BartBlog

Where Have All the Liberal Pundits Gone?  …
By Bob Patterson as told to Belle Starr, Outlawyer

Money is the mother’s milk of politics, no one disputes that.  Almost all of the money donated to Republican political funds will be spent  for ads run in conservatively owned  media – hence there is an  unlimited amount of money to pay for eloquent quality conservative punditry.

To make liberal punditry pay, writers are encouraged to go to Shattuck Ave in Berkeley and hold up a cardboard sign saying “Will write liberal political punditry for $$$$$.”  (Or, “Will Run for Mayor, Need Campaign Funds”).

… what makes the worldslaziestjournalist think he can have unique perceptive comments that the other members of the punditry community missed completely, we ask the question: Did any national pundit review Jeb’s tax return and extract a news nugget from there about his involvement in the Broward S&L scandal?

… according to a recent newstip, Google is on a real estate buying binge in the Venice Beach area. Apparently, the silicon beach phenomenon will be bolstered by these acquisitions.

After being sent to the penalty box (aka the hospital), it seems natural that my visitors want to discuss political events and the latest news tips from Fort Zint. (Where they were delighted to hear that The Donald wants in on the Post Office action-particularly Washington, D.C.)

When Jane Stillwater came to visit, since our column writing efforts have bogged down (my lawyer is lousy at keeping up with dictation), we gave Jane the topic tip of Orphanages for Profit.

According to a tip we got, orphanages for profit are rapidly becoming a hot topic in the liberal community.  It is alleged that the children of homeless mothers are being placed in facilities that are approximately orphanages for profit. Jane recently worked as an extra in a movie about an orphan struggling to regain her family history and heritage. So, Jane has a good hook for a column on that topic.

(Tip to columnist intern: Pitch a story to the National Review because they are the only one taking pitches publicly).

At abut the same time Belle Starr, a column-assistant,  is doing ok as my gopher and some day may make it if I keep salting the bird’s tail. The  Mayoral campaign is heating up and it looks like another great chapter in San Francisco historically different characters is being written by the moving fickle finger of fate.

(Sidebar: Belle Starr (OccupySF Legal Counsel by Consensus since 2011, is supporting the “face of Occupy” Scott Olsen, Iraq vet put in the hospital by Oakland PD, and who is running for KPFA public radio board to rescue us from the actions of the “..current board majority  to break up or privatize the network”.)

Belle is an OH – Original Hippie and mentioned that at a recent reunion of charter members of the flower children, one blurted out that a film based on Bill “Legendary Rock Entrepreneur” Graham should be made. We second the motion.

Belle and Jane have a treasure trove of memories from the sixties and since that is an extremely popular topic we will list suggestions for our readers who want to  time-travel , via literature, back to the psychedelic sixties. Katy bar the door.

We would list these books:  The Maltese Falcon by Dashell Hammett; On the Road (of course) by Jack Kerouac and  Been Down so Long it Looks like up to Me by Richard Farina.  We suggest a stop at The City Lights Bookstore and The Bookstore section of the nearby Beat Museum. Also see the movies “The Graduate” and “Bullett”. (Don’t forget The Love Book by Lenore Kandel and Google “Smoking Typewriters”…OH)

…or try the slanted and often inaccurate “Season of the Witch”-Speed Kills and heroin came into the Haight from December 1966 to January 1967, not later-I was there OH

Again, for those who think the amateur online pundit can’t come up with perceptive insights we will ask this question did any republican on the FOX debate program mention that pot should be made available to vets with PTSD?  Did any of them mention the veterans at all?

If liberal pundits can’t turn writing into a money generating endeavor, liberals better start preparing themselves for the third member of the Bush Dynasty.

Audiences get what they are willing to pay for. You don’t have to be Phineas T. Barnum to know that. No one is going to pay for hideous idiosyncratic liberal punditry . So, they better get used to the idea that FOX News and Rush Limbaugh are going to choose the next president for them.

… if the Chairman of the Board, Frank Sinatra, can offend chicks and get away with his snide references to frails, skirts and broads, why can’t Trump get away with it, too? … the real winner of the Fox Debate was Megyn Kelly. (Her agent must love Trump because  hasn’t  Trump guaranteed an additional annual million dollars to her salary in the future?)

… 6 people died in the Berkeley Balcony tagedy, now we have to see if anyone is going to jail.

Cue up the wrap-up music: (and roll a joint for my outlawyer):
Strange Days by the doors.  Working in a coal mine (whoop!, rehabilitation is hard work). And Teen age enema nurses in bondage, as we fade out.

DISCLOSURE: The world’s laziest journalist reminds regular readers the column is being written under stressful conditions. We will try our best to maintain a high quality of editing and reporting. We thought keeping the 15 year string of weekly postings trumped  being compulsive about spelling and punctuation.
(We sometimes make up words and/or sentence structure for shock and chaos.)

Now its time for the disc jockey to play “They’re coming to take me away, ha ha…”.

Yes, I know that Cecil the Lion is old news right now, just one more forlorn leftover from last week’s media cycle and therefore not really chic any more — but bear with me. There is still a very important question of morality here, one that I can’t seem to keep from haunting the back lobes of my poor over-worked brain.

I keep asking myself, “How come everyone in America got so completely upset when some jerk of a dentist paid cold hard cash to behead a lion in Africa, but when some jerks in the CIA pay ISIS terrorists cold hard cash to behead thousands of Syrians and Iraqis, no one even gets mildly upset with said CIA jerks for laying out cold hard cash to do the exact same thing?” Who the freak knows. Certainly not me. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42590.htm

Apparently lions’ lives matter — but Syrians’ lives do not.

If I were a Syrian or an Iraqi right now, I would demand that someone immediately put me in a zoo! Hey, at least there I’d be safe and not on the endangered-species list any more.

And of course we also know how little Black lives matter here in America — as compared to the life of one lion. No one here seems to be getting as upset about the cruel death of Michael Brown or Sandra Bland as they did over Cecil the Lion’s cruel demise. Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to be human. https://secure.piryx.com/donate/mS25KFCe/MORE/mikebrown

And does even your own life matter these days either? Does mine? Hard to tell.

And exactly how old was Cecil the Lion anyway? If he was getting fairly long in the tooth, would that have mattered either? If the dentist hadn’t beheaded him, would Cecil have been kicked off of MediCare and Social Security and stuck in a run-down nursing home for lions because that would be all he could afford? Would the same thing have happened to him that is currently happening to a whole bunch of our elders here in America? http://marygsykes.com/2015/07/22/randy-robinson-continues-to-fight-for-his-mother-in-detroit-michigan-probate/

And what if Cecil had been an African human being instead of an African lion? Would we have minded so much — or even noticed — that millions of African human beings have already been slaughtered in the name of corporate profits by some jerks in the White House, the Congress, the CIA, the Pentagon and Wall Street?

And I bet you anything that Cecil the Lion would love to have his head screwed back on again. And that Syrians and Iraqis (and Africans) would love to get their heads screwed back on again too.

I’d even be willing to bet that most of the Syrians and Iraqis who have lost their heads recently had never even heard about ISIS before their heads got chopped off — or about the CIA jerks behind ISIS either. And I’ll even bet you the farm that the jerks who are currently running our disastrous foreign policy would just love to have their Syrian and Iraqi trophies stuffed and mounted on the walls of Congress, the White House, the Pentagon and Langley too.

PS: Here’s an interesting bit of information about the CIA-trained “moderate rebels” (aka ISIS) that War Street has sent off to terrorize the legitimate government of Syria.

$500 million of American taxpayers’ money has been spent on training just 60 terrorists — in either Jordan or Turkey, I forget which. And 54 of them actually ended up in Syria. And 18 of them actually fought against Syrians.

That’s $925,925 of our tax dollars spent on each one of the 54 recruits sent to Syria. And that’s $2,777,777 per actual active terrorist that the CIA and friends have spent. Geez Louise. For that amount of money, that jerky dentist could have bought a whole zoo.

PPS: “Hearts and Minds”. That was the reason that Wall Street and War Street lost the War on Vietnam — and why they will also lose the War on Syria too. And why they will eventually lose their War on the Entire Planet as well. http://www.globalresearch.ca/why-syria-is-winning-advancing-towards-a-strategic-victory-that-will-transform-the-middle-east/5468277

And “Hearts and Minds” is also why that jerky dentist eventually lost his War on Cecil.

I hate Frank Sinatra. Always have, even when I was a kid. He’s such a phony. He sings all his songs like he’s bragging, “Wow, look at me, aren’t I so wonderful!” Sure, the Chairman of the Board can carry a tune but what’s the big deal? So can a million other blue-eyed guys named Frankie. I just don’t get it. Does he not also put his pants on one leg at a time like the rest of us? Did he not also have wet dreams when he was a teen?

And when Sinatra croons “Fly me to the moon,” is he not also using code words for s.e.x.? Of course he is. Where else did Nancy Sinatra come from if not from doing the nasty?

But guess what? Old Blue Eyes is not alone here. Almost every other adult on this planet, unless they are genetically modified by castration, female mutilation or something else equally gross, has wet dreams. Or masturbates. Or has had, is having or will have s.e.x. How the freak do you think that we got to the point where there are now seven billion human beings on the planet if not for sex? Fairy god-mothers? I think not.

Even priests, monks, nuns, imams, rabbis and probably even zombies have some form of wet dream. And why is that? Because of orgasms, of course. Have you personally ever had an orgasm? Nice, aren’t they — if for no other reason than they force you to stop thinking for just few seconds. During an orgasm, the whole world slips away and you become, for that instant, the king or queen of the world even if you don’t live in Buckingham Palace — and you are rich beyond compare even if you aren’t an oil sheik or corporate pirate living on Park Avenue.

Even the poorest of the poor can afford a wet dream — “Los pobres de los pobres,” as they say in “Black Orpheus”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkxGkL7o9xk

This fact must really gall the world’s elite billionaires — that some homeless bum living in a cardboard box under some inner city freeway can have as good as or possibly even better orgasm than them, even without the champagne, call girls, porno flicks and cocaine.

“But Jane, you are digressing,” you might say at this point. And you would be right. I actually do have a point to make here. Actually, I have two of them. First, of course, is that the human race needs to “make love not war”. Wet dreams are so much better (and so much more fun too) than the sleazy, greedy pornographic slaughterhouse nightmares being offered to us these days by Wall Street and War Street. And my second point is to always avoid phonies, hypocrites, corporate-sponsored candidates for president and Frank Sinatra.

PS: I just suffered through yet another operation on my poor broken wrist. It’s been over two years now since it was broken and I’m still in great pain. And, unlike Hunter Pence, I am still not quite up to playing center field yet.

But don’t even think for a second that I’m not totally and eternally grateful for the excellent medical care that I have received — the best in the entire world! And thank goodness for MediCare. Without it, I would have been forced to live with a useless left arm for the rest of my life.

And also thank goodness that I’m not living in Libya, Iraq, Palestine, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen, Paraguay, Honduras, parts of Syria or in any of the other countries that have been “liberated” by American neo-colonialists and their neo-colonialist allies. For instance, if I was living in Libya right now, I probably wouldn’t even have a left arm at all. http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-americas-inherent-resolve-to-destroy-another-sovereign-nation/5464871

Hell, if I was currently living in those parts of Syria and Iraq that have recently been “liberated” by American-trained “moderate rebels” (aka ISIS), I wouldn’t even have a head!

PPS: And speaking of sex, a whole lot of poorly-informed people are proclaiming that the decline of the American Family in recent years has been due to abortions, birth control and same-sex marriages. That is totally not true. According to journalist Robert Putnam, the major cause of broken families and single-parent households in America today is, wait for it, the War on Drugs. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/inge-fryklund/want-to-solve-inequality-and-child-poverty-end-the-war-on-drugs_b_6978462.html

According to “Orange is the New Black,” one out of every 100 American adults has been incarcerated. http://piperkerman.com/orange/bio

So if your dad (or mom) is currently in jail for possession of a baggie of marijuana, then of course your other parent is gonna have to work double shifts down at the car-wash or something in order to raise you by herself. And this is a totally bad thing for the American Family — and also for America in general because incarceration causes more crime than it prevents because it obliterates ex-cons’ earning potential. http://qz.com/458675/in-america-mass-incarceration-has-caused-more-crime-than-its-prevented/

So let’s get all the dads (or moms) out of jail and educate them and provide them with decent jobs (ones that don’t involve slave-labor wages or becoming cannon fodder for neo-colonialist wars) instead. https://www.facebook.com/iseeitall/videos/10153052369309755/?pnref=story

Let’s stop spending so much wasted money on war and prisons and start spending it on, er, sex education? No, spending it on peace and LOVE!

The Gonzo Assignment of a Lifetime
By Bob Patterson as told to Belle Starr, Outlawyer

On the morning of July 14, Bastille Day, The World’s Laziest Journalist, got an assignment card from the great assignment desk in the sky: have a stoke then write a gonzo punditry column about the recovery process and the various thoughts that occur to you in the hospital bed.

75 years ago the high-water mark for broadcast journalism was set by Edward R. Murrow as he was reporting live at The Battle of Britain. Now, airlines are worrying that drones are being used to endanger commercial airlines.

My friend, Belle Starr, Outlawyer and Write-In Candidate for San Francisco Mayor, will get an assist credit on this column.

We’ve collected various thoughts and topics over the past few days.

There are themes running in popular culture that seem reminiscent of my stay in a hospital in 1970 repeating here in 2015 where I am in a hospital recovering from a stroke.

A stroke is an educational process. Culture is a trend.  A journalist’s job is to spot trends. The new word from “The Graduate”,  replacing plastics, is EKSO. (Full Disclosure: Belle wants to buy more of their stock and I want to be in on the action too … )

The exoskeleton from the military is being deployed in this hospital to rehabilitate the world’s laziest journalist and it fits fine and does all the work…with some electrical stimulation.

PHOTO   Rachael Adams
(Google Hint : Ekso Bionics (helps survivors of stroke, spinal cord injury … to walk again. )

When I first  started writing and posting online, I had decided to follow a Walter Winchell  style. He was the  master and originator of three-dot-journalism …

Stringing information together.  You know why writers are stringers?  They used to be paid by the column inch and the editor measured with a string to determine the pay when they paid. The length of the string was converted into the amount of the paycheck.  The string was carefully kept for tax and accounting purposes…NOT!

Then came Herb Caen who  continued the … with a necklace of terms from beatnik to hippie and all the intervening dots and stories from Baghdad by the Bay.

(Snide Aside: How things have changed – Baghdad, psychedelia and rock’n’roll to shock and awe and Babylon.)

Lions and circuses -  The  social media shaming of a dentist for killing  Disneyfied Cecil, the  most beloved,  with hyperbole that personifies the lion, but not nearly as cool as Frazier, the most sensuous lion alive, while depersonalizing a human being misses the point.

Frazier was randy and loved for it.  He was survived by many, many cubs when he died of exhaustion (old age) somewhere in Africa…maybe Kenya.

“Unfortunately,” says the Zimbabwe government, “it was too late to apprehend the foreign poacher as he has absconded…” to Ricks’ in Casablanca, no doubt, where this backhanded payoff is as apparent as Looie’s winnings.

There’s a continent of garbage in the Pacific. Reunion Islands refuse and recycling opportunities. If it took until 1961-62 for remnants of the Battle of the Coral Sea to wash ashore and to be found by beachcombers in Baja, will it be twenty years for the continent of pacific plastic to wash ashore and choke the Reunion Islands?

Camp Justice , Guantanamo, Cuba   Tent city lawyers are dying from cancer in droves.

(Bob is watching too much TV) In the hospital there is a lot of TV at night  and if I am not worn out in my iron man suit. There are 17 republicans running picked by FOX and I ought to sue them.Take a note, counsellor,  Dear FOX, I am the perfect side-kick for Bill O’Reilly and here’s why: I am related to Che’. That’s right, THE Che’. So, I am a Latino Irish Catholic pundit who is more effective at anti-democratic rants. (The Medical Director walks in)  Doctors and caddies go together.

And speaking of TV, have you seen “Velocity”? Shut up and listen to me, Sandy, (if only you had listened…) you have to get a kid who does video and go “Barn Finding” like the 47 Caddy you found for Frank Nicodemus Castle Cadillac Restoration.  When you get a vintage “barn find” we can have a segment “Barn Finding Safari” on Velocity.

I have got to sue FOX, counsellor!  They are discriminating against me as a latino—irish-catholic-democratic pundit and Barbara Lee isn’t liberal enough. It’s all marketing hype.

Governments- North v South, SF BD v LA BD.   Another 50 years in the discussing Candlestick vs Marina del Rey as best  bucket without bottom for campaign contributions.

(News Tip: How the hell can someone get a news tip to Rachael Maddow? For that matter, how do you submit a news tip to The New York Times, because they specifically state the don’t want to be annoyed by news TIPS.)

“Catholics make the best fascists”.
(What me worry? : Death Panels as inevitable as health care and taxes.)  What is a Whore’s bath and is it politically incorrect?   Nurse didn’t know but didn’t think sex-worker’s bath meant the same thing.

(Health Tip: Belle says Turmeric is neuroregenerative. Nurse says I only have to watch sugar and carbs.)

(Sidebar with Lawyer: You can write about the app on indiegogo called “My Data 4 Sale”.)

“The app is to stop the filtching of your data, without compensation, by government, corporations and any hacker who passes by.”

“It’s your gig and you sell your habits for a time period to data miners who pay a certain per unit time fee to you. No more free lunch on your preferences – Your data, your habits, your gig in this gig economy.”

(Google Hint: indiegogo.com and look for mydata4sale.   Over to you, BOB!

We need an official whistleblower’s protective association or union. Remember the whistleblower Victor Risell?  In the 50’s?  Labor?  Acid thrown in his eyes? Is that why Belle wears sunglasses all the time?

This has been the toughest assignment of our journalistic life BUT it does give you a fresh perspective of “every day you wake up is a blessing”.  Amen, brother!  With a lot of work and effort we should be back in the column-a-week groove in about another month.

(Coming Attractions:  Mid-August here in Berzerkeley is the 50th year since the founding of the Berkeley Barb.)

After California had a transgender “Woman of the Year” we  now have a transgender on the cover of Vanity Fair.

It is now clear that men are smarter than women and men make better women than women do.

If Trump has gotten addicted to shocking the public how long before he drops the “N” word in an off-the-cuff sound bite?

Just in: My Outlawyer is implicated in the last two days Front Page News. Mayor Ed Lee is alleged to have taken bribes. Way to go, Mayor Starr! (Google Hint: SF Chron Bob Egelko and Emily Greene).

That’s Journalism!

Now the disk jockey will play a song that became a favorite from my last stay in a hospital in 1970, Carson, Tahoe: I Never Promised you a Rose Garden by Lynn Anderson; Waylon Jennings, I’ve Always Been Crazy and (from the movie Casablanca) As Time Goes By, by Dooley Wilson.

Have a “it will never happen to me” type week. Live life to the fullest and don’t postpone having fun. Live life as if you are a winner on a game show!

DISCLOSURE: The world’s laziest journalist reminds regular readers the column is being written under stressful conditions. We will try our best to maintain a high quality of editing and reporting. We thought keeping the 15 year string of weekly postings trumped  being compulsive about spelling and punctuation.

Olivia Newton-John pretty much got it right back in 1978 when she sang her heart out to John Travolta, “It’s raining on Prom night”. http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/11058/Grease-Original-Trailer-.html

And here and now, in 2015, it’s still pretty much raining on prom night too — but in a different movie, one called “Greece”. And there are also worse things that Germany’s sleazy bankers could do to Greece (but I can’t imagine what).

Back 1946, when Germany was in big economic trouble after the Allies let loose their “greased lightning” on the Nazis, America bailed out that country with the Marshall Plan. But now that Greece, the country, is in big trouble from German banks and the roles are reversed, German banksters are showing absolutely no mercy. As far as Greece is concerned, those banksters are now singing “We go together” at the top of their lungs — but not in a good way.

So what’s my point? That Greece is in trouble, of course. And that Greece is about to become another beauty-school drop-out. http://deconstructedglobe.com/wordpress/selling-out-greece/

“But what can we possibly do to help?” you might ask. I’ve got a great idea. Let’s all go to Greece and become tourists. To paraphrase Rizzo again, “There are worse things you could do.” If a million American tourists suddenly become “hopelessly devoted to you” and descend on the Acropolis, the Parthenon and the Greek Isles, this would provide a much bigger infusion of euros, drachmas or whatever than German bankers could ever wring out of Greece with their stupid austerity programs. Plus it will be fun too!

As Danny Zuko was fond of saying back in the day, “Summer dreams, ripped at the seams. Bu-ut oh, those summer nights!” Let’s all go visit Greece.

PS: It is really, really hard being a teenager these days — so much harder than it was in 1978, when the movie “Grease” first came out.

“Just how much harder can it be?” you might ask. I just said. Really, really hard.

For instance, let’s look at two recently-released coming-of-age movies about the lives of post-millennial teens. Their tribulations make Sandra Dee’s tribulations look almost silly.

“I believe in Unicorns” is a haunting tale of a very starry-eyed young girl who runs off with some cute soul-eyed bad-boy from down at the skate park — and with disastrous results, but with magical animation an FX scenes that will have you believing in unicorns too. http://ibelieveinunicorns.com/trailer

If you are a teenage girl these days, forget about “Grease”. This cautionary tale is for you.

The next coming-of-age-in-2015 movie to see is “The Wolfpack,” a strange documentary about six boys and a girl raised in an apartment in New York City — literally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDbqcMfUdlI

Afraid to expose his kids to the mean streets of the big city, their father barely lets them out. “Sometimes we got out once a year. One year we never got out at all.” Except that one day the oldest boy finally escapes. How’s that for an interesting way to come of age?

PPS: And then there is the coming-of-age footage we see every night on the TV news: Coming of age in Ferguson. Coming of age in Gaza. Yes, there really are worse things teens could do. Coming of age in Libya, Baltimore, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Congo, Honduras, Detroit — all the places where America’s military are making a living hell out of taking your date out on prom night. http://journal-neo.org/2015/07/20/nazis-to-enforce-neoliberalism-operation-jade-helm-and-the-ukrainian-national-guard/

And children coming of age in 2050 will most likely to be starving to death or dead if we don’t drop fossil fuels right this instant. Talk about your really, really hot summer nights!

Note: The photo below is of me and my mean-girl older sister, coming of age back in the 1950s. Don’t let her friendly smile fool you. It’s all a facade — as was everything else in the 1950s. Thank goodness for the internet. Now we really know what is going on in places like Syria and Ukraine, unlike what McCarthy used to tell us was going on in Hollywood back in the day.

Without fail, every single year I get yet another year older. Nothing I can do about that. But it is a whole lot easier to face yet another birthday when there is a really big reason to look forward to it. So every year I save up my money and go off to Chez Panisse for my birthday and then I can always look forward to that. Except that this year I got my OpenTable reservations all screwed up and we had to eat in the cafe upstairs instead in the more glamorous downstairs seating.

The other five people I went with had absolutely perfect dinners upstairs and the more casual atmosphere up there suited my family just fine. Plus we met Leah Meyerhoff, the director of “I Believe in Unicorns,” which opened at the Roxie in San Francisco last week. http://ibelieveinunicorns.com/trailer

But my own pasta dish tasted practically just one step above Chef Boyardee and I was heart-broken not to have the open-fire-roasted rack of lamb that the nobs downstairs got to eat.

Then, it being my birthday, I went home afterwards and reflected on my life so far. And I was not a happy camper about what I saw. “You seem to be pretty much wasting your life right now,” I said to myself. And, sadly, my self nodded back in agreement.

At dinner my son had observed, “There are two kinds of people — those who happily live their lives on the surface and those who are willing to go deeper into who they are and what they can do to make their lives more meaningful and worthwhile.”

Good grief, sometimes I wish that I was just happily shallow. Then I wouldn’t freaking care so much about the recent tragic deaths in Charleston and the on-going tragic deaths in the Middle East. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42288.htm

And it wouldn’t even matter to me that America is being sucked into a financial Black Hole. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42280.htm

But all this does matter to me. Greatly.

Too bad it doesn’t seem to matter to anyone else.

But next year I plan to get my Chez Panisse reservations all carefully straightened out early so that I can eat roast lamb instead of Chef Boyardee.

If there is a next year, that is.

We could have spent seven trillion dollars on making this earth into another Eden — and instead Wall Street and War Street have spent seven trillion dollars on turning our planet into Hell.

PS: I just opened up a new online T-shirt shop at Cafe Press! Be the first on your block to proudly own and wear a T-shirt proclaiming “Stop Wall Street & War Street from destroying our world”. Or else get a bumper sticker or baby shirt or mug that says it. Somebody has to say this. Might as well be us. http://www.cafepress.com/stillwatershop

PPS: And speaking of getting older, way back in 2004 I wrote a really funny satire on the annual Bohemian Grove bacchanal that rich people hold each July. But re-reading my article again in 2015, I realized just how naive I had been back in 2004 — obviously thinking that bankster skullduggery and Endless War was just some passing phase and something I could easily joke about. http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2004/07/my-weird-weekend-at-bohemian-grove.html

But over a million American-made corpses later, I don’t think that way any more. Endless War and bankster skullduggery are obviously here to stay and it’s really hard to be cheery in the face of that fact — especially when one realizes that bankster skullduggery is now a done deal and that Endless War is now the world norm and could come to my home town now just as easily as it had once come to Baghdad.

Who would ever have dreamed that so many sovereign countries would go down in flames and that so many millions of people would be either dead or homeless within just one short decade more. “Mission Accomplished,” Wall Street and War Street.

One of the main reasons I hate Wall Street and War Street is that they are usually lying through their teeth to us. Fortunately, however, there are usually actual eye-witnesses to what really happens as well, and these actual eye-witnesses are always calling Wall Street and War Street out for their lies — but none of that even seems to matter. Remember all the lies we were told about Vietnam? Iraq? Afghanistan? Libya? Palestine? Bosnia? Ukraine? Panama? Guatemala? Granada? And how we were always warned about these lies? And yet those “wars” went on anyway.

And here is just one more example of the kind of pretty lies that we are constantly being told — this time about Syria. An internet friend of mine who I met after visiting Damascus last year is now living in Aleppo and he sent me the following eye-witness 411 about what is really going on in his town.

So you read this. And you have been told. By an actual eye-witness. But does that mean that the unjust and mendacious “war” on the Syrian people will now stop, now that you actually know the actual truth? Obviously not.

“We didn’t sleep at all last night,” my friend Waheed (not his real name) wrote me today from his home in Aleppo. “Attacks by the so-called ‘moderate rebels’ started in the afternoon yesterday and continued constantly up until this morning. The news here said that three or four civilians died and that 87 civilians were injured. But the ambulance sirens didn’t stop all night long.”

Hey, Waheed, are you okay? Apparently yes, but just barely.

“I’m sure that you have heard time and again in the American media,” said Waheed, “that Syrians support the so-called ‘moderate rebels’. But every single one of the people I know over here do not — and aren’t they the real Syrians? And after all these years and after all these attacks on them and after they have lost their income sources and family members, they are still asking the Syrian army to fight on their behalf, to terminate these vicious attackers and their nests, which have become like cancer in our body.”

But what about the barrel bombs we hear so much about? I asked.

“At this point in time,” said Waheed, “the Syrian people no longer even care if the termination of these terrorists who are invading our homes is by chemical weapons, bombs or whatever. All we want is for the killing of Syrians to stop. Yet, around the world and in the mainstream media, they still dare to demonize the so-called ‘barrel bombs’ of the Syrian army and they talk about the loss of lives of ISIS terrorists as if it was the loss of lives of some mythological Syrian peaceful moderate opposition who had been killed by a dictator!”

Waheed is totally pissed off that all these lies are being spread around. Barrel bombs? Really? When the terrorists’ ISIS version of Freddie Kruger is being armed, trained and paid for by US, Saudi, Israeli and Turkish neo-colonialists who are only after capturing Syria’s land and oil? Barrel bombs are the bad guys here? I think not.

“I don’t swear, and I’m fasting this month,” Waheed said next, “but this injustice is unlimited and it makes me and many others here feel like we are going to explode with cursing and swearing against all that nonsense of people lecturing in some conference in Britain this week or people at the UN who are telling nothing but lies and hypocrisy.”

Part of Waheed’s family spent last night huddled in the bathroom of their house because it was the safest room. “Everyone there was crying and terrified by the ‘moderate peaceful opposition’ as their house is located close to one of the conflicts lines. But the Syrian army can’t bomb these ISIS and foreign-fighter terrorists because then the ‘international community’ will accuse the Syrian army of using this unprecedented super-ultra-modern weapon that is way stronger than a nuclear bomb: Barrel bombs!”

Yeah, right. And next the Syrian army will probably be accused of illegally using fire crackers or cap guns to protect themselves.

“The terrorists are using mortars, explosive bullets, cooking-gas-cylinder bombs and bombs made out of water-heater cylinders; filled up with explosives and shrapnel and nails, and fired by what they call “Hell Canons”. Just Google these weapons or see their YouTube clips.” Yes, they still do have Google in Aleppo — but not for long if Obama and Bibi and Turkish hard-liners and the House of Saud have their way.

To quote certain Israeli generals who are finally coming to their senses, “According to General Azer Tsfrir, for example, allowing the Assad regime to fall would mean turning Syria into a ‘black hole’ in which the border areas could become launch pads for operations against Israel. Writing in Haaretz, the former military intelligence officer suggested that the fall of Assad would subject Syria to the hegemony of extremist Muslim groups which have declared their desire to destroy the Zionist state. They would, he claimed, become a first degree strategic threat.” https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/19688-israelis-call-for-arms-for-assad-to-save-regime

But we all know that Bibi is pretty much crazy to support ISIS — so let’s get back to Waheed.

“The cooking-gas cylinder is made of steel, and it weighs around 25 kg. Imagine it thrown by a canon to hit civilians? And imagine knowing that it is full with explosives? And yet, the mainstream media in America is all busy with the legendary weapon of ‘barrel bombs’! And also filled up with how these terrorist ISIS ‘moderate rebels’ came to spread ‘freedom’ among Syrians! How dare they say that Syrian army shouldn’t fight them back?”

And meanwhile the fighting just keeps getting closer to Waheed’s house. “For the first time last night, we smelled gunpowder. The shelling was so extreme and so close as to leave the smell gunpowder in the air.” Yet no one at the UN complains about the American-backed terrorists.

“The results of last night’s shelling was nothing but more new innocent civilian victims,” said Waheed. At this point I’m almost ready to cry.

“I mean, the terrorists failed in gaining new land or occupying new buildings or quarters. They lost many of their foreign-fighter cannon-fodder ‘zombies’ here of course but their zombies don’t count because they are being paid to fight and have no families or friends here to weep over their mangled bodies like is the case with our civilians.”

Waheed then apologizes for being so upset — as if he didn’t have a legitimate reason. I know if it was my family and neighbors who were being blown up by terrorist death machines, I’d be too hysterical to even put words on a page!

“Mostly I’m not so much upset by the attackers and whoever is supporting them in Turkey over here (and Israel and Jordan in the south); but mainly from the liars in that conference in Britain or at the UN, who keep lying and lying, telling piles and tons of lies, about ‘freedom’ and ‘barrel bombs’ — and they live in their perfumed and ironed suits and ties, happy with their Ph.D degrees in stupidity and fooling the world, having no problem in obtaining clean water, electricity, hot food and the rest of the services that we are suffering over here to obtain, even a part of them.

“Those people travel in 1st class airlines and live in 5-star hotels, and are ready to come on TV to weep over the fate of the ‘Syrian people’ and blame the ‘regime’ — while giving a blind eye upon all the terrorists they are funding and supporting. I wish these people, whether they are Arabs or Western, Muslims or Christians, Syrians or others… I wish them Hell! And to taste and suffer the same pain they are causing to the innocent Syrian people.” Me too!

These pond-scum should be evicted from their 5-star hotels and forced to go live out the reality that they now happily force millions of others to endure.

“The Syrian army has defended our city, and all the lies on the media claiming terrorists’ victories are nothing but rumors and gossip. But that’s all for today. Take care.” You too, Waheed.

For Fathers Day, I wanted to take my son to see “Inside Out,” a new animated movie by Pixar, but he ended up seeing “The Wolfpack” instead — a film about a whole different style of fathering altogether. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDbqcMfUdlI

But I still wanna go see “Inside Out”. Its main plot revolves around meeting some of the various emotions that live inside of our brains, such as “Anger” and “Sadness”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MC3XuMvsDI

But according to a book I’m currently reading by anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, one of our most important human emotions is trust. I wish that Pixar had introduced us to “Trust” as well.

“If a small baby doesn’t feel that it can trust, specifically that it can trust having some modicum of control over its own situation, then it might even die,” to paraphrase Bateson. Along with the ability to learn to walk and talk and develop teeth, apparently babies also need to learn to develop trust too — and if they don’t, life can become unbearable for them. And we adults also need to learn to meet “Trust” as well.

But how in the world do we actually go about meeting this actual “Trust” person ourselves? We do it by putting ourselves into trusting situations and then taking careful notes on who passes our trust tests — and who fails.

For instance, would you ever trust a mother who, like that bizarre mom in “Game of Thrones,” stood by and watched her own daughter getting burned at the stake — only protesting when it was obviously Too Late?

And would you ever trust a government that continually sells out “We the people” to Wall Street and War Street at every chance that it gets? When it comes to trusting our government’s current warriors and cavaliers in DC, I would much sooner trust Lebron James and Seth Curry. http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/30876-focus-climate-change-is-a-crisis-we-can-only-solve-together

If you were an African-American, who would you trust? Would you trust your local trigger-happy police? Would you trust the haters who demand that the Confederate flag, clearly used by them as a symbol of racism, be flown over your state capitol? http://gawker.com/unarmed-people-of-color-killed-by-police-1999-2014-1666672349  According at a recent civil rights report published in China, “Cops killing African-Americans is practically a norm in the US”. And then also add no jobs, sub-par schools and extensive social ostracization to that toxic mix. Trust results from all this? Highly unlikely.

Will Americans ever again be able trust our mainstream media to tell the truth after WikiLeaks just exposed that Saudi Arabia has been slipping them payola for years now in order to get the MSM to leave the House of Saud’s name out of the news, including but not limited to its major role in such events as 9-11, the war on Iraq and creating ISIS — as well as the celebration of its 100th beheading this year? https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/press

Would you ever be able to trust Congress and Obama again after they worked so hard to shove that horrendous TTP trade agreement down our throats like some porn movie featurette — just to make corporate billionaires get even richer than they are right now? http://www.thenation.com/article/206409/damage

How can we possibly trust Monsanto after it has blatantly chosen profits from GMO-bred Frankenstein plants and animals over us — like we were some orphan step-child they are forced to put up with?

And how can we even think about ever trusting Israel, our government’s major ally in the Middle East, when all that the neo-colonialists who run Israel with an iron hand want to do is to stir up trouble in the region so that we taxpayers can come to their rescue? I was in Sweida, in Syria, last year and, trust me, the Syrians trust President Assad a lot more than they trust ISIS’s BFF Israel. http://www.globalresearch.ca/syrian-druze-fighting-israeli-backed-al-qaeda/5455651

And what about our very own Supreme Court? Anton Scalia? We are supposed to actually trust this man? Hardly. Not after he gleefully sold out American voters in favor of huge corporations with regard to Citizens United. Seth and Lebron have much better judgment than Scalia does. Heck, even Curry’s two-year-old daughter would have better judgment than that.

Trusting that climate change isn’t really real, are we? Good luck with that one. With American war hawks all practically wetting their pants at a chance to attack Russia through Ukraine, and with Turkey, the Saudis, Israel and the US neo-colonialists just dying to do to Syria and Yemen what they did to Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, then there is only one thing we can truly trust in here — that “war” is gonna release so much carbon dioxide that it’s gonna cause climate change on steroids. And that we’re soon gonna meet a whole new kind of “I can’t breathe.” http://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2015/06/22/nato-russia-collision-ahead/

And can we even trust the Rule of Law here in America? Or the FBI or the IRS or even the freaking building codes after that balcony in a relatively new building here in Berkeley just fell down?

Modern American government has no transparency these days. No one knows where our money goes. The CIA is a black hole and so is the Pentagon, NSA, NATO, Congress, etc. And who even knows what the White House is up to, let alone the Federal Reserve. Countries that have no transparency are clearly on the road to dictatorship — and who the freak can trust dictators? Talk about your lack of control! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biNGtrIqWRQ

The moral here? That Americans also need to develop trust in their government if we are ever going to grow up and “meet Trust” in ourselves. And our government needs to start acting a hecka lot more trustworthy too.

PS: And speaking of books (Don’t you just love to read!), I’d like to recommend one. Along with all the usual murder mysteries that I love such as “Last of the Independents” and “As the Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust,” my summer reading also includes a book called “Chief Complaint: A Country Doctor’s Tales of Life in Galilee”.

“Chief Complaint” is a wonderful compilation of what small-town life was like in Palestine both before and after Israeli neo-colonialists killed off thousands of Palestinians, forced a million of them off their land, seized their property and lost their trust. It’s a delightful read, a true anthropology of what village life was and is like for Palestinians in Galilee — with all its warts and merits included. http://justworldbooks.com/chief-complaint/

Photo is of me and Ghost back in 1963, back when I still had a little bit of trust left (as much trust as a Beatnik could have that is — after Hiroshima, HUAC and the beginnings of Vietnam where my neighbor’s son was an “adviser” even back then)

“Why can’t we all just get along?” asked Rodney King back in 1991, after he had been savagely beaten by four Los Angeles cops. That’s a really good question, Rodney. But an even better question might be, “Why wasn’t Rodney King thrown in jail forever with no hope of parole — like what happened to Mumia Abu-Jamal?”

Quick question, quick answer — someone had a videotape recorder up and running on the day that King was being beaten so badly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb1WywIpUtY No one had a videotape recorder up and running back in Mumia’s day.

So now let’s go forward in our time machine, from 1991 to the present. Now everyone has a video camera on their iPhone, and not just some clunky old video camera that is impossible to haul around in your back pocket or purse. And now a whole big bunch of police malfeasance is being caught on tape — daily. Everyone who witnesses police brutality can now post it on YouTube. Police all across the nation now have nowhere to hide.

But now let’s go backwards in our time machine again — and this time let’s take our iPhones with us. What would we see? What else could we videotape and upload on YouTube from back in the day?

Would we catch the FBI unlawfully attacking innocent Native Americans in their home and then forcing witnesses to give false testimony against Leonard Peltier, J. Edgar Hoover style? http://www.freeleonard.org/case/

Would we see Mumia Abu-Jamal being framed for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer even though evidence points to Kenneth Freeman having done the shooting and that Freeman was later found naked, handcuffed, beaten and dead? What do you want to bet that we would? http://www.freemumia.com/who-is-mumia-abu-jamal/

Or what if bystanders had all gleefully pulled out their iPhones and taped the real killer in the murder of Caroline Olsen? Then Geronimo Pratt, who had been falsely charged by COINTELPRO, wouldn’t have had to spend 27 years of his life in jail before his conviction was overturned.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/03/geronimo-pratt-dead-at-63_n_870910.html

And what if…. “Don’t go there, Jane!” Sorry, guys, I just gotta go there. What if everyone had iPhones on the Grassy Knoll back in 1963 and also took videos of what Abraham Zapruder’s home camera has shown us — only in more detail? Would Lee Harvey Oswald still be the lone patsy? I bet not. My best bet would be that heads in the CIA would have rolled.

But, alas for Wall Street and War Street and Fox News (but lucky for us), there are now over 700 million iPhones loose on the world — and, all over the world, they are telling us what is really happening instead of what corporate propaganda sorely wishes that we would believe.

Police in America can no longer get away with carte blanche brutality.

We now know that Flight MH17 was shot down in Ukraine by the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev.

ISIS and Al Qaeda are now in possession of over 2,300 American Humvees — especially after American satellites just happened to fail to notice that thousands of ISIS and Al Qaeda fighters were crossing open deserts in Toyota trucks after having been thrown out of Syria by President Assad, who is currently hated by Turkey, the Saudis, Israel and the US for taking his courageous stand against ISIS and Al Qaeda, War Street’s new BFFs. Plus a lot of this American-backed craziness in the Middle East has actually been captured by teams of ISIS bad guys on their iPhones and uploaded to FaceBook — which is completely and totally weird!

You don’t believe that American, Saudi, Turkish and Israeli neo-colonialists are backing, financing and supporting ISIS? Here are just a handful of the many, many links that prove my case — and I’m sure you will find some iPhone snapshots in this mix as well.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/01/iraq-isis-humvees_n_7487254.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/lawmakers-move-to-curb-1-billion-cia-program-to-train-syrian-rebels/2015/06/12/b0f45a9e-1114-11e5-adec-e82f8395c032_story.html?tid=sm_tw

http://journal-neo.org/2015/06/09/logistics-101-where-does-isis-get-its-guns/

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/world/middleeast/isis-is-winning-message-war-us-concludes.html?_r=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r68ANObt818&feature=youtu.be

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/10/did-the-war-in-syria-just-become-a-regional-war/

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2015/06/the-guardian-joins-the-moderate-al-qaeda-public-relation-campaign-.html

Damn those traitorous American bastards to hell who are funding and supplying ISIS with weapons! ISIS just attacked a school in Aleppo. Ambulances were heard carrying suffering children away to hospitals for over four hours. And we can now watch this carnage close up — taken on the iPhones of the families and doctors of these children. Why aren’t Americans stopping this! https://www.facebook.com/ForMotherSyria/posts/662030840564771?notif_t=notify_me

And as for Monsanto, Scalia, Obama, Congress and the Koch brothers, we also know what you did last summer — thanks to Apple and Steve Jobs.

But why stop here now that we’ve got our time machine out? Let’s take this analogy even further. Holy sheep dookie! Just imagine!

What if…. What if there had been iPhones back in the days of Jesus, Moses and Mohammed? And we could all actually listen in on what these three amazing men actually said? Then all of those phony Christians, Jews and Muslims in Washington, Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia today would be immediately exposed for what they really are: Just sleazy neo-colonialist hypocrites in disguise. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/yemen-historic-houses-unesco-world-heritage-sana-old-city-reduced-rubble-by-saudi-strikes-1505760

Even as an old man, my father was as strong as an ox and built a log cabin from scratch with his bare hands when he was 70 years old. But then he suffered a heart attack. And his doctor put him on all kinds of medications, at least ten pills a day. And a year later he had shrunk from standing over six feet tall to being only 5′ 7″ — and from weighing 200 pounds to weighing only 125. And a month after that he was dead. Geez Louise! What the freak was in those pills anyway? Couldn’t he have just eaten more bananas instead?

And, yes, I really am aware that modern medicine does save a whole bunch of lives. And, yes, I do watch Gray’s Anatomy and know that modern medicine can and does perform miracles. But still. 106,00 Americans a year die from “adverse drug reactions”. Side effects, side effects, side effects — just like the ads on TV say.

And I used to really resent Big Pharma for that — especially when my own father was one of those statistics.

And I also used to really hate the idea that American children are being overdosed on vaccines too. Our kids will be given 71 different batches of vaccinations before they reach age 17 — and 26 of these vaccines will be given to babies under one and a half years of age. But it’s not the vaccines themselves that I used to resent. Hell, bring them on — in the hundreds if that’s what it takes to save little kids’ lives.

It is the fillers, additives and preservatives such as mercury, formaldehyde, MSG, detergents, aluminum and yellow dye #6 that make up approximately 99.99% of each shot that I used to hate. I used to really hate that Big Pharma would shoot all that junk into the bloodstreams of our very own little darlings — just to save a buck on extending their drugs’ shelf-life. http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/appendices/B/excipient-table-2.pdf

Apparently there are now a few drug-company start-ups working on creating DNA-based vaccines that no longer need fillers. Others are working on vaccine-based “tattoos” that don’t need fillers either. Hurray for them. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/tiny-tattoo-vaccines.html

But I still used to shudder with dread for my three-month-old granddaughter at the thought of her callously being used as fodder for Big Pharma profiteering. Because of baby Sofia, I used to study up and read everything I could lay my hands on with regard to the pros and cons of vaccines. With a tiny and vulnerable small baby in my family, I used to worry night and day about the fillers, additives and preservatives in her vaccines. http://www.ora.tv/offthegrid/grid-robert–kennedy-jr-takes-big-pharma–vaccine-industry-0_6ck7ne6j25bv

But not any more.

Now I’ve finally learned to relax and love Big Pharma. I’ve finally become philosophical on the subject. I’ve finally learned to just reflect on the Spartans of ancient Greece and how they put their weaker babies and old folks out to die in the snow — for the good of the tribe. Or was it Sarah Palin who did that?

And then I remembered that the presence of lions in Africa are actually good for the gazelle population there — because they cull the herd. On the plains of the Serengeti, only the strong survive.

And then I learned to cogitate upon the African slaves who survived the dread Middle Passage — only the strongest made it through that ordeal too, right? So that only the most healthy slaves arrived in the New World? Or I’d think about the small-pox-laden blankets that European immigrants used to give Native Americans so that the weaker ones would die off and stop hogging up all the good land.

And now, like some heroic latter-day Spartan or Indian-killer or human trafficker, Big Pharma is also culling our modern American herd of weaker babies and seniors — making sure that only the strong survive. How philosophical of them is that! http://yournewswire.com/mandatory-vaccine-act-2015-spine-chilling-u-s-legislation-proposed/

A recent study has shown that America is ranked way down at Number 34 in the list of countries with regard to infant mortality rates — and is also the highest in the world regarding vaccines given to babies in their first year. So what does that tell us? That we should all immediately move to Singapore as soon as we get preggers? http://www.wanttoknow.info/health/vaccines/vaccines-studies-infant-deaths

No, this tells us that we Americans should stop bitching all the time about how Big Government (under pressure from the Big Pharma lobby of course) is taking away our very right to chose whether or not to have our babies inundated with huge doses of preservatives and fillers before they are even out of diapers, and about how over-selling drugs to our elders has become such a profitable racket — and instead just be grateful that now only our strongest babies and most viable old people survive, and that Big Pharma is culling our herd.

I mean really. Who the freak wants a weak baby or an old person who can no longer produce and will retire or be hospitalized before reaching age 90? “Man up, babies. Old guys, stop being wimps.”

PS: I just went to see Rebecca Solnit give a talk here in Berkeley. “The greatest danger to human beings right now is climate change,” she said. No, the greatest danger to human beings right now is what causes climate change — the use of fossil fuels, especially by the military.

According to Project Censored, “The U.S. military is the biggest polluter on the planet.” So not only is Big Pharma trying to cull the American herd, but War Street is apparently trying to cull this herd too. With all of its various wars and proxy wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Palestine, Haiti, Honduras, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Iran, Russia, China, Africa, South America and goodness-knows-where all else? The American military is now endangering the lives of babies and elders here at home as well as killing them outright on the other side of the world. http://www.projectcensored.org/2-us-department-of-defense-is-the-worst-polluter-on-the-planet/

Just sayin’. Rebecca Solnit got me to thinking about how War Street is also culling the herd. Perhaps she will get you to thinking too. Nah, not gonna happen. Thinking is obviously too un-American.