Archive for the ‘Christiane Amanpour’ Category

The New York Philharmonic played in North Korea this week. They played An American In Paris, my second favorite by Gershwin, just behind Rhapsody In Blue. How cool. I adore the word Philharmonic. It’s a cool word.

How cool is the whole thing? One of America’s premier orchestras moves an audience in North Korea as much as any band could. Broadcast over the entire country. How fucking cool is that? Sorry. Let’s send the Foo Fighters next. Really. That’s diplomacy. It is how to get shit started.

We, are all the same.

From US News & World Report:

“Still, the Bush administration sought to dampen expectations. The White House Tuesday all but ruled out further cultural exchanges until North Korea reveals all of its nuclear programs. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, herself a classically trained pianist, offered a cool assessment recently, saying, “I don’t think we should get carried away with what listening to Dvorak is going to do in North Korea.”

Bitch. Assholes.

This, while Christian Amanpour reports from Pyongyang, touring plants, machines and other disabled nuclear things.

Idiocy, bought and paid for.

You have got be fucking kidding me.

An effort to say something positive, to reach out, arrogantly squandered by our very own Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

It will be interesting to see what Obama has in store for you. At the very least, I’m hoping he parks your ass down the road and across the street.

Drinks for my friends.

I wasn’t impressed.

Dick-in-Bush are nothing if not adroit with the smoke
and the mirrors. Adept with the dogs and the ponies.
If it didn’t smell so damn familiar, if it didn’t give
me the creeps, if I was new, I might just swallow it.

Today General Mars Petraeus spoke, and he was full of
shit.

I’m not interested in writing a term paper here;
suffice it to say that we are further away from any
lasting solution than we were when Petraeus entered
stage right.

The potential for peril continues to swell as
Iran breathes power into the vacuum. It is an unmitigated
mess. A sigh between today and abject
failure.

The only thing mitigated is a chance for a
solution and that is by our own hand. Now we shake
fingers and rattle swords at Iran.

No wonder that the rest of the world
fears our foolishness.

I was impressed with CNN.

From Christiane Amanpour’s piece on religion and
conflict to this very evening, where I see Anderson
Cooper call into question the copious glut of charts
and statistics proffered by Mars Petraeus in front of
congress today.

Bravo.

Cooper and CNN are savvy enough to realize that
bouncing atop a wave of ever increasing Americans who
are beginning to see that they’ve been fed shit for
over six years is a wise play indeed. They are
saying, it seems, that we’ve been lied to so far, so
how do we know we aren’t being lied to now?

In other words. There seems to be an enormous war fat,
lipstick slathered swine of an emperor without any
clothes, parading gracelessly in our streets and on
our televisions.

Dumbya is not just sinking in the polls, he’s starting
to disgust us. Beware the tipping point that has us hating
ourselves. She’ll be coming ’round the mountain when
she comes.

Don’t go thinking these guys are done. They have fifteen months. It will get worse.

Read my lips. Mark my words.

You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Drinks for my friends.

More TV.

Christiane Amanpour’s extensive piece on religion
titled “Gods Warriors”.

I watched most of it.

Fascinating and perhaps comforting on a certain level
to find practitioners of faith even more completely
insane than our own brand.

Scary because they have more conviction and less
hypocrisy.

Ironic they live in an arid region that supplies the
big blue marble with oil while the world’s breadbasket
drowns because of America’s abuse and control of the
filthy nectar sucked from their sand.

Religion is at the core of this conflict. It is the
fundament. It is why we are where we are. Neither
side of the marble will relenquish it’s imaginary
friend. Both sides insist that it’s imaginary friend
is morally superior to the other. By virtue of that, each side
is confident that it’s imaginary friend can kick the
other’s ass.

Yet, it was not the Muslims or the Christians that
poured nitro on this acient and acrimonius pile of
smouldering camel crap that has us on the threshold of
a third world war. The first where we are capable
of entirely erasing ourselves.

It was our government. Dick-in-Bush, a spineless
congress and a complicit judiciary.

Welcome to the fifth grade.

I gotta tell ya, I’m not happy to see proof that
they are just as gullible, dogmatic and stupid as we
are. Christian fundamentalists scare me every bit as
much as Muslim extremists.

It’s kinda like being in a dive bar. A small one.
And there’s two dumbasses that don’t have enough sense
to realize that the shit they are stirring will end up
with at least one of them bleeding bad on the floor.
As well as the real possibility that they’re both
packing and will kill each other and more than a few of
the rest of us.

That, my friends, is where we are. Organized religion
is comprehensively culpable.

Religion took the bait.

Religion smiled, held out its hands and
accepted the kool aid along with a formula to make
it available to the masses. They then followed
through with glee. They paid it forward.

We are in a war of religious ideology.

I’m about to piss a few of you off.

Faith* is stupid. Creationism is retarded. All you
people who buy into God, in any traditional sense, are
willfully ignorant.

Your goddamn beliefs are the root of most of the evil
ever perpetuated and precisely the reason the world
has remained in chaos since man has been able to write
about it.

The single most important reason I loathe organized
religion is it’s complete disregard of logic. Of
Science. Of what makes sense. Empirical
discipline.

There’s a sixty thousand square foot museum in
Kentucky dedicated to creationism. One diorama after
another of modern man hanging out with dinosaurs. A
sprawling complex in 21st century America, dedicated
to picking it’s nose and looking out the window at
every theory, fact, and mountain of evidentiary
information mankind has been able to compile
throughout history.

No apologies. That’s really stupid.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.

I don’t know if the Muslim religion has a parallel for
Santa Clause but I’ve always viewed Christianity as
Santa and his list of good and bad kids, for adults.

See all religion has long since been usurped by
avarice. Faith and bureaucracy do not mix. It is a
recipe for corruption and myopic pursuit of power and
control.

My point is this: If we are to prosper as a species on
this tiny blue moist spec of dust in in a universe
beyond our imagination, we absolutelty must learn
humility. We must discard these archaic and obsolete
notions of superiority based on distorted views of the
way our world was made and/or the badassness of our imaginary friends.

We are an accident. A biological coincidence lucky
enough to flourish and achieve consciousness. It
is imperative that we stop our bickering and begin to
be grateful for our barely consequential existence.

Walk it off people. Set it aside. There are things
so important you cannot begin to imagine them.

You want to worship? How about worshipping where your water comes from? How about the planet that sustains you? Your family and friends and all the people you’ve never met and won’t ever meet? Art. Kittens. Whiskey.

*What I’m talking about here is blind unchecked faith.
All I know, is if I were to observe merely faith in
the context of day to day, I would end up residing in
a cardboard box.

I am an agnostic. As such, I view your God, in
whatever form you believe it to be, as without proof
of superiority, or even existence. I don’t care. All
I want, is for you to refrain from trying to insert it
into my life, our society, our government, our world
and MY FUTURE.

Drinks for my friends.