I’ve always had this small dream of becoming a professional reviewer or critic of this or that media — novels, popular movies.  Then I could write a review and give things “A -“, which would force onto the cover the movie poster or book an “A -“, begging the question “What… deficiency knocked its grade down?”

The other effect is the old Siskel and Ebert show.  That show tossed in the trash-bin for use any pull-quote by Siskel or Ebert (in favor of “Two Thumbs Up”), and made moot for promotional use any review by Siskel or Ebert if the other gave a negative review.

There is this effect in reading The Kite Runner that comes with its quick “Study Guide” inclusion, which is a product of the novel’s immediatnotch to the status of “Big Important Literature”, and the fact of its study guide affects my reading rather detrimentally, even if I paid that no mind.  I was consciously aware that I was paying too much attention to structure.  So… what is that?  A few points deducted due to post-production presentation?

With that, I can say it is a depressing ending.  Bleak and full of despair.  With that little narrative tic of wrapping it into the feeling of bitter-sweetness.  But that only magnifies the destitution.  On its own, it wouldn’t be too bleak, but the emphasis on the tiny shining light as a positive source for optimism is what makes it depressing.

But this is a novel regarding Afghanistan and the by-product of three decades of war and turmoil, so that is pretty much the way things have to be, I would suppose.

Back into the world of current events, with something like 130 percent of the vote counted, Harmid Karzai has pulled out of run-off status against his competitors.  Next up is the what now?

The Strange Death of Franklin D Roosevelt, Emanuel M Josephson, 1948

page 85
The invisible Rockefeller Empire is a super-government that is rapidly encompassing the entire globe.  It has entered into partnership or other deals, and has dominated the governments of numerous countries including France, Italy, Roumania, Germany, Czecho-Slavakia, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China, Abyssinia, Japan, and Soviet Russia; and in the Western Hemisphere, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia, Bolivia, and Argentine.

For the past thirty-five years, the government of the United States has been a completely dominated and minor dependent bureau of the Rockefeller Empire that has always done its bidding.  For more than half a century, the Rockefeller Empire has controlled by its contributions the nomination in the major political parties.  Under Franklin Deleano Roosevelt, their agent, the Rockefeller Empire entered into open rule of the United States.

[page 305]

War is an absolute necessity for the continued maintenance of our present scarcity economies and for the support of the scarcity monetary system, whether that economy be Communist, Socialist, Nazi, Fascist, or the Speculative or “Gold Standard” economy we call Capitalism.  […] 

The Truman Administration, like that of Roosevelt, is undertaking to follow the Lenin formula and force dictatorship through bankruptcy.  By direct and indirect taxation it is taking between a third and a half of the nation’s income.  As the percentage rises higher, ever more persons will be forced into straightened circumstances and bankruptcy.  Finally, when a sufficient number of taxpayers and a sufficiently large proportion of the productive capacity of the nation has been bankrupted, the government itself will be bankrupt.  The nation will be faced with the alternative of seizing private wealth and industry, as was done by the Communists or concentrating wealth directly in the hands of the ultra-wealthy whose fortunes will have escaped taxation through various loopholes written into the law, in which case the pattern will be that of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.  In either case dictatorship will eventuate, as planned.  The blight of wanton waste and of oppressive and confiscatory taxes is being depended upon to impoverish all but the Dynastic rulers and their allies.  The Rockefeller Empire will then reign supreme.

We can now say goodbye to Geocities.  It will go black at the end of October.  In its hay-day, it was much maligned by techies, and probably for good reason — even if one basic thrust of their problem has that sort of elitism that didn’t take into account a desire on the public not to become computer techies themselves.  Geocities misfired on a couple of occassions — a noxious little watermark, and then at the acquisition from Yahoo a claim of corporate copyright over everything anyone posted.  In retrospect, Yahoo’s purchase of geocities was probably an unwise investment, a flush down the toilet of some millions of dollars, though it made sense at the time — geocities reportedly was the third most hit site on the web at one time.  Geocities could have been something, had it evolved with the Internet Zietgist — on to something paralleling any blogger or facebook, but it didn’t evolve.  So it was a relic, by-passed.  The thing lacked any dynamic features, encouraging a great deal of inaction and abondonment, and thus languishes its users into obscurity.

I liked, or at least adapted a liking, to the neighborhood subdivision inherent in the sub-directorys for the web addresses.  “SoHo” “Coffeehouse” “7115”.  What an address!  It gave me a bit of amusement in “looking around the neighborhood”, where I found a lot of unused websites — people figuring putting up a website of their own was the thing to do, and then not doing anything with it.  Lack of dynamism.

Then again… the subdirectories of these address… and an inability to communicate it to Law Enforcement… all on their end, I have to say… appeared to foster a feeling that I wasn’t playing things straight with them, which is never a good thing to engender with figures of Authority.

I stood at the entrance of the police station, whisked off of my high school campus after a brief and horrifying little chat, and the officer asked, “What’s the address?”  And I answered.

“dubba u dubba u dubba u dot geocities dot com slash SoHo slash Coffeehouse slash seventy-one fifteen slash diddley dash doot dot h t m l.”
I don’t know what he was expecting, but he couldn’t quite process such a thing.  After a short pause, he rustled about for a notepad and a pen, handed them to me, and asked “Could you write that down?”  Which I did.  And, after a pause, he parked me to the little holding cell, only convenient place available to dispose of me.

A minute later, he came back.  Unlocked the door.  Handed me the paper.  “This is… the right address?”
I looked at the paper.  Saw that everything was in order.  Handed in back, nodding my head, “Yep!”
 He handed it back, saying “Are you sure?”  I looked down again.  Grabbed my pen (which I had been impulsively clicking for the duration of this police visit), drew three lines above the “C” in “Coffeehouse” and “S” and “H” in “SoHo”, and handed it back. 
“It’s … um… Case Sensitive.”
Huh.

He returned in a minute.  Opened the door.  Summoned me.  And asked, “Why don’t you… um… come back with me and type it yourself?”
In retrospect, there probably wasn’t too much harm in having me do so in the first place.  But there was no protocol for this, so the police was in a very real way was playing this in an ad hoc manner.  As it were, I entered the office.  Another officer, the other’s Superior I presume, rolled his seat back, and let me lean over with just enough room to type the address on his keyboard.  There was a false start in getting the page up as it clicked to one of the barely wrong addresses he had been typing in to no avail, and so came a stern and accusatory question — “Why don’t you type in the address that you actually use to get to your page?” — which was answered by the page coming up.  I was ushered back out so they could apprise the situation anew.

It turned out all right, of course.  Me?  Not a Serial Killer.  Good to know!  But I am trying to imagine how these things might work in this day and age.  I don’t know. Do schools make it a point to survelliance their students’ Internet accumulations?  (Quick google search.  Around here?)  And how does one answer the question of handing an address for a long-gone facebook post — isn’t that a bunch of “&”s and random numbers and “^”s, something a bit more confusing than three slashes, three upper-case letters, and a dash (which, I suppose, everyone is used to by now).

Anyway, cue Mountain Goats.  And fade to black.

Any good geocities pages out there?  I can think of two.  Kind of.

The new First Lady of Japan, Miyuki Hatoyama, believes she has travelled to the “very green” planet Venus.  She is also married to a man nick-named “Alien” due to his very big eyes and a few eccentricities, the new Prime MinisterYukio Hatoyama.  Upon hearing this, I suspected a definite connection — albeit I knew I would have to check chronologies in order to figure out the casual relations.  Did she marry an “alien” due to an attraction that came after the experience of Venus, or did she have this dream experience thinking about her husband / muse?  The latter is roughly the answer.  I also imagine that the eccentriticies of the two attracted each other.

I want to know whether the the new prime minister in Japan given his version of Obama’s “Skinny kid with big ears and funny name”.  I assumeYukio Hatoyama’s name checks out fine in Japan, so we’re left with something like, “Only in Japan can a man with funny bug-eyes get to the highest position in the Land.”

So, the prime minister’s wife is the new Japanese Administration’s either embarrassment or funny eccentricty.  There is, reported by the oh so illuminating World Net Daily and Townhall and on from there, a story about the president and White House being in a panic about Michelle’s mother’s practicing of voodoo rituals.  This is, I think it’s fair to say, purely racist claptrap — from what fevered imaginings it’s pushed its way into these realms I can not say.  Though, there’s nothing too much wrong with voodoo — if you asked a voodoo priest how to handle this or that, they’ll be liable to answer to say the Lord’s Prayer.

A bit less fanciful, Obama has working for him in advisory capacity, not “Czar” a man who signed a petition to investigate the circumstances of 9/11, including as it were “foreknowledge” and “complicity”.  The signiture is justifiable and understandable — we are rolling back to a time when the Bush Administration was stonewalling any investigation and than throwing out the name Henry Kissinger to head such a thing (Why Kissinger?  Just to increase the number of 9/11 Truthers in the polls, I suppose), finally tossing out a report redacting mentions of “Baudi Ababia” (to use Senator Bob Graham’s term).  Well, it’s justifiable to the point where he’s in an “advisory role” — meaning he had a bit more to do with signing off on the terms of the investigation.  So it comes to the point where I couldn’t much care one way or the other the fate of this man Van Jones within this administration.  It appears he has resigned — forced to, one would presume.  I shrug, and await more important matters.  I see, looking around the blogosphere, much dancing on Obama’s Gravestone due to this.  Why?  Because some people are just very much jacked up on Cortosone.

Following in on his detractors, I see the hovering around on the name of one signator to this petition — Howard Zinn.  I followed a link from commentary from the comments section of a “Huffington Post” thing.  This blogger is wrong.  This does not prove his “9/11 Truth” membership.  Quite the contrary, it shows Howard Zinn as proferring a “Popular Front” with his intractable anti American Empire pure Blowback position and the 9/11 Truth Movement.  This does not alleviate the main point, which would be that Zinn can’t move away from signing that thing as far as he’s trying to here, but it is a distinction worthy of note.  Also worth noting, he’s in the six years following that, moved further away from this “popular front” position and blasted them.

Interestingly enough, at least for me, this puts Howard Zinn circa 2002 / 03 — if you want to go through the prism of a one dimensional left / right continuum and define the positions like this — to the left of Noam Chomsky, who I note from my skimmings of 9/11 Truth Materials is pretty well bemoaned and testily shoved away as a “gate keeper” and not consistent in having said words against people who charge “conspiracy theorist” too quickly and with his words brushing off 9/11 Conspiracy theories.  I conjecture that every person throws up a “popular front” of some sort or the other, things being a matter of what your own personal coalition allows.

Van Jones,  I guess we can say that he failed that “25 – 25” rule proferred by some liberal blogger or other (Yglesias?  No.  I see it was Kevin Drum.) with concerns to the college work given by Virgina Republican gubernatorial candidate Robert McDonnell.  But Robert McDonnell fails, for me, on my basis that anyone who attended one of Pat Robertson’s universities should be disqualified from high public office.  That, I guess, is one of my gate-keeping outtery.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Okay.  Glenn Beck.  The Man of the Hour.  Mr. “Key to the City.”  Good for ratings, his curious foray into conspiratorializing.  And it has come to that point where the blogs — Huffington Post on down– as well Keith Olbermann can snatch out a few minutes of his program on a daily basis for their own amusement.

We laughed when he left out a letter in spelling “Oligarchy”.  We scratched our head as he expounded on the art at Rockefeller Center — can you spot Lenin and Marx?  (A bit more here.)   And, yes did you catch that — he admitted it!

All very good and well.  But I’m stuck on the Czar Quote thing.  This just doesn’t strike me like good propaganda.  It’s like revealing the horror of Naziism by playing “Springtime for Hitler”, or showing Hogan’s Heroes programs.    (Or… this?)

Actually I want to test this.  Take the video again.  Czar Quote thing.  Now, watch the video, but have — instead of your Van Jones and whatnot, play the clip and put in some quotes from Hitler and Goebbels.

“The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.”

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over”.

Robotic voices make anything, including the most sinister, funny and non-threatening.  Including John D. Rockefellar.

Obama.  To speak before the children on the day after Labor Day.  Horrors!

Time for all the bloggers to run to Photo-shop and splice together images of Hitler Youth with Obama buttons!

I mean, the timing of it all!  Right here, when he’s pushing Health Care!  And… on the first day of school for many locales.  One or the other.

Parents in Utah, Kentucky and Texas are keeping their children out of school for the day.  To boycott th video taped message.  I don’t know what age children will start making these connections, but the connection will be made: your parents are bonkers!  (Or, I suppose, in the most rarefied of red districts, the students left behind have parents who are Liberal Socialist Communists?)

There is some manner of historical digging.  We remember what Bush was doing on September 11, and that was tied directly to promotion of his “No Child Left Behind” policies.  Reagan took a student’s question and gave his support for Supply Side Economics.  Apparently.  I suppose politico digs up something a bit more algined to this “controversy”.

Obama isn’t the first president to be criticized this way. O’Neill recalled President George H.W. Bush made televised address to students in October 1991 as campaign season was heating up. A handful of Democrats denounced Bush’s address as pure politics. Bush asked students to “take control” of their education and to write him a letter about ways students could help him achieve his goals, strikingly similar to Obama’s messages.

I don’t remember that speech.  Will the kids remember the Obama speech?
I do think things surrounding the Persian Gulf War trended around the boosterism that Obama is claimed to be pecking out here, treated as the naturally good thing in stasis.  I know that in grades higher than I was and probably in locales more liberal than I was in, some students organized a walk-out at the start of the Gulf War… for a conciousness veneer to play hookey, I would say.

Anyway.  My message to the Negative Reaction to Obama on this:  Get a Grip.

Yes.  Pat Buchanan.  Hitler Apologist.  He penned an editorial entitled, “Did Hitler Want War?”  The answer, I think, is round about “Yes.” 

I don’t know why everyone’s in such a furry over this.  He wrote a book expounding on his views on Hitler in this stuff down in his last book.  Perhaps he added something new in his column, but I doubt it.  I guess he’s chomping at the bit, waiting for a grand debate in Great Britain to knock down Winston Churchill.  He’s not at Michael Savage level in getting banned from the nation, it appears, because he’s a lovable bigot.

How did Buchanan manage to keep this out of Sprio Agnew’s speeches, we’ll never know.

A few months ago, Pat Buchanan white-washed American history, essentially removing black soldiers out of all of America’s wars.  It was a bit strange, as all anyone needed to do was roll through the National Archives and pull out some photographic evidence.

Pat Buchanan was long run out of the Republican Party.  He won a third of the New Hampshire primary vote in 1992 and 1996, the latter enough for the win.  He made a blistering speech in 1992, such that he was locked out of Bob Dole’s convention in 1996.  I recall an NPR news feature of alarm over Buchanan’s advisors hailing from such groups as the “National Association for the Advancement of White People”, the organization founded by David Duke.  (I got a haircut once at around that time, television was on in the corner and an NAACP ad went on.  The barber asked that question “Why isn’t there a National Association for the Advancement of White People?”  I stared ahead in awkward silence as he continued clipping my hair, not sure what response I could possible give.) 

In the rev up to the Iraq War, some liberals noted his strong opposition to the Iraq War, with added with his Protectionist views on trade gave him a bit too much sympathy.   In her round up of strident voices at the dawn of the bombing, Amy Goodman on Democracy Now included in a couple sentence quote from Buchanan, blasting those “neo-cons” (for … Israel).  It is good to see the balance met back to square one, we can all now remember his 1992 RNC speech.

Notable, and I don’t know what can be noted with this, The American Conservative magazine — Buchanan helped found and remains published on the website and in print, a cover-story panel focus on his anti-Churchill book, for instance (a little loopy was that!) — has published this thing to their blog on Health Care, and I find no mention of Buchanan’s Hitler apologia and controversy from their stable of bloggers.  That strikes me as very odd indeed for a controversy that every political magazine’s blog has tossed, regarding one of their central figures.

… Who deserves a good biography by now, incidentally.

PUMAs.  They’re still out there.  If you really want to look.  See, for instance, here:

I’ve been watching the Glenn Beck Show this week;[…]  For me, it is confirmation of everything I have thought, said, felt about Obama since the campaign. […]  I find it rather alarming that we now have avowed communists and radicals advising our President in official positions called czars.

Hm.  At the dawn of the Russia’s Communist Revolution back in 1917, if you had told Vladamir Lenin that within a century the United States would go Communist, he would have smiled and nodded in approval.  If you had then told him that the Communists would be infiltrating the United States government in the form of Czars, he would have been, well, a tad confused.  Such is the weird arc of history.

Another day, another creepy murder related in some way to Barack Obama. There is something about this guy that leads to unusual murders wherever his name arises.

There is some dejavus with this one.  It reminds me of Clinton’s Ring of Death.  Though, of course, every president has a Ring of Death, so why shouldn’t Obama be different?  But it just kind of strikes me as odd — PUMA — Hillary Clinton supporters, weren’t they?

When pondering the election returns and the red streak that ran across Appalachia, Arkansas was the state that stands out most glaringly.  Or:
McCain:  58.72 percent  Obama:  38.86%
Bush :       54.3 percent    Obama:  44.6 %

The Republican advantage, on the national scale, has doubled.  The difference between the state Democratic party (Arkansas is at once a one – party state on the state level) and the National Democratic party widens, and there I suppose we have to suggest that the party is three and four decades behind the rest of the South.

We could basically assign Arkansas as the “Epicenter of PUMA”.  There was no “PUMA effect”, but to the degree that there was — it would have been pretty much consigned to Arkansas.  In a way this makes sense, the final attachment to a Clinton, the husband swamping his “Favorite Son” state in his two elections, and leading his successor Al Gore to a narrow loss, helping to obscure the political shifts.    To say these are at times complicated and confusing matters, I had to laugh when I saw this headline / suggestion that Clinton be brought in to arm-twist the “Blue Dogs” — the Blue Dogs having formed their formation after the 1994 midterm election.

Oklahoma is on the state level “Democratic” (of that type that would run their mouth against the Secular Conspiracy and bemoan the lack of school prayer in the schools), but they spit out to the Senate two crackpot Republicans.  Arkansas has managed to spit to the Senate two Democratic senators, such as they are, and the bill should come due sooner or later.

Arkansas is also the Epicenter of Birtherism, it appears.  These two things probably go hand in hand, the conspiratorial churnings that bring about one aligns with the other. 

The new survey of Arkansas from Public Policy Polling (D) finds the state to be very conservative, very Birtherist, and very much opposed to President Obama on health care — despite the fact that the state’s Democrats are typically dominant and hold all major offices right now.

Only 40% approve of President Obama’s job performance, with 56% disapproving — matching up pretty closely with John McCain’s 59%-39% victory here in 2008. In addition, only 45% say Obama was born in the United States, with a strong 31% saying he was not, and 24% unsure. Among Republicans in Arkansas, the Birther question comes up as 23%-49%-28%.

On health care, only 29% support Obama’s plan, with 60% against it. In addition, respondents were asked whether Rush Limbaugh or Barack Obama has the better vision for America: Limbaugh 55%, Obama 45%. And keep in mind that this is a state where Dems have both Senate seats and three out of four House members.

Arkansas Republicans have been shifting about locating a candidate to take on Blanche Lincoln.  They have some minor status candidates and not their “Big Guns” (being a one-party state, somewhat hard to find — though party-switches are pretty likely around about now), and polling indicates that just might be enough to oust Blanche Lincoln.    Their candidates include:

In May 2009, Hendren apologized after it was reported that during a meeting of the Pulaski County Republican Committee in Little Rock, he referred to Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer of New York as “that Jew” after Schumer had criticized the Republican Party. “I ought not to have referred to it at all. When I referred to him as Jewish, it wasn’t because I don’t like Jewish people. I shouldn’t have gotten into this Jewish business because it distracts from the issue… I believe in traditional values, like we used to see on The Andy Griffith Show,” Hendren said, adding that he does not use a teleprompter and sometimes mispeaks in haste.^[3][9] Schumer said that he accepted the apology. Hendren’s comments drew a reprimand from Brian Walsh, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, who said that “Comments like this are completely inappropriate and don’t have any place in public or private discourse.”^[3]

And then there’s this candidate.

“When I joined the military I took an oath to defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic,” Reynolds said. “I never thought it would be domestic, but in today’s world I do believe we have enemies here. It’s time for people to stand up. It’s time for us to speak out.”

He added: “We need someone to stand up to Barack Obama and his policies. We must protect our culture, our Christian identity.”

When he got to the Q&A session, he said that he would be careful with his answers, “I don’t want to do a Kim Hendren,” and later clarified that he was not categorizing President Obama as a domestic enemy.

To be fair, that one may be considered the “Alan Keyes” in terms of fringe-ty in this election race.  I don’t know how viable the Founder of the Arkansas Tea Party, Tom Cox is either.  For all I know, the primary battle will become an epic battle between those two.  But the polling is matching up Coleman, Griffin, Baker, and Cotton.  Nobody’s ever heard of them, and they tie your Blanche Lincoln.

Considerig the Birthers and PUMAs and “Deathers” floating about, I wonder if a Sam Yorty prototype character could gain some traction in the Democratic Primary?

Although he was the first mayor to have a female deputy, and the first to have a racially integrated staff, his appeal did not extend to most of the city’s large African-American population. Disaffection with high unemployment and racism contributed to the Watts Riots of August 11–17, 1965. Yorty’s administration was criticized for failing to cooperate with efforts to improve conditions in neighborhoods such as Watts, but he accused other leaders of raising false hopes and of action by communist agitators, having always categorically rejected any criticism of the city’s police or fire departments.

After the riots, Yorty challenged incumbent Democratic Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown in the 1966 gubernatorial primary. He received 981,088 votes (37.6 percent) to Brown’s 1,355,262 ballots (51.9 percent). Yorty’s politics shifted toward the right. This change became evident when he joined the election night celebration of Brown’s successful opponent, Ronald W. Reagan. Yorty went to Vietnam to support the American troops and was thereafter dubbed “Saigon Sam” by his liberal opponents.

I direct you to this article in the “American Conservative “, a bastion of isolationism.  The article calls to “ditch the Carter Doctrine” and remove our troops from Afghanistan.  Make of it what you will; I don’t really care at the moment.

What I want to direct you to now is the advertisement on the sidebar.  Ads by google.  The “Google Ad Sense” program, offered to your blog though unless your blog gets any hits you’re not going to get much money out of it.   With that, the google wanders over the website and  randomly give you:  “Find your Russian Beauty Today”.  “Browse Photos Now”.  And there is what I take to be a photograph for a “Mail Order Bride” possibility that you might just pursue — an attractive smiling blond Russian woman in a bikini.  Purchase her marriage today, why dontcha?

I’m just trying to get some perspective on geopolitics and the history of foreign policy decisions here.  I’m not in the market.