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Tuesday, December 27, 2005

American Musical Culture Is Dying, As Mariah Carey Ties Elvis as #2 With A 17th #1 Single,

Link

Does God hate America? Has Hell frozen over? Why did this happen?

Apparently, the collective American musical "taste" has devolved to a point where a lollipop-pop audio-porn queen can be one of the most popular singers (I refuse to use the term "artist" here, as some have) in our history. That is, as shown by sales figures, the latest Mariah Carey single, "Don't Forget About Us", reached #1 on the Billboard Top Ten. This (her 17th #1 single) ties her with Elvis as the number two owner of #1 hits.
But Carey's brand of pap and froufrou isn't alone on the Billboard list. This is not an isolated event. Let's look at the rest of the Billboard top 5:

Chris Brown "Run It!"
Nelly "Grillz"
D4L "Laffy Taffy"
The Pussycat Dolls "Stickwitu"
(yes that is spelled accurately, I know..I know...it should be three words...I know)

All of the top 5 singles this week completely suck. All lack origionality, musical and lyrical depth, correct grammar and/or spelling, and most lack talent. I'm not just dissing pop music for the sake of dissing pop music. I have a point here. Or rather, I hope I do.

Don't get me wrong, I love music. And there is a plethora of good, if not even GREAT music out there. Of course, you've probably never heard most of it. Probably, you've never even heard of most of the artists, groups, etc. involved. Now I'm not saying this is your fault. Most people don't have time to dig around the net, read mediocre at best low-circulation music magazines and what not, I do. I am a broke, lazy, apathetic, worthless human being. But most of you trust radio stations, MTV, VH1 to filter through the flotsom and allow the good music to come to the surface. After all, that is the essence of Capitalism, free market theory, the best rising above the rest. Or, perhaps, it isn't.

To be continued...

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Sunday, December 25, 2005

Short Note

Just wanted everyone to know that I'm still alive and kicking. I'm actually working on a little writing piece about Mariah Carey, music, capitalism, and God hating America. Sounds fun right? Yeah, thought so. So stay tuned my friend, my friend.

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Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Happy RamaHannaKwansMas!!


You know how I'm all multi-cultural and whatnot.

So yeah, people are starting to vote now in the "BIG" election in Iraq. Do any of you really believe that the stitched together caliphates, sheikdoms, and feifdoms that make up Iraq will really be knitted together under this new "democracy" for any meaningful amount of time? I'm just curious.


RM

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Sunday, December 04, 2005

The Man Who Sold The War (sung to the tune of "the man who sold the world" [the Nirvana cover version])

I can't vouch for this whole article 100%, so do your own homework, but most of it rings true to me. Below I'm posting a link to the article and a fairly long excerpt.

This article was first published in Rolling Stone, though I don't know why. I didn't know anyone even read that crap anymore. On with the snow.


The Man Who Sold the War

Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war

By JAMES BAMFORD



The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.

On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.

The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon.

Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.

"They're very closemouthed about what they do," says Kevin McCauley, an editor of the industry trade publication O'Dwyer's PR Daily. "It's all cloak-and-dagger stuff."

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Bill O'Reilly's Enemies Lists

I've always found Bill to be a tad fascist. Now he even has Enemies Lists. Of course he doesn't call them that, but I do, because I'm fair and balanced.

Here's the first (a link):

A Message from Bill: Media Operations that Traffic in Defamation


The following media operations have regularly helped distribute defamation and false information supplied by far left websites:
- New York Daily News


- The St. Petersburg Times


- MSNBC


These are the worst offenders. In the months to come, we expect to add more names to this list. We recommend that you do not patronize these operations and that advertisers do the same. They are dishonest and not worth your time and money.



And by "defamation", he means "stuff that conflicts with what he preaches".

Here is his now famous "Cowards List":

O'Reilly's "coward" list

On the October 25 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly unveiled his list of invited guests who he said will not appear on his television or radio programs. O'Reilly explained that the list contains "people who are afraid to answer any questions." Earlier in the show, O'Reilly described the list as "people who will not stand up and answer questions about their bomb-throwing statements," adding "You have a moral obligation to do that. If you don't, you're a coward."

The list:

Dick Cheney (Vice president. O'Reilly acknowledged, "He must be sick of getting our calls.")
Michael Chertoff (Secretary of Homeland Security)
Jeb Bush (Governor of Florida)
Samuel Bodman (Secretary of Energy)
Tom DeLay (Representative, R-TX)
Howard Dean (chairman of the Democratic National Committee. According to O'Reilly, "the biggest coward in the country")
Cindy Sheehan (anti-war protester, founding member of Gold Star Families for Peace)
John Kerry (Senator, D-MA)
Brad King (state attorney for Florida's 5th Judicial Circuit)
Jon Corzine (Senator, D-NJ)
Jane Fonda (actress)
Jesse Jackson (founder, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition)
Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Senator, D-DE)
George Pataki (Governor of New York. O'Reilly, "He's so unsure of himself on TV.")
Sheldon Silver (Speaker of the New York State Assembly)
Al Gore (former vice president)
Bill Clinton (former president)
Andy Rooney (journalist, syndicated columnist, regular contributor to CBS' 60 Minutes)
Richard Clarke (former counterterrorism adviser to presidents Clinton and Bush)
Roger Mosey (Director of BBC Sport, former head of TV News at BBC News)
American Civil Liberties Union (O'Reilly: "Anybody from the ACLU is afraid.")
National Public Radio (O'Reilly: "The executives over there are afraid.")
Oil and gas industry (O'Reilly: "The heads of the oil companies are afraid.")
Bill Moyers (journalist. O'Reilly: "biggest mouth in town")
Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (Governor of Louisiana)
Ward Churchill (Professor of ethnic studies, the University of Colorado at Boulder)
Barbra Streisand (Singer, actress. O'Reilly: "All of these Hollywood people ... I mean, they're way out of control there.")



Anywho, thought you'd enjoy that.

Finally, just to piss Bill off, Happy Holidays!!!

(but to all my peeps be down for whatever, Merry Christmas!)

RM

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