I thought I was done with this.  But I keep hitting upon more and more items contemporarious regarding LaRouche.  None of them really answer what is an unanswerable question, which is quite simply a “Huh?”, but they do answer peripheal questions.  Example:  So, um… LaRouche moved from the “far Left” to the “far Right” — through what bit of mental gymnastic trickery?  From a National Review expose on the “US Labor Party” from March 30, 1979 (oddly enough, combine that with a Nation article in 1980 and you have a pretty darned good look at this transformation), an internal strategium memo from 1975, the rise of the anti-Rockefellar … um… Whig (???) Coalition.

Our success in beating back the Fang’s Endgame Scenario shows the otential impact we can have among previously unpenetrated strata.  Operations reports from our organizers in the field indicate growing sympathy for our “Impeach Rocky” campaign among right-wing circles.  We must move to take advantage of this situation.Right-wing organizations offer fouropportunities: 1) sources for fund-raising (espcially rleated to our organizing); 2) political contats to circulate our perspective in anti-Rocky political financial military circles; 3) opportunity to expose and discredit Rocky’s Buckley – FBI – CIA penetration of the Right; 4) potential USLP members and periphery.

I suppose LaRouche was thinking he would “defeat the right wing comparatively easily” in a similar manner that he “consolidated left-wing hegemony” through “an” “Operation Mop – Up”.  It remains difficult to figure what has gone on in that man’s head, but eventually LaRouche would have to zig and zig across with more mainstream electoral politics.

The Nation and the National Review are both Rockefellar mags, anyways.

Okay.  I have to stop this insanity.  I’ve noticed a few LaRouche publications lying around in the manner that they usually are, which means… the LaRouchites are somewhere in the shadows somewhere around here.

I remember when Coca Cola (or was it Pepsi?) introudced Surge onto the market. They had commercials such as this one, a bunch of rambunctious youths run up, throw themselves in a barrel, and on the command of “SURGE!”, they, um, surged? by rolling themselves down a hill, to their destination… which was a bottle of… Surge, which was, apparently, as this commerical shows, the Ultimate Carbonated Beverage Drink.

I am briefly reminded of the sordid Cola War battles that took place in corporate underwritten public schools in the 1990s, which had one school have a “Coca Cola Day”, Homecoming Week-like students all jumped into Coca Cola t-shirts. One student chose to disrupt the event by wearing a Pepsi t-shirt, and there some legal curiosities bumped themselves in. I would like to think that student wasn’t particularly brand-loyal to Pepsi so much as Pepsi was the obvious conduit for a message of “WTF?” — though Pepsi stpped in and sent the kid a bunch of crap in the ensuing media storm. At any rate, Surge might have gotten further had the cola company had high schools do this barrel-roll to the Surge as a Physical Education activity. (Hey! It couldn’t beat that middle school “yo-yo” exhibition and assembly meeting, which loaded the school down with yo-yos such that they had to figure out what to do with them– which apparently do a 2 week yo-yoing for PE for the next decade.)

We are shortly going to have Bush unleash his new “Surge” product. At the moment, the public is not buying it. Maybe he can get together with the Coca Cola Company (it was Coke, wasn’t it?), and give away their back-stock of Surge at his “listening tour” — or whatever he is going to be doing here.

It is remarkable how many books in the “Current Events” section of a bookstore strike me as dead-weight.  I am slightly offended by about half the books’ existence.  I cannot quite quantify it, and the exceptions are sometimes not entirely apart from the type of book that I’m attacking here — meaning at some point I’m a hypocrite (albeit I’d argure only slightly so).

It is seeing Ann Coulter’s Godless next to the response of Susan Estrich’s Soulless and Joe Maguire’s Brainless.  None of these books should exist.  The first book gives us nothing and the other two books are diversions away from any real issue — the proper response to Ann Coulter is “Why should anybody give a rip?”

From there, the books fall into an even lower depth of meaninglessness.

In other political book news:  I saw a used biography on Estes Kefauver.  It was just under 200 pages.  Which seems appropriate for the subject.

I overheard a couple of people today.  I heard the name “Joe Biden” within this conversation.

No.  Seriously.  I overheard two people talking about Joseph Biden.  I never thought I would ever hear such a thing.

It bodes well for his future plans.  It bumps him up the percentile from 5 digits past that decimal point to 4 digits.

Have you ever seen a stranger give you the stink eye?  As a repsonse, have you ever given the stink eye right back, largely to cover your bases as you try to figure out who he is and what the genesis of this conflict is?  After a few seconds, you then withdraw the stink eye and get back to whatever business or pleasure or boredom you are attending to, as per not coming up with any answers as to why this stranger is giving you the stink eye or why you should care.

What if you meet up with him again?  What if this time he asks, point-blank “Why were you giving me the stink eye just then?”  I imagine my answer to be a bunch of stammering, with “You did it first!”

The conflict can escalate or de-escalate from there depending on a number of factors that seem only assigned to the fates.

I couldn’t find myself anything to do on New Years’ Eve.  Honestly, my preference runs to something like watching part of the Twilight Zone marathon run every New Years’ Eve and every July 4th on the Sci-Fi network — alone or with a group of sympaticos — which I have done in the past,  and probably will in the future.

I rode from one corner of Portland to another, seeing if such and such a place were open and if such and such another place were open.  Neither were.  At one point in the Tri-Met ride, I looked around and saw that I really had a strong dislike for everybody in my sight.  It was a panoply of hipsters, and a bit of bathroom graffiti struck out at me “Hipster Culture will be shown to be just as vacuuous as Disco was”.  There was a group that especially annoyed me — and one person in the group who did so even more.  It was a studied and carefully crafted geek chic and a strange “too cool for school” pose from a young lad just slightly than I… I don’t know quite how to describe it, and am at a loss of what disparate cultural cues shoved into a blender brings this person to the point he was at that precise moment.
At a different point in time, and with a completely different crowd — one that I liked better, and one that allowed me to shrug the other crowd off and inwardly figure “Well.  Leave them to their fun and I hope they enjoy themselves”–, two slightly high and slightly drunk gay men pointed at about three men in their sight, saying “Hot”.  I am happy to say that I am Hot.  Two people wearing the typical Fare Inspector uniform, but clearly with other duties this day being a “Fare Free New Years”, walked in.  They jotted notes in a notebook, frantically scanning the scene.  This again brought me to a state of annoyment.  Either you see something or you don’t… there is no notetaking for reference.  I am sure they had a mental list of items to take note of.  Interestingly enough, one of them said something to one of the gay men — who immediately obeyed by tossing his cigarette (or was it a joint?  No.  Couldn’t have been.) out the fast-closing door.  A seat immediately opened up, which I jumped at to sit in.  I saw why it was free… there was three beer cans.  I, having had bad experience sitting next to empty beer cans, shoved it out of my seat — contemplating for a second waving at the quasi – authority figures to say “Not Mine!”
I couldn’t figure out what could possibly be happening at Pioneer Square.  Sometimes it is cordored off on New Years’ Eve; sometimes it is not.  It wasn’t this time.  There was a decent sized but not overwhelming number of citizens milling about… I would later learn that one of them was Daniel Lee, all the more reason to have avoided the spot.  The next day I saw that a ball of some sort had been broken into pieces, and silver metal specks were all under the large Christmas Tree.  More power to that.
The rest of the night was all a blur, and just as well that it was.