Lightning Strikes? Get Used to Them.

The Friday is withering away, and Saturday is another work day. That rhymes, but I don't have enough time to put it into song. And even if I did have enough time, I'd rather jam out a farewell to California, my favorite state on Earth. I spiel onward on the conflagration for my pals at AlterNet:

Lightning Strikes: Get Used to Catastrophic Wildfires and Worse
"This is a specter against which grand inquisitors and wars against terrorism are powerless to protect us," Mike Davis wrote in a 2003 essay titled "The Perfect Fire," which was composed against the backdrop of a massive firestorm that callously rampaged across Southern California, burning thousands of homes and billions of dollars in its wake. "It is, of course," he added, "the right time of the year for the end of the world."

It still is. In late June, an ahead-of-schedule dry lightning event sparked more than 8,000 strikes across California, setting off over 800 fires, many of which are still burning as I write. And if you're the praying type, you might want to start praying they can be put out before the conventional time window for such events arrives in late July and August.

"This doesn't bode well for the fire season," AccuWeather.com meteorologist Ken Clark told the Associated Press in June, shortly after the lightning hit. "We're not even into the meat of the fire season at this point, and the brush is extremely dry. It's not going to get any better," he added. "It's going to get worse."

How much worse? How much time have you got? You might want to spend it packing... MORE @ ALTERNET

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The Real Nigerian Nightmare

[Back on you, Morphizm pals. I get deep on oil, Nigeria and geopolitical clusterfuckage for AlterNet.]

AlterNet: Africa, Victim in Our Quest for Cheap Oil
Whether or not we have fully arrived at peak oil can be left to the nitpickers and bean counters to decide. What we know for sure is that the cost of black gold has exponentially risen in just a few short years, and the global economy it is built upon is currently straddling a razor waiting for the inevitable slice. That final cut may come from Nigeria, where all the major oil companies have done business, dirty and otherwise, for the last five decades, degrading the environment and depressing the general population along the way.

That disturbing feedback loop is the subject of the new book Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, which juxtaposes the arresting graphics of award-winning photojournalist Ed Kashi with the geopolitical insights of UC Berkeley professor Michael Watts to present Africa's most populous nation as a possible epicenter for the full-blown resource wars to come... MORE @ ALTERNET

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The Fourth Is Over? Let's Kill Iran!

What a way to celebrate American independence. Another lethal war, another nail in the nation's coffin. Seymour Hersh breaks it down. Be afraid. Very fucking afraid.

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Is Google Evil For The Environment?

Doubtful. But I asked them and Treehugger anyway, for AlterNet:

Google: Good or Evil For The Environment?
Now that it has unseated Microsoft as Earth's most recognizable and influential technology behemoth, Google has gone from a crowd-favorite upstart to an octopus multinational beneath the bull's-eye. As such, its innovations in search, advertising, video, open sourcing, communications, computing and beyond have taken a backseat to legitimate concerns over everything from its impossible motto, "Don't Be Evil," to its carbon footprint. And while the former is a terminological chimera, the latter is an increasing problem for a planet that is practically warming by the day, due to a lethal combination of explosive global growth, rampant carbon dioxide emissions and lackluster world policy.

To mangle the cliche, the evil is in the details... MORE @ ALTERNET

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Exxon Drills Alaska In The Ass

[Morphizm homey Greg Palast checks in on the Supreme Court's recent hand-off to Exxon, who really needs the money. Way to go, Supreme Court. Way to stand up for the oil-slicked little guy. -- ST]

Court Rewards Exxon for Valdez Spill
by Greg Palast
Twenty years after Exxon Valdez slimed over one thousand miles of Alaskan beaches, the company has yet to pay the $5 billion in punitive damages awarded by the jury. And now they won't have to. The Supreme Court today cut Exxon's liability by 90% to half a billion. It's so cheap, it's like a permit to spill.

Exxon knew this would happen. Right after the spill, I was brought to Alaska by the Natives whose Prince William Sound islands, livelihoods, and their food source was contaminated by Exxon crude. My assignment: to investigate oil company frauds that led to to the disaster. There were plenty.

But before we brought charges, the Natives hoped to settle with the oil company, to receive just enough compensation to buy some boats and rebuild their island villages to withstand what would be a decade of trying to survive in a polluted ecological death zone.

In San Diego, I met with Exxon's US production chief, Otto Harrison, who said, "Admit it; the oil spill's the best thing to happen" to the Natives.

His company offered the Natives pennies on the dollar. The oil men added a cruel threat: take it or leave it and wait twenty years to get even the pennies. Exxon is immortal - but Natives die.

And they did. A third of the Native fishermen and seal hunters I worked with are dead. Now their families will collect one tenth of their award, two decades too late.

In today's ruling, Supreme Court Justice David Souter wrote that Exxon's recklessness was ''profitless'' - so the company shouldn't have to pay punitive damages. Profitless, Mr. Souter? Exxon and it's oil shipping partners saved billions - BILLIONS - by operating for sixteen years without the oil spill safety equipment they promised, in writing, under oath and by contract.

The official story is, "Drunken Skipper Hits Reef." But don't believe it, Mr. Souter. Alaska's Native lands and coastline were destroyed by a systematic fraud motivated by profit-crazed penny-pinching. Here's the unreported story, the one you won't get tonight on the Petroleum Broadcast System:

It begins in 1969 when big shots from Humble Oil and ARCO (now known as Exxon and British Petroleum) met with the Chugach Natives, owners of the most valuable parcel of land on the planet: Valdez Port, the only conceivable terminus for a pipeline that would handle a trillion dollars in crude oil.

These Alaskan natives ultimately agreed to sell the Exxon consortium this astronomically valuable patch of land -- for a single dollar. The Natives refused cash. Rather, in 1969, they asked only that the oil companies promise to protect their Prince William Sound fishing and seal hunting grounds from oil.

In 1971, Exxon and partners agreed to place the Natives' specific list of safeguards into federal law. These commitment to safety reassured enough Congressmen for the oil group to win, by one vote, the right to ship oil from Valdez.

The oil companies repeated their promises under oath to the US Congress.

The spill disaster was the result of Exxon and partners breaking every one of those promises - cynically, systematically, disastrously, in the fifteen years leading up to the spill.

Forget the drunken skipper fable. As to Captain Joe Hazelwood, he was below decks, sleeping off his bender. At the helm, the third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar. But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker's radar was left broken and disasbled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just too expensive to fix and operate.

For the Chugach, this discovery was poignantly ironic. On their list of safety demands in return for Valdez was "state-of-the-art" on-ship radar.

We discovered more, but because of the labyrinthine ways of litigation, little became public, especially about the reckless acts of the industry consortium, Alyeska, which controls the Alaska Pipeline.

* Several smaller oil spills before the Exxon Valdez could have warned of a system breakdown. But a former Senior Lab Technician with Alyeska, Erlene Blake, told our investigators that management routinely ordered her to toss out test samples of water evidencing spilled oil. She was ordered to refill the test tubes with a bucket of clean sea water called, "The Miracle Barrel."

* In a secret meeting in April 1988, Alyeska Vice-President T.L. Polasek confidentially warned the oil group executives that, because Alyeska had never purchased promised safety equipment, it was simply "not possible" to contain an oil spill past the Valdez Narrows -- exactly where the Exxon Valdez ran aground 10 months later.

* The Natives demanded (and law requires) that the shippers maintain round- the-clock oil spill response teams. Alyeska hired the Natives, especiallly qualified by their generations-old knowledge of the Sound, for this emergency work. They trained to drop from helicopters into the water with special equipment to contain an oil slick at a moments notice. But in 1979, quietly, Alyeska fired them all. To deflect inquisitive state inspectors, the oil consortium created sham teams, listing names of oil terminal workers who had not the foggiest idea how to use spill equipment which, in any event, was missing, broken or existed only on paper.

In 1989, when the oil poured from the tanker, there was no Native response team, only chaos.

Today, twenty years after the oil washed over the Chugach beaches, you can kick over a rock and it will smell like an old gas station.

The cover story of the Drunken Captain serves the oil industry well. It falsely presents America's greatest environmental disaster as a tale of human frailty, a one-time accident. But broken radar, missing equipment, phantom spill teams, faked tests -- the profit-driven disregard of the law -- made the spill an inevitability, not an accident.

Yet Big Oil tells us, as they plead to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, as Senator John McCain calls for drilling off the shores of the Lower 48, it can't happen again. They promise.

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Is Famine Inevitable?

Greetings, Morphizm diehards. I apologize for the state of disrepair. Things have been progressing too quickly for me to catch up. Kind of like food prices. Speaking of, I spiel for AlterNet on that very issue. What a strange coincidence:

Is Famine Inevitable?
Paul Krugman's "Grains Gone Wild" column may have boasted one of the most hilarious titles ever in the annals of agrichemical economic analysis, but the situation is far from funny: Our food situation is on the precipice of failure. And all it's going to take to get past the tipping point is the slightest of mistakes -- or manipulations.

Much of our current recessionary intrigue has been aided and abetted by market speculation, from the oil and food sector all the way to the White House itself. For the last seven years, the Bush administration has placed climate crisis on the back burner in existential pursuit of resource wars and an "American way of life" that has turned from a dream of Hummers, housing and bling into a nightmare of price hikes, foreclosures and layoffs.

Mission accomplished... MORE @ ALTERNET

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Post Up: Barack Obama's Victory Soundtrack

Good news, this late night. June is here.




Post Up: Barack Obama's Victory Soundtrack
In a refreshing sign that math and hope can actually work together, Barack Obama predictably sewed up the delegate count on Tuesday night and defeated Hillary Clinton in what has turned out to be a very long, deeply contested Democratic primary. And now, for the first time ever, a black man is on track to inhabit the White House, fulfilling Parliament-Funkadelic's dream of turning Washington, D.C. into Chocolate City... MORE @ WIRED

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What Is An Envirogee?

Back from a long, strange trip to NorCal. Wind events, heatwaves, the usual. LA was a trip while I was gone. Tornadoes, mud floods, crazy shit. Hey, I just thought of a word (for AlterNet)!

What Is An Envirogee?
Chew on this word, jargon lovers. Envirogee.

It carries more 21st century buzz than its semi-official designation climate refugee, which is a displaced individual who has been forced to migrate because of environmental devastation. Maybe the buzzword will catch on faster and shed some much-needed light on what will become a serious problem, probably by the end of this or the next decade. That light is crucial, because so far envirogees haven't been fully recognized by those who certify the civil liberties of Earth's various populations, whether that is the United Nations or local and national governments whose people are increasingly on the move for a whole new set of devastating reasons.

In short, immigration is about to enter a new phase, which resembles an old one with a 21st century twist. For thousands of years, humanity has fled across Earth's surface fearing instability and in search of sustainability. But that resource war has kicked into overdrive thanks to our current climate crisis -- a manufactured war with its own clock.

And the clock is ticking... MORE @ ALTERNET

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Hillary Removes Bill Clinton as First Husband

[Morphizm pal Greg Palast checks in with a shorty on the faltering Clinton presidential campaign, and a move that may save it. Or at least make it look less lame. -- ST]

Hillary Removes Bill Clinton as First Husband
[Greg Palast, Morphizm]
n a surprise move meant to reinvigorate her faltering campaign, Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton dismissed William Clinton as First Husband designate.

Those close to the candidate, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Clinton, also known as “Bill,” had, with press revelations of his business associations with the repressive Colombian regime, plus a long history of support for anti-union causes such as NAFTA, had become a “real drag” on Senator Clinton’s ambitions.

While disappointing returns from Kentucky primary polls flashed on campaign monitors, the Senator’s spokesman issued a tersely worded statement announcing the resignation of the ex-President and thanking Mr. Clinton for “his years of service in support of Hillary’s career and her goals for America” and that the candidate would, “miss his presence greatly.”

Mr. Clinton will retain the title of Former Chief of the Free World.

Meanwhile, Senator Clinton dismissed rumors of her accepting the number two spot on the ticket from Senator Barack Obama, though she appeared to leave the door open, telling reporters traveling with her she would consider the Vice-Presidential nomination if she were also simultaneously appointed White House chef, a comment followed by that weird and frightening laugh of hers.

Campaign insiders said that Senator Clinton will shortly announce that her new designee for “First Lad” will be Kevin Costner who is expected to join her in the final desperate days of the primary season after the release next month of his latest flop, Big Advance in My Pants.

Reached at his office in Harlem, New York, Mr. Clinton, an uncommitted super-delegate, stated that he had not been forced from the Clinton campaign, but had chosen to remove himself so he could “devote more time to [his] family.”

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Naomi Klein: Regime Quake!

[Happy Saturday, Morphizm nuts. Naomi Klein has sent us another stunning peek into our future dystopia, and since I'm away from the home office, it is appearing in its full glory here on the MorphBlog.]

Regime-Quakes in Burma and China
[Naomi Klein, Morphizm]
When news arrived of the catastrophic earthquake in Sichuan, my mind turned to Zheng Sun Man, an up-and-coming security executive I met on a recent trip to China. Zheng heads Aebell Electrical Technology, a Guangzhou-based company that makes surveillance cameras and public address systems and sells them to the government.

Zheng, a 28-year-old MBA with a text-messaging addiction, was determined to persuade me that his cameras and speakers are not being used against pro-democracy activists or factory organizers. They are for managing natural disasters, Zheng explained, pointing to the freak snowstorms before Lunar New Year. During the crisis, the government “was able to use the feed from the railway cameras to communicate how to deal with the situation and organize an evacuation. We saw how the central government can command from the north emergencies in the south.”

Of course, surveillance cameras have other uses too—like helping to make “Most Wanted” posters of Tibetan activists. But Zheng did have a point: nothing terrifies a repressive regime quite like a natural disaster. Authoritarian states rule by fear and by projecting an aura of total control. When they suddenly seem short-staffed, absent or disorganized, their subjects can become dangerously emboldened. It’s something to keep in mind as two of the most repressive regimes on the planet—China and Burma—struggle to respond to devastating disasters: the Sichuan earthquake and Cyclone Nargis. In both cases, the disasters have exposed grave political weaknesses within the regimes—and both crises have the potential to ignite levels of public rage that would be difficult to control.

When China is busily building itself up, creating jobs and new wealth, residents tend to stay quiet about what they all know: developers regularly cut corners and flout safety codes, while local officials are bribed not to notice. But when China comes tumbling down—including at least eight schools in the earthquake zone -- the truth has a way of escaping from the rubble. “Look at all the buildings around. They were the same height but why did the school fall down?” a distraught relative in Juyuan demanded of a foreign reporter. “It’s because the contractors want to make a profit from our children.” A mother in Dujiangyan told The Guardian, “Chinese officials are too corrupt and bad….They have money for prostitutes and second wives but they don’t have money for our children.”

That the Olympic stadiums were built to withstand powerful quakes is suddenly of little comfort. When I was in China, it was hard to find anyone willing to criticize the Olympic spending spree. Now posts on mainstream web portals are calling the torch relay “wasteful” and its continuation in the midst of so much suffering “inhuman.”

None of this compares with the rage boiling over in Burma, where cyclone survivors have badly beaten at least one local official, furious at his failure to distribute aid. Simon Billenness, co-chair of the board of directors of U.S. Campaign for Burma, told me, “This is Katrina times a thousand. I don’t see how it couldn’t lead to political unrest.”

The unrest of greatest concern to the regime is not coming from regular civilians but from inside the military – a fact that explains some of the junta’s more erratic behavior. For instance, we know that the Burmese junta has been taking credit for supplies sent by foreign countries. Now it turns out that it have been taking more than credit—in some cases it has been taking the aid. According to a report in Asia Times, the regime has been hijacking food shipments and distributing them among its 400,000 soldiers. The reason speaks to the deep threat the disaster poses. The generals, it seems, are “haunted by an almost pathological fear of a split inside their own ranks…if soldiers are not given priority in aid distribution and are unable to feed themselves, the possibility of mutiny rises.” Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, confirms that before the cyclone, the military was already coping with a wave of desertions.

This relatively small-scale theft of food is fortifying the junta for its much larger heist—the one taking place via the constitutional referendum the generals have insisted on holding, come hell and high water. Enticed by high commodity prices, Burma’s generals have been gorging off the country’s natural abundance, stripping it of gems, timber, rice and oil. As profitable as this arrangement is, junta leader Gen. Than Shwe knows he cannot resist the calls for democracy indefinitely.

Taking a page out of the playbook of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the generals have drafted a Constitution that allows for future elections but attempts to guarantee that no government will ever have the power to prosecute them for their crimes or take back their ill-gotten wealth. As Farmaner puts it, after elections the junta leaders “are going to be wearing suits instead of boots.” Much of the voting has already taken place but in cyclone ravaged districts, the referendum has been delayed until May 24. Aung Din, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Burma, told me that the military has stooped to using aid to extort votes. “Rainy season is coming,” he told me, “and people need to repair their roofs. When they go to purchase the materials, which are very limited, they are told they can only have them if they agree to vote for the constitution in an advance ballot.”

The cyclone, meanwhile, has presented the junta with one last, vast business opportunity: by blocking aid from reaching the highly fertile Irrawaddy delta, hundreds of thousands of mostly ethnic Karen rice farmers are being sentenced to death. According to Farmaner, “that land can be handed over to the generals’ business cronies” (shades of the beachfront land grabs in Sri Lanka and Thailand after the Asian tsunami). This isn’t incompetence, or even madness, as many have claimed. It’s laissez-faire ethnic cleansing.

If the Burmese junta avoids mutiny and achieves these goals, it will be thanks largely to China, which has vigorously blocked all attempts at the United Nations for humanitarian intervention in Burma. Inside China, where the central government is going to great lengths to show itself as compassionate, news of this complicity could prove explosive.

Will China’s citizens receive this news? They just might. Beijing has, up to now, displayed an awesome determination to censor and monitor all forms of communication. But in the wake of the quake, the notorious “Great Firewall” censoring the Internet is failing badly. Blogs are going wild, and even state reporters are insisting on reporting the news.

This may be the greatest threat that natural disasters pose to contemporary repressive regimes. For China’s rulers, nothing has been more crucial to maintaining power than the ability to control what people see and hear. If they lose that, neither surveillance cameras nor loudspeakers will be able to help them.

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Pawns In The Hedge Funds Chess Game

Sorry for the late post, Morphizm pals. I've been stuck in neutral for days now, and logistics and administration have taken over my life. But I'm almost out of the woods, so look for more content in the next couple of weeks, with a dramatic relaunch perhaps in June. Speaking of drama, here's some I wrote for your mama and her devalued dollars:

Hedge Fund Titans Are Treating Us Like Pawns in Their Economic Chess Games
Recently, two important and related events occurred. The first is that hedge fund kingpin Cerberus Capital Management was considering buying Blackwater, the notoriously Orwellian security contractor that has become the scourge of Iraq and America alike. And the second event? As soon as the news was reported, the deal was killed.

Neither company, you see, likes the publicity. Plus, with Blackwater in its portfolio, Cerberus would have more than lived up to the origin of its name, which comes from Greek mythology. Yes, Cerberus is the three-headed demon dog that guards the gates of Hell.

"We do our best to avoid the spotlight," secretive Cerberus founder Stephen Feinberg reportedly told his staff in a memo earlier this year, "but unfortunately, when you do some large deals, such as Chrysler and GMAC, it is hard to avoid."

True, Stephen, true. When you bail out two of the worst environmental and economic offenders in the automotive business (and subprime debacle, in the case of GMAC), and then follow that up by looking into acquiring what passes for a private army with itchy trigger-fingers and a suspicious habit of corruption and cost overruns, well yeah, people will talk... MORE @ ALTERNET

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The Roots Dig Into Danger

Bottom of the morning, Morphizm fans. Today is going to be the grind. But it's a good thing I have a badass soundtrack on hand. The Roots have a new, visceral disc out, and it could be the best thing they have ever made. My review for Metromix explains the rest:

The Roots
Rising Down
Whereas their most recent efforts have widened the Roots' portal into the mainstream, Rising Down is a defiant, agitated classic that might thankfully shake off the weaker bandwagon-jumpers. The title track throws down the gauntlet on geopolitical strife, from blood diamonds to climate crisis, with the help of conscientious virtuoso Mos Def. Dice Raw, Peedi Crakk and DJ Jazzy Jeff stop by to bring staccato danger to the visceral "Get Busy," while the Roots' rapper-in-residence, Tariq "Black Thought" Trotter, uses his militant, machine-gun delivery on "75 Bars" to remind us why rap used to actually scare some people. (Ah, the good old days!)... MORE @ METROMIX

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Don't Try This At Home!

Favorite line? "We are absolutely confident he will be found alive and well, floating somewhere in the ocean." From the LA Times:

A Roman Catholic priest who floated off under hundreds of helium party balloons was missing today off the southern coast of Brazil. Rescuers in helicopters and small fishing boats were searching off the coast of Santa Catarina state, where pieces of balloons were found. Rev. Adelir Antonio de Carli lifted off from the port city of Paranagua on Sunday afternoon, wearing a helmet, thermal suit and a parachute."

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Spurlock + Swift = Bin Laden Trackdown

I turn over today's morning Morphizm post to pal Rob Swift, who has some good news about Morgan Spurlock and bad news about Osama bin Laden:



Remember that documentary Super Size Me? The one where film maker Morgan Spurlock addresses Americans eating habits by using himself as a human guinea pig by strictly dieting on McDonald's for 30 days, just to see what the affects of eating McDonald's for breakfast, lunch and dinner would have on his health.

Well it was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004 and Spurlock's new movie Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? might land him another nomination. Spurlock's second film revolves around his search for the world's most wanted man and that's where I come in. There's a scene in the film that contains an excerpt from a song I composed entitled "Terrorism."

Yes, Morgan Spurlock licensed one of the tracks off my last solo album War Games.

It's been roughly three years since I dropped War Games, an album (coupled with a DVD) that tackles my thoughts on social/political issues like 911, Terrorism, the Iraq War, police brutality and poverty with the turntable as my microphone and scratches as my voice. So it definitely feels good to know the hard work I've invested into WAR GAMES is being recognized by someone like Morgan Spurlock. Big thanks go out to Barry Cole for submitting "Terrorism" for placement in the film. Thank you Barry!!!

Many of you have already heard "Terrorism" but if you haven't, just visit my MySpace page and check it out. It's the first song on my player. And please go see Spurlock's new film. It's been seven years since 9/11 and unfortunately, it feels like a lot of Americans have pushed the entire event into the back of their minds. Almost as if the fear of surviving another terrorist attack has gave way to the fear of surviving our current economy. They caught us sleeping on September 11, 2001 and I swear it feels like we've been gradually dozing off the last few years. So for those that need a wake up call, set your alarms to this Friday (April 18th) and GO SEE IT!!

Rob Swift, April 16

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It's Happening: Global Warming Kills Australia's Rice

It's been awhile since I've been down that dystopian road, but evidently my Hyperhighway to Hell is getting crowded with data. Global warming has taken hold of Earth, and tipping points have been reached. Ask Australia, who can no longer grow rice thanks to a drought that will probably never end:

Drought has already spurred significant changes in Australia’s agricultural heartland. Some farmers are abandoning rice, which requires large amounts of water, to plant less water-intensive crops like wheat or, especially here in southeastern Australia, wine grapes. Other rice farmers have sold fields or water rights, usually to grape growers.

Scientists and economists worry that the reallocation of scarce water resources — away from rice and other grains and toward more lucrative crops and livestock — threatens poor countries that import rice as a dietary staple.

The global agricultural crisis is threatening to become political, pitting the United States and other developed countries against the developing world over the need for affordable food versus the need for renewable energy. Many poorer nations worry that subsidies from rich countries to support biofuels, which turn food, like corn, into fuel, are pushing up the price of staples. The World Bank and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization called on major agricultural nations to overhaul policies to avoid a social explosion from rising food prices.

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Fed Increases Fed Conspiracies By Being Lame

Sorry for the delay, peoples. Been working out with Wired, and I forgot to stretch. Catch-ups to come later, but for now I'm back on the AlterNet attack. Cash it in!

Over the Top Fed Actions Feed Conspiracy Thinking
Given the fact that it is the target of more than a few conspiracy theories since it was created in 1913, the Federal Reserve System, more commonly known as the "Fed," in media and finance parlance, could be acting with a bit more prudence during these dark economic times. But no, it's gone ahead and damned the depression by doing what the New York Times described as the "unthinkable": bailing out Bear Stearns while giving away hundreds of billions to banks and other institutions whose labyrinthine securitization of our debt economy started this whole mess in the first place.

In other words, rewarding the criminals and screwing the victims.

That kind of behavior is only going to make the conspiracy theorists even cozier. When you already think the Fed has made a serious living from doing everything from transferring public wealth to private hands to signing off on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, you're not going to start thinking better of them when they offload billions onto Bear Stearns, which is a securities firm and not a bank at all. You're not going to get the opposition to stop parroting the usual party lines about the Fed being a privately owned bank that screws Americans by charging interest or compromises the overall interests of the United States by unconstitutionally printing up money like it was going out of style. You're only going to further invigorate them... MORE @ ALTERNET

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Meat Beat Manifesto Immunizes Ears, Brains

Rejoice, left-leaning multimedia jam fans. Meat Beat Manifesto is back with a bracing new effort called Autoimmune. I covered the release with a double-shot of love on Wired. To wit:



Meat Beat Doses the World With New Manifesto, Autoimmune
Two decades ago, Jack Dangers co-founded Meat Beat Manifesto, a band that delivered an explosive mashup of performance, multimedia and head-trip soundtracking that teased brains as ably as it packed dance floors.

Today, the synth collector and sonic experimentalist is hobbled by psoriatic arthritis and, he jokes by phone, he's "walking around like Howard Hughes." The autoimmune disease hits you hard in the joints and digits -- the worst possible places for a guy who makes a living pounding on synths and sequencers.

"You get used to it," Dangers says of the disorder. And perhaps you morph the experience into a banging effort called Autoimmune, Meat Beat Manifesto's 20th anniversary release due Tuesday. Autoimmune, Meat Beat Manifesto's 20th anniversary release due Tuesday... MORE @ WIRED

Sonic Immunity: Q&A With Meat Beat Manifesto's Jack Dangers
Wired: You've always mashed sound and video in interesting ways. I get a kick out of the samples, especially that classic Pinback line from Dark Star.

Dangers: One of the tracks were playing is "Nuclear Bomb" from Subliminal Sandwich, and we're cross-referencing a lot of imagery for it. We're superimposing Bush speeches over the banjo scene from Deliverance.

Wired: Oh man, that's hilarious.

Dangers: Exactly. If you just play the audio, you wouldn't get the same song. The visual adds much more impact: A creepy close-up of him licking his lips. Ben Stokes plays the Bush sample and I play the Deliverance sample... MORE @ WIRED

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R.E.M.'s Accelerate Brings the Noise

Sorry for the extended radio silence, Morphizm pals. Many new developments to discuss. Later. It's been a blur.

But at least it's been a noisy one, since I've been hard at work on R.E.M.'s newest effort, the bruising classic called Accelerate, out today in America. I'll kick off the proceedings with the Metromix review, and follow up with a Michael Stipe interview on Morphizm tomorrow. For now, let's bring the noise.

R.E.M.
Accelerate
Put simply, Accelerate is easily one of the band's finest releases, and certainly the loudest. Stipe's growling, urgent vocals are a jarring departure from some of his more recent downtempo deliveries, and socio-politically charged barn-burners like "Living Well Is the Best Revenge" and "Man-Sized Wreath" are rants on war, media and the vacuum otherwise known as American pop culture. Even when he stumbles, on the power balladry of "Hollow Man" for example, his heart is so firmly screwed to the right place that the song flies by. R.E.M. diehards will appreciate the fire, and late adopters will bang for the rawk, especially Peter Buck's axe shredding on the stunning "Sing for the Submarine"... MORE @ METROMIX

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The B-52s Bomb The Funplex

Top of the morning, Morphizm pals. The B-52s have been out of the new release game for 16 years, believe it or not. But the doomed pop culture they left behind is in serious need of cheering up, and mobilizing for the future. Hence, their new effort, which I recently reviewed for Metromix:

The B-52s
Funplex
When guitarist Ricky Wilson, brother of Cindy, died of AIDS in 1985, the B-52’s went introspective. But they transformed into the party-starters of “Love Shack” soon after, and "Funplex" is one of their horniest, bounciest efforts to date. Whether it's the addictive title track or the G-spot theatrics of "Ultraviolet," the B-52’s want to energize your sex drive as much as your desire to vote. Even the thoughtful but overwrought "Too Much to Think About" steps aside for a sick surf solo from guitarist Keith Strickland, who built the crowded sound of "Funplex" with an eye on the beer keg... MORE @ METROMIX

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Noam Chomsky: Let's Get Essential

Morphizm pal and Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal author Anthony Arnove is one busy dude. He's been working with Howard Zinn on translating their Voices of a People's History of the United States compilation into a PBS mega-documentary. But he's also compiling the wisdom of another interested public intellectual into another collection. This time around, it's Noam Chomsky, who gets assembled by Arnove into an accessible exercise in brain augmentation called The Essential Chomsky.

It's already got a positive blurb from Hugo Chavez, so it's sure to be a thorn in the side of those in the mainstream, which is why Morphizm is such pals with Arnove and Zinn in the first place. If you're not a thorn, then you're on the wrong side, people. Chomsky, for his part, hasn't been: He's applied the rigors of math, science and linguistics to Everyday Life, and found abuses of power everywhere. So the mainstream can cry all they want, but the little people understand. They understand just fine.

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Arthur C. Clarke 1917-2008

UPDATE: This post has found a home on the pages of our pals at the Huffington Post and Yahoo Buzz, which is nice. For more on Clarke, visit the eulogy I created for Wired, which features testimonials from DC Comics, George Lucas, DJ Spooky, that cranky bastard Harlan Ellison and more.

On March 18, the science and sci-fi legend Arthur C. Clarke died, which is a sad passing for us all. Clarke codified the future through a series of scientific and literary experiments that will never pass as he has. They will endure, mostly because they realize the utter singularity of the human race over time, from its earliest manifestations to its later, terrorized forms.

"I hope that we have learned something from the most barbaric century in history -- the twentieth," he said in his last recorded message to his home planet Earth. "I would like to see us overcome our tribal factions, and begin to think and act as if we were one family. That would be real globalization."

Instead, we have panic in the streets from globalization of another kind, and our eyes are more glued to our inner spaces than our outer ones. But even Clarke had hope we would pull out of it, as Clarke's friend Harlan Ellison told me by phone, in his own patently cranky way. (I wrote more on that conversation at Wired.) Clarke knew the human race would realize how absolutely lucky it is to be living at all in the void of space, much less living together in harmony on Earth.

From his prescience on satellites to the immortality that is 2001: A Space Odyssey and beyond, he always had his mind and art on something bigger than all of us -- and himself, the ever-gracious but still droll wit, who never wanted to stop growing. We could learn lessons from his work that would last us centuries. And we could start learning them tomorrow, days after he died.

We better. Or else.

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Deep Spitz!

Back again on the Spitzer tip. (Nasty!) According to Morphizm pal Greg Palast, Eliot's mess and the Fed's recent ahistorical cash handouts are connected. I'll be writing more on that issue, with scathing quotes from Palast, for AlterNet tomorrow. But for now, here's Greg's take on the cash and ass grabs:

Getting Intimate: Eliot Spitzer and The Fed Bailout
While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort' $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush's new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.

Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there's a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush's man Bernanke was using ours.

This week, Bernanke's Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks' mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers' bordello: Eliot Spitzer.

Who are they kidding? Spitzer's lynching and the bankers' enriching are intimately tied. How? Follow the money... MORE @ MORPHIZM

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A FARC-ing Fake

It's been a minute since Greg Palast hit Morphizm up. But he's hit us up nicely in the last week, with a couple eye-opening articles and even an interview for an article on Federal Reserve Bank conspiracies that I'm writing for AlterNet. Down below, he tackles the Bush administration's head-fake on FARC and Hugo Chavez, and how the Democrats might play it for fear of looking like pussies on national security:

A FARC-ing Fake
[Greg Palast, Morphizm]
Do you believe this?

This past weekend, Colombia invaded Ecuador, killed a guerrilla chief in the jungle, opened his laptop – and what did the Colombians find? A message to Hugo Chavez that he sent the FARC guerrillas $300 million – which they're using to obtain uranium to make a dirty bomb!

That's what George Bush tells us. And he got that from his buddy, the strange right-wing President of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe.

So: After the fact, Colombia justifies its attempt to provoke a border war as a to stop the threat of WMDs! Uh, where have we heard that before? MORE @ MORPHIZM

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Monsanto's Recombined Milk Turns Sour

Greetings, Morphizm pals. So, last week and the one before, I spent too much time investigating some bullshit by Monsanto, who have been trying to crush the movement to label their recombined milk because of the well-founded fear that smart consumers would avoid it like the plague. What I didn't realize was that Monsanto more or less invented the plague. With that, I'd like to introduce my AlterNet piece in all its ragged glory, wherein a volatile discussion over the agrichem titan has broken out. Tune in, join up, get sick:

Frankenfoods Giant Monsanto Plays Bully Over Consumer Labeling
[Scott Thill, AlterNet]
Since 1901, Monsanto has brought us Agent Orange, PCBs, Terminator seeds and recombined milk, among other infamous products. But it's currently obsessed with the milk, or, more importantly, the milk labels, particularly those that read "rBST-free" or "rBGH-free." It's not the "BST" or "BGH" that bothers them so much; after all, bovine somatrophin, also known as bovine growth hormone, isn't exactly what the company is known for. Which is to say, it's naturally occurring. No, the problem is the "r" denoting "recombined." There's nothing natural about it. In fact, the science is increasingly pointing to the possibility that recombined milk is -- surprise! -- not as good for you as the real thing.

"Consumption of dairy products from cows treated with rbGH raise a number of health issues," explained Michael Hansen, a senior scientist for Consumers Union. "That includes increased antibiotic resistance, due to use of antibiotics to treat mastitis and other health problems, as well as increased levels of IGF-1, which has been linked to a range of cancers."

For its part, Monsanto is leaning on the crutch of terminology to derail the mounting threat to its bottom line: The consumer-driven revolution against recombined food. And so the St. Louis-based agri-chem giant has launched a war of words in the form of a full-court press to suppress the "rBGH-free" label at the state level. And it's sticking to its guns by obfuscating and indulging in cheap semantics... MORE @ ALTERNET

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George Carlin: Fuck You, Human Race

Unrepentant Canadian and Morphizm pal Rachel Sklar posted a stellar interview with the immortal George Carlin on the HuffPo today. And it was good.

George Carlin Reads More Blogs Than You Do
[Rachel Sklar, Huffington Post]
"I don't believe anymore in my fellow human, or my fellow American. I divorced myself from these two groups a long time ago, somewhere around 30 years ago. I found myself feeling completely outside of the human race and the American experience. Abraham Maslow, the psychologist said, the fully realized man does not identify with the local group. And when I read that it really hit me. I said, "That's me." I really don't identify with these people, I don't feel a part of this - I've never, never felt a part of this. And by "this" I mean - the human race yeah I know, I'm human, by definition I'm in it, I mean feeling like I'm in it. I mean feeling like I'm American. I just don't give a shit anymore. I stopped giving a fuck. And because I did that, it gave me a great deal of artistic freedom - it gave me emotional detachment from which I could operate with a more even-handed look at everything. I didn't have a rooted interest. I didn't have an outcome I was interested in. I didn't have a rooted interest. I wasn't a cheerleader. I was really just an observer..." MORE @ HUFFPO

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Smear This, Obama

Naomi Klein is right. Just because someone called Obama a Muslim and floated a photo of him in Somali garb during a hypersensitive primary campaign doesn't mean he's been smeared. So what does it mean?

Obama, Being Called a Muslim is Not a Smear
[by Naomi Klein, Morphizm]
Hillary Clinton denied leaking the photo of Barack Obama wearing a turban, but her campaign manager says that even if she had, it would be no big deal. "Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely."

Sure she did. And George W. Bush put on a fetching Chamato poncho in Santiago, while Paul Wolfowitz burned up YouTube with his antimalarial African dance routines when he was World Bank prez. The obvious difference is this: when white politicians go ethnic, they just look funny. When a black presidential contender does it, he looks foreign. And when the ethnic apparel in question is vaguely reminiscent of the clothing worn by Iraqi and Afghan fighters (at least to many Fox viewers, who think any headdress other than a baseball cap is a declaration of war on America), the image is downright frightening.

The turban "scandal" is all part of what is being referred to as "the Muslim smear." It includes everything from exaggerated enunciations of Obama's middle name to the online whisper campaign that Obama attended a fundamentalist madrassa in Indonesia (a lie), was sworn in on a Koran (another lie) and if elected would attach RadioShack speakers to the White House to broadcast the Muslim call to prayer (I made that one up)... MORE @ MORPHIZM

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Be Afraid. Very Afraid.

Sci-fi has predicted this type of lunacy for years. But it's still spine-chilling to watch it unfold, like some intertiatic nightmare. From the AFP:

Intelligent machines deployed on battlefields around the world — from mobile grenade launchers to rocket-firing drones — can already identify and lock onto targets without human help.

There are more than 4,000 US military robots on the ground in Iraq, as well as unmanned aircraft that have clocked hundreds of thousands of flight hours.

The first three armed combat robots fitted with large-caliber machine guns deployed to Iraq last summer, manufactured by US arms maker Foster-Miller, proved so successful that 80 more are on order, said Sharkey.

But up to now, a human hand has always been required to push the button or pull the trigger.

It we are not careful, he said, that could change.

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Comcast Stuffs Seats, Survives Hearing

Comcast is lame. This you know, and not just because they're still cable in a wireless age when cables of any type should be extinct. It's because they got caught stifling file sharing and then stuffing seats with paid tools during public hearings about it. Smooth move, obsolete corporate entity. Smooth move. From Save the Internet:

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Mall Fight!

Putting together this piece on the battle over protest at D.C.'s National Mall was arduous and time-consuming, almost not worth it. And taking a look at the general lack of comments it has generated, I might have just given up on it altogether if I had to do it again. Which, of course, is exactly what the opposition wants you to do. Nice plan! In any case, it's a stellar piece that I am proud of, and I hope AlterNet digs it. Same with you, Morphizm pal. Same with you:

National Mall Redesign Could Seriously Restrict Free Speech
[Scott Thill, AlterNet]
The National Park Service (NPS) is planning to redesign the heavily trafficked National Mall -- the sprawling open area between the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol that has become America's iconographic site of popular protest. It is where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his immortal "I Have a Dream" speech, where protests against everything from the Vietnam War and Iraq War have been launched, where locals and visitors alike lunch, jog and sightsee, and, in 2007, where Al Gore kicked off one of Live Earth's concerts.

In short, it is the premier destination for Americans from all walks of life to gather, relax, orate and bask in their collective freedoms.

But that might be coming to an end, as some organizations see it. Critics of the redesign including the ANSWER Coalition, Impeach Bush, Partnership for Civil Justice and more are complaining that the National Park Service's proposed redesign, still in its formative phase, is a subtle attempt to restrict that time-honored ability to congregate and complain.

For their part, they're suspicious of the National Park Service's recent partnership with the private foundation Trust for the National Mall to secure funding for the redesign, and they're not too happy about how current NPS Director Mary Bomar and the one she replaced, Fran P. Mainella, have connections to a Bush administration that is not exactly enthusiastic about either protest or the public trust... MORE @ ALTERNET

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DJ Shadow + OxFam = OxJam

It's not a secret Morphizm is a fan of DJ Shadow. But it's good to see Shadow is a fan of international service. He hooked up with OxFam for an eye-opening trip to Nairobi, which has been documented below. An OxJam Festival kicks off in April. It takes a digital village, people.

VIDEO, DJ Shadow + OxFam in Kenya

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Bizarre Ride 2 The Dark Side

A hat tip to the once-brilliant Pharcyde for the title, but that's as far as it goes. Because the indie film Taxi to the Dark Side has nothing to do with hip-hop, or happiness at all, come to think of it. It's about torture, rendition, black sites and other things that are supposed to keep us safe. By scaring the living fuck out of us. Literally:

Anything Goes: Taxi to the Dark Side
[Cynthia Fuchs, Morphizm]
In December 2002, a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar was picked up and delivered to the Bagram Air Force Base prison. Five days later, he was dead. Sgt. Thomas Curtis, one of the Military Police at Bagram, remembers, "There was definitely a sense of concern because he was the second one. You wonder, was it something we did?"... MORE @ MORPHIZM

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Prescription, Not Illegal, Drugs Killed Heath Ledger

I usually stay out of the tabloid news, but I couldn't let the overdose of Heath Ledger pass without analysis. There are just too many knobs trying to foist his "accidental" death onto drugs like cannabis and cocaine, rather than the over-the-counter meds that really axed him. My recent piece for AlterNet explains:

Prescription Drugs, Not Illegal Ones, Killed Heath Ledger
[Scott Thill, AlterNet]
"This would have never happened with weed."

I made that declaration back in May 2007, when Oxycontin maker Purdue Pharma pled guilty to criminal charges of misleading customers about the lethality of their product, promising to pay $600-plus million and be real good people going forward. But with the accidental overdose of Heath Ledger, the first sentence of this article is proving to be a tag line with serious staying power.

Last year was the latest in a series of banner years for Oxycontin, which kicked heroin and cocaine to the metaphorical curb to become one of the most popularly abused substances of the 21st century. Of course, it has been joined by painkillers like Vicodin, sleeping pills like Restoril, anti-anxiety poppers like Valium and Xanax, and even antihistamines like Unisom, all of which were found in Ledger's system during his autopsy. The official verdict, sent in written form by medical examiner spokeswoman Ellen Borakove, avoided marketing buzzwords in favor of designations more scientific, which is to say obscure: "Mr. Heath Ledger died as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine. We have concluded that the manner of death is accident, resulting from the abuse of prescription medications."

What's in a name, you ask? Oblivion. Wait until you hear the numbers.

According to a recent Associated Press analysis of Drug Enforcement Administration stats, retail access to these "accidental" killers has skyrocketed 88 percent since 1997, and you don't even need to ask about prescriptions, because doctors are dishing them out like mints. Consequently, a collaborative study from the University of Michigan and the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that teenage abuse of Oxycrack has risen 26 percent since 2002, while overall prescription drug abuse has tripled among teens since 1992. For those who know their immortal hip-hop well, that was the year N.W.A. soundtracker and rapper Dr. Dre scored crossover platinum with The Chronic, a highly influential album dedicated to the love of cannabis that made Snoop Dogg a superstar in his own right. Neither has yet to die of weed.

The irony is sweet and sour. And while I'm not sure if Heath Ledger was a fan of Dre and Snoop, he was certainly a fan of cannabis. I "used to smoke five joints a day for 20 years," he confessed on a hidden camera video that Entertainment Tonight bought and planned to air, but then reportedly pulled "out of respect" for Ledger's family. In the video, Ledger allegedly flirts with coke and openly admits to the problem it will cause Michelle Williams, who according to the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid New York Post had to lay down the law with the Brokeback Mountain and Batman star over his abuse of not just those drugs but heroin as well. Once the video was yanked, his family and business associates sighed with deep thanks and quickly condemned the former decision to air it as "shameful exploitation of the lowest kind."

But was it? Sure, airing footage of Ledger at a Hollywood coke party while he rhapsodizes about how much cannabis he used to smoke may not have been the most sensitive way for Entertainment Tonight to eulogize him. But an important point is being utterly missed: Coke, heroin and weed did not kill him. Prescription drugs did... MORE @ ALTERNET

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Where The Fuck Is Tanikistan?

[Morphizm pal and news muckraker Greg Palast checks in with some love on Ted Rall's stunning Silk Road to Ruin. Rall has joined Palast's team for Election 2008.]

Where the fuck is Tanikistan? Or Kyrgyzstan? Or Turkmenistan? As your kids will be fighting there among the oil pipes, you should kiss Ted Rall’s crazy ass for going there first - and getting it all down in a book of dead-on cartoons and reportage, Silk Road to Ruin.

Rall almost didn’t make it back. The Taliban who was supposed to execute Rall spoke English - the gunman picked it up as an NYU grad student. As happens when two guys from New York get together, they talked about New York women. Rall told his executioner that you could learn a lot about women by looking at their legs. The Talib said he looks at their eyes. “Not like you got much choice,” Ted opined, noting the draped figures nearby.

This was, by definition, gallows humor. Lucky for Ted, the fanatic shooter needed a couple of chuckles. We all do. And Ted gives us plenty to laugh at in his journey through a horrific wonderland run by a gaggle of lunatic, blood-guzzling dictators (in other words, allies in our War on Terror) where locals play hockey with goat heads.

Silk Road even includes the recipe of Uzbekistan’s President, Islam Karimov, for boiling dissidents alive. (I suggest you skip page 160 where Rall includes a photo of a boiled father of four.)

Instead of a bullet through Rall’s head, the Taliban gave him a “safe-conduct” pass. But Rall’s conduct was anything but safe. When, recently, Bill Clinton flew to Kazakhstan to cuddle up to the dictator Nursultan Nazarbeyev, he was ferried in on private jet of a high-roller locking in a creepy deal for Kazakh uranium. Rall, apparently, missed the jet.

Instead, Rall caroms through the ‘Stans by bus, barfing and bribing and joking his way past sex-starved, over-armed fanatics and avaricious body guards. He’s too whacked by dehydration and diarrhea to worry about the stark-raving danger of such a journey in war-time (it’s always war time in the ‘Stans) to tell us the story you won’t find in the captions of Bill shaking hands with a despot du jour.

Ultimately, what Rall’s story is about is what everything’s all about: oil. The ‘Stans are drenched in it, floating on it, or in the way of it. Thus, the book’s sub-title, “Is Central Asia the New Middle East?”

Rall’s answer is, “Yes, but more dangerous.” Hey, thanks for that.

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The People Speak!

Here's the short backstory on Morphizm's involvement in Howard Zinn's live performances of Voices of a People's History of the United States. Here is the trailer for the upcoming series based on the same. It's going to be a revolutionary good time.

VIDEO: THE PEOPLE SPEAK TRAILER

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Back With Delirium

Been on the road for a few days, but I'm back at Camp Morphizm and feeling strange. Super Tuesday, brain surgery, NorCal nature, my girls Sofie and Sandra, Super Bowl: It adds up. I've got what immortals like the RZA, GZA and Bill Murray called "Delirium" in Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes. It's like that, and that's the way it is:

VIDEO: "Delirium," Coffee and Cigarettes

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Can't Pay Your Mortgage? Trash Your House

Hello, pals of Morphizm. I stepped into a hornet's nest with my new AlterNet piece about the housing crisis and the rise of arson, fraud and trashouts. It's already getting heavy traffic and impassioned comments, so by all means check in and join the discussion. Because it's a serious doozy:

Can't Pay Your Mortgage? Trash Your House and Leave
[Scott Thill, AlterNet]
On the lookout for disturbing trends? Here's one for your pile: According to a recent article in Fortune, there has been a noticeable increase in not just fraud but arson that has kept pace with the housing depression. Professionals in the insurance and lending industry are bracing themselves for all manner of similar situations, as homeowners either trash, or simply leave their trash lying around their houses, often taking off without even claiming their furniture. This is already a dirty problem in the housing business, with owners, lenders and banks having to figure out a way to stick each other with the check when tenants destroy their property on their way out the door. Woe is the person left behind to clean up the chaos.

"We just estimated a trashout yesterday where we're going to have to drain the pool," one Fontana, CA resident posted on AgentsOnline.Net, a resource and idea site for realtors, "and the stench from it when you enter the backyard is overwhelming. Then, of course there are mosquitoes all over the top and it's been sitting so long without chemicals that it's green on top and murky black on the bottom. We've already had to refuse one pool because of its really creepy condition and I'm not so sure about this one either. [I] just hope we don't find the previous homeowner at the bottom when we drain it"... MORE @ ALTERNET

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Disowned By the Ownership Class

Thank the Big Bang for brainiacs like Naomi Klein, who has been calling bullshit on disaster capitalism for years. She's also been letting Morphizm run her stories for free, a testimony to her belief in what free markets are really about. Here's her latest dose on the housing meltdown, and why it's really more of a grand sabotage:

Disowned by the Ownership Class
[Naomi Klein, Morphizm]
Remember the "ownership society," fixture of major George W. Bush addresses for the first four years of his presidency? "We're creating...an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property," Bush said in October 2004. Washington think-tanker Grover Norquist predicted that the ownership society would be Bush's greatest legacy, remembered "long after people can no longer pronounce or spell Fallujah." Yet in Bush's final State of the Union address, the once-ubiquitous phrase was conspicuously absent. And little wonder: rather than its proud father, Bush has turned out to be the ownership society's undertaker.

Well before the ownership society had a neat label, its creation was central to the success of the right-wing economic revolution around the world. The idea was simple: if working-class people owned a small piece of the market -- a home mortgage, a stock port-folio, a private pension -- they would cease to identify as workers and start to see themselves as owners, with the same interests as their bosses. That meant they could vote for politicians promising to improve stock performance rather than job conditions. Class consciousness would be a relic.

It was always tempting to dismiss the ownership society as an empty slogan -- "hokum" as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it. But the ownership society was quite real. It was the answer to a roadblock long faced by politicians favoring policies to benefit the wealthy. The problem boiled down to this: people tend to vote their economic interests. Even in the wealthy United States, most people earn less than the average income. That means it is in the interest of the majority to vote for politicians promising to redistribute wealth from the top down...MORE @ MORPHIZM

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SoCal Set To Dry Up

I've been following water issues for awhile now, and being a Los Angeles resident, it didn't take a rocket scientist to tell me that the farther global warming advances, the less water L.A. is going to have on tap to help it forget that it is, in fact, a desert. Looks like the LA Times finally caught up to this ironically cold fact. So, where to move?

Human-caused global warming has been shrinking the snowpack across the mountain ranges of the West for five decades, suggesting that the region's long battle for water will only get worse, according to a computer analysis released today.

As temperatures have increased, more winter precipitation has fallen as rain instead of snow, and the snow is melting sooner, reported the study published in the journal Science.

The result is that rivers are flowing faster in the spring, raising the risk of flooding, and slower in the summer, raising the risk of drought.

"These trends will only intensify over the next few decades," said Richard Seager, a research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

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Terraformation: China's Cloudhacking

I've been working this type of budding terraformation into Hyperhighway to Hell, although I'm far from a finished product. But the mind reels. From the LA Times:

The Chinese are among the world's leaders in what is called "weather modification," but they have more experience creating rain than preventing it. In fact, the techniques are virtually the same.

Cloud-seeding is a relatively well-known practice that involves shooting various substances into clouds, such as silver iodide, salts and dry ice, that bring on the formation of larger raindrops, triggering a downpour. But Chinese scientists believe they have perfected a technique that reduces the size of the raindrops, delaying the rain until the clouds move on.

The weather modification would be used only on a small area, opening what would be in effect a meteorological umbrella over the 91,000-seat Olympic stadium. The $400-million stadium, nicknamed the "bird's nest" for its interlacing steel beams, has no roof.

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One Bush Left Behind

So I heard the president gave another State of the Union speech. I can't watch those. They're turgid, bullshit affairs. Good thing Morphizm pal Greg Palast checked in. Here's what he checked out.

One Bush Left Behind
[Greg Palast, Morphizm]
n his State of the Union, the President asked Congress for $300 million for poor kids in the inner city. As there are, officially, 15 million children in America living in poverty, how much is that per child? Correct! $20.

The President also demanded that Congress extend his tax cuts. The cost: $4.3 trillion over ten years. The big recipients are millionaires. And the number of millionaires happens, not coincidentally, to equal the number of poor kids, roughly 15 million of them. OK class: what is the cost of the tax cut per millionaire? That's right, Richie, $287,000 apiece.

Mr. Bush said, “In neighborhoods across our country, there are boys and girls with dreams. And a decent education is their only hope of achieving them.” So how much educational dreaming will $20 buy?

George Bush's alma mater, Phillips Andover Academy, tells us their annual tuition is $37,200. The $20 “Pell Grant for Kids,” as the White House calls it, will buy a poor kid about 35 minutes of this educational dream. So they'll have to wake up quickly. $20 won't cover the cost of the final book in the Harry Potter series...MORE @ MORPHIZM

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Israel: Too Late By Two Beatles

This is quite possibly the most hilarious thing I have read all day. Oh Israel, may you never run out of comedic situations for us bloggers to spiel about. From the AP:

More than 40 years after it barred the iconic British band from playing there, Israel said it wants the surviving members of the Beatles to participate in a concert celebrating the country's 60th birthday. But the Israeli embassy in London denied a report that the Jewish state had apologized for its original refusal to let the Beatles perform in the country. The band had been booked to appear in 1965, but the government refused to grant the necessary permits on the ground that its music might corrupt the country's morals.

The best part is that Israel thinks it is doing its people a favor by getting the two living Beatles to reunite for a show. Yes, exactly what all diehard Beatles fans would want: Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr singing "An Octopus's Garden" and "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Dah." Life may go on, brah, but it would move much better if John Lennon were still alive to sing "I'm So Tired."

The worst part? Thinking that The Beatles would corrupt Israel's morals. Where do I start? Maybe I shouldn't?

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Two Words: Sibel Edmonds

This from Morphizm IT wiz The Riz: "I have two words, and then two more: Sibel Edmonds. Valerie Plame. See if you can guess the connection between them."

To which I would only add: "I'm shocked -- shocked! -- to find the Bush administration playing both sides of Armageddon."

My favorite line from the first link?

"It's another blockbuster. So big, the U.S. media have assigned several extra reporters to begin ignoring it immediately."

That's rich.

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Is Bush Trying To Take Down Fannie Mae?

Happy Monday, pals of Morphizm. My beat goes on for the indie journo titan AlterNet, this time with a story about the housing meltdown and the Bush administration's possible role in it. But before you cry conspiracy, understand something: It's not my idea. It comes from the ex-CEO of Fannie Mae. Read on.

Is the Bush Administration Trying To Take Down Fannie Mae?
[Scott Thill, AlterNet]
"I love my grandfather," CNN chatterhead Glenn Beck complained on his eponymous show, "but I just want to slap him across the face for liking FDR. I think that was one evil son of a bitch."

Beck's complaint was echoed by his guest for the segment, supply-side economist Stephen Moore, one-time president of the Club for Growth, fellow at think tanks like the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation, author of Bullish on Bush and now a Rupert Murdoch employee on the Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Together, they tag-teamed the history books so hard on Roosevelt and the New Deal that one could have been forgiven for forgetting that the four-time president's policies not only carried America through the Great Depression, but defeated both Hitler and Mussolini to score a geopolitical hat trick. In Beck and Moore's rhetorical attacks, FDR comes out looking like the very fascists he defeated, one who actually lengthened the Great Depression in an attempt to "nationalize," as Beck asserted, everything in sight and screw honest, hard-working businessmen out of their deserved paydays.

Of course, Moore and Beck are not alone: Naomi Klein's stunning The Shock Doctrine, a deeply researched and scathing condemnation of Milton Friedman's free-market ideology (and ideologues), catalogs neoconservative attempts over the last several decades to unwind everything FDR's New Deal has accomplished. Taken together, the attacks on FDR share one major goal: To privatize what is left of the New Deal and undermine its programs to help the poor and unlucky of the United States navigate their way into the middle class.

The Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), more commonly known by its portmanteau nickname Fannie Mae, is one such government entity created by the New Deal, initially to inject liquidity -- or cold, hard cash -- into the mortgage market. That is, until 1968, when it was converted into a private corporation that ceased to guarantee loans made by the government. Since then, it has existed in a nebulous state otherwise known as a government-sponsored entity (GSE), like its smaller GSE-in-arms Freddie Mac, which also buys and pools loans on the secondary market to package them into mortgage-backed securities for sale to investors on the open market. Even though Fannie and Freddie receive no direct funding or backing by the government, the loans that they securitize have the implicit support of the U.S. government behind them, thereby making it easier to land favorable lending rates, buy prices and what passes for financial security in the capital and mortgage markets.

And if that sounds like a bureaucratic labyrinth to you, that's because it's supposed to. Good luck navigating it. But the tangled acronyms and economic jargon still cannot hide one major problem: The GSEs are neck-deep in the housing meltdown and sinking fast... MORE @ ALTERNET

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Zinn Goes Widescreen

A few years back, my wife and I helped a cool dude named Anthony Arnove produce a live reading of the source texts from Voices of a People's History of the United States, the epochal alt-history book from revered scholar Howard Zinn. It was a stunning success, mostly because of Zinn and Arnove's stirring vision and the utter dedication of talent that came on board for it. That talent included Viggo Mortensen and the dedicated Josh Brolin, who told me after the show that his kids actually go to a school that uses People's History of the United States as a textbook. I was floored by that one.

Same with the live readings themselves, which are now in the process of going widescreen, according to recent emails Anthony has been sending me. Here's an in-depth update from my pals at AlterNet, and here's Seven Stories page for Zinn's recent book, The Unraveling of the Bush Presidency. Read them all, and get ready for the bigger show, which is going to turn heads and tease minds.

Just in time for us all.

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The South Carolina You Won't See on CNN

It's Friday, pals of Morphizm. So relax, unwind and catch up on your political news. OK, I'm kidding: You're all caught up on that every day. So here's another dose, from our friend and investigative muckraker Greg Palast. It is not pretty, but then again, nothing about politics ever is.

The South Carolina You Won't See on CNN
[Greg Palast, Morphizm]
South Carolina 2000: Six hundred police in riot gear facing a few dozen angry-as-hell workers on the docks of Charleston. In the darkness, rocks, clubs and blood fly. The cops beat the crap out of the protesters. Of course, it's the union men who are arrested for conspiracy to riot. And of course, of the five men handcuffed, four are Black. The prosecutor: a White, Bible-thumping Attorney General running for Governor. The result: a state ripped in half - White versus Black.

South Carolina 2008: On Saturday, the Palmetto State may well choose our President, or at least the Democrat's idea of a President. According to CNN and the pundit-ocracy, the only question is, Will the large Black population vote their pride (for Obama) or for "experience" (Hillary)? In other words, the election comes down to a matter of racial vanity.

The story of the dockworkers charged with rioting in 2000 suggest there's an awfully good reason for Black folk to vote for one of their own. This is the chance to even the historic score in this land of lingering Jim Crow where the Confederate Flag flew over the capital while the longshoreman faced Southern justice.

But maybe there's more to South Carolina's story than Black and White.

Let's re-wind the tape of the 2000 battle between cops and Black men. It was early that morning on the 19th of January when members of International Longshoremen's Association Local 1422 "shaped up" to unload a container ship which had just pulled into port. It was hard work for good pay. An experienced union man could earn above $60,000 a year.

In this last hold-out of the Confederacy, it was one of the few places a Black man could get decent pay. Or any man.

That day, the stevedoring contractor handling the unloading decided it would hire the beggars down the dock, without experience or skills - and without union cards - willing to work for just one-third of union scale.

That night, union workers - Black, White, Whatever - fought for their lives and livelihoods.

At the heart of the turmoil in South Carolina in 2000 then, was not so much Black versus White, but union versus non-union. It was a battle between those looking for a good day's pay versus those looking for a way not to pay it. The issue was - and is - class war, the conflict between the movers and the shakers and the moved and shaken.

The dockworkers of Charleston could see the future of America right down the road. Literally. Because right down the highway, they could see their cousins and brothers who worked in the Carolina textile mills kiss their jobs goodbye as they loaded the mill looms onto trains for Mexico.

The President, Bill Clinton, had signed NAFTA, made China a "most favored nation" in trade and urged us, with a flirtatious grin, to "make change our friend."

But "change," apparently, wasn't in a friendly mood. In 2000, Guilford Mills shuttered its Greensboro, Carolina, fabric plant and reopened it in Tampico, Mexico. Four-hundred jobs went south. Springs Mills of Rock Hill, SC, closed down and abandoned 480 workers. Fieldcrest-Cannon pulled out of York, SC, and Great America Mills simply went bust.

South Carolina, then, is the story of globalization left out of Thomas Friedman's wonders-of-the-free-market fantasies.

This week, while US media broadcasts cute-sy photo-ops from Black churches and replay the forgettable spats between candidates, the real issues of South Carolina are, thankfully, laid out in a book released today: On the Global Waterfront, by Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger.

Erem and Durrenberger portray the case of the Charleston Five dockworkers as an exemplary, desperate act of economic resistance.

Thomas Friedman's bestseller, The World is Flat, begins with his uplifting game of golf with a tycoon in India. Erem and Durrenberger never put on golf shoes: their book is globalization stripped down to its dirty underpants.

While Friedman made the point that he flew business class to Bangalore on his way to the greens to meet his millionaire, Global Waterfront's authors go steerage class. And the people they write about don't go anywhere at all. These are the stevedores who move the containers of Wal-Mart T-shirts from Guatemala to sell to customers in Virginia who can't afford health insurance because they lost their job in the textile mill.

And the book talks about (cover the children's ears!) - labor unions.

South Carolina is union country. And union-busting country. But who gives a flying fart about labor unions today? Only 7%, one in fourteen US workers belongs to one. That's less than the number of Americans who believe that Elvis killed John Kennedy.

Think "longshoremen" and what comes to mind is On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando, the good guy, beating up the evil union boss. The union bosses were the thugs, mobbed-up bullies, the dockworkers' enemies. The movie's director, Stanley Kramer, perfectly picked up the anti-union red-baiting Joe McCarthy zeitgeist of that era of - which could go down well today.

Elected labor leaders are, in our media, always "union bosses." But the real bosses, the CEOs, the guys who shutter factories and ship them to China … they're never "bosses," they're "entrepreneurs."

Indeed, the late and lionized King of Union Busters, Sam Walton, would be proud today, were he alive, to learn that the woman he called, "my little lady," Hillary Clinton, whom he placed on Wal-Mart's Board of Directors, is front-runner for the presidency. She could well become America's "Greeter," posted at our nation's door, to welcome the Saudis and Chinese who are buying America at a guaranteed low price.

So what happened those five union men charged felonious reioting in 2000? Through an international union campaign, they won back their freedom - and their union jobs - after the dockworkers of Spain, the true heroes of globalization, refused to unload the South Carolina scab cargoes.

Erem and Durrenberger ask themselves why they were so drawn to a story of five Carolina cargo-handlers put in prison a decade ago. Maybe it's because the Charleston Five show how courage and heart and solidarity can lead to victory in the midst of a mad march into globalization that threatens to turn us all into the Wal-Mart Five Billion.

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The Choice Is Yours

Once again, our political wit Ross Levine checks in, after a long silence. I hear the Morphizm old-schooler has a book in the works. Which is great, as he's already written a hilarious short story about hybrid animalia for us. More on all of that later. For now, here's Ross on the contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the future. Be at peace:

The Choice is Yours
[Ross Levine, Morphizm]
What a radical concept. Instead of putting our energy into deciding which of the candidates is the "right one," we look at ourselves and decide what we ourselves would have to do to earn our votes. Not that we even want to run a nation of 300 million less than ideal human beings, but let's just say we're running the little country we call home. Whatever we find incapable of doing is probably what the nation itself and her leaders are incapable of doing. Which is why, it seems, all our hopes for the oft-invoked concept of “change” come to naught.

But not always. Every now and then -- and these "now and thens" don't come often -- the people elect a leader who actually rises above non-expectation and acts boldly and decisively with the future in mind. It is in situations like this that the real power of democracy asserts itself. When the people, in their blind quest to select a leader, actually do so. When that happens, it's a confluence of so many variables and coincidences and fortuitous outcomes that it's truly a miracle. But don't hold your breath. After eight years of Bush, you may be hoping for a miracle in the ballot box, but chances are you won't get one. So, once inside the voting booth, just do the best you can. And at home, just do a little better than that...

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Holy Freakin' Hell!

So, I'm feeling good after selling off one of my cars yesterday, ahead of what I predicted, along with every other economist or person blessed with common sense, would be a sick recession in 2008. A couple thousand in my pocket, a money pit filled in and replaced. But then I awoke to this hideous picture:



That is Apple's five-day stock graph. It had reached a high of $200 around Christmas, but has tanked, in step with the overall economy, ever since. $40 billion in shareholder value has been disappeared, Abu Ghraib-style, over the last two weeks. And that, my friends, is our economy in microcosm.

Apple had been what gold and oil are for rich assholes: A safe haven for investment during a contracting economy. But if you didn't want to feel like a jerk, investing in destruction and hoarding, you put your money in innovation. Today, that is no longer the case. Everyone is running from innovation, and banking on fear.

And whether you like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, it doesn't matter. A dollar put into Apple and Microsoft's coffers was one taken away from the fossil fuel industry, the disaster capitalism complex, the dystopia coming our way. But the bear is fully upon us now, and the only safe haven is the one that is driving us to a very uncertain future.

Don't enjoy the ride.

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You a Terrorist? Thoughtcrime Bill Decides.

The AlterNet hits keep on coming. I used to write for them a lot back in the day, and it's nice to groove with them again. This time around, I filed a piece on H.R. 1955, a crazy piece of legislation drafted almost entirely by Democrats aimed at suppressing so-called "homegrown terrorism" by possibly constricting both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Hmm. Where have we seen this before. There was this guy. He hated the enemy. Held embarrassing hearings. Ruined careers. Man, if only I could remember his name.

Punishing Thought Crime: Would New Bill Make You a Terrorist?
[Scott Thill, AlterNet]
According to Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., House Resolution 1955, otherwise known as the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, is a much-needed piece of national security legislation subject to unnecessary paranoia and fear. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the resolution, which Harman sponsored, is one step too close to an Orwellian nightmare, especially for the Democrats who concocted it.

The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between. But first, let's back up and check the facts.

House Resolution 1955 was introduced without fanfare in April 2007 by Harman and passed with little disagreement in October 2007. In fact, more House politicians missed the vote than voted against it, and if that isn't unanimity as far as American politics go, I don't know what is. Considering the resolution engages three charged terms in succession -- "violent," "radical," "terrorism" -- it's hard to believe that it wasn't designed to scare the living daylights out of every representative who showed up to vote that day. It also might explain why it garnered 404 yeas and barely enough nays -- six, to be exact -- to count on one hand. And while 22 representatives declined to show up for the vote, those who felt that H.R. 1955 was a terrible waste of time and tax funds had no chance at voting it down anyway.

In any case, it's the Senate's headache now.... MORE @ ALTERNET

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George of Arabia

It's good to have Greg Palast back. He's always a breath of fresh air, especially when it comes to gas, money and graft. A journo' journo. He's popped off on Morphizm about Bush's trip to the Saudis, international revenue streams and how the subprime meltdown is the tip of the proverbial assberg:

George of Arabia
[Greg Palast, Morphizm]
Bend over, pull out your wallet and kiss your Abe ‘goodbye.' The Lincolns have got to go - and so do the Hamiltons and Jacksons.

Those bills in your billfold aren't yours anymore. The landlords of our currency - Citibank, the national treasury of China and the House of Saud - are foreclosing and evicting all Americans from the US economy.

It's mornings like this, when I wake up hung-over to photos of the King of Saudi Arabia festooning our President with gold necklaces, that I reluctantly remember that I am an economist; and one with some responsibility to explain what the hell Bush is doing kissing Abdullah's camel.

Let's begin by stating why Bush is not in Saudi Arabia. Bush ain't there to promote ‘Democracy' nor peace in Palestine, nor even war in Iran. And, despite what some pinhead from CNN stated, he sure as hell didn't go to Riyadh to tell the Saudis to cut the price of oil.

What's really behind Bush's hajj to Riyadh is that America is in hock up to our knickers. The sub-prime mortgage market implosion, hitting a dozen banks with over $100 billion in losses, is just the tip of the debt-berg.

Since taking office, Bush has doubled the federal debt to more than $5 trillion. And, according to US Treasury figures, on net, foreign investors have purchased close to 100% of that debt. That's $3 trillion borrowed from the Saudis, the Chinese, the Japanese and others.

Now, Bush, our Debt Junkie-in-Chief, needs another fix. The US Treasury, Citibank, Merrill-Lynch and other financial desperados need another hand-out from Abdullah's stash. Abdullah, in turn, gets this financial juice by pumping it out of our pockets at nearly $100 a barrel for his crude... MORE @ MORPHIZM

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Joe Sacco on Arabs, Jews and Comix

Greetings again, pals of Morphizm. I told you I would be busy this week. Here's another dose, an interview with comics journalist Joe Sacco about his classic graphic novel Palestine, Bush's reactivated road map for the region and why universities and J-schools are tagging his acclaimed comic for their courses. It's up on the LA Weekly now, and in print. Viva la whatever!

Joe Sacco on Comics, the Arabs and the Jews
[Scott Thill, LA Weekly]
Joe Sacco can give you a headache. A cartoonist who is more often recognized as a journalist, he straddles so many fences that he makes you realize that life really isn't simply a choice between black and white. Ironic, considering that his comics are mostly in black and white, and that he spent much of his early years after graduating with a journo degree from the University of Oregon in 1981 trying to find a job writing legit investigations about matters of consequence. That went nowhere, so he turned to comics, which took him seriously, and then took him where he was looking to go all the time.

It is that type of reversible flux that marks his compelling work, usually delivered from embattled regions like Sarajevo, Gorazde, and the mother of all geopolitical clusterfucks, the Palestinian territories. Or Palestine, as he calls it in his American Book Award-winning collection of the same name, now receiving the deluxe-reissue treatment from comics powerhouse Fantagraphics. He was overdue for an upgrade: Sacco has created panels on subjects as different as indie rock and war crimes for Harper's, The Guardian, Harvey Pekar's American Splendor and other publications. Plus, Palestine is his Great American Novel, and is making the rounds not just at comics houses, but at universities, J-schools and more... MORE @ LA WEEKLY

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DJ Spooky in Antarctica? Cool.

I've been talking back and forth with DJ Spooky and his crew about the brain-hop pioneer's latest project Terra Nova: The Antarctic Suite, which sounds highly promising. He recently checked in after traveling to the frozen but nevertheless warming tundra in hopes of logging hours of film footage and sound samples:

It was an incredible and awe inspiring exploration of nature. I'm still feeling the wind and waves... Anyway, I edited the material there, and created a soundtrack based on the environmental material at hand: wind, the tides rhythm (it made good hip hop material!), oceanic currents, and yes, penguins.

Next up, he's heading to Sundance to premiere the work-in-progress, before honing it into playing shape for a worldwide tour. Definitely stop by and check it out if you're in the region. I bet it would make sick snowboarding soundtracking. Details:

New Frontiers - Sundance Film Festival Presents
Terra Nova: The Antarctic Suite
A Film by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid
Official Selection Premier:
Tuesday Jan 22nd at 9pm
New Frontiers (Sundance Digital Cinema)
333 Main Street (lower level)

You have to be on Spooky's list to get in, but as cool as guy as he is, I bet showing up and caring about the collision of sound and climate ought to be enough to score a pass. If not, tell them Scott at Morphizm sent you.

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Will the World's Oceans Be Our Next Drinking Tap?

Back at it, Morphizm pals. I am writing like my life depends on it, because it does. The latest is for that fine indie journalism titan AlterNet, and is about something that affects all of us. Water, how to get it, how to save it, and how its loss might screw us all.

Will the World's Oceans Be Our Next Drinking Tap?
[Scott Thill, AlterNet]
Stephen Hawking is no dummy. That much has been established.

Yet in 2006, when the acclaimed scientist told an audience of mostly university students and professors in China that he was "very worried about global warming" and that Earth "might end up like Venus, at 250 degrees centigrade and raining sulfuric acid," the dystopian prediction nevertheless dropped off the cultural radar after a few short weeks. Which, of course, is a sad commentary on the state of our minds, distracted as they are by horserace punditry possessed with the 2008 election, athletes on HGH, or the latest meltdown of pop tarts like Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse. After all, some might argue, the thought of our verdant Earth metamorphosing into the environmental nightmare that is Venus, whose oceans evaporated millions of years ago, is beyond sci-fi, a transformation so stunning and apocalyptic that it cannot be comprehended, much less be true.

But Hawking is not alone, especially among activists and scientists who have been keeping a sharp eye on our planet's precarious water situation. And that includes Maude Barlow, author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water as well as the founder of the Blue Planet Project and the national chairperson of the advocacy group Council of Canadians.

"I fear that the global water crisis will destroy all life on earth if we do not deal with it soon," she confessed... MORE @ ALTERNET

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It's Sacco vs. Bush on Palestine

Joe Sacco knows a thing or two about Palestine. He spent time there writing not a mind-numbing academic tome, but a heavy comic called Palestine, which went on to become an academic regular at English, art and journo classes worldwide. Along the way, Palestine has also become one of the underground and overground's most respected graphic novels, as well as the recipient of a recent deluxe reissue books with stature always get when they make deep impact.

So when I got a chance to interview Sacco about his comic and the troubled territory it takes its name from, which will go live in next week's LA Weekly, I couldn't resist. Especially since the Bush administration has suddenly and serendipitously found its abandoned road map for the region, a stunning turnaround given their disaster capitalist obsession with Iraq. But as Sacco told me during the interview, just because George Bush remembered Palestine doesn't mean his memory is worth anything.

"Everyone's seen these talks about talking before," Sacco said. "But it's a sorry spectacle to see a president of the United States using such a wretched conflict to get himself a Clintonesque photo on the front pages and three or four days of lukewarm press coverage. The man can't see further than next week."

Maybe not, but he's sure acting like it, uttering that which must remain nameless -- "occupation" -- and more or less promising a peace treaty by the time he leaves office. His chatter on Palestine is reaching a rhetorical fever pitch, but will Bush's words actually translate into on-the-ground action?

Yeah, right.

Forget the suspicious Sacco, to say nothing of almost unanimous regional disbelief in the possibility. Bush has got so far to go on this issue that, even if he does broker some sort of detente by the time he thankfully vacates the White House, whatever he achieves is certain to be as thin as his evidence to invade Iraq. Plus, now that he's pulling the same nonsense with Iran as he did with Iraq, his credibility on the issue is worse than bad. Let's just say he owes the world a shitload of geopolitical back pay.

But who's really going to pay? With Bush, that has always seemed to be the question no one really wants to answer. But the smart money says it's always someone else. Always.

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Love From The Nation

[I love writing for the youth journo mag WireTap. They give me free rein on subject matter, and have a cool syndication with The Nation. Here's my recent spiel on the thorny roots of social networking. -- ST]

Who Owns Whom? Social Networking's Corporate Roots
[Scott Thill, The Nation]
You'll have to turn elsewhere if you want to keep corporate influence from social networking.

As the Facebook controversy proves, the best place to start is the social network itself. While it may feel imbalanced to use Murdoch to fight Murdoch or use Microsoft to fight Microsoft, it has been proven to be somewhat effective. After all, you drop a quarter or half billion dollars for something, you want that investment to at least retain if not gain value. And that doesn't happen when your consumers are fleeing to the next social networking site, which seems to pop up with more regularity than before.

In the end, it may feel imbalanced. But the playing field is perhaps more level than ever... MORE @ THE NATION

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US and Iran: Schoolyard Bitches

Oh, here we go again. I'm not the only one who's been trying to get people to think outside the Bush box, and get with the idea that this war with Iran is going to happen, regardless of what the people of both countries actually want. And the stratagem is playing out exactly the way someone who won't take no for an answer would want it to.

In other words, this year's Bush/Cheney geostrategical contest for Iran's oil began in earnest today, as the U.S. navy and Iranian Revolutionary Guard navy had a stare-down in the Strait of Hormuz:

U.S. military officials told CNN the boats were "attack craft" that they believed were operated by Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard.

The Iranian boats made threatening maneuvers against the U.S. warships and threatening radio transmissions, the officials told CNN.

The captain of one U.S. vessel was in the process of giving the order to shoot when the Iranian ships began turning away, CNN said.

A radio transmission from one of the Iranian ships said, "I am coming at you. You will explode in a couple of minutes," CNN reported, citing a U.S. official.

After the threatening radio communication, U.S. sailors manned their ships’ guns and were very close to opening fire, it said.

"Attack craft?" Junkers, you mean. The world's most powerful military isn't worried about Iranian jalopies. And for those who don't remember their history, look up the Gulf of Tonkin incident if you want to find out the history of those who are now making your Nikes.

That said, everyone involved in today's schoolyard bitch-fest, except our war-mongering asses, agreed that it was much ado about nothing. Which is great if you ignore the fact that the fake intrigue felt like an attempt to push oil back to its record high of $100 a barrel:

U.S crude hit a session high of $98.40 a barrel following news of the tensions between the United States and Iran -- already at odds over a range of issues from Iran's nuclear program to U.S. allegations of Iranian support for terrorism -- at the weekend. The Pentagon said the incident was serious and described the Iranian actions as "careless, reckless and potentially hostile" and said Tehran should provide an explanation. The Iranian foreign ministry described the incident as ordinary.

Someone is making mad cash from these non-stories, believe that. Too bad it isn't us.

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Too Late, Hillary. Too Late.

UPDATE: Morphizm's pals at the Huffington Post have syndicated this post there. Drop by and join the discussion before it is buried.

I'm not going to predict that Obama sweeps the rest of the states as surely as he has in Iowa's Democratic primary, especially on the eve of New Hampshire's tally. But I am going to say that Hillary Clinton continues to bark up the wrong tree. And the reason is very simple: She's not a viable candidate for change. She is the Establishment. And that sucks.

As David Morris of AlterNet posted today, the distasteful reign of Bush and Cheney has made well-meaning change agents in this country, and the world, forget what it was like under the Clintons. As a Berkeley leftist, I couldn't believe what was happening myself, as Bill and Hillary set about dismantling the New Deal with the help of the losers on the Right they were so busy capitulating to. It was, after all, their mantra: Reach across the aisle, shake the hand of those who disagree with you, find common ground. Which is a nice enough sentiment, if you're living in a fantasy. But in the real world, dreaming up something as stoopid as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" or repealing the Glass-Steagall Act and laying the foundation for the 2007 subprime screw-over, things don't work that way. You reach across the aisle and you end up with a world where Pat Robertson has his own TV show and Al Gore loses a presidency he won because, as the dope lamented in An Inconvenient Truth, "What can you do?"

Uh, something? Anything?

The problem with the Clintons, and the Gores, and every other so-called Democrat who thinks the best way to gain and retain power is to sell out their base to their enemies who believe in insane stratagems like intelligent design and economic deregulation, is that they make it easier for those backwards power-mongers to not only sink knives into our backs, but to argue that we had it coming all along. Let me put it this way: If you hate Bush, you should hate Clinton. It is the Clintons' spirit of capitulation that has led us to this momentous crossroads, where the dollar is in freefall and the Gulf-of-Tonkin rewind plays itself out in Iran's Strait of Hormuz. Sure, the Bush regime has been a loaded gun ever since it planted its sick roots in Texas -- my vote for the worst state in America -- but that doesn't mean it needed to be taken off the shelf. Shopped around like it was something worthwhile.

But at almost every stop in her last several years of senatorial service, Hillary Clinton has polished Bush's gun with aplomb, hoping for some kind of reverse capitalization she could use to build her own regime. A third-grader with access to the internet could have told you that voting for a war authorization against Saddam and Iraq based on pure speculation with no substantial evidence would end up becoming a political death sentence when the world woke up from its consensual hallucination and realized it had been sleeping with the enemy. That third-grader could have told you the same thing about allowing telcos to data-mine Americans within an inch of their lives and liberties, or designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. Or suspending habeus corpus. Or...you get the point.

So when Hillary, according to the knobs at the Washington Post, seizes the reins of her own campaign in hopes of stopping Obama's runaway train, see that for what it is: A failure of leadership, not its opposite. Like her husband did during the 90s, she's capitulated too much to too many dumbasses, and now it's too late to look like someone you would want running the country. Can you imagine the headlines a few years from now if she won the White House? "Hillary Seizes Reins as War in Iran Goes Badly." Wonderful. Where do I not sign up?

Look, no one with any sense that I know of is arguing that Obama is not wired tightly with hedge funders and lobbyists and all the other poisonous elements of American society that help those in his position land the highest-profile job in the nation. There is zero way of escaping those influences if you want to become president. That, too, is reality. But Obama is not Clinton, just as Clinton is not Bush. He is new to us, and a reminder that the White House isn't a mere timeshare to be handed off to two political dynasties once every eight years. In other words, Obama is change, if only by virtue of the fact that he shares a different last name than the slackers who have ruined America over the last two decades. (Fucking A, has it been that long?)

So when Hillary gets on the stump and argues "That's not change!" after blasting one of Obama's missed or non-declarative votes, she might be right. Until one looks at her own voting record, that is, or what she has done, or more importantly, hasn't done during a crucial period in American history where the country really, really needed someone to do something. Anything. Whatever could be done, rather than floating a Gore-like defeatism ("Well, what can you do?") while actually emboldening those who shove razors beneath her, and our, fingernails.

So yeah, Hillary, it is much too little too late. We needed a change agent when your husband was president, or when Bush ran amok over the Bill of Rights. But you slept on the job, played it safe, and went along with the pillage. And now you're going to pay for it by losing the one job you thought someone should have just handed you, because of your last name.

That might have been your last mistake.

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Obama Takes Iowa

Good news for America: A state full of rural whites just gave its blessing to what may turn out to be America's first black president.

Now, I know Obama is the real deal, but this win is a smackdown for Clinton. She's been whining about everything except her disastrous voting record during the Bush administration, and that now shows in the ballot results. The fact that she and Edwards are in a dead heat sniffing Obama's fumes proves that this country can get its shit together when it has to.

But...there's always a but. It's one state. There are plenty to come. Then a nominee has to be picked. Then a VP, then a national campaign. Then the actual election.

Did I mention global warming? An economic recession? Peak oil? Resource wars? So-called terrorism? Any or all of those, and more, can monkeywrench Obama's run for the White House, at any given moment. This death march isn't over at all. It's just beginning.

Good luck, righteous dude whose name rhymes with Osama.

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Kunstler Peers Into 2008, Sees Clusterfuck

[Morphizm used to reprint James Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation columns on the regular in Web 1.0. But with 2.0, we have to be leaner and meaner, which means no splashy mag page. But you win, as Kunstler's words are the real deal. Everything else is just a frame. -- ST]

Forecast for 2008
[Jim Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation]
For the tiny fraction of people who actually pay attention to real events -- those, for instance, who know the difference between Narnia and Kandahar -- the final hours of 2007 leading into the fog-shrouded abyss of 2008 must induce great racking shudders of nausea. Has there ever been a society so exquisitely rigged for implosion? The whole listing, creaking, reeking edifice stands like one of those obsolete Las Vegas pleasure palaces awaiting a mere pulse of electrons to ignite a thousand explosive charges perfectly placed to blow away the structural supports.

The inertia holding everything together that I described in last year's forecast finally melted away at mid-summer and events began spooling out of control. Specifically, the massive tonnage of debt-backed securities circulating through the financial sector stood revealed for the mostly worthless bales of paper they truly are, and the investment community was left suspended in mid-air, grinning unconvincingly, like Wile E. Coyote thirteen yards beyond the edge of the mesa, with a sputtering grenade in each hand and an anvil tied to his ankles.

The whole second half of 2007 in the ranks of finance was a desperate rear-guard action to stave off the inevitable work-out. The fiasco over at Bear Stearns was instructive. Not long after two of their hedge funds blew up in August, the company announced that the funds had been chartered in the Cayman Islands and were therefore beyond the reach of official US legal machinery -- meaning, forget about lawsuits, you losers, chumps, and suckers who bought into our jerry-rigged scams... submit your complaints to the Tough Noogies desk and begone with you! This dodge might have benefited Bear Stearns in the short term, but in the long term it's hard to see why anybody would ever after cast one red cent in Bear Stearns' direction (in the life of this universe or several like it).

The summer's blow-ups were followed by truckloads, boatloads, and helicopter loads of rescue "liquidity" delivered through autumn by the Federal Reserve and other central banks in a continuing effort to allow investment houses, mortgage originators, reinsurance firms, and other companies trafficking in suspect paper to avoid declaring greater losses. Then the foreign sovereign wealth funds jumped in with five billion here, ten billion there, coming away with big chunks of ownership, but of what? Of companies with liabilities in excess of assets? Mostly, these desperation moves worked to paper over virtual bankruptcy through the crucial Christmas holiday, when yearly bonuses are doled out, which spared the boards of directors from having to explain why executives were lined up at the loading docks filling their Lincoln Navigators with stupid dope piles and knots of the shareholders' loot.

On the ground out in the heartland, in the anxiety-drenched, over-valued beige subdivisions of California and the ennui-saturated pastel McHousing tracts of Florida (not to mention the pathetic vinyl outlands of Cleveland and Detroit) a mighty keening welled forth as mortgage rates adjusted upward, and loans stopped "performing," and "for sale" signs failed to turn up buyers, and sheriff's deputies showed up with the rolls of yellow foreclosure tape, and actual ownership of the re-poed collateral entered a legal twilight zone somewhere north of the Florida State Teacher's Pension Fund and south of the Norwegian Municipal Councils' investment portfolios. What a mighty goddam mess was left out there by the boyz at the Wall Street genius desks, who engineered a magical system for eliminating risk from the capital markets -- only to see it leak back in from a million holes and seams and collapse the greatest bubble ever blown.

In the background, the US dollar sank to record lows against the euro and the pound sterling, the price of oil jumped 56 percent across the year just grazing the $100-a-barrel mark, drought punished the American southeast and Australia's grain belt, floods ravaged Texas and England, the polar ice shrank dramatically, but the US escaped any major hurricane action for a second year in a row.

Except for the murder of Mrs. Bhutto just a few days ago, the international scene was supernaturally quiet. Even Iraq fell into a torpor, variously attributed to utter exhaustion among the warring factions or to the US troop "surge" under general Petreus. Iran got a surprise clean bill-of-health on its nuclear bomb-making activity from America's own investigators, to the consternation of Mr. Bush & Co. The non-human denizens of Planet Earth didn't have such a good year. Honeybees, Yangtze river dolphins, and house sparrows took big hits, and Al Gore went up another suit size (as well as winning part of the Nobel Prize for his Powerpoint show). Which brings us finally to the heart of the matter: what's coming down the pike starting tomorrow, January 1, 2008?

Down and Dirty
I shudder to imagine how things will play out now as we turn the corner into 2008. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my little walnut brain can't imagine any scenario in which the US economy doesn't end up on a gurney in history's emergency room. It's not necessary to rehash the particulars of the Greenspan bubble-blowing disaster. The outcome is what concerns us. The web cables have been blazing for months with arguments as to what form the workout will take. There's little disagreement about the fundamentals at the housing end of things.

The housing market is in a death spiral. Eventually, the median price of a house will have to fall back to the median income, and it has a very long way to go, perhaps 50 percent. Until that happens, houses will be generally unsellable. At the same time, of course, an anxious finance sector will be offering fewer mortgages and on much more rigorous terms, so there will be far fewer qualified buyers even for distress sales. And the median income itself may soon not be what it has been. The whole equation has changed. As the painful re-pricing process plays out, many owners/sellers will be upside-down and under water in what they owe on the mortgage in relation to the value of the house they occupy. Quite a few may have lost jobs and incomes along the way. Most of these unfortunates would be better off just mailing in the keys and walking away. But in so far as these awful liabilities are peoples' homes, full of all their stuff and their childrens' stuff, not to mention being the repository of all their previously-imagined wealth, as well as their hopes and dreams, walking away is psychologically more easily said than done.

Surely in this election year, schemes will be advanced to bail out these poor suckers. But the beneficiaries of such a putative bail out would be far outnumbered by the home-owners still making mortgage payments, plus property taxes jacked up during the recent orgy by greedy public officials, and I don't think this majority would stand for the unfairness of seeing their neighbors simply let off the hook on their obligations. Perhaps the one thing that congress could do is change the insane law that treats foreclosures like some kind of bizzaro capital gain and piles additional huge tax demands on people who can no longer afford to buy their kids a frozen burrito. The issue of what to do about the dispossessed will be so politically red-hot that it could upset the election process --but I get a bit ahead of myself.

One thing the public doesn't get about the housing debacle is that it is not just the low point in a regular cycle -- it is the end of the suburban phase of US history. We won't be building anymore of it, and those employed in its development will have to find something else to do. Now, unfortunately the whole point of the housing bubble was not really to put X-million people in so many vinyl and chipboard boxes, but rather to ramp up a suburban sprawl-building industry as a replacement for America's dwindling manufacturing economy. This stratagem ran into the implacable force of Peak Oil, which not only puts the schnitz on America's whole Happy Motoring / suburban nexus, but implies a pervasive trend for contraction in everything from the daily distances we can travel to the the very core idea of regular economic growth per se -- at least in the way we have understood it through the age of industrial capital.
But to return to my point, something like 40 percent of all new jobs after the year 2000 were created in the final burst of suburban expansion -- everything from the excavators to the framers to the sheet-rockers, and then the providers of granite countertops, the sellers of appliances and furnishings, and cars to service the far-out new subdivisions, and so on. This is the end, therefore, not only of the production "home-builders," but perhaps everything from Crate and Barrel to WalMart, too, eventually.

By the way, the housing collapse was only one phase of a more generalized real estate debacle, because the commercial side of the business has also begun a nauseating slide into non-performance and equity destruction. In other words, we built way too many strip malls, power centers, and office parks. God knows what will happen to the owners of these white elephants, or the mortgage and lien holders of these things -- but as one wag remarked to me some years ago as we both gazed upon a forlorn abandoned strip mall outside of Tulsa, "...we don't need that many evangelical roller rinks...."

What happens out there on the housing market scene will certainly redound in banking and finance and whatever still constitutes the US economy generally. The fears and uncertainties surrounding all credit-backed tradable securities derive first from the millions of troubled home mortgages dangling slowly in the wind. These fears and uncertainties will multiply as defaults commence in commercial real estate, and desperate individuals next enter a wave of credit card default, all of it, too, securitized and sprinkled all over the world. None of this stuff has yet been priced into the public disclosures of the many troubled banks and bank-like companies holding it. Nor does anyone really know how this is affecting the hedge funds, and their staggering leveraged positions in things that are looking more and more like quicksand. I can't imagine that quite a few major banks will not collapse in the first half of 2008. It is hard to escape the conclusion that many hedge funds will also blow up, given the unsoundness of their counter-parties' positions, not to mention the frailty of the bond reinsurers. But the death of more than a few hedge funds could easily unwind the entire global finance system -- meaning a period of destructive chaos followed by a set of severely different institutional arrangements, with untold loss of imagined capital wealth along the way and big changes in everyday life. The world has never really been in a situation like this before and it is impossible to say what it might lead to. But there is no doubt that the American public has enjoyed an artificially high standard of living in relation to the value of what we actually produce -- fried chicken, hair extensions, and the Flaver Flav Show -- so the conclusion is pretty self-evident.

Others have said (and I concur) that 2008 will be the year that the issue of Peak Oil not only takes stage in the forefront of American politics, but pushes global warming aside as the most immediate threat to the "modern" way-of-life. There is every reason to believe that the world has arrived at its all-time oil production peak -- and some statisticians would even pin-point the exact moment as July 2006. Since then a few new and crucial story-lines have emerged to allow us to understand what is happening out there on the world oil scene.

One story-line is that only "demand destruction" among the world's poorest nations has kept the oil markets functioning "normally" among the OECD nations and the rising Asian players. Even so, oil priced in US dollars more than doubled in 2007. It remains to be seen whether demand destruction in a wobbling US economy -- with the suburban builders crippled -- will keep oil prices from jumping into the uncharted territory beyond $100-a-barrel. But two other forces are in operation now.

One is the growing oil export problem, soon to be a crisis. It now appears that exports, in nations with surplus oil to sell, are going down at an even steeper rate than production declines. Why? They are using more of their own oil. The population is growing robustly. The Saudi Arabians are building the world’s largest aluminum smelter and many chemical factories. This takes a lot of oil. Russia, another big exporter, saw its car sales jump by 50 percent in 2007. Mexico is depleting so rapidly, and using so much more of its own oil, that it might be out of the export game altogether in three years. That will be bad news for the US, since Mexico is tied with Saudi Arabia as America's number two leading source of oil imports. Remember, the US now imports close to three-quarters of all the oil we use.

The second new factor on the Peak oil scene is "oil nationalism." It is prompting countries like Norway and Russia to husband more of their own resources as the awareness hits that they are past peak and might want to keep their own motors humming further into the future. Oil surplus nations are also trending more toward selling their oil on the basis of long-term contracts with favored customers rather than just auctioning the stuff off on the futures market. This makes oil a much more important element in geopolitical power politics. Note that the US may not enjoy "favored customer" standing among many of these nations.

Matt Simmons, the leading investment banker to the oil industry, predicted at a major conference in October that the US is much closer to encountering a problem with chronic spot shortages of oil (and gasoline, of course) than the public realizes, and Simmons says that this supply problem will be extremely disruptive in every imaginable way -- economically, politically, and socially. Most of the commentators I take seriously see the price of oil oscillating in 2008 between $80 and $160-a-barrel. Simmons says Americans will keep sucking up the price increases, but they will probably freak out over spot shortages.

I have no idea how presidential election politics will play out in 2008. It must be obvious that so many nasty pitfalls lie out there in the months ahead that something's got to shake up the current scripted mummery among the contenders. The current batch of candidates will soon find their story-lines and pre-cooked messages out-of-date as the nation faces crises in finance and energy (at least). Given the uneventful geopolitical scene of the past 18 months (since the Hezbollah-Israel War and up to the murder of Mrs. Bhutto in Pakistan), odds are that the US will have more rather than less trouble from the rest of the world in 2008-- especially if our own financial recklessness trips up the global economy.

Back in the early days of George W. Bush, even before 9/11, I used to joke with my friends that Bill Clinton would return as the Emperor Bill the First. The joke doesn't seem so funny anymore with Hillary off and running. I never liked the way she muscled her way into a US senate seat -- sending the message, in essence, that there was not one genuine New York resident qualified for the job. But there is so much more about her I dislike now, starting with her presumption of dynastic entitlement to the annoyingly phony way she nods her head (like one of those old "drinky-bird" toys) to put across the idea that she is a fabulous "listener." I write this a few days before the Iowa caucuses and then the New Hampshire primary. New York's Mayor Bloomberg is suddenly making noises again about entering the race as an independent. That might lead to a situation as fractured as the one in 1860 that saw a multi-party scuffle send Lincoln into office (or the election of 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt made a credible run on the independent Bull Moose line). At the moment, I'd like to see both John Edwards and Barack Obama roll on. The mere thought of a president Huckabee gives me the chilblains, and the rest of the Republican pack I would not want to have as my county supervisor.

In any case, whoever ends up in the oval office will preside over one king-hell of a clusterfuck. In the immortal words of TV's erstwhile "Mr. T," I pity da fool who gets elected into this mess. There will be a whole continent full of bankrupt, re-poed, and idle former WalMart shoppers, many of them with half of their skin tattooed and many of that bunch all revved up to "roll heavy and gun up" against the folks who screwed them.

Which leads me to my penultimate observation of the moment: 2008 will be the year that celebrity wealth goes into hiding. A land full of people crying into their foreclosure notices will take a dim view of the Donald Trumps and P. Diddys luxuriating out there and may come looking for scalps -- though in the case of Mr. Trump they'll be sorry they woke up the wolverine that lives on his head. Basically, though, I'm not kidding. Conspicuous displays of wealth will be so "out" that Mr. Diddy might take to club-hopping in a 1999 Mazda. Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton may have to double-up living in a minuteman missile silo to keep the angry mobs of fans-turned-vengeful-berserkers away.

Okay, my final comment. After being chastised endlessly about mis-calling the DOW in 2006 (I said 4000), I have learned my lesson about making numerical predictions for the stock markets. So let's just say there is no fucking way that the DOW, the NASDAQ, and the S & P will not end the year 2008 absolutely on their asses. The charade of permanent prosperity based on getting something for nothing is over. That sound you hear out there is reality knocking on the door. It has been standing out in the cold for a long time and it is not happy with us.

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Dirtying Hands With David Cronenberg

Cinema auteur David Cronenberg needs little in the way of introduction. So I will merely state that my feature and full interview with the legendary director went up on Wired.com recently. And it was good.

Cronenberg Drifts From Tech Horror, but Shocks Remain
David Cronenberg has cooked up some of cinema's most compelling visions of technology's sometimes-violent interface with the human body. From his first full-length feature, 1975's Shivers, to Eastern Promises, recently released on DVD, the Canadian director has steadily stripped away the layers of the human condition to reveal its sexual and social dependencies on both the organic and inorganic. He's also creeped out millions... MORE @ WIRED

Body Language: An Interview With David Cronenberg
"A gun is not intimate, you know? Even if you're standing three feet away from someone, you can abstract that person, who is at a real distance from you. But if you have to stick a knife in someone, you're going to feel their blood, you're going to feel their sinews, and you're going to smell their breath. It's a very intimate thing, and you have to be the certain kind of person who can and would do that. In a way, it's actually scarier and has much more impact.

Think of it: We're in a very bizarre era right now where snuff porn that never really existed before is now available, via Muslim extremists mostly. But if you want to see beheadings or stonings, you can see them any time you want on your computer, which brings it close to home. And it's low tech too: Not the internet, but a woman being stoned to death. What could be more primitive that that? And you can see it if you want. It's quite scary and strange, but also very intimate"... MORE @ WIRED

Meet the new flesh. Same as the old flesh.

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Guiliani, Dictator in Waiting?

From Morphizm pal and sometimes blogger ZenKat: "Hey dude, thought you might have some fun with this one. Perhaps a game of 'What Nut Jobs Make Up Your Base?' Happy new year! Wait, perhaps 2008 isn't going to be that happy after all?"

Perhaps he's right. Here's Talking Points Memo on John Deady, the co-chair of New Hampshire Veterans for Rudy Guiliani. He's ass-backwards, but scary. Just like Guiliani:

In the earlier interview with The Guardian, Deady said of Muslims: "We need to keep the feet to the fire and keep pressing these people until we defeat or chase them back to their caves or in other words get rid of them."

When I asked Deady to elaborate on his suggestion that we need to "get rid" of Muslims, Deady said:

"When I say get rid of them, I wasn't necessarily referring to genocide. What I was referring to is, stand up to them every time they stick up their heads and attack us. We can't afford to say, `We'll try diplomacy.' They don't respond to it. If you look into Islamic tradition, a treaty is only good for five years. We're not dealing with a rational mindset here. We're dealing with madmen."

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Alan Moore's Homeland is Finally Ready for Alan Moore

Good news from Morphizm pal and Top Shelf publisher Chris Staros: Alan Moore's dense sexual tome Lost Girls is finally going to be released in the UK. Which is where Moore has been living since forever. Which is the site of many of his postmodern reimaginations. Which is the country that has been benefiting from his massive reputation as the finest comics writer ever to take a breath. You're welcome, you laggard bastards. Here's Chris:

On January 1st, Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s LOST GIRLS will finally be released in the United Kingdom and European Union. FAIR WARNING: Get your copies quick, as the limited supply will most likely disappear within a few weeks.

For more on Alan and Lost Girls, check out my huge Morphizm interview with the brainiac here:

We Are All Complicit: An Interview With Alan Moore
[Scott Thill, Morphizm]
Enter his latest tome Lost Girls, a collaboration with his longtime partner and new spouse Melinda Gebbie. An intertextual erotic tale reimagining the familiar narratives of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Wizard of Oz -- with all the sex, loving and otherwise, put back into them where they originated and belong -- Lost Girls promises to stir the family values shit harder and longer than anything Moore has ever written. Mainly because he set out to save pornography from itself, and used Western culture's master narratives of budding maturity to make it happen. No squares allowed...
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Here also is a indie doc on Moore that I dug up on Tube. Anyone have a torrent I can peek at before bothering the director? Send it on!

VIDEO: THE MINDSCAPE OF ALAN MOORE

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Owning Up to Social Nets

Greetings Morphizm-lings. Especially if you arrive here via MySpace. Or Facebook. Or LinkedIn. Or. My latest filing for WireTap explains. -- ST]

Who Owns Whom? Social Networking's Corporate Roots
[Scott Thill, WireTap]
From Howard Dean to Barack Obama, Ron Paul and Hillary Clinton, online social networking has become a treasure trove of connectivity, cash and exposure. But who's buying whom? Whether it's MySpace's cozy relationship with Fox News, Facebook's privacy invasions or LinkedIn's reported quest for corporate funding, the brave new world of online friendship has become, like its real-time partner in the offline world, a tangled web of competing loyalties.

And, as usual, it's consumers, particularly youth, who are caught in the middle.

Take MySpace for example, which started out as an improvement over Friendster, a similar social networking site of the early 2000s that was too clunky to survive its leaner, meaner counterpart. After spending a few years as a property of eUniverse and its founder Brad Greenspan, MySpace was sold in 2005 for $580 million to Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., the tabloid empire behind such right-wing phenomena as Fox News, the New York Postand the Weekly Standard, and the third-largest media conglomerate in the world. The buyout placed MySpace, the home of 200 million users, firmly in the grasp of Fox Interactive Media, which also counts entertainment aggregate IGN and Beliefnet, the largest online faith and spirituality network, among its many holdings.

"MySpace.com [is one] of the Web's hottest properties and resonate[s] with the same audiences that are most attracted to Fox's news, sports and entertainment offerings," Murdoch wrote in a press release after the takeover. "We see a great opportunity to combine the popularity of ... MySpace with our existing online assets."

While Murdoch's myriad assets aren't all steeped in propaganda, some of them are, including Fox News which, unlike most other news organizations, makes you dumber the more you watch it. Columbia University's Project for Excellence in Journalism found in May 2007 that of the three major cable networks, including MSNBC, CNN and Fox News, only the latter spent as much or more time on the Anna Nicole Smith scandal than it did on the war in Iraq or even the 2008 presidential race. It spent little to no time on the U.S. attorneys firing scandal, and not just because Fox News' Mara Liasson called Attorney General Alberto Gonzales -- who circumvented the Geneva Convention guaranteeing habeas corpus -- "a good choice" for the job that Gonzales eventually lost because of corruption.

As the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy report put it back in 2003, two years before Murdoch acquired MySpace, "Those who primarily watch Fox News are significantly more likely to have misperceptions."

But that penchant for confusion didn't stop sociopolitical and environmental justice groups like Greenpeace, American Civil Liberties Union, Food Not Bombs and scores more from logging onto MySpace and setting up proxy sites. Some jokers even set up fake sites for Murdoch himself, which were soon pulled down by Fox Interactive. The best one still resides at Slate.com, where Murdoch's bio ominously but correctly explains: "It's MySpace -- you just lurk in it"...

MORE @ WIRETAP

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The End Times Near: Tila Tequila Tops MTV

I have seen ten minutes of this show. I couldn't take much more. Even in minute doses over several weeks. It is a formulaic distraction from things that matter, interested in excess when the world could use more of less. And it has zero to do with music. Which is probably why it is ruling MTV:

Tequila's `Shot at Love' is toast of MTV [AP]
MTV series development guru Tony DiSanto points to the show's original will-she-choose-a-man-or-a-woman format as the main reason for its success.

"It's one of those shows where you never know what's going to happen next," DiSanto says. "I think there's an innate curiosity in wondering what is going to make Tila decide between a man and a woman. It makes for a compelling piece of programming that you just can't take your eyes off of."

Wrong, dude. I can take my eyes off of it pretty easily. And my ears, and fingers.

But, in times of terror and war, it seems I'm somewhat alone in that respect. At least among the youth demographic. And since they're the ones killing and dying in Iraq, I guess I shouldn't complain.

Wait, I just figured it out. Starship Troopers was a documentary. That explains everything.

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Exponology: Con-cen-tra-tion!

The irony is intense. The hotter it gets, the more our distractions mount. Baseball. Steroids. Dude, tell me something I don't know.

What some might not know is that climate change will be the only game in town soon. As a follow-up to our previous Exponology entry, Morphizm has this bit of news from Bali:

2007 data confirms warming trend [BBC]
The UK's Hadley Centre and University of East Anglia conclude that globally, this year ranks as the seventh warmest. The 11 warmest years in this set have all occurred within the last 13 years. For the northern hemisphere alone, 2007 was the second warmest recorded.

That's some concentration. Imagine what happens when those holdout percentages cave in. Now imagine it snowballing. And it might. England might enter another ice age. Cali will enter permanent drought. I can hear the borderlines shifting as I write.

They smell like the future.

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Why We Are Totally Screwed

UPDATE: Morphizm's pals at The Huffington Post have syndicated this post there. Dig in, and join the discussion!

I'm not the only one who thinks that the Bush administration has been playing with the markets ever since 9/11, when a series of terrorist attacks destroyed New York's nerve center for international finance, the World Trade Center. And if you think it's suspicious that planes nailed the towers while missing other empty symbols of American power like the Washington Monument or the White House, you're not alone. But that is for another, more controversial essay.

Suffice it to say that the Bush administration may seem incompetent, but they are fundraisers par excellence. It's certainly no mistake that the Fed lowered their funds rate to practically nothing under Bush and Greenspan, paving the way for the Great Hedge Funds Fuckover of the New Millennium, which I covered in depth for AlterNet here and here. And now that Greenspan's successor Ben Bernanke has come out and cut another quarter-point off, expect the trend to continue. The Fed's action and Bush's recent plan to bail out subprimers share something significant in common: They will have zero effect of the problems the American economy faces hurtling into 2008. Just in time for the election!

Of course, I could give a long, Thillian (new word!) spiel on why Bush's subprime plans sucks ass, but why? I've got a stone-cold economist and a brainiac doom prophet to handle that for me. And you. Thank the Big Bang for the internet:

Spirit of the Season
[Jim Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation]
"The Hope Now Alliance is just a political sham. The purpose of it is not to save the hapless occupants of over-leveraged houses, but first to buy a little more time so that the worker bees in the financial industry can justify awarding each other multi-million-dollar Christmas bonus packages, and second, to postpone the 'workout' of all this bad investment as far into the future as possible...Maybe all the players really know that keeping the ship afloat until Christmas is really the best they can hope for. Christmas means a lot in this country. It represents all Americans' old hope that miracles can happen. Bums turn out to be Santa Claus. Old curmudgeons are transformed overnight into loving uncles. Angels save us when we jump despairingly into icey torrents. And Goldman Sachs executives pass out multi-million-dollar checks to the wizards who 'innovated' an ingenious way for the rest of their country to commit financial suicide." MORE

Henry Paulson's Priorities
[Paul Krugman, Common Dreams]
"Mr. Paulson’s attempt to help investors, while doing little or nothing for distressed and defrauded borrowers, might make sense if his plan would reduce investor losses enough to seriously improve the overall financial situation. But only a small fraction of subprime borrowers will qualify for relief, and many of these borrowers will eventually face foreclosure anyway. So the plan is unlikely to reduce overall mortgage-related losses by more than a few percent, at most - not enough to make any real difference to financial stability. Indeed, interest-rate spreads that have been signaling a crisis of confidence in the financial system didn’t narrow at all when the plan was announced. Still, you might say that the Paulson plan is better than nothing. But the relevant alternative isn’t nothing; it’s a plan that - like Barney Frank’s proposal - would actually help working families. And that’s what the administration is trying to avoid." MORE

As long-winded as I am, I am also in love with short answers. And they are always around, even in labyrinthine mechanisms like CDOs and SIVs and other acronyms for upper-class scams. So let's be frank about this: The subprime trend was built to sell heavily structured loans to suckers in order to skim bonuses off the top, buy mansions for the suits who retire comfortably while the rest of the economy, and its suckers, suffered the negative billions in blowback. That is it, that is all.

Bush's plan to fix the problem amounts to little more than dampening the impact for the suits, while screwing their victims. Why would he want to help people without any money to begin with, especially after he asked them to go back to shopping after they saw planes and bodies fall from the sky? He knew then, as many of us did, that the global economy had changed to the extreme, and that the attacks on 9/11 were vast evidence for that transformation.

But the lone gunman theory works nicely when people just want to cruise the mall, and pretend that oil (or ice, for that matter) will be around forever. That those who supply them with "the gas," as it was called in the great sci-fi dysoptia The Road Warrior, are not the same people that bankrolled their doom.

No, Bush and Paulson, once the head of Goldman Sachs -- who managed to escape the subprime collapse with nary a scrape -- are no good at fixing things. They are only good at fucking them up. For the suckers, that is. For everyone else? They're gold, baby. Black and otherwise.

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Karl Rove, Master Hyperrealist

UPDATE: My pals at the Huffington Post have syndicated this rant. Go there and join in the discussion!

I must admit I have some admiration for the fat ass. He went from a student Republican wonk to the architect of the most transparent coup America has ever witnessed. A direct-mail operative with no life to a presidential adviser responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of lives. Say what you want about the guy, but please stop calling him stupid. Same goes for his obsessive love interest, George W. Bush. These monsters are not stupid. They are brilliant. They've played and mastered the game that could drown us all.

I know I have been crowing about hyperreality a lot lately, and I apologize to those who are getting tired of the term. But when Karl Rove goes on Charlie Rose to mind-wipe America by insisting that Congress led the march to occupy Iraq and secure its oil reserves, I'm pulled back into hyperreality's vertiginous vortex without resistance. It is everywhere, kind of like The Force, or Jesus. It's the webwork we're caught in, all of us. There is no escaping it, especially if you live in the reality-based community.

After all, it was most likely Karl Rove himself who told Ron Suskind the following:

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That’s not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Creating reality? I thought reality created all of us -- before I read Jean Baudrillard or Aldous Huxley or Karl Rove or any number of hyperrealists who understand that perception is reality, as marketers and advertisers have been telling us for decades. And while Suskind was right to dredge up the ghost of the Enlightenment and empiricism, he forgot to mention that the former is just a word that fell apart under the weight of class and resource wars, while the latter is incomplete for our purposes. Empiricism, after all, can only get you so far, because you can't see or experience everything. And if you're relying on those who can experience more than you, in the end, you're merely relying on their word.

And we know how that usually turns out.

From the Declaration of Independence establishing equal rights for everyone except women, slaves or the Native Americans we nearly exterminated to control North America to the Constitution and Bill of Rights which still to this day cannot establish our total access to habeus corpus, free speech or any other rights, we are at the mercy of language and those who manipulate it for our lives. And Karl Rove? The dude knows how to manipulate with force.

He understands that, decades down the line, the party line on the Bush administration will blur, as Americans, who have a hard enough time remembering what happened to them yesterday, forget the intricacies and details of geopolitical dilemmas past. This is, of course, why America could get behind an invasion and occupation of Iraq, or the political assassination of Saddam Hussein, a man we placed in power for the specific purpose of controlling the country's oil reserves and murderously pacifying its populace, who themselves are drunk on thousands of years of tribal differences that amount to nothing. It is why they could forget, barely two years after 9/11, that Saddam had nothing to do with it at all. Or why they could forget that the Saudis, who bankrolled and mostly comprised the terrorist group that attacked us, were our real enemies.

It is also why Rove's Office of Special Counsel spent much time erasing every incriminating piece of email he could with the help of a group called, hilariously enough, Geeks On Call. The nerds gave his hard drive a level-seven mind wipe, I kid you not, which is what Rove and his pals have spent the last two decades giving an all-too-willing American populace, who woke up too late in the procedure to stop it. By the time their polled dissatisfaction caught up to "reality," Rove's hyperreality had already replaced it.

And it will again, if Charlie Rose is any indication. The media, to mangle McLuhan, is the message, Rove understands, and it doesn't matter how large the lie is. All that matters is that the media repeats it, over and over again. Eventually, through the powers of language, apathy and consumption, the lie will become truth.

So yes, hyperreality is here to stay for the reality-based community. The exponentially increasing ubiquity of the internet and media in American life mandates it. We unplugged from the real world and jacked into MTV's Real World a long, long time ago. Revisionists like Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch may not be anything new -- the Germans had Goebbels, the Romans had Nero, the Catholics have the Pope -- but in the information age, their reliance on erasure and drive-wiping is more than manipulative. It is inevitable.

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Tomorrow Science Today

Trudging down the Hyperhighway. Hard to post. Must. Finish. Book.

Must. Finish. Book.

Speaking of, Hyperhighway to Hell has an optmistic third act. It's about the possibility ready to explode in our new millennium. It's called From Terror to Terra. She blinded me with science.

Tomorrow Science Today
[Scott Thill, Wiretap]
From wireless power to nanosuits that can turn anyone into Spidey and perhaps even to mobile solar, we're on the cusp of massive scientific breakthroughs all over the place. If we can only get past peak oil and a Bush administration hell-bent on war with Iran, we may find solutions to the harrowing future climate change is bringing to our doorstep. Here are ten of them, from most needed to least believable...
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