A blast from the past, newly relevant for the Sensation of the Day: Harry Potter.

Both “Pokémon” and “Harry Potter” are fresh examples of epidemic forms of mental disease akin to the “Flagellant” cult which rampaged during Europe’s Fourteenth Century “New Dark Age,” and to the “witchcraft cults” which spread during Europe’s Seventeenth Century, as a by-product of the Venice-directed, Habsburg-led horror of religious warfare over the 1511-1648 interval.

I wonder if Larouche consigned Don Phau to write up the anti-Harry Potter material?

Speaking of Pokemon — One of the World’s Stupidest Fatwas:

Denouncing the lovable Japanese cartoon characters as having “possessed the minds” of Saudi youngsters, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious authority banned Pokémon video games and cards in the spring of 2001. Not only do Saudi scholars believe that Pokémon encourages gambling, which is forbidden in Islam, but it is apparently a front for Israel as well. The fatwa’s authors claimed that Pokémon games include, “the Star of David, which everyone knows is connected to international Zionism and is Israel’s national emblem.” Religious authorities in the United Arab Emirates joined in, condemning the games for promoting evolution, “a Jewish-Darwinist theory that conflicts with the truth about humans and with Islamic principles,” but didn’t ban them outright. Even the Catholic Church in Mexico got into the act, calling Pokémon video games “demonic.”
Wait. What am I insinuating here?
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Some impossible – to – guage and standard buffoonish .
A Brutish Idiot Who Can’t CountJuly 12, 2007 (EIRNS)–This release was issued today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC). July 12 (LPAC)— Echoing the line from known circles in Britain, the New Republic has published a piece of garbage by one Conor Clarke. By making itself available as the neo-con outlet in the U.S. for the garbage spillover from London, the New Republic has only succeeded in making known what a piece of garbage it itself has become. Lyndon LaRouche issued the following comment today: “This visiting lunatic who lurks in the orbit of the Washington Post, Conor Clarke, appears to be operating as a card-carrying Guardian of the Cheneyite ‘New Republic.’ His count of the population of the town of Leesburg suggests that had he ever actually visited Loudoun County within the recent quarter- century, it was by Ouija Board, or, perhaps, ‘LSD Express.’ Considering the Guardian’s track-record in the Cheney-Blair gang’s Jeremy Duggan hoax, one might estimate from his own recent scribblings, that poor wretched Conor’s personal morals are even lower than his minuscule IQ.”

I cannot make heads or tails of this insinuation. The town of Round Hill has a 2000 census report of 500 people, and today it is evidentally up to 650. A difference of 150, a drop in the bucket compared to the cows that Conor Clarke reports overwhelm the human population — because he really needs to set a bucolic scene and that is the shorthand way to do so. Round Hill is close enough to Leesburg that one commonly just lumps it in (anyone who grew up 45 miles from the nearest small media market and 3 hours from the nearest major media market knows the sensation of (1) national news reporting events — by which I mean stupdifying things such as the sighting of the Virgin Mary on a sign-post — as coming from the small media market, (2) describing the location of the town in relation to proximate places, and getting further outlier and further off base as the other person fails to recognize anything). Besides which he distinctly referenced Round Hill. The New Republic piece’s online presence is now behind a firewall where I would have to pay to see how he gets around to referencing Leesburg — but it strikes me as not mattering a whole lot.

Larouche appears to be pretending like the interview for Conor Clarke (that resulted in a banal fluff piece he can contort into “SLANDER” for the benefit of his followers) never happened, that Clarke created it out of whole cloth. I… guess(?) I don’t know. I have read enough material through Larouche’s past 40 years to see that he oftentimes leaves these dangling insinuations, where I can’t for the life or me figure out what the insinuation is — or how it connects to what he later explicates. The proof in the pudding is that he misstates the population — kind of — and locates Larouche’s estate into Leesburg — maybe.

I wait with less than baited breath a response to my query of what the hell he is talking about from a Larouchie at FACTNet who seems to think this is a “GOTCHA!”

The more appropriate title of the LPAC press release should be, “I’m a Brutish Idiot Who Can’t Read.” The New Republic article says that the town of Round Hill, Virginia [not Leesburg] has a population of 500. Guess what? So does the City of Round Tree: http://www.city-data.com/city/Round-Hill-Virginia.html.

Well, it makes sense to somebody — the cloistered unit of LYMers — I guess, as I quickly google to see what the hell a “Round Tree” is — with no success, and make sure to note that every goddamned Larouche-given location for his estate posts “Round Hill”. The next article, coming in a month or so — anticipated to the degree that such articles can be anticipated — should get an even more entertaining press release, tying up the Baby-boomers, synarchists, Jeremiah Duggan*, Dick Cheney, and on and on.

Cult leaders, I suspect, are much worse tragedies than the people who get hurt by them. The victims can snap out of it, walk away and, eventually, recover from the experience having learned some very hard, valuable lessons that can make them stronger and more fully human and compassionate beings. The cult leader seldom sees the possibility of snapping out of his self-constructed world and leaving it for healthier, more beautiful and loving ones. And, ultimately, this is a fate, whether conscious or not, that the cult leader has chosen.

Much more material is coming out of his world of make-believe out of the Larouche rss feeds, (blah blah blah — Baby Boomer Democrats stop the LYM and Democratic Youth — um? together at last? – from issuing an impeachment resolution somewhere or other… blah blah blah — will deliver to John Edwards shortly.) But really? In the world of fantasy, I hear that JK Rowling writes better stories. No hang up over out-of-date almanacs. An item from “the other side” of that story: Hm, am I wearing something that says “Potential LaRouche Cultist Recruit”? Why are they here? Does the world really need more looneytoons in it? And so it goes…
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*or, as  LL insists on calling him, Jeremy Duggan.

A couple of years ago, at Christmastime, my nephew played with a Harry Potter toy — or something to that effect — waving it around and incessantly declaring “I’ll put a spell on you.”

It was either a catch-phrase from the Harry Potter movie, or it was not a catch-phrase. My sister, his mother, expressed that “I’ll put a spell on you” was certainly not used in the movie (or book) as often as he was using it. It didn’t matter: the kid had glommed onto that expression, and for all intents and purposes, the entire Harry Potter experience for him boiled down to “I’ll put a spell on you”.

But the movies are truncated adaptations of the books, the books being too long to clip into 2 and a half hour of film, so I almost figure that perhaps some parts of the books could be shortened in that matter with a glib “I’ll put a spell on you!” Blamo! 30 pages shortened to that phrase, and we can move to the more important scene.

I have not read Harry Potter — or rather, I read the first 30 or 50 pages of the first book before moving on. Obviously I approve of Harry Potter — blah de blah: kids. read. long books. Enjoy it. Striking a blow for Literacy. Hard to disapprove of that, and short of a series of puppy mutilations, any discussion of literary value is moot to that positive.

I can haphazardly measure out basic Fantasy themes from Harry Potter information that has seeped into my consciousness through osmosis. I see the bumper sticker reading “Republicans for Voldemart”. Okay, this is the villian — authoritarian, I presume. I hear negative references to “muggle”, which I think refers to those without magical power, and more generally in our popular culture refers to a lack of creativity — for example, that woman who challenged Harry Potter in some school library or other — muggle.  (Or is muggle-wump, a further denigration downward).  Harry Potter is an ordinary child who was, in typical fantasy manner, discovered to have great powers and fit into another realm.  And thus is born the intrinsic pleasure of identifying with Harry Potter.

Who may or may not have said “I’ll put a spell on you”, but I assume that was a bad guy. And may or may not die in the final book. Page 634.  Dagnabit if that didn’t spill out onto the web like that!

The other day, The Telegraph, a major newspaper in Great Britain, linked to a blog entry here about John Edwards, a largely negative post questioning his dizzyingly wild swing on iraq between 2003 and 2007 while at the same time expressing dismay at the media fixation on his expensive haircuts. The link pushed my technorati rating up a couple of points, as well pushed my ranking down by 100,000 or thereabouts — something that I don’t really care about but find mildly interesting to note, and I pass this along .

The question from Tom Harden was “John Edwards: The Worst Presidential Candidate Ever?”, and before he clarified the meaning with

It got me wondering (wandering and wondering – I can multi-task) whether John Edwards might be the worst presidential candidate ever. I don’t mean the most inept campaigner – he’s not. I mean, intrinsically the worst candidate: the phoniest, slickest, most disingenuous, least electable.

I was already stalled with that ever omnipresent word “EVER”, which trails behind “OF ALL TIME” for probable ahistorical reference points. Unless I see a discussion about John Edwards in comparison with, I don’t know — the 1940 Thomas Dewey campaign (picked entirely arbitrarily and without any concern for whatever Thomas Dewey was actually up to in 1940, which I am not at liberty to peg one way or another), the question is not going to really be answered.

I can say that Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign rhetoric for the 1928 presidential bid of Alfred Smith was off base with his campaign rhetoric for his 1932 campaign which was again off base with what he war running on in 1936.

But this does not particularly excuse John Edwards.

Meantime, John McCain’s campaign implosion includes diatribes against “gay sweaters”, which strikes me as a more meaningful superficial image problem. Mitt Romney, who I think is John Edwards’s soul mate for the “Phoniness” “Image Consciousness” problem, has gone from campaigning against his Republican affiliation for the benefit of Democratic dominated Massachusetts to campaigning against his Massachusetts affiliation for the benefit of his Republican Party primary base, and I hold him as more problematic than Edwards.  Now I need to figure out and understand what is up with this — which does not beggar for anything less than an authoritarian presidency.

I watched the Matt Groening interview on Jon Stewart’s show this morning, and I was struck by Groening comments about a bit of censorship regarding Fox News.  It is interesting in comparison with what I had thought he said on NPR’s Terry Gross show a few years ago.

The show had a parody of the Fox News bottom-of-the-screen ticker, the joke being about you would think it is: News alert — Democrats bad, Republicans good.

Matt Groening described the reason Fox News nixed this as being because viewers would be confused, thinking it was the real thing.  Asinine reasoning, but essentially apolitical, and we’ve heard equally stupdifying corporate decisions over the years.  But the Fresh Aire interview provided a longer story which ran the gamut into the political:

During an interview broadcast today on NPR’s Fresh Air, Simpsons creator Matt Groening revealed that the Fox News Network had threatened to sue The Simpsons over a parody of the right-leaning news channel.  […]  According to Groening, the Simpsons team refused to cut out the segment, which Groening told Fresh Air he “really liked,” figuring that Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t allow the Fox News cable network to sue the Fox Broadcast Network, which carries The Simpsons.  The Fox News Network did back down on its threat, although it has told The Simpsons creators that in the future, cartoon series will not be allowed to include a “news crawl” along the bottom of the screen, which might “confuse the viewers”. 

The story is evolving, if not necessarily in a conflicting manner, a manner that de-emphasizes Fox News paranoia.

I’m watching this item from prisonplanet of some group or other of 9/11 conspiratorial windbags assaulting John McCain. The video is tedious.

What I hate about this video is not so much the crux of the content — a press outlet where these conspiratorialists ask John McCain awkward questions McCain considers beneath him — McCain having garnered their wrath for having written a preface to the Popular Mechanics 9/11 conspiracy theory debunking book. To each their own.
I loathe the production. I hate the intro. I hate the outro. I hate the trumpets at the start announcing that something is coming. I hate the stylistic drumbeat of splatting from one still image to another in rapid procession, which intercuts the thing at different points in the proceedings for a naseating effect that in its desire to captivate me into strong emotions leaves me rather detached.

They are stylistic jackasses. I see this mode of video editing for “politically provocative” “guerilla” videos of any number of political stripes, and on to the non-political. I do not like it.  I want my web content from self described grassroots fighters against the Establishment to be stripped down. If you look around there, you can find video of Alex Jones yelling in a bullhorn in the direction of the meeting of the Bilderberg Conference. I liked that one. Just as politically fringey, if a little more palatable in the sense that — indeed, it is a conspiracy of the rich and powerful making decisions on the course of human events — and in its way as confrontational — if only to a brick wall — but much more viewable.

Scott McLemee, on his duo “Inside Higher Education” article / “Crooked Timber” blog entry — posted the comment:

It took a while, but a LaRouchie has commented on my article, saying among other things

And then on to a refutation of this Larouchie’s belief that she is fighting the neo-cons, and then to the precise point of reference for Larouche’s ideology. I submit that McLemee is slightly off about when Larouche started aligning himself behind the FDR mantle, but it’s a minor point — especially in line with the bigger focus about — oh, you know — Larouche’s klansman alliance and such.

But indeed. Three Larouche followers ended up making comments to the “Inside Higher Education” post. Starting with Margaret Fairchild. The name is strangely familiar, and familiar in association with Larouche. (ie: I am not confusing the actress Morgan Fairchild with Margaret Fairchild. Though the quickest of google searches shows there was indeed an actress named Margaret Fairchild — of some renown, too). It appears that there might indeed be a family of Larouchian Fairchilds, headed by Mark Fairchild — who destroyed the 1986 Illinois Democratic Party — and ended the political family dynasty of Adlai Stevensons — by unexpectedly winning the nomination for lieutenant governor.
Never mind. The first sentence sort of stuns me. Suddenly there are a lot of blogs about Lyndon LaRouche and the LYM. Could this be because the man LaRouche has been fighting to Impeach since 2002, is in big trouble? Why all the attention to LaRouche, if he’s so crazy and irrelevant?

Simply put, there aren’t a lot of blogs about Lyndon Larouche and the LYM. There’s this blog — and I have chosen to stay on this horse since December. There are a couple of others. And there’s an assortment of entries of various blogs on encounters with Larouche or odd places Larouche has stuck his unwanted neck out — video game players pounding on about Larouche official Don Phau glomming onto the Virginia Tech tragedy with some rewritings of old 1980s conspiratorial diatribes on Heavy Metal music reworked so as to replace video games for the subject, for instance.
Seriously, I was a little pleased when that my bloglines feed for the word “Larouche” spit out all the comments from these Scott McLemee pieces, because otherwise the standard is a whole mass of Larouche party-line material about, oh, you know, the BEA Scandal.

It is enough to make me feel like this goddamned blog is a bigger deal in Larouche-land than I had thought. Really? Is that a possibility? That seems like an insane proposition.
Margaret Fairchild goes on to air her insecurities and the cue to the motivation of anyone who joins with the forces of Larouche from the start. “The LaRouche youth, stupidly wanting a future, not wanting to go to war for Dick Cheney and Halliburton, or work at Walmart after getting a college degree.” I don’t precisely know what the venues to change the status quo are — and I am constantly searching through our nation’s political history to attempt to conceptualize such things out–, but I know it is not with Larouche — after all, the opportunities for Career Advancement at WalMart are much greater than with LYM.

And she throws out the Larouche party line on Larouche’s Fraud case. For that, I may as well suggest Chaitkin’s biography of George Herbert Walker Bush (available at Powells), which is relatively hilarious in the manner that a few references to Larouche as “the pre-eminent political opponent of George Bush” turns the book right around and makes it about Larouche.

Moving on to Larouchie #2: The point that Scott is missing is that Larouche is right. And on to describe an ebullient technological wunder-future — the rub coming that any practical considerations of Environmental Impact Statements are going to be pretty much null and meaningless.

Actually I just want to skip along to Larouchie #3, and for all intents and purposes want you, the reader, to forget everything you have read and focus on Margaret Fairchild’s sentence: Suddenly there are a lot of blogs about Lyndon LaRouche and the LYM. And “Grizzled Veteran”‘s opening sentences in this message:

Why indeed the sudden appearance of articles in the media about LaRouche and his youth movement. The New Republic just weighed in with an slander piece on LaRouche as well.

LaRouche and his LYM have Dick Cheney on the ropes and they will most certainly knock him out for the count.

God bless Lyndon LaRouche and all the people in his organization both past and present.

What a cloistered outfit we have here. The New Republic’s “slander piece” was a rather banal affair. I can count on one hand the media pieces on Larouche that have appeared lately, of this and that type. But the thing is, in the Larouche Universe, this handful of articles — Nick Benton’s pieces, Scott McLemee’s piece, the New Republic fluff piece, the piece that is coming up shortly for another political magazine — seem like a MEDIA FRENZY, bashing up against the gate, suddenly THE ENTIRE ESTABLISHMENT of synarchists is being pitted against the forces of Larouche… because, I guess, Cheney has an approval rating in the 20s… what with that BEA Scandal nobody has ever heard of that Larouche, Inc. has sent his following into a frenzy over.
If you dig into the pieces, and throw out the New Republic fluff piece as a matter of spite, the answer to the question is sort of answered with the final statement of that blog comment — God bless Lyndon LaRouche and all the people in his organization both past and present. Or, better still, forgetting the first half of that equation, and go with: God bless Ken Kronberg.

But perhaps the cloistered outfit of the Larouchians don’t quite see that “slander” connection, since it is outside what they need to think about.

………..

An additional update: The writer of The New Republic fluff piece has written on the “Larouche Watch” blog: as it happens, I had reported on all of those things – the magazine just wasn’t interested. sometimes that happens and it’s got nothing to do with the writer. This gives the suggestion that Larouche had his organization primed for something of, quote-in-quote “slander” (ie: substantive reporting), and what appeared was less than what they saw him sniffing about toward. Or maybe I’m just giving the yahoo too much credit by suggesting he has standards to define “slander”.

I ran into a book the other day, I’m tempted to call it a historical curiosity and not much more — but I know better. The 1962 publication Men of the Far Right by Richard Dudman, which — whatever else it does — defines lines of political demarcation as viewed from the vantage point of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era.

The Men of the Far Right include

Senator Strom Thurmond
Senator Barry Goldwater
National Review founder William Buckley, Jr.
John Birch Society founder Robert Welch
General Edwin A. Walker
McMarthy backer Gerald Smith
American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell

If I’m at first tempted to play the game of “Which of these things is doing its own thing?”, ot figure out which you cannot connect to any other, I am stalled because I do not really know the answer. Likewise, these divergent figures do not a coherent movement make, even a fledgling one. To see George Lincoln Rockwell placed next to Barry Goldwater is a wee bit jarring. But, I suppose I can connect them through the “5 Degrees of Seperation” ploy — scratching about for thematic ties if not actual ties. Easy enough to tie him to Thurmond; easy enough to tie him to Welch — from either direction there you can tie to Smith, and from there to Rockwell.
Goldwater appears today as the harbinger of the future. From the vantage point of 1962, we are working through the strands of a hyper patriotic marked anti-communism which lined Joseph McCarthy as a pre-eminent figure of the “Right” in Eisenhower’s America — and lines General Edwin A. Walker as a key figure, and we are sorting out the strains of the Depression-era politics — meaning that Gerald Smith was a sort of Ghost from the Past.
In a previous decade, Strom Thurmond would be characterized as relatively moderate on racial issues compared to his Southern Dixiecrat Governor compatriots. By the time he jumped ship to the Republican Party, flagged at the press conference with Barry Goldwater, his role had changed, though I suppose would end up being overshadowed by George Wallace and/or Lester Maddox.

These days, Barry Goldwater’s image has been refurbished somewhat, an erstwhile maverick crypto-liberal, albeit with libertarian predilications. The semi-haliography is partially the result of shifting political alliance shifting and resulting political issues, and partially historical amnesia. Never mind — nothing is ever one dimensional, even if we try to conceptualize things as such. He is cited as someone who represents the “old Republican Party”, a decent sort where the current crop has “lost his way” — which seems disingenuous enough, seeing as he would have been the figure placed where we place Bush and the neo-cons and theo-cons today, and belly-ache on how the Republicans have lost their way and gone crazy in nominating this nutcase–

who had the fancy of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Maybe you’ve not followed the Hamas Children’s television show “Tomorrow’s Pioneers”, but when we last left out this guy:

Farfur — oddly enough never a subject of a Disney Corporation lawsuit — was beaten to death by an Israeli who wanted to take his land away.
Well, his cousin, Nahoul, has descended to carry on Farfur’s legacy, and to avenge his death.

The premier of Nahoul is available on Youtube, and it is a laugh riot, of sorts. But as I contemplate the militant Islamist message being imparted on the Youth, and as I look at the crude production values, I come back to this question.

COUSINS?

Bees, Scientific classification, from wikipedia:

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Hymenoptera
Suborder: Apocrita
(unranked) Anthophila ( = Apiformes)
Superfamily: Apoidea

MICE, Scientific Classification, from wikipedia:

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Rodentia
Superfamily: Muroidea
Family: Muridae
Subfamily: Murinae
Genus: Mus
Linnaeus, 1758

CAN’T HAMAS EVEN GET RUDIMENTARY BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE RIGHT?

In other news, the word has been that the Bee is disappearing. Hamas, I guess, can be lauded for bringing the Bee back into the public sphere.