Saintperle

Gee, Newt -- you'd think you would have learned it way long ago

2012-01-26T19:18:00.000-08:00

You've had your bloated face on TV screens long enough to know the universal TV adage:

Be careful the asses you kick on the way up --
Same ones you'll have to kiss on the way down.

(In other words, when you come back after the people you worked with threw your nasty ass out -- it's really unlikely you'll make it if you come back in kicking asses again.)

A comment on the Republican presidential candidate wannabe's

2011-12-27T17:21:00.000-08:00

Howard Luck Gossage

He made so many witty, apt, and pithy observations that he often gave credit for his quotes to other people.

He died in 1969 and made the following comment at dinner in 1963, but it's exactly the same comment he might make today looking at the lineup of Republican wannabe's (actually, he'd probably make a wittier comment, but since he's not here, this will have to serve):

Look at the Names -- Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann, Ron Paul, Jon Huntsman, Tim Pawlenty... and I can see him sitting there, looking over his reading glasses and saying about any one of them:

"That man is trying to work his way up
to being a horse's ass...
But he hasn't got what it takes."

(Except for Ms Bachmann, of course, in which case it would be

"That woman is trying to work her way up ... But she hasn't got what it takes."

A difference between spirituality and religion -- BLACK CROSS

2011-12-23T22:58:00.000-08:00

Spirituality enlarges the soul, religion squashes it.
Spirituality is a magnificent tree.
Religion is cutting down and killing the tree to make a religious symbol.

With all the tiresome bullshit spouted this time of year by people who own stock in one form of cosmic hooey or another, I think of this poem often.

And in the neverending election year, people who want POWER all brag about how well they can kneel at the cross.
Fuck that -- I don';t want to hear about it -- that's THEIR business and none of mine and it is NOT an acceptable alternative to qualify a person to receive our trust.

This point has been said better by others.
This poem is one of the ones that says it better than I can.

I first heard this poem in 1963 on a record by Lord Buckley.

The poem -- Black Cross -- was written and published in 1948 by Joseph S. Newman in a collection of poems entitled It Could Be Verse. The poet ran a sporting goods store in Cleveland, and wrote and published both as a poet and as a local journalist. (He was the uncle of the actor Paul Newman.)

Lord Buckley may have met Newman at some time. He recorded two of the other poems in his collection, Jehova and Finnegan and Leviathan and another The Shah's Embroidered Pants that was not in the book.

Black Cross was also performed by Bob Dylan and can be found on bootleg recordings.

Attempts to put dialect into print is primitive and outdated, and the following is as clear an example of that as one might find --- but despite that, the meaning -- the essence --- comes through unscarred, as immediate and relevant as anything can be.

(This is Lord Buckley's version which differs slightly from the poem as originally published.)

There was Old Hezekiah Jones, of Hogback County.
He lived on a hill in a weatherbeaten hovel.
And all that he owned was a two-acre plot
with a bed and some books and a hoe and a shovel.

Old Hezekiah, black as the soil he was hoeing,
Worked pretty hard to make both ends meet.
Raised what he ate, with a few cents over
To buy corn likker that he drank down neat

And a few cents more that he put in the cupboard
Against what he called "de rainy season,"
But he never got to save more'n two or three dollars
Till he gave it away for this or that reason.

The white folks around knew old Hezekiah...
"Harmless enough, but the way I figger
He better lay off'n them goddam books,
'Cause readin' ain't good fer an ignorant nigger."

Reverend Green, of the white man's church,
Finally got around to "comin' ovah
To talk with you-all about the Pearly Kingdom
An' to save yo' soul fer the Lawd Jehovah!"

"D'ya b'lieve in the Lawd?" asked the white man's preacher.

Hezekiah puckered his frosty brow,
"Well I can't say 'yes,' so I ain't gonna say it,
Caze I ain't SEEN de Lawd... nowhere... no-how."

"D'ya b'lieve in Heaven?" asked the whiteman's preacher,
"Where you go, if you're good, fer yer last rewa'hd?"

"Ah'm good," said Hezikiah, "good as Ah'm able,
But Ah don't expect nothin' from Heaven OR the Lawd."

"D'ya b'lieve in the Church?" asked the white man's preacher.

Hezekiah said, "Well de Church is divided;
Ef they can't agree, than Ah cain't neither...
Ah'm like them... Ah ain't decided."

"You don't b'lieve nothin'," roared the white man's preacher.

"Oh yes Ah does," said old Hezikiah,
"Ah b'lieve that a man's beholden to his neighbahs
Widout de hope of Heaven or de fear o' hell's fiah."

There's a lot of good ways for a man to be wicked...

They hung Hezikiah as high as a pidgeon,
And the nice folks around said, "He had it comin'
'Cause the son-of-a-bitch didn't have no religion!"

An Open objection to Chris Matthews' Religious Intolerance

2011-12-14T22:40:00.000-08:00

To Chris Matthews --

I watch you almost every day, and yeah, I know that Christine O'Donnell is something of a Wack Job (or "zany" in current polititude) -- but you have to know something:

Wicca is a religion.
A real religion.
An old religion that pre-dates Christianity.
Witches are the theo-equivalent of your priests and parishioners.

Yeah, I know -- big joke, like today -- ha-ha -- dark powers and all.
(The satan crap? That's Christianity that believes in that, not Wiccans.)

How about an equivalency example:

You know about Catholics?
How they invoke demons by practicing cannibalism?
How they eat the body of their prophet?
   (It's just a cracker, but their priests do a magickal invocation to turn it into flesh.)
How they drink the blood of their prophet?
    (It's just wine but when one of their priests does a magickal invocation, it becomes blood.)

Gives them some kind of power.

Get it?

I'd use a mockery of my own religious tradition as an example -- Judaism -- but that's really more a matter of birth than belief. As I was often told as a lad: "Doesn't matter if you don't believe it -- as far as Hitler was concerned, you're a Jew."
And it seemed to be the same deal with the Irish Catholic kids who went to the church a few blocks from my family's home .. .used to chase me and throw rocks screaming: "Faddah sez you killed our Lord!."
And that was hometown stuff -- your hometown and mine -- Philadelphia.
But while the Irish kids were the mob, it wasn't just the Irish kids, don't want to single out the descendants of the great poets -- one Italian-American lad named Gino used to burn crosses on the lawns of Jewish homes.
Probably had something to do with me joining the Marines when I was getting drafted.

Anyway, you get the idea?
There are a lot of Wiccans in America.
But they stay low-profile because of what I'm talking about.
And because they remember the American Puritan drownings and crushings.

It's just another religion.
Like all religions, you look at their rituals from the outside and they seem bizarre.
But unlike many Christians, they actually practice "Do as you would have done to you," since the underlying principle is that what you send out returns to you seven-fold.

So, please -- knock it off.
Don't make the people who like you and think you're intelligent and mostly agree with you have to be embarrassed for your ignorance.

Ok?

This is overdue -- sharing a great source for Haitian Music

2011-12-08T16:57:00.000-08:00

It's Checkoutcds.com

I found them a couple years ago, looking for the two collections of music by Toto Bissainthe -- Volume 2 was findable but Volume 1 not anywhere. (I had found a copy of her Haiti Chante at Amoeba records some time before, but it was definitely not available)

Toto Bissainthe was an unique singer with an angelic voice* who sang what one might call Haitian Country Music, incorporating some Vodou music into her compositions. She lived in exile while Poppa Doc Duvalier was in power. She died in 1994.

The owner of CheckoutCDs --Bernard Etheart -- said he thought it was out of print, but he'd look on my behalf, and got back to me a few weeks later with the goods.

CheckoutCDs has a very large inventory and now has sample cuts for many of the artists whose works they sell -- really helpful since some wonderful musicians are people I've never heard of and can't find their recordings anywhere else (meaning I can't go to Amazon to hear them).

The CD categories they offer are Rasin(Roots), Kreyol Jazz, Ragga/Rap, Zouk, Francaises, and Konpa.

You can look under alphabetical listings under any category, and hear cuts from most.

They also offer DVDs -- comedy, drama, Music, Romance and Documentaries

The one documentary I've bought is a famous one called The OblivionTree -- it deals with a place and a town and a tree in Africa that slaves passed by on their way to the ships, and no one who went past that tree was ever seen again. It's an amazing documentary, even including interviews with the descendants of the prime slave trader who still live there, in the same place.

CheckoutCDs is a great resource -- you can pretty much be sure that gifts you give from there will be music or films your giftee doesn't already have, probably not even ever had heard of, and Bernard Etheart is very helpful, aware of the fact that you may not be familiar with the genre.

The only thing I get from doing this is realizing I finally got around to giving Bernard the appreciation I have for his site and his help.

********

Toto Bissainthe: clips of her songs online at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGoLiAWJGsk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1DcPdMZs9s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXZ2SWR1dw4

*********

CheckoutCDs

Bernard Etheart

Tel: 305-537-6509

Fax: 801-406-2246 –

210 174th St. #1406

Sunny Isles Beach, FL, 33160

The Markov Chain replaces the Mark of Cain*

2011-12-03T13:53:00.000-08:00

I knew the term (Markov Chain) from Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus, which had a character named Markov Chaney. I planned to use it mostly as a homonymial pun contrasted against the negritude of Mr Cain referring to one of the ongoing religious (Christian-esque) slanders against people of color. ("They're inherently evil and their dark skin is the Mark of Cain so all can see their guilt.")
After researching it a bit, it seemed to me that the fictional Mr. Chaney's dubious personality characteristics were almost identical to those shared by Mssrs Romney and Gingrich. In fact, it seemed to be a near-perfect description of the opportunistic slimes and shifts and trademark say-anything unprincipled behavior (flipflopping) of the "last two" standing in the traveling circus known as the Republican Presidential Candidate Debates.

It's a mathematical term relevant to quantum physics.

from Wikipedia:
A Markov chain, named after Andrey Markov, is a mathematical system that undergoes transitions from one state to another, between a finite or countable number of possible states. It is a random process characterized as memoryless: the next state depends only on the current state and not on the sequence of events that preceded it. This specific kind of "memorylessness" is called the Markov property. Markov chains have many applications as statistical models of real-world processes.

To repeat:
"It is a random process characterized as memoryless: the next state depends only on the current state and not on the sequence of events that preceded it."

In other words, habitually changing what they claim they believe -- straight-faced lying that depends on "memorylessness" of both the speaker and the listener ("You're wrong -- I never said that.")
Their only consistency is devotional adherence to the principle of "Any way the wind blows, that's what I will swear to you is my firm, unshakeable, lifelong belief."

--------------------------------------
*If you're not familiar with that phrase -- "Mark of Cain" -- it refers to persons with dark skin, asserts that such dark skin is the result of sin, i.e., Cain murdering Abel -- to find out how this plays in the world, have someone ask Mormon Bishop Willard Mitt Romney about how welcome such folk have been in his church (until grudging acceptance forced by federal law in 1978).
Or go to this link: Mormonism and the Negro

Maybe some day that church will stop telling the rest of US -- people who do NOT believe in their version of moonlight and are NOT devotees -- to deny social and civil rights to various people THEY are afraid of (millions of dollars they sent to California to promote their vicious and virulent Proposition 8 because they couldn't stand the fact that we had passed a law in order to correct a long-standing civil wrong, i.e., stop denying the right of marriage between people of the same sex.)

Maybe some day they'll allow the rest of us the right to pursue our own ideals and beliefs.

How powerful is/was Herman Cain?

2011-12-01T20:29:00.000-08:00

Powerful enough to revive the hideous old stereotype --

The lustful Nee-gro

The ignorant Nee-gro ("... Iz-beki-beki-beki stan."

The lazy Nee-gro ("I don't need to know all those things.")

The shifty (dishonest, lying) Nee-gro
("All I did was say 'You only come up to my chin -- that's how tall my wife is.' ")
("She was a friend and I was trying to help her. Just a friend.")
("I invented the single slice of Pizza.")

And his ratings -- well, maybe that's EXACTLY what that wing of the Republican Party believes African Americans ARE and SHOULD BE and he smiled and sang and showed them they were right.

Chris Christi -- biggest crybaby on the block

2011-12-01T13:48:00.000-08:00

Chris Christi took the food out of his mouth long enough today (hey -- I'm quite visibly overweight -- I can make jokes about another fat slob) -- to go "WAHH WAHH WAHH" about the president.

He doesn't seem to be aware of the fact that the president has a job, and that congress has a job for which it gets paid OUR money to do. And it isn't the president's job to hang out with people who won't do their own.

But no: "We need a president who isn't just a bystander."

What he's saying is "Daddy - why did you go do the job the people pay you to do and talk with the leaders of the other countries we do international trade with instead of staying home with me and mommy and making my pals do their job?" (Which -- in this instance -- just happened to be the committee set up to do the budget job they DIDN'T do a while ago.)

Hey, Chris -- why don't you do YOUR job and make sure the Jersey mob gets all their state contracts and gets paid with the money you take away from the firefighters, the police, and the schools? (That IS your job, isn't it?")

It's probably best to not cry like a baby when you so resemble one. A mean one.

Chevron commercials -- not just insulting...

2011-11-17T18:45:00.000-08:00

oh so obviously manipulated they're downright rude...

The music --- chunky wheels turning machinery on the move the new world ... like some thirties look what's coming, ain't it great?

So they have a black guy with a midwestern accent talking about how wonderful oil sand would be -- hey, a black guy from the midwest? Must be telling the truth -- I especially enjoy -- "No more pollution than other forms of oil" -- there's a weasel-worded disclaimer that's tap-dancing around guilty almost as much as the gout commercial that mentions "a small number of deaths from ... but it's not certain our drug caused them" -- "It's not certain" -- that's one step away from "you can't prove it!" --- but oh yeah, the black guy from Kansas tells us how the oil sand project would provide lots and lots and lots of jobs...

And a white guy for another ad extolling the lowering of air pollution ("We're destroying your lungs, but we're working on doing it a little less..")
and they have a jug-eared Aussie for another (hey, everyone likes the straight-on outback fellows from the land of Oz)

And all that would just be rude and reflect a view of us as 2d grade students who can be convinced of anything -- typical corporate disdain --- But the worst part?

All those ads are tax deductible... hundreds of millions of dollars of time buys. and every time you hear that chunk chunk chunk music, every time you hear those slick dissings -- REMEMBER --- WE'RE PAYING FOR THEM!!

And that's why they don't pay much in taxes -- oh they say it's all research ("Every dollar goes into..." )

Bullshit -- it's straight on political, i.e., anyone who's against the oil sand pipeline is against jobs and against black people and against America...

These people are straight out of Nova Express, destroy the planet and move on to another planet.

Or to a country without extradition laws, one which loves oilmen -- Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirate, etc...

I think of the delightful Kathy Griffin starting her show with:
Where are my gays?"

And I think of the Chevron people and wonder:
"Where are my Wobblies?"

Also:

http://www.kued.org/productions/fire/photos_stories/wobblies.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goldman/peopleevents/e_iww.html
http://www.prole.info/texts/dynamite_chapter32.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_slogans

Direct Action Gets the Goods!

The problem with Herman Cain is the same one as the problem with Donald Trump

2011-11-05T14:04:00.000-07:00

They don't know how to talk to anyone as actual people.

Neither of them has talked to anyone but employees for as long as they can remember.

In Cain's case, he has an alternate supercilious option -- treating people as if they paid to sit at his feet and listen to him expound.

I don't know how Cain came up, but The Donald always seemed as if he was getting even for having to be Roy Cohn's pretty bitch boy in his early years.

Maybe talking to people and treating them as if you were signing their paychecks makes some people think that's leadership, and say "Yes sir," but to me, that just mean-spirited louts to which all I can say is "Go fuck yourself."

From an article on Jack Abramoff's new scam...

2011-11-05T13:02:00.000-07:00

Making money with a book on holes in the system that still allow vermin like him to rip off the public, but it was this line in the Nedra Pickle article that caught my eye:

"He was especially close to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. He writes that the two bonded over their adherence to religion; Abramoff is an orthodox Jew, DeLay a born-again Christian.

Orthodox Jew? Born-again Christian?
Is there some part of the Ten Commandments they didn't read?
No stealing.
No bearing false witness.

They CLAIM to be that, but just another lie.

Orthodox crook is Jack Abramoff's religion.
Born-again thief is DeLay's.

Political crooks and monsters -- we really need to drive the equivalent of a stake through the heart to keep these unwholesome creatures from rising up out of from their well-deserved media graves.

And that should include Gingrich, Armey, et al.

Any wonder why vampires and zombies are such popular metaphors?

We see them every day -- the resurrected crooks and the media people who are desperate enough to write, film, talk about them feed on us in their own ways -- vampires sucking out our life force, zombies eating our brains.