Juanes in Cuba

Colombian singing star Juanes performed a free live concert in Havana Cuba yesterday for a crowd estimated at 1.1 million people. 'Art triumphs over tyranny' should be the cheer in Miami today. It is, for the young people.

But the old Mustache Pete Cubans were out yesterday, throwing Juanes CDs into Calle Ocho in Little Havana in Miami and ran over them with a steamroller. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen called the concert a "triumph for the Cuban regime" because Juanes did not cite a list of human rights violations during the show. Only the old farts believe her, as they watched more done in one day to end the dictatorship than their failed policies have accomplished in 50 years.
http://www.miamiherald.com/213/story/1243567.html

The times they are a-changin down south. What will break the old right wing Miami Cuban power base will be when the Castro regime falls during Obama's administration. Nixon and Kissinger opened up Russia and China by offering what they wanted, Levis and Pepsi-Cola. The same will work in Cuba. Many Americans believe that these Miami Cubans don't want change at all. Big frogs in a little pond become little frogs in a big pond. And you can hear the croaking loud, loud, loud today.

Bestselling

Time magazine this week features a funny and insightful article by David Von Drehle on Glenn Beck, including Stephen King's description of Beck as "Satan's mentally challenged younger brother." Read it online: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1924348,00.html

It also shows that Glenn Beck is one of America's bestselling authors, and has had Top Ten NY Times bestsellers in both nonfiction and fiction, though with Beck I'm not sure how you tell the two apart.

Dan Brown continues to mine the publicity gold vein. His new book is a Number One before it's even released, and Hollywood bound as well it seems. Both of Brown's previous bestsellers, The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons read like first drafts from small town writers conferences. To me this is encouraging. I like small town writers conferences.

When The Tea Party's Over

How the celebrants are being duped by the private insurance companies:

http://www.slate.com/id/2228458/?from=rss

The healthy majority insured account for only 3% of total health care costs. And now their rates just went up, and they get less coverage than before. Hey, let's go out and protest healthcare reform. We like getting ripped off.

Sand in the Vaseline

I loaned a friend the Talking Heads greatest hits collection, and she told me Disc 2 is now her workout music of choice. Heads made intelligent dance music, with David Byrne's unique perspective, and driving beats to keep everyone on the floor at CBGB. Like "Life During Wartime" one of a series of songs about a Second Civil War:

Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons,
packed up and ready to go
Heard of some gravesites,
out by the highway,
a place where nobody knows
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance,
I'm getting used to it now
Lived in a brownstore,
lived in the ghetto,
I've lived all over this town
This ain't no party,
this ain't no disco,
this ain't no fooling around
No time for dancing,
or lovey dovey,
I ain't got time for that now
http://www.elyrics.net/read/t/talking-heads-lyrics/life-during-wartime-(live)-lyrics.html

Or my favorite, "Love For Sale"

I was born in a house with the television always on
Guess I grew up too fast
And I forgot my name
We're in cities at night and we got time on our hands.
So leave the driving to us
And it's the real thing.
And you're rolling
In the blender
With me.
And I can love you
Like a colorTV.
Now love is here
C'mon and try it
I got love for sale
Got love for sale
And now love is here
C'mon and try it
Got love for sale,
Got love for sale.


"And I can love you like a color TV"----who else would say that?

Anyone needing a healthy dose of fun can check out the Jonathan Demme documentary of Talking Heads live, Stop Making Sense

Friday 9/11

Believable Lies will observe a moment of silence to honor the memory of those lost on 9/11.


Believable Lies will observe a day of silence to honor the thousands of brave men and women lost as we try to make sure it never happens again.

Why We've Lost That Lovin' Feeling; Obama and 24

The Obama staff seems at a loss as they try to explain the drop in popularity of the new president. They should step back, and take a look from outside, or at least pay more attention to Believable Lies.

The one thing that has pushed America back toward the Right is the constant talk of prosecution of Bush/Cheney Admin members and CIA operatives for torturing 9/11 suspects. We don't want to punish anyone for brutality to terrorists. Jack Bauer tortured terrorists right in our living rooms for years following 9/11, and we're damn glad he did. This should be a joke but it isn't. A popular Top Ten show had Keifer Sutherland using electrodes, pliers, pistols,garrots, and knives on suspected terrorists in an effort to stop their latest attack. We cheered him on as we watched. I did anyway. What America wanted more than anything and still does want more than anything is a sense of something being done about these murderous fanatics.

To have a black Attorney General talk about going after Dick Cheney for authorizing waterboarding and other extreme measures is the BIGGEST BLUNDER OF OBAMA'S CAREER. Most Americans would be happy to see Mr. Cheney retired with a medal, rather than an indictment. The Republicans await gleefully the charges to be brought. The Obama administration would be brought down almost immediately.

You can't have a President with an Arab sounding name prosecuting former Presidents who went after Arab terrorists. Whoever does the PR for Obama should be fired for not noticing so obvious a fact. And when you have black admin people going after 9/11 admin people, you put the whole effort on a racist level.

Obama had the option of stopping this and he missed his opportunity. It's killing Healthcare Reform and making pinheads like Glenn Beck look like patriots. Barack and Michele need to go to Netflix and get DVDs of 24, complete seasons. Quite honestly, if Jack Bauer had been portrayed by Will Smith instead of Keifer Sutherland, none of this would be going on. And note:
two of the Presidents on 24 were black men, who authorized extreme measures to stop the terrorists.

Descartes In Reverse

After Descartes, philosophy adapted itself to Isaac Newton's mechanical universe, and the mind-body duality became what is referred to as "the ghost in the machine" with the body being the machine subject to physical laws and the mind a spirit entrapped within this meat robot.

These days, the reverse is more acceptable. The mind is the machine, a computer run by neurons and protein, constantly processing the data collected by the animate entity it finds itself embedded in. The body is like a ghost to the computer, as foreign and hard to understand as uranium. Does the mind ever understand having multiple sclerosis or cancer of the colon or any of the other fleshy horrors that attack without remorse? Does the mind understand death, or passion, or even the difference between Self and Others? Or am I an Other after all, outside the binary logic of the machine sending Tweets about a life story I hardly recognize?

Does Art matter? What does Art reveal about ghosts and machines? Why do so many artists choose suicide as their final expression? The point I make: there's a connection. The relation of the Self to the outer world, to Others, carries with it the potential to change the biochemical neurological structure of the body. A crack addict's brain chemistry is changed by the drug AND by the behavior. A smoker's body is changed by smoking. Does despair change the body? Of course it does. DFW had lost over sixty pounds of body weight before he hung himself.

It seems like understanding more about ghosts and machines is a desirable goal for Art.

The Rise of Fascism

In Florida, we are seeing the fringe elements of the Right coagulate into one Fascist clot. GOP head Jim Greer does not want Florida children "to listen to Obama's socialist ideaologies" and of course, students of history will recall the same type argument being made by Benito Mussolini in Italy in the 30s. http://cbs4.com/local/florida.gop.indoctrinate.2.1165839.html

The Conservatives have disrupted Town hall meetings on healthcare reform, the fear of socialism being their motivation, as though having a public healthcare option that would help those who cannot get coverage from private insurers would lead us to communes and gulags. I cannot coverage from Aetna or Blue Cross to get follow up treatment for the melanoma I had removed two years ago. It's a pre-existing condition, one that Aetna insurance covered during the diagnosis and treatment. Now that I no longer have that job and could not afford Cobra coverage, the Conservatives have a health alternative for me: to die, from a treatable condition, because that way our American way of life will be preserved.

Give me a break, people.
The fearmongers and brown shirts need to understand, this is a matter of life and death for many Americans. And we're not going down without a fight. The Revolution talk of the 60s makes more sense now than before, except we're in power. Watch out for assassins and other patriots, looking to be on talk radio for five minutes. Beware of people who don't want their children to hear what the President of the United States has to say.