Deals of the Day! Amazon Edition!

DEALS OF THE DAY!

‘With this CD on Winter & Winter, the Arditti String Quartet celebrates 40 years of cutting-edge performances. Long recognized as the leading string quartet in avant-garde circles, and admired for the brilliance and virtuosity of its performances of the most demanding works, the Arditti gave its first concert in March, 1974, and over four decades it has not stopped rehearsing, studying, performing, and recording the most challenging music of our time. This program consists of 14 short works by some of the most prominent contemporary composers — Wolfgang Rihm, Hans Abrahamsen, Toshio Hosokawa,Brian Ferneyhough, Brice Pauset, Mark Andre, Marco Stroppa, Liza Lim, Harrison Birtwistle, Hilda Paredes, James Clarke, Georg Friedrich Haas, Uri Caine, and Johannes Maria Staud — and the variety of their compositions makes this survey a fascinating exploration of innovative techniques and original concepts. Adventurous listeners will be impressed by the Arditti’s fearlessness and directness in approaching this uncompromising music, and the liner notes by violinist Irvine Arditti provide background information that will be helpful to those just discovering the group.’ — All Music

View/price it here:

http://amzn.to/2EsqSTm

FERNEYHOUGH:TERRAIN – with the 21st century’s most complex composer ‘s most famous CD out of print and commanding multiples of its msrp, this TERRAIN cd is a good way to sample some of the composers best works without taking out a mortgage. Great CD at an affordable price.

Get tge CD here:

http://amzn.to/2BGw1Ed

 

Jack Kirby’s FOURTH WORLD OMNIBUS – At over 1200pages this hardcover is big enough to go into battle with, or you can do something more traditional with it and enjoy it and put it on your bookshelf. Rushed out just at the end of 2017, to be part of the 100th Anniversary of Jack Kirby, it is easily the must own collected edition/graphic novel to have. The first printing does have a printing error, all that rushing I was talking about. One page is printed twice. It is an easily corrected error.

You can find details here:

https://www.bleedingcool.com/2017/12/21/fourth-world-omnibus-major-printing-error/

I printed the correct page (found at the link above) on my color printer and slipped it in the book at the correct spot. Job done. And sure we can wait for a corrected edition, or future printing, but considering we have no idea when or if that is happening, my 10 cent fix more than suffices.

Get your copy, while it is still below cover price, here:

 

http://amzn.to/2ErGztV

 

Come back next time for more… Deals of the Day!

 

The News Thing, a boat of lost souls, and the cross

This is me, ranting. Bat crazy ranting. Those who want to avoid Bat Crazy ranting, avoid this one, come back tomorrow and hear about super-heroes punching each other in their under-wear. 🙂

I don’t really do… the news thing.

I mean the major stuff I keep abreast of, if the president and congress are trying to sell first borns to big business, etc. But the 24 hour, FOX/CNN/SS constant “thought police, be afraid, believe, color coded terror, be afraid”… not really my bag.

You tell me something one time a day, that’s news. You tell me something 72 times a day, the same thing, 3 times an hour, that is not about news, that is about programming. That is about conditioning. That is about terror.

That is about you, the media, in ways deep and dreadful and not at all healthy, trying to touch me.

I watch people, sit in front their tv god… constantly just soaking up and regurgitating another man’s hate.

Older women in my family, god love women, but they are like sponges for the dreams of madmen, raised on serialized entertainment, on soap operas, so news and talk shows are just more soap operas to them. Idiocy is just more entertainment to them. And they will open up their mouths and parrot out of their mouths whatever is on television… without questioning.

“Oh isn’t it good we’re invading Libya” one recently said to me, when this nation (under God?) was committing yet another coup in a sovereign nation.

“Why?” I asked her.

“Cause of all the bad things the leader has done to his people.”

“Do you mean Gaddafi, who was supporting the civil rights movement in this country, and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, when the American government wouldn’t let great quantities of the population drink out of faucets or use a bathroom, and was siccing dogs on marchers, and bombing churches and lynching Black children? That Gaddafi?”

Needless to say I’m really popular at family reunions.

It’s just amazing to me, how few people in America, think. Not Black people, or White people, or Brown people, or Yellow people, but any people… think, beyond what the idiot box tells them.

Oh it is to be wept at, how all you victims of Rome, so gleefully are turned into victimizers.

Here’s the thing with me. You have to earn the moral high ground.

YOU HAVE TO EARN the moral high ground.

Be you a man, or a nation, you have to earn the moral high ground.

America is forever taking the moral high ground. And no country, in the history of this world, is less suited to walk that walk. America began as a terrorist nation, and America grew fat through fostering a level of inhumanity and terror, that no Iraq or Iran or Cuba or Korea or Russia or Libya, has ever come close to.

And the thing about America, is her present shows no sign of having repented of her past.

America has never stopped being a terrorist nation. It’s her one, last great product.

So yeah when the military industrial complex, pulls the strings for the 24hour propaganda show we call CNN or Fox, etc… I’m not really big, on goose stepping along.

I guess because I have a long memory, and I potentially can forgive, but I will never forget and I will never cheer you into a position to do it again. To anyone.

Now you, the tides of war, can come through me, or you can try to walk over me, but you’ll never reach your goal with me.

It’s the same reason I’ll never be a Christian as practiced in America. I have no particular issue with Christianity, I think the ideology is grand, however in practice especially in America it has been an abomination in the eyes of God.

That’s not a dig, and it’s not an insult, it is however a fact.

From the Witch trials on. The odious form of Slavery that took place in this nation, the most depraved the world has ever seen, happened not despite Christianity. It reached it’s peak of evil BECAUSE of how Christianity was practiced in this country.

Slavery, in the vile form practiced in the US flourished… because of Christianity.

That’s a hell of a thing for anyone to say, I know it… and I take no pleasure in the saying.

More hell still, because it’s the truest thing you’ll ever hear anybody tell you.

I have seen the torture devices. I have seen your abominations. I have seen ships with names like HOPE, and CHARITY, and GRACE (all we need is one named OPERATION FREEDOM), loaded down with tortured men, women, and children. I have seen the machinations of righteous men and women. Shielding their abominations under the name of Christ and god.

And I have seen one more thing, that we are our fathers even onto the 7th generation, and crimes not grappled with, not resolved… are repeated: there or there or there.

Christianity as practiced in this country, has more of Rome in it, than of Christ, and this country has the crucifixions to prove it. The cross itself, having nothing to do with a Christ, being a Roman symbol long before any such messianic birth or death, a roman symbol of power, and dominance, and torture. The devil going up and down, and to and fro.

How does a person wear a cross and not know that? Not think one minute, of one hour, of one day, of the millions upon millions who died screaming their guts out on that most sacred torture device of Rome… on the cross.

That cross.

Think about it, logically for a second. Who would carry around an idol, a symbol of a lynched man except the lyncher. Much the way lynchers in America would cut trophies from the bodies of their victims to wear around their neck.

Such… Christian people. Such, righteous people. God forbid you accuse anyone else in this world of terror.

So to, who would wear a symbol of a crucifixion around their neck, except the crucifier? For one second, think, actually think, about the dogma, the ritual that Christians do, that has nothing of Christianity in it… but everything of Rome, even onto the forsaking of the Sabbath.

I honestly don’t care what people believe.

But I do care that your choice of good or evil be informed. Whatever you choose to believe, make it an informed choice.

It’s not evil men that worry me.

It’s the masses that cheer them as they go marching by, too busy to make a choice not handed to them. The careless masses are the engine without which, the dreams of evil men… could not fly.

Try an examined choice.

I’ve done that, and I’ve found I can’t wear lynched or crucified men or the symbols of their suffering around my neck, I can’t bend my knee to bloody priests, and I can’t follow a nation of terror.

But I’m wacky that way, your examined choice may be different.

That’s been my news for today.

Cheery son of a gun, aren’t I?

But it’s past now, my mad fit of absinthe and peyote, it comes only rarely, when the spirit moves.

Perhaps even when the spirit needs,

For a man, supposedly shorn of faith, I do believe in fate.

I needed to speak.

Perhaps becomes someone needed to listen.

Who knows.

Wild is the world, and occasionally wonderful.

But the mad compulsion has left me, until the next blue moon.

Which is fitting, because I find the truth you don’t have to repeat as often as lies. If a lie, it will touch you not, without a constant barrage, and you will be unmoved by my mad ramblings.

But if the truth, it lived in you long before you read these words, and my words simply, like a stone waiting for a sculptor… revealed it.

If the truth you will know it. And if a lie you will know it.

And how you make of that news, something new…. well, who knows, the world is wild and wonderful… his miracles to perform. 🙂

President Obama: The Summing up Place. Conservatism, Liberalism… and the road yet traveled

The problem I have with President Obama, is not that he lied in his pre-election promises.

To some extent all politicians, slaved to corporate interests lie, it is an unfortunate failing of the American political system that we allow business to have more influence on our politicians than the citenzenry they are supposedly there to serve.

No my issue with Obama, that I hinted at on this blog prior to his election, is the magnitude of his lies.

He rode into office on the hopes and dreams and eloquent quotations, sufferings and civil liberties of the dream of America. Rode into office as an answer to this endless push to war, to the dismantling of liberties, and to the corporate plundering and rape of America, that characterized the Bush administration.

And unfortunately Obama’s administration has been, for all wild mutterings of America’s nazietic wing, has been a continuation of Bush’s policies, which is to say a continuation of corporate America’s policies.

He pays lip service to liberalism, when his policies, laws and edicts since entering office, is conservative to the point of totalitarianism. Granting the FBI and other acronyms of our abuse, unheard of powers to dismantle, without oversight or rule of law or due cause, civil liberties on a frightening scale.

They can shut down websites, the Internet in fact, a kill-switch, with no cause, and no oversight beyond their own. The FBI is allowed to put a tracer, a tracking bug if you will, on any person, any vehicle, at their discretion, with no oversite of law. With no word, but their own. A recent push to make abuse or violation of corporate rules by employees, a federal crime. And the list goes on.

Add to that the continuing rape of the American people, unholy taxation of the American people, financial slavery of generations not yet born, to support businesses unrepentant in their mismanagement and greed, and willingness to sacrifice America as a concept, to advance insane policies of the military-industrial complex, and new middle east pleasure nations, carved out of the bodies of all those we have blown to hell.

So yeah, you can say I’m not happy with the current administration. Obama was the lesser of two evils, but much like Kerry before him, whose race against Bush was a sham, too good old boys staging a fixed fight for the rubes, the wrestling crowd, he was just Bush, repackaged.

Which is to say, he is the talking head of global corporate entities, that love America not.

But what makes Obama’s betrayal, particularly egregious, is it really is a no win situation for him, the way he is currently playing it. He will go down as a traitor to the masses who elected him, and to the interests of people and causes and legacies, that he had the gall in his election bid to invoke, and the gall in his presidency to utterly betray.

And even though he serves well his Bushian corporate masters, following in policy the dismantling of liberties initiated by Bush, he is reviled and hated by the very conservatives that his presidency is clearly supporting. Hated because, he still plays enough lip-service to liberalism, in his color if not in his heart, to elicit a Pavlovian hate, from people who are ignorant of the larger mysteries, and for whom hate is all they have been bred to give.

Obama, if he continues the perilous road he is on, he will be hated by heroes, and he will be hated by the fools he serves. And his presidency will go down as a failure, to shake the very foundations of the empire.

Which is perhaps what it was designed to do all along.

There are those, chairmen of ships of industry, pullers of strings, proponents of slavery, and dismantlers of concepts such as minimum wage, and workers protection, who want very much to be their father’s sons. To be once again undisputed Robber-Barrons and Masters, and make the mass of men serfs and slaves. And all that stands in their way… is this dream called America.

If they can make Americans renounce this dream of liberty and brotherhood, this purposely failed concept of America, they can win, those great things, their fathers lost.

They can win, by extinguishing in the hearts of those who should love it most… even the dream of liberty.

And Obama’s presidency stands poised to give to these men their…New World Order. Their rise of Nazism. We are Germany, being groomed for the coming atrocities, for the rise of a new Hitler, to save us from our failed democracy.

Obama as puppet to corporate masters will serve nothing but his own vilification, and the destruction of his children’s future, all children’s future, and the immolation of 400 years on this continent, long before the constitutional signing, of striving toward a more perfect union.

Obama’s only hope, as President, as Father, as Man, and ultimately as descendant of slaves, is to be in deed the man of his election speeches, to give those who voted for him, his half of the contract. And to give those who hate him for no reason, cause to respect him, and if necessary to fear him.

It is a hard road to walk. But when the choices are liberty or slavery, I will walk the former road, though hell and some such neighbor bar my way, to paraphrase Shakespeare. And Obama is at that point in his presidency where he must choose his road.

As defender of liberty… or its destroyer.