Debate Coverage - it’s not the answers, it’s the questions.

Oddly enough, its not the answers that fills me with dread. It’s the questions. They never ask questions of value.

Questions never asked: Off the top of my head. . . .

Have you ever seen a UFO? (Pres. Carter did.) How many people would you justify killing to secure our oil interests? Who are your biggest contributors and how beholden are you to them? Will you be appointing a special prosecutor to pursue Bush administration wrong doings? If no, how many other crimes will you ask the Justice Department not to pursue? (For the Republicans) Why is homosexuality so abhorrent to you? Please describe your own sexual proclivities so we all can judge you. Doggy style? Oral sex? Would you ever consider having sex with Jesus?

Do you believe that global warming exists? If so, do you agree that drastic action is required?

There are two million people in U.S. prisons. 80% are in prison for drug offences. Is the legal system the best way to handle what is essentially a public health issue? Marijuana doesn’t kill anyone, how do you justify legalize tobacco? Should marijuana be legal? Should alcohol? Alcohol kills more and hurts more than all the illegal drugs combined.

If you don’t endorse universal healthcare, how do you justify murdering U.S. citizens that don’t have insurance?

And can we, for the love of god, have a debate which give the candidates enough time to fully answer the questions. And if they don’t answer the question, can’t the moderator press for an answer? I’d prefer a system whereas the moderator can push a button and send the candidate through a trap door if they don’t answer.

Almost every politician has endorsed testing our teachers - can’t we test the candidates? Give me a thousand word essay describing the worst part of the American dream. How are your algebra skills? How many signers of the Constitution can you name? Please list the amendments to the constitution.
Since we’ll never, ever, ever get anything like that, I’m throwing up my hands at the entire process.

The shallow American . . .

Lets get down to the real issues. We don’t really need a debate. We don’t even need a primary. As an American I make my choice based on looks alone. I’m all about the image. So, in the end its Romney vs. Obama. But, as an American, I place huge value on their names, so I can’t vote for Mitt or Obama. I’ve never even heard of a Mitt before. That leaves Hillary. But as an American my voting decision is mostly based on who has the best television commercial. Hillary has the worst commercials. So, as an American, my vote now goes to whoever gives me the best photo ops. I need a candidates willing to go to a diner and sample the local cuisine, just to show they are like the average Joe. Too bad that will never happen. But if I had to make a decision now, my vote goes to the best haircut. For this reason, and this reason alone, I am throwing my support behind Derek Zoolander! Zoolander from President!!!! Mugatu for Vice President.

Rollerball

Rollerball was on T.V. last night. Released in 1975, Rollerball is a vision of our future where society was run by corporations and professional sports franchises are nothing more than an updated version of the Roman gladiatorial games. Over the top drivel. I had to laugh.

I hate it when Hollywood takes fantasy too far. I mean, honestly, you can’t believe for one second that millions of people would blindly worship gladiatorial type games while Rome is burning. People aren’t that dumb. If criminals took over our government, looted our treasuries, started wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people and committed high treason, the citizens wouldn’t be huddled around the T.V. in grave concern over the Super Bowl. People wouldn’t be praying to God for their team to win. It just couldn’t happen. The American people are smarter than that.

Imagine corporations running society. How absurd. And what kind of world would we live in if corporations owned our home town sports teams? The very idea is crazy. Why would anyone root for a home town team if that team was full of players that weren’t from that home town? And even if a few of them grew up in the city the team is based in, why would you care about them if they were regularly traded between teams? Even better, why would anyone root for a team which could switch home towns? The very idea is absurd. Sports fans aren’t that dumb.

If teams were owned by corporations, the players would only be regarded as commodities. All that would matter would be the bottom line. You could never really have any sports heros. A players value would be directly related to their performance and drugs that enhance that performance would become paramount. Fans would be reduced to rooting for the player that took the best drugs. It’s the height of absurdity.

The very idea of a corporate society is ridiculous. What will Hollywood think of next? It could never work. Leaders that serve the interests of the corporations over their own citizens? Impossible. They could never get elected if they didn’t represent the people.

You just can’t fool the Americans into voting a criminal into office. To do something like that you’d have to find millions of people who already have a difficult time defining their own reality and people aren’t so gullible as to believe any moron in a suit that professes their same exact values.

A society built on corporate ethics? To actually think that corporations can teach people fall in love with the pursuit of money - it’s the height of absurdity. You’d have to brainwash the populace. Corporations would have to fill the media with propaganda of the virtue of pursuing wealth. They’d never be able to pull it off.

There would have to be television shows dedicated to the virtue of self indulgence. Who can have the biggest party? Who can spend the most money on their lavish lifestyle? They can’t sell shows like that. People aren’t dumb enough to watch that kind of drivel. Teenagers, maybe. But they’d have to disguise the shows as young and hip. Like who can have the biggest and best sweet 16 party. Or maybe they’d just dazzle the kids with shows about the excessive lifestyles of ultra rich movie and television actors. But come on, nothing like that could really happen.

I’m sure that in this freaky weird Rollerball future world there were entire television networks dedicated to innocuous social trends like fashion and celebrities; reporting it like it’s news. As if grown adults would care about the latest fashion trends while their country was being destroyed by criminals. It’s absurd. Once again I must laugh at the very thought. Ha. Ha. Ha. That could never happen.

Rollerball. An outrageous concept for our future. It’s too over-the-top. But if you’re looking for a truly prophetic look at the future, look no further than Planet of the Apes. That could really happen. I truly believe that some day apes will reclaim this planet and I look forward to serving our new overlords. Lucky for me I ran into this really cool politician. He said he shares my faith in the dream of an ape run world. I’m voting for him now. He gets me.

Be Careful What You Wish For

When I was thirteen I began having a crisis of faith. At least that’s what I called it at the time. In reality it was more of a crisis of existence. I was stuck on the questions - What am I? What is this? What is going on? Reality made no sense. To a lesser degree it still doesn’t.

Those questions kept swirling around in my mind for well over a year. I would find myself praying to God, over and over, asking those same questions, over and over.

Be careful what you wish for.

By the time I turned fifteen I had resigned myself to never knowing these answers, but I took solace that no one else knew. It was about this time that I started having petite seizures. At the time I didn’t know what they were. Petite seizures are like little jolts of electricity that broke my train of thoughts and left me wondering what just happened. (I’d lose about two seconds of memory.) It was difficult covering up my lapses. People would be talking to me, and my head might twitch, but there was no outward sign that anything about me had changed. So when my response to our conversation wasn’t quite right, they would often regard me as insulting or aloof. A missing two or three seconds of any conversation left me putting together puzzles without all the pieces.

At the time I didn’t understand what I was experiencing. Imagine getting directions from someone and losing a couple of seconds: Zap. "What? Oh, sorry. Head down East third to . . ." Zap. "Okay, lets start again, head down East third. . ." - It’s a bit unnerving to say the least. And anyone you're talking to thinks you’re an asshole. Petite mal seizures would hit me nearly twenty times an hour - all day.

All the while this is going on, I continued to pester God, "What is going on?" "What am I" "What is this?" "How can this possibly be real?"

I didn’t have my first Grand Mal seizure until I was 18. Even then I didn’t understand what was going on. I woke up with a huge knot on my head where I had fallen. Only, I didn’t know that I had fallen. I didn’t know my own name. A full grand-mal is a truly jarring experience. Cascades of electricity shoot out of my brain, leaving me to fall, face first, wherever I am at the time. My muscles would tighten to their maximum tightness for the next four to ten minutes. It’s a hell of a workout. I would wake up feeling like I had run a marathon on my hands. Everything hurt. My toes hurt. And the soreness would go on for over a week.

Waking up from a grand mal is another test of endurance. A full blown seizure would leave me thinking - nothing. Not a thing. Like a computer overload, my brain was wiped. I had no memory of anything. Complete amnesia.

It’s a strange thing to have amnesia on a regular basis. There’s about three minutes when even the language center of my brain hasn’t kicked in. I can hear what people are saying to me, but nothing makes sense. It’s at these times I can’t even think in words. Just emotions and thoughts. Who am I? What am I? - I am fear. I am pain and suffering. I am panic.

The experience would leave me in total panic. The pain was from the bloody knot on my head from the fall. The suffering would come from my body after it’s marathon session of flexing. Panic would set in as people would be surrounding me, asking questions like, "are you alright?" "Who is our current president?" "Do you know what day of the week this is?"

I’m 46 years old now. Even on medication I had on average three grand mal seizures a year for over twenty years. Many, many, trips to the hospital. Not a lot of fun. And still, the worst part of epilepsy is the petite seizures. I still have those, although not as much as I use to.

But God answered my question. God came thru in the end. What are we? What is going on? Why are we here? What am I?

I followed the Buddhist path to enlightenment. Many years ago it occurred to me that what Buddhist monks were trying to accomplish through meditation, I had achieved through malady. Try this exercise yourself. Try not to think. Try to clear your mind of your own thoughts. It’s not an easy thing to do. After a grand mal seizure I had no thoughts. My brain was a clean slate. It’s the definition of amnesia.

I had trained myself to answer those dumb questions people asked after a seizure. Who is our President? What year is this? I had forced those answers into my brain, even without understanding what they meant. I would answer, "Clinton or Bush" without even understanding what a President was. I would tell them what year it was without knowing what a year was. Knowing this, I tried to force another first thought into my mind.

"Relax" "Breath" "Try not to think" "be one with the universe." "No pain." - - - Not an easy thing to do or think about when you wake up in extreme anguish. But, after a dozen or so grand mals, I achieve just that. I clearly remember the first time I touched oneness. I was in my father’s office when I woke up. I recognized the scene. Pain and suffering filled every inch of me. I tried to breath. I tried to relax. And then there I was. Everywhere.

Don’t let anyone try to sell you that oneness is like heaven. It’s not. My first experience was jarring and scarey. Oneness is like being hit by a train. It’s too much. Reality isn’t reality if you are not separate from it. Oneness loses your self. Which is still of consternation to me - it’s a hard thing to reconcile.

Subsequent visits to everything became manageable at least in a psychological sense. I slowly began to understand what I was experiencing and I achieved peace with it. I’ve told this story to friends and family - often falling on deaf ears. For those interested in the experience of oneness, I can only say, - - - don’t worry about it. There will be time enough for oneness when you are dead. Which leaves me shaking my head in dismay at the billions of sky pilots jabbering into heaven on this planet. I understand it. Those billions are me when I was 13. They are all asking, what am I?

If I took one thing away from the experience it’s that - - God doesn’t want us to spend our time praising her. God wants us to live. Also - God is everything and everyone.

Obviously I took away much more from my brief moments of oneness. I could spend days trying to relay the emotional impact of my religious experience but in the end, that’s what life is. Life is the journey to finding ourselves thru this reality. Trying to convey my journey is just one more story in your journey. Relish your path. Enjoy your existence while you have it. It won’t last forever.

SUPPORT YOUR POLICE, BEAT YOURSELF UP

I got to hand it to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. He sat through the public and Congressional hearings, he listened intently, and after a thoughtful deep introspection, he told the public what we already knew. He had already made up his mind. The public hearings were a formality. Martin, you gotta have balls. Big freakin’ Stephen Colbert balls to act like that. I’m thinkin’ you were brainwashed by L. Ron Hubbard himself. What’s your thetan level? Is it just me, or does Kevin Martin give off a kind of ‘Children of the Corn’ vibe?

But fear not! There’s a whole slew of corporate Democrats will set things right. Focus groups have already approved their rhetoric, so don’t worry about what they might say; you won’t care anyway. All glory to the hypnotoad! All glory to the hypnotoad!

Picking a Corporate Democratic Candidate

I’m a little selfish when it comes to picking a candidate. My single criteria is to put Bush and his administration on trial. And not just any trial. We need one of those Italian style trials when they had hundreds of mafioso in cages surrounding the courtroom. When the guilty verdicts are handed down we’ll need a Running Man type game show to carry out the executions. If Cheney and Martin can make it through the maze of rabid baggers, they live another day. We’ll call it the General Electric’s Bagger Maze, featuring the Bud Lite dancers. - with a writer’s strike on I don’t see how they can say no.

What I’m basically saying is we need some sort of deterrent. We need some way of letting the criminals know things like this won’t be tolerated. Like Martha Stewart. One day the American people just rose up and said no to Martha’s reality. Calls were made and the tri-lateral commission handed down the verdict. Two weeks later she was indicted. It’s true. Alex Jones told me. Remember, if you read it on the internet, it has to be true.

2007. The year of the wide stance.

http://www2.tbo.com/content/2007/dec/27/pinellas-sheriffs-employees-punished-adultry/?news-breaking

I got a kick out of this one. Two Sheriff’s county employee’s were punished for having an affair. Not for just having sex. They were punished for adultery. Which makes me wonder what the punishment is for lusting after my neighbor’s wife. What’s the punishment for not keeping the Sabbath holy? If I’m not supposed to covet my neighbor’s slave, does that mean I have to force him to get a slave?

My Jihad on Christmas

Editor's note from 8/25/08: For some reason I’ve been receiving 10 times the usual number of hits on Basket of Puppies regarding George Hunter White, who I featured in a post last year at this time. If you’ve come to my blog in an effort to find info on the Hunter S. Thompson of law enforcement please send me an e-mail and tell me why you are interested. (One of the best resources is Wikipedia.) I love writing about George Hunter White. It's an incredible story and my curiosity is itiching to find out why he has recently become so popular. For those that don't know, White's personal writings and correspondence are available at Stanford - but can’t be checked out. They are only available for viewing in the library.

________________

It’s Christmas time, so lets talk about torture. It comes in two forms. Direct torture, i.e. water boarding, (which apparently needs to be video taped and then erased.) And then there is the mental kind. A good example is being assaulted by cheesy 1950's Christmas music, every year, year in- year out, until your Clockwork Orange brain sautes at the sound of Rudolph that fucking reindeer.

Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer
- a television special - created by General Electric in 1964.

Some call it the television show that will never die. I pray they’re wrong. We need to break the cycle of abuse before we infect another generation with this cartoon madness. If the CIA kept a master copy of this at least we could hope it might be accidently erased. As it stands now, our grandchildren may be forced to watch this sick twisted tale; scaring them forever.


For those uninitiated, Rudolph is the story about a reindeer forced into exile by a psychotic toy maker who considers any physical abnormality as evil. Living in a frozen wasteland Santa keeps a slave army of little people toiling away building crappy wooden toys from the 1950's. Rudolph is befriended by another outcast, Hermey the Misfit Elf - who was shunned for preforming the evil art of dentistry. Apparently, Santa Claus, a/k/a Saint Nick, derives pleasure from denying his slaves proper dental care. Acceptance only comes for Rudolph when his abnormality becomes useful to the crazy old man. At the end of this ghoulishly animated television show, Santa and his slaves don’t deliver the toys. Instead, they just throw them out of the sleigh into the foggy night. It's a lot like Christmas in Dick Cheney’s home.

Rudolph is about the torture of spirit; a perfect allegory for Christmas itself. Thus, my jihad on Christmas. Bah-humbug.

Be assured, I don’t blame Christmas music on the recent rampage shootings across the country, but, like coal and global warming, it can’t possibly help.

For those of you that have not been indoctrinated into this twisted American Christmas, the song, The Little Drummer Boy illustrates what happens when you introduce a snare drum to a new born infant. Apparently, they love it. I know this sounds counter intuitive, but freshly born infants of all sorts coo love sounds when a snare drum snaps down a quick time beat next to their new born ears. It's a lot like Christmas in Dick Cheney’s home.

I have to confess that The Little Drummer Boy does hold a special place in my heart. But not for the song. Every Christmas I hug the memory of Bing Crosby singing it in a duet with David Bowie.



Looking at those two in the same room I am somehow reminded of when Elvis met Nixon. Or, maybe it’s more like the infamous kiss between Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley. Either way, it leaves me with a weird creepy feeling like soiling yourself at your own birthday party.

I’m not sayin’ that Bing is a right wing nut, but knowing what we now know about the man, I can only assume he didn’t know who Bowie was before taping this. I like to imagine Bing’s reaction after learning that he sang a Christmas classic with one of those ‘god-damn hedonistic faggots.’ After Bing got home I can see him throwing a Citizen Kane type tantrum where he stamps around the room in a rage, knocking everything off the walls, pushing over all the furniture. His wife walks in on it all and he ends up beating her down while yelling, "Why didn’t you tell me he was a fruit?!?" Ah, Christmas memories. It does have a certain nostalgia.


Christmas Peer Pressure


My jihad finds legs when you consider the alternative to not believing in the Spirit of Christmas. In case you didn’t know, Christmas peer pressure inspired George Orwell to write 1984. It speaks to the bondage of the spirit and the body. Much in the same way free range breasts are forced to lives of solitude confined behind heavy wire support bras. A tragedy to their body, and my spirit. So, BELIEVE IN SANTA!!! BELIEVE IN SANTA!!!!

As a bazaar flavor to the mix this Christmas, Hallmark is marketing their newest line of singing Christmas cards by showing small families of Christmas carolers who opt for just giving the card instead of singing themselves. What makes the commercials ungodly weird is the laugh-out-loud reaction from the recipient of the card. Watching the card recipient cackle like they’ve never seen anything so funny, leaves me feeling like I was just raped by a Mentos ad.

Operation Midnight Climax


For me, Christmas renders billions of blinking colored lites which illuminate the psychotic tapestry of our culture and I can’t talk about the American Christmas tapestry without mentioning George Hunter White. In the 1950's and 60's old George worked for the Federal Narcotics Bureau which loaned him out to the CIA for Operation Midnight Climax - part of MK-ULTRA - where he ran the first national security whorehouse. Over the years our government bought him several whorehouses. He started in New York, but then moved to San Francisco. For ten years he would slip LSD into the drinks of Johns and whores alike while taking notes on it’s effects while they had sex. He sat on a toilet behind two way glass to watch his handywork while drinking heavily. He died in 1975 and his diaries and personal papers were bequeathed to Stanford University. I imagine they read like Hunter S. Thompson and Ann Coulter’s love child tried to write an translation of Mein Kampf without knowing German.

George Hunter White was well known for throwing lavish orgies over Christmas when he was in San Francisco. From what I’ve read, those were some impressive Christmas parties, but I never got a clear indication of wether he worked on that day also.

But that’s just a small part of his story. If you have the time, check it out.. . .It gets much weirder.

http://www.levity.com/aciddreams/samples/xrated.html

"I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?" - George Hunter White.

http://www.historyhouse.com/in_history/lsd/

My point in relaying the heartwarming Christmas story of George Hunter White, is that you can justify anything in the name of patriotism. It comes from a "them vs. us" paranoid mentality. This month, sponsored by the CIA.
I don’t think anyone will disagree with the fact that the CIA is excellent at blacking out documents and editing videos. You could say the CIA has a Phd in redaction, but recently they claimed unable to black out people’s faces on video and had to destroy torture tapes to protect the torturers identities.

Listening to their spokesman I’m reminded of the words of Navin Johnson, "He hates those cans!" I don’t care if the CIA destroyed evidence in a congressional inquiry. I care about the maniac firing the gun at me. Torture should never be used. The U.S. is powerful enough to survive without it.

The more I thought about the CIA’s position on this the more I wondered if that was the best lie they could come up with. I mean, if you’re going to lie, and you know everyone knows you are lying, why not swing for the fence?

Top ten torture tape lies if I was the CIA’s public relations officer:


We destroyed the torture tapes because. . .


10. Jesus told us to.
9. We felt it unprofessional for a torturer to make a pass at his victim.
8. Hello. My Name Is Inigo Montoya. You Killed My Father. Prepare to Die.
7. Your puny Congress has no real power. We can do whatever we want. Oh, wait. Is this microphone hot?
6. We believe, somehow, Jack Bower is involved.
5. I’ve been advised that these torture tapes were actually from the last war and scheduled for destruction five years ago. We’ve been a little busy since 9/11!!!!!!!
4. The tapes themselves were cursed. Anyone reading them would instantly turn into a Democrat. We couldn’t allow that kind of unchecked evil to spread.
3. VHS tapes are inherently unsafe. Taken apart from the cartridge, the tape can be used to bind victims into all sorts of stress positions and . .. uh. . .I’ve said too much.
2. We did it for the children.
1. You can’t handle the truth!!