Catapult the propaganda!::::::::Another Presidential Poster (free to our customers!)

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Catapult The Propanganda!! Another letter to the President

July 30, 2006

Dear Mister President:

It's been fourteen months since you uttered those words about catapulting the propaganda. The problem may be that you were catapulting not "the truth," but a bushel-full of bulls**t, Bushisms, calumny, deceit, myths, misstatements, fibs, fish stories, whoppers, disinformation, distortion, evasion, hyperbole, terminological inexactitude, perjury, hype, shuck and jive. Yeah, with what you're peddling it's going to take a whole lot longer to sink in than the truth.

You said "You got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in," but how many times do you have to repeat it when you're peddling wholesale lies? It's been fourteen months since you said that and now you're facing even more quagmires. Baghdad is again enveloped in chaos; Lebanon is caught in the middle of another war; our partners in the coalition are slowly packing up and going home. You have Saddam Hussein on a feeding tube!

We blown $300 billion and 2600 soldiers' lives like drunken sailors on three day shore leave. We embarked on a half-baked war with virtually no planning. And we're no closer to our goals than we were sitting on our hands.

Now, we should be in Darfur, and in Israel, Lebanon, and the Gaza strip, we cannot afford to go. We are unable to act. The great giant is silenced. You, Mister President, asked the United Nations (and organization you abhor) to handle it. Just when the U.S. could do some good, our hands are tied behind our backs in Iraq. In other conflicts like this, the United States would charge in with diplomats, and with troops when necessary. The one thing the United States was sometimes good at is not available to us, because you have the money and troops attempting to hold Iraq together.

It's about time for you to dislodge you head from your sphincter and figure out how to disentangle ourselves from your Iraq adventure. We've got places to go and people to see. You have proven we are not miracle workers. It's time to get back to doing what we do right. We'd prefer not to wait for your retirement for that.

Your buddy, friend and pal,

Jack Brummet
Seattle, Wash.

Crosslink: George Bush's letter to All This Is That.
Crosslink: Catapult the propaganda poster
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All This Is That Poster: men in black

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One of four posters/handbills I am exchanging with a coalition of art and poetry bloggers
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Poster 2: repeal the 2nd amendment

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Keelin Curran With President Ronald Reagan

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The former President appears to be expressing disapproval in this photomontage from about 1981.

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Neil Young's lyrics to "After The Garden"

The lyrics to one of Neil Young' great new songs on the album Living With War, being performed across the U.S. right now with CSN & Y. If you want to hear the album, he has the entire thing streaming. But you should probably just buy it--it's that good. To listen go to Neil's always interesting web site click here. He also streams it from his myspace page




After The Garden

won't need no shadow man
runnin' the government
won't need no stinkin' war
won't need no haircut
won't need no shoe shine

after the garden is gone
after the garden is gone
after the garden is gone

what will people do?
after the garden is gone
what will people say?
after the garden

won't need no strong man
walkin' through the night
to live a weak man's day
won't need no sunshine
won't need no purple haze

after the garden is gone
after the garden is gone
after the garden is gone

where will people go?

after the garden is gone
what will people know?

after the garden

after the garden is gone
after the garden is gone

(we live in the garden of eden, yeah
don't know why we wanna tear the whole thing to the ground
we live in the garden of eden, yeah
don't know why we wanna tear the whole thing down

and we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden)
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Poster: repeal the 2nd amendment

Click image to enlarge.
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Holy Smokes! Mel Gibson Goes Apes**t in Malibu & The Cops Cover It Up

Mel Gibson went bananas when he was arrested Friday for drunk driving. And because they believed the arrest report was so inflammatory, detailing ethnic slurs, and religious epithets, they had the arresting officer create a new one. They kept the real one under wraps. TMZ leaked the original arrest report. You can read it in a PDF here.

On being arrested, Gibson began swearing uncontrollably, and said over and over

My life is f****d.

The deputy asked Gibson to get into the squad car. Gibson said

I'm not going to get in your car.

He then ran to his own car. The deputy subdued [1] Gibson, cuffed him and put him inside the patrol car. Once inside the car, a source directly connected with the case says, Gibson began banging himself against the seat. The report says Gibson told the deputy,

You mother f****r. I'm going to f*** you.

The report also says "Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he 'owns Malibu' and will spend all of his money to 'get even' with me."

Gibson launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements:

F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.

Are you a Jew?



Arriving at the police station, a sergeant started videotaping Gibson. When Mel saw the camera, he said

What the f*** do you think you're doing?

Gibson noticed a female sergeant and yelled,

What do you think you're looking at, sugar tits?

Gibson took two blood alcohol tests, which were videotaped, and continued saying how "f****d" he was and how he was going to "f***" the arresting officer, Deputy Mee.

Deputy Mee thought Gibson was going to take a leak on the floor of his cell and had someone take Gibson to a bathroom. After finishing up business, Gibson demanded to make a phone call. He was taken to a pay phone and, when he didn't get a dial tone, we're told Gibson threw the receiver against the phone. Deputy Mee warned Gibson that if he damaged the phone he could be charged with felony vandalism.

On Saturday, of course, Gibson was contrite [excerpts]:

...I drove a car when I should not have, and was stopped by the LA County Sheriffs. The arresting officer was just doing his job and I feel fortunate that I was apprehended before I caused injury to any other person....

...I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested, and said things that I do not believe to be true...

...I apologize for any behavior unbecoming of me in my inebriated state and have already taken necessary steps to ensure my return to health...


[1] A great police word that may mean anything from ordering the "suspect" to stop to truncheoning him senseless with your "baton," or billyclub.
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Crosby Stills Nash & Young at the White River Amphitheatre July 27th

It's been 37 years since Crosby Stills Nash & Young's first serious appearance--at Woodstock, on August 17, 1969-- and America is more lost than ever.

During Woodstock, we were in the middle of a massive escalation of the Vietnam War. Today, we're in the Middle-east and Afghanistan, waging a new war against some other people that don't really seem like our enemies ("don't feel like Satan/But I am to them"). We don't burn flags, we blog. It might have worked better when we burned flags, and protested, wore black armbands to Kent-Meridian high school, and burned down the ocassional draft board office.



Neil Young, earlier this year, was pissed off enough to create a new album, completely focused on The President and His War. So rather than sitting around waiting for someone else , he took matters into his own hands. The resulting album Living With War, is a searing indictment of our leaders, and of ourselves for following along. Neil talked his old confederates, Crosby, Stills, and Nash into taking the album on the road, as part of a CSNY tour. The show would give a nod to the oldies; the songs that everyone can sing along with. But it would focus on The War.

Opening with the song Flags of Freedom, the stage showed flags from all the countries of the "coalition." Our partners in crime.

Neil used his love of his adopted country like a bludgeon, lashing out at government, consumers and war. The set included a lot of chestnuts like Carry On, Wooden Ships, Long Time Gone, and some others, including my favorite Nash song, Military Madness. The highlight of course were the songs from Young's Living With War: Flags of Freedom, After The Garden, Living With War, Restless consumer, Shock and Awe.

The second set started with some moldy oldies, Helplessly hoping, Our House, Guinevere, and the like, and then went into the solo work. Stills had an interesting song, that he played with only Young--Treetop Flyer. It was also the only time he seemed to shake off the doldrums. Crosby too, often seemed a little bored; it has probably not been easy for him to take a back seat. Some of the best vocal work in the show was between the frequent collaborators, Crosby and Nash.

This second set included some more Living With War tunes, like Roger And Out, and the centerpiece of the set was the singalong Let's impeach the president, with excellent video and singlong lyrics on screen. The show ended with old political tunes, Ohio, Chicago, and Young's Rockin' in the Free World. Rockin' led to an extended cadenza of distortion and feedback with Young riding around the stage like a wild stallion. Because Neil was front and center for nearly the entire show, there was more feedback than at a Crazy Horse show, and by the end, the strings were all broken on his Les Paul. A mellow version of Woodstock was the only encore. And they were gone; ghosts gone modern in the twilight of their career. . . with Neil now in charge, and dragging his old friends back into relevance in a shining moment of music and protest.
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A compendium of strange, warped, sweet, and wonderful statuary and sculpture from around the world

Haha.nu has put together a collection of some of the world's most amusing sculptures and statues. Click here to see the photos.


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Alien Lore 83 - The Great Fireball Cover-up Conspiracy

The facts here come from several sources, all of somewhat, per usual, murky provenance. Are we reading these for the truth or the story? As Old Chief Broom says in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, "it's all true, whether it happened or not."

The news media are known for magnifying events out of proportion to their actual significance (Presidential oral sex, POTUS 41 hurling on the Japanese P.M., VP Cheney swearing, and the like). In this instance, however, it seems as though the media worked hard to downplay the story.

On August 10, 1972, what is known in astronomy as a "fireball" occurred in the afternoon over the Rocky Mountain states, witnessed by thousands of people under its path from Utah straight north all the way into The Great White North. Fireballs are actually large meteors; one bright enough to see in daylight is extremely rare.

This fireball left a trail across the sky that lasted for several minutes. Morning papers of August 11 from the area where the fireball was most visible, Utah and Idaho, had long stories, by local reporters filled with eyewitness accounts. The articles had an AP photograph of the object's trail. West Coast and Midwestern papers carried truncated versions of a wire dispatch. The East coast press didn't cover the story at all. Only one television network, NBC, mentioned the event, saying that an airliner pilot had seen a flaming object--possibly a meteor--pass under his plane.

The AP dispatch most papers carried had no dateline. A few of the wire stories had it datelined Denver. "One or more" objects had been sighted over a wide area of the Mountain states, the articles went. The articles contained contradictory reports of their direction of travel and altitude. An FAA official was quoted saying that an object was seen at 80,000 feet over Missoula. The article, however, also mentioned the item about the object passing under an airliner flying "in Utah." It quoted NORAD, which keeps track of all orbiting objects (including, as you may recall, Santa Claus), as quoted a second-hand report of an object over Boise going from west to east. Sidney Hacher, an astronomy professor at Washington State University in Pullman was quoted saying that whatever was seen was probably part of the annual Perseid meteor shower, due to reach its maximum in the next few days. And it quoted a Mrs. Thomas Williams of Mead, Washington as having seen an object "about four feet in diameter."

Newspapers from the area where the fireball was actually seen published coherent accounts. In particular, there was no doubt that there was only one object and that it was moving from south to north. Patty Minton of the Idaho Statesman of Boise said, "Most observers, laymen and experts, agreed that the object was traveling fast and at great height." These papers raised the question of whether the object might be manmade. The Deseret News of Salt Lake City cited a NORAD statement issued late in the day that "it is either a space vehicle re-entering the earth's atmosphere or a meteor." The scientist these papers quoted, Mark Littman of the planetarium in Salt Lake City, said that the object was probably not part of the Perseid shower, but rather from the asteroid belt. Patty Minton, in her Statesman article, noted that experts differed on the object's origin. She had obviously read the AP dispatch -- she handled the object-under-the-airliner report this way:

"Associated Press reports from Denver said a Frontier Airlines pilot allegedly saw it pass underneath his plane while it was in flight over Utah."

The confusing situation portrayed by the AP dispatch suggests that it was dashed off fast after the fireball. The AP story was never updated.

The Spokane Spokesman-Review, close to the periphery of the viewing area, had a mixture of wire service feeds and local reporting in its story. It quoted an unidentified spokesman for Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane. The spokesman said the object "was a manmade satellite that broke away from its orbit." The spokesman's statements seem full of mininformation: "A meteor would look like a rock and generally would not be flaming." He also said the object might have "rejoined its orbit," which may be a first--space junk or meteors turning around and leaving the atmosphere!

The San Francisco Chronicle tried to resolve the contradictions in the feeds and local articles by artfully coimbining them: "A fireball, possibly a deteriorating meteor, flashed across the Great Basin and Rocky Mountains yesterday afternoon, dipped beneath an airliner and vanished, observers said."

President Bush and the origins of the "you rock/devil horns" sign

For some reason, George Bush, his daughters, and wife often use the devil horns sign that I used to see only at rock shows. Fortunately, Ear Candy magazine did my work for me...they tracked down the genesis of the sign (but they did not explain how it came to be The President's sign too). Here is their article:

"Over the last few years there have been two artists that have claimed to have created the famous heavy metal "devil's horns" hand signal: Ronnie James Dio (BLACK SABBATH) and Gene Simmons (KISS).

"You know the "devil's horns" signal? It is the universal heavy metal sign for "you rock", usually used in unison with the music at heavy metal concerts. Not to get satanical or anything, but the sign is supposed to represent the sign of the beast, with horns represented by the index finger and pinkie raised. If you raise both hands with this sign, the band "really rocks!"

"There are two heavy metal rockers from the '70s both laying claim. Ronnie James Dio claimed to have created the gesture before joining BLACK SABBATH in 1978. Gene Simmons also claims credit, writing in his 2002 autobiography that it was the bass-playing demon of KISS that created the international heavy metal symbol. So there is no evidence that the symbol was created earlier than the '70s...or is there?!



"We have discovered irrefutable photographic evidence that is was none other than Beatle John Lennon that created the famous sign in 1967. Furthermore, it was even used in animation for the BEATLES "Yellow Submarine" (just check the original vinyl album cover). These are two photographic images that can be tied down to specific years PRIOR to the '70s.

"The photo of Lennon giving the sign appeared in one of the first BEATLES pictures in which the band promoted the upcoming "Yellow Submarine" animated movie. Since the BEATLES changed appearance often and were one of the most photographed icons of the '60s, it is possible to date the photo between June and October of '67. "Yellow Submarine" was being animated between '67 & '68, so the cartoon image of John flashing the heavy metal sign can also be verified date-wise. Although the film "Yellow Submarine" was released in 1968, the vinyl album (on which one can clearly see Lennon displaying the sign) was not released in the U.S. until 1969. But that is still years before Ronnie James Dio or Gene Simmons!



"What other ties does Lennon have to heavy metal? Well, he claimed that the BEATLES song, "Ticket To Ride" was "one of the earliest heavy metal records ever made". How fitting that it was Lennon who also created the best-known symbol of heavy metal! "
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