AN SMS, THE PANIC AND THE JOKE OF MODERN DEMOCRACY

So this guy sends an SMS to a bunch of people on the jolly little island of Cyprus claiming that there is going to be a second "haircut" on deposits and the probability of (yet another) bank going bankrupt.
The panic button is stricken and the jolly primates rush to withdraw deposits and stash them in their pillow cases. I swear, should you come across pillows in Cypriot households, you'd go :
"Man, these people must have huge heads! Imagine the brains that nest in them skulls!"

The problem does not only lie with the ruling few who take advantage of the malleability of a system like Democracy by manipulating it to fit their needs.
What about the hapless citizens? The ultimate goal of Democracy is for people to create their own fate.
How can these dimwits expect to take their fate in their own hands if the mere mass distribution of an SMS has them running for cover. This ignorance and this gullibility shows people who refuse to better themselves and try to get a better understanding of the world they live in, branding them incapable to implement, uphold and sustain democracy…

  "These blind slaves are told they are 'free' and 'highly educated'
    as they march behind signs that would cause any medieval peasant
    to run screaming away from them in panic-stricken terror."



 
    "Secret Societies & Psychological Warfare"

                                    (Michael A. Hoffman II)



The mass dumbing down of societies through a star system (that has stretched to accommodate politicians), religious and political symbols, dogmas and cosmotheories should prompt the question of whether the citizens should be passed fit before being granted the right to vote.

The same way as politicians and parties should :
a) Produce IQ test results
b) Be banned from receiving ANY sort of funds for election campaigns and other activities
c) Allow "horizontal voting"

Citizens :
a) Have read any books without pictures and which ones?
b) IQ test results
c) Is the flag a piece of cloth or a sacred symbol which you wave in a jolly fashion during football
    games of the national team or during the the Eurovision song contest? (Trick question)

I always wondered about people waving flags at events. I wouldn't be caught dead doing that sort of stuff. When I see them, I go :
"Hey look! That a**hole is from this part of the world. That clueless f**k is from that part of the world.
  And where is that woman from? I don't recognise that printed piece of cloth. Could be a newly
  emerged tribe of dimwits…"

"Hey buddy, my daddy died for that flag"
"Really? I bought mine. Yeah, they sell them at K-Mart."
"He died in Korea."
"Wow, what a coincidence. Mine was MADE in Korea."

No one-and I repeat, NO ONE-has ever died for a flag. See, a flag is just a piece of cloth. They may have died for freedom, which is also THE FREEDOM TO BURN THE F****NG FLAG."

BILL HICKS

If you didn't care what happened to me

And I didn't care for you

We would zig zag our way through the
 boredom and pain

Occasionally glancing up through the rain

Wondering which of the buggers to blame

And watching for pigs on the wing



"Pigs On The Wing Part 1"   (PINK FLOYD)

WORLD CUP RANT

Back home from work, grab a cold beer and sit in front of the TV to watch the opening match.
Oh, there is the small matter of the opening ceremony but I have lots of beer in the fridge to negotiate
that sort of atrocity. Yes, I find Opening Ceremonies tedious, vain and ultra-extravagant affairs.
I mute the sound cause I figure it's Brasil, it will be carnival music and by the way they are shaking
their butts I must be right. I disagree with music designed solely for the body. Music is the greatest
cultural achievement of man (and woman for the politically correct) and at its best, when they get the dynamics right, can excite your senses and illuminate the dark corridors of your brain. It can be an elating experience unlike any other. It excites more than modern american porn because modern american porn has been taken over by fake tits and fake tits don't jiggle.

Wait a minute. What is that? I'm I hallucinating? I see people with long legs with tree branches coming out of their shoulders, walking about the pitch through people who are dancing and prancing around
an egg shaped structure that changes colours and shapes?
I scan my beer bottle… normal alcohol percentage. I wonder how much that psychedelic egg in the middle of the pitch cost. Time for another beer to wash the images down.

I heard the news before the show begun and, as expected, there were riots outside or close by the stadium. The police used rubber bullets and, get ready for this… stun grenades! What da f..k, did I miss a whole bunch of meetings with the gun club? I've heard of stun guns but… stun grenades? Whatever happened to good old fashioned water guns from the fire brigade? Even a p….y like Boris can handle that. What's next? Stun napalm bombs? Why don't you send a B52 and drop some on the hapless crowd. No need to worry. Stun napalm releases tiny tongues of flame that can, at best, eliminate your eyebrows and make you look like an albino for a while. I swear, these companies that make guns employ quite creative people…

While on the subject of guns, 4 more shootings ripped the sanity out of the collective conscience of American society. And, sadly, you got the infamous Obama comment "This society is not yet ready…"
The society? I guess we'll have to wait until the President of the USA grows some hair on his balls and replaces the word "society" with "NRA lobbyists"…

I'm on my fourth beer now and the Opening Ceremony is dragging on. And suddenly, the Psychedelic Egg is opening up like a Venus flytrap inviting its prey and out pops a  lady dressed in a skimpy blue garment holding a microphone. The sound on the TV set is still muted. I don't know who she is as pop music disagrees with my taste. They will never have the Andrew Jackson Jihad sing at these ceremonies, just women flashing flesh and multimillionaires who were once RELEVANT to real music. Oh my god, who is that? Is that JLo? Even the pop ignorant in me recognises that ass. Oh she is shaking it, I don't want to hit the fridge for another  beer just yet. She is dressed in a green skimpy garment. And the one in the blue, compared to JLo, looks like she possesses a deflated ass. They sing and dance on the Psychedelic Egg. All around on the pitch, boys and girls are dancing and prancing…
And these images (being beamed into my home-RW) tend to make me more intoxicated. And  intoxication unleashes the vivid imagination. What if all these people dancing and prancing were stark naked. Now, that would be a show… bouncing titties and bouncing balls and bouncing butts…

Finally the song is over. It seemed to have lasted more than Pink Floyd's "Echoes". Jlo walks towards the exit followed by the sorry assed blue clad lady. I've just noticed, Pitbull is along with them. Woof.
Talk about who let the dogs out...

The crowd swallow the whole thing. The collective taste in the arena is a more civilised throw-them-to-the-lions-sort-of-Roman-arena.
Outside the arena, a young boy tries to locate a fountain to reload his toy water pistol before the stun atomic bomb gets to him…
It was Justin Sullivan who sang "One world is rising, one world is dying,
                                                     and one has got his precious head buried in the sand"

And the children of Melrose strut their stuff
I s absolute zero cold enough
And down in the valley warm and clean
The little one sit by their TV screens
No thoughts to think
No tears to cry
All sucked dry
Down to the very last breath
Bartender what is wrong with me, why am I so out of breath
The captain said "Excuse me ma'am
                             The species has amused itself to death"

                                                      "Amused To Death"                        (ROGER WATERS)

A DULL POUNDING RAIN

Said you'd never be old enough
Or young enough
Tall enough
Or thin enough

Or smart enough
Or brave enough
Rich enough
Pretty enough

Strong enough
Good enough
Well you were to us
You wanted silence by itself

Just the word
You wanted peace by itself
Just to learn
There were things you couldn't change

You got the dull pounding rain
You got the last car in the long desert train...
(Jason Molina)

Peppino Camassa
1957-2014

                                                   Free of hope
                                                   Free of a past
                                                   Thank you God of Nothing
                                                   I'm free at last
                                                                  (Vic Chesnutt)


I and I alone
ghost of thy ghost
walk I will walk
a burning stem
to illume thy night

blood of my blood
bone of my bone
can but do for you
I and I alone
(Patti Smith)


All the white horses have gone...
and you, My Dear...

PRACTICAL WAYS TO RESURRECT A DEMOCRACY ON LIFE SUPPORT (PART 3)

What if… somewhere along the way the Western World made a terrible choice. It is possible…

What IS impossible is to create a system to govern humans, implemented by humans without taking into consideration the human nature. You may have more luck implementing it to emus or giraffes or aardvarks.
Aristotle created a work which on paper sounds fantastic for a human race consisting of …..righteous people. Maybe they were back then but today they ain't…

The lack of courage, the inability to read between the lines, the failure to detach emotion from logic (all are characteristics of the human race) may have led to crucially wrong decisions…

Consider this…

"Rousseau rejects original sin, Christianity's pessimistic view of man born unclean, with a propensity for evil. Rousseau's idea of man's innate goodness led to social environmentalism, now a dominant ethic of American human services, penal codes and behaviourist therapies. It assumes that aggression, violence, and crime come from social depravation-a poor neighborhood, a bad home. Thus feminism blames rape on pornography and, by a smug circularity of reasoning, interprets outbreaks of sadism as a backlash to itself. But rape and sadism have been evident throughout history and, at some
 moment, in all cultures.
This book takes the point of view of Sade, the most unread major writer in western literature. Sade's work is a comprehensive satiric critique of Rousseau, written in the decade after the first failed Rousseauist experiment, the French Revolution, which ended not in political paradise but in the hell of the Reign of Terror. Aggression comes from nature; it is what Nietzsche is to call the will-to-power. For Sade, getting back to nature (the Romantic imperative that still permeates our culture from sex counselling to cereal commercials) would be to give free reign to violence and lust. I agree. Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man's innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social influences but by a failure of social conditioning. Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex, have set themselves against nature. Sex is power. Identity is power. In the western culture there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live.Nature's universal law of creation from destruction operates in mind as in matter. As Freud, Nietzsche's heir, asserts, identity is conflict.Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead."   CAMILLE PAGLIA

So we can't really complain for the state we are in since we could not read between the lines of what Sade (a true free spirit) penned.

We're all at the mercy of the 7 deadly sins
We're all at the mercy of the elements in this world we're in
We're all at the mercy of each other's little whims
And we're all at the mercy of the little man within


"The Ballad Of The Little Man"           Karl Wallinger
                                                              (WORLD PARTY)






I'm tired of this back slapping' "Isn't humanity neat bulls**t." We're a virus with shoes. (BILL HICKS)

If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses.
Except for pharmaceutical poisons, there are essentially two drugs that western
civilisation tolerates. Caffeine from monday to friday to energise you enough
to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from friday to monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison you are living in.


                                                              BILL HICKS

BEST MUSIC OF 2013

ALBUM OF THE YEAR

"From The Ages" by EARTHLESS

Who needs to spend 200000 to book a trip to space when you can spend 20 for a vinyl that will take you there?
Cosmic rock created by three amazing musicians who take no prisoners. Nobody jams quite like them as they throw everything into the mix from Sabbath to Hendrix via Hawkwind to create a mind bending trip. Guitarist Isaiah Mitchell embarks on voyages to the stratosphere and the rhythm section is happy to follow instead of acting like an anchor. Just check out the side projects these musicians are involved with: Howlin Rain, Golden Void, OFF!, to name a few.
You'll sail away from the light of this world on this trip, baby...
                                                      Earthless may not be of this earth after all...

"Shrine Of New Generation Slaves" by RIVERSIDE

Mariusz Duda has finally made his masterpiece! The Polish (neo)prog band show superlative musicianship in this eloquent statement that lifts them away from the shadow of Porcupine Tree.
"I could be foreign forevermore to your neverland.
One little brick then another and I will build that wall anyway.
You can find me there rested and calm without mask.
This is where I'll stay."
Waters tore down a wall to find his sanity. Duda builds one to find his. One of the sharpest thinkers ever, Robert Anton Wilson,
spoke of the validity of many realities re one subject and here is
                                                      proof. Mariusz Duda, take a bow...

"Push The Sky Away" by Nick Cave

This is Nick Cave the impressionist rather than the narrator/ storyteller. An artist still evolving, still searching for new forms of expression. Kudos to collaborator Warren Ellis.
Nick Cave ages like wine, really...

"Pelagial" by THE OCEAN

A post metal band based in Berlin with an unusual concept. There is the instrumental version which explores the layers of the ocean and the vocal which explores the human inner psyche. "Awsome" doesn't even come close...

"Exodus Of The Deemed Unrighteous" by Lincoln Durham

It's raw, it's got soul, it's dark, it's poetic. LD has recorded a brilliant second LP that nods to the old blues masters (Johnson, House and especially McDowell) with the modern twist, urgency and edginess of Waits and Cave.
And he can play the slide that the devil himself...

"Sky Burial" by INTER ARMA

Try counting the sub genres included in this affair and you'll stop count by the passionate inventiveness of these musicians. There is ISIS and NEUROSIS in there but there is also room for FLOYD along with a dozen other metallic distractions in a furious amalgam that leaves the listener gasping with awe.
This is experimentation that actually leads somewhere...

"Tall Tall Shadow" by BASIA BULAT

A more mainstream(ish) choice, perhaps? Where everyone is salivating about Lorde, I prefer the immediacy of the canadian singer songwriter's voice. Deceptively, her songs sound simple but she is stupendously talented and her unique delivery may sound strange and awkward to some ears. Not mine, though...

"Sunbather" by DEAFHEAVEN

American Black Metal was widely considered as a joke until the emergence of Deafheaven. And they can not be categorized as black metal anymore. They have widened their canvas to include post rock melodies and other influences to coexist with their black metal without sounding "sellout". They sound "aural revolution"!
Deafheaven explore the dynamics between absolute zero and earsplitting mayhem...

"Fisherman's Box" by THE WATERBOYS

At last, all the sessions from the most creative and enlightening era in the life of Mike Scott. Overflowing with soul....

"Sound System" by THE CLASH

It's the Clash, that's all! Come to think of it, they could've chosen to record more London Callings through the 80s but they chose to evolve as musicians and writers. Having witnessed them live, the energy emanating from the stage is still, to this day, unparalleled.
UNPARALLELED!!!

"Shakerism" by HEYMOONSHAKER

I usually don't go for music in compressed electronic form. It is not the way I enjoy it. But this human beat box blues duo make stirring music that will not pass by unnoticed. Fabulous raspy Waitslike vocals. Never thought I would ever say this, but check this YouTube
clip.

                                                  

            

DEAD PRESIDENTS CLUB

The pomp and sensationalism are still running amuck and the demons are still crawling under my skin.

An ex president has passed away and instead of dignified obituaries the primates have elevated him to superhero status. Maybe pomp and sensationalism is in the DNA, along with stupidity and incompetence…

"He marked the history of Cyprus"
Correct me if I'm wrong but, isn't the history of this nation good enough to make the Guinness Book of Records (™)? I mean, in 50 short years our politicos have achieved everything. A coup d'etat, a war the effects of which are still felt today, blew up the energy infrastructure to smithereens, bankruptcy etc.

Perspective, please…

"He helped establish Democracy in Cyprus"
What colour drugs are you on? Where is Democracy? I've searched in all my pockets. One had a hole so, I should guess, it slipped right through it? And then it dawned on me that I have never experienced Democracy in this place other than the one I've created within me…

"He was instrumental in safeguarding the Freedom of the Press"
Oh, I guess that explains the fact we have so many paid for paperboys full of pomp and sensationalism.

We live in a country where 60 year olds (politicians included) still go by the names they had when they were four years old. Do we have time to listen to a Yannakis (Little John) or a Michalakis (Little Michael)? Seriously, little boys lost in big mens' shoes...

So, perspective, please..

An OK politician…so his name will be given to a dozen of avenues and streets and half a dozen of buildings. By 2112 if this place exists all the streets will be named after politicians. Everywhere you look there will be no escape. No groundhog day, though…
"Please deliver the pizza at 5 Glafkos Clerides street…"
"Is that 5 Glafkos Clerides street in Acropolis, Engomi, Ayios Dhometios, Kaimakli or Strovolos?"
Every municipality will have one except, maybe, Aglandzia… Talk about a taxi driver nightmare worst than the DeNiro flick.

Only the fact that his last wish was to stay off life support, an act of dignity devoid of vanity, should have grounded politicos, journos and primates alike. But, I guess, it's in the DNA…

When my synapses pause in my quest for applause
When my ego lets go to my end of the bone
To focus instead on the love that is precious to me
Then I shall be free


"Flickering Flame"                   (ROGER WATERS)

KARAGOZ & HACIVAT

SCENARIO 1
An ex mega developer is suing an ex president  for the sum of 600000.00 euros.


SCENARIO 2
Karagoz and Hacivat were two hilarious characters who were actually construction workers on a mosque in Bursa in the mid-1300s. Their clownish behavior distracted other workers, slowing down construction thus, the ruler of the time had them executed. Their antics were so sorely missed that they were immortalized as the silly puppets in Shadow Theater in Turkey, then in Greece and eventually and inevitably, in Cyprus.



(Imaginary) SCENARIO 3
In steps Hollywood, sniffing big bucks by realizing the potential of merging SCENARIOS 1&2 into
a big budget spectacula (without the "r"). Spot on casting has Forrest Whittaker in the role of the ex president while Eddie Murphy lands the coveted role of the ex mega developer.
Here is an excerpt of the first draft of the screenplay :

ex P :    Wassup* homie*?
ex MD :(angry) I'm suing yo ass* for 6000 benjamins*, that's wassup!
ex P :    (suprised) Why you suing my ass, nigga*?
ex MD: Fixed up yo crib* muthafucka* and you stiffed me!
ex P:     (perplexed) Whatcha on about, nigga? I gave you cash and you wouldn't take it! I made you a    
             playa*, nigga. Gave you jobs, gave you a football club, nigga, and you gone and fucked it all
             up!  
ex MD: I'm bustin' on yo ass, muthafucka. All I got now is dem threads* on me. Yo bitch better be
             payin' up 'cause we ain't straight* no more.
exP:      Fake ass nigga*, what you on about? Like you built a crib for Queen Elisabeth or somethin'?
exMD: Aight*.  Football club my ass! See yo ass in court!

GLOSSARY
Wassup                    : What's up
Homie                      : A friend from back home/own kind
Ass                           : Arse
Benjamins                : $100 bill, as the face of Benjamin Franklin is on the bill
Nigga                       : Negro
Crib                          : House
Muthafucka              : Oedipodean fornication (sort of)
Playa                        : Someone who dates many people or mover and shaker
Threads                    : Clothes
We straight               : All is well
Fake ass nigga          : Pretentious, not the real deal
Aight                        : Allright




Tell me why things don't look the same
In this shadow play
I have to find my way
In this shadow play
I have to get away
From this shadow play


"Shadow Play"             (RORY GALLAGHER)