V.V.V revistited
posted by LAB at 11:45 PM
Saturday, December 09, 2006
Monday, November 20, 2006
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Let's take it down a notch, shall we?
Well, Kittens, I'm back. Meaning that perhaps some of you may have been fearing that I was teetering dangerously on a ledge, heading for a precipitous plunge into something militant and cheerless. But fear not, for while my recent posts were fuelled by mostly political anxities, I've decided to instill future posts with the levity and superficial lightheartedness you've come to expect from me (unless, of course, I'm required by certain personages and/or entities to fight injustice with vitriol). In the meantime, I'm starting a new series of weekly video posts which excavate the best bits of cheesy/sleazy music culture of the 80's. This essentially means you'll being seeing drag queens, huge shoulder pads, hideous hairdos and listening to the cheesiest and most esoteric pop of all time. What could be better ? (besides an impeachment, maybe... but nevermind) So, without further delay, let's begin our journey with the indisputable Queen of Sleaze:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiIJOB0GLW4
x
posted by LAB at 2:47 PM
Thursday, November 09, 2006
and fuck off
And there's still hope for America yet!!! Perhaps;
I was on the cusp of abject despair and I was going to be forced to give up my US citizenship if the hated Republicans weren't summarily ousted in all quarters. My rationale being, what's the point of living and participating in a democracy and voting if the majority is too ignorant to understand the issues on which they're voting?!? It's not a question of running away - it's a question of taking in hand the education of 150 million redneck, Red American dipshits. Sorry, not my responsibility. AND the icing on the beautiful cake is that the bastard Donald Rumsfeld is gone!!! Yay x 1000! Ding-dong the witch is dead! And I'm very delighted that Arizona (finally) showed some degree of enlightenment and defeated the anti-gay proposition 107 (the only state to do so among those with similar props). So, whoever commented on my blog a few weeks ago about the merits of this unconstitutional measure AND dared to draw a ridiculous allusion to the brilliance of Texas for implementing a similar shitty initiative,
#1: you can fuck off.
#2: whoever is under the absurd impression that emulating Texas in any way whatsoever is a good idea is obviously brain-dead and can fuck off.
#3: I lived in Texas for 15 years, so I know what I'm talking about, so fuck off.
However, let's hope that the Dems dont forget the lesson that was served to the Reps during these elections which was that if you fuck up, you get voted out. So, don't squander this opportunity to exact some real positive change:
>Get out of Iraq.
>Re-examine and change American foreign policy (a xenophobic military state is not the answer).
>America is not the global moral police - get off the soapbox and mind your own fucking business. Or, if you think the US belongs in (much less can lead!!) any discussion of global moral issues, get a passport and use it. See the world. Then, go home and initiate a debate.
>Reduce oil dependancy to zero (if Sweden can do it, so can the US).
>Repeal the Patriot Act.
>Provide clean manufacturing technologies to China and India, or we're all dead.
>Increase taxes appropriately - how do you think we pay for public education, roads, libraries, text books, etc? if I were a policeman, fireman, teacher, nurse, African American, student, Muslim, homosexual, the list goes on... I'd never vote Republican again.
And, that creepy idiot Bush better adopt a less arrogant over-all stance, even though it's highly debatable that he even possesses another stance in him somewhere.
.
I was on the cusp of abject despair and I was going to be forced to give up my US citizenship if the hated Republicans weren't summarily ousted in all quarters. My rationale being, what's the point of living and participating in a democracy and voting if the majority is too ignorant to understand the issues on which they're voting?!? It's not a question of running away - it's a question of taking in hand the education of 150 million redneck, Red American dipshits. Sorry, not my responsibility. AND the icing on the beautiful cake is that the bastard Donald Rumsfeld is gone!!! Yay x 1000! Ding-dong the witch is dead! And I'm very delighted that Arizona (finally) showed some degree of enlightenment and defeated the anti-gay proposition 107 (the only state to do so among those with similar props). So, whoever commented on my blog a few weeks ago about the merits of this unconstitutional measure AND dared to draw a ridiculous allusion to the brilliance of Texas for implementing a similar shitty initiative,
#1: you can fuck off.
#2: whoever is under the absurd impression that emulating Texas in any way whatsoever is a good idea is obviously brain-dead and can fuck off.
#3: I lived in Texas for 15 years, so I know what I'm talking about, so fuck off.
However, let's hope that the Dems dont forget the lesson that was served to the Reps during these elections which was that if you fuck up, you get voted out. So, don't squander this opportunity to exact some real positive change:
>Get out of Iraq.
>Re-examine and change American foreign policy (a xenophobic military state is not the answer).
>America is not the global moral police - get off the soapbox and mind your own fucking business. Or, if you think the US belongs in (much less can lead!!) any discussion of global moral issues, get a passport and use it. See the world. Then, go home and initiate a debate.
>Reduce oil dependancy to zero (if Sweden can do it, so can the US).
>Repeal the Patriot Act.
>Provide clean manufacturing technologies to China and India, or we're all dead.
>Increase taxes appropriately - how do you think we pay for public education, roads, libraries, text books, etc? if I were a policeman, fireman, teacher, nurse, African American, student, Muslim, homosexual, the list goes on... I'd never vote Republican again.
And, that creepy idiot Bush better adopt a less arrogant over-all stance, even though it's highly debatable that he even possesses another stance in him somewhere.
.
posted by LAB at 3:27 PM
Sunday, November 05, 2006
What a little cunt
(My comments appear at bottom)
By Steven Saint and Keith Coffman
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Reuters) - Disgraced U.S. evangelist Ted Haggard, a vocal opponent of gay marriage, said on Sunday that he was guilty of "sexual immorality" and that he had long battled with a "repulsive" side of his life.
"I am guilty of sexual immorality, I am a deceiver and a liar. There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark and I've been warring against it my entire adult life", Haggard said in a letter that was read to his New Life Church in Colorado Springs by a church overseer during a Sunday morning service.
Haggard resigned as president of the influential National Association of Evangelicals on Thursday after being accused by a male escort of having had a sexual relationship with him.
He also agreed to step down as senior pastor of the New Life Church, a 14,000 member "mega-church" which he founded in 1985 and where he is affectionately known as "Pastor Ted.". Haggard, 50, had initially denied the allegations but began backpedaling on Friday when he admitted to seeking the man at a Denver Hotel for a "massage" and contacting him to buy the drug meth. But he said he had thrown the meth away.
Haggard, with his chiseled features, wide smile and five children, had been a poster boy for the evangelical movement and social conservative causes that have been embraced by the Republican Party.
Conservative Christians are a support base for the Republican Party and President Bush. Evangelical leaders have been urging the faithful to vote in congressional elections on Tuesday with polls showing Republicans could lose control of at least one house of Congress.
They also have encouraged conservative voters in eight states including Colorado to support proposed amendments to ban same-sex marriages.
In the letter Haggard said he was embarrassed and ashamed and asked the congregation to forgive his accuser, who has been widely quoted as saying he came forward because he was angered by what he perceived as the pastor's hypocrisy on the issue of same-sex marriage...
Truly sad; If you've been warring against your sexuality for your entire adult life, well, Pastor Ted, there's probably a good reason for that. Call me crazy - but it sounds a little bit like you're, well... gay. And don't really want to come to terms with it. And if you weren't raised in some toothless-hillbilly-ignorant-hate-mongering state, and if you didn't continue to live in the same life-withering environment, wallowing in secret self-loathing/denigration and surrounded by narrow-minded wretches all this time, you perhaps could come to some healthy resolution and find some peace. Instead, you're buying meth and rent boys in hotels (not that there's anything wrong with that per se) in some misguided, myopic attempt to supress what seems to be an inviolable part of your psycho-sexual makeup. I mean, you're absolutely right: Republicans (mostly) have every right to be concerned with THE EVIL GAYS' subversive agenda to undermine the family structure and forever upset the natural balance of the universe with nefarious civil partnerships, repulsive gay marriages, etc. For fuck's sake. What's wrong with your family structure, I wonder...
It would be easy to hate someone like you, Pastor Ted: a hypocritical, lying, drug-addled, whoring, latent cock-sucking faggot, fraudulently masquerading as some fine, upstanding pillar of the community, the mouth-piece of God of the Rockies. But the point is that we don't judge other people for who they are, or what they do (unless they eat children). And certainly if youre a Christian, you don't judge others. Instill in your life the practice of loving others - our children will grow up to love themselves and, then, poor guys like dear Pastor Ted won't need to resort to such dire behaviour in order to find the personal acceptance which has always eluded him.
x
By Steven Saint and Keith Coffman
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Reuters) - Disgraced U.S. evangelist Ted Haggard, a vocal opponent of gay marriage, said on Sunday that he was guilty of "sexual immorality" and that he had long battled with a "repulsive" side of his life.
"I am guilty of sexual immorality, I am a deceiver and a liar. There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark and I've been warring against it my entire adult life", Haggard said in a letter that was read to his New Life Church in Colorado Springs by a church overseer during a Sunday morning service.
Haggard resigned as president of the influential National Association of Evangelicals on Thursday after being accused by a male escort of having had a sexual relationship with him.
He also agreed to step down as senior pastor of the New Life Church, a 14,000 member "mega-church" which he founded in 1985 and where he is affectionately known as "Pastor Ted.". Haggard, 50, had initially denied the allegations but began backpedaling on Friday when he admitted to seeking the man at a Denver Hotel for a "massage" and contacting him to buy the drug meth. But he said he had thrown the meth away.
Haggard, with his chiseled features, wide smile and five children, had been a poster boy for the evangelical movement and social conservative causes that have been embraced by the Republican Party.
Conservative Christians are a support base for the Republican Party and President Bush. Evangelical leaders have been urging the faithful to vote in congressional elections on Tuesday with polls showing Republicans could lose control of at least one house of Congress.
They also have encouraged conservative voters in eight states including Colorado to support proposed amendments to ban same-sex marriages.
In the letter Haggard said he was embarrassed and ashamed and asked the congregation to forgive his accuser, who has been widely quoted as saying he came forward because he was angered by what he perceived as the pastor's hypocrisy on the issue of same-sex marriage...
Truly sad; If you've been warring against your sexuality for your entire adult life, well, Pastor Ted, there's probably a good reason for that. Call me crazy - but it sounds a little bit like you're, well... gay. And don't really want to come to terms with it. And if you weren't raised in some toothless-hillbilly-ignorant-hate-mongering state, and if you didn't continue to live in the same life-withering environment, wallowing in secret self-loathing/denigration and surrounded by narrow-minded wretches all this time, you perhaps could come to some healthy resolution and find some peace. Instead, you're buying meth and rent boys in hotels (not that there's anything wrong with that per se) in some misguided, myopic attempt to supress what seems to be an inviolable part of your psycho-sexual makeup. I mean, you're absolutely right: Republicans (mostly) have every right to be concerned with THE EVIL GAYS' subversive agenda to undermine the family structure and forever upset the natural balance of the universe with nefarious civil partnerships, repulsive gay marriages, etc. For fuck's sake. What's wrong with your family structure, I wonder...
It would be easy to hate someone like you, Pastor Ted: a hypocritical, lying, drug-addled, whoring, latent cock-sucking faggot, fraudulently masquerading as some fine, upstanding pillar of the community, the mouth-piece of God of the Rockies. But the point is that we don't judge other people for who they are, or what they do (unless they eat children). And certainly if youre a Christian, you don't judge others. Instill in your life the practice of loving others - our children will grow up to love themselves and, then, poor guys like dear Pastor Ted won't need to resort to such dire behaviour in order to find the personal acceptance which has always eluded him.
x
posted by LAB at 9:04 PM
Monday, October 30, 2006
W.the.F.U.
Over one thousand internet experts will gather in Greece this week (30 October 2006) for the first UN-sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting, amid grumblings over the dominant position currently enjoyed by the US.
The four-day forum on the future of the internet opens on Monday in Athens. The event follows the Tunis World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), which took place in November 2005, and which nearly saw a rift open between the US and the rest of the world on who should control the internet.
Countries such as Iran and China objected to having the key internet systems managed by the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit organisation under tender from the US Department of Commerce.
The US has resisted attempts to modify the existing framework, warning that regimes that do not allow freedom of speech could gain leverage over the internet in this fashion...
Err...hold on here... disallowing free speech? You mean, nothing at all like a 1st world superpower espousing the virtues of free speech, the vaunted 1st Amendment, a country in which the Patriot Act is alive and well, right?
George Bush's Patriot Act gives an ambiguous definition to the crime of “domestic terrorism” that could be conveniently interpreted to encompass civil disobedience. Was Martin Luther King a “terrorist”? Only the defenders of an unjust status quo that is only favorable to them would find the movements for change terrifying. The Secretary of State is now empowered to designate groups as “terrorist groups” or engaged in “terrorist activities” with such vague parameters that groups from churches to political parties to non-governmental organizations could all be susceptible to such a designation. The act now gives the law-enforcement and intelligence agencies much greater access to information transmitted through various modes of communication, including the Internet, without the burden of probable cause. Such powers of surveillance certainly threaten our cherished First Amendment that grants the freedom of expression. Even more frightening is that these and many other powers granted to separate branches of our government without proper checks and balances just reek of potential abuse.
When will America wake up from its deep slumber, and stop gouging out its own eyes with regard to the double standards and hypocrisy of the 'b'ush adminstration? In essence, the Patriot Act allows the US govt to investigate me for making comments - on this blog even - which it deems 'unamerican' or 'of a terrorist nature'. A friend of mine recently wrote to all 100 US senators via email expressing a negative opinion of continued US involvement in its war in Iraq. 2 weeks later, the IRS called him up asking questions... when it never had before. Coincidence? Maybe. But not likely. We live in a country where, yes, you can go ahead and say any damn thing you like - afterall, Americans and its govt believe in inalienable rights of free speech. Just better watch your back...
speaking of wars, how many wars is America going to instigate and fight and continue to lose?
let's see: the War
on Terror
on Poverty
on Drugs
on Immigration
on Guns
So, there's at least 5 home-spun wars (Im sure there's a dozen others) running right now - America losing each one of them. How fucking shameful, pathetic and humiliating. People in power and their regimes start to die off when they forget history... pay attention; 1789 wasn't all that long ago, afterall. Why should the US stop its endless embattlements on 100 different fronts? Why should it stop invading other countries for oil (a limited, polluting resource which will be all but depleted in 20 years, anyway). Why should it give up control of the internet? Why should it stop monitoring your emails and blogs?
Isnt it time for a pardigm shift? Oh, I forgot - we just had one in 2000. Oops, sorry.
x
posted by LAB at 9:29 PM
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Margaret Cho and Proposition 107
Ok, even though I live in the UK, Im registered to vote in Arizona and I always vote absentee. I encourage any Arizona-registered voters to look at the following info 'borrowed' from mistress Margaret Cho's website, www.loveisloveislove.com, and vote 'NO'.
Arizona Voters to Decide
November election in Arizona to include Proposition 107, otherwise known as Protect Marriage Arizona.
What it says:"To preserve and protect marriage in this state, only a union between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage by this state or its political subdivisions and no legal status for unmarried persons shall be created or recognized by this state or its political subdivisions that is similar to that of marriage."
What it would do: Define marriage in the state Constitution as a union of one man and one woman. Block any alternative for same-sex couples, such as domestic partnerships or civil unions. Bar governments from offering benefits, such as health insurance, to employees' domestic partners, gay or straight. This is one of the most insidious versions of this so-called "protection" amendment. It serves to protect no one and nothing. Only the religious-right will find empty comfort in this measure should it pass. What will ultimately happen is countless relationships will be temporarily cast into legal limbo as a fight is launched to reverse this amendment with another. It will be struck down. Nothing could be more at odds with the Constitution than denying an American citizen his or her rights based on the biased beliefs of another citizen. In any event...Time to raise awareness and get voters motivated! I wish all our brothers and sisters in Arizona the best of luck. Here are some links to help you in the fight. Find & Contact Arizona Lawmakers by clicking here.
VOTE "NO" ON PROPOSITION 107
originally posted Monday, September 25, 2006
from Margaret Cho's www.loveisloveislove.com
.
Arizona Voters to Decide
November election in Arizona to include Proposition 107, otherwise known as Protect Marriage Arizona.
What it says:"To preserve and protect marriage in this state, only a union between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage by this state or its political subdivisions and no legal status for unmarried persons shall be created or recognized by this state or its political subdivisions that is similar to that of marriage."
What it would do: Define marriage in the state Constitution as a union of one man and one woman. Block any alternative for same-sex couples, such as domestic partnerships or civil unions. Bar governments from offering benefits, such as health insurance, to employees' domestic partners, gay or straight. This is one of the most insidious versions of this so-called "protection" amendment. It serves to protect no one and nothing. Only the religious-right will find empty comfort in this measure should it pass. What will ultimately happen is countless relationships will be temporarily cast into legal limbo as a fight is launched to reverse this amendment with another. It will be struck down. Nothing could be more at odds with the Constitution than denying an American citizen his or her rights based on the biased beliefs of another citizen. In any event...Time to raise awareness and get voters motivated! I wish all our brothers and sisters in Arizona the best of luck. Here are some links to help you in the fight. Find & Contact Arizona Lawmakers by clicking here.
VOTE "NO" ON PROPOSITION 107
originally posted Monday, September 25, 2006
from Margaret Cho's www.loveisloveislove.com
.
posted by LAB at 12:26 PM
Thursday, October 05, 2006
MSG
MSG - The Slow Poisoning Of America
MSG Hides Behind 25+ Names, Such As 'Natural Flavouring'
MSG Is Also In Your Favorite Coffee Shops And Drive-Ups
I wondered if there could be an actual chemical causing the massive obesity epidemic, so did a friend of mine, John Erb. He was a research assistant at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and spent years working for the government. He made an amazing discovery while going through scientific journals for a book he was writing called "The Slow Poisoning of America". In hundreds of studies around the world, scientists were creating obese mice and rats to use in diet or diabetes test studies. No strain of rat or mice is naturally obese, so the scientists have to create them. They make these morbidly obese creatures by injecting them with MSG when they are first born. The MSG triples the amount of insulin the pancreas creates; causing rats (and humans?) to become obese. They even have a title for the fat rodents they create: "MSG-Treated Rats". I was shocked too. I went to my kitchen, checking the cupboards and the fridge. MSG was in everything: The Campbell's soups, the Hostess Doritos, the Lays flavoured potato chips, Top Ramen, Betty Crocker Hamburger Helper, Heinz canned gravy, Swanson frozen prepared meals, Kraft salad dressings, especially the 'healthy low fat' ones. The items that didn't have MSG marked on the product label had something called ''Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein'', which is just another name for Monosodium Glutamate. It was shocking to see just how many of the foods we feed our children everyday are filled with this stuff. They hide MSG under many different names in order to fool those who carefully read the ingredient list, so they don't catch on. (Other names for MSG: 'Accent' - 'Aginomoto' - 'Natural Meat Tenderizer', etc) But it didn't stop there. When our family went out to eat, we started asking at the restaurants what menu items had MSG. Many employees, even the managers, swore they didn't use MSG. But when we ask for the ingredient list, which they grudgingly provided, sure enough MSG and Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein were everywhere:Burger KingMcDonaldsWendy'sTaco BellAnd every restaurant like: TGIF, Chilis', Applebees and Denny's use MSG in abundance.Kentucky Fried Chicken seemed to be the WORST offender: MSG was in EVERY chicken dish, salad dressing and gravy. No wonder I loved to eat that coating on the skin, their secret spice was MSG.So, why i s MSG in so may of the foods we eat?Is it a preservative or a vitamin?? Not according to my friend John. In the book he wrote, an expose of the food additive industry called "The Slow Poisoning of America" he said that MSG is added to food for the addictive effect it has on the human body. http://www.spofamerica.com Even the propaganda website sponsored by the food manufacturers lobby group supporting MSG at: http: //www.msgfactscom/facts/msgfact12.html explains that the reason they add it to food is to make people EAT MORE OF THEIR PRODUCTS.A study of the elderly showed that people eat more of the foods it is added to.The Glutamate Association lobby group says eating more benefits the elderly, but what does it do to the rest of us? 'Betcha can't eat just one', takes on a whole new meaning where MSG is concerned! And we wonder why the nation is overweight? The MSG manufacturers themselves admit that it addicts people to their products. It makes people choose their product over others, and makes people eat more of it than they would if MSG wasn't added. Not only is MSG scientifically proven to cause obesity, it is an addictive substance! Since its introduction into the American foodsupply fifty years ago, MSG has been added in larger and larger doses to the pre-packaged meals, soups, snacks and fast foods we are tempted to eat everyday. The FDA has set no limits on how much of it can be added to food. They claim it's safe to eat in any amount. How can they claim it safe when there are hundreds of scientific studies with titles like these?
'The monosodium glutamate (MSG) obese rat as a model for the study of exercise in obesity'. GobattoCA, Mello MA, Souza CT, Ribeiro IA. ResCommun Mol Pathol Pharmacol. 2002.'
'Adrenalectomy abolishes the food-induced hypothalamic serotonin release in both normal and monosodium glutamate-obese rats'. Guimaraes RB, Telles M M, believable VB, Mori C, Nascimento CM, Ribeiro Brain Res Bull. 2002 Aug.
'Obesity induced by neonatal monosodium glutamate treatment in spontaneously hypertensive rats: an animal model of multiple risk factors'. Iwase M, Yamamoto M, Iino K, IchikawaK, Shinohara N, Yoshinari Fujishima Hypertens Res. 1998 Mar.
'Hypothalamic lesion induced by injection of monosodium glutamate in suckling period and subsequent development of obesity'. Tanaka K, Shimada M, Nakao K, Kusunoki Exp Neurol. 1978 Oct.
Yes, that last study was not a typo, it WAS written in 1978. Both the "medical research community" and "food manufacturers" have known about MSG's side effects for decades! Many more studies mentioned in John Erb's book link MSG to Diabetes, Migraines and headaches, Autism, ADHD and even Alzheimer's. But what can we do to stop the food manufactures from dumping fattening and addictive MSG into our food supply and causing the obesity epidemic we now see?Even as you read this, G. W. Bush and his corporate supporters are pushing a Bill through Congress called the "Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act" also known as the "Cheeseburger Bill", this sweeping law bans anyone from suing food manufacturers, sellers and distributors. Even if it comes out that they purposely added an addictive chemical to their foods. Read about it for yourself at:http://www.yahoo.com. The Bill has already been rushed through the House of Representatives, and is due for the same rubber stamp at Senate level. It is important that Bush and his corporate supporters get it through before the media lets everyone know about 'MSG, the intentional Nicotine for food'. Several months ago, John Erb took his book and his concerns to one of the highest government health officials in Canada. While sitting in the Government office, the official told him "Sure, I know how bad MSG is, "I wouldn't touch the stuff." But this top level government official refused to tell the public what he knew. The big media doesn't want to tell the public either, fearing legal issues with their advertisers. It seems that the fallout on fast food industry may hurt their profit margin. The food producers and restaurants have been addicting us to their products for years, and now we are paying the price for it. Our children should not be cursed with obesity caused by an addictive food additive. But what can I do about it?... I'm just one voice. What can I do to stop the poisoning of our children, while our governments are insuring financial protection for the industry that is poisoning us.This e-mail is g oing out to everyone I know in an attempt to tell you the truth that the corporate owned politicians and media won't tell you. The best way you can help to save yourself and your children from this drug-induced epidemic, is to forward this email to everyone. With any luck, it will circle the globe before politicians can pass the legislation protecting those who are poisoning us. The food industry learned a lot from the tobacco industry. Imagine if big tobacco had a bill like this in place before someone blew the whistle on Nicotine?If you are one of the few who can still believe that MSG is good for us, and you don't believe what John Erb has to say, see for yourself. Go to the National Library of Medicine, at http://www.pubmed.com. Type in the words "MSG Obese" and read a few of the 115 medical studies that appear. We the public, do not want to be rats in one giant experiment and we do not approve of food that makes us into a nation of obese, lethargic, addicted sheep, feeding the food industry's bottom line, while waiting for the heart transplant, diabetic induced amputation, blindness or other obesity induced, life threatening disorders. With your help we can put an end to this poison. Do your part in sending this message out by word of mouth, e-mail or by distribution of this print-out to all your friends all over the world and stop this 'Slow Poisoning of Mankind' by the packaged food industry.
Blowing the whistle on MSG is our responsibility, get the word out.
(from the internet via email)
MSG Hides Behind 25+ Names, Such As 'Natural Flavouring'
MSG Is Also In Your Favorite Coffee Shops And Drive-Ups
I wondered if there could be an actual chemical causing the massive obesity epidemic, so did a friend of mine, John Erb. He was a research assistant at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and spent years working for the government. He made an amazing discovery while going through scientific journals for a book he was writing called "The Slow Poisoning of America". In hundreds of studies around the world, scientists were creating obese mice and rats to use in diet or diabetes test studies. No strain of rat or mice is naturally obese, so the scientists have to create them. They make these morbidly obese creatures by injecting them with MSG when they are first born. The MSG triples the amount of insulin the pancreas creates; causing rats (and humans?) to become obese. They even have a title for the fat rodents they create: "MSG-Treated Rats". I was shocked too. I went to my kitchen, checking the cupboards and the fridge. MSG was in everything: The Campbell's soups, the Hostess Doritos, the Lays flavoured potato chips, Top Ramen, Betty Crocker Hamburger Helper, Heinz canned gravy, Swanson frozen prepared meals, Kraft salad dressings, especially the 'healthy low fat' ones. The items that didn't have MSG marked on the product label had something called ''Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein'', which is just another name for Monosodium Glutamate. It was shocking to see just how many of the foods we feed our children everyday are filled with this stuff. They hide MSG under many different names in order to fool those who carefully read the ingredient list, so they don't catch on. (Other names for MSG: 'Accent' - 'Aginomoto' - 'Natural Meat Tenderizer', etc) But it didn't stop there. When our family went out to eat, we started asking at the restaurants what menu items had MSG. Many employees, even the managers, swore they didn't use MSG. But when we ask for the ingredient list, which they grudgingly provided, sure enough MSG and Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein were everywhere:Burger KingMcDonaldsWendy'sTaco BellAnd every restaurant like: TGIF, Chilis', Applebees and Denny's use MSG in abundance.Kentucky Fried Chicken seemed to be the WORST offender: MSG was in EVERY chicken dish, salad dressing and gravy. No wonder I loved to eat that coating on the skin, their secret spice was MSG.So, why i s MSG in so may of the foods we eat?Is it a preservative or a vitamin?? Not according to my friend John. In the book he wrote, an expose of the food additive industry called "The Slow Poisoning of America" he said that MSG is added to food for the addictive effect it has on the human body. http://www.spofamerica.com Even the propaganda website sponsored by the food manufacturers lobby group supporting MSG at: http: //www.msgfactscom/facts/msgfact12.html explains that the reason they add it to food is to make people EAT MORE OF THEIR PRODUCTS.A study of the elderly showed that people eat more of the foods it is added to.The Glutamate Association lobby group says eating more benefits the elderly, but what does it do to the rest of us? 'Betcha can't eat just one', takes on a whole new meaning where MSG is concerned! And we wonder why the nation is overweight? The MSG manufacturers themselves admit that it addicts people to their products. It makes people choose their product over others, and makes people eat more of it than they would if MSG wasn't added. Not only is MSG scientifically proven to cause obesity, it is an addictive substance! Since its introduction into the American foodsupply fifty years ago, MSG has been added in larger and larger doses to the pre-packaged meals, soups, snacks and fast foods we are tempted to eat everyday. The FDA has set no limits on how much of it can be added to food. They claim it's safe to eat in any amount. How can they claim it safe when there are hundreds of scientific studies with titles like these?
'The monosodium glutamate (MSG) obese rat as a model for the study of exercise in obesity'. GobattoCA, Mello MA, Souza CT, Ribeiro IA. ResCommun Mol Pathol Pharmacol. 2002.'
'Adrenalectomy abolishes the food-induced hypothalamic serotonin release in both normal and monosodium glutamate-obese rats'. Guimaraes RB, Telles M M, believable VB, Mori C, Nascimento CM, Ribeiro Brain Res Bull. 2002 Aug.
'Obesity induced by neonatal monosodium glutamate treatment in spontaneously hypertensive rats: an animal model of multiple risk factors'. Iwase M, Yamamoto M, Iino K, IchikawaK, Shinohara N, Yoshinari Fujishima Hypertens Res. 1998 Mar.
'Hypothalamic lesion induced by injection of monosodium glutamate in suckling period and subsequent development of obesity'. Tanaka K, Shimada M, Nakao K, Kusunoki Exp Neurol. 1978 Oct.
Yes, that last study was not a typo, it WAS written in 1978. Both the "medical research community" and "food manufacturers" have known about MSG's side effects for decades! Many more studies mentioned in John Erb's book link MSG to Diabetes, Migraines and headaches, Autism, ADHD and even Alzheimer's. But what can we do to stop the food manufactures from dumping fattening and addictive MSG into our food supply and causing the obesity epidemic we now see?Even as you read this, G. W. Bush and his corporate supporters are pushing a Bill through Congress called the "Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act" also known as the "Cheeseburger Bill", this sweeping law bans anyone from suing food manufacturers, sellers and distributors. Even if it comes out that they purposely added an addictive chemical to their foods. Read about it for yourself at:http://www.yahoo.com. The Bill has already been rushed through the House of Representatives, and is due for the same rubber stamp at Senate level. It is important that Bush and his corporate supporters get it through before the media lets everyone know about 'MSG, the intentional Nicotine for food'. Several months ago, John Erb took his book and his concerns to one of the highest government health officials in Canada. While sitting in the Government office, the official told him "Sure, I know how bad MSG is, "I wouldn't touch the stuff." But this top level government official refused to tell the public what he knew. The big media doesn't want to tell the public either, fearing legal issues with their advertisers. It seems that the fallout on fast food industry may hurt their profit margin. The food producers and restaurants have been addicting us to their products for years, and now we are paying the price for it. Our children should not be cursed with obesity caused by an addictive food additive. But what can I do about it?... I'm just one voice. What can I do to stop the poisoning of our children, while our governments are insuring financial protection for the industry that is poisoning us.This e-mail is g oing out to everyone I know in an attempt to tell you the truth that the corporate owned politicians and media won't tell you. The best way you can help to save yourself and your children from this drug-induced epidemic, is to forward this email to everyone. With any luck, it will circle the globe before politicians can pass the legislation protecting those who are poisoning us. The food industry learned a lot from the tobacco industry. Imagine if big tobacco had a bill like this in place before someone blew the whistle on Nicotine?If you are one of the few who can still believe that MSG is good for us, and you don't believe what John Erb has to say, see for yourself. Go to the National Library of Medicine, at http://www.pubmed.com. Type in the words "MSG Obese" and read a few of the 115 medical studies that appear. We the public, do not want to be rats in one giant experiment and we do not approve of food that makes us into a nation of obese, lethargic, addicted sheep, feeding the food industry's bottom line, while waiting for the heart transplant, diabetic induced amputation, blindness or other obesity induced, life threatening disorders. With your help we can put an end to this poison. Do your part in sending this message out by word of mouth, e-mail or by distribution of this print-out to all your friends all over the world and stop this 'Slow Poisoning of Mankind' by the packaged food industry.
Blowing the whistle on MSG is our responsibility, get the word out.
(from the internet via email)
posted by LAB at 5:18 PM
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Videodrome
Well, summer has come and gone (essentially) in the UK, and my big accomplishment since July has been finally getting wireless broadband set up in my cottage, which, to you, may not sound like such a herculean feat of superhuman prowess - but - if you live in the middle of nowhere and are held hostage in a nasty choke hold by the ghastly restrictions of primitive infrastructure, then you'd be very proud indeed. See pic. Does it look like there's a hub anywhere nearby? Anyway, as a result of my endeavours, I've spent all day in bed (wireless!!) watching videos from the 80s, 'cause, sometimes you feel a little bit Clan of Xymox, and at other times (against your better nature) you feel a little bit Wendy James. Check it out:
http://www.1500videos.com/
Some notable, must-see entries you'll find include:
1) the 12" single of Imagination, by Belouis Some (makes Girls On Film look like Gidget)
2) Fascination, Company B (for the fabulous choreography and wigs!!! LOL)
3) Pretty Boys and Pretty Girls, Book of Love (because I was a teenage drag queen when this came out. Ah, nostalgia)
4) Never Say Never, Romeo Void (because it still rocks 500 years later)
5) Cat House, Danielle Dax (like most 80s videos, it sucks hard, but the song still kicks ass. It would have been so much better if they just invested in a bloody wind machine!)
6) Living On Video, Trans-X (just watch it and love it. And dont question me)
7) Carolyn's Fingers, Cocteau Twins (you know how I feel about this already)
8) Homosapien, Peter Shelley (what is there to say? except Genius)
9) Vienna, Ultravox (just because)
10) They Dont Know, Tracey Ullman (guilty pleasure!! I laughed, I cried...)
11) then, bizarrely, there is Twist In My Sobriety, Tanita Tikaram (which seems quite weirdly out of place amongst the Siouxies, Devos, Joy Divisions, Specimens and Sigue Sigues, the frightful editing techniques, and the absurdly inane and puerile story lines).
There's also lots of early techno, industrial and deliciously ridiculous New Romantic goodies, BUT, mind you, there's mostly ultra appalling shite listed, utterly unwatchable rubbish: Saxon, Debarge, Christopher Cross, Toto, Janet Jackson, etc. You really hafta dig to find the gems lurking in this pile of muck. But God, is it worth it. I havent been this happy... well... since I snuck my very first record (OMD, 1980) into the house and hid it from my mother for fear of corporal punishment. You know, work of the Devil, and all that...
posted by LAB at 7:30 PM
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
www.savetheinternet.com
www.savetheinternet.com .
Congress is pushing through a law that would permit large telephone and cable companies,
like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast,
to control what you do,
where you go and
what you watch online.
Visit the URL below to check out what's at stake and send a loud
message directly to the Congress:
http://action.freepress.net/campaign/savethenet?rk=p7seLP41mBzvW
Congress is pushing through a law that would permit large telephone and cable companies,
like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast,
to control what you do,
where you go and
what you watch online.
Visit the URL below to check out what's at stake and send a loud
message directly to the Congress:
http://action.freepress.net/campaign/savethenet?rk=p7seLP41mBzvW
posted by LAB at 6:38 PM
Friday, July 14, 2006
Blink
The only interesting thing that has happened to me of late (besides the joyous departure of my boss!) is my recent eye exam in a neighboring village 5 miles away. Look! Here's the photo of the retina of my right eyeball, which I begged them to print for me. See how pretty-pretty. Plus, today I'm trying out a pair of daily-wear contact lenses for the first time ever. Because Vanity is the strongest, most powerful force in my base and supremely superficial life. So what!
Well, I don't have glaucoma (always a concern) but my prescription has increased since my last exam, which is irrefutable proof that I'm aging. God. I spend 1/3 of my salary on Decleor creams and unguents to appear forever youthful, and then I start rotting from the inside. I can't win. Just make the end swift and painless. And bloodless, if possible?
The only other thing to report is my latest role, as BORIS, the (heterosexual, thank you) Thug in the upcoming British indie, Whatever Happened to Pete Blagget? I thought about posting some of the amazing lines that lovely Boris has, but I thought that might be slightly premature and violate some sacred actor-director pact somewhere. Anyway, I shall post some of the tastier lines after shooting ends, in late-August.
What else?
It's been 85 degrees every day this week and cloudless, an unmistakable and nefarious sign of global warming in the UK, former land of perpetual mists and fog and rain. Even though we're rendering the only known hospitable planet to an unlivable cess pool at a supernaturally terrifying rate, it must be said that when the sun shines here, England is the most beautiful place in the world.
Pity that's all coming to a dazzling, screeching halt soon.
Now, Kittens, you know that I'm a staunch proponent of levity, and so as not to leave you feeling abandoned with the dark thoughts above and bereft of any amazing, happy vibrations, I'm posting a lil somethin-somethin for you sent to me by my groovy friend Kathlene in LA:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL6E7R4IbCM
x
posted by LAB at 6:53 PM
Monday, July 03, 2006
The Long Emergency
What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?
A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars a barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago. The next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered significant news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span of ten days. That same day, the stock market shot up more than a hundred points because, CNN said, government data showed no signs of inflation. Note to clueless nation: Call planet Earth.
Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that "people cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.
It has been very hard for Americans -- lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring -- to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.
Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life -- not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense -- you name it.
The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.
The term "global oil-production peak" means that a turning point will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline. It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total endowment, meaning half the world's oil will be left. That seems like a lot of oil, and it is, but there's a big catch: It's the half that is much more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and located mostly in places where the people hate us. A substantial amount of it will never be extracted.
The United States passed its own oil peak -- about 11 million barrels a day -- in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen.
The U.S. peak in 1970 brought on a portentous change in geoeconomic power. Within a few years, foreign producers, chiefly OPEC, were setting the price of oil, and this in turn led to the oil crises of the 1970s. In response, frantic development of non-OPEC oil, especially the North Sea fields of England and Norway, essentially saved the West's ass for about two decades. Since 1999, these fields have entered depletion. Meanwhile, worldwide discovery of new oil has steadily declined to insignificant levels in 2003 and 2004.
Some "cornucopians" claim that the Earth has something like a creamy nougat center of "abiotic" oil that will naturally replenish the great oil fields of the world. The facts speak differently. There has been no replacement whatsoever of oil already extracted from the fields of America or any other place.
Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.
It will change everything about how we live.
To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also declining, at five percent a year, despite frenetic new drilling, and with the potential of much steeper declines ahead. Because of the oil crises of the 1970s, the nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the acid-rain problem, the U.S. chose to make gas its first choice for electric-power generation. The result was that just about every power plant built after 1980 has to run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated with gas. To further complicate matters, gas isn't easy to import. Here in North America, it is distributed through a vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas would have to be compressed at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified) at special terminals, of which few exist in America. Moreover, the first attempts to site new terminals have met furious opposition because they are such ripe targets for terrorism.
Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly understood by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease and population overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble.
We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions.
No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.
The widely touted "hydrogen economy" is a particularly cruel hoax. We are not going to replace the U.S. automobile and truck fleet with vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas. The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants. Apart from the dim prospect of our building that many nuclear plants soon enough, there are also numerous severe problems with hydrogen's nature as an element that present forbidding obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas, especially in storage and transport.
Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with "renewables" are also unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not only the enormous problem of scale but the fact that the components require substantial amounts of energy to manufacture and the probability that they can't be manufactured at all without the underlying support platform of a fossil-fuel economy. We will surely use solar and wind technology to generate some electricity for a period ahead but probably at a very local and small scale.
Virtually all "biomass" schemes for using plants to create liquid fuels cannot be scaled up to even a fraction of the level at which things are currently run. What's more, these schemes are predicated on using oil and gas "inputs" (fertilizers, weed-killers) to grow the biomass crops that would be converted into ethanol or bio-diesel fuels. This is a net energy loser -- you might as well just burn the inputs and not bother with the biomass products. Proposals to distill trash and waste into oil by means of thermal depolymerization depend on the huge waste stream produced by a cheap oil and gas economy in the first place.
Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas, extant in less abundant supplies than many people assume and fraught with huge ecological drawbacks -- as a contributor to greenhouse "global warming" gases and many health and toxicity issues ranging from widespread mercury poisoning to acid rain. You can make synthetic oil from coal, but the only time this was tried on a large scale was by the Nazis under wartime conditions, using impressive amounts of slave labor.
If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may indeed have to resort to nuclear power, with all its practical problems and eco-conundrums. Under optimal conditions, it could take ten years to get a new generation of nuclear power plants into operation, and the price may be beyond our means. Uranium is also a resource in finite supply. We are no closer to the more difficult project of atomic fusion, by the way, than we were in the 1970s.
The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world's richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict. Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world's remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq's oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.
And then there is the issue of China, which, in 2004, became the world's second-greatest consumer of oil, surpassing Japan. China's surging industrial growth has made it increasingly dependent on the imports we are counting on. If China wanted to, it could easily walk into some of these places -- the Middle East, former Soviet republics in central Asia -- and extend its hegemony by force. Is America prepared to contest for this oil in an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I doubt it. Nor can the U.S. military occupy regions of the Eastern Hemisphere indefinitely, or hope to secure either the terrain or the oil infrastructure of one distant, unfriendly country after another. A likely scenario is that the U.S. could exhaust and bankrupt itself trying to do this, and be forced to withdraw back into our own hemisphere, having lost access to most of the world's remaining oil in the process.
We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. President George W. Bush has been briefed on the dangers of the oil-peak situation as long ago as before the 2000 election and repeatedly since then. In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that "the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary."
Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other arrangements for the way we live in the United States. America is in a special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.
Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical terms. We made the ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips, fried-food shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to stop making more of those things, the bottom will fall out.
The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.
Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not "services" like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work. The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers who had to relinquish their grip on the American dream. These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.
The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" won't be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain stores' 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and all the disorders that go with it.
As these things occur, America will have to make other arrangements for the manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary goods. They will probably be made on a "cottage industry" basis rather than the factory system we once had, since the scale of available energy will be much lower -- and we are not going to replay the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today, from paints to pharmaceuticals, are made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable. The selling of things will have to be reorganized at the local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy and far fewer choices.
The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the "level of service" (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.
America today has a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. Neither of the two major presidential candidates in 2004 mentioned railroads, but if we don't refurbish our rail system, then there may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades from now. The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially, is likely to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining gigantic airports may not justify the operation of a much-reduced air-travel fleet. Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than our highway network.
The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and tumultuous. In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others have further to fall. New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have long been paved over. They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of necrotic suburbia that will only amplify and reinforce the cities' problems. Still, our cities occupy important sites. Some kind of urban entities will exist where they are in the future, but probably not the colossi of twentieth-century industrialism.
Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century. I predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.
I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons. I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.
The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems, from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.
These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.
Adapted from The Long Emergency, 2005, by James Howard Kunstler,
A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars a barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago. The next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered significant news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span of ten days. That same day, the stock market shot up more than a hundred points because, CNN said, government data showed no signs of inflation. Note to clueless nation: Call planet Earth.
Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that "people cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.
It has been very hard for Americans -- lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring -- to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.
Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life -- not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense -- you name it.
The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the core of the argument. That argument states that we don't have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.
The term "global oil-production peak" means that a turning point will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline. It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total endowment, meaning half the world's oil will be left. That seems like a lot of oil, and it is, but there's a big catch: It's the half that is much more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and located mostly in places where the people hate us. A substantial amount of it will never be extracted.
The United States passed its own oil peak -- about 11 million barrels a day -- in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. In 2004 it ran just above 5 million barrels a day (we get a tad more from natural-gas condensates). Yet we consume roughly 20 million barrels a day now. That means we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen.
The U.S. peak in 1970 brought on a portentous change in geoeconomic power. Within a few years, foreign producers, chiefly OPEC, were setting the price of oil, and this in turn led to the oil crises of the 1970s. In response, frantic development of non-OPEC oil, especially the North Sea fields of England and Norway, essentially saved the West's ass for about two decades. Since 1999, these fields have entered depletion. Meanwhile, worldwide discovery of new oil has steadily declined to insignificant levels in 2003 and 2004.
Some "cornucopians" claim that the Earth has something like a creamy nougat center of "abiotic" oil that will naturally replenish the great oil fields of the world. The facts speak differently. There has been no replacement whatsoever of oil already extracted from the fields of America or any other place.
Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. In 2004, however, after demand from burgeoning China and India shot up, and revelations that Shell Oil wildly misstated its reserves, and Saudi Arabia proved incapable of goosing up its production despite promises to do so, the most knowledgeable experts revised their predictions and now concur that 2005 is apt to be the year of all-time global peak production.
It will change everything about how we live.
To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also declining, at five percent a year, despite frenetic new drilling, and with the potential of much steeper declines ahead. Because of the oil crises of the 1970s, the nuclear-plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and the acid-rain problem, the U.S. chose to make gas its first choice for electric-power generation. The result was that just about every power plant built after 1980 has to run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated with gas. To further complicate matters, gas isn't easy to import. Here in North America, it is distributed through a vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas would have to be compressed at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified) at special terminals, of which few exist in America. Moreover, the first attempts to site new terminals have met furious opposition because they are such ripe targets for terrorism.
Some other things about the global energy predicament are poorly understood by the public and even our leaders. This is going to be a permanent energy crisis, and these energy problems will synergize with the disruptions of climate change, epidemic disease and population overshoot to produce higher orders of trouble.
We will have to accommodate ourselves to fundamentally changed conditions.
No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it, or even a substantial fraction of it. The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have lulled us into a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome, leading many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. These days, even people who ought to know better are wishing ardently for a seamless transition from fossil fuels to their putative replacements.
The widely touted "hydrogen economy" is a particularly cruel hoax. We are not going to replace the U.S. automobile and truck fleet with vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas. The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants. Apart from the dim prospect of our building that many nuclear plants soon enough, there are also numerous severe problems with hydrogen's nature as an element that present forbidding obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas, especially in storage and transport.
Wishful notions about rescuing our way of life with "renewables" are also unrealistic. Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face not only the enormous problem of scale but the fact that the components require substantial amounts of energy to manufacture and the probability that they can't be manufactured at all without the underlying support platform of a fossil-fuel economy. We will surely use solar and wind technology to generate some electricity for a period ahead but probably at a very local and small scale.
Virtually all "biomass" schemes for using plants to create liquid fuels cannot be scaled up to even a fraction of the level at which things are currently run. What's more, these schemes are predicated on using oil and gas "inputs" (fertilizers, weed-killers) to grow the biomass crops that would be converted into ethanol or bio-diesel fuels. This is a net energy loser -- you might as well just burn the inputs and not bother with the biomass products. Proposals to distill trash and waste into oil by means of thermal depolymerization depend on the huge waste stream produced by a cheap oil and gas economy in the first place.
Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas, extant in less abundant supplies than many people assume and fraught with huge ecological drawbacks -- as a contributor to greenhouse "global warming" gases and many health and toxicity issues ranging from widespread mercury poisoning to acid rain. You can make synthetic oil from coal, but the only time this was tried on a large scale was by the Nazis under wartime conditions, using impressive amounts of slave labor.
If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may indeed have to resort to nuclear power, with all its practical problems and eco-conundrums. Under optimal conditions, it could take ten years to get a new generation of nuclear power plants into operation, and the price may be beyond our means. Uranium is also a resource in finite supply. We are no closer to the more difficult project of atomic fusion, by the way, than we were in the 1970s.
The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world's richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict. Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world's remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq's oil but to modify and influence the behavior of neighboring states around the Persian Gulf, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.
And then there is the issue of China, which, in 2004, became the world's second-greatest consumer of oil, surpassing Japan. China's surging industrial growth has made it increasingly dependent on the imports we are counting on. If China wanted to, it could easily walk into some of these places -- the Middle East, former Soviet republics in central Asia -- and extend its hegemony by force. Is America prepared to contest for this oil in an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I doubt it. Nor can the U.S. military occupy regions of the Eastern Hemisphere indefinitely, or hope to secure either the terrain or the oil infrastructure of one distant, unfriendly country after another. A likely scenario is that the U.S. could exhaust and bankrupt itself trying to do this, and be forced to withdraw back into our own hemisphere, having lost access to most of the world's remaining oil in the process.
We know that our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. President George W. Bush has been briefed on the dangers of the oil-peak situation as long ago as before the 2000 election and repeatedly since then. In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly that "the world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary."
Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other arrangements for the way we live in the United States. America is in a special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.
Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical terms. We made the ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips, fried-food shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to stop making more of those things, the bottom will fall out.
The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.
Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not "services" like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work. The relentless subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. Food production will necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers who had to relinquish their grip on the American dream. These masses of disentitled people may enter into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if mistreated they may simply seize that land.
The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" won't be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain stores' 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and all the disorders that go with it.
As these things occur, America will have to make other arrangements for the manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary goods. They will probably be made on a "cottage industry" basis rather than the factory system we once had, since the scale of available energy will be much lower -- and we are not going to replay the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today, from paints to pharmaceuticals, are made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable. The selling of things will have to be reorganized at the local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy and far fewer choices.
The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the "level of service" (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.
America today has a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. Neither of the two major presidential candidates in 2004 mentioned railroads, but if we don't refurbish our rail system, then there may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades from now. The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially, is likely to vanish. The sheer cost of maintaining gigantic airports may not justify the operation of a much-reduced air-travel fleet. Railroads are far more energy efficient than cars, trucks or airplanes, and they can be run on anything from wood to electricity. The rail-bed infrastructure is also far more economical to maintain than our highway network.
The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and tumultuous. In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others have further to fall. New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have long been paved over. They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of necrotic suburbia that will only amplify and reinforce the cities' problems. Still, our cities occupy important sites. Some kind of urban entities will exist where they are in the future, but probably not the colossi of twentieth-century industrialism.
Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century. I predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.
I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons. I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.
The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems, from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.
These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.
Adapted from The Long Emergency, 2005, by James Howard Kunstler,
posted by LAB at 3:54 PM
Monday, June 26, 2006
Jesus revisited
At long, long last, Kittens - the phoenix arises from its forlorn ashes. Many of you have wished I'd die a more painful death (than the one represented at left here) for abandoning you, and believe me, as evil and black as your tiny hearts are, you couldn't have wished worse upon me than the unrelenting and unadulterated agony I've suffered from being separated from you this month. So, check it out. Remember JESUS from a few posts back? Well, here he is in full cinematic splendour (and hairless to boot, if one scrutinizes the body of Christ closely. Click the cross for a larger image (do it)). Anyway, it's not that the director was opposed to une version poilue, it's just that there were lots of bloody latex wound prosthetics adhered to the torso with the glue that NASA uses to cement the heat-resistant shingles to the belly of the Space Shuttle; I had my back waxed last summer in LA - and a crucifixion would be far less painful than waxing my tits, so I cleverly brought along an electric buzzer and shaved away all the potentially painful obstruction prior to makeup. The only teeny downside is the army of in-grown hairs that have launched a full-scale ground assault on me. But, of course, the amazing upside of it all is that I can now say with a straight face that I've been properly crucified at the next cocktail party I happen to be at.
posted by LAB at 9:38 AM
Thursday, June 01, 2006
V*V*V
http://www.myopicfriend.com/movies/vivavoce.mov
Manly 1970s hunks Burt and Buddy are survivors of a car smash-up that has left them stranded, to their horror, in an all-gay fantasy utopia: Gay Andy's Resort & Hotel. There's only one solution: these straight-as-a-die men are going to have to pass until they can escape. Meanwhile, light years away, a parallel universe exists - our own, the year 2005, London. Struggling actress Ronnie has just got her first big break in a lesbian vampire B-movie. But Ronnie holds a secret: she dates girls in real life, too. And things aren't too enlightened on set: the assistant director Jesper is a homophobic asshole; Ronnie's girlfriend is exasperated with her closeted behavior and, worst of all, bits of another disturbing world - Gays Andy's - are starting to leak into Ronnie's real life. When Ronnie starts to investigate why, she comes across a disease called THE VIVA VOCE VIRUS that has its roots in Hollywood's yesteryear, a sickness spread by the heterosexual screen kiss.
A film about contagion, voodoo, blue virus, the closet, and pastiche. And how we can be vaccinated against it all.
* * * watch the trailer above - be patient - it may be slow loading * * *
posted by LAB at 11:08 AM
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
I Have 3 Words For You:
N . P . R
http://www.democracynow.org/
Ok, Im not one to quickly eshew my naturally-occurring, healthy dose of skepticism in favour of donning the latest fashionable mantle in conspiracy theories. BUT, I've been in Italy for a while and I've noticed that something bizarre happens when you step beyond the borders of the US (and its puppet-government in the UK): you (occasionally) get news that hasnt been filtered by goverment-backed scare mongering in media outlets. On a near-daily basis it's reported on CNN and other outlets that a carbomb killed 20-30 or more Iraqi workers in Baghdad while they waited to be picked up to go to work... and yet (curiously) why is it never reported where it was they were working? Slave labour for the vile Halliburton or some other nefarious US corporation exploiting the disintegrating situation there? Attacks like this are always described and couched in the most neutral language possible, but I assure you these attacks are anything but neutrally motivated... but you'll never know otherwise. Big Brother just isnt a wretched TV show - it's evolving into a way of life in your country. It's already a reality here in the UK and Europe where internet providers are legally obliged to provide information about (your) web page traffic to government offices upon request. You're being numbered, tagged, data-based... and now monitored. But so what. It's all in the name of national security. You think you can change the current climate? Fuck yeah. You live in the most sophisticated democracy the world has ever known; your vote will probably be tossed away in 2008 if you don't happen to vote for the party 'destined' to win the election. And sorry if youre African American because your vote is 900% more likely to be 'lost'. You've slightly better odds if you're Hispanic at 500%, but American Indian votes come in at a staggering 2000% more likely to be mysteriously discounted in elections. http://www.gregpalast.com/ (BTW, a word of warning: if you buy the book, Armed Madhouse, which is mentioned on the site above don't use your credit card to pay for it. Yes, it's all very chilling. All very 1984.) Of course, now all this makes much more sense when placed in the context of other weird election outcomes: 1994 and the very .. er... surprising upset victory of George W. Bush over the popular incumbent governor of Texas, Anne Richards. Ole W again. So smart. And yet so disingenuously inept, so ironically inarticulate. But really, this man is wonderfully mystifying and incredibly rich and woe unto those who casually dismiss him and his demonic hoarde as ineffectual, country bumpkins on the brink of extinction. What did he mean exactly when he stood smugly on the deck of a US aircraft carrier stationed in the Persian Gulf and uttered the phrase, 'Mission accomplished'? Well, one barrel of crude in international markets sold for $18 when he took office. Now it tops $80 a barrel. So, you tell me what he meant.
I feel like my ancestral homeland is sleepwalking.
http://www.democracynow.org/
Ok, Im not one to quickly eshew my naturally-occurring, healthy dose of skepticism in favour of donning the latest fashionable mantle in conspiracy theories. BUT, I've been in Italy for a while and I've noticed that something bizarre happens when you step beyond the borders of the US (and its puppet-government in the UK): you (occasionally) get news that hasnt been filtered by goverment-backed scare mongering in media outlets. On a near-daily basis it's reported on CNN and other outlets that a carbomb killed 20-30 or more Iraqi workers in Baghdad while they waited to be picked up to go to work... and yet (curiously) why is it never reported where it was they were working? Slave labour for the vile Halliburton or some other nefarious US corporation exploiting the disintegrating situation there? Attacks like this are always described and couched in the most neutral language possible, but I assure you these attacks are anything but neutrally motivated... but you'll never know otherwise. Big Brother just isnt a wretched TV show - it's evolving into a way of life in your country. It's already a reality here in the UK and Europe where internet providers are legally obliged to provide information about (your) web page traffic to government offices upon request. You're being numbered, tagged, data-based... and now monitored. But so what. It's all in the name of national security. You think you can change the current climate? Fuck yeah. You live in the most sophisticated democracy the world has ever known; your vote will probably be tossed away in 2008 if you don't happen to vote for the party 'destined' to win the election. And sorry if youre African American because your vote is 900% more likely to be 'lost'. You've slightly better odds if you're Hispanic at 500%, but American Indian votes come in at a staggering 2000% more likely to be mysteriously discounted in elections. http://www.gregpalast.com/ (BTW, a word of warning: if you buy the book, Armed Madhouse, which is mentioned on the site above don't use your credit card to pay for it. Yes, it's all very chilling. All very 1984.) Of course, now all this makes much more sense when placed in the context of other weird election outcomes: 1994 and the very .. er... surprising upset victory of George W. Bush over the popular incumbent governor of Texas, Anne Richards. Ole W again. So smart. And yet so disingenuously inept, so ironically inarticulate. But really, this man is wonderfully mystifying and incredibly rich and woe unto those who casually dismiss him and his demonic hoarde as ineffectual, country bumpkins on the brink of extinction. What did he mean exactly when he stood smugly on the deck of a US aircraft carrier stationed in the Persian Gulf and uttered the phrase, 'Mission accomplished'? Well, one barrel of crude in international markets sold for $18 when he took office. Now it tops $80 a barrel. So, you tell me what he meant.
I feel like my ancestral homeland is sleepwalking.
posted by LAB at 12:50 PM
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
I Kill Me
Fuck!!! I just wrote the funniest and most clever shit and when I clicked on PUBLISH POST I got the nefarious and damnable CANNOT FIND PAGE error!!!! Clicking the BACK button produced an unpopulated field! ALL LOST! I hate everything right now. And of course, as we all know, the amazing freshness and spontaneity of the original writing is now lost forever. I shall endeavor to recreate this masterpiece even with the heartbreaking knowledge that whatever I write will be merely a flat, tired facimile of the original greatness. This fucking site is so slow today! fucking figure it out, you engineering arseholes! GAWD!
My suicidal tendancies are screaming in my ears of late, to my minor annoyance. SO addicted to drama! The WHY is rather unimportant - what IS important is the HOW and then second in importance is WHEN. Way back in April, I retired one dark afternoon of misery to the sanctity of my livingroom. I lit all the black candles, applied black eyeliner and wrapped myelf in swathes of black crenoline (I conveniently had oceans of it lying around from a recently discarded hat-lining hobby. So what! Look, for future reference, it really looks dramatic in low, indirect lighting). I reclined on my purple velvet sofa (I know, but it really is hot) in a corpse-like pose and mentally - and very carefully - composed both my resignation letter and my suicide note. And I very thoughtfully addressed it to everyone. 'Dear Everyone, as the lucky recipient of this missive, you are entitled to read and know the Secret of the Universe and the Meaning of Life...' Because why selfishly address the grandest (albeit brief) piece of romantic literature (and treatise on the nature of the human condition) to just a single pair of eyes? To do so would have been most selfish and unforgivable indeed, Kittens. And anyway I'll prolly post it in a future blog. So, my impending demise was staved off, thwarted and avoided in the end because I wisely decided that I needed to go on holiday prior to offing myself. So, on wednesday I'm voyaging to southern Italy for the rest of the month which means, Kittens, that there will sadly be little activity from me here for some time. But we shall discuss the scintillating prospects of suicide upon my return. Providing, of course, that there isn't a murder along the way.
Ciao for now, Kittens.
x
My suicidal tendancies are screaming in my ears of late, to my minor annoyance. SO addicted to drama! The WHY is rather unimportant - what IS important is the HOW and then second in importance is WHEN. Way back in April, I retired one dark afternoon of misery to the sanctity of my livingroom. I lit all the black candles, applied black eyeliner and wrapped myelf in swathes of black crenoline (I conveniently had oceans of it lying around from a recently discarded hat-lining hobby. So what! Look, for future reference, it really looks dramatic in low, indirect lighting). I reclined on my purple velvet sofa (I know, but it really is hot) in a corpse-like pose and mentally - and very carefully - composed both my resignation letter and my suicide note. And I very thoughtfully addressed it to everyone. 'Dear Everyone, as the lucky recipient of this missive, you are entitled to read and know the Secret of the Universe and the Meaning of Life...' Because why selfishly address the grandest (albeit brief) piece of romantic literature (and treatise on the nature of the human condition) to just a single pair of eyes? To do so would have been most selfish and unforgivable indeed, Kittens. And anyway I'll prolly post it in a future blog. So, my impending demise was staved off, thwarted and avoided in the end because I wisely decided that I needed to go on holiday prior to offing myself. So, on wednesday I'm voyaging to southern Italy for the rest of the month which means, Kittens, that there will sadly be little activity from me here for some time. But we shall discuss the scintillating prospects of suicide upon my return. Providing, of course, that there isn't a murder along the way.
Ciao for now, Kittens.
x
posted by LAB at 4:25 PM
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Personal Jesus (blech - that song really sucks)
Forget everything I wrote yesterday!!Yes. I know, Kittens. Shield your eyes from the amazing blessedness lest they melt in their sockets! A miracle of the highest magnitude and mystery has unfolded right before us. Yesterday I was bald. And today, I've been cast (which in itself is a miracle) in a small (but extremely crucial (of course)) playing JESUS (requiring a full head of hair). You know - thorns, blood, crosses, thirst, holiness. Oh, and a fab hair piece. All my favourites. Now, Kittens, I'm sure the irony of this is not lost on you. So, there's really no need to insult your intelligences and expound.
But, O! Behold! See how hairy the rest of Jesus is! Eww. Can that be right? I don't ever remember seeing any traditional representations of the Christ as a hairy, evolutionary throwback. I bet they make me shave my chest. I hope someone does it for me. Hmmm...I think I'll insist on that. I won't have to do my back because there will be a big wooden, blood-soaked cross back there obscuring any forests of hair which may silently be proliferating.
Anyway, check out the following link for info on the film.
http://www.pixelrevolutionfilms.com/The_day_the_sun_danced.html
x
posted by LAB at 7:00 PM
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
My Life as a Star Fucker
Minus all the stars, Kittens.
But that will all change!
I had an audition in Birmingham earlier today because as some of you know, I'm a struggling actor well on the perilous road to riches and fame and total loss of anonymity. Yay. Ok, that's all a long way off obviously since I'm still uberinvisible and uber x10 poor. But why is it that everyone in the world wants to cast me as the Camp Gay Mugger?! I have versatility! I have depth. Yes, I can kick over your grandmother and steal her handbag, then half way down the block decide I can't be seen with such a hideous beige abomination - it totally clashes with my black and chocolate Armani - and toss it into the nearest dumpster (forgetting, of course, about the 80K she's got stashed inside). Yes, I can do that quite well. It's the tits. I need a tit reduction. It's the gigantic tits that make people think, 'aggressive yet nelly homosexual'. Ok, in America, my tits are just slightly unforgettable. But here in the UK, land of underdeveloped, withered sticks and sickly chubbies, they have a supernatural power to command all who behold them. I need to find a pic of the tits to post (ha! as if that will be difficult - I have at least 39 million images to sift through... there... what about this one?). You'll quite agree, I think... Anyway, the audition went well - but you can never tell what they think because they always kiss your ass all the way through like you're Julia Roberts -but- it doesnt mean shit... not until that call comes. If it comes.
My kinesiologist just left and practically all my muscles were turned off today. I'll explain more about this ancient, arcane practice in a future blog. Stay tuned, Kittens.
x
Wait, do I sound shallow??
posted by LAB at 4:25 PM
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Rolf me
Recently, my world is being blown into bits and recreated every 5 minutes, which is a bit exhausting although very exciting. Just when I settle on thinking, 'oh, it's going to be this way', suddenly no - it's going to be that way, instead. This is all quite new. I'm used to a staid, controlled, unchanging environment. I had my 8th Rolfing session earlier today and I think this Rolfing business is largely (yet indirectly) responsible for the aforementioned chaos. Aside from the amazing physical changes, it's shifting quite a lot of emotional and psychological stuff in me. I'd recommend Rolfing to anyone especially because it will test your threshhold for pain. Which is always fun. It's like a hot branding iron pressed into your flesh, it makes you see stars, and then when it's over you feel like youve gone 10 rounds with Skeletor and kicked his bony ass. Fuck yeah. I even got hard once during one of the sessions - I wonder if that was any indication of the beginning of a fulfilling yet presently unrealized S&M career ahead of me? God, I hope so. I have all this expensive kit lying around unused...
Anyway, I only have 2 more sessions left until Im done with the entire process. And Im sad. I've truly grown to love it. But, listen, aside from all the flip commentary above, it's so very, very worth it. It will change your life. And it won't compel you to wear 6-inch stilletto heels and an executioner's mask afterwards. And if it does, then you prolly wanted to all your lives anyway, Kittens. x
Anyway, I only have 2 more sessions left until Im done with the entire process. And Im sad. I've truly grown to love it. But, listen, aside from all the flip commentary above, it's so very, very worth it. It will change your life. And it won't compel you to wear 6-inch stilletto heels and an executioner's mask afterwards. And if it does, then you prolly wanted to all your lives anyway, Kittens. x
posted by LAB at 3:14 PM
Links
- Whatever Happened To Pete Blaggit? - the film
- The Day the Sun Danced - the film
- What Actaeon Saw - MySpace Music
- VivaVoceVirus - the film
- DemocracyNOW
- Alternet News
- Cocteau Twins
- 4AD
- snarg
- IAMX
- Ultrafox
Previous Posts
- V.V.V revistited
- Sleaze-O-Rama 80s! II
- Let's take it down a notch, shall we?
- and fuck off
- What a little cunt
- W.the.F.U.
- Biodiesel Now (no gritty war aftertaste)
- Margaret Cho and Proposition 107
- MSG
- Videodrome
Archives
