Feliz cumpleaños, Ambrose Bierce

“Insurance: An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.”

Bierce/Spartacus

"On the outbreak of the Civil War Lucius Bierce organized and equipped two companies of marines. [Ambrose Bierce] joined one of these on 19th April, 1861, and two months later became part of the invasion force led by George McClellan in West Virginia.

On 6th April, 1862, Albert S. Johnson and Pierre T. Beauregard and 55,000 members of the Confederate Army attacked Grant's army near Shiloh Church, in Hardin, Tennessee. Taken by surprise, Grant's army suffered heavy losses. Bierce was a member of the force led by General Don Carlos Buell that forced the Confederate to retreat. Bierce was deeply shocked by what he saw at Shiloh and after the war wrote several short stories based on this experience."

Bubba, RIP

R.E. Lee   (no, not that one)

"Bubba was a rodeo producer by trade and also worked for Frank Gardner Construction. He was passionate about rodeos', bull riding and great bulls. He was a born again Christian man and strong in his faith and a member of the Romance Full Gospel Church. In his last days Bubba enjoyed all the visitors, phone calls and texts he received."

Jus ain't right-- the Almighty takin' a bull rider in the prime of his life. Buh bye Bubba, and may the good Lawd bless n keep ya.

Mo'

Bobby Kennedy, konservative

http://www.counterpunch.org/macaray06272011.html

""It’s a mystery why John F. Kennedy is still regarded as the family moderate—cautious, pragmatic, shrewd and calculating—while brother Bobby gets to be portrayed as the impetuous, left-leaning, idealistic humanitarian. It’s a mystery because even a cursory examination of history reveals that that wasn’t Bobby.



For openers, Bobby Kennedy was about as “leftist” as Douglas MacArthur. In truth, he, like his brother John, was a shrieking anti-Communist. The Kennedys were not only Cold Warriors, they were fairly paranoid about it—confusing progressivism with Bolshevism—which is why they believed, ludicrously, that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Communist, and is why they (John as president and Bobby as Attorney General) had King’s telephone tapped.


How much of an anti-Communist was Bobby Kennedy? Consider: During the early 1950s Bobby served as an aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Yes, that Joseph McCarthy. His witch-hunting senate committee ruined the careers of scores of Americans through the use of smears and innuendo. It’s a fact. Bobby (“Don’t get mad….get even”) Kennedy was Joe McCarthy’s boy.

It was only after family patriarch, Joe Kennedy, advised his son to jump off the McCarthy bandwagon (alas, “Tail-Gunner Joe” had become an embarrassment, having degenerated into a clownish, alcoholic demagogue) that Bobby sought a new vocation. It was only after Papa Joe urged him to abandon Commie-hunting and focus on another bogy man that Bobby Kennedy decided to make America’s labor unions his next victim. ""

That's a bit too f-ing historical and real for the liberal sentimentalists, Davey

BachmannSpeak

Michele Bachmann quotes

"Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann made the acquaintance of some hula dancing Teabaggers from Hawaii, and they brought her a lei, which Bachmann herself could obtain at the airport in Hawaii, were it not for the fact that she believes planes cannot fly over water without the use of witchcraft. Anyway, she told Congress, "I'm reminded that the one who created this lei also created our freedom. Are we so insensible to the high cost our forebearers paid to purchase our freedom?" So, the Hawaiian Bureau of Tourism created our freedom? I guess this is not supposed to make much sense."

Whoa. Oral Roberts U in the House

no divine right of Kings (Ayn Rand)

The Divine Ayn in the House:

"Since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men, this meant, in practice, that the rulers of society were exempt from moral law; subject only to traditional rituals, they held total power and exacted blind obedience—on the implicit principle of: “The good is that which is good for society (or for the tribe, the race, the nation), and the ruler’s edicts are its voice on earth.”

This was true of all statist systems, under all variants of the altruist-collectivist ethics, mystical or social. “The Divine Right of Kings” summarizes the political theory of the first—”Vox populi, vox dei” of the second. As witness: the theocracy of Egypt, with the Pharaoh as an embodied god—the unlimited majority rule or democracy of Athens—the welfare state run by the Emperors of Rome—the Inquisition of the late Middle Ages—the absolute monarchy of France—the welfare state of Bismarck’s Prussia—the gas chambers of Nazi Germany—the slaughterhouse of the Soviet Union.

All these political systems were expressions of the altruist-collectivist ethics-and their common characteristic is the fact that society stood above the moral law, as an omnipotent, sovereign whim worshiper. Thus, politically, all these systems were variants of an amoral society.

The most profoundly revolutionary achievement of the United States of America was the subordination of society to moral law......"

just Tom

Pynchon collection/LA Times

"In the early 1960s, Phyllis was a Spanish teacher in Seattle, married to Fred Gebauer, a mechanical engineer doing work at Boeing he couldn't discuss. At a party celebrating a mutual friend's new piano, the two met Pynchon, a technical writer working for another part of Boeing. Pynchon and Fred clowned around by reaching into the piano and plucking out the Yogi Bear theme song on its strings -- "which did not delight the host," Phyllis Gebauer said Wednesday night.

Fred couldn't talk about his work, and Pynchon never mentioned he was writing a novel -- instead, they talked and joked and Phyllis made lasagna and they played charades. "He's a great charades player," Phyllis said. "He's great at puns. They're awful."


Fred and Phyllis only learned that Pynchon had been working on a novel when he sent them a copy of his first book, "V," published in 1963.


The Gebauers' lives separated from Pynchon's. Phyllis, in a "mini-memoir" distributed at the event, wrote that aerospace workers of the era were called " 'aero-braceros,' because they changed jobs and locales as frequently as Mexican field hands."


The couple had moved several times in just a few years when Fred took a job at NASA -- another one he couldn't discuss -- and, after being in Houston just a week, they bumped into Pynchon after a concert. "Phyl, Fred, what are you guys doing here?" she remembers Pynchon calling to them. The coincidence was the kind of thing that might happen in one of Pynchon's books - but in Pynchon's world it would have been the result of a deep and complex conspiracy.""

So Capn TP was palsies with Phyllis Gebauer, one of those hip U-claw Extension babes. Coolnicity--and probably sufficent for removing him from the list of Zodiac killah suspects.

"Whitey" Bulger busted

LA Times--

"Legendary Boston crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger, who has been on the run for more than 15 years, was arrested Wednesday in Santa Monica, multiple law enforcement sources told The Times.


Bulger, 81, fled Boston in late 1994 as federal agents were about to arrest him in connection with at least 19 killings, racketeering and other crimes that spanned the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. He headed an organized crime group that allegedly controlled extortion, drug deals and other illegal activities in the Boston area.
...
Authorities said Bulger initially fled after being tipped by John Connolly Jr., an FBI agent who used Bulger as an informant. Connolly was convicted of racketeering in May 2002 for protecting Bulger and another reputed crime boss and FBI informant, Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi.


Bulger was the subject of several books and helped inspire "The Departed," the 2006 Martin Scorsese film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson, who played a Bulger-like character.""

boston-mob-boss-hiding-plain-sight-


 That old g. could be seen at times kickin' it around 3rd street in St. Mon. --of that we're pretty sure-- with his blond mollie.

Meet the Huntsmans

Typos corrected!
Pah-raise Moroni, and kick us down some of that copacetic de-caf Pepsi, my Nauvoo brutthrrr

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-huntsman-videos-20110621,0,149621.story

Prejudice against Moronic candidates persists, poll shows

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-gallup-poll-mormons-20110620,0,7160786.story

""With one Moron leading the pack for the Republican presidential nomination and another scheduled to announce his candidacy on Tuesday, a significant bloc of American voters continues to oppose followers of that religion, according to a Gallup poll released Monday.


About one in five Republicans, or 22%, said they would not vote for a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the official name of the Moron church. About the same proportion of independents said they would oppose a Moron while a larger number of Democrats, about 27%, said they were opposed, according to the poll.

Prejudice against Morons has been a measurable political factor in American politics since at least the late 1960s, with a solid group opposing members of that church. That number has varied, ranging from about 20% to as much as 30%, depending on how the polls were worded and carried out.

The finding is especially worrisome to the campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, considered to be the leader in the GOP race with about 20% to 25% support. Romney in 2008 gave a speech defending his faith in the hope of deflecting fears about Moronism.

Recently Romney stopped by a cafe in New Hampshire to chat with some locals, and took some time to explain his faith. "I'm a Moron, folks. My family were Morons.  I have been a Moron since birth, and will always be one,"  Romney told a small crowd of enthusiastic republicans.  Romney then stated, "the Book of Moron is my  guide on political and spiritual matters. I favor conservative principles, and I'm a Nephite, headed to the celestial kingdom.  That's the way it is. The Book of Moron says so."  Shaking hands as he exited, he then joined his staffers in the Romney for President Hummer, and they slowly headed back to the highway."

sabado Gigante

Bloomsday 2011

Joyce

"The tag-team reading was one of hundreds held around the world in celebration of Joyce's acclaimed work that chronicles the wanderings and rendezvous of Dublin characters in one single day: June 16, 1904.

Though Joyce's characters are common folk, he parallels their lives to classical characters of ancient Greek literature. For example, Joyce's main character, Leopold Bloom, a newspaper ad salesman, is Homer's hero Odysseus, wondering the world (Dublin). Hence, Bloom's episodic day, June 16, is called "Bloomsday."

+++++ +++++


http://contingenciesblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/bloomsday.html

what NASA needs

Tom Wolfe/NYT

"Why, putting a man on the Moon was just the beginning, the prelude, the prologue! The Moon was nothing but a little satellite of Earth. The great adventure was going to be the exploration of the planets ... Mars first, then Venus, then Pluto. Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus? NASA would figure out their slots in the schedule in due course. In any case, we Americans wouldn’t stop until we had explored the entire solar system. And after that ... the galaxies beyond.


NASA had long since been all set to send men to Mars, starting with manned fly-bys of the planet in 1975. Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who had come over to our side in 1945, had been designing a manned Mars project from the moment he arrived. In 1952 he published his Mars Project as a series of graphic articles called “Man Will Conquer Space Soon” in Collier’s magazine. It created a sensation. He was front and center in 1961 when NASA undertook Project Empire, which resulted in working plans for a manned Mars mission. Given the epic, the saga, the triumph of Project Apollo, Mars would naturally come next. All NASA and von Braun needed was the president’s and Congress’s blessings and the great adventure was a Go. Why would they so much as blink before saying the word?


Three months after the landing, however, in October 1969, I began to wonder ... I was in Florida, at Cape Kennedy, the space program’s launching facility, aboard a NASA tour bus. The bus’s Spielmeister was a tall-fair-and-handsome man in his late 30s ... and a real piece of lumber when it came to telling tourists on a tour bus what they were looking at. He was so bad, I couldn’t resist striking up a conversation at the end of the tour.


Sure enough, it turned out he had not been put on Earth for this job. He was an engineer who until recently had been a NASA heat-shield specialist. A baffling wave of layoffs had begun, and his job was eliminated. It was so bad he was lucky to have gotten this stand-up Spielmeister gig on a tour bus. Neil Armstrong and his two crew mates, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, were still on their triumphal world tour ... while back home, NASA’s irreplaceable team of highly motivated space scientists — irreplaceable! — there were no others! ...anywhere! ... You couldn’t just run an ad saying, “Help Wanted: Experienced heat-shield expert” ... the irreplaceable team was breaking up, scattering in nobody knows how many hopeless directions.
•


How could such a thing happen? In hindsight, the answer is obvious. NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers..."

Gunnar Fischer RIP

do the phunky Totentanz! yah

Cinematographer for Bergman dies

"Gunnar Fischer, a cinematographer whose use of stark lighting and sharp focus lent mood and psychological depth to a dozen of Ingmar Bergman’s early films, including “The Seventh Seal” and “Wild Strawberries,” died on Saturday in Stockholm. He was 100. "

sabado Gigante

?

church of the Harleyites

from Pynchon's V:

....."Around three Profane woke up on the kitchen floor with a headache. Night air, bitter cold, seeped under the door and from somewhere outside he could hear a low, persistent growl. "Pig," Profane croaked. "Where you keep the aspirin." No answer. Profane stumbled into the other room. Pig wasn't there. The growl outside turned more ominous. Profane went to the window and saw Pig down in the alley, sitting on his motorcycle and racing the engine. Snow fell in tiny glittering pinpoints, the alley held its own curious snowlight: turning Pig to black-and-white clown's motley and ancient brick walls, dusted with snow, to neutral gray. Pig had on a knitted watch cap, pulled down over his face to the neck so that his head showed up as a sphere of dead black. Engine exhaust roiled in clouds around him. Profane shivered. "What are you doing, Pig," he called. Pig didn't answer. The enigma or sinister vision of Pig and that Harley-Davidson alone in an alley at three in the morning reminded Profane too suddenly of Rachel, whom he didn't want to think about, not tonight in the bitter cold, with a headache, with snow slipping into the room.


Rachel Owlglass had owned, back in '54, this MG. Her Daddy's gift. After giving it its shakedown cruise in the region around Grand Central (where Daddy's office was), familiarizing it with telephone poles, fire hydrants and occasional pedestrians, she brought the car up to the Catskills for the summer. Here, little, sulky and voluptuous, Rachel would gee and haw this MG around Route 17's bloodthirsty curves and cutbacks, sashaying its arrogant butt past hay wagons, growling semis, old Ford roadsters filled to capacity with crewcut, undergraduate gnomes.""

Original literary rock n roll.  Pynchon has made a few references to the  Harleyite brotherhood, IIRC.--in Vineland as well. His viewpoint is  nuanced, of course--but like HS Thompson, Pynchon was never one to mistake the meth-tweeking, beer guzzling thugs of the Hells Angels & CO for the  authentic counterculture.

the idea of free will

"It is ... the faculty of remembrance which may be said to place us in the class of moral agents. If we were to act only in consequence of some immediate impulse, and receive no direction from internal motives of choice, we should be pushed forward by an invincible fatality, without power or reason for the most part to prefer one thing to another, because we could make no comparison but of objects which might both happen to be present."
Dr. Johnson.

Sam Harris/HuffPo

Sarah "Wadsworth" Palin

PaulRevere/Tom the Dancing Bug

net access--your right

""""The United Nations counts internet access as a basic human right in a report that bears implications both to on-going events in the Arab Spring and to the Obama administration's war on whistleblowers. Acting as special rapporteur, a human rights watchdog role appointed by the UN Secretary General, Frank La Rue takes a hard line on the importance of the internet as "an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights, combating inequality, and accelerating development and human progress." Presented to the General Assembly on Friday, La Rue's report comes as the capstone of a year's worth of meetings held between La Rue and local human rights organizations around the world, from Cairo to Bangkok. The report's introduction points to the impact of online collaboration in the Arab Spring and says that "facilitating access to the Internet for all individuals, with as little restriction to online content as possible, should be a priority for all States.""""

wikileaks-internet-human-rights

related--smackdown-rawls-vs zizek

A start: next, establish a basic right to blog/comment without being required to use the "captchas" verification crap.

The cult of the LDS, continued

"To me, the possibility that the Mormon church might control America is a frightening prospect."
"Why I left the Mormon church"/Packham