Boooooooring!

Have you ever watched a movie where the first act is really exciting, the third act rocks you through to a great climax, but that middle half hour or so is like watching paint dry? That's how I sometimes feel about my movie (left hand sidebar in 11 parts - just watch it already - you can skip through the boring parts). And that's also how I've been feeling about this election cycle. It was exciting out of the gate with Obama's surprise win of Iowa, his respectable showing on Super Tuesday, his post-super Tuesday sweep and the resulting embarrassment of Team Clinton, then Super Tuesday II: Electric Boogaloo leaving him with a definitive lead. And the general election promises to be a thrill fest, a battle royale between the same old bullshit and history-making new blood invigorating a dying body politic. But we are in one hell of a lull now. Even the minor manufactured scandal of Obama's pastor (BTW, when I heard his whole sermon rather than just the foaming at the mouth soundbytes that the right wing noise machine lamely tried to create outrage with, I couldn't find a single thing I disagreed with, though I tend to agree that we do need to move past that kind of rhetoric if we expect to move on as a nation) and his incredible speech on race, these weeks have been filled with nothing but acrimonious mud slinging, backroom party deals and absolutely no exciting political action. Something exciting better happen soon, preferably in the form of Hillary dropping out. So what's a political junkie like me to do when there's little excitement? Well besides spending lots of quality time with the fam' I've immersed myself into some great TV shows that I never had a chance to watch when they were on. I did a marathon of the first season of The Wire, have the next two seasons downloaded and ready to go, and I also just started watching Dexter. All really good stuff. And my usual daily comic relief has potential for greatness as George Takei will be sitting in with Howard Stern all week.

I Got Nuthin'

I've really been wanting to write another post, but I'm having a real hard time channeling anything coherent that any of you might want to read. So instead I've got some links to other stuff that you might enjoy. First up is a set of found photos from Flickr of a few kids in the 80's doing things that kids in the 80's did best. For that Wizard of Oz meets Dark Side of the Moon vibe, you might want to play the audio from this youtube clip while you look. Next up, the anti-immigration crowd is about to get a double whammy when Mexican emo kids start running for the border for political asylum. And lastly, if you're outraged about what Obama's pastor had to say, check out this crazy church service that Hillary attended!

Mr. 4000

George Bush says that the 4000 Americans who have died in Iraq since he sent them there under false pretenses are worth it. Let's see where we are 5 years later... no WMDs found and a plethora of new reasons for being there have popped up. An whole generation of people who are growing up under occupation get to see their families killed and tortured now have a reason to become radicalized anti-American terrorists, bin Laden is still on the loose and making videos, any progress made in Afghanistan is backsliding, and we are spending wasting trillions of dollars that could otherwise be spent on education, health care and other things that might actually benefit Americans. It wasn't worth it on the first American death, and it's 4000 times not worth it today. George Bush, these people died because you had something to prove to your daddy, and he still thinks you're the fuckup of the family.

Zombie Alert!

Warning: there is a zombie on the loose today. A Hispanic male, 30 to 35 years of age, aproximately 6 feet tall with long hair and facial hair, known only as Jesus, has been reported to have risen from the grave today. Zombie Jesus should be considered extremely dangerous. He and his followers are known to practice cannibalism, eating of his body and drinking of his blood. Remember, if you are bitten by a zombie, you will become a zombie yourself. The only way to kill a zombie is by destroying their brain or by decapitation.

5 Years

We're just about rolling around to the 5 year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. Marking five years too long of human tragedy launched on the world by an idiot lying president trying to simultaneously cater to an extremist think tank, allow his corporate sponsors to plunder our treasury while somehow trying to take care of his personal issues with daddy is a job for protesters and other bloggers. Because to me, the start of Operation Oil Grab also marks the anniversary of my cross country move. It's actually a good thing that we were on the road because if I were sitting in front of a TV and internet back in DC while that was going on, my head would have exploded. Instead I enjoyed quite the adventurous road trip while being shocked and awed only by the increasing gas prices. So here's my log of our trip (with my funky old blog template!). We've now been in California for 5 years. Since we pulled out of DC in that truck, we've gotten married, had a child, and now we're finally to the point where we're just about scraping by out here, all in the time it took Bush to never find any WMDs at the cost of thousands of our troops and countless innocent Iraqi civilians. I think we've definitely had a far more productive five years than President Fucktard and his gang.

Denounce This, Motherf$%&#!s!

I am sick and tired of hearing Barak Obama having to denounce people. This has nothing to do with the people he is actually denouncing. While there is no denying that Louis Farrakhan has said some truly racist stuff, none of these supposedly shocking and offensive statements that the right wing noise machine have cherry picked from Obama's pastor are as radical as any given Public Enemy song, and certainly not even in the same ballpark as the sort of ignorant bigoted theocratic douchebaggery coming out of the mouths of these extremist wingnut religious hucksters who John McCain has sure as hell not denounced. Obama, dude, seriously, if none of the other candidates are playing the denunciation game, anything less than a refusal to play it yourself is a sign of weakness. The next time somebody demands you denounce somebody, turn it around on the wingnuttiest thing you can find said by some supporter of McCain's or Hillary's campaign. If you're the only one doing any denouncing, you're the weak one. Stand tall, you're the front runner. You should be the one making these other two clowns have awkward moments instead of the other way around.

Is There Honor Among Thieves?

What is it that keeps a gang of criminals from stealing from each other? There's usually some kind of code of honor amongst thieves and other lowlife criminals, usually punishable by death. But besides that, most criminals know better than to trust each other because they know that if the shoe was on the other foot and they had the opportunity to steal from somebody who trusted them and there was the possibility of getting away with it, they'd do it in a heartbeat. Apparently, leaders of the largest white collar crime ring in the country aren't smart enough to figure out that the kind of people who help plunder our national treasury for their corporate cronies wouldn't think twice about robbing from each other. And that is how the National Republican Congressional Committee lost upwards of a million dollars to their former treasurer! That's a million they could have otherwise wasted in their futile attempt to gain any house seats this election.

Notes on a Scandal

I must confess something. I am very bad about keeping up with the local politics of my beloved home state of New York. All I knew about Eliot Spitzer until a day or so ago was that he was this bad ass DA who went after corporate criminals who went on to become a governor who was rather heavy handed in dealing with republicans. As I am no great fan of corporate criminals or republicans (somewhat redundant, I know), I brushed off stories of his abuses of power in how he was treating the republican legislators. It's far too easy to look the other way on wrongdoings when you have little to no sympathy for the victim, and the fact that people on both sides keep making excuses for behavior from their side that they would condemn from the other is what keeps politics as dirty as they are. I strive to be more evenhanded with these kinds of things, but I am only human and at some point we all manage to fall into this sort of bad thinking. If I complain about the way Bush has steamrolled the democrats in congress, it is hypocritical of me to cheer when Spitzer does the same to the republican legislators, and I am man enough to cop to it and try to rise above rather than continuing to make excuses or demanding the other side clean up their act first. So my home state has this governor who has been a rabid pitbull in his attacks republicans and white collar criminals. And when you're in the business of making powerful enemies, the one thing you need to do is cover your own ass. It is generally a well known fact that men in power are a bunch of horndogs. Perhaps it's just part of the personality type of men who seek power, or maybe it's higher levels of testosterone that drive them to the power and the sex. The point is, a great number of men in power crave lots and lots of sex, the kinkier and nastier the better. Go through history to find more examples than I could possibly list here. This is a classic example of thinking with the wrong head. If you're a horndog in power, you've got to think with the big head and be discreet. You don't go into airport bathrooms and tap on the floor. You don't use a personal check to pay a massage parlour. You don't have quickies in the Oval Office with interns and cigars. And if you're using a high end call girl ring, you don't make large and suspicious fund transfers. If you're going to transport your favorite hooker from NY to DC, you spring for better transportation than the local Amtrak train. And as Artie Lange so eloquently put it on yesterday's Howard Stern show, you "never negotiate price with a whore." The republicans are frothing at the mouth over this one, and I don't blame them. They don't have much to be happy about these days, and for the next few years the inevitable sex scandal on the other side of the aisle is about the only thing they have to look forward to. And on the upside, New York will be the first state to have a blind black governor, paving the way for Stevie Wonder to unseat Ahhhnuld here in California. Higher Ground, indeed. UPDATE: Here's "Kristin's" Myspace. Cute? Yes. $4000 cute? I don't know about that.

Art Imitating Life Again

By the late 90's I had all but given up on the idea that there was any sort of true leftist movement in the US. I even took a job at the DNC in the fall of '99 because to me, the democratic party seemed to be the only place where a progressive could make any real kind of change. But that November, something exciting happened that changed everything for me. The global corporate cabal, otherwise known as the World Trade Organization, was holding their meeting in Seattle to figure out new and exciting ways to race to the bottom on labor and environmental standards at the expense of workers, the planet and national sovereignty. And then out of nowhere tens of thousands of activists took to the streets and shut that meeting down! And while corporate media was telling a very one sided story of these protests, the web was alive with first hand accounts from the activists themselves. I was glued to the computer, reading, watching and listening to the first shots in what I was sure was the greatest people's uprising in my lifetime. How could such a massive movement sprung up without anybody even knowing it was there? Not only was the anti-globalization movement born in Seattle, but so was the independent media movement. A few months later the circus came to DC with a meeting of the global loansharking agencies, the World Bank and IMF, and I took the week off from my job to volunteer with the local independent media center and join the protests myself. And right after that I bought my first digital video camera, loaded up on editing software and embarked on a mission to cover the revolution live from the belly of the beast. Jump ahead a year after major protests at both party conventions and the Bush inauguration to a Tuesday morning that changed everything. Jump ahead another year. The protest organizers have shifted focus on stopping the Iraq war before it started. An incredibly unpopular president lucked out with an environment where he could push any kind of insane in the membrane legislation and paint anyone who might raise questions of constitutionality or rights or any other bits of common sense as unpatriotic and soft on terror. And it was in this climate of political bullshit whene I realized that documenting things wasn't enough. This political atmosphere needed satire in the worst way. So I made the film that this blog is named after, which you can watch in 11 parts on the left column. One thing I really wanted to do was shoot scenes in a real protest, which I did with the closing scene. My hope for the film was to bring these issues to a wider audience, but I had pretty unrealistic expectations about just how far a zero-budget, amateur underground film could go. Jump ahead yet another couple of years to the 2004 republican convention and there was a film shot in the midst of the protests where Rosario Dawson even got arrested. And now four years later, it goes full circle with a film making the festival circuits about the Battle in Seattle. I can only hope that this film does well enough to remind people that the global corporate cabal is still out there plundering the world for profit at the expense of the people, and once we get rid of the neocons in the next election the anti-globalization movement will start back up where we left off.

The Poli-Scifi Meme Dies Here!

JSF has tagged me for this meme and I considered blowing it off given that homeboy hasn't made a comment on one of my political posts in ages while I usually tend to comment on his. But since I am a good sport, here goes... 1) President George W. Bush or President William Clinton? You must answer 1a and 1b. None of the above 1a) Give 3 issues why you support your guy: Neither is my guy, I support neither. Though I prefer Clinton because: A) His lie about sex didn't get us into a war B) His scandals were never potential acts of treason C) Jobs were easier to come by when he was running things and America wasn't a laughingstock as it has been under Bush. 1b) Now name 3 things good about the other guy. There is really nothing good to say about our worst president ever. But here are three silver linings to this 8 year dark cloud... A) Most of us are all still alive. B) Not all of our constitutional rights have been flushed down the toilet. C) His failures are an albatross around the neck of the republican party for decades to come. 2) Favorite Sci-fi movie? How could I possibly pick a favorite? Does Donnie Darko count as scifi? 3) Favorite Sci-fi TV show? Heroes 4) Favorite Alternate History story (movie, TV or book)? The Illuminatus Trilogy 5) Best American Legislator? (if overseas, your local Legislators) Politicians are the scum of the earth. But just because it would raise the hackles of the right, Cynthia McKinney. 6) Best Foreign Legislator? (if overseas, this is where you can choose American legislators) See number 5 and to piss off the right again, Hugo Chavez (though I do not like authoritarians on the left or right). 7) Favorite Sci-fi scene? (Youtube it if you can) 8) Pitch a cross-over between two sci-fi shows/movies/etc.: Dr. Suresh hires Mulder and Skully to help him hunt down Sylar. 9) Who will win the Democratic Presidential Primary? Why? Right now it's a toss up. I'm still rooting for Obama, but Hillary has plenty more dirty tricks up her sleeve. Please let it be Obama! 10) Will Gordon Brown call an election before 2010? To quote the great Casey Casem "These guys are from England and who gives a shit?" I'm sure the English give a shit, but I really couldn't care less. 11) Favorite Steampunk, Cyberpunk or Post-Cyberpunk novel, comic, book or movie? The Baroque Cycle 12) Best Pizza place? Please provide the link. Out here, it's got to be Lanesplitter. I'm supposed to tag 5 people, but nobody I ever tag is as sportsmanlike about this as I am. So if you volunteer to be tagged, let me know in the comments.

You're Torturing Me With 3AM Phone Calls!

George Bush just took a very brave and powerful stand today against the loathsome concept of human rights by vetoing a ban on torture. What a swell guy! He's been fairly sparing in using his veto power, only using it against human rights, American children who need affordable health insurance and medical science. And yet again for like the millionth time since he wormed his way into office he has managed to make me more embarrassed to live in a country that has a large enough minority of people misguided enough to get him close enough to cheat his way into office. But say what you will about Bush, as president the man has gotten 8 years of experience in foreign policy. While it hasn't been a particularly great experience for the rest of the world, it is 8 years more experience than his wife has had. And that's also 8 more years than a certain presidential candidate who is touting her extensive experience in foreign policy because she was married to a president. I love my wife and she is incredibly talented at what she does, but if my phone rang at 3AM with somebody who needed some video shot and edited, I don't think that it would be something my wife would be qualified to do just because she's married to a guy with years of experience. Same thing with the plumber's wife, or the car mechanic's wife or the machinist's wife. These wives may have a better understanding of how their husbands' jobs work, but understanding does not equal experience. And Hillary cannot point to one single example of her foreign policy experience. Obama should point to where she does have more experience. She's got lots more experience sucking at the teat of corporate lobbyists than he does, and that's just the kind of experience we have had enough of. The only 3AM phone call she should be getting is from the Jerky Boys.

Friday Zen

There's plenty of stuff going on in the world to get upset about today. Instead of worrying about all that, might I suggest spending an hour and a half of so to blow off whatever it is you have to do and immerse yourself into a beautiful world of music and vision with Sigur Ros. If you're not familiar, they are an Icelandic post-rock band who make music that is so mesmerizing that people literally faint at their live shows. I actually saw this happen to a friend of mine at the 9:30 Club in DC. We missed the whole second half of the show because of it. So in 2006, they went back to Iceland and played in some of the most remote, and visually stunning corners of their country before playing a huge show in Reykjavik. So clear out your schedule and watch it on YouTube now. And if you still want more great full length music film on YouTube, there's also Radiohead in Scotch Mist.

So Long Gary

The man who brought geekery to a whole new level is no longer with us today. I could try to come up with all sorts of dorky references about the passing of Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons, but any number of blogs already have headlines about lost savings throws, double damage and what have you. I have many fond memories of D&D games, sitting in the library on Saturdays with dice and graph paper while many of my peers were playing little league, convincing our jr high English teacher to let us play in study hall and her defending us from the dirtbags making fun of us, lots of incredibly dorky jokes at the expense of younger and dorkier players, and the subtle differences between adventures run by pre-pubescent boys and post-college adults. Gary was single-handedly responsible for creating a huge area in the world of geekdom and the world just lost a big chunk of creativity with his passing. Kids today might consider D&D oldschool, but they should remember that before there were collectible card games, LARPing, MMORPGs and a wide range of gaming systems, there was only Dungeons and Dragons, and it was the mind of Gary Gygax that gave birth to the whole genre of gaming.

Antisemite Alert: Condi Rice

Why does Condoleezza Rice hate the Jews? Did you hear, she had the nerve to tell Israel not to kill so many civilians in Gaza. Of course, if it was a liberal who dared make the understatement of the century that Israel can be a bit on the heavy handed side, we'd never hear the end of the accusations of antisemitism, support of terror, and complicity in the freakin' holocaust. I wonder what the rabid neocon crowd is going to say about one of their own criticizing the only uncriticizable country in the world. And then there are the wackjob christian faction who will see her as interfering in the chain of events that they are counting on to deliver them the apocalyptic thrill ride that they read about in the Left Behind books. Those nutjobs will turn on her quicker than you can say "Reverend Ted Haggard smokes the pole." And of course, for the high crime of speaking outside of the very narrow bit of orthodoxy that the far right minority has set for discussing the topic of Israel, I become yet another free thinker inadvertently helping the far right to further water down the very meaning of antisemitism.

More Music!

OK, I know all three readers of this blog expect angry and sarcastic political rants with a twisted sense of humor, but until tomorrow's big must-win primaries there's not a whole lot of political goings on that warrant a post from me. Instead, I've got more music downloads for you. First up is a 2 disk compilation of Syd Barret tracks, both with and without the Floyd. It's culled from non-commercially released materials by a group of fans, so it's actually a legal download. For those who are reading this wondering who this Barret guy is, he is the guy who they wished was here in the song Wish You Were Here. And if you don't know the story of this tragedy of sex, drugs and rock and roll (mostly drugs), here's a good place to start. Too much acid is baaaaaaaad, m'kay! Also, Trent Reznor just pulled a Radiohead, independently offering the new Nine Inch Nails album up as a $5 download with the first 9 tracks for free, officially distributed on The Pirate Bay! Then there are pre-orders for different levels of collectable physical packages, some of which contain the multi track files so people can remix it themselves. And it's even licensed under a creative commons non commercial license! The downloads are offered in various high quality formats and are completely DRM-free. The face of the music business is changing, and the corporate dinosaurs ot the RIAA should take note or face extinction sooner than they think. I haven't heard it yet (it's still downloading) but it's 24 instrumental tracks and Adrian Belew is listed as one of the players on it! And in case you missed my previous post, don't miss that rare Velvet Underground bootleg that just found the light of day.