A listener to the Brother Russell podcast has this question about the June 3 show, in reference to the radio host who is the target of the prank call at the top of the show:

"That host.. who is that wack-job?" - Jonathan

Thanks for listening, brother, and that wack-job would be Steve Solomon, pastor of Riverwalk Fellowship in Dallas TX and host of "Praise in the Night", a program that airs very late at night and gives Steve a chance to faith-heal depressed drunks, tweakers, and insomniacs while playing his own new-agey brand of "praise" music in the background. That's right, while he is talking incessantly on the radio, he is playing music that he composed, and in which he is the lead vocalist, in the background. While simultaneously promoting his CDs and encouraging people to come visit the church which he pastors. (Steve Solomon's program is therefore even more self-indulgent than my own Brother Russell Podcast, and that's really saying something).

Read Steve's testimony and learn more about him here:

http://www.pitn.org/About.html

A former Jew who was saved when a ball of fire spoke to him. Sounds quite a bit like St. Paul (formerly Saul of Tarsus). If you want to join in the fun sometime, you can listen online by going to the "Listen Live" page on this same site. He has a toll-free number!!

Steve Solomon is also the host that can be heard on the tracks "Charismatic Chiropractic" and "This is Not Voodoo!" on my Radio Jihad CD, as well as "Choked Up for Jesus" and "Down on all Fours" on Melba Comes Alive. He is also featured on the track "Filled, Lady!" on my CD-EP "Filled".

Steve has an on-air style of confident, self-assured slickness that somehow reminds me of the cocky sophistication that characterized "The Rat Pack".. Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr. etc.  On the aforementioned "Filled" track, he prepares to command a woman to be filled with the Holy Spirit. This would seem to be a sacred occasion, a moment of great import and solemnity. But Steve simply says "you go ahead and be filled lady, and I'm going to eat a cracker". We can then hear him repeatedly saying "filled" in a voice muffled by the presence of food in his mouth, while the lady begins to go into vaguely sexual-sounding paroxysms of holy filling. (By the way, his eating a cracker has nothing to do with the Eucharist, although some might argue that he is unconsciously profaning that sacred rite on the air.) Steve then imparts the gift of "holy laughter" to her, which was fashionable at the time of the broadcast (late 1990's), by repeatedly saying "haha.. ho-ho.. hee-hee" and instructing her to repeat it after him.

Please note that when I talk of sacred rites, I am simply speaking about what the majority of Christians/Catholics would believe and consider sacred, and setting Steve's goofy, off-the-cuff style in contrast to that. I am not speaking from a theistic point of view.

Thanks for the question!

Bro Russell a.k.a. Melba

After a three month hiatus, the Brother Russell Podcast is back. New show online now at http://melba.podbean.com

ASCENT OF THE PSEUDO-MELBA? WEIRD COINCIDENCE?

For everyone who has been asking, the person who was featured on Ellen DeGeneres recently doing the voice of an "88 year old lady from Austin TX" named Gladys Hardy who "loves Jesus but drinks too much now and then" is not me. It's apparently some stand-up comic guy in Austin. I will keep his name under my hat, but he has apparently been doing his own old lady schtick even longer than I have. The influence of the great Jonathan Winters lives on. I suspect that Gladys Hardy and Melba Jackson are both partly inspired by Winters' twisted character Maude Frickert. I think Gladys Hardy is largely inspired by the Austin comedian's grandmother, whereas Melba is inspired by 20% my own grandmother and a bigger percentage of this crazy old battleaxe that lived next door to us in Garland, where I grew up. One of those old ladies who is so disagreeable and prone to rants that even her own children have nothing to do with her any more. God bless the old ladies of the world, there's a little of them in each of us... http://www.austin360.com/tv/content/tv/stories/2007/01/25gladys.html

It will be a weekly half-hour of music, weird audio from my vaults, pranks new and old (mine and other people's), strange guests and fun. Here's where you can subscribe to it (it's free)...

http://melba.podbean.com/

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/16173616.htm

Web profiles new source for police

Networking sites tip off law enforcement on illegal activities such as underage drinking, illegal possession of firearms

MELISSA MANWARE AND DÁNICA COTO

mmanware@charlotteobserver.com | dcoto@charlotteobserver.com

PHOTO USED WITH SEARCH WARRANT

This photo was included in a warrant returned Monday in a Wilmington robbery investigation. The warrant said one suspect, Ryan David Mills, a UNC Wilmington student, was pictured on the Internet with guns. The warrant did not identify the three men, say whether the guns are real or where it was taken.

• About Community Web Sites
• Autopsy: Teen died from gunshot wound in raid
• Apex man held in PlayStation case

When police went to search a Wilmington house for stolen PlayStation 3 consoles last week, they brought heavily armed deputies because a picture on the Internet had made them think the college students inside might be armed.

Investigators had found an online photograph of a man who hung out at the house posing with two others and what appeared to be an assault rifle, pistols and a shotgun.

Millions of young people post their personal thoughts and photographs in cyberspace. And law enforcement has begun combing through it in search of useful information about the lives of young people -- and evidence of crimes.

"We've got to pay attention to it," said Charlotte-Mecklenburg police Capt. Eddie Levins, who heads the Intelligence and Organized Crime Division. "Years ago, we'd go to bars and read cards on the walls to learn who was selling dope. Now kids are putting all kinds of stuff (on these sites). These have become intelligence tools for us."

Levins said police use MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and other sites to find young people wanted for crimes. They also use the sites to learn what's happening in schools and neighborhoods, and get an idea what kids are talking about.

Most commonly it's detectives in the gang and intelligence units who troll the sites, but Levins said more officers are getting trained because the sites have become so popular -- and young people are so frank on them.

He said the department doesn't keep files on young people who post photographs of themselves with guns or flashing gang signs. But if a person already is the subject of an investigative file, detectives will add anything interesting they find online.

In New Hanover County, snapshots found on the Internet prompted UNC Wilmington police to bring those heavily armed deputies when they went to search the house for stolen video consoles, according to a search warrant. In the end, authorities shot Peyton Strickland, an 18-year-old student at Cape Fear Community College, in the foyer of the home. The SBI is investigating his death.

Two friends of Strickland, Braden Riley, 21, and Ryan David Mills, 20, have been charged with robbery with a dangerous weapon, assault with a deadly weapon and breaking and entering a motor vehicle in the case.

Riley's attorney questioned the charges against his client. And friends of Mills criticized UNCW campus police Tuesday, saying they misinterpreted a teenage prank as a threat. The photo, which friends said captures a smirking Mills holding a rifle, was a joke, friends told The (Raleigh) News & Observer.

Fred Stutzman, a doctoral student in information science at UNC Chapel Hill, said young people who post their profiles online often don't realize police may be looking at them.

Officers, though, have to remember that digital pictures can be altered, and also that those posing with gang signs or toting guns often are simply mimicking what they see in movies or on CD covers, he said.

A study last year found that half the nation's teens -- 12 million youths -- have created content on the Internet.

Officials at MySpace, one of the most popular social networking sites, say they frequently assist police in investigations. The site also offers safety advice for users and their parents.

Two months ago, after a 17-year-old was charged with having an assault-style rifle outside an West Mecklenburg High football game, a Charlotte crime blogger posted photographs of that teen and more than a dozen others posing either with guns or flashing gang signs. The photographs, according to the blog, were taken from MySpace, and depicted Charlotte-area teens.

Levins said it's not illegal to pose with a gun, unless you are a convicted felon. Even then, he said, it would be difficult to prove the gun is real.

"There are air soft guns that look just like real guns," he said. Getting a conviction would require more proof than a MySpace picture, he said.

But police across the country are using the Internet as part of criminal investigations:

• In Pennsylvania, police used photographs posted on Webshots.com to place teenage crash victims at a party where beer and rum were served, according to court documents.

• In Colorado, a 16-year-old was charged with illegal gun possession after authorities said he posted photos on MySpace showing himself holding guns.

• Police at Penn State used Facebook to find unruly football fans who rushed the field after a win against Ohio State University.

Dr. Phyllis Gerstenfeld, chair of the criminal justice department at California State University, said the sites are not an ideal investigative tool because people can lie online. But workers have gotten into trouble as a result of what they've posted, she said.

"If you're going to post something on the Internet," she said, "you should have the expectation that anybody's going to look at it."

(Best thing I have read in a long time. This pretty much sums it all up.)

Six Flags Over Neo-Nuremberg:
Bush, Oprah, the San Diego Chicken and a proto-fascist panopticon of the mind
by Phil Rockstroh, Online Journal Contributing Writer

Oct 6, 2006

Many believe fascism will come to the United States of America resembling contrived spectacles such as the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards, and American Idol, with the proceedings intercut with teary, yet ultimately triumphant, Oprahesque tales of how redemption can be gained through the renunciation of one's rights and liberties, as well as, the dutiful turning in of one's subversive neighbors.

Don't reach for that remote, folks: It's already here.

Our journey to fascism began at the end of the Second World War, when the tenets of the hyper-commercialized entertainment / military / corporate state became sacrosanct by means of our internalization of it from constant mass media reinforcement. What purported to be only a message from our sponsors metastasized into the 24/7 corporatized UberCulture of the present day. The Revolution will not be televised – because the Corporatist Coup is being continually broadcast.

Commercial advertising is a form of political speech: A very potent one and its effects are far from benign. By means of its cultural dominance, commercial advertising is promulgated, to the point of total market saturation, without any form of effective opposition; hence, by its very nature, it amounts to corporatist propaganda and serves as a vehicle of mass indoctrination.

By way of a ceaseless bombardment of advertising imagery, we exist in a nonstop, holographic, corporate Nuremberg rally of the collective mind. We need not participate in old school, torch-lit processions of Brown Shirts through the streets: This brand of all-media penetration proto-fascism has been internalized. We, like maggots born into a pile of dung, find nothing malodorous about our place of birth.

Karl Rove, Roger Ailes, et al, are not evil geniuses. Well, at least, they're not geniuses. They're simply cocktail party variety, confidence artists of the electronic age. They're media professionals who understand the proto-fascistic fantasies of the populace of the consumer state.

Hitler and Goebbels grasped what any advertising copywriter is taught early on: People can be manipulated, if an appeal can be addressed to modern man's yearning to break free from the constraints of his existence as an economic animal . . . Whether it's the promised dawning of the Thousand Year Reich or the empty facsimile of freedom promised by the purchase of a new automobile, both provide the feckless sucker with the illusion of shaking up the old order; hence, the quotidian prison will collapse, allowing one's imprisoned longings to escape to freedom over the rubble. But first, paradoxically, one must surrender their rational mind to the individuality-destroying agendas of the state and/or corporation.

When people habitually surrender their free will to the irrational dictates of a dominant order, an inner anxiety results. Outwardly, one feigns strength, yet inwardly one is ridden with doubts. To compensate, an individual will grow, over time, more rigid, even totalitarian.

Enter George W. Bush, a man affecting a massive measure of feigned toughness -- yet, at the same time, riddled with such a high degree of concomitant inner doubts that when he attempts to speak, his words trip and stagger over his lips like drunken dwarves attempting to clear a high curb.

In temperament, Bush is as vain and brutish as any tin-plated dictator. Worse, Bush more closely resembles an abusive pimp – tragically -- Lady Liberty's. Habitually slapping her around, accusing her of holding out on him, and paranoid of betrayal, Bush, a preening caricature of Macho Narcissism, like any run-of-the-dark-alley pimp claims to be her protector, as, all the while, he abuses, exploits, and degrades her. Apropos, Bush's vast collection of outfits for every occasion should include a plum purple pimp suit; accordingly, the presidential limo should be tricked out to sport 1970's style Cadillac El Dorado opera windows, a two tone paint job, and be accessorized with plush, white fur-lined upholstery.

It was the wicked magicians of advertising who sold us George W. Bush. Bush was initially marketed as a box of detergent (though he's dumb as a box of rocks) -- a cleansing, Christian soap, to be used as directed to wash and scour the stain of Satanic jism left on the fabric of American life by the sinful Bill Clinton. Bush, a former drunk, now "cleaned-up," was ready to lead America to a whiter-than-white future -- plus provide round-the-clock protection from the offensive odors emitted by the body politic.

But, after the 11th of September 2001, Bush was marketed as a Humvee. The biggest, most powerful vehicle traveling the perilous roadways of a hostile world . . . It's okay, kids; daddy's at the wheel . . . just sit in the backseat and watch your DVDs . . . You're safe and protected: anybody or anything stupid enough to get in our way will be crushed beneath us. Challenge us you evildoers and you'll join the rest of the smoking wreckage and pulverized roadkill in our wake.

Although -- after wildly fluctuating gas prices and a series of deadly rollovers on the roadways of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Post-Katrina Gulf coast -- the Hummer presidency of George W. Bush is sputtering: the DVD player is running an endless tape loop of Bush strutting, clad in a flight suit, while Iraq burns and bleeds; in addition, the vehicle's passengers are carsick and road weary.

The fool's gold standard for this form of governance by marketing subterfuge was set by former soap and nuclear missile salesmen Ronald Reagan, who was successfully sold as a kind of grandfatherly Marlboro Man. Reagan, whose fantasy prone hagiographers still believe, by some cryptic act of telegenic alchemy, brought down the Soviet Union – somehow -- by simply reading a teleprompter. Later, Bill Clinton was a rock-a-billy cool Elvis who fattened up the economy, like it was binging on a round-the-clock, fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches and chocolate cake diet.

At this point, hapless George W. Bush, as was the case with his geeky, hyperthyroid father before him, must be beginning to cause his corporate creators to drastically up the dosages of their respective SSRI prescriptions, because, while they intended to market Bush II as the heir apparent of the iconic, cowboy Ron Reagan, it's clear he couldn't handle the responsibilities of the San Diego Chicken.

Bush should serve out the rest of his term wearing a chicken costume. Such an act would be emblematic of the man, as well as our era: Bush as an emblem of the populace of the United States -- a people who have lost their dignity, by way of surrendering it to the corporatist order.

In a more literate age, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, limned characters emblematic of his era. Yet the words he wrote in the 1920s still resonate today as a powerful indictment of those who created and enable men like Bush -- the corrupt corporatist classes of the present time:

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . ." (Pg. 180-181)

Carelessness is the manner by which extroverts manifest despair. Being a nation that considers introspection a loser's gambit, carelessness has been our national mode d'être since the country's inception. Bush is only its latest manifestation.

And the mess is piling up by the hour. As was the case with Gatsby, beneath the carefully constructed image and manic consumption of the UberCulture, the American empire is doomed. Although, we, unlike Gatsby, for all our cunning artifices and desperate subterfuge, are not flaming out and falling amid the glittering debris of frenetic, jazz-imbrued bacchanals -- we have only managed shopping spree debt, overpriced coffee jags, McMansion-enclosed anomie and porn habituation.

Gatsby remains an emblem of the hollowness howling beneath the convivial veneer of capitalist man. An updated version of the model is Oprah Winfrey.

Yes, I realize Gatsby is a fictional character, imagined and realized by F. Scott Fitzgerald within the context of a novel; Gatsby is a construct of the mind sent out into the world to synergize with the imagination of the reader. Yet the Oprah we hold in our mind's eye is also an imagined character -- a character wholly created by Oprah, fully imagined and realized inside the media hologram.

Oprah is a corporate capitalist, performance propagandist. Her rousing tales of personal redemption are very useful to the plutocratic order of the present day; an elitist order in which she's comfortably ensconced.

In a time when the besieged laboring and middle classes would benefit from an honest exposé detailing the ruling class machinations that belie their sense of powerlessness, Oprah, instead, proffers 12-step platitudes, "Self Help" bromides (suggested book club title: An Idiots Guide To Idiocy) and shopworn Horatio Alger doggerel, all refitted to the media age.

The Gospel of Oprah reeks of faux redemption. Even when Oprah addresses a topic such as the wage enslavement of minimum wage jobs, she avoids the obvious question of who benefits from having this exploitive system in place. Such disingenuous story telling is analogous to Charles Dickens penning "A Christmas Story" sans Ebenezer Scrooge.

Oprah is a plutocratic enabler disguised as the populist underdog who made good. She is a shill for the status quo. She will never point a pampered finger towards the corrupt ruling elitist of the corporate class -- because that finger would end up pointing back at her.

The Uberculture's frenetic come-ons and false promises flatten people out emotionally, rendering them depressed, passive, and conformist. Moreover, in a culture where success is deemed the end all/be all of all things -- even a measure of God's love and grace -- when contemporary Americans risk straying from the mainstream and fail, the repercussions are terrible, more than most people can endure, economically, as well as psychologically. And within the parameters of a corporately controlled economic structure -- rigged for the benefit of a privileged few -- failure is altogether likely. Then combine those noxious realities with the puritanical idea that failure is due to some character flaw (a toxic notion Oprah has given a makeover for the media age) and we're left with a populace who are conformist, terrified to risk, yet cling to the defining delusion that they live in a society where industry, innovation, and pluck are rewarded with success.

For this reason the corporatist order needs a consummate propagandist like Oprah; a charismatic mountebank who, by means of her stem-twisting tales of personal redemption, dangles before her credulous audience the elusive and illusionary carrot of success. Success and personal fulfillment are possible for one and all, she lies, if only one will surrender their rational instincts and avail oneself of her gospel of self-help salvation. In doing this, Oprah simply sells a variation of the old totalitarian snake oil.

Oprah Winfrey is a sleight-of-hand artist. One of an order of corrupt illusionists who have conjured an all-pervasive, corporatist narrative, a ceaseless mass-media phantasmagoria, wherein empty imagery deluges authentic apprehension and our minds are whirled within a virtual reality vortex that drowns out resonate experience. The Virtual States of America.

In reality, a large measure of our lives are comprised of long work hours, rounded by tedious, time-decimating commutes, while in unison, mass media manipulation creates a psychological and societal dynamic whereby we must work, nearly continuously, so that we can afford to purchase the empty distractions needed to stave off the demoralization attendant to this soul-numbing arrangement; yet, for all our efforts, we only accumulate more enslaving debt. Ultimately, condemning ourselves to exist indentured to our corporate bosses, by means of our own consumerist compulsions.

These circumstances and our own complicity contrive to fetter us to the global company store of late capitalism as, all the while, our perceptions remain imprisoned within the proto-fascist panopticon of the Uberculture. Part prison, part holographic theme park of the mind, it spins a ceaseless spectacle of commercial propaganda. Call it: Six Flags over Neo-Nuremberg, U.S.A.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: philangie2000@yahoo.com.

Copyright © 1998-2006 Online Journal

Some of you have been asking where Melba gets those adorable outfits that she sports on the covers of her CDs. (Or if you live in the Dallas area, perhaps you have seen her out and about, for example at the monthly Methodist Ladies Fish-Fry Night at Katfish Kove in Mesquite). You may have taken note of the fact that she always looks so precious, yet she never draws attention to herself in a way that might provoke lust among the unchurched, or among carnal Christians.

In a recent conversation, Melba informed me that she used to make her own outfits, but she tells me that these days, she has some wonderful nieces that sew her outfits, since Melba's arthritis began to give her blinding flashes of white-hot joint pain that cause her to pray for death every night, and made her unable to continue to sew. (Melba says that her arthritis got worse after she disobeyed God, spent most of her social security check on a godless secular doctor, and subsequently missed a pledge payment to Rod Parsley). Well anyway, the good news for you is this:

With a little help from the Lord, those dear nieces have started selling their anointed raiments on the Internets:

http://www.modestapparelusa.com/

http://www.simplymodest.com/

And here is a wonderful page for the Bible-centered woman with an Issue of Blood (Mark 5:25-34):

http://hillbillyhousewife.com/sanitarypads.htm