Okay!

Good thing we don't get to peek into the real lives of Homer, Shakespeare, the cave painters of Lascaux and the rest, including all the unknown authors of traditionals and drinking songs. Or we'd have to line up a lot of the works attributed to them against the wall! And forget about the modern philosophers, really the whole imperial lot, even Marx.

It's a fundamental of art that it tends to take on its own autonomous existence, and that the recipient (re)makes the work every time. Especially if it's largely persona-independent, or, as in this case, has nothing to do with the acts of the man. Songs especially are birds that fly on their own. It's a song that a couple of hundred million people have played and sung without almost ever thinking that Don McLean wrote it. It's about the death of Buddy Holly.

And I told you, his behavior isn't even personal, it's abhorrent and should be punished (assuming the truth of it is determined in a court of law). Of course, by your standard of exclusion - not just of physical abusers, an always serious and inexcusable matter, but also "hypocrites" and "liars" and "etc." - pretty much no one will be left to listen to.

It's a robocall poll.

I know anytime a robot calls, I hang the fuck up, as do higher proportions of people than with humans.

The results fluctuate by more than 10% per day!

The "finish" is ages away, the all-caps headlines on the site are a tipoff on the intellectual tenor of the outfit.

Emerson College-based, but a for-profit outfit (.com, there's a page for putting in bids) that exploits student labor.

"Methodology" at http://www.theecps.com/#!methodology/c1iwz.

Through the use of a screening question, we usually seek out "likely voters" which has been shown to give a much more representative sample of the populations for most political polling.

You proud of Carter's head on a platter, are you?

You're right, it's not apartheid. I don't recall that South Africa ever spent a month bombing a densely populated, enclosed refugee prison full of children. It's worse, and in this country - the one that just gives a few billion in tax dollars to Israel every year - your legalistic hair-splitting trying to disguise an order based on religious colonialism, racism and violence plays only to a very narrow support base of pro-Israel and Republican-Christian-endtimes fanatics. You live in a bubble. Good day to you sir.

The primary game is over! You have been assimilated!

The latest high-level endorsement for Hillary, by the incumbent secretary of transport, is enormous, enormous news. Totally. Unexpected. I can't conceive of how much all-caps and italics could ever do it justice. This. will. SWING this election! Decisively, I believe. This week, everyone will be talking about this, and nothing else. Until their teeth bleed.

In other news, 1.4% of Americans will hear today for the first time that the name of the incumbent Transport Secretary is Anthony Foxx.

Rounding down, 0% of this group will get as far as his Wikipedia page, and learn about his career prior to holding office, mainly as a "business litigator" with Hunton & Williams (your international outsourcing experts, for whenever your friendly mom-and-pop multi-death corporations need to export a few thousand jobs overseas).

That's the kind of simple but forceful title that your true power elite get to hang on their shingle. Lobbyist? Pshaw! This man did it in court! I mean, how cool does that sound? "Tony Foxx: Business Litigator: Washington DC: ESQ." Coming soon to no TV near you.

Surrender the Bern!!!

Indubitably, but...

These people really live their own bullshit.

The correct answer is, it doesn't matter. Having inherited ownership of a supermarket chain, or having been born to the Number 1 lawyer and Seattle at just the right time to later scam IBM into letting them monopolize the PC operating system, or having written the code for a MySpace that People Like Better are not reasons to allow anyone to accumulate billions, or to pretend to convert these billions from personal to "philanthropic" wealth still under their control, or, worst of all to give them an almost monarchical privilege in deciding the shape of public policy. What qualifies Waltons and Gateses and Zuckerberg get to set policy for the schools, while educators, parents and students have almost no say? If you allow that, our nightmare will continue to be that we live in whatever wish to dream.

Only Bowie

A personal obituary for the Major and the minor:

If you are reading what I put here, as opposed to all those who are not, then you belong to a group I shall for the moment define as we. I think today 99% of us are mourning David Bowie. Does it feel like the end of the Seventies, or the beginning of how those who share a particular feeling of Seventies, and then Eighties, and then Nineties, shall now see all this begin to pass from living memory, as even 1929 and the one-and-only World War II have almost done? Do you remember your President Nixon? Time, he flexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor, his trick is you and me boy.

If I'm not crying today, then because out of the firmament of rock and pop and living artists and authors who have played regular gigs in my emotional sky and read themselves into my nerves, Bowie's was the only one whose necessary death I'd begun to mourn already years ago. Couldn't help it. I also thought selfish reasons why he should live; he is but 19 years older than I; his launch injects the first atom into my own clock remaining as a mobile thinking piece of zig-zagging stardust mixed into meat. That is how it is on orbiting rock number three, where humans give their imaginary space to odd beings they have never met and cannot know, but persistently love in their dreams.

Now he's a star man waiting in the sky, he'd like to come and meet us but he thinks he'd blow our minds. Here now as my offering among the millions is a link to one of his products of a certain two years that, according to the legend, Bowie forgot in West Berlin, only to have it found again on the cassette that for years my brother and I would start playing as we took to bed. As eine kleine Nachtmusik, "Low" delivered what he had presaged in the lines to Starman a couple of years earlier:

Then the loud sound did seem to fade
Came back like a slow voice on a wave of phase
That weren't no D.J. that was hazy cosmic jive

click this

Well I guess the game is over now!

This latest endorsement for Hillary, by the incumbent secretary of transport, is enormous, enormous news. Totally unexpected. It will swing the election decisively, I believe. This week everyone will be talking about this and nothing else, until their teeth bleed.

In other news, 1.4% of Americans will hear today for the first time that the name of the incumbent Transport Secretary is Anthony Foxx.

Rounding down, 0% of this group will get as far as his Wikipedia page and learn about his career prior to holding office, mainly as a "business litigator" with Hunton & Williams (your international outsourcing experts) which is the kind of simple but forceful title that your true power elite get to hang on their shingle. I mean, how cool does that sound? "Tony Foxx: Business Litigator: Washington DC." Coming soon to no TV near you.

"ISIS" is the Saudis

That's reductive, but true enough: "ISIS" is the result of the Saudi regime indoctrinating, dispatching, arming and financing foreign jihadis in Iraq and Syria, who end up recycled into "ISIS," which the US then bombs, or one of the other more "moderate" jihadi militias, which the US sometimes supports openly. And this Saudi practice can't be sold as anything other than also a U.S. policy, since it is done while Saudi enjoys the full backing without criticism from the U.S. U.S. sells the arms with which Saudi Arabia also conducts its simultaneous and official mass-murder in Yemen. U.S. says nothing about Saudi intervention in Bahrain. If we want this to be different, we need to stop othering and hating -- as detestable as this regime and the extremist thought it pushes and many of the people thus produced may be. Change begins at home with things we might change, like ending the longstanding arms and support for this regime, and moving to shut down the ME arms market. Otherwise "we" also own these barbarities.

Oklahoma is shaking with joy.

Or it's shaking with something, as America's new top earthquake zone.

http://www.koco.com/weather/oklahoma-ha-more-earthquakes-in-2015-than-all-of-continental-us-combined/37209902

It's great that we've solved the oil and gas shortage by using massive explosives - an American specialty - to lay waste to useless wildnerness, aquifers, mountaintops, and ocean floors. This can be done forever without any consequences whatsoever. Take that, environmental doomsayers!