Comments Upgrade

I've just imported a more user-friendly comments interface. You don't have to register with Blogger before leaving comments anymore. Hopefully I've ironed out any technical glitches. So, feel free to be as profane as you want to be.

Senate Bill: 0069 - The Privatization of My Cock

There's a lot of privatization talk going around lately, what with George W. Bush's landslide pummeling of John Kerry in the polls and the mandate that goes along with a .001% margin of victory. The president, at his first press conference after winning the election, talked of the "political capital" that he was now free to spend.

First on the agenda seems to be his stated desire to privatize social security. I'm all for it. If you're a shitty investor, you don't deserve to be taken care of by the state-- your infirmities and/or your old age be damned. Then there's Bush's "No Child Left Behind" education privatizing scheme. If you go to a shitty school, well, then fuck you. You're shit out of luck, sucker. Your district wouldn't know how to spend the federal funds it received if it got them. And let's not forget the Bush/Cheney accomplishment of further privatizing the military. Hopefully, we will soon have an all-mercenary armed forces. And Gary Jackson, the president of Blackwater USA, one of the top private military firms in the country, is wholly on board. As he put it, "I would like to have the largest, most professional private army in the world." I say, fuck yeah, my brother! If I was rich, I might hire Blackwater myself-- I'm sick of all the graffiti in my neighborhood (I guess there's always the Guardian Angels).

Then there's this from today's Washington Post, which I received via Trapper John at Daily Kos. And this really, really makes me motherfucking happy!

"Officials at Dulles International and Baltimore-Washington International airports said they are considering the replacement of federal airport screeners at security checkpoints with workers employed by private contractors.

The Transportation Security Administration this week invited airports to apply to leave the federal security screener system and return to private screeners. The government took over airport screening after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and is planning a transition for approved airports by spring or summer 2005.

"The issue of the long lines -- that's probably where we're most concerned about customer service issues," said Tara Hamilton, spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority."

Yes! Hell, fucking yes! As long as I don't have to wait in long lines at the airport, I don't care if they let the Iron Shiek, Kamala the Ugandan Giant, and Nicholai Volkhoff on the plane. Just get me to the church on time!

And speaking of getting to the church, I've been so inspired by the recent spike in privatization going on in our country that I've decided to step into the arena myself. That's right, I have decided to privatize my cock. Sorry, bitches, no more BJ's on the subway for the Caption Jockey. No more jerk jobs in the confession booth. No more tea bagging at the opera. No more joint sniffing in the locker room. No more salad tossing at Arby's. No more dick licking in the elevator. No more knob knocking in the alleyway. No more pacifiers for the toothless. No more Indian burns on the member. No more jabbing away in the library. No more. No more. No more.

It's now the private property of the D-ster. And neither of us could be more happy.

Holy Hominid, Batman!

There have been several articles on subjects anthropological that have penetrated the mainstream press of late. Just a few weeks ago, it was announced that Australian anthropologists had discovered "...a new species of hobbit-sized humans who lived about 13,000 years ago on an Indonesian island." There've also been several items on the ongoing matter concerning the first human occupants of the Americas.

And then in today's LA Times, I see that researchers at Harvard and the University of Utah are theorizing that it is our species' ability to run long distances that set us apart from the other great apes of Africa and led us to developing our modern anatomies. This notion smacks up against the largely discredited aquatic ape theory, first espoused by Alistair Hardy, and then teased out in a series of books by anthropological laywoman and writer Elaine Morgan. I like the aquatic ape theory. It's sexy. It makes for good television on the Discovery Channel. I also like the way it makes "serious" anthropologists whirl around in a dervish-like frenzy of superiority and condescension.

I haven't been keeping up very well with the big anthropological controversy in the last few years, though it appears to me, through various anecdotal sound bites, that biogeneticists and the large majority of anthropologists have further buttressed their "Out of Africa" theory with yet more mitochondrial, DNA, and fossil evidence. Maybe Milford Wolpoff is still holding strong to his multiregional hypothesis, but I wouldn't know. The idea, though, that seems to have all the traction these days is one that I will dub the "Immaculate Cerebrum Flogging" theory. The proponents of this set of ideas, while controversial to a large segment of the scientific community, have succeeded in convincing a great many laypeople that the real story of human origins is quite a bit different than the narrative delivered by the academics. They say that all evidence points to there being an original guy who, with the kindly help of his homely girlfriend--she, by the way, was created out of his extracted rib-- propagated the species in rabbit-like fashion, despite O.G. girl's bearing only two male children, at a far more recent time than the anthropologists would generally put it. It's a truly revolutionary theory, and only time will tell if it will be accepted, grudgingly, by the scientific community at large.

For my part, I've been working on a pet theory of my own that posits that all organic life started out as spores that were germinating in the folds of fat in Frank Black's skin and spontaneously ejaculated into mastigophora, labyrinthomorpha, Ascetospora, and all other types of protozoan life, culminating finally, after a long lunch or two, in the highly evolved hominids that we are today.

Paranoia Strikes Deep

Here's a delightful piece about the state of our Bill of Rights in our tortured democracy. Via Kevin Drum I see that in Boulder, Colorado a high school band has been paid a visit by the Secret Service for planning to perform Dylan's antiwar polemic "Masters of War" in a school talent show after "some students and adults who heard the band rehearse called a radio talk show Thursday morning, saying the song the band sang ended with a call for President Bush to die."

"Masters of War" is of course from Dylan's seminal second album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, an album fully awash in the current events of its times, and specifically the Cuban missile crisis. On the liner notes to the LP the young Dylan wrote that "A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall" was his reaction to the crisis and that each line was the title of a song that he would not get the chance to write. The song that got the students in trouble is Dylan's acerbic take on what Eisenhower, in his farewell address to the nation in 1961, dubbed "The military-industrial complex." Eisenhower warned:

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. "

Dylan was as caustic as he's ever been, singing directly to the puppeteers, "And I hope that you die/ And your death'll come soon/ I will follow your casket/ In the pale afternoon/ And I'll watch while you're lowered/ Down to your deathbed/ And I'll stand o'er your grave/ 'Til I'm sure that you're dead."

Never mind the fact that this song was written no later than 1963 (the year the album came out). Never mind the fact that the writer of the song has been nominated for a Nobel prize for literature every year since 1997. Never mind the fact that the song is addressed to anonymous illuminati types. Never mind the fact that this is one of the most famous protest songs of the of the 20th century. Never mind the fact that George W. Bush was but a teenager at the time the song was written. Never mind the fact that W.'s father hadn't yet run for public office at the time the song was written. Never mind the song's continued relevance today as our country is engaged in endless imperial wars. Never mind the song's continued relevance today vis a vis Sidemouth's friends at Halliburton. Never mind the the historical artistic trajectory, from de Sade to the 2 Live Crew, of artists coming up against the power of the state. Never mind the first amendment. Never mind it all.

Despite this all, some lunatic students and parents took the last verse of the song to be a direct threat against the president of the United States. But what's even more disturbing is the Secret Service of the United States thought this was something that needed to be investigated. Personally, I don't think that there should be a law against threatening the president's life. (In fact, I'm gonna do it now-- I'm gonna kill me the motherfucking president!) But even so, even if the song's lyrics were explicitly "I'm gonna kill George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States, this Saturday at 2:00 p.m. EST," this still falls under an increasingly threatened pillar of "free" society, namely artistic expression. It's a slippery slope from here to the gulags, I'm afraid, but maybe I'm just paranoid.

The band's name is Coalition of the Willing, and I wish them luck.

Blog On!!

After spending a good portion of the day trying to get this blog working, I realize I know next to shit about code, templates, and all of the other sundry computer D&D speak that's out there. I have no idea how to link to an Internet item that may or may not be pertinent to any of my current or future musings. I don't know how to customize this blog to whatever specs I want to give it-- I chose the current "Simple 2" design template because it was just that, simple. And it appeared to be a relatively legible format.

It's getting to the point these days where every monkey and his prehensile tail has his own blog (let's see if that experiment in linkage will bear any fruit), but I've decided to throw my hat in the ring in typically tardy fashion and start one of my own. I expect to use this space to meditate on the funk and fire of American life; to riff on the creeping fascism that's threatening our already dead culture; to scream out with delight and rapture, trumpeting the great American rock and roll resurgence of which we're in the midst; to explore the sensuous and the profane, the artful and the inane, the able and the insane; to ridicule the ruling class and their proxies in the public life and in the blogosphere-- in short to write whatever the hell I want, Michael Powell be damned! Michael Powell be double damned with his ass sniffing father! Fuck 'em! Fuck 'em all! Here's to future days...