Why I love Eschaton--reason #364
Because you get great ideas from the posters there, like this one from Falstaff on

writing a neo-con to english dictionary

Massacre? What Massacre?

Japanese politicians continue to revise history to smooth over what the media here often refer to as "that spot of unpleasantness back in 40s." One alleged human being from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party - Masahiro Morioka, the parliamentary secretary for the Health Ministry - criticized the Chinese government for demanding the Japanese Prime Minister stop visiting the Yasukuni Shrine where the souls of Class A war criminals are specifically enshrined along with the rest of Japan's war dead.

"Class A war criminals are treated as bad people because of fear of China,"
Morioka said. "War criminals were categorized as Class A, Class B and Class C at
the Tokyo Tribunal of War Criminals. They were categorized by a one sided
tribunal led by the Occupation forces at which crimes against peace and humanity
were created"

"A war is a part of politics, and it is in line with an
international law. The Diet unanimously agreed to pay pensions to the families
of Class A war criminals who have died. They are not seen as criminals in this
country." "
(Saturday, May 28 Daily Yomiuri)

I recommend the excellent Wikipedia entry on the Nanjing Massacre as a starting point in explaining why Morioka is an idiot. The Tokyo Tribunal did not behead prisoners or bayonet infants or particpate in gang rapes. It didn't invent comfort women, Unit 100, Unit 731 or the Bataan Death March. Morioka is a facist apologist who deserves to be pilloried in the press and beaten like a rented mule at the ballot box. Unfortunately neither will happen.

Too Sweet
I love plagarists, I especially love how incredibly dumb they are. So does World O'Crap

Just for Pete
"Centuwion, Why do they titter so?"

Our hero and new spiritual leader of the moment -

Wammo

He's finally done it! Wammo has gotten his online act together. He's blogging and posting films and all manner of good stuff - check him out!

follow this link to Wammolovesme.com

Have a listen courtesy of Amazon.com

With all apologies to his His Regal Wammoness for not paying him to post this, here are the lyrics (from his site) to one of my favorite songs by the "Fat-Headed Stranger"

WINGLESS ANGELS (from My Favorite Record)

I lost my virginity

While the preacher was downstairs

Chattin' with my mom

And I wasted my youth

On a girl named Ruth

And it don't make no difference to me

Now all you wingless angels

Get in line to take a stab at me

'cause I'm rollin' down the last six pack

And two A.M. brings finality

I was born in New York City

And beat up down in San Antone

And I wasted my time

Smokin' agriculture

In the back of my buddy's old Firebird

Now all you wingless angels

Start clocking yourselves

With the junebug of the times

'cause I'm staggerin' in to your pit stop

And I'm lined up

Down at your favorite bar

Crippled at the South Ban

I fulfilled the prophesy

But baptized in the waters of the Broken Spoke

When a yodeller named Walser

Pierced my soul

lNow all you wingless angels

Stop trampin' 'round my back door

'cause I'm drownin' in a Bushmills dream

And I got a hot date

With the Holy Ghost

Now Jesus, he knew his price tag

Thirty pieces of silver hung on his hide

But that devil in your smile

Is so divine

I'll be Judassing your ass out for twenty-nine

Now all you wingless angels

Sanctify my ability to recognize

'cause I'm drunk off my ass

In Omaha

And I'm sleepin' on the bus

With a busted wing

Yeah, I'm passed out on the bus

With a busted wing

(c)B.Y.G.U.M. 2000

Department of Blatant Plugs
My neighbour and new pal Professor Jesse Glass is an author, poet and fan of outsider music and art. He is also one of the proprietors of Ahadada Books a very cool small publisher based in Toronto.

Also, check out Jesse's partner in Ahadada Books, Daniel Sendeki, and his useful advice for the useless Conservative/Alliance/Reform/Republican/Fourth Reich Party leader Stephen Harper.

War is not good for children or other living things, but we shouldn't let it spoil David Brooks' morning coffee

Sid Schanberg takes our second least favorite NYT columnist and many, many more of us not on the firing line to task for being afraid to look at images of a war so many flag-waving jackasses think is a cross between a video game and Sands of Iwo Jima.

And if you don't like to see pictures of four-year-olds who have been caught in an airstrike, think about why that airstrike is supposed to have taken place.

Yeah, freedom is on the march all right, you can tell by the sound of the jackboots.

Flushing credibility

My take on the whole "Newsweak" fiasco is that it is a tempest in a teacup brewed up by Rove and his minions to further discredit an already battered national media. In their attempt to shoot the messanger, a story that has been corroborated by several former Gitmo detainees, is now being branded a fabrication because one anonymous govt source backed down at the last minute. See the Rude Pundit for further details. The Rude One is entirely correct. Every time the press screws up, the right and left both hammer them for it, eroding trust in the media. Which is just what the White House wants.

We are now seeing more and more accusations of torture in Afghanistan and the latest are hardly the first. As the Rude One points out, the short term result of the Newsweak cave-in is going to be that every right-wing bloviator will be painting every report out of Afghanistan with the same brush as they have the "Newsweek lied, people died" claim.

Pimping the media whores redux

Tim Noah at Slate's Chatterbox reports the results of the "columnist for sale" poll. The responses he counted - and I'm guessing mine was not among them due to the math involved since I advocated David Brooks being forced to pay me to read he crapulous nonsense about "heartland values" - apparently averaged out to this:

Paul Krugman: $6.90

Thomas L. Friedman: $4.10

Frank Rich: $3.92

Maureen Dowd: $3.42

Nicholas Kristof: $2.35

Bob Herbert: $1.42

David Brooks: $1.39

John Tierney: $0.31

IN YOUR EAR

Bruce Springsteen - Devils and Dust

Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Imagine you've spent the night at a big house party smoking, drinking and carrying on into the wee hours. Almost everyone else has crashed out or staggered home and you find yourself in the kitchen with the last survivors, puffing a final cigarette and draining the dregs of someone's bottle of Jose Cuervo as the sun comes up.

Some middle-aged guy from New Jersey is noodling away on an acoustic guitar and somebody tells him to either play a song or put it down. He strums a few chords and in a raw-throated rusty voice, sings a handful of stories about love, loss, redemption and desperation with a world-weariness and sincerity that makes the roomful of sleepy drunks sit up and take notice.

Bruce Springsteen's Devils and Dust is not the kind of album you put on to liven up a party, but rather the sort of thing you listen to when the frivolity has passed.

This is not a typical collection of muscular anthemic rock 'n' roll about cars, girls and the good old days. Devils and Dust is a stark, stripped-down series of sketches of life on the margins of society. Foregoing the big rowdy sound of the E Street Band, this album harkens back to earlier efforts like Ghost of Tom Joad and Nebraska.

The instrumentation is generally understated and sparse, centering on Springsteen's acoustic guitar with minimal drums and percussion and a subtle keyboard wash in the background. Devils and Dust's quiet intensity is a long way from the bombast of "Born to Run" or "Born in the USA."

As might have been deduced from his many appearances on behalf of John Kerry during the 2004 U.S. presidential election, Springsteen is not a big fan of the Iraq war, and the title track is an intense and haunting statement conceived as part of a conversation between soldiers in Iraq:

"Well I've got God on my side
And I'm just trying to survive
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love
Fear's a dangerous thing
It can turn your heart black you can trust
It'll take your God filled soul
Fill it with devils and dust"

There's a sort of Southwestern thread running through many of the songs, with Spanish words sprinkled through the lyrics and cowboy imagery used repeatedly.

The political title track aside, the focus is mainly on Springsteen the storyteller telling tales of redemption. "Reno" tells the story of a depressing liaison with a prostitute that has aroused controversy for its explicit lyrics and imagery. "Hitter" chronicles the experience of a journeyman bareknuckle boxer who has come home for a rest. The moving "Matamoros Banks" is about an illegal immigrant who drowns trying to cross the border from Mexico to the United States. The stories are mostly about people at, or at least near the bottom--ragged cowboys, runaways, losers seeking a fresh start.

But it's not all darkness and gloom, a pair of love songs, "Maria's Bed" and "All I'm Thinkin' About," lighten things up, with Springsteen showing off his falsetto on the latter tune.

The accompanying DVD directed by Danny Clinch is in some ways superior to the album itself. Featuring intense and intimate performances of five of the best songs on the album, it comes about as close to duplicating the aforementioned fantasy concert as anything short of the real thing is likely to. It doesn't feature any fancy special effects or an all-star band, it's just the Boss and his guitar on a straightback chair in what looks like an abandoned hotel room. He doesn't even look into the camera. He just strums a few chords, throws back his head and sings in a rough and ready rasp.

Suddenly it feels like dawn around the kitchen table.





Copyright 2005 The Yomiuri Shimbun


In a non-published list let me just add that among the other discs in heavy rotation at the Woodshed are the new Loudon Wainwright III "Here Come the Choppers," lots of new John Prine and Sam Bush's "Ice Caps - peaks of Telluride" --go and buy them all now!

Pimping the media whores
The New York Times has announced that its columnists work will no longer be available for free on the internet, but instead will be available only to those paying a $50 subscription. Fair enough, as the subscription also gives one access to the NYT archives.
Just for fun though....Slate's Tim Noah is running a one day contest to see which of the columnists you would pay to read and how much you'd be willing to cough up. He reckons the archive is worth $25 and thus the other $25 should be divided amongst the eight main op-ed writers. Here's my payment plan:

*$10 goes to Paul Krugman - the K-man is one of the best and brightest in the biz, and his well-reasoned, well-researched and artfully written dope slaps to the Bush Junta are one of the best things in the Grey Lady.

*$5 each to the generally excellent Nicholas Kristof and Thomas L. Friedman.

*$4 to the only-slightly less excellent Frank Rich.

*$3 to Bob Herbert, whom I rarely read, but who seems to have his act together at least

*2 cents for Maureen Dowd, just because she makes me laugh occasionally, though not on purpose.

The reality-based amoung you will have noticed that we have exceed the $25 cap, but bear with me for a moment

*David Brooks should pay Krugman $2 out of his own pocket for the honor of appearing in the same publication. Furthermore, he should have to pay me $1 every time I read his inane and wrongheaded blatherings, thus paying for my Times online subscription. I know he writes more than one column a week, but one a week is about all I can stomach.

*John Tierney, whom I think of as Brooks-lite can cough up one-tenth of the fine levied against Brooks, thus supplying the two cents Dowd is paid.

Bill Moyers doth stomp upon the terra!

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control using the government to threaten and intimidate; I mean the people who are hollowing out middle class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class to make sure Ahmad Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil; I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into Karl Rove’s slush fund; who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets; I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy. That’s who I mean. And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s okay to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.

see it all here

The wrong end of the Mojo wire

some ruminations on what it was like to edit Hunter S. Thompson may be found in
CJR May/June 2005: Ideas & Reviews - Essay by Robert Love

Ann or Dan?

Don't Stare at My Adam's Apple!

Christian Jihad

how would most of us feel if these guys were saying their mission was to impart faith in Allah or Mohammad?
<-Welcome to FORCE Ministries->

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Pat Bucanan, Nazi-lover

Shorter Pat Bucanan "World War Two wasn't worth it. We should have let the Nazis have Europe instead of letting Stalin have part of it, because facism is better than communism. George agrees with me."

What can we expect from someone who wrote speeches for Nixon. How the hell did Hunter Thompson ever drink with this facist yahoo without taking a Wild Turkey bottle to his pointed head? It just goes to show that the Good Doctor was a man of fine manners and considerable restrait for which he is very rarely credited.

From the profane to the sacred

Yes the woodshed goes from one extreme to the other. Keep in mind that this piece on the impending theocracy in the USA was written, not by some rabid atheist, but by a Baptist minister of 40 years experience. And check out the source of the tip in Mr. Neiwert's excellent as always blog Orcinus (see blogroll)

It was only a matter of time

"We know for a fact that there are weapons there."
Ari Fleisher, Jan 9, 2003

"The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas."
George W. Bush, Oct. 7, 2002

"Saddam Hussein was dangerous, and I'm not just going to leave him in power and trust a madman. "He's a dangerous man. He had the ability to make weapons at the very minimum."
-George W. Bush, Feb, 2004

WMD found!

Don't read this link Mom!

...and if you do, don't complain that I didn't warn you. I really, really dislike Ann Coulter and the anything anyone does to mock her is okay by me, but this? Well, lets just say it is funny as hell, but definitely
Not For the Squeamish