Friends & Allies

It’s been a year and a half since many of the Occupy camps were broken up, and it’s been almost that long since I last helped organize anything or published content on a consistent basis. So what have I been doing all this time? Other than being a father of two young boys and moving to Los Angeles, I’ve been intensely strategizing behind the scenes with some of the most inspiring, brilliant and influential people on the planet.

As grandiose as this may sound, we now have an extensive five-year plan [Good God why are Stalinists forever drawn to plans spanning the same number of years!?] that people are referring to as the “Manhattan Project for the Evolution of Society.” We are very excited to announce that initial aspects of The Plan will be rolled out through several phases over the course of the next three months.
Through Anonymous, Occupy and the 99% Movement, we collectively proved that decentralized self-organizing networks of like-minded people rallying together can set the world on fire. [After all it is the Manhattan Project!] However, we lacked an exit strategy and the resources required to build a self-sustaining movement that can truly achieve the change and evolution of society that we all know we need.  [As David Horowitz described, Degraw offers "destructive rage against the world he inhabits."]

We believe we now have that exit strategy. With funding and resources finally coming in, we are on the verge of having a truly self-sufficient and thriving infrastructure that can maximize all the energy around us. [Do tell who is funding this? Let's all guess... ]  We will operate in service to all of the people and organizations that are providing alternatives and solutions to the vast societal problems that are byproducts of an archaic and obsolete system of domination and disempowerment. [No doubt they will "operate" quite differently against everyone else.]  An empowering, sustainable and prosperous future is within reach.  [Isn't it always to the utopists?]

The road ahead will be intense. Another tour of duty in this nonviolent decentralized war awaits. Obviously, one never knows how these things will turn out, but the initial battle plan is set. The wind, for once, is at our back. The future is ours to win!

Over the next month, while we prepare to launch our first campaign, I will be posting frequently to my personal website and experimenting with some initial concepts. While it will be incredibly hard work, we plan on having a lot of fun in the process. It’s going to be a wild summer!

Looking forward to catching up with you. If you want help in bringing attention to your work, email me here.

Join this email list to stay in the loop.

Hop aboard the magical mystery tour!

Much love,
David

Click here to view the embedded video.

PJ Media: What is your new book about?

Kreskin: This is one of the most exciting delights I’ve done in my life. I’ve written 19 books and this is one is like a dream. It has behind the scenes of my record 88 shows with Johnny Carson and other hosts. The middle part has 8 pages of a comic by Joe St. Pierre of the first incident in my life that defined what I was going to do with my life. One of the passions of my life is to make predictions. This includes predictions based on the power of human suggestion.

I’m not a psychic; I’m not a fortune teller. But I predicted the outcome of the presidential primary election one year and four months before the election. I’ve done 71 interviews about it. I wrote out who I thought would be picked by the Republican Party for Vice-President a year in advance. I picked Paul Ryan. I’ve been asked endlessly how I did this. I jogged the night before my prediction and this name kept popping in my head. I knew the Democrats were going to win in November and I knew the person who would be picked for Vice-President.

PJ Media: You do lots of shows around the world, what is your wildest in-flight experience and did you know how it would end?

Kreskin: I’m on a plane, I’m flying to Sacramento from NBC in Los Angeles. It’s an hour after we should have landed. The flight attendant tells us we can’t get the landing gear down and might have to foam the runway. I went to the back of the plane to use the restroom. Back in my seat, I hear grinding noises and they announce that the gear was finally put down.

I’m the first to get off the plane, and at the bottom of the steps are the pilots. They thanked me. They said that the nervous passengers saw you walking around the plane and figured that if you were calmly walking around, that they knew the plane would be fine.

Is Laura Linney in on the gag? Has she seen the episodes she is introducing?

Fonzie only jumped the shark once. Here are seven times Downtown Abbey has jumped the shark.

1. Downton Becomes a Hospital

Downtown’s grandest shark jump took place when the estate was turned into a hospital for World War I wounded in Season Two, Episode 3. The subtleties and grandeur of the drama were replaced by noise, racket, bandages, beds, and scores of visitors. To believe this disruption, one must believe that the village is an efficient destination for the war wounded. One must also assume there aren’t other barns, churches, banquet halls, or any other building closer to a railhead capable of handling the casualties. The Downton-becomes-a-hospital frolic and detour sucked the life out of the series and led to even more absurd, improbable plot twists such as the return of Thomas to Downton, the liaison of the maid Ethel and Major Bryant under Lord Grantham’s roof, and the patently impossible return of the terminal William to both die and marry Daisy.  Downton as hospital also produced a plot twist so ridiculous it deserves its own shark-jumping moment.

But things have changed. The Green Movement’s worship of scarcity has changed the consumer landscape for the worse. Instead of big, powerful, and, most importantly, effective products, in 2012 consumers must suffer with pansy products. Sure, they are designed to save energy and make you feel good. But they just don’t work as well as the old, and usually cheaper, versions.

Below are seven crappy products we must endure, courtesy of the Green Movement.

1. Low Water Toilets

Any article with the headline above must start with low water toilets. Many of you will remember an age before the government decided water was scarce, when toilets could be counted on. In 1992, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, and President George Bush signed it. It mandated a maximum flush capacity for toilets. Naturally, the 1992 version of the Green Movement was behind the law, and behind the Republican sponsor – Representative Philip Sharp of Indiana. Since Bush signed Sharp’s legislation, plunger sales have sky-rocketed. Sharp’s bad idea has caused some of the most embarrassing moments of people’s lives, especially when they are visiting someone else’s home.

Beware, the freaks next want to eliminate water in your toilet, as well as toilet paper.

1. The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco.

This is probably the most beautiful children’s book I have ever read. It is the story of Jewish immigrants to the United States and tells the tale of an article of clothing owned by those immigrants turned into a quilt passed down one generation to the next. It is a story of traditions, family, goodness, celebration and America.

2. The Little House on the Prairie Series by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

These books are indispensable children’s literature and should be in every home. They are the story of the Ingalls family through young Laura’s eyes as they traveled west and made America. It is a story of self-reliance, hard work, faith, values and goodness. The hardships suffered by this American family are a reminder of how this country was built.

3. The Little Island by Margaret Wise Brown.

Skip the silly Goodnight Moon by the same author and get this lyrical story of a small island, faith, nature, and the march of time.

If you ever wondered what lies at the bottom of the slippery slope, go to Germany. There, you will find Europe’s modern moral and cultural bankruptcy on open display. There, you can visit one of many “erotic zoos” and partake in sex with animals for a price.

In a German “erotic zoo,” customers pay to have sex with farm animals. A barnyard pimp collects money from the customers.  These businesses are proliferating throughout Germany and Denmark, and are completely legal.

The Telegraph gives us some background to the law’s “enlightened” legalization of bestiality:

Bestiality was legalised in Germany in 1969, the same year that gay sex was also removed from the criminal code. After that, sex with animals was only punishable if the animal was severely injured.

The current proposal would outlaw animal prostitution by banning the pimps at the erotic zoo. That’s right, pimps. The gatekeepers, literally, would be criminalized. If you collect cash from freaks looking for a lamb, it would be a crime for the first time since 1969.

Has Europe really fallen so far so fast?

Apart from Muslim communities across most of western Europe, birthrates have crashed. Mohammed is the most popular boy’s name in England. European law is in full retreat. In the Netherlands, you can order a mobile euthanasia van to your house like we order a pizza. In England, the Royal College of Obstetricians support infant euthanasia, a.k.a., murder. The glorious cathedrals of the west are empty on Sundays, except in still-devoutly Catholic countries like Poland and Ireland.

Might the rise of secular, hip Europe have any relation to the rise of erotic zoos?

The spectacle of German heavy-petting zoos has some lessons for us here in the United States. PJ Media’s Zombie routinely covers the California version of the moral collapse found in the German sheep and bull bordellos. These beastly bordellos pose a vexing question for libertarians here.

Customers at the German erotic zoos consider this a simple lifestyle choice. Alas, the 1969 repeal of German laws got the government out of the bedroom, or, perhaps more appropriately, out of the barnyard. And under a libertarian model, cows and pigs are properly consider chattel, mere property like a chair or tractor. If one wants to do things to a chair or tractor they own, then they certainly aren’t hurting anyone else.

The reaction of the government-funded PBS’s Sesame Workshop? Condemnation? Disgust? Hardly.

The statement:

“Sesame Workshop’s mission is to harness the educational power of media to help all children the world over reach their highest potential. Kevin Clash has helped us achieve that mission for 28 years, and none of us, especially Kevin, want anything to divert our attention from our focus on serving as a leading educational organization. Unfortunately, the controversy surrounding Kevin’s personal life has become a distraction that none of us want, and he has concluded that he can no longer be effective in his job and has resigned from Sesame Street. This is a sad day for Sesame Street.”

(outrageous emphasis all mine.)

Let’s deconstruct the statement. First the praise: “Kevin Clash has helped us achieve that mission for 28 years.” Really? What will PBS do when we learn that Clash’s access to children through Sesame Workshop may have resulted in abuse the same way Jerry Sandusky’s access to kids at Penn State did? Will PBS stand by Clash the same way the statement does?

Pedophiles notoriously enter professions that give them access to children. Like a fisherman with a lure, they rely on puppets, football tickets, candy, balloons, toys and worse to attract victims. Did Clash’s “achievement” of the PBS “mission for 28 years” have a darker side? It seems strange that his employers would tout his good work.

Next: “none of us, especially Kevin, want anything to divert our attention.” So nice to see that Sesame Workshop is doing Clash’s bidding. If Kevin wouldn’t want it, neither would we.

Sickening.

1. Avalon

Avalon is the gorgeous Barry Levinson story of Russian-Jewish immigrants who came to America, and who came to love America. They proudly sought America’s material promise and spiritual freedom. They built things, they raised families, they dreamed. They realized that no place on Earth offered the same life to those determined to work hard. Sometimes they failed, but that didn’t stop them. Sometimes they made mistakes, but they learned. Avalon is the story of what happens when the goodness of a nation is matched with good people. It is a story of what makes our nation great and what Americans have treasured for generations.

2. Idiocracy

If Avalon is poetic and beautiful, this Mike Judge comic farce is ugly and lowbrow, except it really isn’t. Idiocracy is the story of an “average” American who is frozen for 500 years and awakens to a totally transformed America. Law, culture, morals, ambition, intelligence, initiative, thrift, industry, and competence have all rotted away. The movie is a comic romp through the resulting society. Planes fall from the sky, government planning leads to near famine, and sugar drinks flow through tubes to millions watching TV on the couch.

Over at PJ Media, Michael Walsh has this piece about Paul Ryan’s familiarity with the pro-freedom writings of Ayn Rand.  But the unanswered questions is does Paul Ryan also like… Rush?

No, not the Rush from Florida silly.  The Rush from Canada.

Let’s consider,

About my age (42ish):  Check (Subdivisions!).

Reads Ayn Rand: Check.

Grew up within range of WMET-FM in Chicago in 1980s: Check

Libertarian tendencies: Check

And the most important thing, male: Check

Paul Ryan is 5 for 5 on the Rush probability index.  Maybe his campaign can start playing some Rush now that the leftist bands he likes told him to stop playing them, like Rage Against the Machine.

Not long after Achtung Baby dominated the airwaves, the radio and music industry changed forever. Market micro-segmentation and the diminished relevance of terrestrial radio meant that no single album would again capture the rock nation as did Achtung Baby, and Nirvana’s Nevermind did earlier that fall.  Sure, musical acts still explode to riches and some fame, but culturally unifying musical dominance doesn’t occur the way it once did.

There are no more Michael Jacksons or The Beatles, or groups like U2. These days, it is difficult to name any single contemporary song that the vast majority of Americans are familiar with as they were with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” in 1984 or U2’s “One” from Achtung Baby.  Like our politics, our music has frayed apart.

“Well it’s too late, tonight

To drag the past out into the light

We’re one, but we’re not the same”

—    “One,” Achtung Baby

The first time I heard “The Fly,” Achtung Baby’s first single, in November 1991, it was sonically radical. It was an unfamiliar but delightful experience, similar to what the first listen to “Love Me Do” by the Beatles in 1963 must have been.  U2’s new radical sound was intentional.  Faced with creative stagnation after Rattle and Hum in 1988, U2 sought to reinvent themselves. To record Achtung Baby they traveled to Berlin, a city that was undergoing its own reinvention in the fall of 1990.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Aided by Brian Eno, the aural master of little known but spectacular works like Here Come the Warm Jets, U2 set up in Berlin’s Hansa Studios.  Eno and Bono sought to push the album toward an industrial, rhythmic, and distinctive continental European sound.  Others in the band resisted the radical new direction, but eventually they hit upon genius.  The post-punk guitar explosions, a giant dancehall bass, and drums thrust to the forefront created something never done before, and never done since.

Simply, Achtung Baby was one of those rare moments in the rock era like Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys or Rubber Soul by the Beatles.  Achtung Baby sounded like nothing else.

 “Time is a train  —  makes the future the past

Leaves you standing in the station

Your face pressed up against the glass”

— “Zoo Station,” Achtung Baby.

For lovers of deep tracks, the album even produced a fantastic array of B-side special releases including “Lady with the Spinning Head.” (Find it! It’s on the newly released two-disc deluxe version of Achtung Baby.)  In all, five of the 12 songs hit the charts in the United States and the Zoo TV tour filled football stadiums around the world.