Thom Hartman opened his show with this topic this morning. That guy who set off the car bomb in Norway and then killed 68 children at a "labor party supper camp" was constantly referred to as a "terrorist" while they thought he was an Islamic working for Al Qaeda or whatever. But when it was found out he was just your garden variety right wing Born Again redneck, the word "Terrorist" was suddenly dropped from all news accounts. This shooter is pure evil. We know that. He was dressed as a police officer to gain admittence to the island. From then on it was like shooting fish in a barrel since nobody at the camp was armed. The furtelizer bomb had the same chemical compound as the bomb in the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy Mc Vey and Terry Nichols. He is of the identical political stripe. He wrote out a Ted Kazinsky style "Manifesto" which had some anti technology stuff in it but mostly he just raged against the immigration policy of his country and how they allowed Moslems there. Some of the right wing and not so right wing sources made pure jackasses of themselves in their editorials over the weekend. "The Wall Street Journal" was running stuff like "This only goes to show that President Obama is wrong in wanting to wind down the war in Afghanistan, and why we shouldn't cut our defense budget because we never know there the next attack from Al Qaeda is coming from". Others went so far however as to declare this "labor party summer camp" is a "Hitler youth" training facility by liberals. However if you actually check the FBI.gov web site and look at the statistics on terrorism you find that a full 42% of US terrorist attacks are Latino in origen, such as various Puerto Rican liberation fronts. There are a number of left leaning groups on the list. But there are only six percent of the attacks tracable to Islamic groups and they trail attacks by the Jewish Defense League at 7%. And yet we are told how much a threat "Islamo-fasciests" are. This term is an oxy-moronism, of course. People will say or write anything if they think it will sell newspapers, or raise them up a few notches in the polls. But years ago there was some major terrorism report done by the Bush administration that stressed that the political right of this country was a major threat as far as future terrorist attacks in this country are concerned.
Of course the beating of that Giants fan at Dodger Stadium after the game on opening night is in the news again. They had the wrong suspect for months. But now it's determined that though he was guilty of parole violations and other offences, he was shacking up in a motel room with his girlfriend and wasn't at Dodger Stadium that night. The two new suspects they do have now, and a third girlfriend of one of them, are bad dudes. Apparently they cut out the guy's tongue and gauged out one of his eyes in one of the attacks. The police had never released that information before and it sheds rather a new light on the thing- - as being something of a whole different order than your garden variety beating. They do have things called "enhanced" charges - - such mayhem- - which I imagine could get the suspects 25 years to life.
This is a period of firsts and last. Yesterday the Tour De France came to a conclusion with a winner. Last Friday they officially did away with "Don't Ask; Don't Tell" but the edict does not go into effect for another sixty days, or till about the first day of autumn. So I guess you could still get kicked out during this period. Of course over the weekend they had their first gay weddings in New York. So what is the in thing now- - - a gay ceremony at the foot of the Status of Liberty with doves and flowers and everything. So I guess it's all "Best Men" and so it's a whole line of men up front, like a glee club, probably dressed in white tuxes to symbolize purity or something, and no bride's maids. The whole thing is a little much for me. I see little difference in this than a ceremony where a man marries his car. I don't see a good future for the institution of marriage. And on Friday the last space shuttle craft landed in pre dawn darkness officially ending the thirty year long space shuttle program. Now we'll only have private groups in space funded by corporations. And of course Amy Weinhaus' carrier came to an end on Saturday when the British singer showed up dead of a drug overdose. It is one of those cases where a lot of people saw it coming. She now joins the "27 Club" along with Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Kurt Cobain. Brian Jones only made it to 26 before he died, as you know from the poem on "Through the Past Darkly", a vague Corinthians allusion.
I'm trying to read my notes "Buddy Ruemey" (?) anyhow there is another Republican running for President who is probably "too old" or at least that's how they'll attack him. He wants to restore the economic terriff policy we had in this country from Alexander Hamilton through to Jimmy Carter where the average terriff on foreign goods was 22% (or was it higher?) At any rate it was a primary means of raising taxes for a big part of this country's history. And I thought we were looking for new revenues, but apparently not, because nobody is upset about the August 2nd deadline any more. Anyhow our policy now is the subsedize the transfer of a corporation's factory and headquarters to another country. Moving is expensive, you know. People like Judy and Dr. Levy act like it's as simple as pie and anybody would do it. No, our governments HELPS them move by allowing them gigantic tax write-offs. Apparently the House passed a bill to get rid of this anti job provision of the law when the House was ruled by Democrats, but a minority of Senate republicans killed it. Keep in mind the forty percent of republicans in that body at the time probably represented only ten or twelve percent of the entire US population. Otherwise the President would have signed the bill into law.
I have had various Deja Vu experiances involving the Beatles at the BBC. For one thing the song "Young Blood" when I first heard it by the Coasters, probably in the LATE sixties- - seemed to me to be way too slow and just "wrong". It turns out I was right. The Beatles did it completely differently. I experianced Deja Vu listening to the BBC tape with "I Forgot to Remember to Forget" on it, because before that song even came up I KNEW it was coming, even though I had never heard this tape before. I also had never heard the Brian Matthews introduction to this song, which, knowing his kind of humor, was predictable. Of course the chronology is a little different from the CD package because one of the early sessions had "I'm Gona Find My Baby", "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues" and "Young Blood" all recorded for the same program. Brian Matthews introduced the middle song - by Arthur Alexander by saying "Wel'll feel better or we will, after a shot of rhythm and blues". The segment opens with a rather contentious John Lennon. Of course "Lonesome Tears in my Heart" spawned Deja Vu thoughts, partially because I think maybe I heard the song before but more because the guitar riff sounds like the guitar riff in "The Balad of John and Yoco". As to the song "I Just Don't Understand" I sure thought April Stevens and Nino Temple did this song, but nobody else remembers that. You know, I was going to make this a whole lot longer paragraph but we'll save it for later.
This is Monday July 25, 2011 and Augustine was just in to check for toilet paper. Nora was in here and unhappy about my moving the chair out of place and having the spread on the floor and the bed unmade. I just called Mom at three using the number of the new card, which I had to fish for because it’s been some weeks since I even got that one. The problem has been too few calls and too long a period of clasped time. Judge Pirro is on right now. The floor buffer still smells of mildew. There seems to have been other commotion in the hall but so far I have not seen the green cart. Me and Mom had a nice conversation. Her weight is holding steady, but not going down. She lost the ‘House and Garden” station on her cable, and perhaps others. I confirmed that her cable still isn’t HD. She still gets visits from [name deleted] who checks out her computer. They exchange magazines. [name deleted] recommended the grape juice. I told Mom that they have stopped serving milk around here for lunch. The weather isn’t as hot today.
Last night it was ABC network news and at twelve after six I went down to the living room despite my generally feeling a little sick and definitely tired and not operating on all eight cylinders. I sat on the couch and waited there 25 minutes for Seid and Nicky to arrive, and listened to Wally talk about his experiences as a fork lift operator. Finally I left and had a smoke. Then I went back down at ten to seven and now the size of the crowd seemed to have more than doubled. Seid a Nicky are nothing is not erratic. They brought vanilla ice cream with them and I had one standard “large” serving and a second small serving. We were also served a Russian “hot dog” that Seid says is made out of lamb. I don’t know – but whatever it was it was going bad. We talked about the Temple ceremony yesterday for four people here that were officially confirmed into the church, Manfred, Wally, Elizabeth, and Marcia. Lorrie had told me that Marcia felt she was being socially shunned, and puzzled I asked why, and she said “Because she is Black”. This is the God’s truth but her race didn’t even register to me - - I never thought about it – till that very moment. It’s kind of a sober eye opener. When I arrived Seid greeted me and shook my hand. I was looking for a chair and brought one over and set it down and this guy in a wheel chair ordered me to “move it” because I was blocking his view. The room had so many walkers and things scattered about and I said “Where shall I put it?” and he said “Take it out to the street for all I care”. He later gave another late arrival a hard time and Laurie told him to “Knock it off”. Good for her. I didn’t stay but about twenty or twenty-five minutes. Then I went out for a cigarette.
Sixty Minutes had this thing on the corruption of cops in New Orleans I had never seen before. They said the murder rate in “The Big Easy” is now the highest in the nation and rattled off troubling statistics. One person said “A lot of cities have temporary spikes in their murder rate. We just seem to have more of them than most. In that class poem there was a line about “If you go to New Orleans you’ll find that the food is greasy”. Dr. Levy set the bar real low on this poem. How about “If you go to New Orleans you’ll find that getting away with murder is easy”. Or if you want to be not so nice you could say “If you go to New Orleans you’ll find that the Niggers are greasy”. At any rate I wasn’t real sure what sort of “corruption” the P D was experiencing. Then they had that thing on sharks and how “sharks are people too”. The thing is to find a shark who is “a player” and one you think you can swim with. Kind of like Nicole picking out her next husband, hoping she doesn’t get devoured. You want a shark who is curious about man, but not angry or aggressive. He went on to say that the death statistics on sharks is really low and how “in fact many people at the beach have actually had positive encounters with sharks and didn’t know it”. Kinda like space aliens, huh? The trick of course is to never show fear and of course, don’t splash or do anything else to make them think you’re a seal, because they love seal blubber for its high fat content. And sharks don’t like contact with metal so the camera is kind of your protect device that says “Don’t come close”.
After this it was a strange Simpson’s episode. (They’re ALL pretty strange, these days) Last week’s Cleveland Show was so awful I’m never watching it again, so switched to some unknown show on KCOP. I went to bed at nine, and managed to sleep well. But I wasn’t 100% in the morning and had diaria. My innards have some sort of bug. We are on page seven. I brewed coffee. We had corn flakes for breakfast and then scrambled eggs and butter and jelly. Andrew gave me his orange juice. The rest of the morning was pretty non eventful. I had Stephanie Miller on before and after breakfast and had Thom Hartman on. I did make a lot of notes I intend to use but not here. We had ham sandwiches for lunch and red tomatoish soup. Laurie gave me another half sandwich and also her Fritos. We had bananas for desert. Coffee is a less important factor now that I have my own coffee maker and can have it any time I want.
This is after dinner. We had pepper steak with unflavored white rice. We don’t seem to get the good stuff any more, and also coloflour and broccoli. We had peaches in lemon pudding for desert, which was different. Eye Witness news is on now. Janet wants her coffee. Joe wants his coffee. Everybody is eager today. Well, coffee is not cheap. It gets used up, too. It doesn't last forever. Dr. Levy said maybe I should take donations when I buy the coffee - - along the same vein is chipping in to buy a pizza.
Today the NFL announced that the players voted and ratified a ten year NFL contract so we are all set for football in the fall. “Captain America” actually beat out “Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows Part II” in the box office, which slipped to number two. The smurfs are starring in their first 3 D adventure. I saw a preview of that movie yesterday and the idea of using that cartoon series for a movie is idiotic. Jerry Brown wants to give illegal aliens student financial aid while putting the screws to the rest of us.
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