cheese it, the cops!

what is your fundamental ontology, dude?

 

look out!

 

chomsky's anarcho-statism

just showed this video to my 'anarchist theory' class.

I might call the position 'anarcho-statism.' He envisions a full-scale liberal welfare state, a wild expansion of it, in fact. He wants "a bigger cage' until we break free of all cages. First he says that we are being victimized by 'state-supported capitalists and corporations,'  then he presents the state as the solution to the bad effects of capitalism, what's protecting us. He might as well be FDR, okay? Then he says 'there is no contradiction,' which is just silly. By his own terms, increasing the power and resources of the state and people's dependence on it will also in the long run consolidate the power of capital.

One reason for this, I would say, is that he's much more socially affiliated with leftism than with anarchism per se, and so many of his allies are the biggest statists in the universe: socialists, Marxists, etc. But Chomsky's anti-statism is merely verbal, a distant ideal against which he's working in the present as he tries to market his bigger cage.

Many self-professed anarchists, David Graeber for example, have versions of this. Work it out, y'all, one way or the other!

 

Did I ever mention collaborating with crazy people

 

Odd times over at the Veterans Today Network or where ever the hell it is I write. Problems with their server, hackers, attacks and so on; oddly, they believe that they've traced it to Army hackers at the Intel School at Fort Huachuca because Trump hates us. Did I mention I collaborate with a bunch of crazy people? That is, other crazy people. Still, as a group we're probably a pain in the ass to just about everybody in the political spectrum so...

New piece. Chance to use Henri Le Chat Black, Edith Piaf, The Dead South and a variety of other wierd stuff to talk about France's election and Marine Le Pen...did you know that Brigitte Bardot and Sarah Palin have compared Le Pen to Joan of Arc? I mean, seriously...

 

She has proposed that they re-write the curriculum for history in French Schools omitting things like, oh, French Colonialism and the Second World War. All part of the French Identity...sheesh...

 

http://www.veteranstodaynews.com/2017/04/23/dispatches-from-wolf-country-bordellos-of-avignon/

 

launching on a series of vids on entanglements: a system of philosophy. the first two are more or less intro.

 

 

 

 

splice today column this week is a longer tribute to the j. geils band, including 20-song list. (here is the frigging 50-cut version.)

 

 

fujistone and hokusai 2

 

suiseki 'view of fuji,' collected in latimore township pa. (unaltered natural stone)

hokusai

message to the repression-of-expression left

This thing on my face? It's my mouth. That one on yours is yours. I'm in charge of this one; you're in charge of that one. I know you'd like to jam your arm up my ass and operate my mouth like I was your sock puppet. Perhaps that's your sexual orientation, so I guess it's not your fault.

J. Geils is gone. When I tell people that the J. Geils band was my favorite rock act of the '70s, they are somewhat puzzled. And every obit describes them as the band who did 'Centerfold,' indeed their biggest hit by a way. But by the time they got there, in the '80s, they were a pretty different act than 10 years before. I do think of that song as a novelty thing, and like a lot of what they did a lot better. When they started out, they were a great blues and basic rock/soul band.

 

 

I was already working on blues harp around when their first album came out ('70; I was 12), and Magic Dick blew me away, let's say. And also he was the featured instrumentalist an an arena-filling rock band. I remember I auditioned later for a band that was doing  Kiss covers and suchlike, and Magic Dick was the only possible reason they could even conceive having a harmonica in a group like that. On the other hand, rock harp didn't get that far, and there is no harmonica on 'Centerfold.' This is insane:

 

 

They were kind of tasteless at many times - intentionally - in their stage personae and repertoire: Peter Wolf would wear that tux with a dollar sign, and roll through sort of Wolfman-Jack raps on stage which at times...weren't that great. 'First I Look at the Purse' became their theme song, more or less. They presented themselves as a crass American rock band. But I am telling you they could handle blues and soul-type styles as well as any white people ever, and pushed the boundaries of those forms a bit too.

 

Few bands have ever poured out more energy onstage. I did think of them as America's Rolling Stones. Every album after the first four (J. Geils Band, Morning After, Live: Full House, and Bloodshot) was a very mixed bag, but with really good moments. Dick continued to innovate: over and over he brought sounds out of the harmonica that had never been heard, playing with wah-wah pedals and phase shifters, among other things. They struggled financially through the whole decade, and I think made a conscious decision finally to see how many records they could sell. Can't really blame a band for that.

 

 

That Monkey is tied, so let's skin him!

 

Seriously, this started out about a column in The Stone on this morning's Times Op Ed page about whether or not Bo Diddley was a Buddah...and it then morphed into Brian Williams stealing a  line from Leonard Cohen's First we'll take Manhattan and then TRUMP and then more stuff about blues music and improvisation and then Trump and then ...Olbermann? On Trump now being coherent in a false equivalency to a normal president because he's blowing shit up....

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I'm guided by a signal in the heavens
I'm guided by the birthmark on my skin
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I'd really like to live beside you, baby
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes
But you see that line that's moving through the station?
I told you, I told you, I told you, I was one of those

Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

I don't like your fashion business mister
And I don't like these drugs that keep you thin
I don't like what happened to my sister
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
Then we take Berlin, then we take Berlin

 

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

 

 

It's true! The Beatles got whytheysucked. And remember to keep track of the whole roster.

american stasi

spliced today, discussing the obvious fact that the american government is controlled by intel agencies. also tweeting all around it. you're wrong if you think the trump 'wiretap' stuff is an irrelevant smokescreen of jive. tonight's development: it does seem that susan rice requested that people connected to the trump campaign be unmasked. that is extremely close to obama, alright? then the leader of the dem party is using the machinery of the nsa to monitor the republican nominee. i think the intel community is looking to take trump out, more or less right now. no wonder he's thrashing about extremely.

so, roughly, we have an east german form of government: government by secret police. it needs its own 'ocracy.'

this is true even though it's also true that the trump/russia connection is disturbing and probably disqualifying. at any rate: the fsb surveiled and leaked the clinton campaign to death. the nsa surveiled the trump campaign and is leaking them to death. not exactly a democracy.