Seven Devils Dead

Checks and Balances

2011-11-11T18:04:00.000-08:00

They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved. ~ Peter 2:19

Encouraging signs have developed in the long time since I last added an entry here. The popular movement to remove corruption from government that began in Tunisia and spread across northern Africa and the Mid-East finally washed up on these shores. Ignored, then mocked and now repressed by the lackeys of the oligarchy...we wait for a system (that has spectacularly failed to self-regulate in the recent past) to either save itself from within or face a final collapse.

All of the problems of capitalism are, of course, self-imposed. The system of competition will leave behind those less capable of fixing the rules to affect the outcome. This is no boon to society in the long run, though it may be successful for periods of time if heavily regulated. Inevitably, monopolies develop and the regulations are either gotten rid of or poorly enforced. The end result is the robbery of the many for the benefit of the few. We are at the point where the system has been too rigged for too long to be of any use for virtually anyone. Except those that own the government.

A tragic microcosm of this perverse evolution recently ended in the immolation of another supposed paragon of virtue as the big business of college football was given a chop block to its knees. State College, Pennsylvania is a small college town surrounded by farms only a few miles away on every side. In the spring and fall, the farmers spread manure on their fields and the smell wafts over the campus when there is a strong wind. That smell can't compare with the smothering, putrid stench currently hanging over that campus.

The sordid and unecessarily extended period of sexual child abuse in "Happy Valley" occurred because there was a complete breakdown of the systems of checks and balances over a period of time. This was to accomodate the whims of one Joe Paterno, and made possible by the legions of fanatical followers and the tens of millions of dollars of business they generated for the school and local area. I went to grad school there and saw firsthand the cult of personality. Penn State was the church, football the religion and Paterno the combined Pope and King. To tempt fate, his supporters erected a statue of this man while he was still living, unaware that it was built on a foundation of sand. The sand was slowly, grain by grain, falling away and marking time before the revelations of past discretions would come to light.

When the sand finally ran out, the King had just attained one final triumph. He had broken the record of Eddie Robinson of Grambling University for most college football wins in the history of the sport. Little consolation now, one would hope. Defiant, incredibly insensitive, and tone deaf to the bitter end, Paterno had to be forced out, while his brain-dead legions rioted. These incredibly dense "students" were the reason I had hoped the football team would lose every Saturday that I went there, so that the sidewalks would be relatively free from the vomit that was deposited there on nights when they won. They proudly advertised their ignorance of who the actual victims were, lost in the herd mentality that is so carefully cultivated in this country.

Which brings us to Veteran's Day. Reactionary thinkers fail to grasp what should be obvious nuances in separating wars of liberation from wars of agression. You cannot honor a warrior without cursing the sham of the war. Please don't congratulate me on my service without excoriating those who would and so blatantly have used the military for the material gain of the ruling class. To all those who served, honestly ask yourself what you served for. To those currently in the military, get home soon and in one piece and to hell with those who would make you heroes for no good cause!

The People United

2011-02-16T11:38:00.000-08:00

Bayonets cannot weave cloth.
~ Joseph Etter, IWW labor organizer commenting on the Massachussetts governor's decision to send in the National Guard to crush a strike by textile workers.

It has been interesting watching the conglomerate-owned media covering the revolution in Egypt. It has also been interesting hearing the Obama administration telling one of the many corrupt lackeys of U.S. foreign policy to not crush the will of the people over there, while the war against the peasantry intensifies on U.S. soil. The union busting threats made by governors of New Jersey and Wisconsin are similar to those of 100 years ago. We are stuck in a reactionary time warp.

Both Republicans and Democrats seem to be on the same side lately. Perhaps this is due to the racheting up of the campaign finance corruption enabled by the judicial activism of five ultra-right members of the Supreme Court. In order to play the candidate game, you now have to be able to raise vast sums of money AND not incur the wrath of those who can raise vast sums of money against you. All this leads to policies that will support the very top of the economic pyramid at the expense of everyone else.

It doesn't take a lot of predictive power to see that this will end badly if a radical change of course does not occur. The attack on the public workforce and unions, along with environmental and safety regulations, the continued reliance on fossil fuels, the neglect to educational and physical infrastructure...all of these things will have negative consequences, many of them dire, to everyone. The least powerful will, as always, be most negatively impacted. It won't stop there, however. Those in charge seem determined to find the limits of popular revolution in this country. At some point, the left-right divide will have to be bridged and the recognition of the common enemy must occur. The appropriation of "not gonna take it anymore" by right-wing corporate stooges will seem rather quaint compared to when the shit actually hits the fan. I hope our government follows its own advice to foreign countries when it happens here.

The Korean Conflict: A Historical Perspective

2010-11-24T09:53:00.000-08:00

"General Bradley said that we must draw the line (against Communist expansion) somewhere. The President stated he agreed on that. General Bradley said that Russia is not yet ready for war. The Korean situation offered as good an occasion for action in drawing the line as anywhere else."

~ From the official minutes of President Harry S. Truman's meeting with his top military and foreign-policy advisers at the Blair House on the evening of 25 June 1950

Here we go, again. Another opportunity for people halfway around the word to die, en masse, for the United States to demonstrate its uncanny ability to enforce a global double standard. While Israel, judging from its recent and not so recent actions, is as reckless and dangerous a government as they come, is allowed to keep its nuclear arsenel without sanctions (and indeed without any mention at all in official U.S. diplomatic circles) while other countries who we don't share a "special relationship" with, are not. In this case, North Korea, representing one third of the Neo-con "Axis of Evil", and already being slowly starved to death by economic sanctions imposed by a U.S.-domininated U.N., is about to take things into some very dangerous territory. Namely, they are about to become the noisy focus of the "Loud Little Handful" of Neo-cons. These are people that would like nothing better than to follow Douglas MacArthur, their ideological ancestor, down the rabbit-hole of nuclear abyss. This is history that could repeat itself, hopefully without a brand new, glowing and radioactive ending. So let's look at that history and clear up in advance some misconceptions that will no doubt be foisted on us again in the coming days by the usual suspects.

At the end of WWII, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were defeated and the world became the domain of the two "liberating" powers. The U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. Even before the last shots were fired in that war, a new ideological war between the two remaining large military powers was beginning. The "Cold War" in which the aspirations of the people of the world were boiled down into capitalist/communist ideological doctrine, would continue to cause turmoil and divert resources from the basic needs of humanity and towards the existance of massive armament stockpiles.

One of the key points of revisionist history is that this massive weapons buildup was able to "keep the peace". In fact, while nuclear war was avoided, dozens of "lower intensity" conflicts raged and millions died. Korea would be joined by a long list of places where Cold War brinksmanship would result in proxy wars, bringing foreign troops, advisors and armament into conflict with eachother.

Most U.S. history books will state that the Korean War began on June 25, 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea. The true origin is murkier, as offensive actions on both sides of the 38th parallel were occurring ever since this border dividing one country into two was established at the end of WWII. The border was in effect a dividing line between the influence of the two superpowers who had divvied up the Korean peninsula after removing the Japanese army, similar to the military occupation of Germany.

Syngman Rhee, the U.S.-approved ruler of South Korea, suffered an electoral setback a month before the war started as popular dissatisfaction with the pace of reconstruction grew among the South Korean population. The tenuous political position he faced seemed to force his hand towards diversionary tactics, such as increased belligerance towards the North, something we may see happening again if Obama tries to get his groove back after the mid-term elections by proving his foreign policy toughness to the incessant cry of the Neo-cons as amplified by the war-hungry corporate media. The Cold War never ended for these people, it just morphed into another War Without End.

Capitalism: The Silent Killer

2010-11-22T10:29:00.000-08:00

"The streets and people of New York are devastated for the second time in a decade. This time, the culprits behind the wrecked lives and ruined livelihoods are not foreign extremists, but homegrown. And rather than receive appropriate retribution, the perpetrators receive billions of government dollars for their demolition job."

~Tom Engelhardt

Capitalism. A word that should be at least as well known as Communism or Socialism. Or terrorism for that matter. Yet a word that is strangley missing in most debates about or descriptions of U.S. government. The word is often replaced by sunny sounding proxies such as "freedom and democracy" or "liberty". One wonders about the taboo nature of this word in the imperial lexicon of corporate media. So let's break it down.

This is a system primarily fueled by the most base of base human nature; greed. Yet, this engine of exploitation and inequality is exhorted as instrinsically good and pitted against the intrinsically evil-by-association Socialism. We are thus being sold the idea that greed and selfishness and ranking priviledge by the amount of excess accumulated property is more noble, natural and godly than an egalitarian and selfless existance. What would Jesus do if faced with this assumption? As we are faced with it every day.

And it has been more in our face than usual these days as the system has collapsed in a massive tangle of crooked deals and unstaunched bleeding of outsourced jobs. All of this mess made possible by politicians on a legalized bribery binge pushing continued de-regulation of industries irrevocably driven to excess. Some very public dirty dealing was seen in the last few months as the Democratic congress and president attempted to tackle the most vital issue facing us; health care. We saw how crooked and gamed the legislative process is. The health insurance and pharm lobbies strangled the best option, single payer, in the crib then kneecapped even a weak public option. We saw our lives and well being quite literally given less priority than industry profit. It was there in all its naked, destructive glory, this god called Capitalism, the magical hand of the marketplace that decides whether we live or die.

It also decides where we live and the quality and conditions of our life. One of the sadder stories I have read recently is that of the children affected by the foreclosure tidal wave sweeping the country. This will not be a good holiday season for them, and neither may be future ones as the emotional scars of being uprooted remain for a long time.

So when you hear about the evils of Socialism and Communism or when you hear about the great goodness of freedom and liberty, remember the premature death, suffering and misery of the most dangerous and deadly "ism" out there: Capitalism.

Death By Corruption

2010-11-16T18:41:00.000-08:00

"The Court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution.

While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."

~Justice John Paul Stevens, dissent on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

The 2010 elections are done and spell further doom to anything resembling the American Dream. The lukewarm, mild, tepid support of the New Deal safety net by the Democrats was swamped by a scalding-hot tea mess of ultra-right nutcases parading as populist reformers. The tea they served was brewed from an ocean of money provided in part by the Koch brothers, savvy businessmen who want a return from their investment.

They spent millions on attack ads, robo-calls and other forms of nefarious disinformation and now expect billions from the U.S. treasury to be provided by their army of looters soon to be sworn in to congress. This will come at the expense of anyone hoping to retire before the age of 80, anyone not raking in more than seven figures a year, and anyone trying to go to college without being saddled with debt for the next 30 years after graduation.

The campaign finance system is no longer just broken, it has been pulverized by corporate cash into a shadowy, toxic fog that cannot even be traced. Anywhere there is dissent from the corporate agenda the fog rolls in and blankets the airwaves with poison. The dissent is killed and replaced with a compliant tool to accomplish the further dismantling of FDR's social contract. This wave election may be the wave of the future if the walls between corporate money and fair elections are not rebuilt. Expecting the politicians to fix this is like expecting a drug cartel to police themselves and a drug addict to come clean without any type of intervention. It is up to we the people to get a constitutional amendment to fix this mess. That's the only hope of stopping the slide back to the Gilded Era of robber barons.

Autumn: Death is Life

2010-10-19T11:26:00.000-07:00

My death waits there among the leaves
In magicians' mysterious sleeves
Rabbits and dogs and the passing time
My death waits there among the flowers
Where the blackest shadow, blackest shadow cowers
Let's pick lilacs for the passing time
My death waits there in a double bed
Sails of oblivion at my head
So pull up the sheets against the passing time

~ Jacques Brel

Leaves are falling and blowing across the streets and lawns as cool winds whip through my suburban landscape. Gone are the long evenings of slow twilight. Gone are the slow and relaxed gaits of movement. There is an urgency to get through the more turbulent atmosphere and arrive more purposefully at a destination now. The darkness falls quicker and returns slower. The mud and buds of spring time renewal are far away, both in the past and future. Forgotten and not yet imagined. The reality is currently stressing the cold and the process of going dormant. There will be a long stretch of trying to hold on to the promise of renewal ahead of us.

The chill in the air that appears this time of year is incrementally more chilling with each passing year. We feel the slow transition from summer to autumn as becoming less tangential to our own life's cycle. Yet there is a familiar assurance and reassurance that greets us in the annual dying off. We have been through it so many times before that we can feel comfortable knowing the many intricate variations of what we can expect of winter in these temperate latitudes. Imagine the shock if we had never been through a winter before.

The shorter days can be depressing. The cold wind can be painful to endure. The sense of impending death can be a source of dread. Then comes the revelation of our long experience: There can be no renewal without this dying off. There can be no promise without this finality. There is a reason to this season.

Good Fucking Riddance

2010-10-15T08:45:00.000-07:00

Finally and at long last, the year 2010 has delivered some good news. Rahm Emanuel, the destroyer of Democratic congressional majorities, is leaving, supposedly to try to get a piece of the action in Chicago. No one really believes the motive, the more likely scenario is he is bailing out to avoid the stigma of potentially once again presiding over a huge (and hugely avoidable) Republican renaissance. In 1994, it was his DLC strategy of pushing through NAFTA by the Clinton administration that persuaded the Democratic base to stay home, opening the door to the Newt Gingrich-led raping and pillaging of the middle class. In 2010, it was his continued strategy of allowing corporate cash to rule over all else that is similarly demoralizing all voters that aren't batshit crazy, or millionaires (or in some case, both). History repeats itself and the crooked campaign-finance money machine never misses a beat.

President Obama's hiring of Mr. Emanuel right after the 2008 election was the first clear indication that the hope and change rhetoric of the campaign was not going to amount to much of the susbstantive change as we had hoped for. Two years later, we can clearly recognize it as Clinton redux, the corporate and Israel lobbies still rule the day and the rest of us are still serfs populating an ever-growing feudalist chasm between what needs to be done and what cannot be done as long as the real change, a fundamental restructuring of the campaign finance system, is not implemented.

Let Rahm Emanuel be a symbol, the poster boy, of the need for this change. Twice now he has squandered the hopes and dreams of working people and sold them out to the highest corporate bidder. But we must not focus narrowly and concentrate our disappointment, frustration and anger on the player. We must put our effort into finally changing the game.

Bring Forth the Wedge Issues!

2010-08-07T13:11:00.000-07:00

"Most voters, he had found, still voted on the basis of ethnic or cultural enmities that could be graphed, predicted and exploited."

~ 1970 New York Times article on one of the architects of Nixon's Southern Strategy, available here

Wedge issues, as always, are once again a huge part of the Republican Party's electoral campaign strategy this election year. The past two election cycles saw the crash and burn of Republican fearmongering about ruddy-complected terrorists that had been so effective in the two election cycles before that. It is clear that the economy finally emerged as the deciding issue in elections recently and people were seeing that Ronald Reagan's trickle down had turned into a seeping toxic sludge that was annihilating the middle class. Well the Republicans still don't have any answers to that problem except the same old same old, so we can expect to hear a lot more diversion being screamed through the news tickers of corporate media in the next three months. Prop 8, illegal immigrants, health care portrayed as welfare...all the old standards will be new again. Any real debate on how to revive the economy will be drowned out.

As for the Democrats, they do not have the luxury of running against a Republican Party in power, so their strategy is to make people remember how we got here. It will be difficult, since there is the growing realization that the economy will not recover any time soon and may be in permanent decline, only temporarily alleviated by short-lived speculative bubbles. They seem content to let the Republicans go on abusing archaic parliamentary procedures to obstruct any meager attempts to pull us out of the death spiral. Even without their obstructionism, there are no signs of the bold type of actions necessary, such as a radical transformation to renewable energy, and shifting priorities from the military and prison industrial complexes to education and living-wage job creation. This is where the Democrats must take the debate. We shall see how effective they will be.

It seems one seldom goes broke while exploiting the short attention span and prejudices of the U.S. electorate.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Rupert Murdoch's Curse on the World

2010-07-23T09:30:00.000-07:00

“The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.”
~Andre Gide

Perhaps the most teachable moment in network news coverage since the "Balloon Boy" fiasco of late last year unfolded this week. The real question is, in this time of 24 hours news cycles, will anyone learn anything? Before we forget and move on to the next celebrity-going-to-jail story here's a recap:

Right-wing media terrorists do a drive by smearing of a government employee. Obama administration tosses the employee under the bus immediately. Someone actually bothers to investigate the right wing smear machine and discovers it was all a disgustingly manipulative hoax (as well as defamation of character, which could be a sweet legal issue to smack down these fools this time). Right-wing media blame Obama.

The real beauty of this, besides a lawsuit against these bastards, is that they had pulled this shit dozens of times before and gotten away with it. Van Jones and ACORN were the most high profile victims of the lie machine's withering attack on Democratic timidity. But now no one will EVER take them seriously again. We hope.

Fox "News" looks more transparent than ever as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. And as such, the narratives they adhere to, such as the divide and conquer strategy that is as old as ancient Rome and as young as Nixon's Southern Strategy, has become obvious to all who wish to see it. Rachel Maddow had an excellent breakdown of how they changed tack on the Sherrod smear once the lie had been exposed. She used the network's own video clips from one day to the next to expose their blatant shilling. They are beneath contempt!

President Obama is walking on eggshells because of the power-charged race issue that Republicans have and will exploit to the hilt. However, I don't believe Hilary Clinton, or any Democrat for that matter, would have had any more fortitude than Obama. Do you recall Lani Guinier? The Democrats have enabled the lies and smears by rewarding them instead of fighting them with the most powerful weapon there is: the truth. Ultimately, it falls back on the American public to put an end to the bullshit, but they seem to be more interested in Hollywood gossip than in politics. That is the real source of the problem.

Tonight We're Gonna Party Like it's 1789

2010-07-14T20:50:00.000-07:00

‎"Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities."
~Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 1944

Today is le quatorze juillet also known as Bastille Day, marking the onset of the French Revolution, which overthrew a hopelessly corrupt, and ineptly deficient monarchy. Far flung wars of conquest had bankrupted the country to the point it could not even take care of its growing number of war veterans. Years of no-so-benign neglect had resulted growing poverty and inequity between the peasants and the ruling class. Sound familiar? Not to fear, the royal warmongers of this country are currently safe, and at this time even seemingly poised for a comeback. If one were to listen to the right-wing media, the biggest issues in the elections of 2010 are not perpetual war, too-big-to-fail banks, or even the continued decline of the middle class from globalization. No, these topics are not even being debated because both of the major political parties are competing for the big money of those special interests, and no substantive change can occur. None of the major media speak of the one solution to this mess: then end of pay-for-play politics.

What we get instead are plenty of wedge issues as a distraction. How long will peasants fall for this? Instead of "let them eat cake" those holding the reins say "let them swallow this BS" and that not insignificant segment of the electorate with racist/homophobic/xenophobic tendencies put their own heads in the guillotine for another election cycle.

Ode to the Dead Poets

2010-07-12T12:29:00.000-07:00

We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.
~Keats, "Endymion"

One of the nicest features of the internet is that it allows you to catch up on your past. Being in a reflective mood recently, I sought to search for the contact information of an English professor whose class (Introduction to English Literature) I took as a college freshman. I wanted to express, almost 20 years later, how much that one course changed my life and made me appreciate the written word as a way of "saying the unsayable", as the phrase the professor used to explain the purpose of poetry.

Now that's deep when you think about it. It means that all poetry is ultimately futile. No matter how well you choose your words and arrange them, they can never fully express what motivated you to write them. But the very act of trying to express those feelings goes a long way just the same. That was just one of the important revelations that unfolded in that class. It was a basic, introductory class, but the reverence shown for the written word combined with the interpretation of the meaning of each line got my attention. The interpretation of each poem was attended by an explanation of the personal motivation of the poet, so that the words could be fully realized and appreciated by the students, who all too often were disinterested, hungover and just there to fulfill a requirement. Which was the reason I was there, too, because I could not get out of it by taking a CLEP test. This was one case of things working out for the best.

When you do intensive physical training, you can actually see your body changing. This class was the educational equivalant of that transformative process. I could actually sense my perceptions of the world around me changing. It made me realize the true purpose of education in making us better at appreciating all we are exposed to and motivating us to seek further horizons. This is what I wanted to thank this professor for after all these years.

So I searched for the name on the internet. Sadly, I found that the professor had died almost five years ago. I knew this was one of the possible outcomes of so many passing years, but it still came as a great disappointment to me. There was no way to express how he had transformed my mind. Then again, it would not have been fully possible to do that anyway, as he had already explained.

Anti-American

2010-07-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

"To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour."
~ Frederick Douglass "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro", 1852

Each July 4th I am reminded of the classic speech made almost 150 years ago, which fully sums up my feelings about self-congratulatory displays of patriotism made whilst the list of crimes is added to on a daily basis by a government representing not its people, but transnational corporations which despise the very ideals that we are supposedly celebrating. Like most people, I want to join the herd and wave the flag in pride, but unlike so many people, my grasp on reality won't let me. I can feel a quick tinge of emotional patriotism when the promise of what this country is about is alluded to, followed almost instantly by a sense of rage because that promise is so tragically unfulfilled.

To the reactionaries that would call me "Anti-American", I ask for a definition of that phrase. I am anti-war, anti-exploitation, anti-corporate oligarchy, and anti-environmental destruction. I don't approve of democratically governments being overthrown by our government because they threaten the profit margin of an influential cartel of international gangsters. If that's what you mean, then yes, I am Anti-American. And proud of it.

Perhaps someday soon this system will be forced to fall under its own weight. It is unsustainable and therefore will be brought down eventually. But what would make me most proud as a citizen of this country, what would make me wave the flag and feel a great rush of pride, would be if "we the people" forced it to fall BEFORE then. Before it had consumed everything in its destructive path. Now THAT would be worthy of a grand celebration!

The Death of Mars

2010-06-30T19:40:00.000-07:00

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
~Voltaire

Our current on-going disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan are recognized as a lost cause by virtually everyone these days. Everyone except those who have the power to stop them. The "War on Terror" is now recognized by most as what it was obvious to some of us in the beginning; a scam. Osama Bin Laden is still alive more than eight years after he launched the impetus for this fiasco. The recent arrest by Pakistan of an ordinary citizen who took it upon himself to go and find him is as tragic as it is comical.

Have we reached a tipping point? Will Congress deny funding for this fool's errand? I would love to see it happen, but doubt it will. The deficit hawks that scream about large deficits when denying another penny of social spending, will no doubt rubber stamp another 50 billion dollars for the pointless and endless bloodletting. They are the true whores of war, even more so than the mercenary armies they give our tax money to.

No, it will be the public leading Congress on this issue, as is so often the case. People are sick of seeing the U.S. Treasury looted and services cut to support this boondoggle. Even the right-wing chickenhawks that plastered their SUVs with yellow ribbons stopped supporting the war once their Chickenhawks-In-Chief left office in disgrace early last year. Their allegiance to their country only went as far as their partisan political preferences. They were the only true believers and now that they have packed away their Chinese-made flags and ribbons all that is left to look at is the huge price tag in blood (never a concern of theirs anyway) and money, which they do care about. Two years ago it was "we can't cut and run". I think we can all agree on cutting our losses now and going home before our economy implodes for the last time.

Short Term Profits, Long Term Problems

2010-06-27T09:41:00.000-07:00

There is an endless supply of white men. There has always been a limited number of human beings. If things keep trying to live, white men will rub them out.
~Chief Dan George as "Old Lodge Skins"

Heavily under the influence, to the point of being blinded by, greed, our captains of global industry are barreling down the tracks toward a canyon wall. The docile cargo of the lower classes are finally becoming aware of the existence of the wall, too late to really stop the impact, but not too late to slow the train down enough to make the impact somewhat survivable.

We've all heard about the poisoning of a section of our waters and coast of course, but we haven't really been told of the destruction of large sections of our land through mountaintop removal and other hideous forms of exploitation developed by the extractive industries. When I heard candidate Obama mention "clean coal" I knew that the two major political parties were not that far apart on environmental policy and that King Coal had covered their bets by buying them both off. Our current Secretary of the Interior, "Cowboy" Ken Salazar has been a nightmare for those who thought wolves were finally safe in the northern Rockies or endangered species were actually going to get a break from the relentless assault by the monied interests. The beat goes on, with people placing more importance on the quarterly reports of their portfolios than the long term survivability of the planet.

The 2010 mid-term elections present the choice between keeping the train going at roughly its current speed, or accelerating towards an even worse impact. Where is the real alternative? Where is the long term plan to forge a sustainable economy? As long as we are using the paradigm of quarterly profits, I doubt it will ever arrive and our fate will be sealed.

Every Day Wingnuts

2010-06-19T20:47:00.001-07:00

In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
~George Orwell

We all seem to know them. Wingnuts. Or just plain ign'ant folks. If we are lucky, we may only see them when we are in line at the grocery store, or just briefly overhear them spewing their bile at the table next to us in a restaurant. If we are not so lucky, they are our neighbors or people we work with so we have to see them almost every damn day. My question to you is how do you deal with them? I usually take one of two courses. One is to just ignore them because life is too short to use up precious time and energy on a lost cause. The other is to confront the ignorance. I usually only do this when they are either egregiously out of bounds with their comments or I'm in a special mood where I need to educate someone who has been fed the talking points, and is badly in need of some context and background information that they missed from Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh, etc.

Of course, the chain emails are the easiest to refute, because you can quickly and devastatingly provide factual links and info against the ObamaKenyanSocialist nonsense. But I do richly enjoy the live contact and seeing a wingnut become quickly flustered when hit with a dose facts from this universe, instead of the parallel one they prefer to dwell in. One thing I don't like is seeing how many other people, who I thought were actually too smart to fall for the bullshit, weren't. Yes, the sad part is seeing how well the corporate media have hidden the real history from so many people who have not had the inclination to find it, probably because of their own deeply ingrained prejudices.

Apathy is Not an Option

2010-06-18T19:55:00.000-07:00

From each crime are born bullets that will one day seek out in you where the heart lies.
~ Pablo Neruda

Should the Republicans pick up enough seats in the 2010 mid-term elections Rep. Joe Barton will become chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. This is one of the countless reasons why this is not a time for apathy. While the Democrats are certainly not the end all and be all for a better world, at least their measured non-responses are much less worse than outright hostility to progress and complicity in envoronmental armegeddon. Wow, what a choice. But let's at least stave off a biological collapse for another decade or so, shall we?

Free Enterprise Isn't Free

2010-06-14T17:04:00.000-07:00

There's a particle of risk involved in every venture.
~Allardyce T. Merriweather

The engine of "free enterprise" that is the "magic of the marketplace" touted as sacrosanct dogma by every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan has hit a rough patch recently. First came the great Wall Street meltdown of 2008, and now comes the immolation of the Gulf Coast economy. Both of these things were the direct and predictable result of 30 years of right-wing assualt on "Big Government" through the deregulation and ineffective oversight of corporations. Most of the damage here can be laid at the feet of Republican presidents, especially the petrochemical nightmare years of Bush/Cheney. Of course, the assualt didn't stop under the Democrats, it just barely slowed down. Barack Obama's obviously false promise of change we could believe in makes us recall Bill Clinton's disastrous free trade policies, which haunt us to this day with lost jobs and lower living conditions for working people on all sides of the border.

Let's avoid the knee jerk reaction to defend Barack Obama from the wolves of the Republican Party. The Democrats, Obama included, are part of the problem. They can't help it, they are in a life and death struggle for funding from the truly soul-less old men that have been gaming the system since the days of big plantations, railroads and Northern industrialization. We must not delude ourselves thinking that anything can change as long as the system of legalized bribery which is our campaign finance laws are intact. Unless some major changes are made there, we are going to be learning just how corrupt, self-centered, and downright misanthropic the ruling class can be for decades to come. And the fallout from their fetishes will last decades beyond THAT. We have no real brakes on the system right now. Corporate lobbyists write the laws for legislators that were once lobbyists themselves or will soon be once they retire from or get kicked out of office. And the mainstream media is in collusion with all of them, since they are owned by those same interests that write the laws.

Our last best hope is for the people of WalMart Nation to awaken and fight for an end to the deadly corporate merry-go-round of death and desolation.

Hello, Sixth Extinction!

On Freedom of Expression

2010-04-15T13:56:00.000-07:00

Man reaches his full potential when he no longer has to sell himself as a commodity.

~Ernesto Guevara

What is your favorite song? Or book? Or any work of artistic expression? Why is it your favorite? For me, it seems every song, movie, poem or sculpture that I have found enlightening, inspiring or just entertaining was made as a tribute to artistic expression itself and not to sell X amount of units to an audience determined by accountants in terms of demographics.

I'm sure mindless entertainment/escapsim will always be with us, and damn it, sometimes it even has a purpose I suppose, but when you really need to FEEL something, there must be more than a beat you can dance to. As for music, it needs to hit your heart, mind and soul as well as your ass. The song lyrics are as crucial as the beat in those songs that I can really feel and groove to in spirit.

There are many things I detest in this for-profit society and one of them is the lack of artistic expression for its own sake. This seems to get worse every year. Just like speciation of living things, artistic expression is at its peak when there is a new niche to be filled. As the niche gets filled, innovation is stifled. This evolutionary process is hastened by the demands of the marketers, who quash artistic innovation almost immediately by applying the lowest common denominator.

Now imagine a society where the profit motive or state apparatus does not control artistic expression. Where art is created not to be sold or to sell a state-sanctioned point of view but, free from all forms of censorship, was created to exist soley as artistic expression. What a brave new and perhaps ethereally beautiful world that would be!

Wingnut Waterloo

2010-03-23T18:58:00.000-07:00

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
-Matthew 7:16

If there is one reason to take solace after the passage of the government insurance industry bailout disguised as "health care reform", it is watching the wingnuts squirm and squeal like an army of stuck pigs. We may not have won much, but these porcine punks lost, and lost big. Let their rallying cry be "Kill the Poor!" Let them show what they are really about, death merchants hired by captains of industry to deny life to those peasants who have not the providence of life to be wealthy enough to afford to live. The mask is off, the ugliness is on the increase. We can take some pleasure in the defeat of actual reform, by watching the defeated Napoleonic Army of Wingnuts march forlornly along, dreaming of future victories while still safely in exile.

The Alternative

2010-03-05T11:28:00.000-08:00

It's time we talked about THE most important issue in U.S. politics. The one responsible for President Obama hiring Rham Emanuel and following the Clinton DLC playbook, in direct opposition to his campaign rhetoric of meaningful change from the past. It is responsible for the obstructionism of the Republicans and the wavering cowardice of many Democrats. Indeed pretty much all the evil inherent in our current government policies directly flows from this. The only way to get change we can believe in is to get the corrupting influence of money out of the system. And to head off at the pass the Supreme Court majority's attempt to return to the Gilded Age of robber baron debauchery.

The Fair Elections Now Act is a start. I have my qualms about asking a drug addict to eridicate drug abuse. But it's a start at least. I wonder if anything short of a constitutional amendment will get it done. But this is a start. Please check out this website and do what you can to make democracy responsive to something other than dollars.

Fair Elections Now

Your alternative is...You have no alternative.

2010-02-22T15:15:00.000-08:00

The odds remain against any kind of mega reform and so from that perspective there's probably upside to these managed care names.
~ Tim Nelson, analyst with First American Funds, describing why you should buy stock in companies that are complicit in the deaths of 45,000 Americans every year.

If the state of affairs in U.S. politics these days does not make you physically ill, you have the stomach of a conservative. And a corresponding lack of humanity. As I have said many times, as indifferent as the Democrats have been lately to the majority of people in this country, the Republicans are that much worse in their outright hostility. Amazingly, President Barack Obama is determined to see the goodness of the Republian heart and still has an abiding belief that they are reasonable people (or he is just cozying up to the same campaign cash trough as they).

The latest kick to the groin of the Democratic base by the "Rham-bama" administration arrived recently in the form of a massive taxpayer handout to price-gouging insurance cartels disguised as the official Presidential "health care reform" plan. What a heaping load of betrayal this thing is. Just like NAFTA, it has DLC fingerprints all over it, and like NAFTA, it is a means of degrading the lives of working people in favor of large corporate campaign sponsors. In another sign of how low our expectations have become, no one was surprised that it lacked a public option that would provide competition with the profiteers. What was a bit of a surprise was an increase in the take from our pockets to the HMO's profit margins.

This plan is so lame and ultimately useless as "reform" it could well have been written by a Republican. It would most certainly be supported by a majority of Republicans in congress if it were proposed by a Republican president. Since it was not, not a single Republican will support it. You see, they might be lying, hypocritcal, nasty, misanthopic pricks but they are extremely disciplined and loyal lying, hypocritcal, nasty, misanthopic pricks. Which is why Rhambama is in a lose/lose situation when it comes to this disastrous strategy of trying to get a Republican on board with anything these days. Even if it were to garner the incredibly hard target of one or two Republican votes it is still a shitty bill that won't energize the Democrat base. The only smart strategy here is to offer this to the Republicans, watch them reject it, then announce to the world that you tried so hard to make concessions to the Republicans, but they refused to work with you. Then announce that you will do what the clear majority of Americans WANT and scrap all the insurance company give-aways, add the public option and pass the bill through reconciliation. If this happens, and if a similar tack is taken in dealing with unemployment, we will see a strong resurgence in the Democrat's chances in November.

What I fear will happen instead is the DLC strategy prevails and the two parties continue to be the evil of two lessers, locked in a death struggle for campaign cash from the corporate interests that are literally killing this country and its economy. People want universal health care, yet we get another industry bailout. People want the wars to end, yet they still go on. People want the Wall Street predators reigned in, yet they still are making the rules and getting bonus money instead of jail time.

The only answer to having no viable alternative in the voting booth is to finally address the only thing standing in the way of change we can actually believe in: we must end the pay-for-play system of government we are currently suffering from.

The Good Life (La Dolce Vita)

2010-02-18T09:40:00.000-08:00

It's good to teach the world's fortunate people from time to time, if only to shame their pride for a single moment. Because there are higher forms of happiness than theirs, on a grander scale, and more delicate.

~ Baudelaire, "Parisian Melancholia"

One of the reasons I love to travel is to have my badly-battered faith in humanity restored by coming in contact with other cultures. It does my cynical heart good to know that there is still hope in the world, if not in this country. Yes, the rest of the world can offer us much, but perhaps the most important thing they can do is force us to take a good look at ourselves. Americans can be an ugly lot when representing this country abroad, as residents of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada are probably finding out all too well these days. We really need to chill and stop looking at everyone and everything in materialistic terms. I think it would do wonders for our collective psyche and individual psyches for a sea change to occur in our way of thinking.

Let me offer one example from my own experience. Many years ago I attended a conference/tourist junket to Rio de Janiero. There were lavish lunches and dinners, a hotel rooftop pool, and pulsating nightlife excursions which are de rigueur for these types of trips. But the thing I took the most joy from and which I recall most fondly of all my time there was an afternoon of playing frisbee and volleyball with local kids hanging out at the beach. There was a human connection there that was so simple and pure, a familial bonding with people I had never met before and didn't know me or want anything from me besides a moment of camaraderie. Yet this was a feeling totally lacking from the circle of associates that I was travelling with. It made me look at myself in terms of what my value system had become under the influence of American society. It shook me out of my comfort zone and into questioning what I had accomplished in real terms, human terms...which is the only yardstick we should be using to measure our progress. That experience always stuck with me and continues to define my belief that a much better world is possible if enough of us "ugly Americans" would spend more time looking in the mirror.

We Love to Kill People

2010-02-14T12:56:00.000-08:00

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

~ Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America (emphasis added)

The recent demise of anything even pretending to be health care reform in the congress of the Unites States is yet another clear indication of the failure of capitalism in its present form to live up to the ideals of the Founding Fathers and the vision of many of their descendents in what this country should be about. Promote the general welfare? We simply cannot afford it! Providing for the common defense? That only includes making wars, not saving people's lives at home from illness!!

Yet 45,000 Americans will die this year because we will not provide them with health care. This is almost twenty times as many as died in the terrorist attacks of 2001. Where are the memorials for these preventable deaths?

Love's Gonna Get Ya

2010-02-13T21:51:00.000-08:00

In honor of Valentines Day...

"I be telling you all the time man, you know LOVE,
that word love is a very serious thing, and if you don't watch out
I tell ya that (Love's gonna get you)
because a lot of people out here say "i love my car" or "i love my chain"
or or "i'm i'm just in love with that girl over there"
so far all the people out there that fall in love with material items
we gonna bump the beat a lil' something like this..."

Played Out

2010-02-08T16:32:00.000-08:00

There's gotta be a better way, than this hypocritical system.
Yes there's gotta be a better way, because the people are always the victims.
They set our wages, and they set the prices,
this wicked system, and it's evil devices.
They took the chains off our ankles, and they put them on our pockets.
They've gotta new kind of slavery, runnin it like a rocket.
They've got all the money, but before they will lend it,
they say they must tell you, just how u should spend it.
Don't pay the teachers, and they can't pay the nurses,
see illiterate children need only tombstones and hearses.
Yes there's gotta be a better way!

~Mystic Revealers, "Got to be a Better Way"

I'm done with capitalism. Not only does it contain all the tragic scenarios that come with being the predatory phase of human development, and not only is it unsustainable due to its exhaustive exploitation of resources both human and natural, but it is getting just plain boring. No bigger annual example of marketing schemas exists than the Super Bowl commercials and this year I was forced to watch most of them since I attended a Super Bowl party and could not bolt the room during every commercial break like I wanted to, or flip channels via remote like I do within the cozy confines of my own vegetative viewing domain.

In a word, they were flat. In two words, they were played out. They reminded me of any Hollywood sequel of a sequel. Unimaginative, formulaic, predictable, tame and the opposite of anything that might actually offend someone, which is what worthwhile artistic endeavours never fail to do. Then it hit me. This is exactly the current state of our society, politically, socially, artistically. Everyone is too busy trying to sell something to take a chance on offending the most conservative senses of the marketplace. We are the land of the safe and the home of the tame. Then there was the other supposedly culturally iconic halftime show. It consisted of a band that was cutting edge...in 1965. I'm not even exaggerating, either.

Then something else occurred to me, selling stuff can't be revolutionary because, well because you're SELLING stuff, which is what this great country is all about and has been since the days of snake oil salesmen and faith healers. It is our most hallowed tradition, the freedom to buy stuff and the liberty to charge a little extra for it. P.T. Barnum has turned to dust, but his axiom is still keeping the economy chugging, or in these days more like wheezing, along. Sputtering and wracked with arthritis, very much like its entertainment institutions. Is it finally, mercifully on its last legs?

2010, WTF??

2010-01-25T18:20:00.000-08:00

Ouch. The nearly 30 days since I last wrote has been filled with one humanitarian and political disaster after another. Earthquakes, wingnuts, and five heartless, malicious Supreme court justices have pretty much finished the job begun by Rham Emanuel and Max Baucus to make sure every last bit of hope was wrung out of the dying wish of a weary people and their doomed Democracy. 2010, you have already packed more than a year's worth of destruction in your first three weeks. I trust you to mellow out beginning now. Please! So to catch up to recent events...

God Don't Like the Least of Us

Of all the places in the world for an earthquake to strike, the god of tectonics chose Port-Au-Prince, Haiti home to millions of long suffering victims of the one-two punch of Global Empire and Local Despots. The resulting snuffing out of 200,000 lives predictably became fodder for pseudo-religious crackpots and bloviating, pill-popping psychopaths. Even some folks who I figured to be a little less insane, like Chris Matthews, worried out loud about a wave of dark-skinned, poverty stricken "boat-people" setting out for these shores before the dust had even settled.

I Drive an Old Truck and I want to Fuck you Real Hard

Then came the Great Bay State Debacle. Senator-elect Zoolander grabbing Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. And yes it was Teddy's seat so FUCK YOU, David Gergen you fucking shameless corporate whore. This was the greatest political travesty of our lifetime, but was perfectly predictable given Obama's disastrous DLC strategy of making backroom deals with the insurance and pharma companies, while company pawn Baucus (who deserves a special place in hell) had single payer advocates arrested in a supposedly open hearing. The fact is, this deal should have been done and signed when Teddy was STILL ALIVE! President Obama, if you lose to Sarah Palin in 2012, you will set this country back 150 years and have no one to blame but yourself.

American Sovereignty: 1776 - 2010

Obama losing to Palin, or the similarly creepy Mitt Romney, became a lot more possible thanks to the Felonious Five, who sold out American voters/democracy/sovereignty and their own mothers with their criminal decision to let loose the hounds of Hell on what's left of honest government. The airwaves will soon be saturated with corporate-funded smears, half-truths, and blatant lies paid for by ill-gotten loot in the bottomless coffers of oil companies, Wall Street banks, Saudi sheiks and a rogue's gallery of the world's most dangerous cartels. Our country is rapidly transforming itself into the Haiti of the Duvalier years. Goodbye social safety net. Goodbye middle class. Hello favelas.

Who can stop this?

As discouraging as all of this is, I still believe that people can wake up before it's too late. Perhaps someday soon we will have as much interest in Washington, DC policy debates as we do in Hollywood gossip. Perhaps voter turnout will be closer to 80 percent than 40 percent. Perhaps we won't just repeat talking points we hear from TV pundits but will dig deeper to form an educated opinion for ourselves. Perhaps we can get the money out of politics through a Constitutional Amendment, or good legislation. It's not too late! But it is getting very close to midnight.

The Great Abyss

2009-12-26T12:43:00.000-08:00

Shortly will another year
Pass away and disappear
Set thine house in order, man
Life is but a fleeting span

The end of another year is usually the time to look back at the momentous events of the past 12 months. It is also the time to take stock of one's mortality, especially if that one is at the post-child rearing, looking-forward-to-retirement in another decade or two age. And with thoughts of mortality comes the question of what's next after mortality.

To fully explore my current state of mind on this subject, it is helpful to go back to the beginning of my religious indoctrination. We are all subject to this, every child in every society. It is a tradition and, like our political views, our religious beliefs are inculcated by our parents and then either accepted without question and clung to forever, or rejected. Or something in between.

As a child I was raised "Roman Catholic". This was my parents' religion, and it was of course, their parents' religion. But my mother had a falling out with some priest over some issue before I was born, so we didn't attend church regularly. My mother's mantra was "I believe in God, but I don't believe in the Church". Although I was baptized and went to catechism, my religious experience was pretty much limited to praying every night to a small statue of the Virgin Mary on a bureau in my room. I prayed the Lord's prayer and often added an addendum prayer to please watch over me and my family. Sometimes I would make a special request, such as asking to let me do well in a little league baseball game the next day. Eventually, I developed a social conscience, and my faith in religion as a force of good was severely eroded by the wars and suffering it caused. Then there were the unsettling questions like how there could be so many religions if there was only one God. The realization came to me that religion was a ritualized superstition, gradually discarded as I got older and more widely-read. Prayer was left unsaid except for an emergency, basically when someone's life was in danger and science and technology in their current state were being stretched to the limit. My faith had gradually been transferred to laws of physics as I learned of them and better understood them. The supernatural was still lurking there behind the curtains of the natural world.

So it remained until my final religious epiphany came. Fittingly, it happened on a mountaintop. A mountaintop dedicated to scientific exploration; Cero Tololo in northern Chile, an observatory overlooking the Pacific Ocean. With little humidity, far from any cities, and at several thousand feet elevation, the sky is dark. So dark that the Milky Way galaxay, our island of life and light in the vast and eternal darkness of space, casts a shadow on the ground when the center of the galaxy shines directly overhead. From this perspective, you can see our galaxy as any other more distant edge on galaxy. There are one hundred billion galaxies like ours, with one hundred billion stars each. The image presented is profound and awe inspiring to the very core of your being. What are the odds we are the only ones alive and that someone, somewhere else isn't looking back from this void? I was inspired to write a poem from this experience.

From solid ground I stare
Upwards through the Great Abyss
Asking the meaning of creation
Seeking acknowledgement of struggle

But this infinite power
Whose sparse molecules shined above
Gave nothing more of an answer than
Overpowering, Silent Ambivalence

I demanded redemption from the void
To have my nearly impossible random chance
of Existence given a momentary glance but

The gaze never shifted
It looked away and past
On parallel paths
Unable to receive me

And yet I felt not rejection
But the most profound acceptance
As part of Creation
And a part of the infinite

Love in a vacuum
Redemption in space

Our molecules, in fact all elements heavier than hydrogen or helium, were forged by the pressure and heat at the center of a long dead star. That, and many other wondrous processes described by the laws of physics, is how and why we exist. We need no other purpose than that we appoint to ourselves, for better or worse. The concept of religion became something new, and something very distant on the night I got my answer on that mountain.

Change you Can Deceive With?

2009-12-16T10:43:00.000-08:00

Well, you knew it was coming. The day of reckoning. And I'm not talking about November 2010 and the mid-term elections. I'm talking about the growing feeling that President Obama has become one of THEM, rather than one of US. A Washington insider/Wall Street water carrier like all his predecessors, which he promised not to be (like all his predecessors). I must admit, I never expected a radical change from what had gone before. If you go back and read some of what I wrote in 2008, you will see that I never expected even a slight change in the most importnant policies. So I am not disappointed.

No, I never believed in much of Candidate Barack Obama's promises to forge a new kinder, gentler brand of capitalistic economy. Only young, idealistic people who hadn't been around long enough to become old and cynical actually fell for the schtick. Now they are learning the hard way, the Rahm Emmanuel way, of how it is Wall Street uber alles. And the rest of us get no bailout, only empty speeches.

What irks me is not the fact that it is business as usual. What irks me is that there is no need for business as usual and every need to break with the past. There is a dramatic, pressing need to chart a bold new course away from the Wall Street chicanary and towards a self-sustaining economy based on paying people a living wage. Candidate Barack Obama needs to find President Barack Obama and give him a good dose of soaring rhetoric from last year's campaign trail. Or forget them both and let's exhume the withering, skeletal remains of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to give some life to actual change worth believing in.

As it stands, there's far too many entrenched, powerful bastions of corruption in the way of real reform. What is making people angry these days is the lack of fire coming from the White House directed at these bastions, and the unnecessary capitulations towards them without putting up any fight whatsoever.

Then there is the whole, baffling effort at bi-partisanship. What is the point of trying to placate people who will not only never support you, but actually do everything they could to obstruct what you are trying to do? That doesn't make you look magnanimous, it makes you look WEAK, if not downright foolish. The lastest fiasco along these lines is another disgusting cave-in to Joe Lieberman. Instead of letting him play God with thousands of peoples' lives, Obama should tell him to get on board...or else. Remind him that you gave him support in his primary challenge and that he was allowed to keep committe chairs DESPITE his campaigning for Republicans. Tell him that his ass is OUT and that every Democratic resource will be used AGAINST him in 2012 if he decides to oppose actual health care reform. This is supposedly the Rahm way of doing things. We need to see some of that right now. Or else you can bring back the Republicans in 2010 and the country can go into a real depression. Torches and pitchforks, anyone?

Santa's Elves: Always on the Move

2009-12-05T17:11:00.000-08:00

Ahh the Christmas season, when the birth of the almost-officially state-sanctioned Messiah is honored by the mass purchase of toxic-painted plastic from across the wide, wide ocean. As one of the Wise Men said, "cheap labor maketh the world go 'round". And so those good, sturdy Taiwanese and Mexican toys we fondly recall from our youth are now a memory. One wonders where in the world the source of our grandkids' amusement will come from when such junk can be churned out more quickly and cheaply in another dank and dangerous elve's sweatshop.

Out

2009-11-23T07:59:00.000-08:00

Call 202-456-1111 ASAP and tell the President to dial back the Cheney/Bush looting of the treasury and sacrificing on the altar of the MIC even one more life in a self-defeating war. End the bullshit. Now.

Half the Story Has Never Been Told (Until Now)

2009-11-21T10:13:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Howard Zinn for writing the definitive "People's History of the United States" and bringing this work to television next month on the History Channel. For those unfamiliar with the book here's a quick review.

We have of course read countless versions of the standard scholastic historical texts telling us about the Founding Fathers throwing off the yoke of British colonialism, and establishing a paradise on earth of freedom and liberty. Here is the other, darker and more realistically detailed side of the story. A chapter titled "A Kind of Revolution" details the exact how and why of the merchant/plantation owner quest for self determination that resulted in annual commemorative fireworks displays. Similarly illuminating are chapters on the Civil War, which was fought at least as much for the interests of northern industrialists as it was for the issue of slavery, and the mobilization of workers during the awful conditions of exploitation in the late 19th/early 20th century industrial age. The epic labor struggles are included here and are from a perspective that is seldom if ever seen; that of those on the other side of the National Guard bayonet charges. Yes, believe it or not, governors and presidents of these United States used our own military to crush strikes and kill workers at that time. Why is this part of U.S. history barely mentioned or completely ommitted from most history texts? Later chapters bring us up to date on how both political parties have essentially melded into one when it comes to foreign policy and the barons of Wall Street. A cursory look at the day's headlines proves the veracity of the line of reasoning that is present throughout the book. An added bonus is the classic quotes peppered throughout the text from all eras. These allow the voices from the other side of the story to be heard loud and clear across so many years. This should be required reading in all schools. But especially in those places that want to teach Creationism.

Go here to get more information on the upcoming TV show.

Please Don't Eff This Up (Any more than you have to)

2009-11-09T18:34:00.000-08:00

A quick couple requests of some top Democrats: Harry Reid would you for once in your life please stop being such an ineffectual wussie. Barack Obama would you please tell the Republicans to either get on board or go jump off a damn cliff already. Get this DONE and get it done THIS MONTH.

That is all.

Nostalgia

2009-10-23T19:20:00.000-07:00

Why do things always seem better after you are 10 years removed from the situation? Music, relationships, life in general...all seem so much better once they are all relegated to the cobwebbed section of your mind. Memory has a way of erasing the negative and accentuating the positive. If only the mind would allow things to look so shiny/happy when you are actually living in the moment. Anyway, I always wondered why when I hear a song that brings me back a decade or more, I get this warm, fuzzy feeling when I know damn well I had just as many problems and worries (and probably more) than I do now. At least I can tell myself I am older and wiser than I was back in the day. So here is Lyte and Missy taking me back to the '90s groove. Ahh the 1990s, things were soooo much better then. Yeah right! Well actually the music was MUCH better than the crap passing for entertainment these days. That much no one can argue with!

Why Can't We be "Too Big to Fail"?

2009-10-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

Banks get bailed out, people get kicked out. That's a lesson I learned during the financial crisis of the past year. I have seen families in my town go through the humiliation of having their furniture carried out and piled near the curb in the rain. Some of them were kicked out the day before Thanksgiving last year. The scene has been repeated ad nauseum and continues to this day, while 2 trillion dollars of our tax money is largely unaccounted for. This was money given to the banks by their buddies, in our name, to not only help the biggest (read greediest) of them stay solvent, but also to ostensibly give loans to people who need them. The only chunk of that 2 trillion that has resurfaced has been in the form of big bonuses for Wall Street execs! What a surprise! Did we truly expect anything less, given the track record of these people who, thanks to the revolving door between big business and government, are all intimately interconnected?

Meanwhile, the foreclosures continue with no end in sight. Disappointingly, but not really unexpectedly, the policies of the current administration are all too similar to Bush and Clinton before, which is why it is so laughable and frustrating to hear the wingnuts call President Obama a socialist. Here's the socialism he is presiding over: The ill-advised speculative risks of large financial corporations are socialized, while the ill-advised financial decisions of the underclass are paid in full. And the cost to them includes the emotional trauma of the innocents; children whose lives are disrupted. How do you even put a price on that?

If you are in or near Chicago this weekend, let the bankers know you are paying attention.

Please make this STOPPPPPPP

2009-10-18T15:06:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have seen this story. It goes to the heart of my problem with the fashion industry, i.e., their continuing attacks against women and girls' self-image by pushing these unreal (literally) photos of glamorous stick figure-women. My question here is...who really thinks the feminine ideal should be that of a prepubescent boy? Besides child molesters. No heterosexual man would find a bony ass attractive (unless they are hung like a fruit fly, but I digress). Real men want curves, especially in the hips and butt area! I apologize in advance if this sounds homophobic or anti-caucasian, but I think the problem comes from two places...old white women and gay men. They are the two demographics that dominate the fashion industry here and in Europe and they are the ones imposing these ideas of the feminine ideal on the rest of us. These old Salukis (google it) hang out at the gym and starve themselves to maintain as flat an ass as possible and they expect women of child bearing age to look just as dried up and barren as they do. Gay men like the young, svelte, narrow-hipped boy look. So young women are brainwashed to the point of anorexia and bulimia to meet these standards. I've had enough of this bullshit! Bring back real women models with butts and breasts NOOOOOWWW!!

Their Money or Your Life

2009-08-16T20:40:00.000-07:00

The United States is the laughingstock of the world these days, thanks to the health insurance companies that have thoroughly subjugated our democracy. The changes that the large majority of people want are being drowned out by a lunatic fringe that represents about 3 percent of the population. Meanwhile, thousands of people die every year thanks to the for-profit industry that dominates health care in this country. This state of affairs is nothing short of domestic terrorism, and it is supported by some Democrats and virtually all Republicans, who are being showered with one million dollars a day to keep things exactly the way they are. Washington, D.C. has proven itself again as nothing more than the world's largest whorehouse. Then there is the wonderful mainstream media, which is conglomerated with the same insurance companies that brought us this horror show. Which explains why they don't ask one obvious question: Why can we have trillion dollar wars, yet we can't have single payer or the public option? Why don't we hear anything about the deficit when the next 100 billion dollars leaves the treasury for Iraq and Afghanistan? No, we only hear about it when it comes to actually saving people's lives rather than killing them. What a disgusting joke of a civilization we have allowed ourselves to become!

The Real Swine Flu: Why Capitalism Must be Eradicated From the Face of the Earth

2009-05-01T21:17:00.000-07:00

Here's the state of the nation on May Day 2009: the financial terrorists that ruined the global economy still aren't in jail. In fact, not only are the immune from criminal prosecution, they have been rewarded. With our money. Billions of dollars of our money. The so-called socialists in our government gave it to them. It seems hard to believe, until you realize how things work here. While the less fortunate (lower class schmucks) die from lack of adequate health care, the power brokers in the world of finance own both political parties and all the branches and of our federal government and get to be bailed out on our trillions of dimes. It's a good thing most people aren't paying attention or there just might be a real revolution here. We can always blame the Mexicans for spreading some scary virus or whatever other diversion CNN is trumpeting. It helps to get our minds off our retirement/college funds being wiped out and our home foreclosed on.

April is National Shooting Spree Month: Have you hugged your Assault Weapon lately?

2009-04-20T22:33:00.000-07:00

"I'm not afraid of Al Queda, I'm afraid of Al Cracka"

~ Chris Rock

Ahhh Springtime, the time of flower blossoms, birds singing...and violent, bloody, bullet-riddled rampages. Why is it that a time of year known for the renewal and promise of life is also the time most likely to result in mass murders? The sad litany of place names includes Waco, Columbine, Oklahoma City, Virginia Tech, and about a dozen more places have been added so far this month. The problem appears to be that we we have a lot of guns and a lot of crazy people, and we tend to allow that combination to occur more often than most places on earth. But it's more than just crazy people, it's a societal ill that is borne out especially harshly this year. With the economy tanking, the alienation and contradictions of a very cold system of competition is intensified. Not only has the safety net for the lowest 98 percent of the economic order been torn away in the last 30 years of bipartisan attacks on us native working schmucks, but the fallout from the loan scams have added to the ferment. Things get bleaker each Spring it seems as the greedfest of Wall Street is relied upon by our government to drive the economy. As long as that remains the case, and there is NO sign of it changing anytime soon, the Easter Bunny will need to wear kevlar.

Another scary development is the recent gun buying binge of right wing lunatics. These are the people that are genuinely afraid that Obama is a Muslim who will outlaw the Jesus-declared right to own a machine gun, and then ship them off to concentration camps where their women flowers will be pollinated by swarthy Muhammadians or some such outrage. So they stock up on ammo and semi-automatic weaponry. The good news is that statistically they are much more likely to accidentally kill themselves than purposefully kill anyone else, but the bad news is that they remain a danger to innocent family members and to you and I. If only the authors of the Second Amendment could have foreseen these nutjobs and edited the document to read:

A well regulated Militia*, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

* a well regulated Militia does NOT refer to some beer-swilling yahoo with his car up on blocks and an old washing machine on his front porch who wants an assault rifle because he thinks he saw a black "heldicopter" watching him!

Our Long National Nightmare Continues: Neocons Still in Control

2009-03-25T22:53:00.000-07:00

"Now is the time...for Babylon to fall"
~Aswad, "Three Babylon"

The very cautiously tepid attempts of the Obama foreign policy team to give the appearance of being a sea change from the strident genocidal maniacs of their predecessors are a sure sign that U.S. foreign policy is still firmly plowing down the same disastrous path at nearly the same speed. The Neocon agenda is the de facto bipartisan agenda of our foreign policy, which is largely controlled by two main forces, transnational capital and Zionism. That much has not changed one bit and until it does, there will be nothing to celebrate for the long suffering of the world.

So it is safe to assume that all the worst aspects of our entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan will not be brought to any real conclusion in the next decade, or longer. More blood and treasure will be lost in the drifting sands of time. New fronts will open up with new conflicts as regions are made safe for those who control the flow of international capital. Meanwhile, there are some positive developments in Africa and Latin America where democracy continues apace in providing change we can actually believe in.

The repressive policies of the IMF and World Bank that caused so many financial meltdowns in Africa and Latin America, the so called "emerging nations", are being soundly rejected and sent to the dustbin of history. These nations are now truly emerging as they throw out the representatives of corrupt oligarchy and the policies of their puppetmasters. For the first time since the Monroe Doctrine, we are actually letting the people decide how they shall be governed without invasions, coups and assassinations in our self-annointed sphere of influence. We have gone an entire 5 years without forcing a coup in this hemisphere! An incredibly long time for us. Perhaps we are finally reaching a new level of maturity and "leaving such childish things behind"?

If only we would be as wise and mature in our dealings with the problems in the Mid-East.

The Pressing Need for an American Nuremberg

2008-11-27T19:29:00.000-08:00

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

~Robert Jackson, chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg

Forget about the economy...for now. Forget about the environment...for now. Forget about every pressing issue that has resulted from 8 years of disastrous policies. The single most important item on the agenda of the incoming administration is the prosecution of members of the current administration for torture and other war crimes. This must be at the very top of the list. Nothing takes precedence over this country declaring it is a civilized nation that does not allow its leaders to initiate wars of aggression or to torture prisoners. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, based on "faulty intelligence" was a con game that had the explicit support of many Republicans and the implicit support of many Democrats. The international community and most people in this country are well aware that this is an international crime, perhaps the worst since the United States involvement in Southeast Asia. In additions to the thousands of deaths and injuries that have resulted from the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the United States has been torturing prisoners and subjecting others to rendition to other countries that have tortured them. If we let those guilty of these crimes go unpunished we not only set a dangerous and unnacceptable precedent for the future, but have also permanently decreased our international standing as a country interested in the most basic form of justice.

There is very important history to be made in the next few months. We must demand our leaders to be wise and brave enough to forge ahead in what is right and just. We must demand those guilty of torture and war cimes be prosecuted.

Go to this link and demand that the incoming administration prosecutes those responsible for the war of aggression against Iraq and for the torture of prisoners. We must restore some sense of morality as a nation before we can do anything else.

I'm Declaring War on Dumbfuckistan

2008-09-14T00:23:00.000-07:00

My official declaration of war, made just moments ago:

From my base camp in America, before it's too late, I announce with solemn heart, weary mind and indomitable spirit, that I do hereby declare a state of war with the place in the human mind known as Dumbfuckistan. This decision is neither made lightly, nor in haste. Indeed, this state of affairs has been building for eight long years now, and that slow percolation only recently resulted in the pressure needed to set off an all out explosion, a desparate need for action. It is indeed a desparate state of affairs that the country is on the precipice of renouncing even it's lofty words of attempting to be interested in equality of opportunity. So we have come to this; religion used as a blunt instrument of force to secure a future for well to do Republicans. Identity politics used to divide and conquer a low income, low information lower class programmed to think in Balkanized terms of self-disenfranchisement. I am thus consumed with a righteous hatred. No, I don't hate the average Dumbfuckistani, who is for the most part a passive, grazing creature, sometimes even amiable, but nonetheless more dangerous in its ignorance than any other beast on the Plains or in the mountain forests. My hatred is reserved for the state of mind fog that the Dumbfuckistani remains in, even after being painfully raped and violently mugged for nearly a decade. It is this that must be eradicated, and given no quarter. For desparate times require desparate actions, and I must take up mental and moral arms against the virulent corruption, environmental destruction, torture, state terror, perverted Christianity, bald-faced lies, incompetence due to cronyism, war profiteering, etc., etc.,that the Dumbfuckistanis have allowed to fester for 8 years too long. This is war, a total war, an all-consuming war. It is war that has been fought before in this country. It is a war recognized by the Founders as altogether necessary when times require. Now is one of those times, and I am confident in the victory...of good over evil!

What Would YOU Do

2008-09-11T20:18:00.000-07:00

What would you do if you
Knew all of the things we knew
Would you stand up for truth
Or would you turn away too
And then what if you saw
All of the things that's wrong
Would you stand tall and strong
Or would you turn and walk away

I see a message from the government, like every day
I watch it, and listen, and call 'em all suckas'
They warnin' me about Osama or whatever
Picture me buyin' this scam I said "never"

Now ask yourself who's the people with the most to gain (Bush)
'fore 911 motherfuckas couldn't stand his name (Bush)
Now even niggas wavin' flags like they lost they mind
Everybody got opinions but don't know the time
'Cause Amerikkka's been took - it's plain to see
The oldest trick in the book is make an enemy
A phony evil so the government can do its dirt
And take away ya freedom lock and load, beat and search
Ain't nothin' changed but more colored people locked in prison
These pigs still beat us, but it seem we forgettin'
But I remember 'fore September how these devils do it
Fuck Giuliani, ask Diallo how he doin'
We in the streets holla- 'jail to the thief' - follow
Fuck wavin' flags bring these dragons to they knees
Oil blood money makes these killers ride cold
Suspicious suicides people dyin' never told
It's all a part of playin' God so ya think we need 'em
While 'Bin Ashcroft' take away ya rights to freedom
Bear witness to the sickness of these dictators
Hope you understand the time brother cause it's major
So now you askin why my records always come the same
Keep it real, ain't no fillers, motherfucka blingin'
Mine eyes seen the gory of the coming of the beast
So every story every word I'm sayin' 'Fuck Peace'
See you could witness the Illuminati body count
Don't be surprised these is devils that I'm talkin' bout
You think a couple thousand lives mean shit to killers?
Nigga I swear to God we the ones - ain't no villains
Or any other word they think to demonize a country
Ain't no terror threat unless approval ratings slumpin'
So I'ma say it for the record we the ones that planned it
Ain't no other country took a part or had they hand in
It's all a way to keep ya scared so you think you need'em
Praisin' Bush while that killer take away ya freedom
How many of us got discovered but ignore the symptoms?
Niggaz talkin' loud but ain't nobody sayin' shit'
And with the 4th Amendment gone eyes are on the 1st
That's why I'm spittin' cyanide each and every verse
I see the Carlyle group and Harris Bank Accounts
I see 'em plead the 5th each and every session now
And while Reichstag burns I see the public buy it
I see the profilin see the media's compliance
War is good for business see the vicious make a savior
Hope you understand the time brother cause its major

Batshit Crazy

2008-09-06T21:35:00.000-07:00

The elections of 2008 are rapidly approaching and bringing a looming sense of guarded optimism. Well they were until recently. Now they have the added bonus of comedy.

The Republican Party has finally gone totallly insane. Mind you, they are still evil and capable of scaring enough low information voters to make the 2008 elections a lot closer than they should be. But they have reached a level of desparation that is actually heartening to see. The choice of "Mooselini" to the ticket was bizarre. Until you realize that Creationists/Rapturists make up a large part of their vote. I'm not sure whether that's funny or scary. It was very scary that in 2004 this group gave us four more disastrous years. But Americans are not that stupid anymore! They won't fall for the same bullshit as they did four years ago.

I hope.

Dick Cheney is the One True Antichrist

2008-08-17T15:10:00.000-07:00

I got a chain email a while ago from a Hillary supporter that claims Obama is the Antichrist. Recently, as expected, the wingnuts have been reviving the meme since Obama hasn't assuaged their fears that he is not a true warmongering, torture-endorsing, tax-protesting, electric chair switch-pulling nutcase disciple of Jesus Christ, Our (Their perverted) Lord and Savior.

What's truly amazing is that wingnuts are so into projection and have been so out of touch with reality for so effing long is that they can call Obama, someone who actually is not out to destroy the world, the antichrist, whilst they ignore the mass murders and economic catastrophes foisted on the world and nation of our own Dick Darth Duck! Mutherfukkin' Cheney. A guy who has so much clout he can shoot someone in the face and make THEM apologize TO HIM for it. Think about it. That's right, think. Something the wingnuts and the corporate media have conditioned us not to do. As the classic blues song goes: That's EVIL, evil is going on wrong!

So wingnuts, please spare us the pathetic projection and STFU for the next several months...no make that decades. Thanks.

On Olympic Coverage and My Grand Plan for the Future of Telecommunications

2008-08-17T14:44:00.000-07:00

NBC's Olympic coverage so far has been less than impressive. In fact, it's been a steaming pile of bullshit. I wanna see real Olympic sports like boxing, sprints, long jumping, etc. Not water polo or horse riding or fucking volleyball. Especially not volleyball, which has been on wall to wall coverage today. They spent 6 hours on indoor volleyball then another 6 on beach volleyball. Who gives a fuck!? The entire premise there is to set up a spike. That's it. That's the entire strategy. Jesus hopping Christ on a pogo stick, they broadcast 12 hours of that today! Setting up a spike!

Why are there so many lame ass sports that have been added to the Olympics in recent years? Badminton!? This is a gold medal sport? WTF is next, lawn jarts and bocce ball? Who wants to see this shit? Do soccer moms really wanna see this? Is that who NBC is pandering to? There's GOTTA be a way to see the sports I wanna see, w/o having this shit dictated to me. Here's my idea:

INTERACTIVE TELEVISION.

Imagine combining your PC and TV and picking ANY sporting event (or movie, or music video) that you want to see ANY time you want to see it. It would be like Youtube, except better. You can get anything that exists in all the archives of all the entertainment outlets, anything that was ever recorded. There would be a kickass search function, better than google, that would identify that long ago song or movie whose name you can't quite remember, but all you had to do was type in (your TV would come with a keyboard/text message/remote type thing that I haven't fully thought out yet) and voila! There's that movie you saw when you were a kid that you vaguely recall, but always wanted to see again. And of course, it would also allow you to bypass the crappy excuses for Olympic sports that saturate NBC's current Olympic coverage and let you get right to the stuff you want to see. Freedom of choice! Where is it? Is this not the land of the free!? Interactive TV now!!

Thank you internet for letting me vent.

On Presidential Role Models

2008-02-21T13:46:00.000-08:00

“It’s impossible for a chicken to produce a duck egg. It can only produce according to what that particular system was constructed to produce. The system in this country cannot produce freedom for the Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic system, this political system, this social system, this system period. ...And if ever a chicken did produce a duck egg, you would say it was certainly a revolutionary chicken.”
~Malcolm X

“What can a cloth suit tell me about the wealth of a soul?”
~ Randell Robinson

This presidential election of 2008, still being decided, has often been spoken of in terms of history. Even more so, it has been constantly spoken of, by virtually all the candidates as a watershed for "change". In actuality, barring a miracle, the only historical change that there may be...maybe... someone other than a white male elected President of the United States this year. This change, important yet ultimately superficial, in these days of greatly diminished expectations, is cause for rapturous awe, and a strange mix of delirious optimism and great anxiety. We have given up on a fair system. We have long given up on even a slightly less bloodthirsty imperialism (which we are actually supposed to be proud of!) All we have to hope for is a symbolic victory, one that gaurantees no substantive change in policy in terms of what really matters.

I will not downplay the power of the symbolism. The United States, with something other than a white male as president, will look a lot different. It will even feel a lot different. Alas, I fear it won't actually be much different. We will have a duck as president. Perhaps a female duck, or a black duck, but a duck just the same. This system can only produce one species. Only if we change the internal workings of the system or the interaction with the environment can we force a mutation. We are told to hope...to wish for...to dream of...this significant change. For in 2008, the greatest expectation is a role model that will inspire the next generation to actually accomplish the substantive change that is needed now and has been needed for many past generations. This is what diminished expecations give you...dreams deferred. No thank you. I won't believe in presidential role models until there is some substantive reason for believing.

Handicapping the 2008 Presidential Election

2008-01-06T18:28:00.000-08:00

Hey, it's presidential primary season again. Has it already been four years since the American electorate, in their infinite wisdom, handed the Boy Monkey Ass four more years of raping and plundering the known universe? I had been blissfully semi-unaware of this mess until I was watching football the other night and went to switch to the NFL channel and landed on C-SPAN by mistake. There they were talking about momentum and likeability and blowing the usual smoke and nonsense that makes about 60 percent of the people not bother to vote. There they were once again ignoring the two most important things about any election in this country...who is giving each candidate their money to run, and which candidate has the best hair. As every pundit knows, but none will admit, these are the two things that will determine the next president.

Unfortunately, I have no idea who is getting what percentage of their bribe money from what grossly misanthropic segment of the American capitalist rogue's gallery. They never print this stuff anywhere in the McPapers or on the McNews Channels. But I have seen the candidate's hair. Oh yeah, they do show you the hair and make-up. So without further ado, here's how I see it panning out.

Republican:

Rudy Guiliani: Bald. NEXT!

Fred Thompson: Bald with huge bags under his eyes. Who the fuck begged him to join the race? Nobody, that's who. Keep it moving, Uncle Fester.

McCain: Silver hair, thinning. Very Old...not as bad as Thompson, but you just can't picture him getting an intern to drop to her knees, except maybe under duress.

Huckabee: Dyes his hair, slightly thinning. Looks like Dick Nixon around the time of the Checkers Speech. Same nose, jowels, shifty eyes and 5 o'clock shadow. At the first sign of sweat on his upper lip this mofo is DONE.

Romney: Pure televangelist hair. Dyed.

So Romney has the best hair. He's a very slick dude that tries too hard to be sincere sounding. He's totally transparent, though and totally full of shit with no moral compass whatsoever. He's also the big money candidate. In any other year he would be a lock for the presidency. But a large percentage of the electorate who would normally be easy pickings have sore rectums from the last 8 years of getting the 50-inch GOP elephant dick in that azzzz. Some of them still might fall for it, though. In the words of Bugs Bunny "don't these ducks ever learn?" The Republicans also have a protest candidate this year, Ron Paul. He is against the Iraq War so of course he is insane. Anyone against the Iraq War is insane and believes in UFOs. Just ask the corporate media, they'll tell ya. But I digress...

Democrats:

Obama: Closely-cropped natural. I thought for sure he would go for the waves at some point in the last 4 years, but he's keeping it very basic and unassuming. I think he would still do well if he grew it out a little, but how much is too much for the mainstream voter??

Clinton: Her hubby rocked the undyed "poof" look all the way to the top back in the day and she is staying with what got them there, with the perfect business-like corporate cut.

Edwards: Best in show, his hair got all the press so far and gave him a huge boost in Iowa. Hard to hold back the Little Lord Fauntelroy factor and I see him being a force at the convention, with his well-groomed mane good for at least a couple hundred delegates.

So taking in all of the above, look for the impeccably coifed Democrats to easily take the Presidency over the follically (and morally) challenged Republicans this fall.

Message to the Black Athlete in America

2007-12-09T19:15:00.000-08:00

I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is a staunch Republican outpost located about halfway between Chicago and Detroit. Perhaps our most famous living native son is the champion boxer Floyd Mayweather, Jr. I bring this up because recently Floyd beat up some Brit to win some kind of middle weight boxing title. You see I don't follow the sport closely. In fact, I truly wonder why if it's illegal for chickens and dogs to fight then it's perfectly acceptable for people to scramble eachother's brains for sport. I have my theories as to why, but I will save that for another day. Anyway, the point is that you would think our local newspaper and TeeVee stations would be closely following this story. But I watched the local news last night and they did not mention anything about the fight (which was going on at the time) until the sports section. Yet, last year when the Tigers (which play in a city 180 miles away) were in the World Series, they led off the news with coverage and reporters covering the story in front of wide screen TVs at local sports bars.

Now let's go back in time a few years to 1998. At that time Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs and was a modern day folk hero. Three years later Barry Bonds broke that record and was subpoenaed. He then went on to break the all time home run record in 2007 and was subsequently indicted.

Ok disclosure time. Barry Bonds and Floyd Mayweather Jr. are black men. So, to borrow a sports anaolgy, they have two strikes against them starting out. They are also considered arrogant by many sports writers who happen to be caucasion. STRIKE THREE!

They are outta there. No front page headlines and you better watch your step. That's the price you must pay if you insist on being the UBA, or Uppity Black Athlete. This is the CLS, or Carl Lewis Syndrome at play here. Named after a famous UBA from the '80s, who didn't play by the rules of the caucasian media and was even suspected of being gay. That killed his megastar and even star status in America (though not elsewhere in the sissy world of Europe and Japan).

If you want to be well liked and black in the world of sports you have to be at least humble if not downright deferential. Caucasian athletes can do as they damn well please, they get a pass. These are the rules. Michael Jordan was a possible exception. He would not suck up, but he still became the megastar because he bit his lip and let the Nike money do the talking. Be like Mike. And they will at least tolerate you.

Joe Lieberman in the Garden of Gethsemane

2007-11-02T22:29:00.000-07:00

And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.

Mark 14:35

Of the many rouses that politicians use to cow people, religion is perhaps the most effective. The sight of a senator or president appearing as a moral standardbearer while backing wars of agression is as common as suicide bombers in Baghdad these days. Case in point: "Holy" Joe Lieberman, the orthodox Jew that so pompously chastised Bill Clinton for sticking his penis in unauthorized areas, has since devoutly endorsed the decidedly not-so-moral Bush/Cheney cabal and its spreading of torture and death hither and yon.

Now he is in the unenviable position of having to vote yay or no for the next advocate of torture and genocide that Bush has nominated for Attorney General. Our Mr. Morality can take a righteous stand against these evils just as he did against the philandering Clenis. Or he can give the green light to torture and death. Or he could use the sleazy, torture-enabling Mr. Schumer and Mrs. Feinstein as cover and give a purely symbolic vote against the nominee. It will be interesting, in a disgusting kind of way, to see how it pans out.

Must Be Halloween Again

2007-10-29T21:30:00.000-07:00

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

~ Bertrand Russell

In WingnutLand, it is always Halloween, that dark, spooky place where danger lurks in every shadow and evil ghouls are ready pounce without warning. Of course the only real ghoulish characters involved here are those who have so tragically appointed themselves as the guardians of our safety. The latter day Pearl Harbor aka 9/11 allows them to wield fear as the most powerful weapon in their arsenal since it allows them to unleash all the others. The sad fact is that the public has wised up to them before many cowardly people in congress have.

So now they want to attack Iran. Why? I guess it's because the Iraq thing went so wonderfully smooth. Yep, mission accomplished. Err...or not. Never mind, let's move on. These Iranians are terrrorists ya know and they umm...have these nookular things that they plan on using to ehh...kill us all with. Yep, that's what they wanna do...kill us all. With their bombs. Yeah. Their bombs. Nookular ones.

Well that's good enough for me. I am convinced. Wait a minute...my attention span being longer than three seconds, it just occurred to me that I heard this bullshit before. But where? Oh yeah, from these same assholes. About Iraq. OK...can someone arrest these motherfuckers now? Oh wait, congress is going along with them again. Way to go Democrats. Take AIPAC money much?

So let's listen for that little satanic hobgoblin Dick Cheney, here he comes now with his Halloween ditty:

Trick or Treat
Smell my Feat
Gimme sum more Blood to Drink

But there's hope...the media will expose them this time. Certainly after the last disaster they won't be made to look like criminally negligent accomplices to genocide AGAIN will they? No effing way...they are gonna totally expose these shysters this time I can feel it. You believe me don't you?

If you do then I have some Revolutionary Guard nooks to sell you.

Slavery...Again

2007-10-06T09:44:00.000-07:00

I will begin my comments this very, very serious topic with a somewhat light-hearted aside. I am that rare type of person that actually enjoys certain uncomfortably awkward social situations. Don't get me wrong...I don't try bringing them about. It's just that some other damn fool invariably does and when it happens I actually welcome it, for a couple reasons. First, there's the very funny aspect of watching ignorant people stutter and spit while other less brash, but no less ignorant people, shift from foot to foot uncomfortably and stare off into space yearning for immediate deliverance from the here and now. And there's the emotional catharsis of "educating" on some fool that is just mindlessly regurgitating the talking points meant to reinforce their own lack of historical perspective.

Speaking of which, one of the most insidious and downright amusing-in-a-perverse-sort-of way talking points are those that deal with the topic of Slavery in America. These, I believe, are being cooked up by the modern day equivalent of plantation owners and their enormous PR machine that consists of an army of intellectual charlatans to do their bidding on the propaganda circuit. Well recently one of these charlatans, a movie critic turned culture warrior (only in America!!), decided to join the long list of right-wing nutcases that have expounded on the "Slavery Wasn't so Bad, Actually" meme that resonates so strongly with most white people benefitting from a socio-economic lansdcape descended directly from the plantation Big House. I will not even name the author because he deserves no special recognition, being one of the more unremarkable of the wingnut hired mouthpieces (maybe making a name on the freak show parade was one of the motives here). It's highly doubtful that he, as a supposedly educated person, even believes what he writes. So let's go down the list of the author's six "inconvenient truths" of slavery and see just how truthful they are. Why bother? Because this is the internet and we (still) have the opportunity.

1. SLAVERY WAS AN ANCIENT AND UNIVERSAL INSTITUTION, NOT A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN INNOVATION.

OOOOhhhhh. Good call. "But Mom, everyone else was doing it!". How far did that justification get you, when you were a 5 YEAR OLD? I could see how this argument would play well with the spoiled ass young Republicans that it was meant for, though.

2. SLAVERY EXISTED ONLY BRIEFLY, AND IN LIMITED LOCALES, IN THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC – INVOLVING ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE OF THE ANCESTORS OF TODAY’S AMERICANS.

It existed almost 200 years before The Republic was even declared, after which African slaves were denoted as 3/5ths of a person for another 89 years. The tiny percentage is misleading on a number of counts. Number one slave owners were rather small segment of the population to begin with. Number two, it involved a large percentage of the ancestors of Black people and one of the reasons for this is that, number three, the slave owning men sired quite a few black children. In fact, this can be traced through modern methods, and the thought of a lot of lilly-white trust funds being called into question on those grounds is a very scary thought indeed for some folks!

3. THOUGH BRUTAL, SLAVERY WASN’T GENOCIDAL: LIVE SLAVES WERE VALUABLE BUT DEAD CAPTIVES BROUGHT NO PROFIT.

Oh my favorite one, the old "My Holocaust was Bigger Than Yours" argument. He even does the Auschwitz comparison. Just because slaves were murdered for being sick, just because slaves were murdered for wanting to be free, just because slaves were murdered just because, this doesn't mean that all of them were MEANT to be murdered. They were really just meant to be WORKED TO DEATH. But the underlying theme is more along the lines of "the profit motive is your friend, even if you are a lowly slave". Meanwhile, people are still dying in this country because of profit-driven health care. Not to mention those in Africa consigned to death by the Big Pharma patent obsession. But I digress...

4. IT’S NOT TRUE THAT THE U.S. BECAME A WEALTHY NATION THROUGH THE ABUSE OF SLAVE LABOR: THE MOST PROSPEROUS STATES IN THE COUNTRY WERE THOSE THAT FIRST FREED THEIR SLAVES.

All this says is that Northern manufacturing was more profitable than the Southern agriculture. That's not to say that temendous wealth was not built on the backs of slaves working the plantations. The author also neglects to mention that Northern wealth was built on the backs of immigrants and children in factory sweatshops. Even so, if given the choice, I'd take the sweatshop over the plantation experience any day, tyvm. I bet the author would, too.

5. AMERICA DESERVES NO UNIQUE BLAME FOR THE EXISTENCE OF SLAVERY, THE UNITED STATES MERITS SPECIAL CREDIT FOR ITS RAPID ABOLITION.

It took 89 years and about the bloodiest civil war any country has ever fought to get rid of it. It was then replaced with a system almost as brutal that lasted another 100 years. And all the while there were people justifying slavery by saying it was God's will as expressed in the Bible. Of course there is little doubt that if slavery were still around the author would be listing the six "inconvenient truths" about "why slavery ISN'T that bad" instead of why it WASN'T that bad.

6. THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT TODAY’S AFRICAN-AMERICANS WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF THEIR ANCESTORS HAD REMAINED BEHIND IN AFRICA.

There's also no reason to believe that if Europeans had not continued to exploit the people and resources of Africa to this very day that large segments of Africa would not have the turmoil and misery they have had. But getting beyond that often overlooked truth, this statement is like saying that "hey, at least the Jews that were murdered by the Nazis in Europe didn't have to go to Israel and worry about being attacked by Palestinians".

OK I'm done. Now after having gone through all that trouble...I am beginning to think that the whole point of the drivel cascading from the right-wing parade of assclowns is to have forward thinking people waste their time and energy debating and debunking obvious bullshit. They are no more than internet trolls. Unfortunately, they are too well funded to be ignored.

Spreading What?

2007-09-22T22:36:00.000-07:00

The Iraq Fiasco, againt all odds, continues to smell even worse lately. Two stories to follow (that the Money Media certainly won't) are the plans by our beloved U.S. oil companies to privatize the entire national oil sector, and the continued subjugation of the Iraqi government by crazed terrorrists aka Blackwater mercs. Both of these things can be traced right back to that caricature of evil incarnate, Darth Cheney. This reptilian mafioso creep was part of the Poppy Bush junta in the early 90s at which time he came up with the concept of privatizing large segments of the military, and contracting that business out to Republican-owned companies. He had to wait about 10 years before he could fully exploit the system he created, but now it's ON, thanks to 9/11 and the all too predictable scenario of the U.S. public not paying attention. So our tax bucks go to a few of his favorite violent charities, and some of that gets funneled back into the Republican campaign slush fund. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been redistributed that way in the past 4 years. It's a remarkable achievement for someone who lacks a heart, and soul. And with this killing machine we are in the process of spreading democracy in the Middle East.

But what exactly are we spreading? It seems that democracy in Iraq is the kind of democracy that we have in the United States. One where the vast majority of people have important decisions made for them by people who are corrupt in the most basic sense: they put cash money ahead of everything else, most notably the lives of their fellow people. What kind of democracy prevents a sovereign government from kicking out psychotic death squads like the Blackwater mercs? What kind of democracy sees politicians bribed in order to sell off the vast wealth of the nation to foreign oil companies, allowing billions of dollars to be swiped out of the national treasury?

Answer: The kind that we want to spread to Iran, Cuba, and North Korea.

What's in a name: Katrina

2007-08-28T21:31:00.000-07:00

You know I rowed a little boat, five miles 'cross the pond

You know I rowed a little boat, 'bout five miles 'cross the pond

I throwed my things in the little boat, it rolled me right along
It was thunderin' and lightnin', but it rolled me right along

It was thunderin', it was lightnin', Oh yeah, it rolled me right along

There were thousands of people, they didn't have no place to go, mmm
Little children they were screamin'and cryin', Oh yeah

The wind was howlin', they didn't have no place to go, mmm

There were thousands o' people, they's goin' from door to door, mmm

- I Rowed a Little Boat

Traditional, from the 1927 Mississippi River Flood

On August 29, 2005, almost 80 years after the terrible Mississippi flood of 1927, the levees broke and flooded the poorest, lowest-lying sections of New Orleans, Louisiana, drowning over one thousand people. Two years later, many of those sections are still deserted, their inhabitants scattered across the country, many with no plans or desire to return. For several weeks the sight of the survivors, stranded by the floods and by the harsh economic realities of a country that consistently puts money ahead of life, was out there for all the world to see. And the world did see it, more clearly and objectively than most people in this country were willing to. I remember going to the BBC and other foriegn news outlets to get the most in-depth look at why the richest country on earth could doom its own citizens to a watery grave. How that country that could spend a trillion dollars on invading and occupying countries halfway around the world was not willing to spend less than one hundredth of that cost to shore up the levees that protected one of its own cities.

Coming almost exactly four years after the 2001 attacks, with a similarly horrific death toll, this disaster in many ways stood in stark contrast to that event. This time, the lie was put to the term "Homeland Security" the reactionary name and department that was born of 9/11. It was exposed as a grand farce as floating corpses were eaten by dogs and people died of dehydration, waiting for help that never came. This government was obviously not capable to secure this country, much less Iraq.

And then there the were people stranded and dying even after they were rescued, or waded out of the flood waters. As Wolf Blitzer observed in a moment of live-TV stream of consciousness "These people are so poor, so Black". And they were. They were not the wavy-haired, light complected Louisiana ruling class Moriels et al., but their darker brethren, lowest on the economic and social totem pole that is the living legacy of the plantations. They were "left behind" even as the pets were flown out of harm's way while the monstrous swirl of clouds and wind approached.

Perhaps the sickest tendency in the wake of the event was to blame the victims, which is elevated to something of an art form by our media giants. So we have LOOTERS and SHOOTERS and all kinds of hysteria that turned out to be 99 percent bullshit, all in the name of making people think "yep those niggers are animals and they brought this on themselves. Nope, there's no helping those people". What they didn't report that most of the poor people in New Orleans and all across our land of bounty, have jobs, often more than one. And they still can't afford a car to get the hell out of town. No they never spoke of poverty wages, but the first thing Bush and Cheney did was foist an executive order making it legal to pay slave wages to workers reconstructing the city!

Oh and one more thing the media never told you. The lower 9th ward, the lowest of the low lands, was created when the New Orleans Superdome was built, destroying a more prosperous (and elevated) working class community and relegating its inhabitants to the place that is now a wasteland. It is sadly ironic that the Superdome became their terrordome again during Katrina and their middle passage out of New Orleans.

The Great (Non) Debate

2007-08-17T22:53:00.000-07:00

Listen to me! A two-legged animal will believe anything, and the more preposterous the better. Whales speak French at the bottom of the sea. The horses of Arabia have silver wings. Pygmies mate with elephants in darkest Africa. I have sold all those propositions...and more.

~Allardyce Meriweather, snake oil salesman in the movie "Little Big Man"

Americans like to be fooled. It's in our blood. We are suckers for hucksters with good sales pitches. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of politics. How else can you explain so many people voting against their own economic self interests? Karl Rove was no genius, despite what some frustrated non-wingnuts may think. It's not hard to fool people who are raised up as consumers, the human equivalent of a grazing bovine herd animal. It's been done before, many times. Just play to the fear and ignorance. Genius means inventing something new...and ole fat Rover just took the ancient turgid playbook of American politics and ran through the mud one more time with it. The genius part of politics exists elsewhere, however...to wit: the entire "left/right" debate on Fox News and CNNBCBS. How is this desultory bit of theatrics genius you ask? First of all, the true left is nowhere to be found in the mainstream media. Rather we have center-right debating with the rabid wingnuts. It's a sham, designed to make people believe that the likes of Bill Clinton is actually a "leftist" rather than the big chubby, amiable friend of carnivorous capitalism that he is. It's also designed to make people believe that there is an opposition to a system that puts profit ahead of life on earth when there isn't. Not one that can get elected president anyway.

So in campaign 2008 we have the Republican side already proudly advertising themselves as the worst in human nature. Shameless boorish hypocrites willing to squander whatever resources (both human and natural) they can to maximize the profits of the top 1 percent of the population. On the other side we have the Democrats, divided into the so-called "top tier" candidates who are undercover Wall Street stealth operatives ready to sign more disastrous trade agreements and the more true representatives of the long battered working class who are already being termed the "also-rans" by the money pundits before a single vote is cast. These are our choices. We are told the only people that are willing to make any meaningful change cannot be elected to make that change.

This is the democracy we want to export to the rest of the world? No wonder no one wants us occupying their country.

Perversions of Christianity

2007-05-18T08:01:00.000-07:00

"Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

-Matthew 19:24

I don't recognize anything remotely Christ-like in the biggest purveyors of Christianity in the United States these days. Backers of religious wars, vilifiers of the poor, supporters of the continued acceleration of maldistribution of wealth and resources among the economic classes; on virtually every important issue, they are more akin to Roman rulers rather than the humble servants of God they pass themselves off as. The great paradox here is that those who most closely preach the true word of Jesus are more often than not agnostics or non-Christians. Jesus set an example for not judging others, lest ye be judged. But all these people are good for is passing judgement, and a harsh judgement at that. I'm telling you, if the current crop of right wing religious hucksters were around back then, they would have hurled stones in response to the statement "let he who is without sin...", because they truly believe they are without sin. That is the level of their hubris and hypocrisy. You have to be seriously blind to any faith in order to take a message and change it to suit your own prejudices and class perspectives. This is the modus operandi of the faith hustlers, southern white conservatives that were never in touch with the true teachings of Jesus Christ having grown up in segregated churches and in a culture where black people as subservient, almost invisible members of the world was the norm. And they preferred to keep it that way, and they still do. Listen to them speak about the past in nostalgic terms, and you know what I mean. Once having any concern for others ceases, then religion loses any purpose it had. This ain't coming from me, either. Read your good book, whatever that good book may be...ALL religions have the Golden Rule as their central message. Realizing that, we see how many people in the world today are TRULY LOST. Those that preach the message along with those that follow them into the hell they inevitably create.

So Much for Living in a Free Country

2007-05-10T09:43:00.000-07:00

This is classic hypocrisy from the ruling elite...in fact it doesn't get any more in-your-muhfukkin-face obvious than this:

"Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore is under investigation by the U.S. Treasury Department for taking ailing Sept. 11 rescue workers to Cuba for a segment in his upcoming health-care documentary 'Sicko'."

Now this story requires some background info so let me set the stage for you. About 50 years ago the people of Cuba overthrew centuries of autocratic despotic rule, promulgated by Spain and the United States. They installed a socialist regime, and that resulted in a large number of rich and/or corrupt Cubans fleeing to Miami, where they proceeded to rent out a bunch of whores that we commonly refer to as U.S. politicians. These whores took the old casino/brothel money from the Cuban exiles and, among other dirty things, made laws preventing U.S. citizens from travelling to Cuba. Let me repeat that part with emphasis: THEY MADE IT ILLEGAL FOR US TO TRAVEL TO CUBA.

Now ask yourself, what kind of country makes it illegal for its own people to go where ever the hell they want to? A despotic regime? A banana republic? Yes, that's what we are living in. So the next time you hear some right wing clown talking about how repressive things are in Cuba (or any other country currently out of favor with the State Dept.) ask in a loud and clear voice: WHY IS IT ILLEGAL FOR AN AMERICAN CITIZEN TO TRAVEL WHERE THEY WANT TO?

Now back to the story. Among the most corrupt element of United States society is the propensity for politicians to take money from big corporations and then make laws benefitting them. And about the worst offenders in this practice are big pharmaceutical companies, a special breed of people that ALWAYS put profits ahead of people's lives. A case in point, these are the people that condemned millions of sub-Saharan Africans TO DEATH because they were worried about losing a few dollars to generic drugs that fight AIDS. They are the lowest of the low. Well maybe with the exception of the U.S. State Department.

So Michael Moore is making a movie about how our health care system is basically, criminal. But you can't call very huge and powerful corporations what they are. Nope, not in the United States. Because where there is a lot of money, there are a lot of people being paid to lie. So in those rare instances when someone attempts to bring up the unpleasant and obvious truth, such as our health care system is an embarrassment and criminally neglectful, these people will spring into action. They will write stories, they will go on talk shows and yes, they will run for political office:

"Moore's opponents have accused him of distorting the facts, and his Cuba trip provoked criticism from conservatives including former Republican Sen. Fred Thompson, who assailed the filmmaker in a blog at National Review Online."

Remember when I mentioned how U.S. politicians are whores? Fred Thompson is a big whore. Now he may play a tough guy on TV, but he is really a soft pussycat when it comes to standing up to deadly corporate behavior. He rolls over and arches his back for those who are going to sponsor his potential presidential run. And that's where we are in this free country right now, being ruled by people like that.

All I wanna say is that they don't really care about us

2007-05-07T10:07:00.000-07:00

Breaking News: F5 Iraqi Shytstorm hits Kansas:

In Kansas, the governor said the state's response was limited by the shifting of emergency equipment, such as tents, trucks and semitrailers, to the war in Iraq .
"Not having the National Guard equipment, which used to be positioned in various parts of the state, to bring in immediately is really going to handicap this effort to rebuild," she said.
Sharon Watson, a spokeswoman for the adjutant general's office, which manages state resources during emergencies, said the state has a shortage of heavy equipment transport trailers, pallet-sized loading systems, Humvees, dump trucks and other large equipment that would be help move massive amount of debris.
"We are never at 100 percent because we are allocated a certain amount from the National Guard Bureau. With the war, we are much shorter than we would be. We have about 40 percent of what is allocated," Watson said.
----------------------------------------------------

Yet more proof that the scam wars in the Mideast are not to make us any safer. Nothing has changed since Katrina, people. Our health and safety is about the last thing the war makers are worried about; up top of the list is lining their pockets.

Peggy Noonan: Blood Drinking Zombie from Hell

2007-04-24T17:20:00.000-07:00

This must stop now. You wonder, how can we do it? And your mind says, immediately: Whatever it takes.

-Peggy Noonan, advocating genocide against Iraqi children, April 2004

An indian who is as bad as the white man cannot live in our nation; he would be put to death and eaten by the wolves. We told them to leave us alone and keep away from us but they followed on and beset our paths and coiled themselves among us like the snake. They poisoned us by their touch. This is the cause of us making war; and they know it. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it. Indians are not deceitful. Indians do not tell lies. Indians do not steal. But they look at the indian spitefully and speak bad of us... It is true that the white men do not scalp the head: but they do worse - they poison the heart.

-Cheif Black Hawk, 1832

Well this is some old business that needed taking care of, so it may be some days late and a few hundred billion dollars short, but here goes. As some of you may recall way back in early April 2004 four Blackwater mercenaries got the George Armstrong Custer/Mogadishu treatment in Fallujah, Iraq. The grotesquley macabre images of which quickly reverberated throughout the world and sparked one of the most grotesquely macabre editorials ever written. This was penned by none other than Ronald "Ketchup is a Vegetable" Reagan's former propagandist, Peggy Noonan. Yes the same subhuman creature that trumpeted it was "Morning in Amerikkka" as poor children saw their school lunches evaporate, death squads crank up in Central America and Osama Bin Laden's Afghan Mujahadeen get sent many millions of dollars and hundreds of Stinger missiles to boot, circa 1984.

This creature, this...this thing, sat down and banged out some of the most bloodthirsty prose seen since the days of Manifest Destiny sought justification for the Twin Godheads of this country's foundation: African Slavery and Indian Genocide. Fittingly enough, it appeared in the editorial section of The Wall Street Journal, the very mouthpiece of Capitalist Exploitation and Those Without Souls aka the ruling class. Let's take a look (take a deep breath and if you have just eaten you might want to wait a few minutes before continuing) shall we?:

"The world is used to bad news and always has been, but now and then there occurs something so brutal, so outside the normal limits of what used to be called man's inhumanity to man, that you have to look away. Then you force yourself to look and see and only one thought is possible: This must stop now. You wonder, how can we do it? And your mind says, immediately: Whatever it takes."

Wow, where to begin... Well, let's start with some muuuuch needed perspective. These haughtily indignant words were written well after the last vestiges of any moral justification for the invasion/occupation of Iraq (which resulted in the slaughter of countless thousands of Iraqi civilians) had disappeared. We knew there were no WMD there and therefore we knew that Bush/Cheney were two big lying sacks of murderous shit. Whatever it takes? How 'bout some fucking TRUTH you pig, or have you been writing your lame ass propaganda so long that the truth is an abstract quantity, something impossible for you to grasp? But Wait it gets better...or worse, since I hope we are all living outside of Peggys "Up is Down Bizarro World":

"The pictures that television appropriately mostly did not show and the Internet inevitably mostly did were horrifying in a way that was reminiscent of the first still pictures of the Trade Center victims of 9/11. It was like seeing people in business suits falling through the air again. It was as if someone pointed a camera at evil and actually caught it in the act."

Ah several of the most amazing "qualities" of the propagandist are on display here in all their sick glory. To whit:

EMOTIVE PANDERING: Hey, let's exploit the 9/11 dead ONE MORE TIME, Peggy.

SELECTIVE MEMORY: I guess you don't recall the sight of hundreds of massive bombs dropped on Baghdad just a year earlier do you? Oh, but those were just Iraqis being shredded into little pieces by them, many of them not even wearing business suits. Their lives ain't worth remembering much, huh Peggy?

LACK OF PERSPECTIVE: Comparing civilians going about their workday to armed mercenaries in an illegal war halfway around the world.

And it still gets better (worse):

"This stops nothing, the terrorists will not win. A State Department spokesman said the contractors "were trying to make a difference and to help others." Indeed they were. There are many such in Iraq. They are risking their lives for many reasons, including improving the prospects for health and safety of 12-year-old boys like the one quoted by Reuters who witnessed the actions of his elders after the attack on the civilians. "I am happy to see this," he said."

"It is hard not to hate the teenagers and young men who celebrated under the bridge where they hanged the charred bodies. They are human expressions of nihilism. They take pleasure in evil, and they were not shy to show it. They are arrogant. They think barbarity is their right.
If this time, in this incident, these young men are left unchecked, their ways and attitudes, their assumptions and method of operating will only be encouraged, and spread. So we had better check them."

Those fucking savages, Peggy!! How DARE they not throw rose petals at our glorious mercenaries while they were applying symbolic bandaids after kneecapping them with a machine gun. Ungrateful sand niggers, the lot of them! Why can't they be civilized like the lilly white neighbors in your gated community, Peggy!? (You know, the ones heavy with Boeing, Raytheon and Halliburton in their investment portfolios.) Why didn't they invite the mercs over for a spot of tea? You just can't reason with those savages Peggy, much less understand them. There's only one solution Peggy and you know what it is...to check them, Peggy. Yes we must check them. Umm, what are you suggesting?

"We know what the men and boys who did the atrocity of Fallujah look like; they posed for the cameras. We know exactly what they did--again, the cameras. We know they massed on a bridge and raised their guns triumphantly. It's all there on film. It would be good not only for elemental justice but for Iraq and its future if a large force of coalition troops led by U.S. Marines would go into Fallujah, find the young men, arrest them or kill them, and, to make sure the point isn't lost on them, blow up the bridge. "

That's right. Arrest them and/or kill them, whichever comes first. Then blow them up. And nuke them and their damn bridge, too. Wow Peggy, I didn't know you were taking testosterone injections. Check your adams apple, baby. Thump your chest like the big wholesome silverback gorilla that you are. Well guess what, Pegs...you got your wish. Your boys lobbed several thousand rounds of white phosphorus all over that motherfucker. Enough to melt the skin off every first born (and second and third born) son in the whole city. We depopulated it, too, just like Andy Jackson did the USA of the troublemaking savage Indians more than 150 years ago. Like the Nazis did to Lidice more than 60 years ago. Are you happy Peggy? Do you sleep better at night knowing that white people will not be dishonored by brown savages anywhere on earth?

Not long after this the story of Abu Ghraib broke, and Peggy shut the hell up about Iraq. And of course, it should come as no surprise that Peggy had not a damn thing to say about Hurricane Katrina, except praising Bush's inaction and empty rhetoric while the underclass were being washed away.

You Had a Billion Chances...

2007-04-21T13:33:00.000-07:00

Don't kill the old lady
Nor the baby where a suck 'pon titty
Jah Jah Him no go have no mercy
-Eeka Mouse "Terrorists in the City"

April is the cruelest month
- T.S. Eliot "The Waste Land"

Gunshots punctuate a sad song on the early morning radio
Was it just static or an automatic
My brain says no but my ears say so

You had a billion chances to change history
But you kept right on walking
You had the time to end it all
But you listened to other heads talking

No one is born to go out like that
Chemical imbalance put you in a trance?
Set you down a different path
He's gonna shoot, now you can dance

You just kept piling it on each day
Looking ahead with a sideways glance
You can't stop looking at the prize, no way
He's gonna shoot, and you can dance

It's the cruelest month of a cruel year
Look far away and it gets much worse
Ask yourself what you're doing here
Filled with a hunger that hangs like a curse

You have a billion chances to change
Before the time comes around
You don't have to keep insane
Before you go dormant underground

Numbed Down, Dumbed Down

2006-11-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

Life is cheap here. People accept it or leave it with very little fanfare.
~ Ernesto Guevara commenting on the Bolivian peasantry, 1953

We have already looked at the plantation system and the way our current economic structure approximates it. Now I'd like to look at the natural world and the predator/prey relationship as a way of illustrating how things work in our society. So let's talk about herbivores and carnivores.

The herbivores are composed of the workers/consumers and the predators are the ruling class that prey off of them. Great big herds of herbivores roam the plains and forests, grazing on the fields of grass and browsing the branches of trees and shrubs. Their two primary means of defense against predators are either size or speed. The predators feast off the weakest and slowest, continuosly culling the herd. The predator prey ratio is held rather constant despite changes in population. The increase in the predator population is dependent on an increase in prey. The sytem depends on two main things: there is always a steady prey base for the predators and the prey base does not evolve new defenses that thwarts the predators. Although this is the natural order of an ecosystem in the natural world, it is not to be confused with being a natural order of human society. We have evolved past that!

In our society there will always be a prey base, those that can be sold things or made to work with the surplus value of their labor supplying the predators. So the system will not be evolved out of until the prey is able to develop new defenses. The development will include an increase in intelligence, in the same way that a certain species of omnivorous primate was able to climb to the top of the food chain. In order to develop that intelligence, we must apply ourselves and reject the torrent of cultural propaganda meant to reinforce and perpetuate the stats quo. If you have read this far, you are a suitable herbivore to begin evolving away from the predators. Kill your TV, develop your ability to question societal norms and economic realities versus the possibilities of a world with no one being preyed upon. Then you will have the predators on the run., screeching like jackals. Like they are in Bolivia these days. If it can happen there, we can do it here.

Calling Things by their Real Names: Hugo Chavez Speech to the U.N

2006-09-23T14:20:00.000-07:00

What a shame we never hear the truth plainly spoken by our own media or elected officials. What a shame we have to import the truth unwillingly then have it drowned out in a wave of righteous lying indignation. What a shame that those same liars that are so upset to hear the truth have turned this country into the world's biggest whorehouse. What a shame so many want so much to believe those liars.

Oh man, this was good. Best thing I've heard since Dick Cheney was told to go f-ck himself down in Mississippi after Katrina. Here's a partial transcript:

I think that the first people who should read this book (Chomsky's "Hedgemony or Survival") are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is right in their own house. The devil is right at home. The devil, the devil himself, is right in the house. And the devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the devil came here. Right here. [crosses himself]

And it smells of sulfur still today.

Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world. I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday's statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world. An Alfred Hitchcock movie could use it as a scenario. I would even propose a title: "The Devil's Recipe." As Chomsky says here, clearly and in depth, the American empire is doing all it can to consolidate its system of domination. And we cannot allow them to do that. We cannot allow world dictatorship to be consolidated.

They say they want to impose a democratic model. But that's their democratic model. It's the false democracy of elites, and, I would say, a very original democracy that's imposed by weapons and bombs and firing weapons. What a strange democracy. Aristotle might not recognize it or others who are at the root of democracy. What type of democracy do you impose with marines and bombs?

The president then -- and this he said himself, he said: "I have come to speak directly to the populations in the Middle East, to tell them that my country wants peace." That's true. If we walk in the streets of the Bronx, if we walk around New York, Washington, San Diego, in any city, San Antonio, San Francisco, and we ask individuals, the citizens of the United States, what does this country want? Does it want peace? They'll say yes. But the government doesn't want peace. The government of the United States doesn't want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war.

I don't think anybody in this room could defend the system. Let's accept -- let's be honest. The U.N. system, born after the Second World War, collapsed. It's worthless. Oh, yes, it's good to bring us together once a year, see each other, make statements and prepare all kinds of long documents, and listen to good speeches... But we, the assembly, have been turned into a merely deliberative organ. We have no power, no power to make any impact on the terrible situation in the world.

There are alternative ways of thinking. There are young people who think differently. And this has already been seen within the space of a mere decade. It was shown that the end of history was a totally false assumption, and the same was shown about Pax Americana and the establishment of the capitalist neo-liberal world. It has been shown, this system, to generate mere poverty. Who believes in it now? What we now have to do is define the future of the world. Dawn is breaking out all over. You can see it in Africa and Europe and Latin America and Oceanea. I want to emphasize that optimistic vision. We have to strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle, our awareness. We have to build a new and better world.
Venezuela joins that struggle, and that's why we are threatened. The U.S. has already planned, financed and set in motion a coup in Venezuela, and it continues to support coup attempts in Venezuela and elsewhere.

President Michelle Bachelet reminded us just a moment ago of the horrendous assassination of the former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier. And I would just add one thing: Those who perpetrated this crime are free. And that other event where an American citizen also died were American themselves. They were CIA killers, terrorists. And we must recall in this room that in just a few days there will be another anniversary. Thirty years will have passed from this other horrendous terrorist attack on the Cuban plane, where 73 innocents died, a Cubana de Aviacion airliner. And where is the biggest terrorist of this continent who took the responsibility for blowing up the plane? He spent a few years in jail in Venezuela. Thanks to CIA and then government officials, he was allowed to escape, and he lives here in this country, protected by the government.
And he was convicted. He has confessed to his crime. But the U.S. government has double standards. It protects terrorism when it wants to. And this is to say that Venezuela is fully committed to combating terrorism and violence. And we are one of the people who are fighting for peace. Luis Posada Carriles is the name of that terrorist who is protected here. And other tremendously corrupt people who escaped from Venezuela are also living here under protection: a group that bombed various embassies, that assassinated people during the coup. They kidnapped me and they were going to kill me, but I think God reached down and our people came out into the streets and the army was too, and so I'm here today.
But these people who led that coup are here today in this country protected by the American government. And I accuse the American government of protecting terrorists and of having a completely cynical discourse.

We want ideas to save our planet, to save the planet from the imperialist threat. And hopefully in this very century, in not too long a time, we will see this, we will see this new era, and for our children and our grandchildren a world of peace based on the fundamental principles of the United Nations, but a renewed United Nations. And maybe we have to change location. Maybe we have to put the United Nations somewhere else; maybe a city of the south. We've proposed Venezuela.
You know that my personal doctor had to stay in the plane. The chief of security had to be left in a locked plane. Neither of these gentlemen was allowed to arrive and attend the U.N. meeting. This is another abuse and another abuse of power on the part of the Devil. It smells of sulfur here, but God is with us and I embrace you all.

----------------------------

OK for all of you who want to faint at the sight of a world leader calling the President of The United States the devil...who else but the devil would try to justify a big moneymaking operation into Iraq as being a plan that JESUS put in his feeble mind?

My main beef with religious people is their unwillingness to question the dogma foisted on them, including the many perversions of Christian doctrine. Here's a hint for you weakminded types...if someone is using Jesus Christ as a tool for starting and maintaining hatred and war, then he is the very definition of the DEVIL.

There's still time to save your soul, but it's running out fast. Wake up or burn, suckers.

Hey Speaking of Anniversaries...

2006-09-11T15:03:00.000-07:00

This is also the 33rd anniversary of the U.S. government-inspired slaughter in Chile, where democracy was crushed and 3,000 people were rounded up, tortured and murdered.

Yeah, we've been spreading our own special brand of goodwill around the world for a long time now.

Read all about it.

Fermi's Paradox Answered

2006-08-18T21:04:00.000-07:00

I am in the vast minority. I am one of those people that finds reality more interesting than fantasy. If everyone were like me, Hollywood and the cult of celebrity would not exist. Instead scientists would be celebrities and we would have cured most diseases, developed a susatainable economy and be exploring the universe. Well...once we finally sobered up. ;) But seriously, I think I have the answer to Fermi's Paradox, which asks why there are no aliens colonizing Earth. It follows that if there were other planets that harbored life that evolved to the point where they could master interplanetary space travel, then one such civilization would have reached Earth by now. There are several assumptions here, one is that interplanetary space travel is possible. We suppose it is, although we have not attempted it yet. Think about why that is... Then you will have the answer, too.

Creeping Fascism

2006-06-16T23:58:00.000-07:00

I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Phillipines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking glass.

~ Mark Twain

Does anyone recall the scary days right after September 11, 2001? No I don't mean anthrax scary...I mean worse...when criticism of the United States, God and the Republican Party was strictly verboten. There was heavy censorship of anything that questioned the natural order of things, namely that Jesus Christ would get vengeance on Mohammed in the big sand box. I remember all the shiny gas-guzzling SUVs toting big flags, then brightly colored decals (made in Chinese prisons) and asking how stoopid could some folk be? They didn't see it coming. 3 buck a gallon gas. The attack on civil liberties, which has been non-stop. The diversion into Iraq. The decals have faded, bleached by the sun and the letdown of a quick high followed by a quicker withdrawal into reality. You been had, people, you been took. Bamboozled. I sensed it immediately, not because I am clairvoyant, but because I saw it all before. I knew where the media was being lead, willingly, complicitly. Most of all, I knew that the righteous warlords would get PAID in big stacks of pure blood money. Yes sir, a quick infusion right into their icy cold veins. And the worst part was that I couldn't call them on it. No one could or your words would disappear right off the page as if they, and you...never existed. I've studied enough history to know that these things go in cycles. I was there in 1991 when the same thing happened with Poppy taking down his doublecrossing drug runner buddy in Panama and then Oil War Numero Uno. I was there when Raygun atoned for all the dead marines in Lebanon by gangbanging a tiny island that neither he or his voting bloc could find on a map. Going back further in the same tragic history there was Nixon bombing the entrails outta SE Asia all through Christmas and Chanukah 1972 and beyond. There were so many lies ringing and echoing further back to the Red Menace, the Rosenbergs, McCarthy's lists of names, but most of all, the cowardice of the people to stand up to creeping fascism. What a tremendous let down, when you see what you thought was a free society crumble so quickly through fear and nationalistic hysteria. You would never think it was that fragile until you watch it fall. And it continues to fall little by little, brick by brick, even though the censorship loosened up slowly during 2002 as it become obvious that the struggle was taking an obvious detour to (quite literally) take care of business in Iraq. The criticism is there now, mostly uncensored. But so are the stealth prisons and the disappeared and the watch lists and the NSA data mining and the quid pro quo of the telecommunications companies. Freedom isn't free, it is a constant struggle against against opportunists, nationalists and believers in the supernatural. The fight against global capitalistic extremists will continue.

Off the Plantation

2006-01-23T22:08:00.000-08:00

"I freed thousands of slaves in my life and I could have freed thousands more, had they known they were slaves".

- Harriet Tubman

Yeah, officer from overseer
You need a little clarity?
Check the similarity!

-KRS-ONE

The society of the U.S.A is remarkably similar to the plantation system. A very small minority of the population owns a large majority of the wealth and sets policy for the rest of the people to live and die by. Along with these modern planatation owners there are the latter day equivalents of the rest of the system: the wait staff and mammies living in the Big House. Most of them like their position and will work hard to retain their place of priviledge. The overseers who relish the use of force to keep the fieldhands in check. They see this excercise as validation of their superiority, when in fact it is a symptom of a deeper pathology. Finally, we have the large majority composed of field hands, who are given just enough table scraps, kept just exhausted enough, and threatened with enough violence/promised eternal salvation to prevent a large scale insurrection. It is a tenuous balance, but the glue that holds it together is the economic dependency of all involved, backed up by the threat of violence. But the system is doomed, as all unsustainable systems are. It is only a matter of time before declining natural resources result in the the standard of living reaching critical mass and a mass exodus off/collapse of the plantation. There will be a revolution and the new equilibrium will be established. But this revolution is less likely to resemble the American Revolution of 1776 and more likely to resemble the French Revolution of 1789. Payback is a muffa and overseers/collaborating house servants get cut no slack.

I'm Not Buying It

2005-12-11T21:06:00.000-08:00

The most radical thing by far that you can do in America is to realize you can have a perfectly good time without buying anything. That means of course, that our entire society is built upon the premise of selling you things that you don’t actually need. This time of year it is especially obvious, as we have Christmas, a holiday that celebrates the concept. Jesus may have died for our sins, but it appears he was born as a way of selling a bunch of plastic crap made in Chinese prisons. Think about the way we are living for a moment: the better the economy is doing, the faster the landfills are filled up. The volume of garbage we generate is the leading economic indicator. This is not healthy for the planet and by extension, for us. So this season and every season, don’t buy the crap. And don’t ask for it. Be creative with your gifts and make/give things that mean something, like the little drummer boy did. Here’s a rule of thumb, the more space it takes up in a landfill or the quicker it gets there, the more it is to be avoided. Live gently, but love sincerely. All year round.

Uncle Scam Wants You

2005-11-11T16:55:00.000-08:00

11/11/05

"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar soaked fingers out of the business of these [Third World] nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the 'haves' refuse to share with the 'have-nots' by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans."
-General David Shoup, United States Marine Commandant Retired, 1966

At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows. How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
-Maj. General Smedley Butler, two-time Medal of Honor winner, 1933

November 11, 1918 was the end of the “war to end all wars”. And the date became a holiday called Armistice Day, later renamed Veteran’s Day to honor those who were part of the many wars that followed. Honoring veterans is a noble idea. But we must ask why there have been so many more wars after the Armistice. And why some of them were started by deceptions that were abetted by a news media owned by companies that stood to profit from the wars. But most of all we must ask why it is that those who beat the drums for war the loudest aren’t on the front lines fighting it. This is nothing new of course. The old men who thought up this current war all managed to avoid the front lines of Vietnam, although they no doubt supported that disastrous conflict. The tradition of a ruling class avoiding combat goes back to at least the Civil War. We read the following passage from Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”:

"In premodern times, the maldistribution of wealth was accomplished by simple force. In modern times, exploitation is disguised—it is accomplished by law, which has the look of neutrality and fairness. By the time of the Civil War, modernization was well underway in the United States”.

So much so, that we learn the Northern industrialist robber barons could buy their family’s way out of military duty in the war. J.P. Morgan paid 300 dollars for a substitute to go off to war in his place. James Mellon was told by his father that “a man may be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are plenty of lives less valuable”. That attitude is more alive than ever. And here’s the kicker: it is most alive in the people that have the gall not only to talk about supporting the troops, but to claim that those opposed to their war, the one they refuse to fight in, are on the side of the enemy! The only thing I can hear them saying is “Bleed for me and shut up about it”. To which I reply, “you want a war, you fight in it.” This of course, falls on deaf ears. Which leads to the inevitable conclusion: Support the troops, kill a chickenhawk. Smedley Butler said it best: WAR IS A RACKET.

In Remembrance (aka "Camilo's Airplane")

2005-10-28T19:10:00.000-07:00

October 28, 2005

Who killed the man who, in the lives of others like him, lives on in the people? The enemy killed him, killed him because they wanted him dead…

“Camilo” by Ernesto Guevara

John Brown, him dead and gone.
Jah know that him history still live on
As him dead more John Brown born…

“Terrorists in the City” by Eeka-Mouse

Perhaps the most absurd manifestation of the market economy is the industry of Death. I am not talking about the funeral business, but the nostalgia marketing of dead celebrity. The more tragic and unexpected the death, the more meteoric the career of the dead, the more profitable is the selling of the legendary demise. All but the bones of the deceased are packaged and sold. In this country we watch this curious spectacle from within the framework of the marketing system, where everything has a price tag of value. Here, our numbed minds are incapable of fully seeing the macabre aspect of marketing based on the level of morbid, sensational, prurient interest in the dead.

In other societies this interest can manifest itself somewhat differently. The dead become iconic, martyrs, symbols of virtue that are not mourned, but celebrated. Here, the industry is non-profit, but the dead are still sold. The selling is that of the legacy of the dead as a moral lesson. The weaknesses, the human frailty, the very humanity is replaced by the image of resolute zeal and uncompromising character. No more realistic than the glamorized selling of a dead icon for profit, though one hopes that the sentiment is at least more authentic and heartfelt.

But what is the fascination with the storied cliché of the sudden demise of someone in the prime of life? Actor, athlete, musician, rebel, seditionary, become the eternal…celebrity. The fascination is that of what might have been. And the imagined course is always a powerful antidote to the omnipresent failings of those contemporaries that have survived and turned out very mortal, or even banal, compromised, or just plain uninteresting. Longevity and relevance seem to have a natural inverse relationship, particularly in a consumer driven society. But in the perfect society there is no need for heroes, icons, or martyrs. Those things are to motivate the masses to strive for selfless effort, to work for the common good of all. This effort would already be innate. As long as the struggle to achieve this perfect society is ongoing, the search for Camilo’s airplane will not end. We who struggle to see that day arrive, say to Camilo:

You are a spirit, not a ghost.

Operation Northwoods

2005-10-18T17:55:00.000-07:00

In 1962 the United States military signed off on a plan called Operation Northwoods. The point was the overthrow of Fidel Castro. The means to justify the end result was to stage terrorist attacks on American soil, attack airliners in flight, kill American civilians, and a few other things, then blame it on Castro. This was the pretext for launching a massive attack on Cuba and installing the U.S.-approved government that the mercenary attack of the previous year had failed to do. If the documents of this plan were never released no one except conspiracy nutcases would believe it. But they were. In the spring of 2001 the story broke, receiving some attention in mainstream media circles, where it was dismissed as the work of a general gone insane...even though all the members of the Joint Chiefs approved it. John Kennedy, still smarting over the dismal failure of the last plan to invade Cuba, rejected it. One can only wonder what course history would have taken if one Richard Nixon had claimed the presidency in the extremely close election of 1960. Fast forward to September 2000, when there was another plan written. This one mentioned a “catalyzing event” similar to a latter day “Pearl Harbor” as a means of justifying the ends of establishing U.S.-approved governments across the globe. Say what you will about them, but the people who wrote the plan don’t dream small. One year later, in September 2001after an extremely close election went the way of the party of Richard Nixon, came a catalyzing event. Even if one believes the “official version” of who planned the attack, then the facts are that an organization founded with great expense by the CIA and U.S. military to give the Soviet Union “their Vietnam” not only did that, but 15 years later went on to give the newly installed marginally unpopular government of the United States their “latter day Peal Harbor”. What is three thousand lives worth to killers? Apparently not much since the latest justification to stay in Iraq and reach the 3,000 dead benchmark is in order to…get this… pay homage to those who have already died. This is the logic of the end justifying the means. This is the same logic that produced Operation Northwoods. And September 11th, even if you believe the official story.

All Power to the Imagination

2005-10-18T17:51:00.000-07:00

The student protests in France in May of 1968 produced the graffiti that I have used to title this story. But what happened in 18 October of that year best illustrates the possibility of protest taking forms unimaginable. Robert Beamon ran down a track in Azteca Stadium in Mexico City and landed in a sand pit exactly 8.9 meters from the point he left the earth. It was a gold medal and world record performance that rocked the Olympics just as profoundly as the protests that followed. Avery Brundage, the personification of the old guard power structure wasn’t pleased when Bob followed that up by taking the podium wearing black socks and no shoes as a symbol of solidarity with the victims of poverty throughout America and the world. This was the year of protest and violence that had claimed the lives of King and another Kennedy and the national political conventions, In the year that gave the world Richard Nixon as the law and order president meant to restore civilization through the continued killing of peasants halfway around the world and in the ghettoes at home. Tommy Smith was listening for the click of a gun as he stood on the podium with his fist raised in the air in Mexico City. As Apollo 11 orbited overhead and Hurricane Gladys spun its way through the Caribbean towards Florida. Thirty-seven years later another hurricane is in the same spot headed in the same direction. Beamon’s unbreakable record jump has been broken for 14 years. It lasted not quite 23 years, even less than the record jump of Jesse Owens which lasted a full 25 years. Jess Owens was there in Mexico City telling the young and angry athletes to wait…these things take time. But the power of protest and the imagination remain undiminished. Even if the dreams remain unrealized for so long. To quote Malcolm X…’time is on the side of the oppressed today and against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed and against the oppressor. You don’t need anything else.”

Thirty-seven years is a long, long time.

Politics and Religion

2005-10-17T16:50:00.000-07:00

The two most uncomfortable subjects to bring up in everyday conversation. Well, besides anything of a sexual nature. As always, the question of why this is appeals to me. So let’s take a look at why these two seemingly innocuous topics generate such anxiety and dread when some oaf dares to broach them in polite company. My theory is that it’s because the very personal nature of the subjects, which goes way back to our childhood. We picked up our beliefs first from our parents and then from the media. But the first instruction in or absorption of them was as children, from our parents. And they have been reinforced over the years. Therefore, our beliefs are deeply personal. And it is quite uncomfortable to have deeply personal feelings and opinions questioned or debated. It is akin to someone speaking ill of your mother. So why do I love debating these issues? Well, first of all I think I am right. And anyone who would disagree with me is wrong. Of course, the other person feels the same way. And never the twain shall meet, so…what’s the point again? Perhaps there is none, but I wouldn’t argue a point just for the sake of argument. I want to make known the facts on my side and throw them at an opposing viewpoint like so many fragmentary grenades. And hope that none can be lobbed back. It is great sport. And while it may work to a degree in political debate, what about religion? Well, there you can throw rational debate, facts, and anything else that is even near coherent right down the waste disposal. Anything based on faith is impossible to debunk to that person who believes…or should I say has suspended belief in the laws of physics and everything else of this universe to accept an answer unquestioningly. Why anyone would accept anything without question is another question. My answer is that they are lazy and superstitious. So there is no sense debating religion. And there is no sense to the tenth power in fighting a war over it. Suffice to say that I echo the old adage that asks “O god, protect me from the people who believe in you”. After all, there is no difference between those on any side willing to kill the “non-believers”. They use the word “infidel” to recruit, while we use “terrorist”. Fifty years ago, while Jim Crow ruled the South by terror, the word was “communist”. Today it is “terrorist”. May I say that the devil does not change form, but merely changes a word here and there to better fit the circumstance. Speaking of words…I will also say that those who use the words “freedom” and “democracy” as synonyms for “unregulated crony capitalism” are the oldest terrorists on earth. And over the years they have racked up a body count that would make Satan blush. War through deception is their stock in trade. Which brings me to tomorrow’s subject: “Operation Northwoods”. And the question: just what is the devil on earth actually capable of?

An Exauspicious Beginning

2005-10-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

Greetings to all. This is my first post in my first blog. Huh? Yeah...I don't care if you don't care. It's a big thing for me. Which shows you what kind of life I lead. But it is kinda neat to finally have my own blog after hijacking threads and such on dozens of others. I will briefly state my interests in the off chance that anyone has read this far, or at all for that matter. I don't expect a lot of hits...maybe 3 in the first 3 months. But anyway...I like talking about politics, and science. The environment is the most important issue, followed by distributing resources in an equitable manner. Then everything else. Pet peeves: people who mix up the usage of there, their, they're, too, to, losing, loosing, and several others. Also... fat, enviro-trashing Republicans that drive gas guzzling cars ten to twenty mph over the speed limit. You are causing the destruction of all life on earth at a faster rate than everyone else, so the sooner you perish or change your ways the better. The rest of us will be right behind you. So cool it. You pigs.

About the name. I wanted to call this blog "Venceremos" but that name was chosen already? So I couldn't think of another name. I had a CD playing at the time and I named it after the song that was playing...which is by Lee "Scratch" Perry, the legendary reggae kingpin that most people haven't heard of. If you have heard of him you are cool in my book. And even cooler if you have heard of Eeka-Mouse. Otherwise, you are not cool...in fact you are lost sheep. Oh that reminds me, I like talking about music, too. Look for future posts on music and the environment, and long winded rants about how Republicans are wiping out all life on earth. That is all for now.

Venceremos!,
Ernesto Del Mundo