Thursday, January 19. 2006The New Fascism'Say "fascism" to anyone you meet, and you will conjure images of coal-scuttle helmets, of Nazi boot-heels clicking in terrible unison down Berlin streets during dark days that only a few remaining among the living remember. Each day, members of the generation that heard those heels for themselves go into the ground, taking with them whispered words of warning. I saw it for myself, they whisper before they pass. See this tattooed number? See this scar? It happened. It was real. Wednesday, January 18. 2006Jack Parsons: King Of The Rocket Men'John Whiteside Parsons, born Marvel, known as Jack, writer, visionary, dedicated occultist, and chemist of genius, was born in 1914 and died in 1952 in a mysterious explosion whose cause has never been fully explained. He was a tall handsome Californian, whose early work on highly volatile rocket-motor fuels was regarded highly enough for French scientists of a later generation to name a crater on the moon after him. Parsons introduced into early American rocketry a range of exotic solid and liquid fuels whose later forms were eventually to help drive Apollo 11 to the Moon. He helped create the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, now a major industrial complex. In early colour footage from JPL archives, he looks like a better-fed James Dean in some 1950s road movie. In the manner of many mid-century heroes such as Dean, his life was more a script than a life. Today, over fifty years later, we can run Parsons in our heads, in torn jeans and greasy shirt as he off-loads equipment from a hired pick-up truck in the baking dust of some remote desert arroyo, and gets ready for one of his many pre-war rocket experiments.' (Fortean Times article). World War IV - A Realistic Scenario'The neocons have insisted for years that the first shots of what they call "World War IV" have already been fired, and we are in for a new cold war (the previous one was WWIII) that is bound to turn hot. Now Niall Ferguson, the British exponent of a new American Empire, has come up with a scenario in which he envisions how the heavy fire might begin – one that reveals, in its fictionalization of entirely plausible events, all the assumptions and arrogance of a superpower infected with a fatal hubris.' (Antiwar article). Tuesday, January 17. 2006Livergood: The New American Civil War'We Americans are now engaged in a New Civil War, testing whether this nation, conceived and dedicated as we are, will endure. Monday, January 16. 2006Stanhope In GQ MagazineMy peculiar friend Doug Stanhope has been featured in February's edition of GQ Magazine (how the fuck does that work, it's still only January?). Some might think it odd that Doug should feature in a magazine entitled Gentlemen's Quarterly but, hell, he's always been perfectly amicable to me. The article is sensationalist for sure, but it will do his comedy rock star persona no harm whatsoever. As Doug writes: "[It's] full of half-truths and old material transcribed as conversation. I rather enjoy reading Chalmers' journalistic pieces, as much so in how he can cut corners and cheat his paymaster into thinking he's done quite a bit of work when he was really just abroad on their dime and drinking away his guilt." Full article here.
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