of Child Protective Services, you discover that, more than three quarters of the cases requiring the removal of a child from the home concern acts of the most appalling physical cruelty and neglect, and less than a quarter (19% is the figure that comes to mind) involve sexual abuse.  You will also discover that about four times as many girls as boys are the victims of sexual abuse.  And, if you dig really deep, you will discover that the victims of real physical and mental abuse and neglect, real cruelty, are, by an overwhelming majority, boys.

So, what the fuck do you think that means?

Well, one of the things it means, if you treat offenses of dissimilar gravity, such as physical child abuse and sexual child abuse, as the same sort of offense, is that you very disproportionately exaggerate the seriousness of the lesser offense of, say, pedophilia, and trivialize and make light of the greater offense of physical and mental cruelty.  Which means that, with your reptilian stupidity and cowardly and self-serving refusal to face facts, you greatly increase the incidence of cruelty to boys.  

DID NATO OR ITS NEO-NAZI STOOGES IN KIEV SHOOT DOWN MALAYASIA FLIGHT MH147?

My guess is NATO.  They're the ones with the fire power and the special willingness to use it on a massive scale against women and children (as in Libya and Afghanistan)--not unlike the Israelis in Gaza.

More of me, Anatole: My Personal Experience of Innate, Essential (Femininity and) Masculinity, and incidentally, Rape, in Men

I had been a macho gay eleven-year-old, after hitting puberty late in my tenth year--the kind that worshipped strong handsome men, and that detested girls, and didn't kiss them but still made them cry. By the time I was thirteen, awareness of the opprobrium which attached to my normal-for-me gay sexuality, plus the redoubled surges of testosterone natural at my advanced stage of puberty, were turning me into an introverted, hyper-masculine monster, hell-bent on having sex with a man.  I knew of only one (flamboyantly effeminate) man, a cousin, Lester, some eight years older than I, whom I was pretty sure I could corner and, if necessary, browbeat or blackmail into having sex with me.  And, one fine, hot July day, just before harvest, in the middle of a patch of tall weeds behind an abandoned cow shed, I virtually tripped him and beat him to the ground.  And it was awful.  Cousin Lester was a young man in external appearance, muscular-from-farm-work, super well-endowed (a good 9 inches) and uncircumcised, and even handsome (when he kept his mouth shut)--but as effeminate as a little girl. Sex with him was, for me--like shooting fish in a barrel, or stealing candy from a baby--an act of molestation. For all his having between his legs a membrum virilis of a size that boys dream of, at his heart, and in his slightly retarded mind, he was nothing but a flaming, silly sissy, or mere girl. I was as sick to my stomach afterwards with searing, remorseful disgust as if I'd  been having vaginal (or anal) sex with, say, Loretta Young or Elsie the Borden Cow.

I avoided cousin Lester for a couple of years after that.  Then, when I was fifteen, came word that he'd been killed in a car accident, and, as cousins did in those days I went to his (open casket, neck visibly broken) funeral--my impression, viewing the remains, was that, for all the embalmer's art, he still looked like a simpering, nelly queen.  His older sister, overcome with grief, fell weeping into my mother's arms, saying, "Lester was so sweet!"  It shocked me a little that she knew that, but I thought to myself, "Yes.  In fact, 'sweet' was all he was."





Skipping forward seven years--an immense span when one is young--bypassing the first time in Spokane, when, as a 19-year-old, I first had real man-to-man sex with a virile  30-year-old construction worker who came up to my specs (muscular, hung, uncircumcised, chiseled good looks, butch as a Stag at Eve), and whose specs I came up to; and going beyond those edifying occasions later, when I was  20 years old, in Paris, where I saw, with utter amazement, disbelief and horror, my first drag queen (in the bar of the Moulin Rouge), and where I was once robbed at knife-point and then ruthlessly fucked, or, if you will, raped, by a horse-hung, god-like-beautiful Portuguese pimp (thug or voyou) a couple of years older than I, in a coupe-gorge just off the Place Pigalle, who so liked my liking his raping me, as well as he liked raping me, that he gave me half the money that he had just stolen from me back--to an illuminating encounter which occurred late one evening (or early one morning) in San Francisco, shortly after I had first arrived there on my own, at the age of one and twenty:

2:00 a.m. closing time in the Blue and Gold.  Being a little drunk, and the bar being dimly lit, there were several things I didn't notice about the young fellow about my age who put his hand in my pants when Last Call was announced, and invited me to come home with him:  He was wearing lipstick and eye makeup--and when we got to his place a couple of blocks away and he took off his jacket, I was nearly asphyxiated in a cloud of women's perfume.  Still, having got that far, and pretending to be somewhat drunker than I was--and I remember thinking then that maybe, when we both got hard, he'd start acting more masculine--but it got worse instead of better.  As he started taking his clothes off, the stench of civet-based perfume got stronger and stronger--It was getting on my clothes.  He unzipped my pants, pulled down my shorts, and leaned over as if to kiss my dick with those ghastly, greasy rouged lips--And that was it.  I pushed him away roughly, yanked my pants back up, and ran out and down the stairs, followed by his (ïts) mingled moans, squeals and curses. Once back in my apartment, I stood under the shower for more than an hour to get the sickening stink of perfume off me.  I still shudder to this day, to think that I came that close to getting lipstick on my penis.

Ever upward...climbing Mount Parnassus

So, it was a couple of years after writing my Chant Chrétien--the winter of 1977/78, I think it was--in Spokane, on the way to an evening's 'Family Party' (at Bill and Sue's), that a small carload (three) of us stopped off at Bob Minks's (the twenty-something, anorexic, artist, intellectual, closet-bisexual's) apartment to smoke some pot in the kitchen; which, as marijuana often does, provoked an animated discussion among my companions and Bob that I found boring, so I wandered off by myself to the living room, pulled a novel of Aldous Huxley's, Chrome Yellow (which I had read some thirteen or fourteen years before at Patrick McClelland's instance), out of the bookcase, and sat down to leaf through it:  And there, fairly leaping out at me, were all four stanzas of 'Phyllis plus avare que tendre,' which I therewith grabbed a sheet of note paper and a pencil, and copied out on the spot.

A couple of years later, before, during and after Mt. St. Helens blew up (May, 1980) and blanketed Spokane with volcanic ash, high on the heart stimulant we were all using then for speed, noodling around on a recorder, I worked out the "shepherds' piping" for the beginning, segues (between stanzas) and codetta, and the basic shape of the melodies of each stanza of 'Phyllis plus avare que tendre'; and, checking into a Gonzaga University Music Department piano practice room,  I put together an essentially/harmonically five-part song for mezzo soprano and (perhaps lute) accompaniment.  The next day I hunted down a fine young classical guitarist, very patient and good-looking and somewhat dazzled  (I couldn't help but notice) by my being an actual composer who writes music down, who helped me go through the accompaniment note-by-note and remove all the notes that a guitar couldn't possibly play. Otherwise, I'd have made a hash of it.  I don't know how to play the guitar; which, for me, is half the fun of writing for it

And then, for I was full of juice, a few days later, I wrote out a very effective, funny, and idiomatically guitaristic setting (for, perhaps, contralto and guitar) of Jean Antoine de la Baïf's 'Le Loup, la Mère et l'Enfant.'

And then, after another few days, still oozing the vital sap, I wrote out, for myself, a tricky 7/8 meter, solo-voice setting of Charles d'Orléans' 'Le Temps a laissé son Manteau/ De Vent, de Froidure et de Pluye,' which, I confess, when I'm by myself, I love to sing.  I've heard other versions, including Debussy's (which, I boldly confess, I particularly dislike), but none does what mine does:  capture the bitter-sweet melancholy that throbs just beneath the surface of the glittering spring-song, or the still-melancholy, but also loud and joyous, "crying" of the beasts and birds in the second stanza.

Then for a couple of years I rested.

Nota bene:  The lyrics for all my songs have been characterized, qua poems, by absolute, exquisite, gem-like perfection--and I, as a composer, have done neither more, nor less, than to give them the (perfect) musical settings that they deserve.  It is also to note that all of my works have 'charm,' in the same way that our wisest and most socially aware forbears, in the most civilized era of our history (avant 1789), always had themselves portrayed as 'smiling' with their eyes.  This ineffable personal charm of mine has given rise to the dismissive fiction that I write in an "18th century style."  Would that I did!  More sympathetic friends to whom I've shown my work profess to hear in it, besides 'charm,' a certain harmonic astringency and fluent counterpoint more characteristic of 16th and 17th century Spanish and English music than of the 18th century; while my manipulation of metrics, of hemiola and polyrhythm are entirely of my time.  There, I have said enough.

Something new for me--

Dunno why, but last night I clicked on Billboard.com/"The Hot 100," and, when I'd read the description printed under that Rubric--

The week's most popular current songs across all genres, ranked by radio airplay audience impressions as measured by Nielsen BDS, sales data as compiled by Nielsen SoundScan and streaming activity data from online music sources tracked by Nielsen BDS.  Songs are defined as current if they are newly released titles, or songs receiving widespread airplay and/or sales activity for the first time--

I clicked on the first twenty or so and played (with my fine Boze sound system) a couple of minutes from each of the first eight or nine "songs" by male (I mean, why punish myself?) "artists" (singers).  This was the first time in 63 years that I have deliberately listened to popular music, chosen in the narrowest and vulgarest sense as the music that the many-headed, at just this point in time, will pay money to listen to.  My impressions:

Well, first of all, I'd like to congratulate these earnest and comely young men for their humane, congruent tonalism, for their sparing use of cacophony and atonalism, and for singing their simple "songs" quite nicely on pitch.  But, on the negative side, I have a couple of major criticisms:  (1) They are over-miked and much, much louder than they need to be.  And (2) the lyrics--the words--of the "songs" they sing (as near as I can make them out) are bathetically neurotic, ill-conceived, badly written, and quite plainly stupid--simply to recite them, without "music" to half-drown them out, would be as embarrassing as reading aloud, for all to hear, from the works of J.K. Rowling or Danielle Steele. Which is why none of these "songs" has an honest tune that you could hum or whistle--much less an interesting harmonic progression: because, as Wagner sort of said, you can't write a good song to bad lyrics (If it wasn't Wagner who said so, it was me).  And that's why I put quotes around their vocal effusions: Because songs, in the sense of such songs as I (literally) have written, or of 'Das Veilchen' or 'Die Lotosblume,' they ain't.

I suppose that I do accept, in a general sort of way, Pablo Casals' verdict that "Rock 'n Roll is poison put to sound; a brutalization both of life and art."  But more precisely, as a perceptive teenager said to me a couple of decades ago, "The music I like--like to dance to--is just nothing to you--nothing at all."  And I'd say that's a fair summation of my judgement on it.  Particularly, for example, the so-called "music" of Lady Gaga:  utterly nothing, nothing at all.  However, I found it ironic (in fact I was laughing my butt off) that when, a few years ago, as the year's top-selling "artists," Eminem (whose strongly rhythmical, slant-rhymed poetry I admire, without particularly liking it) and Lady Gaga were put together as co-hosts of a television music awards program, the former could not, and did not, even in his official capacity, conceal his utter contempt of, and complete disdain for, the actual person and the supposed "artistry" of the latter.  And she, poor, insipid cannibal lizard de haute Crèche that I believe her to be, was insufficiently galvanizable to evince the least sign that she understood, much less resented, his brutal, masterly, total rejection of her.

Confirmation!

In the approximative Greek font which is all that can I muster so far:  Nikasítiµos oîøe Tiµíona: "Nikasitimos has been (was) fucking Timiona."  [Those are both male names] Graffiti recently discovered by Dr. Andreas Vlachopoulos, at Astypalaia--a remote and rocky peninsula  on the Aegean island of Samos--dating to the fifth or sixth century B.C.  Dr. Vlachopoulos suggests that the "use of the of the past continuous [imperfect?] tense indicates that the two men were in an ongoing relationship."  No--God fucking damn the anachronistic, intrusive and presumptuous knee-jerk heteronormativity of such a suggestion--it does not.  It, rather, merely indicates that the two men had butt-sex on more than one occasion, and it implies that they were happy about it, with no opprobrium attaching either to the bottom (Timiona) or the top (Nikastimos).  Stuff the "relationship" twaddle, ladies.  One of the things that men like--have always liked--about other men is that they can have sex on a fairly regular basis, without it occurring to either of them that they're "in a relationship."

[It doesn't mean, Mesdames, that they don't like one another, or don't respect one another, or that they aren't friends  or social equals.  All it means is that they don't need, or want, society's approval, or yours, for the butt-fucking they enjoy together out on that remote and rocky peninsula--and they don't give a damn whether society, or you, disapprove.]  

Old Fashioned Radical Liberalism: Thomas Paine's 'Common Sense'

Sorry about your democratic Confusion, Mr. Adams, but some things have only to be said (or written up in a pamphlet and passed around to be read by free and responsible people--or if, shall we say, it goes viral on the Internet) to be acknowledged as true, binding and necessary:  Such things as Thom. Paine's "inarguable pamphlet" (as George Washington called it) Common Sense, and Thom. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and several opusculi of Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, including Reflections on Negro Slavery, The Rights of Man, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, and De l'Admission des Femmes aux Droits de la Cité.

Even going on two and a half centuries into the metastasis of the devolution of our Constitutional Republic into a prison-state/fascist plutocracy, we can still extrapolate from Paine's division of government from society, that the Internet, under an enlightened and democratic Rule of Law, might  serve as the instrument of the reintegration of society and government:  That every citizen, according to his competence (to be determined by his academic performance, his life/work experience, and the Mother of all Civil Service Examinations) might, for example, be required to spend an hour or two a week online doing the work of governance.

Or suppose, thinking of Condorcet's reflections on the injustice of one portion of humanity's holding another portion of mankind in thrall, abused, fettered and incarcerated, that we were to abolish the savage and abhorrent practice of judicial punishment for non-violent offenses, and to eliminate detention or incarceration for all but the violently criminally insane.  

Just these two innocent, entirely workable proposals would put democracy where it ought to be, within reach of the average citizen.  And if it did let loose the bloody jacquerie that Sam. Adams seems to fear that it might--would the garroting of the Supreme Court as presently constituted, or the disemboweling, dismembering, flaying and torturing to death of the ghouls and thugs who fill our so-called Security Agencies, our military and police forces, and the legislative and executive branches of the federal government, be so unjust or unnecessary?  Or even unbearably unpleasant? After what they've done in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan?  After the Patriot Act?  After the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012? Not to mention South and Central America (Operation Condor)...or Operazione Gladio in Italy... or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...or the abomination of the invention of the fictive "Cold War" and the imprisonment of whole decent, innocent countries, full of decent, innocent people, like  Czechoslovakia and Hungary behind the Iron Curtain.   A little Reign of Terror, a salutary Massacre of the Guilty, might be just the Thing--as in the movie Assault on Wall Street.


This is the man, Maximilien Robespierre, who had perhaps the clearest grasp of these principles.

"Putin has done what he can to avoid conflict. Now he needs to do the right thing, as he did in Georgia and Crimea."

I quote, as title for this blog, the last sentence of Paul Craig Roberts' essay in Information Clearing House, , entitled 'Washington's War Crimes From Africa And The Middle East to Ukraine.'

THE FASCIST (U.S.A./NATO BACKED) REGIME OF KIEV CONTINUES TO SHELL AND BOMB THE CIVILIANS OF SLAVYANSK--

And the lickspittle, fascist corporate media (such as CNN and the New York Times) continue to ignore it.  God fucking damn them (and us) to hell.