Ice T's 'NRA'

With the Northern base closures in the years after the Cold War, it was inevitable that the great Metal vs Rap (the real hardcore stuff) would be something to discuss in public school.

Ice-T, in the news for defending the tradition of preparing to defend life and property, was the first cross-over as I recall it.  I am not talking about the always dubious Anthrax covering a song with Public Enemy (or the crossover Aerosmith did with Run DMC ), but actually making the attempt, as a "rapper" in writing something metal-core.

“Cop Killer” isn’t very good as a record, but when one tired of Headbangers Ball, and put on the earphones for the local radio, Heavy Metal From Hell and heard the first licks of Bodycount, and Ice-T’s narration:

You know, sometimes I sit at home, you know, and I watch TV
And I wonder what would be like to live in some place like
You know, The Cosby Show, Ozzie and Harriet
You know, where Cops come and got you cut outta the tree
All your friends died at old age
But you see.. I live in South Central, Los Angeles
And unfortunately... SHIT AIN'T LIKE THAT!!

...

You try to ban the A.K. 

I got ten of 'em stashed  

With a case of hand grenades

, anyway, it was pretty good to have a crossover.

I mentioned to a ‘rap’ friend that Bodycount was a legit song, and he passed me his copy of Original Gangster—I didn’t really get it, but the use of the Halloween theme on a tune was cool. 

“And I ask myself who has the power

The whites, the blacks, or just the gun tower?”

Charlton Heston, with National Review and NRA bonafides, was livid as a Time-Warner stockholder when he learned of Cop Killer, and that pretty much finished off Ice T the musician.  He later went to work for the Man on Law and Order.

Heston had a point; maybe Ice T did then too.  Heston didn’t mention anything about Slayer, also on Time-Warner, pushing the then multi-media popular theme of serial killer chic.

And things have worked out as they have.

  ______

Alice in Chains, on their first album Facelift, offered‘We Die Young’ to a question Ice T did not ask. 

“I'd just temporarily moved in with Susan Silver because Sean and I had just had a fight. So I was riding the bus to rehearsal and I saw all these 9, 10, 11 year old kids with beepers dealing drugs. The sight of a 10 year old kid with a beeper and a cell phone dealing drugs equaled "We Die Young" to me.” Jerry Cantrell, Alice in Chains.

Kentucky

Drug Money Funds Voter Fraud in Kentucky, says the headline, though the article is actually worth reading with Menckenian " “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods," or a localist heart.

"The sellers in this situation would come to me and ask how much was I paying for votes, and ask me if I was buying votes or whatever, and I told them the most I could pay is $25," Salyers described to Fox News. "They would go into the machine and cast their vote...They were supposed to vote for me. They would come back to me and I would pay them for going to vote.  I had one gentleman come to me and say 'Mike, I have four votes,' so he took them to vote and I gave him $100, $25 a vote."

Read more:

 Sounds cheaper then the vast majority of "above board" vote buying scams, and no doubt, Mencken would notice as much--just think student loans or the politics of food stamps/Wall Street that even Breitbart has figured out.  And even note the honor system involved in the actual vote.

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Sally Denton wrote The Bluegrass Conspiracy decades ago, a story of a Kentucky Governor and his network, including State Police, running drugs.  She applied the same methodology with Harvard Professor and liberal, Roger Morris, to finish work on another Borderstate Drug Running conspiracy (a story that began in college research classrooms), this time Arkansas, and involving a then sitting President.

The story, as legend goes, was set to run in the Washington Post, but killed at the last moment--a neat trick, that offers plausible denial, rather than set-up.  Why did Lefties take a commission from a CIA paper to begin with?  Better to suggest shadowy figures killed the story when they learned of it.

The story, The Crimes of Mena, was picked up by Penthouse, and ran in July 1995.

Kentucky, anyway, is a complicated place.
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Rand Paul's Iran Vote explained?

As Ron Paul's Audit the Fed bill passed the House today, an alternative suggestion to the above link, is that Rand Paul can be credibly against 'central banking.'

July 20th, Again

Columbine on Hitler's Birthday, and down the street, the Joker goes nuts on the anniversary of the July plot (1944) just when Tom Cruise who played Count Stauffenberg is getting divorced.

I am just playing with some derivative of numerology, and how many celebrated Guy Fawkes, indirectly and ironically, thanks to a movie, that Catholic terrorist? 

We preach Doom here, so nothing's shocking.

I am so wretched I side with the community who wants to know what sort of Pharma he was on, and tidy up an explanation.  The State, Big Pharma being just a client, may well see these things as a Feature not a Bug, so the hysterics don' bother me, and might be necessary, politically.

The Craiglist Killer in Boston was engaged and yet, up to eyeballs in debt trying to be something that doesn't exist.  Happens a lot.  Old Leatherface, Ed Gein, in that respect is comforting as a psycho (Psycho too, as Norman Bates is based on Leatherface, rather Ed Gein.)

Pharma and Debt--look there.

Weekend Music for the Doomed

Heart with Layne Staley, covering Bob Dylan.

I don't give a damn, next stop Afghanistan

Congressman Ron Paul is getting in his last licks, with The Bernake, and this floor speech on Afghanistan.

Revilo Oliver, Buckley's best man, was a capable man, if, in the realm of politics, just another post-war character of the Far Right with that Birchian anti-Russian bias that so divided the Right of that era, but it seems appropriate to site him here.  His analysis is limited to the history Paul offers, and same with his Marxmanship in Dallas, he misdirects blame to his chosen "Other" but one can start to see the younger generation emerge from this stuff. As it is, Afghanistan has always done Ron Paul in

Liberty Bell, 9/1988

In 1961, when the Soviets judged that the time had come to revive and carry to completion the old Czarist ambition to conquer India, the American end of the Washington-Moscow Axis was charged with the duty of bleeding the tax-paying animals in the United States to finance the construction of a highway to permit the rapid occupation of Afghanistan by Soviet troops. The engineers of the U.S. Army were accordingly sent to Afghanistan to build through some of the most mountainous and difficult terrain in the world a broad modern highway that extends for three hundred miles from the Soviet border to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, which is not far from the southeastern border of that county, and whence a road, built by British engineers in 1880, runs through the Khyber Pass to Peshawar, which was the provincial capital of what was called the North-West Frontier Province when India was under British rule.

This American work for the Communist Empire was carried out in effective secrecy from 1961 to 1965, when the work was completed. It was done by American engineers at the expense of the American boobs, who were not told for what they were paying. Some information about the work naturally reached Americans and was reported in some of the publications of the tiny minority of 'Fascists' and 'Neo-Nazis,' who have not yet been cured of the vice of thinking. Such publications are ignored by well-trained boobs, and the disclosure was officially covered by the usual chatter about international do-gooding and some nonsense about promoting trade and harmony among the "democratic peoples of Asia."

Soviet control of Afghanistan, as of the United States, began with massive internal subversion carried out by trained agents and dim-wits who become intoxicated with drivel about "democracy" and "welfare." The stupid Afghans permitted overthrow of their monarchy in 1973, and Americans who heard about it were naturally delighted by the spread of their own mortal disease. The "democracy," of course, was merely preparation for a revolutionary coup d'état, complete with almost enough bloodshed to content "Liberal intellectuals," and the assumption of power by the Revolutionary Council of the People's Democratic Party, which immediately concluded a treaty of "alliance" with the Soviet. No "Liberal intellectual" in this country could possibly object to such delicious progress in "human relations." Reactionaries in Afghanistan were less pleased, and the first contingent of Soviet troops entered Afghanistan in December 1979.

Since the lid was on in the daily press, the average American could be excused for being unaware of his contribution to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan until March 1980, when Ron Paul, a Congressman from Texas, publicly disclosed the facts and even exhibited photographs of sections of the highway. For this and other indiscretions, he was soon thereafter removed from Congress by the Jews.[Ed note: It was the Bush Family/Eastern Establishment take over of the Texas Republican Party that did Ron Paul in during the early '80s.  Oliver makes the same mistake with his JFK assassination analysis--he won't touch it, perhaps out of loyalty to old friend Buckley?]

After 1980, however, the American population, if still capable of taking an interest in their own affairs, should have known what Mr. Paul had made public knowledge, including the use of the highway for the purpose for which it was designed by the Washington-Moscow Axis.

Soviet troops, moving over the highway, very quickly consolidated occupation of Kabul (begun by air-borne detachments) and of all the strips of territory adjacent to the principal highway and the five tributary roads that had been improved and modernized by our Army engineers under the supervision of the Soviets, who were coöperating in "aiding" the Afghans.

In the United States, there was, of course, jabbering, most of it hypocritical, about "aggression" and the "surprising" Soviet invasion, but the American boobs never saw a connection between that invasion and the highway they had built in preparation for it. In its issue for the week of 19 January 1987, the Spotlight quoted Congressman Paul and made clear the relation between the highway and the invasion, but despite the comparatively large circulation of that American periodical, the article made no impression on the public. It is a truism that you can lead horses to water, and Americans to facts, but can't make the former drink or the latter think.

Old friends of mine know my skepticism regarding road building.

Continuing Controversy

Steve Sailer, over at TakiMag, is a bit longer in tooth, hence his write up of the conspiracy theory meme, fits along side my various takes  as I do run a generation younger.
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MajorityRights takes up but one aspect of a "Far" Right debate on Anthony Sutton, and his work covering the funding of the NSDAP rather than his work covered here, on the funding of the USSR (a common point of agreement on even the mainstream Right.)

If you do read the on-line book linked to, the most fascinating part I thought was the bombing runs over Germany during the war, how certain targets were skipped, and note the theory is popular in Reformed Theology and kinsist circles.

___
A former pro-wrestling television guy, Mark Madden--pro-wrestling again!, hinted last November that the Sandusky Affair extended to a pimping ring for the elite.  Louis Freeh didn't go there--oh, those ghosts of Waco, but the New York Daily News broke a story today that might lead this most ancient and contemporary of "conspiracy theories" a bit further.

...and the Waco Atrocity

With the Family Research Council naming General Jerry Boykin to an Executive position, one can only conclude the old folks that run these things cannot recall Waco let alone the Clinton Administration they once loathed. 

There was a brief moment where Boykin's name was a familiar villain, but as the Alzheimer's sets in, the Machine can still take advantage.

Click ahead to ~minute 15 of Part 2, Waco: A New Revelation for info on Delta Force at Waco.

Here is World Net Daily reporting on Boykin's relevance to Waco in 1999.

Zombie

It's the same old theme since nineteen-sixteen.
In your head, in your head they're still fighting,
…
In your head, in your head,
Zombie

-Cranberries

Jack Donovan comments on the Zombie meme, but I just cannot shake there is a larger twist. 

While Jack lamentably searches out the positives if from a more consumerist perspective in this case, I find a reason to miss the old anti-heroes of my youth.  We had slashers who enforced the old Purtian morality, well stated in Scream about what happens to “minorities” and fornicators, and its rival, the Zombie picture, which had leaned leftist since Romero established the genre as a commercial success.  (Monster movies were a different Cold War genre, but after the wonderful Jaws, it would take an Alien to get post-modern.)

Jack, to his credit, demonstrates that the those who identify with the zombies seem rather lame.

In 1981, Mel Gibson became an American star on the back of the sequel to Mad Max.  Road Warrior was an American hit.  No doubt, American audiences recognized the Western in the film, but Mel’s character in the movie was something evolved.  It was man amongst the ruins, only with Man, siding to defend civilization against the hordes of barbarians--this might be relevant.

Pro-wrestling observed as much and created a heel tag team, the Road Warriors who rivaled, and surpassed, the Confederate minded heels, the Freebirds.  The Road Warriors, as a wrestling team, took the look of the bad guys, the raw and real nature of the bad guys, Road Warrior outlined.  The Road Warriors, against the rules of kayfab wrestling, gradually became fan favorites.  (Where are they now note:  Hawk died in ’03, but Animal lives, and his son made the NFL in ‘09.)

Mel Gibson became a movie star in the United States, with all its troubles, and the bad guys of Road Warrior became an archetype, beloved by those fans of a certain folk-theater genre.

Says something I think, about threading the needle.  Something zombies will never offer.

The Conspiracy Theory and its Actors

Umberto Eco's Foucalt's Pendulum came to mind when word arrived that John Roberts had run off to Malta after his vote.  The picture featured in the CIA leaning WaPo, shows Roberts leaving a car to enter a building with a Knight's Templar symbol.

None of this is by accident, there is some purpose--of all the places Roberts could have gone to, the trip to Malta should cause pause..  Precisely because the older Protestants are suspicious of Roman Catholics (and folks like Tolkien and Lewis), at the same time the Catholic Church in the United States is trying to make money off the hospital industry without looking ridiculous (the brouhaha about paying for contraception), what is the purpose here with the symbolism? 

I'll leave it as crass politics to deny cooperation with non-elite Catholics and Prots (undoing Mel Gibson's work), to generate some hostility--but there is some inside baseball here, when one adds that President Bush was being photographed in some African village on July 4, promoting invasive investigations of women.

Maybe just monkey wrenching, and hoping it works out.

Kauffman still has it

I exchanged e-mails with Bill Kauffman many years back, when he was just about the only game in town with 'Ain't My America.' 

In a way, the Ron Paul campaign, beginning in 2007 was Kauffman's zenith, speaking at Ron Paul's shadow convention with the sort of fight that should command the political imagination, here in the States.  I read his Luther Martin, Drunk (something) which was outstanding patriotic revisionism, but too obscure for mass thinking.

Nevertheless, anyone interested in writing on political topics should continue to read Kauffman, and enjoy his bag o' tricks:

(a selection from the current AmConMag column:)

...The prison-industrial complex depends upon the drug war for its seemingly limitless supply of bodies. (I write, by the way, as one so drug-averse that I don’t even like taking Tylenol for a hangover—I much preferred Minor Threat to Johnny Thunders.)

Although we have reached a stage where the jock potheads of my boyhood have their avaricious little hands on the levers of power, the bong throng—including three consecutive deracinated ex-coke-sniffers in the White House—lack the guts even to take the gateway step of saying that to imprison men and women for buying and selling marijuana is an affront to personal liberty.  (Not to worry: the empty cells can be filled with Thought Criminals.)

 

More Death and Taxes

Tapping the Snus is paleo nodes of recent, Ryan McMaken at LRC comments on funeral industry protectionism in Louisiana from a capitalist perspective.

Bomber LeMay and the Waco Atrocity

I have asked my elders for any information on why Wallace chose the 50-60s rightish caricature, Curtis "Bomber" LeMay as his VP in 1968.  I have received no answer, perhaps because the folks I ask believe he was the Right, that Strangelovian thing.

Bomber LeMay, in a Rightish environment that was increasingly becoming skeptic of the Vietnam War and the nature of the Cold War, let alone, dabbling in WW II revisionism, makes no sense, save Wallace clearly had no interest in winning anything but a certain Southern segment in perpetuity.

Bomber LeMay proudly and unrepentant, led the Dresden War Crime, which again, in our day and age, looks like an odd position for a populist Rightwinger at any point in the Post-War Era.
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Over the last several years, the WND crowd has both promoted progress in the OKC narrative (while shelving Waco) and has attempted to rehabilitate one General William Boykin.  The rehab production continued today.

Boykin was a member of Delta Force and at Waco-- as the link shows, even the neocon Frontpage mag understands he knows some real dark secrets. 

If all one does on the web is Remember the Criminals, time has been well served, but not quite my point.

It was Walker in the late 50s and early 60s--whom Lee Harvey "tried to kill" or tried to kill, then it was LeMay...then it goes dark, save Al Haig.  Then, in the height of the Patriot movement, Waco & OKC, General Partin (who alleged missiles were inside the Murrah building and testified for the defense led by Kirk Lyons--see post that mentions a certain trial v. The Spotlight, in the Waco trials, got a tour, and then his counter, Boykin?)  What 'cause Counterpunch noted that Delta Force was at Waco; Gore Vidal was explaining OKC from a different perspective, and the patriot movement was split over the Soldier of Fortune/Rules of Engagement narrative?, he had no choice but to go Right? Just show business, this General thing.

Bar Flies

I was mentioning to a friend who had passed the Rich video featuring Mickey Rourke-a rightish character who reemerged in The Wrestler-- something I wrote about years ago or something about wrestling in general.  I reminded him that Rourke played Bukowski in 'Bar Fly' and he reminded me that Axl and Rourke were friends.  I post the Bukowski poem below, stolen from the LRC blog and Butler Schaefer, for no other reason then it means someone else, who pinged Schaefer, who gets it, is still out there.

What can we do?
at their best, there is gentleness in Humanity.
some understanding and, at times, acts of courage.
but all in all it is a mass, a glob that doesn’t have too much.
it is like a large animal deep in sleep and almost nothing can awaken it.
when activated it’s best at brutality, selfishness, unjust judgments, murder.
what can we do with it, this Humanity?
nothing.
avoid the thing as much as possible.
treat it as you would anything poisonous, vicious, and mindless.
but be careful. it has enacted law to protect itself from you.
it can kill you without cause.
and to escape it you must be subtle.
few escape.
it’s up to you to figure a plan.
I have met nobody who has escaped.
I have met some of the great and famous but they have not escaped
for they are only great and famous within Humanity.
I have not escaped
but I have not failed in trying again and again.
before my death I hope to obtain my life.
—       Charles Bukowski