shawn avery

osama bin-laden has sold out. he has officially declared wanted Jordanian Islamist Abu Musab al- Zarqawi his “emir” in iraq. this insurgency leader has beheaded not only americans and other foreign nationals, but he is responsible for the deaths of shiite muslims. osama has recently called for election boycotts, offered a truce to western nations who withdraw, and even tried the andy griffith approach by having a little sit down chat with american citizens, urging them to vote for peace. smart guy. yes. smarter than our guy? oh yes. osama is in charge. but by aligning himself with terrorist organizations that kill muslims, he pretty much lost the moral argument, that up until now, he at least had some loosely based logic for. i'm heading an hour north tonight to do one more night of rehearsals with judah and gainer's drummer for some stars below sessions at synchromesh studios next week. later on tonight i'll be returning to bham to begin "final" vocal tracking in...

i had some chinese food today in a strip mall in homewood. damn good stuff. i wonder if there is a chinese takeout flavored ice-cream out there somewhere? like spicy-sesame chicken crunch. check this out... a quick graphics based infomercial about bush's plans to dominate the globe, even if it means starting world war three . thanks to my college buddy stev e for posting this on his blog. he's gotten very political on there lately. sides are being taken, and he's hip baby. it's too bad i haven't seen him in four years.

i'm doing a lunch time perusing of internet headlines and i read a news report about a global population trend study. i was floored by how a tenth of a percent increase or decrease in population growth could save or end the human race by the year 2300. notice in the study that if today's current population growth rates go unchanged, we will basically fuck ourselves out of existence. that puts an interesting spin on the pro-life movement. here's an excerpt: If fertility rates stabilize at 1.85, the population would shrink to 2.3 billion. If it went to 2.35, the population would balloon to 36.4 billion. If fertility rates remained unchanged from the 2000 rate of 2.83, there would be 134 trillion people in 2300, impossible to sustain. also... i wanna give some props to the guy who got my vote .

i'm thinking about going into politics. i'm not saying i want to run for office, but i wouldn't mind fundraising, marketing, campaign staff, etc. something really strange happens when you hit thirty... you gain weight, enjoy documentaries more than rock concerts, and you actually start looking at not only the "big picture", which i feel i have always done, but the "right picture" - the point of view matched with personal action. heady stuff. my summation of this week - the nation has gone red. although the heavily populated, progressive states held onto reality. in '08 there will be no middling. there will be no centrist pacification. america had it's chance, they made a clear, legal choice. they have four years. the democrats played nice. kerry was respectful, truthful and honorable. in return, he was smeared for a life of service and duty. we on the left figured america would vote based on truth. this was not the case. they voted squarely...

51 - "the moral majority" 49 - "the reality based community" at least we know once and for all where america stands... on it's head. this election has done something truly beautiful for me. it has erased the centrist leanings of my mid/late twenties, and has sent me back to the left. i'm such a naughty bastard. i'm also thankful that i am not a female. the criminalization of abortion awaits. elections are almost too exiting. i voted for the first time last night, and even though i live in the backward state of alabama, and thus had no chance of my vote winning, at least we have scantron ballots. my vote was probably counted. ...a new world order... By Sidney Blumenthal Nov. 3, 2004 | "This country is going so far to the right you are not even going to recognize it," remarked John Mitchell, President Nixon's attorney general, in 1970. Mitchell's prophesy became the mission of Nixon's College Republican president, Karl Rove, who imple...

this is one of the best clips i've seen regarding the election, via salon.com, could this be the real enemy ? also check this out... 1. this lady does some great art. it reminds me of some of matthew barney's work. 2. she uses dead animals. and - yep... she kills them herself. that's creepy and brilliant at the same time. here's the nathalia edenmont exhibit . and here's the rationale for the art-killings via the host gallery, wetterling. i don't really have an opinion. i just thought i should share that little art nugget. ...moving on... i got the final packaged verison of the jesse payne solo album. it was very well done. the front and back photo is of canterbury church here in birmingham. the liner book is solid white, with plain black text. very simple and clean. i like it. i'll post a pic in a few days. pay attention to rock radio in the next several weeks and you'll probably hear some promos for the album that is slated to drop in election day. ...

i read today that john peel, the famous british dj has died. rock afficianados are familiar w/ the john peel sessions, and other historic recordings. he was a champion of rock, early punk, hip-hop, various emerging scenes in the us, ireland and britain... a very important figure in popular music. he died in an ancient city on vacation in south america of a heart attack. weird. on saturday night, just minutes after watching the pathetic corporate robot known publicly as ashley simpson perform on s.n.l., i changed the channel over to c-span and watched about an hour of jon stewart from the daily show talk about the media... to the media... and watched about an hour of a conversation w/ the governator - arnold. he was at the pinetta institute talking about public policy, immigration, tax reform, pro-business policies, the environment, california's ailing infrastructure, the state's massive debt, special interest groups like the tribal gaming pac, border patrol, undocumented worke...

this morning on salon, i read this article about world sentiment toward the american people vs. bush's presidency. turns out that they actually like us - probably because we make all of the big movies - but they hate bush. if we re-elect him, will the planet still show the love? i dunno - here it is . somehow i have found myself, by way of people cooler and more hip than i - going to the jay-z concert tonight. that should rock quite hard. i ended up not watching ambulance ltd. last night. i was all ready to go, but the prospect of watching eternal sunshine of the spotless mind w/ jim carry was too compelling not to watch - one of the best movies i've seen in years. what an incredible, impossibly hard-to-write script.

i think my body is starting to reject the 2004 election. i happened about 1:15 this afternoon... i decided to do some more reading on the election... electoral analysis... speeches, more polls... then i read the jon stewart vs. cnn/crossfire transcript. naturally i wanted some video of the argument on the crossfire episode - so i googled for a while. after a few minutes of not finding the clip i wanted, i got all anxious-like. then my tummy felt strange. it's around this time that i suspect my liver began to fail. it's a cliche, but it holds true for politics as well... everything is fine in moderation. i'm taking a break from the election for about 24 hours. so here's one last link about the election for a while. it's a big one. an empirical study that concludes that bush supporters have about as much of a command of "real facts" as bush has of the english language... "bush supporters still believe iraq had w.m.d." so anyway - tonight... i'm...

polls, and more polls kerry now leads bush in newspaper endorsements 45-30. and there are a growing number of papers who endorsed bush in 2000, that now either cannot support either candidate, or has endorsed jkf'04. i think florida will again decide the election this year. in my "research" on the electoral process, lately being done through poly-sci papers and non-network/broadcast sources, i've realized that the magic number is 50. no incumbent president has ever won re-election with public approval ratings below 50 percent. every president, i.e. reagan, clinton, nixon, etc. that has had a 50 rating or above during the final days on a campaign, has won. following the gop's $150 million dollar convention, bush was riding high (for him) at about about 47. (by anyone's standards in the "reality communities", this is still techinically an unpopular president) right now he's at 48-50 depending on the bias of the polling. no president involved in a r...

the man who would be king... mr. al gore, is hella pissed at the neo-cons. check out what the winner of the popular vote had to say about mr. bush. i couldn't agree more. i'll even leave the caps... (Reuters 10.19.04) "I'm convinced that most of the president's frequent departures from fact-based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible," Gore said in a speech at Georgetown University. "It is love of power for its own sake that is the original sin of this presidency," he said. He painted the Bush administration and its "right-wing" supporters as pursuing policies for the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the rest of the country. "The essential cruelty of Bush's game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals and then cloaks them with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans ... who have a deep and ge...

i started the weekend early (thurs) with a group outing to a haunted house, did some editing on some of the tracks we recorded earlier in the year, saturday night i hung out with amber and judah... and we did lunch on sun at rojo. did more yardwork...and continued to read profusely on the election. factcheck.org, salon, ny times, time, newsweek, etc. i can't even estimate how many speeches i've watched and read, from both sides... i've listened to npr, talk radio, cnn, fox, pbs, internet radio. I would say that i am among the most informed of the peasants.

what can i say? i've been to hundreds of concerts over the past 15 years and apparently they were all preparing me for last night. wilco is simply the best band out there, at least for my musical sensibilities.they rocked harder, sung softer, phreaked out noisier and seemed generally happier than i could have guessed. and they were at the fox theatre in atlanta, which is easily one of the top 5 venues in the south. it might be the best. even tweedy seemed amazed to be chatting about how stupid "dubya" is, in front of 4,200 folks in a place like this. according to him, there aren't a lot of "good republican bands." i must give the ultimate props to ashby for thinking tickets to see wilco would be a decent birthday gift. to pay him back properly, i'm going to have to schedule him a marine expedition to the titanic. i'm more than a little inspired. they are the frank sinatra of "modern americana indie rock."