The horrific crime shocked a nation. Three young boys, cub scouts, were tied up, murdered and their naked bodies dumped in a drainage ditch.

As a Deep South community bayed for justice, attention focused on a group of misfit teenagers, heavy metal fans accused of killing the children in a Satanic ritual. The case became a sensation at a time when a ‘Satanic panic’ over cults was gripping 1990s America. All three were found guilty. Jason Baldwin, then 16, and Jessie Misskelley, 17, got life sentences. Damien Echols, 18, was put on death row, where he remains.

Now evidence, including DNA samples, has emerged to suggest the real killers are still at large and that three innocent men have been behind bars for almost 15 years. ‘No reasonable juror would convict… knowing what we know today,’ said defence lawyer Dennis Riordan.

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When a writer is younger he sometimes feels the need to blow smoke up readers’ asses because he thinks that others need to be fooled into recognizing his greatness. When he is older he is amused that some did inhale the smoke of his youth and were intoxicated. What is pathetic about the literary PhD is that he staggers toward retirement constantly pissing on the fire to produce more smoke.

A long time ago I remember a class discussion about the Japanese writer Yukio Mishuma who killed himself in a Japanese ritual. It had to do with killing yourself in the prime of your life in order to preserve your honor. There was somehow no honor in living into a withering state. There was all this talk comparing the writer to the athlete who retires in the prime of his career in order to maintain his self respect. And I believe there was the requisite bullshit that retired athletes say about having nothing left to prove.

How pathetic that all seemed to me. It just sounded like the same old Lord Byron nonsense about living fast and dying hard, and the stupid line from the Who song “I hope I die before I get old.” What a load of horseshit. Bernard Lewis is still writing great books in his 90s. George Burns, Buddy Ebsen. What the fuck is old? Old is just a concept for the young who fear not being young anymore. I’ll step out the door myself before someone inevitably slams it on me. The whole thing sounds like death anxiety distilled into ever more elaborate conceptualization. The fear of death is so great that the only way to overcome the fear is to feel that you can control it, control the means, the time, the circumstances.

Age simply means adapting, constantly growing out of and into new situations, being a creator. It takes an incredible amount of courage not to anesthetize yourself with alcohol or prescriptions in order to march towards the cliff which you ultimately must fling yourself over, all the while holding yourself up through the daily routines, the disappointments of family and friends, the rude manipulation of the business world, the callous stupidity of casual observers. To take all the shit and make something out of it takes sheer determination that you don’t see when you are young.

The idea of dying with honor seems a selfish one. In the end people forget you, forget your life, what kinds of clothes you wore, what side of the bed you preferred, how long you liked to sit on the can, that you blew your nose on your sleeve. Very few people are remembered by more than a few acquaintances for a generation or two after they die. When they die their honor dies with them. All that is left is of them is the conversation of others, and that changes with the prevailing winds. T. S. Eliot is all but forgotten now. Ezra Pound, Sinclair Lewis, Henry Miller, all writers who inspired a multitude were of another era, it seems. Arnold, Carlyle, Tennyson nobody but old professors read. They all have been buried like the small time Midwest farmer. Their ghosts just had a reason to hang around longer.

The most respectable people are the ones who carry on their business until the end, though others sling mud on them daily, spit on them and abuse them. One day told they are gods and geniuses, the next withered remnants of what they used to be they slough it all off and continue going through the routines of living. It is something that most people people do and is why most people are honorable in their own way. The very few who think they have to end it all at any point aren’t honorable in my eyes. They are simply escaping. Because in the end honor is a two sided concept that involves one’s identity and one’s own conduct as measured by the greater society that one is a part of. Where the individual sees honor the community sees escape. The idea of suicide with honor sounds to me like the runner who quits after running a third of the race because he is running as fast as he can and knows he can only run slower and slower. He is contented with himself that he ran as fast as he could, but not being able to bare seeing the young runner with more stamina eventually surpass him, he takes his baton and goes home.

Whenever I say things like this to people of Asian descent I get the standard remark: you don’t understand the culture, as if by disagreeing with their ways or ideas I don’t understand. That is so sad. I could just as easily say that by using that remark on me they are failing to understand American culture. And I have said that. I usually get a self absorbed smirk, just as any person will give you when you disagree with them. Then they go their way, plodding through their own routines, preserving their own measure of honor unto their death.

There are a lot of stupid fucking commercials that appeal to a low common denominator: guilt for lacking a sense of humor. Stop already with the wackiness. Jesus fucking christ. I was with my sister the other day at fuckmart and she said she had to get some underwear for her husband. She asked me if I had seen the commercial where Cuba Gooding Jr. shouts at Michael Jordan “hey, I’m wearing your underwear.” I said yeah. I had. Not because it was really my choice. I have the tv on while I work. I never actually sit in front of the tv and give it my complete undivided attention. She said she couldn’t remember what kind they were. I had to admit ignorance myself. We didn’t buy any underwear because Jordan’s face wasn’t to be seen on any packaging. Hey, but that sure was a wacky commercial, eh chief? If I want to watch stupid comedy I’ll watch Dave Chappelle or Chris Rock spout there stupid racist horseshit. Their stupidity leaves me in stitches.

But the dumbest commercial of all time is the one about the California cows. “Great milk comes from happy cows. Happy cows come from California. Make sure it comes from California.” What, do farmers hire life coaches or new age gurus for their cows in California? Perhaps the new age idiots have won the cows over by reading them the Bhagavad Gita. I picture a herd of cows being led into the milk house and there is a hippie with a vapid look on his face giving them each a flower.

Then again, perhaps there is some logic to this. I remember seeing a newspaper poll that indicated around half the children in New York City public schools believed that chocolate milk came from brown cows. I’m just not sure what the target audience is for this commercial. Children? Hey mom, make sure you buy the California cow milk. I want to eat happy cereal today. Okay, junior. Good call. I noticed you getting a little cranky lately. Must be all that midwest milk you’ve been drinking.

Maybe the commercial is a call to all cows in the midwest to protest their collective roundups and march to California. Did you hear Martha is going to California? What is that? Not what, where. Where is California? I’m not sure. I was sleeping that day in the barnyard when we were taught geography. No, they put something in your feed to make you sleep so you wouldn’t learn. I think it’s a conspiracy to keep the milk cow ignorant of the fact there is a better life waiting for them somewhere else.

It was 1970, Summer. I was 5 years old. Washington, D.C. I was sitting on the little cement wall in front of the White House. Next to me and also sitting on the wall was a black family, and further down were scores of others sitting on the wall. I was talking to my brother. Suddenly, I heard a loud bellow “Get down from there.”

Startled, I turned to see a big black Washington D.C. cop glowering at me. Surely, he couldn’t be talking to me.

“I said get down from there,” he screamed.

I looked over at the black family, none of whom moved off the wall. I’m sure my face showed my confusion.
“Don’t you hear?” the ignorant pig hissed. “I said get down from there.”
I did.
“And don’t let me catch you back up there again.”
“Stupid white kid,” I heard one of the blacks say.

That is my earliest recollection of what racism in America is all about.

To be successful with women you have to be a good actor, merciless and cruel, or a good slave.

People always used to ask me to read their shit and tell them what I think. Everyone thinks they’re a writer because they post a stupid comment on YouTube, or leave their brain refuse instead of an actual book review on Amazon book reviews. In the early 90s I edited a a small press literary mag. I made the stupid mistake of advertising in Poets and Writers. The people who read that shit are fucking worms. They long to see their slimy words crawl along the page, while they imagine readers being fortified by their shit. A lot of PhD’s read that shit, constantly on the look out for some new fool to acknowledge their imagined greatness, never bothering to read the magazine they are submitting to. I published 4 issues and said fuck you all. I had one person actually purchase a copy first before sending me their pretentious, lifeless shit. Two years later I was still getting submissions from legions of assholes. I had thousands of manuscripts in boxes that I used to use as door stops, tables, horse saws, etc. At first I would answer some of these ass wipes why I didn’t like their scribblings only to get hurt and vengeful utterances in reply. It was a lesson I would apply in many ways. Most people only want to hear you acknowledge their specialness( yeah, I can say that all you fucking grammar police. It is comprehensible language and makes perfect sense to anyone who reads it, and I don’t feel like using uniqueness or some other word).

It’s a “hey, look at me and listen to what I have to say” world. Every kid who has learned to put his rants on paper thinks that he is being unique because of his ranting. It wouldn’t be so bad, except that most of the people who want their voices heard have the most impressionable minds. They unquestionably have accepted the latest drivel from their favorite tv or radio host, or other loudmouth celebrity, learning it like a parrot. Just read the comments left on any video on YouTube and you will realize that the human mind is a reciprocal of news entertainment shit, stupid, narrow minded prejudice and idiocy that the brain regurgitates as its own original thought.

It sickens me to go to some social function as a middle aged man and still be asked “when are you going to get married?” That isn’t a question, that’s a commandment. They don’t give a shit why. Don’t give a shit who you are, or what you want. No thought is given toward me whatsoever. It is not a question, it is a judgment, a statement. Fuck you. I used to feel sorry for people like that because their minds are so absorbed in their own egotistic, idiotic entity that they couldn’t possibly have lived a single moment of their lives. But when you see so many like them you get past the disillusion and simply say, “you know, I cannot waste any of my energy caring for you. I need to keep it all to myself just to keep from going insane.

“Born-again Christians are more likely to believe in the traditional elements of Christianity than are Catholics or Protestants. For example, 95 percent believe in miracles, compared to 87 percent and 89 percent among Catholics and Protestants,” according to the poll.

“On the other hand only 16 percent of born-again Christians, compared to 43 percent of Catholics and 30 percent of Protestants, believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution.”

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We tend to think of the relationship between organised religion and totalitarian regimes – as in the Soviet Union – as one in which freedom of religious belief and expression are ruthlessly suppressed in the name of the unity of the state. But if that is the case, what exactly is taking place in our notional Christmas scene – one which could be taking place in any German town from 1933 to 1943? Does the substitution of the swastika for the cross reveal the Nazis’ transformation of a key Christian festival into a pagan rite, an appropriation of a popular tradition for political ends or an uneasy coexistence between the German people’s old-fashioned Christmas pleasures and the imperatives of their new masters?

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This video has received a great deal of play on YouTube, and contrary to what most are saying, I want to know the religion of the candidates. I want to know what they believe, because GW Bush has proven that a person’s religion can’t help but influence the decisions we make. If it’s a philosophy that closes the mind to the ways of others. And since a great deal of ideology plays into a President’s decisions such as judge nominees (one need only elicit the name of Samuel Alito to strike anger in the minds of civil libertarians everywhere), cabinet members, ambassadors and cabinet officials. Stem cell research hasn’t been explored to the degree as it should in America because of Bush’s ideological decisions. So, no, I don’t agree with the prevailing the opinion that religion isn’t important. It is very important as it gives us a hint of what kind of decisions we can expect from a candidate.

Watch this short video describing the fiction cum scripture of Mormonism.

Two people have to understand that they are using the same code language and know the definitions inherent within that language in order to communicate with at least a modicum of effectiveness. Death, life, presence, God, self, etc are the context. When an extremist proclaims that god will have vengeance, god becomes a Janus figure, a context that is measured in a multitude of ways depending on the code language of those discussing it. For Muslims, Hindi, Buddhists, Hebrews and Christians the language is taken into translation, and then come the debates or what was meant, etc.

This is where we stunt our progress. Without language there is simply perception. On a basic biological level we are all the same regardless of race. To overcome prejudices, bigotry and hatred is to realize the structure of language and ideas, the alienation it causes and work to eliminate confrontation. If you are an American of Asian descent, stop referring to Caucasians as “the Americans”. You are American too. If you are black and want to be referred to as African American instead of “black,” stop referring to white people as “white.” They are Irish, Dutch, British, German, Polish, Russian, Swiss, Australian, etc. They are no more all the same than “black” people are all the same, and they also experience their own ethnic alienation. Until the 60s most neighborhoods in major cities were divided among ethnic lines. To stray into another neighborhood was dangerous simply because of ethnicity. Catholics and Protestants have their own bigotry that causes alienation. White people do know what it is like to be discriminated against.

Even the atheist knows Allah because he knows himself. Only, the atheist is too humble to conceive of himself as a god. To him god doesn’t exist. It is only an insignificant rhetorical definition. When you speak of god to him you are speaking of the person’s mind to whom you are talking. You cannot insist that he use the same terminology of god since, too him, god doesn’t exist. Your concept is moot to him. If you wish to inspire this person to do the wonderful things he is capable of doing you must appeal to the code language that makes up his thoughts and not appeal to him to give up that code language and take on your code language. The good he does in the world is not within the context of religion, and compassion is not an exclusive right granted by a god or a religion. When a Christian speaks to a Muslim of god the Muslim hears the word god and it is translated into his own code system. And when the Muslim speaks of god to a Christian, the Christian is thinking of god in his terms.

The entire western language catalog with all of its inferences and semiology has been influenced by Christian culture. To know this is to know the language that is being used when talking to a Westerner, regardless if he is an atheist or a devout Christian. With the advent of America as a world power, the other nations of the world have lined up to decry America for its lack of understanding the other cultures of the world. But it is painfully evident that those other cultures no more understand the culture of America than, as they claim, Americans fail to understand theirs.