Thank God for Maurice Sendak! Before he came around with his artwork it was all Walt Disney style excess saccharine ‘sweet’, Lassie, and Flipper. He revolutionized the story writing and design of kids books. ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ author Maurice Sendak dead at age 83.

I love this song.
Zombie – by Fela Kuti
…Fela Kuti is Africa’s greatest musical legend and this is his greatest song!

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It’s close to Mother Nature Day and the following is a brief Marxist answer by John Bellamy Foster to this question about the corporate value of nature under a capitalist world economy controlled by international corporations. Read more »

“Ladies Who Lunch” used to mean the idle spouses of financially successful husbands, as one New Yorker cartoonist fondly dubbed them, his Grand Dames, until Broadway in the mid-seventies where Stephen Sondheim subverted the idiom for Elaine Stritch’s COMPANY showstopper which exploded the pretense of the ladies’ self-serving philanthropy. Forty years on, out in the provinces, the expression adorns a Colorado Springs radio show on what is an otherwise erudite classical music station, at lunchtime, for ladies. Cultural illiterates too, probably. Imagine thinking that Titanic means big like Titan, absent the hubris. My neighbors could happily move back to the farm after they’d seen Paree, wondering what idiot decreed “you can’t go home again.”

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You go, Girls! Go Pussy Riot! Russian church organises against rock band.

The posting of this song to NMT is dedicated by me to all the dumb redneck shitheads I have known in my lifetime. …and also is dedicated to the Mitt Romney campaign 2012! Go, Get Out of my Country, you Dumb Fucks! Go live in White Apartheid South Africa of your dumb idiotic wet dreams instead! You suburban ‘rednecks’ still suck, same as you did when you once lived in lost away, rural America! The Day Ted Nugent Killed All The Animals. You stupid dumb ass turkeys!

‘It was now-disgraced President Richard Nixon who coined the term “war on drugs” in 1971. Since then, the drug war has cost more than one trillion dollars, the Associated Press reported in 2010. Hundreds of thousands of lives have also been lost. Observers are split on whether the goal of the programme was actually battling drug cultivation, or if the real aim was the projection of US military power in the region.’

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Obama versus Romney? ‘How did it come to this? How did democracy in America degenerate into a mind-numbing absurdity? The answer, in a word, is money.’

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Happy Easter from Tim Tebow. He’s just as inspiring as all Hell let out! Tim Tebow's Easter Message …Move over, Pope. You’ve now got competition!

“A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels,” Joan Didion wrote. “It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.” Read more about Kinkade… Thomas Kinkade's artistic legacy up for grabs.

‘Bales, a student of Middle Eastern history and customs, often admonished younger GIs to treat noncombatants with courtesy and respect, Alexander said. “Some guys had a pretty negative attitude, but Bales wasn’t like that at all. He said there was no need to be a jerk. Be polite, be professional and have a plan to kill everyone you meet if you need to.” (from The Seattle Times report about Robert Bales …Oh, he’s Mr. Nice Guy alright! He’s the all American guy, from an all American family, with an all American attitude!

‘Jorge Gonzalez, executive director of Coffee Strong in Lakewood (South Tacoma, Washington area) , called for a congressional investigation into why Fort Lewis-McChord’s leadership is failing its soldiers. The shop, located near the sewing center, provides counseling and other outreach to Lewis-McChord soldiers. The organization had planned a Monday night vigil for the victims of Sunday’s attacks but canceled it out of concern it would be seen as criticizing the Army and its soldiers.’ See Lewis-McChord soldiers concerned.

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An interesting assessment of today’s Colombia after many years of Made by America counter insurgency warfare. How foreigners view Colombia. And if you want to sample Colombian music, try the link to Discos Fuentes.

According to the study, vets with psychiatric and other behavior problems are being given 2-4 times the amount of narcotics if they claim to have physical pain of some sort as those without these Psych conditions. What gives? PTSD veterans prone to drug addiction get risky painkillers

‘The U.S. government and the American commander of NATO-led forces in Afghanistan apologized after Afghan laborers found charred copies of the Koran while collecting rubbish at the sprawling Bagram Airbase, about an hour’s drive north of Kabul.’ See Reuters Six killed, many wounded in Afghan Koran protests.

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‘Whoever lives it is the one enjoys it’ (Quien lo vive, es quien lo goza) is the introduction to the Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico region’s greatest celebration of Carnaval. See Mardi Gras in Barranquilla and be sure to click on where the website tells you to! I wish I was in Colombia right now!

………………………………………… Penn State’s Joe Paterno has died

Aug 2011- Anthony Bourdain told TV Guide that Paula Deen was “the worst, most dangerous person to America,” who “revels in her unholy connections with evil corporations” and is “proud of the fact that her food is f—ing bad for you.” Read more »

Tom Brady leads Patriots’ 45-10 rout of Broncos and Tim Tebow in NFL playoffs. Maybe God will deliver to Tim next year? ..and then again, maybe not.
 
God was not on ‘our’ side after all.

Most Americans know the lyrics of this depression-era song. Now they know what it was about.
 
They used to tell me I was building a dream,
and so I followed the mob,
When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear,
I was always there right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream,
with peace and glory ahead,
Why should I be standing in line,
just waiting for bread?

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One more time, for the Community Kitchen Cookbook. This is something like the coon-asses I planted tree with for a season used to do over a propane cooking ring. They used a couple dozen squirrels and fed us all at once. Man, that was some good times. If you want it coon-ass authentic, serve with plenty of cheap beer. Don’t get too drunk and kick the pot over.

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There are two qualities about the New Yorker I find irresistible though I’m loath to praise any part of the established press. No matter how suddenly forthright or honorable their editorial might appear, it’s only a feint. The Grey Lady NYT for example, has expressed accord with Wall Street’s recent invaders, but otherwise will spew at best neoliberal subterfuge. The WSJ will only ever be Murdoch pretending. But I have the suspicion that some artsy pretense prevents the New Yorker from bowing to the corporatist agenda. It’s the usual PUP on Israel of course, but too elitist for bourgeois self-deceit. That’s my theory. As a result the most disturbing investigative journalism leaks regularly through its pages. It competes with Harper’s among very few, but where the New Yorker has no peer is its cover art, which is often surprisingly subversive. The Oval Office Jihadist being a notorious example. Last week’s cover illustration was a nod to the Liberty Plaza demonstrators, showing Manhattan tourists being subjected to special use sidewalks akin to the restrictions NYC reserves for protesters. This week’s cover depicts Wall Street as sinister metropolis, literally an industrial behemoth, with the inhospitable accouterments of smog, smokestacks, cooling towers, and obelisk(!), looked over by a sphinx-like sacred bull with glowing eyes, nostrils and smoking horns, really if I had to guess, Mammon. Fitting that the bull signified indisputable power in the dawn of agrarian civilization, now its only symbolism is a brutish money-above-all-else juggernaut.

Here’s a page from the Little Golden Book of Airplanes, which taught children in 1953 that “Bib big bombers carry bombs, guns and rockets. The big bombers help guard our country.” Unless kids understood the concept of nuclear deterrence, they might have wondered how dropping bombs on other lands helped guard OUR country? Even contemporary books about the US military use “defensive” to describe weapons that are obviously used to attack. The Corvair B-36 was an intercontinental bomber distinguished by the six weird pusher props, twelve cannons, a crew of 22 and it carried the first thermonuclear bombs. The B-36 never received an official name because the Air Force wanted to call it the “Peacemaker” but couldn’t overcome the objections of church groups who considered that idea beyond the pale. Today the USAF aeronautic death dealers are named “Predator” and “Reaper” and American churchgoers are cheering front and center.

It might stretch credulity that the US Bureau of Engraving encrypted prophetic images of the Pentagon –and the not yet built WTC twin towers– in their iconic Reichstag Fire infamy, unto dollar bills folded just so. But who knows, they might have chosen to encode Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted but unheeded chiding to the American people: “Every generation needs a new revolution.” And don’t we especially want to ignore this one? “When injustice becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.”