Louisiana Hot Links...Mmmmmm
- The Cynic's Sanctuary Message Board
- Don't let the title discourage you; a better and smarter group of Netizens you shall not find.
- The Noam Chomsky Archive
- After many arduous hours bent over a keyboard, trying one search engine after another, I finally discovered this, the best collection of Chomsky's writings and lectures available on the Web. Enjoy!
- Salon
- Salon is, in my humble opinion, the best magazine in cyberspace; it's entire content changes daily (unlike some other webzines I could name) and it's contributors are always interesting.
- Guest Book Gone to the Dogs
- Due largely to the efforts of your's truly, this Moronic Inferno has been doused. I consider it my good cyber-deed for the year.
- The Nation Magazine
- This is the web presence of the venerable left wing publication The Nation. First published as an abolitionist sheet, it is still fighting the good fight almost 130 years later.
- Rotten
- I include this site as an object lesson in how depraved some people publishing on the web really are. Warning: Extremely nasty material.
- Murman
- Like Rotten, I include this site only to demonstrate that there is indeed evil lurking on the Internet
- Feed
- Excellent writing and great topics. Besides which, Steve Johnson is clearly Left-of-Center, which automatically makes him a righteous man in my book.
- Slate
- As you may or may not know, Slate no longer charges a yearly subscription fee. Why am I not surprised?
- The Onion
- The most hysterically funny site on the web. Beware, though; it is VERY scatalogical.
- Mojo Wire
- Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was one of the great fighters of injustice in the history of this country. The magazine that bears her name is no different. Check it out.
- McSpotlight
- Haven't heard about McDonald's ludicrous lawsuit against a group of impoverished, British Greens? Well, you should have; here's where to read everything you need to know.
- Variety Magazine
- Look...what can I say? I'm a screenwriter and cineaste. If you were those things, what would YOU read?
- Premiere Magazine
- See above.
- George Magazine (yeah...right)
- I've included this link to drag into the harsh light one of the most dishonest marketing stunts in web history...which is saying something. You may be wondering why; just trust me and click away.
- Welcome to the 3-D Hotel! Would you care to sign....THE GUESTBOOK!!
- This guestbook is for comments, commentary and the general spewing of rhetoric. Enjoy!!!
- In These Times
- This is the web site of one of the better progressive-left magazines. They're a little stingy with how many articles you can read on-line for free, but worth it nevertheless.
- Ain't It Cool - Inside information about current and upcoming film releases. Very reliable.
- The man who operates this site gives the major film studios major fits; the use to which he puts his site constitutes the Web's greatest potential - dissemination of otherwise unavailable information
- Adbusters
- Hate commercials? Feel like you're being hypnotized every time you interact with the media? So do I, so get thee to this site for instant relief.
- Fat City News
- Yet another hysterically funny web site. And yet it is one that is weird in ways far too infinite for me to describe. I guess you'll just have to find out for yourself....if you DARE!
- Cyber Libel
- This site is very important, especially for those of you who maintain your own web pages. It contains a plethora of information and advice from real, live lawyers who don't charge. Wow!!
- Time Magazine On Line
- Would you like to read Time Magazine for free? If so, click above and believe me, I'm doing you a huge favor. You wouldn't believe how long their bloody URL is. Also, ALL content is included.
- Atlantic Monthly On Line
- Unlike Time Magazine's site, this one does not include every article from each issue; however, I have found that the articles they do post always contain very interesting links to other articles.
- Nerve Mag
- "Literate smut" is the motto for this site, and I would have to agree. If it is possible to become both aroused and informed at the same time, you are most likely to experience it here.
- Word
- This site almost defies description; indeed, calling it quirky would be like calling the ocean salty. It is quirkiness defined. Some of the writing is amateurish, but there are gems to be found.
- The Fray
- I think you'll find that the interactive way in which this site displays it's short stories and essay is engrossing and entertaining, not to mention inventively bizarre.
- The San Francisco State University Web Site
- Come visit my alma mater, and feast your eyes upon the place which sent forth into the world one of the strangehood that is ME. Find out HOW they did it! Find out WHO did it!
- The Shakespeare Debate
- For those of you of a literary bent who have been intrigued by the oft raised question "Did Shakespeare write all of his own plays?" this is the definitive site. You can learn much here that is new.
- Coming Attractions
- Pssst! Wanna see information on every film currently in production or development? Yeah? Well, click on in...
- The Boston Globe
- The Globe is one of the more generous newspapers in terms of on-line content. However, it is not a very good newspaper. Nevertheless, it's worth a look.
- LA Weekly
- This is the web presence of what is arguably the west coast's best progressive weekly newspaper. Plenty of cutting edge stuff, and excellent writing and investigative reporting.
- The San Jose Mercury News
- This paper has been called the New York Times of Sillicon Valley, proving yet again how outlandishly provincial are the people of Silicon Valley. The newspaper is an excellent source of Valley news.
- Lycos Search Engine
- One of the better search engines on the Web. There, that was short and sweet, wasn't it?
- Yahoo!
- This is the search engine for beer-swilling yahoos (just kidding).
- Alta Vista
- This and the three previously mentioned engines are the best on the Web...gauranteed.
- The Internet Movie Database
- The best source for movie-related information that currently exists on the Web.
- Graveyards of Chicago
- I bumped into this site by accident, was initially put off by it's subject, but was then captivated by the serene beauty of these places of last rest. Check out the number of famous residents.
- The Teamsters Union Home Page
- Ron Carey blew it, but that doesn't mean the Teamsters aren't still the best hope for reform in the union movement.
- Road Kill's Cafe
- This is where a certain individual goes to mastur--uh, display his "cartoons." You be the judge.
- Excite Search Engine
- I've been told by those who should know that this is engine is actually not bad. Give it a try, and let me know what happens.
- Sondra London Speaks to Serial Killers
- Sondra London is an amazing woman, one who has helped the fields of criminology and psychology to understand the minds of serial killers. She is also a bit strange; prepare yourself.
- Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
- Come see where I work....well, at least you'll see the web site designed for where I work. You might even learn a thing or two about the EDA software industry. I'm a Technical Writer, by the way.
- Roger Ebert's Home Page
- Yes, that's right..."the fat one" has his own page within the Chicago Sun-Times. I think he's one of the better film critics of his generation, and therefore worth the read.
- The Ghost Research Society
- Uh...let's just say that these people, like me, believe in the afterlife. Unlike me, they think they have proof of it. Enough said.
- The Gate to San Francisco
- This is it for info. about what we provincials call The City, Baghdad By the Bay, The City Built on Rock 'n Roll.
- Fuck Everything!
- No, that site name is not a sick joke. Only dedicated scatologists should look at this site, and then only when proceeding with caution.
- Suck
- A site chock full of the callow and nihilistic rantings and ravings of a bunch of over-paid, under worked boobs...who also happen to be damn funny and quite insightful.
- CounterPunch
- Yet another left-progressive magazine, this one edited by the brilliant and scabarous Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. Outstanding investigative reporting.
- The Progressive
- Still ANOTHER left-leaning on-line publication. My god, will this never end?! Nope.
- Brill's Content
- The content of Brill's Content is not content to be merely contentious. It contains a constant stream of contrasting opinions. Please converge.
- The James Randi Educational Foundation
- At this address you will find archived the wisdom of James Randi. Is he a paranormal and junk science debunker extraordinaire, or a cranky old fart? You be the judge.
- Second Amendment Sisters
- Would you believe a pro-gun site created by women? No? Well, you sexist pig, click and be amazed.
- Souterrains
- Apparently there are those whose hobby it is to explore mines, abandoned subway stations, sealed-off sub-basements and the like. This site offers a view into their world.
- The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
- A civilization is judged not only by how it celebrates it's best citizens, but how it treats it's worst citizens. It is time for the U.S. to re-join western civilization.
- The November Coalition
- Hundreds upon thousands of decent citizens have been ensnared by our government's ludicrous "War on Drugs". This site supports prisoners convicted of drug offenses, and their families.
- The Innocence Project
- Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld founded and run this organization, which has helped get dozens of condemned men and women out of prison, sometimes off death row. An eye-opener, to put it mildly.
- Free the West Memphis Three
- Three teenage boys were convicted - and one sentenced to death - for the murder of three smaller boys, in what must be the very definition of the sort of injustice that permeates our system.
I am going to dedicate this site to essays, articles and cultural reviews that reflect my own political leanings, which are progressive-left. How progressive-left? Here's a hint: One of my personal heroes is Noam Chomsky. If that name makes you run screaming from your computer, you probably shouldn't bother reading any further. I have no idea how many "hits" I'm going to get, but I hope that however many people view this page, they take the extra step of e-mailing me with their thoughts, comments and/or shrill insults. Feel free to vent, but be warned: I will only respond to intelligent and interesting rants. If you are merely full of shit, you will not engage me. I consider this site to be living and dynamic, so it will change quite often. In the meantime, enjoy.
Two years after graduating from San Francisco State University, in 1990, I found myself somewhat adrift and bereft of hope for the state of our nation. I had just bid farewell to one of the most politically destructive decades in the history of the United States, and the Vice President of the administration responsible for most of that destruction was now ensconced in the White House (a good friend of mine remembers to this day how he heard that dreadful bit of news: My mournful voice on his answering machine, chanting "four more years....four more years......").
It was in a bookstore that I stumbled upon a volume - and was introduced to an intellect - that would blast away all of my dreary self-doubt and turn me into the flaming, blazing and, above all, proud progressive leftist that I am today. The book was Manufacturing Consent, and the intellect belonged to one of it's authors, Noam Chomsky. I was stunned at the simplicity - and sense of decency - at the heart of this book that exposed and proved beyond any doubt that there is in our media a conspiracy of like-mindedness that ensures only certain points of view make it to the public eye and ear.
This same simplicity is, of course, turned against Chomsky over and over again. He has been described as looney, "deranged" (David Horowitz) and "just from outer space" (Jeff Greenfield). He is dismissed by most in the mainstream media as a conspiracy-crying crackpot but, as he himself wrote in the introduction to Manufacturing Consent, such charges are merely evasions. Chomsky is not God, or some prophet; he has no stranglehold on the truth; nevertheless he is right far more often than he is wrong and people are beginning to pay attention.
The following is Alexander Cockburn's introduction to Chomsky's book Chronicles of Dissent (1992):
Chomsky went to the dentist, who made his inspection and observed that the patient was grinding his teeth. Consultation with Mrs. Chomsky disclosed that teeth-grinding was not taking place during the hours of sleep. When else? They narrowed it down quickly enough to the period each morninig when Chomsky was reading the New York Times, unconsciously gnashing his molars at every page.
I asked Chomsky why, with the evidence and experience of a lifetime, he kept hoping against hope that the corporate press, particularly the New York Times, was going to get it right. Reality should long since have conditioned him to keep his jaw muscles relaxed. Chomsky sighed, as if in anticipation of all the stupid perversions of truth he was condemned to keep reading for the rest of his life, jolted each morning into furious bouts of bruxism.
Chomsky knows the score; he is not under the illusion that one day he will write a critique so compelling that the owner of the New York Times will suddenly perceive the error of his ways and order his minions to tilt towards truth. But he also believes in the power of reason, of compelling evidence carefully marshalled. Hence the grinding of the teeth. "I don't know why they aren't drowning in their own hypocrisy," he remarked to me on the phone the other day, speaking with a kind of violent astonishment as we discussed the furor over "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in which were raised voices of American Jews who had spent a lifetime keeping quiet about the ethnic cleansing that commenced in Israel in 1948.
Chomsky feels the abuses, cruelty and hypocrisies of power more intensely than anyone I know. It's a state of continual alertness. Often, after I've glanced at a story in the paper and skipped rapidly over the familiar rubble of falsification, a week or two later will drop into my mailbox a photocopy of that same story marked up by Chomsky, with sentences underlined and a phrase or two in the margin etched deep into the paper by an angry pen.
People sometimes spot a reference in some column of mine to an off-beat paper or some foreign language publication and ask me how I manage to keep up with such a tide of newsprint. They imagine that I subscribe on a daily basis to El Pais, or the Jerusalem Post, or the Anchorage Times and hundreds more.
This apparent omnivorousness is mostly an illusion. Readers send things that have caught their eye. A fair-sized chunk of the weekly trawl is stuff sent on by Chomsky.
The times I've stayed the night at Noam and Carol Chomsky's house in Lexington I've watched him at even-tide working his way through a capacious box of the day's intake of tripe--newspapers, weeklies, monthlies, learned journals, flimsy mimeo-ed mailers--while Carol Chomsky does the same thing on the other side of the room.
Add to this a voluminous correspondence--Chomsky once told me he spends 20 hours a week answering letters--plus telephone conversations, encounters with visitors to his office at MIT and we end up with a formidable intelligence system. The first duty of an intellectual is to know what's going on and it's very hard work.
Fred Gardner, writing a story for the Anderson Valley Advertiser, about a visit by Chomsky to the [San Francisco] Bay Area in the spring of 1991, remarked that "It's true that Chomsky has a fine understanding of history and contemporary politics; that he speaks to the point; that he has unrelenting courage...but he doesn't have any special inside sources; there's nothing in what he does or how he does it that's beyond the ability of any radical professor. There should be a Chomsky or two on every campus. The fact that it's a wasteland from Cambridge to Berkeley--that people have to wait for this linguist from MIT to come to town and critique U.S. foreign policy--says a lot about our intellectually bankrupt academies."
This is true up to a point. Most of the time you don't need "special sources", merely the ability and stamina to read intelligently what material there is in the public domain. (One of the most successful efforts at information collection in the Second World War was run by a U.S. Army intelligence officer who simply had roomsfull of people reading the Japanese and German press. At one point--the result of a political row and consequent leak--the Chicago Tribune published the entire U.S. Navy order of battle in the Pacific, a useful item apparently missed by the Japanese.)
There are in fact many campuses across America which have a radical faculty member or two doing thier best to excavate the truth and bring it to light. Chomsky's most frequent observation about his innumerable speaking forays across the country concerns precisely the illusion that there is a wasteland between Cambridge and Berkeley, as against the reality--one that I've noted often enough msyelf--that the inquiring and even radical spirit flourishes widely, often in supposedly stony soil, such as at Texas A&M at College Station.
What Chomsky offers is a coherent "big picture," buttressed by the data of a thousand smaller pictures and discrete theaters of conflict, struggle and oppression. People will go to a talk by Chomsky partly just to reassure themselves that they haven't gone mad; that they are right when they disbelieve what they read in the papers or watch on TV. For hundreds of thousands of people--over the years, he must have spoken to more American students than any other person alive--Chomsky has offered the assurance, the intellectual and moral authority, that there is another way of looking at things. In this vital function he stands in the same relationship to his audience as did a philosopher he admires greatly, Bertrand Russell.
There is the view, not unsympathetic to Chomsky, that he has been marginalised by the dominant culture. Until quite recently the man regarded internationally as among the U.S.'s most outstanding and influential intellectuals had never been interviewed on American network television, was the subject of slander and abuse in the corporate press.
Such vilification is entirely predictable. Much of Chomsky's work involves memory, the memory of everything that vested power prefers to forget. Essays such as the one in honor of A.J. Muste where Chomsky evokes U.S. policy toward Japan in the 1930s are, for the ruling elites, definitively out of bounds. To accept them is to acknowledge culpabilities of inolerable dimension.
One prominent member of the British intellectual elite, warning a colleague against getting into a dispute with Chomsky, described him as "a terrible and relentless opponent," by which he meant that Chomsky never surrenders ground, never cedes a position as part of some elaborate maneuver [hence, the reason William F. Buckley will no longer debate him; that, and the fact that Chomsky definitively whipped his patrician ass on Firing Line in 1969. Care to guess the topic?--Ed.]. This is why, surely, abuse of the foulest and most childish kind descends upon him. His opponents shirk the real argument they fear they will lose, and substitute insult and distortion.
But beyond this, has Chomsky truly been marginalised? There have long been fierce attempts to exclude him from any orthodox venue of intellectual debate, most intense at moments when supposedly dissident intellectuals are beating a retreat towards the permitted terrain of official discussion--on Vietnam, the Middle East, Central America, and so forth. But to say that in consequence he is "marginalised" is absurd, given his actual weight in the culture at large.
"But it's all so depressing," cried JoAnn Wypijewski, managing editor of The Nation, when Chomsky had finished outlining to her his analysis of some supposed break-through in Palestinian-Israeli peace talks. "It's not my job to cheer you up," Chomsky replied.
I've heard people lament, after listening to a talk by Chomsky, that he doesn't always offer, in the time allotted, the requisite dose of uplift and a simple route map to a benign future. One person I met, I think it was in Boulder, told me that he had written to the professor, reproaching him for just such omissions and had duly received a three-page, single-space letter setting forth the elements of a positive strategy and vision. Chomsky is a realist, not a pessimist, though the two, these days as almost always, tend to run in symbiotic harness. Chomsky believes deeply in the benign tendencies of human kind. He wouldn't be an anarchist by political conviction if he did not.
(Chomsky does not, I have to admit, envince much interest in the tendencies and behavior of the natural kingdom, excluding humankind. I once chided him for describing Haitian refugees as having to guide their boats through "shark infested waters." On average, I reminded him, sharks kill about 25 humans around the world each year, in return for which humans kill, each year, about 25 million sharks. It was the sort of contrast between legend and reality Chomsky loves to expose on the human plane, but I could tell that the shark-icide had not really struck home. I mentioned to him not so long ago that I had some horses at my place in Humboldt county, norhtern California. He was incredulous. "Horses?" he snorted, asking sarcastically whether I played polo. It was the same when I mentioned I had cats.)
Chomsky's greatest virtue is that his fundamental message is a simple one. Here's how he put it in that interview in the Anderson Valley Advertiser:
"Any form of authority requires justification; it's not self justified. And the justification can rarely be given. Sometimes you can give it. I think you can give an argument that you shouldn't let a three-year-old run across the street. That's a form of authority that's justifiable. But there aren't many of them, and usually the effort to give a justification fails. And when we try to face it, we find that the authority is illegitimate. And any time you find a form of authority illegitimate, you ought to challenge it. It's something that conflicts with human rights and liberties. And that goes on forever. You overcome one thing and discover the next.
"In my view what a popular movement ought to be is just basically libertarian: Concerned with forms of oppression, authority and domination, challenging them. Sometimes they're justifiable under particular conditions, somethimes they're not. If they are not, try to overcome them."
(copyright)Alexander Cockburn
Petrolia, California,
August, 1992
A Chomsky Excerpt
"When I was invited to speak on the topic 'LANGAUAGE AND FREEDOM,' I was puzzled and intrigued. Most of my professional life has been devoted to the study of language. There would be no great difficulty in finding a topic to discuss in that domain. And there is much to say about the problems of freedom and liberations as they pose themselves to us and to others in the mid-twentieth century. What is troublesome in the title of this lecture is the conjuction. In what way are langauge and freedom to be interconnected?...
"One of the earliest and most remarkable of the 18th century investigations of freedom and servitude is Rousseau's 'Discourse on Inequality'(1755), in many ways a revolutionary tract. In it, he seeks to 'set forth the origin and progress of inequality, the establishment and abuse of political societies, insofar as these things can be deduced from the nature of man by the light of reason alone.' His conclusions were sufficiently shocking that the judges of the prize competition of the Academy of Dijon, to whom the manuscript was originally submitted, refused to hear the manuscript through. In it, Rousseau callenges the legitimacy of virtually every social institution, as well as individual control of property and wealth. These are 'usurpations...established only on a precarious and abusive right...having been acquired only by force, force could take them away without [the rich] having grounds for complaint.' Not even property acquired by personal industry is held 'upon better titles.' Against such
a claim, one might object: 'Do you not know that a multitude of your brethren die or suffer from need of what you have in excess, and that you needed express and unanimous consent of the human race to appropriate for yourself anything from common subsistence that exceeded your own?' It is contrary to the law of nature that 'a handful of men be glutted with superfluities while the starving multitiude lacks necessities.'
Rousseau argues that civil society is hardly more than a conspiracy by the rich to guarantee their plunder. Hypocritically, the rich call upon their neighbors to 'institute regulations of justice and peace to which all are obliged to conform, which make an exception for no one, and which compensate in some way for the caprices of fortune by equally subjecting the powerful and the weak to mutual duties'--those laws which, as Anatole France was to say, in their majesty deny to the rich and the poor equally the right to sleep under the bridge at night. By such arguments, the poor and the weak are seduced: 'All ran to meet their chains thinking they secured their freedom...'
--The Chomsky Reader, pgs. 139-141 [copyright, 1987, Pantheon]
___________________________________________________
***Gore Vidal***
The following is an essay written by Amercia's - and perhaps the world's - only left wing snob, and it is for this reason that his essays are so unerring in blasting the bombast and bullshit that is American politics, culture and economics. And he is no scurrilous outsider lobbing rhetorical bombs; on the contrary, Vidal's family roots reach deep into the soil of this nation's history. Vidal is famous for his literary rivalries, Truman Capote amongst them. Here is another:
NORMAN MAILER'S SELF ADVERTISEMENTS (from Gore Vidal - United States, 1952-1992 [Random House])
I first heard of Norman Mailer in the spring of 1948, just before "The Naked and the Dead" was published. I remember thinking meanly: So somebody did it. Each previous war had had its big novel, yet so far there had been none for our war, though I knew that a dozen busy friends and acquaintances were grimly taking out tickets in the Grand War Novel Lottery. I had debated doing one myself and had (I still think) done something better: A small cool hard novel about men on the periphery of the action. "Williwaw" was written when I was nineteen and easily the cleverest young fox ever to know how to disguise his ignorance and make a virtue of his limitations. (What an attractive form the self-advertisement is: One could go on forever relighting one's image!) Not till I began "The City and the Pillar" did I begin to get bored with playing it safe.
I took to the field and have often wondered since, in the course of many excursions, defeats, alarms and ambushes, what it might have been like to have been a safe shrewd custodian of one's talent, playing from strength. I did not suspect then that the ambitious, rather cold-blooded young contemporary who had set out to write the big war novel would one day be in the same fix I was. Not safe. Not wise. Not admired. A fellow victim of the Great Golfer's Age, then no more than a murmur of things to come in the Golfer's murmurous heart.
My first reaction to "The Naked and the Dead was: It's a fake. A clever, talented, admirably executed fake. I have not changed my opinion of the book since, though I have considerably changed my opinion of Mailer, as he himself has changed. Now I confess I have never read all of "The Naked and the Dead." I do recall a fine description of soldiers carrying a dying man down a mountain (done almost as well as the same scene in Malraux's earlier work). Yet every time I got going in the narrative I would find myself stopped cold by a set of made-up, predictable characters taken not from life, but from the same novels all of us had read, and informed by a naivete which was at its worst when Mailer went into his Time-Machine and wrote those passages which resemble nothing so much as smudged carbons of a Dos Passos work.
Sourly, from a distance, that year I watched the fame of Mailer quite surpass that of John Horne Burns and myself, the heroes of the previous year. I should state for those who have come in late or were around then but inattentive that the O.K. List of writers in 1947 and 1948 was John Horne Burns, Calder Willingham and myself. Capote and Mailer were added in 1948. Willingham was soon dropped; then burns (my own favorite) sank, and by 1949, in the aftermath of "The City and the Pillar", I too departed the O.K. List.
(a nice quote to tide you over until the next installment: "What matters finally is not the world's judgement of oneself but one's own judgement of the world. Any writer who lacks this final arrogance will not last very long in America...That wide graveyard of stillborn talents which contains so much of the brief ignoble history of American letters is a tribute to the power of a democracy to destroy its critics, brave fools and passionate men.")
You are one of