INTERVIEW WITH A SERIAL KILLER PART 1

I met up with Johnny Pain last night to see what he has been up to, in the months since he went into hiding, after using a Stoner radio show to accidentally take over the world. Rumor had it that he was reinforcing his already formidable defense system around the two acre lot that housed his small domicile, and a garage -- the roofs of both of which were barely visible over the high fence around his house. Hand-painted on the white fence are variously worded warnings that the owner will shoot to kill anyone who enters his property. I personally had seen the effects of the landmines scattered throughout his yard one day when an unfortunate squirrel tried to run across his lawns. I guess this happens a few times a week, though of course his neighbors are too afraid of him to call the cops, who would only laugh anyways and ask for the films... Johnny hides cameras everywhere around his neighborhood, and his cautionary lifestyle has saved his ass more than once from various factions he is to this day vaguely waging war with... I cannot go into any that, of course, of he would kill me.

A lot of people credit Pain with getting Obama selected president, since his underground army was under strict orders to vote for him, and to do anything in their power to silence the Neo-con chatter.... up to and including, it is rumoured, selective assassination. A lot of conspiracies are afloat that Pain had something to do with the mysterious heart attack of Jerry Fallwell, who had insulted on of Pain's best friends, Jesus Christ. Christ and Pain go way back, and as the second coming was just beginning to be acknowledged, coming to the aide of the fledgling prophet put him on the good side of the Deity.

Arriving at Pain's house, you first push a buzzer at his outer gate. A large camera is trained on you, as well as suspicious red dots that hover over your forehead and heart. He recognized me from the screen in his monitoring room, ran a quick facial recognition code, then buzzed me in.

I knew the routine, had seem him do the same dozens of times since deciding to write a book about his life. A privilege that Pain, after getting me whisky drunk, made me commit to by cutting off two of my fingers and telling me he would freeze them, and then get them back to be sewn on after he okays the interview. As you can imagine, few people interview this man.

That's why they pay us investigative reporters the big bucks, I guess.

Pain's living room is all black. Walls, furniture, tv, chairs, candles, even the cats sneaking about in the shadows. The windows are covered in black plastic. A security detail that Pain had lived by since childhood. A nineteenth generation serial killer, the Pain family has been associated with a myriad of historical assassinations and wars over the centuries, and are said to work for a secret society of mystics and wizards, an off-shoot of a radical Catholic church that predated the known church, and believed themselves the only true church of Christ...... they were the same organization that traced the path of the soul of Christ as he reincarnated from life to life. They learned the trick from Eastern monks, and spent their lives finding the miraculous incarnations... God meant for them to be found, showed them to the initiated by giving wings to a child. In this way God kept the true church alive no matter what vagaries of belief cropped up into the minds of mind.

Pain's family had from time to time been called in to protect the Christ incarnations. So that is the lore.

In fact, when Pain ended up in Charge of the world, it was all Jesus doing, because the deity is not supposed to get too involved in politics, but he wanted mankind to revolt against the neocons and take the world in a direction that is not going to destroy the planet, and all other species...

After being buzzed in through the gates, I looked across the deceptively flower and plant covered yard -- he couldn't mow with the landmines, so he made everything look like an inviting garden... The smell of weed fills the air, tall plants are everywhere, lined up in a kind of second wall between the gate and the house. There is a small path. Looking through, I see Johnny Pain standing on his porch, his red Siberian husky by his side. He has an M-16 aimed at me, though he knows me damn well, actually. This is just target practice to him, keeping himself battle ready for the next wave of attackers to wage a frontal assault on his house.

From a metal shed on the edge of the weed field, Moon Bong Haze comes out to see who has 'breached the perimeter.' He looks like he usually does, long, unkempt hair down just below his ass, jeans with torn knees, eyes perpetually red, expression almost always somewhat puzzled or amused. I had heard he fell on hard times after the radio show we worked on together fell apart. He was living in the tiny, rusty shed, since being hired as the night watch men for Johnny's crop. Though I suspect something Pain told me could be just as true, "I am going to kill that fucking hippy one of these days, when my mood needs a boost or something, and this is easier than trying to hunt him down." And when he had the chance, after Moonbong struck it rich and had dogs surgically and genetically altered to have Paris Hilton heads, Johnny had ordered him tortured for a month (he also kept one of the dogs, who are specially designed for giving pleasure, though Johnny claims that his has been rehabilitated).

Johnny has a huge joint in the edge of his mouth as he waves me in. He has a short beard, gray in the front, brown like his shoulder length hair on the sides. He has always been considered handsome by the women, though he is obviously unkempt, and the only fashion statement he had ever tried to make was wearing only black, which he did to keep from having to think about matching colors, and camouflage purposes. The good looks that run through his family helped give them the kind of high kills that serial killer fame requires in this day and age. It doesn't hurt that your family existed in the intelligence community, where their skills were put to patriotic uses. What did the CIA care if their best soldiers occasionally went on a serial killing spree over getting cold soup at some Denny's?

Johnny's first memories were of family gathering, which almost always ending in gunfire. I asked him why his family still had them, if at least three of four of them were going to get killed at any given reunion, and he looked at me like I would never understand anything about life, "Now what the hell would be the fun in that? Think of everything your relatives have done to you throughout your life, man. A lot of people would love to get to kill some relative they hate. Hell, we all look forward to the reunions. Separates the men from the will's, you know? Sisters love that shit. Besides, Mom, she is the head of the family... and that old bitch will order a hit on anyone who misses a reunion. No one has dared do it since... well, forty years, I guess. We just call off the damn reunion and hunt them down. That's fun, too.... everybody all drugged up and drunk driving Rv's down the road. Using passing cars for target practice and shit. Hell, we don't exist, you know... whatever my family does, gets blamed on someone else. I didn't invent the system, man."

Johnny brings me out a cold Budweiser and a bong with fresh water. "You know, if this interview pisses me off, in any way, it is going to cost you those typing fingers that I have in the freezer?"

"Johnny, come on..."

"IF we weren't old friends, those would be your balls in that freezer."

"Oh, come on..."

"Remember that interview I gave with national enquirer?"

"I wondered why the hell you did that? All he asked about was your dog, and if you were single."

"I still got his balls. Want to see them? I am going to give them back to him, by the way. Just waiting a couple weeks longer than our agreement, to instill a little more fear of me in the press. You never can have those fuckers too afraid of you."

"Uh, yea." I forget sometimes that in Johnny's world, his secrecy as a double agent is barely held in place. He is hardly discrete about his occasional killing sprees. Most people in the Chicago area have just come to accept that this is the world they live in. The newspapers know better than to touch the story, after all the heads of all those journalists started showing up downtown on the posts of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, during rush hour. Johnny put them up himself, making a show of letting anyone who wanted to see who had done the ghastly deed. The point was well taken.

Under these kind of circumstances, you must be asking yourself why I would even go near this guy, right? Well, Johnny is also loyal. Once he is sure that you are going to be fair with him, and are not neo-cons or pacifists, he is a pretty good friend. He is oddly enough the first guy to send flowers to the hospital, but most of all he could get anything done in Chicago, because of his extensive connections, and he was always getting his weed buddies out of some jam. Once I was busted for a small bag and he simply walked into the jail, took the keys off the walls, waved to his cop buddies and said, "I'll vouch for this guy." After that, they seemed to know me. Chicago cops have extensive lists, Johnny explained to me once, monitoring who gets radical magazines, who might be a protester, lead leftists protests, etc... and who was evidently on their side. I knew they gave out shields to put on relatives cars, and that this means a lot to Chicago cops, but evidently, as always, there is a deeper, slightly darker truth.

Johnny and I sit on matching black leather chairs, between us a coffee table adorned with various stuffed fetuses on small pedestals. At first I mistake them for some bizarre form of art, but when I ask about them, I hear, "OH, the fucking fetuses. Yea, I got that stone ass Moon Bong dumper diving for them out back of the abortion clinic. I took up taxidermy, you remember... "

"I used to bring you my road kill."

"Yea, well I sell these to fundamentalist Christians, who flash them at pregnant women outside of abortion clinics. I'm pro-abortion myself. Not just because I make a lot of money off of this. By the way, you want to see that raccoon you ran over? "

He leads me to a room in the back of the house with the tools of a taxidermist. On the bench is the smashed raccoon I had brought him. It looked much worse now, pink, shiny entrails hanging out... he had stuffed it to look freshly run over.

"I thought it would be posing ... or something. Is there a market for this kind of thing?"

"Sometimes you just got to follow your heart, boy. I'm against road kill personally. So I advertised in this leftest rag at the Heartland Cafe for radicals willing to save wild animals, convinced them showing road kill up close to people would convince people to, as their motto said on their t-shirts, SWERVE NEXT TIME."

"Sounds a little cynical of you."

"What do I care? As long as there is a market for Road Kill Creations, I'm making them. They also go over great at frat parties, as pranks... Hell, I think they make great conversation pieces, and you can even get a can of this death oil, as I call it, and sprinkle a little on the dead animal for a full sensory experience."

"Who buys this stuff?"

"Depends. If they are kids, they are more likely budding serial killers. In fact I give their names to my buddies in the FBI, and they give most of them cancer and shit, before they even become a problem. Like they did with Autism, to keep the middle classes too preoccupied to revolt and shit. Aids to stop the drugs and homosexuality they thought was destroying the moral fiber of our country, etc... It's all about being pro-active in the intelligence agencies anymore. They engineer people through social planning, and anyone who questions the status quo is a problem they would rather not have. Myself? I questioned a lot under bush, and took out my fair share of neo-cons and cash register ministers... hell, I felt I had to do my part, since I was, despite all else, raised a working class hero, so to speak. I like the unions, collective bargaining, using the great wealth of our country to enrich everyone, not just a chosen few -- or especially, a dishonest few. My family may be full of killers, but that also makes us take our vows very seriously. Killing is something we do only for causes, or accidentally, you know...or drunken,kind of stoned fun."

"Just like 007, you have a license to kill."

"More people do than you would believe."

"Really?"

"A lot of them are pussies about it, but yea... they are fairly easy to come by in the states. I mean, all you have to do is become a CIA operative? Been there and done that, in a loose sense. I have no beefs with them, and try to help them catch terrorists, or just shoot them myself.. they flew me into Iraq for awhile, just before the surge, to show the troops how to fight really dirty, I guess. Nothing that I can talk about, but believe me... they owe me one or more. I took my own private army over there, and they do not lose. All the damn money I spend keeping them on that island brain washed and drugged up and steroided out, they better be the best damn fighting force my poppy farms in Afghanistan can buy."

Moonbong comes into the living room where we are talking. "What's up? Can I hit that bong, man... my stash... I think someone ripped me off."

Johnny's hand goes down to the pistol on his belt, and he unsnaps the holster strap. "I told you Moonbong, you live in a weed field, and you can pluck any damn bud you want." Johnny turns to me as his hand pulls out the gun and takes aim at moonbong's chest. "I've had to tell him that every fucking time he runs out of weed for the last month. He sees his empty tray and starts looking for bags. He grew up with the Haze weed business all around him, but they never grew the stuff. I think it's because they'd get wasted and eat the plants while they were still little sprounts. That's at least what happened this one time. And the fucking gerbils ate them, too. They kept everything in Burlap bags. In fact the kids slept in the burlap bags,witht he buds around them for warmth until they were in their teens, and started getting a stink about them that no one would want on their weed. I didn't know back then he was a bed wetter or I never would have smoked any of that damn weed."

Moonbong packs the small silver bowl, leans his mouth over the end of the bong, lights up and inhales. "Whooo... thanks. Hey, Fritz, man, you want to buy some LSD enemas that I got?"

I tell him that no, I do not wish to buy any sort of enemy at all, then ask, "Why did someone put acid in an enema?"

"Rapid delivery, man. It goes straight into your brain."

"From your ass?"

"Best way, man.... I'm getting a company together to market, em, man. This way, people can get a buzz, and clean out their colons, too... man, that is really big right bow. The time of the enema has arrived, and what better feeling than having a purple haze in your ass, right?"

Johnny has not yet stopped aiming at Moonbongs head. His finger has visibly tightened on the trigger. Then he shifts aim and fires two bullets into Moon's sandal ed feet. Two of his toes go flying off in different directions. He looks first at his left toe, which has landed on a coffee table, then his right, which a black cat is just then batting out from under my chair.

"Dude, that would really hurt.... you know, if I was straight enough to feel shit like that. People ask me, like, Moon, why take hand fulls of vicodens all day, and I say... you'll see, man... and here we are, man, in exactly the kind of situation where, like, it pays to take vicodens. People are such fools, man." He picks up his toes and ambles out of the room muttering about putting his toes on ice again. "What won't that fucker shoot your toes off for? Shit, I gotta move."

With Moonbong gone, leaving a trail of blood on the hardwood floor that the cats immediately run out and start lapping. "Johnny, under the Bush regime, you had plenty of targets in government, and a president who while you worked with him, could not have been further away from your politics. Good reasons for anyone like you to kill, of course. Now that Obama, a candidate you backed up with guns when necessary..."

"None of that was proven, and at this point nothing like that officially exists... etc... don't make me kill you."

"Uh, okay.... I was trying to ask how your MO has changed since Obama was elected?"

"Well.... to be honest with... it is a little depressing. Part of why I have been staying in the house these last few months. Hell, I call out for food, drugs, and whores.... what the hell else does a man need to relax? Take your fucking grand canyon, give me a couple boulders of rock and a vat of liquid morphine. Well, that and coloring books. Bush got us all started on coloring books, because at one point in his presidency that was the only way he could communicate with anyone, and since I was taking over the world, I had to have some contact with him. You have to have some pretty damn good drugs to love coloring like Bush does, and he turned me on to this great mix he keeps in a hidden IV under his jacket. Never liked him personally, but what could I do? He had great drugs. I can forgive a lot in people who show up at the party with a barrel of dried Peyote, etc... Man knew how to get visiting dignitaries from all over the world coloring in his back yard with that stuff. Fucking weirds site. All these Arab sheiks on peyote and heroin and these new LSD variations he has the cia coming up with all the time for his coloring parities... between making him drugs and masturbatory devices, it's no wonder they couldn't afford proper armor for the soldiers at the start of the Iraq war."

TO BE CONTINUED

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the graying

He had to forgive everyone, or no one. That was the conclusion Shleeps Mvok came to as he starred out a subway window, into a dark landscape occasionally flickering with passing lights...

If I expect to be forgiven for my trespasses . . .I have to offer the same forgiveness to others. Yet, I do not do the kind of shit that lands people in prison.

Sitting beside him, his brother has been silenced by the roar of the train echoing through the mettallic car. Shleeps was not sure how he was supposed to act toward Alvo. His brother had been in prison for the last twenty two years. Caught up in the Rebellion on Targot Lin, he was one of hundreds the government had rounded up.

He was four when Alvo went to jail. His family had suffered for his actions, too. Their father lost his job, started getting harrassed by the government at every turn, until he did what they wanted him to, and took the family off planet.

They had been run out of town, basically. Now he was back. The prison did not release broke criminals without a family sponsor. Someone had to go back. He was chosen. His brothers actions seemed idiotic to him, almost sure to cause mayhem.

They get off at the airport, walk up the stairs into the main concourse, look around the mammoth steel and glass building for signs to their plane. He is looking down at the tickets for the fourth time, comparing the numbers with the neon signs pointing to the different loading zones.

The voice he hears is official. A cop. They are talking to his brother. He looks up to see one of the men holding handcuffs in his hand, the other has a gun aimed at them.

"We're going to put these on right now. You know why."

He is amazed at what he is seeing. He has just spent seven hours going through the process of getting a prisoner out, passing through all the required hoops to be declared legal. "Hey, he is legel. We just came from Daly Prison. They..."

"Yea, we know. You're going to want to come with us, too. Cuff him up."

His heart is pounding, his fears began repeating the letters from him brother when he was in prison -- once you are charged with terrorism, they can do whatever they want to you. The law no longer applies. He had read through them when he found out he was going to make the trip back to their old planet.

Cameramen and reporters film everything.

He looks at his brother and see's him looking down at his stomach.

The cop putting on his cuffs notices, too, and tells Alvo, "It isn't going off. You went through all that shit to have a dud put in your gut, asshole."

Shleeps does not know what the hell they are talking about, but his brother seems to... his face has gone curiously blank.

Seven hours later, he is in much deeper shit than any of his fears. They have just shown him a video of his beaten brother, repeating back whatever his interrogator was telling him to say... like a puppet, he was saying that his brother was in on his plot to blow up the airport. They had also shown him an x-ray of what his brother thought was a bomb sewn into his abdomen.

His brother hadn't want to leave the prison and start a new life, he'd just wanted revenge for what had been done to him, to strike out at his enemy.

He was the victim of a strangers decision. For the moment, at least. He could see why they would interrogate him, but their assumption that he was guilty was maddening to him.

They were acting like he was totally fucked.

"I wasn't really involved." He starts to use the words as a verbal mantra against them, using the same answer everytime they tried to bring up a new angle with him. One of them starts asking about where he was trained to withstand interrogations?

They name off terrorist camps, ask him if he has been to any of them.

Twelve days later, they have still not beaten him, or treated him all that badly. His brother has been shipped back to prison, while he has been housed in a local jail, in his own room, with a Tell Vision. His file has been shipped from home, and a committee has been chosen to rule on his fate. They will not let him go to a regular court, hire his own attorney. He is considered an enemy combatant until MOOK knows otherwise.

He watches the judges deciding his fate on video. They ask him no questions. They stare into their computer screens and read everything they want to know.

He is surprised when they let him go. He is escorted to the plane by five officers, which he thought was ridiculous overkill until he realized how hated he was. As soon as he left the Prison Van, people were yelling, Murderer... Go Home.... Etc... He had no doubt that without the cops, someone would have attacked him.

Alvo was betrayed by every he had thought was his friend. The prison had an active underground, set up in cells that were cut off from the others. They met unknown to even each other. Set up places where they could hear disguised voices through the vents. He was one of the first to set up the meeting. He had to kill three men to the secrecy in plance. Prison to him was a place to spend all of his time planning his next attack. The government was his enemy, and he owed a lot of allegience to fallen comrades. When he first met the radicals who would lead him down his path into a prison cell,

none of them had much of an idea at all that the government would care about their activities. Like most they believed the rhetoric that the voting public could aright any wrong.

Check out all of my blogs by googling my name, John Scott Ridgway

racial profiling...

Nothing much to add to this debate... except my own experience.

I was driving cab, around 98, in Chicago. I made the decision early on that I was going to disprove the idea that all white cab drivers were rascists who passed up blacks. I had already driven cab in Toledo, and was more sophisticated than any small town indiana boy really needs to be after the experieince -- not only was I not raised racist, but I started driving cab in a city where the black underclass used cabs because there were almost no buses, and the housing projects were isolated in an industrial neighborhood off downtown.

I had also been ripped off dozens of times, experienced the prostitutes jumping in taxi's to avoid getting busted for being on the street, and their doing about anything to get out of paying. Heard all the stories, etc... Chicago turned out to be safer than Toledo, but I was blown away by the racism.

People using the n word right and left... jumping in a cab and assuming that I was a racist, these folks would just go on and on... usually this line started with, "Oh, cool, a white cab driver."

So one day I picked a woman up from a grocery store and I drove her to Cabrini Green, which back then was a fairly dangerous, and very notorious, housing project. She jumped out and two young kids jumped in.

I got their destination and took off without giving any thought to the fact that I had just picked up two gang aged kids from a project, and they were going to another project on up the road.

Bam... in the rear view mirror I see the lights of the cops. I inwardly curse and outwardly prepare myself to be the nice cab driver to the cops. I am very pragmatic about cops. I do not feel like I can win an arguement with them, or that showing any animosity is going to do me any good. Fucking with a cop is like black magic -- whatever you do comes back at you three times harder. They are working joes doing one of the most stressful activities that I can imagine, and they have powers that they can use, anytime, anyday, to cost you, at least, a lot of money and time.

Outside of Cabrini Green, I watch in the rear view mirror as two cops approach the cab. As one comes to my window, the other stops behind the cab, pulls out his pistol and aims in our general direction. The cop actually sounds nice as he asks me, "Where did you pick them up?"

"I dropped a woman off at Cabrini Green and they jumped in."

"Okay. You two, hop out and come around to the back."

The kids are searched. Spoke to. They look like they are kind of pissed but resigned not to say a word. Like me, they have been taught how to act around cops, how to remain neutral in the battle of good and evil.

They get back in the cab and I try to make them feel comfortable again, some how make up for what they have just been through... "You guys get that a lot?"

"All the time." The words come out in the same flat tone they used with the cops.

"Well, I'm sure as hell glad they didn't search me. I've got a huge bag of weed in the glove box. You guys want to smoke a joint?"

"You got weed?" They both start laughing, having hit the jackbox for any stoner, a stranger offering them weed when they don't have any.

I do not know what it is about cabs.... I used to think that since we took people to clubs, this was why customers were always offering me weed. I was never offered anything to drink, but I was offered coke and heroin and weed. Sometimes I would smoke with them, if it was dark and there were not a lot of cars around. You never know when you are driving a cab if you are in some spot where cops are watching. In fact, when I would hit the one hitter as I drove, afterwards I would always, by habit, then act like the reason I kept lighting my metal cigarettte (which it was painted to look like), was that the lighter was not working... I would always hold it up and click it a few times afterwards, look at it in disgust.... then put the one hitter and lighter away. And of course, once, as I finished my little ritual, I looked in the rear view mirror right into the eyes of a cop behind me at a light looking straight at me and kind of calming down from being pissed -- he saw me taking the hit, and was ready to bust me for sure, then my game played him.

You know, I read the other day a quote from Daly about people driving cab stoned... asking if we thought that was okay? I have to fight the urge not to be a hypocrit and say that I wish I had not smoked weed while driving. It helped me make it through the night, deal with working way too much, etc. They passed legislation here this week that makes pot a 200 ticket in unincorporated Cook County. Interesting.... good news, but nothing like a solution to any problem.

Which brings us back to racial profiling.... Talib, the dark marine in dreads, gets searched all the time... last time he talked about this, he had a brand new bowl and tried to get the cop to let him keep it... instead, the cop smashed it in the alley. They had no weed on them, so the cops just let them go.

The problem with this topic is people like to play BLAME THE COP over this shit. Which is patently unfair. Racial profiling like I saw at cabrini green has other elements. The kids they searched were probably in gangs -- the cops knew them, and people die in the streets of Chicago all the time because of the guns. I am all for cops going after people who are notorious for carrying around guns and killing little kids... and sending others to jail forever.

We tell the cops to do their best to stop crime. Then we set up a society where the underclass has few ways to move up in the world; where pot is subject to prohibilition, as seems the world wide consensus at this point, criminals have an in. Someone is going to make money off of pot. The pragmatic way to deal with the problem is to legalize pot, then fund drug treatment alternatives for hard drug users with the taxes. Gangs would lose their attraction real fast without money.

The alleged need for a gun on the streets would drop. The hundred kids killed in Chicago every year from gunfire would become a thing of the past. Cops could concentrate of preventing crime.

The prisons would lose a lot of money... the for profit prisons actually lobby for harsher laws so that they can get more inmates. IS anything more horrible than a company that wants people to be put in their prisons? They want to enslave others. They make money off of people they keep captive and force to work.

The cops who do the front work on this huge issue, are mere pawns on a game board too large to see from one side to the other. I have been to the ghettos enough to know that there is a different world than the nice neighborhoods, that poverty, lack of education and nutrition and employment all combine to create a problematic environment that creates a lot of criminals.

Drug dealers hanging out in the streets are all black or hispanic. Cops see this, and of course that is who they pull over. They also racial profile whites who are in black neighborhoods where drugs are sold.

I know that a lot of cops are racist. I think it shows a mental flaw to become like this, a certain level of madness in ones worldview that taints everything else. The frustration with the system that cops feel wants a target, just like everyone else.... right or left, the one thing they have in common is that they seem to almost need enemies. This is because we are programmed genetically to look at the world as us and them. Football did not invent rivalry, merely played to the genes, as is usally the case.

I don't want to be an apologist for racism, but we are xenophobic apes who tend to naturally fear strangers, and unless we can open up our empathy to another race, we are kind of stuck there.

Once again, I get to the end of the exploration of some idea in an essay, and my feelings are so ambigous . . . I think everyone is a victim sometimes to larger systems, their culture, upbringing, genes.... all kinds of shit that is not their choosing. Blaming them is tricky...

Check out all of my blogs by googling my name, John Scott Ridgway

the fix is in... Why your 401k is losing money and Goldman Sachs is scooping it up

I just read the business section of the NYT... well, at least one article, which is as close as I can usually come to a business section. I tend to think the stock market has nothing to do with me... like a lot of folks, I am learning with this recession that this is hardly the case; unemployment alone is effecting millions. Here in this article, super computers that manipulate the stock market are shown to have not just an unfair advantagous, but what should be an illegal method of making money off of everyone else for no other reason than that they can afford a fast computer, and others are letting them get away with it.

They use the computers to make huge buys and sells, pushing the prices of stocks up so they can sell at higher prices. They are presently responsible for half of the trading done on the market. Golman Sachs, who if you have not read, has been mysteriously (before this article) making money in the market. GS is exposed in a new Rolling Stone article as something of an evil empire with too much power. The claim is that they... manipulate the stock market. And here they are, still doing the same thing. Just because something is legal, does not make it right...

They need more controls on the stock market. If the average trader is going to be used by the super computers as fools to profit from, then why should anyone let them? If I was a stock broker, I would be crying foul, man. How can the government let GS get away with something so blantly bad for everyone in the world? You have to wonder.... has the country just always been prone toward believing so much in the magical hand in the stock market that no controls seem to be needed? Well, we know now that the invisible hand that is supposed to take care of everyone, is actually a computer that is enriching a few people at the expense of billions, and justice.

This is akin to letting a card counter play poker with amatuers. OF course the card counter is going to win. They need some kind of reforms that are beyond me. If nothing is done, a few companies with these computers will end up doing all of the trading. They will basically just be set up to pass stocks back and forth, reaping profits from trading fees. This kind of thing was done during the savings and loan scandal, where rich investors sold worthless peices of property back and forth to drive the price up, then sold it... and we ended up with inflated prices on property, huge loans that made no sense, and a world wide recession. Surprise, surprise...

If I believed in a conspiracy on these matters, I would say look at this shit, the fix is in on the average guy, and whoever is behind that kind of power, would have to be in the elite of the elite...

Instead, I tend to think this is blind luck backed up by blind power. That the problem is fixable, and not something held together by the dark forces of satan or bilderbergs or whoever... Only time will tell. I would not even know about this, I suppose, if people in a position to do something about it were not also aware... so, what will the suits do on this one? You can bet that the future of the stock market, which means the future of your economy, is at stake here. Where do people think this money came from at Goldman Sachs, by the way? Well, they use these computers to suck that money out of others who are playing the stock market -- people who are in control of your 401k...

Very disturbing. Class war of a sorts. The middle class investor is sure as hell getting screwed without lube....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html?hp

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a poet

a few words

earnest and unkempt

slapped into an electronic machine

confounding and confusing

infused with odd impulses and supersticious notions

images of liberitine voyourism

meshed with hallmark cards and tv love

the mystical mish-mass of the mind-mess

mesmorizes and mesmorizes and mesmorizes

trying to make everyone march on cue

work on cue

love on cue

war on cue

think on cue

vote on cue

believe on cue

a harmonious social landscape

the winners and losers clearly defined

by who can jump the most hoops and memorize lines from bibles

so thinks

a serious gray bearded poet

still earning his wrinkles

as he stakes out a terrain in the mental landscape

he is aware that words can explode

he is aware that there are bullets swarming off the pages

he is aware that he is in an environment of endless cognitive warfare

he is aware of the shrinking resources and the dark way man will sacrifice another

he is aware of being a caretaker who will do what he can to stop it

He is aware of being a few words on a scrap of paper blowing in the wind

Check out all of my blogs by googling my name, John Scott Ridgway

give us a one payer system... or give you death

to paraphrase give me freedom. or give me death... with the switch that while I might not be willing to die for this issue, I do know that if we do not correct this health care system, if we just keep going along like we have been, we will be sentencing 46 million people to live without medical insurance. Shame the fuck on us. We should just be better than this. Health is not an issue that mere ups and downs in the market can effect. Stock market fucks up, well... that is no reason to contiue with our health care travesty.

Go fucking back your president people. You voted him in because of this issue, and others... this was a big one. Don't let the propoganda of the insurance companies and the right wing fucks throw you on this one. This is an issue of basic, humanitarian care for others in our society. People who try to derail a one payer system should be ashamed of themselves. Simple class warfare against the poor and the middle class at its most bald faced and out there.

The Deranged And Diseased Tale of Chester Balsonu

Chester Balls On U would always start out talking about sports, which he hated, drift into talking about his veneral disease count and related, often puss-soaked stories... Invariably, his few minutes on the air at the Peace and Pipedreams show ended with him pleaing for sex

with anyone desperatly diseased enough to swap a few with him.

A classic bit of BallsOnU:

"THis is... CHester, ballsonu, reporting... on sports. Which one? All you need to know is there was a ball, they all ran around, then went home... to loving lovers, you can bet... the kind of women who understand when a man has a couple dozens STD's and whatever he has picked up lately that have yet to be shown ... on weekly tests. My depends are full of puss, ladies... who wants to come help me shovel out the little pleasure plodder?"

Chester would go on as long as he could, forcing the other Dj's to yell him down, and sometimes physically toss him out of the studio (though they were all loath to touch him and set off any postule explosions). Once he was gone,there was usually some talk of the puddles of puss that he left on the chairs, etc.

Chester balls on u.... I can't remember if he has a backstory? I do know he got his first venerial diseases while still in the womb, and obtained a number of his diseases from his habit of picking up homeless women, the really, really crazy ones, who he could pay with table scraps.

Well, I suppose I could just call Chester Balls on U on the phone, and ask him a few questions?

"Chester, I was just writing a bit about you and realized that I don't know much."

"I have a veneral disease count, for the day, as of last tuesday, actually... of ..."

"I know about the vd, okay? Please do not remind me by referencing any open sores, or postules of anysort. I want to know what your parents did for a living, where you come from?"

"My father was used in Muskogeee experiments, where they gave black men vd so they could test them."

"Chester, you look like archie bunker, not Obama."

"My Father was a guard at the prison. And I am proud to say, the only patriot to step forward and volunteer for the program."

"Why the hell..."

"He was a genius, and something of a sex addict... always getting some disease and bringing it home to mother. This way, he had a full time excuse. Until it just fell off. He was 34 at the time. He had it stuffed, for mom to use... she never did, just left it on the mantel. Sometimes I pretended like it a space ship that got lodged in my but."

"Oh, too much... Nothing anal, Chester."

"Why are people always saying that to me?"

"How long has it been since you have discussed your shit drippings in your depends?"

"I was just discussing that with..."

"Esactly. Let's try to stick with my questions. What about your Mom?"

"My mother was one of the ugliest woman ever to walk the earth,, though she was also trippled jointed, so Dad bought her, cheap, off of a pimp who was like, her father, or maybe had been her father, though now was there mother. That question held the family reunuions enthralled, let me tell ya."

"Have you ever had a pet?"

"Here and there for a day or so. They always tend to get lodged in my anus and require another embarrassing trip the ER. I can still hear the neighbors when I brought home the last dog, who I called litttle enema... Yelling out, "Well, that'll be in his but before nightfall. I think, sometimes, these kind of statements are gypsy cureses... once you've been cursed, you have no choice."

"What is with the Beastiality and you characters from Peace and Pipedreams?"

"Well, from your lonely pedistal, I suppose you will say you have never rubbed your entire body with sharp Wisconsin cheddar cheese and then laid out naked in an alley as hundreds of rats take little, luscious love bits. The only safe word you need is Shooo..."

"No, I have no desire to... well, to do anything that you have ever thought was remotly related to sex, more than likely."

"Oh, some kind of super freak are you?"

"Super Meek. Your puss spewing ways disgust me. Okay, this name of yours, Chester Balls On U, that has to be a stage name, right?"

"Of course.... my real name is Chester Dickinass."

I hang up on the mind mess of Chester and think, once again, whoever comes up with these characters must be seriously deranged.

Check out all of my blogs by googling my name, John Scott Ridgway

The Deranged And Diseased Tale of Chester Balsonu

Check out all of my blogs by googling my name, John Scott Ridgway

The Strange And Twisted Tale of Moonbong Haze

The sordid life of our cliche stoner has of late taken it's toll. The wayward journey of our young protagonist, the unrepentingdled drugged out, and generally over-dosing somewhat, Moon Bong haze, has left him living in a metal shed, in the middle of a Chicago summer, abondened by his family (he couldn't blame though, they had a much better offer and even his limited intelligence battered by the best of drugs, knew that he would have done the same in their place).

Moonbong Haze was fired from Fearless Radio almost a year before, and the family weed business went to hell after his mother and brother split with the aliens. He had to scrounge for food even back then, though, so he was used to it... he had grown up in a house where his mother was an excellent meth cook, though nothing else inspired her to go into the kitchen. Even when he had the radio show, the only actual pay he got was the owner letting him sleep in the doorway on particular cold nights and an endless supply of coffee -- as long as him and his brother always brought the weed. The Haze brothers felt like they had won the lotto.

No one had ever given them much of a reason to hang around anywhere, let alone paid them for the service. They were used to people being nice to them until they had their drugs, then running them off with sticks. There was good reason people didn't want to be around the Haze's in general, and back then, you seldom found Moonbong without his brother Woodstock. A dangerous duo, to say the least. His younger brother travels well armed and is prone toward firing surface to air missiles at passing planes for target practice, has a habit of laying out IED's all over their apartment while too drunk to remember how to pull out his dick to piss, let alone make sure that none of the bombs blow up his brother, his friends, himself. The immortality of the Haze brothers is kind of a given, of course. They were bred in a lab, from a cartoon road runner, a whily coyote, and an old eight track by Cheeks and Chong, though they had no idea about any of that.

Moon Bong Drives everywhere too stoned to see through the windsheild, relying on minor accidents to stop him instead of harshing his buzz by getting the brakes fixed. He believes that if he is lucky, he can just start the car, put it in gear, put a rock on the accelerator and close his eyes... and the car will drive itself. He tries this two or three times before he will actually admit he has no luck and will have to steer... some.

He tires to earn money through various capatilist adventures that come to him when he is very stoned and make sense only as long as he can remain very stoned and keep everyone around him stoned.

He actually did have quite a little business during the radio show, the infamous Gerbongs, a cadre of air tank wearing rodents who he had spent years training to clean bongs. They had there own song, and an avid following until it was discovered that the gerbils often drowned and clogged the bong up into such a mess that they were best thrown away. After that was a cat cleaning service, which he learned by spending an afternoon on mushrooms watching a cat with kittens. Again, at first people were willing to hire him, for ridiculously low amounts-- what have I got to lose prices of fifty cents. Soon enough Moonbong was hacking up softball sized furballs, and snorting ounces of cat nip just to get out of his litter box in the morning (he had a confusing notion that the cats slept in the box because they too,like him, had chronic bed wetting issues).

Moonbong is also known for having a penis minute enough to make a strong case for some kind sexual reconstructive surgery.

The Haze family included Mama Haze, Woodstock, and Moonbong. The mother has gang bangs that required specially made cum shovels to clean up afterward. The boys were disgusted by the duty, but since their mother controls their drug supply, they feel they have little choice except to go along with her.

Picking up with Moonbong now, his mother and brother have abondoned him, after being offered an invitation to an intergalactic orgy, which Moonbong, while originally invited, was soon enough kicked out because of basic worthlessness at any attribute another human wants in a sex partner... which brings us to beastiality, the farm boys right hand. Moonbong is just the right size for mating with rodents. I will not go too far into this since I am writing about Moonbong for the weekly bulliten at a senior citizens home (at least, that is my target audience... keep your fingers crossed); suffice to say he started out wrestling gerbils on the boardwalk for tips, which he took very seriously despite the size differences, and was indeed badly mawled a few times before ultimatly falling for a fair maiden who dropped, by her tail, into his life one otherwise ordinary, for him.... day.

His choice of drugs and lifestyles is not for the faint of hearted. Or actually anyone who wants to keep their heart beating. He has overdosed daily, when possible, since discovering drugs, in his mothers womb, at Woodstock.

Among his actual enemies (he makes up most of them), is the original artist in black standing sullen in the back, Johnny Pain. JP is an old rogue spy from a family of serial killers who do just enough hits for the intelligence angncies and cops to be left alone, mostly. He is a much older, lonelier, more perverse and wasted version of the Johnny Pain he makes out like he is in his blogs. He gets pissed off occasionally and goes on killing spree's for causes, but mostly he is just kind of a boof in most respects. His violence helped the crew at the Radio Show take over the world at one point -- a feat he acheived accidently, on a lark... though he was too embarrassed to own up to that, so he made a few changes for the better in the world and then went back to his house, which has every window covered in black trash bags, where he has stayed for the last three months, living on daily deliveries of smokes, booze, drugs, and, when at all possible, siamese twin prostitutes,or people who will agree to be sewn together for a few bucks.

He is also the only one who will give Moonbong a place to stay. He does so simply because he has felt that sooner or later he was going to kill that damn pseudo-hippy stoner and he didn't want to wast time looking for him when the mood came.

Moonbong is very wary of Johnny Pain, who at one point cut off all of his fingers and had him tortured for a few months purely because he could. If not for the roof over his head... the metal shed where he kept his bong and sleeping bag... he woud not have actually risked his life by coming anywhere near Johnny Pain. Pain has a huge crop of weed growing in his backyard, so always let a stoner or two sleep in the garage for security purposes. They also came in handy if he needed to frame someone for a murder -- which was indeed one of his hobbies, along with taxidermy -- he specialized in fetuses, corning the nitche market with hard care pro-lifers..

Ugh.... these characters are repulsive... an attempt at comedic thought to clear these damn poems out of my head.

Check out all of my blogs by googling my name, John Scott Ridgway

Masks

Obama is going to teach this country a few lessons

His skin-tone alone...

even here in the liberal enclave of Chicago

we can hear the dull roar of rednecks minds exploding across the country

I see the

reporters

dancing like excited chipmunks

pretending to be driven to the brink of heart attacks on news tv

by the president's protocol

fearful of words they barely understand --

they yell socialists instead of BOO!

this week the young republicans elected a leader who last week was laughing

at calling the president part of an 'angry pack of coons.'

taken from barracoons -- the hated cages where slaves awaited ships to the free (sic) world

the pricks declaring that their rascist rant is just a joke

have yet to learn that they dwell in

nostaligia for a world that never was

one they were taught exists

to explain this otherwise ambigous mess of moral centers

to explain why they feel hatred, anger, a will to power, and a need to love

Shared emphathy costs us...

another emotional pit opens up with every extension of our ethical circles

we find it is easier not to care

can become like cons in the yard

watch without emotions as our tv shows the heroes meeting out death

not so much stupid as stunted

anyone can be a racist

doesn't take brains or a lack there of

takes scar tissue built up from a lifetime of tiny cuts

takes our dna

xenophobic apes

hating every new wave of immigrants

hating the .... weak.

cultivated slaves to the rules of the jungle

ill-equpped to fight off their mental demons

Poeple want to pretend otherwise

tell themselves they hate the unworthy

Most won't go after the powerful

better hold your tounge if we know what is good for you

only strike when you know

there is a painted bird and you are part of the flock

everyone knows one rule... shit rolls down the hill

another battle front for the genetics of xenophobia

opens and closes

a temp0rary victory for clear thinking

soon enough swept away with the next wave of hysteria

we treat other races like they try to say Jehova

treated the jews

punishing them all for the sins of the one

might as well lump the white liberals in with Limbaugh

oh well oh well

I suppose this is why they invented hell?

the imposition of the idea of justice

finally found on the distant shores

behind eyes stitched shut for the final journey

the libraries we build up around concepts apes discuss with a few grunts

our siren songs to suicide

sung from a voice on the otherside

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Mawled and Molested

wondering whether there was ever a real reason

for anything anywhere ever

. . . all our words just an endless chain of conclusions

that add up to nothing

more than

how to build a hut

& pick corn

Check out all of my blogs by googling my name, John Scott Ridgway

calls to prayer in a foreign language

echo around me

there is supersonic war-talk

under the oceans

scrambling the brains of whales and sharks and seals

the air is thin in this room

barely sustains my breath

there is an absence of gravity

a sensation like I am floating away

prickles of panic at the chaos of the coming wave of fate

We give our unconscious beasts faces

our hunger/panics/fears

projected onto otherwise blank slates

the news is vomit inducing

our cruelities compounded

by our fascination with blood

our inability to turn away

a sacred sickness unto itself

scarred

by wrinkles of mild despair

on our foreheads

angels wander stunned and bloodied

through a landscape of the dead and dying

Their gray wings open wide behind them

their outstretched hands spewing lightening

into a legion of demons

humans hiding in the shadows

trying to stay out of the way

refugees from a war in the heavens

the dream is of a justice that is accepted universally

for all people

everywhere

all the time

The angels are relentless

a purely mechanized destruction of everything in thier fated path

a wounded man crawls along between the bodies

he never wonders who won the battle

the carnage seems endless/forever/all he has ever known

WE ARE

choosing our sides

with every word we speak

every article we read

every hand we take

every gun we aim

we pledge alleigence

to somebody

something

maybe sometimes just ourselves

in a cattle car

on the way to a gas camp

I yell through the slats at my Nazi guards

leave me out of your wars

yell until my voice is a hoarse whisper

trying to come across some way to use language that will make them understand

Another whispered voice in the unintelligible muddled roar of conversation

They know something I want to hide

There is no way to leave the battlefield

Warring Angels

led into battle

in the last turbulent years of Christ

they have always won before

will always win

the contest is one of will and patience

the carnage is no less horrifying

to the gentle choir of God

they understand

the human ache for death

for the release

of one existence

for another

Curtain Calls

See....

A star is a metaphor

for many things

that a mere mortal

could never attain.

we hate and love few strangers

we love and hate a lot of metaphors

stand-in's for people we don't know

we communicate with them as what we think they are

not what they are

the michael jackson in my mind

represented those who prey on Children

My issues used him as a media target

Where I could try to confess and purge my rage

I remember him

too

as a child star

a child myself

I would have told you back then that he was the luckiest child alive

we were raised to want and worship the rich and famous lives

our young minds were still just discovering

the worship of icons in the media

society just then beginning to crumble

destroyed by the new ministers of truth

the actors and writers and artists

the quoted and interviewed and photographed

L Ron Hubbard tried to buy icons for his religion

stars

ready made little media magnets

human billboards walking around promoting his con

An early take on Dungeons and Dragons

Before the deconstructionists got a--hold of all the myths

and began searching around inside for any hint of Truth

creating an Anonymous crew holding up the truth to their lies

They almost got Jackson... sent Lisa Maria Presley after his money

Gave him the sham marriage his career required

He was like Elvis in his rejection

They both had grown up with people trying to get their money

& recognized the con under the earnest smiles

Michael Jackson began to morph before my eyes

His music lost me at thriller

I was too rock n roll to care for what I thought of as Disco

No music aficionado in the first place -- I sort of assumed my taste was bad

Today I am reading all the notes left in his wake

The bits of information that make up my myth of the man

were forged in rage at predators and his seeming transformation

into a white woman

The politics just were bad....

Now I am learning just how horrible this man's life truly was

Just how complete he fits into the way I think of wealth and fame

He was a slave laborer throughout his childhood

beaten or watching beatings his entire life

Children being hit

He wanted to surround himself with children who were happy

to fill himself with feelings he felt he'd missed in childhood

An icon, he spoke the words and everyone wanted to go along

Now we find out he is taking 30 Valiums a day

... I used to take those for my back and they mess you up

no one likes living that fucked up

your life is a hell that you refuse to enter anymore when you are filled with needle marks

the only thing left in your real life is pain and withdrawal... why go there?

He was abused, used, and neglected

He grew up to be an abuser, a user, and a neglector

and a genius at dance and performance

I can never forgive people who go unpunished

Do the crime, do your time

come out and start over

be someone else

He was punished for his crimes

crippled his lifestyle at least

let a bit of how people see him

into his life

Good people want to say nice things to the family

stay on the better stories

b appropriate

at first when I heard he died

he completed a story that I had about him in my mind

a predator was gone

One down....

Now I see how the doctors kept him all wasted

He was slaughtered by modern medicine

beaten into a bruised and bleeding babe

dependent on a bottle of Jesus Juice

Can a man be judged for being created a monster?

Seems the creator himself is to the blame

the beatings given children that drive them to think

violence is the way to show someone who is right

who is almighty

who is making the rules

then they wonder why the gangs seem so natural to some?

I have seen enough life to know that some blows to the brain never heal

In the press the stars have to be Svengali

for every interview, auditions, performances

They play up whatever metaphor suites their target audience

toe the party line

stay away from the spotlight when they snort coke and whore out

Jackson's couldn't have gotten away

with having all the children over to never never land

if he was out and gay

That ain't right but prejudice is out there

Maybe if society were a little kinder

he would have evolved into someone adult

tempered by the moods of lovers

whose grace would have been more important than any drug

A gay black man in the media

Don't see too many of those

The pressure is too extreme to conform

and grows more extreme

with every step you take up the ladder

sexuality becomes an economic equation --

a gay loses some of their core audience

the screaming girls who were in the front row since his first memories

would have turned away

He was so afraid people would turn away

He tasted what it was like to hailed with love from all over the world

He swam in that love like an ocean of morphine

The life he went back to after the performance could never compare

He started shooting the concerts up into his veins

Getting all that glory without an audience

after a life of needing to be needed

he needed no one

His own chemical never never land

snorted, shot, swallowed, smoke and drank

The doc's were well paid to go along

employees

in a criminal operation to keep a human being controlled

docile

signing those checks

Told since infancy that it did not matter what he felt

what mattered was what he did

His feelings were secondary to the dance moves

the belt

he could feel it

even when his brothers were being beaten

And his father was beaten and someone is being beaten as I write these words

And someone else is saying that they wished their parents had spanked them enough

to avoid jail and go to school

He was told that what mattered was what people thought of him

Told WATCH PEOPLE WATCH YOU

Be What They Want

tried to hide that he drank, the drugs

got into a sham Scientology marriage

even as he changed his face into a perfect androgyny

He couldn't hide who he was

Anymore when the drug him into court for sleeping with kids

He was wasted and wearing pajamas one day

spry and defiant the next

now the people are coming out and talking about trips to south America with boys

gay lovers hidden in cheap motels

he quickly becomes a tragic figure

he knew he was almost too weak to live

that the od's were going to get him sooner or later

the anesthesia he was taking to sleep kills most people who abuse the stuff

told his daughter he would be gone soon

He was signed to do fifty concerts he and everyone around him knew

the sickeningly thing drug addict was never going to make

even his contractually obliged 13 minutes a show

I guess we all hope that God

or our conscious

buys the rationalizations

we've used to navigate

the human geography

I believe the only word

that means god

in the human language

is love

Endless love...

replacing the hatred

the cynicism

the cryptic con jobs

I forgive him now

What If Cohen Was To Do To Blacks What He is doing to gays?

Sure, I laughed at Borat... then later I felt a bit guilty; stories started coming out that he tricked the college kids in the RV into getting very drunk, and then played them into saying racist statements that were out of character. He basically took advantage of the kindness, and tolerance of a lot of people. When he pulled out a bag of shit as a gift from his country, the poor hosts tried to be nice. Americans do this. They may hate someone inside, or have all kinds of misconceptions about a race in general, and still treat that race kindly in person.

He showed that there is racism in America.... a quick Internet search would show you the same thing. It was like he pointed out the color blue was blue. Amazing antics got him there, the acting was incredible, etc... there is a lot of talent involved. They could probably make Cohen cooking an omelet into something incredible.

Now, comes Bruno. He is pointing out that there is homophobia in America. This is basically a sequel to Borat with a different figure of ridicule. Again, he is pointing out the obvious -- like when he shoved his ass in Eminems face, who is said to be homophobic; as someone on record as homophobic, it is no wonder he could go along with this joke, Cohen is said to be straight, so there was no revulsion, as would happen if he was hit on...

Remember, sociobiology has shown us that most of our behaviors are remarkably similar to animals, and when we try to make humans out to be more than we are, we run into all the problems with religions, social stigma toward minority traits, etc.... Animals, as you can read an essay about on this site, have been shown by science to be bi-sexual -- there are even two gay penguins who raised a chick in a zoo... So, whether his mid addled mind will admit it or not, Eminem is a bi-sexual animal. Animals also seek out plants that get them stoned, and that list is nearly endless as well... including a Badger I read about today that ate a bunch of cherries that had hung long enough to get all filled with liquor. Eminem would of course more readily admit that he is an animal in this regard. Try telling him that he is a bi-sexual and I'm sure he would get so mad he would attack you, which says a lot when you have body guards all around who will hold you back, protect you... Oh, well.

People who put down gays hate the part of themselves that is a bi-sexual animal. This basic self-hatred of their species makes some of them fag-bash. I lived in Grand Rapids Michigan for awhile, a small town with almost no crime, but very dominated by a fundamentalist, Dutch Something religion. And there were all kinds of attacks on Gays. A buddy of mine from AA worked in the city for ten years. A thoughtful, educated guy who actually became my sponsor, and I only chose very together, long sober, and brilliant folk for this honor. When he gave up his job as a city assessor after fifteen years, no one would come to his going away party because he was gay. Hard to imagine, but their religion made them particularly hateful of themselves. And we have two basic choices with anger, we can internalize it, which leads to suicide, or we can project it outward, which leads to violence; I mean this last sentence metaphorically and literally.

Bruno is going to embarrass people who he tricked into getting pissed at him. The gayness is not needed for this guy to get people pissed, obviously, since that is what his characters have been about since the start -- but getting these people angry at him, hardly shows they are homophobic. The scene they show over and over of him pissing off some black women for saying he traded for his baby, and named his a traditional African name, OJ, did not need a crazy gay person to make them angry.

So the people who watch this movie, are almost certainly telling their unconscious mind an old and familiar message -- Gay Is Bad and people will hate you. Look up the astonishing number of teenage gays who kill themselves, and you will get a bit of insight into how fag-bashing -- from kids who inevitably are homophobic slamming each other with this term ( unless in direct contact with Gays, and then this shit just makes them feel alienated), to the slur-use of gay on South Park.... meaning this kind of talk is downright MURDEROUS.

He is basically doing a minstrel show. I wonder what would happen if he pulled this shit in black face, going around exposing that prejudice? I have seen this done in serious reporting, and people notice the shift in societal perceptions right away. They show that there is still racism without offending blacks. Cohen going out and playing a mean, misogynist, dope dealing, pimping black guy, and going into projects to show black racism and homophobia, he would almost surely have to move to an island somewhere to avoid getting capped. His rap character by the way, seems to make fun of black culture, as handed down to white rap stars (you can make fun of these people for adopting a certain way of speech, or whatever... but they respect the black culture enough to do an honest portrait, where as Cohen makes fun of that culture).

Now, I do not think that anyone should necessarily avoid insulting people with their humor. If that criticism is valid. Strictly making fun of people for a God given attribute, that is another story.

If God was a hung up on heterosexuality, He would not have created a bi-sexual animal kingdom... unless, the hetero idea is part of our punishment for eating from the tree of knowledge?

I do not think that the people behind this movie think they are doing anything bad for the gay's... and this more or less shows their ignorance, and homophobia. Most of our thinking is done with our unconsciousness mind, in wordless parts of our mind that interpret emotions and images... this film, deconstructed ever so slightly, is gay bashing on one level.... people would see that if he put on a black face, instead of going with being an Austrian. The Austrains are sure as hell pissed.

Cohen is out to make a buck, a rep, be a star. I guess that he is trying to something real with his art means I have to give him a break.... still, I think I prefer the Jamie Kennedy school of this, where he plays with peoples perceptions by doing things like dancing with the alleged corpse of his dead wife at her funeral. Basically, he gets the same funny reactions we love, without having a hateful portrait of a minority. His white rapper moves showed a loving portrait of black culture by the way....

FURTHER READING E.O. WILSON... ON BEING HUMAN.

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Oh, Please, God.... let this become a trend...

Rihanna mama wearing spangles instead of a Bra. Oh, please, please, please let this catch on. Might not be too safe in Muslim cuntries.

Check out all of my blogs by googling my name, John Scott Ridgway

One Fine Peice Of Brainless Ass

God, I hope the Republicans run this woman for office. She would lose so nicely. Still, I would do her.

Check out all of my blogs by googling my name, John Scott Ridgway

everything that is wrong with Hollywood.

Movies based on toys like the View-Master? Some asshole accountant comes up with the idea that making movies based on toys is the way to go. After Transformers, I guess we can expect as much from the idiots in Hollywood. The stories should be the most important ingrediant, not an after-thought. As a writer, I see this process as sickening commercialism. I met Bonnie Hunt once, and she told me that she had to make a movie about heart disease, because some suit said that a lot of people are having heart transplants, so they will go see our movie. They made her make this movie before they let her do her own scripts... the movie flopped... don't know if she made any others.

Man, I should be getting movie offers... my book One War is actually about something, not a goddamn toy. The arts could be leading the consciousness of mankind, instead they just add to the fucking garbage in our heads. I know a black guy who talks about a crew who want to start to killing hollywood producers over the way they treat blacks. Look at the new transformers, the characters speaking black english are illiterate idiots. This shit is real. Racism is in the movies. Jar Jar Binks was enough to make me think Lucas had lost his mind...

A movie about a toy... my God, they are stupid.

DreamWorks eyes View-Master toy as movie concept

Tue Jul 7, 2009 9:52am EDT

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By Borys Kit and Jay A. Fernandez

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - View-Master, the Fisher-Price toy with little 3-D picture discs of mountains, rivers and caverns that kids could rotate through a viewfinder, is the latest vintage toy getting a second life on the big screen.

DreamWorks is in negotiations to acquire movie rights to the toy from Mattel (which owns Fisher-Price) and has asked writer-producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci to do some "Transformers"-style magic on it.

Brad Caleb Kane, who worked as a writer-producer on the duo's Fox series "Fringe," is on board to write the screenplay. Kurtzman and Orci would produce.

Story specifics are being kept under wraps, though Kane, who during the holiday weekend sent out a message on Twitter announcing his involvement, said, "It'll be like the old '80s Amblin movies: 'Goonies,' 'Young Sherlock' ... in that vein." (That post has since been taken down.)

The Kurtzman-Orci production banner has specialized in Amblin-style movies. Kurtzman and Orci do have experience with toy brands, as well: Their resumes include the two "Transformers" movies, which are based on Hasbro toys.

DreamWorks is hoping to make a family-friendly movie. The studio, the producers and Kane will devise a story from scratch. That approach is becoming more common as Hollywood picks up properties based on the allure of brands and board games. Universal recently picked up rights to the Atari video game "Asteroids" and under its Hasbro deal is developing movies based on such games as "Battleship" and "Candyland."

The View-Master deal, which is not yet signed, has been brewing for a while. One time-consuming element has been getting Kurtzman and Orci on board. The two writer-producers are in high demand as a result of their work on box-office hits "Star Trek," "The Proposal" and "Transformers."k out all of my blogs by googling my name, John Scott Ridgway