LADY GAGA: THE 4TH MOST POWERFUL PERSON IN CORPORATE AMERICA

ITEM: Forbes magazine has released its annual list of the 100 Most Powerful Famous People On Planet Earth. Oprah is No. 1.

Lady Gaga is No. 4.

Which is impressive (her apprenticeship in the Illuminati notwithstanding) considering (1) her first album came out just two years ago, and (2) her videos and stage act frighten the hell out of Mainstream America.

And yes, I know, Corporate Rock Sucks, etc and so on. On the other hand, consider the irony that rock music built its reputation – and its empire – on at least appearing to be subversive and dangerous to the very fabric of Decent Society. Name a single rock band that is currently fulfilling its duties in that regard on the scale of Lady Gaga.

There isn’t one. U2 may make twice as much money as LG, but do they frighten yr parents? Hell, yr parents are probably fans.

By contrast, LG is selling Catholic lesbian hermaphrodite shock fantasies to teenagers, and she is making tens of millions of dollars doing it – and that’s despite the best efforts of the Christian Values Tea Party to portray themselves as mainstream.

How rock’n’roll is that?

Well, okay, not THAT rock’n’roll. But it’s a lot closer than Miley Cyrus, and she’s No. 13 on the list. Whose music would you rather the children of Earth listen to?

[Okay, yes, technically you’d want them listening to Black Sabbath 24 hours a day, but I’m talking about the real world here.]

Money talks,

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GAY PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, PART 5: HITTING VOLLEYS IN THE PARK

It’s Gay Pride Week. And I promised you I’d include some Pansy Division, who are so proud, they can take any subject and turn it into an explicit gay pr0n song.

Tennis, anyone?

There’s gonna be some racket,

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WATCH WHAT YOU SAY, OR WE’LL WATCH IT FOR YOU

ITEM: The ACLU releases a report that chronicles incidents in the US in which the police have either placed under surveillance or outright detained groups and individuals simply for exercising their First Amendment rights.

If you map the incidents out by state, it looks like this.



LEGEND: Red states = speech-related surveillance incidents.

To be sure, this represents incidents collected over the last decade – a few of them actually date to the Bill Clinton years. But it’s still a pretty long list for a country that lists free speech and freedom of assembly as a constitutional right rather than a potentially suspicious activity if you go around saying the Wrong Things.

We’ve been here before, of course. The difference this time is that it’s not just the FBI that thinks in such terms:

The FBI, federal intelligence agencies, the military, state and local police, private companies, and even firemen and emergency medical technicians are gathering incredible amounts of personal information about ordinary Americans that can be used to construct vast dossiers that can be widely shared with a simple mouse-click through new institutions like Joint Terrorism Task Forces, fusion centers, and public-private partnerships. The fear of terrorism has led to a new era of overzealous police intelligence activity directed, as in the past, against political activists, racial and religious minorities, and immigrants.

That’s life in the Kingdom of Fear, where citizens are warned frequently to be on the lookout for dangerous people that may appear harmless – pregnant women, Hooters waitresses, white people, etc.

Why just the other day, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) warned of a new insidious plot by al Qaeda to turn the 14th Amendment against America by recruiting pregnant women and sending them into the US to breed a secret army of future Manchurian Candidate terrorists to be activated at The Right Moment:

And then one day, twenty...thirty years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life.  'Cause they figured out how stupid we are being in this country to allow our enemies to game our system, hurt our economy, get setup in a position to destroy our way of life.

That should keep the surveillance teams busy for the next few decades.

READER ADVISORY: I spent most of Iraq War II making Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld jokes, so those of you who have recently signed on here, yr probably in my FBI file now. I probably should have mentioned that in my Friending Frenzy blurbs. Sorry about that.

Everywhere you look,

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PUBLIC LIBRARIES ARE UN-AMERICAN

ITEM: Anna Daviantes of Fox News Chicago delivers some hard-hitting journalism that asks the important question: why are we spending millions of tax dollars on libraries when we could be spending it on important stuff? Like schools! Which also have libraries!

Or something. It’s a pretty odd article that seems more like an audition tape for Fox & Friends. This is as relevatory as it gets:

... Keeping libraries running costs big money. In Chicago, the city pumps $120 million a year into them. In fact, a full 2.5 percent of our yearly property taxes go to fund them.

That's money that could go elsewhere – like for schools, the CTA, police or pensions

One of the nation's biggest and busiest libraries is the $144-million Harold Washington Library in the Loop. It boasts a staggering 5,000 visitors a day!.

So we decided to check it out. We used an undercover camera to see how many people used the library and what were they doing.

In an hour, we counted about 300 visitors. Most of them were using the free internet. The bookshelves? Not so much.

Conclusion: ... well, I’m not sure, really. Except that Anna Daviantes has it in for libraries. Or thinks her station’s demographic does.

To be fair, it’s not the topic that’s the problem. Daviantes is hardly the first person to ask if libraries serve a negligible purpose in a world where we have Borders, Amazon.com and Google. It’s a question that usually comes up when city/state budgets are tight, and it’s a question worth asking, if only to get people thinking about just what a library is for, and why we have them in the first place – is it just a govt building full of books, or is it something more to the community it serves?

(Apart from giving the FBI a way to find suspicious persons, I mean.)

For me, the answer is fairly obvious – yes, we need libaries, for several reasons:

1. Not everyone has Internet access.

2. Not everyone who has Internet access knows how to find specific information that is also reliable.

3. Not everyone can afford to buy books (especially if they’re specialized reference books or textbooks).

4. Not all books are available online, either in print or digital form – millions of books are out of print.

5. The same goes for articles in newspapers and periodicals that haven’t been digitalized.

6. Universal access is important because society benefits from everyone having access to knowledge and culture, not just the ones who can afford to pay for it. This is especially applicable in societies where television journalism is this bad.

Also, librarians kick ass. Sometimes literally.

Observe.

Look it up,

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