My All Over the Place Rant… Beware, there be Dragons here

It’s 0330 dark of the morning and I’m listening to Disaster-Piece’s IT FOLLOWS film score on CD (not something I would particularly recommend if you are in the house by yourself at this time of night), and I’m thinking…we are all adrift in the fields of the Lord.

That’s what I’m thinking.

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And I’m thinking of Carlos Castaneda and a Yaqui Indian called Don Juan and truths and fictions, and how the one becomes the other and the other the one.

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I’m thinking of the quality of person that would have actually voted for Resident Trump and be not ashamed.

I think the clinical term would be somewhere between fool and sociopath.

I’m thinking of seas relatively unspoiled by man, and islands far from this benighted shore.

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I think…

I think there are other worlds…

but this one is not quite done with me.

I think of duty and honor and truth and justice and loyalty, words co-opted by the venal to keep a nation of young men killing and dying and being mutilated and maimed for the 1%ers’ Dubai pleasure nations.

I’m listening to track 9 of IT FOLLOWS, the stereo panning in my Avanti Headphones, is working for me. Left, right… left, right. My brain relaxes, and formulates something beyond questions and answers.

It is a truly brilliant album, to accompany one of the standout horror films so far this 21st century.

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I’m thinking I can’t get down with media lynchings, especially by a notoriously untrustworthy and historically lynching obsessed nation as America. So the more they tell me to demonize anyone, whether a Cosby or Simpson or insert famous Black male target of the day, the more I have to question it. In a world full of evils to fight, it’s funny to me how the press never tackles the evil that really controls and infects their viewers lives.

Like the evil of Pharmaceutical companies that are getting rich selling you not ready for human use drugs that have more dangerous side-effects than the conditions they are created to combat. “Oh you have acne, oh use our product, but oh, it might sterilize or kill you. Heehee… but we told you up front so we’re not liable.”

No you pieces of offal, that’s not how it works, if someone buys a hamburger from me and it is laced with arsenic, that may make them very sick or kill them, that’s called attempted murder. Even if the burger was a good tasting burger, did its advertised job, side effects of food poisoning and possible death are not acceptable or allowable risks to eating a hamburger.

So that burger is not ready for human sale or consumption and is recalled, pulled from the market.

The pharmaceutical companies instead market you these not ready for human usage products, and lawyer up against their products being filled with arsenic.

The actions that would get an individual arrested for attempted murder, these companies are using to get rich on the sick and desperate . Now that is something the press should for 3 decades be raging against. Not a suspect celebrity murder case, and not an even more vacuous charge of sexual assault.

So when the press avoid the crimes of their rich corporate sponsors and overlords instead to pile on with, ‘what Black celebrity can we pull down today’, well that’s a train I’m not going to board, and that is a Dachau I’m not going to populate.

There are lots of racist cops walking around free that have committed worse crimes than either Simpson or Cosby have been accused of. There are lots of you judging them, Cosby, Simpson,… that should be wary of casting that first stone.

Simpson I don’t care about, except that the fact of a white owned media embroiled in demonizing him over 2 decades after his acquittal shows clearly the new face of lynch mobs. We have young men and women coming back from parts of the world we didn’t even know we were still fighting in… damaged, and having damaged, for reasons that stink of lies, and true evil, and rather than the press demonize the real monsters that fill our nightly news with blood, they want to waste energy on cases that in the scheme of things while significant to the families of the victim and the families of the accused, to the larger body of society, are not of import.

As far as Cosby, Cosby I was raised on, and in a world that would have you be less, he was one of the ones breaking barriers and opening doors so that a whole generation of young Black men and women could be more. There are very few people drawing breath on this planet that can claim to have done the good that Bill Cosby has done, and if you can not equal a man’s good, you are unfit to judge his evil.

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If he committed a crime, that is to be determined in a court of law.

But a man’s falling down does not erase his standing up, including the many times he stood up for a castigated people. So to take arms against him now is beyond ungrateful, it is cowardice of the highest order.

To let yourself be so crudely used, in this war of Black and White.

Now transitioning to another rant…

Why is local autonomy in nearly every walk of life being replaced by autonomy of these very few companies and oligarchies and families.

Once a blockbuster movie meant not only the studios did well but the regional independent local theater did well. These days theaters are mostly studio owned, so we have this incestuous chain of the studios getting paid in every part of the process, and local economies are obliterated by it. Reduced to only the most minuscule piece of the proverbial pie.

AVENGERS makes a billion Dollars, I don’t really care.

I care that it is or isn’t a good movie, but do I care if a Billion dollar studio make more millions and billions? Not in the least.

As it stands now these studios such as Disney and Fox and Warner Brothers (pieces of larger snakes) should have been broken up years ago and their anti-competitive and local economy suppressing monopolies ended decades ago.

The best thing that could happen to America is a nation where all the Disney Properties, most of which are over 50 years old went into the public domain where they belong so everyone can legally make money off of them and be enriched by them.

An America without the endless shadow of Disney and its lie of family values would suit me fine.

The album is over, the clock has moved on, and my rant…

My all over the place rant… ended.

For now.

“Come back and throw stones later, Mother will be more receptive”

—LION IN WINTER

TRAILER NEWS: THE INVISIBLE WAR, a rash of institutionalized Rape in the US Military?

The Invisible War

From Oscar(R)- and Emmy(R)-nominated filmmaker Kirby Dick (This Film Is Not Yet Rated; Twist of Faith) comes The Invisible War, a groundbreaking investigative documentary about one of America’s most shameful and best kept secrets: the epidemic of rape within the U.S. military. The film paints a startling picture of the extent of the problem–today, a female soldier in combat zones is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. The Department of Defense estimates there were a staggering 19,000 violent sex crimes in the military in 2010. Twenty percent of all active-duty female soldiers are sexually assaulted. The Invisible War exposes the epidemic, breaking open one of the most under-reported stories of our generation, to the nation and the world.–from the filmmakers

Well that… troubles me, to put it lightly.

It does not however surprise me.

Unfortunately given the rash of atrocities associated with our military, particularly in the last dozen years, the tale THE INVISIBLE WAR has to tell while infuriating, is not surprising.

I have to think it has a lot to do with that rash of news stories about the military being in dire need of soldiers, and filling their ranks by any and all methods; some extremely suspect.

Here’s the thing, for every person who is in the military for the right reason and to do the right thing, you have three people who… in no manner, no way, and for no reason, should have passed the screening process and been given a gun, and put in a position to control others, much less in a position to end lives.

At the best of times, and to the best of people, such responsibility… is to be watched.

But seemingly, no one is watching anymore. So we end up with a rash of incidents about people who cannot even control themselves, being given a gun and sent all over the globe to control people and cultures that were old when America was but a dream. And doing it badly.

Again not all our soldiers, hopefully not the majority, but enough. Enough bad apples to spoil the pie.

And this isn’t just about our military over there. This is about our police force, and our prison guards here. This is about a culture of oppression and the cost we all pay for turning a blind eye to a police/slave state… it is about rule by terror. And the thing about terror, it doesn’t respect boundaries real well.

There’s no way to sow terror and horror, without reaping it. Without breathing it in. And when the mandate from the top, to this immature and often volatile young world police force is to, still, spread shock and awe… the results as we have seen, are not pretty.

When in our name, soldiers are given authority to terrorize and devalue the other with impunity, you get American torture prisons, you get American concentration camps, and eventually you get that behavior coming home to roost. You get the abhorrent methods used to pacify the resistance of those we disagree with abroad, brought home… to be used against those we disagree with here.

It becomes our method for relating to everything, and everyone. Even our own. Barbarism as national policy.

And maybe it’s even simpler than that. Maybe it’s an American male population that instead of being raised on movies about saving damsels in distress and opening doors for ladies, finds entertainment in movies and video games about women getting raped and tortured and killed. The truth is… we do not rise above our fictions, we become them. The fifties dreamt of space and the sixties saw us achieve it. In the last two decades the mass media of America has been about fear and terror and torture and mistrust, and we are living up… to those dreams.

Maybe in the mad rush to devalue the other, all we have done is learned to laughingly… devalue ourselves.

I don’t have the answers. But we better damn sure start looking for them. And it begins with asking the hard questions. Is our military doing right? If so, how? And if not, how? And what can we do, to make our soldiers not victims nor puppets nor fall-guys for an administration of madmen?

These are questions, especially as yet another election devoid of any real choice (you can pick corporate meat puppet 1 or corporate meat puppet 2) approaches, that we have to ask and answer.

Because the security and rights of anyone in this country, any soldier, any woman, any person, is tied directly to the amount of security we give even the least of us.

Our liberties as citizens are only as secure as the liberties of those we disagree with. is tied to how we treat enemy combatants, prisoners, foes (which as history teaches us, will be our governments friends tomorrow. Never hate for your government, because to your government it is all just a game of dollars and cents). Because the lines we cross cannot be easily uncrossed, and the human rights we ultimately eradicate when we violate the other… are our own.

Go see the trailer here, and see what questions and what answers you come up with.

Viewing the Present through the Past

I’m in the mood to rant. Those of you who’ve been with me a while know I do that from time to time. Some of you, the more insane, even love me for it. A few of you pat me on my head, and abide me my rants.

For those in the mood, not to love or to abide, then I would say…. run.

Come back tomorrow, the fit of truth will have passed, and I will be a cuddly clown again, cooing and capering for pleasures… cloying.

But right now, like Lovecraft’s mad apocryphal Arab, Abdul Alhazred, the fit is on me. Sometimes the blood seeps into my eyeballs, the blood of all those we are killing… and it is either speak or die.

So the words will have their say….

Everyday

Everyday I wake up, I ask myself if I’m on the side of the angels

Every single day.

I don’t take it for granted I am.

On the side of the angels I mean.

Most people take it for granted, that they were right yesterday, and will be right today and tomorrow. Particularly Americans. Americans are always so sure that they are right, adamant of their right before they do something so glaringly wrong. No nationality in the history of the world has ever been so documented in their lies not just against other nations, but lies against their own citizens. America has repeatedly and consistently been wrong about yesterday, yet continues to follow the same wrong path through ever more bloody todays and tomorrows.

As if true choice, and true change were concepts America steered away from long ago, and no longer even sees.

I don’t take it for granted that in the night, the causes I love have not been invaded by the causes I loathe, And the things I adore, have not been replaced by what I despise

That is the nature of evil

It sheds its skin

It is ever changing, ever moving

And you must be on guard

Ever on guard

And guided not by stagnant allegiances

But by the fruit of your present tree. That is the constant question you must challenge everyone and everything with. What are your actions sowing? If they are things you fear to show, and fear to acknowledge, then your fruit is rotten, and your tree withered.

And the only sane thing to do, is to cut down the old… and to plant a new tree.

But god… are we fond of the old.

I think of that generation that stood around when Christianity called burning people righteous.

I think of that generation that stood around when Christianity called slavery holy.

I think of that generation that stood around when Christianity called Jews an abomination.

I think of that generation that stood around when Christianity cheered killing Arabs to save them.

And of that generation, that is ever changing and always unchanged, I would say simply

If people die at the end of the day… perhaps it be not Christianity, but something else.

Something that wears the skin of righteousness but not the heart.

Perhaps Rome never relinquished herself to Daniel’s Christians

Perhaps Rome, the idealogical not the geographical, survived

The only way evil ever does endure

by hiding

by changing

by subverting

Like klansmen and scorned ex- slaveholders invading Lincoln’s party post the Reconstruction,

Making of the Republican party

Making of the Party of Tolerance and Abolition

That which it was not.

A party of bigotry and landholders (that is not an insult, that is history and verifiable fact in the wake of the reconstruction)

Perhaps in this same way Rome, the religion of Rome

Rome, the ancient

Survives under the guise of the religion it hated

Even to the naming of the days of the week

And not keeping the Sabbath

So Be ever mindful Christian soldiers

Marching as to war

That you have been

led astray
bamboozled
hoodwinked

And be wary
lest the cause you fight for my Christian Brothers
is the one you should be armed against