Sorry for the minimal posts. I have been out in the field lately watching out for our boys over in Babylon.

"Babylon (ancient city), major city of the ancient world, located 90 km (56 mi) south of present-day Baghdad, Iraq. About 2200 BC Babylon was known as the site of a temple, and during the 21st century BC it was subject to the nearby city of Ur.

Babylon became an independent city-state by 1894 BC, when the Amorite Sumu-abum founded a dynasty there. This dynasty reached its high point in the 18th century BC under Hammurabi. In 1595 BC the city was captured by Hittites, and it later came under the control of the Kassite dynasty (1590?-1155 BC). The Kassites expanded Babylon into the country of Babylonia and made the city the religious and administrative center of this kingdom.

From the late 8th century BC until Nabopolassar expelled the Assyrians, between 626 and 615 BC, the city was part of the Assyrian Empire. Nabopolassar founded the neo-Babylonian dynasty, and his son Nebuchadnezzar II expanded the kingdom. In 539 BC Cyrus the Great incorporated Babylonia into the newly founded Persian Empire. Alexander the Great captured the city in 330 BC. Later it was used as a capital by the Seleucid dynasty set up by Alexander's successors. In the early 3rd century BC most of Babylon's population was moved to a new capital, and the city almost disappeared before the coming of Islam in the 7th century AD.

Babylon is best known for Esagila, the temple of Marduk; Etemenanki, a seven-storied ziggurat; and the Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, which Nebuchadnezzar II built for his wife."

No doubt part of the plan is to plunge that region into civil and bloody tribal confict, not liberation as the neo-cons propagandists claim.

24 hour TV war coverage, the new Sun god. "The main point about the information environment is that we have to realize that the audience feeds on itself and that TV is like the sun - it's always going to come up. Once a society starts to use electric media, it's like nature, it will want to be used 24 hours a day, there will always be something that has to be on the electric environment. People turn it on not really for what is on the media, but to experience that electric discarnate space which is TV itself - that vibrating, resonating dimension you feel is communicating and resonating with everybody else that's watching it. So that is a psychotic, obsessive need we have once we have the TV environment. So therefore, we have to have content on at all times, and therefore, everything becomes content. That's Warhol's prediction, and every artifact gets exhausted because by the middle '70s everything is played out. Then you've got to do it with a sense of irony or detachment and keep the content going, but then you say: "this is ridiculous - keeping the content going", and that's what Letterman played up. So the hidden ground is the need for TV to keep itself going with content."

THE MOTIVES & CONSEQUENCES OF THE SIXTIES COUNTERCULTURE AND BEYOND
with Bob Dobbs and Paul Krassner - April 13, 1994
FLIPSIDE #99 - DEC. '95/JAN. '96 & FLIPSIDE #100 - FEB. '96/MARCH '96