Bush’s watch was stolen by Albanians.

That is story number two coming out of Bush’s Blockbuster Trip to Albania, the only place in the world Bush can travel and be greeted as a Liberator.  Oh yes.  The news coverage about Bush’s trip to Albania has been comically hyper-ventilating, and maybe a little condescending to the Albanians.

The reason Bush is Huge in Albania is because they love Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton — Wilson for “liberating” them in the process of World War I, Clinton for saving ethnic Albanians from Milosevic’s slaughter.  I understand that George’s father is beloved and highly respected in Turkey — where they call the chickens they eat “Bush-wings” because of a trade deal made during the Bush the Better administration, which I guess legitimizes any crowd chanting toward Bush the Better into Turkey.  But Bush the Lesser’s foray into Albania is a queasy example of afterglow from previous administrations.
I have to wonder something about a comment found in that Washington Monthly blog post, though.

Who, how, and why notices this stuff?

Not to say it isn’t good schadenfreude, if indeed Bush got robbed, but how would Bush’s watch become a focal point from a youtube clip?

No, really.  What world of the Minutiae Loving Internet Media has he been paying attention to?  THIS IS THE STUFF THAT THE INTERNET IS MADE FOR.

Story number three… Bush.  Putin.  Albania as focal point of … er… differences of opinion.  Probably more important than a stolen watch, but far less entertaining.

Now then. Full steam ahead.
What is the deal with Robert Beltran?

Of the half a dozen episodes I think I saw, I remember two episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, that forgettable a series it is for me. One of the episodes I remember basically because it was a rip-off of a Next Generation episode, a premise later used — I think but am not certain on the X-Files and then later on with a wink and a nod on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All of which is just as well, because Groundhog’s Day had a not dissimilar premise.

It does look like the weakest link in the Star Trek franchise. I know nothing about Deep Space Nine, but I do remember that there was a one or two season story arc that my Star Trek fan siblings found fascinating. Even Enterprise looks as though it had more charm, or potential for charm, than Voyager. The Trek franchise is a bit on the rocks right now, and there isn’t any clear idea of how to jump-start it with new material. In the popular imagination of the casual civilian, Trek begins and ends with Kirk’s crew and Picard’s crew. It actually is enough of a feat that they managed to churn out The Next Generation; you can throw the darts twice and come up with something.

So it is that Patrick Stewart, a classically trained Shakespearean actor, can be pretty damned comfortable with his role, known primarily as Jon Luc Picard.  Robert Beltran has a harder time as Commander Chakotay. From a 2001 New York Times:

“Chakotay has not changed enough for my taste,” the outspoken actor said, referring to the character he’s played for seven years on Star Trek: Voyager. […] “Although they come up with a scene here or there that’s tolerable, I think the character has not progressed since season four,” Beltran said. “In fact, he may even have regressed a little.

“I would have explored his past, his spirituality, the inner conflicts he might have,” the actor said, “and most definitely his relationships, not just with the captain, but with everybody else on the ship. I would have liked more revealing scenes with the other cast members, which were sorely lacking with Chakotay.”

Though his frustration is palpable, Beltran insisted that he never let it seep into his performance or his on-set demeanor. The actor gave his all when called upon, and it wasn’t unusual to find him joking with cast and crew on the stage or tossing a football outside, in front of his trailer on the Paramount lot.

“When you’re given these throwaway scenes with not much thought put into who’s saying it and its importance to the whole story – and I’m talking mostly about seasons five and six here – it just makes me feel like the writers don’t care,” Beltran said.

“I just felt let down, ignored and insulted,” he said. “I think they did a grave disservice to what I thought could have been an interesting character.” […]
“I’m just sorry that it has gotten to the point where I’m feeling so unexcited, that I got to be so disillusioned with it,” he said. “I’m sorry that happened. I’m sorry the writers didn’t see the possibilities. I’m sorry for all the missed chances, not only for my character but for the whole Voyager story.

“I just feel like it’s been a disappointment,” he said.

Beltran, however, is looking forward rather than back. Life after Voyager, he said, will resemble life before Voyager.

“I’m an actor,” he said. “I do television. I do films. I do stage. I’ll do whatever feels right.

“I can only do what’s offered to me,” he said, “and from the list of what’s offered to me I’ll just do what I think is the best thing to do. Ideally I want to do my own films – I’d like to have my own production company and tell the stories I like.”

I imagine Larouche and company getting wind of this disaffected actor, with it piquing their interest. I don’t think a Scientology approach per se could work at all with Larouche — a group of Big Name actors hamper the need to be above this silly pop culture world.  But a single well-regarded actor disillusioned shadows their recruitment base, and besides which he is in a position to wander in and out of Hollywood without much fret.
Note the immediate post-Trek stage performance he took part in, which served as his “in” to the orbit of Larouche:

Robert Beltran, perhaps best known for his work on “Star Trek: Voyager,” stars as Charlie Castle, a much-adored movie star who has sold his soul, metaphorically speaking, to satanic, all-powerful studio head Marcus Hoff (chilling Miguel Sandoval). When Charlie killed a child in a hit-and-run accident some months back, Hoff covered up the incident. Now, Hoff is pressuring Charlie to renew his 14-year contract — a Faustian bargain Charlie’s wife, Marion (effective Rita Rehn), will not tolerate.

Ever mindful of the period, beautifully evoked by Scott Siedman’s tacky-lush set, Melendez calibrates the distance between emotional truth and histrionics, seldom tumbling into the gap between. Reminiscent of John Garfield in his prime, Beltran is righteously passionate as a conscientious artist forced into an unholy compromise — Odets’ prescient nod to escalating McCarthyism.

It doesn’t take too much work to read into his motivations to that role.  It also managed the trick of putting some of Larouche’s words into Beltran’s mouth regarding a post – FDR let-down in society, a bridge into Larouche’s faux idealism.
Interesting to note what Larouche’s attitude toward Star Trek and Star Wars has been — largely negative “moronic space opera drivel”, but with the value of “getting kids interested” in his dreams of moon colonies and missile defense “Beam Weapon Technology”.

Robert Beltran later insisted that he basically hates the genre conventions of science fiction, and insisted that one of his projects not be compared with The Twilight Zone.

That explains why Robert Beltran is now teaching Drama at Larouche’s Academies. Actually, he is not too dissimilar from the Youth Recruits in respect to motivation.

lhl scamed beltran with the truman story, and the generation gap story, and now beltran thinks he finally has modern american history – as well as the cause of all the world’s problems today – figured out…thanks to lhl – the world’s one and only non-solution.
lhl is very good at making up simple explanations to help make complicated things line up neatly…the only problem is that every now and then some new explanation will come along – but this doens’t mean that lhl was wrong – it just means that lhl was hypothezing the higher hypotheses,
the org is using beltran to sucker in more youth…the idea of having a well-known actor give you acting classes is too good a pull.
the org has used this trick before…get to know some well-known singer, musician or actor, get some rapport going with them, by having “intellectual” discussions with them about how bad movies or music or broadway is today…then the target will think that they have found someone who understands them, their problems, share their hopes and dreams, etc.
then comes the ego stroking – you get an invitation to perform at a conference or something like that.
finally, comes the “lyn is the only solution” line, with some explanation on how lyn is so clever that everybody just slanders him as a fascist and everyone who has left him – chris and carol white for example – are agents – real estate or otherwise.
then, the org starts asking for money…which is what it was all about to begin with.
it happened to william warfield…and now that warfield is dead…beltran is next in line.

OR… Robert Beltran speaking before an excited conference of Youth:
The final speaker was Mr. Robert Beltran, a Classical actor who has been working with the LaRouche Youth Movement for about five years.  He connected “the long arc of corruption and immorality from Nietzsche, Wagner, Kant, Liszt, Darwin, Freud, and various others like that.”  Beltran read from 19th and 20th Century poets such as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot, which include such demoralizing, banal, and self-hating lines as, “Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.  For I have known them all already, known them all-Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons. I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”-which was written by T.S. Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1919).”
Robert then contrasted that by reading two sonnets by Shakespeare, two poems by John Keats, and the great “Ozymandias” by Percy Shelley, which, if you make it simpler for Bush and Cheney, would be nice for them to hear. “Ozymandias” is a political lesson for those who don’t know the consequences of an empire. He also read “On Peace” by Keats, which is a call for Europe to free itself from the chains of Empire, following the model of the just-created United States. (Hear Robert Beltran read the poems)
The dialogue which ended the meeting rallied the audience to establish its responsibility as a social body, and to find self-inspired passion to change their own identity in order to create a renaissance. “How do you lift society up in a world jaded and bereft of beauty?” Beltran was asked. He replied, “All I can do is hope there is a project out there worth putting your time into. You have to do it yourselves, like what the musicians (Duckles and Levin) said, you do it because it’s in you. You will have to create it, you guys will have to create it, we have to create it. The world needs great poetry, a great chorale.”
Too bad he couldn’t be Captain Picard.

I.  James L. Bevel, a civil rights leader who worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted of charges that had an incestuous affair with a juvenile between October 1992 and 1994 in Leesburg.

[…] Bevel is credited with playing a key role in some of the country’s major civil rights protests, including the 1963 Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, AL. He also was a leader of the Freedom Riders to desegregate public accommodations throughout the southern states in the 1960s and was an architect of the March on Washington in 1963 and the Selma-to-Montgomery march in Alabama in 1965. Bevel also helped organize the Million Man March in Washington in 1995.
And it goes on from there.  Okay.  By now anyone who sees this blog knows what “Leesburg” is, and where this is going:

 In 1992, Bevel was a candidate for Vice President of the United States on the ticket with Lyndon LaRouche, a Loudoun-based political activist and economist, who was convicted for mail and tax fraud as well as illegal fundraising practices. LaRouche and Bevel received less than 1 percent of the popular vote.

Lyndon Larouche’s running mate.  A more pathetic and inconsequential political slot I would be hard-pressed to think of.  Oh well.  At least his name was attached to Larouche’s program of 1992.  That’s worth something… I suppose.  I know there are a few of those civil rights workers drawn into the orbit of Lyndon Larouche – land, which is somewhat bemusing.
II.  A new gutter outlet for Wall Street Fascist John Train.
III.  I was told that Larouche was just about to release a new ground-broken article titled “The Rules of Survival”, looking for all the world like the new “Children of Satan” in terms of at the moment agenda-setting.  And so he has.

The world as a whole is presently caught within the last phases of a general breakdown-crisis, a crisis for which there is no true comparison, until now, within modern European history since the 1618-1648 Thirty Years religious war. In fact, the nearest resemblance to the current threat, is to be found in European history in the so-called “New Dark Age” of Europe’s mid-Fourteenth Century. In that mid-Fourteenth-Century collapse, half of the parishes of Europe were erased from the map, while the level of the population was reduced by about one-third.
There is no reason anyone needs to read anything beyond that first paragraph.

IV.  The panel looking into the Virginia Tech shooting has lost patience with the Larouche- representatives in the attack against video games, politely brushing one of them aside.

V.  And we have this oddity to consider, the current Larouchie pestering the FACTNET boards and breaks down in a fit of psyche-showing paranoia, and seeming guilt related to the death of Ken Kronberg…:

Time for Truth, you just wrote the following:

This forums dialogs would be translated to in the public in the form of:

No one in the LaRouche movement should feel able to say that with impunity–especially after LaRouche’s letter about his death, the EIR package about him–weren’t you paying attention to Lyn? What about Fidelio?

Creepy and telling, methinks.

Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.

“The truth of the matter is it would have never come to my attention if it was dismissed at the time it was proposed,” he said. “In fact, the Pentagon has used it repeatedly and subsequently in an effort to promote non-lethal weapons, and in fact they submitted it to the highest scientific review body in the country for them to consider.”

Any further comment seems like it would be gilding the lily of one of those absurd items you hear about tucked in the Pentagon Budget at one point through its history or other… but…
I think I already that comic book.

What?  Don’t believe me?

Two items said by Mitt Romney, right in a row, have been receiving a bit of attention.  Interestingly enough, they were said one after another.

Governor Romney, I wanted to start by asking you a question on which every American has formed an opinion.

MITT ROMNEY, FORMER GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS: Well, the question is, kind of, a non sequitur, if you will. What I mean by that — or a null set — that is that if you’re saying let’s turn back the clock and Saddam Hussein had opening up his country to IAEA inspectors and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein therefore not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn’t be in the conflict we’re in.

OR Okay.  Try this again.:  Kind of a non sequitur, if you will.  What I mean by that is a null set.  The transcript and the words that I heard on various replays do not exactly match.
What is it a null set?  In mathematics, a null set is a set that is negligible in some sense. For different applications, the meaning of “negligible” varies. In set theory, there is only one null set, and it is the empty set. In measure theory, any set of measure 0 is called a null set. Mitt Romney is saying, I guess, that the question is invalid.

The audience watching is all gaping “Huh?”  I just the other day posted rumblings from a Washington Monthly plastering Democrats for trying to speak over the publics’ heads.  I read another article that posited that Al Gore, with his new book, has picked that habit up full-steam — chastising the public for its television viewing habits and on.  Al Gore, of course, can afford to because he is not running for president — which solves the problem that particular article had with what they saw as Al Gore’s presidential campaign.

Mitt Romney, by tossing out the word “null set” had an Adlai Stevenson moment … of sorts.  I am not entirely sure his use of the word makes sense, which leads to explanation number two for “null set”:

Try this:
Kind of a non sequitur, if you will.  What I mean by that is a Vinn Diagram.
Kind of a non sequitur, if you will.  What I mean by that is a Venetian Blind.
Kind of a non sequitur, if you will.  What I mean by that is Fish.
See how that works?  Mitt Romney is explaining the definition of “non sequitur” by use of an example.  That leads to a paradox, which is that it is no longer a non sequitur because  the example is an example and thus not a non sequitur, but you already read that Shannon Wheeler cartoon, and thus we start a feedback loop not dissimilar to the time travel paradoxes used in science fiction films.

The second part of this statement receiving some attention — Paul Krugman wrote on it — is that Mitt Romney’s assertion that Saddam Hussein kicked out the IAEA Inspectors is simply incorrect.  The basic problem is that this narrative is generally accepted as true in the media and by the Political Establishment, false though it is, and to call him on it is to cave in to unorthodoxical Truth — thus Wolf Blitzer ends up an idealouge by the terms set down by establishment politics.

And what I mean by that is a null set.

Why The Beatles look more like The Partridge Family, it’s a product of lack of concern with the manuevering of popular culture.  I oughta give where I picked this image up his due, this was posted at Progressive Ruin, and comes from Jack T Chick’s funda-MENTAL comic creation, The Crusaders.
I am rummaging through the FACTNet board, trying to sort some things out of it.  I can’t really say I am doing a great job of it, and have ended with the habit of simply dragging long passages from some posters to save without reading it — Scott and Tom.   I ended up deciding to create a separate page saving the any comment relating to Jeremiah Duggan, which is probably a pointless exercise only insofar as, unlike with Ken Kronberg, nobodyhere has any direct insight about that case and individual — everything is inference from their own experiences.

A sort of uneasy gray area lies in the attempts at selling us the Truth According to Larouche, and … god help us all… debate it.  Right out the gate, a “Tom” defended the Larouche line on … The Beatles.

I’ve done considerable amounts of homework on the origins of the counterculture, and I am certain it was intentionally created for a particular political effect. In fact, the LaRouche movement was formed out of the opposition to the Vietnam War, and the concurrent launching of the counterculture.

Now, when one starts digging into the origins of the SOE, and related British intelligence outfits, one soon discovers that the British are masters of various forms of psychological warfare. The British Tavistock Institute, for example, is notorious for originating so-called “brainwashing,” electro-shock “therapy,” and the use of drugs to induce psychosis. Later, during World War II, Tavistock psychiatrists were attached to every major British army unit. Their methods soon became very influential within United States military intelligence circles, ultimately leading to the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency. One of the notorious experiments the CIA conducted during the heady days of the Vietnam War was the so called MK-Ultra project, which included the large-scale distribution of LSD on college campuses. So much for the opposition. Somehow, a generation of Americans was induced to give up their commitment to truth and justice. Paul McCartney was knighted.
I rather prefer Jack T Chick’s take on the situation.  There are more druids in his historical take.  There are a few things to say about the Beatles in this conspiracy theory.  Firstly, it is a constant with Larouche — Lyn Marcus, the Marxist, could tie it in as a Bourgeoise plot… and Tom picked up on that.  But it does tap right in to the conservative flight against the 1960s.  Hence, the attacks against heavy metal in the 1980s.  Written by the same man who is now writing anti – video game screeds for Larouche, seemingly with the same formula, in this decade.
Thirdly, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Love, Love, Love” must really rankle that man.

Fourthly, and most importantly, the rejection of The Beatles a con game for psuedo-intellectualism, and elitism.  We reject the mass commercialist mindset created to us from the marketing taste-makers, to a great extent true enough, and accept instead… Beethoven.  It makes one feel like they are thumbing their nose at the Marketing — well, Oligarchy.  Literally every single Larouchie and every single ex-Larouchie and every single semi-Larouchie touches upon that theme as an attraction to this Cult of Personality, I see it as appropriate alienation from their peer group leading to an inappropriate response.  But Tom seemed a little bit unaware of the irony of his “drop out” comment.  Hold on a minute here:

In any case, I have not ignored the difficult question with respect to the Beatles. I’m amused that it’s really an issue, but I am not surprised. My experience has been tempered by years of political organizing. I have learned that it’s relatively simple to educate someone politically. Most anyone who has an attention-span, and the willingness to do some work on their own, will readily agree with LaRouche’s basic analysis of the world’s political-strategic affairs. However, the culture, particularly with respect to music, is always the sticking-point, because one’s “music” is almost always the key to their identity. For example, generation X-ers, like myself, generally talk, dress, think, choose their friends, recreate, etc., with their favorite “music” as a reference. I’m sure you are aware of the phenomenon, and I don’t think our enemies are unaware of the effect.

We’ve all seen infants jumping up and down in their crib, hollering nonsense, and putting toys in their mouth. Thankfully, some of them grow up. Unfortunately, many of them are induced to remain forever infantile, and they defend their infantilism to the rotten core, without ever really knowing why.
Ugh.  Actually, this is Jack T Chick.  And, for that matter, the bestialization… the species differernation… right back to what that Larouche questioner asked right on this blog as what he saw the key question to be:  DO YOU KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MAN AND ANIMAL?
The absurdity of this is probably the clearest arena to spotlight.  After that, the discussion on matters of culture become somewhat boredom-inducing, and not worth much in the arena of saving.  To sum up that situation:

Lyn’s narratives of the history of science make for fascinating study in the paranoid style, if you can endure the torturous quality. Essentially, as previously noted, there was a Pure Method known to Plato; it was attacked and silenced by Aristotle and Ptolemy, revived by Cusa, cherished and continued by Kepler and perhaps Leonardo; this was promptly attacked by the regnant oligarchy in Venice using their agents, Galileo and Newton. Leibniz then “discovered” the calculus in a flash of complete, brilliant, fresh genius, supposedly after studying “the Kepler problem,” as Colonel Blimpoid has put it.

And never mind that basing the calculus on the infinitesimal leads to Zeno-style paradoxes and that this was known 250 yrs ago, was much discussed and argued, nor that the rigorous articulation of the Limit concept by Cauchy formalized the calculus on a logically sound basis; none of these developments have any internal logical or natural historic force, native to the subject’s complexities. There just has to be a conspiracy, run by oligarchs since the founding of Greek philosophy out of myth and poetry, to silence those (like Lyn) who seek to elevate mankind. 

That is all ye know, and all ye need know, methinks.  I can pretty much by-pass it, ridiculous as it may be.
“Unified conspiracy string theory” of the world. I remember being told in 1979 that Atlantis was found off the coast of Spain, “right where LHL said it would be”. We can spin out more conspiracies than you ever imagined. We could give you a prehistoric conspiracy, a bronze age, Egyption/Babylon, Israeli, Masonic, Christian, Platonic, Satanic, Marxist,British, Rockefeller, JFK, Nazi, Humanist version. I could not even begin to catalogue the stories we published, stole, rewrote and claimed as our own discoveries. Each story will have an appeal to some segment of the population. So, the person listens lightly to the jibberish, then reaches his “level” and then thinks that we have something that he always thought about, but never had “the facts ” to back up.

Now the biggest conspiracy is that people who join think that LHL wants a mass movement. If that was true you would think after 30 years we have a few more subscribers and contributors. But, if you look at the lists you find that we burned every one out. If you takle a close look at the Presidential lists you will see that the repeat givers soon drop off. The demographics of the givers also changes as we targeted another group. At one time, through the anti drug coalition work, we had numerous supporters who were in the right to life groups. Another time we had John Birch type lists to call. Now you will see a lot of Muslim names as we pick up on the post 9/11 comspiracy of how Israel is the ultimate master of the British and US war efforts.

Rewind a little and stop at this line:

Now the biggest conspiracy is that people who join think that LHL wants a mass movement.

This is one of two things that “xlrc” has hammered on this board constantly, that Larouche he wants — a parallel world where he is a dictator and creates the impression upon a group of fawning syncoprants that he is a Player in World and Cultural Affairs.  The other being that Larouche is being used and duped by other criminals — the extortion does not  with Larouche ciphing up money from the LYMers.  I don’t know what the make of the latter impression.  The former, I can suggest one my problems with Dennis King.  It is interesting that his book “The New American Fascism” was published just a couple years before David Duke narrowly lost a Senate seat and then the governor seat for Louisiana.  I say that because a David Duke has a clearer shot of winning anything electorally than Lyndon Larouche, and has a clearer antecedent and connection with the “Old American Fascism” — the one party white supremicist ruled Jim Crowe Southern — um– oligarchy, and the KKK.

Actually I reflect on this:

There are some people on FACTNet who are out to ruin LaRouche, I think. They’re not obsessed with what he says, but with what he does. The site got a lot more intense since a senior LaRouche org member committed suicide in April.

Sure.  Sure.  OKAY. There is a strange sense that Larouche’s Empire is now perpetually on the brink of collapse.  3 years before I receieve a post on the current strains of Larouche, Inc — Fidileo — Dead, and all that:
today, the movement is all but broke.
there is that whiteboard in the “national centre” showing how much each local raised so far for the week, and the total is never enough for the movement to stay afloat – at least not with helga’s weight in the boat.
many old timers are moonlighting as substitute high school teachers or got some computer job (data entry).
‘Intelligence’ consists mainly of internet searches. The am bfg is constructed primarily from surfing the web, with some gossip from “contacts” thrown in. Lar doesn’t have any intelligence capability – at least not anymore. He has some “contacts”, many of whom don’t even like him. But people talk to EIR/EIW/Strategic Alert because everybody likes the idea of being interviewed, makes one feel important.
The ultimate source for the stuff in EIR now comes from web search engines – except for LAR’s rantings – those repetitive and near-repetitive tracts come from lar personally. The web searches are copy pasted into the am bfg, or the “daybook”, and eventually amalgated into an “article”. A typical EIR article is made up of stuff from other people’s websites, with some jokes and opinions thrown in.
There is one guy in the national centre – Richard F. – who collects a lot of statistics from the web, comes up with charts, etc. At least this guy does some actual work. The rest just writes opinions columns.
Every now and then, the NEC, or whatever , will decide (i.e. “judge” — inside term) on which slant to take (i.e. “intervention” — another inside term). The truth will be shaded in EIR in such a way as to reflect the “policy”.
“Contacts” around the world will then get a call or two, and be “briefed” on the latest incarnation of lar “policy” based on the assumption that they really cared about what lar thinks. This will be followed by the customary joke — “the world is coming to an end and there is no other solution except lar”. After that, the begging for money starts.
Sometimes, some “contacts” will give some gossip, and tell the boomers in leesburg not to publish it. the boomers will then relate the gossip to lar, and lar will think that he is being let in on something because he is so important to the world.
This basically sums up the best private intelligence agency in the world.
about helga and her bitch’s rich and famous lifestyle — the trouble about courting VIPs is that you must have the means to entertain them. every now and then, you read about the german and her bitch rubbing shoulders with this or that VIP. VIP shoulders don’t come cheap…and the big shots will only give you the time of the day if you look like you have some means. hence, the true purpose of the yoot movement…to help foot the bills.

I think Robert Beltran’s services are a good trade-in for Fidelio, in a very broad “teach the classicist method of Acting” versus classicist Art mode.  Besides which, there should be plenty of Fidelios in back-stock to wave before these artistic-minded recruits, and they shouldn’t notice that they’re a few years’ old.
I think the nature of the Cult is that is that it needs to be Strained in terms of its financing.  On one hand, it does shadow the Perpetual Impending Collapse claims for the Broader Economy.  On the other hand… the nature of a con is that you funnel your winnings right on through and never stop.

I had long ago expected the new book from Daniel Pinkwater to be something of a kid’s novel overlaying a telling of The Iliad and / or The Odyssey. Unless I’m missing something, it wasn’t. When I saw the cover for the first time, it became clear that it would be a retelling of the ancient Turtle related Creation myths.
I am somewhat flummoxed by some reader reaction that I’ve seen in the blogosphere, to the effect that it ended abruptly. I don’t really see that. It ended the way it had to. It’s a more or less complete book which doesn’t trail off, unlike… say… The Education of Robert Nifkin. (I duck my head as someone hurls a book at me.)

Okay. Footnote this passage, toward the end, and I do so because I have an excuse as it is a mash of political references and this is a political – oriented blog.
Sholmos Bunyip, wearing a gold Roman breastplate and a gold helmet, was standing on the suggestum, chanting and mumbling. Most of what he was saying was gibberish and nonsense syllables, but now and then there was a phrase I could understand.

“Humma humma… goo goo… manifest destiny (1)… waka waka (2)… power to the proletariat (3)… ish Kabibble (4)… New World Order (5)… remember the Maine (6)… hoo hoo… thousand points of light (7)… we don’t want to fight, but by jingo (8)… oop shoop… guns or butter (9)… lebensraum (10)… no child left behind (11)… city on a hill (12)… I feel your pain (13)… walla walla bing bang (14)… day that will live in infamy (15)… who put the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder? (16)

He was clean out of his mind, glassy-eyed, and a little scarier than the thousands of prehistoric carnivores listening to his weird speech. I knew what he was doing. He was the warm up guy. He was getting the crowd ready for the appearance of Kkhkktonos.(17)

(1) Originally used by the Jackson Democrats desiring the territorial expansion from the Atlantic on the Pacific. We can thank James K Polk for “annexing” much of Mexico — annexing being an interesting term in this context, as is “liberate”.
(2) Fonzie the Bear. I suspect it has an earlier origin.

(3) Phrase that spurs on the Communist Revolution, I suppose. Leads to the Dictatorship of the Prolatariat, which doesn’t strike me as a terribly positive thing.

(5) Long been around, long been seized upon by conspiracy theorists and, I guess conspiracy analysts. Wikipedia tells me it started with Wilson, which makes sense in terms of the fear of the “One World Government”. HG Wells wrote a book in 1940 which posited the positive nature of such a thing — Overly idealistic, methinks, it sits on my bookshelf. It may have been re-triggered into popular conciousness when George H W Bush talked about it in his speeches to describe the new post-Cold War world political environment.

(6) … and thus a murky set of events hyped up by Hearst’s tabloid papers leads the US into the Spanish – American War.

(7) George H W Bush’s call for action for private charity organizations to fight poverty. Mocked by Neil Young in the lines “We’ve got a thousand points of light… for the homeless man”.

(8) Sounds a lot like Theodore Roosevelt, our burly and jingoistic president.
(9) Lyndon Johnson’s lament during the Vietnam War. Solved as “Guns AND Butter”. Didn’t seem to work.
(10) The Nazi’s version of “Manifest Destiny”.
(11) George W Bush’s educational initiative. Full of standardized tests. Disliked by every school teacher I know of, including my mother.

(12) John Winthrop used it in 1630. Ronald Reagan used it, as did John F Kennedy, for their political purposes.
(13) Bill Clinton in 1992 as a way of suggesting that he is in touch with the plight of the common people. Mocked in various ways, as political pandering, and easily ponderable of what else he feels.

(14) 1958 song “The Witch Doctor”.

(15) Remember Pearl Harbor.

(16) I admit to having to google this up. It seems the verb should be “threw” and not “put”. A Bing Crosby song.

(17) Ancient Norse God, Kronos, allowing the destruction / creation parable to be completed.