Monthly Archives: December 2006

Borders & Ignoble

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Retail citadelI found myself inside one of these boxes again, waiting for my wife to finish up some mall shopping I had tried to talk her out of. These 2 chains of supposed bookstores are like the Democrats and Republicans almost. Nobody can tell any real difference between the two of them.

Usually, I can pull up a chair, and browse their discount picture books for a bit, but this time they had the music (Christmas oriented for the season) cranked up double the usual volume, and it began to drive me a little crazy. It was really annoying, giving some, I guess, an incentive to buy quick and get out of there. I didn’t have that incentive though. These places aren’t really bookstores so much, and I have a hard time even finding anything much of interest to read inside, let alone for puchase.

What do I mean about Borders and its chain competition not really being bookstores? Well, I happened to come across what B & N describe themselves as being to explain some. Here it is…

“Our mission is to operate the best specialty retail business in America.”

This little pearl of thought sits upon all the computer screens as a screen saver, and also is meant to be personal inspiration for the mechanized robots, I meant customer assistants that work there. Nothing about books about these places really. It’s about specialty retail business.

Still, people who enter are most often confused. They do seem to believe that they are in a real bookstore. Actually, meany of the customers have nere seen an actual bookstore, or at least not close up between the shevles. Or even if they happened to stroll through the shelves of a real bookstore, have never really looked much to see what was on the shelves. So it’s kind of easy to see how so many get confused about thinking that they are inside an actual living breathing bookstore. But they aren’t!

They are inside a specialty retail business, that’s all. A good place to sit at a table with a laptop sipping coffee. A good place to buy some pop music crap for some demented teenager one might know. Or a place to pick up a calendar, or some blank sheets of paper for correspondence or a blank diary perhaps? Sure there are books there, but not so many real ones. Many are dedicated to computer programming, or things like Manja (6 shelves alone for that Japanese cartoon stuff and ‘role playing’).

There are categorized sections of everything, well almost. Theses stores are marked off like a MS windows filing system and give sort of a superficial encyclopedic appearance. But little old stupid me. The category that interest me most is Foreign Literature. But look around? I saw about 55 shelves titled Fiction and Literature, but strangely enough there’s hardly a book of foreign literature in this group! One would think upon browsing there, that only dimwitted American authors were alive today? Oh, and maybe a dimwitted Brit, or two.

Oh sure, maybe I should go over to the Science Fiction (20 shelves), Mystery (14 shelves), or Romance (10 shelves) sections. Nothing. Everybody is an America. Apparently they never write mysteries or SF in Italy or Spain, Brazil or Africa? If they do, certainly you can’t find it at an American specialty retail store, as opposed to a bookstore. Despite their supposed thoroughness, Borders and B & N apparently don’t carry certain stuff. Like foreign fiction. Go figure.

They also don’t carry current affairs (3 stacks) commentary much, unless it is Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, that sort of gag-us quality of thought. One does find 13 stacks of Christian babble, too. 6 stacks of Tarot/ New Age 1 1/2 stacks of ‘Eastern Religions”. I am an atheist myself, so I looked for that stack? If you really want to befuddle employees in these stores, go up to one and ask to be directed to atheist oriented non-fiction. It’s great fun!

Or better yet, tell them that you have found the 10 stacks of Romance novels, but that you are a man and would like to see some male oriented porn instead. In book form. They might direct you to a shelf entitled Erotica (in some stores less regionally influenced by Dobson’s minions)? But then, you will see only gay ‘erotica’ there. Tell the clerk that you are not gay and would rather see their collection of porn books for heterosexual men. “Sorry, Sir, we only have magazines in that genre.” My reply is always, “What? The adult entertainment business is a multi-trillion dollar one, and yet your retail establishment carries not a porn book at all, outside of the gay ones!” And in Colorado Springs, not even much of that. Moo.

So, as an atheist heterosexual porn seeker who loves foreign lit, I am kind of out of luck at these specialty retail establishments. If I was a gay person, ‘spiritually inclined’, and didn’t know that a word was ever written outside US national boundaries, I might be in better shape, it seems. Or, if I could just get more interested in reading romance novels or military history, which is where the multiple stacks are. Yes, these stores don’t really seem to know that history has been passed through, unless it circled on a planet other than USA and has been interpretted by a Republican minded citizen. Not true, you can find some Democrats, too. Like Michael Moore, perhaps? But you’ll be much better off if you like books with names like ‘Semper Fi’, etc.

All in all, these retail establishments are more Americana than a retro Fifties Diner would be. But they are not quite being bookstores by doing that. In short, your prospective reading material is being grossly censored, and that’s why so few are purchasing from the shelves, and more just seem to be sipping their Lattes and Mochas, or talking on their cell phones while inside. Borders and Ignoble seems more like a telephone booth at times, than an actual bookstore.

At this point, one might object to my comments. “‘Erotica’ should be censored by B & N. Go to an ‘adult store’ if you want such filth!” But they don’t carry books there, I will moan. “And as an atheist, go to Hell and get some books by atheists.” Or to the philosophy stacks, as I have been directed by employees. As if all philosophers were automatically atheists, lol. Sorry, I’ll just order my atheist books from the Sceptical Inquirer magazine folk, thank you. And for a good porn book, I’ll just have to write my own, it seems. Though it’ll never get published, let alone make it to the B & N.

And if I might want to know how the French care about life, I will just have to confine myself to Agatha Christie, it seems. That is after I get through with the latest from Ann Coulter I purchased at the specialty retail store. She tells it like it is about the French. And she is informative about the Arab mind, too.

Nobody reads anymore, no publishers publish anymore, and no specialty retail establishments even stock what little is still around. The last time I have seen much of interest in a bookstore/ specialty retainl establishment was in a University of Texas dorm building. They had a little used bookstore that had some used books of African writers that had been published by the African Studies Dept of the UT.

Americans once wrote great literature back before the ’50s. Unfortunately, all those works are out of print and unavailable mainly. The lit was too red, it seems. Efforts to get them reprinted have flopped miserably. We have become a specialty retail people, and not a literate one. Oops, my wife is back from the mall. Got to end my rant. Bless her heart, she bought nothing at all. Or, maybe she did and is just hiding it away from Scrooge?

The US & Britain are profoundly undemocratic forces in the world today

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If it is not enough to give Israel the free reign and financial aid to terrorize Palestianians and steal their lands at will, the US and Britain also try to disrupt and tear up the governance the Palestinians try to arrange for themselves.

For years they made demons out of Arafat and Fatah, but today the US & its allies are politically supporting Fatah by trying to force new Palestinian elections early and pumping money into Fatah and its leader Abbas, so that this group will be able to buy the new elections at will and destroy their opposition, Hamas. The US and Britain are profoundly undemocratic forces in the world today, though this in effect is nothing new, and this is just the most recent example of this. Our corporate government leaders no more support democracy in placxes like Palestine and Iraq, than they do in our own workplaces if we try to organize unions.

We can go back to the US’s coup against Allende where Washington DC installed Pinochet into power. We can go also to examine Algeria, where in 1991 the US and Europe supported a military coup after the elections were won by an Islamic coalition. Subsequently, several hundred thousand were slaughtered down, and repression there continues to this day. Hardly an incentive for Muslim groups looking for national independence and liberation to take a peaceful course of action, as opposed to crashing planes into the Pentagon and elsewhere.

We can also see today, the US and its allies pushing to keep an undemocratic and unpopular Lebanese government in power. One that opened the gates to a foreign power (Israel) to wage war once again inside Lebanon against the majority sector of that country’s population. We can see it in the US and European’s support for the fraudulent and unpopular president just installed in Mexico, that provoked the largest demonstrations in the history of that country. And we can see it in the longterm US and Brit support for the Saudi Arabian monarchy, the Musharraf dictatorship in Pakistan, and the repressive Egyptian government, that has merely the sheerest of mirages of having any democratic trappings to it.

Everywhere we look, the US and its allies are supporting tyrants and thugs, but can anybody really claim that this is something new? But this latest example of the US and Britain trying to force new elections on the Palestinians, is a new low of sorts, I think. It is forcing upon the Palestinians the type of factional violence that the US and Britain have already forced upon Afghanistan and Iraq. Could the Nazis themselves have taken this strategy of fomenting inter factional fighting to a form more detrimental to its victims?

Tom Tancredo, my old homebase is in the news again, You Dope

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Idyllic Mexican cultural heritageI have spend a lot of time in Tamaulipas, Mexico. And I once lived in Laredo across the river from this story, too. If you have never imagined such a place, Laredo is America’s largest inland port. That would make where this story occurred, Nuevo Laredo, Mexico’s largest inland port. Just one shallow river that flows from Colorado’s mountains, divides the 2 cities. Subcomandante Marcos (now going by the name, Delegate Zero) of the Zapatistas visited there last month. Here is what he saw, amidst the garbage of Tamaulipas.

I have to tell people about any real info written about Tamaulipas. It is really about America, too. Ask my daughter. She has spent much of her young life there.

Now, let me mention that I am offering our idiot Colorado Representative, Tomas Tancredo, free transportation with my family to visit in Tamaulipas. He can go fishing down there with the family, and doesn’t have to walk the same barrios that Marcos just did. Wouldn’t want the poor guy to get hurt. That is when he gets back from his ‘Third World’ Miami vacation that he passed at a swank hotel..

What a dummy this twerp is. He heads the House Immigragion Reform Caucus, and he is just about as knowlegable on immigration matters, as Silvestre Reyes is about Shia and Sunni divisions. In other words, he is a totally ignorant dumbass. If he thinks that Miami is ‘the Third World’?, duh, then come along, Fool, and let me show you.

Tom Tancredo was in the news last week embarrassing even the Bush Klan by his uniformed and stupid remarks that Miami was just like the Third World. Duh? Then why is much of Latin America trying to get there then? Not too many are trying to get to South Texas, though.

Maybe we can get this dummy a job at the Swift and Co meatpacking plant in Greeley? If he’s smart enough to even do the work right on the kill floor there even? I have my doubts. He’s only smart enough to be the Big Boss Man.

Kucinich announces he will herd wimpy and prayerful DP Peaceniks back inside church again

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The best candidate who does not represent the Democrats 
 
Dennis Kucinich announced Wednesday that he is again running for president as a supposedly antiwar Democrat within his prowar party. Yawn. This time around, unlike before, one can cut the palpable unenthusiasm of the mascoshist antiwar element of the Democratic Party with a knife.

Rather than inspiring any hopes for leadership change amongst this faithful crowd, the announcement of his candidacy seemed more to have dashed any hope at all. The faithful believers are on to Dennis, it seems, and now know his role in the DP is to be merely that of a DP herd dog serving to keep the flock together. Together to get sheared of the wool over their eyes, we would hope.. lol.

But more likely to again just to get entirely group fucked in the deepness of the dark, depressing night. Or, for those more inclined to visualize romantically in this manner, a faithful flock to get completely reemed (in mass) underneath the light of the full moon…. Oh well, the prose here doesn’t really matter, it is the faith that does, they say.

More seriously now. If Kucinich was sincere about rallying Americans to end the US bipartisan government Iraqi and Afghan war fiascoes, he would run as an independent and not as a Democratic Party perennial loser. In short, he would denounce the Democratic Party as not fit for any patriotic American to participate in. That would be easy to do, too.

Imagine if instead of announcing his Democrratic Party fealty at thsi time, he had instead approached Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders, Cynthia McKinney and Noam Chomsky, say? Approached them and asked ALL for their endorsements in an independent run for president? Now that would be sincerity, rather than a false and hollow parody of it by going forth as some sort of pretend New Age George McGovern, or New Age Clean Gene pied-piper. Yes, Dennis could push the antiwar cause ahead. Just not by the action he has chosen to undertake.

These are times that test faith, are they not? Sane secular people can watch this contest of liberal vs conservative religious faithful from the side, and place our bets once again on which of these 2 dogs will persevere. Will Hound dog Haggard’s followers at New Life Church stay in that arena the following year in group more cohesive than the Democratic Party antiwar flock will be tempted to continue to be herded, by Pastor Dennis Kucinich? Me? I’m betting that the liberal DP religious faith is much stronger than that of the the RP-worshipping, ‘New Life’ certified, idiot big top tent mob. How ’bout you?

Religion is something else, isn’t it?! I’m thinking about converting to Islam!

Save Darfur from us

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Do you wonder how the word is getting out about Darfur? How is it Americans can’t mobilize a decent opposition to the harm we’re perpetrating in Iraq, but we can -seemingly by grassroots efforts alone- make a case for coming to the rescue of the people of Darfur? It’s because taking action in Sudan means intervention. Taking action in Iraq means ceasing intervention.

With intervention the Western participants get to control the problem nation’s resources. In both Sudan and Iraq that means the oil. Remember how the Coalition of the Willing worked? If you didn’t participate with soldiers, your businesses weren’t allowed to bid on any of the contracts.

The tragedy unfolding in the Sudan is deplorable and must be remedied. But it’s not going to be solved by petitioning President Bush to send US troops there. We’re just inviting the fox into the henhouse. They’re busy with another henhouse right now, but I’m sure they’re pleased as punch that “grassroots” operatives can get them a personal invite into the next one.

George Clooney and so many well-intentioned college clubs are being coordinated by a well-funded PR machine in DC. They are being blinded by the ferocity of the crimes against the people of Darfur, which require urgent policing, but they are ignoring the necessity of an African-managed remedy. Help the Organization of African Nations join with the political players in the Sudan to enforce peace. Any solution will be better than sending in the white vultures who are only after the oil. There are enough regions of the world being kept destabilized for the profit of Western multi-nationals without adding Sudan to the list. Not to mention that Darfur is one of the places where Islamic forces have determined to make a stand against western capitalism.

You have the right to travel anywhere, why don’t they?

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If there is one position that American liberals and conservatives seem to have a common answer to, it must be that of supporting making America a gated community. Conservatives most often desire this with sadistic glee, while liberals tend to be quite apologetic about it.

But together they both desire retreat behind thick and reinforced walls. Why the reason for this unity on this one matter? Because America’s liberals and conservatives are quite nationalistic at heart, and scared of the world, too. They fear that the world is out to take their treasures away! America First!…then becomes their combined cheer.

But is it right for so many of us Americans, rich and poor alike, to desire to deny others a right that we cherish so much for ourselves? Which right is the fundamental one, to be essentially unchained by restraining laws and documents and to be able to travel anywhere around the globe with total freedom from police bullies and tyrants? What gives us this right, but makes us want to deny it to others so strongly?

I believe that it is simply because Americans no longer know the suffering that passports, visas, and bureaucratic paperwork causes so many other people around the globe. We as a nation are like the rich amongst us, who believe that they are due better than all those who surround them. That believe that they should live, while others are best left to die.

A`whole nation that shares amongst itself such a heartless, cruel attitude that there is a supposed necessity constantly to have a gated and walled community, is a rotten and corrupt one that will fail and fall. It is an arrogant nation that has allowed its heart to be turned into stone. It is a nation that goes rotting behind its moat. A nation that will try to turn corporate clowns into saints.

Problem eyes?

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My 10 year old has become obsessed with eyeware in the last couple of months, not because she has needed glasses but solely because for some reason, some in her age bracket think glasses are cool? As a long time ‘four eyes’ I have been baffled by this attention to the subject she has had, that has even mandated me buying her ‘cool’ $1 glasses at the dollar store for her wardrobe. But this week she was asking me about contact lenses instead.

Basically, I told her, that there were 3 options available these days for us visually challenged, the ‘four eyes’ amongst us. Surgery, contact lenses, or glasses. Girls unfortunately seem to opt more for the contact lenses I told her, principally because they have traditionally seemed to think that glasses make them unattractive to boys. But then I confessed that as a boy I had never come to be able to want to put these damn little things in my eyes, poking around with my fingers on my eyeballs daily, and that I thought that contacts were way too dangerous anyway. As so do I think surgery still is.

And Lo and Behold, here crops up the latest contact lense caused epidemic into the news! Eye fungus outbreak is causing severe eye damage up to blindness, in hundreds across America. And it appears mainly that this epidemic is hurting women (higher percentage of contact lense users than men), making it yet another way that women searching for ‘beauty’ oftentimes endanger themselves while doing it.

This is a shame I told her, because I have always thought that women with glasses can be quite cute anyway. So lesson? Don’t go chasing shadows that aren’t even really real. You’ll still be attractive with contact lenses, or without.

Oh. And don’t let the corporations make it legally impossible to sue them for damages if they tempt you to blind yourself with their product. It’s a dangerous world out there, so be careful with the choices they try to get you to make.

The Approaching End of Universal Auto Slum

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America, land of the universal automobile slum, from sea to shining sea. Dick Cheney has our nation desperately fighting to preserve this coarse and rude America, while talking Alice in Wonderland absurdities about supposed ‘democracy installations’, ‘counter-‘terrorism’, and ‘national secuirty’ of the ‘homeland’. The US good life embodied by auto slum America is a lifeless, treeless, community-less slurb, stretching for miles upon miles. But the oil is running out.

Yes, the oil is running out, but just as evolution is denied, global warming is denied, ecological collapse is denied, so too, is the fact that we have over-mined our planet. James Howard Kunstler, in his commentary, The Twilight of Mechanized LumpenLeisure, takes us down our most recently passed motorway on our ride to the future. He has collected for us a series of postcards of the past and present.

Alas, we seem to have an evolutionary future ahead that also is most often denied as being ours. But at least it might well be more tranquil and without the sounds of traffic all around. Are we approaching the end of the universal auto slum? An end to abundant oil?

Your own private post office

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Have you seen the postal contract service centers cropping up at suburban strip malls? This is part of an ongoing congressional effort to privatize the entire USPS and divest it of the Postal Service Union. The Republicans want to convert the USPS civil service jobs into minimum wage jobs so that Republican contractors can pocket the savings. The new privatized post office jobs will provide no benefits, no security, no skills, and no upward mobility.

The national postal workers union has just signed a four year contract for its members, but feels their future is uncertain after that. Meanwhile it is responding to urban growth with outsourced contracts.

Do you think your experience at the post office will change if it’s staffed by unskilled workers watched over fast food restaurant type supervisors? The whole city loses with inferior services, but that’s not the worst of it. Fewer dollars into the labor pool means workers who have less to spend around town. A community of poverty wage workers can’t support anything more than cable, pizza and Lotto tickets. It perpetuates poverty which means less education, less productivity, lower expectations, more crime and richer Republicans in their gated communities.

Oaxaca to Greeley with Will Brad in between

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I’ve been posting about Oaxaca for some time now, and in the beginning I believe that those who saw these posts were thinking… What’s Oaxaca have to do with us and our lives in Colorado Springs?

In fact, I had gone earlier to the local weekly, CS Indy, and they had shown zero interest in allowing me to write about Mexican events for them, or for anything on the issue to really be published there. Apparently they needed the space for more important things, like their puff piece this last issue on the newly elected Republican Congressman, Doug Lamborn, titled laughingly, ‘Rarin’ to go’.

Oh, yeah! This must be some sort of reach out to lost members of Ted Haggard’s flock, I guess? That’s the only explanation I can come up with for the publisher and editor of that paper to be running such crap. I doubt that they can outdo The Gazette though in this sappy style of …uh… ‘reporting’. I’m worried about these liberal souls over there at the Indy. I’m even scared that they may become born again evangelical pastors or some such?

But back to the world of reality. Many in Colorado began to pay more attention to Oaxaca when Gringo photographer Brad Will was shot down there like a dog. He was busy filming events for the rest of the world to be able to see, and that is just too dangerous to allow to happen freely. Some folk began to take notice of events in far off Oaxaca, though most thought of Brad as being way braver than they could ever be as Americans. And they thought more foolhardy, too.

Cut to events in Greeley and across the nation this week, as Bush sent in the INS troops to take people’s minds off his failures as US Commander in Chief in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 1200 human beings rounded up and shackled for doing America’s nastiest work, working in slaughter houses. Families are being split asunder, children may have to permanently relocate to countries they have never known, and all of us get to ponder how more threatened we are becoming from the horde of American uniformed brownshirts, blueshirts, and khakishirts everywhere around us. Merry Christmas from Uncle Damn and Scrooge Dubya.

Even though so many folk in Greeley apparently supported rounding up their neighbors (this can be seen from the Greeley papers website where these racists post their tripe), now they are getting a quick lesson of what Oaxaca is all about. Oaxaca is about American forced trade policies (NAFTA) that have destroyed people’s livelihoods across much of Mexico, and how many of those people had to leave their homeland because of the American government’s actions just to get the same shaft here!

And in Greeley, Colorado, it’s how one’s personal racism and hatred can lead to destroying the lives of others. Not a pretty scene, as many Anglo kids go back to school and see their schoolmates being disappeared in front of their eyes. What a lesson in American citizenship for them, without doubt.

They then return home to see many of their supposedly Christian parents cheerleading for INS. Some of these parents will then be lining up for the jobs of the people victimized by this witchhunt, just like so many Germans profited from the stolen property of their Jewish neighbors once. We are a nation of immigrants, but some just go bad after a generation or two living here.

Check out the video Documentary of Oaxaca at the web site of the friendsofbradwill.com. You’ll have to punch into ‘videos’ once you reach this site. Its a lengthy documentary (28 min) , but it gives about as good and authentic of an explanation of the connections between Colorado’s world and the world of Oaxaca that might be found online right now. Well worth the time. And if you are still interested about Brad Will, scroll down to the other video called ‘I like the cops’, where Brad can be seen singing (he’s no Dylan, and I mean that in the best sense, too) and strumming the guitar while showing his love for the Men in Blue. Three minutes, and he got it all down about right.

Malachi (the man in Chicago who set himself on fire to protest the US slaughter in Iraq) and Brad, two examples of American sacrifice that inspire us. True American heroes, both in their own ways. Both trying to bring our country back to some sense of reality. Compare them to Doug Lamborn and Ted Haggard, perhaps? Oh, and compare Brad to the Men in Blue.

Privatizing the loo

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John out-house rip offPrivatization is nothing but a scam to lower wages and pocket the difference.
 
A few years ago our city Republicans decided to pull a porta-potty switcheroo. First they convinced the citizens it was too expensive to maintain public facilities in the city parks. To save money they leased portable outhouses from Republican businessmen. Thus the city workers who normally cleaned the bathrooms lost those jobs, union jobs of course. The contractors who supply the Port-a-lets hire day laborers to hose the plastic units down, making for a tremendous savings in labor cost. Every dollar that would have gone for a living wage, benefits, retirement, etc, goes right into stinky Mr. Port-a-let’s pocket.

Might I add there’s a stretch of Highway 24 on the west side of Colorado Springs where, if you have your window rolled down, you can smell a back yard where they service Port-a-lets.

Meanwhile city park patrons are left with the plastic Port-a-let experience, instead of the brick facilities they once paid for thirty or so years ago, unveiled at a ribbon cutting ceremony, when local politicians were not so visionary with their greed.

Excuse your blind spot

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Warning spotted on truck: “YOU ARE IN MY BLIND SPOT.”

I found myself on the lee side of a passing semi-truck the other day. On the passenger side of the cab, where the driver couldn’t see me, I read a sign in capital letters: You are in my blind spot.” Yeah?

It reminded me of the sign you used to see in restaurants above the coat racks, “not responsible for lost items.” Actually not true. If the hats and coats were not in line of sight from where the clientele were seated, the restaurant was completely responsible, the disclaimer not-withstanding. Wouldn’t we all love a t-shirt that read “not accountable for my actions.”

A great percentage of highway fatalities attest to the danger large 18-wheelers pose for passenger cars. To see a sticker admonish the smaller vehicle to take greater care is simply insulting. Mind your blind spot? How about you find a truck manufacturer to make your high-velocity lethal mass come equipped without a blind spot? Install a camera for instance. Make sure you can keep an eye on where you’re swinging that colossal hard body. Until you can get by without our assistance, stay off the road. You may not insist on ambulating with a blind spot mortal to others. A blind spot for the safety of civilians in automobiles is the blind spot you have.

And what of the signs: “this vehicle makes wide turns?” Out of your designated lane is what you mean. Can I put a sign on my car reserving my use of the left lane to make a right turn when I’m inclined? Hardly. Design a truck which plays well with others. You can start by abiding by the rules of the road, endangering no passersby. Use smaller trucks if you have to, but don’t give me your signs.

“Warning to trucks: driver of this vehicle protected by lawyer, give wide berth please. Thank you.”

Nancy Pelosi’s new dog, Silvestre, fails IQ test

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Democratic Party exINS police dog, Silvestre Reyes, flunked his IQ test this week. The new head of the House Intelligence Committee was given a series of basic questions about the Middle East by the journal Congressional Quarterly Today, and scored ZERO on their IQ test for him. Yes, truth is stranger than fiction, it seems. But Pelosi’s pick for the spot didn’t seem to even know the difference between the Sunnis and the Shia! Unbelievable! Maybe they should rename it the House Ignorance Committee instead?

Even the CQ interviewer didn’t quite believe what he was hearing when he sat down with Reyes to talk about this newest advance in his career as Democratic Party top hack. Hint hint. Now go and give this test to Obama, too. We want some more fun. This is much better than watching Sasha Cohen play Borat. And even much more fun than a vactaion to Tehran to do a philosophy conference, even! Can we get Cheney tested now? Pleaseeeee….

Doesn’t it boggle the mind to think that this bipartisan DP-RP insane asylum trying to run another culture without a clue to what’s going on, could possibly succeed? Nobody speaks Arabic or Pashto, nobody in the country other than Pat Robertson, Billy Graham Baby, and Glenn Beck know anything about Islam (just kidding), and 99% of the US public that supports this fiasco overseas can’t locate their asses from a hole in the ground on a map! Yes, our leaders are all as stupid as rocks. Good going Democrats with picking Reyes for his post. He might be even stupider than Dubya? No mean feet. duh.

Look, to be fair, the liberal voters even to the Left of the Democratic Party politician hacks try to play Risk with other people’s lives while being totally clueless. How many of these nitwits want to go rushing in with US troops from Djibouti (I guess?) into Sudan, Chad, and the Central African Republic? Give these good hearted fools an IQ test about the region, and they would be out of their Risk game within secs due to brain infarcts.. Most of these liberal wannabe admirals so ready to Trotsky into areas like that, probably have already forgotten their Kosovan Albanian. It is sad, this US desire to control the world. When will it stop?

Mengistu found guilty of genocide

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Ethiopia’s ex-ruler and Leonid Brezhnev’s African superstar, Mengistu, was found guilty in absentia for genocide today. He fled Ethiopia for Zimbabwe after the capital, Addis Ababa, was taken by rebel forces in 1991. He has been tried in absentia by a regime that itself is now having real problems with keeping its repression from running totally out of control. Still, Mengistu was definitely a bloody tyrant despite his original revolutionary drive. Under his Dergue regime, somewhere beetween 1 and 2 million died during his time in power, either from famine, through war, or directly through assassinations ordered by Mengistu’s people. He deserves his conviction, though he alone was not responsible for all those who died.

The problem one has though in assigning responsibility for crimes such as genocide, is that often there is so much blame to share all around. All of Africa became an arena for proxy fights in the ‘Great’ Cold War between the US plus its allies Portugal, France, Spain, Belgium, Britain, and the White Apartheid regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa, all combined in struggle to keep the former Soviet Union from influencing the region in alliance with various indegenous rebel groups. This combined European-US interventionism caused the deaths of millions upon millions of Africans. And yet no genocide trial for the Whites.

Much has been made of Brezhnev’s miserable decision to have Russians fight it out on foreign soil in Afghanistan against the Islamic proxy troops of the US. This was actually a reasonable fight though, since what went on in that country certainly effected the Soviet Union, too. But why on earth Brezhnev continued to side and fund Mengistu in the Horn of Africa wars is hard for many to understand. He truly was a totally incompetent and corrupt leader, and his decisions he took in regard to the African tribal conflicts, certainly had a major effect on what ultimately led later on to Gorbachev’s own reaccionry and embecilic policies. That in turn led to the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union back into a group of many barbaric and often warring, Fourth World capitalist states.

That all being said, one positive effect of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, is that it pulled the rug out from under Mengistu’s foreign funding for war in the Horn of Africa. When he finally fell in 1991 from power, he was about as credible as Pol Pot had become in Kampuchea after beating back the US in SE Asia. Lesson learned once again? An intial revolutionary movement that comes to power with war being waged continuously by imperialist powers against it, can lead to a meltdown of the revolution and a total disintegration into slaughter and famine.

The land developer loan default racket

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Did you read about the developer who had to default on a 5.3 million dollar loan for a project in Denver? What of that? Poor guy has to give back his $5.3M play toy if he can’t pay for it, is that what you’re thinking? He bit off more than he could chew maybe? Hardly.

Particular real estate schemes vary in their complexity, but here’s what happens in a nutshell. Developer sets up a Limited Liability Corporation to shield himself and his colleagues from financial risk. This entity receives financing from the banks and passes the money on to the participants, the brokers, builders, and management. This pays for the land, the labor and the overhead, being the developer’s cut. Whom the developer chooses as participants might also be considered his cut, since the money goes to who he says.

The point is, the money goes. By the time the project is defaulted to the tune of $5.3M, the money is already spent. By that I mean the money is already earned/gleaned/pocketed. It’s not like defaulting on an auto loan and having your car repo’d. Sure the banks get to repossess the project, but the profit’s already been squeezed from it. The bank will put the property on the market, sell it for a fraction of what it’s worth, and take a loss. Their loss is applied against the bank’s income, so in essence since they pay less in taxes, the taxpayers pay for that deficit. The national deficit grows by an amount that the developer and his friends have pocketed. Some of it went for laborers and materials and local fees, certainly, but the management percentage, that’s theirs. And whoever provided the labor, or sold the materials, or received the fees won too.

And who buys the project from the bank? The next developer, who gets to do another number on us all.

I’ve seen developers at city meetings, tanned, one hand in their pocket of some loose fitting slacks, soft leather loafers, big smile, they’re the top of the food chain and they know it. But I don’t think there’s any harm in looking closer at how they prey on our economy, on you and I. And if you should chance upon one of them standing on some open space conversing with a partner holding blueprints, and he has to cross the road to get to back to his LX, I’d say give him a scare at least. He may know how to beat the system, but has he got your number?

Bush gives early Christmas gift to racists- turns INS loose on Latino workers

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With Bush’s press affairs going so badly for the Iraq Holy Christian Crusade againsts Arabs and Muslims, how to rally the kore Klan klowns around the flag once again? If the Middle East holy war for oil appears to be sputtering along on only one cylinder, why not jumpstart another holy crusade somewhere to distract people with? You know? What about the one that Anglo racists have going against the Spanish speaking? What a thought!

What a nice Christmas gift for the White, English speaking, America First, hate all the rest crowd, too! Turn INS loose in droves around the country at meatpacking plants! Kick America’s most exploited workers in the teeth, too! Fuck the unions! They thought they won a victory in Houston by raising Latino janitors salaries a dime or two in the SEIU Justice for Janitors effort. We’ll teach those mojados a lesson! Si, no se puede, pendejos! That’s the Bush way! He’s such a compassionate conservative.

And for the kids of the parents to be rounded up? Well Uncle Dubya has a nice lump of coal for them for Christmas! He’s a sweetheart, he is. And such great photo ops for the press! Anglo dittoshits just love to see those minorities hauled away in shackles! Their only regret is that more aren’t shot down like dogs.

In Greeley, Colorado alone, the INS goon squads hauled away over 300 from the Swift meatpacking plant there alone. Nationwide the total hauled off to be deported is sure to go over 1,000. See the map locator at the end of the Greeley paper’s article above to see where the other Swift plants are. Apparently Hyrum, Utah needed over 150 stormtroopers on hand to do the dirty work at that plant.

Here is a Denver paper slideshow of the pigshow at Greeley

To add insult to injury, the INS cops decided to loudly and publicly accuse the rounded up with being all involved in Identity Theft crimes. How better to make Spanish speaking people really be labelled hardened criminals amongst Anglos than to throw this stuff into the stew? So our latest messages from the authorities is, Don’t be Muslims and pray in airports and don’t be talking Spanish in public, if you know what’s good for you, that is.

Since Democrats are also on board this Holy Crusade, we can expect much more of this tax paid hatemongering ahead of us. Our political representatives from both parties suck totally on immigration issues. They both entirely support this sort of witchhunt against the working poor, all under the guise of ‘keeping our borders safe’ and ‘protecting the native workforce’.

CSAP.com

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Stamp out CSAPYay! The CSAP scores were published last week and we the public are able to assess how our educators are doing. I am exceedingly glad that we have a single test that tells us everything we need to know about our children. Really takes the monkey off my back.

In my district, every one of our elementary schools achieved one of the top two marks: (1) Excellent or (2) High. This should be a cause for celebration. But it isn’t. My children are at a school achieving the embarrassing High mark. This has happened for the past few years and has caused a mass exodus from our school to the Excellent schools. Children are receiving a much better education there, no doubt. In return, we receive many out-of-district children which, like it or not, causes a further slide in our scores.

The funny thing is that my children were in the Excellent school for 8 years and I felt that they were receiving an inferior education there. Lots of control. No enrichment. No affirmation or fun or freedom. I forget. Where on the CSAPs do they measure musical talent? Artistic genius? Creativity? Vision? A high EQ, Emotional Quotient, which psychologists recognize as the true measure of future success? Oh, that’s right. Nowhere. Monkeys, take your number 2 pencils and fill in the circles.

The CSAPs remind me of Match.com. Newly divorced, my friends convinced me that Match.com was a great way to meet cool guys. Reluctantly I put together a rather sarcastic profile, no picture because I felt that a response would indicate a certain level of bravery, and waited for my dream guy to find me. After a few weeks, I started corresponding with someone who seemed super groovy on paper. Athletic, outdoorsy, humorous, intelligent, financially secure. Eureka!

Against my better judgment I agreed to meet for dinner. Oh boy. I could tell within 2 minutes of walking in the door that a paper representation of this man had given me an incomplete picture of his true personality, to say the least. By the end of the night, I was holding his head in my lap, stroking his hair as he sobbed his way through stories of his schizophrenic sister and his abusive father. With my free hand I searched my purse for a razor blade or a hallucinogenic mushroom or a flask of Jack Daniels or anything else that might comfort me, but to no avail. I am happy to report, however, that he finished up the date not with a kiss, thank God in heaven, but by giving me a Scottish tam with fake fur hair attached. A downpayment on a future date he said.

Do I have a point here? I think I do. It’s that nothing real or complicated or meaningful can be reduced to paper. To a score. CSAPs don’t measure true genius, family relationships, athletic ability, talent, the condition of the mind or heart. They don’t measure the capacity to learn. They don’t measure the brilliance or compassion of the teacher. They measure nothing except a child’s ability to regurgitate a head stuffed full of useless information. They tell us nothing more than a rat walking through a maze tells us. Nothing more than a carefully-worded Match.com profile tells us. Both should be taken with a very large grain of salt.

In case you were wondering, I still have the tam.

Super Duper Heroes

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Let’s grieve for Ken Jordan. Let’s grieve for him as a beloved son, a cherished brother, a loving boyfriend. But must we grieve for him as a slain police officer, one who died to protect us? He didn’t give his life. His life was taken from him by a drunken asshole. Just as the lives of the teachers at Columbine were taken, the lives of relief workers and journalists in Iraq and elsewhere are taken, the lives of nuns caring for the downtrodden in dangerous countries are taken.

Since 9-11 we’ve been conditioned to worship the “public servants” who fight our kitchen fires and bust our teenagers for tinted windows. Does anyone really believe these guys chose such a career because they care about us? The same can be said about our soldiers. With rare exception, men who choose a career in police/fire/military do so because it works for them. They don’t want to work at Wal-Mart, can’t work at Apple. The idea of carrying a gun appeals mightily to the kid whose head was bashed into the gymnasium locker by the big jock with the cute cheerleader on his arm. The idea of dressing up in a dapper uniform and becoming part of a powerful club resonates with the guy who has a lot of testosterone, quite a bit of adrenaline, but little else to distinguish him. They love their institutional authority. They enjoy pulling over the red BMW and watching the rich guy quake in his Bruno Maglis. They relish wiping the tears of the pretty girl who didn’t give them the time of day in Junior High.

I saw the procession for Officer Jordan yesterday. And, yes, it brought a tear to my eye. But not because he was a cop.

Mothra vs Nopalzilla, Taco Bell, GM food, and bioengineering

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Two articles today in the news got me thinking about genetically modified food and bioengineering again. In short, I think we have Ag gone mad, medicine gone mad, and Hey!, we just plain got Science gone mad! What drove HighTech crazy? Unfortunately it is the same thing that is driving all of us crazy, the constant insane drive by our ruling class to find new ways to profit and to max all profits out, and to speedup profit making all for themselves. In short, their greed is doing us all in. Let’s look at the story of Mothra vs Nopalzilla first, to see what got me into a tizzy on this one. It would be comical, except it’s really not.

As we can see, the moth that came to threaten Mexico got its start 90 years ago by an attempt of ‘scientists’ to ‘bioengineer’ in Australia. Some 125 years previously, settlers in Australia had imported a dye producing bug to help color their uniforms red. How important was that! They then imported cactus nopales to feed this bug with the red dye inside. But the nopales ran amuck in Australia like the poisonous cane toads later did, and wrecked havock on the natural habitat. That’s when the genius scientists stepped in with the moth that they took from Argentina to kill the nopales. Great success!

But this moth then made its way from Australia to Florida and started heading south towards Mexico, where 1/2 of all the world’s many species of nopal lives. Stopped in Alabama, the moth decided to hit the Isla of Mujeres offshore in southern Mexico, where now it may be blown a few miles to mainland Mexico in a few days, and then go on to destroy the nopal plants that just happen to hold down much of the soil of Mexico! In short, bioengineering scientists can later be proven that they have been about as adept as the Three Stooges.

So speaking of the Stooges, we have Taco Bell and Monsanto genetically modifying corn. But these stooges forgot the scallions it seems. E-coli, served at Taco Bell in the scallions has been killing and injuring folk now in several Eastern States, and Taco Bell and US health officials initially blamed Mexican produce for that. But just today, the actual culprit had been tracked down to California once again, where just a few weeks previous the Spinach had been killing folk that had bought those nice packaged, clean looking bagged specimens we are all tempted to buy while grocery shopping. Should we really trust people like Taco Bell with the GM corn, when they can’t even get the regular old onions right? I rather think not. Plus, we have the example of Mothra and Nopalzilla, too, to also help make us think twice about the supposed benefits that the HIghTech Ag folk say will come our way with mutating corn and other farm products.

Which brings us to medical bioengineering. It’s just the big thing now to be playing with genes, Dr Moreau. Go to the journals Lancet and Scientific American, and all sorts of groovy things are on the way, they say. Not only farm animals and farm plants are going to be modified right and left genetically, but medicines, vaccines, and lab rats. And you and I are the lab rats, it appears. All disease is going to disappear due to these tinkerings! Never mind the trillions being spent to blow the world up, reduce people down to utter squalor and despair, and to make us …. well…. SICK.

We need a lot less techology guiding the world on behalf of rich pirates that own the ag labs where it is being produced, and more common sense from the peasants. So in regards to genetically engineered foods, we should still say Down With the Food Czars! They are interested in making more bucks, and not interested really in our overall health. Don’t believe that? Walk down the grocery aisles some and ponder it a little more then.

And Doctor Moreau? You scare me the most. Your bizarre experiments on us all through your med labs and hospitals are producing a monstrous world ahead. The net result of the last decades’ practice by the corporate docs, is a world of disease we never ever dreamed possible not even in Hell, all flying our way at once. Don’t believe me? Pay a visit to some of the cancer wards perhaps. Try the burn units. Try the ICUs. Then go to the labs where reaserch is done on Dr. Moreau’s creatures. Hell with George Orwell and 1984. It’s more like HG Wells and his famouns book about the mad doc, instead. Todays’s Dr Moreaus promises us vaccines to cure all diseases that taste just like lollypops to lure us aboard his grand experiment. Yes, the bioengineering story has a little of Hansel and Gretel in it, too.

Another weeping pastor

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What is it with these gays? You think that they would stop marrying and having babies? But they are just so full of sin they can’t seem to help themselves! Another Right Wing Protestant pastor has come out weeping once again. I’m talking about Denver’s, Rev. Paul Barnes.

You think by now these purple perverts would know that the Catholic Church is the one and only true Christian denomination, wouldn’t you? BONUS! With the Catholics, gays don’t have to get married and can continue a gay lifestyle unimpeded by having the kids around late at night. It’s kind of like the YMCA. So why are so many gays confused and flocking to these Protestant evangelical denominations? Guys, no need to flagellate yourselves in this sort of manner. Turn to Papa (the Pope, to those Anglophones) instead.

OK, seriously now. If Grace Chapel had any grace about it, they’d leave Rev. Paul (good Christian name) at their helm. For all they know, the original Big Bad Christian Paul was gay himself. There wouldn’t even have been a Christian Chuch without him. Though he didn’t sin by getting married, it seems.

So why does Grace Chapel force gays to live in matrimonial sin in order to preach? Pastor Barnes, I hope that you and your family will learn from this, and maybe at least transfer to the Metropolitan Church congregation? It’s just not worth it to stay with the ignorant bigots. There are better churches out there.

Anti-war is not pro-peace?

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Human peace sign on the Magyar Heroes SquareI’ve heard the point made twice now. First someone complained after a rally that they were the only one to speak in favor of peace in the midst of exclusively anti-war sentiments. Then another person asked me, if instead of the anti-war statements I was soliciting, could they submit ideas that were pro-peace?

“Of course!” I told her. To be inclusive was my main intent, but I really wanted to ask, what to you is the difference? And I’d like to put the question to anyone: what distinction are you making between ant-war and pro-peace? Are you thinking that someone against the Iraq War is not necessarily against all war? Because I’m thinking someone who is pro-peace is not necessarily taking a stand at stopping this war or any other.

There are enough people sidestepping the issue of war, ignoring the War in Iraq, afraid to speak out of turn or against the grain or outside of the norm. The I’d like to teach the world to sing peace people would seem to be choosing the non-confrontational route while the tanks roll onward. Our mantra must be peace, but our bodies must be set against war.

It’s so easy to criticize someone who is anti, because they can be accused of offering no alternative. But need there be an alternative to war? Just stop it. If I catch you strangling your little brother in the bathtub, need I suggest an alternative method for you to dispatch him? No. Cut it out. Period. Let your brother be.

Anti-war voices were accused of being too negative at election time. Too anti. But were there any politicians we could support? If more candidates had expressed being opposed to the war, we could have been pro- those candidates! Instead, look at the batch that we got, a Democrat majority, but too few of them against the war, I’m sorry, pro-peace.

Is Tony Blair a member of the US Democratic Party?

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I know it’s impossible, Tony Blair cannot both be Britain’s Prime Minister and a Member of the Nancy Pelosi Democratic Party leadership team at the same time! So I guess I’ll just have to blame Neville Chamberlain’s influence for the performance of the British Labor Party when it concerns George W. Bush. Still, I got a sinking feeling that the Democrats do consider Tony Blair to be an honorary Democratic Party misleader.

Lest anybody think that Blair’s falling in line with Dubya on invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan is an aberration, how about this commentary about how Jack Straw, Blairs’ Foreign Secretary , saved the day for Pinochet? How Tony Blair and The Labor Party let Pinochet off the hook

Without Blair and Straw, we wouldn’t have had the experience of Augusto Pinochet shooting the world (including the families of his victims) his finger in his last dying days. And that he did. Because of the British Labor Party’s top officials, he was able to walk away totally unrepentent and unpunished.

In contrast, Milosevic spent his last days jailed while dying in the middle of his show trial under suspicious circumstances. All while in custody of those successful invading troops, which included the countries of Tony Blair’s, Jack Straw’s, Bill Clinton’s and Nancy Pelosi’s. His crime was defending his country against those invading troops. Pinochet’s crime, was overthrowing a lawful and democratically chosen government in a coup effort initiated by the US government, and then murdering and torturing thousands of his fellow countrymen. Contrast the treatment dished out to these two, Slobodan and Augusto.

And what did the Democratic Party of the US ever do to bring Pinochet to justice? Well that would be a big and absolute NOTHING.

Not getting wired

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Ideas for iPod ads, GET WIRED campaign.
(Position of dark silhouette, with white iAppliance.)
 
Prone, with opium hukkah.
Seated, with TV wired in a straight line to eyes.
Corpse on mortician’s table, with embalming fluid.
Fetus in womb, with Coca Cola placenta.
Baby in crib, with Disney IV hanging from mobile.
Standing in disheveled suit, with concrete poured around feet.
Kid standing, with Playstation controller wired to large mounted gun.
Walking in crowd, all with cellphones linked to happy face satellite.
Sitting on bar stool, pants zipper wired to pole dancing stripper.
Pulling oxygen tank, with tube to Oxy cylinder shaped like cigarette.
Kid standing, with Playstation controller wired to nipples and crotch.
On knees, bent over, with [head in] toilet.
Peeing, with urine stream flowing into bottle of alcohol.
Kid sitting on floor, with tooth tied to doorknob.
Chalk outline on crosswalk, with iPod.
Line of dancers in identical position, all with iPods.
Queue of forlorn commuters heading into subway car, all with iPods.