Red, White, and Blue, Especially Red
In 1975 I brought my father's silver-plated trumpet to the first day of sixth grade band class. Positioned at fourteenth chair, only Fritz Christensen occupied a lower position. We shared a music stand, played supporting and boring third part trumpet harmonies; unnoticed, occupying the middle of a mass of eleven and twelve year old musicians. Christensen, curious about my 1928 trumpet made in Elkhart, Indiana, thought it was cooler looking than his or any of the other rental instruments in our row of fifteen horn players. Fine gold work decorates the trumpet's bell area. Just now I tried to make a musical sound come out of it but produced only air passing through curving metal. With practice I could make it sound at least all right again, as I was able to do by 1977 when I was first chair.
Another memory from that time involves the stunning popularity of Disco. I had no direct experience of the musical genre other than hearing excerpts on the radio and seeing TV shows trying out Disco-themed episodes, like the one on Wonder Woman guest starring Wolfman Jack as a DJ working in a club where a hotshot Disco dancer is also a mind control specialist--a typically bizarre Wonder Woman plot. The Disco dancer, dressed in a white suit like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, does his mind fucks in a private mirrored room at the discotheque, a disorienting space where a victim's brain finds itself unmoored from stable life experience, guided by a malign mind.
Such mindfuckery parallels CIA experiments from the 1950s and 1960s and probably later, too. When Wonder Woman aired from 1975 to 1979 (a period when my pre-teen and early teen self was drawn, with accompanying erections, to the show's star, Lynda Carter), the CIA was in Congress's doghouse. President Carter, seeking to curtail their illegal clandestine activities, succeeded only in making the spooks more underhanded until they burst into multiple horrible actions during the Reagan years.
Congressional investigations in the mid-1970s into CIA activities revealed an astonishing record of criminal behavior, ranging from the psychopathic (spiking random strangers' drinks with LSD and monitoring them to see what would happen) to the ludicrous (trying to assassinate Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar; cartoon style, I guess).
That nefarious organizations and individuals would seek to control minds and commit a host of unlawful activities against the public for criminal reasons played out honestly sometimes in 1970s American entertainment. Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford as a CIA analyst targeted by his own employers, is not a film friendly to the intelligence community and would not be made during these days of intelligence agency-friendly movies and television. In the 1970s, human experience in America, generally, was depicted as gray, rather than red, white, and blue.
Diana Prince (Wonder Woman in human form) works for the IADC (Inter-Agency Defense Command), and also works for Naval Intelligence with the rank of Commander. She's a spook. IADC coordinates the work of other intelligence agencies (including, I infer, the CIA) but is separate from them. In the show, villains sometimes do the terrible acts that U.S. intelligence agencies really do. Apart from the comic book fantasy aspect of an immortal super-being with extraordinary powers, the other fantasy in Wonder Woman consists of the pretense that an organization like the IADC would be benign. This debatable idea, of course, is reflected in today's sanitized TV dramas about the FBI, Navy Seals, and the police. There are no shows in which a police character murders an unarmed Black man and then doesn't do time for it. I have yet to see a show about ICE agents putting children in concentration camps.
If the IADC were to exist, what would it actually do? And would Diana Prince, presented as she is as a force for good, want to have anything to do with a secret spy agency concerned with collating data concerning numerous accounts of execrable behaviors and activities committed by the CIA and other agencies?
I never played "Taps" on my trumpet, the song sending soldiers to their dreams, the slumberous world where they often don't escape what they've done and experienced in war theaters.
Vic Neptune
Monday, January 21, 2019
Thursday, January 17, 2019
Transparency
Government Shutdown, Trump's new reality show. He expects hundreds of thousands of federal employees to continue showing up to work, but without pay. I guess it's deferred payment, but it means people who need them aren't getting food stamps. It means the National Parks are getting trashed with some likely illegal hunting going on because there are no Rangers to stop them.
I've heard talk of a possible TSA strike. That would shut down air travel in the United States. It would probably get the government going again.
The shutdown is Trump's play at getting funding for his Wall. Schumer, the senator from New York who works for Wall Street interests, offered $1.7 billion for the construction, but that's well short of the likely $20 plus billion it will probably cost, if it ever gets into the ground. All eight of the wall section prototypes inspected by Trump, while wearing one of his profit-making Make America Great Again baseball caps, failed, as in people can foil all eight of these possible walls. One of them is vulnerable to a metal-cutting saw. There are hardware stores in Central America.
Absurdity, but with people suffering. Making people work for free is a form of slavery. No one in the news media, as far as I know, has made that connection in this case. The government is referred to, in relation to the shutdown, as "dysfunctional," which can mean "not operating normally or properly." Congress and the Executive Branch in their normal practice don't represent the people so this really is normal. It certainly isn't proper, though. Theoretically, our government is supposed to help people in need, from great needs to minor ones. Tax returns will be affected. We might not get our refund checks for a while, along a period when we'll probably need them most because the fucking government is shut down due to the incompetence of Trump and much of Congress. They all still get paid, too. There's just no end to how those motherfuckers can add new twists to their psychopathological behavior. To be a politician is to serve the richer.
I read an illustrated piece in some internet news service about Melania Trump's "creepy" red Christmas trees decorating part of the White House last month. Lacking ornamentation, they're red Christmas trees of a shade slightly lighter than the color of fresh blood. Interpretations of her decorating tastes can't explain anything. Why she does what she does when cameras are nearby is anyone's guess. She went to visit Central American migrant children in their prisons near the border, was shown kids who were in the best shape--not the ones neutralized with anti-psychotic drugs--and she was photographed getting into her plane wearing a jacket with the words, I Really Don't Care.
Take her at her word. After all, she married a demented pig for his money and then had to become First Lady, a highly scrutinized position in society. She feels pressure to be a friendly face for America to enjoy, the softer side of Donald, perhaps. She doesn't want to do anything as First Lady, however. She took on the cause of heading an anti-bullying campaign in connection with something called Be Best. The bullying irony may have been her way of sending a message to her husband, but it obviously didn't influence him. Be Best seeks to bring about well-being in youths, including the discouraging of drug use. Cyberbullying is also on her mind as a serious problem. Once again, her husband is a cyberbully, but she's directing her attention and the occasional speech at children. President Trump also may be a child whose brain stopped growing at age six. It would explain a lot.
Mr. Center of Attention, thinks the world revolves around him. His wife is a trophy, someone to use during the campaign as a goad to an opponent, like when he compared Melania to Mrs. Ted Cruz.
Trump in that tweet was saying, "Which one would you rather bang, America?"
Cruz, outraged, spoke of the vileness of Trump bringing his opponent's wife into the race, and in such a crude, insulting manner. He was right about that, but Cruz later became a Trump ally, never explaining how he managed to swallow his vomit and cooperate with the Republican nominee.
I saw recent video of Cruz, sporting a beard to look more serious, a wise statesman who in college wanted to ban sex toys on campus, standing by Trump in McAllen, Texas, home to thousands of illegal immigrants locked up in concentration camps and cages in ICE-run facilities where they sometimes drop dead for want of proper doctoring and needed drugs. Or they get sexually abused by guards. Heartwarmingly, the for profit prison industry is doing good business along the border.
Melania was a model. One gossipy website refers to her as a "former D List model." Pictures offered of the 1990s Melania, before she dated Trump, look very similar to modeling shots. I can't tell if she was bad at the job or not. She possessed that "I may have nothing to say, but that could mean I'm not a thinker."
Yet, she speaks four or five languages, three or four more than I do. If we could hear her interviewed in Slovenian (she's from Slovenia, where the band Laibach is from, and Mojca Zugna, bassist of Clan of Xymox too), accurately translated, get to know her in her original language, she might become human, instead of a gossip object.
Entertainment news outlets and the "serious" news spend time on nonsense about Melania Trump. She's the Marie Antoinette in this scenario of government shutdown.
Vic Neptune
Government Shutdown, Trump's new reality show. He expects hundreds of thousands of federal employees to continue showing up to work, but without pay. I guess it's deferred payment, but it means people who need them aren't getting food stamps. It means the National Parks are getting trashed with some likely illegal hunting going on because there are no Rangers to stop them.
I've heard talk of a possible TSA strike. That would shut down air travel in the United States. It would probably get the government going again.
The shutdown is Trump's play at getting funding for his Wall. Schumer, the senator from New York who works for Wall Street interests, offered $1.7 billion for the construction, but that's well short of the likely $20 plus billion it will probably cost, if it ever gets into the ground. All eight of the wall section prototypes inspected by Trump, while wearing one of his profit-making Make America Great Again baseball caps, failed, as in people can foil all eight of these possible walls. One of them is vulnerable to a metal-cutting saw. There are hardware stores in Central America.
Absurdity, but with people suffering. Making people work for free is a form of slavery. No one in the news media, as far as I know, has made that connection in this case. The government is referred to, in relation to the shutdown, as "dysfunctional," which can mean "not operating normally or properly." Congress and the Executive Branch in their normal practice don't represent the people so this really is normal. It certainly isn't proper, though. Theoretically, our government is supposed to help people in need, from great needs to minor ones. Tax returns will be affected. We might not get our refund checks for a while, along a period when we'll probably need them most because the fucking government is shut down due to the incompetence of Trump and much of Congress. They all still get paid, too. There's just no end to how those motherfuckers can add new twists to their psychopathological behavior. To be a politician is to serve the richer.
I read an illustrated piece in some internet news service about Melania Trump's "creepy" red Christmas trees decorating part of the White House last month. Lacking ornamentation, they're red Christmas trees of a shade slightly lighter than the color of fresh blood. Interpretations of her decorating tastes can't explain anything. Why she does what she does when cameras are nearby is anyone's guess. She went to visit Central American migrant children in their prisons near the border, was shown kids who were in the best shape--not the ones neutralized with anti-psychotic drugs--and she was photographed getting into her plane wearing a jacket with the words, I Really Don't Care.
Take her at her word. After all, she married a demented pig for his money and then had to become First Lady, a highly scrutinized position in society. She feels pressure to be a friendly face for America to enjoy, the softer side of Donald, perhaps. She doesn't want to do anything as First Lady, however. She took on the cause of heading an anti-bullying campaign in connection with something called Be Best. The bullying irony may have been her way of sending a message to her husband, but it obviously didn't influence him. Be Best seeks to bring about well-being in youths, including the discouraging of drug use. Cyberbullying is also on her mind as a serious problem. Once again, her husband is a cyberbully, but she's directing her attention and the occasional speech at children. President Trump also may be a child whose brain stopped growing at age six. It would explain a lot.
Mr. Center of Attention, thinks the world revolves around him. His wife is a trophy, someone to use during the campaign as a goad to an opponent, like when he compared Melania to Mrs. Ted Cruz.
Trump in that tweet was saying, "Which one would you rather bang, America?"
Cruz, outraged, spoke of the vileness of Trump bringing his opponent's wife into the race, and in such a crude, insulting manner. He was right about that, but Cruz later became a Trump ally, never explaining how he managed to swallow his vomit and cooperate with the Republican nominee.
I saw recent video of Cruz, sporting a beard to look more serious, a wise statesman who in college wanted to ban sex toys on campus, standing by Trump in McAllen, Texas, home to thousands of illegal immigrants locked up in concentration camps and cages in ICE-run facilities where they sometimes drop dead for want of proper doctoring and needed drugs. Or they get sexually abused by guards. Heartwarmingly, the for profit prison industry is doing good business along the border.
Melania was a model. One gossipy website refers to her as a "former D List model." Pictures offered of the 1990s Melania, before she dated Trump, look very similar to modeling shots. I can't tell if she was bad at the job or not. She possessed that "I may have nothing to say, but that could mean I'm not a thinker."
Yet, she speaks four or five languages, three or four more than I do. If we could hear her interviewed in Slovenian (she's from Slovenia, where the band Laibach is from, and Mojca Zugna, bassist of Clan of Xymox too), accurately translated, get to know her in her original language, she might become human, instead of a gossip object.
Entertainment news outlets and the "serious" news spend time on nonsense about Melania Trump. She's the Marie Antoinette in this scenario of government shutdown.
Vic Neptune
Tuesday, January 1, 2019
The Thick Blue Line
At the end of each year, Americans focus on New York's Times Square, a place resembling an amusement park for advertisements. Countdown to the New Year culminates with the slow drop of a huge lit-up ball. Spectators kiss, cheer, and grin at news cameras. Bands play, Grammy Award-winning singers belt out their songs into the coldness. No one from CNN or NBC mentions the problems of the world. It's a time of hope and mostly of forgetting, the latter a brain failure many Americans regard as a strength as they "look forward," or "move forward."
On December 29, 2017, Colleen Long of Associated Press wrote an article printed in USA Today entitled, "Tightest security ever for New Year's in New York's Times Square after deadly attacks"
She reminds readers of that year's mayhem committed in New York by an ISIS-inspired man who drove down a bike path, killing eight people; a man setting off a bomb in the subway, "injuring only himself"; and "Times Square itself...targeted in May by a man, said by police to be high on drugs, who drove through crowds of pedestrians, killing an 18 year old tourist from Michigan."
"Those attacks," Long remarks, "were reminders that New York City's massive security apparatus can only do so much, but city officials insisted they will be able to keep people safe on New Year's Eve."
"'The fact is, they will absolutely be safe,' said Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat."
It's a fact!
For the event, police would employ "vapor wake dogs...trained to sniff out trace amounts of explosive particles that trail behind someone carrying a bomb."
The 125 parking garages in the vicinity would be sealed off, high rise hotels (in the aftermath of the Las Vegas mass shooting) would be infested with detectives.
Police Commissioner James O'Neill: "This is going to be one of the most well-policed, best-protected events at one of the safest venues in the entire world."
An area twenty-two blocks long and three blocks wide sealed off, a thousand security cameras, sand-filled garbage trucks blocking off the area.
"Partygoers entering that secure zone will be screened at a dozen access points where they will encounter metal detectors, the vapor wake dogs and officers with portable radiation detectors. Large backpacks are not allowed. Small bags will be searched...From there, people will go through a second round of security screening when they enter spectator pens where they are essentially confined for the night (italics mine). People who leave the pens aren't allowed to re-enter--so no bathroom breaks."
Mariah Carey and other popular performers would then play music to a crowd composed of willing prisoners of the national security state, content to give up their freedom of movement for a night in order to participate in an annual experiment run by the New York Police Department and Homeland Security to test their crowd-monitoring equipment and population control techniques, so that when they deploy these methods against protestors they'll have much to analyze.
Donald Trump, during his campaign and also when he speaks at rallies as president, has news media personnel confined to pens. None of the journalists seem to think this is outrageous; they go along with it, it's their assignment to cover the man. Similarly, when it's New Year's Eve and the ball's going to drop, musicians and singers blasting the air with feel-good vibrations, citizens willingly subject themselves to examination by the police, sniffed at by specially trained dogs, all inside of a public space turned into a panopticon in America's largest city.
Yesterday, my area's Noon news program aired an unquestioning segment on Times Square New Year's Eve 2018, dealing with precautions and measures taken by the NYPD and whatever other agencies not exactly protecting us but actually monitoring us. In addition to the crazy shit mentioned above in Colleen Long's article about 2017, NYPD authorities now boast of their use of drones as being one of the new technologies keeping Times Square citizen goofballs "safe." We're being conditioned to believe that robots flying overhead, spying on us, is something to feel good about. It's one step from armed drones flying over America being regarded as something necessary to keep us safe.
Long's article amounts to dry reporting. We don't know what she thinks of the batshit crazy things she's writing about. Given Trump's victory over journalists when he first had them confined to pens and they accepted that, I'll guess that it's likely Colleen Long of the AP would step into a pen at a Trump rally and think nothing of it. Jimmy Dore, comedian and YouTube independent news commentator, reported on a Trump rally in 2016. Penned, he tried to get reactions to being confined from other journalists, but they ignored him.
Submission to authoritarianism is normalized in a land providing Mariah Carey along with vapor wake dogs, police snipers, total surveillance, and full bladders in spectator pens. Happy New Year to a Sick Fuck Society run by cops and other creatures addicted to power, profiting from an idea of security manufactured by them as a supposed need.
Vic Neptune
At the end of each year, Americans focus on New York's Times Square, a place resembling an amusement park for advertisements. Countdown to the New Year culminates with the slow drop of a huge lit-up ball. Spectators kiss, cheer, and grin at news cameras. Bands play, Grammy Award-winning singers belt out their songs into the coldness. No one from CNN or NBC mentions the problems of the world. It's a time of hope and mostly of forgetting, the latter a brain failure many Americans regard as a strength as they "look forward," or "move forward."
On December 29, 2017, Colleen Long of Associated Press wrote an article printed in USA Today entitled, "Tightest security ever for New Year's in New York's Times Square after deadly attacks"
She reminds readers of that year's mayhem committed in New York by an ISIS-inspired man who drove down a bike path, killing eight people; a man setting off a bomb in the subway, "injuring only himself"; and "Times Square itself...targeted in May by a man, said by police to be high on drugs, who drove through crowds of pedestrians, killing an 18 year old tourist from Michigan."
"Those attacks," Long remarks, "were reminders that New York City's massive security apparatus can only do so much, but city officials insisted they will be able to keep people safe on New Year's Eve."
"'The fact is, they will absolutely be safe,' said Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat."
It's a fact!
For the event, police would employ "vapor wake dogs...trained to sniff out trace amounts of explosive particles that trail behind someone carrying a bomb."
The 125 parking garages in the vicinity would be sealed off, high rise hotels (in the aftermath of the Las Vegas mass shooting) would be infested with detectives.
Police Commissioner James O'Neill: "This is going to be one of the most well-policed, best-protected events at one of the safest venues in the entire world."
An area twenty-two blocks long and three blocks wide sealed off, a thousand security cameras, sand-filled garbage trucks blocking off the area.
"Partygoers entering that secure zone will be screened at a dozen access points where they will encounter metal detectors, the vapor wake dogs and officers with portable radiation detectors. Large backpacks are not allowed. Small bags will be searched...From there, people will go through a second round of security screening when they enter spectator pens where they are essentially confined for the night (italics mine). People who leave the pens aren't allowed to re-enter--so no bathroom breaks."
Mariah Carey and other popular performers would then play music to a crowd composed of willing prisoners of the national security state, content to give up their freedom of movement for a night in order to participate in an annual experiment run by the New York Police Department and Homeland Security to test their crowd-monitoring equipment and population control techniques, so that when they deploy these methods against protestors they'll have much to analyze.
Donald Trump, during his campaign and also when he speaks at rallies as president, has news media personnel confined to pens. None of the journalists seem to think this is outrageous; they go along with it, it's their assignment to cover the man. Similarly, when it's New Year's Eve and the ball's going to drop, musicians and singers blasting the air with feel-good vibrations, citizens willingly subject themselves to examination by the police, sniffed at by specially trained dogs, all inside of a public space turned into a panopticon in America's largest city.
Yesterday, my area's Noon news program aired an unquestioning segment on Times Square New Year's Eve 2018, dealing with precautions and measures taken by the NYPD and whatever other agencies not exactly protecting us but actually monitoring us. In addition to the crazy shit mentioned above in Colleen Long's article about 2017, NYPD authorities now boast of their use of drones as being one of the new technologies keeping Times Square citizen goofballs "safe." We're being conditioned to believe that robots flying overhead, spying on us, is something to feel good about. It's one step from armed drones flying over America being regarded as something necessary to keep us safe.
Long's article amounts to dry reporting. We don't know what she thinks of the batshit crazy things she's writing about. Given Trump's victory over journalists when he first had them confined to pens and they accepted that, I'll guess that it's likely Colleen Long of the AP would step into a pen at a Trump rally and think nothing of it. Jimmy Dore, comedian and YouTube independent news commentator, reported on a Trump rally in 2016. Penned, he tried to get reactions to being confined from other journalists, but they ignored him.
Submission to authoritarianism is normalized in a land providing Mariah Carey along with vapor wake dogs, police snipers, total surveillance, and full bladders in spectator pens. Happy New Year to a Sick Fuck Society run by cops and other creatures addicted to power, profiting from an idea of security manufactured by them as a supposed need.
Vic Neptune
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