Saturday, June 03, 2006



Don Vito says, "In my day, we’d put a head in this fool's bed."


YOU JUST CAN’T TRUST A REPUBLICAN
(Even in the smallest things)
So there I was in front of the computer – hot night, too fried to be creative, or even turn the damned thing off – so I’m idly web wandering and I check out a bunch of blogs, and even take a notion to look at that of Cathy Seipp, LA CityBeat’s former girl fascist, because the poor woman has cancer and I feel truly sorry for anyone who gets dealt that hand. But she’s still there, totally against socialized medicine even now. And then I spot a link to a blog with an amusingly stupid name, so I take a look and discover that it’s predictable neocon shitheel who, aside from all of his other predictable poison, thinks it’s funny to run what he claims to be a spoiler for the ultimate ending of The Sopranos. Out of a comradeliness, I’m not going to repeat it, or give a link, or even name the site, but the fucking idea is now in my head and I’m going to be looking for indications this scumbag is actually right from now until the end of the series.


The secret word is Reprehensible


CRYPTIQUEAt times, though, head in bed would be more than acceptable.



LUCIFER, WE HAVE A PROBLEM
Suzy sent this link that could put a theological cat among the pigeons of orthodoxy. (And how’s that for a bit of fake Blake?)

A newly discovered fragment of the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament indicates that, as far as the Antichrist goes, theologians, scholars, heavy metal groups, and television evangelists have got the wrong number. Instead of 666, it's actually the far less ominous 616.

For the full story...
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/166/story_16630_1.html

The secret word is Redial

Friday, June 02, 2006



HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO MAKE THE SAME GODDAMNED POINT?
The Swiss decriminalized heroin and drug use dropped through the floor. Aeswiren sends this from the London Independent...
"Zurich, which adopted a liberal drug policy a decade ago, and has seen an 82 per cent decline in new users of heroin, experts say. The change has been achieved by offering drug addicts in Switzerland "substitution" treatment with injectable heroin on prescription, as well as oral methadone, needle exchange and "shooting galleries" where they can give themselves their fix. The new approach has medicalised drug use and removed its glamour, researchers say. Crime and deaths linked with drugs have fallen, and the image of heroin use has been transformed from one of rebellion to an illness."
For the whole story...
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article623415.ece



FREE BOB DYLAN
From Billy we get a link to a zip file of Bob Dylan’s XM radio show.
http://fuelfriends.blogspot.com/2006/05/happy-hour-with-bob-dylan.html


AND I ALSO HAVE A NEW BOOK OUT TODAY!!!
Conflagration, my 25th novel is published today. Did you notice the fanfare? No, neither did I, but it’s the sequel to Kindling, and, as such, set in the same somewhat steampunk alternative universe, with all kinds of fun like wholly fictional narcotics, sex (both regular and deviant), a couple of paranormal orgies, a black airship, evil twins, and a very nice set-piece battle with Mamaluke cavalry and some slow-moving tanks. Buy one, buy two, or, if you don’t read, just send money. It’s all part of my personal war on poverty, and not having to worry how to pay the phone bill and buy drugs.

But totally confounding that argument, here’s a link to some free downloads of my music.
http://www.progarchives.com/Progressive_rock_discography_BAND.asp?band_id=2509

The secret word is Contradiction

Thursday, June 01, 2006



IMPORTANT STUFF! BATWOMAN IS A LESBIAN AND SHE FIGHTS CRIME!
I spent a goodly part of the day hiding from the TV. I had the feeling that I was being softened up for a possible -- and wholly idiotic -- Bush attack on Iran, at exactly the same time as Haditha was demonstrating that, like most troops in prolonged counter-insurgency campaigns, the Marines in Iraq have gone trigger happy and are shooting everything that moves. Even the commercials offered no solace. Big energy is currently running spots that inform us how CO2 is a wonderful substance what makes the grass grow, and what’s a little global warming and a few dead polar bears as long as we maintain our standard of living? Fortunately I did more retain more vital data like...


Kathy Kane, the gay Batwoman will appear in costume for the first time in a July issue of 52 [a yearlong DC Comics series]. Batwoman was introduced in 1956, but she was one of several, often silly additions to the Bat family, including Ace the Bat-Hound (1955), Bat-Mite (1959) and Bat-Girl (1961). In her latest incarnation, Batwoman is a wealthy, lipstick lesbian who has a history with Renee Montoya, an ex-police detective who has a starring role in 52.

MEANWHILE...
In LA CityBeat, I have some observations on patriotism. http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=3842&IssueNum=156

The secret word is Selective

Wednesday, May 31, 2006



Mona says "No code. Just a pint of Guinness."


"I am the Mekon and I don’t like this sort of thing."


DID ANYONE MISS THE ALIEN HEAD INSIDE THE DUCK?
http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/video/offbeat/2006/05/29/barnard.ca.alien.head.xray.kxtv

send by the fabulous w&c

Tuesday, May 30, 2006



"I’m getting outta here before somebody sneezes!"



THE PANDEMIC RACKET
For some reason I have always had an irrational distrust of the drug Tamiflu. Now lazzafairy sends over the following and the bits fall into place. This is a blog, and no, I haven’t fact-checked the allegations. It’s not my function. Either it’s absolutely true – and highly plausible judging from other behavior by the bastards in power – or it’s the best fabricated rumor about Rumsfeld I’ve seen in a while.

Do you know that 'bird flu' was discovered in Vietnam 9 years ago?
Do you know that barely 100 people have died in the whole world in all that time?
Do you know that it was the Americans who alerted us to the efficacy of the human antiviral TAMIFLU as a preventative.
Do you know that TAMIFLU barely alleviates some symptoms of the common flu?
Do you know that its efficacy against the common flu is questioned by a great part of the scientific community?
Do you know that against a SUPPOSED mutant virus such as H5N1, TAMIFLU barely alleviates the illness?
Do you know that to date Avian Flu affects birds only?
Do you know who markets TAMIFLU?
ROCHE LABORATORIES.
Do you know who bought the patent for TAMIFLU from ROCHE LABORATORIESin1996?
GILEAD SCIENCES INC.
Do you know who was the then president of GILEAD SCIENCES INC. and remains a major shareholder?
DONALD RUMSFELD, the present Secretary of Defence of the USA.
Do you know that the base of TAMIFLU is crushed aniseed?
Do you know who controls 90% of the world's production of this tree?
ROCHE.
Do you know that sales of TAMIFLU were over $254 million in 2004 and more than $1000 million in 2005?
Do you know how many more millions ROCHE can earn inthe coming months if the business of fear continue?
So the summary of the story is as follows: Bush's friends decide that the medicine TAMIFLU is the solution for a pandemic that has not yet occurred and that has caused a hundred deaths worldwide in 9 years. This medicine doesn't so much as cure the common flu. In normal conditions the virus does not affect humans. Rumsfeld sells the patent for TAMIFLU to ROCHE for which they pay him a fortune. Roche acquires 90% of the global production of crushed aniseed, the base for the antivirus. The governments of the entire world threaten a pandemic and then buy industrial quantities of the product from Roche. So we end up paying for medicine while Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush do the business.
ARE WE CRAZY!!? OR ARE WE IDIOTS!!?
AT LEAST PASS THIS ON SO THAT IT CAN BE KNOWN!


I would also add that a pandemic in the USA – be it H5N1 or anything else – would run amok. Lazzafairy sends this from the UK where they at least have a vestige of a healthcare system. With no coordinated (we don’t even dare say socialized) medicine, Americans would have about as much chance as New Orleans in another level 4 hurricane.

The secret word is Sick

Monday, May 29, 2006



THE CHE WHO WON’T GO AWAY
Last week, I found myself watching MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, and Matthews and that fascist old bag from the National Review whose name I can never remember because she’s so fucking irritating, was making a whole big thing about how kids on the recent immigration marches have been wearing Che Guevara t-shirts. She wasn’t wrong. I noticed much the same myself. Indeed, as a owner of a couple Che shirts myself, plus a large red and black Che flag that hangs on the wall of my study/workroom, I have actually noticed a bunch of Latino and other kids walking around the streets of LA with Che on their chests. Matthews and the old bag seemed ready to make a whole issue out of this, moving towards a paranoid fantasy of some whole new form of Aztlan reconquista communism. I’ve pretty much stopped yelling at the TV screen but I was tempted. "Fools, you don’t know the half of it." The image of Che Guevara may actually have become a non-verbal – and maybe non-philosophical – gesture of the old Howard Beale, "I’m mad as hell and not going to take it any more." The concept is certainly worth a thought.

The secret word is Viva


CRYPTIQUEEvery boredom will be entertained.

AND HERE'S SOME TO GET EXTREMELY MAD ABOUT...

Like the destruction of Andean glaciers out of sheer corporate greed. (And guess who's involved.) http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/pascualama.asp

Sunday, May 28, 2006


FILE UNDER FUCKING UNBELIEVABLE
Aeswiren sends over this link (although I’m a little late in posting it) that tells how the staff of Tom Delay the former and now indicted Republican Party terminator believes that the TV satire show The Colbert Report is for real. (For those of you out of the US, Stephen Colbert plays a terminal-dumb, ultra-right news pundit, but it’s a joke.)
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/05/24/delay-colbert/

Aeswiren adds the following not of confusion
You're the media expert, what is going on there? Do Delay's people expect that Delay's fans (hard to imagine, I know...) don't know who Colbert is, because he doesn't appear on Fox News? Or....they're so desperate.. or they're so stupid... or...?


WE’VE HEARD IT ALL BEFORE BUT NOW IT’S IN THE WASHINGTON POST
We’ve been seeing studies for years that reefer doesn’t cause cancer and may even retard certain kinds of lung cancer, but how much longer can prohibition be maintained when even pro-drug war scientists admit there’s no risk?


STUDY FINDS NO CANCER-MARIJUANA CONNECTION By Marc Kaufman

The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer. The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years. "We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."
Federal health and drug enforcement officials have widely used Tashkin's previous work on marijuana to make the case that the drug is dangerous. Tashkin said that while he still believes marijuana is potentially harmful, its cancer-causing effects appear to be of less concern than previously thought. Earlier work established that marijuana does contain cancer-causing chemicals as potentially harmful as those in tobacco, he said. However, marijuana also contains the chemical THC, which he said may kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous. Tashkin's study, funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Drug Abuse, involved 1,200 people in Los Angeles who had lung, neck or head cancer and an additional 1,040 people without cancer matched by age, sex, and neighborhood. They were all asked about their lifetime use of marijuana, tobacco, and alcohol. The heaviest marijuana smokers had lighted up more than 22,000 times, while moderately heavy usage was defined as smoking 11,000 to 22,000 marijuana cigarettes. Tashkin found that even the very heavy marijuana smokers showed no increased incidence of the three cancers studied. "This is the largest case-control study ever done, and everyone had to fill out a very extensive questionnaire about marijuana use," he said. "Bias can creep into any research, but we controlled for as many confounding factors as we could, and so I believe these results have real meaning."
Tashkin's group at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA had hypothesized that marijuana would raise the risk of cancer on the basis of earlier small human studies, lab studies of animals, and the fact that marijuana users inhale more deeply and generally hold smoke in their lungs longer than tobacco smokers - exposing them to the dangerous chemicals for a longertime. In addition, Tashkin said, previous studies found that marijuana tar has 50 percent higher concentrations of chemicals linked to cancer than tobacco cigarette tar. While no association between marijuana smoking and cancer was found, the study findings, presented to the American Thoracic Society International Conference this week, did find a 20-fold increase in lung cancer among people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day. The study was limited to people younger than 60 because those older than that were generally not exposed to marijuana in their youth, when it is most often tried.
© 2006 Washington Post

The secret word is Delusional

Desmond Dekker -- RIP