cheese it, the cops!

The River and the Thread

Rosanne Cash's newest release, The River and the Thread approaches masterpiece status. I know I included it on my latest list of albums I'd like to take to the other side...one of the troubling things for a lot of us is that we realize the South in a lot of ways represents the American Id and as such is part of all of us. We have to find out how to deal with it before the Id slaughters us all -- is it the food, water, reliance on religion, in-breeding or what the hell is going on there? Who wants iced tea so sweet and treacly it rots your teeth as you chew it? Who has NASCAR drivers tatooed on their private parts? Who would elect Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell and the newest dingbat who things homosexuals should be purged from the Republican party? 

 

Well Rosanne doesn't really try to answer those questions, but she might have some insights. 

45 years later, I see that this matches the brilliance of "Ode to Billy Joe..." The album cover was a picture taken by Rosanne's husband and music director John Leventhal standing behind her looking down at the Tallahatchee River from the Tallahatchee bridge. 

 

 

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Stupid people place equal importance on all things...

Bit of military nostalgia and wisdom this evening...just because entropy increases doesn't mean we have to like it or even give in gracefully... Oh, the gray is links the green is music.... 

it lives: a very brief counterfactual history

i don't blame john kennedy for being a pretty party boy whose biggest legislative priorities were pills and poontang. no one's really in control of stuff like that about themselves, and he did what the best and brightest do do in such a situation: he hired good writers and delivered their woolly hooha with remarkable pseudo-sincerity. no, i blame us, the idiots, for following someone like that around drooling and throwing money. basically, all anyone wants is to find a model and do what he says. there's a thin line between politica and erotica. 

what would kennedy have done if he had lived? how would history have been so very different? as it turns out, he made sgt. pepper two years before the beatles and revolutionized world pop. then he nuked hanoi. then he gave everyone everything on their christmas list. finally he died in a freak chimpanzee attack. the chimp's digestive tract was the only remaining source of dna, so when we cloned kennedy to be our pres again, we had to clone him from chimp shit. chimpshit kennedy exuded so much charisma you could smell him in central asia from the white house. then, in an unholy conspiracy of edward snowden, pope francis, and oliver stone, he was gunned down in the streets of his beloved hohokus. when chimpshit jfk bit it, a nation lost its innocence.

but what if chimpshit kennedy had lived?

Clarity, madness, venality and heroism...

In which Crusader AXE uses a picture of Gina the PTSD suffering IED dog to illustrate how sadness in the face of pain and madness infects us all, confusing the better natures and sparking occasional moments of communication outside the noise media...and then fades away .

Tell me, Crispy, of what philosophical school is Krampus an alumni?

In which Crusader AXE explores Musicology, Existentialism, Mysticism, and several beautiful girls with marvelous voices, a couple of Texans, a Geezer or two and recommends some Bing Crosby as angst producing and reflective poetry. 

That which really matters...not a lot

 

In which Crusader AXE reflects on work, fast cars, Kierkegaard, cats and the meaning of life...and invites Crispy to hang out the cafe with him and his friends Soren, Socky, Rhett and Waylon...

Two of Crispin's favorite Renaissance thinkers collide...kinda, sorta, maybe

Highjacking Crispin's site again with JJ Cale and Chuck Prophet, Thomas More and Thomas Hobbes, the Navajo, the Army, Paul Ryan and Tora Bora...it just doesn't get better than this. I think at times there's a better class of reader here than at the other places I babble...certainly the comments I get over at Veteran's Today give me a lot of pause. Anyway, this has been a complex piece to get my teeth into...for a variety of reasons. So, here we go...

Civilized costs more than hard, brutish and short...

The number of broken promises and bad judgments made over the last 30 years is incredible. Each bad judgment ends up causing more broken promises. However, the majority of the problems I see – crumbling infrastructure, lousy schools, increased long-term unemployment, mounting debt, lagging modernization, lack of a coherent energy plan and so on and on and on  as well as what has happened to Native Americans, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsman, Civil Servants, Labor Unions, and on and on comes from the idea that we don’t have the wherewithal to pay for what we need to do. That is bullshit. 

To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life.
Thomas More

 

 

Can you say AN/PDR-27R?  ALPHA-NOVEMBER-PAPA-DELTA-ROMEO-TWO-SEVEN-ROMEO?

Love is a bar band in Boston or Austin

Ok. Crusader AXE here. I guess the incredible, inscrutable, incomparable one either wanted me to occasionally put something here for the erudite masses, or he just forgot he gave me permission many years ago. Regardless, I'm glad he did. He gets a better class of reader here than we do at the Defeatists, most of whom appear to be robots. 

 

Today's topic is love and Valentine's Day. I speak as a bloodied veteran here on several fronts.

So, in the proper spirit of the thing.  Ok. Yesterday was our 36th anniversary. We are very fond of each other and have a reasonably complex financial life that would make disengaging difficult. We don't want to cause the other pain or even inconvenience. I rate this as a successful marriage. We don't hate each other, wish the other grevious harm, and try not to act contrary to our mutual best interests. 

That said, we got married on Friday the 13th. My thought, being a strategic thinker, was that this way I would not forget both Valentine's day or the Anniversary and hopefully, one would key my brain as to the other. Generally has worked...I see the Valentine's bullshit in the stores, and it triggers the response that I need to do something to commemorate the day so as not to violate the "first, do no harm or cause unnecessary pain" part of my ethic. It does not make me happy. This makes me happy... 

I hate Valentine's Day. It is part of the conspiracy of the consumer society that begins in pre-school to make us all ready for a life of disappointment and conspicuous consumption. 

Angels and Demons- Yemen

Truth is, writing here has been an eye opener for me. I think most Yemenis do not really realize the gravity of the situation. For decades a whole population has been in denial (apart from the Southerners who sometimes go on a rally every now and then and get squished right away)- it could of course be credited to the fact that everyone is constantly high from chewing Qat, or because we have this saying: "a devil you know is better than an angel you don't know" which is what everyone uses when confronted with the autrocities of the regime. This multifaceted disaster has been cooking for quite some time.

On a more funny-or sad, depending on your mood- note, the German Prime minister arrived yesterday to deal with two issues: 1)the 6 germans kidnapped by one fo those groups who seem to enjoy kidnapping expats who pump millions of euros into the country in development aid, 2)the four germans who were training in an Al-Qaeda camp. Now, the Yemenis who join Al-Qaeda are usually poor and ignorant, so i am not sure what excuse other than stupidity do these guys have!

Got no dog in this fight but...

Hi, y'all. Crusader AXE here, occasional guest blogger from the Defeatists. I personally have no dog in this hunt, but find it something that Crispin would probably find enragingly amusing. The idea of not swearing in bars is intriguing -- in a lot of places you can't smoke in bars, so not swearing in bars sort of fits in with the puritanical-Mormon-Nanny-State ethos that the country is evolving toward. Next, they will turn off the big screen TVs because sports TV encourages yelling, cheering and betting in bars. Then they will forbid talking to strangers. The sole reason for going to bars will be to drink. Which will then be forbidden by the FDA because alcohol is addictive and a food. (C6-H12-O6). Commerce will be paralyzed and human life will become extinct, although ....Life is already not worth living...

Occasionally you wonder what you might do if you were smarter

Crusader AXE here, occasional guest blogger and long-time fan of Crispin's Sonata in A Minor for Kazoo and Jewsharp. I know that he occasionally despairs about the ability of his undergraduate students to read, write and think critically. I did with mine and found a solution; I ceased teaching. This was especially rewarding for me personally, since my students were graduate students.

However, it's wonderful to see what happens when highly intelligent adult scholars and scientists choose whimsical idiocy over serious endeavor. It makes me feel warm inside to know that there is indeed hope for the sword-swallowers amongst us.

truly these idiots in iran have got to go. yo let's have an academic conference and invite david duke.

i'm shocked to hear that the situation in iraq is grave and deteriorating. i wouldn't have believed it if james baker hadn't told me. but at least the report of the iraq study group will give me "political cover" to change my position, and propose a simultaneous increase and withdrawal of american forces, while moving toward and away from new diplomatic initiatives for its resolution.

i'm glad to hear that prosecutions of turkish authors for insulting kemal ataturk continue apace. true, kemal ataturk was a dumbfuck, a mongoloid, a clinically brain-dead, feculent sump of absolute stupidity. still, describing him as dressing in a chador, whether the description is true or false, insults turkishness itself. insulting such a race of intellectual pygmies and crossdressers is surely redundant, and there's no sense piling on. let us now praise kemal ataturk: he was probably the best drag queen i've ever seen: his diana ross was fucking uncanny. his mad affair with warren g. harding remains an inspiration to turks and republicans the world over. i think of ataturk as the founder of the modern gay liberation movement, and it is well known that he personally introduced amyl nitrate and crank
to the gay community, a signal service to humanity itself.

i'd love to hear your thoughts on what other persons or abstract concepts it should be a crime to insult. personally, i think it should be a crime to insult kurdishness, wisconsinness, cornishgamehenness, and the ramones.

cats!

truly, people are idjits.

hurricane karl

so. why was karl rove handling relations between the fed gov and the state of lla in the response to katrina? there's only one possible answer: because the white house considered hurricane response a political operation.

White House senior adviser Karl Rove wanted it conveyed that he understood that Blanco was requesting that President Bush federalize the evacuation of New Orleans. The governor should explore legal options to impose martial law "or as close as we can get," Vitter quoted Rove as saying, according to handwritten notes by Terry Ryder, Blanco's executive counsel.

Thus began what one aide called a "full-court press" to compel the first-term governor to yield control of her state National Guard -- a legal, political and personal campaign by White House staff that failed three days later when Blanco rejected the administration's terms, 10 minutes before Bush was to announce them in a Rose Garden news conference, the governor's aides said

when i said that i found it hard to distinguish between rick santorum's underwear and the holocaust, i promptly apologized. but now i'm forced to compare rick santorum's brain to a cinder block. here  he is in "catholic online," discussing the celibates-have-sex-with-altar-boys-as-their-superiors-wink-and-nod scandal:

It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.

we ought to blame this thing on michael dukakis, or feminism, rather than on a religious culture that has implicitly promoted and protected homosexual pederasty for 1500 years. possibly when your average catholic priest asked himself: should i force this little boy to have sex with me? he said to himself: michael dukakis would approve! hillary clinton would dig it! the various cardinals who helped conceal the matter (no doubt many were also participants), certainly take their moral bearings from the women's studies program at harvard. possibly, rick santorum's flatline iq is due to the atmosphere of moral permissiveness in tierra del fuego. i guess, though, when he says that the people who are most disturbed by the scandal are academics and other liberals, he means that he himself and like-"minded" people aren't upset about it at all, or perhaps even that they're way into it.

hey! people are hugging . haven't they heard of stds? via eric .

david horowitz is a bit of a bitter crank, but he always at least seemed kind of bright. but his "guide to the left" is incomprehensible. it includes zarqawi, khomeini, khalid shaik mohammed, mohammed atta, zacarias moussaoui, along with, you know, rob reiner, danny glover, susan sarandon. it must not be easy to be driven by extreme ideological commitments into a realm completely detached from reality. um: those folks are religious fundamentalists. they are reactionaries. they are far more similar to john ashcroft than rob reiner. it's like i put up a rogue's gathering of the american right and included not only, say, john gotti, but also the weather underground and huey newton. but perhaps horowitz is more to be pitied than censured: things have been so hard since the lobotomy.