George W Bush - American Idiot

More on Bush - is fearless leader of Kazakhstan...I wish Henry_Allen

Liquid Sky Should be here

I'll have my own list for you at an early date. Meantime, here's one guy's

version of bizarre. Henry_Allen

Retro 10 List: Bizarre Films
Written by Chris Beaumont
http://draven99.blogspot.com/
Published April 30, 2005
See also:


Originally posted on Draven99's Musings on 7/28/04:

The list is compiled from films that I own and I have limited myself to one

film per director, as some directors make a lot of strange films. The list is in

no order of weirdness.

Ten Bizarre Films
1. Mulholland Dr.: One of the most unexplainable films (except for the hard to

find Lost Highway) I have ever seen, this film from David Lynch started it's

life as a pilot for a television show that got rejected.

2. City of Lost Children: From the director of Amelie, comes this sci-fi film

about a circus strongman searching for his little brother and getting ensnared

in a child thievery ring. More strange than it sounds.

3. Happiness of the Katikuri's: A Japanese remake of a Korean film (The Quiet

Family), and directed by Takashi Miike, this film is part musical, comedy,

drama, and horror. It is about a family that runs a remote cabin, where the

clientele keep dying.

4. A Clockwork Orange: I remember disliking this the first time I saw it, my

opinion has clearly changed, but it still remains one strange film. Great use of

the old Ludwig Van, plus an anti-violence message.

5. Vanilla Sky: Cameron Crowe and Tom Cruise team up to deliver one strange film

of jealousy, sex, and science fiction. A thinking man's Total Recall.

6. Suicide Club: A film about a string of unexplainable suicides, including a

group of 54 school girls, and the cop investigating them takes a surreal turn

into the realm of the unexplainable at the end.

7. Naked Lunch: "Exterminate all rational thought." That would apply to most

films on this list. Based on the work of William S. Burroughs this film

incorporates drugs, bugs, and typewriters into surreal fantasy starring Peter

Weller and directed by David Cronenberg.

8. Pi: Darren Arronofsky's debut is a tale of a mathematician working to unlock

the secrets of the stock market while everything else falls around him and he is

pursued by stock brokers and religious zealots. Very strange.

9. Six String Samurai: What if Elvis lived? what of there was another World War

and Elvis ruled the last city, Las Vegas? What if he died and we need to find a

new King? Sound interesting?

10. Songs from the Second Floor: I have no idea how to explain this film from

Sweden, it is not to everyone's tastes but it does help to show the absurdity

that is all around us.

I love strange films, as evidenced by the list above. The more bizarre, the

better. These films push the boundaries of the film medium, and at times show

that a linear narrative is not necessarily needed to tell an insightful story.

Whoever believes a film must exist in a straightforward way has not experienced

all that the film medium has to offer. Please let me know what you think of

these films, and feel free to suggest others that you think may interest me.

Julian Curry - HARSH WORDS CAN BE HARD TRUTHS

Report: Black Men Mired In Social Crisis
NEW YORK, April 16, 2007(AP) Citing bleak data on incarceration, joblessness and AIDS, the National Urban League said Monday that problems facing black men represent America's most serious social crisis and proposed an aggressive campaign to provide them with more opportunities.

The 97-year-old black empowerment organization, in its annual "State of Black America" report, called for universal early-childhood education, more second-chance programs for school dropouts and ex-offenders, and expanded use of all-male schools emphasizing mentoring and longer class hours.

"Empowering black men to reach their full potential is the most serious economic and civil rights challenge we face today," said Urban League President Marc H. Morial. "Ensuring their future is critical, not just for the African-American community, but for the prosperity, health and well-being of the entire American family."

According to the report, African-American men are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as white males while earning 74 percent as much per year. They are nearly seven times more likely to be incarcerated, with average jail sentences about 10 months longer than those of white men, the report said.

In addition, it said, black males between 15 and 34 are nine times more likely to be killed by firearms and nearly eight times as likely to suffer from AIDS.

"I could rattle off the names of African-American men who have overcome the odds and have risen to national prominence," Morial said. "But for all the Barack Obamas, Tony Dungys and Colin Powells out there ... there are many more black men who face very limited opportunities and diminished expectations."

"It's not enough to have role models to give them hope," he added. "We need a public commitment in the form of concrete policy strategies to help lift them out of their state of underachievement and put them on equal footing with white men in this nation."

Obama, the Illinois senator who is a top contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, wrote the report's foreword.

"The crisis of the black male is our crisis," he wrote. "It is in our shared interest and in the interest of every American to stop ignoring these challenges and start finding the solutions that will work."

On several key measurements, the report found greater disparities between black and white men than between black and white women.

For example, it said unemployment for black men was 9.5 percent, compared to 4 percent for white men, while the jobless rate for black women was 8.5 percent, compared to 4.1 percent for white women.

In terms of annual median income, black men earned less than 75 percent of what white men did, $34,443 vs. $46,807. Black women made 87 percent of what white women made even though they earned $5,000 less than black men — $29,588 a year.

The report did highlight a few bright spots for blacks of both genders, for example in the improved readiness level of children entering elementary school.

However, the report cited a widening gap after elementary school as blacks begin to fall behind on standardized tests. In fourth grade, the report said, blacks perform at a level of 87 percent of whites; by the time they reach 12th grade, their scores are at 74 percent of whites.

By high school, blacks are more likely to drop out — 15 percent compared to 12 percent for whites. For black males, the percentage rises to 18 percent compared to 14 percent of white males, the report said.

In an essay accompanying the report, University of California, Berkeley, lecturer Christopher Knaus said the rising emphasis on standardized testing would not yield major improvements as long as heavily minority schools had the least experienced teachers and highest faculty turnover.

"The curricula in most public schools also fails to adequately engage black students," Knaus wrote. "Disinterested students who are labeled as problems or disruptive often become the victims of 'zero tolerance' policies. ... contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline, especially among black males."

The report suggested that all-male schools with a strong emphasis on mentoring could help keep black boys "focused on their education and away from distractions that could lead them down the wrong paths."

The Urban League also recommended increased federal support for a summer jobs program in cities nationwide, and stressed that any overall progress will need a boost from parents.

"They must continually talk to their children about how much better off they will be by graduating from high school and college," it said.

For more information visit the National Urban League Web site at www.nul.org.


© MMVII The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Islamic Fascism

Pearl honored with Holocaust victims
MIAMI BEACH (AP) — Daniel Pearl was added to the 30,000 names etched on the Holocaust Memorial Wall here on Sunday to honor the American journalist who was abducted and killed by terrorists in 2002.

Although Pearl's death and the Jews of the Holocaust were executed by people of different faith, language and agendas, there is a common thread of hatred, his father Judea Pearl told a crowd of hundreds as his son's name was unveiled as the first non-Holocaust victim to be remembered at the wall in Miami Beach.

"The forces of barbarity and evil are still active in our world. The Holocaust didn't finish in 1945," Judea Pearl said.

Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal's South Asia bureau chief, was abducted Jan. 23, 2002, while working on a story about Islamic militants in Karachi, Pakistan.

Four days later, the Journal and other media outlets received pictures of Pearl with a pistol to his head. A group calling itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty claimed responsibility for the kidnapping and demanded that suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters be released from U.S. custody.

The journalist's body was found months later in a shallow ditch in a compound on the outskirts of Karachi. His throat had been slit.

Three Islamic militants are serving life sentences in Pakistan for the killing; a fourth was sentenced to death. A Pentagon transcript released last month revealed that suspected 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to personally beheading Pearl, among several attacks and plots he took credit for.

During the ceremony, famed violinist Ida Haendel played a song as Judea Pearl lit a candle.

He said he would always think of his son, a classically trained violinist, as "the journalist who is roaming the roads with a fiddle and a laptop spreading friendship and goodwill into the human faces behind the news."

Daniel Pearl's last words, "I am Jewish," are the title of a book his parents wrote in 2004. A movie starring Angelina Jolie based on the memoirs of Pearl's widow, Mariane, is scheduled to be released this year.

Daniel Pearl's parents also started a foundation that bears his name and aims to eradicate hatred.

"We have a unique weapon — the legacy of a person that earned respect on the east, west divide so we feel compelled to use that legacy as much as we can."

Members of Temple Emanu-El also lit candles and sang in honor of other survivors during the ceremony. Miami-Dade County is home to nearly 3,800 Holocaust survivors, according to the Greater Miami Jewish Federation.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.



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So It Goes. (Kurt Vonnegut 1922 - 2007)

- 10 Zen Monkeys (a webzine) - http://www.10zenmonkeys.com -

When Kurt Vonnegut Met Sammy Davis

Posted By Destiny On April 12, 2007 @ 12:14 pm In All Articles, Pop Culture, Celebrity | No Comments

When Kurt Vonnegut published Slaughterhouse Five, he was 47. He’d struggled for 20 years to earn a living as an American writer, working as a public relations man for General Electric, an advertising copy writer, and even a car salesman. “All I wanted to do was support my family,” Vonnegut wrote in 1999. “I didn’t think I would amount to a hill of beans.”

But this forgotten period of his life also includes a haunting story about television, a World War II story, and Sammy Davis Jr.

With two children, “I needed more money than GE would pay me,” Vonnegut wrote in his introduction to [1] Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction. “I also wanted, if possible, more self-respect.” Vonnegut hoped to spend his life writing short stories for magazines, and began tapping his experiences in World War II — and in the world that followed. But in the 1950s the magazines publishing his fiction were exterminated by the ultimate juggernaut: television.

“You can’t fight progress,” Vonnegut wrote bitterly. “The best you can do is ignore it, until it finally takes your livelihood and self-respect away.” In 1958 his sister died — and then her husband a few days later — and the 36-year-old would consider abandoning writing altogether.

In another world, Sammy Davis Jr. was a rising star. Though the 32-year-old had yet to join Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack, he was making a name for himself as an entertainer in Las Vegas and on Broadway. In a [2] 1989 biography, Sammy remembered asking his agency for a role in TV dramas, and being told a black actor would be too jarring for audiences in the south.

“Baby,” he replied, “have you any idea how jarring it must be for about five million colored kids who sit in front of their TV sets hour after hour and they almost never see anybody who looks like them? It’s like they and their families and their friends just plain don’t exist.”

Sammy’s genuine pain found echoes in one of Vonnegut’s stories. D.P. — published in [3] Welcome to the Monkey House — tells the story of the only black boy in a German orphanage. (”Had the children not been kept there…they might have wandered off the edges of the earth, searching for parents who had long ago stopped searching for them.”) When the boy spots a black American soldier, he mistakes him for his father.

Though television was killing his career, Vonnegut ended up as the co-author on this single teleplay, which was to appear in a showcase of half-hour dramas sponsored by his old employer: G.E. Theatre. The published story ends with the young boy explaining his newfound hopes to the other skeptical orphans.

“How do you now he wasn’t fooling you?”
“Because he cried when he left me.”

In the teleplay, the heart-wrenching scene is played out. The alienated soldier — an orphan himself — finds himself abandoning the boy, yelling “Go away! I’m not your father!

“I don’t need you!”

Then he realizes he can’t do it. He collapses to his knees, and sobs “I need you.”

And he promises he’ll be back.

Sammy remembers that “everybody on the set was crying.” Future President Ronald Reagan even wandered in — then the host of GE Theatre — and said warmly that “It’s going to be a wonderful episode.”

And according to Sammy’s biography, his Hollywood agent Sy thought it was a milestone for America. “Well, sweetheart, you’ve made television history. When they write the books about the tube, they’ve got to write that Sammy Davis Jr. was the first Negro actor to star in episodic television… You’ll have opened those doors for others to follow.” Sammy remembered that “It didn’t matter what as long as they broke out of it being just maids and butlers.”

But there was one problem. General Electric worried that nearly two-thirds of their products were sold “below the Mason-Dixon line,” according to Sammy’s agent. His biography remembers that painful conversation. “They say they will be ostracized by their white customers and dealers. So there’s no way we can use that show.

“The sponsor is the boss… GE paid for the show, and it’s GE’s right to bury it.”

The show finally aired — in a doomed time slot competing against Rock Hudson’s first television appearance ever. But surprisingly, it beat Hudson’s ratings in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles — and was only a half point behind nationwide. The reaction was surprisingly positive, and GE even cast Sammy in two more episodes. And somewhere, America began to change.

Vonnegut struggled through another 10 years of writing. In Bagombo Snuff Box he complained that when he published [4] Mother Night and [5] The Sirens of Titan, “I got for each of them what I used to get for a short story.”

But eight years before his death he’d look back on that time of his life for what it was — “a golden age of magazine fiction… a time before there was television, when an author might support a family by writing stories that satisfied uncritical readers of magazines, and earning thereby enough free time in which to write serious novels.

“This old man’s hope has to be that some of his earliest tales, for all their mildness and innocence and clumsiness, may, in these coarse times, still entertain.”

Civil War - No Place to Fight Terrorism

The War on Islamist Fascism is a 4GenWar. Our approach to Iraq has been to pretend it is Normandy and the liberaytion of Europe. Iraqis aren't becoming democrats. They are becoming theocrats. This is the wrong war....Watcch these pages for the Right Way to Fight Islamo-Fascism...Henry_Allen


Army prosecuting more deserters
WASHINGTON (AP) — With the nation fighting two wars, the number of soldiers deserting has increased and the Army is stepping up prosecutions.

Army statistics released this week show the number of desertions rose in the four years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America prompted the Bush administration's war on terrorism. Desertions then fell for three years but they have been rising steadily again in the last three years as the increasingly unpopular campaign in Iraq has worn on.

ON DEADLINE:Marines claim Target kicked them out because they were thought to be recruiters

Even with the recent increases, less than 1% of the Army's active duty force of 507,000 soldiers desert, according to Army data. That compares with 3.4% of the 1971 force that fought the Vietnam war, Maj. Anne Edgecomb, an Army spokeswoman, said Tuesday.

And even with a sizable boost in the rate of prosecutions, the overwhelming majority of cases still are handled through administrative discharge. Some 5% of cases go to trial, Edgecomb said.

Junior enlisted soldiers are the most likely to desert, Army researchers say.

More than 60% of deserters over the past 1½ years had less than a year in service, Edgecomb said. More than 80% have less than three years of service.

"The three primary reasons deserters cite for their actions are dissatisfaction with military life, family problems and homesickness," she said.

The problem "tends to increase in magnitude during wartime" and the Army treats the offense more seriously during war, she said, because it can affect a soldier's unit and its mission.

"We prosecute for desertion much more heavily in a time of war than in a time of peace," said Paul Boyce, another Army spokesman.

Army statistics include the following:

• Desertions rose steadily from about 1,800 in budget year 1998 to about 4,400 in the budget year ended Sept. 30, 2001.

•After the Sept. 11 attacks, desertions trended down for three years. There were roughly 4,000 in fiscal year 2002, 2,600 in 2003, and 2,450 in 2004.

•Desertions rose in 2005 and 2006 and appear to be slightly higher again in the 2007 fiscal year that started Oct. 1. They went from approximately 2,700 in 2005 to 3,300 last year and are at about 1,700 for the first half of this budget year.

•Army statistics for prosecutions were impossible to match exactly against the number of desertions because deserters were counted by fiscal year and prosecutions by calendar year. But as an example of the increased rate of prosecutions in recent years, the Army said 167 soldiers were prosecuted in the calendar year started January 2002 against roughly 4,000 desertions counted in the fiscal year started October 2001. That compared with 59 prosecuted the previous year out of 4,400 desertions.

When a soldier is reporting missing or AWOL — absent without leave — the military attempts to find him or her. After 30 days of consecutive absence, the soldier is classified as a deserter, Edgecomb said.

When the soldier returns or is apprehended, a commander has discretion to prosecute the deserter through a court-martial, discharge, retain and rehabilitate, as well as apply a wide range of administrative punishments.

"Our primary course of action is to attempt to rehabilitate the soldier — reintegrate him/her back into their unit," Edgecomb said.

Administrative actions include counseling, a reprimand, forfeiture of pay, reduction in rank and involuntary discharge.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.



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Iraq Battle(s) For an Iranian Colony?

Six U.S. Soldiers Killed In Iraq
BAGHDAD, April 8, 2007(CBS/AP) Six U.S. soldiers died in Iraq on Sunday, the U.S. military announced.

Three were killed by a roadside bomb during a patrol south of Baghdad, the military said. One soldier was wounded in that incident.

Another soldier died and three were wounded by a mortar or rocket attack in a separate incident south of the capital, the military said in another statement.

Two more soldiers died Sunday from wounds sustained in combat, the military said — one each in Diyala and Salahuddin provinces, both north of Baghdad.

Earlier, the military announced that four U.S. soldiers were killed Saturday in an explosion near their vehicle in Diyala. Another soldier was also wounded in the attack, and evacuated to a U.S. military hospital, a statement said.

The victims' names were withheld pending family notification.

At least 3,280 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians.

Violence in Iraq remained as relentless as the deepening debate in the United States about the way forward in the war four years after Marines and the Army's 3rd Infantry Division swept into the Iraqi capital 20 days into the American invasion.

In Other Developments:

# The powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his militiamen on Sunday to redouble their battle to oust American forces and argued that Iraq's army and police should join him in defeating "your archenemy."

# Security remained so tenuous in the capital on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the U.S. capture of Baghdad that Iraq's military declared a 24-hour ban on all vehicles in the capital from 5 a.m. Monday. The government quickly reinstated Monday as a holiday, just a day after it had decreed that April 9 no longer would be a day off.

# The Senate will not stop paying for the Iraq war nor relent from insisting that President George W. Bush keep pressing the Baghdad government for a negotiated end to the violence, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, said Sunday.

# Iran's foreign minister warned Sunday that cooperation with Iraq could deteriorate if five Iranian diplomats detained by U.S. troops in Iraq are not set free.


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