Resembling, as she does, one of those hopped up zombies featured in George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead, or Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, Sarah Palin is out to shove those here come the injuns, circle the wagons values of fear and righteousness down the world’s throat.

Yep, with the addition of this square-jawed, gingham-wrapped, rootin’ tootin’ female hombre to the Repuglycan ticket, we are about to witness the mother of all polarizing culture wars. If Bush-Cheney failed in the attempt to divide Umeruhca between small-town xenophobes and world-embracing progressives, McCain-Palin will do so, perhaps terminally.

In order to retain power, the Repuglycans are going to whip up the redneck conservatives’ innate hate of that engine of change, the dreaded intellectual, to the point where the country could be at cold war with itself. Then again, because Small Town Umeruhca is armed to a man, woman, child and baby, there could be some modern form of civil war. Look what Pol Pot did to “suspected intellectuals”. As we’ve said many times before: Ol’ Pol Pot just had ‘em shot.

To me small town values combine suspicion of outsiders, intolerance of difference and a flabbiness of spirit; in short, a life which is lived by rote from birth to death, sunrise to sundown, and is punctuated by roundups, rodeos, and the 4th of July. It’s a great life, if you like that sort of thing, but it has more in common with the past than the future.

Guy Rundle, Sic ‘em Sarah, has this to say:

For 20 years the right had insisted that there was one cause for unmarried motherhood: poor parenting. Here’s Fox News supremo Bill O’Reilly in 2007: “On the pinhead front, 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant … here the blame falls primarily on the parents of the girl, who obviously have little control over her.”

The ironies are almost too great to catalogue here. The right has insisted that teen pregnancy has nothing to do with ignorance or lack of opportunity, and everything to do with virtue and good parenting. For this reason they, including Palin, had voted for abstinence-only education, a course of action that doesn’t tend to survive six tequila shooters on prom night.

Yet suddenly teen pregnancy was a morally neutral act, and everything politicised in the past 20 years, was a matter of privacy. Hilariously, family values conservatives suddenly morphed into choice freaks. The desperation for a symbol of an imaginary Middle America meant that everything else could be thrown overboard.

And this hilarious piece by Jonathan Porter, Peaceniks bleat as McCain gets just the shot he needs:

The US is a warrior nation. Wait, you say, the Yanks are all obese, stupid or they are all left-wing, bleeding hearts, blah, blah.

No, no, no, no, no and no. Those are the Americans you see on television or meet over here.

The great heartland of America rather likes the smell of cordite, and the snake-eaters they send into harm’s way are very far from obese. Nor are they mincing merlot moderates.

Recall in the last election America had a choice between a decorated veteran who rather disliked war and a cocaine-sniffing draft dodger who wanted to keep fighting. Guess who America picked?

Then there is the following corrective to my rant. Linda Grant, The great divide of US politics:

The conviction by the left that the right is stupid is one of the defining and least attractive characteristics of contemporary politics. Assuming that anyone who disagrees with you is too dim to get your point is not itself a particularly brainy way to win others over to the essential correctness of your views. But it is true that to small-town Republicans the world is not a complicated place, because they have seen so little of it.

Small-town Americans have values, and a lot of those values are good ones: neighbourliness, family life, a knowledge of the land and what grows in it. The other America they see on TV seems without ethics — crime, violence, drug addiction, pornography and prostitution — and they don’t want any part of it.

The problem is that when they’re running the whole country, they want to take away abortion rights, drill for oil in Alaska (a Palin policy), ignore climate change and start unwinnable wars. With the small-town Republican mindset in charge, the rest of America and the rest of the world is forced to live by small-town values, which aren’t much help when you’re trying to decide what, if anything, can be done about Iranian nuclear ambitions or, more humbly, workplace date rape.

Finally, all of the above may mean little. Read David Hirst, US waves goodbye to prosperity and democracy.

Tags: America, election, McCain, Sarah Palin, small town values

Move over Family Guy, Umeruhca’s got what it really wants: a sitcom based on the family values of genital erasure (except for the production of fast faith Christians), chuckleheaded creationism, nationalistic hubris, anti-intellectualism, and guns for one and all.

Alaska’s pistol packin’ mama, Sarah “Annie Oakley” Palin’s address to the Repuglycan convention was a winner on all counts. She’s no fool, that’s for sure. And her aim is that of a sniper. She got Obama between the eyes with her observation that he “has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform”. Lofty vision? Hell, that’s for elitist commie-sympathisers. Her feisty speech showed that Obama is not the only orator in town.

Can you imagine the anxiety and dread being felt by Hillary Clinton just now? If Sarah Palin were to pip her and be the first woman president, the humiliation would likely be terminal. Let’s face it; John McCain could easily drop dead during his first term. And taking his place? A lipstick-wearing Pit Bull who makes Mike Hukabee look like a bleeding heart Liberal.

The November election is now wide open, but if there is to be a landslide, it will be the GOP who wins it. Like most people on this woeful planet, Umeruhcans are basically conservative (a synonym for cowardly). And if they get a candidate with pizzazz, oomph and chutzpah who coincidentally believes in preserving in formaldehyde a past whose cumulative blindness has brought the world to its knees, then that candidate may well be a shoo-in.

The only thing that matters to most Umeruhcans is being able to shop at the Safeway without being shot at (and if shot at, the right to shoot back), and the freedoms their forefathers fought for, namely the freedom to switch on the television with a TV tray chock-full o’ new! improved! pre-packaged goodness.

Anything else is elitist claptrap.

So let’s sit back and watch the cartoon unfold (or unravel). No matter who wins, Umeruhca is stuffed. The trouble is, so is everyone else.

Tags: America, election, McCain, Repuglycans, Sarah Palin

Courtesy Dan Wasserman, Boston Globe

You have to wonder how Umeruhca got to be the greatest nation in the world with this kind of thinking. McCain, infirm at 72, could easily croak during his presidency, leaving in charge a woman no one has ever heard of. Worse, he’s tacked Sarah Palin on to his ticket in the mistaken belief that the women who backed Hillary will suddenly switch sides because she’s the same gender they are. This move shows what McCain thinks of women. That they are brainless Stepford Wives who live for baking and mopping and looking after the dumb shits who vote Republican. Palin is certainly no Stepford Wife … a Stepford Husband is more like it. She represents just about everything Hillary’s supporters detest.

The answer to the question asked by this post is … Yep, it sure looks like it.

Tags: America, McCain, Sarah Palin

“[An upside down flag is] an international distress signal. It means ‘we’re in a whole lot of trouble, so come save our ass b’cause we don’t have a prayer in hell of saving ourselves.’” - Sgt Hank Deerfield, In the Valley of Elah.

Now that Barack Obama has been anointed as the leader to take America back into the community of nations, we, the people of the world, now live in dread of his assassination.

There have already been arrests of a couple of good old white trash boys over a planned attempt. Check out their mug shots: racists are almost invariably genetic garbage.

Umeruhca will not survive if Obama is assassinated. It may already be too late. After eight stolen years under George W. Bush, the country appears polarized beyond redemption. There are the larval, born yesterday Christian fundamentalist/nationalists who use god and flag to bolster their fear and hatred of The Other. And the rest of us.

The would-be assassins might as well give it a bye, though. No need to take time out from their usual occupations of wife-beating, fucking the kids and livestock. Obama will probably lose because: 1) he’s an orator with humanitarian ideals and the nation has felt relaxed and comfortable with a president who can barely speak English and who has the ideals of serial killer. 2) Michelle Obama. Umeruhcans don’t cotton to uppity women who know who they are, who refuse to be their drunken hubby’s doormat. 3) Well, he’s black.

Race and slavery are America’s original sin. The election of Obama would be, beyond question, one of the noblest gestures of historical redemption that Americans have ever been called upon to make. But that is precisely why it may not happen. - Martin Kettle, How McCain can win. (In that late, great Australian newspaper, The Age.)

Meanwhile, the War Chimp is begging for all out confrontation with Putin and his boy Dmitry Medvedev. Well, Dubya’s been pushing for Drive-In Christianity’s whoopee apocalypse for years now. He blew it in Iraq, a pushover of a blown state, but tough guy ex-KGB Putin will be calling the ignorant little dunce’s bluff from now on. The trouble with Bush and his neo-con cronies is they think everyone is as stupid as they are.

Looking at the rest of the world, we can plainly see that Globalization’s corporate behemoth is on a roll. Little by little the privateers are buying up everything but the air we breathe. And don’t think they haven’t tried to come up with a way to bill us for that.

Thanks to the U.S. and its salivating, deregulated Ownership Society economics, the rest of the world’s economies are taking terminal hits. The obese blimp of corporate avarice is about to explode like a corpse in the noonday sun on every last family’s pocketbook.

Global Warming? It will only be looked into if there is a buck to me made. Vested interests are even cheering the Arctic melt. Never mind rising seas, now they can drill for oil. The electric car was removed from the market to keep profits high for the gas-guzzler industry and the oil companies. Plans to deal with the worldwide shortage of water are being put into the hands of private companies, where water will be allotted to those who can pay. They frown on household water tanks because they can’t get any money from their contents, unless they buy up all the companies making the things and then double or triple the price. In the name of competition, of course.

Banks and other institutions record massive profit increases every year while gouging consumers, who have no choice but to do business with them. And working conditions are slowly returning to 19th century standards.

There isn’t a government on the planet worthy of respect. Not one will stand up for the citizens consumers who voted them into the power. Every politician is either in the corporate sector’s pocket, or owned indirectly by an enforced party line dictated by the corporation’s bought-and-paid-for pocket rocket.

While the United States collapses under the willful ignorance of its descent into a savage amorality, China and Russia are becoming the capitalist autocracies of the future. No meddlesome democracy for them. Let the consumers work and spend, just don’t give ‘em too many freedoms to spoil their obeisance. Hell, in democracies where they do have freedoms, the fools couldn’t care less. People want security, not freedom. They want to be told what to do from birth to death. Freedom demands awareness of that which is beyond the alarm system at the front door. It demands courage. Security, and its political wing, conservatism, is the stuff of cowards.

An interesting footnote to all this is the generation of children called Generation Z, which includes those born since 2001. These are the kids born with the internet at their fingertips. Simultaneously global and local, they may well be the generation that refuses to accept thousands of years of evolution-interfering war and its prerequisites, greed and the male lust for power.

Then again, theirs is the last letter of the alphabet. The times are indeed a-changin’. Maybe “the times,” as we have historically understood them, are ending. The question is, will we become an archaelogical dig for some interplanetary species in the far-flung future? Or are we about to evolve beyond the embarrassment of the weakling species we have always been.

Tags: America, Bush, generation Z, global warming, globalization, McCain, Obama, Putin

Today I am tempted to reach for Jean-Paul Sartre’s Le Nausée, the textbook on existential dread. The first time I read it was in high school and the last time I read it was shortly after former Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s re-election in 2004. That a majority of the population was willing to reinstall such a tricky, mean, ultimately cruel, and entirely inauthentic excuse for a human being was enough to induce a weeks-long bout of existential nausea. The book helped. As in: misery loves company.

The world is going mad at an accelerated rate. We know all about the daily horrors being inflicted by capitalism’s logical extension: greed and its greatest achievement, man’s inhumanity to man. This morning I experienced a microcosm of the madness, though not as dramatic as the daily headlines.

I needed to verify an extended warranty on a cheapo TV bought at Harvey Norman a few years back, but they hadn’t yet opened. So I repaired to a coffee shop in the relatively new Home HQ, self-described as “Melbourne’s first undercover state-of-the-art homemaker centre.” It’s a immense two-story rectangle, home to several bedding and furniture outlets. The reason I go there is JB Hi-Fi, the only shop with any customers, for their great selection of CDs and DVDs.

As I strode down the cavernous upper corridor to the Big Café, I was assailed by bland pop music at extreme volume. We’ve all become accustomed to this auditory intrusion in just about every establishment on the face of the earth, but this had the hallmark of insanity. It was 8:45 AM, for Christ’s sake. And the place was empty.

I entered the coffee shop (no doors, it opens on to the corridor). The music there, on a different loop, was twice as loud as the the music in the corridor. Standing on the perimeter between the two, my left ear was assaulted by Abba, and my right ear by Billy Joel. The coffee shop’s music was not just loud, it was blasting. I should have left, but told myself, “You’re bigger than this.” So I ordered a coffee and, would you believe, managed to read a few pages of Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda. (I read it in the Sixties, and it’s even better now.) Don Juan was up to his usual antics and I laughed out loud a couple of times, though it was hard to hear myself. What a choice venue to drive home the old Brujo’s teachings, I thought.

A few weeks ago I had breakfast at the local Pancake Parlor. It was 9 AM on a Sunday morning and they were playing disco music at full volume. Posing as the last sane man on earth, I asked the waitress to turn it down; she cheerfully complied. But this morning I didn’t bother. The pinch-faced girl on duty was probably trying to drown out the noise in the corridor. But at what cost to her sanity?

As I said, this is not exactly a dramatic example, but it is an example. The crap thrown at us by profiteers and their market forces is relentless.

Tags: existential dread, market forces, noise

Like Bunny Berigan, who once sang, “I can’t get started with you”, I can’t seem to get started with this blog. After two weeks of honing and toning to make it look acceptable, I succumbed to a case of acute plugin-o-mania, some of whose activation led to pants-filling results. Now that they appear to be working (and one can never really be sure), I have decided to upgrade to WordPress 2.6, in spite of my better judgment and the screams, cries and whimpers of many who have tried and failed with disastrous results.

It is surely a proven fact that the upgrading of blog software often leads to insanity and/or sudden death by simultaneous stroke/heart attack. Not to mention the onset of a bevy of wildly metastasizing cancers were one to survive. This leads me to the theory that the internet has spawned a new form of masochism, those of us who can be called upgrade masochists.

We know the odds are against us. We are certain that instead of merrily continuing with our daily posts, we are going to encounter that hell of hells: emptiness in the form of blank screens where once our creative endeavours flowed without incident. We know that once we make the fatal mouse click, raw fear will turn our blood cold as it soaks our clothes with primal sweat. But we do it anyway.

Of course, the complement to masochism is the sadist. In our case, the sadists who write the programs we flagellate ourselves with. They are sadists, because they all believe that their code is bugfree. (Thankfully, that is mostly true.) Some get downright snotty when challenged. Reading their replies to the desperate questions of the inept in various forums is not a hopeful sign for the future of the species. Nevertheless, you can’t have a sadist without a masochist, and I must qualify as a prime example of the latter. I simply cannot resist.

But while it may end there, upgrading actually starts with the backup of the database. This requires entry to a control panel which is equivalent to the dashboard of a jumbo jet. One must then utilize an arcane system known as phpMyAdmin to encounter the database itself, called MySQL. It is here that you begin to understand what it feels like to be smack dab in the middle of a horror movie. One false step and the lurking evil contained in your ignorance of the mechanics of cyberspace will sizzle your database, and all traces of your virtual existence will disappear.

But the starting doesn’t end there either. Suppose you’ve actually backed up your database. There is no certainty that you will be able to restore it. Many have tried, many have failed. Something will always go wrong. As the WordPress Codex states under the title of Warning:

With great power comes great responsibility. phpMyAdmin allows you to interact with the database directly: it also lets you mess up the database directly. There is no “undo” or “undelete” in your database. Always exercise caution when working with the database.

In short, yours truly and this blog may not survive the next few days. Perhaps I will emerge a hero, one whose blog will go on to be unread by millions. Perhaps I will emerge as someone with a life. By that I mean someone whose life exists on the planet instead of in front of a computer screen.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…

Technorati Tags: plugin, plugins, upgrade, phpmyadmin

Tags: phpmyadmin, plugin, upgrade

Back when I used Movable Type for a previous blog, I came to rely on Technorati’s ping service to get my posts tagged. It rarely failed, though in the last few months of the blog’s existence, Technorati’s indexing of pings became more and more erratic.

Now that I have a new blog, using WordPress 2.5.1, the indexing of pings is simply nonexistent. I’ve claimed this blog with Technorati, manually pinged several times via my account, used every possible version of adding tags at the bottom of posts, deleted and republished posts with a different code, sent Technorati emails on the subject (they are notorious for never answering), and bitched in the Technorati discussion page along with the others. The result? Zip.

Take a look at the Technorati Discussions page and you see complaint after complaint. Over at the WordPress Forum, folks don’t even bother to reply to queries about their Technorati pings going into the ether. There are pleas for help going back several months, all unanswered. Clearly no one is wasting their time on a failed enterprise.

That nothing is impossible has been proven by Google. Somehow, they seem don’t miss a thing. Therefore the conclusion must be reached that Technorati is currently in the hands of incompetents. Perhaps Google should buy Technorati?

Technorati Tags: technorati, google, pings, tags, internet

UPDATE 2 July 2008: Technorati actually answered my query! Here is what they said:

Subject: [technorati.com #135162] Most recent posts not indexed AND “Last Updated” date IS NOT updating?
From: Zoe McLaughlin via RT
Message: “Janice handled via the forum.”

I assumed they meant the above mentioned Discussions page, so I went there. No sign of the topic mentioned, so I put the info into Search. Nothing came up for either item. So I put my bloody name into search and presto! This is what they said:

Hello Will. Our apologies for any inconvenience. I checked your blog and all looks to be indexed.

But wait a minute. My blog is brand new with a whopping rank of 3,900,162. Whose gonna look for my blog?

I want the bloody posts to appear under the proper tag when I enter whatever it might be in the the subject line of Technorati Tags. In this case “bukowski”. That’s where someone looking up what’s new with Charles Bukowski will find entries for both new blogs and those with huge authority rankings.

And guess what? It’s still not there.

Tags: google, internet, pings, tags, technorati

**To Abel Debritto, whose email out of the blue invoked this long ago night.**

It must have been mid-April, 1968. I had just published the second and last edition of a mimeo poetry mag called The Willie. It sold for a buck with a print run of about 100 copies, and featured, among others, Charles Bukowski, Doug Blazek, Steve Richmond, t l kryss, and Stanley Fisher, who was the first person to introduce me to the concept that earth is a planet of spiritual criminals. It still sounds good.

Since fleeing Haight-Ashbury after the Easter weekend in 1967 (the date most locals accepted as the beginning of the end of the hippie era), I managed to keep no fixed address with the greatest of ease, hitchhiking between scattered addresses in San Francisco, Sacramento and various burbs in LA.

Now, at their invitation, I was living with a family in Long Beach. Or did I invite myself? Yep, that must be how it went. In those days I was known to suddenly appear on people’s doorsteps without a cent and nowhere else to go.

These good people (a sociologist, a librarian, and their 14-year-old d-d-daughter) allowed me to get out the mag and decide what the hell I was going to do next. When I came up with the idea to hitchhike across country to visit the poets I’d been in contact with by mail for the last couple of years, they stepped in and gave me their old 1956 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, a beige job on its last legs, but capable of at least another 3000 miles. I jumped for joy.

A couple of weeks before leaving, I decided to visit my oldest friend, then living in West Hollywood. We were the guys who drove our grade school teachers into frenzies of ruler abuse. We must have suffered from a shitload of pre-fashionable, mostly creative, disorders, because the clowning around and the pranks and the witty backtalk (or so we thought) never ceased. Grownup, our paths forked away to pretty much opposite directions. These days, he was a disc jockey and I was an itinerant, dope-smoking hippie. But we were still buddies.

From Long Beach, the nearest freeway exit to Dave’s apartment was close to Charles Bukowski’s digs on De LongPre Avenue in East Hollywood. I’d been there a couple of times before (the second time even got me into his short story, Beer and Poets and Talk). Why not get the old growler’s blessing for the trip?

When my amiable hosts heard of this, they stepped in again to present me with a bottle of Martel Medaillon for the occasion. It was the first but far from the last time I imbibed this elixir of the gods. Years later, my fondest wish was to become a cognacaholic somewhere in France, having paid homage to the noble muse-seducer by becoming a crazed genius in a smoking jacket holding forth in a great dark room lit only by a crackling fireplace and the worshipful bright eyes of creamy maidens.

The rest of this post went that-a-way -->

Tags: bukowski, humor, short story, sixties

I’ve had the first post (not this one) ready for almost a week. But since this is a new blog, and it doesn’t really matter to anyone but me if the thing exists or not, I thought, let’s tweak the templates and download a whole buncha plugins, see what happens. I’m not exactly a beginner, but mercy!

Folks have been bitching about this for years, so let me be the next in line. Thing about plugin documentation, as it is with just about every manual ever written, is that the doco writer(s) think they’ve covered everything. In the simplest cases, they have. For the rest, it’s hair-tearing, teeth-gnashing and face-pulling from beginning to end. Take HeadSpace2, a monster plugin that all but brushes yr teeth. Complicated? Hell, it’s a bloody evaginator. That’s right, it’s turned me inside out and the slithery parts are putting people off. The author gives a casual run through and then, near the end, points to a couple of links which purport to give a detailed walkthrough. Come again? It’s all overviews!

The site that put me on to HeadSpace2, a certain Mr Yoast isn’t a hell of a lot better. But I didn’t know this when I decided to follow his instructions on how to make mine a killer blog. “They’ll be flocking to Too Broke in droves,” I salivated. But then I read a little further. “Shite, I’ve got nothing to sell!” In one form or other, I’ve been on the Net since 1999 and never once sported an advert or uploaded a plugin. O’course, hardly anyone ever knew I was there.

To be fair, Yoast’s plugin Robots Meta gives detailed instructions, and he has been a great help (I think) in otherwise spiffing up the inner workings of TBtF. But there were moments when I started to feel uncomfortable, as if I’d unwittingly gone over to the enemy. Because Mr Yoast is all about SEO: Search Engine Optimization. And he’s speaking primarily to web sites and blogs who are in the business of making money. Nothing wrong with that, if hustling for bucks stiffens yr weanie. Trouble is, when it comes to earning a crust, my mind just wanders. People like me should’ve been born with a silver spoon poised over life’s bowl of cherries.

So I’ve spent six long days weakening the remaining eyesight and smoking too much over arcane code maneuverings while trying to fill in the canyonesque gaps in information supplied by the doco writers who just take it for granted that the rest of us are wizards like them.

Which is a shame, because for people like me, it’s almost orgasmic to follow instructions that actually get you from A to B.

Technorati Tags: plugin, plugins

Tags: plugin