oh, and about this fucking war

look:

1) iraq did not destroy the world trade center. 7th-century islamic fundamentalists did. iraq does not have a population of islamic fundamentalists any more than stalinist russia had a population of religious fundamentalists; iraq is a brutal and efficiently repressive dictatorship, but it is a secular dictatorship. in order for that mustached stalin-appreciating asswipe to stay in power as he has for the last 24 years, the last thing he can allow is iraqis who value allah more than they value saddam. so wake the fuck up.

2) at least 12 and possibly 17 of the 20 hijackers came from saudi arabia. osama bin laden came from saudi arabia. church and state are one and the same in saudi arabia. the holiest cities in islam are part of saudi arabia with zero degree of separation. in the videotape of bin laden bragging ofthe attacks to his pals in afghanistan, sympathetic saudi religious leaders are named. 7th-century fundamentalists come from 7th-century governments, such as the oligarchy that is saudi arabia. do the math.

3) iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were given to them by american corporations! when iraq’s neighbor iran underwent a religious fundamentalist revolutionin 1979, hussein, threatened by the religious influence, went to war with them almost immediately and our government allowed iraq chemical and biolgical agents to use to kill iranians! physician, heal thyself!

4) if i hear one more lefty idiot telling me that i caused all of this by voting for ralph nader in the 2000 election, i’m gonna start squeezing throats. it’s been decades since any president has truly been the commander in chief of the military-industrial complex of the usa. the last (and really, the only) president to warn the public about this was dwight eisenhower on his way out of office. what, do you think the guy who won world war II had limited credibility about this? what, you think the us government has become less beholden to private interests since the fifties? you think the dead silence on this issue by every successive president is because the problem went away? you think al gore wasn’t bought and paid for? you’re dreaming.

5) assuming the us kicks hussein out of bagdhad without needing three to ten times the number of combat troops currently marshalled (can anyone say selective service?) iraq will be in huge risk of falling apart into bloody pieces as yugoslavia and russia did without the iron heel of the head killer in charge. make no mistake, in order to not make the region much more unstable, the us will need to preserve the apparatus of repressive dictatorship even after we kill the dictator. consider this: as hanna arendt writes in her excellent book about nazi germany and soviet russia the origins of totalitarianism, in 1963, 18 years after the fall of nazi germany, there were 11,500 judges sitting on the bench in the democratic part of the country. 5,000 of these judges were active in the courts under hitler – and the nazis were in power for only 12 years -the ba’ath party have been running iraq for 35 years! run away! get out! stop!

fresh tin donuts of the worthy variety

middle america’s very best manglers of pop music, enon are out on the road, europe and the us. if you have not yet been smacked around by their sound, get thee to the cd store and pick up an album of theirs called believo!…an excellent starting point. me, i lost mine when it rolled under the flooring of the dj booth at liar’s club a few months ago. but i have an excellent memory for music, so i play it often…in my mind. a more recent enon lp on touch & go called high society in my opinion doesn’t deliver as much punch, but when i saw them last year at the fireside bowl here in chitown they completely ruled. in their hands, rock music doesn’t seem like the played out cul-de-sac it usually does these days. check the tour dates and watch for a new lp as well.

on the downtempo tip, i picked up geogaddi by the highly swell boards of canada. so i’m a year late, shut up. for me, this music is mining an emotional territory i recall from my younger days watching educational films (which is pretty funny since i recently found out their very name is indeed an homage to a group of cultural/educational films from the 70s produced by the canadian governmental organization film boards of canada. good call.) geogaddi might be showing the extremes of the palette they use, which is a charitable way of saying maybe their superb music has the right to children lp was the one collection of consistently appealing pieces their vocabulary could produce. or maybe it just means i quit smoking pot. i dunno. we’ll see. it’s not as if it’s impossible that their collection of approaches, equipment and tones is inexhaustible. just ask kraftwerk about running out of gas after totally changing the world with a minimalist toolset.

was curious about röyksopp as well, and picked up melody am. i kind of liked the one track with the high-pitched ‘lectric piano, but the rest of it is too dancey. ebay, here i come.

so long pioneer 10; let ’em know we’re coming

well, a miserable winter means silence. there hasn’t been much worth posting lately…bitter complaints about the weather are about as much fun to read as they are to mutter, so silence has done nicely.

but today…today saw a landmark event in the eternal human struggle to spew ourselves into every crack and crevice we lay eyes on.

back when nixon was president, nasa launched a space probe named pioneer 10 on a mission of exploration. amazingly, just today, the 570-pound, nuclear-powered tourist, eight billion miles from home, sent its last message back to nasa. it’s so far away, it took the signal 11 hours to get here at the speed of light.

pioneer was the first probe to survey jupiter and saturn, and lasted 28 more years than it was designed to. the computer processor power onboard has less muscle than your cellphone, yet it hung in there until today, when it sent its last faint message home using the last of its power.

it’s on its way to the star aldebaran, which is the eye in the constellation called taurus the bull. at 68 light-years away, it’ll get there in about two million years. there’s a plaque bolted to pioneer 10’s side that shows pictures of human beings for the benefit of any sentient beings who may intercept the spacecraft. apparently, pioneer’s designers felt that the human species might not proliferate out into the cosmos and make aldebaran a suburb of earth and thereby make our presence known. they can be forgiven for this mistake; it was 1972 and they hadn’t yet seen the true magnitude of the sprawl of suburban blight we now have caked around our cultural centers.

next time you feel out of sorts, think of poor pioneer 10, a billiard ball coasting forward 30 years after the smack of the cue stick. 30 years down, 1,999,970 left to go. you may feel better about your own predicament. unless you’re stuck in traffic.