5:14 pm CST
“If you're reading this on the Internet, the FBI may be spying on you at this very moment …”
Homeland Security States of America

4:49 pm CST
The Great Dumbing Down:
U.S. students say press freedoms go too far

PNAC always gets what it wants:
PNAC Calling for a Draft?

Operation Paperclip:
CIA Refuses to Release Nazi Papers

11:58 am CST
Sunday Morning News

US jets 'flying over Iran to spot potential targets'

PNAC Letter to Congress on Increasing U.S. Ground Forces

Coca Cola Buys Coca Leaves from Peru

NAFTAtional ID card reintroduced

8:54 am CST
Gore Vidal: Iran next, then who?

8:52 am CST
DREAM: It’s the 1800s. My wife and I attend a show at an opera house. George W. Bush is the featured performer. He stands on the stage facing the audience, waving a conductor’s wand, and singing. He doesn’t know the words to the song, so each line has to be fed to him by someone off-stage speaking in German, whereupon he sings the line in English, smiles broadly, and the audience applauds; then he is fed another line, and so on. At the end of his performance, he receives a standing ovation. I turn to my wife and say, “Isn’t this surreal?”

8:43 am CST
If a way could be found to turn juice rewards into cash, this could open up a whole new market for Playboy Magazine:

Researcher: Male monkeys will pay (give up juice rewards) to ogle pictures of female monkey bottoms

3:21 pm CST
Russian officers 'helped in plot to seize Beslan school'

3:20 pm CST
Commentary

Seymour Hersh is on Fire

Gore Vidal on Bush's Inaugural Address: "The Most Un-American Speech I've Ever Heard"

3:17 pm CST
Media Whores

Third Columnist Paid by Bush Administration

Shilling for Bush

Mockingbird: The Subversion of the Free Press by the CIA

1:55 pm CST
DREAM: I’m attending a party of cartoonists in San Diego. As a gift for the hostess, I’ve created a sculpture: a square globe (like the Bizarro World in the Silver Age-era Superman comics) with one-word slogans such as “THINK!” written on the sides. The globe rests on the tip of the cross carried by a garishly painted statuette of Christ wearing the crown of thorns stumbling to his knees on Dr. Frankenstein’s lab table. I am holding the sculpture in one hand, eating an apple with the other, and explaining the sculpture to my daughter, when the hostess and her father walk up. We discuss the sculpture and art in general. The hostess’ father holds up a painting he says is his favorite—a pointillist painting of a boy and his parents; the boy has a leopard’s face. But, when the painting is tilted, the leopard’s face becomes a boy’s face. Tilt it back and it’s a leopard’s face again. The leopard boy is mischievous, I learn. As a prank, he mixes up some chemicals in a bowl and hides the bubbling concoction in the back of a church. It smells like raw sewage, only worse. People holding babies think they’ve got one hell of a diaper to change and hurry out of the church. Soon everyone is leaving. The incident strikes me as funny. Later I relate it to a woman. We’re lying in bed in a large, rambling house. The house is similar to Grandma Walker’s house in Mineral Wells, also like the house on North Main in Cleburne in 1964; there are rooms in the farther reaches of the house that are never used, rooms I am afraid to enter alone (reminding me of the way I felt about that strange, unused front room with the dusty furniture in old Mrs. Jones’ house on Truman Street in Arlington in 1973—a suspicion that the room was haunted). Curiosity conquers my fear, however; I explore the rooms, opening one door after another, till at last I open a door that takes me outside. There, in the autumn twilight, I see a long wall, like the Berlin Wall or Great Wall of China, but made of steel, stretching into the distance. I see myself walking along the top of the wall, lonesome, and follow myself, thinking about a story I want to write. I grow doubtful about the story. Meanwhile night has fallen and the wall has come to an end and I am walking through a vast lit-up complex of tennis courts, baseball diamonds, and soccer fields, towards a huge coliseum. I enter the coliseum and begin sliding down an artificial ski slope. I go faster and faster, enjoying it at first, then hit a ramp at the bottom of the slope and go shooting upwards into the air, terrified …

7:49 pm CST
When I was 9-10 years old, I was always drawing. Sometimes I drew some pretty gruesome things: monsters eating people, people getting their brains blown out, rotting corpses. But I grew out of it. Not drawing—I never grew out of that. But, in time, I grew out of drawing the gruesome-for-its-own-sake. Oh, even in adulthood, I might still draw something gruesome, but not simply to titillate, or to appeal to the dark side of human nature, but rather, to underscore a serious point I hoped to make.

In other words, drawing some morbid or vicious scene when I was young did not mean that I was actually going to act on such a thought. If anything, it meant that I was dealing with my dark side in a healthy way—sublimating it through art, as a psychoanalyst might say—and therefore was less likely to commit some atrocity in real life. Furthermore, this process of allowing my young mind to create a dream on paper, no matter how horrible the manifest content might seem to a more mature mind, eventually led to a career of creating dreams on paper to communicate something useful to my fellow human beings.

But, were I a 9-10-year-old child now and drawing such things, my teacher and other “authorities” might not be as tolerant as they were when I was young. No, they might react like the authorities in Florida who arrested two boys (one 9, the other 10) for drawing some stick figures depicting a classmate being stabbed and hung . Yes, arrested them—took them from the school in handcuffs—and slapped them with felony charges! Unbelievable.

Now, I never drew a classmate being stabbed and hung. But, to tell you the truth, if it had occurred to me to draw such an unspeakable thing, I might have done it—especially later in junior high when I was tormented by bullies. But I didn’t do it. Instead, I used my fists to deal with the bullies, and as a result suffered many an unnecessary black eye and bloody nose—not to mention a paddling from the principal—for defending myself. It would have been better not to fight—better to walk away with my tail tucked between my legs and, as soon as I was at a safe distance, take out my No. 2 pencil and a piece of notebook paper, and draw my tormenter being stabbed and hung, or disemboweled, or burnt alive, or subjected to some other hideous fate—and snicker over the drawing later with my buddies. But no, I was not that clever—at least not yet. It would be a few more years before I would learn to use my art to settle a score. (And, brother, when I learned that trick, I learned how to exact the sweetest revenge.)

As soon as I wrote the above phrase “a paddling from the principal,” a question came back to me that I have been asking since I was 13 years old:

Why was it okay for the principal to use violence to punish me for using violence to defend myself against violence?

But that question is not relevant today; in fact, it is almost quaint. For corporal punishment is not practiced much in today’s public schools. Today, instead of paddling a child, the principal calls the cops and has the child arrested, handcuffed, and charged with a felony—and often for minor offenses. Which prompts this question:

Why is it okay to arrest and handcuff a child for drawing some stick figures performing a violent act, but not okay to arrest and handcuff the “neo-cons” who advocate torture and murder in the real world?

8:00 pm CST
Neo-Con Torture Rhetoric Alarmingly Mirrors Nazi Counterparts

Gore Vidal on Bush Cheney Conspiracy

Did New York Orchestrate The Asian Tsunami?

7:55 pm CST
Media Whores:

Second Columnist Got Money from Bush Administration by E&P Staff

Johnny Carson, Dead CIA Shill

7:35 pm CST
Michael Ruppert continues to be a divisive figure. Several weeks ago he angered many by demanding everyone unquestioningly accept the official verdict in Gary Webb’s death. And now this:

Ruppert: 9/11 Cause No Longer Useful Political Tool

As might be expected, this has drawn a harsh response:

Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson: 9/11 Truth Movement Only Just Beginning

Paul Fassa: It's Time to Ignore Michael Ruppert

Victor Thorn: Mike Ruppert: 9-11 Saboteur

Kurt Nimmo: The Problem with Mike Ruppert

LibertyForum.org: Who is the Mysterious Michael Ruppert?

8:32 pm CST
Population Control:

Gates foundation injects 750 million dollars for infant vaccination

Vaccine Dangers

8:20 pm CST
Earlier today you may have downloaded this site and (depending on your browser) seen the screen fill up with html code. This was due to an experiment on my part. Needless to say, the experiment failed and will not be repeated. Thanks to all who alerted me to the problem.

8:22 am CST
Taser Report

Police Taser Handcuffed Anti-Bush Protester

Policing force: Tasers potent and controversial

7:51 am CST
"We can expect to find good contemporary copies of known masterpieces and to recover works lost to humanity for two millennia. A treasure of greater cultural importance can scarcely be imagined ..."

Focus: The search for the lost library of Rome