Telebubby Tinky Winky is outed! And in other breaking news, Professor Dumbledore’s own mentor, JK, has turned on her own creation and revealed his deadly secret. Yes, Professor Dumbeldore likes young male Hogworts!
I smell yet more literature ahead here for inquiring young minds coming from this wealthy writer! But Tinky Winky’s career is probably over, as is Professor Dumbledore’s. Now, can somebody clear up this nastiness about Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson?
Here’s how it works. The US pays the Mexican government to wall off Mexico’s southern borders to keep immigrants out. It helps militarize Mexico, too, and it can be called the ‘War on Drugs’.
But in reality it’s a war on immigrants even more. Let them die! That’s official US immigration policy. The latest poor folk murdered by US immigration policy
The Air Force top nuns got strict today and slapped several of their grunts and lower level officers hard across the knuckles. Poor guys… See the BBC’s report, Airmen punished for nuclear error
What I love is the constant refrain in the coverage of this story about how that no hydrogen bombs could have exploded in The Heartland. Yeah, and what’s a little plutonium here or there going to matter? Uh, when’s the next space shuttle going up?
Biofuels – Great Green Hope or Swindle is a great article just published on Common Dreams. It comes as a good read at a timely moment, right after neocon and con James Woolsey just passed through CS and CC trying to scam himself off as the great Green Warrior to our town’s innocent, naive, and evidently totally ignorant liberal class.
We can look for many more Mr. Green Jeans selling even more snake oil in mass in the immediate years ahead. Corporate America wants US tax payers to fish over their monies for ‘research’ and ‘development’ for funding and buying their new products. ‘Save Mother Earth’ they will shout.
We should say NO Go to companies like Woolsey’s ‘GoEthanol’ gang. In fact, government gangsters like Woolsey that have pushed for Bush’s war crimes should out right just be in jail. We need to turn community policing into corporate policing and then jail these bastards for the crimes they have committed. Watch out for their biofuel scams!
Meeting Resistance trailer, and the US military trying to perhaps? better understand itself by watching the film Meeting Resistance.
Oh my! Dubya so wants these 2 kids to get along but that all got blown away with a Big Bang yesterday. Generalissimo Musharraf just doesn’t want to share power with a prettier face it seems.
Benazir Bhutto’s husband, Zardari, blurted out the truth about Washington’s man in Karachi instead of playing along with The Blame It on Evil Terrorists game Musharraf wants to play.
Send in Condi immediately, Jorge! And better shut up Zardari fast before he reveals more of the plot to the world. Poor Pervez…
The world press took a brief respite from studying in detail Britney Spears, Hillary Clinton, and Paris Hilton to titillate us all with the grand search for one pedophile.
I am surprised that there was time to do this since the OJ Simpson case is also needing reportage time. Still, I am glad that the eyes of the world press did what they had to do, otherwise we would never have been introduced to Ohm, the katoey, the ‘ hero’ in all this!
I wonder if he will later publish a book for the world to read? It would be nice to have his story fleshed out some.
Oh, and here is some info about how the pedophile got his start as a Canadian military chaplain! Religion and the military are always a fine mix to help build character…
Before they got to Ode to Joy, before the Brahms, the Colorado Springs Philharmonic warmed up, their conductor marched out, the audience clapped, an American flag size 3XL descended behind the stage and the musicians played a spirited Star Spangled Banner. Everyone rose, hands on their hearts, some singing. I didn’t know if I was in school or at a baseball game. What next, spitting? I heard female voices behind me that were almost operatic. Would a cultural art center not have been a sanctuary from this plebian pledge of allegiance? To me it’s become almost distasteful these days, because it could so easily be misinterpreted to mean approval of what’s being done in our name.
Easy credit crunch or paper money trash? What is the answer to what corporate military spending corruption has sown? Dollar plunges to fresh Euro low We are going to pay a heavy price for our sins of complicity with Bush’s war games. Soup, any one?
It is time to begin to confront the fact that the US government has completely destroyed the United Nations as being a true international governing body with any legitimate authority.
Instead, the US has turned the United Nations into a rubber stamp totally under its own control. The General Assembly has been turned into a speech club in a manner that is reminiscent of how the Bush Administration has defanged and turned the US Congress into the same. Authority in the UN flows completely from top to bottom, with the top being Washington D.C.
What to do about this? Should there be a World Movement to demand reform of the United Nations, or a Movement to just abolish it? I think the answer is that there should be a Movement to abolish the United Nations, but that the first step to doing so is to create a Movement to reform it. So what would a Movement to reform the United Nations look like? Where would the rebellion come from and in what form?
It is clear that the Movement to reform the UN must come from the Third World countries now totally marginalized by US control over the international body. Curtis Doebbler points the way forward in an opinion piece in Egypt’s leading English language news edition, Al-Ahram titled UN or US pawn. In this commentary he mentions the need to remove the United Nation’s world headquarters out of New York City as a symbolic step toward casting off US government control over the world body.
As symbolic as it would be alone, a World Movement to remove the United Nations to having its meetings and governing body located outside of the US would be an important campaign to reform the organization. Perhaps to move to relocate the United Nations HQ to another locale could galvanize support around the world to try to wrest control over the UN away from the US? It’s something for people to think about at the very least.
‘The antibiotic-resistant infections, commonly called MRSA, were once confined to a few hospitals, but a new study by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in 2005 they made an estimated 94,000 Americans seriously ill and killed almost 19,000, compared with 17,000 who died of AIDS.’
This CDC report reported on heavily in the news today, goes on to mention that MRSA is killing more people in the US than AIDS does, so it sounds like this is a true picture of how dangerous this problem of MRSA is becoming. But….. notice the wording of the report, that it mentions that ‘94,000 Americans become seriously ill’ .
Here is the thing though. MRSA does not always make one ‘seriously ill’. It is a disease that usually never even gets diagnosed. The CDC does not mention these millions of people that are coming down with MRSA that are not ‘seriously ill’, and gives the impression that MRSA is only a problem for less than 100,000 each year in the US! The CDC is deliberately misstating how bad this problem really is.
Why is this so? It is so simply because the CDC does not have any real plan to deal with this problem. I mean other than telling people to wash their hands, etc. So it understates how widespread MRSA actually is, and keeps the spotlight off themselves and the US Medical Establishment for not even diagnosing this condition in most people who have had bouts of MRSA.
MRSA is not diagnosed much because people with MRSA sores seemingly just have extremely difficult and painful lesions that refuse to heal well. Many deal with this without seeking medical help, or while being denied medical help for the condition. Most people just plain don’t recognize a MRSA sore when it develops on them.
I myself have had MRSA sores develop at pressure points about 5-6 different times, and never have been treated for this. A few of these sores left scars even. They hurt like the devil, but i was not ‘seriously ill’ to use the vocabulary of the CDC.
MRSA is just one part of the epidemics of new infectious diseases spreading like wildfires around the globe. Yesterday I wrote about C-Diff killing off larger and larger numbers, and the day before I wrote about resistant TB. The world is seeing capitalist for-profit medicine disintegrate before our very eyes, and the business world has no plan to fight the epidemics.
We need an entirely different set up to deliver medical and nursing care to those who need it. And we need a world guaranteed income for all the world’s people, otherwise poverty will continue to add gasoline to the fire, so to speak. We are all going to be in deep, deep trouble with infectious diseases continuing to not be dealt with wisely by the for-profit health systems we are currently stuck with. Many are going to die unless something much different is done real fast.
Al Gore throws race to Hillary, Hillary throws race to the Republicans by supporting nuking Iran alongside Dick Cheney. Meanwhile, Edwards and Obama play their part, as they make Hillary’s one ring circus act, which is pretty damn boring by itself, a three ring circus act for now. Al Gore continues to run his freak show outside the tents.
What a pathetic charade of pretend opposition to Republican governance. Oh, and I forgot to throw in mention of the other 2 big DP performers, Slick Willie and the Peanut Man for World Peace and Democracy. They both have their own seemingly independent tent revivals going, too. There are plenty of yokel suckers to go around.
We should boycott this charade of pretend democracy and just not vote at all in 2008. The System is totally rigged the way it is. Until we get some massive movements for peace and justice going, America will continue to be led by its collective nose.
Stop Playing Their Game
Time to Boycott Voting
By JOEL S. HIRSCHBORN
The people just do not seem ready to wake up yet. Very sad, but unfortunately the case. The anger is there for about 2% of the population, but the rest are out shopping the same old bag. It’s still circus time for America’s rubes. Even reruns of Benny Hinn are more interesting IMO than the 3 ring DP circus that’s coming soon to town.
Hundreds of thousands of people a year in the US are injured in some way due to our crumbling and insane health care system’s defects. Thousands upon thousands die.
For-profit medicine just does not work contrary to what the pro business propaganda constantly tells us. We can do much, much better.
First step would be to declare health care a human right for all, and then to seek to make that a reality. Insurance companies have been perfectly happy to not deliver care to so many people that they should now just be totally removed from the equation. There is just absolutely nothing that they give to the delivery of medicine.
Health care for all is easy to bring about. Just remove the insurance companies entirely. The public doesn’t need them interfering with delivery of medical care in the US.
And when that is done, get these companies entirely out of providing retirement income to the elderly, too. The public sector could and would do it better too.
Why the US Lacks Full Health Care is a good article online at the California Nurses Association website.
Just like our medical system is falling apart and poorly serving the general population while making fortunes for the top dogs that run the system, so too is the dental care system a mess. And it is getting worse and worse as less and less people have dental insurance now.
What a disgraceful mess our 2 demented corporate parties are making out of America.
See Boom Times for Dentists, but Not for Teeth for a rarely commented on topic.
Putin’s visit to Iran appears to be Russia finally drawing the line as to what it will passively allow the US to do against Russian interests.
Is this visit meant to state to Bush that Russia will not stand by doing nothing if the US-Israel attacks Iran? It appears to be the case that Russia is fed up with US military aggressions and will take action to stop them now.
Saddam’s US jailer goes on trial What’s this about? Who is this man, Lieutenant Colonel William Steele, who now faces life in prison? What did he do?
Wikipedia gives us some basic information about the charges this man faces. William H. Steele We learn what the legal charges consist of here, and what we find is that this man, like Guantanamo military chaplain James Yee before him, has done absolutely nothing worthy of being made into a criminal offense. James Yee was let go after a torturing Kafkaesque experience where the military threatened to destroy his life completely. William Steele will not be so lucky it appears.
So what did he supposedly do, this Lieutenant Colonel? It turns out that he gave Saddam Hussein a cigar and some hair color to cover up the gray hair while he was in jail! For this he is charged with aiding an enemy of the United States and was threatened originally with the death penalty!
Oh yes, there are other charges they used to stack the deck for conviction against this career officer. He was charged with flirting some with a female interpreter! And get this! He was charged with having porn on his computer! Oh, and it gets much worse…. He allowed some kids, that were thrown into this military prison, to call out on his own personal cell phone to notify family members of their arrest by the US storm troopers! What a beast!
I think we can see now why people like Yee and Steele have to be imprisoned. They are to be made into an example for others in the US military, that no compassion must be allowed with Muslim prisoners. Muslim prisoners are to be tortured, humiliated, and murdered, and not coddled as Steele is made out to have been doing.
What a contrast! Under the Bush Administration with active Democratic Party help, the US has put thousands of POWs in Afghanistan in air tight containers where they were suffocated, choked, and shot to death. They have hooded and tortured POWs at Guantanamo using isolation techniques of sensory deprivation. They have raped and sexually humiliated POWs at Abu Ghraib, along with using other forms of physical and psychological tortures. They have moved (‘rendered’) POWs to hidden torture centers around the globe using a hidden fleet of unmarked aircraft. But giving a cigar to Saddam Hussein in jail is now to be made into a capital offense, which in the infinite mercy of these Christian Crusaders will be turned into a mere life sentence in prison. All minds off Donald Rumsfield and Dickey Cheney… Who’s the guy who gave the cigar to Saddam? Get him! Give him LIFE!
This whole trial is an indecent charade, and shows how little support the government really does give the troops. Instead of support, they threaten and bully them just like they wish to do with the rest of the whole world. When you sign up with the military, you truly do sign a deal with the Devil. This is the real mistake that Lieutenant Colonel William Steele has made. Now he is to be scapegoated and made into an example for the other troops.
Bad guy! You showed a drop of compassion for our official enemy, the Muslims. For this you must be punished but good.
Thirty eight years ago the US had its largest demonstration ever and we need to do this again. Two million marched to demand an end to the Vietnam War on October 15. It was The Vietnam Moratorium of 1969
Like then just like now, Americans demonstrating in the streets will not alone be enough. Ultimately it is the resistance of the Iraqis like it was with the resistance of the Vietnamese that will force the US to desist, and finally to withdraw. Today, we salute the heroes of the Iraqi Resistance. You will win the independence of the Iraqi nation from US government control through your sacrifices.
We as Americans owe a huge debt to the Iraqi people as we do to the Vietnamese people. We have allowed tyranny to once again prevail inside the US, our own country, and you have suffered disproportionately because of it.
Your struggle on your own behalf works for our own behalf, too. Thank you. We owe you, the Iraqi people, more than we can ever repay you. From your Resistance we will build our own Resistance, and we shall eventually together stop our corporations from destroying the entire planet. Together we must win!
The biggest political problem in the US is that Americans hate their neighbors, and our neighbors hate us as well. We have all been taught that the common folk have no good qualities, and that only the corporate world of top dogs is competent at least, unlike ourselves and our neighbors who supposedly know nothing and can do nothing right.
That is a big problem since it it precisely the reverse of what is actually true. In a corrupted society like the US, it is mainly the criminal element that rises to the top and not the non criminal. Contrary to popular opinion promoted in countless cop shows and Hollywood movies, the criminal element is not principally made up of taxi driver robbers, convenience store hold up men, and Bonnie and Clyders all at the bottom of society.
The criminal class is not principally engaged in drug sales out in the bad ol’ ‘Hood’. Can you guess where and how you can find them? Hint… the main body of criminals are quite well dressed compared to most of the folk you probably deal with in your personal life. ‘Clothes make the man’ is a good line of reasoning, but the well dressed folk is what one should be suspect of in the search for criminality in America. Criminals most often have a fine wardrobe.
So why do Americans hate their neighbors so much, and hence hate themselves, too? Who teaches them this self hate? Why do they adore, admire, aspire, and put the powerful criminal class ahead of themselves all the time? It is a complicated question without perhaps a single answer? But one thing is for sure, Americans hate the common man, the common worker. They hate themselves. And that is the principal barrier to any change being made possible for Americans.
Americans hate themselves and their neighbors. Instead, they prefer being delusional and thinking that the better off classes are better than themselves. They hate themselves for being ‘poor’, and think that that comes about because they are somehow defective and therefore more sinful unlike the better set crowd. This perhaps is the real reason that American folk refuse to much work together with their neighbors for change. Instead, they look for ‘leaders’ to follow, always find them, and then discover they have gone nowhere once again… led by their noses.
Led by criminals… well dressed ones, but even more criminal… they are led by well addressed and admired criminals. Our countrymen’s love of the wealthy and their desire to become wealthy means Americans no longer much aspire towards being a democratic society, as possibly our ancestors once did several centuries ago. Instead, they seem most often to hate their lower class neighbors and follow the upper class criminals they hardly know, even when given a choice.
The US started the current war in Somalia by bombing the country early this January and sending in its Ethiopian proxy troops to occupy the nation. Now, it is slowly starving the population to death, as 400,000 refugees from Mogadishu alone remain homeless in the countryside.
SOMALIA: Malnutrition stalks once fertile region Especially hit hard are the children.
The US is directing this war against the Somali people. Troops forcing residents from homes in Somali capital, rights group says We must pressure the world to stop this US government terrorism in Africa. We cannot let the world forget about what the US is doing to Somalia.
Once-upon-a-time-Vice-president, Al Gore, now introduces himself at public appearances with a real knee-slapper: the man who won the 2000 election. The joke counts on the audience knowing about the rigged count in Florida, black box voting, Supreme court cronyism, etc, because Al Gore explains it no further. To me it’s like the Monty Python routine, nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more, know what I mean? Except the audience does know and does get it. Hahaha, say no more!
Well I don’t get it. A stolen election, a bitter aftermath, tragic consequences which compound every day, to Al Gore this is a joke?
If Al Gore, Emmy, Oscar and Nobel in hand, wants another shot at the helm, he’s got some ‘splaining to do.
Gore is being given credit for taking global warming seriously, but I’m not sure it reflects his taking responsibility for the problem. What’s he doing about it? He’s running around talking about it. Who does he think is responsible for it?!
Gore wants us to address global warming. Weren’t he and Clinton in charge once-upon-a-time? What did they do about it? The little boy who put his finger in the dike wouldn’t be so honored if the Nobel Committee had seen him laughing while the hole was being drilled.
Now Americans are looking to Al to be the Democrat’s Great White Hope, to step into the ring and trounce Bush and Co in the next election. Does Gore give you any sense that he wouldn’t do the same thing he did in 2000, graciously step aside while barbarians plunder the country, his finger on the alarm bell, a silent alarm meant not to alarm the burglars, pretending but probably knowing that really there are no first responders on the way. Gore is the ambulance driver waiting for roadside assistance, cracking jokes with the patient, both deluded that there’s another ambulance on the way, one dying, the other contemplating another run at a rescue.
Some chose their battles, holding themselves as would-be winners above the fray, had the fray mattered. Al Gore chose his battle in 2000 and it wasn’t the presidency, the fate of the world perhaps being merely academic. To the above-the-fray class I assure you it is. Now the man who would be king wants to weigh in again? Why?
My favorite sports analogy is prizefighting. They are surely the most courageous men who enter the ring knowing they bring no one but themselves to bear against the blows of their opponent. You want to be heavyweight champion of the world? No one”s going to do it for you.
As part of the Global Network’s KEEP SPACE FOR PEACE WEEK (October 4-13), Citizens for Peace in Space will organize a nonviolent vigil outside the west gate of Schriever Air Force Base on Friday from 3-4 p.m. Mark Lewis has directions at CSAction.org. Or meet at the PPJPC at 2:30pm to carpool. 214 E. Vermijo Ave. For more information, contact Bill Sulzman.
Schriever Air Force Base is where GPS comes from.
Al Gore? What a joke the Nobel Peace Prize is! Gore is the most laughable winner since all together now, Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin got the prize in 1994.
I take that back. This is the most laughable recipient since Woodrow Wilson got it in 1919.
Who even remembers the majority of winners of this prize? Willie Brandt for example? Or Frank B. Kellogg, who supposedly stopped World War 2 from happening?
Now Gore gets to join on board this illustrious list of Peace Prize big winners alongside Henry Kissinger, who won in 1973! How proud he must be… Awarding a peace prize for a man that never spoke out against the atrocities the US committed against Iraq while he was in office as US VP is shameful. Not to mention that he still is no voice of peace against the current Iraq War continued forward by Bush after he left office.
For further commentary see A Grand Misjudgment, Gore’s Peace Prize at counterpunch.org
C. Diff: New Threat From Old Bug /// Epidemic Gut Infection Causing Rapid Rise in Life-Threatening Disease But how and why is this bug killing people?
Fact is, it is spreading because nursing staff is rushed and overworked and the conditions in nursing homes and hospitals are way too nasty because of that. Our for profit medical system is always trying to squeeze out the maximum work from the fewest number of people they can hold down the fort with. That’s how companies make their profits. But now, these practices are spreading super bugs that are killing more and more of the people who come to medical facilities to get care.
In the US, nobody is even writing about this spreading epidemic yet. It is not on the media’s radar screens. But here is a British report about the situation titled Hospital bug deaths ‘scandalous’ Yes they are indeed. And even more scandalous is the lack of scandal about this problem in the US. There are some bleak days ahead as this planet heads down into ecological collapse.
Poor Roberto Madrazo. He and his political party, the PRI of Mexico, together epitomize what corruption is all about. Corruption is like a bad habit with them that is endemic to how that party has always functioned and all that the PRI is about.
Roberto Madrazo is only the last gangster in a long line of PRI politicos who have enriched themselves, the gringos to the North, and a very few super rich Mexican industrialists at the expense of millions upon millions of common Mexican folk.
Madrazo thought he was owed the Mexican presidency through the deals he made within the top political class misleadership, but he in fact had become expendable for the other gangsters he had negotiated with. Just last year he wrote a book talking about this betrayal. He thought that Mexico itself had been betrayed by a cabal by this cabal not allowing him to get into Los Pinos, the Mexican White House. But he was the worst of the worst, and the stink of his campaign was just too much to make him desirable to the elites for becoming the front piece for the Mexican establishment.
Here is Madrazo’s latest escapade in the news. Mexico politician denies cheating It’s just too funny for words. In fact, it reminds us of some of the political clowns we have here in the USA.
Breaking note… a huge statue of Vicente Fox just put up hours earlier in Mexico was roped and then toppled down to the ground! We can do the same in the US if we try! If they put up a statue of Donald Rumsfield at Stanford University, it should be toppled, too!
What makes the US such a dangerous place where constantly kids go bezerk? It is the constant militarism of our society, the bleak and bare social landscape. From Littleton to Cleveland, no place is safe.
Strangely enough, this last Sunday I went for a hike with my family at the Dear Creek Open Space and found ourselves above a gigantic Lockheed building in the middle of countryside nowhere outside Littleton, Colorado. How strange… Bowling for Columbine by Michael Moore… Seeing this building from the hiking trail brought back to my mind Michael Moore’s movie.
Lockheed to Cleveland to Blackwater to Littleton to where next? Guns are us. No place in the world will be safe until we disarm ourselves.