Now that Ted Haggard is losing his following, people need theological direction more than ever. This is classical ABB religion that can give you the Number of the Beast. Go for the liturgurgical music if nothing else. Plus, many liberals surf the internet while playing the music here. You can too, if you only believe!
I wanted to study dance in college. I wanted to perform on Broadway. I wanted to walk through campus, and life, with “jazz hands.”
As a freshman, I was at CU-Boulder, living the life of a lab rat as a Molecular/Cellular/Developmental Biology major. My older brother was a year ahead of me, also an MCDB major, brilliant beyond belief. He seemed to understand the “cell,” with all of its asinine complexity, at an intuitive level. He understood physics, chemistry, had memorized the Periodic Table and was even capable of making hilarious jokes about it. I, meanwhile, stumbled around campus humiliated by the forehead crease left by my lab goggles wondering what geek could help me figure out the molarity of my latest unknown.
I eventually changed my major to business, accounting more specifically. It wasn’t so much that I was wildly excited by debits and credits, I’m still not, or that most of the gorgeous fraternity boys were in the B School (they generally studied “finance,” accent always on the second syllable, and went on to be successful brokers or developers), but that I didn’t come from a particularly wealthy family and I needed a career, not just an education. Becoming a CPA seemed a safe bet. It has proven to be such.
Because of my college experience, and maybe my perceived lack of personal creative freedom, I always find it interesting to hear what young people are studying these days. I wonder how the parents feel, especially the fathers, when they hear that their young son is going to be, say, a puppeteer. Does this revelation cause Dad to puff out his chest and smoke a stogie on the back deck? Does Mom call over her coffee klatch girlfriends to boast about her son’s incredible prowess with a hand puppet?
When my son (now 21) was little he had a puppet as his constant companion. We got it at Poor Richard’s Toy Store and it was, sad to say, a beaver. Furry brown with lewd teeth and a hopeful demeanor. Bren wanted to take it everywhere. Unfortunately, after about five minutes, he wanted me to hold it. He was a very engaging child and, frequently, when he saw someone he found interesting he would shout, in a loud Mickey Mouse voice, “Look at my mom’s beaver!” This, of course, had an EFHutton effect. Everything would slow to a crawl, people would turn their heads deliberately toward me to see how I would respond.
I learned quickly to deal with this recurrent nightmare. I “worked up” a little beaver dance and performed it on the person nearest to me that appeared somewhat sympathetic. I would take “Beav” and bite the person’s forearm and say “Come help me build my dam!”
I don’t want to malign puppeteers. In fact, I want to laud puppeteers. In my immediate family, we have three CPAs, a pathologist, an attorney, a pharmaceutical drug rep. Our parents are proud of us. We all have careers and children, big houses and big mortgages, lots of demands for our money and our time. We’re living the American dream!
I can’t help but wonder, though, if any of my siblings ever feel like I do while I’m scurrying through the office clutching my mechanical pencil and my laptop, wearing the latest Ann Taylor fashions, picturing myself instead in fishnet hose and a bustier, standing under the bright theater lights, bowing demurely to thunderous applause. When my older brother holds his stethoscope does he secretly wish it were a paintbrush? When my sister makes her closing arguments in front of the judge and jury, would she rather be doing improvisational comedy in a little club somewhere? I don’t have any idea.
I know one thing. I hope my children will pursue their passions. It may be an uphill battle. Already their Dad and I have college funds set up for each of them. We have firm ideas about which elite schools they should attend and what careers might hold promise. I imagine we’ll have a doctor or two, maybe a physicist, probably a computer whiz. The IQ tests have been administered and we know where their strengths lie. But not where their dreams lie.
I have secret wish. I want a puppeteer.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) is in the news pontificating again. They are like little tiny parkings ticket officers who spin around in their little 3-wheel vehicles, ticketing people in places like the Warsaw Ghetto and Nagasaki for not pumping coins properly into the human rights’ meters they are in charge of monitoring.
How do they do such a good job from their little office in New York City where they telescope the world looking for offenders? Where does their money come from? How even handed they are as they hand out parking violation summaries to both Big and Little. They are like that famous ‘American justice’ which is said to apply the vagrancy laws equally to both rich and poor. If either Hobo Joe or Bill Gates sleeps under the highway overpass, they both equally will be hauled off to jail for violating the law. Similarly, this is the HRW code of ethics.
If you visit their website, HRW will proudly inform you that it accepts no money from any government. Oh Wow! How impressive. They will also inform one that they are the biggest ‘human rights organization’ in the US of A. They have a staff of close to 250, and an operating budget of around $40,000,000. Look further, and you will see that they have ticketed offenders from BanglaDesh to Myanmar to the other side of the moon. And then strangely enough, you will find that there is nothing listed about how Iraq and Afghanistan being invaded by the US government is a human rights violation! A rather big one. I guess they don’t take political sides? lol. I don’t know about you, but I believe in proportionality when it comes to human rights and who violates them. HRW does not. Despite their pretense of going after everybody, the big human right’s offenders, like the US government and the Pentagon, mainly get a free walk.
This supposed neutrality in judgement that they push is like that of the Carter Center. Kind of suspect. If they accept no funds from the US government, then where does their money come from? From people like you and me their website will smilingly proclaim! uh… and from foundations. So who are these foundations? Well that seems to be HRW’s big secret. They just don’t really say. But i’m quite sure they’re ‘liberal’ foundations, though distinctly Americancentric ones. Snicker,snicker…. Democratic Party-minded foundations, shall we say. And last I heard, the Democratic Party was one of the 2 pillars of the US government. So much for the HRW’s claims to be without official US government backing. Let’s jiust say that it is unofficial support, then. From liberal Democrats like you and them.
So how does this supposed neutrality of pointing out supposed human rights violations work? If funding begins to decline because a bad thing or two was said about Israel, then denounce ‘equally’ the Palestinians. And that’s just what HRW is doing. Got to keep the staff employed. Got to get them liberal funds from liberal folk that liberally have supported Israel from inside the US back flowing. Let’s call our ability to talk out of both sides of our mounths, NEUTRALITY. Let’s parade ourselves as independent from the government. And let’s hide who those foundations are that give us the funds. I bet its not the Bradley Foundation, nor from the Walton family? Maybe Soros or Gates? People like you and me. chuckle.
HRW has just gotten through with condemning the way that Palestinans defend themselves from being slaughtered by Israel. See these 2 responses to that.
Would HRW have attacked MLK, too? by Jonathan Cook
and
HRW’s Shameful Press Release by Norman Finkelstein
Tired of the same junk food pizza? Tired of the same old ingredients? Here’s a site to help you out if you decide to make your own pie. Three whole pages of recipes at the Japanese Pizza Page
Most popular add on ingredient in Japanese pizza? Corn. I also like the tater tot pizza and the squid ink ones, too. So how can you go wrong here? Move over sushi, I want some Japanese pizza instead! Hold the mayonnaise though. Please.
Palestinian women protesting the illegal detainment of their husbands. Israeli soldiers fired directly into the crowd.
Incredible as it may seem, the US appears to be moving back into destabilizing the Horn of Africa once again. It’s like there are not enough problems in the Congo, Sudan/ Chad, Rwanda/ Burundi regions of conflict already for Bush, so the US must provoke reopening conflict in the Horn of Africa/ Somalia zone, too! See AFP article- Eritrea accuses US of masking invasion of Somalia with peacekeeping plan
The last 2 US administrations have absolutely destroyed the credibility of the UN as being a body that functions independently of the Pentagon. Most of the world does not see either NATO or the ‘UN peacekeepers’ as anything other than pure extensions of US militarism, and for good reason, too. UN cooperation with the US bombing and dismemberment of Yugosalvia, UN cooperation in the US destruction of the countries of Iraq and Afghanistan, UN cooperation in accepting Israeli Apartheid and its terrorism of the Occupied Territories as norm, UN carrying out the continuation of the US invasion of Haiti, and UN acceptance and complicity of the US-Israeli destruction of Lebanon all have led to nobody still believing that this is a neutral world association anymore. Not that it ever seemed to be that so much, to the majority of the world outside Europe and the Anglophile countries.
It’s time to dump the UN and reestablish a new world body of nations totally outside the control of the US government. The current United Nations is a totally spent organization politically. Not even moving its adminstrative offices out of New York City could ever reestablish any of its credibility at this point. A better name for the UN in its current state would be the United Imperialist Nations (UIN). Except that even the word ‘united’ no longer can be considered to apply, as the imperialist countries continue to develop fissures in the post WW2 alliance amongst themselves.
As to the US via the UN in Somalia? What a disaster this appears to be in the making.
These discussions about how many Iraqis have died, or how much the war is costing are so damn abstract. No reason to get too alarmed. Then again, check this clock out.
After 1937, the fabled J-Class sloops, the enormous Bermuda-rigs which vied for the America’s Cup, were discontinued in favor of a compact 12-meter standard. The reason? Humility. The huge J-Class boats were too conspicuous and extravagent for even the world’s rich yachtsmen like Sir Thomas Lipton, out of consideration for the emerging egalitarian world conscience.
With the new millenium, prompted perhaps by the 1999 orgy of 12-meter extrapolations which confused the America’s Cup with catamaran and trimaran design variants, and perhaps due also to advances in ultra light/strong materials, the behemoth J-Class is back.
It’s unfortunate that the J-Class reemergence also coincides with the breakaway of the uber-class, a time when the ultra-rich have wrestled unprecented material advantage from the rest of mankind. While the wretched struggle in war and subsistence, the rich are racing yatchs whose masts can be seen across the horizon. Is there shame in taking many times your share from the mouths of the dying imprisoned masses? There is not.
When we watch the likes of an Alan Dershowitz or a Donald Rumsfield pontificating on the US government’s supposed need to use torture, even as they in the same breath deny that torture is torture or that they are advocating and using it in US prisons and elsewhere…. well… it is a sign that gangster capitalism now reigns supreme.
Other signs can be seen in countries like Mexico, Colombia, and Afghanistan…all puppet friends of the US government, btw, where mafiosos dump dead mutilated bodies daily into the streets victims of the continual drug turf wars. Well that too is another sign that today gangster capitalism is more the norm, than the exception. Too, we see gangster capitalism at work in the cases of Enron and HealthSouth. And remember the US Savings and Loan bailouts of a previous decade that opened the gates to the mafiosos? Billions hauled away by gangster capitalism’s thieves prowling the streets of our country. Gangster capitalism today has penetrated to the highest levels of our country’s political offices. It is not just a US problem. Go ask a Russian.
But the heart of gangster capitalism is ripping off the environment. It is easiest to rip off the commons, and that’s what nature is, the commons. The Pentagon is the leader in this type of gangster capitalism, as it mines, deploys toxins, explodes ordinance, and confiscates entire states and territories for its use everywhere around the planet. Gangster capitalism’s heart, if it has to be said, is a US military toxic waste dump. But the whole world has become that Pentagon dump now.
Here is a look, titled appropriately enough ‘Gangster Capitalism’, at how today’s capitalism is looting our environment. Check it out at Black Agenda Report.
The longer President Bush can put off closing down the war in Iraq, the longer he and his cronies can keep making their millions in war profits.
The nightmare in Iraq may have spun beyond our capacity to minimize it, but to the weapons industry and big oil, the Iraq enterprise just gets better and better.
Tomorrow, 4 PM, is the day of the big demonstration in Mexico City to protest the brutality of the federal police attacks on the people of Oaxaca this last weekend. Friday is to be the day of the inauguration of the declared victor of the Mexican presidential election, America’s puppet, Felipe Calderon, or ‘Fecal’ as he is best known by those who oppose this electoral fraud. Mexico is beginning to unravel, and the situation of Oaxaca is just one sign of this.
Today in yet another sign of unravelling government control, the halls of the Mexican congress erupted into fist fights. Calderon’s popular support is as thin as it could come, and six years of this US propped up clown in power is more than anybody really wants to tolerate. Mexico is beginning to unravel out of control of the neoliberal regime in DC just as have other parts of Latin America. People are fed up with their native elites following the commands they get from the White House. They are fed up with their elites living high off the hog, while their own children go hungry and die from easily preventable diseases. There is no patience or desire to tolerate D.C. control any more.
And in Mexico, many people will not just sit back and watch while yet another unpopular candidate, winning by fraud, is installed into power over them once again. Many are no longer deluded that the PRI dictatorship has been replaced by genuine democracy. A two party corporate elite dictatorship is no better than a one party one in their eyes. The PAN is no longer seen as being a democratic replacement to the old PRI dictatorship, but rather as being nothing more than a neo continuation of the same old thing. Mexico is no longer waiting for real people’s democracy. They are demanding that it be theirs now, without any more false promises from their elites of change that never comes.
Let’s face it. UCCS was designed by second rate people to be a second rate school. A simple visit or two is all that is necessary to come to this conclusion. America is full of these second rate schools and all of them have the same features. These middle schools masquerading as universities all were deliberatey designed not to become another Berkeley, Madison, Boulder, UT at Austin, etc. They were designed to be intellectually barren zones, devoid of life, liberty, and happiness. Just what is the formula for doing this that the architects of The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs followed so faithfully?
Location, location, location! That is the key to successfully designing the second rate, nominally public university. You got to build these places out in the boonies far from intellectual family, friends, and community. You want no liberal cafes, bookstores, video stores, nor public places of any kind to pop up. The ideal, is to enclose the campus building within a fortress of parking lots 40-50 miles out of the way. A place amongst the cows, and far from the people. UCCS didn’t quite meet this ideal, as it is not even that physically far from the center of the city. But just try to walk onto the campus from outside! It’s nigh near impossible!
On one side you have the cliffs, and on the other side you have the busy road. Then you have the wall, the signs that disallow parking, the signs saying it is illegal to cross the busy road on foot. Shoot, I’m surprised they don’t have machine guns pointed out over barbed wire blocking the community’s way to keep normal folk of the city away from the impressionable young minds jailed inside! So as it is, you do risk your life by trying to ambulate onto the grounds of higher education designed by second rate people to be second rate. Oh, and to produce conservative credentialed folk that are usually too stupid to realize that they got robbed of any real education by the time they stumble forth once again.
Maybe you want to commute a vehicle to approach this ivory tower of mediocrity? Some delectable conference ‘open’ to the tax payers of Colorado Springs has perhaps tempted you to breach the gates? Go right ahead inside! Pop out of your car, appraoch the automated university pick pocket, and chunk down your $7.00 parking fee. Oh what a bargain, no wonder people are knocking this place down to use a s a community resourse! Not. What you have instead is so-called university designed as gated community. Gated any way you look.
There are two common incorrect assumptions made about the UCCS. Number one- that it is actually a university. Wrong. A university is engaged in education, while UCCS is not. It is engaged in credentialing. That is, it is engaged in credentialing essentially people that remain uneducated. Number two- UCCS is thought of as being a publicly funded school. Not really. Go to their website and see where the money actually comes from.
Sure, some of it is from public taxpayers’ money, like the parking structures and general architecture of the area, all designed to keep the taxpaying lower classes of the public away and off campus. But the big political money comes from super rich people like Philip Anschutz. He just wrote off his taxes to the tune of $92 million given to control the direction that UCCS goes in. Think this supposedly public university is going to allow any public professor to bad mouth Phil? You can take all that chortle and nonsense about balance and free speech away, can’t you? This is a place paid for by the Mr. Bigs.
So you now see why the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs sucks so big time. Big money produces big crap once again in yet another American city. ‘Universities’ everywhere, and all populated by credentialed dunces. Thanks, Philip Anschutz. Thanks big boys. So much money to produce a UCCS! What a waste.
Our national debates often enter into surreal territories, and I got to say that I find the liberal sites to be almost as bad as the conservative ones when it comes to their examination of US militarism. Today finds the liberal sites, like Alternet and CommonDreams celebrating what a supposed advance forward it is that NBC started calling the situation in Iraq a civil war. The White House duly responded with, “Is not! Is not!”. So there, we now have lined up the two sides of the usual American idiocy, The Democrats versus the Republicans. Yawn…. But is the Iraq conflict in reality a ‘civil war’ like the liberals are now declaring it to be? I think not.
See, the liberal Democratic Party types don’t dare call the Iraq conflict what it really is, which is an imperialist war and colonial occupation Made in America. So they do the next best thing they can come up with, and that is to say that the US has troops centered in a country with a ‘civil war’ flaring up. Oh my! Despite ‘our’ good intentions, we’re in danger! Let’s cut and run!
This way of stupidly arguing this issue of war and peace with the Right, allows pro-warmongers to say, Look, the Iraqis need us to keep themselves from killing each other. Oh how humane we shall always be!
Liberals, this is no civil war at all. Can you imagine in our real American Civil War, would we have ever called it a Civil War if all the American cities, both South and North, had been occupied by a bunch of murderous imperial troops, from say Mongolia or Japan? And that these troops were causing the chaos between different sections of our own country’s population? See the simple difference between a real civil war, and an imperialist war? Apparently, the liberals have big trouble on that! Our American Civil War was a civil war, whereas the Iraqi chaos is not.
If one remembers this, the Vietnam War was once described by the American press as a civil war, too. The supposed good guys in South Vietnam were our friends, and the bad guys there were the commies. It was taught that South Vietnam was in a civil war where another country would not leave the South Vietnamese alone to solve their internal difficuties. That bad country was called North Vietnam. Just like then, the argument went that we had to occupy the country, simply because without us, the ‘civil war’ there would go much for the worse. Plus, another country, Iran… uh I mean North Vietnam, was wrongly entering into another country’s civil strife. and trying to turn it into a ‘civil war’! We had to save the South Vietnamese from foreign intervention into their civil war! Oh such tortured logic the warmongers must use.
Liberals refuse to tell the truth to people, back then and right now. They don’t go out and say that we have torn apart another society because we are an imperialist country that invaded and occupied their land. God forbid it if the liberals , who are such great flag waving patriots, would ever speak bad of the troops! Instead, the liberals have a tendency to revert to just moaning and groaning about, Why be over there in such a bad neighborhood? Look, there’s a civil war going on. Gotta go now! We’re getting hurt. Today, some liberal nuns were actually here in Colorado delivering food to our US soldiers! Poor soldier boys and girls. Get them out of harm’s way. They’re innocently in the midst of a ‘civil war’, and need some canned goods delivered to them! They’re starving! Bring them home and feed them better. Such nonsense makes me want to cry, but that’s what the liberal nuns were pushing today in Colorado.
What to say when the US spent all that time previous to the invasion, arming and training Kurds in the North of Iraq? When they take orders from DC, Iraqi Kurds are not fighting a ‘civil war’ then? But if they free lance like the Shia and the Sunni are currently doing, well that’s ‘civil war’? No? That’s nonsense. Iraq is still a conflict where ethnic tensions are being provoked by foreign powers. There is a simple name for doing that, too. It is called IMPERIALISM, not ‘civil war. The US is an imperialist country as is Britain. Imperialism often times picking on weaker countries, not countries that can better fight back. So the first cousin of American imperialism is COLONIALISM. Iraq is in the center of a colonial war, not civil war, Olbermann. I center on this liberal, because he is the point man of the Democrats within the media at this time. It is he that is pushing this use of ‘civil war’ to describe the battlefield that his government has made in the Middle East. LOL. Well he would say, at least, that Bush is not ‘his’ government. But then again, both Iraqi Shia and Sunni agree on one thing. This is not a ‘civil war’, but a warfare forced on them by colonial occupiers. My Fellow Americans, this is an imperialist war and a colonial war. It’s kind of shameful for us continually putting the guilt on the Iraqis on this matter.
The sheer nature of imperialism, is that the imperial power always uses one sector of the colony against another. It only gets called civil war, when the imperial country doesn’t klike the way things are spinning out of its control. Then they can withdraw, and say, “Oh those primitive people. They hate each other. They are always in a civil war”. I’m waiting for the day when NBC and Olbermann start calling the Middle East wars of the US for what they are. What they really are. That’s right. I’m waiting to hear the righteous Olbermann to start calling the foreign policy of the US, IMPERIALISM. But Democratic Party motivated liberals and their liberalism can’t be depended on too much.
FHM, STUFF, MAXIM, RAZOR, et al.
Porn is back at the 7-11. It’s the resurgence of clean porn to counter the free-for-all no-holes-barred internet, just like Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Magazine put glossy clean brakes on the sexual revolution.
Hef put a gloss coat on the age-old girly magazine and put it unto the coffee table, Guccione dirtied it up with Penthouse and put it back under the mattress and Flynt left no fig leaf unturned with Hustler and put pornography right back in the garage. But after the ugly fin de siecle the puritans are back.
Now we have the nouveau prurient clothed seductresses. Here little flesh is revealed that is not already displayed on every popular magazine cover. Naked media stars, but covered. That’s another story, nudity in fashion magazine magazines.
Today’s men’s magazine’s entice but don’t deliver, they tease, and apparently that’s enough. In the porn heydays of the seventies, the magazines were owned by independent publishers. You could say “I read Playboy for the articles” and it’d be true. Many anti-establishment stories could only see daylight through the independent press. But the magazines today belong to the publishing empires which belong to the advertizing empires which belong to the consumer goods empire. You can’t use sex to sell anything if the boys are getting the sex. Visually at least.
The curious aspect of the today’s bathroom reading for boys is the lack of sexual depth. It’s all surface. It’s curves and titilation without a sense of anything lying beneath, inside, beyond. It’s beads of water, not sweat.
Surface and complexion is all that matters. Breast implants don’t matter because they’ll be under wrap. You’re not going to keep them, you’re not even going to undress them. Knock them against the bathroom door at the nightclub, disrobe them in the darkness at her place, you’ll be gone before it’s light. Only the visual coutour matters.
To whom? The virgin spectator.
There has been a virtual English language news blackout, except for Democracy Now’s Monday edition, of what has been happening in Oaxaca the last 3 days. A huge and peaceful demonstration against the occupation by federal police forces of Oaxaca City was attacked Saturday afternoon by the very same police. Hundreds have been rounded up, and many have been tortured even while being arrested. Many have been either disappeared or taken out of state to prisons where they are being further brutalized. The people of Oaxaca have resisted, and fighting apparently has continued up to now. See section 2 of a 4 part report from La Jornada
Have a look at where our meat comes from. 12 minutes the meat industry doesn’t want you to see, narrated by Alec Baldwin.
Washington DC went down in total defeat in the Ecuadoran presidential election held this last Sunday. Bush’s candidate was the richest man in Ecuador, Alvaro Naboa, who tried to buy the election with his banana billions and his Bible thumping. His clownish campaign had him repreesenting himself as the candidate of the poor, no less!
The victor, Rafael Correa, has made it one of his central campaign issues to stop allowing US use of Ecuador’s national territory to wage war against Colombia and other locales in South America. He has vowed to fight to close down the US military base in the city of Manta, Ecuador. As one can see, there is plenty of US support for doing this also.
Close down the US military base at Manta!
When our president signed the Military Commissions Act, it granted US agencies the power to torture their captives. Dear council members, the PPJPC comes before you to ask that the City of Colorado Springs adopt a resolution to condemn the use of torture anywhere in the world. You may say that it not the place of a municipality to second guess national legislation. We would assert to you that it is.
I know that for the most part the members of the council support the Bush administration, and you begin every meeting with an invocation to a higher authority. Somewhere between those authorities exist moral principles which have been agreed by international consensus, appropriately called conventions. They bind the laws of nations and they bind you too.
The Geneva Conventions govern the treatment of individuals in war. They were written to protect all people, there are no peoples excluded. Waring regimes have often tried to hold that certain combatants should not protected by international conventions but the Geneva Conventions were adopted to preempt just such ploys.
There is a later Convention on Torture which our nation has also ratified. And there are further conventions that make clear the enforcement of international law. That no person, regardless of their nationality, is exempt from the international conventions. Further, that no laws, passed by nations attempting to circumvent the rule of law, will exempt individuals or nations from having to adhere to internationally agreed principles.
You may tie your political fortunes to the Bush administration, and perhaps in your lifetime that ship may still float. But on the troubling matter of torture, the unfair and immoral abuse of defenseless individuals, I believe you know you face a higher and certain judgment.
This recent photo
from Afghanistan accompanied a story about the lost cause that is becoming the US trying to impose a Western will upon Afghanistan. With pictures like this I’m convinced that plucky photo editors are able once in awhile to subvert the official message of their bosses.
Does the composition remind you of something? It sure looks like Iwo Jima to me! A handful of rugged American GIs atop a mound, ready to raise a flag. But these guys have no standard to raise, no legitimacy for which they claim the land. They appear to be looking out in all directions, perhaps for direction, stranded with a lot equipment, some sandbags, no flag, and no paddle.
Jimmy Carter is championing the Palestinian cause with his new book, but he still faults them for not recognizing Israel’s Right To Exist. How unreasonable of them.
Whether we agree Israel stays put or not, How can one make a case that the nation of Israel is not a foreign colony established by expelling millions of Palestinians from their homes, by biblical eminent domain, to create a Jewish State?
Aren’t we adding insult to injury by asking the displaced Palestinians to agree that the Israeli repo of their homeland should stand, expressed as a “right to exist?”
How about my boot on your throat? Right to Exist? My claim to your purse? Right to Exist? My dance on your grave? Right to Exist? My Right to Exist over Yours? Gentile, let me hear you say Yes, SIR!
Americans are shown nothing of the deaths taking place in Iraq. We hear that people have been taken captive, some may be released, but later bodies turn up with their hands tied behind their back, many having been tortured with electric drills and other methods unfathomable to us.
We may be told of these things, we’re certainly not shown them. The picture above was taken as two captives were being executed in the middle of the highway in broad daylight.
Iraqi government hiding true casualty figures
It is often said that we are a nation of laws? That’s certainly true, but just what kind of laws? Are our American laws there to provide protection and justice for the overwhelming majority of us, or are they to codify the privileges of the much tinier US elite, the corporations and their super rich owners?
If you don’t know the answer to that, then try to bring a law suit against a corporation or the corporate government that rules over us. Or what’s more likely to be the situation, try to defend yourself when the elites come after you. Fact is, justice in the US is sold in dollars and cents and if you don’t have the money, you’re going to do the time. You’re going to have your life messed over, and you will have no recourse if you come into contact with the No Justice System.
The corporations won’t go to jail, you will. You will, or you will go into limbo one way or the other. Quite simply, we are not a nation that benefits from having any real justice, but a nation sunk under corporate legal bullshit where justice is routinely turned on its head. It’s your lawyers versus theirs, is it not? Can’t fight city hall, and can’t fight the corporation. Don’t be stupid to think otherwise if you go into the US courtroom.
Did you think that the police are there to serve you? Think again. You are the centerpiece of nothing, Pal. What ever made you think that the US was about justice? Some fairy tale nonsense you learned in kindergarden? Those squads of cops all over the place, those prisons in every city and county? They’re there to protect property, not you. Most of us are lucky to own the shirt on our backs, or some small shed we live in. That’s not property! The cops are a goon squad to keep your sorry ass in line, so that property can be maintained. Not some trinkets that you might have accumulated, neither. Real property. Property you’ll never know or see.
When you watch these show trials over and over again, it’s about property. Manuel Noriega? He went to jail because he messed with US government property, The Panama Canal. Somebody steal your car? So what? That’s not property. Took your wallet? Big deal. Saddam Hussein going to get the death penalty? That’s because he tried to take property belonging to the US and European oil companies. Stupid low breed Arab he was! And what about that ignorant Slav, Milosevic? Didn’t he know that Slovenia belonged to Italy, and Croatia to Germany? It’s about property. Not about justice. Justice is not for common folk in this world of corporate control and greed.
The scales of justice weighing most evenly? Bullshit! On one side sits the dollars against you, and on the other side sits the cents you have. Result, you’re going to go flying off to jail, Chump. Flying just like the jailbird they’ll make you into if you get caught up within The System, the Injustice one. Here’s about the best summary of some of the more recent corporate legal bullshit that has been piled upon us by the Right Winger whores of the corporations. Gerry Spence’s essay, Kill All Lawyers He especially hits it right on about how the docs and insurers united to screw the rest of us over with their so-called ‘tort reform’ legislation.
Are there any readers out there dumb enough to defend the US system of corporate legal bullshit? How about you, Michael? Care to defend the sea that your profession swims in? A sea of corporate legal bullshit. A sea of nonsense so obviously not justice.
My muse is upset because everyone is making fun of Kumbaya.
Relax, Kumbaya is safe. The story you read in the Gazette, Oh Lord, not Kumbaya, syndicated from the Dallas Morning Herald, is a rather underhanded loaded question. You know the classic example: “When did you stop beating your wife?” Whether you never stopped or never started, the load is delivered, you do. (But you don’t.)
The DMH article asked “How did Kumbaya become such a joke?” and then lists instances of the joke being made: A GOP ad, a Christian Science Monitor quip. They are able to find an early instance in an obscure 80’s comedy Volunteers spoofing the Peace Corps. It seems to me SNL has made fun of everything, that wouldn’t make the ridicule universal.
I was tipped off when my friend paraphrased the article as having said Kumbaya was an “international joke.” What international? The rest of the world isn’t making fun of our spirituals, certainly not our peaceniks. The lambast is purely English-speaking and it’s coming from corporate mouthpieces who want to ridicule any tools of grassroots community efforts.
Television has no interest in sing-a-long songs. People singing together and not looking at the TV doesn’t serve them at all. But for people communing together, a melody and lyric like Kumbaya is very powerful, especially because everybody knows it already. When protestors assembled with Cindy Sheehan last year in Crawford, we sang Kumbaya among others. We wound up singing all the patriotic songs too because they were the only ones we all knew.
And so the media is determined to keep the heat on hippies and idealists, religious or not, by making fun of them, and concluding that the derision is universal. The press laughs with each other’s jokes and then report the humor to be statistically unanimous.
The Dallas reporter asked several etymologists “why did Kumbaya become an idiom for idiocy?” And none of the etymologists knew. Maybe that’s a tip off it isn’t.
Hopefully one day the press will stop trying to paint people who hope for peace and goodwill to all mankind as idiots.
Marie’s got her own venue. Check it out!
It’s The Deep End of the Gene Pool.
I’m very sorry to see her go, she lent us a simply brilliant and self-effacing quality which this forum otherwise lacks in spades.
