EDITORIAL PAGE
Coming soon: the Bullshit Page
Coming soon: the Bullshit Page
Only two years after losing the presidency to a man who openly admits he doesn't like to read, finally Al Gore is feigning interest in politics again. He managed to put the bong down long enough to make a few phone calls and get his name printed on the Internet again with a picture of him shaking somebody's hand. There we go, that looks like a presidential contender to the Monday-Night-Football crowd. Pair it up with a sudden interest in conflicting ideas with President Robot, and we've got public interest again.
According to a recent article on www.msn.com, some of the people, such as union leaders, who put large amounts of public support behind Gore in the 2000 vote (it wasn't exactly an election) haven't seen or heard from the guy in about a year. Big Al has been working on a book with his wife Tipper, whose morality issues have bilged the public trough often enough to choke the recording industry, and he has tried to keep out of the public eye because "they can't miss you if you never go away", though it's doubtful that anyone's missing the man who was so anxious to let us know he's just a Republican with no balls. The Democrats are missing a leader, whether Gore's in front of them or not.
If you want a leader who spends his time licking his wounds and practicing his Mister Rogers act (speak slower! no big words!), vote Gore. If your idea of a solid president is one who vacations for two years because he lost the election due to corruption, Gore's your man. If you believe public servants should be hired based on their sheer mediocrity and truthlessness, let's give it up for the Amazing Mr. Indecisive, Albert Gore.
Here's a good joke for you: Joseph Lieberman, Vice-President. HAHAHAHA! That idea itself is proof enough that we might actually be better off with Bush. At least with Bush, we know he's strictly working for the oil industry, and he's left a trail of greasy fingerprints everywhere he's ever passed paper. With Lieberman, you have no idea what master he's serving, other than Israel. It's hard to say which allegiance is more psychotic, oil or religious terrorism. Ill Logic supports spirituality, and it's hard to see spirituality through the veil of a politico-religious machine which shoots rockets into ambulances and bombs overcrowded ghettos. Not to say Palestine is any better, given their citizens' occasional penchant, government-supported or not, for using cease-fire times as the opportunity to blow things up in Israel, sometimes sacrificing themselves in the process.
Let's see, what's Ralph Nader been doing in the last two years..... still touring, still keeping his eyes out for working peoples' rights, still maintaining the same platform as his bid for president, same platform he's had his whole life actually, still poking sticks in the eyes of gutless, soulless, thoughtless, do-nothing career politicians and their corporate sponsors. Gee, good thing HE didn't get elected. God knows we couldn't have a leader who says what he means, does things for the good of the actual majority of citizens and keeps doing it despite losing an election and having millions of people pissed at him (thousands of whom had their lives personally saved by him, due to his commitment to making careless businesses accountable for their faulty products), as though it's his fault the Bush family is rich and corrupt.
Sept. 9, 2002
"I've become so disgusted by how far to the right this country has gone that I wanted to make a statement about it. I felt that THEY LIVE could be an INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS for today; rather than Communists-under-the-beds, the monsters would be unrestrained capitalists. The Other, meaning the creatures, are yuppies, and I don't think they've been portrayed that way before; they've been shown [in films like AFTER HOURS or SOMETHING WILD] as a kind of goofball part of us, but never as inhuman.
"In the US, the middle class is slowly disappearing: there are more poor people and more rich. I think THEY LIVE will be looked back on as one of the few voices of outrage at a time when everyone wanted two things: to win, and to make money; all other considerations were secondary. If you had a pair of those sun-glasses [to see who's human], you might want to watch out for your Prime Minister." ---- film director John Carpenter in London Times, 1989
Well folks, it finally happened, just as the far-right planned it--- they kept us distracted long enough to take a shitload of money. The richest people in the world made themselves many times wealthier by smiling for the camera, saying "We're going to help everybody by giving corporations whatever they want," and keeping folks more interested in the Super Bowl than in making intelligent voting decisions.
Supposedly there's a baseball strike right now.... are we supposed to have sympathy for those guys? Sports industries are like the rancid icing on the rotten cake of this country's addiction to money--- seems odd that most folks who are really into sports can't seem to have a decent talk about politics without freaking out due to lack of bibliography. Personally, I'm a little more interested in keeping track of senators' voting records than finding out who wins 'Survivor'.
Finally the statistics on the recent corporate thefts are coming out. This one by Derrick Jackson caught my eye. Remember, the Savings and Loan thefts of the mid-'80s amounted to (as I recall) about $3 trillion, and that was the biggest theft in the history of the world until now.
"This summer, $5 trillion of paper wealth is missing in the dot-com crashes and book-cooking scandals highlighted by the collapses of Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, and Arthur Andersen. It remains to be seen whether this historic theft of American labor is enough to inspire a revolutionary yell against renegade capitalism. In 1982, the average CEO made 42 times more money than an average production worker. Today, CEOs make 411 times more.
"If production workers had received the same rate of pay increases that CEOs received from 1990 to 2001, production workers, according to the two think tanks, would be making an average of $101,156 a year instead of $25,467. The minimum wage, if it had grown at the same rate as CEO pay, would now be $21.41 an hour instead of $5.15." -------- Derrick Jackson, Boston Globe, August 28 2002
May 25, 2002
Hi there, everybody. Did you get a good look at the notes in the crawler down south-screen in your browser? In just a second it should be getting around again to the most important message of the day: make sure you kill John Malkovich before he kills Robert Fisk, correspondent for the Independent News service in London. Malkovich is succumbing to his own vanity AS USUAL and joining hands with other 'burn-the-books' type folks, who have, since about September (for SOME peculiar reason), been rather nasty toward journalists who don't pick sides when it comes to terrorism.
Malkovich recently informed the Cambridge Union, for reasons apparently withheld, that he wants to kill Mr. Fisk, who has been one of few voices of undamaged logic during this bizarre ordeal with Afghanistan. He conducted an interview with Osama Bin Laden in 1996, which was reprinted recently, and while reading it I realized that it was the ONLY article I'd ever seen which lent its depiction of Mr. bin Laden any sense of humanity. Fisk did not disguise Laden's contempt for the US or gloss over the frightening aspects of his personality, but it depicted him as a human being and not simply 'evil'.
Unfortunately, simple minds break easily, and loudly, so many journalists like Fisk and fellow Independent writer Phil Reeves have been catching more than an earful since 'terrorism' became a household word again. Fisk was severely beaten in December by a crowd of Afghan refugees who had just seen their relatives killed by American bombs. Before the day was out, many callous, thoughtless people were cooling their heels on Fisk's kicked ass, voicing their appreciation for his attackers in such toss-rags as the Wall Street Journal.
The new preference is becoming loud and clear for people whose minds and hearts are truly imbalanced: fuck reality, we want to get rid of the Other People. Intolerance is becoming accepted, as long as you're intolerant toward Muslims and anyone who attempts to UNDERSTAND the current political climates through reasoning and examining the details without prejudice. Apparently this means PREJUDICE IS BECOMING OK.
Is that going to be OK with YOU?
Love, Al I. Logic
Nov. 5, 2001----
Taliban plans alligator attacks
[found at www.snopes2.com]
Don't go to the bathroom on November 28th. CIA intelligence reports that a major plot is planned for that day. Anyone who takes a poop on the 28th will be bitten on the ass by an alligator. Reports indicate that organized groups of alligators are planning to rise up into unsuspecting American's toilet bowls and bite them when they are doing their dirty business.
I usually don't send emails like this, but I got this information from a reliable source. It came from a friend of a friend whose cousin is dating this girl whose brother knows this guy whose wife knows this lady whose husband buys hotdogs from this guy who knows a shoeshine guy who shines the shoes of a mailroom worker who has a friend who's drug dealer sells drugs to another mailroom worker who works in the CIA building. He apparently overheard two guys talking in the bathroom about alligators and came to the conclusion that we are going to be attacked. So it must be true.
10/28/01 ---More of the same old battle
Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx): And now, members of the cabinet, we'll take up old business.
Senator: I wish to discuss the tariff.
Firefly: Sit down, that's new business. No old business? Okay, [hits table with gavel], we're gonna take up new business.
Senator: Now about that tariff....
Firefly: Too late, that's old business already.
Senator: I give all my time and energy to my duties, and what do I get?
Firefly: You get awfully tiresome after a while.
Senator: Sir, you try my patience!
Firefly: Don't mind if I do; you must try mine sometime.
From 'Duck Soup', 1933
10/6/01
[I tried putting this first article on the Front Porch (main page), but I could feel the eyes of the neighbourhood on me before I even had opened the door with the hideous thing in my hands. Perhaps some bastardized version of this will become a Poll at the bottom of the Front Porch.]
What's the scariest magazine cover of the year? My vote goes to the issue of 'People' which had the smoky, hazy silhouette of plane #2, 1/2 second before impact. It was even scarier than Time's cover of OJ Simpson's mugshot. Best Coverage of Major-League Terrorism award goes to: ABC, which had some amazing shots of the two smouldering towers, so perfect that I nearly wanted to print t-shirts of it, but was warned that the shirts would also need an insurance policy and a waiver to keep me from being sued by the first person who gets their ass kicked for wearing one of the shirts. So I'll wait another few months, and see if anybody would even recognize the image once it's been effect-drenched and chopped up in Photoshop. And if you didn't already know we had one, READ THE DISCLAIMER because it legally vindicates us from anyone else's madness, subjective abuse or supernatural disturbances, including but not limited to the HAARP Project (a U.S. science project) and the Think-Happener (an Ill Logic Laboratories project).
9/16/01
"Congressmen and Senators spent the day calling for more money for the military; one Senator on CNN even said he didn’t want to hear any more talk about more money for education or health care - we should have only one priority: our self-defense. In just 8 months, Bush gets the whole world back to hating us again. He withdraws from the Kyoto agreement, walks us out of the Durban conference on racism, insists on restarting the arms race - you name it, and Baby Bush has blown it all." [Michael Moore]
9/20/01
The last week has been one of the most bizarre and intense times I have seen in my mere quarter-century on the planet's face. Two giant goddamn buildings went down in NYC--- two buildings which to some stand as symbols of the World Trade Organization, which has come under serious scrutiny by social activists recently--- and it is tripping everybody out. People in general are more contentious than anytime I've ever seen... and even worse, it's near the end of summer, folks are coming back from their vacations (and many are forced to extend their vacations because they can't get home, since airlines are operating on a very meager schedule... such as a guy I know who's trapped in Phoenix right now), and it seems like most people have already blown their illfully-issued tax rebates and are feeling more broke than ever, since we now know that the federal budget surplus is not nearly the gutbucket we were hoping for. And now that WAR is in the air, military-hack senators are rushing to cut the school lunch program again to build a few extra land mines... even though if anybody needs land mines, Afghanistan is full of them... which is one reason a ground war there is an extremely dangerous prospect, as detailed by Robert Fisk in a recent article, which you can find through Jay's Leftist News Links, a rather comprehensive site which has given me peace of mind when thinking I might be a little too hard on the U.S. government.
Though I have endless sympathy for innocent victims of any major disaster, I've definitely rubbed a few noses the wrong way this week by shamelessly mentioning that the U.S. is not one to be pointing fingers when it comes to terrorism, since the CIA has taught many of the world's best terrorists how to ply their trade, and the tale of Osama bin Laden is another story of what Malcolm X called "the chickens coming home to roost" (which right now seems more pertinent than ever, even more so than when he originally used the expression). I got thrown off a chatroom on the 'Ween' rock group's website, when somebody was mentioning that he couldn't stop watching the news, and I said, "Maybe I can figure out a way to make some money off this too." My point was that the media mill is never sad to be in full swing, no matter how fucked up the situation is. But the guy picked out my IP address and kicked me to the curb. I felt bad for an hour or so but eventually figured out that the Ween chatroom isn't exactly the place to go for intelligent political discourse. My frequent stops at the P-Funk 'One Nation' Boardroom became increasingly frictive after a while also, coming to the point with some folks that if we'd been in a bar, tables would probably have been thrown. Even so, for now I'm trying to chill out a little and keep seeking the full story, since the 'face' of the story is keeping some of my friends from sleeping well. In times like this, the unexpected is to be expected the most. Demagogues become coherent, and those who ignore politics become theorists... or flag-wavers. Anyway... I just hope this situation will be limited in the 'war' aspect, and maybe nobody will have time to really capitalize on it or lose civil liberties (or friends) over it. J. José Carter
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