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In the June-July, 2008, issue of Armageddon Buffet, Harold Jaffe details the life and career of "Bela Lugosi."

Our editorial notes the similarities -- and differences -- between 1968 and 2008 in "The Summer of Our Discontent."

On the (now-blogged!) Road to Armageddon, Signs and Portents of Armageddon asks, once again: are we oil right?

Wars, Famines and Pestilences looks at the war against inappropriate war mourning.

In Preparing for Armageddon, we spy on the Pentagon's 100-year-war plan.

Finally, in The Cassandra Report, we discover that We Are Cassandra!

Next issue: September 2008!!

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Tyrone Nagai / Lola and Jean It is a little-known fact that the 1998 film Lola rennt (Run Lola Run) is actually based on an event that occurred on July 22nd (2005) in London, England. In the movie version, a narrator iterates the musings of the late soccer coach Josef (Sepp) Herberger -- the Yogi Berra of Germany: "After the game is before the game. The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes."

Jefferson P. Swycaffer / In Search of The Fuehrer The Nazi hierarchy had gone on retreat, taking the waters and airs at the spa at Kandersfeld, Austria. Accessible by a winding truck-trail up the Zillertal Alps, although within easy radio communication of Innsbruck, the inner circle of the Third Reich had the mingled advantages of isolation and total hierarchical dominance of wartime affairs.
     Winter's furies had abated, and Adolf Hitler had decided to take a bit of a walk. Therefore, the rest of his entourage had decided likewise. Heinrich Himmler was managing to keep up the pace, while Josef Goebbels, showing the sort of canny wisdom that had kept him alive during periodic party re-organizations, managed to go slowly, so as not to show up the less athletic of the junta. Hermann Goering, of course, plodded along in the rear, red-faced and huffing.
     A platoon of mountain troops had fanned out over the ridges and cuts, and a special section of SS officers maintained a minute-by-minute census of the population of Kandersfeld, taking no chances against any lack of patriotism or loyalty on the part of the good citizenry.

Don Traverso / Dysecdysis As the latest images of war show on the TV screen, Kuhn hears someone exclaim, "What kind of world is this? It's like God has abandoned us."
      Kuhn smiles sadly at the woman who'd said these words. He wishes he could do something to take away her despair. He sees so much of it around these days. He wipes the moisture from the chapped skin around his eyes.

Thomas Logan / Ghost Dance Soliloquies Trash, is it necessary to our modern life? That sounds like a documentary you'd see in grade school, huh? Like the answer will have to be 'yes', unless I asked it with a more serious tone, maybe an angrier voice, 'Trash, is it necessary to our modern life?' and then somehow you'd know to shout out, No! and maybe pound or raise your fist. Trash, yeah, there's too much of it. It seems to be our gross national product. Everything's expendable, meant to be on its way to becoming trash.

B. F. Price / Animals Were Harmed The Head Scientist made her way through the empty corridors and entered the laboratory unit at her usual early hour. She was the first to arrive in the labs but not the first to arrive in the building, as evidenced by the list of last night's dead animals posted on the job board by Paul, the animal caretaker, who liked to arrive early to haul off the dead carcasses and feed and hose down the still-living animals before the researchers arrived. She was relieved to note that none of her animals had died that night, and chose to interpret this as a sign that the research she was doing would achieve the results she wanted.
     She wasn't superstitious: instead, she believed in a chaotic and unpredictable universe and thus good and bad omens signaling how the universe was operating. For now, the universe was treating her research well, which was fortunate. It was vital to stopping the wasting epidemic spreading through the colony.

Jefferson P. Swycaffer / The Gift that Keeps On Giving In the deeps, in the lowest fastnesses, in the caverns of red, buttery rock and black pools, the Devil languishes. Here there are crags and precipices, rising up and over-arching, closing in again above this moral encystment.
     But, were one to scale the rugged cliffs, edging up the gore-slick crevices and inching up coarse chimneys, one may find a niche, a nook, an encircling standpipe.
     An exit.

Harold Jaffe / Cho Taking no chances, Texarkana, Texas, police Thursday spent hours combing through every crack and crevice of Bowie County High School after a cafeteria worker said she saw two young "Oriental males" wearing camouflage -- one in a ski mask -- "trotting" through the hallways before the school was scheduled to open, officials confirmed.
     The alert prompted school authorities to cancel classes for the day.
     The cafeteria worker said she did not "think" she saw any weapons on the young Orientals, and no one has seen them since, Texarkana Chief Duane Louie said.
     "We don't know if this is a prank, we don't know if this is a copycat deal, we don't know if this is a figment of someone's imagination, but we're going to take every precaution we can."

Jefferson Swycaffer / Leviathan of the Blades I've been there, and I never grow tired of it. There's a beauty to it, a calmness, a glorious isolation. I filled in the blanks in my mind, envying him the chance to go out and down, even with students. In clear water, it was more like flying than flying itself is. The giant kelp stalks grow up from the depths, an ugly greenish-yellow in color, and the sunlight shines down from the surface, growing weaker and weaker the farther down you go. The kelp fronds had a way of casting shadows and sunbeams, so distinct they sometimes seemed solid.

Devin Walsh / Felix Culpa When the invaders came they mostly blacked out the sky, and they pilfered everyone's watches and clocks and hoarded batteries and surgically canceled electricity throughout the City and took people's generators, so basically nobody ever knew what time it was. The invaders probably thought this would put a real curb on the ability of the occupied to coordinate a resistance movement, and for the most part they were right. But it would happen sometimes, in the chill of early evening, when the air smelled unmistakably of twilight, when people's stomachs growled for dinner, that cells would gather in someone's candlelit living room.

More Original Fiction!

Editorial / What the %$#@ Happened? By now Scott McClellan's book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception has hit the stores, but the media and political sturm und drang arrived a week earlier. The book makes the case that the rationale for the Iraq War was a manufactured lie -- and the "useful idiots," like McClellan, Colin Powell, and the "liberal" media, shouldn't have believed the lies. The evidence for it being a lie is overwhelming: Iraq, and Hussein, were no threat to the U.S. -- until we made them one by invading their country, destroying their government, economy, roads, schools and oilfields, and killing thousands upon thousands of men, women and children. Enough to piss anybody off.

Editorial / How We Got Here Five years in Iraq. 4000 American dead, with more to come. 10,000 others permanently handicapped; an unknown number traumatized. 90,000 Iraqis dead -- taking an average of the high and low estimates, because no one is really counting.

And no end in sight.

As of this writing, a week-long battle has just ended between Iraqi government forces and the Mahdi militia of Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, leaving hundreds dead in Basra and the Sadr City enclave of Baghdad. Hauptkommandant Bush praised the initial assault by Iraqi regular forces as proof that the government in Baghdad was functioning as it should and asserting its authority. Unfortunately, the Shiite-led army could not hold the line against the Shiite militia; Iraqi police looked the other way as the militia held the streets, and American troops had to take over the fighting until al-Sadr called another ceasefire. So . . .who's in charge?

Editorial / It's the Stupid Economy At the end of January 2008, a month in which the American stock market lost 8.8% of its value, the economy has come to dominate the news and the presidential campaign. Once more we wake up from our American Dream to learn that another bubble has burst -- like the dot-com bubble that ended the previous decade -- and that as a nation we should have known better.

Editorial / It's Not How Wrong You Make It; It's How You Make It Wrong This December 6 will probably not go down in infamy, although it was the day Mitt Romney, former Massachusetts governor, took the stand for religious liberty. That is, for all people of faith. In defending his Mormonism, he observed that the only religion that should be reviled as un-American was "the religion of secularism" with its belief that faith should be "a private affair with no place in public life." Although he made some noises about the separation of church and state, he did not go so far as Kennedy in 1960, who in fact argued that religion was a private affair.

Editorial / Between Iraq and a Hard Place What we call the cradle of Western civilization -- from Mesopotamia to Israel to Greece -- gave us the basis of our agriculture, our alphabet, our religion, and our political system. It also passed along the story form we know as tragedy -- from the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh through the biblical stories of Samson and David to the tales of Achilles, Hercules, and Oedipus. In all of these a man with a special relationship with the divine overreaches, having stumbled into the belief that his own power or virtue signifies that he himself can do no wrong.

Editorial / And So Fourth Another Independence Day has passed. Supermarkets and drug stores have bins of discounted flags and patriotic red-white-and-blue napkins to wipe your mouth on. On the Fourth United Statians lit barbecues and fireworks, listened to patriotic pronouncements on TV, to Sousa marches, or to the ritual reading of the Declaration of Independence-all, the mantra goes, to "celebrate our freedom."

Editorial / Memorial Day If Andrea Yates was crazed (or guilty, under Texas law) for sending five children to a happier place, if Cho was disturbed for punishing 32 for their sins, if the young Muslims who kill themselves and others in Allah's name are "evil," what should we say of any individual, or nation of individuals, who claim a holy right to rain death upon their enemies -- not to mention the collateral damage? As Pascal said, speaking from the standpoint of the French Enlightenment, to really do evil, one needs religion.

Editorial / The Republic of California As we watch the regime of Bush II slouching toward the landfill of history, it merits remembering that only two years ago, as term two began, the media buzzed with awe for the "genius" of consiglieri Karl Rove and dropped to its knees before the power of the Christian Right and the "values voter." Meanwhile, serious talk of emigration ensued as many a Californian and New Yorker eyed the kindlier, gentler America of the North -- i.e., Canada. And once again there was talk of secession.

Editorial / What Does It Mean: "Support Our Troops"? Something similarly mythic and unreflective transpires when Americans -- across the political spectrum, it must be noted -- repeat another ubiquitous saw: "Support Our Troops." First popularized in the Reagan era as a response to the contemptuous treatment, real or imagined, of Vietnam-era troops by war opponents, it has theoretically come to mean separating one's attitude to war from those who fight it. Antiwar politicians and street protestors alike affirm their support for the troops, and in fact use it as an argument for their cause: they support the troops by seeking to bring them out of harm's way and back to their families. Prowarriors, on the other hand, argue that one can only support the troops by withholding all criticism, not only of the war itself but of the Commander-in-Chief, on the grounds that such opposition "undermines morale." For these militants, "Support Our Troops" means only one thing: "Support Our War."

More Original Commentary!

Armageddon Buffet is looking for speculative fiction, social satire, and cyberpunk; future fantasies, alternate histories, and apocalyptic visions; surrealism, naturalism, and literotica; well-researched and considered political, philosophical, and cultural commentary; true tales of successful activism, rebellion, and opposition; positive alternatives and survival strategies. More