Thursday, April 13, 2006

Do you believe in GOD (Good Old Days)?

Posted by Mickey Z on 04/13 at 04:44 AM
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  1. hey

    will post on topic later - have to run now.

    what i want to say now is please can i ask for a bit of expendable help with a campaign? it is not much compared to some of the things happening in the world but it is very dear to me.

    it is about not allowing this
    Image Hosted by ImageShack.us
    to be turned into this
    Image Hosted by ImageShack.us
    more details here
    http://tinyurl.com/zsmuq
    and here
    http://tinyurl.com/fpzs6

    please take the time to email or something. tell them you have cancelled an as yet unplanned trip or something.

    Posted by michael from exile  on  04/13  at  05:25 AM

  2. Hey, MZ, it’s not “shameless” when it’s your sight! It’s only shameless when we do it!

    Tom Brokaw, in his best selling book, “The Greatest Generation,” informs those who came of age during the era of Reagan and Rambo that those who came of age during the Depression and WWII were “the greatest generation any society has ever produced.” This was a generation that would take its rightful place alongside those “who had converted the North American wilderness into the United States,” Brokaw declares without even a hint of irony.

    A “wilderness”, perhaps. Uninhabited, no. Is Brokaw glorifying what was probably the largest and longest campaign of ethnic cleansing the world has ever known?

    Hey Michael. I’ve got Scottish blood in me. McKinnon, Sutherland, and McCallum, I believe. Anyhow, about your post, who’s paying for the pylons, the energy company or the government?

    If the energy company, the added cost of buried lines could be easily transferred to customers. If the government, taxes could pay for the extra cost.

    Either way, people will protest. They don’t want to take on the extra cost from the corporation and they don’t want to pay the extra taxes. But they don’t like the pylons. I’m not saying this is you, just speaking generally of part of the problem.

    I hear ya and am just interested in the problem to help find an equitable solution.

    Posted by Jeremy from Taiwan  on  04/13  at  06:29 AM

  3. MZ, I still have your “Saving Private Power” book on the go.  I’d have finished it already, but it’s been a mighty busy time recently.  (BTW, a number of my friends cracked up at the title - informed people, these - so on that score at least a job well done!  I’m enjoying the fine book, too)

    As to the greatest generation, isn’t this part of the two pronged attack we get from the all high and mighty propaganda desks?  These people - threats!  Kill bomb main hate & fight.  These people - worshipful!  Agree with them!  War = gooooood etc etc

    Interesting, I read a review of a book that was published last week taking issue with the way the Brits fought WWII strategically - all the mistakes, all the lack of heroism.  Hopefully a time soon for the blinkers to come off.

    Posted by Chris Wood from Manchester, odd wet lovely Manchester  on  04/13  at  06:45 AM

  4. I almost forgot!  Mickey, you must sound your best for the interview.  Plenty of gargling, hunching like a warmed up opera singer and projecting “doh ray me fah” etc etc until Michele is tying pillows to her head. 

    For any English readers, this issue of Private Eye has a very funny bit in on the newest Blair / Brown press conference, complete with all the thuggery & back biting ... very highly recommended.

    Posted by Chris Wood from Manchester, odd wet lovely Manchester  on  04/13  at  06:49 AM

  5. they be laying two enormous 40,000 volt pylons through the Pyrenees - called the THT on French side and MAT on the Catalan - to stretch down as far as Algeria, the locals aren´t taking it lying down and one mayor promised to blow it up as part of his campaign platform.

    Posted by owen from barcelona  on  04/13  at  07:29 AM

  6. Great line from Kurt Nimmo today (referring to US and Israel):

    Birds of a feather plot mass murder together.

    Posted by JOS from Chicago  on  04/13  at  11:07 AM

  7. Right on today, Mick...great article.

    Posted by JOS from Chicago  on  04/13  at  11:13 AM

  8. Thanks, Big Country JOS...and hello to Jeremy, Michael, Chris, Owen, and everyone else who’s hanging out here today. Thanks for the activist alert, Michael. And Chris: I look forward to your feedback, re: Saving Private Power. You can thank another Expendable—Mudge—for getting that one published.

    Posted by Mickey Z. from Astoria  on  04/13  at  11:28 AM

  9. P.S. Jeremy, thanks for the permission to be shameless. It feels good.

    Posted by Mickey Z. from Astoria  on  04/13  at  11:30 AM

  10. RE the first sentence of your article mickey i don’t like the way some westerners appropiate a bit of asian this, a bit of african that.

    although the idea of the good old days is messed up in all sorts of ludicrous propaganda i still think a lot of community sense has gone out the window since the ‘good old days’. it still exists under the surface but a lot of it has gone. the reason for this is simple. its called television.


    my earlier post...jeremy...the company is paying for it and the government is backing it in the face of huge public opposition (not like we haven’t heard that one before)

    i need keir on this - he has been there.

    Posted by michael from exile  on  04/13  at  12:01 PM

  11. to elaborate on earlier television point i just want to quote the end of orson welles war of the worlds broadcast when thousands of americans fled the cities because they thought it was real…
    (i know everyone on this site feels this)

    “this is orson welles ladies and gentleman. out of character to assure you that the war of the worlds has no greater significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be..the mercury theatres own version of jumping out of a bush and saying boo.

    Starting now we couldn’t soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night so we did the next best thing..we annihilated the very world before your ears and utterly destroyed the CBS.

    you will be relieved i hope to know that we didn’t mean it and that both institutions are still open for business [michael isn’t relieved]. So, goodbye everybody and remember please for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight… that grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitabt of the pumpkin patch and if your doorbel rings and nobody’s there, that was no martian, it’s halloween.”

    i hope tha isn’t on the net elsewhere cos i just typed it all out…
    til tomorrow

    join the campaign. don’t let them ruin scotland

    Posted by michael from exile  on  04/13  at  12:15 PM

  12. Conversation overheard a few years ago at Helga’s work:  ‘What about the good old days?’ ‘Come on, there was never anything like the good old days, Helga!’ And so true, too!  Thanks for making the same point, Mickey!

    And hi, Michael (thanks for the alert), Jeremy, Chris Wood, Owen and JOS.  It is Good Friday morning down under and has been raining but then we need the rain ..

    Btw:  there was an excellent take on the Brokaw book by Mark Crispin Miller wherein Mr Miller really wrapped Mr Brokaw over the knuckles, pointing out that the ‘greatest generation’ had also produced the likes of Roy Cohn and Richard Nixon.

    Posted by Helga Fremlin from Daylesford, Australia  on  04/13  at  01:35 PM

  13. And that interview is on in about 1 3/4 hours, Mickey?  Good luck - I am sure you will go very well.

    captcha:  ‘meeting’ - let’s hope Mr and Mrs Helga can meet Mickey one day in NYC.

    Posted by Helga Fremlin from Daylesford, Australia  on  04/13  at  01:48 PM

  14. I don’t believe in GOD in the sense Brokaw describes it or TINA ("there is no alternative"), and I’m not a big fan of pylon-studded Scottish wilderness either.

    I never read Brokaw’s book but I can tell you there most certainly were “good old days” i.e. before the bomb. Our culture has put existential tools in the hands of assholes, idiots, and maniacs. In the good old days the truly ruthless could only hope to rape and murder a few million people at best before Nature or her nemesis human(un)kind caught up with them. Now Boy King Bush and his bloodthirsty court of messianic militarists can liquefy the planet in minutes. For profit. And as if that threat wasn’t enough to turn every last one of us into Gregor Samsas writhing in stupefied fear and shame we have the general and widespread desire to bleed the planet dry and render it poisonous. It’s called civilization and if it smells funny that’s just the toxic fumes. They might not bother you but your cancer cells are lovin’ it.

    Now. I can’t say I’m surprised that private enterprise is combining with the State to destroy what is perhaps the most breathtakingly beautiful place I’ve had the privilege of visiting on this sinking shithouse of a planet---the highlands of Scotland. Don’t you see? The company must build these awful and poisonous and hideous power-pylon thingys in order to conform to the government’s own green standards. Bomb the village to save it and all that. Makes me sick.

    Posted by Keir from The Hague  on  04/13  at  02:06 PM

  15. Just spent a beautiful day in Buxton, looking at the great countryside, some voluptuously constructed old buildings (what’s that, then, an opera house with a big rack?  Sleazy bloggers!) and drinking fine old English country beer ... aaah!

    Hope you all had a similarly fine day, & MZ, hope the interview went well.  Give the right bastards hell!  Feedback from “Private Power” will follow soon as I can ... what I read so far I loved, & have committed a few details to memory for general war argument purposes.  Some of those stats are terrifying.

    Posted by Chris Wood from Manchester, odd wet lovely Manchester  on  04/13  at  02:50 PM

  16. Hello all. My apologies, re: the radio interview. I was taped today for an interview to be played on the radio this Sunday morning. It will be heard on the radio in North Florida.

    Posted by Mickey Z. from Astoria  on  04/13  at  03:54 PM

  17. Yeah, you’re right, about Tuesday. Thanks… I’ll be the same age my dad was when I was born. I’m having anxiety attacks already. But that could be because I ‘ve hardly slept in two days or so.

    Posted by James from Hell's Kitchen  on  04/13  at  06:59 PM

  18. Mickey and expendables-- got to pass this link on:


    Jackson Browne, Lives in the Balance. 
    http://tinyurl.com/j6vdr

    Robert B. Livingston
    San Francisco
    http://tinyurl.com/mbzst

    Posted by Robert B. Livingston from San Francisco  on  04/13  at  11:35 PM

  19. Michael, if the company is paying for it, it’s only natural that they’d take the cheaper route. They owe it to their stockholders. That’s just the nature of the beast, like it or not. In order to change that, it has to be shown to be in the company’s advantage to bury the power lines, or a law must be passed requiring buried cables.

    One could lobby to require a new law to be passed. One could start a campaign to show the company that it would be just as economical to bury the lines buy having consumers sign a petition saying they would be willing to have costs for burying the lines transferred to consumers and encouraging the company to do so. One could demonstrate how it would be uneconomical not to bury the lines by boycotting energy from the power company, and get everyone to say they won’t turn on their lights unless the lines are buried.

    That’s my two-cents, anyhow. I’m not trying to sound pessimistic. It’s an unfortunate situation.

    MZ, I guess you had your interview (it’s Friday, April 14, 4:34pm here right now), and I neglected to extend my congratulations and “good luck”, though that’s just an expression as I’m sure you would do (did) fine and don’t require any “luck”. Anyhow, best regards.

    Posted by Jeremy from Taiwan  on  04/14  at  03:34 AM

  20. Thanks for the cool link, Robert...and Jeremy: the interview went well. Thanks. It’ll air this Sunday morning in Florida.

    Posted by Mickey Z. from Astoria  on  04/14  at  05:58 AM

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