Podcast of the Day : 11 O’CLOCK COMICS #320

11 O’CLOCK COMICS #320 – Guest host James Gonzales brings the knowledge in this informative and fun disection of everything from comics to rap to Elvis to parenting. I found his breakdown on his approach to parenting… pretty darn impressive.

Just a great revolving discussion with him and the regulars of Vince, David and Jason; to accompany you through your day.

“And it’s a hard pill, where you’re no longer important to marketers, no one wants your attention anymore… it’s a loss of virility to a degree and I think they are lashing out against that, the [loss of] the time when they were iimportant to comics. And using it [that lashing out] in a very transparent way to try to sell their comics.” Discussing Chuck Dixon and Paul Rivoche’s article in Wall Street Journal

Happy Holidays, Merry Mass of Christ and Improbable Heights

‘When you strip everything away from Batman, you are left with someone who doesn’t want to see anyone die.’ — KINGDOM COME by Alex Ross and Mark Waid

When I think of humanity in general, and the holiday season in particular it strikes me that that should be our goal. The pursuit of a world, where nobody dies in vain.

But the reality, particularly in America, this time of year is that with the eyes of the media diverted; government sponsored mass-murders actually ramp up, bombings ramp up (now of the drone and unmanned variety, machines murdering men.. what an unholy road we walk), the terrorism of the rich… ramps up.

I’ll not forget the media celebrating the death of Bin Laden. Death and Murder and Torture are never things to celebrate, no matter the justification.

While I am savage enough to know that killing may be a necessary evil, I am human and moral enough to know it is never a joy, never a victory, never a cause for celebration.

Be the murdered Bin Laden, or Hitler or insert bogieman here, bringing murder to murderers is never anything less than a soiling, and a failure, necessary though it may be, it is a failure of reason. And as such is a solemn time, not a glorious one.

Because to do otherwise, to take joy from death, and celebration from degradation and horror… is to devoid you of moral high-ground, is to make you (in ways stark and true) worse than those you would revile, worse than your Hitlers and Bin-Ladens. It makes you a lynchmob, a coward, and an opportunist of carnage.

We must strive to be better than that, otherwise your protestations of Christianity, and Holy Nights, and piety are just lies, are hypocrisy and mendacity most foul, that you use to conceal your roman desire to see people bleed and suffer and die.

You become that lowest form of life, a gibbering coward among cowards, you become nothing more than a grasping claw, a rolling eye, and a screeching mouth… in the creature we call lynchmob. And there is no lower, and ultimately, more inhuman form of life.

Our goal therefore must be to reject that, to reject the easy lies and the easy hates, and work toward this wildly improbable world where no one dies in vain.

But humanity’s very existence is an improbability, so we can bend that already fanciful existence to either improbable heights of good, or improbable depths of evil. We just have to pick a direction.

‘We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. ‘ — John Fitzgerald Kennedy when imploring men into space

Here, on this holiday season, more fiction than fact, ‘goodwill to all’; look into yourself and find what is hypocrisy, what is lies, and find it in yourself to make truths, and truly believe and act on this idea…. of a time of peace.

Here endeth the lesson.

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. 🙂

THE WELL DvD Review! and boycotting KFC and TACO BELL!

THE WELL- Gripping, tense, powerful, exhilarating, and even surprising are all words that can be leveled at this unfortunately virtually unknown film, released in 1951 to general acclaim.

While film classes teach of Fritz Lang’s FURY and William Wellman’s THE OX-BOW INCIDENT, the film THE WELL by co-directors (and co-writers) Leo C. Popkin and Russell Rouse (of DOA fame) doesn’t even register on the radar of most (even classic) movie fans, which is a shame, because it’s every bit as good as those heralded classics.

It’s filmed in a wonderful experimental manner that veers from cinema verite to stylish crane shots, and filled with engaging performances by both seasoned and first time actors. And another strength is its large cast filled with many fine actors of color, in non-stereotypical roles, something rare in the 1950s, and unfortunately and shamefully, only more rare in 2011.

But thankfully through the magic of DVD, a new generation gets to view this exemplary film, which is beyond its fiction, a great historical record, snapshot, of the times and the tempests of an America of over 60 years ago. A great portrait of the things we’ve gained and the things we’ve lost in the fire, in those 60 years from then to now.

It’s a great film about mob rule, and how thin the veneer of civilization is, and touches on topics of bigotry, perversion, sex crimes, suspicion, violence, and the loss of reason… and the finding of it.

It would unfortunately be Leo C. Popkin’s last film as Director, but what a one to end on.

A great movie that everyone should have in their collection. Grade: B+.

Buy your copy here: The Well

This review is brought to you by the boycott KFC (KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN)/TACO BELL campaign.

The food chain company has its corporate headquarters in an aggressively maintained, completely segregated town. And considering the bulk of their revenue comes from people of color, that’s just not kosher.

So do your part and spread the word, and boycott KFC and TACO BELL. I know there are times when you’re on the road and they may be the only game in town, so of course do what you have to do. But make that the exception and not the rule. The rules should be to avoid doing business with companies that denigrate you.

To avoid doing business with companies that have not learned the lesson… of the Well.

On Muammar Khadafi, Grapes of Wrath, American Liberty and Rome

Henry Fonda/Tom Joad:

Maybe it’s like Casey says. A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then –

Jane Darwell/Ma:

Then what, Tom?

Henry Fonda/Tom Joad:

I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look – wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be there in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be there in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they built – I’ll be there, too

— Grapes of Wrath

Iraq, Afghanistan, Liberia, Haiti, now Libya… but a few names on that list of Dark Countries that America has been toppling like dominoes. Invasion, bombing, mass murder, terrorism of the rich… on an unprecedented scale, since just prior to the start of the 21st century.

“We need breeding room” Adolf said then, and the talking puppets of Bush and Obama have said now.

The last time a country had killed this many nations this fast, we called it Rome or Nazi Germany. But today they own the press, so we call it nothing at all.

What does it mean when the most terrorist nation on the planet calls other nations terrorist?

It means they resist a bully. They harbor in their hearts difference, a different religion, a different style of government, a different people, a different value structure, and most damning of all a non-business friendly structure, ie they don’t want their natural resources exploited by outside forces.

Enter trumped up reasons to invade.

Enter the crusades 21st century style. Rawanda, Kosova, the Congo region. Uprisings of surprisingly well backed, and brutal (mostly Christian) factions in heretofore relatively homogeneous non-Christian nations.

The use of child soldiers to declare war on their own. The destruction of social order. The plunging into chaos of an entire region.

And you follow the money of all these bloody uprisings, and it leads unsurprisingly back to people not of the countries pushed into endless civil war. And the countries we can’t get to destroy themselves, quick or fast enough, we move in and do the job, with patriotic flags a flying, and to the swell of horns and drums… while the blood and monuments of people older than American liberty, stains the sand and veldt.

Tripoli has fallen.

The greatest libraries and seat of learning in the world. Delicate architecture and cultural artifacts, fragile beauties irreplaceable in the history of the world, blown to hell by planes without the decency to even have pilots, and offshore barrages from monstrous warships at sea.

We are killing indiscriminately people we don’t even have the courage to see. People we might actually like, and smile with and laugh with and love upon the seeing.

Whole blood lines, and families, and castes of people, as fragile and irreplaceable as their architecture, and language and culture… blown to hell by the Barbarians at their gate.

It’s empire building 101.

They say they’ve killed Muammar Khadafi.

The new Rome says he was a bad man.

An evil man.

And Rome would not lie to you.

But if I may, This is what I know about Muammar Khadafi…

I know that when the new Rome was sicking dogs and fire hoses on people of color it was Khadafi who spoke out an offered not just words but financial and cultural support to Rome’s criminals of the time such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

But this same Rome, that still holds slavery and their apartheid regime of the early 20th century as not a mistake, but a lost but not relinquished battle, this new Rome, sire to Israel, this new Rome says Muammar Khadafi was a bad man.

And the new Rome would not lie to you.

But with all this blood on their hands, perhaps their definition of good… is in question.

By the fruit will you know the tree, and by god what a bloody, crippled harvest has been the fruit of the new Rome.

Perhaps their definition of good and evil… should be questioned. Before any more irreplaceable men and nations lose their lives… for breathing room.

And perhaps… before we lose our souls.

Just Say No to WINDOWS 8!!! or Star Trek, Al Capone, Linux, Apple and Terrorism!

The snazzy logo courtesy of LinuxBird here.

“The acquisition of wealth is not our prime motivation, we seek to better ourselves.”

That paraphrasing of Patrick Stewart’s dialogue from the film STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT, is central to Gene Roddenberry’s enduring mythos, his conceit of a world… beyond greed.

I think as mission statements go, as core beliefs go… that is as good a one for the human race as I can think of.

“The acquisition of wealth is not our prime motivation, we seek to better ourselves.”

However with the move to an industrial society at the launch of the 20th century, and the gutting of the previous agrarian/barter model, the acquisition of wealth, the consolidation of wealth, became the driving theme of the 20th century.

And it’s no coincidence that the 20th century also became the bloodiest in the history of the world, though clearly the 21st century is on fast track for supplanting it. Never in the history of the world, have so many, died so quickly, from nuclear weapons, to biological weapons, to push button wars, and all of it driven by the 20th century deification of money.

Not to say money is not felt throughout other centuries, but not to the global, and near religious personification, that the pursuit of wealth became with the 20th century, it has become idol absolute of an entire world.

But the 21st century with concepts such as peer to peer, open source, social networking, was poised to create a model for the 21st century. A model that akin to Roddenberry’s dream, could very much usurp the industrial model, just as the industrial model had usurped the Agrarian model.

The age of technology, open technology, had it, and has it in its grasp, to bring us more in line with this slightly Utopian concept, of life lived for improvement and discovery, rather than accumulation and subjugation.

But the dinosaurs, The Microsofts, the RIAAs, the Sonys, the Disneys, have co-opted, and outlawed, and sued, and bullied and terrorized the new hope, all so they may maintain… the old terror.

Scared Dinosaurs, holding humanity back… from visionary new days. Companies,courts, and politicians… and their paid enforcement arms, all working so hard to hold onto the bloody old, all working so hard not to evolve.

Microsoft and their setting up of the DMCA, and their last couple of years of buying their way into the open-source movement, worming their way into ‘helping’ with the open-source movement, particularly Linux, all so they could destroy and extort the movement from within.

You see this on the mobile side, where their various mobile Window initiatives cannot compete with Apple or Android. They now are extorting money from companies that do utilize Android on the basis of ridiculous and innovation killing software patents.

(It’s largely recognized that Software Patents are a lunacy that need to be done away with)

It is the act of a gangster and a thug, and if IBM was allowed to act like this in the 80s there would have been no Microsoft and no Apple, because these actions exterminate free enterprise and innovation.

Microsoft has spent the last twenty years burning every bridge and every freedom, that they themselves utilized in order to be innovative and initially successful, and now completely outlawing those liberties, indeed those necessities, for companies other than themselves.

Microsoft’s time has passed. They are a dinosaur using terror and intimidation to extort customers they can no longer earn with quality. They are no different than a 20th century Capone, selling liquor and protection at the barrel of a gun.

And Windows 7 was an improvement over Vista, they had ‘borrowed’ enough of the concepts and look from other operating systems to make it one. But that said, Windows 7 was and is still inferior to any half decent Linux Distribution.

So just as they are committing extortion against Android on the mobile front, on the Desktop/Server front they are dealing with the brilliance and the growth of Linux, that is now ready for prime-time, ready to be the next big thing, to replace the sick, twisted, decaying, and immoral dinosaur that Microsoft has become…. they are dealing with this fresh beautiful new thing, by basically collaborating with hardware vendors to KILL the very ability to install Linux operating systems on your computer. They are so afraid of Linux they want to make it impossible for you to even install it on YOUR computer.

It is so sad and pathetic, that it is almost funny.

Again what if IBM had done that to them, Microsoft and Apple? We would, as a society, be the poorer for it. And we are going to be the poorer for it if we allow Microsoft to continue to get away with dismantling any innovative idea or company they can’t compete with.

Can you understand? For Microsoft to do this, for a tech, for a software person, for someone with a rudimentary concept of how companies like Microsoft and Apple came to be, it is a betrayal of not just everything that is the technology movement, it is an attack on innovation and free enterprise that must stand as one of the most blatant and disgusting that I have ever witnessed.

It is a crime. As great a crime, in its way, as US drone airplanes killing indiscriminatingly in darker lands, so that a white press can gloat about another bounty collected, another arab, another nigger dead.

Though they don’t dress it, this 21st century crusade, in those crude terms, any more then Microsoft dresses its actions as what it is, a bloody monopoly committed to eradicating your option to choose.

“Pay us or else!” That’s how business talks to consumers in the 21st century. And it is a form of war. Less bloody to be sure, but the repercussions of what it can mean to freedoms subtle and gross… is staggering.

And I… am not having it.

I haven’t used Windows in my personal computer in 3 to 4 years. I fix Windows machines and work on them for other people, but for myself Linux is the only OS/distribution I deal with. I love the freedom of it, the very thing Microsoft is working so hard to legalize and sue and intimidate away.

I’m not going back to Microsoft. And to those companies that they are intimidating, extorting, bullying, I can only tell you what I would tell anyone being bullied… you start letting people push you, and they are never going to stop.

You have to stand against them.

And maybe you win, and maybe you lose. But you teach them to pay for every foot of ground. You give them a bloody nose, and win, lose or draw… it will give them pause.

Microsoft is a pathetic, barren, immoral, and worst of all inferior and scared technology company, and they are standing in the way of a better life…for everyone.

They are protecting the rotting, diseased old, when what it is time for… is the new.

And if you’re a company, and have been on the Microsoft merry-go-round it’s scary to consider getting off of it, but it is infinitely scarier to stay at the mercy of an immoral monopoly.

There are viable open source alternatives to Microsoft’s over priced crap.

Explore them.

Not only for your own sake, but for something companies start out believing in, but lose along the way, for the sake… of progress.

That’s an idea that Microsoft gave up on, a long time ago.

“The acquisition of wealth is not our prime motivation, we seek to better ourselves.”

It’s the only goal, that will save us from all this blood.

If you’re a subscriber to this blog and want help ditching Microsoft and finding something that works for you, reach out to me… and we’ll find an answer that works for you.

We’ll be a new age Untouchables, facing the tyranny that is Microsoft’s Capone.

And maybe we win, and maybe we lose. But my God, we’ll give them reason to pause.

Here endeth the Lesson.

Suicide Bombings vs Carpet Bombings and Institutionalized Slavery or Merry Christmas to You

Well the holiday season is upon us, which generally just means an increase in the number of places the US is bombing, or funding the bombing of. “Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men” indeed.

I was talking to coworkers and it always amazes me how much people are products of propaganda.

They are horrified by this talk of suicide bombers, horror being an understandable reaction to all violence, but they are quick to be dismissive of the act, to presume that it is the act of monsters or the insane, and that is a misleading conclusion to jump to.

It is a reaction, this suicide bombing. It is a reaction, an extreme one, but a reaction none the less. And an extreme reaction, must have an extreme impetus.

Suicide Bombing, if the terrorism of the poor, is a response to increasingly horrendous oppression and carpet bombings of whole cities, which is the terrorism of the rich. Remote controlled planes that drop fire from the sky, and kill men, women, children, dogs, goats, insects, flora, everything. Indiscrimiate death.

Which is the more extreme form of terrorism?

A 16 year old boy or girl, straps on a bomb, not for fun or kicks, but because they rather die throwing a stone at their tormentors, then live as slaves. They turn themselves into a human bomb, because their death is the only value you have left them in their life.

I understand about not wanting to be a slave. And I understand about, if you have to fall down, wanting to fall down going forward.

Not monsters. Not insane.

People who have only their deaths, to generate any attention on their lives.

You want to end suicide bombing? You want to end the terrorism of the poor? Then you have to stop the terrorism of the rich… this carpet bombing, this blockading, this new age of apartheid.

Cause I’m never going to ask anyone to live on their knees. And I’m never going to side with anyone who forces people there.